Why Japanese Generals Couldn’t Explain How America Defeated the Island Fortresses It Never Attacked

There is an atoll in the western Pacific called Woleai. In the Japanese records, it is Me Re Yon. In 1944, it held a garrison of several thousand men. And the Americans looked at it, decided it was not worth the landing craft, and sailed past. No invasion came. No flag was planted. And then, over the months that followed, more than eight in 10 of the lowest-ranking soldiers on that atoll died.

Almost none of them fell to an enemy they could see. They starved. Woleai was not rare. It was the pattern. Of the roughly 2 million Japanese servicemen who died in this war, most were not killed in the moment we all picture, the moment with the beach and the machine gun. Something close to six in 10 of them died a quieter way.

And by the end of this video, you will know exactly how that number was built, and what it cost. They were killed by something that arrived, or rather failed to arrive, by sea. The famous story of the Pacific is a story of islands taken one bloody yard at a time. Hold that story in your mind, because it is true, and it is also a misdirection.

The islands that decided this war were, in many cases, the ones America never touched. There was a fortress in the South Pacific with roughly 100,000 men inside it. One of the strongest positions Japan ever built. And the United States defeated it without landing a single infantryman on its beaches. How you break a fortress of 100,000 men without attacking it is the question this whole video answers.

And the answer has >> [music] >> almost nothing to do with the men themselves. When Americans remember of Pacific War, they remember the beaches. >> [music] >> They remember Guadalcanal, the first desperate foothold where hungry Marines held an airfield in the mud against wave after wave of night attacks. They remember Tarawa where the reef stopped the landing craft and men waded hundreds of yards into machine gun fire.

And a tiny coral island cost a thousand American dead in three days. They remember Iwo Jima, the black sand, the flag on Mount Suribachi, the photograph that became the memory of the entire war. They remember Okinawa, >> [music] >> the last and worst of them, months of fighting that killed more than 12,000 Americans >> [music] >> and many times that number of Japanese and civilians.

This is the Pacific War >> [music] >> as it lives in film and memory. And every piece of it is real. The courage was real. The cost was real. Island by island, the United States Marine Corps and the Army fought their way across thousands of miles of ocean toward Japan, advancing some 3,000 miles in two years. And the men who did it earned every word of remembrance.

And the arithmetic of that grind was terrifying. [music] Tarawa cost a thousand American lives in three days for an island you could walk across in an hour. If every fortified rock between Hawaii and Tokyo had to be paid for at that price, the road to Japan would have been years longer and hundreds of thousands of lives more expensive.

Everyone assumed that was the war. Take the next island, then the next, then the next. There is a detail inside the legend that should have given the game away. The Japanese soldiers who fought on Guadalcanal, the first island of the whole campaign, had a private name for the place. They called it the island of starvation because even there, at the very start, in a stand-up [music] fight for an airfield, the thing quietly killing them was not only the Marines, it was the supply that could not get through.

The most famous battles of the Pacific already carried the fingerprint of the weapon that would decide the war. Almost nobody was reading it. Because look closely at the line of advance and it is not straight and it is not continuous. It skips. >> [music] >> Between the islands America stormed are dozens of islands America deliberately walked past.

Islands packed [music] with Japanese troops, airfields, and guns left behind the advancing front and simply ignored. Tarawa was invaded. Woleai was not. Iwo Rabaul, four or five times larger, never was. The map of the Pacific War is not a map of every island taken. It is a map of a few islands taken and a great many islands avoided.

>> [music] >> And the men on the avoided islands did not survive the war in comfort. Most of them did not survive it at all. That gap between what was stormed and what was skipped [music] is the crack in the legend. And it opens onto the thing that actually won. Here is what the beaches hide. Japan was not a country in the way Britain or America was a country.

It was an empire stretched across a quarter of the planet and it was held together entirely by ships. Every barrel of oil that moved its fleet, every ton of rice that fed a garrison on some coral speck a thousand miles from home, every rifle and shell and bag of cement, all of it traveled by sea because there was no other way for it to travel.

