World Battlefronts: Come Out and Fight

(See Cover)

A column of green-camouflaged destroyers and boxlike landing craft crept northward through the slot of the Solomons. New Allied invasions—of the tiny Treasury Islands, of Choiseul across the way, and eventually of Bougainville between them—were beginning. This triple play was to be an important operation, for heavily defended Bougainville was the last stop on the long road to Rabaul, Japan’s main South Pacific base. TIME Correspondent William Chickering was aboard a ship bound for Treasuries, and he cabled:

“There was no moon. Not even a cigaret glowed and silence spread over our ship. Below decks a few played apathetically at cards, and at the end a big major, his glasses clouded with steam and his inflated face slick with sweat, owed $8 to a sharp-eyed little captain. He asked: ‘Do you want it now, or will you take it off the corpse?’ One by one the men drifted off to the narrow, airless bunks assigned them. The wardroom was empty by 9:30. . . .

“At 3 o’clock the colored mess attendant had turned on the wardroom lights and got the table ready for breakfast. The troops somnambulated in. A few had already made themselves ready, had melted pellets of green dye and smeared their faces. One of these had applied an imaginative swirl of green across his face, leaving an eerie eye and half a mouth. ‘I want them to die laughing,’ he explained.

“After breakfast men drifted together in the corner of the wardroom. One of them softly began to sing. Shyly others cleared their throats and chimed in. As the singing finally died down, one officer smiled a funny smile and broke into Just Before the Battle, Mother. . . .

“My boat was in the water. We moved forward into the congregation of Higgins boats, jostling and bumping, while destroyers fired arching red balls ashore. Then the red balls seemed to bounce back, and we realized with horror that the Japs were thoroughly awakened and were returning fire. The jungle remained inviolate, as though it could soak up all the fire we could pour in.

“Suddenly we bolted forward. The pup-pup-pup of 20-mm. guns on the landing barges sounded like an irritable Fourth of July. Leathery men, with their garishly daubed faces, clenched their guns with sweaty hands, gritted their teeth and stared with frantic concentration at the shoulders of the men ahead.

“The boat jolted against the pebbly shore. The nose clanked down. Men sucked in their breaths and shouldered forward.

“The Japs scurried off up the dense hillside and were hotly pursued. Meanwhile, LCIs (Landing Craft, Infantry) had filed in and were unloading. At sea bigger and clumsier LSTs (Landing Ships, Tanks, affectionately interpreted as “Large, Slow Targets”), their bellies heavy with mechanical equipment and troops, lumbered toward the harbor mouth. They suffered the indignity of being attacked by Jap mortar fire from the hillside, and a destroyer had to go to their rescue with an offshore barrage. At this point task forces had a look over the horizon to see how we were getting on. We were doing all right.”

Where Is Koga? On both Choiseul and Bougainville, Allied landings were made on relatively undefended beaches, near but not too near Japanese strongholds. Allied amphibious forces under the command of Rear Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson did their job unmolested except by a few hit-&-run air attacks. Enemy airfields in the area had been literally knocked out by a sustained air campaign. By week’s end, the Japanese Fleet had not reacted to the advance in any way. General Douglas MacArthur, a relative newcomer to the delights of naval warfare, said: “If the Jap Fleet comes out I will welcome it. I will throw everything against it.” But the Japs did not immediately oblige.

The Japanese Navy had been lying low for months. The last time Japanese units had shown themselves in battle was in Kula Gulf on July 7, and the last time before that was in the final tussle off Guadalcanal in November 1942.

There were four principal reasons for this seeming shyness: 1) the Japanese Navy was busy with its traditional mission of building and maintaining supply lines, 2) attrition of Japanese strength and additions to U.S. strength, in both naval and merchant vessels, had finally clamped caution on to Japanese helms, 3) the new Commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral Mineichi Koga, was a careful man, and 4) the flexibility of Allied strategy had the Japs guessing about the best way of defending their home islands.

Doctrine of Supply. The Japanese Navy has an Occidental background, but its functions are peculiarly Japanese and are often misunderstood by Westerners. Japan’s greatest naval figure, Heihachiro Togo, served the apprenticeship to his trade in England.

In Edwin A. Falk’s Togo and the Rise of Japanese Sea Power, the chapter which describes the British phase of his naval education is entitled: The Decks That Nelson Trod. Togo and his naval heirs might have been — but were not — molded by “the Nelson touch,” as Admiral Nelson himself referred to his way of fighting. Essence of the Nelson touch was the order: “Close with the enemy.” Allied naval officers still revere and in some cases (notably Cunningham of the Mediterranean and Halsey of the South Pacific) still have the Nelson touch: their one desire is to find and destroy the enemy fleet. But not the Japs.

