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

by Ian W. Toll

The moonshine in MacArthur’s press communiqués was gratuitous and unnecessary, because his military achievements, in 1943 and 1944, were quite real. His advance up the coast of New Guinea, his landings in New Britain, his bold surprise amphibious landing on Los Negros-Manus, his long jump up the northern New Guinea coast to Hollandia—all those moves were deftly planned and executed. Kenney’s bombers did wipe out the better part of an important convoy; they did improvise a new and lethal tactic to sink ships at sea, a feat that had eluded them in the past. MacArthur’s forces had ample cause to take justifiable pride in their achievements, and the controversy surrounding his communiqués only tended to tarnish what should have been regarded, quite properly, as a winning South Pacific counteroffensive.

For the next three days, the train meandered through the Great Plains and the desert regions of the Southwest. Its speed rarely exceeded 35 miles per hour, partly because Roosevelt found the ride more comfortable at that imperial pace—but also because he wanted to deliver his speech accepting the party’s nomination from a naval base in San Diego, and the exact timing of his nomination was uncertain. At that speed the train’s batteries would not recharge, so it stopped often at local sidings to plug into charging stations. FDR was sleeping well each night, a vital consideration for his health. Travel had always done wonders for his spirits. He was invigorated by the peaceful ritual of watching the country roll past while identifying towns and other landmarks on a map he kept in his lap. He impressed his staff and companions by citing esoteric details of local history,

MacArthur’s desire to liberate the Philippines was genuine, honorable, and deeply felt. But in the interest of a full accounting of this history, the following facts should be weighed in the balance. On February 13, 1942, in the command bunker on Corregidor, Philippine president Manuel Quezon signed an order transferring from Philippine commonwealth treasury funds the sums of $500,000 to MacArthur, $75,000 to Sutherland, and lesser amounts to two other senior officers on MacArthur’s staff. The payments were described as compensation for past services in the U.S. military mission to the Philippines. The current-day equivalent of the sum paid to MacArthur was a cool $8 million.

The president spent most of the voyage in his cabin, sleeping and reading, replenishing his strength for the punishing schedule that lay ahead. He was briefed each day by Admiral Leahy. Most afternoons, he and Leahy sat for an hour or two on the flag bridge, taking in the sun and salt air. A movie was screened each evening in Leahy’s cabin. Fala, as usual, was everyone’s friend; members of the crew slipped him snacks and snipped away locks of his hair as souvenirs, until the captain told them to desist. It would not do the Baltimore’s reputation any good if the president’s dog arrived in Hawaii overweight and looking as if he had the mange.

the persistent confusion in the historical literature about Leahy’s role in the war. The admiral is alternately named as “White House chief of staff” or “chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” Both jobs exist to this day, but they are vastly different, and a single individual would never occupy them simultaneously. So what was Leahy, exactly? Was he a mere staffer? A dependable loyalist? A sophisticated message-runner? FDR’s best friend? Or was he really the almighty chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? The answer seems to be that Bill Leahy was all of these things. He was the president’s alter ego, especially in the last year of FDR’s life; but he was also deeply respected by his fellow joint chiefs as a strategist, a former CNO, and a global statesman. The JCS made policy by consensus, rather than by majority vote. At the very least, therefore, Leahy was one of four equal voices in this powerful quartet. When and if the chiefs failed to muddle through to a unanimous decision, their deadlock would be appealed to the commander in chief, to whom Leahy was the principal link.

MacArthur’s tardy arrival on board the Baltimore is one of the most familiar scenes of the Pacific War. Sam Rosenman, a longtime FDR aide and speechwriter, recalled that MacArthur’s arrival was heralded by a chorus of sirens, “and there raced onto the dock and screeched to a stop a motorcycle escort and the longest open car I have ever seen. In the front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back one lone figure—MacArthur. There were no aides or attendants. The car traveled some distance around the open space and stopped at the gangplank.”34 Every other flag and general officer involved in the ceremony was turned out in immaculate dress uniform. MacArthur, in the heat of a Hawaiian summer afternoon, wore his famous brown leather flight jacket over khaki. The corncob pipe was not in evidence on this occasion, but he wore his familiar aviator sunglasses and his battered Philippine field marshal’s cap with a mass of “scrambled eggs” (gold braid) above the visor.

