Chapter 18: The Pacific in Grand Strategy
A great country cannot wage a little war.—DUKE OF WELLINGTON
The victories that had given a new urgency to plans for the Pacific, together with the Soviet stand at Stalingrad and the landings in North Africa, signaled a radical alteration in the relative position of the Allies and the Axis. The days of crisis, of shortages in critical war materials were past; the initiative throughout the world was passing into Allied hands. New and important questions had to be answered. Where should the Allies strike next? How could they best use their advantage? How should they distribute their resources?
Almost everyone agreed that Germany was the main enemy and its defeat the key to victory, but that broad principle did not provide the answer to the problems ahead. It was neither a plan for victory nor a working basis for the many decisions that had to be made from day to day. Allied forces, engaged with the enemy in the Pacific and in the Mediterranean, were competing with each other for aircraft and munitions. The Soviet Union and China had to be supplied and the Middle East reinforced. And, most important of all, a decision had to be made on the cross-Channel invasion, deferred in July 1942 for the landings in North Africa. Despite the increase in Allied resources and trained troops during the past year, there was not enough for all theaters and for every purpose. It was time to take a new look at strategy and reach the decisions that would provide a guide for the future.
Strategic Concepts
Efforts to produce a long-range plan for victory as a realistic basis for the allocation of resources between Europe and the Pacific had been under way since mid-1942. The cancellation of SLEDGEHAMMER (the plan for an emergency operation in Europe in 1942) , which had the effect of abandoning the principle of concentration in the British Isles in favor of the invasion of North Africa, combined with additional commitments to the Pacific to meet the Guadalcanal emergency, had virtually voided these early efforts. One of the more interesting of these, in the light of the cancellation Of SLEDGEHAMMER, was the study made to determine what effect the collapse of Soviet resistance would have on Allied strategy. The conclusion, accepted by the Joint Chiefs, was that in such an event the United States would have to reverse its strategy and go on
the defensive in Europe.1 After the victory at Stalingrad this possibility became so remote that the subject retained only an academic interest.
The search for a strategic concept on which to base long-range plans continued throughout the fall of 1942. Finally, late in November, the problem was referred to the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, which, it will be recalled, consisted of three distinguished senior officers, one each from the Army, Navy, and Army Air Forces, whose function it was to advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff on matters relating to global strategy and national policy.2 The solution of the elder statesmen of the joint committee, submitted on 11 December, was to make more flexible the “Beat Germany First” concept by specifying that though “maximum forces” would be employed for the offensive in Europe, the size of these forces would be limited by whatever “offensive-defensive operations” might be required in the Pacific and elsewhere. As the strategists viewed it, the primary effort was to be made against Germany, first by air bombardment and then by a coordinated large-scale invasion to be launched in 1943. Operations in the Pacific they limited to those required for the security of Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Alaska, and the line of communications.3
The response of the Joint Chiefs was, on the whole, favorable. Maj. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer, substituting for General Arnold, could find nothing to quarrel with in the committee’s emphasis on the bomber offensive against Germany, and General Marshall heartily approved the goal of a 1943 cross-Channel assault. Admiral King accepted the emphasis on operations in Europe without question but objected to the role assigned the Pacific. The term “offensive-defensive,” he pointed out, was subject to varying interpretations, and he proposed, in a clear reference to the British, that it be changed to “offensive” so that there would be no misunderstanding the intention of the United States to exert constant and steady pressure in the Pacific. Only in this way, he argued, could the Japanese be prevented from consolidating their position and the war in the Pacific brought to an early close. He thought, too, that the strategists had failed to give sufficient weight to the fact that stronger forces than those already allocated would be required in the Pacific during the coming year. A fixed percentage of the resources of the Allies, 25 or 30 percent, King suggested, should be set aside for the war in the Pacific.4 Just how King arrived at these figures and how he expected them to be used in allocating Allied resources is impossible to determine. But they did serve to dramatize his plea for the Pacific war, and to set some limits to the priority of Europe and the Mediterranean.
