LI: One Step Closer, October 1943
Yamamoto frowned as he read over the telegram for the fifth time. The officer on Wake that had written it had left out a lot of details. There was a “large air presence”, but that could mean ten planes or ten thousand. Allied destroyers (about the only clear detail in the entire telegram) had bombed installations across the entire island, but no mention of whether heavier ships were there. The American infantry clearly outnumbered the garrison, but by how much it did not say. Then, “For the Emperor”, which meant nothing to a Navy man as long as the Army had a hold of him. Apparently there was already a rescue mission being planned, but that wouldn’t be able to save Wake.
“This has to be a diversion.” Yamamoto decided. “The real attack will come in the south.”
Admiral Nagumo shook his head, remembering the argument they had had six weeks ago about the very same topic. “You cannot be sure of that, sir.”
“I am sure of it.” Yamamoto said. “Wake is completely useless. It is impossible to feed anyone there – our garrison was starving to death the entire time they occupied it. The airstrip is too small to fly any large force off, and you’d have to ship in fuel from a thousand miles away to use it. There’s hardly a dock, much less a proper port facility, and it’s in the middle of nowhere. If the Americans were going to attack the north of the defensive perimeter, this telegram would be saying that Kwajalein or Tarawa was under attack.”
“Sir, perhaps the Americans wanted to cover their northern flank.” Nagumo said. “Another attack could be on the way.”
“Wake is about the size of a bird dropping.” Yamamoto said. “It can’t cover anything. The only reason they would ever attack it is if they wanted me to see them taking it. They know I still have a fleet. If I send the fleet to Wake, it’s not there to defend the Philippines, or more likely Java first, when MacArthur comes parading back in.”
“You could be wrong.” Nagumo warned. “We can’t afford to not be ready again. Wake didn’t matter, but if we let them take the Marshalls then the entire outer perimeter is compromised.”
“I’m not wrong.” Yamamoto said. “My judgement hasn’t failed me yet this war, and I see no reason for that to change. Besides, they’ve told me where they’re coming.”
He pulled out a leaflet that had been captured by the garrison in the Philippines and made its way back to Tokyo. Two thirds of it was Douglas MacArthur’s face, the bottom third the words ‘I Shall Return’.
“Draft a plan to fight them near Kwajalein if you must.” Yamamoto said. “I’m going to prepare to sink MacArthur.”
***
The invasion of Wake had been something of a disappointment for the Allies as well. The ground offensive had taken nearly thirty-one hours, well short of the eight or nine that had been expected. Wake had not been nearly so well defended as New Guinea, and evidence of poor supply and even worse leadership was strewn around the island. The island’s small size, combined with its lack of defensible terrain, should have led to a rapid victory. Instead they had suffered several hundred casualties, and only the news of the liberation of the 98 prisoners on the island prevented the battle from attracting any public criticism.
Wake did prompt the Joint Chiefs to take another look at the reports MacArthur had sent following his landings in New Guinea, largely ignored until now due to MacArthur’s poor relationship with Washington. MacArthur’s casualties had been proportionally far heavier than anything seen on Wake, but most of them had been suffered during the advance into the New Guinea interior and the urban battle of Port Moresby. Wake had no interior, neither did any of the atolls marked for invasion as part of Operation Wasteland. The beach battles, as much as they could be, had been successful. There would be no need to dig the Japanese out of hillside bunkers in the Marshall islands either.
MacArthur’s proposal for a heavy shore bombardment certainly looked like a good addition for Wasteland. While MacArthur had only had access to four fleet carriers, six were set to be used in the Marshalls operation now that the first four Essex-class ships had entered service, and huge numbers of smaller escort carriers were coming out of shipyards to join them. The story was similar for battleships, with five modern battleships now operating in the Pacific and many older ships available to join them if the need arose. If what MacArthur said about gunfire support was true, the defenders of the Marshall islands would have little hope of surviving the pre-invasion bombardment.
Wake had been a disappointment for another reason, although one that the United States had no real control over. New Guinea had sparked a string of deaths of high-ranking officers, particularly members of the Imperial Navy. Decoded intercepts didn’t reveal the true cause of these deaths, but the Japanese Army and Navy had been feuding for quite some time, and Imperial Japan had a history of “rule by assassination” particularly in the 1930s. If the Japanese wanted to kill of their officer corps in what was close to a miniature civil war, that could only work to the Allies’ benefit. One particularly strange message sent by Yamamoto to General Doihara, threatening an outright blockade of half the Japanese empire, certainly suggested such an eventuality.
After Wake, there had been no more disappearances among the Japanese top brass, no more “unfortunate accidents” or even deaths claimed to be of natural causes. The Japanese were no longer killing each other, and the Minister of War was no longer a relative unknown, but now an infamous criminal brute, who would very likely be at the top of the list in any post-war war crimes trials, at least if the assassins didn’t get to him first.
Yamamoto remained as frustratingly “off the map” as ever. Navy codes hadn’t changed, but there were no messages indicating that the Combined Fleet had moved. That had greatly helped at Wake, but Yamamoto was well known to be both a gambler (and so far a very lucky one at that) and very aggressive. He would show up somewhere, sometime soon. Everyone in the American high command wanted advance warning when he did.
- BNC
