Strategy in Crisis: The Pacific War, 1937-1945

By John Kuehn

The Pacific War (1937-1945) remains a crucial topic for strategic discussion, especially as Japan's push for a broader conflict in 1941 still fascinates historians. That regional push grew into a wider world war with all the major maritime powers, as well as the Soviet Union, in a conflict which challenged the allied response in Asia and beyond.
 
John T. Kuehn examines the Pacific War from the vantage point of strategy and the execution of that strategy. The allies entered an ongoing Sino-Japanese War in China (1937-1945) which shaped the implementation of strategic decision making for the larger campaigns of The Pacific War. The Pacific War is often regarded as a conflict between the United States and Japan, but it involved a far greater cast of national characters, and the strategic calculations of these actors are addressed by the author in concise detail. The actions of the powers, such as the Dutch, British, Australians, New Zealanders, and the Soviet Union as well as the two primary nations, the U.S. and Empire of Japan, are considered through the strategic paradigm. The author, looking at the strategy of Imperial Japan as well as that of the U.S., concludes that the Axis failures in terms of coalition strategy continued throughout the war, even as the Allies strengthened coalition warfare along fronts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781682477663

Book preview

Cover: Strategy in Crisis, the Pacific War, 1937–1945 by John T. Kuehn

ESSENTIALS OF STRATEGY

Michael F. Pavkovic, PhD, editor

The volumes in Essentials of Strategy cover wars, conflicts, and battles through the prism of strategy. Aiming to develop a broad strategic literacy, this series will offer short works on the strategies employed by belligerents and competing powers. So widely employed but little defined, strategy requires additional study from contemporary scholars and historians, with an emphasis on lessons gleaned for modern practitioners, and revelations revealed for contemporary readers.

THE PACIFIC WAR, 1937–1945

STRATEGY

IN CRISIS

JOHN T. KUEHN

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2023 by the U.S. Naval Institute

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kuehn, John T., author.

Title: Strategy in crisis : the Pacific War, 1937–1945 / John T. Kuehn.

Description: First edition. | Annapolis, Maryland : Naval Institute Press, 2023. | Series: Essentials of strategy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023017668 (print) | LCCN 2023017669 (ebook) | ISBN 9781682477656 (hardback) | ISBN 9781682477663 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area. | Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945. | World War, 1939 −1945—Causes. | World War, 1939–1945—East Asia. | Strategy—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Strategy | HISTORY / Military / Naval

Classification: LCC D767 .K844 2023 (print) | LCC D767 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/26—dc23/eng/20230629

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017668

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017669

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Printed in the United States of America.

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First printing

CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE TO READERS

PROLOGUE

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. Prewar Strategies and Plans

CHAPTER 2. Oceanic Blitzkrieg: December 1941 to May 1941

CHAPTER 3. From Defense to Offense

CHAPTER 4. The Allies Strike Back: The First Counteroffensives in the Pacific

CHAPTER 5. The Offensive Continues: January 1943 to January 1944

CHAPTER 6. The Triple Advance Becomes the Dual Advance: Truk, Hollandia, and Beyond

CHAPTER 7. The Twilight of Japanese Power in the Pacific

CHAPTER 8. Armageddon

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

MAPS

1.Fleet Admiral King’s Map of the Pacific

2.Japanese Centrifugal Offensives, 1941–42

3.Guadalcanal and Local Waters

4.South and Southwest Pacific

5.The Central Pacific

6.New Guinea and Noemfoor

7.Northern and Central Philippines

8.The Ryukyus

9.Southern Okinawa, Shuri Line

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS WORK IS A RESULT of a conversation in Newport, Rhode Island, with Mike Pavkovic. If not for that genial conversation, amidst the bleak times of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, this book would not exist. Mike, I cannot thank you enough. Trent Hone, Rich Frank, and D. M. Giangreco have been sources of inspiration throughout the entire project. As for the manuscript, the indefatigable Jon House, scholar, friend, and colleague, reviewed the entire beast, and if there are any errors in it, they are not due to him, but to me. He improves every manuscript he reviews and I owe him, as usual, a huge debt of gratitude. Kimberlee, my wife, listened to various portions of the text and helped me with phrasing and encouragement, as she has with everything I have done these last forty-two years since we teamed up and joined the Navy. Finally, as always it has been a pleasure to work with the Naval Institute Press, especially Glenn Griffith and Adam Kane. Thanks for the support, gents.

