Pacific and Philippines
In June 1942, the US emerged from the Battle of Midway with naval superiority in the Pacific. General MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz seized the initiative, launching an ‘Island Hopping’ campaign. Their strategy was to capture the Pacific islands one by one, advancing towards Japan and bypassing and isolating centres of resistance. Macarthur and Nimitz planned a two pronged attack: MacArthur would push northwest along the New Guinea coast and into the Bismarck Archipelago with the eventual aim of liberating the Philippines; Nimitz would cross the central Pacific, ‘hopping’ through the Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline and Marianas islands. The execution of the plan would place Japan within the range of US bombers, and eventually allow the Americans to launch a mainland invasion.
The offensive against the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Archipelago marked the beginning of ‘Island Hopping’. The Guadalcanal Campaign, fought between August 1942 and February 1943, eventually succeeded in forcing Japan to relinquish the island. With the great Southwest Pacific offensive firmly underway, Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey landed his troops on New Georgia on 1 July while MacArthur moved his forces to Nassau Bay, New Guinea. In the face of perilous reefs, heavy rains and high winds, and heavily dug-in Japanese troops, MacArthur’s men succeeded in taking the Munda Airfield on 5 August, forcing the Japanese into retreat. MacArthur’s next strike was against Bougainville on 1 November; where the invaders pummelled the occupiers, inflicting heavy casualties. New Britain was attacked on 15 December; Halsey’s carrier strike against Rabaul inflicted huge damage upon Japanese planes and isolated the port; the last Japanese naval forces would eventually withdraw in March 1944.
Meanwhile, in the Central Pacific, Nimitz set out to recapture the Aleutian Islands, defeating the Japanese in a campaign fought between May and August 1943. On 20 November, landings on Makin and Tarawa marked the beginning of the Gilbert Islands offensive. Nimitz’s troops secured Makin after four days. Tarawa, with its network of pillboxes, mines and coastal gun emplacements proved more difficult; after a bloody landing operation, US troops inched inland, slowly crushing the Japanese defences and receiving some hard lessons in amphibious operations.
The victory paved the way for the invasion of the Marshall Islands. During January and February 1944, the US wrestled control of Kwajelein, Majuro and Einwetok from the Japanese. They also succeeded in neutralising Truk, the formidable Japanese naval base on the Caroline Islands. Now able to move its fleet and air units forward, the US captured Saipan, Tinian and Guam in the Marianas in June and July. Crucially, the capture of the Marianas provided a fixed base from which to launch B-29 air attacks on the Japanese home islands. Between September and October 1944, the US Navy crushed the Japanese fleet as it tried to halt the US advance in the First Battle of Philippine Sea; the unstoppable island hoppers then took Ulithi in western Caroline Islands and Peleliu in the Palau Islands.
Between October 1944 and February 1945, MacArthur fulfilled his famous promise to return to the Philippines. Between October and December, a fierce naval battle raged in Leyte Gulf. As the US slowly gained control, Manila and Luzon were occupied in February 1945. The next step was the first American landing on Japanese territory, at Iwo Jima. US troops invaded in February 1945, following ten weeks of relentless aerial bombardment. As the Japanese emerged from tunnels and underground bunkers, a bloody 36 day combat began. While the US lost 6381 men, 20,000 Japanese soldiers perished. The invasion of Okinawa followed in April 1945. The Japanese launched massive kamikaze attacks on the US invasion fleet in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. In August 1945, the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan forced the country to surrender, rendering an invasion of the Japanese mainland unnecessary.
China
By 1941, the Chinese position was precarious. The largest forces opposing the Japanese were the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek, but the foreign military aid they had been receiving in the 1930s had dried up because of the war in Europe. Chiang’s forces were badly trained, badly disciplined and badly equipped. Their loyalty was questionable. The truce with their Communist rival, the CCP, was fragile. Both sides seemed more intent on maintaining control in their own territory than in fighting the Japanese. Both were expecting and preparing for a fresh civil war as soon as Japan was defeated. Many of Chiang’s men also held allegiances to local warlords.
In February 1942, when Congress approved a 500 million dollar loan to China, Roosevelt described China as the US’s main ally against Japan. Chiang Kai-Shek was enchanted to now be described as one of the ‘Big Four’ Allied war-leaders. General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stillwell became Chiang’s Chief of Staff, as well as commander of US forces in China, Burma and India. Chiang believed China would be the centre of US efforts against Japan.
