A Patriot's History of the Modern World (64 page)

Whereas the First World War was popularly seen in Europe as the end of monarchies and unfettered capitalism, its replacement by social democracy had spawned communism and fascism, or socialism controlled by nationalists. Deep in World War II, this view even affected leftist academics in the United States who turned further left, following the European elites by blaming the war on capitalism, seeing Nazism as National-Capitalist, not National-Socialist. Ford, General Motors, ESSO (Exxon), and IBM were castigated for enabling Hitler's ascent to power, whereas delusional socialism, unable to satisfy the needs of people through state planning, was overlooked.

Even worse, Christianity was seen by many to contribute to Nazism. Pope Pius XII was especially criticized due to his 1933 Concordat with the Nazis (signed by him when he was Vatican secretary of state), for continuing to support the Third Reich as Europe's bulwark against Bolshevism almost until the end of World War II, and for fracturing Italy into equal parts of communism and Catholicism after the war; and Protestant German clerics were taken to task for not standing up to Hitler. Those who did went to concentration camps and were executed (the most famous being Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who joined in a plot to assassinate Hitler), but to someone safe from combat or the horrors of fascism back in the United States, that was no excuse. As a result of the hammering by the Left, Christianity's credibility was damaged. Faith was replaced by skepticism and atheism. Temple's contributions marked the beginning of that decline in Britain, and the country wouldn't wait for the war to be over to reject Churchill for a socialistic government.

Hence, at the very time that European intellectuals and policy makers abandoned, at least in their limited concept, liberty, democracy, free markets, and even Christianity, for socialism and state control of individuals, the United States had turned to freer industrial production to save the West and the world. And by the end of 1942, the Americans had shifted from defense to offense.

Remember Pearl Harbor, Remember Bataan!

The transition came only after the Imperial Japanese Navy went on a rampage throughout the Pacific such as the world had never seen. Even before Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had landed on the Malay Peninsula and begun their march to Singapore, while pounding the city with bombs. Wake Island, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Guam were soon assaulted and conquered, and the Japanese racked up an unbroken string of successes. Isolated Wake fell after repelling one Japanese assault in a heroic but futile defense, Guam's tiny force didn't last a day, and Hong Kong's 14,000 British, Canadian, and Indian troops resisted for seventeen days, but the outcome and fate of Westerners in the colony was sealed from the start. One day after Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft caught the British battleship
Prince of Wales
and battle cruiser
Repulse
in the Gulf of Siam and quickly dispatched them to the bottom. Singapore fell to General Tomoyuki Yamashita's bicycle-riding troops in seventy days, and the bastion Churchill had called “impregnable” became a glittering Japanese prize, wiping 85,000 British Commonwealth troops off the British order of battle along the way. Held up only in the Philippines, the Japanese raced into the Dutch East Indies, annihilating the mixed American, British, and Dutch naval forces in their path, and capturing the vital oil fields for their war machine. The run of successes made the Japanese appear invincible, particularly when the task force that struck Pearl Harbor raided Ceylon, destroying the British presence in the Indian Ocean, sinking an aircraft carrier, three cruisers, three destroyers, and various miscellaneous vessels.

The Philippines were the only sticking point, but they too were doomed. Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma directed the invasion against the islands, defended by 151,000 troops, mostly untrained and lacking arms and equipment, although 12,000 were Philippine Scouts, taken in and made a part of the American Army. The Scouts would soon prove their effectiveness on Bataan, the peninsula on Luzon where the allied forces concentrated for defense. American forces were under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, who, retired from the army, had served as an adviser to the Filipino armed forces. He had been reinstated and named commander in July 1941 when FDR federalized the Philippine Army. At that time, the Filipino forces consisted of about 10,000 U.S. troops and the Philippine Scouts. MacArthur, controversial and flamboyant, brilliant and mistake-prone, had a penchant for self-promotion. Even the issue of his
popularity with his men remains one of historical uncertainty. He seemed both to exhibit recklessness—he had exposed himself to German fire in World War I and would gain a reputation for showing up to inspect positions under fire in World War II—and, at the same time, earned the nickname “Dugout Doug” for his unwillingness to visit troops on Bataan. His stay on Corregidor, the rock island off Bataan where the U.S.-Filipino troops made their last stand, and his subsequent evacuation—ordered by Roosevelt personally—went down poorly among those men who remained to enter captivity.
¹⁸

