Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

Born in 1885 into a German family who became successful hotelkeepers in Texas, Nimitz had intended an army career until offered a midshipman’s place at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. A former submariner who was among the pioneers of refuelling at sea, he was well-known for his skilful management of committees, and meticulous personal habits—he was irked by the unpunctuality of politicians. The admiral invariably travelled with his schnauzer Mak, a mean little dog which growled. His staff, like most wartime service personnel, worked a seven-day week, but were encouraged to take an afternoon tennis break. They inhabited a sternly masculine world, for Nimitz insisted that there should be no women on the team. There was just one female intruder—a mine warfare intelligence officer named Lt Harriet Borland, who for administrative purposes was deemed not to be a member of Cincpac’s headquarters. The admiral and his wife Catherine entertained generously in their home at Pearl, often serving fruit delicacies flown from the Pacific islands.

A natural diplomat, sober and controlled, Nimitz strove to defuse tensions with MacArthur, even when—as sometimes happened—the general flatly refused to surrender control of shipping temporarily diverted to him from navy resources. In March 1944 the two men and their senior staffs met in Brisbane, for what promised to be a stormy encounter. ‘Nee-mitz’, as MacArthur called the admiral sourly, opened the conference by telling a story of two frantically worried men, pacing a hotel corridor. One finally asked the other what was troubling him. ‘I am a doctor,’ came the answer, ‘and I have a patient in my room with a wooden leg, and I have that leg apart and can’t get it back together again.’ The other man said: ‘Great guns, I wish that was all I have to worry about. I have a good-looking gal in my room with both legs apart, and I can’t remember the room number.’ Even MacArthur laughed, though it was unthinkable that he himself would have stooped to such perceived vulgarity. Carrier admiral ‘Jocko’ Clark asserted reverently that Nimitz was ‘the one great leader in the Pacific who had no blemish on his shield or dent in his armour’. This seems not much overstated.

Why, on Hawaii, did Nimitz not voice the navy’s strong reservations about the Philippines plan? First, he found himself in a weak diplomatic position. Whatever MacArthur’s private contempt for Roosevelt, at their meeting the general deployed the full force of his personality to charm the president, whom he had known since serving under him as army chief of staff. The undemonstrative Nimitz found himself perforce playing a subordinate role beside two showmen. More than this, naval commanders were themselves divided about future strategy. Admiral Raymond Spruance, commanding Fifth Fleet, favoured an advance on Okinawa by way of Iwo Jima, rather than taking Formosa. Despite King’s order to plan for Formosa, Spruance instructed his staff not to waste time on it.

Nimitz himself, meanwhile, was more sympathetic to the Philippines plan than was King, his boss. Six months earlier, the Pacific C-in-C had been furiously rebuked by the Chief of Naval Operations for advocating a landing on Mindanao rather than in the Marianas. While the navy certainly saw no virtue in protracted operations to recover the entire archipelago, Nimitz and his staff deemed it useful, indeed probably indispensable, to secure Philippines ground and air bases before advancing closer to Japan. Logistics would permit Mindanao-Leyte landings before the end of 1944, while no assault on Formosa was feasible before the spring of 1945. Furthermore, Japanese captures of US air bases in China, and general disenchantment with Chiang Kai-Shek’s nation as an ally, made Formosa seem far less useful as a door into China than it had done a few months earlier. Nimitz almost certainly considered that the Hawaii meeting was symbolic and political, rather than decisive. The joint chiefs would arbitrate. There was no purpose in attempting to translate a political showcase occasion into a strategic showdown.

Yet MacArthur, the man of destiny, believed that he had exploited the occasion to good effect. When he climbed back on his plane to return to Australia, barely twenty-four hours after landing on Hawaii, he declared triumphantly to his staff: ‘We’ve sold it!’ He was justified in this assertion insofar as Roosevelt sailed home on 29 July, after a further two days visiting bases and hospitals, believing that the US must retake the Philippines. Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a part in the presidential endorsement of MacArthur’s wishes. Roosevelt knew that the general’s political friends would raise a storm among American voters if they could claim that the suffering millions of the Philippines—America’s dependants or colonial subjects, according to taste—were being wantonly abandoned to continuing Japanese oppression.

Even after Hawaii, however, for several weeks the US joint chiefs of staff havered. Marshall had once described the MacArthur plan for the Philippines as ‘the slow way…We would have to fight our way through them, and it would take a very much longer time than to make the cut across.’ In north-west Europe, Eisenhower staunchly resisted pleas to liberate the starving Dutch people in the winter of 1944, arguing—surely rightly—that the welfare of all the occupied peoples of Europe was best served by concentrating forces without diversion upon the defeat of Nazi Germany. Yet so great was the prestige of MacArthur, so effective was his emotional crusade for the Philippines’ liberation, that to gainsay him would have required a vastly different supreme command in Washington.

From the late summer of 1944 onwards, America’s difficulties in the Pacific related principally to the logistic challenges of supporting large forces at the limits of an oceanic supply chain. Moreover, in the early autumn, after MacArthur’s cheap successes in Papua-New Guinea, there was no anticipation of the intensity of resistance the Japanese would offer on Leyte and Luzon. US air and sea power had lately overwhelmed the enemy’s puny efforts wherever he accepted battle. Desperate courage and superior fieldcraft enabled Japanese soldiers often to inflict pain on American forces, but never to alter outcomes. For instance, a belated offensive at Aitape in New Guinea in July 1944 cost the Japanese 18th Army 10,000 dead, in exchange for killing some 440 Americans. US forces paid with the lives of almost 7,000 men for the capture of the Marianas and later Peleliu—but the Japanese counted 46,000 dead. Such a dramatic balance in favour of the victors was small comfort to a Marine in a foxhole under mortar and machine-gun fire from an invisible enemy, with comrades bleeding around him. But it represented a reality which promoted optimism among American commanders in the autumn of 1944.

It was almost certainly the correct decision to undertake limited operations to straddle the Philippines with naval and air power, seizing bases, destroying Japanese aircraft and interdicting enemy shipping routes. MacArthur’s plans, however, were vastly more ambitious. He was bent upon a campaign of progressive liberation which could contribute little to expediting America’s advance upon the Japanese home islands. His first landing would be made in the south, on Mindanao. US forces would then advance progressively via Leyte to the capture of the largest island, Luzon, which MacArthur assured the Chiefs could be taken in a month. Nimitz, meanwhile, would prepare to capture the central Pacific island of Iwo Jima, and thereafter assault Okinawa.

Just as in Europe Eisenhower committed his armies to a broad-front advance, rather than favouring any one of his subordinate commanders’ operations above those of others, so in the war against Japan the US sustained the twin-track strategy, sustaining both MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines and the navy’s drive across the central Pacific. This represented a broadcasting of resources acceptable only to a nation of America’s fantastic wealth, but it was the compromise adopted by the chiefs of staff, with the belated acquiescence of Admiral King. So assured could be America’s commanders of forthcoming victory, that it was hard for them to regard the Philippines as an issue of decisive importance—and indeed, it was not. It was in no one’s interest to bet the ranch against MacArthur about rival routes to a final outcome which was not in doubt. In the late summer of 1944, the general began to gather land, sea and air forces for a November assault on his ‘second homeland’.

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