Instructed by these views, the three members of the Joint Strategic Survey Committee retired for further study and discussion. Nine days later, on 20 December, they presented to the Joint Chiefs the fruit of their labors. The strategic concept outlined earlier remained
unchanged, except for the phrase “offensive-defensive” to which King had objected. In the new version it became “offensive and defensive.”5 The committee had also taken to heart King’s animadversions on the Pacific and now stipulated that “until such time as major offensive operations can be undertaken against Japan, we must prevent her from consolidating and exploiting her conquests.” Thus, the committee recommended that in the Pacific the United States conduct those “offensive and defensive operations necessary for the security of Alaska, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and the line of communications, as well as those required to maintain the initiative in the Solomons and New Guinea and inflict heavy losses on the enemy.
The Joint Chiefs subjected this new statement to the same searching scrutiny it had given its predecessor. First it modified the committee’s statement on the war in Europe by limiting the forces there to those “consistent with maintaining the accepted strategic concept in other theaters.” Indicative, perhaps, of the changed role of the Pacific in global strategy is the fact that the term “strategic defensive,” though it was applied to other areas, was not once used in connection with the Pacific. Instead, the Joint Chiefs accepted Admiral King’s statement calling for offensive and defensive operations there and in Burma. In other theaters, not specific, operations would be limited to those required to maintain “the strategic defensive.”6 With these changes, the report of the Joint Strategy Survey Committee was approved by the Joint Chiefs, who then passed it on to the British Chiefs of Staffs for comment.7
The British planners meanwhile had worked out their own ideas on strategy. Like the Americans, they favored the early defeat of Germany, but their conception was closer to the formula adopted at the ARCADIA meeting, and they gave to the war against Germany a priority on Allied resources much greater than that allowed by the Americans. In recognition of Germany’s strength on the Continent they favored an intensive air campaign against the Nazis before invasion and thought that the main effort in 1943 ought to be devoted to operations in the Mediterranean. All Allied resources, except the minimum necessary to safeguard “interests in the East,” should be devoted to this primary objective.
Only after the defeat of Germany, the British contended, should the Allies turn to Japan. In support of this position they pointed to the logistical advantages of fighting in Europe as compared to the Pacific war and to the superiority of the Soviet Union over China as an ally. Nor did they fail to observe that once Germany was defeated the Soviet Union might well be persuaded to join the Allies in their war against Japan.8
Though they minimized the significance of the Pacific in global strategy, the British planners were not blind to their imperial obligations. Starting from the same premise as the Americans –
that Allied bases and the line of communications in the Pacific must be made secure—they concluded that offensive action against Japan should be limited to those operations that would “contain the Japanese forces and so prevent her liquidating China or successfully attacking the Western Coast of America, Russia, India, Australia, or New Zealand.” No mention was made of operations then in progress or projected in the Solomons and New Guinea.
Aware that their formula for the Pacific, first advanced in November, had been sharply though informally criticized by the Americans, the British planners had a modified version ready when the Joint Strategic Survey Committee’s report reached them late in December. Still asserting that the Japanese were incapable of expanding their war effort significantly or becoming unbeatable, as Germany could if left alone, the British reiterated their preference for limited and containing actions against Japan. But they expressed this idea in more general terms and gave less emphasis to purely British interests in the hope, apparently, that their strategic concept Would be acceptable to the Americans. Omitting their earlier references to the necessity for action to hold India, Australia, and New Zealand, they proposed instead that operations in the Pacific be on a limited scale, “sufficient only to contain the bulk of the Japanese forces in that area.”9 On the necessity of keeping China in the war and conducting operations in Burma to keep open the line of communications, there was no disagreement between the Allies, and the British included a statement to this effect in both versions of their study on strategy.
