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by
Ian W. Toll
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August 14 - August 17, 2023
The press, he said, was a profit-seeking enterprise that found sensationalism and gossip more lucrative than sober, accurate reporting, and was polluting the nation’s civil discourse.
Looking back from the present, when his legacy has been engraved in marble, it is difficult to sense how polarizing and controversial a figure FDR was in his own time.
Although the truth would not come out until years later, MacArthur’s conduct on the first day of the war had been at least as culpable as that of Kimmel or Short.
The different standards of accountability imposed in Hawaii and the Philippines have bothered historians ever since. The latter events were never formally investigated, and MacArthur never answered for errors and derelictions that seemed at least as blameworthy and certainly more avoidable than those in Hawaii.
Leaders in Washington would have to reckon with MacArthur’s singular influence at every stage of the coming war, Eisenhower predicted, for “the public has built itself a hero out of its own imagination.”
In a remark that circulated widely in Washington, Davis observed that King’s idea of a press policy was to tell the public nothing until the end of the war, and then to issue a two-word communiqué: “We won.”
In 1941, King had arrived in Washington determined to have nothing to do with the press. Before the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, he was manipulating it from behind the scenes like a veteran Washington wire-puller. On first impression, it was a surprising reversal. But after further reflection it was not surprising at all, because no one had ever mistaken Ernest J. King for a slow learner.
Few Americans knew how unpopular MacArthur was among the rank and file of his own army.
Among servicemen in the Pacific, there had been a pervasive feeling that the “folks back home” had forgotten them. The struggle against Nazi Germany had dominated print, radio, and newsreel reporting—and that was doubly true during that summer of 1944, when Allied forces were pouring into France and driving toward Paris. Since the start of the war, they had seen FDR touring military bases and war plants in every corner of the mainland United States, and they had seen him in exotic international locations such as Morocco, Egypt, and Persia. Until now, perhaps, they had not expected to see the
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Not one of us but felt, actually felt, the wave of hope that swept the hospital as shattered men saw before them not merely the President of the United States but another human being, once struck down as they themselves were stricken, who had triumphed over physical disability by force of will and invincibility of spirit.
“Ship-borne aviation is necessarily helpless against the enemy’s land-based aviation, and the ‘bases’ themselves are extremely vulnerable. Navies have been disqualified for what used to be one of their primary jobs: to take the offensive initiative against enemy shores.”1 By 1944, that portion of Seversky’s argument had been debunked by the exploits of Task Force 58, the main carrier striking force of the Pacific Fleet. Nothing like it had ever been seen on the high seas, nothing like it has existed since 1945, and it is unlikely that a fighting fleet will ever again be built on such a scale.
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If Spruance deliberately tried to avoid work, as he freely admitted in at least one postwar letter, he achieved the singular feat of turning his indolence into a virtue.
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 contested area was only about a single square mile—but for the men who fought in it, the Urmurbrogal pocket was like a planet unto itself, a seemingly interminable and unconquerable maze of karst.
When the guns paused, the marines could hear wounded and dying Japanese crying out in the night. Often they cried out for their mothers, as did dying men of all races.
On many Pacific battlefields—most infamously on Saipan—the differing tactical concepts of the army and the marines had caused serious friction between the services. Geiger and Rupertus had wanted to snuff out Japanese resistance before turning the island over to the army, and they regretted their failure to do it. But it would take seven more weeks of hard fighting to dig the enemy out of their caves. In this final stage of the battle for the Urmurbrogal badlands, the Wildcats showcased the advantages of go-slow siege tactics.
Nakagawa had effectively used his underground network to vitiate American advantages in offshore firepower and command of the air. His forces had mostly eschewed the tactically futile banzai charge. They had made shrewd use of the terrain, fighting on ground of their own choosing. Those tactics would be repeated on a larger scale on islands nearer Japan in the battles to come in 1945. 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,
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After a grueling ten-day passage, the Canberra and Houston and their salvage group limped into Ulithi Atoll on the morning of October 27. Both cruisers were returned to the United States for extensive repairs, and both would be returned to service in the postwar navy.
Though they could not afford to admit it, either to their subordinates or perhaps even to themselves, the Japanese admirals knew that the last big naval confrontation of the Pacific War was upon them. They would fight it without effective air support, and therefore they would lose it—but at any rate their real mission was not to win at all, but to go down fighting in a final blaze of glory.
