The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TO DAY

OUR naval offensive in the Pacific — beginning with Tarawa and proceeding with speed and audacity to the Marshalls and the Marianas, to Truk and Paramushiro — was made possible by two years of unspectacular toil. Not until the circle around Japan had been well constructed could body blows be delivered at will and at points of our own choosing.

We struck only when it was clear that the chain of steel around the Japanese Empire was so strong that a concentrated blow in one direction could not be answered by dangerous Japanese diversions in other areas. Without minimizing the achievements in production, planning, and supply which obviously underlie the naval offensive, we must put it in proper perspective. It is properly understood as one element in a vast and complex plan to shatter the foundations of the Island Empire.

Our general strategy has become so clear that it was useless to attempt to conceal it. Admiral Nimitz’s remarkably frank statement that he was on the way to China was echoed immediately by General Stilwell and General Chennault. There was no point in concealing from the Japanese what they already knew. Unless Japan is willing to oblige us with a full-scale naval battle, there is no way of mounting a full-scale air offensive against the home islands short of bases in China.

This limitation does not exclude the desirability of securing bases in the Kurile Islands or on Karafuto. But China is most certainly one of the many roads to Tokyo.

We can afford to be all the more open about our strategy because the very nature of Japan’s possessions gives us mastery of tactical surprise. The Japanese have no way of telling where or when we are going to strike next. There is no reason why the empire which Japan won so quickly should not be as quickly lost, if we can capture the bases from which to use the air and sea power that we are now employing so effectively. We have the advantages which accrue to the side with the initiative.

Islands can’t maneuver

The change in the Pacific strategic situation, so carefully noted by our Soviet allies in their official military publications, stems first from our superiority in heavy battleships. Admiral Takahashi put the point clearly in a statement he made towards the end of February. He told his listeners that the “unsinkable air bases” of the Pacific, in which Japan had placed much confidence, cannot be maneuvered, whereas the battleship can.

The basic operations of sea warfare, he suggested, are very different from land war, and Japan should not think of the front in the Central Pacific as similar to that in Russia or Italy. The victor, in other words, will be the one who attains final mastery of the sea; the last battle is the most important. Admiral Takahashi was saying what Admiral Jellicoe said in the last war: the commander of the fleet can lose the war in an afternoon.

The reason the Japanese fleet had not given battle, according to the Admiral, was lack of air power. This is not due, we can suppose, so much to inadequate numbers as to inability to apply them in the proper place and in sufficient force. The strings of island air bases which radiate from the home factories are too far apart to be used successfully unless Japan has mastery of the sea. Fighter planes cannot proceed to the defense of outlying atolls, fight, and return. Nor are the carefully prepared island outposts able to withstand the new techniques of land, sea, and air attack by task forces.

What is a “task force”?

These task forces really constitute a new kind of weapon. We are told little about them, but it is clear that they change in size and composition according to the task to be carried out. The Army’s air forces serve as the “strategic air force" and the Navy’s carrier-based planes serve as the “tactical” — although in some cases, as at Truk, the carriers must do everything. All land-based aircraft in the Central Pacific are under one command, whatever branch of the service they stem from.

Details of the exact nature of task force composition and tactics will not be disclosed to the American people — if only because the Japanese themselves must be singularly ill-informed about them. The concentrated fire which destroyed the radio station at Kwajalein was something like the artillery pattern we used on the Anzio beachhead. Nothing could remain upright or alive in the area covered by the shells. Nor could any Japanese get away from these islands to tell the story. In this sort of operation we either succeed immediately and decisively or fail altogether.

Where are you hi-i-ding?

Japanese naval strength is still of tremendous importance. Some estimates put it as low as two thirds of its strength at the time of Pearl Harbor. But estimates of new building are necessarily speculative. The important change, from the point of view of naval strategy, is that Japan’s fleet, like Germany’s after Jutland, is now a “fleet in being.” It is sobering to remember that the battle of wits between our own naval forces and those of the enemy has only just begun. Anything may yet happen in the vast spaces between the Marshalls and Japan.

Much has been made of our enormous superiority in planes and ships. These play their part, but that superiority is relative to the task which must be performed. The most encouraging aspect of our naval offensive is not its weight but our superior strategy — the tactical skill and inventiveness with which these forces are being used. The colossal effort all this represents is in itself the best testimony to the strength of the Japanese Empire.

Tojo at home

Premier Tojo removed his Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff immediately after the attack on Truk. It is not necessarily true, however, that the one event led to the other. The usual procedure is to remove the Army or Navy commander on the spot, not to take away the brains of the military machine when the going becomes difficult. Truk may have been the occasion, but other differences must have been the cause of the removal of the Chiefs of Staff and the cabinet shake-up.

These differences are not entirely a matter of speculation. It is significant that the Ministers of Agriculture and Commerce, of Finance, and of Communications, were the ones to fall. These men had to do with the three main difficulties of the Japanese Empire: they had faced the bulk of criticism in the Diet and were under the greatest pressure.

