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

by Ian W. Toll

Practitioners of Zen and other schools of Buddhism offered a harmonious theology rooted in the precept that life and death were essentially one and the same. Meditation tended toward the annihilation of the ego. According to Goro Sugimoto, an army officer and influential writer: “Egolessness and self-extinction are most definitely not separate states. On the contrary, one comes to realize that they are identical.”

“The source of the spirit of the Special Attack Forces lies in the denial of the individual self and the rebirth of the soul, which takes upon itself the burden of history. From ancient times Zen has described this conversion of mind as the achievement of complete enlightenment.”

To die by one’s own hand had long been associated with samurai ideals of honor and fidelity. Suicide offered a solution to the loss of face (giri, or honor). That was a chief theme of Japan’s national epic, the story of the 47 Ronin. 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

and shaped the nation’s culture. After the Meiji Restoration, and especially in the decades before the Second World War, it was thought that samurai ideals might serve as a template for national development, and the nation transmuted into a master race of warriors—thus giving Japan hegemonic strength among nations, just as the samurai had once wielded uncontested power over their fellow Japanese. 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. The ancient bushido of the sword-bearing samurai had emphasized zealous loyalty to a local feudal lord—but not to the emperor, who had been an obscure and little-thought-of figure before the Meiji era. Bushido meant stoicism, self-discipline, and dignity in one’s personal bearing; it emphasized mastery of the martial arts through long training and practice; it lauded sacrifice in service to duty, without the slightest fear of death; it demanded asceticism and simplicity in daily life, without regard to comforts, appetites, or luxuries.

But traditional bushido had not imposed an obligation to abhor retreat or surrender even when a battle had turned hopeless, and the old-time samurai who had done his duty in a losing cause could lay down his arms with honor intact. That was the last of the Thirty-Six Strategies, a Chinese classic studied by twenty generations of Japanese warriors: “When overwhelmed, you don’t fight; you surrender, compromise, or flee. . . . As long as you are not defeated, you have another chance to win.”

Nor had suicidal tactics played an important role in previous eras of Japanese warfare. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), the Japanese army had implemented sweeping changes in its culture and doctrine. The infantry manuals were rewritten to emphasize the importance of “fighting spirit” over such factors as technology and mechanical power, and the massed fixed-bayonet banzai charge was adopted as a preferred tactic in close combat. The “no surrender” ethos was codified after the First World War, and later amplified into an absolute injunction in the Japanese army’s revised field manual of 1928.

The explicit glorification of death in battle—death as an end in itself—was a recent phenomenon in Japanese culture, as were the “no surrender” principle, massed suicide attacks, and the master race ideology of imperial bushido. None of those ideas was anchored in the samurai tradition. The pre-Meiji samurai had fought only his fellow Japanese. He had no occasion to indulge in racial chauvinism, and he did not think at all of foreign conquest. He would have been puzzled by the suggestion that he and other Japanese were somehow cosubstantial with the divine emperor.

The Japanese had lost nearly a thousand airplanes in October alone, and the replacement aviators flying into Philippine airbases had only rudimentary skills. Pilot cadets were being rushed through truncated programs and sent to frontline units having logged just a few dozen hours of flight time. Most received no formal gunnery or navigation training. If these new aviators were going to die in their cockpits anyway, as seemed inevitable, perhaps suicide tactics offered the only realistic hope of scoring a valedictory blow against the enemy.

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.” Compared to dive bombing, torpedo bombing,

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 behind his amphibious invasion forces.

The aviators and their officers agreed that the suiciders should approach the enemy fleet at high altitude, about 18,000 feet. When the American radar detected them, they would descend quickly to about 200–300 feet in hopes of slipping under the radar screen. They would drop “window”—aluminum strips—in order to thwart the radar operators. On the final approach to their targets, the pilots would drop the noses of their planes and descend in a 45-degree dive.

Inoguchi remarked, “Nothing is more destructive to morale than to learn of the enemy’s superiority.”

This was religious dogma, rooted in the divinity of the emperor and (through him) the Japanese race. If the Americans were still fighting in 1944, and still demanding unconditional surrender, it was because they had not yet fully grasped the potency of this spirit. And how could they? They were a mongrel people, hopelessly decadent and self-seeking, without any real unity of spirit or purpose. Their great material wealth, industrial base, and technological aptitude would count for nothing if they could not summon the will to fight to the end on Japan’s terms. It was no accident that the kamikaze was introduced to the world in the final weeks of the U.S. presidential campaign, when FDR and Governor Dewey were at one another’s throats, and American political disharmony was on display for the entire world to see.