NOTE TO READERS

THE ASIAN FORMAT for Japanese and Chinese names will be used, with patronym first, as much as possible throughout the text. For example, Yamamoto Isoroku is used instead Isoroku Yamamoto. Chinese alliteration will use Pinyin spellings instead of Wade-Giles except for certain high-profile personalities and places, such as Chaing Kai-Shek. The geography of the war in East Asia and the Pacific can be daunting. A wonderful resource for readers requiring more fidelity for this geography (to supplement the maps) can be found online using the West Point Atlas series, https://www.westpoint.edu/academics/academic-departments/history/world-war-two-asia. Readers are advised that government links often change, but one can simply type US Military Academy Atlases to locate this resource. Finally, all distances will be in nautical miles (NM) unless otherwise noted.

PROLOGUE

NOVEMBER 1921, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BILL PRATT WAS IN A HURRY. The next day might be the most important day in the new century for the U.S. Navy. Pratt, a captain in the U.S. Navy, was to play a key role. He had been assigned as a technical advisor, on loan from the General Board of the Navy, to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. Pratt’s job was to make copies of Hughes’ speech on behalf of the United States for the invited delegates to the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament—including a legible copy for the secretary to read at the conference. Hughes had nearly been elected president in 1916. He was edged out of the job by the incumbent Woodrow Wilson, whom the American people ironically elected on the slogan he kept us out of the war. Pratt thought highly of Hughes and agreed with his secret plan to propose radical measures—against the advice of the General Board—to end the postwar naval arms race as well as to continue the work toward the peace that had begun at Versailles and which the U.S. Senate had demurred from ratifying.¹ Bill Pratt might have congratulated himself that he was on the right side of history as he made the copies for delivery the next day, November 12, 1921, at Constitution Hall, not far from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.²

The next day Charles Evans Hughes stood in front of a glittering assemblage of delegates and diplomats in Constitution Hall. Secretary Hughes was a Republican and he fervently believed in the cause of peace, especially if the United States—League of Nations membership or not—could serve as a beacon to the rest of the world for correct and pacific behavior. Bill Pratt might have thought of the word pacific as a pun, but the concern of men like Hughes and him was focused on the Pacific Ocean and the challenges to American interests posed by an increasingly hostile Japan, especially in China. However, the U.S. Army and Navy’s foremost concern was the possibility of an attack on the Philippines—whose defense was governed by a series of documents titled War Plan Orange. No one had forgotten Japan’s tendency to attack first if she regarded her honor at stake, both in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). Anything that might soothe Japanese concerns, especially over racist demonstrations and school legislation in places such as California, was worth trying.³ Not only averting war but ending a global naval arms race, which the end of the Great War had not accomplished, might also be another significant result. Averting that arms race could also lead to those monies instead being used to rebuild the world with more peaceful projects.

The conference convened on a cold November morning at 10:30 a.m. in Constitutional (sometimes called Continental) Hall, not far from where the sobering Vietnam War Memorial resides today.⁴ Hughes’ president, Warren G. Harding—a pleasant man from Crestline, Ohio—had earlier given the welcome speech to the conference and set a tone of pacific accommodation. Harding seemed to have set a high bar for his Secretary of State, saying near the end of his closing remarks,

Out of the cataclysm of the World War came new fellowships, new convictions, new aspirations.… A world staggering with debt needs its burden lifted. Humanity which has been shocked by wanton destruction would minimize the agencies of that destruction. Contemplating the measureless cost of war and the continuing burden of armament, all thoughtful peoples wish for real limitation of armament and would like war outlawed.… I can speak officially only for our United States. Our hundred millions frankly want less of armament and none of war. Wholly free from guile, sure in our own minds that we harbor no unworthy designs, we accredit the world with the same good intent.⁵

Premier Aristide Briand of France spoke next, followed by the former prime minister and current foreign minister of Great Britain, Arthur Balfour. On the motion of Balfour, Hughes was unanimously elected as the chairman of the conference.⁶

Hughes might have measured the mood of the diplomats as he took a breath; his steely gaze was that of a lawyer more than a diplomat.⁷ Then he began to speak, and after some perfunctory remarks that echoed the president’s, he paused; some applause broke out because many thought he was finished.⁸ He had only just begun. After reviewing the failure of previous international agreements to limit armaments, he moved rapidly to outline his plan:

1.That all capital-shipbuilding programs, either actual or projected, should be abandoned;

2.That further reduction should be made through the scrapping of certain of the older ships;

3.That, in general, regard should be had to the existing naval strength of the Powers [primarily Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States] concerned;

4.That the capital ship tonnage should be used as the measurement of strength for navies and a proportionate allowance of auxiliary combatant craft prescribed.

