The Pacific

The Pacific

For the first year of the Second World War the Pacific Theater seemed like an afterthought. Even prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR and Churchill, in March 1941, had agreed on a Europe First strategy that saw the lions' share of men and materiel headed across the Atlantic. After the surprise attack, planners saw no need to shift gears. They continued to see Germany as the greater global threat. Were Germany to defeat Britain and the Soviet Union, the US would be alone, facing two enemies. Despite opposition from General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Ernest King, Europe First remained the Allied strategy.

 

General Jimmy Doolittle

The only operation of any significance in the early days of the Pacific campaign was the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Though scarcely a pinprick it was an important morale boost for the US and proved that the Japanese home islands were vulnerable to attack from carrier-based aircraft. And interestingly the audacious raid was not carried out by naval aircraft but by 16 B-25 bombers, modified to carry twice their normal fuel load and flown by members of the US Army Air Force from the USS Hornet. (You might want to do a little investigating as to why they didn’t use Navy aircraft and naval aviators.) It was the first incident which caused the Japanese leadership any concern. 

Audie Murphy American Legend

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Doolittle Raid Over Tokyo WWII Newsreel (Great Original Footage)

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Doolittle Raid over Tokyo at the start of World War II

As we have discussed, the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway caused a shift in the momentum of the Pacific War, but the question remained--how to deal with the small but important Japanese garrisons spread across the wide Pacific in the course of their campaign to build the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The solution was called Island Hopping. Taking every island would have simply been prohibitive in men, material, time and treasure, so planners targeted key islands, and the rest were blockaded and left to wither, cut off from the home islands. Both General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area, and Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief United States Pacific Fleet, supported the approach.

Names like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Peliliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa became part of every American's vocabulary. We’ll discuss them in some detail in class. However, we should take a little time here to examine the development of the amphibious doctrine which the United States Marine Corps focused on during the inter-war years. The first major amphibious landing by US Marines took place at Vera Cruz on March 9-10, 1847 during the Mexican American War. The Marines used whaleboats to get as close to shore as possible, relying on covering fire from US naval vessels just off shore. The operation was a success, with no casualties, but meant that the men had to jump off into the surf and wade ashore.

A long “dry” spell followed the Vera Cruz landing. Not until the Great War did troops participate in a major amphibious operation, the disastrous Gallipoli landing. On April 25, 1915, troops from Australia and New Zealand landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the northern bank of the Dardanelles, in an attempt to secure transit to the Black Sea to support Russia. After an extensive bombardment by a joint Anglo-French naval force, ANZAC troops with smaller French, British, Gurkha and Indian contingents landed at Anzac Cove, and Helles. Again using whaleboats to approach the beach, the assaulting troops met a stiff resistance by the Turks under Kemal Ataturk. Though the Allied troops established a beachhead and moved inland they never came close to their objective. In the end close to 100,000 men died in the Gallipoli campaign, roughly 50,000 on each side. It became clear by late fall that further operations were futile and the Allies began withdrawing their troops on December 7, 1915. This video will give you a good idea what the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign was like. 

mengutimur

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World War I: Gallipoli Campaign 2/4

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Even before World War I, Japan’s aggressive approach to both China and Russia caused concern in certain circles in Washington which worried that she might be a threat to US possessions (the Philippines, Wake, Guam and Hawaii). In 1897 the US Navy began to develop plans against eventual hostilities with Japan, the first version of what became known as the famous War Plan Orange. At the close of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles awarded a number of former German possessions to Japan as so-called mandates, including the Marianas, Marshall and Caroline Islands, giving Japan a much larger footprint in the Pacific. Later iterations of the plan perfected by the Joint Army and Navy Board included the concept of Island Hopping. With the new perceived threat from Japan, Marine Corps Commandant John A. Lejeune sent Major Earl (Pete) Ellis on a reconnaissance tour of the Pacific islands. Unfortunately Ellis died during his trip (conspiracy theorists suggest he was murdered) but he left behind “Plan 712, Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia” that also included an element of island-hopping.

Earl Hancock (Pete) Ellis

While the strategy made sense, the men who would be required to carry it out looked to the gross failure of the landing at Gallipoli and concluded that they needed to perfect their amphibious landing techniques, and develop a better way of moving troops from ship to shore. The execution of amphibious operations hadn’t changed for centuries. The whale boats of an earlier era left assaulting troops exposed to fire from new weapons such as machine guns at the waterline, ensuring massive casualties even before they arrived on the beach. How should they meet that challenge, and what was the best way to incorporate aircraft and submarines in an amphibious assault?

Beginning in the 1920s the Marine Corps Advanced Base Force began a series of exercised with the that was originally designed to establish mobile and/or fixed bases overseas. To develop appropriate policies and procedures for amphibious landings they carried out exercises in Panama, Culebra, and even Hawaii. These were amphibious operations, still based on suing ships boats to transport troops to shore, but they also included some air elements.

 

General Victor H. Krulak

In 1933 the Advanced Base Force gave way to the Fleet Marine Force. In a series of Fleet Exercises (FLEXs) the Marines began experimenting with improvements in landing craft. The British Beetle boat proved unsatisfactory, as did several American designs. During the Sino-Japanese War, an American observer, future Marine Corps General Victor Krulak, took photographs of Japanese boats which had a bow that could drop down, allowing the troops to land “feet dry.” He sent sketches and photos to the Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair, where they were filed away with no action taken. As the Flexs progressed it became clear that amphibious landings required a new form of landing craft. When Krulak returned stateside, he got his materials out of bureaucratic limbo and took them to Headquarters USMC.

At the same time, two American civilians hit upon the answer to the problem of a proper landing craft.  Andrew Jackson Higgins a lumberman in Louisiana developed a shallow-draft boat to transport timber through the bayous, but quickly saw the value to the USMC. After initial tests in 1938 of his Eureka boats, and some modifications, including a bow ramp which dropped down, the Eureka’s, also known as Higgins boats, were included in the FLEXs for 1939 and proved to be vastly superior to other designs. The Eureka boat became the platform for the famed LCP that saw many modifications and improvements throughout the Pacific Campaign. 

galaxies352

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Andrew Higgins: The American Noah, WWL-TV Part 1

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Higgins Landing Craft

Donald Roebling, great-grandson of the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge was another important figure in the development of amphibious landing craft. After several disastrous hurricanes in Florida, Roebling, in 1935, developed a shallow-bottomed rescue vessel to navigate Florida’s swamps. Known as the Alligator, the Marine Corps first learned about it through an article in Life Magazine. After consultation with Marine Corps Headquarters, Roebling redesigned the boat, adding tracks similar to those used on tanks which would allow it to traverse reefs and some underwater defenses. Eventually they “amphibious tractor” became known as the amtrac, or the Landing Vehicle, Tracked (LVT). Select this link for more information. 

 

Marines landing on Guam

These vessels which made the Island Hopping campaign possible. It became crystal clear at Tarawa, the first of the many amphibious landings of the Pacific campaign, that without an adequate number of such landing craft, the extraordinary defenses constructed by the Japanese would inflict such devastating casualties as to make the landings prohibitively costly. Being able to deliver men and materiel within wading distance of the beach, or in some cases even onto the beach was a life saver. This USMC video of the Tarawa landing is graphic, and clearly illustrates the importance of landing craft in the Pacific.

C-SPAN

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"With the Marines at Tarawa" - 75th Anniversary of WWII Battle

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