Books: Central Pacific Spectacle

ALEUTIANS, GILBERTS AND MARSHALLS (353 pp.)—Samuel Eliot Morison—Little, Brown ($6).

01′ (64) Sam Morison just keeps rollin’ along, writing the most fascinating serial about World War II that anybody has yet, with the single exception of Winston Churchill. Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls is Volume VII in Morison’s history of U.S. naval operations in World War II, and marks the halfway mark in the Harvard professor’s long literary voyage. “Now that the outward passage is ended,” he says comfortably, “we shall be homeward bound shortly.” After Volume XIV, tentatively titled The Liquidation of the Japanese Empire, Morison expects to put into port at 71, a reasonable retirement age for a lean Yankee seafarer (who was officially retired this summer as a reserve rear admiral).

Admiral Morison’s new volume begins. in the Aleutians, which “might well be called the Theater of Military Frustration.” No admiral or general, Japanese or American, won fame in the North Pacific except possibly Rear Admiral “Soc” (for Socrates) McMorris, whose achievement was that he did not lose the naval battle of the Komandorskies—and Morison fails to make much of a case for him (Admiral Hosogaya turned away when he might have murdered McMorris’ inferior, crippled force).

At Attu, the desert-trained U.S. soldiers showed little dash, though outnumbering the suicidal Japanese more than four to one. Off Kiska, a naval task force wasted more than 1,000 rounds of 14-and 8-inch shells, shooting at phantoms on their radar screens; after that, Admiral Kinkaid launched an invasion by 34,426 troops, only to find that the enemy had pulled stakes and cleared out 18 days earlier. After the trigger-happy U.S. soldiers landed in the Kiska fog, they began shooting at each other, killing 25 and wounding 31.

The Coral Seedbed. Volume VII was to have been called “The Conquest of Micronesia”; Morison had to put the reconquest of the Aleutians in somewhere, and his present gazetteer title was the result. But once he washes his hands of the melted snow of the North, Morison launches into the great drive across the Central Pacific, beginning in the Gilberts. Here was the testing ground for all future amphibious operations, the sine qua non of Japan’s defeat.

At Tarawa (November 1943), the naval bombardment was not accurate or heavy enough; preliminary air bombing was poorly executed; amphibious tractors were too few, and unarmored. So the 2nd Marine Division had to wade through 500 yards of Japanese machine-gun fire to the bloodiest beachhead in the Corps’ 176-year history. This they did. Morison gives the back of his hand to General Holland Smith, who says of his own troops’ victory: “Tarawa was a mistake,” claiming that the Marshalls should have been invaded first.

Of the thousand marines who died in Tarawa’s 76 hours Morison says convincingly: “Not one died in vain, nor did the 2,101 men wounded in action and who recovered, suffer in vain. Every man there, lost or maimed, saved at least ten of his countrymen as the Navy plunged deep into enemy waters and sailed irresistibly through Micronesia. All honor, then, to the fighting heart of the United States Marine. Let that small stretch of coral sand . . be remembered as terrible indeed, but glorious, and the seedbed for victory in 1945.”

The next plunge proved that the lessons of Tarawa had been learned well. This time, Kwajalein atoll was devastated by five times the weight of steel that Tarawa received, and “even ‘Howling Mad’ Smith loved the Navy—for a few days.” Twice as many Japanese were killed at a cost of one-third as many marines and soldiers. “A well-executed amphibious operation is as beautiful a military spectacle as one can find in modern warfare,”says Morison.

The Twin Weapons. Sam Morison writes with grace—and without ham-handed politeness. Interservice etiquette bothers him not at all. The soldiers at Makin were “miserably slow,” and their fellows from the same division (the 27th) at Eniwetok were “all right but their training and leadership alike were poor.” On the other hand, the 7th Division profited from Attu and was smart in the Marshalls.

In Micronesia, the aircraft carrier came of age. Whereas the Americans were reduced to one flattop in the Solomons in late 1942, they took 16 to the Marshalls in early 1944. Two weeks after Kwajalein, Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 smothered the great base at Truk with 568 planes, and sank 200,000 tons of shipping (biggest single day of the war). The Navy, abetted by U.S. industry, had found —in amphibious expertness and carrier proficiency—the twin weapons that would lead to victory.