Hughes probably took a breath after this mouthful, and then continued,

The United States is now completing its program of 1916 calling for 10 new battleships and 6 battle cruisers. One battleship has been completed. The others are in various stages of construction; in some cases from 60 to over 80 percent of the construction has been done. On these 15 capital ships now being built over $330,000,000 have been spent. Still, the United States is willing in the interest of an immediate limitation of naval armament to scrap all these ships. The United States proposes, if this plan is accepted—(1) To scrap all capital ships now under construction.⁹

More applause broke out. In the British delegation to Hughes’ left, the representatives nodded approvingly as he counted down through the almost one million tons of U.S. Navy battleships and battle cruisers the Americans intended to scrap. When he got to the list of Royal Navy ships to be scrapped, Admiral Beatty, the First Sea Lord,was seen to come forward in his chair, ‘a slightly staggered … expression’ on his countenance. The reaction from the Japanese delegation to his cuts for their Navy was a stony silence.¹⁰

Hughes continued as general applause continued and cheering broke out with his final words:

When you first met, I told you of our America’s thought to seek less of armament and none of war; that we sought nothing which is another’s, and we were unafraid, but that we wished to join you in doing that finer and nobler thing which no nation can do alone. We rejoice in that accomplishment.… Preparation for offensive naval war will stop now.¹¹

The former soldier and journalist Charles à Court Repington later quipped that Hughes sank in thirty-five minutes more [capital] ships than all the admirals of the world have sunk in a cycle of centuries.¹²

On the Japanese delegation, the senior member, Navy Minister Admiral and Baron Kato Tomosaburo—veteran of the Battle of Tsushima—realized that Hughes and the Americans had captured the moral high ground and the diplomatic initiative in a single stroke. Kato almost instantly decided to accept the proposal as a basis for peace and progress. He knew that Japan could not compete with the United States in a naval arms race.¹³ However, not everyone in the Japanese delegation agreed with Kato. Another officer on the delegation, Vice Admiral Kato Kanji (no relation) believed that accepting the American terms for a 5-5-3 (or 10-10-6) ratio of capital ship tonnage—the United States, Great Britain, and Japan, respectively—fatally undermined Japan’s national security. Both the Japanese and American naval officer corps believed that allowing Japan a 70 percent ratio in comparison to the worldwide obligations of the United States and Britain would give the Japanese fleet de facto superiority in the Western Pacific. This was because it was believed by both navies that a major fleet lost 10 percent of its combat power for every 1,000 NM it sailed from its bases without maintenance or upkeep. If the U.S. Navy sailed 4,000 NM to the Western Pacific it might only have 60 percent of its combat power when it met the Japanese fleet, thus 60 percent was vital for equality or even a slight edge for the U.S. fleet in any possible maritime conflict with Japan.¹⁴

Thus began the battle of the two Katos—older and younger—at Washington. The result was the fracturing of the Japanese naval officer corps into two factions, the treaty faction led by the elder Navy Minister Kato Tomosaburo and his heirs at the Naval Ministry, and the so-called fleet faction that included the younger Kato Kanji and his followers (which at the time included a young Yamamoto Isoroku), who congregated in the Imperial Naval General Staff and the fleet. Kato Tomosaburo latched onto a proposal to limit fortifications in the Western Pacific to the status quo, and Hughes and the Americans agreed to this caveat as part of the eventual Washington Naval Treaty.¹⁵

By February the elder Kato had prevailed over his younger, insubordinate namesake. The wily old Navy Minister outmaneuvered the more junior admiral by going to the hero of the battle of Tsushima—Admiral Togo Heihachiro—via his trusted aide back in Tokyo, Captain Nomura Kichisaburo. Togo held immense prestige in Japan as a national hero and wise, elder statesman (genro), analogous to the American admiral George Dewey. If Togo supported the treaty, everyone else in the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) would have to go along. Together Kato Tomosaburo and Nomura gained Togo’s support in accepting the American terms in exchange for a limitation on building or improving American naval bases in the Western Pacific (in the Philippines and Guam in particular). As the ink dried on the Washington Naval Treaty that formalized Japan’s inferiority to the U.S. Navy (on paper, at any rate), Kato Kanji exclaimed to a colleague—reputedly with tears in his eyes—As far as I am concerned war with America starts now. We’ll get our revenge over this by God!¹⁶

