The Pacific Campaign: The U.S.-Japanese Naval War

Dan van der Vat, “The Pacific Campaign: The U.S.-Japanese Naval War 1941-1945”, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks; (1991) 401 pp.

I have read quite a bit of history concerning WWII, both in the Pacific and in Europe.  I did not find anything all that new in this book but did find its thorough presentation of all the facts compiled in one-place concerning the Pacific worth the read.  Many historians feel this book will be the standard work on the U.S.-Japanese war for years to come.  I was particularly taken with the ego-mania of leading US military figures: General MacArthur & Admiral King rate special mention.

Daniel Francis van der Vat (born 28 October 1939, Alkmaar, North Holland) is a journalist, writer and military historian, with a focus on naval history.  He grew up in Nazi-German occupied Holland.  He graduated from Durham University in 1960 and has written fourteen books.

 My Notes:

Pg. 13:  The Japanese shoguns were displaced in 1868 with the restoration of imperial rule under the Emperor Meiji.  Feudalism was abolished and Japan made every effort at rapid westernization by setting up a two-chamber parliament, an independent judiciary, a modern army and navy and very limited political rights (only 1 percent had the vote at first).

Pg. 21:  Pearl Harbor Dec. 7^th 1941:  In all, eighteen U.S. ships were either sunk or badly damaged, including four battleships on the bottom and four crippled; 164 Navy and Army aircraft were destroyed and 124 damaged.  For this the Japanese paid with twenty-nine planes destroyed and seventy-four damaged.  The Americans reported 2,403 killed and 1,178 wounded, the vast majority from the Navy.  Luckily the Japanese failed to send in the planned third wave of planes to attack the fuel tanks and other vital shoreside facilities.  Their destruction would have rendered the base useless and forced the US Navy back to the West Coast, over two thousand miles to the east.  The Japanese attack proved that the age of the aircraft carrier had arrived—all three US carriers were absent from Pearl Harbor during the attack.

Pg. 24:  Ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines were attacked.  One hundred US aircraft were knocked out at Clark, ninety-six of them on the ground.  The Japanese had intended this attack to be simultaneous to the Pearl Harbor attack so that little resistance would be offered—they did not have to worry (Macarthur was in command).

Pg. 78:  It took the Germans six weeks to force the French to capitulate on June 21, 1940.  The British escaped in “the miracle of Dunkirk”, but invasion seemed imminent until mid-September 1940, when the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain.  Britain then took on the Italians in the Mediterranean and North Africa.  They won easy victories on land and sea until Hitler came to the rescue of his Axis partner, sending Rommel with a corps to Africa, and submarines, E-boats, paratroops and strong air forces to the Mediterranean.

Pg. 114:  After the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill was anticipating the US becoming his active partner, but the US only declared war on Japan.  Not to worry: on December 11th Hitler declared war on the US.

Pg. 157:  After the Doolittle April, 1942 B-25 raid on Tokyo, the Japanese, suspecting Chinese collaboration in the raid, killed 250,000 Chinese people in reprisal—a worse atrocity than Nanking.

Pg. 195:  After the June 1942 battle of Midway, the Japanese from now on were to be on the strategic defensive.  The Pacific Campaign had undergone a mighty sea-change heralding a shift in the balance of power across the ocean.  The numerically much superior Japanese force had lost four fleet carriers with 225 aircraft and their pilots plus one heavy cruiser lost and another badly damaged.  The Americans lost one carrier, one destroyer and 113 carrier planes, plus the thirty-three Marine aircraft that failed to return to Midway. 

Pg. 224:  One night on Guadalcanal, an American sentry heard movement and issued the customary challenge.  He was rewarded with the following unusual reply: “Hold your fire.  We are American Marines and wish to report our evening’s activities.”  The sentry immediately began firing his entire clip, later commenting: “No marine would talk that way.”

Pg. 237:  The first half of November 1942 was a period of almost undiluted good news for the Allies.  The Americans got the upper hand in the Solomon’s, Rommel was on the retreat from the British in North Africa after his defeat at El Alamein, the British captured Madagascar; the Americans successfully made their landing in North Africa and the British recaptured Tobruk; and the Russians held the Germans at Stalingrad.

Pg. 248:  The defective US torpedoes on submarines is a senseless tragedy.  After continually blaming the submariners for poor performance, it was finally determined that the torpedoes ran ten feet deeper than set.  Also, the detonators were defective.  Instead of going off a few feet under the enemy ship’s bottom, as intended, it might detonate as much as fifty feet short of her side, creating a lovely splash but no damage.  These defects persisted until October 1943 (some say all defects were never corrected for the entire war).  The torpedoes had never been properly tested in order to save money.

Pg. 270:  The Japanese failed to learn the lesson from WWI on how important convoys were to safeguarding shipments of supplies.  Any study of WWI would show how close Germany came to starving out Britain, reduced to six weeks’ supply of essentials by the spring of 1917, when they finally awoke to the necessity for mercantile convoys.  The Japanese sent its submarines to sea in 1941 without radar, sonar or even hydrophones (the passive listening device invented by the British in WWI).  These deficiencies were not fully remedied until well into the Pacific Campaign. 

Pg. 283:  MacArthur claimed credit for the leapfrog or bypass island strategy in the Pacific.  Like most of his claims, this is also not true.  As early as 1940, the Naval War College proposed a thrust from Hawaii straight at the major Japanese naval base of Truk, bypassing the Marshall Islands which would otherwise have been attacked first in a step-by-step progress across the Pacific.  This stratagem was under serious consideration by the staffs of both Nimitz and Halsey in January 1943. 

Pg. 328:  Nearly eight thousand noncombatants on Saipan committed pointless suicide, taking the total of Japanese who died in vain for Saipan past the thirty-thousand mark.  Saipan was the first loss to the Allies of territory that had been Japanese before the war and it gave the Americans an invulnerable base for bombing Japan. 

Pg. 400:  Over fifty million died worldwide in WWII, ten times more than in WWI.  Two thirds died in Europe and one-third in Asia.  The majority was civilian.  Japan lost 2.25 million killed.  The US lost 290,000 on all fronts, nearly all military and naval.  The Army lost 234,874, including 52,173 in the Air Corps; the Marines lost more than 18,000, nearly all in the Pacific.  The rest belonged to the Navy and the Merchant Marine.