The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE war in the Pacific has been variously described as a war of communications, a war of logistics, a war of bases. These terms describe the accumulation of offensive power, rather than its application. We have not yet closed with the enemy. Just as it was necessary to win the Battle of the Atlantic before we were in a position to launch decisive blows at Germany, so the winning of the Battle of the Pacific will put us in a position where our strength can bear directly on the major defenses of Japan.

Since we seized the offensive in the Pacific, our campaigns have aimed at breaking the blockade of China and gaining access to the land mass of Asia, where we can meet the armies of Japan and attack the heart of her power. Our campaign in Burma is an attempt to establish an overland route for effective assistance to China, and our penetration in the Central Pacific, as Admiral Nimitz has declared, is aimed at giving us access to ports on the Asiatic mainland. All of this is in preparation for the final crushing attack on Japan itself.

No slowdown in Asia

The invasion in Europe should produce no slackening in the war with Japan. Now that we have painfully gained the initiative in the Pacific, military wisdom dictates that we not only maintain but intensify our offensive there. We had to do more than contain the enemy in this theater before we could launch an attack in Europe.

If we had embarked on an offensive in Europe while on the defensive in Asia, Japan could have affected the disposition of our strength and aided Germany by operations intended to divert our power. Our freedom to move in Europe would be controlled by the possibility of sudden demands in Asia, and our attack on Germany would be essentially a limited offensive.

True, we shall be unable to concentrate on Japan the strength that will be required to bring about her complete defeat until we have made a successful conclusion to the war against Germany. Shipping and landing craft especially will have to be freed. But we shall have immensely valuable and hard-bought experience in the business of invasion, and a large body of battle-tried troops and officers. Meanwhile we have ample targets to keep our strength busy in the Pacific and in opening a way to China. We have still to regain a good deal of the space we traded for time.

But our naval and air preponderance and the skillful use of the techniques we have evolved for applying that preponderance ensure us less costly and risky advances than Tarawa and Guadalcanal. We now enjoy comparative immunity from counterattack on the island bases we have seized. For Japan to attempt to eject us from these positions would require her to mount an amphibious effort equal to that we expended in their capture. So far the Japanese High Command has preferred to write off the garrisons.

Japan hoards her fleet

Japan has shown no inclination to risk her fleet in defense of these positions. She would be more likely to risk it in defense than in counterattack. A counterattack would commit her to concentration on one sector of her defensive arc. Once committed at any point, she would leave other and equally vital areas vulnerable, since she cannot launch a counterattack that would develop into a counteroffensive.

The Japanese fleet is still a formidable weapon of defense, though its operations are restricted by the loss of bases, by Japan’s inability to support it with seagoing air cover on a scale comparable to ours, and by the inability of Japanese shipyards to turn out the huge tonnage of fleet auxiliaries that make up so important a part of modern sea power.

It is no longer true that Japan’s fleet could “lose the war in an afternoon,” because it is no longer true that Japan’s fleet could win the war in an afternoon. The Japanese fleet might still deliver a heavy blow to our fleet. But a naval victory by Japan would not bring her a margin of power that could assure her victory, though it might postpone defeat.

A Japanese naval disaster would hasten, but not govern, the development of our strategy. Japan cannot hope for a naval victory great enough to give her command of the seas and enable her to destroy the sources of our military strength. That moment passed not so much by default as by the accumulation of losses in successive engagements, by the loss of bases, and by the growth of our own naval and air strength.

Stilwell’s jungle-hopping

The tactics of our advance in the Pacific, and the conditions that made them possible, have been paralleled in land fighting. In Burma, we fought against isolated Japanese positions. Jungle and mountain wastes, like the ocean spaces, rendered Japanese positions hard to come at, but at the same time created difficulties of supply and reinforcement for the Japanese.

We brought to the attack against these positions something of the same technique we employed in the seizure of island bases, in a kind of terrestrial islandhopping. We used our air superiority to attack communications, and air-borne troops set down in thinly held areas gave us bases that lay behind Japanese strong points. We by-passed Mogaung and Kamaing to surprise Myitkina.

In these sudden and daring thrusts, we joined the most modern mechanical weapons with the most primitive military strength. We used the toughness and stamina of ground troops, and the ancient weapon of infantry, the forced march, in precise concert with the airplane. This coöperation between foot soldier and plane, a union of science and Indian fighting, is a sign that we are using our technological mastery flexibly and imaginatively.

“Vinegar Joe”

It is fitting that Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell should lead this march back into Burma, from which he and his men were expelled by superior Japanese forces more than two years ago. He has manifested real greatness. He has exploited new and almost untried tactics and tools of war, and carried on the methods originated by another great general, the late Orde Charles Wingate.

But what is even more important is Stilwell’s leadership of men. His Americans have fought successfully under conditions never known to American fighting men until this war. He has recognized and made full use of the magnificent fighting qualities of the Chinese soldier. And he has produced a harmonious military organization of Chinese and Americans and taught them to use efficiently and spiritedly all the armament of modern war.

Chinese, Burmans, Americans, and British are joined in fighting the Battle of Burma, which is not so much a battle for Burma as it is a battle for China, The Ledo Road is an artery that will pour new blood into China’s many-sided war. It is not only part of the global war against militarism and aggression; it is also for China a war for the realization of her political maturity, and in that war too we have an interest.

