The Pacific War

ON THE WORLD TODAY

IN THE first year of the war, Japanese fortifications on hundreds of Pacific islands and the immense distances of the Pacific seemed almost impassable barriers between us and Japan. That is what Japan wanted them to seem, and that is probably what Japan expected them to be. Therein lay the defect of Japanese strategy.

We evolved a kind of warfare that enabled us to apply our full power at a great distance from its sources. We developed a fleet that could keep the sea over 6000 miles from continental United States and 3500 miles beyond Pearl Harbor, that included air power as an integral part of itself, and that functioned in the closest relation to ground forces.

Saipan really hurts

The bloody conquest of Saipan is proof of our ability to carry the offensive to the battlefields where the war in the Pacific will be decided. The impact on Japan of our penetration in the Pacific derives not only from the nearness of our forces to Japan itself and the importance of the targets attacked, but also from what is revealed about the kind of power behind our advance.

Japanese propagandists were able to write off the Gilberts, the Solomons, the Marshalls, as isolated and remote outposts of little military significance. They could remind the home front of Truk and Rabaul, portray them as impregnable bastions that seemed to hold the promise of successful counteroffensive, and foster the illusion that a position occupied denoted space dominated. They could emphasize the grim price of our landings and claim great numbers of ships and planes destroyed.

But the speed and power of our advance have forced Japan’s propagandists into a position where they must begin to present the seriousness of our threat to Japan. Cause and effect grew evident as the Pacific became a more closely knit battle front. We were able to support action deep in the Western Pacific from bases below the by-passed Carolines, by pinning down air strength that might otherwise have assisted the Marianas, and by depriving the Japanese fleet of the use of its advanced bases. The vulnerability of the Bonins stems in no small part from Japanese defeat at Guadalcanal. Our recent advances have a cumulative impact, bringing into sharp focus the significance of earlier actions.

We get our second wind

We have obviously been gaining strength as we advanced. There have been no long waits recently, in which we paused to accumulate the energy, men, and weapons that would enable us to move on to the next objective. Each attack has been carried out in greater strength than the attack that preceded it. We are no longer fighting limited campaigns like those in the Solomons.

Each advance has increased our military potential by multiplying the possibilities of strategic combination and the opportunities for surprise and for utilization of our initiative. With a fleet organized to achieve self-contained and mobile striking power, comparatively independent of bases and unrestricted by the length of our supply lines, we have gained more with each new position than we lost in men and materiel expended. The exercise of our offensive power has been creative, not exhausting.

Japanese military thought misunderstood the relation between a navy and the industrial system behind it. The Japanese High Command conceived the war in the Pacific as one to be fought, like the trench warfare of 1914-1918, in terms of area and fixed defenses. We have imagined and built a navy designed to exercise sea power in the broadest sense — to seize and maintain control of the sea. It does not diminish the achievement to say that it grew out of the necessities created by the disaster of Pearl Harbor.

The points we have seized have required consolidation. But we have consolidated them as points of deployment, not as essential parts of our strength. Japan, in her rapid expansion in the early days of the war, was seizing both positions and resources, and now she must defend both. We threaten industrial facilities, vital communications, and sources of raw materials in her pre-Pearl Harbor empire, in her more recent conquests, and in the home islands. Her defense will become more desperate, not only because she is being brought to bay, but also because we are in position to attack the sources of her strength.

Nip and tuck in China

The Japanese Navy has been losing both space and time to the massed weight of the mightiest concentration of sea power that the world has ever known. Now the Japanese Army has assumed the task of winning additional time for Japan.

Our naval war is proceeding brilliantly, but our position on the mainland of Asia has deteriorated. Although the Japanese drive into Manipur has been stopped, the attempt to cut General Stilwell’s communications thwarted, and the Chinese offensive across the Salween developed, these are essentially alterations in local strategic positions.

The general position on the Asiatic continent has not been changed. We did not succeed in opening the Ledo Road before the monsoons began; now neither amphibious operations in the Indian Ocean nor the continuing advance by Chinese-American forces in the Burma-India sector can offset or prevent the Japanese offensive in South and Central China. We are winning the war on the ocean; we are barely holding our own on the continent.

The Japanese drive has met little effective opposition. The Chinese have been as much handicapped by the absence of transport as by their relatively weak firepower. Japan has modified her tactics to meet the threat of air strafing and bombing by the Fourteenth Air Force: she makes her thrusts with dispersed columns moving under the protection of darkness.

Japan fights for time

Japan’s action in China has been essentially defensive in purpose. General Chennault’s Air Force, flying from bases in Eastern China, has been taking heavy toll of Japan’s coastal shipping, imperiling the passage through Formosa Strait, and forcing Japanese ships into the open waters to the east where they are vulnerable to our submarines.

Depriving us of the use of bases does more than protect Japan’s coastal shipping. It allows her to supplement her shipping with direct overland transport. From these bases also we could have had air support in the assault on the Philippines — and the range of B-29’s would have made possible shuttle bombing over the Philippines from China and New Guinea terminals, thereby simplifying our fuel problem by allowing us to transport gasoline by sea. And secure bases in South China would of course support any offensive aimed at Formosa or the China coast.

