Island hopping campaign

So the allies took a campaign of skipping some of the more heavily defended bases of the Japanese to attack lesser bases. I believe the allies never took Rabaul, could be wrong, and instead they let the base be used as a training ground for air crews as I understand it. So if the Japanese were able to make the allies, principally the Americans mind you, pay with increasingly higher casualty rates with each island campaign...what bases were bypassed and how devastating would the casualties have been if they had not adopted this strategy?

 

Could have gone one of two ways, They either concentrate of the South West Pacific area in which case casualties would probably have been around the same or the could have just gone and attacked everything and anything that the Japanese were located on in which case casualties would have been higher and the war dragged on much longer (12+ months more).

If they weren't going to island hop i'd say the South West area would have been the best option to move forward but that is just my view.

 

The two main bases truk and rabaul were bypassed because the cost would not be worth the price. Each had around 100k men stationed there. The main advantage was there were always bases that could be easily taken that could be used in the SW pacific. In the Central Pacific this was true only for the Marshall islands. There were no alternatives for the Marianna islands.

 

Cape Gloucester and the New Britain campaign were the campaigns that isolated Rabaul. Rabaul was located on the northwestern tip of New Britain. The base was successfully bypassed and the Japanese left there were reduced to just surviving, and it wasn't actually captured until after the war.

 

Iwo Jima and Peleliu probably being the two most noteworthy in the "should have been bypassed" category. Which is probably another discussion. Tarawa was no great prize either, certainly not worth the price we paid for it.

One could say the same of even Guadalcanal were it judged solely on its own merits.... but on the other hand, judged as what it became, as the focal point for Japanese counterattacks, well, the war had to be fought somewhere, and that was the place.

 

Iwo was needed for a more effective air campaign, etc.....

 

Prewar plans like War Plan Orange were based on a war just between the United States and Japan and took little note of the British, presumably neutral, Gilbert Islands. The planned first major offensive would have been direct to the Marshalls, basing from Hawaii (it was thought/hoped that we would still hold Wake as a forward base for long-range air support). The "necessity" of taking Tarawa and the Gilberts as a prerequisite to the Marshalls only arose because of Japan involving them and Britain in the war.

Ironically Tarawa proved to be a much harder nut to crack than Kwajalein which the Japanese had occupied for over twenty years. "Lessons learned" at Tarawa presumably helped, but overall it seems that the defenses and defenders were less formidable. It also helped that we went direct to Kwajalein in the western chain of the Marshalls, bypassing fortified atolls like Wotje and Maloelap. It seems unlikely that we would have suffered any greater losses making our first Central Pacific assault there rather than Tarawa.

One comment that applies both to this example and to the island-hopping strategy in general: even a perfectly successful landing means a couple of months' delay until you can mount the next one. Looking at the map, the Gilberts are a diversion from the path from Hawaii across the Central Pacific. Leaving them too to die on the vine could have saved both casualties and time.

Good point about Guadalcanal; if it hadn't been there, there would have been some other place where both sides would fight to near-exhaustion, with similar end results favorable to the US.

 

No matter where the first landing took place there would have been a steep learning curve against opposition.

 

http://www.historynet.com/worth-the-cost-justificaton-of-iwo-jima-invasion.htm This is kind of long but it brings that into question. It's certainly open to question whether Iwo had to be the island chosen for the purpose that it ended up serving.

 

Force Projection an Area Deniability are two big reasons the islands were taken. I guess Iwo could have been disregarded; but, I don't think the Navy had plans to make a carrier big enough to launch a B-29 from.

 

I should add that I realize how much hindsight plays into my judgments here; had the USN/USMC known ahead of time how bloody Iwo, Peleliu, and Tarawa were to be, I feel certain they would not have been attempted, and alternate avenues to achieving the same objectives would have been explored. In all 3 cases, the operations were expected to be much easier and less costly than they actually turned out to be. So it makes it easy for me to say after the fact "we could have done the same thing more easily somewhere else", well, the brass thought that too, afterwards.

 

If Guadalcanal had not been there then Papua and New Guinea would most likely have been the main point's of conflict. The Japanese would be unlikely to push for any other gains until Papua and New Guinea had been secured and the US would be unlikely to go on the offensive until they were ready or had no choice (Guadalcanal was only started to protect the sea lanes).

 

Just happened across this link in another thread. Thought it gave a contemporary visual angle to the topic. Be sure to click through, some very interesting photos.

http://picasaweb.google.com/7thfighter/IwoJima?authkey=Gv1sRgCIW06db_6oth&feat=email#slideshow/5447514772304406114

 

The landing at Iwo Jima was not needed, nor were carriers large enough to handle B-29s. The island was not big enough to stage assets for the invasion of Japan, nor was it big enough to base enough B-29s or long range fighter escorts (P-51s) either. And it was useless as a naval anchorage. The only thing on Iwo that could have been essential to destroy was the radar station the Japanese installed there. Of course it was taken out, but the nearby island of Rota was never invaded, and their radar continued operating until the end of the war. Very few damaged bombers landed there, and the few bombers based there were not enough to justify the assets expended in securing the island, not to mention the large numbers of Marines lost there. Iwo could have been neutralized and bypassed, like Peleliu and Tarawa should have been. None of those islands were worth the heavy loss of Marines and Army troops there.

