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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ian W. Toll
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November 17, 2020 - June 15, 2021
When a powerful Japanese fleet approached on the night of June 18, 1944, Admiral Mitscher asked permission to take Task Force 58 west to intercept it. Wary of the risk (however remote) of an end-run attack on the beachhead, Spruance denied the request. On the morning of June 19, the Japanese carriers launched three large airstrikes against the Fifth Fleet. In a daylong aerial battle nicknamed the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” F6F Hellcats met and slaughtered the attackers, sending more than three hundred Japanese aircraft down in flames. But Task Force 58 was too far east to launch a
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By tethering Task Force 58 to Saipan, Spruance had made the calculated decision to allow the Japanese to strike the first aerial blow, while simultaneously placing his carriers out of range for a counterstrike. In the (admittedly short) history of carrier warfare, the decision was unprecedented. To Spruance’s critics, his tactics had seemed not only wrong but obviously wrong, and therefore unpardonable.
The debate exposed a rift in the ranks of the U.S. Navy between traditional naval line officers who had served chiefly in battleships and other surface warships (“blackshoes”) and an insurgent cadre of professional naval aviators (“brownshoes”). The brownshoes argued that a blackshoe like Spruance was not qualified to command the fast carrier task force because he lacked an innate feeling for the new capabilities of carrier aviation.
August 1944 brought an important command transition. Admiral Halsey, who had held a sub-theater command (COMSOPAC) in the South Pacific since October 1942, was brought north to relieve Spruance. The changeover would occur at the conclusion of the Marianas campaign. Spruance and his staff would take a well-deserved leave in the States, and then return to Pearl Harbor to plan future operations. Halsey would command the fleet until January 1945, and then be relieved in turn by Spruance.
His bloody-minded tirades against the Japanese had been received with enthusiasm, not only by Allied servicemen in the Pacific but also civilians in the United States. Like many celebrities, he had a famous tagline. “The way to win this war,” he said, “is to kill Japs, kill Japs and kill more Japs.”27 He signed off his messages: “Keep ’em dying.” Referring to atrocities against American prisoners, he declared ominously, “They’ll be properly repaid.” He told the press he intended to ride the emperor Hirohito’s famous white horse through downtown Tokyo, and had addressed himself directly to the
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King eventually selected John McCain for the job. McCain was a very senior vice admiral, having graduated Annapolis in 1906. He had been one of King’s most trusted deputies in Washington. He had been the air commander in the South Pacific during the Guadalcanal campaign, and then ran the aeronautics bureau of the Navy Department.
Naval etiquette gave leeway in certain circumstances, but in general, drunken aviators were not permitted to lay hands on a three-star admiral and heave him into the sea.
On a map of the Pacific, a 3,000-mile-long arc of island groups reached from Japan through the Bonins, the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Palaus, terminating in the southern Philippines. Having taken the Marianas, American forces would now extend control southward down that long arc. Task Force 38 would cover the impending Operation STALEMATE amphibious landings on islands in the Caroline and Palau archipelagoes. By November, if all went as planned, they would occupy or otherwise neutralize every important island in the chain from the Marianas in the north to Mindanao in the south. The
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Up the crescent, between the Marianas and Japan, were the little islands known as the Bonin and Volcano groups, called the Nanpō Shotō by the Japanese. The Americans had nicknamed them the “Jimas.”35 They had become a strategic hot spot since the Americans had landed in Saipan ten weeks earlier. Iwo Jima was especially significant as a way station for enemy air reinforcements headed south.
Davison’s carriers lost only five airplanes in the operation. 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. His plane was hit and damaged by antiaircraft fire over Chichi Jima. Bush parachuted into the ocean and was later rescued by a submarine, the Finback—but his two aircrewmen, and six other aviators from other downed planes, were captured, tortured, and executed by Japanese military personnel on the island. Four of the prisoners were partly eaten by Japanese officers in an episode of ritualistic
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THE JAPANESE GARRISON, 11,000 MEN STRONG, was drawn from the crack Fourteenth Division of the Kwantung Army. The commanding officer was Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, a heavily decorated “star” officer who had commanded the division’s Second Regiment. The force had shipped in from Manchuria after the sudden loss of the Marshall Islands earlier that year. Tokyo did not expect the Peleliu garrison to survive, and had made no plans to evacuate survivors. These seasoned veterans were expected to sell the island as dearly as possible, and then die to the last man.
