Triumph in the Pacific; The Navy’s Struggle Against Japan

This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books—picklepublishing@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TRIUMPH IN THE PACIFIC;

THE NAVY’S STRUGGLE AGAINST JAPAN

EDITED BY

E. B. POTTER

AND

FLEET ADMIRAL CHESTER W. NIMITZ, U.S.N.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

1.—The Japanese Advance 5

THE JAPANESE SOUTHERN OFFENSIVE 9

THE JAPANESE DEFENSE PERIMETER 12

HOLDING THE LINE IN THE PACIFIC 14

2.—The Turning of the Tide 20

THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY 21

GUADALCANAL 27

THE RECONQUEST OF ATTU AND KISKA 38

THE SOLOMONS CAMPAIGN 40

THE NEW GUINEA CAMPAIGN 44

NEUTRALIZING RABAUL 45

3.—Beginning the Central Pacific Drive 47

POWER FOR THE NEW DRIVE 51

PLANS AND PRELIMINARY OPERATIONS 53

RECONQUEST OF THE GILBERT ISLANDS 57

INVASION OF THE MARSHALL ISLANDS 69

4.—The Dual Advance to the Philippines 78

TASK FORCE 58 SUPPORTS MACARTHUR 78

HOLLANDIA AND WESTWARD 79

ACROSS THE CENTER 83

THE ASSAULT ON SAIPAN 84

SPRUANCE COVERS THE BEACHHEAD 86

THE ADVANCE OF THE MOBILE FLEET 88

THE BATTLE OF THE PHILIPPINE SEA, JUNE 19-20, 1944 90

CONQUEST OF THE SOUTHERN MARIANAS 95

PRELIMINARIES TO THE INVASION OF THE PHILIPPINES 97

THE INVASION OF LEYTE 102

CONCLUSION 102

5.—The Battle for Leyte Gulf 105

ACTIVATING SHO-GO 105

FIRST BLOOD 108

DISPOSITION OF THE ALLIED FORCES 108

THE BATTLE OF THE SIBUYAN SEA 111

ATTACKS ON SHERMAN’S TASK GROUP 111

HALSEY UNCOVERS THE BEACHHEAD 112

THE BATTLE OF SURIGAO STRAIT 117

THE BATTLE OFF CAPE ENGAÑO 121

THE BATTLE OFF SAMAR 125

THE KAMIKAZES STRIKE 127

KURITA’S RETIREMENT 128

CONCLUSION 130

6.—Submarine Campaigns 132

THE JAPANESE ADVANCE 133

THE MARIN RAID 134

THE SOLOMONS CAMPAIGN 135

TORPEDO TROUBLES 137

THE GILBERTS AND MARSHALLS 138

THE MARIANAS 140

THE PALAUS AND THE PHILIPPINES 142

OTHER OPERATIONS AGAINST THE JAPANESE NAVY 142

THE LIFEGUARD LEAGUE 143

FURTHER JAPANESE SUBMARINE OPERATIONS 144

THE ASSAULT ON JAPANESE MERCHANT SHIPPING 145

OPERATION BARNEY—THE SEA OF JAPAN 148

CONCLUSION 149

7.—The Defeat of Japan 150

THE LEYTE CAMPAIGN 151

THE RETURN TO LUZON 152

THE LIBERATION OF THE PHILIPPINES 157

THE BORNEO CAMPAIGN 159

THE CAPTURE OF IWO JIMA 160

THE OKINAWA CAMPAIGN 165

THE JAPANESE SURRENDER 174

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 177

PREFACE

While taking full responsibility for errors of fact and interpretation, the authors wish to express their gratitude to all who have helped them to complete this work.

The following officers reviewed portions of the typescript of the original version and provided the authors with detailed comment and marginal notes: the late Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey USN (Ret.), Admiral Raymond A. Spruance USN (Ret.), Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid USN (Ret.), Admiral Robert B. Carney USN (Ret.), Lieutenant-General Julian C. Smith USMC (Ret.), Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood USN (Ret.), Vice Admiral Stanton A. Merrill USN (Ret.), and Captain Ralph Weymouth USN.

