World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Hirohito’s Troubled Mind

Along a 6,000-mile arc of the Japs’ Pacific defenses the Allied blows fell thick & fast. They flared like lightning strokes from Sumatra, where the Allied Eastern Fleet beat up Padang and Emmahaven, to Halmahera, where the enemy feared General MacArthur’s next amphibious stroke, to the Kurils, northeast of Japan.

For the Japanese there was no choice but to wait, and wonder where the next amphibious assault would strike. It might be Halmahera, as Tokyo had nervously predicted, or it might be the Philippines. Or it might be a swift lunge across the Empire’s marine artery which would set marines and soldiers down on Formosa or the China coast.

The slash into the artery running north from the fabled riches of the Dutch East Indies held the most fearsome possibilities of all. Japan was already getting a bitter foretaste of it.

In a single strike on Celebes, Lieut.

General George C. Kenney’s bombers sank five freighters, left two more burning along with a cruiser. Here & there they picked off singletons. In the South China Sea, one of Major General Claire L. Chennault’s Liberators sank a light cruiser. A week earlier the same plane had sunk three merchant ships, total 27,000 tons; before that the 18,765-ton Italian liner Conte Verde, which had just been refloated by the Japs at Shanghai.

U.S. subs, now operating from new advanced bases and thus able to stay longer in the Empire, were biting even deeper into the artery; they were sinking Jap ships at the rate of two a day. In the Indian Ocean, British and Allied submarines were creeping up to the same rate of destruction.

Japan’s shipping losses were running at the rate of more than 2,000,000 tons a year. Her shipyards could replace only 1,000,000 in steel hulls. Her emergency program for wooden ships, 100 to 300 tons, was a flop; they were good only for Inland Sea and intercoastal traffic. Short of oil, minerals, food, even lumber, the Empire was in a pinch.

Said Radio Tokyo: officials received by the Emperor have promised “supreme efforts to ease His Majesty’s august mind.” Considering the blows that were soon to fall on the Empire, His Majesty’s officials had taken on a big order.