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Vice Admiral Hara then stated:
The victories of your carrier planes took the initiative away from the Japanese Navy. A defense type of war did not suit our purpose but due to your strong offensive we were not able to fight the type of war we had planned. You won the initiative and held it.
At the time war commenced we did not believe that carrier planes could attack land targets. Our
theory was that carriers should be a unit of "sneak thieves" that would make sudden and
unannounced attacks. The old idea that a ship's guns could not match shore batteries prevailed; similarly we did not believe carrier planes could match shore based planes.
Your navy, however, eventually made up the deficiency of performance of carrier planes as compared to land based planes by concentrating overwhelming numbers at the objective.
It was during these interrogations that Rear Admiral Kojima, Vice Admiral Hara and Rear Admiral M. Sumikawa expressed their interest to Rear Admiral C.T. Durgin in learning "what measures were being taken by General MacArthur to prevent the stranglehold that the Imperial General Staff had held over Japan for so long."
Admiral Sumikawa stated ,"I am truly afraid of the communists, especially now that bellies are hungry and a lot of city populations are unemployed and neither know nor desire to know how to farm." Admiral Hara added, "It will take much patience to get a democratic government really going. It is a fine thing that the Emperor is there to lend authority. He is much freer to exercise an influence for good, now that the Imperial General Staff is destroyed."
Truk, once a feared first-class naval base for waging offensive operations, was far too inadequately equipped to maintain even a strong defensive position. No doubt the lesson to be drawn is that nothing is certain in war with respect to a fixed facility. This is a fact that has been proven time and again since the construction of the ancient wall of China and may again be true in the future against hardened missile silos.
After the battle of Truk the United States had gained unquestionable superiority in the air and on the sea through out the central Pacific. The Americans laid to waste and paralyzed the once great anchorage in a coordinated strategy of air and surface attacks. How was it that such a great armada could advance within one hundred miles of the base undetected by the Fourth Fleet's submarines and reconnaissance aircraft? How the Japanese could be caught so completely by surprise is still one of the last remaining mysteries of the Pacific war.
Admiral Koga, before his departure from Truk, had indicated to his staff that an attack was not likely until after February 21st, although his reason for selecting this date has never been determined. A Japanese reconnaissance aircraft was dispatched from Truk on February 15th but never returned. This alone should have been enough to arouse suspicion and place the base on alert. Yet this was apparently never done. A Japanese radio operator had even monitored communications between American carrier groups before the attack. Nevertheless, six scout planes sent out to reconnoiter the sea around the base on February 15th found no evidence of the advancing carrier forces.
When the attack did occur, the American aircraft were picked up by Japanese radar a full thirty minutes before they crossed the reef. Not one defending Japanese aircraft was in the air to meet the attackers. When the Japanese did realize they were under attack, their resistance seemed uncoordinated and disorganized.
The chain of command at the naval base was equally curious and complex. The Commander of the
Fourth Fleet was responsible for defense of the air and sea around Truk, and the Army was in charge of defensive action in the event the islands within the lagoon were invaded. Yet the Commander of the Fourth Fleet was responsible for the Army's anti-aircraft weapons since he was also in charge of air defense. To make matters more ludicrous, a Palau-based admiral held command responsibilities for the 26th Air Flotilla at Truk. As far as reinforcements are concerned, once it appeared that an attack on Truk was imminent, the only support received was from the Army's 52nd Division, which came ashore largely without supplies, due to an attack by American submarines while en route to Truk.
Many vessels were caught in the lagoon by American raiders even after they had been alerted by the American scout planes which were detected over the base in early February. They had remained at the anchorage even though an attack was imminent. They did so either because they had not yet discharged their cargo, because their seaworthiness was questionable after damage from other air attacks or because they could not obtain the fuel necessary to get underway. Among other things, Truk suffered a fuel shortage, and what fuel there was in the tanks of the oilers at anchor had to be transferred to shoreside reservoirs before being distributed to the thirsty vessels. Even the docks were inadequate and could accommodate only a few vessels at any one time.
Before the war Truk was viewed as a powerful offensive naval and air base. Its geographic location threatened Allied bases to the east and south. It sat astride the routes for a return to Guam and the Philippines and offered security to the Japanese homeland against attack. Truk was the keystone of Japanese holdings in the western Pacific and became a dreaded obstacle and the subject of wild and imaginative conjecture on the part of the U.S. military. Professional U.S. military opinion, based on an appreciation of the advantages of geography, thought Truk was a powerful fortress well-equipped to withstand amphibious attack.
After Truk was neutralized and bypassed, it ceased to be an effective base from which to launch operations against advancing American forces. All the while, the Japanese waited for an invasion that never came. Summer uniforms for the troops were stored so that the final battle could be fought in clean uniforms in a military fashion. Even after Truk ceased to function as a navy base late in 1944, the former fortress still had a thirty-day food supply in reserve, despite the fact that the men were starving.
Japanese secrecy had aroused American suspicion and helped perpetuate the myth of an impregnable fortress – which Truk was not. Only the Japanese were aware of the base's real weaknesses. The Americans, familiar as they were with their own force and efficiency, applied western criteria in evaluating their enemy at Truk and so grossly overrated the lagoon's strength.
The Japanese themselves had neglected making the base, blessed as it was with one of the most remarkable anchorages and natural defenses in the world, into a facility from which to launch offensive action. It was simply an anchorage and hardly anything more; certainly it was not a fully equipped repair base. There were no large dry docks other than small floating facilities and no large repair shops. While Truk could service submarines, it could not perform major repairs. Rather than build huge shoreside facilities, the Japanese used their military budget to finance a large fleet of ships. It was a tragic mistake for a nation that would wage a war against the United States. They even lacked large piers and had only a small number of cranes. The reason so many ships were caught trying to discharge their cargo was that most of the supplies had to be transferred from ship to shore on lighters and small sampans. It was inefficiency in the extreme.
Unlike the Japanese encountered on Saipan and elsewhere, who fought from caves and rocky ridges with their backs against the wall, the Japanese at Truk fought only an air war. Thus there was very little the Japanese Army and Navy could do except grow sweet potatoes.
Aside from routine scouting missions and the single attack on the Intrepid, no real offensive attack was ever launched from Truk. There are those who even believe the attack on the American carrier was actually launched from the Marianas. Lieutenant Bertran Vogel, an intelligence officer, noted in an article published in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (Vol. 74, No. 548 (Oct. 1948)) that one Japanese officer, when interrogated after the war, reported that it was frequently necessary to beat Japanese pilots to get them to take off to meet the incoming American planes. Many of the guns which were used in the defense of Truk were of nineteenth century castings. They were in such short supply that the Japanese even had to remove their batteries from the reef islands for repositioning in caves. The men and supplies required to reinforce the base never got through in the quantity needed. This is evidenced by the fate of the 52nd Division, which lost 2,250 military personnel on February 17th while in convoy en rout to Truk. Three ships were sunk by American submarines in this one action alone.
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