Introduction

THE ASIA-PACIFIC WAR (1937–45) to which the United States awakened on December 7, 1941, traces its primary cause to events in China. It was an ongoing war, one that started more than four years before Pearl Harbor, having begun in China in 1937. One must go back in history to the decrepit Qing Empire to trace the tragic path to a wider global war in December 1941. A nominal republic displaced the Qing (or Manchu) Dynasty in 1911, but that date only marked a milestone in China’s slide into the status of what today is known as a failed state.¹ Soon warlords dominated China’s expanse, from the Great Asian steppes and deserts in the west and north to the China seas in the east and south to the heights of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush in the southwest. By the 1920s, China was fractured, with the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communists centered in Shanghai and Jianxi only two of many competing factions, and neither controlled Beijing, the political capital of the nation. China had split into competing power centers, as it had over its long history, when rival dynasties resided in both Beijing and Nanjing, the northern and southern capitals.² However, the most important force threatening China was not the Chinese, but rather the expanding Empire of Japan.

The opportunistic Empire of Japan took advantage of the chaos in mainland Asia to attempt to supplant the Chinese as the cultural, social, economic, diplomatic, and military hegemon of East Asia. From the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) through the Boxer Crisis (1900), Japan increased its involvement in mainland East Asia.³ With victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) Japan moved into a dominant position, recognized as such by the British, who had signed a naval defensive treaty with Imperial Japan just before the outbreak of the conflict with Imperial Russia.⁴ As the British Empire stagnated and Russia disappeared in 1917, Japan surged. Both Korea and Formosa (Taiwan), historically regarded as being tributary states of the Chinese, came under Imperial Japanese occupation. With the outbreak of World War I, Japan saw more opportunities and continued its aggressive campaign to create what some have labeled an informal empire in China. Japan gobbled up the German possession of Shandong and levied the infamous 21-Demands on China. Only the combined weight of Anglo-French-American resolve at Versailles prevented the formalization of Japan’s high-handed actions vis-à-vis China.⁵

However, World War I also led to Imperial Japan’s acquisition of former German territory in the Mariana Islands (except for U.S.-owned Guam) and its mandates in the Caroline and Marshall Islands, tending toward a collision course with the United States, especially over the defense of the Philippines. Earlier in the young century, Japan and the United States had nearly come to blows. During the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, Japan had felt insulted by anti-Asian segregationist school legislation by California, and this led to the first iterations of what became War Plan Orange.⁶ At the time of the Washington Arms Limitation Conference in November 1921, the breakdown of the relationship between Japan and the United States nearly led to war, again precipitated by racist legislation against Japanese American schoolchildren in addition to the problems associated with U.S. naval building programs. These programs alarmed the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) so much that it responded with its 8-8 building plan for eight modern dreadnoughts and eight modern battle cruisers. Sensational popular literature in both Japan and the United States had roused the public about the possibility of war.⁷ Declassified correspondence from the period emphasizes that even after the United States entered war against Germany, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) seemed more concerned about a stab in the back by the Japanese. The ONI actively spied on U.S. citizens of Japanese descent both at home and abroad.⁸

Ironically, the other component involving the stability of East Asia found Japan and the United States as uneasy partners in the intervention in Siberia at the close of World War I. The Bolshevik revolution resulted in the Western Allies and Japan intervening in Russia. They now tried to reclaim the supplies that had been intended for the Tsarist Russians fighting the Germans. The U.S. military mission quickly realized the futility of trying to oppose the Bolsheviks, and the Americans withdrew first, but the Japanese continued to aid the White Forces in Siberia and were handed a series of humiliating defeats before being forced into a very ugly retreat back into Korea. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) became thoroughly discredited in the public eye due to costly and bloody adventurism.⁹

In summary, it was these developments—China as a failed state, an ambitious Japan interested in keeping China weak and exploiting the opportunities that arose, the animosity of the Americans and the Japanese, the emergence of the Soviet Union, and finally the supposed resolution at Washington in 1921–22—that formed the historical context for the development of prewar strategies by all parties. Another key factor, as shall be shown, was the attitude of the other European powers—especially Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands—that were trying to hang onto their colonial possessions in the Far East and their extraterritorial perks inside China.

