This episode is dedicated by Timeghost Army
Brigadier Drew Hardin to his grandfather Donald Wilson Round and all those who flew the
B-26 Marauder bomber. More on that later.
Remember six months ago when the American Pacific
Fleet sailed into a typhoon? Remember that? Yeah. Well, this week, it happens again.
I’m Indy Neidell; this is World War Two.
Last week, in spite of devastating Allied bombing
campaigns, Japan’s High Command again vowed to fight to the bitter end. They were inspired
by the long and tenacious defense of Okinawa, though by now, their forces there have withdrawn
to a small area at the very southern tip of the island. The US was considering several options to
win the war with Japan’s unconditional surrender, and a new option is a super weapon they’ve
developed- an atomic bomb, though it has yet to be tested to see if it even works. There were changes
in both American and Japanese naval command, and an American mission to Moscow to ensure that
the Soviets will soon join the war against Japan- now last man standing for the Axis Powers.
The second to last man standing was Germany, who surrendered a month ago.
This week on June 5th, the Allied Control Commission meets for the first time in Berlin,
announcing that they are the new government of occupied Germany. This is also when Karl Dönitz’s
Flensburg government is officially dissolved, though its members were rounded up two weeks
ago. The Allies set up the European Advisory Commission in October 1943 at the Moscow
Conference, and confirmed it at Teheran a few weeks later. See, they anticipated
already then the defeat of the Axis Powers, and the EAC was to make recommendations
for postwar politics in those countries.
The ACC members for Germany are the US, Britain,
France, and the Soviet Union. Decisions can only be made by consensus. German territory is
now back to what it was December 31, 1937, minus what’s been given to Poland
and the USSR, and each of the four nations has its own sector of occupation.
This week in the Pacific, the Americans are really trying to occupy the final sector of Okinawa.
On the 4th, two Regiments of 6th Marine Division land on Oruku Peninsula to outflank the
Japanese defense lines. Many Japanese have in fact retreated here from Shuri, so this
will be a tough fight. Here Naha airfield is defended by the Japanese Naval Base Force
of 5,000 that I mentioned last week. The 6th Marine Division is blocked from moving
south by Naha Harbor, hence the amphibious landing by the 4th and 29th Marines.
On the 8th, the Americans attack fortified positions on Yuza Hill and Kunishi Ridge. Napalm
is pretty much the only thing that can dislodge- or more accurately, destroy- the enemy here.
“…the Japanese determination to fight back led to an enormous number of casualties among the
Marines. On average, an American rifleman could expect to fight for only about three weeks before
becoming a casualty. In many front line companies, every soldier was wounded, and their replacements
then wounded in their turn. Some replacements were killed before they could fire a single shot.”
But really, the rest of the forces are coming up and consolidating this week for what the attackers
hope will be the final assault next week.
There is still fighting on the
Philippines too; the Japanese are still holding out in several places there.
I haven’t mentioned the island of Negros in a while, not since the Americans eliminated the
main enemy position there on Dolan Hill. The battle wasn’t over, though, and US 40th Division
has been combing the island to take out each and every Japanese position. That’s not nearly over
yet, and this week on the 4th Japanese Commander Takeshi Kono disperse his forces all over the
island, and it is up to the US 503rd Regiment, together with local Filipino forces,
to clear the island from now on.
The 25th and 32nd Divisions have been fighting the
Shobu Group on Luzon for nearly two months now, and they’ve taken serious casualties. Total battle
and non-battle casualties for the two division are over 15,000, which is the strength of a full
division. The Japanese committed just over 20,000 men against them as fighting front line troops,
but 13,500 of those have been killed by now. The Japanese have, in fact, lost nearly 400,000
men total in the fight for the Philippines, and the American battle and non-battle casualties
there are around 150,000 total at this point.
25th and 32nd Divisions do not get a
rest now either; they, and 6th, 33rd, and 37th will continue to surround and compress
the enemy in the mountains of Luzon north of Santa Fe and northeast of Baguio. US 6th Army
Commander Walter Krueger’s staff estimates there are only around 23,000 Japanese troops left here.
There are nearly 70,000 of them in actuality.