The Japanese consider that the main function of the Navy, besides defending the home islands, is to pave and patrol safe sea roads to the Empire’s outposts. In the realm of strategy the Japanese Navy is the Army’s handmaiden. The Navy commits its ships for the most part in direct support of land operations and supply lines.

This is not necessarily a defensive doctrine. Nelson’s spirit has been matched by some Japanese naval officers; the difference is one of strategic doctrine. Nelson believed in destroying the enemy fleet. The Japs believe in letting their armies destroy the enemy’s land force. Supply lines are the essential of offense, since armies travel on their stomachs and win by firing ammunition which must be transported to them.

Pearl Harbor to Kula. Only once in World War II has the Japanese Navy fought a major surface action which was not linked with Japanese troop movements. That action was also the only defensive battle the Japanese Navy has fought. The record:

> Pearl Harbor was clearly, and successfully, a naval diversion to facilitate landings in the Philippines and elsewhere. There is evidence that its incidental effect —destruction of the U.S. battle fleet—astounded the Japs as thoroughly as it shocked the U.S. Navy. Certainly, they did not follow up their advantage.

> The Battles of Macassar Strait and the Java Sea covered landings in Borneo and Java.

> In the Battle of the Coral Sea the Jap carrier forces were escorting an invasion force bound for an undetermined point—perhaps Australia, perhaps the Solomon Islands.

> The Battle of Midway cost Japan four carriers with which it hoped to insure an invasion of the most important stepping-stone to the Hawaiian Islands.

> There were six important actions in the Solomons. The first, the Battle of Savo Island, Aug. 8-9, 1942, when Japanese cruisers and destroyers sank four Allied cruisers in an effort to halt U.S. landings, was the unique exception to the rule, and in that case the Japanese did not return to follow up their success. The other Solomons actions—the Battles of the Eastern Solomons, Cape Esperance, Santa Cruz Islands, Guadalcanal and Lunga Point—were all occasioned by Japanese attempts to bring up reinforcements.

> No U.S. ships, only Army planes, took part in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, but in that case the Japanese committed and lost naval vessels while trying to push troops ashore.

> Finally, in the Battle of Kula Gulf, the Japanese were again moving reinforcements.

Attrition & Addition. At some point, Mineichi Koga and his Navy will have to begin fighting battles which, if not intended to destroy the U.S. Fleet, are at least intended to destroy the invasion forces which those ships will accompany. U.S. troops, rather than Jap troops, have begun to move forward. The classic Japanese doctrine of supporting ground troops on offensive missions must give way to a purely defensive pattern. That pattern must inevitably include a willingness to attack Allied troop convoys as they advance and a willingness to undertake major fleet actions—or else the Allied successes will eventually reach right to the shores of the hitherto inviolate islands.

Not since the 13th Century has an invasion of Japan’s home islands been attempted. That one, initiated by the Mongol Kublai Khan, was destroyed by the sort of storm which the Japanese like to call a Divine Wind—in Japanese history, an event comparable to the destruction of the storm-blown Spanish Armada off Britain. But wind will not blow away the Allied forces now accumulating against Japan—and accumulating for the specific purpose of first attacking Japan’s outposts such as Truk and Singapore, and eventually Japan itself.

The accumulation is already visible to the Japanese. U.S. carrier strength, for instance, has sharply increased in recent months—enough so that the biggest U.S. carrier task force ever assembled could attack Wake on Oct. 5-6, and only three weeks later another carrier force could help destroy Bougainville’s air power and back up the Treasury and Choiseul landings.*

The Allies enjoy not only an increasing strength from production, but also an increment for success. The clearing of the Mediterranean has freed a considerable number of units, both British and U.S., which have now begun to move East against the Jap.

Koga’s fleet, meanwhile, has suffered heavily from attrition because it has not the same regenerative powers. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan had at least eight carriers. The U.S. Navy has claimed six. Two were being built when the war began, and doubtless after the shock of Midway other carrier keels were laid. But it is certain that Japanese carrier strength has not been able to keep pace with that of the U.S., nor, in all probability, has Japan’s strength in other categories (battleships, cruisers, etc.), about which even less is known.