An island empire runs on merchant shipping the way a body runs on blood. Cut the circulation and the extremities die first, no matter how many soldiers are standing in them. And here is the flaw that decided the war before it was fought. Japan built an empire that lived entirely on shipping and then refused to protect that shipping.

Its navy was built around a single idea. The one great decisive battle against the enemy fleet and convoy escort was a monotonous defensive chore its admirals did not want. Japanese first-line destroyers went to war carrying almost no depth charges and the few dedicated escorts that existed carried only a dozen or so a piece.

There was no central system for gathering merchant ships into protected convoys until late in 1943, years after the shooting started, when Japan finally stood up what it called a grand escort command, handed it obsolete ships and hastily assigned crews and then watched its better vessels get pulled away to the battle fleet anyway.

The bitter part is that Japan’s own officers knew better. At their war college, they had studied Churchill and the Atlantic convoys. They had read exactly how Germany nearly strangled Britain the same way in the previous war. And they were overruled. So, when the United States went for the shipping, it was pushing on a door that had been left open on purpose.

And it went for the shipping hard. >> [music] >> Not the famous carrier battles, not the beaches, but the slow, unglamorous, brutally effective destruction of Japan’s merchant [music] fleet, mostly by submarines hunting cargo ships and tankers across the empty ocean. And alongside it came a strategic choice that flowed from the same logic.

Instead of assaulting every fortified island, American commanders started skipping the strong ones. They called it leapfrogging. [music] They would take a lightly held island, build an airfield, and use it to seal off the heavily held island next door. Cutting its sea lanes and leaving it, in the planners’ own phrase, >> [music] >> to wither on the vine.

A garrison that cannot be resupplied [music] is not a fortress. It is a prison. And then, it is a grave. The beaches were where America chose to [music] fight. The sea was where America chose to win. And it won by making sure the ships stopped coming. If following the number instead of the battle is starting to change how you see this war, >> [music] >> subscribing is how the next one finds you.

Now, the arithmetic. Because this is where the reveal stops being a claim and becomes a fact. Start with the merchant fleet. When Japan went to war in 1941, its merchant marine carried a little over 6 million tons of shipping. And that fleet was the empire’s entire circulatory system. By the end of the war, it had been cut to about 1 and 1/2 million tons.

And of that, only a few hundred thousand tons were still in any condition to carry cargo. If you index the fleet at 100 at the start of the war, it stood at 93 after 1942, 77 after 1943, 40 after 1944, and around 23 by the summer of 1945. The empire’s bloodstream was drained to less than a quarter in under 4 years.

And the collapse was not steady. It fell off a cliff. And the reason why is one of the strangest stories of the war. For the first year and a half, the American submarine was a nearly toothless weapon because its main torpedo, >> [music] >> the Mark 14, did not work. It ran too deep and passed harmlessly under its targets.

Its magnetic trigger went off early or its backup firing pin crushed itself flat on a perfect square hit and did nothing at all. Submarine captains lined up flawless shots, fired volley after volley into stationary ships, and watched them sail calmly on. One boat put 11 torpedoes into a single anchored tanker and still could not sink it.

Only in the second half of 1943 were the flaws finally hunted down and fixed. And then the graph changed shape. The fleet had lost about 2 million tons across all of 1943. In 1944, with torpedoes that finally worked, it lost more than 4 million. By the early months of 1944, American submarines were sending a quarter of a million tons to the bottom every single month.

And notice what they were sinking. Japan had gone to war in the first place to seize oil, the great oil fields of the southern seas, because its own home islands had almost none. It got the oil. What it could not do was carry it home. The tankers that moved crude from the conquered south to the refineries and the warships were hunted [music] first and hardest.

And as they went down, the paradox closed like a trap. An empire sitting on all the oil it had fought for and no ships left to move it. Its navy and its air force is slowly going dry. Not for want of fuel in the ground, but for want of a deck to carry it across the water. Steel and oil. And neither one any use without the ship in between.

And even the ships still afloat were never enough. Because three masters fought over every hull. The army needed bottoms to move its troops and feed its island garrisons. The navy needed them for the fleet. And the civilian economy at home needed them to bring in the iron ore, the coal, and the food that kept the factories running and the population fed.

