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

by Ian W. Toll

Again, General Griswold asked for airstrikes; again, he was denied. It seemed that MacArthur still hoped for a stroke of providence that would preserve the beloved old barrio. Again, the Americans brought in massed heavy artillery to do the same job that the bombers would have done.

For the Filipino people, the price of losing Manila was incalculable. In the old, historic city center, it was not even a question of rebuilding—they would have to cart off the rubble and begin anew, with a blank slate. Much of the nation’s cultural patrimony had been obliterated: architecture, libraries, museums, archives, the history of several centuries. Even the destruction of official government records was a problem with far-reaching consequences, because it destabilized the legal and civil foundations of the nation’s postwar recovery. Manila, the elegant and functional city, “Pearl of the Orient,” had been the single most valuable asset possessed by this emerging Asian democracy. It was the nation’s singular political, commercial, and cultural capital. Losing it was a cruel setback to the Filipino people’s hopes for economic recovery and a successful transition to independence.

The files were soon bulging with damning evidence of systematic war crimes, collected with an intention of building a case that “the sack of Manila and its attendant horrors are not the act of a crazed garrison in a last-ditch, berserk defense but the coldly planned purpose of the Japanese high command.”55 (That case was not proven, but Yamashita would hang nonetheless.)

To be incited by mere impetuosity to violent action cannot be called true valor. The soldier and the sailor should have sound discrimination of right and wrong, cultivate self-possession, and form their plans with deliberation. Never to despise an inferior enemy or fear a superior, but to do one’s duty as soldier or sailor—this is true valor. Those who thus appreciate true valor should in their daily intercourse set gentleness first and aim to win the love and esteem of others. If you affect valor and act with violence, the world will in the end detest you and look upon you as wild beasts. Of this you should take heed.

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.

And in the end, as Hirohito’s grandfather had foretold, the world came to detest them and to look upon them as wild beasts. As one surviving witness to the Manila atrocities commented afterward, “They were like mad, wild dogs. They were not even human beings—they acted like animals.”

Observing his captors, Kojima was astounded by their racial and ethnic diversity: “Blond, silver, black, brown, red hair. Blue, green, brown, black eyes. White, black, skin colors of every variety. I was stunned. I realized then that we’d fought against all the peoples of the world. At the same time, I thought, what a funny country America is, all those different kinds of people fighting in the same uniform!

More than half of the fighter pilots who had flown the February 16–17 strikes had had no prior air combat experience. They had acquitted themselves like veterans. Mitscher’s action report concluded: “Too much credit cannot be given to the naval aviation training organization and its methods.

“We had to haggle like horse traders, balancing irreplaceable lives against replaceable ammunition. I was never so depressed in my life.”

A second and more famous flag-raising occurred three hours later, when a subsequent patrol of the 28th Marines carried a larger “replacement” flag to the summit of Mt. Suribachi. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal was on hand to record the scene. 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.

Battlefield medicine had taken long strides in the quarter century since the First World War. In the earlier conflict, about eight of every one hundred wounded soldiers evacuated to a U.S. field hospital subsequently died. In World War II, that figure fell to under 4 percent. It was a superb improvement, attributed by medical authorities to better first aid on the battlefield, quick evacuation of the wounded, including by air, and the widespread availability of fresh, type-matched whole blood.75 But despite the excellent capabilities of the medical corps on Iwo Jima, the mortality rate of casualties evacuated from the island was nearly 8 percent. In other words, it was double the mortality rate for all theaters in World War II, and about the same average as for U.S. infantry forces in the First World War.

No one witnessed Kuribayashi’s death, and his body was never identified. Some Japanese sources maintain that the general led this final attack, and was killed in action; others suggest that he took his own life before leaving the bunker. The Americans searched the Japanese dead at Hirawa Bay, but all rank insignia had been removed, and none carried any documents.

In the five remaining months of the war, B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force would make 2,251 emergency landings on Iwo Jima. Possession of this vital way station, almost directly on the flight line between the Marianas and Japan, effectively added to the range and payload of the Superforts. It also saved untold numbers of lives. In April, P-51 squadrons based on Iwo would begin providing fighter escort for the B-29 formations as they hit Japan. Approximately 20,000 USAAF aircrewmen made at least one emergency landing on the island; many would otherwise have perished at sea. A B-29 pilot spoke for all of his fellow airmen when he said, “Whenever I land on this island I thank God for the men who fought for it.”

MacArthur’s implied criticism had been grossly unjust. The tactical options for seizing Iwo Jima had always been limited, and Kuribayashi’s preparations had been brilliant. For all his undoubted talents as a field commander, MacArthur had never confronted such a challenge as Iwo Jima, and one fails to imagine what he could have done differently. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served as MacArthur’s protégé in the Philippines, and who had led the largest ground campaign of the war, briefly visited the island (as president-elect) in 1952. As he stepped off his plane and looked around, Eisenhower was astounded to learn that the marines had brought more than 60,000 troops ashore. Comparing the barren little island to the “wide open spaces of Normandy,” Eisenhower said that he could barely visualize a battle on such a scale, in such constricted terrain: “It was just very difficult for him to comprehend.”