The reaction of the American strategists to this study and to the British comments on their own report was, so far as the Pacific was concerned, unfavorable.10 The difference over Pacific strategy, they told the Joint Chiefs, was fundamental, and they recommended that the problem be studied anew. This recommendation the Joint Chiefs accepted after a discussion in which General Marshall again expressed his feelings about operations in the Mediterranean, and Admiral King urged once more that the Pacific be allotted a fixed percentage of the total resources of the Allies.11
With the Casablanca meeting only a week away, the American planners had little time to re-examine their own ideas and seek to reconcile them with those of the British. Two groups worked on the problem and both came to the same conclusion: that the British had underestimated the Japanese. There were other differences between the Allies, deriving mostly from the different emphasis given by each to operations in the Mediterranean and to the build-up of forces in England for the cross-Channel assault.12 Before firm plans could be made, production schedules fixed, and Allied resources allocated for the coming year, the U.S. and British heads of state and their military advisers would have to
reconcile these basic differences and reach agreement on a long-range strategic plan for the defeat of the Axis in Europe and Asia. It was at the Casablanca Conference that the Allies sought to solve these momentous problems.
The Casablanca Conference
Second of the great wartime U.S.-British meetings that marked the most successful coalition in the history of modern warfare, the Casablanca Conference resolved only imperfectly the differences between the Allies and failed to produce the blueprint for victory the Americans had hoped for. In the ten days between 14 and 23 January, the political and military chiefs of both nations found themselves separated—as they had been a year earlier at the ARCADIA Conference in Washington—by national interest, outlook, and divergent strategic concepts. That they resolved these differences even imperfectly and agreed upon a common program was evidence of a mutual confidence and singleness of purpose that their enemies never achieved.
Pacific strategy occupied a subsidiary place in the discussions at Casablanca; the major problem was how to defeat Germany and where to strike after North Africa had been secured. Both sides were agreed on the goal but each wished to reach it by a different path. The Americans, led by General Marshall, argued strongly for the concentration of Allied air and ground forces on a cross-Channel invasion to defeat Germany at the earliest possible moment. Any diversion from this program Marshall likened to a suction pump siphoning away the resources needed for the main effort and delaying the inevitable clash with the main body of the German Army.
The British, poorer than their allies in manpower, natural resources and productive capacity, were understandably less anxious to formulate a long-range strategy or to invade the Continent and take on the Wehrmacht. They wanted first to so weaken Germany that the struggle would not leave England in an exhausted state. By conducting offensives on the periphery of Fortress Europe and striking at the heart of Germany from the air, they hoped to make the final blow less costly and perhaps unnecessary. Thus, they argued for an extension of operations in the Mediterranean to knock Italy out of the war and to force Hitler to scatter his forces. From this basic difference with the Americans stemmed other differences and the varying emphasis each side placed on the problems before it.13
The solution reached was in large measure a victory for the Mediterranean cause, which the President had always found more attractive than did his military advisers. Sicily was to be the Allied objective in Europe in 1943. Meanwhile, preparations for the cross-Channel attack would continue. Ground forces and landing craft would be assembled in the United Kingdom during the next year and a combined staff formed to plan for the invasion. Until that time, Germany’s industrial and economic system was to be progressively destroyed, and the morale
of its people undermined “to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened,” by a combined bomber offensive from the United Kingdom.14
It is in the context of the cross-Channel debate that the Casablanca discussions of Pacific strategy and the decisions reached there must be read. Unwilling to tie their hands in Europe by adopting a long-range strategic program for the defeat of Germany, the British were even more reluctant to commit themselves to a broad plan for the defeat of the secondary enemy, Japan. Until Germany was defeated the Allies should limit themselves in the Pacific, they argued, to the defense of a fixed line in front of those positions that must be held. To do otherwise, the British feared, might involve the Allies in a major effort against Japan and thus curtail or make impossible the concentration of forces against Germany. Such arguments, they knew, might well raise some doubt in the minds of the Americans about the intentions of the British to participate in the war against Japan once the war in Europe was over. It was to allay this suspicion that Churchill offered, “for the effect on the people of the United States,” to enter into a treaty committing his government to turn all its resources and effort toward the defeat of Japan, “if and when Hitler breaks down.”15 The word of a great English gentleman, the President assured him, was enough for the American people.