So many persons have been helpful in supplying information that a comprehensive listing is impossible, but prominent among them are General of the Army Douglas MacArthur USA, Admiral Arleigh A. Burke USN (Ret.), the late Vice Admiral Eliot H. Bryant USN (Ret.), and Rear Admiral Walter C. Ansel USN (Ret.).

Professor Vernon Tate, Head Librarian of the United States Naval Academy, his predecessor, the late Louis H. Bolander, and their staffs have been unstintingly helpful, as have Rear Admiral Ernest M. Eller USN (Ret.), Director of Naval History, and his staff.

The charts and diagrams were drawn, largely from the authors’ sketches, by Mr. William M. Shannon and Mr. Albert Jones, both of the United States Naval Academy. In some instances one source has been the primary basis for an illustration. The authors therefore wish to acknowledge these sources for the illustrations appearing on the following pages: page 4, adapted from Allan Westcott, ed., American Sea Power since 1775 (Chicago: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1952); pages 12, 30, 82, and 83, adapted with the permission of the author from Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vols. III, V, and VIII (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1948-53); and page 60, adapted from Philip A. Crowl and Edmund G. Love, Seizure of the Gilberts and Marshalls (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1955).

Much of the material of Triumph in the Pacific is based upon original research, particularly among official documents. Some is based on correspondence and interviews with participants. A great deal, however, is drawn from the numerous histories and memoirs of World War II already published. Of these, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, by Samuel Eliot Morison, has proved most useful.

The authors and Admiral Nimitz wish to emphasize that Triumph in the Pacific is in no sense official history. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

E.B.P.

1.—The Japanese Advance

For sheer audacity the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, is almost without parallel in naval warfare. It required conducting a carrier force undetected across 3,500 miles of open sea to within striking range of America’s most powerful Pacific base. For it to succeed, the Americans had to remain uninformed and unprepared, their fleet in the harbor and their planes on the ground, until the attack was upon them. Incredibly enough, that is exactly what happened.

Yet the United States had had ample warning. The Americans, having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, were reading secret Japanese radio messages. They knew that the Japanese embassy at Washington had been ordered to destroy all but one code—which was to be used to decipher a final message. The final message, breaking off negotiations with the United States, began coming in on the eve of the attack. It was shown to President Roosevelt, who said, This means war!

In two preceding wars, against China in 1894 and against Russia in 1904, Japan had established a pattern of breaking off relations and then attacking the enemy’s fleet without a declaration of war. The main body of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was in Pearl Harbor. It could be attacked effectively only by carrier aircraft. Such an attack would doubtless come early in the morning so that the attacking carriers could make their final approach under cover of darkness. The decrypted Japanese message specified that it was to be handed to the Secretary of State at precisely 1300, December 7. At that time it would be 0730 at Pearl Harbor.

Admiral Harold R. Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, saw no reason to send another war warning to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. I hesitate to send any more, he told General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff; a new one will be merely confusing. General Marshall did notify the principal Pacific bases, but the message he sent to Major-General Walter C. Short, Commanding General of the Hawaiian Department, went out by commercial radio and did not arrive at General Short’s headquarters until after the attack was over.

In the Pearl Harbor area aircraft were lined up in neat rows, making them easy to guard against sabotage—and easy to destroy from the air. The emphasis was on training, not defense. On Sunday morning, December 7, all the battleships in the area were in the harbor, anchored in Battleship Row—to permit weekend liberty. Luckily the two carriers, Lexington and Enterprise, were still at sea, delivering planes respectively to Midway and Wake. An hour before the attack a destroyer reported and sank a midget submarine off the entrance to Pearl Harbor. At the same time, at the opposite end of the island of Oahu, a pair of army radar operators began plotting a large flight of planes coming in from the north. Neither of these events served to alert the defenders.