On MacArthur’s part, he recorded in his memoir that they “talked of everything but the war—of our old carefree days when life was simpler and gentler, of many things that had disappeared in the mists of time.”48 Not having seen the president in many years, MacArthur was taken aback by his diminished appearance. He predicted, accurately, that FDR would not survive another term in office. But after watching the president lifted like a child and carried from wheelchair to car and back again, the general “marveled at the spiritual strength Roosevelt obviously possessed in order to retain his mental acumen and wit in the face of evident physical deterioration.”

He was determined that the Axis powers should recognize that they had been utterly and permanently defeated. No doubts or ambivalence on this score could be permitted to intrude into the proceedings, either at the time of surrender or in the long lens of history. Therefore, it was necessary to insist upon the formality of an unconditional surrender. Behind that formality, however, lay the implied promise of a magnanimous peace. It might even be said that the lesson of FDR’s parable was that if the Germans and Japanese would first agree to surrender unconditionally, they could anticipate that all reasonable requests would subsequently be granted.

BECAUSE TASK FORCE 58 WAS SO BIG, and because it grew steadily as newly commissioned ships arrived in the Pacific, it was too unwieldy to operate in a single circular formation. The force was cleaved into component “task groups,” each a small circular fleet in itself. Each task group sailed as a unit and operated semi-independently under the local command of a rear admiral. It could break away to refuel or conduct air operations; or it might be dispatched by Admiral Mitscher to raid a target several hundred miles away. It was also possible to form a conventional surface warship force consisting of battleships and cruisers of the several task groups, which could then be sent ahead to engage Japanese warships in a conventional naval gunnery battle, or to bombard enemy shore fortifications. Usually, however, the task groups (varying from three to five in number) remained at full strength in adjacent positions, spaced at a distance of fifteen to twenty miles, so that they could provide mutual support.

Returning dripping wet to the dock, Buell glimpsed a small, white-haired man being pitched headlong into the lagoon. The victim was already airborne when Buell recognized him as Admiral McCain. Naval etiquette gave leeway in certain circumstances, but in general, drunken aviators were not permitted to lay hands on a three-star admiral and heave him into the sea. Buell shouted a warning, but too late. He and several others dove after McCain immediately: As we got hold of him and helped him to his feet, he was gasping and wheezing and said: “Get my hat, boys, get my hat.” The hat, a special version of a field fatigue hat with the gold band and scrambled eggs almost all green from salt air, was his lucky hat and well-known among the fleet pilots. We retrieved the hat, got the admiral back up on the dock, and expressed our deepest regrets for our conduct. . . . He was a small man, almost fragile, and looked like a strong wind could blow him away. Dripping salt water, seaweed, and coral sand, he kept grinning as he shook hands with each of us while we continued making our apologies. He asked for a dry cigarette, lit up, and started telling us how good it was to be back with his “fighting men.”

Clark later said that he “regarded those islands as my special property,” and his aviators nicknamed them the “Jocko Jimas.” Upon returning to Eniwetok the previous month, they had drawn up stock certificates in an imaginary real estate investment company, the “Jocko Jima Development Corporation,” which advertised its business as the acquisition and development of “exclusive sites in the Bonin Islands.” Designated “shareholders” were presented with colorfully illustrated stock certificates, which entitled the owner to a share in “choice locations of all types in Iwo, Chichi, Haha, and Muko Jima—only 500 miles from downtown Tokyo.” As “president” of the make-believe firm, Clark signed each certificate in his own hand. Share No. 1 was issued to Admiral Mitscher. The certificates soon became prized collectors’ items and were traded (in some cases for real money) throughout the Pacific and as far afield as Washington.

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 cannibalism. These ghastly events and the war crimes trials of the perpetrators were documented by James Bradley in his 2003 book Flyboys.

In September 1944, on the eve of the American landing, the greater part of Nakagawa’s garrison force inhabited a great subterranean labyrinth connecting more than five hundred natural and manmade caves. Some of the entrances were fitted with steel doors built flush into the slopes, well hidden by camouflage netting or vegetation. Some were so small that men could enter only by crawling on their hands and knees, but one great underground cavern was large enough to accommodate a thousand men at once. The system had been fitted with wooden stairways, electric lights, telephone lines, storerooms, ventilation shafts, interior decks, mess cooking facilities, hospitals, command posts, and built-in bunks. Freshwater had collected in cisterns, enough to sustain a long siege. The tunnel network went on for miles. Nakagawa could move reinforcements from one part of the hills to another, even over a distance of half a mile, without exposing them to enemy fire. Deep in the rock, the temperature was cool and comfortable, giving the defenders respite from the furnace-like heat outside.

