Allied Victory Over Japan 1945: Rare Photographs from Wartime Achieves

By Jon Diamond

In 1944 with the war in Europe turning in the Allies’ favor, Japan still occupied vast swathes of South East Asia and the Pacific.

In Burma, the seemly unstoppable Japanese advance was halted at Kohima and Imphal in June and July 1944. Six months later the advances made by British-led forces enabled the re-opening of the supply routes from India to US forces in China. It was not until Spring 1945 that British-led forces seized first Mandalay and then the port city of Rangoon after a year of grueling fighting.

Admiral Nimitz’s and General MacArthur’s forces meanwhile were overcoming fanatical Japanese resistance as they invaded Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Leyte and Luzon in late 1944. Iwo Jima and Okinawa fell to the Allies in early 1945. These successes enabled USAAF Superfortresses to bomb mainland Japan. Late Spring/early Summer 1945 saw the steady recapture of the Northern Solomons and Brunei, Borneo and former Dutch colonies. The Soviets were advancing into Manchuria and Korea.

The atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 finally forced the Japanese to surrender without the inevitable carnage of an invasion of their mainland.

The tumultuous events of the final year of the Second World War in the Far East are brilliantly described here in contemporary well captioned images and succinct text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Dec 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399042895

Jon Diamond

Jon Diamond is a practising physician who has had a life-long interest in military history. A graduate of Cornell University, Jon has been on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and Pennsylvania State University. He has served as a civilian attendee to the United States Army War College National Security Seminar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and has written a significant number of articles and papers including over fifteen for Military Heritage Presents WWII History. He has just completed a book on David Low's Cartoons and the British Policy of Appeasement. He resides in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

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Chapter One

Strategic Overview of the Pacific and Asian War 1941–1945

The Allied War Plan against Japan in the Pacific and Asia was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Army COS, General George C. Marshall as they were occasionally at odds with the demands of the US Navy’s C-in-C CNO, Admiral Ernest King and Far East Army Commander (then SWPA CG) General Douglas A. MacArthur. Initially, the ETO, North Africa and the Mediterranean were to receive the bulk of America’s war mobilization of men and matériel to fight the Axis powers. After the Japanese blitzkrieg was halted in mid-1942, Allied Pacific and Asian commanders received enough troops and matériel to slowly drive back the Japanese.

From December 1941 through to June 1942, the IJA and IJN triumphed across the Pacific Ocean and Asian continent, conquering Burma, the Philippine and NEI archipelagos, Malaya and Singapore, Hong Kong, New Britain, the northern coasts of North-East New Guinea and Papua as well as many island groups across the Central and South Pacific (see Map 1). Three seminal events heralded the end of the Japanese blitzkrieg. On 18 April 1942, USAAF B-25B medium bombers from Vice Admiral William F. ‘Bull’ Halsey’s TF 16 comprising the American aircraft carriers USS Hornet and Enterprise carried out air-raids on Tokyo. Although little damage was done, the attack solidified the Imperial High Command’s approval of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plan to attack Midway Island and draw the American Pacific Fleet into a decisive surface battle. However, during the first week of May 1942, American and Japanese task forces duelled with carrier-based aircraft at the Battle of the Coral Sea. A Japanese amphibious invasion against Port Moresby on Papua’s southern coast was thwarted and mitigated the potential invasion of Australia’s Northern Territories. The Battle of Midway (4–7 June 1942) ended with Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s three carrier air contingents sinking Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s four carriers. Imperial Japan’s high tide was ebbing.

After Admiral King was briefed on a Japanese airfield’s construction at Lunga Point on Guadalcanal, across from a seaplane base on Tulagi in the Southern Solomon Islands, he marshalled USN and USMC forces to interdict the enemy’s further south-eastward expansion intended to sever the sea lanes to the Antipodes. On 7 August 1942, US 1st Marine Division (Reinforced), under the command of MG Alexander A. Vandegrift, amphibiously assaulted Guadalcanal, quickly captured and finished the airfield (renamed Henderson Field), and ignited a six-month gruelling defence of the American lodgement that was punctuated by horrific jungle combat, never-ending Japanese aerial attacks and deadly naval surface action. By the first week of February 1943, Japan had evacuated Guadalcanal.