With all these warnings, why did neither Washington nor Pearl Harbor anticipate a raid on the Pacific Fleet? Mainly because American government and military leaders had their attention focused on another Japanese advance, which was in fact the main thrust. A powerful expeditionary force had been observed forming up in Japanese and occupied Chinese ports and had subsequently been reported at sea heading south. Later, American pilots reported the same or a similar force in Camranh Bay, Indo-China. On December 6, British aircraft sighted a convoy rounding the southern point of Indo-China as if headed for the Malay Peninsula.

Such a southward move had been anticipated for months. Japan had depended heavily on the United States for oil, needed to carry on her undeclared war with China. When the American government began restricting sales of oil to Japan, the Japanese made plans to assure themselves of an alternate source in the Netherlands East Indies. In July 1941, they occupied southern Indo-China. This move gave them airfields that threatened the Philippines, Singapore, and Borneo. The United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands East Indies government countered by freezing Japanese assets. The effect was to cut off all trade between the United States and Japan, and to make it difficult for the Japanese to purchase oil or anything else anywhere.

American government and military leaders accepted the probability that in due course, as Japan’s supply of oil ran low, the Japanese would advance into the East Indies, and that they would also seize Singapore and perhaps the Philippines and Guam to protect their communications with the south. The American strategists scarcely considered the possibility that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor. They believed that the Japanese had neither the forces nor the audacity to take such a risk.

The American view closely paralleled that of the Japanese Naval General Staff. The General Staff accepted the necessity of capturing the Netherlands East Indies and adjacent areas, but when Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, proposed also attacking Pearl Harbor, they were shocked. They vigorously opposed weakening their impending southward thrust to carry out such a hazardous operation. Yamamoto stood his ground. He insisted that the elimination of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was essential to the success of the southern advance. He threatened to resign unless his plan were adopted. At length, in early November 1941, the General Staff gave in. The Pearl Harbor Striking Force, comprising the carriers Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku, escorted by the battleships Hiei and Kirishima, three cruisers, and nine destroyers, moved to a secret base in the Kuril Islands to await further orders.

By late November the Japanese leaders had concluded that negotiations with the United States toward unfreezing Japanese assets were futile. As they saw it, their only alternatives were to take on more enemies, including the United States, or to withdraw from China and abandon their cherished project for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. If there was to be war, the time seemed propitious. German armies were threatening both Moscow and Alexandria. A great part of the United States fleet was engaged in an undeclared war in the Atlantic, assisting Britain’s Royal Navy to protect convoys from the rampaging U-boats. By the terms of the Tripartite Pact, if the United States declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy would declare war on the United States.

On November 26, the Pearl Harbor Striking Force left the Kurils, eastbound. On December 1, in Tokyo, an Imperial Conference ratified Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s decision for war. The next day Admiral Yamamoto radioed the Striking Force: Climb Mt. Niitaka, meaning Proceed with the attack.

On December 7, an hour after midnight, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commanding the Striking Force, received from Tokyo an intelligence report that no carriers were at Pearl Harbor. This was a grave disappointment, but there were eight battleships in the harbor. These now became the primary targets—together with aircraft and airfields, to forestall counterattack. Just before dawn Nagumo’s carriers reached the launching point, 200 miles north of Pearl Harbor, and turned into the wind. At 0600 the first wave of 183 planes took off. After a tense wait of nearly two hours, Nagumo’s flagship Akagi picked up from the flight leader the prearranged code word: Tiger...tiger...tiger. Remarkably enough, so did Yamamoto’s flagship in Japan’s Inland Sea. The word meant: Surprise achieved. It is recorded that Yamamoto in this moment of triumphant vindication showed no outward sign of emotion.

