The Pacific War (1941-1945) was a transformative experience for the United States military and naval services. Alongside the war with Germany, it established the United States as the preeminent power throughout the world. More specifically, it resulted in significant operational and tactical alterations and advancements to how the services fought the war and the U.S. Army Engineers especially. These alterations continue to influence military and naval processes to this day. Yet from a historical perspective, much of the story and significance associated with this war surprisingly remains unexamined. Thus, there exists ample opportunity within the discipline of military history to analyze these advancements and analyze their significance, not simply from a combat engineer perspective, but in the broader spectrum of United States’ history.
The United States war with Japan has within historiography received less scholarly and public attention than the war with Germany. Beyond that, the overwhelming amount of research and publication associated with the former remains focused upon the campaigns and leadership of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The historical record reveals a different reality. John C. McManus in his 2019 book Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943 cuts through the veneer of conventional historical perception, noting it was the U.S. Army that conducted most of the land warfare operations against the Japanese Empire.[1] While McManus and other historians such as Richard Frank and Walter R. Boreman have helped redirect some focus to the U.S. Army and its role in this war, there remain opportunities for more detailed research. This is especially true with specific branch contributions such as from the combat engineers.
Within the field of military history and its application in researching and analyzing the Second World War the prominent methodology currently is that of personal experience. The discipline has in large measure moved from a top-down analysis of the war to a more bottom-up study. Thus, military history has incorporated a great deal of sociology and anthropology into the examination of the American experience in the Pacific War. These are valuable contributions to the discipline and their incorporation does help contextualize war. For example, they afford the researcher opportunities to better conceptualize the climatic conditions of the Pacific War. Conditions that unlike the U.S. experience in Europe and the Mediterranean, were diametrically different than what most Americans at the time generally understood or experienced. If that were true, then how could the U.S. Army prepare for and more importantly, fight a war in such a unique environment?
The historical record of the U.S. Army’s Pacific War experience reveals that in the waning months of 1941 and early 1942, it was not appropriately prepared to fight this war, in this region, and at this time. From 1942 onward, the Army learned and adapted doctrine, operational processes, and tactical applications to meet the challenge. That was especially true of the U.S. Army’s combat engineers. Engineers within the U.S. Army historically have held a wide array of capabilities and missions and by necessity, there are multiple types of engineer units. This remained true of the Pacific War. While recent scholarly work has analyzed the work of engineer aviation units, for instance, there remains a breach when contemplating the roles and contributions of other engineer soldiers and units, most notably those in combat units.[2] These soldiers not only were responsible for performing the more well-known engineer tasks of constructing fighting positions, or hastily assembling footbridges, etc., but the added responsibility of fighting as infantrymen, and did so in the island jungles of the Southwest Pacific Area of General Douglas MacArthur’s command. Examination of these unique and generally overlooked soldiers and in a more traditional military history treatment, warrant pursuit.
The aim of this research project is to analyze how evolutions in U.S. Army combat engineer doctrine supported General MacArthur’s strategic objectives in the Southwest Pacific and in a broader sense, United States national strategic policy. At the core of this historical query are combat engineer operations and their evolution or revolution, during the war. Utilization of materials such as U.S. Army engineer doctrinal publications prior to and during the war offer tangible outputs revealing this shift. But, the doctrine does not incorporate the operational experience into how and more importantly why such shifts were necessary. We know that the United States won the Pacific War, but how did combat engineer experiences directly impact that outcome? Or did they in the Southwest Pacific Area? Combining traditional military historical practices and contemporary experiential analysis from primary sources drives the topical analysis of leaders such as MacArthur, inconspicuous engineer soldiers, and tactical advancement. One should think of this qualitative analysis concerning combat engineer evolution as a small piece of what Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox characterize as revolutions in warfare and its critical position within scholarly research and analysis.[3]
Two-plus decades of service (including deployments to Iraq) as an Engineer Officer in the U.S. Army lends itself to comprehension of Army operations holistically, and specifically with engineer training, tactics, procedures, and principles. Another personal connection to this topic was the experience of a great-uncle as an enlisted combat engineer soldier in the U.S. Sixth Army. This technical background combined with years of Second World War historical research results in the requisite skills and background to tackle the contributions of U.S. Army combat engineers in the Southwest Pacific Area.
Bibliography
McManus, John C. Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943. New York: Caliber, 2019.
Murray, Williamson and MacGregor Knox. “Thinking about revolutions in warfare.” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution, edited by MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, 1-14. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Pearson, Major Natalie M.. Engineer Aviation Units In The Southwest Pacific Theater During WWII, Tannenberg Publishing, 2015.
[1] John C. McManus, Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943. (New York: Caliber, 2019), 6.
[2] See Major Natalie M. Pearson, Engineer Aviation Units In The Southwest Pacific Theater During WWII, (Tannenberg Publishing, 2015).
[3] Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, “Thinking about revolutions in warfare,” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution, ed. MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12.
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