A squadron of Marine F4U Corsairs flew into the airfield on September 19 and commenced ground-support operations against Japanese positions on the nearby ridgeline. They dropped 500-pound bombs and napalm, often from very low altitude. These may have been the shortest bombing runs of the entire Pacific War. The Corsairs took off, banked right immediately, and flew low over enemy-held positions in the hills. They dropped their payloads, banked right again, and landed. A typical bombing run lasted less than two minutes; the pilots did not even bother to retract their landing gear.

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, even while hating him from the bottom of their hearts, for his tenacity, his cunning, his stamina, and his implacable courage in the face of certain defeat and death.

Under the close scrutiny of an omnipotent police state, the Japanese people offered no organized resistance during the war, and precious little public dissent of any kind. Indeed, they gave signs of continued support for the war and its aims. Since the nation’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the great mass of Japanese had grown accustomed to war as a natural and quasi-permanent condition. Many did not think it strange or immoral to conquer and subjugate foreigners, and they took hotblooded pride in the overseas triumphs of their military forces. But by the late summer of 1944, they were beginning to grasp that the Pacific War was essentially different.

Civil war did not seem beyond possibility. According to Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, the last prewar ambassador to the United States, the regime’s habit of celebrating make-believe victories was self-defeating, because Japanese public opinion was never prepared for a negotiated settlement. “If we had stopped the war any earlier the people would not have understood. They had never been told the truth about the situation and there would have been civil war in Japan among the people . . . it seems to me that it was the destiny of our country to continue this very unwise war to the very end.”

Pacific War histories have tended to underplay the controversy created in Japan, and even in the military ranks, by the introduction of organized suicide tactics. Many Japanese resisted strongly, arguing that it misconstrued traditional samurai warrior ideals (bushido). Some naval officers associated the concept with a pathological “death cult” that held sway in the Japanese army, and they argued that it had no place in the navy. Veteran aviators, recalling the victories they had won in the skies earlier in the war, tended to regard kamikaze attacks as essentially defeatist. Now and again, Japanese pilots had crash-dived into Allied ships, or rammed Allied bombers in flight—but before the fall of 1944, such attacks had been sporadic and opportunistic, often occurring when an airplane was damaged and could not return to base.

By the fall of 1944, an arsenal of purpose-built suicide weapons was in advanced production. These included a manned rocket, the Oka (“cherry blossom”), which was dropped from a larger aircraft and dove on enemy ships at velocities approaching the speed of sound. A one-man suicide submarine called the Kaiten (“heaven shaker”) was released by a larger “mother” submarine; its pilot would drive it into an enemy hull like a torpedo. A small wooden speedboat called the Shinyo (“ocean shaker”) carried a two-ton warhead, and could charge into the midst of an enemy fleet at 50 knots. Fukuryus, “crawling dragons,” were scuba divers who would carry mines underwater and attach them directly to the hulls of American ships. There were others as well, including gliders that could be launched from mountain peaks, and explosive vests redolent of a more recent era. Some such weapons and vehicles would prove more effective than others in combat. But the time and resources dedicated to these programs belied the myth that the kamikaze era began as a spontaneous, grassroots movement in October 1944.

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. The samurai was “to live as if already dead,” an outlook consonant with Buddhism;

Frequent repetition on the radio and at patriotic rallies might have left the impression, especially to younger Japanese, that “Umi Yukaba” and the sentiments it contained had an ancient lineage. Actually, the lyrics dated back to an eighth-century poem, but that poem had previously been obscure, and had only been set to music in 1937. 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. 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 escort carriers, “CVEs,” were small auxiliaries sometimes known by their nicknames, “jeep carriers” or “baby flattops.” They were about one-half the length and one-third the weight of the Essex-class fleet carriers. They were 500 feet long, displaced about 10,000 tons, and carried just twenty-five to thirty aircraft. Their greatest virtue, from the navy’s point of view, was that they could be built and launched quickly and cheaply. They were deployed in limited roles: to provide air cover for merchant convoys and transport fleets, to support amphibious landings, and to ferry replacement aircraft across the Pacific. They were too slow to keep company with the big fighting carriers of Task Force 38: most could do no better than 18 knots. They were considered too frail to stand up to a concerted air or submarine attack, because their thin steel skin was too easily pierced by bombs or torpedoes. The crews joked that “CVE” stood for “combustible, vulnerable, and expendable,” and their mordant appraisal was accurate on all three counts.