“One of the saddest things I ever saw, when we were flying wing on a plane that got hit, was the barber’s chair gunner in the big bubble at the very top. He was right there beside us in plain sight, beginning to go down. He just waved his hand goodbye. There was nothing you could do. You couldn’t reach out to touch him. Of course, that got you.”

After the war, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) conducted extensive interviews with a cross-section of Japanese at every level of society. The results led the USSBS analysts to conclude that aerial bombing was the “most important single factor” in undercutting the morale of the Japanese people.

It seems likely that the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, at least initially, than the atomic bombings of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. 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.

THE MORNING AFTER THIS UNPRECEDENTED ASSAULT upon the fleet, devastating news was distributed to every ship and station via an “ALNAV”—a message to the entire navy—from Secretary Forrestal in Washington. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead. He had succumbed to a massive cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. On the battleship Tennessee, still recovering from the kamikaze hit she had taken the previous day, the ship’s loudspeakers announced: “Attention! Attention, all hands! President Roosevelt is dead. Repeat, our Supreme Commander, President Roosevelt, is dead.”

MAY 8, 1945, BROUGHT NEWS of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The warships off Okinawa commemorated this historic occasion by launching one of the most awesome and sustained naval bombardments of the Pacific War. But for men in the trenches, V-E Day was met with shrugs and grimaces. The event seemed barely relevant to their own predicament. If V-E Day meant that troops and airplanes would be redeployed from Europe, it was to be welcomed. But they angrily spurned suggestions that it should be celebrated.

These appeals were more effective than at any prior phase of the Pacific War. In the last stages of the fight on the Kiyan Peninsula, thousands of Japanese soldiers emerged from the caves with their hands held above their heads. Most remarkably—and scandalously, in the traditional Japanese view—entire units surrendered while under the organized command of their own officers. The process tended to snowball—as more Japanese crossed into the American lines, more were willing to follow their example. Many brave American nisei—including men whose parents, siblings, wives, and children had been interned in camps at home—volunteered to descend alone into caves, where they engaged enemy soldiers in face-to-face negotiations. Some captured Japanese were even willing to assist in inducing their former comrades to surrender, by returning to the caves or bunkers where they knew them to be hiding. In all, some 11,000 prisoners of war were taken on Okinawa, including more than 7,000 regular Japanese soldiers. The prisoner of war enclosures grew steadily to accommodate this influx. An American lieutenant marveled that “one needed a jeep to go from one end of a POW stockade to another.

No matter how one measured it, Okinawa had been a singularly harrowing battle. American casualties (including naval, air, and ground) were the highest for any amphibious fight in the Pacific—49,151, including 12,520 killed or missing and 36,361 wounded. The Tenth Army had 7,613 killed and about 31,000 wounded. Among the dead was General Buckner, killed by an artillery strike on June 18, the highest-ranking U.S. military officer lost to enemy fire in World War II.

The navy had suffered its worst beating of the Pacific War, with 368 ships damaged and thirty-six sunk, including fifteen amphibious ships and twelve destroyers. The navy had lost 4,907 officers and sailors killed in action, most in kamikaze attacks. The number of naval personnel killed during the Okinawa campaign exceeded the figures for either the army or the marines—although the combined losses in the ground campaign were higher.

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.

“Minelaying has been the most economical in both men and material of all types of warfare against shipping.

In a coup de grâce on July 26, carrier planes pulverized two dozen Japanese warships riding at anchor, effectively wiping out the last remnants of Japanese naval power. “By sunset that evening,” wrote Halsey, “the Japanese navy had ceased to exist.

At an earlier stage of the Manhattan Project, physicists had debated the risk that the blast might be much larger than predicted by their calculations. Some had worried that it would ignite the nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere, perhaps even annihilate the planet. Subsequent calculations had seemed to rule out that scenario. But Enrico Fermi, who was at the observation post at Sandy Ridge that night, had a predilection for gallows humor. He offered to take wagers on the odds that the bomb would set fire to the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would destroy the State of New Mexico or the entire world. Either way, his colleagues might have retorted, no one would collect winnings.

After discussing it with his advisers, Truman decided to let Stalin know of the TRINITY test, though only in the most general terms. He approached the Soviet dictator on the evening of July 24, and told him (through an interpreter) that the United States had developed a “new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin seemed unmoved, remarking casually that he hoped the Americans would make good use of it against Japan. Truman wondered whether the other man had grasped the significance of what he had been told. He did not know or suspect that Soviet espionage had successfully penetrated the Manhattan Project, and that the Russians were already well informed about the bomb.

At the same time, the warnings were appreciated by many Japanese as gestures of consideration and sympathy. A woman in Nagaoka credited the leaflets with saving her life. Her own government had refused to pass on the vital news that the city had been listed as a target, she said—but “I believed the Americans were honest and good people in letting us know in advance of impending raids.” She fled, and three days later Nagaoka was firebombed. A factory worker in Akita shared the sentiment. “They were not barbarians,” he said of the men flying the great silver bombers overhead. “They gave us notice. They said to evacuate.