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.
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.
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.
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. The samurai was “to live as if already dead,” an outlook consonant with Buddhism; he was to regard death with fatalistic indifference, rather than cling to a life that was essentially illusory. Shame or dishonor might require suicide as atonement—and when a
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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.
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 newly formed suicide air group comprised only twenty-six Zero fighters, divided into four sections. Three sections were based at Mabalacat; the fourth was on the island of Cebu, to the south. One-half of the planes were designated as escorts and observers; the others would crash-dive the enemy. Thus, this first kamikaze unit amounted to only thirteen aircraft slated for an actual suicide dive. The command staff gave a name to this corps: “Shimpu,” an archaic pronunciation of the Chinese ideographs for “god” and “wind.” An alternate vernacular pronunciation was “kamikaze,” but that term did
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“Nothing is more destructive to morale than to learn of the enemy’s superiority.”
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the kamikaze was a propaganda weapon aimed at the enemy. It was the culmination of what might be called Japan’s “theory” of the Pacific War—a line of reasoning behind its seemingly reckless decision to attack the United States in December 1941, a decision taken in full awareness that American industrial capacity was some ten times larger than Japan’s. The unique collective “fighting spirit” of the Japanese people—the “Yamato spirit,” as it was often called—explained why Japan had never been conquered, and why it had never lost a war. After the war,
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The man-guided missiles were never a realistic bid for victory, but rather a talisman to ward off the horror of total defeat. Even if the official propaganda would not yet admit it, the battle for the sacred islands of Japan had already begun, and the kamikazes were its first line of defense.
Steaming again to the east, the Center Force passed a few miles south of the smoking, listing, foundering wreck of the Musashi. As one of the two most heavily armored ships in the world, she could take a great deal of punishment, and she had—more than twenty bomb hits topside, and about nineteen or twenty torpedoes below the waterline, including fifteen in her port side. No warship in history had ever suffered such punishment and survived.
Considering the damage to the ship, the near-annihilation of Nishimura’s force, and the deteriorating visibility at sea level, Mori argued that it would be suicidal to keep advancing. A trap had been laid for them: “Admiral,” he said, “up ahead the enemy must be waiting for us with open arms.”27 Shima, convinced, decided to call it a night. He radioed Toyoda: “This force has concluded its attack and is retiring from the battle area in order to plan subsequent action.”28 Samuel Eliot Morison called Shima’s decision “the most intelligent act of any Japanese commander in the entire battle.”
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.
We were close enough to see their unkempt beards and the tattoos on their arms. One of our machine gunners impulsively pulled his trigger. He must have been overflowing with feelings of animosity toward the enemy. But it was checked by a loud voice from the bridge saying, ‘Don’t shoot at escaping men! Stop shooting, stop!’ ”100 American survivors confirmed that the Japanese held fire, and one witnessed a Japanese skipper salute the Johnston as she went down.
The battle effectively brought the naval war for the Pacific to an end.
The most dreaded malfunction was the “circular run,” when a weapon’s rudder jammed and caused it to turn back, fully armed, toward the submarine that had fired it. Several U.S. submarines experienced this horrifying mishap, and escaped narrowly by diving or maneuvering evasively on the surface. Two boats were known to have been destroyed by their own torpedoes, because someone on the crew survived to tell the tale. It stands to reason that others were sunk in the same manner, with the loss of all hands, but posterity can only wonder.
Despite having been killed at the war’s midpoint, and having been handicapped by faulty torpedoes (a problem much alleviated after his death), Morton was tied for second place in the rankings by number of ships sunk, and again tied for second place in the rankings of the best single war patrol. Perhaps it was a further tribute to Morton’s leadership that his erstwhile executive officer, Dick O’Kane, eventually surpassed him in both categories.