The Type 1 armor-piercing projectile fired by the Yamato had been purposely designed to dive under a ship, if it landed in the sea short of the target. This round had functioned as intended, maintaining a linear underwater trajectory and detonating 0.4 seconds after surface impact. Though it did not make physical contact with the ship, its blast force was directed upward into the vulnerable part of the hull. In this respect, the Type 1 projectile had behaved like a mine or an American torpedo fused with a magnetic detonator, designed to trigger the warhead when the weapon was directly beneath the ship.

In truth, the officers and men who manned the Japanese fleet had never really bought into Plan Sho, because it did not offer a realistic prospect of success. They understood that the staff officers who had written the plan did not really expect them to win, but to fight one last glorious battle to crown the Japanese navy’s career. They were being asked to offer up the still-mighty Combined Fleet as a sacrificial lamb. But the Japanese navy differed from the army in this respect: its culture, training, and traditions offered no precedent for a mindless, headlong banzai charge. While the naval air corps was eventually given over to kamikaze tactics, that development was a last resort, long delayed by opposition in the ranks. It involved sacrificing airplanes and novice pilots who lacked the skills to fly and fight using conventional tactics. But the emperor’s ships were major capital assets, state-of-the-art weapons, beloved national icons, built and manned over many decades at monumental expense. It had never been intended that they should immolate themselves for the sake of abstract considerations of honor.

Perhaps it was not cowardice so much as sagging morale that best explains Kurita’s equivocation and retreat. He and his fellow officers knew better than their civilian countrymen that the war was already lost, and that the high command had tried to hide the truth behind a skein of lies. They could not acknowledge it openly, but the incubus of defeatism was spreading through their ranks. And how could it have been otherwise, when the ludicrously named “Plan Victory” was itself a token of the regime’s defeatism?

Halsey retained a fund of goodwill with his colleagues and superiors, for whom the disasters and emergencies of 1942 remained fresh in memory. Often in the past, his fearless and rousing leadership had seemed reckless, but it had succeeded. He had earned the right to a few mistakes. Relieving him of command would only draw unwelcome attention to the near-disaster in Leyte Gulf. And who would replace him? Four-star officers who possessed the requisite seniority and were qualified for the job were vanishingly few. Mitscher could have been fleeted up, but he was overdue for a long rest, and his replacement (John McCain) was still learning the ropes. King and Nimitz apparently discussed the possibility of relieving Halsey, at least temporarily, but quickly discarded the idea.

A little humility would have gone a long way at this late stage of Halsey’s distinguished career. He was a five-star fleet admiral, one of only four in history, a position that entitled him to active duty status with full salary, an office, lodging allowance, and a car and driver until the end of his life. Through the sale of his memoirs and a lucrative tour on the public speaking circuit, he became rich. Seats on corporate boards added another generous source of income. “Bull” Halsey was a major celebrity with a devoted public following, often appearing on television in the 1950s. He could have remained aloof from the judgments of historians. It would have cost him little to acknowledge error at Leyte Gulf—indeed, it probably would have enhanced rather than diminished his legacy. He might have said publicly what he once admitted privately—that he wished Spruance had been in command at Leyte Gulf, and he (Halsey) in command at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.137 But until his death in 1959, the proud old fleet admiral fought a losing rearguard action against the hardening judgment of history.

“Only those people who don’t know me call me Bull.”143 It was no wonder that Halsey rejected the nickname. It was decidedly double-edged, and grew more so on reflection. The bull is respected for its size, strength, and aggression, but not for its tactical acumen. The bull is stubborn, unreasoning, “bull-headed.” It goes about its work heedlessly, “like a bull at the gate.” Other large beasts are clumsy in tight quarters, but it is the bull that is most dreaded by the world’s china shop proprietors. 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.”

WITH RARE EXCEPTIONS, the submarines were kept out of the public eye. Press reporting was minimal, especially during the early stages of the Pacific War. The nickname given to the submarine force, the “Silent Service,” was well earned: submarine warriors were instinctively tight-lipped, even in the presence of their colleagues in other branches of the navy. Their base at Pearl Harbor seemed enigmatic, even ominous. Low, sleek, coal-black boats, tucked behind finger piers on East Loch, were distinguishable only by stenciled numbers on their bridge towers.

