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

by Ian W. Toll

Since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, the chief aim of U.S. policy had been to assist the Filipino people in constructing a functioning democracy capable of repelling aggressors. The Philippines had been promised independence by 1946, and that commitment remained in force. For FDR, the successful decolonization of the Philippines was to set a righteous example for the world, and especially for the British. In this terrible global war, no major strategic decision could be separated from its long-term political or foreign policy consequences. In both Europe and the Pacific, the campaign against the Axis had entered its endgame, and a new postwar order was struggling to be born.

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 in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Like the “black land” of Mordor, the battleground was a foul, evil-smelling wasteland—stripped of its greenery, shrouded in haze, and sealed off by forbidding razorback ridges. An army of cunning troglodytes had burrowed deep into the earth, and could cross beneath mountains through elaborate subterranean networks of tunnels and caverns. To their opponents, these foes seemed every bit as cruel and scarcely more human than Tolkien’s orcs. Even the vile realm’s name, Urmurbrogal, might have been borrowed from a map of Middle Earth—and like Tolkien’s fictional battle for Middle Earth, this was a war to be won by total extermination of the enemy.

But it was a milestone of a kind, and also a foreshadowing of what was to come in the Pacific, especially in the later and better-known island battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In proportional terms, from the American point of view, Peleliu was the costliest battle of the Pacific campaign. Of the 28,000 marines and soldiers who fought on the island, nearly 40 percent were casualties, including about 1,800 killed and 8,000 wounded. 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.

Traditional bushido extolled humility, and the virtues of knowing and respecting one’s enemy. It did not preach an attitude of thickheaded truculence, or an expectation of heaven-sent victory. But those elements of the ancient warrior codes did not serve the purposes of the ultranationalist junta, so they were simply whitewashed out of history, education, and civic discourse.

The morning was clear and beautiful, with scattered high clouds and a thin layer of broken cumulus at 1,500 feet. From 8,000 feet above the earth, the searchers could see nearly a hundred miles in every direction. Below them unfolded a majestic tropical panorama, a repeating pattern of azure shallows, white sandy cays, and mountainous jungle-clad islands. Broad white beaches merged into lush coconut palm groves, lighter greens darkened to deeper greens inland, and steep slopes rose to brown peaks six or seven thousand feet high, or to black volcanic cones with gaping, smoking calderas. The sea was lighter here and darker there, varying by depth, bottom, and angle of light, with lighter cerulean bands running parallel to the beaches, the shallows strewn with coral reefs that went on for miles, and the sea darkening as it deepened in the straits between the islands, its surface glistening in the morning sun. The carrier airmen had no problems matching the landmarks and channels to the charts they carried in their cockpits. Having flown so many missions over the Philippines during the past six weeks, they knew the region well—and they knew precisely where to look for Japanese warships in the relatively few navigable passages through the intricate archipelago.

Postwar expectations were modest. For millions of homesick servicemen, paradise was a simple, ordinary, boring life in a free country where no one was ordering them around or trying to kill them. When they dreamed of home, commonplace amenities and rituals assumed exaggerated significance—privacy, leisure, a cup of coffee at a dime store counter, a walk in the park, the company of women, pushing a child on a swing, physical safety, a soft mattress, and a good night’s sleep. Whatever their pent-up resentments against the “folks back home,” the fighting men had learned to love and appreciate their country more than they ever had as civilians. They conjured up elaborate visions of their futures—of the wife they would marry, the house they would live in, the children they would raise.

Texas congressman Lyndon B. Johnson worked behind the scenes to have an initial $24 million cost-plus-fixed-fee building contract awarded to his major campaign contributor, the Brown & Root construction company of Houston. The cost of building NAS Corpus Christi would eventually balloon to $100 million.35 The massive project had the indirect effect of supercharging Johnson’s political career and sending him on a trajectory for higher office.

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. By the early 1930s, the behavior of Japanese troops was attracting international notoriety, and the trend only grew worse through the end of the Second World War. Meiji’s warning thus became prophecy. In throwing away their lives like so many feathers, Iwabuchi’s forces in Manila unshouldered the burden of a mountain. Forsaking the “true valor” prescribed in the rescript, possessing no sound discrimination between right and wrong, the soldiers and sailors abandoned themselves to feral violence against defenseless innocents. And in the end, as Hirohito’s grandfather had foretold, the world came to detest them and to look upon them as wild beasts.