In his headquarters in Manila, he received the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor at 3:00
A.M
., which called for him to enact the Rainbow 5 war plan and attack Japanese bases on Formosa (Taiwan). But his failure to act aggressively (weather reports said Formosa was experiencing heavy fog) and confusion among recently arrived personnel caused squadrons of aircraft in the Philippines to be on the ground just as the Imperial Japanese forces struck first. Only three American fighters got off the runways.

American and Filipino troops were quickly driven off the beaches, then withdrew in confusion, ultimately evacuating to the Bataan Peninsula, which protruded between Subic Bay and Manila Bay. Initially, MacArthur had 43,000 troops on the Peninsula to supply by barge from Manila, although before long another 80,000 troops and refugees arrived. Food and medical supplies were rapidly exhausted, leaving the survivors to face grim conditions. On January 23, having consolidated their forces, the Japanese assaulted Bataan, and as the position weakened, Franklin Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to personally evacuate to Australia as Supreme Allied Commander South West Pacific Area. Upon arriving safely in Australia after a hazardous journey by PT boat and a B-17 bomber, MacArthur issued his famous “I shall return” statement, making the Philippines' liberation his personal mission. Out of food, medicine, and ammunition, the U.S.-Filipino troops on Bataan surrendered on April 10, leaving 11,000 men, many of them wounded, on Corregidor to carry on the fight.

What followed was the infamous Bataan Death March, in which 75,000 U.S. and Filipino POWs were marched sixty miles to a railhead for transport to Camp O'Donnell. The Allied forces, already starving and exhausted, with many wounded, were denied food and water in the blazing heat and humidity. Thousands dropped out, and Japanese guards shot or bayoneted them while those continuing on were beaten unmercifully with bamboo sticks and rifle butts. So-called cleanup crews killed anyone missed by the
guards, and by the time the POWs reached their destination, between 5,000 to 10,000 Filipinos and 650 Americans had died.
¹⁹

Corregidor finally fell in May, and concerned about saving lives, the American commander, General Jonathan Wainwright, extended the terms of his capitulation to all American forces in the Philippines. Many Americans and Filipinos repudiated the surrender and took to the hills to fight on as guerrillas.

Meanwhile, the British badly bungled the campaign in Burma and were driven out to take refuge in India. Only the terrain, heat, humidity, impenetrable jungle, and lack of supply lines kept the Japanese from following. Losing Burma was serious for another reason, however, in that the Burma Road that supplied Chiang's Nationalist Chinese forces was cut, and the Chinese were already frayed by having to deal with the Communists and various free-agent warlords. Although Chiang ostensibly had 1.2 million men in his forces, only half that number were directly controlled by his generals.

Allied forces elsewhere fared no better. In Papua New Guinea the Japanese secured the excellent harbor at Rabaul, and pushed eastward into the Solomon Islands. By May the Japanese Navy was ready to send an invasion force to secure Port Moresby, on the south coast of New Guinea, as a stepping-stone to attack Australia. The situation in the South Pacific looked dire.

While the arithmetic of war output and personnel overwhelmingly favored the Americans and British in the Pacific, that was not obvious in early 1942. Quite the contrary, Japan's onslaught had gained unprecedented areas of territory and people—more than any other empire in human history in so short a time. Despite Franklin Roosevelt's boast in April 1942 that “for every advance that the Japanese have made…they have had to pay a very heavy toll in warships, in transports, in planes and in men,” the price Japan paid was minimal and, at times, nonexistent.
²⁰
They had lost virtually no important ships prior to May 1942. In fact, it was a strategically meaningless air raid by Colonel Jimmy Doolittle on the Japanese home islands that revived American morale, and, in a sense, turned the entire Pacific war in a new direction.