So a campaign began the last day of last week,
June 1st, by 25th Division to clear the way down Route 5 heading north. 37th Division follows them
and then passes through them into the Cagayan Valley, both fighting and scouting. Bambang
falls to the attackers the 7th. 6th Division is following them and is to head northwest to
central Cordillera. This will allow 25th Division- hopefully for them by the end of the month- to
finally leave the lines and prepare for attacking Japan later this year. 32nd Division will go to
join 33rd at Baguio. This will all take time, more so now since the summer rains have
arrived, raining as much as 25 cm a day, which makes moving troops, and especially
supplying troops, painfully slow.
Both the Americans and the Japanese
have setbacks at sea this week.
In the Java Sea on the 8th, British submarine
Trenchant sinks Japanese cruiser Ashigara after Ashigara evacuates 1,200 troops from Batavia.
Ashigara has a destroyer escort on her voyage, and Trenchant is on the hunt together with
submarine Stygian. Trenchant and the destroyer, called Kamikaze, have a skirmish in the morning,
but lose contact; Kamikaze then heads north and engages Stygian, while Trenchant spots Ashigara
and fires eight torpedoes. Ashigara tries to turn and comb the torpedo tracks- turning into
them to present a smaller target- but she is hit five times and sinks at 1239. 1,253 troops
and crew are rescued by Kamikaze and two local ships, but 1,300 go down.
As for the Americans, Bull Halsey took command of the fleet again last week
and he has some real trouble now. Remember six months ago when he led the 3rd Fleet into
a typhoon? Well, he does it again this week.
Okay, as June begins, there are signs that
a typhoon is building near the Palaus, and on the 4th the reports say that it’s
heading for the waters east of Okinawa, which is where the fleet is, although you can’t
predict a typhoon’s path with true accuracy. Well, the carrier planes are all grounded and
secured with multiple lashings and the destroyers refueled. Halsey talks with the
meteorologists and then sends his two task groups heading East Southeast, which should
put them well in the clear, but new reports say the storm is now heading more to the north and
is going faster. So Halsey changes course to the Northwest to try to cross ahead of the storm
in a big semi-circle, but the typhoon doesn’t play ball, and it crashes into the fleet.
Jocko Clark’s TG 38.1 gets the worst of it early June 5th. Pretty much the entire Group takes
a real beating, though no ships are actually lost. All four carriers report damage, though.
The corners on the flight decks on Hornet and Bennington actually fold over, like dog earing a
book. 30 some meters of heavy cruiser Pittsburgh’s bow is just torn off. 233 planes from the carriers
are swept overboard despite being lashed down, 36 more are wrecked beyond repair, and 23 more
just badly damaged. Six men are lost at sea, and since- again- this is Halsey’s second
typhoon in six months, there may be repercussions for him. We shall see next week.
I said last week that I would talk this week about the plans for the Allied invasion of
the Japanese Home Islands, and now I will.
The overall plan is Operation Downfall and is
scheduled to begin November 1st. It has multiple parts. Operation Olympic is to use Okinawa as
a staging area to capture the southern third of Kyushu. Operation Coronet is to go off in
early 1946, and is to attack the Kanto Plain, near Tokyo, on Honshu. This is to be backed with
air power from captured air bases on Kyushu.
Who is going to do this- which, if it goes
off will be the largest amphibious operation in history? Units redeploying from Europe are not
expected to partake until 1946, so replacements from home in the states will fill out the assault
forces for Olympic, which are the forces that are already in the theater fighting. Krueger’s
6th Army is to run Olympic, with a total of from 14 to 17 divisions, including three Marine
ones. Their plan is to take Kagoshima Wan- Bay- and Ariake Wan to use as ports of entry, and then
drive north to take the southern third of Kyushu. Then they would develop that as a staging ground
for Coronet, with local airfields and all.
Walter Eichelberger’s 8th Army will run Coronet,
backed by 10th Army, made up of divisions redeployed from Europe, ideally taking the whole
Tokyo-Yokohama area first, and then spreading out onto the Kanto Plain and basically just expanding
until Japan surrenders. This will all begin with 14 divisions, two of them armored, and then 10
more coming in as reserves. Douglas MacArthur’s May 28th draft says Olympic will involve
776,700 personnel, and Coronet 1,026,000.
