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� � � �The Pacific war was a new kind of war. The scale was astounding and the distances involved immense. Both sides struck at their enemies thousands of miles from their home bases. Projection of power was the key concept here and in the American island-hoppng campaigns of 1943,44 and 45 it achieved a level both in concept and execution that can only be called epic. There were no titanic clashes of armies as experienced in Russia, France or even the Western Desert. Sea power was the instrument of victoryand that sea power was centred on the aircraft-carriers that gave every task force its most potent weapon of either offence or defence. The carrier-borne planes swept the skies of enemy aerial resistance, the seas of enemy ships and allowed the fleet to take the soldiers and marines anywhere they wanted. � � � �The ships couldn�t, however, take or hold a piece of land. The very idea of warships alone being able to cow recalcitrant natives into submission had died spectacularly with the failure of the Royal Navy at the Dardanelles and the Japanese were no �lesser race�Ebut a highly developed people with a potent war machine. When the fleets had done their job it was still up to the footsloggers to go ashore and and take the land. In the Pacific war this was a particularly bloody affair. All generals order their soldiers to fight until the last man and all armies expect their men to do this. Only the Japanese, in the modern era, have ever done this with any consistency. Folly, insanity, fanaticism one might say but no less a trial for the men trying to destroy such resistance. On atolls now remembered only by the men who fought on them the drama was played out a hundred times. Despite the pounding of naval guns and carrier planes, every yard had to be cleared with rifle, grenade and flamethrowers. Like most soldiers the Japanese knew that the deeper you burrow the better your chances, and they were veritable moles. � � � �The most costly and terrible of these actions took place in 1945 on the island of Okinawa. To get their troops onto the beaches the US navy assembled a fleet of 1500 vessels. They carried over 550,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. They provide landing decks for hundreds of planes and they operated in hostile waters 6,000 miles from the continental United States. It was a floating city replete with repair shops, hospitals, kitchens, laundries, arsenals of millions of rounds of ammunition and tens of thousands of shells, living quarters, chapels, combat control centres, radar rooms and of course the teeth in the shape of massive guns and fast modern aircraft. � � � �It took the Americans 83 days to secure the island and in that time the fleet stayed loyally offshore in the face of the fiercest attacks the US navy has ever had to suffer. The attackers were known as the Kamikaze,the Divine Wind, in honour of the fortuitous typhoons that had wrecked Kublai Khan�s Mongol fleets in 1274 and 1281 and saved Japan from its first foreign invasions. The official name was the Tokubetsu Kogeki Tai ,or Special Attack Group. The pilots were mostly young men, often very very young. They were given a rudimentary training and flew old antiquated planes that had no chance in any kind of air-to-air combat. There were, however, thousands of them and they possessed a singular determination. It�s not they wanted to die rather that they felt they had to die if their country was to have any prospect of survival. Once they had taken off there was no way they could return honorably and alone in their cockpits in the last moments of their lives they had only two possible finales; to die having failed or to die having succeeded. There is no young man who would choose the latter. They were almost always picked up on radar for , novice pilots that so many of them were, wave-hopping was a dangerous course. Combat air patrols flying the highly effective Hellcat fighter piloted by experienced naval aviators would strike them down in great numbers but still they came on. Some would penetrate the fighter screen and then would begin that intense battle between shipboard gunners who wanted to live and airmen who wished to die. The horror the sailors felt in the face of such suicidal rushes was compounded by the almost continuous nature of the attacks. One British correspondent noted that every Kamikaze seemed to be targeted exclusively on yourself. (The smaller British fleet near Formosa drew off only a few of the attackers from the main action at Okinawa and suffered much less than the Americans. One reason for this was the armoured decks of the British carriers.) � � � �Militarily these attacks were foolishness on a grand scale and reflected the bankruptcy of the Japanese high command in the final days of the war. The results were paltry. Although eight carriesr hit and some seriously damaged not one was sunk. The smaller ships of the radar pickets and anti-aircraft screens suffered badly and in total more than 300 kamikazes succeeded in crashing onto a ship. Only 30 of these ships were lost, another 288 damaged. To achieve this the Japanese squandered more than 3,500 planes. Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi, the man who had pushed hardest for Kamikaze attacks to be undertaken, committed seppuku (the ritual suicide in which cuts open ones own belly) when Japan surrendered. His whole strategy had been based on the impossibility of Japan ever giving up and in the 18 agonising hours it took him to die perhaps he felt remorse for the men he had needlessly sent to their deaths. |
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