Since their arrival in May, the Japanese had worked tirelessly to improve and extend Peleliu’s underground fortifications. Colonel Nakagawa was a leading champion of defensive fukkaku (“honeycomb”) tactics, which relied on burrowing under the ground into bunkers and tunnels.
Colonel Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, the regimental commander, intended to take high ground, one ridge at a time, and he was willing to suffer heavy losses to do it. But gaining possession of a ridge would avail the marines nothing if they could not hold
Marines who had fought on multiple Pacific island battlefields agreed that Peleliu was the worst. The pitiless equatorial sun beat down on a lifeless moonscape of ivory-colored coral rock, and temperatures routinely surpassed 110 degrees. After three days on the line, the men looked like wraiths: lips blistered, hair matted, coral dust caked on unshaven faces. Sweat ran into their eyes, which already ached from the glare of the sun. The acrid smell and biting taste of cordite stung their noses and throats. Their hands were raw and abraded from crawling on the rocks. No one could escape the
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Down on the island’s southern lowlands, the rear-echelon engineering and logistics forces were already hard at work converting Peleliu into an advanced operating base. Three navy construction battalions (“Seabees”) had come ashore on D plus 3. They had improvised an ingenious quarter-mile-long causeway made of pontoon barges, allowing vehicles to drive directly out of the LSTs and over the reefs to Orange Beach. By D plus 4, the airfield and bivouac areas were teeming with trucks and bulldozers.
The Seabees had orders to extend and grade the main runway to a length of 6,500 feet so that it could accommodate B-24s.
A squadron of Marine F4U Corsairs flew into the airfield on September 19 and commenced ground-support operations against Japanese positions on the nearby ridgeline. They dropped 500-pound bombs and napalm, often from very low altitude. These may have been the shortest bombing runs of the entire Pacific War. The Corsairs took off, banked right immediately, and flew low over enemy-held positions in the hills. They dropped their payloads, banked right again, and landed. A typical bombing run lasted less than two minutes; the pilots did not even bother to retract their landing gear.
The regiment suffered 1,749 casualties in the first eight days of the battle for Peleliu. Attacking units had suffered 56 percent casualties, including a staggering 71 percent in the 1st Battalion. They had little to show for those awful losses, having made barely any progress into the enemy-held badlands.
As Gene Sledge’s King Company (3rd Battalion, 5th Marines) moved up the West Road on September 21, they passed a column of 1st Marines coming the other way. Sledge saw immediately that the regiment’s numbers had been severely culled. “What once had been companies in the 1st Marines looked like platoons,” he wrote, and “platoons looked like squads.”
As on Saipan two months earlier, clouds of bloated metallic greenish-blue flies rose from the rotting, unburied bodies of the dead. They buzzed loudly in the air, though they seemed to prefer to crawl rather than fly. They fed on the remains of discarded food, on excrement, on blood and bodies; they crawled into the men’s canteen cups and lighted down upon their ration cans.
By the first week of October, most of the front-line infantrymen were nearing the end of their endurance. Three weeks might as well have been three months or even three years. Sledge remembered Peleliu as “a nether world of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle made savages of us all.”41 Lieutenant McCandless had compared Peleliu, as did many others who served and fought there, to Dante’s vision of hell in The Inferno. But a closer fictional likeness was found
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On much of the battlefield it was impossible to dig graves in the rocky ground. Bodies rotted in the heat for weeks. They bloated, darkened, and broke open like rotten fruit. Sledge’s unit found their way around the terrain by using familiar corpses as landmarks. “It was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed, to bloated, to maggot-infested rotting, to partially exposed bones—like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time.”
Trophy-taking and mutilation of enemy dead were prohibited by standing orders. But in that disordered environment, amidst such unremitting brutality, it seemed beside the point to object directly on moral grounds.
