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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ian W. Toll
Started reading
September 1, 2020
about 270,000 Japanese troops and other military personnel were on Luzon—but his forces were scattered widely
That left the road to Manila wide open, but Yamashita did not intend to defend the city or its bay.
For more than three years, Japanese forces in the Philippines had given proof of their capacity for wanton violence and sadism directed against innocents.
But the stinging humiliation of defeat, combined with signs of jubilation among ordinary Filipinos, incited an unprecedented series of savage reprisals.
The Japanese had lashed Filipino civilians to the outer walls of strategic buildings, perhaps expecting them to serve as human shields.
Mass execution orders were distributed in writing to Japanese troops.
On February 13, Admiral Iwabuchi directed his army forces to kill all civilians remaining in the Japanese lines:
The sack of Manila exposed the worst pathologies of Japan’s military culture and ideology. It was a glaring indictment of the “no surrender” principle, revealing the depraved underside of what the Japanese glorified as gyokusai, “smashed jewels.”
stewing in their own fear and hatred, they went berserk
Until the very end, MacArthur appeared to be in denial about the unfolding tragedy in Manila.
MacArthur ignored evidence that the Japanese were strongly fortified in the old city.
There was no more talk of a victory parade. Much of Manila was simply gone.
A sanitation emergency threatened; the city’s water supply had been secured, but the water and sewage mains in the stricken areas were ruptured.
The files were soon bulging with damning evidence of systematic war crimes, collected with an intention of building a case that “the sack of Manila and its attendant horrors are not the act of a crazed garrison in a last-ditch, berserk defense but the coldly planned purpose of the Japanese high command.”55 (That case was not proven, but Yamashita would hang nonetheless.)
The Meiji emperor’s “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors,” issued in 1882, was Japan’s official code of ethics for military personnel.
act with violence, the world will in the end detest you and look upon you as wild beasts.
Thereafter, within the span of a single generation, for reasons that are still puzzled over and debated by scholars, Japan’s military culture took an abrupt turn toward the barbarous.
Meiji’s warning thus became prophecy.
And in the end, as Hirohito’s grandfather had foretold, the world came to detest them and to look upon them as wild beasts.
Yamashita had avoided a reprise of MacArthur’s strategic blunders of 1941–1942, when the defenders had waged an untenable battle on the plains while failing to make adequate preparations for a siege until it was too late.
the core of Yamashita’s Shobo Group held out in Luzon’s northern mountains for more than eight months, until Japan’s official surrender in August 1945.
Two hundred thousand Japanese troops died on Luzon;
Overall, according to Japanese government statistics, the army suffered cumulative losses of 368,700 dead in the Philippines.
That amounted to a suicide order: that Kuribayashi must defend the island to the last man.
it was the only island in the region with terrain suitable for airfields to accommodate heavy bombers such as the B-29.
Iwo Jima a prize worth possessing,
“The Japanese weren’t on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwo Jima.”
General Kuribayashi did not hold out hope that his men could win the battle for Iwo Jima. They were to fight a delaying action, to inflict maximum casualties on the Americans, and (eventually) to die to the last man.
On February 16, 1945, as the American invasion fleet gathered offshore,
On February 15, the electrifying news was announced on every ship: Task Force 58 was headed for Tokyo, where it would raid airbases and aircraft manufacturing plants before turning south to support an amphibious landing on Iwo Jima.
Task Force 58 launched 1,100 warplanes from seventeen aircraft carriers.
Despite the challenges presented by the weather, the Tokyo raids had been a smashing success.
The strikes were held up by naval aviators as Exhibit A in their ongoing meta-argument with the USAAF. The navy had argued that dive bombing and low-altitude strafing and rocket attacks could hit targets on the ground more reliably than the high-altitude precision bombing practiced by the Superfortresses. The results at the Tachikawa and Nakajima plants appeared to justify their claims.
The Americans were braced for a bloodbath on Iwo Jima.
The defenders would remain underground, out of sight, and out of range, and make the attackers pay for every inch of territory they gained.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal was on hand to record the scene. As six marines raised the flagpole, with the flag snapping smartly in the breeze, Rosenthal pressed the shutter button on his camera without even looking through the viewfinder. He sent his undeveloped film roll to Guam, where it was developed by an AP photo editor and sent on to the United States. The hastily snapped photograph, an accidental masterpiece of composition, became the single most iconic image of the Pacific War.
In fact, the conquest of Suribachi was just one early phase of a long and costly battle.
Never before in the Pacific War had the marines attacked at night. It was not in their doctrine or training to do so.
MacArthur’s implied criticism had been grossly unjust.
the USAAF had kept the faith with their precision-bombing orthodoxy,
When the Twentieth Air Force was set up under the aegis of the JCS, its chief mission was to employ precision-bombing
Major General Curtis LeMay had previously served under Hansell in Europe,
LeMay, a natural-born self-promoter,
56 It was no coincidence that the world learned of Japanese atrocities in Manila just two weeks before the start of the firebombing campaign.
The Shitamachi was chosen, in short, because it would burn better than any other part of the capital.
Compared to past missions, that was nearly 5 miles closer to the ground.
Finally, well after dark, 334 Superforts were airborne and on their way to Tokyo.
Cloud cover was less than expected, varying from about 10 to 30 percent over the target, so the lead bombardiers had no trouble identifying their aiming points.
A strong, dry wind was gusting that night, and the initial fires spread quickly.
It was the most devastating air raid of the war, in either Europe or the Pacific. It left more dead than any other single military action in history.
