Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

IN AN AWARD-WINNING ESSAY FOR THE U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PUBLISHED after the war, Captain J. C. Wylie Jr. argued that Japan had been beaten by a synergetic combination of “sequential” and “cumulative” operational strategies. The first was represented by the westward naval-amphibious offensive, a sequence of battles and invasions carrying Allied forces ever closer to Japan. The sequential campaign could be diagrammed with arrows on a map, indicating the territorial gains of fleets and armies. It lent itself to a conventional chronological narrative. It was intuitively graspable, even to laymen without formal military training or education. To those who had followed the war in the newspapers, or read the early campaign histories, the sequential campaign was the story of the Pacific War.