Nagumo’s force had launched a second wave of 170 planes at 0715. By 1300 all surviving aircraft were back on their carriers. Only 29 were missing. Half an hour later, on flag signal from the Akagi, the Striking Force set a retirement course NNW. There was no counterattack.

When the smoke lifted over Oahu, more than 2,400 Americans, mostly naval personnel, were dead or dying, and 1,300 more were wounded. Some 230 aircraft had been destroyed or heavily damaged, and in Pearl Harbor 18 ships had been hit. Battleship Row was a shambles. The Arizona was a total loss. The Oklahoma had capsized and would never fight again. The California and the West Virginia were sunk at their moorings. The Nevada, the Maryland, the Tennessee, and the Pennsylvania were more or less heavily damaged.

Despite these severe losses, the Americans could take consolation in that the Pearl Harbor repair facilities, which could return most of the damaged ships to service, were practically untouched. More important, the attacking planes had missed the tank farms, where 4,500,000 barrels of fuel oil had been accumulated. Loss of this oil would have hindered American naval operations in the Pacific far more than the damage done to the fleet.

What had Yamamoto achieved by his cherished attack? He had instantly swept away widespread pacifism in the United States. He had united 130,000,000 Americans in a relentless determination to push the war against all odds to final victory.

Militarily, Yamamoto by his attack had removed an albatross from around the neck of American naval policy. This was the line doctrine, held by many senior admirals. These had never accepted the carrier as a capital ship. Some influential line admirals believed that the coming war would be fought in much the same manner as the last, that fleet battles would again consist of gunnery duels between lines of heavy ships, and that the gun and not the plane was still the decisive naval weapon. Line doctrine assigned to carriers the missions of reconnaissance and shadowing, spotting of fleet gunfire in surface actions and shore bombardments, assisting to protect the fleet (particularly the carriers themselves) from attack by enemy submarines and aircraft, and attacking a faster enemy attempting to escape—in order to reduce his speed so as to enable the pursuing surface ships to take him under fire.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, by disabling the U.S. battle line, canceled American line doctrine in the first hours of the war. The fleet carriers—Saratoga, Lexington, Enterprise, Yorktown, Wasp, and Hornet{1}—of necessity became capital ships, the queens of the fleet, and at long last acquired permanent escorts of cruisers and destroyers. As new fast battleships began to reach the Pacific in the latter part of 1942, they also were integrated into the carrier screens.

The old battleships sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor were far too slow for such service. Thanks to the undamaged state of local repair facilities, all but the Arizona and Oklahoma were raised, repaired, and renovated by 1944, when they became useful for shore bombardment in support of amphibious operations. Meanwhile, their temporary loss freed thousands of trained seamen, of which there was a severe shortage, for use in carrier, escorting, and amphibious forces.

THE JAPANESE SOUTHERN OFFENSIVE

American pre-war estimates that Japan was capable of sustaining no more than one thrust at a time were quickly belied. Even before the attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Japanese troops were landing on the Malay Peninsula, prepared to advance overland 650 miles to Singapore, all of whose big guns pointed seaward. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese planes also raided Wake, Guam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippine Islands of Luzon and Mindanao, and Japanese troops based on Indo-China invaded the Kingdom of Thailand.

Admiral Thomas C. Hart at Manila promptly sent the combat surface ships of his tiny U.S. Asiatic Fleet south where they joined British, Dutch, and Australian ships to form a defense force called ABDA. Much the most powerful Allied vessels in the East Indies area were H.M. battleship Prince of Wales and H.M. battle cruiser Repulse at Singapore. These Admiral Sir Tom Phillips took north with an escort of four destroyers in an attempt to disrupt Japanese landing operations. The Royal Air Force, hard pressed to support the ground troops, could provide no cover at sea. Phillips’ force, arriving too late to catch the enemy transports, was attacked on December 10 by aircraft out of Indo-China. Both the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, hit by bombs and torpedoes, rolled over and sank—proving to the skeptics that powerful ships maneuvering at sea were not immune to destruction from the air.