Shrewdly the Japanese Army has chosen the area where it can cause us and our allies the greatest embarrassment. Japanese success in Southern and Central China, brief though it may be, will slow up the steadily growing weight of our air forces in China. It has already denied us the use of bases for our medium bombers and for what are now our light heavyweights, the B-24’s. The heavyweights, the B-29’s, still have to carry many additional gallons of gasoline that will cut deeply into their bomb capacity.

As China’s importance as a base for United Nations strength has grown, so has her vulnerability to Japanese attack. Japan is now not only seizing Chinese territory as she has done in the last seven years; she is also denying the use of Chinese bases to the weapons that would permit the Allies in the Far East to carry the war more effectively to Japan.

Japan’s campaigns in China can no longer win her anything that will avert eventual military defeat. Her aims in China now are to win time, to delay as long as possible the blows that will fall on her islands. And she still has scope for political maneuver. The more chaos Japan can create in China at this late hour, the weaker China will be at the end of the war. To the degree that China is weak, Japan, no matter how battered, will be strong.

China’s two wars

The stresses of a war now entering its eighth year have continued to intensify China’s internal weaknesses and cleavages. And the Japanese offensives, coming at a time when China has had some assurances of a victory in the relatively near future, may accelerate the process of deterioration. Economic, social, and political problems have grown more gravely urgent.

Chungking has sought to postpone inevitable change and reconstruction to the end of the war. The causes of this inertia have been in part a desire to preserve a hard-won and still precarious unity, to avoid change that might increase faction and divert energies. It has been as well a more sinister attempt on the part of some groups in China to preserve the special positions of vantage that they enjoyed before the war.

China’s internal strength or weakness, and China’s eventual political orientation, affect, not only the course of the war but the shape of the peace. China’s semi-colonial status in the past was not altogether the product of impairments of her sovereignty, political and economic, by Western imperialism. It was in a measure created and supported by men within China whose vested advantage derived from the maintenance of China’s unsound economy.

Should these men dominate China, supported on the shoulders of United Nations military victory, they would retard the entire development toward China’s emancipation and the creation of an international order in Asia that would produce peoples capable of self-government and sound, peaceful economic development, free alike from imperialism and from feudal inequalities in their domestic economic structure.

Are we ahead of ourselves?

The very momentum of our military action against Japan may produce a United Nations victory in which China participates without the necessity for carrying out the vital internal reforms essential to make her a more effective military force today. Our naval advance may lessen our dependence on China’s military potential. But it does not lessen the dangers implicit in the disparity between China’s internal decay and her international responsibilities.

A victorious China will not necessarily be a strong China. Constructive statesmanship in China, however, would make her a more effective military entity now, and a force for the organization and preservation of lasting and equitable peace in the Far East.

We cannot hold ourselves blameless for China’s failure to develop internally at a pace commensurate with her progress internationally. Neither can we sit back and regard China’s internal problems as a purely Chinese concern. If we look at ourselves honestly, we must admit that our eagerness to help China regain her sovereignty was prompted by the urgent necessity of obtaining as much aid as possible from China in our common war against the Japanese.

China was most valuable to us because of her geographic nearness to Japan. She was the one Asiatic country capable of fighting against Japanese aggression and Japanese ideas. Thus, both militarily and politically, it was essential to us that China be given every appearance of strength and of equality.

China welcomed our concessions, but she must have known, as we did, that they were motivated by expediency. The progress of the war has freed us from our earlier dependence on expediency. Henceforth our influence on China — and thus on Asia — must be derived from the principles we believe essential to the establishment of a decent world order.

Our military might is outrunning our political thinking. The situation grows more acute as we come to grips with the enemy, and as we approach the areas we say we are about to liberate. We and our allies have yet to give definitive expression of our peace aims as they affect the peoples of Asia, free and colonial.

The Chinese and the peoples of Occupied Asia know that we are fighting to defeat Japan’s militaristic aggression. They have lived with firsthand knowledge of that militarist aggression, and we know that they are largely hostile to it. But the comradeship of a common hostility will end with Japan’s defeat if we defeat only militaristic aggression. It cannot supply the basis for a peaceful and progressive world community. Japan’s defeat will leave us the greatest military power the Pacific has ever known. Will our influence rest on our navy or on enlightened and effective statesmanship?

WHAT TO WATCH IN THE PACIFIC

1. The increasing importance of the North Pacific theater of war, and the development of our threats to the Kuriles, which are points of defense for Japan’s Manchurian resources as well as for her home islands.

2. The responses of Japanese civilians to direct attacks on their homeland, and to the certainty that Germany has lost the war.

3. The possibility of weakening resistance in Korea and Formosa, the areas longest under Japanese domination.

4. Increasing activity of the British forces in Southeast Asia.

5. Increasing Anglo-Dutch collaboration and the attitudes of the British home population toward the Pacific war.

6. The effects of our war against Japanese shipping and communications on the Japanese economy and military strength, as shipyards as well as ships become vulnerable.

7. Japan’s attitudes toward her puppet governments, and the sowing of political booby traps to embarrass the Allies in Asia as Japan faces the necessity of retreat.