For the nine remaining months of war to come, this was to be Japan’s guiding strategic vision: to display to the Americans the full force and fury of their Yamato spirit. A nation willing to turn its young men into guided missiles was a nation that would fight to the last man, woman, and child—and a nation willing to fight on such terms could not be conquered. If the Japanese raised the stakes high enough, the Americans would flinch. Their leaders, beholden to American voters, lacked the stomach to fight to the point of civilizational annihilation. Perhaps the Pacific War was already lost; in private councils, among themselves, the junta’s leaders were increasingly willing to admit it. But there was a difference between defeat and surrender, between losing an overseas empire and seeing the homeland overrun by a barbarian army. The man-guided missiles were never a realistic bid for victory, but rather a talisman to ward off the horror of total defeat.

Finally, at 7:15 p.m., Kurita heard from Admiral Toyoda. It was a peremptory order, with quasi-religious overtones: “With confidence in divine guidance, all forces resume the attack.” The original Japanese wording of this message, Operations Order No. 372, was: “Tenyu wo kakushin shi zengun totsegeki seyo.” A literal translation was: “Trusting in heaven’s assistance, all forces charge!”53 But it had a between-the-lines meaning that does not translate readily into English. Its author was Toshitane Takata, the Combined Fleet chief of staff, who drafted it for Admiral Toyoda’s signature. Takata later told American interrogators that the order carried a connotation understood by every Japanese officer, to mean that “damage could not be limited or reduced by turning back, so advance even though the fleet should be completely lost. That was my feeling when sending that order; consequently I am safe in saying that the Second Fleet was not restricted in any way as to the damage it might suffer.”

Kurita’s staff mocked the presumption of those senior officers, safely tucked away in their underground bunker at home, who dashed off such orders while “ignorant of enemy attacks.” The impression given by this account is that the collective mood on the bridge was mordant, contemptuous, perhaps even a bit mutinous. One officer remarked, “Leave the fighting to us. Not even a god can direct naval battles from shore.” Another translated the meaning of Toyoda’s order: “Believing in annihilation, resume the attack!”

The Musashi’s fate was an ill omen for the Yamato. The two behemoths were twin sisters, built on identical lines. Both had been advertised as unsinkable. Japan had poured immense reserves of money, manpower, raw materials, and engineering expertise into their design and construction. An officer in the naval ministry had estimated that for the cost of both superbattleships, the Japanese navy could have built 2,000 state-of-the-art fighter planes and trained top-flight pilots to fly them.57 The program had required major expansions of the two shipyards where they were born, at Nagasaki (Musashi) and Kure (Yamato). Their 2,700-man crews were elite, handpicked from among the navy’s top performers at every level of the chain of command, from skippers to the humblest ordinary seamen. They were the sister-queens of the fleet, whose symbolic importance far surpassed their actual value as weapons. Both had served as flagships to commanders in chief of the Combined Fleet; Ugaki had previously been billeted in both ships as chief of staff to the late Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. With his expert eye, Ugaki did not need a full report to know that nearly all of the Musashi’s available starboard “pumping in” compartments had already been flooded, so there was little more that could be done to correct the list.

On the bridge, Inoguchi informed his executive officer, Captain Kenkichi Kato, that he intended to remain with the ship. He penned a quick note to Admiral Toyoda, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, declaring that he had been wrong to place so much faith in the power of big-gun battleships, and admitting the supremacy of naval aviation.

half past seven, the Musashi rolled past 30 degrees, through her point of secondary stability, and capsized. Scores of men went over the starboard rail and climbed the barnacle-encrusted bilge and keel as the ship rolled over. Some fell into the holes left by Task Force 38 torpedoes earlier in the day. The Musashi’s bow slid under and her stern lifted from the sea, water falling in cataracts from her four great propellers. Sailors retreated aft as the ship went down, climbing the rails and deck fittings, some falling as the quarterdeck rose nearly vertical;

When the sea finally closed over the stern, an enormous whirlpool sucked down debris and swimmers. Men wearing life vests were lifted back to the surface, where they filled their lungs in relief, but many were quickly pulled down again by this implacable suction, and then surfaced again—and so on, repeatedly, as if the ghosts of dead shipmates were reaching up to clutch their ankles. The farther they swam from the sinking colossus, the greater their odds of survival. A few prevailed and lived to tell the tale. Many others were lost, dragged down into the abyss with their beloved Musashi as she voyaged to the floor of the Sibuyan Sea, 3,000 feet below.