Read both of the following:
Now, we have a special that’s just come out about the redeployment issues and the
draft issues involved in getting millions of men to this Theater, so I won’t go into it here.
Now, we have a special that’s about to come out about the redeployment issues and the draft
issues involved in getting millions of men to this Theater, so I won’t go into it here.
But US Army CoS George Marshall’s prediction about a general lessening of enthusiasm for the war post
VE Day is coming true. Congress is calling for the discharge of coal miners, and the exemption of
agricultural workers from the draft. Business leaders are also becoming more and more critical
of the army and what they see as its obstruction to reconversion from a full war economy.
“Cuts in orders were already creating unemployment. Unless the civilian economy picked
up the slack there would be mass unemployment… It is not going to far to say that by VE Day
the Army was becoming the prime target for frustration and anger; it was coming to represent
a war of which the Americans were tiring.”
There is the simple fact that the war economy had
to reconfigure industry to get enough resources to make weapons and armor and stuff like that to
fight the war, but it also had to withhold things from the individual- food and fuel, and other
stuff that had to be rationed so the rest could go to the guys doing the fighting. But through April
and May, the constraints on industry have been lessening, and the market economy is really coming
back. The government is cancelling contracts for stuff they no longer need produced for the war.
What stuff is that, you ask? Well, with the war in Europe over and the Japanese Navy a thing of the
past, they don’t need any more new ships. And they don’t really need any more new planes either.
But a lot of the individual stuff is still in force. Sugar and butter rationing will
remain as is, more meat will be allowed, but won’t reach earlier levels until near the
end of the year. Coal supplies will be reduced, but gas rations doubled, though new tire supplies
are not that far from halved. Cotton especially is in short supply, one because there hasn’t been
so much planting because of labor shortages, and two because the army needs cotton uniforms and
tents for the Pacific. These figures, by the way, are from Implacable Foes. Great book.
Fred Vinson, who is the Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, is also Director of the
Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion- OWMR, and he predicts that war production might
go down maybe 15%, but on the other hand, that’ll mean more consumer items like radios or
vacuum cleaners. Sure, that’ll mean a ‘modest’ increase in unemployment, but that’s only going to
be workers who are ’temporarily’ out of work.
Well, in May the Army Air Forces cancel contracts
for 17,000 planes, which is expected to cause job losses of 450,000 people. That’s spread out over
the next year, but still. And a lot of people in Congress- well, a lot of people in the US- find
it hard to swallow that the armed forces will need 11 million men and women still in uniform
this year and maybe next, and all consuming more personal supplies than they did when the US was
fighting a two front war. Barron’s magazine writes that the Pentagon’s plans, “…envisage,
as has been said of all military plans, anything up to an invasion of the moon.”
But that’s because they can’t see that the staging zones in the Pacific are a mess. You gotta
send all these people, these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, to place to place to
place before the invasion, but where can you send them in such numbers? Manila is a wreck,
as is the whole central valley of Luzon. Where can you deploy two million people, or five, or
seven? As the minutes of an OWMR meeting note, the transfer to the Pacific is like sending
the entire population of Philadelphia to the Philippines, but it can only proceed at the speed
with which people can be received, not sent.
On May 25th, George Marshall met with
the House Appropriations Committee. He said that if the Soviets join the war, then
yes, the US would probably need fewer troops, but who knows if they really will. “Asked
about the strategy of bombardment and blockade, Marshall identified the numerous problems with
that approach, including the cost to taxpayers of a prolonged campaign. He also noted that
Americans needed to consider how the Chinese would feel about the continued presence of Japanese
troops in their country and warned that the occupation of strongpoints from which to launch
an effective blockade could result in a costly war of attrition, with casualties approximating
those expected from a direct assault.”
This meeting was a closed session, but there were
those present who leaked its content to the press, who promptly seized on the Soviet
angle as if it were a settled thing, which it actually became a few days later- if
you watched last week’s episode you’ll know.
Memorial Day was May 30th, and President Harry
Truman gave his message to the people of his country on June 1st. The big majority of
it was about the end of the war in Europe, but he then went in to redeployment and figures
for the Pacific. He said the Army would need just under seven million men for the Japan campaign,
so 1,300,000 men with high points under the new point system- which I went over a couple weeks
ago- will be released from service this year, and another 700,000 or so will also leave
because of age, or illness, or wounds taken, so that’s two million discharged in the next
year or so. He then goes on to talk about what lies ahead, and while it’s a warning to the
Japanese, it’s also a big shot at his critics in Congress and within his administration.
