Was Yamamoto's gloomy forecast to be fulfilled? Was the course of this war simply to be like that of a tide, with Japan sweeping outwards and engulfing vast regions of South-East Asia and the Pacific only to lose its impetus and then recede before the ever-growing American current? Was the writing on the wall by the first few months of 1943?
To answer this question with an unqualified 'yes' would be to accept a tempting generalisation, knowing, as Yamamoto did, the great differences between the economic and military capacities of Japan and the United States. It is an attractive answer but one that is so simple that to accept it would be unhistorical; for the courses of wars, even modern wars, do not simply surge forward and then retreat because of the comparative economies of the combatants but also because of the tactical and strategic errors made by one side or the other. Human beings play a great part in determining history, and the role of leadership, morale and determination can be as important as economic considerations. Secondly, there were many factors still operating in Japan's favour at this stage of the war. Finally, to go on the defensive in 1943 was only to adopt the policy which had been advocated originally before the Imperial Navy's optimism had tempted it to go further, against Midway and the Solomons. This policy, of stoutly defending a strongly-fortified ring of island bases and throwing back all American attacks until Washington finally agreed to negotiate a peace which recognised the essential parts of Japan's conquests, was now to be put to the test.
In this respect, geography appeared to favour the Japanese; if they had somewhat over-reached themselves, they had also left the Allies with a host of problems when it came to reconquering the vast areas involved. An advance from Alaska across the north Pacific route was ruled out by the lack of bases as well as the atrocious weather; from Soviet Russia by Stalin's unwillingness to act until Germany was defeated; from China by that country's isolation; and from Burma by logistical difficulties and sheer distance. If there was a way back, therefore, it would be across the Pacific, either from Hawaii or Australia, both of which were thousands of miles from Japan. Even if MacArthur achieved his aim of capturing Rabaul, he would still be as far from Tokyo as Montreal is from Liverpool; and the intervening region was spotted with a spider's web of island bases, which would be fanatically held by their garrisons and from where the American counterattack could be checked, or at least slowed down, while Japanese forces were rushed to the next line of defence. Her internal lines of communication would be a great benefit, provided she could retain command of the sea.
In contrast, Allied forces and supplies had to be transported an immense distance before they even reached the battle theatres and this caused terrific logistical problems. Everything: fuel, weapons, aircraft and spares, building materials and the rest, had to come from the United States, 5,000 miles away. But before all this arrived, harbours and airbases had to be created among the islands themselves. Finally, since there were no adequate port and repair facilities in the South-West Pacific, all heavily damaged vessels would have to return to American shipyards, and a completely self-sufficient fleet would have to be established. Possibly the Allies had the capacity to do all this if they were at war with Japan alone; but, and this was the greatest advantage Tokyo possessed, they were in fact devoting a far greater amount of their military resources to the campaign in Europe and the Mediterranean, perhaps Admiral King's estimate that only fifteen per cent of the Allied war effort was being directed against Japan was pitched deliberately too low, but the Anglo-American strategy of 'beating Germany first' did mean that the Japanese would not encounter the full weight of the Allied war machine.
All this would seem to indicate that a defensive 'holding' operation by Japan would have a fair chance of success. But this was only true if she had the men and the weapons at hand, and if she possessed sufficient economic power to wage a lengthy war. There was little doubt about the first, despite the severe losses she had suffered in the Midway and Guadalcanal battles. The critical area of the South-West Pacific could be reinforced within a few weeks by another two divisions, 250 planes and the Third Fleet from Truk; within six months by fifteen divisions and nearly 700 planes. But after that? Could she keep feeding troops into this area without critically weakening herself elsewhere? Did she possess the industrial capacity to sustain her armed forces with the necessary numbers of aircraft, guns, tanks, carriers, destroyers etc.? What was her war potential like in 1943?
