The Second World War

An extract from ‘The Curtain Falls’

How the war transformed the Asia-Pacific

The Pacific War saw the deployment of huge forces across a vast geographic area, but it was still a relatively small war by comparison with the European theater – especially with respect to the numbers of soldiers mobilized for land operations. From a population of 194 million, the Soviet Union raised as many as 30 million troops, of whom more than 8 million were killed or died. Germany raised almost 18 million and more than 3 million died. British forces numbered almost 5.9 million with deaths exceeding 300,000 – mostly in Europe.

The eminent military historian John Keegan noted that ‘although the Japanese had mobilised 6 million men, five-sixths of those deployed outside the home islands had been stationed in China; the number committed to the fighting in the islands had perhaps not exceeded that which America had sent.’ Of the 29 US army and Marine divisions in the Pacific, only six army and four Marine divisions ‘were involved in regular periods of prolonged combat.’ By comparison, in the European theater in mid-1944, ‘300 German and satellite divisions confronted 300 Russian and seventy British and American divisions.’ The Japanese army still suffered heavily, incurring 1.4 million deaths. But this heavy loss of life was caused by the weight of firepower delivered by the Americans and the willingness of the Japanese to fight to the death, rather than by large-scale land battles.

Significantly, the Japanese navy also lost heavily – 400,000 deaths. The US navy lost 36,900 killed, mostly in the Pacific. These figures underline the maritime nature of the war. Japan began the war with a well-developed capacity for amphibious operations supported by carrier-based aircraft. As the war progressed, the US navy developed the concepts for carrier and amphibious operations to a new level. The US navy’s carrier task forces became the most powerful elements of its fleet and this concept has continued through to the present time. In the South-West Pacific Area, MacArthur used newly built jungle airstrips in the same way that Nimitz used his carriers, to provide air support for amphibious operations deep into enemy territory. The American naval operations were sustained by a huge fleet of supply ships – the fleet train. The naval war also showed the value of a competent and aggressively handled submarine force.

Allied naval and land-based air forces played a key role. For example, one assessment of the 2,728 Japanese ships sunk during the war reveals that 1,314 were sunk by Allied submarines, 123 by surface craft, 1,232 by direct or indirect air attack, and 46 by a combination of air and sea attack. Aircraft provided an invaluable means of transportation and resupply in a theater where land transport was extremely difficult and often impossible. Chinese and American forces in China were supplied by aircraft flying ‘the hump’ from India. Transport aircraft moved troops in both the Burma and New Guinea campaigns. Troops were sustained by air resupply, often by parachute when landing fields were unavailable. Towards the end of the war, American strategic bombers alone brought Japan close to surrender, validating a concept that had produced less clear-cut results in Europe.

The atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki transformed warfare. As the American strategist Bernard Brodie wrote in 1946, ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other purpose.’ He was only partly right. Countries now tried to limit wars so that they would not escalate to the nuclear threshold.

Some of the skills learned in the Pacific War were employed in the limited wars of the following decades. For example, revolutionary forces in China, Malaya, Vietnam, and the Philippines exploited their guerrilla warfare expertise. The security forces deployed by the British Commonwealth in Malaya in the 1950s had learned their jungle warfare skills against the Japanese in Burma and New Guinea. The Allies had also learned how to provide logistic support in this difficult environment and to counteract the debilitating effects of tropical disease.

Although in 1945 the Allies deployed armies with up to a dozen divisions in Burma and the Philippines, they did not conduct the large-scale mechanized and armored operations that characterized the campaigns in Russia and north-west Europe and set the benchmark for the growth of mobile warfare in the following decades. Not much was modern about the grinding land battles of the Pacific War. But the use of carriers, amphibious operations, and air power in the Pacific set the stage for the further development of modern war. More generally, the war demonstrated the importance of cooperation between land, naval, and air forces.