Map 1. Strategic Overview of the Pacific War, 1941–1942. After the IJN attack on Pearl Harbor, Malaya and the Philippine Islands were invaded in December 1941. Malaya was soon conquered by the IJA Twenty-Fifth Army, with Singapore falling on 15 February 1942. From 7 December 1941 until late spring 1942, Japan also conquered the American territories of Wake Island and Guam, British-controlled Hong Kong, and the Solomon Islands and Gilbert Islands. Rabaul on New Britain Island in the Australian-governed Bismarck Archipelago was invaded in February 1942 with the Australian forces there retreating or taken prisoner as it became the main bastion for the IJA and IJN in the South-West Pacific. The northern coast of Papua, North-East New Guinea and Dutch New Guinea as well as NEI fell to the enemy in their drive towards the South-West Pacific and Indian Ocean, threatening Port Moresby on Papua’s southern coast and north-west Australia. The Japanese strengthened their mandates in the Northern Mariana, Marshall, Caroline and Palau groups. Filipino-American forces surrendered on Luzon’s Bataan Peninsula in April 1942, followed the next month by the garrison on Corregidor. In early May 1942, the USN won a strategic but not tactical victory over the IJN at the Battle of the Coral Sea, thwarting a Japanese amphibious invasion of Port Moresby. In early June, the USN won a decisive carrier-based aircraft victory over the IJN at the Battle of Midway, eliminating a potential threat to the Hawaiian Islands. (Meridian Mapping)

After seizing Rabaul on New Britain in late January 1942, the IJA and IJN landed units at Salamaua, Lae and Finschhafen on North-East New Guinea’s Huon Gulf from 8 March to 7 April. In mid-July, Japanese SNLF troops landed at Buna, Gona and Sanananda, along Papua New Guinea’s northern coast. On 21 February, Roosevelt cabled MacArthur on Corregidor, ordering him to Australia. On 17 March, MacArthur and his retinue arrived south of Darwin after a PT boat trek to Mindanao followed by B-17 air transit. In June, MacArthur, as C-in-C of the SWPA, dispatched additional ‘green’ Australian Militia units to Port Moresby as the US 32nd and 41st Infantry Divisions arrived in Australia. The Australian Militia’s 39th Battalion, already deployed at Port Moresby, was ordered north to defend Kokoda, which was attacked by the Japanese on 29 July. Eventually reinforced by Middle East veteran AIF formations, the Australians combatted IJA units across the Owen Stanley Range via the Kokoda Trail as the Japanese tried an overland route to seize Port Moresby. By mid-September, stiffening Australian defence and Japanese orders to cease advancing saved Port Moresby. Also a second amphibious Japanese invasion at Milne Bay during late August-early September aimed at seizing Port Moresby was turned back by Australian forces. Americans and Australians began their offensive up the Kokoda Trail and through the jungle to drive the Japanese from Buna, Gona and Sanananda.

On 10 September 1942, MacArthur ordered LG Robert Eichelberger’s I Corps HQ in Australia to deploy MG Edwin Harding’s 32nd Infantry Division to capture the 11-mile-long group of Japanese installations at Buna. After a few months of arduous marching and combat against a bunkered Japanese foe, the unprepared American former National Guardsmen, with the aid of battle-hardened Australians, evicted the Japanese from their installations by January 1943, with a steep Allied ‘butcher bill’ compelling MacArthur to vow ‘No more Bunas.’

Beginning in 1943, three separate axes of Allied advances were conducted in the SWPA, SPA and CPA (see Map 2). In January, MacArthur’s Australian-American forces started seizing strategic locales along North-West New Guinea’s northern coast and nearby Woodlark, Kiriwina, Goodenough Island in the Solomon Sea as well as at Cape Gloucester and Arawe at the southern end of New Britain Island while bypassing Japanese strongholds. The Allied strategy was to seize extant enemy airfields or build new ones for future operations and to aerially neutralize the Japanese bastion at Rabaul (Operation CARTWHEEL).

In the SPA, now-Admiral Halsey’s forces of Marines and army troops quickly occupied and constructed airfields in the Russell Islands in late February 1943. The Central Solomon Islands campaign continued with the invasion of the New Georgia group in early July. After several weeks of combat against stubborn Japanese defenders, primarily centred on Munda Airfield, New Georgia Island fell as operations continued among other islands in the group: Arundel, Vella Lavella, Choiseul and the Treasuries. These assaults were a prelude to the invasion of the heavily-defended and largest Solomon Island of Bougainville, along Cape Torokina at Empress Augusta Bay on 1 November by IMAC, commanded by Marine MG Roy Geiger, comprising the 3rd Marine Division as well as Marine Raider and Defence battalions. MacArthur wanted Halsey’s aircraft established on new airfields at Cape Torokina within fighter range of Rabaul in time to assist with the aerial neutralization of that Japanese bastion as well as covering the 1st Marine Division’s invasion of Cape Gloucester on 26 December. Relieving IMAC was the army’s XIV Corps (37th and Americal Divisions) under MG Oscar Griswold, which enlarged and fortified the Cape Torokina perimeter, built new airfields and awaited a massive IJA 17th Army counterattack that was launched and repulsed in March 1944.

