"As late as 1943, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff had not adopted a clear policy for winning the war in the Pacific. Early in the war, they assumed that the burden of the land fighting against Japan would fall on Chinese forces. The bulk of the Japanese army was deployed in China, and Chinese leaders had an immense manpower pool to draw on. But supplying and training the Chinese Army proved to be an impossible task. Moreover, fighting in China did not lead to any strategic objective."
The CBI Theater could have been the springboard for victory in the Pacific War if the advice of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was followed. According to naval historian Samuel Eliot Morrison who had spoken to Gen. MacArthur in 1950, the latter said that the strategy of by-passing Japanese strongholds and then letting them wither on the vine (island
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Until late in 1944, Nimitz wanted to employ a grand strategy whereby a leap to the Mariana Islands would be followed by the greatest island hopping of all - to Formosa - by-passing the Philippines and ignoring the strong Japanese forces there. From Formosa, Allied armies would then land on mainland China to unite with the Chinese Nationalist Army and bomb and invade Japan from those bases.
MacArthur, on the other hand, considered the liberation of the Philippines to be primary importance, from New Guinea thence to the Philippines, contending that once Japanese forces were beaten there, the Japanese would surrender. MacArthur favored this approach to fulfill his "I shall return" pledge.
MacArthur also needed to erase the disgrace of having his B-17's destroyed on the ground despite having been told about the raid on Pearl Harbor nine hours earlier, and having been ordered to initiate preparations for war. He had also refused to allow his air commander's (Gen. Brereton) request to bomb Japan's Formosa air bases, which would have caught the Japanese bombers on the ground in early morning fog and prevented the destruction of his B-17's in the Philippines.
As Adm. Edwin Leyton wrote in And I Was There: "In strategic terms, the Japanese raid at midday in the Philippines airfields was a far greater triumph than the attack on Pearl Harbor. At a single blow, it had removed our ability to strike back and guaranteed the success of the impending Japanese invasion of the islands."
The issue of whether to continue Nimitz's successful island-hopping strategy came to a head in July 1944, when President Roosevelt met in Hawaii with Nimitz and MacArthur. There Nimitz outlined his strategy for hopping to Formosa and thence to the Chinese mainland as the springboard to Japan. Nimitz argued against the invasion of the Philippines.
Gen. MacArthur had previously opposed this strategy in June '44, sending to the JCS what Layton described as "an eloquent plea for honoring his and America's pedge to the Filipino's and contending that failure to do so would cause all Asia to lose faith in America's honor."
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The President went along with MacArthur. The JCS adhered to the Formosa strategy but finally agreed to MacArthur's plan in September. As a result, we incurred thousands of casualties in taking the Philippines, also in taking Iwo Jima and Okinawa which would not have been necessary.
Fortunately, before the invasion of Japan was necessary, Adm. Nimitz's forces won the war from advance bases in the Mariana's (Guam, Saipan and Tinian), bases that Nimitz had taken despite MacArthur's opposition, because they detracted from his Philippine plan. From those bases, B-29's were able to reach Japan. After the A-bombs were dropped, Japan surrendered.
Morrison in his "History of U.S. Naval Operations in WW II" suggests many arguments for invading Formosa, together with the beach-head at Amoy, China. It would "put a cork in the bottleneck" of Japan's communications with her conquests of 1942; it would be closer to Japan than Luzon. To invade Formosa after Leyte would continue the successful "leapfrog" strategy, leaving the most powerful strong points (of which Luzon was one) to wither on the vine. Morrison added: "Also, the presence of an Allied Army on the mainland of China at the end of the war, might have helped Chiang to retain control of China.
In the end, Nimitz' strategy succeeded despite efforts to block it; but if his original plan had been adopted,
CBI'ers would have been able to say that they directly contributed to the defeat of Japan.
(Excerpted from Prelude to Armageddon by Dr. Richard P. Hallion, Air Force historian, as printed in Air
Power History. According to Dr. Hallion, "Without the experience gained by the B-29 crews in the CBITO, the results
of the war in the Pacific might have been different.")
