The Way to Tokyo

Last week warships, transports and merchantmen in categories and quantities never seen before crept into Pearl Harbor, crept out again. The distant boom of practising naval guns reverberated through the silvery warm winter mornings.

Some 2,500 miles to the southwest, Navy planes lifted into the sky, soared west to strike tentatively at Jap-held Kusaie in the Carolines, staging point for supplies bound for the Jap--held Marshalls (see map).

At the Marshalls themselves Army and Navy bombers continued to pound, as they had for two months--bombing and strafing Wotje, Maleolap, Jaluit, Mili and Kwajalein, attacking shipping, airfields, fuel and ammunition dumps in the same pattern of strategic bombing which had preceded the assault on the Gilberts.

Island by Island. Whatever the objective of the next major blow in the Pacific, one thing is certain: the Navy has no present hope of drawing the Jap Fleet into conclusive combat, of destroying it and thus ending the Pacific war. In the central Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz has settled down to island-hopping.

As the Navy views the Pacific (General MacArthur dissents), this campaign has been forced upon the U.S. by the caution of the Japanese Fleet, geography, and the development of modern weapons--particularly aircraft. The Pacific Fleet dares not steam straight across 5,000 miles of ocean through shoals of Japanese submarines, past the airfields in the Marshalls and the Carolines, and attempt to land an invasion force on the shores of Mindanao, in the Philippines. Nor, apparently, does it care to concentrate on MacArthur's Southwest Pacific route. The Navy must secure bases in its rear as it moves. For the Pacific is dotted with unsinkable Jap airplane carriers and sub bases which cannot be left in the rear of an invading convoy. These island carrier-bases must be 1) neutralized or 2) taken.

Fish into Crocodile. The Navy recently set up the new Central Pacific Command under poker-faced Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance. Under him is the Navy's greatest concentration of power, the largest fleet in the world. Working with Spruance is a mixed collection of Navy, Marine, Army and Air Force officers including the Navy's amphibious expert, high-domed Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner; the Marines' amphibious expert, Major General Holland ("Howlin' Mad") Smith.

A few years ago the Navy was a purely aquatic creature with only a casual interest in the landing of men from ships upon an alien shore; the study of amphibious war was largely left to the Marines. But two years ago, confronted with an amphibious enemy and the problems of waging a war thousands of miles from Pearl Harbor, the Navy stirred. "Terrible" Turner, who wears the wings of a Naval aviator, was hurried off to the Solomons to assemble amphibious forces.

No operation, it was discovered, required such careful preparation, such exact timing and precise dovetailing of combined efforts. The failure of any one group --the screening warships, or the landing-boat flotillas, or the covering aircraft, or the troops who were dumped ashore--might wreck the whole enterprise. The Navy, naturally, kept command of all the Marine, Army, Air Forces involved. The first operations were described as "confusion -- slightly organized."

Guadalcanal to Tarawa. Under Turner's immediate command, the new amphibious forces invaded Guadalcanal. Screening warships, unaccustomed to this new kind of mission, were caught napping by Jap cruisers. In a few agonizing hours on a rainy August night, four Allied cruisers were sunk. Naked transports carrying precious supplies brought thousands of miles were hastily withdrawn. For three months the Marines fought without substantial supplies or reinforcements and cursed the Navy.

Next, Turner invaded the Russells, northwest of Guadalcanal. That operation went more smoothly. The Japs had evacuated. On June 30th, with new equipment, new types of landing craft, he put the 43rd Division ashore on Rendova without the loss of a single life (although many lives were lost later and the final capture of Munda took weeks instead of days, as expected).

Two months ago, backed by a tremendous force of carriers and escorting warships, Turner invaded the Gilberts. The Tarawa landing was the most ferocious battle yet fought in the Pacific. In the end, sheer weight and the Marines prevailed. "Impregnable" Tarawa was secured in four days.

Out of the furnace of these sometimes fumbled campaigns the Navy had forged a powerful weapon. To its fleet had been added strange, unheard-of craft which opened their mouths like Jonah's whale to spew trucks, howitzers, Marines, Seabees, infantrymen, seagoing tanks, onto beaches. To naval warfare had been added a whole new book of "standard procedures" covering the hazardous, complicated job of ship-to-shore ferrying. The "beach master" who stood on shore directing the weird traffic assumed as much importance as the master of a ship.

"The Jesus Factor." In the next attack, and in later ones, no planning will ever carry through with mathematical exactitude. There will always be unforeseen reactions from the enemy, freaks of weather, unaccountable failures of command, sudden collapses of men in the stress of battle. Said a Navy strategist in Pearl Harbor : "We can plan up to a point.

We have certain theories we go by. After that there is the Jesus factor -- the unpredictable." Each new objective has its peculiar problem. The Marshall Islands differ from Guadalcanal, which is an 80-mile long island with a great jungle-covered spine and coconut groves, jungles and grassy flatlands along its shores. No coral reefs guard its coast. The Marshalls, like the Gilberts, are ancient atolls -- coral reefs ringing irregularly around blank and limpid lagoons. On the reef, like beads in a necklace, are occasional land masses of coral sand, large enough to support airfields and artillery installations. Hot and waterless, the Marshalls lie under the equatorial sun and dead men begin to stink very promptly. Flat and naked, the Marshall atolls have no natural protection, but how well they are fortified was indicated at Tarawa.

Wake, north of the Marshalls and vulnerable to an attack from Pearl Harbor, is the low-lying, V-shaped coral mound once so courageously defended by Major James P. Devereux and his Marines. Directly west of the Gilberts the isolated, three-by-four-mile mound of Nauru rises 225 feet above the sea. A coral reef encircles it closely. Because of its rich phosphate deposits (in addition to its strategic position), it is jealously held.

Main Objective. Such objectives are only way points--positions from which the U.S. forces can strike off on the chosen routes to Tokyo.

The biggest primary obstacle along the Central Pacific route--or MacArthur's Southwest route--is Truk, heart of Japan's Pacific outposts. Truk stands at the head of the steppingstones which lead westward to the Philippines, and thence to China's eastern coasts. It provides refuge for the Jap Fleet, bases for air reinforcements which can be rushed to any point of Japan's lower periphery of oceanic forts.

If any point can be "impregnable," Truk should be. It is a group of eleven hilly, defensible islands set in a 30-mile-wide lagoon and encircled by a coral reef. Inside the reef, these islands can be shelled by capital ships standing off the reef, can be bombed from the air. Tarawa taught that they cannot be knocked out. Landing forces would have to thread the four narrow openings in the reef--a task which would not be worth the cost if Truk could be neutralized by seizing less formidable islands near by. If Truk is not necessarily a point to occupy, it is certainly one to make useless to the enemy.

Behind all Allied plans lies the certainty of increasing power against the gradually dwindling strength of the enemy. Against that certainty, what strategy can the Japs devise?

They have a strategy. Last week Premier Hideki Tojo voiced an appeal to his people. He called for a strengthening of their will. He said that the people of the U.S. and Great Britain are growing tired and restless. He said that Japan must fight to prolong the war. Along every route to Tokyo--on the inner sea lanes where U.S. subs take a deadly toll of Jap shipping and supplies, on the outer periphery, on the approaches to Malaya, the China coast and Japan itself--the Japs are prepared to fight a bitter, delaying campaign.

Between the Gilberts and Japan lies more ocean than lies between New York and Liverpool. Tojo's strategy is not a strategy of frustration. It is a bid for victory by default--its foundation is the hope that the people of the U.S. and Great Britain will tire, somewhere along the way.

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