Here's more on the perceived strategic importance of Iwo Jima, from wiki.




In hindsight, given the number of casualties, the necessity and long-term significance of the island's capture[ to the outcome of the war became a contentious issue and remains disputed. The Marines, who suffered the actual casualties, were not consulted in the planning of the operation. As early as April 1945, retired Chief of Naval Operations William V. Pratt stated in Newsweek magazine that considering the "expenditure of manpower to acquire a small, God-forsaken island, useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base ... [one] wonders if the same sort of airbase could not have been reached by acquiring other strategic localities at lower cost."



The lessons learned on Iwo Jima served as guidelines for the following Battle of Okinawa and the planned invasion of the Japanese homeland. For example, "because of the casualties taken at Iwo Jima on the first day, it was decided to make the preparatory bombardment the heaviest yet delivered on to a Pacific island". Also, in the planning for a potential attack on the Japanese home islands, it was taken into account that around a third of the troops committed to Iwo Jima and again at Okinawa had been killed or wounded.

The justification for Iwo Jima's strategic importance to the United States' war effort has been that it provided a landing and refueling site for long-range fighter escorts. These escorts proved both impractical and unnecessary, and only ten such missions were ever flown from Iwo Jima.
Japanese fighter aircraft based on Iwo Jima sometimes attacked AAF planes, which were vulnerable on their way to Japan because they were heavily laden with bombs and fuel. However, although some Jap





anese interceptors were based on Iwo Jima, their impact on the American bombing effort was marginal; in the three months before the invasion only 11 B-29s were lost as a result. The Superfortresses found it unnecessary to make any major detour around the island.

The Japanese on Iwo Jima had radar and were thus able to notify their comrades at home of incoming B-29 Superfortresses flying from the Mariana Islands. However, the capture of Iwo Jima did not affect the Japanese early-warning radar system, which continued to receive information on incoming B-29s from the island of Rota (which was never invaded).
As early as 4 March 1945, while fighting was still taking place, the B-29 Dinah Might of the USAAF 9th Bomb Group reported it was low on fuel near the island and requested an emergency landing. Despite enemy fire, the airplane landed on the Allied-controlled section of the island (South Field), without incident, and was serviced, refueled and departed.
In all, 2,251 B-29 landings on Iwo Jima were recorded during the war. Moskin records that 1,191 fighter escorts and 3,081 strike sorties were flown from Iwo Jima against Japan.
Some downed B-29 crewmen were saved by air-sea rescue aircraft and vessels operating from the island, but Iwo Jima was only one of many islands that could have been used for such a purpose. As for the importance of the island as a landing and refueling site for bombers, Marine Captain Robert Burrell, then a history instructor at the United States Naval Academy, suggested that only a small proportion of the 2,251 landings were for genuine emergencies, the great majority possibly being for minor technical checkups, training, or refueling.

According to Burrell, In publishing The Ghosts of Iwo Jima, Texas A&M University Press said that the very losses formed the basis for a "reverence for the Marine Corps" that not only embodied the "American national spirit" but ensured the "institutional survival" of the Marine Corps.
This justification became prominent only after the Marines seized the island and incurred high casualties. The tragic cost of Operation Detachment pressured veterans, journalists, and commanders to fixate on the most visible rationalization for the battle. The sight of the enormous, costly, and technologically sophisticated B-29 landing on the island's small airfield most clearly linked Iwo Jima to the strategic bombing campaign. As the myths about the flag raisings on Mount Suribachi reached legendary proportions, so did the emergency landing theory in order to justify the need to raise that flag.

Pretty much sums it up.

 

Bobby, I think you need to look at the smaller picture. While Iwo was not needed in the "Big Picture" of how the Pacific war ended, it was key in making the move to Okinawa and the impending invasion of Japan. If all the players knew that the Bombs were in the works, and their viability, we could have just hung out at Tinian for a year. With that same logic you could also say that Tinian was the most important battle and the most key island in the entire Pacific Campaign.

 

The islands they skipped were then isolated and supply lines were cut off, so they did affect them even by bypassing them.

 

From what I've read over the years, I still think that Iwo should have been neutralized and by-passed. There was next to no benefit for taking Iwo,except for it being a background for the 1949 classic movie "The Sands of Iwo Jima". Even if the big bombs were not in the works, there still was no benefit for taking Iwo. It played no part in the invasion of Okinawa. Explain to me how having Iwo in the bag helped anything, except for erasing 22,000 names from the roster of the IJA. I'm being totally objective here, and open to any and all angles on the matter that I have overlooked or misread.