Vanished by Wil S. Hylton Read Free Book Online

Japan’s push into mainland China in the 1930s may seem savage, and by modern standards it was. The Japanese atrocities in Manchuria and Nanking still resonate among the great horrors of modern history. Yet it was difficult for Allied countries at the time to object on principled grounds. The American conquest of the West , which dominated the preceding century, spilled no shortage of blood in the name ofpolitical destiny, while the British Empire sprawled across a quarter of the globe.
    What the Japanese saw in China was not just opportunity. They saw a resource they could scarcely live without. Japan’s population had been growing since the turn of the century, until the home islands were filled with more than four hundred people per square mile . At the same time, the country’s military economy was faltering, and the American stock market collapse had eviscerated the demand for high-dollar exports like silk. The combination of a growing population and a sinking economy was devastating. With labor strikes mounting in Tokyo, and food and land in short supply, Japanese political leaders gazed achingly across the sea toward the lush, fertile, and largely open Chinese mainland. As Iris Chang explained in
The Rape of Nanking
,
“ China was twentieth-century Japan’s manifest destiny .”
    But with the Japanese assault on China came a defensive mandate: the greatest threat to the imperial project was not Chinese resistance but the massive US naval fleet parked on the Pacific. To American leaders, the Japanese expansion represented both a military and an economic threat, and by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the carnage may have been shocking, but the war itself was not. US commanders had been planning for it all year, flying spy missions over the Japanese islands, patrolling the region with submarines, and fortifying US bases in anticipation of trouble. All of which made the strike on Pearl Harbor seem sensible to Japan: if war with the United States was inevitable, then the best option was to strike first, strike hard, and keep striking, so the Americans stayed on their heels.
    The Japanese advantage held into 1942, as imperial forces followed Pearl Harbor with a race across the Pacific: northeast to the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska near Alaska, southeast to Tarawa and the Solomon Islands, and southwest across a constellation of larger islands—Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea, and the Philippines, which together comprised about twice as much land as Germany, France, andItaly combined. Some of those captured islands were rich with natural resources, while others, like the diminutive atolls of Truk, Yap, and Palau, served mainly as a strategic buffer. Within six months of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese controlled a radius of three thousand miles in some directions, across a string of disparate islands. Any effort to restrain the empire would require American forces to beat a path through those islands and the garrisons stationed on them.
    Suddenly, the clunky, clumsy B-24 was essential. Whatever its flaws, the Liberator was the only heavy bomber capable of crossing the vast distances between many Japanese islands. As US forces prepared to push across the Pacific, production of the B-24 surged like never before. Soon there were assembly plants in San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Tulsa—but none would symbolize the rise of the Liberator like the facility near Detroit known as Willow Run.
    Managed by the Ford Motor Company, Willow Run was in some respects a greater engineering feat than the planes it produced. It was the largest factory in the world , spread across 3.5 million square feet, with 28,855 windows and 152,000 fluorescent lights. The assembly line traveled so far that, when it reached the edge of the county, designers built a fifty-foot-diameter lazy Susan to rotate the line and avoid paying extra taxes. As American forces drove into the Pacific in 1943, the pace of