“The war had gotten to my friend,” Sledge reflected. “He was a twentieth-century savage now, mild mannered though he still was. I shuddered to think that I might do the same thing if the war went on and on.”46
5th Marines were the last Marine Corps regiment remaining on Peleliu. They were trucked to the north end of the island, where a new bivouac area had been prepared for them. They burned their old uniforms and boondockers and drew new ones, and enjoyed the small pleasures of showers, sleeping tents, and a proper Quonset mess hall with hot meals.
Peleliu had knocked three marine regiments out of action; they would have to be rebuilt over time with a large proportion of replacements.
The 1st Division had suffered casualties of 6,786, of whom more than 1,300 were killed in action. Many survivors would suffer the effects of long-term post-traumatic stress disorder, although the condition was not yet known by that name.
message from Admiral Halsey: “The sincere admiration of the entire Third Fleet is yours for the hill blasting, cave smashing extermination of 11,000 slant-eyed gophers. It has been a tough job, extremely well done.”
Even when the Wildcats held peaks and ridgelines above their heads, the Japanese might yet hold the interiors of the hills. The Americans sometimes heard Japanese voices in the rock beneath them, or smelled Japanese cooking rising through hidden air vents. Cave openings sealed by artillery might later be blasted open from within, and a party of Japanese fighters sneak out to attack from unexpected directions.
covered.”50 On November 24, 1944, Colonel Nakagawa radioed his final report to the division headquarters on Koror. He burned the regimental colors. He had fewer than one hundred men remaining; they would form small infiltration squads and launch one last round of night attacks. Nakagawa apparently committed ritual suicide,
The battle for Peleliu passed mostly unnoticed in the United States. A few brief press accounts appeared in the back pages of newspapers. The news from Europe in those weeks was more stirring and sensational: Allied armies had liberated Paris and were sweeping across France toward Germany. In the Pacific, there was more interest in MacArthur’s march toward the Philippines. The Palau Islands were remote and obscure even by Pacific standards, and it was difficult to convey how this fight differed from a hundred other island battles. Nor was Peleliu a particularly large battle on the scale of the
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Nearly the entire Japanese garrison of 11,000 perished. Even accounting for the disparity in the numbers killed—inevitable given the customary Japanese refusal to surrender—those results gave a casualty ratio of nearly one to one.
U.S. infantrymen had come to regard their enemy as a vicious and sadistic creature, barely human, who had to be rooted out of the ground and exterminated. All the same, they could not help but admire the enemy, even while hating him from the bottom of their hearts, for his tenacity, his cunning, his stamina, and his implacable courage in the face of certain defeat and death.
THE THIRD OBJECTIVE OF OPERATION STALEMATE (after Peleliu and Anguar) was Ulithi Atoll, 345 miles northeast of Peleliu. This oblong loop of palm-crowned sandspits would serve as a new fleet anchorage, almost exactly midway between Guam and the Palaus.
supporting mobile logistics forces. Eniwetok, which had served a similar function for the prior six months, would be reduced to the status of a way station linking Pearl Harbor to the Marianas.
1944, they lived much as their ancestors had lived for millennia, fishing in the lagoon and tending small plots of taro. They traveled and fished in hand-carved outrigger canoes—paddling through the surf, raising triangular sails of woven fiber, and speeding away “like a flock of gulls skimming the incredibly blue floor of the lagoon.”
A navy civil affairs officer persuaded King Ueg to relocate all of his subjects to a single island in the southern part of the atoll. In return, the occupiers would provide food, medical care, and other desired goods for the duration of the war. After initial hesitation, Ueg agreed.
One island, Mog Mog, was set aside as a fleet recreation area; in time it would support a network of baseball diamonds, basketball courts, barbeque pits, outdoor amphitheaters, and mess halls.