After a long night adrift on the surface, a total of ten of the Tang’s crew, including O’Kane, were picked up by a Japanese destroyer.30 They served the rest of the war as prisoners of war, shuttled between various camps in Honshu. Only four came home at war’s end. O’Kane, one of the survivors, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Not until after the war was the entire truth known. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey interrogators confirmed that the Archerfish had sunk a 65,000-ton aircraft carrier, which meant that she had earned the distinction of the single most productive submarine patrol of the war as measured by tonnage sunk. The self-effacing Enright always emphasized that he had been lucky, that blind chance had delivered the zigzagging Shinano into a narrow firing window. That was undoubtedly true: fate had dealt the Archerfish a winning hand. But Enright had played the cards flawlessly, and for that he was awarded
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One thing is now clear: America has lost the war. Japanese forces have now complete air and sea superiority on and around Leyte, and powerful additional Japanese forces are moving up for the attack. All the Japanese have to do in future operations is to project their indomitable spirits at the enemy and they will suffer internal fear that will defeat them before they get into the fight. The Occidental mind, of course, will not understand the great Oriental power.
Al estilo Bagdad Bob
Others offered more cold-blooded evaluations. Raymond Spruance, still on leave in the United States, immediately grasped that suicide attacks were a “very sound and economical” use of Japan’s diminishing air power, and that the Allied fleets would be dealing with them until the end of the war.
“It was actually a guided missile before we had any such things as guided missiles,” said Thach. “It was guided by a human brain, human eyes and hands, and even better than a guided missile, it could look, digest the information, change course, avoid damage, and get to the target.”
“This is one of those rare miracles where you get something for nothing,” said Thach, “you drop your bomb, then you’ve got the world’s best fighter.”
As a measure of the industrial might of the United States in 1944 and 1945, the subsequent whirl of destruction told a better story than a thousand pages of statistics. If a plane needed minor repairs, it was pulled off the flight line and junked, and a shiny new replacement unit flew in to take its place. Hundreds of airplanes were flown into remote Pacific island airstrips, parked in a vacant clearing, and abandoned.
This kamikaze business is the biggest story in the Pacific, but few people at home even suspect it. With a small number of planes manned by a small number of mad little savages, the Japs can seriously damage or sink as many surface ships as we have in combat. . . . In the kamikaze the Japs have the most effective secret weapon of the war. Certainly the most sinister and the most terrifying to contemplate.
In China, Manchuria, Malaya, and elsewhere, the Japanese army had summarily wiped out entire communities suspected of aiding guerilla or enemy forces, a practice known as Genju Shobun (“Harsh Disposal”) or Genchi Shobun (“Local Disposal”). For more than three years, Japanese forces in the Philippines had given proof of their capacity for wanton violence and sadism directed against innocents. But the stinging humiliation of defeat, combined with signs of jubilation among ordinary Filipinos, incited an unprecedented series of savage reprisals.
Meanwhile, a thousand U.S. and Allied POWs were liberated from Bilibid Prison, including many troops captured on Bataan and Corregidor in 1942. MacArthur was there to meet the prisoners as they exited the compound. “As I passed slowly down the scrawny, suffering column, a murmur accompanied me as each man barely speaking above a whisper, said, ‘You’re back,’ or ‘You made it,’ or ‘God bless you.’ I could only reply, ‘I’m a little late, but we finally came.’
The forbidding ancient masonry of Intramuros, the Walled City on the south bank of the river, was honeycombed with tunnels, pillboxes, and artillery emplacements. The Japanese would fight block to block, building to building, room to room; there would be no escape, no surrender, and no survival.
Japanese troops had been ordered to stem the tide of civilian refugees toward the American lines. Soldiers were systematically destroying all boats and canoes that might carry people across the Pasig or into the bay. Sentries were posted at each of the four arcaded gates of Intramuros. As the battle for Manila entered its terminal phase, Japanese soldiers began rounding up civilians all over the city. They began with men and teenage boys above the age of eleven or twelve. Innocent Filipinos and expatriate civilians were kept as hostages against U.S. airstrikes. This brutal practice
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Cosgrave, bleeding from two bayonet wounds, crawled among the dying and administered the last rites. He noted with approval that some of the victims were “actually praying to God to forgive those who had put them to death.”
WUT
The sack of Manila exposed the worst pathologies of Japan’s military culture and ideology. It was a glaring indictment of the “no surrender” principle, revealing the depraved underside of what the Japanese glorified as gyokusai, “smashed jewels.” Iwabuchi’s troops knew that they only had a few more days left to live. They were under direct orders, by officers whose authority was absolute and even godlike, to execute every last man, woman, and child within their lines. Many were instructed to perform the ghastly work with bayonets, or by burning their victims alive, in order to save ammunition.
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