There's an old WWI joke about a horse, a cow, and a mule who argued about who won the war. The horse said
we played a vital part in transporting the supplies and cannon to the front. The cow said we did more; we provided the
bully beef - the Army marches on its stomach you know. The mule responded that if it wasn't for our guys in the State
Department, there wouldn't have been a war for you fella's to have won in the first place.
Well, we can say the same for the CBI Theater of Operations (CBITO) for our vital contribution to winning
the war in the Pacific. We all know that it was the B-29's delivering the A-bombs on Japaan that brought the Japanese
to the peace table; otherwise we could have suffered a million or so additional casulaties in invading Japan. Well it
was the CBITO which provided the learning experience for the B-29's.
In August 1943, the Air Staff of Hqs Army Air Forces (AAF) prepared a plan to use a new weapon (the B-29)
from Chinese territory to attack Japan pending capture of island bases nearer to Japan. Gen "Hap" Arnold (CG AAF)
wanted the first B-29's operational in China by April 15, 1944. The last of the initial batch of 150 B-29's were
combat ready and on their way to China by that time to begin the bomber offensive. (A total of 3898 B-29's were produced
during World War II at an average cost of $639,188 each in 1944 dollars.) So, the B-29 went from a design concept to
an operational weapon in five years; less than three years separated their first flight and the Hiroshima mission.
Initial planning for the China-based B-29's envisioned a force of 780 B-29's supported by the ATC from India,
across the "Hump," attacking Japanese targets in Manchuria and Japan. This plan was later revised by Generals Stilwell
and Stratemeyer to forward base the B-29's from permanent and secure bases in India. Under this plan (called "Operation
Matterhorn"), they anticipated that largely self-sufficient B-29's would carry their own fuel and bombs from India into
China. Unfortunately, this did not work out.
Then, there was the problem of who would command the B-29's in China, Gen. Chennault wanted to have operational
control; likewise did Lord Louis Mountbatten (Commander, SEAC); as did Gen. MacArthur for thos based in the Southwest
Pacific.
The final solution was a compromise by placing them under the direct command of Gen. Hap Arnold as the executive
agent for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The new bomber force was designated the 20th Air Force, and formally established on April 4, 1944, with two
subordinate commands, the XX Bomber Command under Brig. Gen. Wolfe, and the XXI Bomber Command under Brig. Gen. Hansell,
to be based in the Marianas after their seizure from the enemy. Theater commanders were directed to support them.
Ironically, the major use of the B-29's against Japan would not be from bases in China but rather from
bases in the Central Pacific.
Following that raid, on June 14, 1944, 68 planes (out of 92 left in India) took off from bases in China
and raided iron works at Yawata, Japan. Seven B-29's were lost due to mechanical problems and accidents. This raid
indicated the difficulty of operating from India to China and then to Japanese targets, particularly when the B-29's
were still immature systems. On that raid, Gen. Arnold wanted 70 planes over the target, but only 47 actually made it
to Yawata; and only one plane hit the target with one 500 pound bomb.
The B-29's could not carry all the bombs and gas needed to support operations in China. Instead, they had to
call on the ATC to carry no less than 25%, and up to 100% of the monthly tonnage required by the B-29's. So, supplying
them took considerable resources away from the 14th AF, which did not please Gen. Chennault. Subsequent analysis
indicated that the XX Bomber Command was only free to use 14% of its B-29's against the Japanese. The other 86% were
used as ferry tankers keeping the B-29's supplied with fuel. As Gen. LeMay recalled after the war:
"When ordered to fly a mission out of China, we had to make seven trips with a B-29 and off-load all the
gas we could, leaving only enough to get back to India. On the eighth trip we would transport a load of bombs, top off
with gas in China, and go drop them on Japan if the weather was right. Then we'd start the process all over again.
So, the logistical situation was hopeless in China."
Right after the yawata raid, Gen. Arnold ordered another long strike (steel mills in Manchuria). Gen. Wolfe,
commander of XX Bomber Command, protested, so Gen. Arnold replaced him with Gen. Curtis LeMay from Europe. When the
latter took over, he found a pretty desperate situation. As a result, the XX Bomber Command didn't fly another mission
until early July when it returned to Japan for a series of small strikes; then followed by a strike on a Manchurian
steel mill on July 29.
