Lethal Tides by Catherine Musemeche

Author:Catherine Musemeche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

With deadlines looming, Sears had to trust that Mary Grier would be able to locate a wide range of critical references. She had performed brilliantly for the New Guinea report and in record time. For the next wave Grier had to be out of the office most days, tracking down references in the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian and traveling to New York or other states when necessary to peruse references in military libraries. It would be up to Sears, Dora Henry, and Fenner Chace to put the information together, construct diagrams, figures, and tables, and to edit for accuracy. The pressure was intense, but Sears was determined that the team would finish the reports on time and supply enough information to the navy to avoid another amphibious disaster.

Meeting that standard would pose challenges for Sears and her team for the next target—the remote, inaccessible, heavily defended and mountainous Mariana Islands, in the Central Pacific Ocean—slotted for attack in the summer of 1944.

The Marianas, along with the Marshalls, the Carolines, and Palau were handed over to Japan under a mandate from the League of Nations after World War I. As a condition of custodianship, the Japanese had agreed not to establish bases or fortify the islands with defenses. Yet there was little evidence they had abided by the terms and plenty that they had not.

The total land area of the Mandated Islands was a thousand square miles, but their range extended even farther, up to fourteen hundred miles in an east-to-west direction and over five hundred miles north to south across the ocean. With this amount of centrally located real estate under Japanese control, if war broke out, Japanese naval and air forces could easily take control of the entire Western Pacific. The Philippines would be cut off from American protection, Guam would be surrounded, and Wake Island would be within easy striking distance.

Once they acquired the Mandated Islands, Japan restricted shipping and, after 1935, banned foreign vessels of any kind from docking there. A veil of secrecy allowed the Japanese to fortify island defenses and build airstrips, ports, and fuel depots. By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, there were already eight fully outfitted bases with troops in the Mandates. Their strategic location positioned Japan to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor and continue their island-grabbing hot streak throughout the Western Pacific. And in the hours and days after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese carried out Major Ellis’s worst nightmare. They seized Guam, invaded Wake, and attacked the Philippines.

Roosevelt and Churchill had been itching to take those islands out of Japanese hands and to avenge Pearl Harbor as soon as it made sense to do so. The Joint Chiefs directed Nimitz to get on with it.

Invading the Marianas, however, meant treading into Japan’s Absolute Defense Sphere, a perimeter designated by the Japanese late in 1943 after they had suffered major defeats at Guadalcanal and Tarawa. The southern perimeter extended from Western New Guinea through the

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