D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Read online

  D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

  ALSO BY DONALD L . MILLER

  The Story of World War II

  City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America

  Lewis Mumford, A Life

  The Lewis Mumford Reader

  The Kingdom of Coal: Work, Enterprise, and Ethnic Communities in the Mine Fields (with Richard Sharpless)

  The New American Radicalism

  D-Days in the Pacific

  Donald L. Miller

  A LOU REDA BOOK

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

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  SIMON & SCHUSTER Paperbacks

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  Copyright 1945 by Henry Steele Commager

  Copyright renewed by Lou Reda Productions and Mary Steele Commager

  Revisions and introduction copyright © 2001, 2005 by Donald L. Miller

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2005

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Richard Oriolo

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Miller, Donald L., 1944–

  D-days in the Pacific / Donald L. Miller.

  p. cm.

  “Comprised of selected, greatly revised and expanded chapters from The story of World War II, as well as additional new material”—Verso t.p.

  “A Lou Reda book.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area.

  I. Miller, Donald L., 1944– Story of World War II.

  II. Title.

  D767.M465 2005

  940.54′26—dc22 2004065391

  ISBN 0-7432-6929-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-743-26929-2

  eISBN-13: 978-1-439-12881-7

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  This book is comprised of selected, greatly revised and expanded chapters from The Story of World War II, as well as additional new material.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT’S

  A NOTE FOR THE READER

  A NOTE ON JAPANESE NAMES

  PHOTO CREDITS

  1. The Rising Sun

  2. The Hard Way Back

  3. Amphibious Advance

  4. Saipan

  5. A Marine at Peleliu

  6. The Return

  7. The B-29s

  8. Uncommon Valor

  9. Okinawa

  10. The Setting Sun

  11. Victory

  EPILOGUE: REMEMBERING

  PACIFIC D-DAY INVASIONS: 1942-1945

  ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES GROUND FORCES, WORLD WAR II

  NOTES

  INDEX

  MY GREATEST DEBT IS TO MY dear, deceased friend Stephen E. Ambrose. He encouraged me to write this book and made available to me his vast archive of interviews with veterans of the Pacific theater. Over a three-year period, we engaged in an ongoing conversation about the war that he considered one of history’s most vicious racial conflicts. Had he not been struck down in his prime, his next project would have been a major book on America’s Pacific campaign.

  Douglas Brinkley, who succeeded Stephen Ambrose as Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, gave me unrestricted access to the collections of that unique research repository and introduced me to the center’s reigning expert on World War II, Michael Edwards, and its associate director, Kevin Willey, both of whom helped in a dozen significant ways. Gordon “Nick” Mueller, head of the National D-Day Museum, America’s outstanding World War II museum, put at my disposal that institution’s entire holdings on the Pacific war, including its large photographic collection. Martin Morgan, the museum’s Research Historian, was endlessly helpful.

  Whenever I was in doubt about something I called my colleague Allan R. Millett and he straightened me out.

  My conversations with Hugh Ambrose, a young historian who has done fresh research on the Pacific conflict, gave me new perspectives on wartime Japan and turned a professional association into a valued friendship.

  I would probably not be writing about World War II had it not been for a nudge from the documentary film producer, Lou Reda. He suggested that I write the wider book about the war, The Story of World War II, which turned out to be the wellspring for this new, more specialized account. Not long after I began conducting my own interviews with surviving veterans, he made available to me the transcripts and videotapes of the 700 and more interviews with participants in the war that his production teams have been conducting over the past fifty years.

  Joseph H. Alexander, a world authority on the Pacific conflict and amphibious warfare, read this book in manuscript form and offered helpful suggestions. Donald Meyerson, Rod Paschall, and Mort Zimmerman also read the manuscript. My Friday nights at a local watering hole with Don Meyerson, a Marine combat veteran, gave me fresh insight into the experience of warfare.

  I am pleased to thank others who helped with the book, chief among them Mark Natola, John McCullouch, and Austin Hoyt. A film producer for public television, Hoyt sent me transcripts of interviews he conducted for his film on Douglas MacArthur and his forthcoming documentary on the Battle of Okinawa and the Japanese surrender. Serving as Historical Consultant for Victory in the Pacific—talking with men who fought on Okinawa, with scholars who studied the battle, and with Hoyt himself—put me in a far better position to write about the last and most horrific stages of the Pacific war.

  Benis M. Frank, former Director of the U.S. Marine Corps Oral History Project, put at my disposal voluminous source material on the Marines in the Pacific. He and Eugene Sledge, author of the finest combat memoir to come out of the Pacific War. With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, shared with me their experiences as young warriors in the assaults on Peleliu and Okinawa.

