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

by Ian W. Toll

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...