Lockwood told Admiral King that torpedo failures had probably reduced the effectiveness of his Pacific submarine fleet by at least 50 percent through the first eighteen months of the war. The trouble was aggravated by the scandalously slow response of the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, which had designed and built the Mark 14. The weapon had not been adequately tested prior to the war, partly owing to a lack of sufficient funds.

From the start, however, Operation MATTERHORN was hobbled by wretched logistics. The new Superforts with their balky engines were flown into the theater by recently trained aircrews. Their round-the-world odyssey began at Morrison Field, Florida and continued across a daisy chain of refueling stops in the Caribbean, Brazil, Ascension Island (in the mid-Atlantic), Liberia, Cairo, Baghdad, Karachi, and Kharagpur, India (near Calcutta). Along the way, the Wright engines often overheated, leading to crashes and groundings. With dozens of planes stranded in Cairo and Karachi, it was found that ambient ground temperatures surpassing 110 degrees were causing the engines to fail on takeoff, and the Wright engines’ air-cooling mechanisms had to be rebuilt by engineers flown in from the United States.

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 Marianas, which U.S. forces seized between June and August of that year. Saipan, Guam, and Tinian offered terrain suitable for large B-29 airbases, security against enemy ground assault, and (most importantly) a seaborne rather than an airborne supply line. They lay within a 1,500-mile flight radius of Tokyo.

A typical B-29 aircrew comprised eleven men ranging in age from nineteen to thirty. On many planes, the captain and oldest member of the crew was a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who had learned to fly in a single-engine trainer about eighteen months earlier. Not even youth or peak physical condition spared them the fatigue of long flights at high altitude. After a fifteen-hour mission, one pilot wrote in a letter home, “my legs and back were stiff and I can still feel it! We took off at dawn and landed several hours after dark. That’s a point lots of folks miss. Bombing the target takes only a short time. It’s that workout going to the target and returning home to your destination that gets you.”

A Superfort specially configured for long-distance photo reconnaissance flights, designated the F-13, arrived on October 30. By a stroke of luck, the following day dawned with unusually clear skies over Tokyo and its environs. Captain Ralph D. Steakley proposed to fly a photographic mission right away, hoping to capitalize on the rare favorable weather, and Hansell agreed. The lone F-13, sardonically named the Tokyo Rose, soared over the Japanese capital at 32,000 feet, its four cameras snapping continuously. Steakley circled in lazy figure-eight patterns around Tokyo, Tokyo Bay, Yokohama, then west over Mt. Fuji to the Tōkai region and the industrial heartland of greater Nagoya. This was the first Allied airplane to penetrate Tokyo airspace since the Doolittle Raid, two-and-a-half years earlier. Japanese army fighters scrambled to intercept, but to the air defense command’s toe-curling mortification, they were unable to catch the fast, high-flying intruder. Above 30,000 feet, the Nakajima KI-44 fighters (Allied codename “Tojo”) could climb only with a significant loss of ground speed, allowing the Tokyo Rose to sail away, serene and untouchable. Antiaircraft batteries put on a dazzling fireworks show, but the bursts were low and wild. After a fourteen-hour flight in freakishly clear weather, the F-13 touched down on Saipan with thousands of aerial negatives covering major industrial and aviation plants in the Tokyo and Nagoya regions.

Lockwood credited the Archerfish with sinking a 28,000-ton Hiyō-class carrier.63 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 the Navy Cross.

Some pilots were privately horrified, but did not feel free to voice their objections. One aviator-in-training, a university student, recalled that he was “bowled over” by the news that his training class had been designated for kamikaze operations. But he dared not speak up, even to his fellow cadets. “We couldn’t share our doubts with each other. We were all drawn from different universities. If I had expressed my disquiet, my university could have been disgraced. I had to keep my own counsel.”

Among officers and crewmen of the American fleet, the kamikazes inspired dread, horror, loathing, and (not least) fascination. They seemed to confirm a prior suspicion that the Japanese were fundamentally different from other “races”—that they were weirdly fanatical and not quite human in their zeal for guaranteed death. This impression of exotic, dehumanizing “otherness” inspired fanciful rumors about the kamikazes—that they wore green and white religious robes, or black hoods, or were manacled into their cockpits. Some called them “green hornets.” They inspired a new kind of terror. A destroyer sailor wrote his wife: “I have never in my life seen such a vicious scene as a wicked monster driving a plane straight at me at 200 miles an hour with six wing guns going full blast. It looked as if he was after me personally.”