Their prime objective was to overtake and destroy the American flight decks before they could launch planes to attack their pursuers. The tactical circumstances called for making an all-out chase—and also, if possible, maneuvering to windward of the quarry so that they could not conduct flight operations while running away. Kurita ordered “General pursuit,” which meant that each Japanese ship was to give chase at its best individual speed, not bothering to remain in fleet cruising formation.

At that great range, the long barrels of the Yamato’s mammoth main guns were trained forward and elevated to 23 degrees. Propelled by six great jets of flame and smoke, six armor-piercing projectiles spun out of the muzzles and began climbing toward the distant target. Each shell weighed 3,200 pounds. After twenty-five seconds of flight, midway to impact, the shells reached the apex of their trajectories, about 20,000 feet above sea level. Then they began descending at a terminal velocity of about 1,500 feet per second—significantly less than initial muzzle velocity, but still much faster than the speed of sound.

his meticulous analysis of the Battle off Samar, The World Wonder’d (2014), Robert Lundgren proposes that the Yamato’s third salvo should be credited as a hit on the White Plains.43 If the claim is accepted, the Yamato holds the singular honor of scoring the longest-ranged naval gunfire hit in history—34,587 yards, or nearly 20 miles.

Firing windows were fleeting, and the Japanese gunners rarely saw the fall of their shots, so they could not make targeting corrections in consecutive salvos.

was perhaps three feet from the windows on the bridge and could see the Japanese officers and enlisted men commanding the ship,” he said. “There was an admiral in dress whites, complete with sword. The other officers and men were also in dress whites. I was going 530 miles an hour, and I only got a glimpse, but that image is impressed on my mind forever.”57

The first wave of attackers scored against the Chitose, Chiyoda, Zuiho, and Zuikaku. The Zuikaku, Ozawa’s flagship, was the sole surviving aircraft carrier of the six that had hit Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the Americans were especially determined to send her to the bottom.

Nimitz would later say that he spent most of this period on the horseshoe court behind his house on Makalapa Hill. “I was on pins and needles, but couldn’t show it.

Every mammal leaves its feces on the ground, but it is the bull’s that has a revered place in American slang, signifying “nonsense, lies, or exaggeration.” The bull chases the matador’s cape while failing to notice his sword. Seeing red, the bull lowers its horns and charges, confident of striking down this feeble antagonist. But in the end, it is almost always the bull’s bloody carcass that is dragged from the bullring, while the matador leaves on his feet.

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.

By contrast, according to Wylie, a cumulative operational strategy does not involve territorial offensives and pitched battles, but a “less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other, until at some unknown point the mass of calculated actions may be large enough to be critical.”1 It weaponizes the logic of “death by a thousand cuts.”

the Pacific, cumulative strategies chipped away at the economic and political foundations of Japan’s imperial empire. One example was propaganda, sometimes called “psychological warfare,” aimed at foreign peoples under Japanese occupation, Japanese civilians, the rank and file of Japan’s armed forces, and eventually even the senior leadership circle in Tokyo. Another was strategic bombing. Beginning in November 1944, a sustai...

Eventually it laid waste to most of the nation’s urban areas. Most tellingly, U.S. air and naval power (especially submarines) were deployed against Japan’s overseas shipping routes, in a campaign that c...

More than any other industrial nation, and certainly more than any other major combatant of the Second World War, Japan lacked self-sufficiency in raw materials. The home islands were all but destitute of natural resources, offering little or no oil, iron ore, bauxite, or other useful minerals, and only limited reserves of timber and low-grade coal.

Since the Meiji period, when Japan had first aspired to become the leading power in Asia, the chief aim of its foreign policy had been to secure access to these basic commodities.

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 tha...

Japan’s most important foreign suppliers—the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands—were aligned against Nazi Germany. Even so, in September 1940, Tokyo joined with Berlin and Rome to form the Axis alliance, a rash decision that triggered an onslaught of trade sanctions. Prior

The regime expected shipping losses of between 800,000 and 1.1 million tons in the first year of war, declining to 700,000–800,000 tons in each of the two following years. Wartime construction was expected to offset these losses, at least partially. Japan’s wartime shipbuilding effort was heroic in scale, rising from 238,000 tons of new cargo shipping launched in 1941, to 1.6 million tons launched in 1944. But sinkings ran much higher than forecast, and net losses remained critical in every year of the war.4 The Japanese army and navy largely neglected to cooperate with one another, or with the civilian merchant marine.

If Japan’s overseas shipping routes were vulnerable to air and submarine attack, its urban and industrial areas were virtually defenseless against strategic aerial bombing.