TERMS AND ANALOGIES

The Pacific War (1941–45) can be characterized as what Western military doctrine calls a branch—that is, an additional development that takes an ongoing event in another direction while maintaining the trajectory of the original conflict.¹⁰ Although primarily a planning concept, it can be applied to the Pacific War. Think of it as a river that breaks into two or more branches as it flows into the sea. The Pacific War, sometimes known as World War II in the Pacific, clearly would not have happened had Japan’s policies not embroiled it deeply into a military quagmire in China. This study examines the strategy and resulting operations of this branch of the larger Asia-Pacific War that itself helped give birth to what we call World War II. Historian Richard Frank has gone so far as to date World War II’s beginning to 1937, the year that continuous warfare began between China and Japan and that continued until Japan’s surrender in 1945.¹¹

The reader will note the use of the terms strategy and operations throughout this text. The definitions for these terms follow from standard practice in U.S. military terminology. However, a third term must be added, grand strategy. This term applies to the overall strategies of the major powers involved in the Pacific War, including one noncombatant for the bulk of this era, the Soviet Union (USSR). Grand strategy does not just encompass military operations to achieve a particular military or even political objective (e.g., protect India), but envisions the aftermath or end state of the conflict and the policies for that aftermath.¹² Thus something like the unconditional surrender of Japan, which the 1945 Potsdam Conference of the Allies formalized permanently with the USSR’s support, reflects an action that is a more grand strategy than a more bounded strategy, such as military strategy.¹³ By the time the war broke out, the grand strategy (or plural if we are to suggest the USSR and Nationalist China had complementary but different grand strategies) was fairly well developed and understood by the major powers on the Allied side—the USSR, Nationalist China, the United States, and Great Britain.

Strategy, in contrast to grand strategy, deals with an entire theater of war and its military and political objectives.¹⁴ Keeping China in the war against Japan is an example of the objective of a strategy, with the means including military and material support. In this sense, theater commanders, who were apportioned shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, were in charge of formulating strategy: Chiang in China, General Archibald Wavell (for a short time) in Southeast Asia, Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific, and MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific. When these theaters merged, as in Nimitz’s and MacArthur’s case in 1944, strategies merged. However, in the case of the Allies, the higher headquarters of the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) of Great Britain and the United States, always maintained a close watch and controlling hand over the theater commanders of World War II globally. The CCS was the glue that made the Allied strategies global and that integrated and marching toward a postwar order envisioned and implemented, before the war with Japan started, in the Atlantic Charter declarations.¹⁵

Operations in this work refer to specific military operations, on land, sea, air, and permutations thereof, to achieve specific military objectives. These operations are often also labeled campaigns.¹⁶ Not all campaigns are equal in size, scope, or complexity. These features derive from its objectives. The Pacific War was full of giant theaters with mega-campaigns that themselves encompassed smaller component campaigns in time and space. The unique geography of the war, which encompassed so many islands, atolls, and archipelagoes, gave the Pacific War this feature. For example, what is often called the dual advance by the Allies in the Pacific was, up through early 1944, three separate mega-campaigns: (1) one whose axis of advance moved primarily along the northeast shore and adjacent islands of New Guinea, (2) one up the Solomon Island chain toward the Bismarck island chain, and (3) a third through the central Pacific island chains of the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Mariana Islands (see map 1). The first two of these mega-campaigns were part of an even more gigantic operation named Cartwheel, focusing on neutralizing a major Japanese naval, army, and air base complex at Rabaul on the island of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago.¹⁷

One of the devices this strategic-operational study references will be a military-geographic analogy with another of World War II’s immense theaters, that of the Soviet-German front, or the Eastern Front in common usage.¹⁸ Some familiarity with the course of the war by the German Nazi regime against the USSR is needed, but not much.¹⁹ Imagine the Asia-Pacific War in the following way—Japan launched a land-air-sea version of the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa six months after the original German operation—at the same time that it left the equivalent of a Vietnam-style quagmire in its rear in China (to the west). One might reference that Germany, too, had left a quagmire at its rear in the form of Great Britain, but that quagmire did not involve the service that called the shots in German strategy, the Army. Japan, on the other hand, would keep the bulk of its Army for the duration of the conflict in the Asia-Pacific in China, all the way to the very end. Many historians have puzzled over Japan’s decision to broaden her war beyond China, listing its various drawbacks. They tried to understand, and explain, how Japan could line up every major power except Germany against itself in the course of an eight-year conflict that spanned from India to the Hawaiian and Aleutian Islands in the United States (1937–45).²⁰

However, for this study, the Barbarossa analogy serves as another way to understand the course of the war on the largest possible scale, and to note how profoundly similar it was to the bloody existential war between the Germans and Russians to its west. It also helps to highlight the strategic and operational similarities in the course of these ill-advised conflicts, both of which began in 1941. The major milestones in Barbarossa line up much the same