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Aviation History
1945
1945 - 1653.PDF
192 FLIGHT THE WAR AGAINST JAPAN Japan has always chiefly prided her- self, was used to seize the openings created by success on sea and in the air. She had never needed to engage her fleet seriously, though she had taken full advantage of her command of the seas. Here it may be remarked that the lack of enterprise shown by the Japanese .Admirals is one of the most astonishing features of this war. As America gradually made good the losses at Pearl Harbour, while the British fleet, relieved by Italy's sur- render from anxieties in the Mediter- ranean, gradually began to mass strength at Ceylon, one would have expected the Japanese Admirals to fight a fleet action in defence of their ill-gotten gains. This they never did. At the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway they trusted entirely, or almost entirely, to their aircraft, and when the Americans had won the air battle, the Japanese accepted defeat. They lost battleships without having used them. Australian Base At the darkest hour for the Allies the arrival of General MacArthur in Australia turned the tide. The first strategic necessity was to secure Aus- tralia as a base. There were plenty of other reasons for doing everything possible to avert an invasion of Aus- tralia ; but strategically the necessity to secure a base in the South West Pacific was what mattered. To achieve this it was necessary to prevent the enemy from establishing himself at Port Moresby in New Guinea. At first the resources at Gen. MacArthur's command were very slight; but he gathered together as many bombers as he could raise, and began a cam- paign of defence by bombing. It suc- ceeded. It was an almost unique epi- sode. Presently Spitfires arrived and took over the defence of Darwin, and in due course the Australians invaded New Guinea, and the backward move- ment of the Japanese began. The tide The U.S. aircraftcarrier Yorktown was damaged inthe Coral Sea but was repaired.Built to accom- modate 76 air-craft, she has a length of 762ft. had obviously turned. It is not the purpose of this article to recount all the stages of advance from island to island until the Philip- pines had been recovered and Japan itself could be attacked. The advance implied a great number of combined oper- ations in which Navy, Air Force, and Army had- each to play its due part. The point to note is that once the tide began to turn the Japanese seemed to lose that air sense which had served them so well in the early days of the war. It is true that in the British and Americans they met better men than themselves; but even so the way in which the Japanese threw up the sponge in the air is surprising. This was particularly the case in Burma. Burma provided in every way an extraordinary campaign. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten was obviously made Supreme Commander there because of his experience in com- bined operations. The right way to tackle the reconquest of Burma was to land a powerful force at Rangoo: capture the port, use it as a supffty base, and work up from soujm to north. But that, involved thpuse of vast quantities' of landing, graft, ant these were needed for Normandy. So the reconquest had to be undertaken from north to south, with every cir- cumstance of geography and climate telling against the British and Indian forces. The advance was only made possible by the use of air transport on a scale never attempted before and never even imagined. Obviously air supply would be impossible if Japan- ese fighters were able to interfere with it. At the start of the British-Indian advance the Japanese Air Force in Burma was numerically stronger than that of the Allies, and so the first act in ther1" drama lay with our fighters. Spi^res and Thunderbolts had ed, and they speedily drove the pan^se out of the skies. Despite the eadinefe of most Japanese fighting men to lie, the Jap who is beaten by ^strongf r opponent is apt to lose his^ nerve completely, and t!.« enemy pilots soon began to show a healthy terror of the Spitfire. They were soon withdrawn from Burma to Siam, and our supply air- craft, all unarmed as they were, found themselves able to fly where and when they wished. The fighters could then turn their attention to giving close support to the infantry, while the bombers cut the railway from Bang- kok, and the flying boats (now organised as the Indian Among the - British carriers which saw service in the Paci- fic was H.M.S. Formidable, ot 23,000 tons.
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