Books in Progress

One of the things that happens when there is little or little to do at the upper levels of the military is to revise, update and make plans for contingency that often seem bizarre. The famous anaconda plan proposed by Scott at the beginning of the Civil War was part of some obscure planner in Army staff. Although Scott took a lot of grief for the plan, it was carried out, in general, by the end of the war.

Today the puzzle place has plans for almost anything you can imagine, and some you can't. We have a detailed plan for the invasion of England that has been updated every 10 years since the War of 1812. When it looked like England might surrender during WWII marines were sent to Greenland with the task of helping England by allow their troops in Greenlad to return to base. The other reason was to provide the US with an unsinkable base in the event invading England became necessary. That plan is still on the books and to the best of my knowledge updated regularly. 

Our Generals and Admirals do not go off half cocked, our political leaders do enough of that. We have a plan for invading every country. Some are embarrassingly thin on the how, but there is a plan. One of the reasons for all this planning  is the way we fight. The American military swings an immense logistical tail and just swinging that tail from one continent to another is a task. But, once the logistics start flowing and troops are in place the outcome is predictable. 

Most of the plans for the Pacific War with Japan were drawn up and finalized in the 30s as was the overall strategy of Germany first. None of this is something that happens in total vacuum. Even the famous raid on Pearl Harbor was the result of a plan made by an American and later perfected in detail by Japan. 

The best book you can read on the war in the Pacific is E. B. Sludge With The Old Breed.  Everything else is commentary. This is a book that has been on the Commandant's required reading list since it was published in the 80s. 

Artler, I had not heard of the Anaconda Plan. Very interesting.



Thanks. I may check that out. With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa



I’m 38% into The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945. The Battle of the Philippine Sea is just concluding and planes low on fuel are either ditching short of their carriers or attempting difficult night landings.

There is lots of interesting detail, little of which I knew. For example, up until that time, carrier-to-carrier battles had been decided by who spotted who first. The Japs had spotted Spruance’s fleet. Mitscher had wanted to go west and pursue the Jap carriers. Despite heavy pressure (perhaps not “just short of mutiny” but certainly “this side of insubordination”), Spruance resisted the pressure and stuck with the original mandate to protect the invasion force on Saipan.

There was a widespread belief at the time that the best defense for a carrier group was to go on offense, to strike first. The author, Hornfischer, has not yet done a postmortem on the battle. We have little insight yet regarding what was on the mind of Spruance in this regard. If the best way to protect this carriers, which protected the landing, was to attack, Hornfisher has not given explicit information on what Spruance was thinking by just sitting tight.

With the eventual counter-attack by the America forces after the Turkey Shoot, it is noted that unlike the American forces, the Japanese forces went into an evasive scramble which, the reader must assume, did not work well for their defense. Spruance, in defense, did keep things tight.

What we know is that the American fleet concentrated its defenses. It had the relatively new proximity bombs in its antiaircraft shells. With radar-assistance to the targets, the fighters wasted no time getting to the Jap planes. It seemed to be a reverse of what happened early on at Midway when wave after wave of American planes were shot down. But this time, the American had so many planes, never were the ships without extensive fighter cover.

The overriding story, of course, is that the Japs were running low on experienced pilots. That is a main theme of the book. The Japs just didn’t have the fuel to spend on much training. Pilots would learn how to take off, drop a bomb, and land but sometimes not much more. And as we know, there was no rotation system to speak of. American pilots with experience were rotated back to the States to train other pilots. Jap pilots (not unlike their German counterparts) often just kept on until they were killed.

The Japanese had a lot going for them, including the use of Guam as a base for carrier-based planes. The Japs could strike from the carriers at extreme range. The planes didn’t have to make it back to the carriers but could land at Guam. And they had longer-range planes than we did. And the winds (coming from the east) gave them an advantage attacking from the west in terms of launching planes.

And it seems many of the Jap pilots were mystified when they made night raids on the American fleet from Guam. The flack and American fighters were immediately on them. The America radar and command-and-control were far superior than the Japs.

The Japs were outnumbered but not decisively so. The Wiki page on the right shows the strength of both forces. Given that the Japs also had Guam (as well as the ability to fly planes or material from other relatively close by islands such as Iwo Jima), on paper it seems this battle could have gone either way. But it was never close.