“…he cited the casualty figures from the ongoing battle for Okinawa to paint a grim picture of
the struggle ahead. As American forces advanced they would face the bulk of the Japanese Army
for the first time. There would be no easy road to victory. Bombardment and blockade would
not suffice; infantrymen backed by tanks, artillery, and flamethrowers would have to defeat
an entrenched and fanatical Japanese army on the ground. The supplies required for that job would
be staggeringly vast, as would the distances they would have to travel to reach the war zone… the
home front would need to produce fewer tanks, planes, and artillery pieces, but munitions
output would nearly match that of 1944.”
He points out that they do have to produce a load
of stuff specifically for the war over there: anti-malarial drugs, combat boots, cotton
uniforms, um… amphibious trucks… radios, raincoats. This means that things like leather
and textiles will remain limited at home- as will food, since they have to feed the seven
million man army and also the newly liberated or occupied parts of Europe. Them too.
Truman closes by exhorting the country to continue the fight until Japan’s unconditional
surrender. “They hope that our desire to see our soldiers and sailors home again and the temptation
to return to the comforts and profits of peace will force us to settle for some compromise
short of unconditional surrender… They should know better. They should realize that this Nation,
now at the peak of its military strength, will not relax, will not weaken in its purpose.”
And there I will end this week of the war.
A week of hits to the Japanese and
American navies, Okinawa getting ever closer to its conclusion, more fighting in the
Philippines, plans for the invasion of Japan, and plans to move millions of men halfway
across the world to do that invasion.
Marshall and American Secretary Stimson
have a pretty complex plan to beat Japan, and it unfortunately involves the government
continuing to impose on the civilian economy and continuing to command millions of young
men at a time when the country is expecting relief from both. As I said the other week,
their big worry is that any large scale public unwillingness to continue to sacrifice
for the war effort would encourage Japan to hold out and eventually maybe force
the US to accept a negotiated peace, an incomplete victory. So they- and Truman-
feel they must show Japan that the US is fully committed to invading the Japanese Home
Islands with an army of seven million men, and creating the devastation that only such a giant
army and its unlimited firepower can create.
As I said earlier, this episode was
dedicated by Timeghost Army Brigadier Drew Hardin to his grandfather, Donald
Wilson Round, and all those who, like him, flew the B-26 Marauder in the USAAF.
Donald’s war began in Sardinia in the summer of 1943, a deployment which required a
twelve-day journey across three continents in the Marauder. [WE CAN PUT A MAP HERE HOPEFULLY].
Donald then flew 64 missions in the B-26 from January 15, 1944. Some of his earliest strikes
were in support of the Anzio Landings that month. Other sorties included missions to Florence,
Rome, Pisa, and Elba. While living on Sardinia, Donald built a house with some other officers
and ate plenty of good food… oh and he decided that Mark Clark was incompetent and should have
been relieved. Drew wanted us to mention that.
Donald survived all those missions unscathed,
although his plane was hit by flak a couple of times, he saw another B-26 blow up in
front of him, and he lost several friends. Later in life he chalked his survival up to luck – he’d
just been in the right places at the right time. But the B-26 should take a lot of the credit. When
the bomber entered service at the end of 1940, it suffered several accidents caused by a high
take-off speed and a collapsing landing-gear. Pretty soon people were calling it “The
Flying Coffin” and “Widowmaker”. Still, it proved to be an excellent combat aircraft
and had the lowest loss rate of any American bomber. It was fast, carried a heavy bombload,
and could take punishment. Later in life, whenever Donald spoke to Drew about the war, the
topic would invariably turn to the B-26.
I’ll finish off by reading some of Drew’s
words: “When people speak of the people who built America, they are referring to men like
him. He flew 64 missions and went home to his new bride. They raised four daughters in a small
house in Garland, Texas. He drove a Greyhound bus until he retired. Later in life he was the
general contractor on his next house. In his 60s he was out camping with boys and men a quarter
his age. In the end, the war was just a small part of a rich and long life. To me he will
always be the man who could do anything.”
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