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

by Ian W. Toll

John A. Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor’s sixth and youngest child, was a staff supply officer on the Hornet. Admiral Jocko Clark went down to Lieutenant Roosevelt’s stateroom and broke the news. Clark offered to send Roosevelt home for his father’s funeral, but the lieutenant declined, saying: “My place is here.”94 By order of Secretary Forrestal, all ships held special memorial services on Sunday, April 15. In a typical ceremony, five minutes’ silence was observed by the ship’s company, and three volleys of rifle fire marked the late president’s passing. Harry Truman was FDR’s third vice president since 1933. Many Americans did not even recognize his name. William Dunn, the CBS radio correspondent in MacArthur’s Manila headquarters, sheepishly admitted that he could not remember the name of the sitting vice president. Upon hearing the news of FDR’s death, “I held the dubious distinction of being an American reporter who didn’t know who was at the helm of his great nation!”95 Gene Sledge recorded that he and his fellow marines were “curious and a bit apprehensive” about Truman: “We surely didn’t want someone in the White House who would prolong [the war] one day longer than necessary.”96 By contrast, the mood in the Japanese Thirty-Second Army command bunker was euphoric. According to Colonel Yahara, “Many seemed convinced that we would now surely win the war!”97 Some conjectured that the ground attack on Okinawa and the massed Kikusui kamikaze attacks of April 12 must ha...