MacArthur had been involved in the Battle of Biak as part of his New Guinea campaign. There was no known reason why they didn’t use the Imperial Japanese Navy (such as the massed First Mobile Fleet) to wipe out the invasion. Wiki notes about Biak:



So I guess they had a plan. And on Saipan, they had a plan as well, although it seems clear they hadn’t take the time to reinforce Saipan to the extent that they could have. But they had murderous artillery on the reverse slopes of the mountains, and hidden in other places, that were almost impossible to find and hit. And their fire was very effective. Had it been combined and coordinated with a tank attack, who knows. All of that naval bombardment may had done little at times but shift sand. But it did cut about every Jap communications wire on the island.

The Japs did try a massed tank attack. It didn’t work because they apparently took the wrong road and star shells from the Navy lit them up and made them relatively easy targets in their night attack, not to mention the extremely brave and dauntless efforts of the Marines.

It says in the book that Spruance and Nimitz were well aware of the Japanese tactic to feint in the middle while sending a fast force to the flank. And you can be pretty sure every carrier commander was briefed about this.

Mitscher was champing at the bit to give chase. And there’s a humorous section where it talks about Mitscher (or one of the other like-minded admirals) who said “If prudently planned for, the flanking maneuvers of the Japanese could be discounted.” And basically what Spruance was saying was that “prudently planned for” equated to not taking the bait and staying put in the first place. It’s funny (to me) because you can see how easily some of these guys could talk themselves into nonsense.

I didn’t know much about Spruance before reading this. But one thing you could say about him is that he was calm and very clear thinking. And he was very careful not to fool himself into thinking what the Japanese “might do.” He was much more oriented around what their capabilities were. And clearly they had the capability to wipe out Spruance’s task force, just in terms of the forces arrayed against him.

Yes, the Japs were short on fuel and good pilots. Even so, the general gist I’m getting from this book and others (and never explicitly stated) was that (especially after Midway), they were very wary about the Americans.

Without a doubt, their “Banzai!” and exuberant battle tactics had easily overwhelmed forces based more upon bamboo sticks or yaks in their conquered territories. Granted, they did conquer Corregidor, sunk their share of British capital ships, and ran the successful sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

But they were no longer running up against opponents with bamboo sticks and pitchforks. One of the things I’ve gleaned from the books is that Marines were at least as zealous but nowhere near as reckless. They describe a counter-attack on the beaches of Saipan. A few dozen Jap soldiers came screaming out of the bushes. This would have been fine if they hadn’t run into Marines instead of peasants, especially well-armed Marines with tanks.

There is some inside information given by an account from at least one civilian woman who was on the island. Without a doubt, the Japanese who were on the island (beyond just being brutal) had gone a bit peculiar if not outright mad. While up in the hills with everyone else once the Marines had landed, she looked at the faces of the Japanese soldiers and they all looked so vacant.

And we know about kamikazes and the zealousness of Japanese pilots. But what this book underlines is that they had nothing on the pilots of Spruance Fifth Fleet. These guys were extremely competitive. They were armed not only with (by then) superior planes but superior battle tactics, not to mention far superior training.

There’s a great section in the book during the Turkey Shoot when it talks about these guys being in a zone. They would go up, do their shift, come back down and have their planes refueled and take a break and then be right back up. Time often seemed to stand still. They were extraordinarily motivated and efficient. To me, it’s clearly a misunderstanding of what went on if the “Turkey Shoot” is just put down to inferior Japanese pilots. After all, they had a whole lot of these planes coming in at one time and, by rights, should have overwhelmed the defenses. They didn’t. I’m not sure that the book is going to get into sufficient detail as to why they didn’t overwhelm the defenses. But I think part of it is that they caught the Americans ready, willing, and able to do battle as they had never (at least in the sky) done before. It’s a remarkable achievement.

The one thing Japan could never understand was how a nation with the 16th largest military in the 30s could become the most powerful in the world by 45. The invasion from Saipan on were operations of such scale that each one was, in effect, a Normandy invasion. There are a lot of very excellent reasons why the Axis should have never fought the war. The one least talked about is logistics. Only the production capability of the US could have assured military from the Arctic to the jungle of the tools to fight. 