For the first four days of the battle, the Japanese had commanded this tactically useful observation post. Now the roles were reversed; the Americans owned Suribachi, and they had a flag to prove it. Marines of Company E, 2nd Battalion pulled a 10-foot length of lead pipe out of the rubble—it had connected a water cistern to a bunker beneath the summit—and rigged it as a flagpole. At 10:20 a.m., they raised their battalion flag. Observers to the north, and on ships offshore, were overjoyed. Lieutenant Ronald Thomas recalled, “Everyone yelled and I suppose some cried.”48 Brigadier General Leo Hermle, assistant commander of the 5th Division, called it “one of the greatest sights that I remember in my whole life . . . a terrific cheer went up from the whole island, as far as you could see.”

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. Transmitted through copper telephone wires to newsrooms throughout the United States, it appeared simultaneously on hundreds of front pages and magazine covers. Rosenthal received a Pulitzer Prize. The flag-raising was adopted as the thematic showpiece of a national war bonds campaign, and three surviving marines in the photo were recalled to the United States for a publicity tour. The image was re-created as a bronze sculpture at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.

If the highest death toll estimates are accurate, the Tokyo raid may have killed more people (initially) than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. 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.

Naval gunfire and air support were valuable on Okinawa, but they never superseded the bravery, initiative, and grit of individual infantry units. In the end, the soldiers and marines had to dig their enemies out of the ground and kill them. There was no other way. Rarely could they gain an advantage through flanking maneuvers. On the constricted terrain around the Shuri ridges, each battalion was wedged into a densely populated section of the line—on average, a thousand troops for every 600 yards—and the only way to hit the enemy was by frontal assault. They might briefly seize control of the top of a facing ridge, but then be driven back by heavy artillery fire from positions farther south, or by Japanese infantry counterattacks in superior force. That was a recurring pattern on Okinawa: the high ground often changed hands, in a succession of attacks and counterattacks, sometimes as many as a dozen times. American and Japanese dead were splayed side by side on the battlefield. All foliage had been blasted or burned away from the once-verdant landscape, and the zones between the opposing lines were a scarred and denuded wasteland.

The fierce scrap on Ie Shima also claimed the life of Ernie Pyle, the famed and much-loved war correspondent, whom the GIs had nicknamed “the Soldier’s Friend.”4 During past campaigns in Africa, Italy, northern Europe, and the Pacific, Pyle had often exposed himself to serious danger while marching and living with troops in the field. The Ie Shima operation was to be his last combat assignment of the war; he had already been assigned a seat on a C-54 transport for return to the United States. On April 18, Pyle was riding with a battalion commander in the back of a jeep, on a tour of the front lines. As the vehicle slowed at a crossroad, a Japanese machine gun opened fire. The weapon had been concealed in a patch of thick brush, a few feet from the side of the road. The driver and passengers leapt out of the vehicle and took cover in a ditch on the opposite side of the road. None had been hit by that first burst, but Pyle made the mistake of raising his head to have a look. He was hit in the left temple, just below his helmet, and died instantly. Later, soldiers erected a wooden sign: “On this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April, 1945.”5

In his diary and his subsequent memoir, Leahy betrayed no sense of responsibility or culpability for the new president’s relative ignorance. One is struck by this lack of self-awareness in a Washington statesman otherwise respected for his wisdom and good judgment. Whatever he knew or did not know about the state of FDR’s declining health, Leahy had been at the late president’s elbow for most of the last year of his life. He certainly knew enough to anticipate that Truman might be thrust into the role of commander in chief at any moment. Leahy was the White House chief of staff and the chairman of the JCS. What steps did he take to ensure that the vice president was properly briefed? Who else had that duty, if not himself? No adequate explanation has ever been provided for this breakdown in the basic procedures of sound constitutional government.

