World War II, 1939-45
4.6. The Road to Hiroshima
advanced and powerful. The British Spit re, the most famous ghter of all, went through eight di erent versions—an average of more than one per year—that caused the power of its engine to more than double; yet before the war ended it was already being replaced by the even more advanced Tempest. To adduce but one more, rather trivial example, when the Germans in 1944 came to man the West- wall, the construction of which dated back to 1938–39, they found that the bunkers were too small to take the latest anti-tank guns; yet it was only those guns, rather than the door-knockers available in 1939, that stood any chance of penetrating the other side’s armor.
Thus, the most intensive research and development did not proceed at the cost of mass production but simultaneously with it;
as a result, obsolescence was extremely rapid. This became even more evident after the war when the Soviets, perhaps because their economy was smaller, made an e ort to gather their weapons and store them in huge depots. There they helped augment the order of battle, at any rate, on paper; over the coming decades, they were often sold at rock-bottom prices to clients all over the third world who thus acquired the capability to ght one another on the cheap.
The Americans also sold many of their surplus weapons to their Western European Allies (West Germany, once it joined NATO, included). Unlike the Soviets, though, often they did not even bother to evacuate the rest, leaving them to rust instead.
Nothing is more indicative of the speed of technological development than the fact that the atomic bomb, the largest and most expensive R&D project in history by far, took only three years from the moment the green light was given in 1942 to the moment it produced the rst mushroom cloud. Before we can tell that story, though, it is necessary rst to see how the war in the Far East proceeded.
The war in the Far East was very di erent from the one that took place in Europe. This, after all, is a world of islands; hence, except in Burma, China, and for a few days Manchuria, the role played by ground forces was smaller. Even when they operated on the mainland, both sides had to bring in their supplies from overseas.
For example, an American infantry division took up no less than 144,000 tons of shipping; the gure for an armored division was almost double that.54
Once the troops had been deployed in the theater, they often found the climate to be brutally hot, the roads few and far between, and a terrain full of formidable obstacles. All these factors prevented ground warfare from reaching anything like the size and sophistication of its European equivalent. In particular, large-scale, deep-ranging armored operations were largely absent. Instead it was a question of relatively small units clawing their way through jungles, or else of laboriously climbing mountains.
By contrast, the role played by air and sea forces was much greater. This elementary fact was re ected by the kind of weapons the forces elded, the supplies they needed, the methods they used, and the casualties they su ered. Both of the main protagonists, Japan and the United States, had realized the role airpower could play at sea right from the beginning and constructed their forces accordingly. Land-based and carrier-based aviation, amphibious units, and submarines proved to be the most e ective means by which war was waged. American submarines in particular had to be capable of crossing the Paci c before they could go into action. To carry the necessary fuel, they tended to be larger than their German equivalents.55
The vast number of ocean islands and atolls, even such as were too small and too barren to carry human settlement in times of peace, formed indispensable bases for ships, submarines, amphibious forces, and, even more so, aircraft whose range, as well as endurance, was much more limited. The war, therefore, was very much about defending these islands and trying to capture them.
Originally Roosevelt and Churchill, considering their enemies’
relative strength, had decided on a “Germany rst” strategy.
However, as the United States mobilized and more resources became available, it became possible to proceed in both theaters at the same time, and as so often occurs, one factor that dictated American strategy was the age-old rivalry between the country’s army and its navy.
US operations were divided into two gigantic arms. One was a ground force commanded by army general Douglas MacArthur; the other was composed of a huge naval force headed by Admiral Nimitz. MacArthur’s forces fought their way through New Guinea and the Solomons to the Philippines—where the Japanese had ejected him back in 1941—and Borneo. Nimitz’s did the same by way of the Gilberts, the Marianas, Paulas, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Centering on the indispensable landing craft—it was the availability of these relatively small, relatively simple vessels that often determined whether or not an operation was possible—
American amphibious technique gradually improved.
The rst stage was often to isolate the target by what became known as island-hopping. As the landing began, enormous repower from battleships and carriers was brought to bear, forcing the defenders to keep their heads down. Next, the marines, from their landing craft, stormed the beaches, bringing with them heavy weapons, vehicles, and supplies. The defenders, having constructed well-camou aged cannon and machine gun emplacements, put up tremendous resistance. Clearing them often required weeks, and culminated in ferocious hand-to-hand ghting.
The naval battles that ensued, which in the Paci c were the last large-scale eet actions the world has seen, had little in common with any of their historical predecessors. With the aircraft carrier acquiring preeminence as a naval weapon, battles were now fought at such long ranges that the only combatants to see the other were the carrier-borne pilots. Conversely, any surface forces that did not have carriers to defend them were sitting ducks. Because, without ships, men at sea cannot survive, let alone ght, naval warfare is
heavily dependent on technology. As the years of ghting went by, the more pronounced grew the American advantage in advanced aircraft, sophisticated electronics (radar in particular), and powerful naval vessels. The Japanese took an anachronistic step to compensate by building a couple of giant battleships more powerful than anything the United States had, but this proved a costly error:
They were quickly sunk by carrier aircraft. Overall Japanese weaponry became less sophisticated as the war dragged on. Perhaps nothing demonstrated this trend more so than the rise of suicide attacks, whether they be aerial (kamikaze), at sea (human-guided torpedoes), or on land (suicidal attacks against Allied armor).
This, too, was a war without mercy. At Kwajalein in January and February 1944, the Americans used 41,000 men and lost 400 killed.
For the Japanese, the respective gures were 8,000 and 7,870—
probably a record for a force that size. Japanese atrocities in China, rst meant to intimidate the population, then to combat incipient guerrilla warfare, and nally to perfect methods for waging biological warfare, have become deservedly infamous. Waged as it was against the background of racism that had taken decades, if not centuries, to form, the war against the Western powers was also marked by intense hatred. Allied prisoners who had surrendered to the Japanese were considered by their captors to have forfeited their honor and were often deliberately humiliated, maltreated, starved, and worked to death.
The Allies in their turn often refused to take Japanese prisoners at all. Sometimes they used amethrowers to exterminate the garrisons of occupied islands almost one by one, as if they were rats; there were also instances when body parts, such as ngers and ears, were severed and taken as souvenirs, and enemy dead subjected to sexual abuse.56 Cut o from the world, unable to receive reinforcements, and ordered to ght to the end, the Japanese troops’ fear of what might await them reinforced their determination and sometimes led to actions of mass suicide. And so on in a vicious cycle of violence and cruelty that, if anything, became worse as the war went on.