That same day the Japanese bombed the Cavite Navy Yard on Manila Bay into uselessness and made the first of a series of landings in the Philippines. Following the main Japanese invasion at Lingayen Gulf, General Douglas MacArthur declared Manila an open city to save it from further bombings and began moving his Filipino-American army north around Manila Bay to the peninsula of Bataan. The day following the Lingayen invasion the Japanese landed at Hong Kong, which fell on Christmas Day.

The defenders on Malaya gave ground stubbornly but could not hold back the Japanese tide, which in 54 days reached the tip of the peninsula. By February 1, 1942, the last of the British and Australians had crossed over to Singapore Island and blown up the causeway connecting it to the mainland. A week later under a heavy barrage, Japanese troops began landing on the island. On February 15, Singapore surrendered.

From the Japanese point of view all these operations were peripheral—to cover the flanks of the main drive, which began in mid-December 1941 with a landing near Brunei, Borneo. By early January Japanese forces were leapfrogging southward along the east and west coasts of Borneo and also via the Molucca Sea. At each landing point they established an airfield, relatively secure from overland attack because of generally primitive interior communications. Then under cover of land-or carrier-based aircraft they moved on to their next invasion.

In mid-February Admiral Nagumo’s carrier striking force arrived in the East Indies and on the 19th joined land-based planes from Celebes in a raid on Darwin, Australia’s chief northern port, shattering docks and warehouses and sinking a dozen vessels. This attack, together with a Japanese invasion of Timor the following day, effectively isolated Java, toward which the Japanese pincers were advancing.

The United States high command now conceded that the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines were lost, but American troops continued to resist on Bataan, and American ships remained with the ABDA force, not so much in hopes of stopping or even of appreciably slowing the Japanese advance as through an unwillingness to abandon America’s friends in the Far East.

Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman, operational commander of the ABDA naval force, simply lacked the power to cope with either of the enemy advances around Borneo—particularly in view of Japanese air supremacy. Toward the end of February, invasion convoys were approaching from northwest and north-east to close the pincers on Java. On the 27th Doorman sortied to contest the advance of the eastern prong, though by then his force had been reduced to two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and a few destroyers. The ensuing Battle of the Java Sea completed the destruction of the ABDA force.

At first contact in the late afternoon the Japanese escort vessels, enjoying the advantage of air scouting, sank two destroyers and put the British heavy cruiser Exeter out of action. Doorman thereupon broke off contact and circled, trying to get at the enemy transports, but just at dusk he again met and exchanged fire with the escorts. The four American destroyers, their torpedoes fruitlessly expended, now retired on Surabaya and ultimately escaped to Australia. The remainder of the force, after skirting the Java north coast and losing a destroyer to a newly laid Dutch mine field, again headed north, spotted by enemy planes dropping flares. When toward midnight Doorman once more made contact with the Japanese escort vessels, his force had been diminished to Dutch light cruisers De Ruyter and Java, American heavy cruiser Houston, and Australian light cruiser Perth. Both Dutch cruisers were caught by a spread of torpedoes and sunk. As his flagship De Ruyter was going down, Doorman ordered his two remaining cruisers to retire.

In Sunda Strait the next night the fleeing Houston and Perth ran into the western invasion force landing troops, and both were sunk. The following day the damaged Exeter and two escorting destroyers, attempting to escape the same way, were intercepted and sent down by Japanese ships and aircraft. Most of the ships based on Java’s south coast managed to save themselves, but the Nagumo Force, patrolling in that area to intercept such evacuators, sank several vessels, including two American destroyers.

Troops from the Japanese landings, east and west, rapidly converged, forcing Java into unconditional surrender on March 9. By the end of the month the entire Netherlands Indies was in enemy hands. The Japanese had now attained all their objectives in the South, which they called their Southern Resources Area. The rich oil wells of Java, Borneo, and Sumatra would provide them with an inexhaustible supply of fuel. They