Though reassured about the future, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff could find little cause for present satisfaction. Certainly the Prime Minister’s statement did not represent any change in the British view of Pacific strategy. That view the Americans could not accept. It would impose on the nation a passive role in a part of the world the American people considered peculiarly their own and in which national interest and tradition dictated a positive and active program. National pride and sentiment also colored the American view. Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Midway, and Guadalcanal were symbols that stirred the imagination, and the one great American hero to emerge thus far from the war was General MacArthur, whose name was inseparably linked with the Pacific. There were other more practical considerations that the Joint Chiefs had to weigh. The Pacific was an area of U.S. military responsibility where American forces were already engaged. To do as the British wanted might make the final effort more costly and stretch the war out indefinitely, a contingency that neither the American people nor their political and military leaders would accept.
There were strategic reasons, too, why the course proposed by the British was unacceptable. Japan was now on the defensive and sound strategy dictated continued offensives to keep the enemy off balance and retain the initiative. Constant pressure must be exerted on the Japanese to keep them from consolidating their hold over the territory so recently captured. Moreover, the U.S. Chiefs argued, there were already in the Pacific large air, naval, and ground
forces. To allow them to remain idle while the war raged on other fronts was unthinkable, a shameful waste of Allied resources and manpower. Nor did the Americans take as lightly as the British the possibility of Japanese attack. The enemy, in their view, was still capable of limited offensive action and, given the opportunity, could be expected to do his best to improve his position.
It was at the Casablanca Conference that the Americans first used the Pacific as a counterbalance to the Mediterranean. Both bore somewhat the same relationship to global strategy. The British considered the Pacific, the Americans the Mediterranean, as the theater that threatened to drain away from the area of primary interest the resources of both allies. General Marshall was well aware of this and deliberately linked the two when he warned the British that the threat of “another Bataan” in the Pacific “would necessitate the United States regretfully withdrawing from the commitments in the European theater.”16 In doing so he served notice on the British that proposals for further offensives in the Mediterranean would be met with similar proposals for the Pacific. Thus used, Pacific strategy became a lever by which the Americans could exert pressure on the British to bring them back to the cross-Channel assault.
The debate over the Pacific at Casablanca began at the very first meeting of the military chiefs. General Marshall led off with the suggestion, first advanced by Admiral King at meetings of the Joint Chiefs, that Allied resources be divided between Europe and the Pacific, on a fixed percentage basis, 30 percent going to the Pacific. No proposal could have been better calculated to bring out sharply the fundamental difference between the two sides. But the British shied away from the issue then, and at the next meeting sought to avoid it by asking for a review of the situation in the Pacific. This gave Admiral King an opportunity to explain American strategy in concrete terms and to present his own views. The operations in the Solomons and New Guinea, he reminded the British, were designed to protect Australia and its lines of communication. That task could not be considered complete until Rabaul, “the key to the situation,” was taken. Where to go after that was a problem the U.S. Chiefs had not yet considered but King thought the Philippines rather than the Netherlands Indies should be the next objective. Of the three avenues of approach to the Islands—North, Central, and South Pacific—he favored the middle one by way of the Marshalls, Marianas, and Carolines.
This review—and preview—concluded, Admiral King returned to the issue Marshall had raised earlier. Only 15 percent of the resources of the Allies, King estimated, was going to the Pacific, barely enough to hold the present line. Another 15 percent would be required to continue the offensive. General Marshall, who took the floor next, gave point to King’s remarks by describing the status of American forces in the Pacific. The only way to defeat the Japanese, he told the British, was to keep them off balance, force them to fight without pause or rest.
