Reprinted with permission of World War II Magazine
In late September 1944, three of the U.S. Navy’s top admirals met in San Francisco to discuss the next phase of operations in the Central Pacific theater. Adm. Chester W. Nimitz recommended the capture of Okinawa in Ryukyu Islands. It had both the land area and anchorages necessary to serve as a staging base for the final assault on Japan. As a prelude to its capture, Nimitz also recommended the seizure of Iwo Jima, a small volcanic island about 650 miles east of Okinawa.
The importance of Okinawa was obvious. That of Iwo Jima was not. As a staging base for an invasion of Japan, the island had no value whatsoever. It was far too small, it had no anchorages, and it was several hundred miles more distant from Japan. Given those deficiencies, Adm. Ernest J. King, the chief of naval operations, dismissed the occupation of Iwo Jima as a waste of resources. It would be, he predicted, be “a sink hole in the hands of whoever held it.” . . .
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11 Comments
This looks entirely reasonable to me. I’m not clear that the okinawa defense would have been any different without the iwo jima experience, but the rest looks unexceptional.
It would be interesting if there is evidence how much of the problem was interservice miscommunication. AAF says “It would be useful to knock out the listening post on iwo jima and have the island for an airbase” and Navy hears “AAF absolutely needs iwo jima”.
But then, if the operation had proceeded as planned there wouldn’t be much argument about it, right? How many unnecessary attacks did we make that turned out to cost us very little, that we never argue about?
J Thomas makes a great point. This has been an interesting argument for a long time–in the case of Iwo Jima, Burrell’s recent book highlights the case. But the argument of skipping different islands has been offered for Tarawa and Pelilieu too. It can also be made, in the case of the Southwest Pacific, for the southern Philippines (where MacArthur proceeded on a major set of operations without JCS approval) and even northern Luzon, where the Japanese arguably could have been contained.
What strikes me as interesting is the whole premise of the argument–that in the Pacific the Allies had the initiative and could pick and choose their targets. Set against the putatively bad decisions are the questions of the battles that never took place–Rabaul, Truk, Wake II, Formosa. In light of this, I’m willing to give a little more leeway to the decisionmakers who could only look forward and not backward, as we can (this isn’t to limit criticism, just to put it into context). We fully realize now the power the Allies had and the capabilities for great leaps. I think that we may know it better than those leaders themselves. I haven’t seen the counterfactual analysis that looks at the whole campaign at what the effects would have been of skipping all the islands that people claim could have been skipped.
The US was expecting a far different battle at Iwo Jima, with maximum resistance encountered at the beaches and the usual ineffective bonzai counterattacks. Kuribayashi was determined to make it far more difficult, with a detailed defense in depth. Had the Japanese used their older tactics, it would have fit much better into American planning, and the outcome would provide less cause for second guessing.
I really like all the points made in the three comments thus far, and just have a quick comment of my own to add….
Peleliu makes an interesting case alongside Iwo Jima, for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s widely seen as an instance in which bureaucratic momentum overtook strategic need — this is basically the perspective offered in Murray and Milett’s A War to Be Won. Halsey urged the operation’s cancellation, arguing that the troops allocated to it should be added to the initial Philippine landings. Nimitz insisted on carrying through with it.
Second, although planners believed that Peleliu would be secured within a few days, the battle took from September 15 through November 25, 1944. It decimated the First Marine Division, principally because the Japanese defenders employed the same defense in depth tactics Kuribayashi adopted on Iwo Jima. Consequently, Peleliu afforded an object lesson in what might occur on Iwo Jima — though it’s a fair question as to whether the lesson could have been absorbed and incorporated in time.
So how much did the defense of peleliu, iwo jima and okinawa influence the US estimate that the invasion of japan would cost well over a million US casualties? The assumption that the invasion plans, which would be hard to change, would face that same reaction from the old men and schoolgirls left in japan — and so the only alternative was to use the nukes….
Just a somewhat lesser counterfactual point here but still worth considering. If we never had Peleliu we most likely would have never received probably one of the finest set of war memoirs (maybe behind Grant’s) ever written by Eugene B Sledge; “With the Old Breed.”
gian
Gian – You’re right. Sledge’s memoirs are classic. Not quite worth the lives of 2,336 Americans and 10,000+ Japanese, perhaps, but classic.
Mark:
Right, i appreciate your perspective and reminding us that whatever good comes out of war, it always is built on death and destruction.
Nor Grant’s whose memoirs cost in the hundreds of thousands. Like the song says: “war, what is it good for?”
Have a happy holiday season
gian
Thanks, Gian! You too.
One further thought: About half of Sledge’s memoirs deal with Okinawa, and maybe that would have sufficed to make it a classic. At least no one disputes the necessity of that operation.
I’ll have to go back through With the Old Breed to see what opinion, if any, Sledge offers about the Peleliu invasion.
BTW, the code name for the Peleliu op was STALEMATE II. Imagine an op getting that moniker in this age of “Urgent Fury,” “Just Cause,” “Enduring Freedom,” etc.
Oh: and in addition to Sledge’s memoir, Peleliu also gets credit as the inspiration for Tom Lea’s famous painting of the Marine with the thousand yard stare.
I have read in “The War” by Ken Burns that commanders decided to move forward with the invasion of Iwo Jima due to the fact that the Japanese fighter planes were using the airstrip on Iwo to try and destroy US bombers flying to and from their targets back to Saipan and Tinian. Commanders had to eliminate the threat and protect American bombers. The only way was to take Iwo.
I think a recent article in Military History Quarterly made much the same argument, that Iwo Jima was not as strategically important as many people have maintained. I’m at the airport, not in my office, so I don’t have the reference in front of me.