In December 41 the Japanese had a superior fleet. By the summer of 42 we had 16 fleet, escort, and jeep carriers under construction along with the pilots, planes, and crews to crew the ships along with liberty ships to haul the materials and escorts to protect them. 

If the biggest mistake Hitler made was the invasion of Russia. The biggest mistake Japan made was the attack at Pearl. Both would see the destruction of their regimes and an ascending American military to ensure a form of pax Americana that continues to this day. 

Artler, I thought this paragraph from a Wiki article was instructive:



To my mind, there is no reason to believe that this estimation of America would be wrong today. I do believe we would fold like a cheap tent. But in the words of Aragorn in regards to 1941 America:



It is not only remarkable that we did not fold like a cheap tent. It is remarkable that the Japs had no conception of what a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor would do to public opinion.

Today the Muslims take out the world trade center and our president implores us that it is a “religion of peace.” Imagine the ghosts of the Japanese who sprung that sneak attack at Pearl Harbor seeing our reaction to current events. Yes, we threw a lot of money at the “terrorists” problem but we still mostly can’t name the enemy.

So perhaps we should cut the Japanese some slack. Maybe they did misread us. But maybe, too, there had been a reason to read us the way they did, easily domesticated, easily trading freedom for security as we do today without a thought.

But 1941 was not that day. It’s difficult to think of something the Japanese could have done that would have more rallied a united United States against them.

That’s a part that I found interesting. There was a definite lead time to actually getting more carriers and other ships out there. I think both sides were pretty much fighting with that they had through the first half of 1943, give or take.

Artler is so right about each major island campaign being the equivalent of Normandy. I’m reading this book and realize that this would make for a great movie. Heck, there are at least three different movies that could be sliced from the content I’ve read in just one-third of this book.

There was still a use for battleships, but clearly their day had come and gone. The newer ones could move at the speed of the carriers which made them useful as screening ships. The older ones could not move at their speed. But Turner found a use for the older BBs as artillery platforms. They were positioned off a beachhead and put to good use. I think this may have been much the same use that the Missouri was put to in Desert Storm, sitting offshore and, for all intents and purposes, unsinkable with normal weaponry and able to pound away to a great distance.

And it’s a funny/tragic story (one you had mentioned) of the Jap carrier that took a torpedo on the way to the battle. It was no great damage, in the scheme of things. It kept going on. But the torpedo hit a fuel line or something and fumes were pretty heavy in one section of the ship. So they decided to vent the fumes. That sounds perfectly logical to me. The problem was, it vented fumes to the entire carrier which then exploded. I guess the flight deck and the sides of the carrier bulged quite a bit.

The Marines landed on the west of the island of Saipan. Coral was quite an obstruction. Eventually they blew (in one big blast) a channel through the coral. It send black rock and coral into the area and covered one of the big ships. That captain wasn’t too happy but Turner was ecstatic.

I’m not absolutely sure, but there’s a fair chance that in the middle of this Google map of the area today that you can see that bit that was blasted out. It’s right in the center.

War matériel at this point was voluminous. The author of the book said that it was common to just push an entire plane over the side of the carrier if an engine went lame:

By the time of Pearl Harbor the war in Europe had been on for two years. Roosevelt had done a masterful job of turning industrial production from consumer goods to war materials. Detroit was gearing up for the production of tanks, trucks and other armaments, mostly for the British on Lend Lease. We were producing more aircraft than the Japanese before the war started and the logistics wheel was just starting. 

Neither Japan or Germany produced a four engine bomber and by war's end Lemay could put 1000 B29s in the air over Japan every day. The technological ability to produce in such qualities meant that the US was able to sustain the lowest KIA, MIA and WIA rates of all the allies about 400,000 KIA, 3% of an armed services of 12 million,  as compared to USSR and England. 

The lethality of American forces in the Pacific also surprised the Japanese. Guadlecanal was tough going for the 1st Marines but the learning curve was quickly mastered and the Americans were just as well adapted to jungle war as the Japanese. Something the VC learned in Jan 68 (Tet). 

I recall my mother talking about the cargo cult and how they made a religion out of supplies dropped from C-47s as a gift from the gods. No other nation has ever gone to war with such abundance. 

How many bombs did they drop on New York, Detroit, DC, and Chicago?
Having a prototype and actually putting it into use are two different things, actually.