The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944

by Ian W. Toll

Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese warplanes sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off the Malayan coast—the first time in naval history that capital ships at sea had been destroyed by air attack.

the influence of bushido, the traditional samurai warrior code that exalted an honorable death in combat.

The time to consider the risk in turning on the lights for a night recovery is before launching the attack. If the planes are to be launched so late in the day that a night recovery is probable, and if the tactical situation is such that you are not willing to do what is required to get the planes back safely, then you have no business launching the attack in the first place.

ritual seppuku, or suicide,

a suicidal attack, usually in the form of a massed banzai charge.

A Japanese warrior ablaze with the Yamato spirit

banzai charge into the American lines.

Families were bound by the oyaku-shinju (parent-child death pact).

The self-destructive paroxysm could not be explained by deference to orders, or by obeisance to the death cult of imperial bushido.

Suicide, the Japanese of Saipan earnestly believed, was the sole alternative to a fate worse than death.

In the waters off Marpi Point, cruisers and destroyers continued to provide call-fire on Japanese targets. The crews watched as hundreds of civilians leapt from the sheer face of “Banzai cliff” and plummeted into the rocks and surf below.

everyone was convinced that no Japanese would ever surrender.”

The conquest of Saipan was the most costly operation to date of the Pacific campaign.

A new slogan, “One hundred million smashed jewels,” carried the implication that the entire nation was to share the fate of Saipan’s civilians.

quasi-religious kamikaze (“divine wind”)

Every problem, deficiency, or impasse was put down to an “inadequacy of regulations”—but as new regulations proliferated, they took on an inflexible logic of their own.