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

by Ian W. Toll

The service accepted delivery of 24,000 new combat aircraft during the 1944 fiscal year, a figure that exceeded the totals for the previous three years combined.33 That was a high-class problem, one that any other combatant nation of the Second World War would have been glad to face. But the admirals faced an immediate decision: How to resolve the mismatch between surging production and a bloated inventory? In February, Admiral King signed an order fixing an upper limit of 38,000 planes in service, and adamantly refused to relax that edict.34 The production lines began ramping down steeply in the summer of 1944—but the plants could not be permitted to shut down entirely. To preserve the physical capital and know-how of this strategically vital industry, it was thought necessary to keep them turning over at a reduced rate. Admiral McCain, then serving as deputy CNO for air, proposed a plan to assign only the newest aircraft to frontline service, and to return older units to the United States for training or other purposes. In September 1944, the navy adopted a more radical plan—to junk thousands of older planes, including those already deployed in the Pacific, to make room for newer units. The word went out to all commands: get rid of older aircraft by any means necessary.

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. Many such aircraft “boneyards” were later used for target practice by U.S. bombers on training missions. Scrapped airplanes were bulldozed into pits, and the wreckage compacted by running tanks over them. Marginally damaged carrier planes were pushed off the flight decks into the sea, and new replacement units flown in from escort carriers. This mass-junking of perfectly serviceable warplanes occurred at the height of the war, when the Japanese were falling well short of aircraft production targets and struggling to keep their assembly lines in operation at all.

“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.”

More than 3,000 liberated Western civilians, emaciated but elated, began streaming out of the gates. But Hayashi had ordered the remaining 221 internees into a single large building near the center of the campus, intending to hold them as hostages and to bargain for their lives. Fearing a massacre, the U.S. commanders offered a ceasefire and parley. Hayashi agreed to free the internees in exchange for a guarantee of safe conduct to Japanese lines. In a scene that was not repeated at any other point in the Pacific War, Hayashi led his prison guards out of the building and through the university’s main gates, directly past the glowering stares of thousands of American soldiers. Civilian internees hurled verbal abuse at the Japanese as they marched. “Small bands of men and women followed them through the encampment jeering and hooting—the women loudest of all—until the Japanese plodded out of the camp and the gates clanged shut.”16 But the contract was honored. No shots were fired on either side, and Hayashi’s men were permitted to head south, where they would join the main concentrations of Japanese ground forces. As they parted ways with the Americans, each Japanese officer and soldier either saluted or bowed.

General MacArthur visited Santo Tomas later that afternoon. He was mobbed by a grateful, tearful crowd. They pressed toward him from all directions. He greeted those he knew by name. Some of the younger children, having spent three years in the camp, remembered little of their prewar lives. “One man threw his arms around me, and put his head on my chest and cried unashamedly,” MacArthur recalled. “It was a wonderful and never to be forgotten moment—to be a life-saver, not a life-taker.”18 As the prisoners were interviewed, the stories they told vindicated MacArthur’s insistence upon speed in liberating the camps. The food allocations to the prisoners had declined sharply in the past month, and many were verging on starvation. If the liberators had arrived thirty days later, said Bill Dunn, the CBS radio correspondent, “the results might have been completely tragic.”

In the Tondo District, advancing patrols came upon hideous scenes of civilian massacres. Hobert D. Mason of the Medical Corps discovered forty-nine bodies strewn across the floor of a cigarette factory, including many women and children as young as two years old. Their wrists had been tied tightly behind their backs. Most had been butchered by bayonets and samurai swords.21 Nearby, at the Dy-Pac Lumber Yard, U.S. soldiers counted 115 murdered civilians. Children and even infants had been beheaded. In a sworn affidavit provided to war crimes investigators, Major David V. Binkley described what he took to be a mother who had tried to save her two children: “A woman lay face down with an arm around each child. This woman had been slashed to death by a sabre-like weapon. One child had part of its skull sliced off.”

MANILA WAS A CONTRAST of old and new, rich and poor, grand and humble, Asian and European. Many rated it as the most beautiful city in Asia. It was a college town, with more than a dozen secular and Catholic universities. Its many modern hospitals provided the best medical care in Asia. Before the Japanese invasion, it had been a banking and commercial hub, where leading international firms had maintained major offices. It had broad boulevards, verdant parks, first-class hotels, grand public buildings, spacious plazas, and the spires of many Gothic churches. Manila had a Spanish character, with something of the grace and grandeur of Madrid or Seville.