Thereafter, through the end of 1944, XX Bomber Command flew an additional 33 major missions against targets
in Japan, Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia.
Several of these strikes were quite successful, especially the destruction of the dock area at Hankow by
incendiaries. The success of the latter raid greatly influenced LeMay's subsequent raids on Japan. He recognized that
targets in Japan were vulnerable to incendiary attack. So, the CBI operations by the XX Bomber Command in 1944 was a
learning experience.
The XX Bomber Command staggered on throughout 1944 leaving its bases in China by the end of January 1945
in favor of basing in India before finally moving to the Marainas and being absorbed into the 8th Air Force on
Okinawa in July of 1945. All in all, it had been a disappointment.
After the war, LeMay wrote:
So, later the XX Bomber Command became primarily a theater air arm for operations in the CBI; first from
bases in China, and then from bases in India. Of the 15 missions after November 1, 1944, to the end of the year only
three (20%) hit Japan. Of the 37 missions in 1945, only four hit Japan, and there were no raids on Japan on the 26
missions flown from January 17, 1945, onwards.
Like its namesake, Matterhorn was one tough mountain to climb.
Maj. Gen. LeMay left the XX Bomber Command and took over the XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas replacing
Brig. Gen. Hansell on January 20, 1945. Gen. Arnold was not pleased with Hansell's early raids against Japan (from high
altitudes to avoid fighter interceptors, and in uncertain weather). His raid on January 19, 1945 was initially reported
as 38% effective.
Hereafter, the new commander, Gen. LeMay, used the same program he employed in China emphasizing low altitude
incendiary attacks aimed at the heart of Japanese cities.
Whatever the failings of the early campaigns in China and the Marianas, offered no comfort to the Japanese.
The lessons learned earlier spawned furious attacks later that almost consumed many Japanese cities and industrial areas,
rivaling those of the atomic weapons.
The rest of the story is that Japanese leaders sacrificed the nation in a fight to the finish. That victory
is a tribute to the B-29 crews and to those who supported them. The fact that they succeeded is the lagacy of the troublesome
gestation through 1944 in the CBI Theater and the Marianas which took an immature airplane and raw personnel to bring
final victory over Japan.
So, those who served in the CBI can take pride in that they nurtured and supported the force that eventually
made the final victory possible.
Most CBIers know that a CBI connection to the great movie about WWII, "Saving Private Ryan," was that
producer Steven Spielberg's father served in CBI.
One you might not know is that the real-life Pvt. Ryan was Pvt. Frederick "Fritz" Niland of the 101st Airborne Division.
Two of his brothers were killed during the D-Day invasion and a third was a pilot believed killed in CBI the same week.
Robert "Bob" Niland of the 82nd Airborne was killed in action on D-Day 6 June 1944 and Preston Niland of the 4th Infantry Division was killed in action
on 7 June near Utah beach. Believed killed in action, Edward Niland actually bailed out of his B-25 bomber over Burma and was captured and interned for almost a year by the Japanese.
He was liberated on 4 May 1945.
When his mother received all three telegrams on the same day, the War Department later learned
that Fritz the only surviving son and issued orders to remove Fritz from combat and send him back to England.
He was eventually returned to New York and served as an M.P.
until the end of the war.
While a student at the University of North Carolina, Sidney Rittenberg joined the Communist party. In
1942, he was inducted into the U.S. Army and sent to language school to learn Chinese. Later, he was sent to the CBI
and was stationed at Kunming. After discharge, he stayed in China as a member of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration.
Seeing the communist movement as a means of bringing order out of the chaos that existed in China for the
previous 100 years, he then went to Yanan in Northwest China as a member of the English Language News Service to
present the Chinese Communists in a favorable light.
He remained a believer in the communist cause, even after he was arrested as an American spy in 1949, on
orders of Marshal Stalin. Released from prison in 1955, he could have returned to the United States, instead he stayed
behind, believing the Chinese Communists were on the verge of forming a new kind of society.