  At every juncture in my research I received enthusiastic assistance from the staffs of a number of research institutions, chief among them the National Archives, College Park, Maryland; the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division; Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania; the U.S. Naval Institute; the Imperial War Museum, London; the Naval Academy Library, Annapolis; the Naval Historical Research Center, Washington, D.C.; the Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C.; the United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; the United States Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama; the New York Public Library; the film archives of WGBH-TV, Boston; the Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C. I owe a long-standing debt to the librarians at my home institution, Lafayette College, particularly Terry Schwartz and the library’s superb director, Neil McElroy.

  Grants from Lafayette College and the Mellon Foundation allowed me to assemble a research team of students that helped prepare the manuscript for publication. I am especially indebted to Emily Goldberg, my chief student researcher, who trained her able co-workers, Jessica Cygler and Alix Kenney. My secretary of many years, Kathy Anckaitis, has worked mightily to keep my chaotic working life in order. And Fred Chase, my copy editor, brought greater order and clarity to this book.

  I have the good fortune of having a literary agent, Gina Maccoby, who is also a discerning critic and a dear friend. And in Bob Bender I have one of the best
editors in the business. Bob and his brilliant assistant, Johanna Li, make up the entire staff of the little shop in the big plant out of which this book emerged in far better shape than when it went in.

  I am immensely grateful to Bob, and to Michael Korda, Editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster, for reaching out to me at a time of personal need. They give the lie to the notion that a big publishing house is a relentlessly impersonal place.

  This book would not have been possible without the generosity of the over 100 World War II veterans I interviewed in my research. They spoke with vigor and candor about their wartime experiences, without ever calling attention to their own heroism and self-sacrifice. As they leave us, thousands by the day, we can only hope we will see their like again.

  While at work, most writers are not pleasant to have in the house. The usual author’s bow to the long-suffering wife and family is more than an obligatory courtesy. My wife, Rose, has the patience of a saint, and we are together this far along in life—after seven books—because of it. I dedicated an earlier book to her, so this one is for my two devoted children, parents themselves now, but young enough to remember the moody man in the little room not far from their rooms who could only be a proper father when he turned off his writing machine.

  For Gregory and Nicole

  HANSON W. BALDWIN

  It is the man on two feet with hand grenades, rifle, and bayonet—backed by all that modern science can devise—the man with fear in his stomach but a fighting heart, who must secure beachheads. He it is who wins the glory and pays the price, who changes the course of history. Man is still supreme in a mechanistic war.

  A POPULAR MISCONCEPTION IS THAT THERE is only one D-Day in all of history: June 6, 1944, the day the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy and began the liberation of Northern Europe. But the term D-Day—first used in World War I by the U.S. Army—is the military code word for the starting day of any offensive. In World War II the term came to be used most commonly in amphibious operations, attacks launched from the sea by naval and landing forces against a hostile shore.

  In the vast Pacific, with its hundreds of enemy-occupied islands, geography virtually dictated that all major D-Day invasions be seaborne offenses. Amphibious assaults are the most desperate and dangerous of military operations; failure means to be thrown back into the sea or slaughtered at the waterline. Many of the Allied landings in the Pacific were fiercely opposed at the point of attack; but in others, resistance was light or nonexistent on the beaches and the major fighting took place inland.

  There were over a hundred D-Day invasions in the war in the Pacific. Some of them were joint operations, with American units joined by forces from one or more of the twelve other Allied nations at war with Japan. But all of them were planned and directed by American leaders and most of them, like Iwo Jima, were exclusively American affairs, with Americans doing all the fighting and dying. The last major Pacific offensive, Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945, brought to the enemy’s shores the largest invasion fleet ever assembled, more soldiers, sailors, and ships than took part in the landings on that memorable June morning when most of the world heard the term D-Day for the first time.

  IN THE INTEREST OF CLARITY, I have not followed the Japanese convention in which the family name or surname precedes the given or personal name.

  LRP—Lou Reda Productions

  NA—National Archive

  SC—U.S. Army Signal Corps

  USAAF—U.S. Army Air Force

  USMC—U.S. Marine Corps

  USN—U.S. Navy

  The Rising Sun

  OIL AND EMPIRE

  Foreign oil was Imperial Japan’s lifeblood and fatal undoing. Japan went to war with the United States to gain access to oil in Southeast Asia it could no longer obtain from American companies, its chief supplier of the fuel that sustained its military machine. In July 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt blocked the sale of American oil to Japan in retaliation for that country’s occupation of French Indochina, which Japan planned to use as a launching point for an audacious move south into the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), one of the world’s great oil-producing regions. “Riding the Equator east for three thousand miles, a distance as great as the whole span of the United States itself, the Netherlands Indies,” the New York Times pointed up their strategic importance, “support a population of sixty million and produce commodities—oil, tin, and rubber—which the modern world cannot do without. They are an empire in themselves, and no Pacific Power can be indifferent to their future.”1

  In the summer of 1941, Japan determined to seize these resource-rich islands, even if it meant war with the United States. It was her boldest move yet in what had been a ten-year-long campaign of conquest in Asia.