That amounted to about half of Task Force 38, an armada of sixty steel ships with blue-gray camouflage patterns and soaring masts. They seemed to dwarf the adjoining islets. Lieutenant McCandless of the Seabees woke up that morning and walked down to the beach: “As I emerged from the palm trees and looked across the lagoon, I could hardly believe my eyes. It was full of warships—all sizes and types. Aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, tankers, destroyers, ten or twelve submarines, etc., all riding peacefully at anchor. They had slipped in during the night. I have no idea how they could
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The two task groups were at sea again on the afternoon of October 6, forging north in the tail of the typhoon. They would rendezvous with the rest of Task Force 38 at sea, then proceed to the Ryukyuan archipelago between Japan and Formosa, where they would hit targets on Okinawa and adjacent islands. The seventeen-carrier force, totaling one hundred ships with nearly 100,000 seamen, would approach closer to Japan than any other Allied warship (except submarines) had since the Doolittle Raid in April 1942.
At noon on October 9, the fleet rang up flank speed for the all-night run to Okinawa. The ships roared through the night, but no patrol planes appeared on radar; the Japanese did not expect them. Carney remarked that “we caught the boys on Okinawa utterly unprepared, because I suppose they figured nobody in his right mind would be at sea during anything of this sort. We arrived unheralded and in full force.”58 Arriving at its planned launch point northeast of Okinawa at dawn on October 10, the fleet turned into the wind and began launching planes. The initial fighter sweep found few enemy
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Throwing a head fake intended to fool the enemy on Formosa, Halsey ordered a sixty-one-plane fighter sweep over Aparri Airfield on northern Luzon. The ruse did not succeed, however—radar screens revealed many Japanese scouts headed out from Formosa in wedge-shaped search vectors. The aviators would have to fight their way into Formosan airspace, where the Japanese would be ready and waiting for them. Halsey realized that he had erred in hitting Okinawa first; he should have aimed the first strike at Formosa.
When first ordered by a unit commander to fly a suicide mission, the great fighter ace Saburo Sakai was stunned. “A great roaring sounded in my ears,” he recalled. “What was he saying? I was in a turmoil. I had a cold, sinking feeling of revulsion in my brain.”40 A pilot must always be ready to die in battle, said Sakai, but that did not include “wantonly wasting one’s life.”
The historical record is spotty—especially concerning the question of who knew what, and when—but there appears to be considerable evidence behind the charge. In the early stages of the kamikaze recruitment program, no references to suicide tactics were permitted to appear in writing; only verbal orders were given. Naoji Kozu, a reserve naval ensign, agreed to volunteer for the manned torpedo program before he knew that it was a suicide weapon. He and his fellow recruits were told only that they must be “willing to take on a dangerous job” and “willing to board a special weapon.” Looking back
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Inoguchi remained adamant: “This sort of thing has to come up from the bottom and you can’t order such a thing. At no time were kamikaze tactics ordered . . . initially the kamikaze concept was a method of coping with local situations and not the result of an overall policy handed down from GHQ.”44 The record shows those claims to be false.
In fact, kamikaze operations had been studied, debated, and planned for more than a year prior to their first appearance in the Pacific.
References to “sure victory weapons” and the “body crashing spirit” were common in newspapers and radio broadcasts after the fall of Saipan in July 1944. On October 6, several weeks before the first suicide air corps was organized in the Philippines, a Japanese admiral told a radio interviewer that the naval air corps would shortly commence “body-crashing” tactics to “ram an enemy plane or ship.”
By the fall of 1944, an arsenal of purpose-built suicide weapons was in advanced production. These included a manned rocket, the Oka (“cherry blossom”), which was dropped from a larger aircraft and dove on enemy ships at velocities approaching the speed of sound. A one-man suicide submarine called the Kaiten (“heaven shaker”) was released by a larger “mother” submarine; its pilot would drive it into an enemy hull like a torpedo. A small wooden speedboat called the Shinyo (“ocean shaker”) carried a two-ton warhead, and could charge into the midst of an enemy fleet at 50 knots. Fukuryus,
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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.
Some scholars, both Japanese and Western, have argued that the kamikaze phenomenon was an innate expression of Japanese ideologies and traditions, including bushido (the way of the samurai), State Shinto, Zen Buddhism, and the custom of suicide to expunge shame. In a rival view, the kamikaze was a grotesque perversion of Japanese ideals, foisted upon a bewildered and prostrate people by the militarist regime and its propagandists. Elements of truth are probably found in both views. Shinto and Buddhism held that the self was an illusion, and therefore death was not to be feared. Shinto’s myriad
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