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by
Ian W. Toll
Started reading
September 1, 2020
these people are appealing to the ignorance, the prejudice, and the fears of Americans
He spoke directly to the American people by radio, and had done so with great success
MacArthur’s conduct on the first day of the war had been at least as culpable as that of Kimmel or Short.
MacArthur had remained cocooned at his headquarters and refused to communicate with his air commanders, despite their repeated efforts to reach him.
MacArthur never answered for errors and derelictions that seemed at least as blameworthy and certainly more avoidable than those in Hawaii.
MacArthur a narcissist and a megalomaniac,
Few Americans knew how unpopular MacArthur was among the rank and file of his own army.
Japan’s evident weakness invited a more direct assault upon the enemy’s inner ring of defenses.
In this terrible global war, no major strategic decision could be separated from its long-term political or foreign policy consequences.
Defining “unconditional surrender” had been a recurring nuisance since FDR had first articulated the controversial formula—suddenly and rashly, it seemed to many—at a press conference in Casablanca in January 1943.
the “unconditional surrender” formulation was troublesome because it was ambiguous.
It was easier to define it in the abstract than to explain how it would be applied in practice.
Lee had come to Grant thinking about his men. He asked Grant for his terms of surrender. Grant said, “Unconditional surrender.”
the themes Roosevelt intended to emphasize in this parable of Grant and Lee. He was determined that the Axis powers should recognize that they had been utterly and permanently defeated.
Therefore, it was necessary to insist upon the formality of an unconditional surrender. Behind that formality, however, lay the implied promise of a magnanimous peace.
But what requests were reasonable?
“Japan can be forced to accept our terms of surrender by the use of sea and air power without an invasion of the Japanese homeland.”
he was absolutely sure that the war could be (and must be) won by some combination of a sea blockade and aerial bombardment, followed by a truce and a peaceful occupation of Japan by Allied forces.
surrender, someone in Tokyo would have to speak for the Japanese regime. Who was that to be?
The answers bore heavily on strategic and diplomatic choices that Allied leaders would have to confront well before the end of the Pacific campaign.
In the event that the regime in Tokyo did surrender, would Japan’s vast overseas armies—in Manchuria, Korea, China, and elsewhere—also lay down arms?
They were under instructions to consider purely military factors. Political or foreign policy arguments lay outside their scope of authority.
it appears that the president chose to allow the JCS planning process to continue without his interference.§
In San Francisco, Spruance recalled, King continued to argue the case for CAUSEWAY, “but finally gave in and said he would recommend [Luzon-Iwo Jima-Okinawa] to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, which he did.”
On October 3, the JCS issued new directives sending MacArthur into Luzon in December 1944, the marines into Iwo Jima in January 1945, and a large combined navy-army-marine force into Okinawa in March 1945.
in arguing for an invasion of Formosa, King had finally met his match.
Given the breakneck pace of technological and doctrinal evolution, they would have much to learn and absorb.
King eventually selected John McCain for the job.
One of the downed planes was a Grumman TBM Avenger piloted by Lieutenant (jg) George H. W. Bush, a future president of the United States.
In principle, they were ready and willing at all times to throw out their plans and adopt new ones, to move quickly to exploit changing circumstances.
In retrospect, then, it was remarkable that such momentous shifts in strategy could be and often were decided in the eleventh hour.
It’s the Divine Wind, the Kamikaze!”
But Tokyo reported that the “hero god” Arima had deliberately crash-dived into an American aircraft carrier, and that the target had been sunk.
the regime was preparing to launch suicide tactics on a mass scale.
The curtain had been raised on the last act of the Pacific air war, when Japanese planes w...
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These tokko operations would include aviators and aircraft, but also a range of other purpose-built suicide weapons including speedboats, scuba divers, manned rockets, and small submersibles.
Many Japanese resisted strongly, arguing that it misconstrued traditional samurai warrior ideals (bushido).
Potent taboos governed (and still govern) discussion of the subject.
Toyoda’s Combined Fleet staff had been debating and planning suicide operations long before the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
In fact, kamikaze operations had been studied, debated, and planned for more than a year prior to their first appearance in the Pacific.
In March 1944, before his fall from power, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo had approved preliminary plans for dedicated suicide units.
“This method of warfare, I am sure, will never become ineffective. On the contrary, its possibilities are inexhaustible—it will become better and better.”
But the time and resources dedicated to these programs belied the myth that the kamikaze era began as a spontaneous, grassroots movement in October 1944.
As defeat loomed in late 1944, the entire nation was poised to suffer a cataclysmic loss of face. The combat-suicide of the kamikaze pilots, the flower of Japanese youth, could be seen as a ritualistic collective sacrifice that redeemed some portion of the national giri.
For centuries of Japanese history, the samurai had ruled the country and its people. Even more than in medieval Europe or other feudal societies, the elite warrior caste had dominated and shaped the nation’s culture.
But bushido had always been an elite, class-bound creed, and was not necessarily suited to mass adoption across the population. In the transition, it underwent subtle but significant distortions.
But traditional bushido had not imposed an obligation to abhor retreat or surrender even when a battle had turned hopeless,
The explicit glorification of death in battle—death as an end in itself—was a recent phenomenon in Japanese culture,
None of those ideas was anchored in the samurai tradition.
elements of the ancient warrior codes did not serve the purposes of the ultranationalist junta, so they were simply whitewashed out of history, education, and civic discourse.
