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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ian W. Toll
Started reading
September 1, 2020
Captain Inoguchi, in charge of training the new aviators for kamikaze attacks, said that the problem was essentially spiritual—to inculcate the will to carry it out. As for tactics, he said, “the ordinary technique of the pilot is sufficient; no special training methods are necessary.”
The kamikaze corps was inaugurated on October 20, 1944, on the same day (virtually in the same hour) that General MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte
The Japanese, to the very end, believed that by spiritual means they could fight on equal terms with you. . . . We believed our spiritual confidence in victory would balance any scientific advantages.”63 This was religious dogma, rooted in the divinity of the emperor and (through him) the Japanese race.
this was to be Japan’s guiding strategic vision: to display to the Americans the full force and fury of their Yamato spirit.
One of the looming “known unknowns” about the pending operation was the scale and depth of Japanese air resistance.
The Leyte operation differed from all prior Pacific amphibious landings in that the enemy could rely on depth and dispersal of his air reinforcements.
Kurita was being ordered to annihilate himself and his fleet, while trying to inflict some compensatory blows on the American fleet.
He was to lead the naval banzai charge that was to secure the Imperial Navy’s honor in defeat.
Since Halsey had taken command of the fleet in August, relieving Raymond Spruance, there had been a pattern of confusion, sloppiness, and impulsiveness in basic procedures.
No one in the Seventh Fleet suspected that Halsey had taken his whole enormous force north, or that he had left the gate at San Bernardino standing wide open, without so much as a destroyer picket to raise the alarm.
Nishimura’s real duty was to suffer glorious annihilation, guns blazing to the last, thus sustaining the Japanese navy’s honor in defeat.
The first massed suicide attack fell on Thomas Sprague’s Taffy 1,
This small cadre of suicide airplanes, whose attack came as an addendum to the great naval battle that was just winding down, presented a baleful foretaste of what was to come.
The battle effectively brought the naval war for the Pacific to an end.
Kurita had been directly ordered, in no uncertain terms, to charge into Leyte Gulf and attack the American transport fleet and beachhead. He had been expressly instructed to press on even at the risk of complete annihilation. Why had he chosen not to do so?
Halsey had no compelling reason to concentrate his entire sixty-five-ship fleet against the nineteen-ship carrier force to his north, but he had urgent reasons to guard the strait.
Moreover, he did not have to pick between alternatives, because he had more than enough strength to deal with Kurita and Ozawa simultaneously.
The role of the Japanese carriers, Ozawa told the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, was strictly limited: “A decoy, that was our first primary mission. . . . The chief concern was to lure your forces further north; we expected complete destruction.”135 More than six years after that important disclosure, Halsey still claimed to be perplexed by the failure of Ozawa’s carriers to put up a better fight.
But until his death in 1959, the proud old fleet admiral fought a losing rearguard action against the hardening judgment of history.
The home islands were all but destitute of natural resources,
Through the 1920s, foreign trade had met the requirements, and Japanese diplomacy was shaped by the need to protect and sustain that trade. But in the 1930s, the era of Japan’s “dark valley,” the ascendant militarist-imperialist regime was determined to seize and colonize overseas territories that could supply the necessary inputs to its industrial economy and war machine.
In a sense, the B-29’s introduction into service was a microcosm of the whole saga of American mobilization for the Second World War. At every turn, leaders chose velocity of production over efficiency, thrift, safety, or even prudence.
The era of the kamikaze had arrived.
October 25.
but from that date to the end of the war, the kamikazes were the single biggest story in Japanese newspapers and radio broadcasts.
In Japan, where shame always offered a practical lever for social control, the kamikazes were held up as exemplars for ordinary civilians.
With remarkable speed, the kamikaze corps was expanded and institutionalized in both the navy and the army.
Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that a majority of Japanese airmen were not only willing but eager to give their lives as kamikazes.
Kamikazes were a privileged caste.
On the first day of November, waves of suicide planes descended on Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet in Leyte Gulf.
Belatedly, the Americans grasped that the enemy was determined to pour reinforcements into the island at any cost.
But the Japanese headquarters in Manila was committed to win the battle for Leyte, and continued to push reinforcements into the island through the first week of December 1944.
Since Manila Bay was under constant air attack, the Japanese judged that there was no point in trying to save the ships for some future purpose. If they were not sent out immediately, they were likely to be destroyed at anchor.
For the second time in two months, Nimitz was forced to question Halsey’s fitness for the critically important job he held.
“difficult to understand taking the task force right into the dangerous semicircle of the typhoon . . . he was very concerned about it and very upset about it, because that is a reflection on your seamanship.
The court’s formal report, issued in early January 1945, placed a “preponderance of responsibility” on Halsey for failing to dodge the storm, and faulted him for “errors of judgment under stress of war operations.”
In the hot summer of 1943, an epidemic of racial violence swept through many American cities.
The highlight (or lowlight) of the campaign was a speech given by the president on September 23 at the Statler Hotel in Washington. The occasion was a banquet hosted by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. FDR
The “Fala speech,” as it came to be known, was a partisan stemwinder—the angriest, most caustic, most hard-hitting philippic of FDR’s long political career.
(Halsey was right when he said: “I am afraid that my superiors worried about my judgment in the presence of a juicy target.”
In the kamikaze the Japs have the most effective secret weapon of the war. Certainly the most sinister and the most terrifying to contemplate.”
THE NORTHWEST coast of Luzon,
The greatest invasion fleet yet assembled in the Pacific, comprising more than eight hundred combatant and transport ships, began arriving in the gulf on January 6, 1945.
the designated landing date, was set for January 9.
The fleet was too big, and the gulf too small, to allow for high-speed evasive maneuvering. Most ships were obliged to remain at anchor throughout the operation. They were close-packed and stationary.
For the first time in the war, the Americans now encountered the fearsome Shinyo (“Ocean Shaker”) suicide speedboats.
Suicidal Japanese swimmers even attempted to carry explosives to the hulls of American ships, concealing their approach by hiding under floating debris.
Now, by Tokyo’s order, all remaining aircraft were to be launched against the American fleet in suicide attacks.
But there was never any shortage of volunteers to fly suicide missions.
In the five days before the first amphibious landings in Lingayen Gulf, kamikazes struck or near-missed thirty Allied vessels.