With regard to population, the Japanese leaders had no worries. Their 70,000,000 countrymen had produced a fighting force of over 3,000,000 and this could be doubled if the need were pressing. Of course, the United States and the British Commonwealth had far larger populations but they were engaged against Germany and Italy; and there were particular difficulties about employing enormous numbers of troops in tropical jungles and against island strongholds. What was of greater importance was the distribution of Japan's armed forces in 1943. Due to the bias of her Army General Staff, she was still far too preoccupied with the problems of a continental rather than an oceanic war. Over 1,000,000 soldiers were stationed in China alone in the effort to conquer that country. In Manchuria around 600,000 troops of the Kwantung Army were kept in readiness for any future encounters with Russia, despite the fact that Stalin was heavily engaged on his western front. In Japan there were another five divisions and all the training units, perhaps a further 250,000 men. Adequate forces were not lacking, therefore, but given the swiftness of the American recovery in the Pacific, they were badly distributed. However, provided the Japanese awoke to this fact, they would certainly be able to hold their own numerically in a fight for the Bismarck Archipelago. Only if these reinforcements were fed in piecemeal, thus allowing the Allies to have local superiority, would the danger re-emerge.
Of course, such troops could not be transferred there if Japan did not retain command of the sea; in fact, her very existence as a great power and a sea empire depended upon this. Yet her warship production rate was extremely poor, especially in view of her early losses. In carriers, the crucial arm, the Japanese had only one fleet carrier ready for action in the spring of 1943 and while the Americans had only two, there were many more on the way; in December 1942 the first of the new Essex-class carriers was commissioned, and another twenty-three were being constructed or planned for. By the end of 1943, moreover, the United States would have nine new light carriers in commission. Against this, Japan could expect only another three new carriers plus a few conversions. In smaller naval vessels, she had no chance of matching the Americans' plan to build over 100 cruisers and nearly 300 destroyers in the next few years. Even in battleships, which most admirals in the Japanese fleet still regarded as being the most important warship of all, the United States was constructing far more than Japan; by February 1943 she had commissioned seven new battleships. Moreover, the Americans realistically used these ships to support amphibious landings and give anti-aircraft cover to the vulnerable carriers, and had no thought of holding them back for a sort of Pacific Jutland—which the employment of aircraft had now made most unlikely.
Certainly Yamamoto, and even his more conservative colleagues, recognised that it was impossible to control the sea without having command of the air; and yet this very control was rapidly slipping out of Japan's hands. In part, this was due to the concentration of so many planes in inactive theatres; in part, to the loss of so many of her skilled pilots; and in part to the fact that her aircraft were no longer superior in performance to those of the Allies. Japan had no real equivalent to the Flying Fortress and Liberator bombers, and even the supremacy of her fabulous Zero was about to be challenged by the new Hellcats, Corsairs and Lightnings, all flown by pilots who had at least 600 hours' flying experience behind them, six times as much as the average Japanese pilot by 1943. The future was even blacker, for by the end of 1942 the US navy alone had 31,000 pilots in training.
These many trends, so ominous to the Japanese leaders, were rooted in one basic fact: that Japan possessed only about ten per cent of the war potential of the United States. Translated into military terms, this difference was staggering. In 1943 Japan built 230,000 tons of warships to the Americans' 2,667,000; 769,000 tons of merchant ships to the Americans' 12,485,000; 800 tanks to the Americans' 29,500; and 16,700 planes to the Americans' 85,900. Even given the Allied concentration upon the European theatre, the United States was obviously going to be able to field large forces in the Pacific too.
The economic disparity becomes more apparent still when one considers Japan's ability to wage a lengthy, full-scale war. Whereas the United States was blessed with abundant mineral and food resources, Japan was heavily dependent upon receiving large supplies of iron ore, rubber, bauxite, nickel, aluminium, tin, manganese, salt, phosphate, potash, coking coal, cotton, cobalt and many rare metals. Possibly the most important of all was oil, and here Japan produced only twelve per cent of her own requirements while the Americans had ample reserves and produced 700 times as much. Imports also provided seventeen per cent of Japan's rice needs, eighty-four per cent of her sugar, twenty per cent of her wheat, and sixty-seven per cent of her soya beans. Moreover, stocks of these raw materials were now falling rapidly due to the demands of wartime industry: the oil supply had shrunk from 48,900,000 barrels in 1941 to 25,300,000 barrels by 1943; and iron and steel stocks fell from 4,446,000 to 1,437,000 tons in the same period.