Doolittle's raid was the brainchild of Navy captain Francis Low, who was on the staff of the antisubmarine warfare division.
²¹
Twin-engine B-25 Mitchell bombers were to take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier, fly over Tokyo and other targets, then continue on to safe havens inside China.
Removing all nonessential weight and expanding the planes' fuel capacity, the crews trained on specially marked landing fields, then the aircraft were flown to Alameda Naval Air Station and loaded aboard the
Hornet
. On April 18, 1942, seven hundred miles from Japan, the
Hornet
was spotted by a Japanese picket boat and Doolittle's raiders were forced to take off well ahead of schedule and with two hundred extra miles to fly. All the planes were lost, but some flyers, including Doolittle, were rescued by Chinese who took them safely out of Japanese-held territory. Others were captured, subjected to show trials in Japan, and executed. Regardless of this heavy price for what was virtually a stunt, the Doolittle raid electrified the American public and terrified the Japanese, who concentrated on defending their home islands. Indeed, Doolittle's men practically forced Admiral Yamamoto into his attempted invasion of Midway, which would prove Japan's undoing.

The story of the Battle of Midway is well known to many Americans as one of the greatest victories in American history. Courage and luck probably played equal parts, helped by excellent intelligence work in Hawaii and sound decision making by Navy commanders.

A preliminary battle was fought in May 1942 in the Coral Sea which pitted Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's two American carriers against two of the Japanese fleet carriers that had been at Pearl Harbor and a light carrier. In the first naval engagement strictly between carriers and in which no surface vessel saw an opposing vessel, Fletcher lost the
Lexington
, the Navy's largest carrier, while sinking the Japanese light carrier, damaging one of the fleet carriers, and downing a hundred planes. Whether it was labeled an American defeat or draw, its most important impact was that the heavy loss in aircrews forced both large Japanese carriers to miss the upcoming Midway campaign.

Admiral Yamamoto led a massive strike force, spearheaded by four fleet carriers under Vice Admiral Nagumo—the overseer of the Pearl Harbor attack—to seize Midway atoll (and its airstrip) and to simultaneously lure out the remaining American carriers (the Japanese thought there were only two left, thinking both of Fletcher's vessels had been lost at Coral Sea). Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who normally would have commanded the American force, was in the hospital, afflicted with a nasty skin rash. In typical American style, a subordinate, Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, stepped into the breach to command Halsey's task force of two carriers. Fletcher's last carrier, the
Yorktown,
had been damaged at Coral Sea, but
superlative repair work by 1,500 workmen at Pearl Harbor—some ferried by plane to the carrier while it was still en route—allowed him to catch up with Spruance and take command. Armed with intelligence that confirmed Midway was indeed Nagumo's target, the Americans positioned themselves northeast of the atoll, and despite numerous Japanese reconnaissance flights—one of which flew directly over the U.S. force—remained undetected. Nagumo's planes failed to knock out the landing strip on Midway, requiring a second strike, but just as Nagumo ordered the planes to rearm with bombs for attacking a land target, spotters saw American torpedo planes coming in. During the brief, deadly fight that followed, the U.S. forces scored no hits and lost most of their planes, but in the process, Nagumo's fighters had to land and refuel. At that precise moment, with all the carrier decks full of planes, fuel, and bombs—and no air cover to speak of—two squadrons of dive bombers appeared in the skies over the Imperial Fleet. Three carriers were set ablaze immediately by American bombs. Nagumo sent his remaining squadrons of dive-bombers and torpedo planes to the last known location of the
Yorktown
, which took crippling injuries, forcing the
Yorktown
's returning planes to land on Spruance's
Enterprise
. Fletcher delegated tactical command to Spruance, who launched a retaliatory strike with a cobbled-together force of
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
dive-bombers that destroyed the last Japanese carrier. Midway was saved, and the pride of the Japanese strike force was scuttled. Hard fighting was ahead, but after Midway, the negotiated peace leaving Japan as the master of Asia and the Pacific was a pipe dream.