The British could no longer evade the issue, which by now had merged with the plan for an offensive in Burma to
open the supply line to China. Rather than oppose directly the American proposals, however, the British Chiefs sought to limit them by stressing the difficulties and problems while expressing apprehension over the diversion of Allied resources. Their position on an offensive in Burma, which lay within their own theater, was no more encouraging and was conditioned as much by political as by military considerations. Not only did they fear that it would affect operations in Europe, despite King’s assurance that the resources required would come from the 30 percent requested, but they were concerned also over the effect of a Burma offensive on the fate of India. Nor did they share the American view on the importance of China as an ally. So trying was this British lack of enthusiasm that Admiral King was moved to ask, somewhat unfairly, “on whom would fall the principal burden of defeating Japan once Germany had been knocked out.”17 Obviously, nothing was to be gained by continuing the discussion and the whole matter was turned over to the planners with instructions to report “what situation ... we wish to establish in the Eastern Theater in 1943, and what forces will be necessary to establish that situation.”18
The planners were no more able to agree than their chiefs, and though they did narrow down the area of disagreement, each side presented its own report. The Americans laid out an ambitious program, which, in addition to the operations in Burma, called for the capture of Rabaul, followed by an advance across the Central Pacific as far as Truk and up the New Guinea coast to the border of the Dutch portion of the island. All this, as well as the capture of Kiska in the Aleutians, was to be accomplished in 1943.
The British planners played the role of critics, disposing of the American proposals. Guided by the rule that any project that might prejudice the defeat of Germany at the earliest possible moment was unacceptable, they reduced the American program to two offensives: the capture of Rabaul and limited operations in Burma. Hoping, perhaps, to soften their criticism, they suggested that later, if additional operations proved necessary or desirable, the Americans might submit detailed plans to the Combined Chiefs for a decision “as to the right course of action.”19
This last statement, with its assumption that the Americans had to submit their plans for the Pacific to the British for approval, had an effect quite different from that intended. The Pacific theater was an area of American responsibility, as India-Burma was British, and by agreement was understood to be under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. Joint Chiefs, subject to the Combined Chiefs (that is, the Americans acting with the British) only in matters of grand strategy and therefore not a matter for discussion with the British. In a sense, this argument was an evasion. The basic question was the division of resources between the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, and the British were certainly within their rights in objecting to operations
Plenary Session at Casablanca
From left, standing: unidentified British officer, General Ismay, Lord Louis Mountbatten, General Deane, Field Marshal Dill, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Harry Hopkins. Seated, General Arnold, Admiral King, Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt, General Sir Alan Brooke, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, General Marshall.
that would, in their judgment, divert resources from the main effort. By taking the position they did, the Americans reserved to themselves the right to decide what commitments they would undertake in the Pacific, and thereby limit the resources available for the war against Germany.
These sentiments, expressed at a separate meeting of the U.S. Chiefs on 18 January, did not make the discussions with the British which followed any easier. Opposed at every turn and reminded repeatedly that no offensive must be undertaken that would prejudice the main effort against Germany, Admiral King finally asserted flatly that the Combined Chiefs’ authority extended only to the broad issue of deciding on “the balance between the effort to be put against Germany and against Japan.”20 The U.S. Chiefs themselves would determine where and when to use their forces in the Pacific.