Every ton handed to one was a ton stripped from the others. And as the fleet shrank, the fight over the survivors turned vicious. [music] Long before a ship was ever sunk, it was already being pulled in three directions at once. So, sinking the merchant fleet did not merely cut the supply lines to the islands, it collapsed an economy that had been running on too few ships >> [music] >> since the first day of the war.

Who did the draining? American submarines. Above all, >> [music] >> a tiny force, a few percent of the navy’s manpower. 263 of them went out on patrol across the war, and 52 never came back. And between them, they accounted for more than half of all Japanese shipping sunk. Roughly 55%. >> [music] >> Close to 5 million tons on their own, more than aircraft, mines, and surface ships combined.

>> [music] >> And at the very end came one more turn of the screw. >> [music] >> In 1945, American bombers began sewing naval mines in Japan’s home waters by the thousand. In a campaign the planners named with no subtlety at all, Operation Starvation. In a matter of months, those mines sank or damaged close to 700 ships and forced the abandonment of 35 of the Empire’s 47 essential shipping routes.

Add it all up and the United States sank something like 8 and 1/2 million gross tons of Japanese merchant ships across [music] the war. When the Allies occupied the home islands, they found a sea-going empire reduced to fishing boats. And it was not only the soldiers who paid for this, the civilian crews who kept the empire breathing, the merchant sailors, died at a rate that makes a mockery of the word civilian.

Of roughly 137,000 Japanese merchant officers and men, about 108,000 were killed or lost by the end of the war. Gone down with the ships that were carrying the war’s real cargo. The men who moved the oil and the rice were consumed faster than almost anyone in uniform. Now, connect the sunk ships to the islands.

Every vessel on the bottom was cargo that never arrived. And the garrisons could not simply feed themselves because these were not farms, they were coral and jungle, thin soil and salt. >> [music] >> With tens of thousands of mouths and no way to grow rice at that scale. So, somewhere out on a garrison atoll, the rice ran out, the medicine ran out, the reinforcements never came because the ship carrying them was 3,000 ft down.

And this is where the decisive number lands. Of the roughly 2 million or more Japanese servicemen who died in the war, the historian Fujiwara Akira and others have estimated that around six in 10, [music] something like 1 and 1/2 million men, died not in combat, but from starvation [music] and the diseases that follow it.

Six in 10. The majority of an army’s dead killed by an empty supply line rather than by an enemy soldier. >> [music] >> On Woleai, the atoll we started with, the death rate among ordinary soldiers reached above 80%. Even in the Philippines, where the fighting was heaviest, and the dead ran into the hundreds of thousands, a large share went the same quiet way.

That is not the arithmetic of a land war. It is the arithmetic of a siege conducted across an entire ocean. So, what did that number actually do to the war? It meant the fortresses defeated themselves. Take Rabaul, the strongest of them, on the island of New Britain. Roughly 100,000 Japanese troops, powerful airfields, a first-class harbor.

Military planners in 1943 looked at Rabaul and saw a campaign that would cost months and tens of thousands of American lives to capture. So, they did not capture it. Consider what the assaults that did happen cost. Iwo Jima, 8 square miles of volcanic rock, took nearly 7,000 American dead. Okinawa took more than 12,000.

Now, picture a storming Rabaul, its garrison larger than the defenders of both those islands combined, dug into prepared fortifications, and you understand why no planner wanted that battle. So, instead, they took the islands around it, ringed it with airfields, cut its sea lanes, and left it. The same was done to the great naval base at Truk, once called the Gibraltar of of Pacific, smashed from the air in a single raid and then simply bypassed.

Those garrisons sat out the rest of the war growing sweet potatoes in poor soil, steadily more irrelevant, steadily more hungry, defeated without ever being assaulted. And it swallowed whole field armies. The 18th Army under Adachi, cut off in New Guinea, largely starved. The 17th Army under Hyakutake on Bougainville went the same way.

These were not skirmishes. These were the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of men. And the weapon that disappeared them was the empty sea. All told, something like a quarter of a million Japanese troops, and probably a good deal more, sat out the end of the war on bypassed islands and strong points they still nominally held.