Double Job, Double Loss. Since the war began, the Japanese Navy’s job of maintaining supply lines has become a double one—of action at sea and of production at home.

The building of merchant ships has been taken out of the hands of the Ministry of Communications and given to the Navy. In this production, as at sea, the Navy has been fighting a retrograde action. Japan entered the war with about 6,300,000 tons of merchant shipping. She is thought to have built or seized 1,200,000 tons and to have lost about 2,500,000 tons, mostly to U.S. submarines—leaving a net merchant marine of some 5,000,000 tons. Merchant replacements are estimated at a rate of no better than 500,000 tons a year—less than the Japanese had hoped for by now. President Roosevelt recently said that the Japs are currently losing about 130,000 tons a month—which, on average, would mean a net loss of perhaps 1,000,000 tons a year.

That is a net loss which Japan can stand, at most, for two years. It is also a loss which puts an ever-increasing strain on the Japanese Navy, which is obliged to turn more and more Navy tonnage over to supply uses—for instance, destroyers for troop transport.

All these difficulties have made the Japanese Navy even more careful than it was trained to be. Its care is reflected and guided by its active Commander, its Nimitz—the relatively cautious man named Mineidhi Koga.

Defensive Anonym. Not very much is known about Admiral Koga, outside Japan. The U.S. Navy, notoriously ignorant of its principal foe, knows very little about him. In a race of unknown men, he is an especial anonym. He is no Togo. Koga does not seem to have the personality and has not yet shown the fighting genius of the coldblooded, taciturn little slaughterer of the Russians. Neither is he a Yamamoto.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was the executioner of Pearl Harbor. Before Yam amoto came to command, he had advertised himself well as a hater of the U.S., and after Pearl Harbor he announced his intention of dictating peace terms in the White House. Koga has never talked like that.

The bare file on Koga indicates that he is 58; that he probably speaks no English and may speak a smattering of French since he served as naval attache in Paris in 1926-27; that just before Pearl Harbor he was given the Japanese Fleet in China waters—with which he helped take Hong Kong and supported the Malaya operation; and that for the last six months before he took command of the Combined Fleet he held a shore job as commander of the important Yokusoka Naval Station.

Some say that Admiral Koga’s weakest point is his unfamiliarity with the naval air arm (Yamamoto was an aviator). Apparently he is paying much attention to submarine warfare and is already stepping up a campaign against U.S. supply lines in the Pacific—a thing which the Japanese Navy had neglected, using submarines mostly to attack combat vessels.

The Chinese, whose intelligence about Admiral Koga is probably better than the U.S. Navy’s, consider him to be taciturn, scholarly, unpolitical. They say he is “extremely suspicious and careful and lacks Yamamoto’s ability to make quick decisions.”

Toward Koga’s Home. Admiral Koga must recognize that the Allies are about ready for extensive offensive operations in the Pacific. His reaction to the new Solomons’ actions must be complicated by an uncertainty as to what they mean.

He can see the importance of the actions. He knows that Bougainville is the last barrier to the southeast of Rabaul; and Rabaul is the main bulwark to the south of Japan’s Pearl Harbor, the naval base of Truk.

But he can also remember that a strong carrier force raided Wake and at any time might support an invasion blow at Truk’s eastern flank—at the Marshalls and Gilberts, for instance. He must have realized that last week’s Solomons action might be partly a diversion. He probably had means of hearing excerpts from a speech Admiral Nimitz made in Honolulu last week: “Before we can bring our fast-growing air and naval superiority to bear on the Japanese homeland, we must secure adequate bases close enough to that homeland. This will be done. …”

Mineichi Koga knows that he cannot commit large forces to one sector of Japan’s huge defensive perimeter until he is sure that a heavier blow will not fall on another sector. He has to hold back until he is sure. He has been holding back quite a bit lately. But some day soon he will have to strike. If he does not, the rest of what Admiral Nimitz said will come explosively true:

“It is now crystal-clear,” the U.S. Admiral said, “that we will win the war, but it is not yet clear just when it will end. I am realistic enough to believe it will be over long before the gloomy prediction of 1949.”

* The U.S. had seven carriers when war began. Four were sunk, leaving, for a time, three, which were seldom all in service simultaneously, because of damage. But eight new battle carriers of the 25,000-ton Essex class and nine new Princetons, converted to carriers from cruisers, have been launched and are or soon will be in service. Most of these 20 carriers can be used in the Pacific, for scores of small converted-merchantmen carriers can do the anti-submarine work of the Atlantic.