He rose higher in the Chinese Communist hierarchy than any other foreigner after joining the broadcast
Administration in Beijing. Knowing Mao Tse-tung personally, he never questioned his policies, and he even participated
in the Cultural Revolution. Later when anarchy prevailed, he remained steadfast in his beliefs. When radicals demanded
that "capitalist roaders" be dragged out of the Army and the Party, Mao turned against them, and Rittenberg became a
scapegoat.
In 1967, he again was arrested as an American spy and sentenced to another ten years of confinement. Even
then, he remained a believer in their cause. Released in 1977, he refused to believe the terrible things wrought by the
cultural revolution. Only after a few more years did he begin to question Mao's policies and deeds.
In 1980, he returned to the United States. Then, he began to see the error of the communist system, belatedly,
because of his earlier stake in the system. Yet, he continues to think of the mao period as a time when China was
unified and freed from internal warfare for the first time in 100 years. Also, he still does not acknowledge that the
"Great Leap Forward" was responsible for the deaths of 100 million Chinese.
Shortly before the Japanese surrender, China Theater headquarters got the word that a Japanese collapse
was imminent and that POWs had to be rescued immediately to save them from possible harm.
Maj. Gen. George H. Olmsted laid out a rescue plan to his superior, Gen. Albet C. Wedemeyer.
Olmsted first ordered leaflets dropped. Then he sent a single plane carrying six unarmed men to parachute
into POW camps with a letter to the camp commander. It said the Allies knew the number of POWs in each camp and would
hold the camp commander responsible if harm came to any POW.
"It worked," he said later. "But I had some sleepless nights." 30,000 POWs were rescued as a result of the
plan.
At the end of the war, Olmsted woked out a huge sale of military equipment left behind in China. President
Truman said that his effort was the best liquidation of surplus U.S. equipment anywhere in the world.
Prior to active service in CBI, George Olmsted built a major financial empire and later became one of
Washington's wealthiest and most powerful businessmen. he was recalled to active duty during the Korean Conflict and
headed the Army's military assistence program. He died October 8, 1998.
Jack St. Clair Kilby served as a radio man in India in CBI and later became an engineer who invented a tiny
chip which changed the world.
Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his 1958 invention of the integrated electronic circuit,
which made personal computers, satellite navigation systems, cell phones and the $200 billion field of microelectronics
possible. He invented the hand-held calculator, which commercialized the microchip, and held more than 60 other patents.
"In my opinion, there are only a handful of people whose work has truly transformed the world and the way
we live in it - Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Jack Kilby," Tom Engibous, chairman of Texas
Instruments, where Kilby worked for years, said in a statement. "If there ever was a seminal invention that transformed
not only our industry but our world, it was jack's invention of the first integrated circuit."
He was working alone in a lab at Texas Instrument on borrowed equipment on July 24, 1958, when he struck upon
the idea that he jotted down in his notebook: "The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice:
resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor." He had cracked a nagging engineering problem. The transistor
had been invented 10 years earlier, replacing the vacuum tubes used in the earliest computers. But transistors were
built of components strung together with wires. A single bad connection would ruin the circuit, and circuits could
only get so small before it was impossible for humans to solder them together. Kilby's idea was to eliminate the wires
and use a single block of silicon, or germanium, containing an entire electronic circuit. When he built his first
circuit, it was half the size of a paper clip. In the same space, engineers can now squeeze more than 100 million
transistors.
Kilby's invention came just six months before Robert Noyce, who later co-founded Intel Corp., came up with
the same idea. After a ten year patent battle, the men called themselves co-inventors of the microchip, and Kilby
credited Noyce in his Nobel Prize speech.
Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missori, and grew up in Great Bend, Kansas. During World War II, he was in
the Army and was sent to India where his job was to repair radios, although there were no spare parts. The resourcefulness
that the assignment taught him proved useful later in life.
Some controversy attended his Nobel Prize. Kilby was not a physicist and some research scientists felt that
his invention ventured periously close to mere applied science and away from fundamental science. The Nobel committee
decided, however, to honor inventions relating to the tech world.