On the eighteenth, General Yamashita radioed General Suzuki to advise that Leyte would receive no further reinforcements or material support. As Yamashita had feared, the fight for that island had consumed a major portion of Japanese strength in the Philippines, darkening the outlook for the pending fight for Luzon. Based on a methodical attempt to count bodies during the last week of December, the Americans estimated that 60,809 Japanese troops had perished on the island. Just 434 had been taken prisoner.82 U.S. Sixth Army losses were just 2,888 killed and 9,858 wounded.

The sea was lumpy and disgruntled. The sky was painted in freakish colors, a dull coppery glow beneath a purple scudding murk. Gale-force gusts blew streaks of spindrift off the wave crests.

Though he did not admit it, either at the time or later, Halsey must have known he bore grave responsibility for the beating the fleet had just suffered. His subordinates were comparing notes and opinions, and many agreed that Halsey had erred by failing to dodge the storm when there was still time, on the afternoon of December 17. The brownshoe admirals were typically outspoken in their criticism. Admiral Gerry Bogan “felt that it was just plain goddamn stubbornness and stupidity.”111 Jocko Clark, on standby status aboard the Hornet, was similarly harsh, as was Arthur Radford. Ted Sherman attested that the appearance of sky and sea on December 17 had been a sure sign that a typhoon was brewing. Halsey had done what he had done because he was determined to keep his promises to MacArthur. That motive was admirable, but the end result was no airstrikes on Luzon and a storm-mauled fleet. For the second time in two months, Nimitz was forced to question Halsey’s fitness for the critically important job he held.

minds were turning to the postwar future and the challenges of demobilization. Many expressed growing concern about a wide psychological gulf that had opened between men fighting overseas and the “folks back home.” Among veterans, feelings of bitterness and alienation were common. Their resentments were complicated, sometimes ambivalent or inchoate—but in general, veterans felt let down by their fellow citizens. Their anger tended to flare up suddenly and unexpectedly, often taking civilians by surprise. Any mention of industrial strikes aroused their fury,

Servicemen grimaced to hear radio announcers speak in the first-person plural—“We”—when referring to American forces fighting overseas. They snorted at the expression “home front.” As if scrap metal drives and victory gardens could turn a peaceful republic into a battlefield! Posters on factory walls told workers to think of themselves as “soldiers of production.” Soldiers! With their eight-hour shifts and fat paychecks! Everywhere on this so-called home front, servicemen encountered billboard patriotism and war bond sales kitsch. They shook their heads in sorrow at the appropriation of the American flag for commercial advertising. When films were screened for fighting men, and Old Glory unfurled to the accompaniment of swelling orchestral music, they sometimes even groaned and jeered: “Boo, wave that flag!”5 Their scorn was not aimed at the flag itself, which they revered, but at the gross machinations of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. A

But to civilians who had lived through the hardscrabble years of the Great Depression, their newfound prosperity was exhilarating. In 1944, the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 1.2 percent—the lowest ever recorded, probably the lowest that will ever be recorded. Gross national product grew by more than 60 percent in real terms from 1940 to 1944.7 The gains were broadly distributed: indeed, they were proportionally greatest at the low end of the income scale. The war boom completed what the New Dealers had started—it lifted the fortunes of the poorest Americans, including blacks, Latinos, and poor rural whites. In 1944, 19 million women of all races were working outside the home, including about 2 million in the munitions industries. Surging wages ran up against rationing and the enforced unavailability of certain big-ticket goods, such as automobiles and major household appliances. The result was unprecedented savings and a near-quintupling of household wealth.

Trains and intercity buses were jammed to capacity, with passengers sitting on suitcases in the aisles. Scalpers roamed through the stations offering tickets at steep markups. Everywhere one saw young military wives with infants and small children, doggedly following their husbands from post to post. Many migrated to the West Coast to find a home nearer to the Pacific War. Sailors on ships deployed in the Pacific might put into San Diego or San Francisco at any time, without advance notice, and be given a three-day liberty pass. If they wanted a reunion, the families had better be living nearby. In California, however, there were millions of new migrants—the Golden State’s population grew by more than one-third during the war—and never enough housing. A city official in San Francisco reported: “Families are sleeping in garages, with mattresses right on cement floors and three, four, five to one bed.”