China’s long pull

For seven years China has been fighting Japan. During four and a half of those years she stood alone and virtually unaided. The struggle has devoured her military strength, throttled her economy, and given rise to potentially dangerous political currents. But paradoxically, as China has undergone these weakening hardships, she has approached an international position far stronger than anything she has known since Western imperialism began to sap her strength more than a century ago. Not only has she been welcomed into the war councils of the major Allied powers, but many of her rights of sovereignty have been returned to her.

For seven years China’s war against Japan has not been her only war. She has had to fight the battle of internal reconstruction, the development of unity and new political forms, both of which must succeed if China is to attain her full political maturity. We have seen how perilous and difficult this kind of growth is in our own history, in the turmoils and differences that followed our achievement of nationhood.

Japan has been quick to take advantage of China’s internal political situation. As it becomes more and more urgent that she destroy our growing offensive power in China and prepare to defend herself against us on the mainland of Asia, her military offensives have gone hand in hand with political offensives. She has sought to bring out of China’s inner stresses a cleavage that would weaken China’s will to fight, intensify faction, confuse the bases of Chinese opposition to Japanese ideas, and perhaps develop a peace party.

It is possible that the political scene in China will see changes, but those changes will not produce advantages to Japan. No realignment within the Kuomintang could find an adequate basis for power if it abandoned the struggle against Japan for strife with the Communists. But we can expect Japan to continue her attempts at exploiting Chinese internal differences, and at disrupting Chinese and Anglo-American coöperation. Japan well knows that a faction-ridden China can never be a strong China, and that a weak China means a relatively strong Japan both in terms of the immediate war and in terms of the peace to come.

Although China is unable to win a decisive victory against Japan in the military war, she has been winning the ideological war, an accomplishment potentially much more important. China’s long fight against Japan has crippled Japan’s attempt to depict herself as the savior of Asia and the liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. The political morality of Japan has been exposed for what it is, in the course of her seven years’ attempt to impose it on China. Japan’s inability to win the coöperation of China, as well as the rapacity she has shown, has revealed the ambition and unfitness of Japan’s military mind for political leadership and frustrated her propaganda of “’Asia for the Asiatics.”

Japan’s raw material

Japan’s attitude toward Greater East Asia has been changed by the progress of the war. She has had to hasten her exploitation of its resources and obtrude her own needs and designs more nakedly. The honeymoon is over. The possibility that she may have to retreat from the southern regions has led her to create stockpiles at home — as much as her shipping difficulties would permit — of raw materials from those regions, on which the continuing efficiency of her military and industrial machine depends. The imposition of an artificial war-dominated and Japancentered economy on East Asia is an unnatural dislocation of its previous structure, intensified by shipping shortage and the scantiness of overland transport.

Japan’s attempts to institute local economic selfsufficiency have been dictated by her inability to assume the burden of sustaining Asiatic economy. Her promises of political independence to the conquered areas stem from an effort to foster economic autonomy as much as from an effort to lend verisimilitude to her pretense of being the liberator of Asia.

Liberators or imperialists?

But Japanese failure does not mean automatic success for the United Nations in the Far East. In Asia, as in Europe, the political aspects of the war and their relation to military activity become more important and more complex as the war advances. Decisions on the grand strategy of land operations — in terms of allocation of forces, coöperation of command, and choice of objectives — are more difficult than those involved in naval operations of the type we have so far witnessed in the Pacific.

The relation between us and our allies in the Burma theater, for example, offers far more scope for differences than the problem of integrating naval command in our war on the sea. British national policy and our own do not always coincide in Asia. There we move among thickly inhabited areas and politically awakened populations. Contrast the political unconsciousness of the handful of Marshall Islanders with the active core of nationalists in Burma. It will become increasingly necessary for us to face our political problems frankly, a task made easier by the high degree of military coöperation the Allies have already achieved in all theaters of this global war.

The statesmanship and political wisdom of the Allies in Asia will be tested with increasing severity. We have accomplished military miracles in the Far East; we shall have to accomplish equally impressive political miracles if Asia is to become an integral part of a stable world order. The bankruptcy of Japanese leadership is apparent in China and the rest of Occupied Asia, but we must remember that “white imperialism,” always unpopular in Asia, has been absent from some of its seats of power for two and a half years.

Japanese imperialism may not be welcome either, but Japanese propaganda and Japanese politics can be counted on to have created many difficulties for us in Occupied Asia. In 1944 many more Asiatics are conscious of the problem of India than was the case in 1941. The emptiness of Japanese-inspired “nationalism” will not dull the political aspirations of Indonesians. Will our armies be regarded in Asia as the destroyers of a hated occupation or as the restorers of a situation that may seem to Asiatics equally obnoxious?

In this light, Vice President Wallace’s mission to China and Siberia was a shrewd stroke. It suggests some of the contrasts between what the democracies have to offer and the promises Japan makes. Mr. Wallace is identified with efforts to make science and technology the allies of agricultural economy in the battle against hunger; he is an advocate of aiding the industrialization of undeveloped lands, rather than viewing them as a market for consumers’ goods; and he has offered “the Century of the Common Man ” to oppose the imperialism of “the American Century.”

It is high time for us to recognize the fact that in our diplomatic and political relations with the peoples of Asia we shall face problems even more demanding than those we shall meet in Europe. The kind of peace we hope for must shape our conduct of the war.