The awards piled up. He was given the national Medal of Science in 1970 and named to the National Inventors
Hall of Fame in 1981.
Once asked what the worst application of his invention was, his response was the "singing greeting card."
TIME magazine named a CBIer as one of the four outstanding business leaders of the 20th century.
According to TIME, No.1 was Henry Ford, No.2 was Alfred Sloan, Jr. (GM); No. 4 was Bill Gates, but No. 3 was
a B-24 and C-47 pilot in the CBI Theater - Thomas A. Watson, Jr. (1914-1993).
After his service in CBI, Watson worked with his father at IBM. He saw things differently than his father,
so when he took over IBM in 1971 he put it on the course of the computer. He led IBM through one of the largest and
most spectacular bursts of growth ever seen - the greatest success story of America's post-war boom.
By the time he left
IBM he had routed rivals like GE, RCA, and Sperry-Univac in size and importance. He stepped down at age 57 after
suffering a heart attack.
(The following is a excerpt from a May 30, 2002 Wall Street Journal front page article about CBIer
Raymond Cromley)
"The oldest reporter at the Pentagon has quite a storied past. Raymond Cromley, in the 1930's, studied
physics at Cal Tech and became friendly with Albert Einstein. After graduating, he moved to Japan and married a
Japanese woman while there. He was interned by the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor but was released in a
trade for Japanese diplomats.
"Back home he joined the U.S. Army. Because he spoke Japanese and some Chinese, he was assigned to a
military intelligence unit. By July 1944, he and a small unit left for China on the top secret "Dixie Mission" to
meet with Mao Tse-tung in Yenan.
"For more than six months, he lived with about a dozen other intelligence personnel in a cold cave. He
eventually befriended Mao and even danced with his wife at a Chinese New Year's celebration.
"As World War II was coming to a close, Mao asked Maj. Raymond Cromley, then acting chief of the Dixie
Mission, to send a message to President Roosevelt. On January 19, 1945 Cromley sent a message to Theater Headquarters
in Chungking to the effect that Mao was available for an exploratory conference in Washington should the President
express a desire to receive him.
"The message was intercepted by Ambassador Patrick Hurley, according to historian Barbara Tuchman. Hurley opposed
having Mao meet with the President and didn't relay the message. The lost cable was 'one of the great if's and harsh
ironies of history' Mrs. Tuchman wrote in her essay October 1972 in Foreign Affairs magazine.
"Had mao made the trip, Mrs. Tuchman suggested, the U.S. might not have blindly backed the Nationalists;
the Chinese might not have made common cause with the Soviets, and it is conceivable that there might not have been
a Korean War and no expansionist communism.
"Even the war in Vietnam might never have happened, she wrote. When the war ended, Cromley returned to
Japan and found his wife dying of TB. He stayed with her for a few months until she died and then returned alone
to the U.S. and resumed his job with the Wall Street Journal."
Who Won the War in the Pacific
OPERATION MATTERHORN
The B-29's first flew in combat on June 5, 1944. Ninety-eight planes from bases in India raided the Makasan rail center
in Bangkok. It was not a good start, damage was light; five were forced to ditch; 14 others aborted early, and one
crashed at take-off. Less than 20 bombs fell on the target area.
"Despite some modest successes and the lessons learned from the Hankow raid, we really didn't accomplish
as much in China as we had hoped. That would come later when we moved the B-29 bases to the Marianas. In the meantime,
I recommended that Arnold not send any more B-29's to India after November, 1944, because we really couldn't supply
them adequately at the bases in China. The Marianas would be the beginning of the end of the road to Tokyo."
Saving Private Niland
The Man Who Stayed Behind
"If You Fail, It's a Courts-Martial"
The latter's response was: "That's the craziest scheme I have ever heard of in the U.S. Army. Try it, If it fails,
remember we are readying courts-martial charges against you."
CBI Radio Man, Nobel Prize Winner
Outstanding Business Leader of the 20th Century
NO KOREA, NO VIETNAM