Yamashita may not even have known that these contradictory orders had been issued by Yokoyama; there are indications that he did not even know that a Japanese force remained in the capital. But when President José P. Laurel of the collaborationist regime begged Yamashita to declare Manila an open city, as MacArthur had done in 1941, Yamashita refused. He explained that it would reflect poorly on the fighting reputation of Japanese forces.29 It appears that Admiral Iwabuchi never intended to leave Manila, whatever his orders. He had been captain of the battleship Kirishima when she was sunk at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal more than two years earlier. Some among his colleagues deemed it less than honorable to survive such an event, and that may explain the admiral’s determination to keep his forces in place until the city came down around their heads. A gyokusai fight for Manila offered a chance for redemption, or payback, or both.

A platoon (of Company B) was pinned down on a broad boulevard about 100 yards north of the station. Two privates, Cleto “Chico” Rodriguez and John N. Reese Jr., advanced into heavy enemy fire and took cover in a house about sixty yards from the station, and then took turns providing covering fire as they advanced to within thirty yards of the nearest pillbox. In an hour of extraordinary combat, the two soldiers killed about thirty-five Japanese soldiers and wounded many more. Running low on ammunition, they staged a fighting retreat back to the American lines. Reese was killed by a burst of machine gun fire. Later that night, their battalion stormed the station and killed all remaining enemy soldiers in the vicinity. In recognition of their outstanding valor, both Rodriguez and Reese received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Hoping to spare the city, both its physical infrastructure and its inhabitants, MacArthur strictly prohibited aerial bombing of Manila. For the same reasons, he had restricted the use of heavy artillery; in the early stages of the battle, the big guns were limited to counterbattery fire (shooting back at enemy artillery) and to “observed fire on known enemy strong points.”32 But the enemy’s formidable defenses left the U.S. ground commanders with limited options. As their casualty rates climbed, they fell back upon their tried-and-true practice of pulverizing all structures from which enemy fire was detected.

The Rizal Memorial Baseball Stadium, near Harrison Park and La Salle University, hosted a fierce battle on the morning of February 16. U.S. artillery blasted an opening in the outer walls near right field. Sherman tanks advanced into the overgrown outfield, with infantrymen of the 5th and 12th Cavalry Regiments advancing in a crouch behind them. Three or four companies of well-armed Japanese troops were dug into the stands, dugouts, and tunnels behind home plate and the first base line. All openings had been barricaded with sandbags, and firing slots had been cut into the walls. The visiting team advanced into the infield behind their tanks, firing mortars and bazookas. A daylong firefight ended when every Japanese soldier in the ballpark was killed.

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 accomplished its purpose, inasmuch as MacArthur never acquiesced to aerial bombing in Manila. In the end, however, massive and sustained artillery barrages did the same work that the bombers would have done. No one knows how many innocent souls perished in the Battle of Manila, but the figure was certainly enormous—perhaps more than 100,000. Some were buried under the rubble of their dwellings, hiding places, and prisons, but many more—again, reliable statistics are elusive—were murdered by the Japanese in one of the most iniquitous atrocities of the twentieth century. Mass execution orders were distributed in writing to Japanese troops. Roundups and executions of “guerillas” became steadily less discriminate as U.S. forces had crossed the Pasig River. Documents captured on the battlefield refer to “disposals” on a large scale.

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. Trapped in this lurid nightmare, stewing in their own fear and hatred, they went berserk and abandoned themselves to a primordial blood orgy that the world will not soon forget.

If it had all gone differently—if the Japanese had committed no atrocities and released the civilians unharmed—a last-ditch fight for Manila might have aroused the begrudging admiration of their enemies. After all, the Americans had their own anti-surrender traditions and lore—the Alamo, Captain James Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship,” and (much more recently) General Anthony McAuliffe’s one-word reply to a German surrender demand at Bastogne: “Nuts.” But the systematic rape, torture, and massacre of innocents stripped the fight of its honor. Three-quarters of a century later, the Japanese performance in Manila is admired by no one in the world, save a handful of unregenerate mythmakers on the Japanese right.

It does not go too far to say that the two Meiji rescripts were tantamount to scripture in World War II–era Japan, and the “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors” was held to be the singular basis of all Japanese military authority. Every man in uniform was required to memorize and recite it. The most famous line, often quoted in Western histories, is: “Duty is heavier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.” More noteworthy, however, is the following passage, included in the Rescript’s third article: 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.

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. Forsaking the “true valor” prescribed in the rescript, possessing no sound discrimination between right and wrong, the soldiers and sailors abandoned themselves to feral violence against defenseless innocents. 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.”

A landing on Mindanao followed on April 17, followed by smaller landings on Panay, Cebu, Negros, and smaller islands to the south. Casualties were minimal, as Japanese forces generally retreated into mountainous terrain and then wasted away for lack of provisions and support. Surviving Japanese troops dispersed into the backcountry, roaming around in small bands like jungle hoboes, gradually starving or succumbing to tropical diseases. Native guerillas hunted the stragglers, often torturing them to death and mutilating their corpses. Discipline collapsed. Enlisted soldiers turned against their officers. Men fought over food, even to the point of murder and cannibalism. Takamaro Nishihara recalled that a fellow soldier, dying of disease, invited him to prolong his life by eating his buttocks. The starving Nishihara exclaimed that he could never do such a thing, “but I couldn’t take my eyes off the flesh on his rear.”