His copilot, Robert Lewis, turned back in his seat to look. He shouted wildly, striking Tibbets on the shoulder: “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Lewis later wrote in his log of the mission, “My god, what have we done?

The disaster had occurred, and now it would run its course. Some would live, others would die, and the war would go on until those in power said it was over.

Admiral Toyoda, who had been fully briefed on Japan’s failed nuclear program, judged that even if the enemy had assembled enough fissile material for a bomb, they had probably built only one. And even if they had more than one, the number could not be more than two or three, so they would not have enough to destroy the entire country from the air. (On that score, he was right.)

The Eighth Air Force commander, General James Doolittle, had watched the wild landing. He had been sure the plane would crash. Afterward Sweeney reported to his office and explained what his mission had been. Neither man missed the significance—they were, in a sense, bookends. Doolittle had led the first air raid on the Japanese homeland, in April 1942; Sweeney had just dropped the bomb that would effectively mark the end of the war.

Parents who had lost sons in the war were furious that their sacrifice had been rendered meaningless. If ending the war was so easy, if the emperor wielded the power to simply call it off, why hadn’t he acted earlier? “Your Majesty,” one said, “because of this my sons have all died in vain, a dog’s death.

The one word—surrender—had produced a greater shock than the bombing of our city,” the doctor wrote in his diary. “The more I thought, the more wretched and miserable I became.

Dying is the easier thing to do. Consider living under the ugly enemy. It will be harrowing and painful. . . . It will not be easy to live through the dark ages and to transmit our culture to the next age. But if this is not done, there will not be an age when the Japanese people are truly awakened.

The emperor’s statement had clearly absolved them of responsibility for the nation’s defeat, and had summoned them to the work of rebuilding a peaceful Japan. To defy surrender would dishonor his will and subvert his authority.

The failed suicide was considered by Tojo’s countrymen as the crowning ignominy of his odious career. He made a full recovery, only to be convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1948.

In many outlying areas, there was little more than a token occupation force, which could have been overrun quickly if recalcitrant extremists in the Japanese military had chosen to fight. A report produced by General MacArthur’s headquarters called the occupation “a great, though calculated, military gamble.”58 The Americans wagered that the emperor’s will and authority would cast a psychological spell over the Japanese people, and especially the rank and file of the army and navy, which were not yet disarmed. The gamble paid off in spectacular fashion. Across the length and breadth of the populous country, not a single shot was fired at Allied occupation troops. The shift from war to peace was jarring in its suddenness and totality. Three or four weeks earlier, the Japanese people had been preparing to meet the invaders with bamboo spears and kitchen knives. Now they bowed and grinned and welcomed the newcomers as honored guests.

LOOKING BACK ON THE WAR THEY HAD JUST LOST, Japanese leaders marveled at their own stupidity. Asked to name the turning point of the Pacific War, Admiral Yonai replied: “To be very frank, I think that the turning point was the start. I felt from the very beginning that there was no chance of success. . . . I think to this day that it was not a proper plan in view of the situation, our national war strength.”80 Similar views were expressed by many of the Japanese leaders interrogated by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in the fall of 1945. Their fateful decision to attack the United States and the Allies in December 1941 had been founded upon a catalog of faulty assumptions. They had assumed that the war could be won quickly, averting a prolonged war of attrition in which American economic power would become decisive. They had assumed that Nazi Germany was unbeatable in Europe, and would break Britain and Russia to its yoke; that sea routes linking Japan to its oil supply in the East Indies could be secured against submarine and air attacks; and that the main U.S. naval fleet would charge into the western Pacific to be met and annihilated in a single decisive sea battle, reprising the Imperial Navy’s triumph at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.

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.

To the extent that they remembered the war at all, many Japanese remembered it as a tragedy that had befallen Japan, rather than as a monstrous evil that their nation had deliberately set in motion.

During the postwar occupation, many of MacArthur’s policies reinforced and abetted the collective amnesia of the Japanese. By order of the supreme commander, there was no concerted public effort to preserve the history or memory of the war—no monuments, no references in school textbooks, no national museum. The decision to leave Hirohito on his throne, as a national symbol and object of reverence (if no longer worship), created a sense of continuity. Exonerating the emperor seemed a small price to pay to ease the occupation and to erect a bulwark against communism in Asia.

One evening, the VC-10 commander, Edward J. Huxtable Jr., watched the sun sink into the ship’s wake, “and it was one of the most beautiful sunsets I had ever seen with the purples, never had I seen such purples, and the dark hues that were in the sky as in an Arizona sunset.” But few of the other veterans on the Fanshaw Bay were paying attention. They had seen a thousand Pacific sunsets, and the spectacle no longer drew their interest. If they looked anywhere on the sea horizon, they looked forward, to the east, toward home. And one of the other VC-10 pilots, standing nearby on the flight deck, remarked to Huxtable: “You know, Captain, these fellows don’t know it yet, but this experience will have been the greatest experience of their lives.