The reasons for the removal of the military chiefs are not so clear. The attack on Truk must have brought to a head the shift in Japan’s strategic position which had already taken place. Japan has long been on the defensive, but the men in power were still those wfio believed in the offensive and may well have been committed, within the inner councils, to further offensive action, possibly against the Soviet Union. They were not the men to control the destinies of Japan on the defensive. They must have lost a bitter battle over the question of basic strategy. The home front has long been blamed for the shortcomings of the military clique. This is the first time that the militarists have quarreled openly.

We have long had a concept of Japan as a united country singularly free from the internal divisions that are supposed to mark the democracies. But there are more things than the removal of the Chiefs of Staff to force us to modify this concept. Subtle changes are going on both on the home front and among the soldiers in the field. More and more measures are being taken on the home front that indicate concern over the attitude of the people.

Tojo has the task of forcing through measures necessary to meet coming air raids and, at the same time, of keeping up the morale of a people who have been told that the enemy has already been defeated. According to Russian reports, prominent Japanese newspapers urged that the decentralization of the population and offices in the bigger cities be carried out without waste of time: “The speed with which it is being carried out is not satisfactory considering the present state of the war.” When the tide of war changes, the believers in short-range propaganda are caught short.

The Japanese soldier

The stirrings on the home front are perhaps less significant than the changing attitude of the men in the field. One of the casualties of our naval offensive and of the combined operations in the Southwest Pacific is the Japanese theory of “believing operations.” The Japanese must have believed their own propaganda when they assumed that the superior fighting qualities of the Japanese soldier would make the war too costly for us to pursue. They are the victims of their own persistent underestimation of the latent fighting qualities of a non-military people.

If the attack on Tarawa pleased the Japanese from the point of view of its cost in American lives, it must also have warned them, as had earlier operations on Guadalcanal, of the “spiritual quality" of American troops. If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions to defeat.

We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been most unusual for sixty men to allow themselves to be picked out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and Burma, stragglers are coming out of the jungles to surrender. Many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions, and we know that in places such as Attu, when escape was impossible, they often slaughtered their men and themselves long before they had spent the last cartridge.

Once he is separated from his officer, the main fear in the mind of the Japanese soldier is that of being tortured by his captors. Many of the Japanese atrocities have been committed as a demonstration to peasants in uniform of what would happen to them in case of capture. It is part of the indoctrination course. There is something very credible in the report from Kwajalein that a group of Japanese resisted capture until they happened to see one of their own number leaning over the rail of a ship with a cigarette in his mouth. All they needed was this demonstration of good treatment.

The Japanese prisoner

One direction in which the thoughts of Japanese soldiers may now be turning is indicated by reports on Japanese prisoners of war in China. The views expressed are those of a politically sophisticated group of Japanese prisoners and are colored by the propaganda of the Japanese Anti-war League in China. According to these men, they are tired of the war — a war which brings them suffering not only in the field but at home. They assert that the people of Japan are beginning to suspect and even to struggle against the militarists who hold them in their grip. They say that strikes are growing all over Japan. They claim that if Japan can be assured of a chance to develop peacefully, her people will turn against the great industrial organizations and the military machine.

These are political opinions extracted from men already captured, and are colored perhaps by wishful thinking. The Chinese have long hoped for social revolution in Japan and still see a social and political revolution as the most likely concomitant of defeat. It would be unwise to think these views are general in the Japanese Army. They are not. But they do represent one reaction which might well develop rapidly among downtrodden workers and peasants.

United command in China

Our drive across the Pacific towards China is apparently the task of the year. We can expect to see the shadow of coming events not only in the desperate preparations on Japan’s home front, but also in the occupied territories. Because the shadow fell first on the Philippines, the Japanese announced a state of national emergency and gave to Laurel the powers of dictatorship. Only those who have lived under the Japanese can picture the sufferings the Filipino people are now enduring and must ultimately face. We do not know the full extent of Philippine resistance, but we do know that the Japanese radio talks about it at great length.

As reconquest reaches other occupied lands and eventually China, the real test of Japan’s political position will come. Will the Chinese be ready for the counteroffensive? Will American-Chinese military cooperation have been successfully worked out?

In spite of excellent local cooperation in Northern Burma, there are still many unresolved problems. The well-fed, well-armed, and adequately trained Chinese troops who are protecting the Ledo Road represent a pattern of American-Chinese military cooperation which cannot be projected over the whole of China. They are in effect an American-trained army; they operate under American generals.

In China proper it is a question of cooperation between the Fourteenth Air Force and small numbers of American troops and technicians, on the one side, and the Chinese military establishment, on the other. Where and how the Chinese armies are going to fight is not only a military but also a political decision. We are ill-informed as to whether or not American strategy and Chinese strategy are in any way coordinated.

Our own strategy may require an offensive in one direction, whereas Chinese politics may demand it in another. Certainly the faster our offensive moves across the Pacific, the more urgent will be our interest in the internal situation in China. Yet there are few things about which the American public knows less. Reports brought back by our troops and travelers from China today show that the Chinese have as distorted a picture of us as we have of them. It is high time we put our relations with China on the same basis of open and frank discussion as are our relations with Great Britain.