Of course, much of this had been known to the Japanese leaders before the war started and they had planned to accumulate only sufficient stocks to get them through until they were able to develop the vast mineral, oil and rubber resources of Malaya, the East Indies and South-East Asia. By the beginning of 1943, it was clear that this calculated gamble was not coming off. The British and Dutch oil installations were taking longer than expected to repair, and the extraction of all these raw materials was hit by the lack of skilled engineers and equipment. Most important of all, however, was the serious shipping shortage. This, if anything, was the Japanese Achilles' Heel, and all the more surprising because she, like Great Britain, was an island empire dependent upon imported raw materials. Without an adequate merchant marine, Japan could hardly survive in wartime. Yet in 1941 her operable tonnage had been only 5,296,000 tons and she was accustomed to seeing thirty-five per cent of her trade carried in foreign vessels. When the war started, the loss of the latter was immediately felt and was not made up by ship captures from the Allies. Moreover, in the first year of the war Japan lost over 1,156,000 tons of merchant shipping to Allied submarines.
To continue the conflict at full pace, the Japanese needed to protect their existing merchant fleet from enemy attacks and to increase its size by a vast shipbuilding programme; neither had been achieved by 1943. Japan lacked a developed convoy system, and seemed disinclined to follow the British example of countering enemy submarines with hunter-killer groups, better depth-charges and asdic, radar and aerial searches. She was unable to build many merchant ships because of the priority given to warship construction, and because the Japanese yards were often small and lacked much modern equipment. A further reason was the lack of sufficient steel supplies. This was partly due to their inadequate steel industry but also, ironically enough, to the failure to import enough iron ore from her overseas possessions because of the declining strength of the merchant marine; the 3,000,000 tons of iron ore imported from the Philippines and Malaya in 1940 was down to 118,000 tons by 1942. In fact, Japan's industry was entering a vicious circle; it could not produce enough ships to carry raw materials because of her lack of those very materials; and even when, by 1943, she possessed sufficient oil and iron ore in her newly-conquered lands, the lack of merchant ships, especially tankers, prevented her from getting them home. When this was realised and seventeen per cent of Japan's steel output in 1943 was devoted to merchant shipping, work on certain naval vessels and tanks had to be reduced. In an attempt to solve the problem, many small vessels were even built of wood.
These, then, were Japan's chief military and economic weaknesses. Possibly all of these problems could be solved, given immense energy and organisation. She certainly could strengthen her island defences with a flow of fresh divisions, she could take more measures to husband and increase her merchant marine, she could increase her war production and design better weapons; but time was pressing. Yet even if, because of the great economic strength of the United States, the odds seemed stacked against her, she still had certain factors in her favour. Geography, as mentioned above, was one of them; and the Allied policy of 'Germany first' was another. A third was the knowledge that Japan's millions of soldiers, sailors and airmen would fight fanatically, to the last breath if need be, against her enemies, and no one could say how far the western Allies would go in waging war against Japan. If one Allied soldier could be killed for every Japanese, then would not the enormous death-roll, and the prospect of millions more deaths in the future, compel the democracies to consider a compromise peace? The cost would be great but this seemed better to Japan's leaders than a humiliating defeat.
One final incalculable factor remained—the course of the future battles themselves when the Americans tried to break through the Japanese defensive barrier. Here chance, leadership, quick thinking, would play a part. If the early battles went Japan's way, then not only would the American counter-thrust be blunted but the Japanese would also gain valuable time to carry out a further strengthening of their defences and of their economy; but if she lost and failed to stem the breach, then the task ahead of her would be that much more difficult. All would depend, therefore, upon the test of battle; and nothing could be more fitting for warriors brought up on the Samurai code. Hastily despatching reinforcements to the critical area, renewing their war plans, rebuilding their defences and increasing their war production, the Japanese waited nervously though eagerly for the next round of the struggle to begin.
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