The welter of major policy decisions taken by American leaders between May and August 1945 were among the most complex in the nation’s history. Purely military strategy was amalgamated into high considerations of foreign policy; all minds, including those of senior generals and admirals, were turning toward the postwar order. The president’s men were absorbed in the day-in, day-out skirmishes with Stalin over the Yalta accords, the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, the political claims of Charles de Gaulle in France, and the charter of the United Nations. They were just beginning to think about the future of Asia, the status of former Japanese territories, the fate of British colonies, the red insurgency in China, the future of Japan under Allied occupation, and the still-uncertain matter of whether Japan’s overseas armies would lay down arms if ordered to do so by Tokyo, or if they would have to be beaten in the field even after the home islands were subjugated.

At 5:30 a.m., the countdown reached zero and the voice on the loudspeaker said, “Now.” A pinprick of searing white light expanded almost instantly to become a small sun, half a mile in diameter, and the predawn darkness vanished in a cosmic flash, as blinding as a photographer’s flashbulb. For a moment, the desert was lit to the horizon by a noonlike brightness, until most of the light was suddenly sucked back into the vortex of the blast, or so it appeared to the witnesses. Ascending, the great orb seemed to liquefy and dissolve into boiling neon colors, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of gold, green, orange, blue, gray, and purple. Elongating vertically into the shape of a column, it rose through the cloud ceiling and climbed to 10,000 feet, 20,000 feet, 30,000 feet. A mushroom cloud formed at the top, at an altitude later estimated at 41,000 feet, while the base remained a surging, seething, churning mass of gas, smoke, and dust, as bright as burning magnesium but more colorful. For 40 miles in every direction, the New Mexico wilderness was bathed in a violet light that illuminated every hill, ridge, and gulch with searing clarity.

From childhood, the Japanese had been taught that they were a unique race, guided by a divine emperor, watched over by their ancient gods, with a sacred destiny to rule Asia. Indulging shallow stereotypes about American culture and democracy, the Japanese miscalculated the temper and character of their enemy. They assumed that Americans lacked the stomach to fight a long, bloody war on the opposite side of the world. They assumed that their enemies had grown soft and decadent by easy living, and were hopelessly infatuated by popular entertainment. The Americans were a mongrel people, a nation of immigrants, without unity or higher purpose, enfeebled by racial, ethnic, class, and ideological infighting. Women had the vote, and therefore wielded influence in politics—and they would resist sending their sons and husbands to fight on distant foreign shores. The size and strength of the U.S. economy would count for nothing if it could not be mobilized for war, and the capitalist oligarchs would not consent to retool their lucrative industries. The strike on Pearl Harbor was intended to shock and demoralize the American public, so that they would react to the disaster by pressuring Washington to make peace. “We thought that we could easily tackle them,” a leading Japanese officer later admitted, “a race so steeped in material comfort and absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure was spiritually degenerate.”81 If all of these premises had been right, Japan would have won the Pacific Wa...

If the Pacific War had been a game of chess, played between grandmasters, there would have been no endgame. With the outcome no longer in doubt, neither grandmaster would have felt the need to play to the end. Foreseeing that his king was soon to be checkmated, the Japanese player would have laid it down on the board and shaken hands with his opponent. But this was war, not a board game, and conditions in Japan did not allow for the possibility of a negotiated truce until long after defeat had become inevitable.

The kamikazes were a singularly Japanese phenomenon, arising in a unique cultural context. But in tactical terms, the suicide plane was like a weapon from the future, allowing the Japanese to deploy guided missiles at a time when no other combatant possessed such weapons, or effective measures to counter them.

In 1945, the oldest Japanese could still summon early childhood memories of life in the Tokugawa Shogunate, when the nation was ruled by samurai who wore suits of lacquered armor and fought with swords and spears. During that span of time the Japanese people had experienced a wrenching acceleration of historical change. They had modernized and industrialized at a headlong pace, rising to become one of the most formidable naval and military powers in the world, and inflicted humiliating defeats on several of the leading nations of the West. Falling under the sway of fanatical militarists, they had poured their armies and fleets out across Asia and the Pacific, spreading misery across the region and making themselves infamous in the eyes of their neighbors. That misadventure had ended in total defeat. What would the future bring? How would Japan fare, while tucked under the eagle’s wing? No one could know in 1945, and perhaps the answers would not come into focus until another ninety-two years had elapsed.