Island Infernos’ Review: Battle of the Beachheads
By: By Michael F. Bishop
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Eighty years ago this month, the American entry into World War II was precipitated by the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. But the ensuing clash in the war’s Pacific theater has long been overshadowed in American memory by the battles in Europe. Compared to the famed ordeals of the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge, the battles of Guadalcanal, Saipan and Okinawa pale in the popular imagination. This skewed perspective unfairly slights the brave men who fought against Japanese aggression, and distorts our understanding of the conflict’s legacy. As the historian Richard Overy observes in “Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945,” his magisterial new history of World War II, “the Asian war and its consequences were as important to the creation of the post-war world as the defeat of Germany in Europe, arguably more so.”
To the extent that the Pacific theater still lives in the American imagination, the Marines, who fought with splendid valor, play a starring role. The HBO miniseries “The Pacific” (2010) ranged across the sprawling theater of conflict but focused almost exclusively on the experiences of young Marines. One of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century is of six Marines hoisting the flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. It may be that the Marines are as adept at public relations as they are courageous on the battlefield. But the U.S. Army fielded 1.8 million men in the fight against Japan, several times as many as the Marine Corps.
The indispensable contribution of the army to eventual victory over Japan is the subject of “Island Infernos: The US Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944,” by John C. McManus. The author, who is the Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, has written more than a dozen highly regarded works of American military history. “Island Infernos” is the second volume of a planned trilogy—the first, “Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943,” won the prestigious Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History. In both volumes, Mr. McManus brilliantly refocuses our view on the role of the army in this strangely scattered campaign and conveys the experience of the individual combat soldier, who “fought in some of the world’s most inhospitable locales, against a foe who recognized few Western-style rules of warfare.” Among many grim statistics that support the latter assertion: as many as 40% of American POWs in the Pacific perished in captivity.
For the American soldier, the Pacific theater was surely the losing ticket. The climate was intolerable—Mr. McManus quotes the recollection of a young officer: “The land steamed. The combination of heat and moisture was smothering. You had to fight through it.” Men often lived like “subterranean rats . . . in filthy, muddy trenches and dugouts. Monsoon rains poured down in sheets.” Disease was rampant; during the first stage of the war, malaria was a deadlier enemy than the Japanese. Men were ordered to wear protective clothing to protect against the relentless mosquitoes, and to take atabrine pills with their meals. Dysentery was a constant scourge; many sufferers “took to cutting holes in the seats of their trousers and letting nature take its course while they kept moving.” The problem was worsened by linguistic difficulties that arose from fighting alongside foreign allies; in Burma, according to Mr. McManus, “the Chinese were urinating and defecating into a stream the Americans had been using for drinking water,” laying low hundreds of men.
“Island Infernos” follows the army through its swift and successful January 1944 invasion of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, a little more than two years after the Pearl Harbor attack, to the pivotal Marianas campaign and beyond. “Control of the Marianas,” Mr. McManus observes, “meant control of the Central Pacific. With the Marianas in hand, the Americans could sever Japanese lines of communication.” More importantly, “the Marianas offered the prospect of air bases only some thirteen hundred miles from Tokyo, well within the range of the forthcoming American heavy bomber, the B-29 Superfortress.” The troops endured seasickness and food poisoning during the long and harrowing journey from Hawaii to Saipan, commencing offensive operations on June 15. Successful assaults on Guam and Tinian would soon follow; the fateful flight of the Enola Gay to Hiroshima in August 1945 would originate from the latter.
Presiding over the army’s portion of this vast operation, “spread across nearly a third of the globe’s surface,” was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who, ordered by Roosevelt to depart the besieged island of Corregidor in Manila Bay in March 1942, vowed, “I shall return.” He would stop at nothing to keep that vow, for as Mr. McManus relates, “he believed, unshakably and irrevocably, that to defeat Japan the Americans must liberate the Philippines.” His ambitions went beyond Philippine reconquest; even in the midst of the Pacific campaigns he used his large and sophisticated public relations apparatus to pursue the 1944 Republican presidential nomination. No wonder Roosevelt considered him one of the most dangerous men in America.
Mr. McManus gives due credit to MacArthur’s experience, courage and strategic vision. Before the war he served as superintendent of West Point and later army chief of staff, and his strategic conception of the conflict was sound—he explained in 1943 that it would involve “massive strokes against only main strategic objectives, utilizing surprise and air-ground striking power supported and assisted by the fleet.” But he casts a cold eye upon MacArthur’s many flaws, depicting “a man of astonishing pomposity, megalomania and egocentrism,” displaying “petty vanities, a slew of insecurities, and troubling character flaws.”
As Mr. McManus explains, America was fortunate that MacArthur’s naval counterpart was Adm. Chester Nimitz, a man “every bit as modest and self-effacing as MacArthur was egomaniacal,” who dealt with the mercurial general as a “gentle-tempered German shepherd endures the nips of a frisky beagle.” As commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet the white-haired, blue-eyed Texan marshaled one of the greatest naval forces the world had ever seen. With it, he had both to confront Japan’s powerful fleet and transport MacArthur’s army from one objective to another. He carried out these monumental tasks with calm professionalism and astonishing success.
Island-hopping war was an enterprise of overwhelming complexity. In attempting to field a huge army across a vast expanse of sea, military planners confronted logistical challenges far greater than in Europe. Mr. McManus explores in meticulous detail the army’s remarkable feats of transport and supply under unprecedented conditions. “In a typical invasion,” he notes, “one division required, on average, 7,500 tons of cargo on the first day alone.” The challenge was made infinitely greater by the diverse landscape and geology of the Pacific islands; soldiers confronted “rocky coral soil” and impassable seas of mud, with each requiring different types of vehicles and equipment. During the assault on New Guinea, landing craft deposited “steadily rising heaps” of crates, along with “ammo and ration dumps, cots, tents, poles, seabags, and bedrolls” along with “almost 2,000 tons of engineering equipment and supplies.”
“Island Infernos” ends with the bloody Battle of Leyte, which began in October 1944 with thousands of men, most laden with 60 to 100 pounds of gear, pouring onto the beaches. One flamethrower-wielding soldier, coming upon an enemy pillbox, recalled: “I placed the nozzle in the hole and shot three bursts into the bunker. The screams I heard were of intense agony . . . the stench of burning flesh drifted through the openings.” MacArthur wasted no time wading ashore for the cameras, and later delivered a radio address in which he declared, “People of the Philippines, I have returned!” But for all this sense of triumph, observes Mr. McManus, Leyte was an anticlimax, “little more than a protracted, deadly prelude to a more decisive campaign on Luzon and elsewhere in the archipelago.” The battle, with all its attendant horrors, would drag on for months.
That was also true of the larger war, in which “the greatest struggles were still to come,” with a costly invasion of the Japanese home islands then appearing the most likely conclusion. The army in 1944 was a “coiled olive-drab machine, growing in strength and purpose,” maturing into “a professionally led citizen-soldier force of singular potency, flexibility, and complexity.” Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s warning to his countrymen that the bombing of Pearl Harbor had “awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve,” though possibly apocryphal, has always had the ring of truth. And the “terrible resolve” of the U.S. Army would play an indispensable role in achieving victory over Japan the following year.
“Island Infernos” is a feat of prodigious scholarship and exhaustive research into both Japanese and American sources. The author’s brisk, engaging prose speeds the reader through a long and detailed narrative. If the third volume maintains the standards of the first two—surely a safe assumption—Mr. McManus will have produced a study of the American army in the Pacific as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Liberation Trilogy” about its deeds in Europe.
—Mr. Bishop, a writer and historian, is the former executive director of the International Churchill Society and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
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