Kojima finally broached the heretical idea of surrendering to the Americans. At first the idea was shouted down by his men, but the intensity of their resistance gradually abated, and at last the survivors acquiesced to the once-unthinkable disgrace. Eight men managed to evade the ferocious Filipino guerillas on their trek to the American lines, where they were taken prisoner and given cigarettes and canned rations. 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!”

Two hundred thousand Japanese troops died on Luzon; just 9,000 were taken prisoner prior to Tokyo’s surrender in August 1945. Only about 40,000 Japanese troops who fought on the island eventually returned to their homeland after the war. Overall, according to Japanese government statistics, the army suffered cumulative losses of 368,700 dead in the Philippines.63 American forces had destroyed nine of Japan’s elite army divisions and reduced another six to a condition in which they could no longer fight effectively. The campaign had caused, directly or indirectly, the destruction of more than 3,000 Japanese airplanes, and had forced the Japanese to adopt kamikaze suicide tactics as their main aerial tactic for the remainder of the war. American combat losses amounted to about 47,000, of whom 10,380 were killed—but casualties to causes other than combat, especially to diseases, ran to 90,400 American servicemen.

Some called Kuribayashi a tyrant, but the general showed genuine concern for the welfare of his subordinates. When visitors from the mainland brought gifts of food or vegetables, he ordered them distributed among his men. He was a family man who doted on his wife and each of his four children. Kuribayashi wrote them each separately, often dwelling on small details of their domestic life, and reminding the children of their particular duties around the house. He prophetically warned of the devastation to come in the bombing raids on Japan. To his wife, Yoshii, in a letter of September 12, 1944, he wrote: “When I imagine what Tokyo would look like if it were bombed—I see a burned-out desert with dead bodies lying everywhere—I’m desperate to stop them carrying out air raids on Tokyo.”

1. We shall defend this place with all our strength to the end. 2. We shall fling ourselves against the enemy tanks clutching explosives to destroy them. 3. We shall slaughter the enemy, dashing in among them to kill them. 4. Every one of our shots shall be on target and kill the enemy. 5. We shall not die until we have killed ten of the enemy. 6. We shall continue to harass the enemy with guerilla tactics even if only one of us remains alive.

Corpsmen and litter bearers, the battlefield’s indefatigable first responders, rushed across terrain exposed to enemy fire. Crouching beside stricken marines, shells bursting nearby and bullets snapping over their heads, the corpsmen reached into their “Unit 3” pouches for morphine syrettes, called “Hypos,” to ease a man’s pain and relieve the symptoms of shock; sulfanilamide powder, to be sprinkled directly into wounds as a disinfectant; hemostat clamps, sutures, bandages, and tourniquets to control bleeding. If a man was losing too much blood, he might receive an intravenous infusion of plasma—a life-giving fluid that mitigated the deadly effects of hypovolemic shock. The plasma bottles were held aloft or perhaps slung from a rifle staked in the ground.

Wounded marines were carried through heavy double-blackout flaps into a long tent serving as the receiving ward, where their stretchers were laid on portable plywood operating tables. Doctors and corpsmen made notations on clipboards affixed to each stretcher. Plasma bottles were often swapped for whole blood intravenous feeds. Bloody or dirty clothing was cut away; wounds were cleaned; preoperative patients were washed and shaved. It was a stifling environment, particularly at night, when the tents had to be sealed against light leakage. The air was stuffy, smelling of blood and antiseptic compounds, and choked with cigarette smoke. Even so, the field hospitals were extraordinarily well equipped, by the standards of mid-twentieth-century medicine—probably the most sophisticated military field hospitals that had ever existed. They were stocked with operating tables, X-ray machines, oxygen masks and tanks, refrigerators for serums, electrical generators, flake ice machines, and banks of whole blood donated by civilians in the United States and flown into the island packed in ice. The more urgent cases were moved directly back into the operating rooms, where surgeons of various specialties went to work immediately. The worst, the doctors agreed, were the “belly cases”—the men who had been shot through the stomach, intestines, or other vital organs. The damaged organs had to be removed, resected, and returned to the wounded man’s abdomen. Such wounds required long, intricate ...

More serious cases were taken farther offshore to transports, or to the dedicated hospital ships Samaritan and Solace, which shuttled patients down to Guam and Saipan in relays. Large red crosses were painted on their sides, with a green stripe around the hull—and unlike virtually all other ships in wartime, they were kept brightly illuminated at night.