  When Japan unleashed a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, its primary strategic target was not the American fleet berthed there, but the oil fields of Sumatra and Borneo in the East Indies. Hawaii was hit to cover the flank of this great resource grab, knocking out the only naval force in the Pacific capable of stopping it.

  With terrifying speed, Japan seized the territory it had long coveted in its quest for energy self-sufficiency, not just the Netherlands East Indies but also Burma, the Malay Peninsula, and the main islands in the Southwest Pacific that lay north of Australia, including the Philippines, an American protectorate. In a matter of months, it had acquired the most far-reaching oceanic empire in all of history, one blessed with every economic resource it needed to fight a major war. But the shipping lanes to these mineral-rich possessions were too far-flung to be effectively protected by the formidable, but overextended, Imperial Navy. By the late spring of 1945, a strangulating American naval blockade had cut off the Japanese home islands from the oil fields and mineral deposits of the recently conquered Asian possessions of England, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. Japan would stubbornly fight on, but the war was lost. The Pacific war was not exclusively a war over oil, but oil played a decisive role in both its origins and end.

  THE ROAD TO WAR

  In July 1941, the month that militants in Tokyo decided that war with mighty America was inevitable, Japan was fighting another country it could not hope to de feat. For nearly a decade, it had been at war with the Chinese, first in Manchuria, then in China itself. In these years, Japan—an ally of the United States in World War I and a nation that had been undergoing a robust Westernizing movement for almost a century—fell increasingly under the control of jingoistic military and political leaders. With Emperor Hirohito’s compliance, they ruthlessly suppressed political opposition—often by public assassination—and began advancing a mystical doctrine of racialism, the superiority of the Yamato race and Japan’s sacred mission to free Asia of white, Western imperialists. These ultranationalists were convinced that the world’s major powers, all of them ruled by Caucasians, were conspiring to reduce Japan—“A Yellow Peril”—to second-rank status in the community of nations. Young Japanese military officers, along with nationalistic poets and intellectuals, were also a urging a cultural renaissance, the eradication of a soft, decadent Western materialism, with its elevation of individualism and hedonism, and a return to the “divine” land’s purer warrior-state greatness. They dreamed of a new age when millions of spirit warriors abandoned the pursuit of pleasure and sacrificed their lives for the spread of Dai Nippon Teikoku, the “Great Empire of Japan.”

  Economic privation fueled anti-Western xenophobia, political despotism, and an urgent drive for autarky.2 The Great Depression, with its contraction of international trade, had a devastating impact on Japan’s fragile island economy, which was heavily dependent on foreign resources. Britain, another island economy, was also hurt badly by the economic crisis, but it had an empire to help sustain its military prowess. Japan did not. It must have one, and soon, its imperialists insisted, if it was to weather the Depression and emerge as the preponderant power in a new Asia-for-Asians.

>   The Imperial Army was the leading agent in this drive for markets and resources. Profoundly influenced by Germany’s defeat in World War I, its strategists concluded that Germany, with its tremendous continental army, had lost the war because of its vulnerability to the Allied naval blockade, which virtually sealed off the country from the outside world. The lesson was there. The world powers of the future would need more than strong armies and navies. They would have to become self-sufficient, capable of waging total war without reliance on food, fuel, or other war-sustaining materials from other nations. For Japan, this meant expanding industrial production at home and extending its imperial reach.3

  Japan had already acquired Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), and a stake in Manchuria in earlier wars against China and Russia. Now it moved to enlarge and consolidate its holdings in that vital area of Asia that lay directly across the narrow Sea of Japan. In September 1931, soldiers of the rabidly nationalistic Kwantung Army, garrisoned in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory of Manchuria to protect a railroad system over which it had acquired rights, provoked a fight with the local warlord, overran the whole of Manchuria, and set up a new puppet state, Manchukuo. It would be a buffer against the Soviet Union and become “Japan’s lifeline,” proclaimed one Japanese leader, supplying iron and coal for the home country’s new state-run military economy and “living space” for its exploding population, expanding at a rate of a million a year.4 The United States refused to recognize Japan’s new client state and the League of Nations issued a flaccid condemnation, but Japan ignored the American protest, withdrew from the League, and prepared to extend its Asian conquests.

  In July 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists refused to give in to additional Japanese demands for territory and influence, the Kwantung Army stormed into China itself, overran the fertile valleys of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and seized all the important seaports, including Shanghai, which it bombed with vehemence, killing thousands of innocent civilians. After taking the walled capital of Nanking in December 1938, Japanese soldiers—indoctrinated to look on the Chinese as a kingdom of “chinks,” of roving bandits and cowlike peasants—killed over 200,000 military prisoners of war and unarmed civilians, raping, castrating, and be heading tens of thousands of them, in what has been called a Hidden Holocaust.5 The systematic slaughter continued for three months in Nanking and surrounding villages and got so out of control that a member of the Nazi Party who was stranded in Nanking sent Adolf Hitler a telegram pleading with him to intervene to restrain the Japanese army.6