The reality was different. Difficulties in sending supplies, British reservations, general concern about Chiang’s motives, and the urgency of operations in the Pacific and elsewhere meant that China did not become a theatre of main effort for the Allies. Stillwell’s mission to improve the efficiency of Chiang’s forces and turn the tide against the Japanese proved difficult. Chiang, Stillwell and Chennault disagreed fiercely over how to use the limited aid that could be flown in from India across the ‘Hump’ (the Himalayan mountains). To the frustration of Chinese Communists and Nationalists, the beginning of Pacific offensives in 1943 meant that US strategy ceased to depend upon China. The priority given to aid for China plummeted.
By 1944, with the air defence situation improving, more supplies began arriving across the Hump. The Ledo Road (later christened the ‘Stillwell Road’) reopened, having been closed by Japanese conquests in Burma. In April 1944, the ‘Ichi-Go’ offensive saw the Japanese invade the airfields of Kiangsi and Kwangsi; by June the Peking-Hankow Railway was under Japanese control. Despite US concerns that defeat was looming, Chinese forces resisted, repelling two Japanese offensives during summer 1945. Two events brought the war in China to a swift conclusion: on 6 August, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later Stalin, honouring his promise to the Western Allies, declared war on Japan, and Soviet forces overran the Japanese army in Manchuria. Japanese forces in China, Formosa and French Indochina surrendered to Chiang. As many as 20 million Chinese had died in the eight year-long conflict. Fighting between the KMT and the CCP resumed almost immediately.
Atomic Bomb
At approximately 8.15am on 6 August 1945 a US B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly killing around 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, causing the deaths of 40,000 more. The dropping of the bombs, which occurred by executive order of US President Harry Truman, remains the only nuclear attack in history. In the months following the attack, roughly 100,000 more people died slow, horrendous deaths as a result of radiation poisoning.
Since 1942, more than 100,000 scientists of the Manhattan Project had been working on the bomb’s development. At the time, it was the largest collective scientific effort ever undertaken. It involved 37 installations across the US, 13 university laboratories and a host of prestigious participants such as the Nobel prizewinning physicists Arthur Holly Compton and Harold Urey. Directed by the Army's chief engineer, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project was also the most secret wartime project in history. At first, scientists worked in isolation in different parts of the US, unaware of the magnitude of the project in which they were involved. Later, the project was centralised and moved to an isolated laboratory headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. On 16 July 1945, scientists carried out the first trial of the bomb in the New Mexico desert. President Truman received news of the successful test whilst negotiating the post-war settlement in Europe at the Potsdam Conference.
Although voices within the US Military expressed caution regarding the use of the new weapon against Japan, Truman was convinced that the bomb was the correct and only option. Six months of intense strategic fire-bombing of 37 Japanese cities had done little to break the Hirohito regime’s resolve, and Japan continued to resolutely ignore the demand for unconditional surrender made at Potsdam. In such circumstances, the use of the atom bomb was seen as the best means of forcing Japan to surrender, and ending the war. The alternative, of an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands, was expected to cost hundreds of thousands of casualties.
The effects of the attack were devastating. The predicted Japanese surrender, which came on 15 August - just six days after the detonation over Nagasaki - ended World War II. Yet the shocking human effects soon led many to cast doubts upon the use of this weapon. The first western scientists, servicemen and journalists to arrive on the scene produced vivid and heartrending reports describing a charred landscape populated by hideously burnt people, coughing up and urinating blood and waiting to die.
As questions regarding the ethical implications of the attacks grew, the US Air Force and Navy both published reports which claimed (respectively) that the conventional bombing and submarine war against Japan would have soon forced her to surrender. Joseph Grew, America’s last ambassador to Japan before the war started, also publicly alleged that the Truman administration knew about (and ignored) Japanese attempts to open surrender negotiations with the US using the USSR as a mediator. At this time, another interpretation - most famously espoused in 1965 by political economist Gar Alperovitz in his book Atomic Diplomacy - emerged: the atomic bombing of Japan had been motivated by a desire to demonstrate the US’s military might to the Soviet Union, about whom the Americans were increasingly nervous.
The moral aspect of the attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to divide historians. While some argue that the terrible long term human cost to the Japanese population can never justify the use of such weapons, others maintain that in the context of total war, it would have been immoral if atomic weapons had not been used to end the war as quickly as possible.
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