Marjorie Cartwright married a sailor a week before he shipped out with MacArthur’s Seventh Fleet. She accompanied him to San Francisco, his ship’s home port, and promised to wait there for his return. It was the first time she had traveled beyond the borders of West Virginia. “I was on my own, living in a city I didn’t know and where I knew very few people. It was like being an orphan. I felt completely alone.” She found a furnished room in an apartment and took a job as a keypunch operator for Standard Oil. “I learned to knit at that time and spent many nights knitting socks for my husband and listening to the radio for war news,” she recalled years later. “I lived alone for four years during the war, and they were the most painful, lonely years I think I will ever spend. I look back and wonder how I ever got through those years, but when you’re young you can do a lot of things that you can’t do as you grow older. I spent many nights by myself in my room, crying because I was so lonely.”

there was almost no residential housing at all. The workforce was bused in from Detroit or crowded into squalid trailer camps along the roads. Shantytowns of tar paper shacks sprung up in the Michigan mud. In existing dwellings, owners made a killing by renting out their spare rooms. Old Victorian homes became overcrowded bunkhouses, with beds rented out by the hour. Two or three people alternated in the same bed—“hotbunking”—with their sleeping schedules synchronized to their work schedules at the plant. With thousands of workers leaving the factories at midnight, retail and entertainment businesses found it profitable to stay open all night. Bars were open around the clock and crowded even in the small hours of the morning. Long lines stretched down the sidewalks outside nightclubs, where “swing shift” shows featured C-list entertainers between midnight and dawn. One could go bowling at three o’clock in the morning. Movie theaters screened films back to back, twenty-four hours per day, and were always full. Homeless workers bought a ticket for a midnight showing and tried to sleep in their seats. Parents dropped their children off at a movie theater, worked a shift at the plant, and then returned to pick them up.

violence broke out in Los Angeles, in the predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Chavez Ravine (near the present-day site of Dodger Stadium). The riots were touched off by simmering tensions between sailors posted to a nearby naval reserve training center and local Latino youths who wore “zoot suits” and broad-brimmed hats. The zoot suiters, as they were called, resented the influx of thousands of servicemen to their “barrio.” Angry confrontations on the streets were common. Los Angeles newspapers, especially the two local Hearst dailies, began campaigning against the zoot suiters in 1942, accusing them in sensationalistic terms of violence, theft, rape, indolence, draft-dodging, and smoking marijuana. On June 4, 1943—the first anniversary of the Battle of Midway—a rumor swept through the naval and military bases of the region. It was said that a gang of zoot suiters had attacked a sailor and then retreated into a local movie theater. Carloads of sailors wielding baseball bats converged on Chavez Ravine. They stormed into the cinemas, forced the projectionists to turn on the lights, strode up and down the aisles, and dragged anyone wearing a zoot suit out into the street. The victims were beaten and the suits ripped from their bodies. The Los Angeles Police Department and navy shore patrol stood by, for the most part, and did not intervene.

a rumor that had circulated during his sea voyage to Hawaii and Alaska that summer—that Fala, the president’s dog, had accidentally been left behind on an Aleutian island, and that a navy destroyer had been dispatched from Seattle to retrieve him. The story was nonsensical on its face: How could the dog have been forgotten by the entire presidential entourage? How could his absence have gone unnoticed until the party returned to Seattle? Why send a ship instead of a plane? But it was repeated widely in the anti-FDR press. As the rumor snowballed, the destroyer was upgraded to a cruiser, then to a battleship, and the cost of the imagined rescue operation rose as high as $20 million. After a week or so, Admiral Leahy felt compelled to deny the story publicly, causing it to vanish from the headlines. But FDR knew that his opponents had overreached, and he was not going to let the opportunity pass.

On January 3, 1945, a federal order shut down the operations of all horse and dog tracks. The stated purpose was to reduce the burden on roads and mass transit systems. But the real purpose, as government officials acknowledged in off-the-record comments, was to eliminate the unseemly spectacle of war-enriched civilians betting their newfound wealth at the tracks. The following month, a midnight curfew order was imposed on bars and nightclubs. In this case, the ostensible purpose was to save electricity and fuel oil, but the measure was really “an instrument for meeting what is perhaps officially felt to be a shortage of ‘war awareness’ by civilians.”

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.