Map 2. Allied Counteroffensive Axes in the Central, South and South-West Pacific Areas of Operation, 1943–1945. Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance, Nimitz’s COS, was assigned to command the Central Pacific Force (later redesignated the Fifth Fleet in April 1944) in the CPA campaigns. USN, Marine and army forces advanced on separate hotly-contested invasions in the Gilbert Islands (November 1943), the Marshall Islands (January–February 1944), and the Mariana Islands (June–August 1944). In the SWPA, General Douglas A. MacArthur with his Australian and American ground forces and the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet vessels drove along the northern coast of Dutch New Guinea (1943–1944). MacArthur’s goal was to liberate the Filipino citizenry by returning to the Philippines initially Mindanao in the latter half of 1944, which the JCOS agreed to after the 27 July 1944 Pearl Harbor conference. To protect MacArthur’s flanks for the planned Mindanao invasion, Morotai, in the Halmahera group of the eastern Dutch East Indies’ Molucca Islands situated 300 miles from the Philippines (‘left flank’), was assaulted by the US Army’s 31st Infantry Division and some Australian forces. For the ‘right flank’s’ protection, Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet and Amphibious Corps of Marine and army ground forces assaulted in mid-September 1944 Peleliu, Angaur and Ulithi Atoll in the Palau Group of the Western Caroline Islands, directly due east of Mindanao. However, LG Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army landed at Leyte on 20 October 1944, bypassing Mindanao.

After the Marianas’ seizure, Spruance’s Fifth Fleet staff drew up plans to assault Iwo Jima in the Volcano Islands, north-west of Saipan and south of the Bonin Islands. Iwo Jima was heavily-fortified with two well-constructed air bases, enabling Japanese fighters to interdict westward advancing American forces across the CPA towards the Ryukyu Islands and the East China Sea. American commanders were also planning an assault on Okinawa in the Ryukyus as a prelude to and staging area for the final invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Also, once Iwo Jima was captured, those airfields could base P-51 fighter escorts to escort the Mariana-based B-29 Superfortress bombers suffering heavy losses on their 2,500-mile round trip over Japan and serve as emergency landing sites for damaged B-29s on their return leg from the Japanese Home Islands to their Mariana Islands bases.

After Luzon’s invasion and capture (9 January–15 August 1945) and the liberation of the remainder of the Philippine archipelago (10 March–15 August 1945), MacArthur assaulted North Borneo (British), Brunei and Sarawak (British) and Dutch Borneo (see Chapter Four for details). OBOE 1 (1) comprised the Australian-American landing at Tarakan Island off the east coast of Borneo on 1 May 1945 with OBOE 6 (6) landing on Labuan Island in Brunei Bay in north-west Borneo on 10 June 1945. OBOE 2 (2) involved the Australian-American landings at the oil-rich port of Balikpapan in the south-west of Dutch Borneo on 1 July 1945. (Meridian Mapping)

In the CPA of operations, under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (CICPAC and CICPOA) and Vice Admiral Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, the 2nd Marine Division with elements of the army’s 27th Division comprising VAC’s 35,000 troops invaded the Gilbert Islands’ Tarawa and Makin atolls respectively; the first major American offensive in this oceanic sector. After bloody combat from 20 to 23 November 1943, mainly on Betio Island in the Tarawa Atoll against 4,500 suicidal, entrenched SNLF and Special Base Defence troops, the Gilbert group of islands and its airfields were seized at a steep American cost with approximately 1,700 killed and 2,100 wounded. During the same time period, at Makin Atoll, principally on Butaritari Island, the 27th Division’s 165th IR eliminated the small Japanese garrison’s fortified positions one at a time. The USS Liscome Bay, an escort carrier, was sunk (with 644 sailors lost) by a Japanese submarine and the battleship USS Mississippi was damaged with a turret fire (more than forty seamen killed).

The Marshall Islands, a series of oceanic atolls ceded to Japan at the end of the First World War, possessed numerous enemy airfields, seaplane and naval bases. More than 25,000 IJA and IJN troops awaited Nimitz and Spruance’s CPA move. Majuro Atoll to the south-east was initially occupied against limited enemy resistance by a company of Marines from VAC along with a battalion of the army’s 27th Division’s 106th IR on 30 January 1944. The next day, Spruance’s Fifth Fleet carrier aircraft attacked Japanese airfields on Kwajalein Atoll’s islands. Roi-Namur Islands, the northernmost in the atoll, were attacked by the 4th Marine Division, while Kwajalein Island, at the atoll’s south-eastern tip, was invaded by the army’s 7th Infantry Division. Roi was secured on 1 February, with Namur successfully occupied the next day. It was not until 4 February that Kwajalein Island was secured. The amphibious assault on Eniwetok Atoll began on 17 February with the separate 22nd Marines and units of the army’s 27th Division’s 106th IR with Eniwetok Island secured two days later. Eniwetok Atoll’s airfields and anchorages became major staging areas for Nimitz’s next CPA expedition, to the Mariana Islands.

Army and Marine forces invaded Saipan on 15 June 1944 and secured it after heavy fighting on 9 July. The IJN response to