A whole army’s worth of men quietly subtracted from the fight without a battle ever being offered. On New Guinea, it was worst of all. The men of Adachi’s army, >> [music] >> cut off with no way back and no way to be supplied, ate what the jungle would give them and then ate almost nothing. And tens of thousands of them died on foot in the [music] green interior.

Most of them never having faced the main American advance at all. They were not [music] defeated in any ordinary sense. They were simply left on the wrong side of a sea that America now owned, and the sea did the same story rhymed. The 17th Army under Hyakutake was penned into the jungle after the Americans seized [music] just enough of the island to build their airfields and then simply declined to chase him any further.

[music] It wasted away exactly as the others had. Thousands of soldiers dying of hunger and fever in a campaign that, from the American side, had essentially been won and then walked away from. And for the men on those cut-off islands, surrender was not something their commanders would permit. So, they did the only thing left to them.

They tried to farm. Tens of thousands of soldiers who had sailed out to help conquer an ocean spent their final year clearing jungle and coaxing sweet potatoes and taro out of thin volcanic dirt, sliding backward into something close to a Stone Age existence. And it was never nearly enough. And hunger does not kill cleanly on its own.

It holds the door open for everything else. Malaria, beriberi, dysentery, the tropical diseases that stalk a starving man and finish in a few weeks what the empty larder began. On the bypassed islands, the two killers worked as a team and no ship was coming with rice or medicine, or anything at all. And here is the detail even people who know this war often miss.

The dying was not random. It followed rank with grim precision. On the cut-off garrisons, officers survived at far higher rates than the men under them because the little food that remained flowed upward. And so, the ordinary soldier’s death rate on an island like Woleai climbed into the 80s while the officer class endured.

Broken Japanese radio messages read in Washington describe soldiers stretching a 10-day supply of rice across 25 days by chewing it raw instead of cooking it to make it last. That is what the far end of a severed supply line looks like, not a battle. A slow accounting in which the last thing to run out was the will to admit it was over.

The beaches got the cameras. This got the men. Six in every 10 of them. When the war finally ended, the proof was standing there in the flesh. Across dozens of bypassed islands, Allied troops came ashore to take the surrender of garrisons that had not fought a real battle in a year or more and found them hollow-eyed and skeletal.

Thousands of men still dutifully holding positions that had stopped mattering to the war long before. They had been beaten in every way that counts and no one had ever needed to storm their beach. The sea had done it quietly one sunken ship at a time. So, go back to the beaches and see them differently now. The assaults were real and they mattered.

Tarawa and Iwo Jima and Okinawa took islands America genuinely needed airfields and anchorages on the road to Japan and the men who took them are owed every honor. But they were the visible edge of the war, not its engine. Behind and around every island that was stormed lay a dozen that were simply sealed off and left to starve.

And the soldiers on them, more of them in total than died on all the famous beaches, were killed by ships that were never built. Cargoes that never sailed and a merchant fleet that had been dragged to the bottom of the Pacific one tanker at a time. There is a symmetry here worth holding on to. In the Atlantic, Germany tried to win the very same way by sinking the ships that fed an island enemy and it came within a hair of starving Britain out of the war.

>> [music] >> And it failed because the Allied shipyards out built the U-boats faster than the U-boats could sink [music] them. In the Pacific, America turned that same weapon on Japan. And it worked. Because Japan could neither replace the ships nor bring itself to protect them. One weapon merchant shipping >> [music] >> pointed in opposite directions across two oceans.

And it decided both halves of the war. Six in 10. That is the number to carry out of this. Not the flag on the mountain. >> [music] >> Not the reef at Tarawa. But the six of every 10 Japanese soldiers who died with no enemy in front of them. >> [music] >> Killed by the empty ocean at their backs. Japan built fortresses.

And it built an empire that could only breathe through ships. And then it left those ships undefended. America did not need to storm most of the fortresses. It cut the sea lane that fed them and let the arithmetic finish the job. The strongest island in the Pacific held roughly 100,000 men to the very end. Undefeated in any battle and beaten all the same.

Waiting for a fleet that the war had already sent to the seabed. Next time, the war that was won not by a battle but by a city that did not officially exist. Where 75,000 people built the most secret weapon in history without ever knowing what they were making.