This was plain talk, and if the meeting was inconclusive it at least cleared the air and removed some misunderstanding. By the time the Combined Chiefs met
with the President and Prime Minister in plenary session that evening, 18 January, the planners had worked out a tentative agreement, phrased in the most general terms, fixing Allied objectives in all theaters for 1943. Accepted by Roosevelt and Churchill, this agreement became the basis for the general plans developed for the Pacific theater in the remaining days of the conference.21
Strategy for 1943
In several important respects this broad statement of objectives was most disappointing. It contained no clue as to how Japan was to be defeated but merely stated that the object of operations in the Pacific and Far East would be to attain “a position of readiness”—left undefined—for the all-out offensive to come after Germany’s downfall. Moreover, these operations—the capture of Rabaul, an offensive in the Marshall and Caroline Islands “if time and resources allow,” and the capture of Burma—were to be undertaken only if, in the opinion of the Combined Chiefs, they did not “jeopardize the capacity of the United Nations to take advantage of any favorable opportunity that may present itself for the decisive defeat of Germany in 1943.” The Americans could not quarrel with this restriction but might very well disagree with the British on what constituted a “favorable opportunity.”
The general terms in which the agreement was couched made it subject to different interpretations and promised to lead to disagreements in the future. “Adequate forces” were to be provided but no word was said about what they would consist of, who would furnish them, and at what time. And still unresolved was the problem of dividing Allied resources between the two major theaters which Marshall and King had raised at the start of the conference.
But the Americans had to be satisfied with what they could get and on 22 January presented their plans for the Pacific together with a very general statement of how they expected to defeat Japan.22 This last they hoped to accomplish by blockade, bombardment, and assault by sea—“measures which greatly resemble those which would be effective against the British Isles.” But assault from the sea, that is, the invasion of the Japanese home islands, was a contingency the Americans hoped might ultimately prove unnecessary. And it was too early to make plans for this contingency in any event.
Jt was the second of these measures, air bombardment, that appealed most to the Joint Chiefs as a guide to planning in the immediate future. The problem as they saw it was to secure bases within reach of the enemy and their plans for 1943 were designed with that end in view—“to work toward positions from which land-based air can attack Japan.” Just what these positions were they did not yet know. Admiral King spoke of the Philippines; General Arnold of China and the B-29’s still in production. Nor would they know until they had settled on a long-range plan for the defeat of Japan.
Lacking such a long-range plan and ultimate objectives, the Joint Chiefs could not afford to overlook any possibilities or ignore any route of advance. Moreover, their forces in the theater were not concentrated but divided among the several areas and under separate command. None could be permitted to remain idle. With all this in mind and after a comprehensive review of Japanese capabilities, the Joint Chiefs decided on three separate offensives for 1943: in the North Pacific to move into the Aleutians, in the South and Southwest Pacific to capture Rabaul, and in the Central Pacific to gain the line Truk-Guam. But under the restrictions imposed by the Combined Chiefs, the advance in the Central Pacific was made subject to the requirements for Burma and contingent on the release of forces after the Rabaul offensive. Everyone assumed, despite the experience of Guadalcanal and the pessimistic estimates of MacArthur and Nimitz, that Rabaul would be captured by May of 1943.
Precise as this plan was about objectives, it was pointedly silent on several important matters. There was in it no mention of the dates on which these operations would occur or their sequence; nor did it contain any estimates of the forces that would be required. These omissions were deliberate. To have submitted this information to the British would have been a tacit admission of their right to participate in the detailed planning for an area of U.S. responsibility and opened up the possibility of prolonged debate. Such matters were for the Joint Chiefs to decide and would be settled in American councils.
Though the effect of this move was to shut the British out of any voice in the allocation of resources to the Pacific, they accepted the American plan without recorded dissent. Next day, 23 January, both sides presented this plan together with the plan for operations in Europe, to the President and Prime Minister. The heads of state accepted the two plans almost without question and the conference came to an official close. The military chiefs on both sides could take considerable satisfaction in their accomplishments, and in Churchill’s extravagant praise of their work, unsurpassed in its “professional examination of the whole scene of the world in its military, its armament production and its economic aspects.”23 They had, at least, compromised their differences and produced a program for the next twelve months. But this agreement was an illusion, achieved by semantic means and by an over-commitment in Burma, in the Pacific, and in Europe. The differences remained, hidden behind a cloak of generalities. The very first test would tear it apart and reveal the failures of Casablanca.