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

by Ian W. Toll

John Paul Jones’s “I have not yet begun to fight!,” James Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship!,” and David Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

“Chop-chop,” one such man recalls being told by the Chinese madam; he had better undress quickly because his three dollars had bought him only three minutes with “Missie Fuck-Fuck.” As the woman entered, a timer was set. When it rang three minutes later, the encounter had ended whether the man had ejaculated or not, and the woman stood up and left the room.

Malnourished and overworked, driven like a herd of beasts, instructed how to act and what to think, deprived of any sound basis for rational judgment, threatened with torture and prison at the first divergence from enforced norms, the Japanese people were powerless to alter the doomed course chosen by their leaders. Having long since surrendered whatever rights and freedoms they had once possessed, they were fated to share in the coming Götterdämmerung of 1945.