In 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, heavy industrial production had increased by fivefold in a dozen years. Seventeen percent of the Japanese economy was devoted to war production, as compared to 2.6 percent of the U.S. economy.5 Munitions production rose sharply as a share of Japanese GDP after 1941, approaching 50 percent in 1944. At that stage, Japan’s civilian population was more or less immiserated, and most of the remaining (nonmunitions) share of the economy involved agriculture and food production.

In April 1944, B-29s began arriving at their permanent rear-bases at Kharagpur. From there they would stage into advanced Chinese airfields at Chengdu, in Sichuan Province. This involved a grueling and treacherous flight “over the hump” of the Himalayas, the world’s loftiest mountains.

Their destination, at the end of the 1,200-mile flight, was one of four new airfields south of Chengdu, where construction work was ongoing. More than a quarter of a million Chinese peasants had been enlisted to build the 8,000-foot runways almost entirely by hand. Newsreel footage depicts an immense throng of laborers, many barefoot and wearing conical hats, hauling dirt and gravel in baskets and wheelbarrows.

The B-29’s combat debut came on June 5, 1944, when ninety-eight planes departed Kharagpur to hit Japanese-controlled railheads in Bangkok, a thousand miles away. The raid dropped 368 tons of bombs on the target, an encouraging result. Ten days later, the Superforts paid their inaugural visit to the Japanese homeland. As U.S. amphibious forces stormed the beaches of Saipan in Operation FORAGER, fifty B-29s lifted off from Chengdu to bomb the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata, Kyushu.

As always, however, the appearance of enemy warplanes over Japanese soil stirred panic among the public. It seemed to matter little that the raid had done negligible damage. In the weeks that followed, the MATTERHORN B-29s hit enemy targets all around the periphery of the China theater: coke ovens in Manchuria and Korea, oil fields in the Dutch East Indies, steelworks and port facilities in northeast China, piers and depots in Shanghai, airbases on Formosa, shipping at Hong Kong, railroads and depots in Burma.

From Chengdu the B-29s could (just) reach Kyushu, 1,500 miles away—but they could not reach Tokyo or other high-priority targets on Honshu. To launch a full-scale strategic bombing campaign against Japan, more airbases were needed in eastern China. But the Allies did not control any seaports on the Chinese coast, which meant that the cargo airlift from India would have to be extended even farther. Moreover, no one had any confidence that airfields in eastern China could be defended against the Japanese army, which was expanding its footprint on the mainland with a brutally successful ground offensive called “Ichi-Go” (Plan One). Indeed, “Ichi-Go” even threatened the Allied airbases around Chengdu and Kunming. General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the U.S. Army commander in China, gave his opinion that fifty trained Chinese infantry divisions were needed to guarantee the safety of the airfields. But no one (including Stilwell) believed that Chiang could supply forces on that scale. For all of those reasons, Operation MATTERHORN never fulfilled its promise. From the beginning it had been driven by FDR’s concern to keep the Allied coalition together in the CBI theater, and to preserve the possibility of drawing upon China’s bottomless manpower reserves in the final invasion of Japan. By mid-1944, it was becoming clear that the logistical and security challenges confronting matterhorn were too great to overcome. Meanwhile, a better alternative had presented itself: the Marian...

Still, the difficulties presented by the Marianas were daunting. Fuel and supplies would be brought in by sea, but the maritime umbilical cord was long—5,800 miles from San Francisco Bay—and the B-29s would have to compete with hundreds of other Allied military units for scarce shipping and other resources. The heavily loaded bombers would operate from bases that had not yet been built, on islands where enemy holdouts were still fighting in the hills. From Saipan, Tinian, or (especially) Guam, targets in Japan lay near the outer limit of the B-29’s operating radius.

The Joltin’ Josie, as the aircraft was called, flew from Mather Field, California (near Sacramento) in three hops to Honolulu, Kwajalein, and Saipan, landing at Isley Field on October 12, 1944.

The islands offered functionally limitless reserves of coral rock, which was crushed and converted into high-quality concrete for asphalt. But the roads linking coral pits to airfields were generally too narrow, and unpaved in many places; frequently they were jammed by traffic, or swamped by tropical downpours. Thousands of tons of crushed coral were needed to pave the runways and service areas—but first the roads had to be widened, graded, and paved, which likewise required thousands of tons of crushed coral.

With shortages threatening to delay bombing missions, an air cargo route was opened all the way back to California. Once again, B-29s were hauling their own stores into a combat zone. It was the “hump” again, but this hump was the curvature of the earth over 94 degrees of longitude.

In the weeks following Hansell’s arrival, an average of three to five new Superfortresses flew into Saipan each day. Most were staged out of the training and modification centers of Kansas and Nebraska by their own recently trained aircrews.