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. The disparity is explained by a horrific feature of the Battle of Iwo Jima. Relentless mortar fire literally tore men apart, creating a high proportion of especially grievous wounds. Often they were contaminated by the island’s fine volcanic ash, and could not be easily cleaned.

Perhaps 3,000 Japanese troops remained alive and well enough to fight. Holed up in their caves and bunkers, the defenders were relatively protected from the unending violence of the artillery barrages and aerial bombs. But the noise and blast concussions took a steady toll on their nerves, and many were reduced to a catatonic stupor. Their subterranean world grew steadily more fetid and unlivable. There was no way to bury the dead, so the living simply laid them out on the ground and stepped around them. The stench was unspeakable; the ovenlike heat and the lack of ventilation did not help. Nor did the shortage of drinking water, which grew critical in the fourth week of the battle, as the last of the cisterns was emptied. Men spoke endlessly of water, of the fresh mountain streams and springs of Japan. Whatever water collected on the floors of the caves was quickly lapped up by parched soldiers. They were not above licking moisture off the walls. Some drank their own urine.

Many subordinate units announced plans for a last banzai charge against the enemy, but Kuribayashi firmly told them to remain in their positions and fight to the last bullet. He said that “everybody would like to get an easy way to die early,” but it was the duty of every Japanese soldier on the island to stay alive as long as possible, to “inflict heavy casualties to the enemy.”80 The Americans set up loudspeakers and began broadcasting surrender appeals in Japanese, including personal appeals aimed directly at Kuribayashi. There was no response, except bullets. General Erskine’s 3rd Division staff sent two Japanese POWs back into the Japanese lines to carry a message to the commanding officer of the 145th Infantry Regiment. The messengers somehow managed to return to the U.S. lines with the report that General Kuribayashi was still alive, and did not intend to surrender.

It is safe to assume that not a single American regretted leaving Iwo Jima. A Seabee vowed that he would take no souvenirs from the island: “All I want to take away from this place is a faint recollection.”85 For many, of course, the island was impossible to forget. The victors had paid dearly for their victory. The marines and naval personnel on the island had sustained 24,053 casualties, representing approximately one of every three men who had landed. Of that figure, 6,140 died. Save a few hundred Japanese taken prisoner, the entire defending garrison was wiped out, numbering about 22,000 men. Taking the sum of killed and wounded on both sides, Kuribayashi’s forces had inflicted more casualties than they had suffered. In view of the many advantages possessed by the attackers, that was a remarkable feat. His troglodyte army had remained disciplined and organized to the very end, making the marines pay for every yard of captured territory. But if any doubt had remained after Tarawa, Roi-Namur, Saipan, and Peleliu, the Japanese now knew with absolute certainty that their enemy could take any Pacific island they wanted, no matter how strongly fortified or zealously defended.

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 was bidding for supreme command in the Pacific, and his backers in the United States were quick to pick up his cues. At his hilltop castle at San Simeon, on the central California coast, William Randolph Hearst picked up the telephone and dictated an editorial about Iwo Jima to the managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner. On February 27, it ran on the Examiner’s front page: “The attacking American forces are paying heavily for the island, perhaps too heavily. . . . Plainly, what we need in all our Pacific operations is a military strategist.” Hearst nominated MacArthur, because “he saves the lives of his own men.”90 That afternoon, a group of about one hundred off-duty marines filed into the Examiner’s newsroom in the Hearst Building at Third and Market Streets. A flustered employee called the police, but then called back a few minutes later to say that the police were not needed. The marines were calm and law-abiding. They did not threaten the staff or premises, but only wanted to look the editor in the eye as they explained that he did not have the facts. In the end, however, the Marine Corps won its case in the court of public opinion.

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.”

In the heavily industrialized Tokai region, southwest of Tokyo, a major earthquake (magnitude 8.1) and tsunami struck on December 7, 1944. The natural disaster killed 1,223 people and destroyed almost 30,000 homes. The Mitsubishi Aircraft Engine Works, a giant airframe production center east of Nagoya Harbor, was severely damaged. As Mitsubishi struggled to get its production lines up and running, three large B-29 raids struck on December 13, 18, and 22. The weather was clear, and the bombing more accurate than usual. An assembly shop and seven auxiliary buildings were destroyed. The raids persuaded Mitsubishi and the government to shut down production at the site, and to attempt to disperse the assembly lines to underground sites and outlying locations. Meanwhile, the Americans attacked the psychological foundations of the Japanese war effort by dropping leaflets over Nagoya, asking, “What shall we offer you next, after the earthquake?”

The homeland air defense squadrons consisted of a hodgepodge of different aircraft types, including many older-model Zeros, but also a few newer designs that performed much better at higher altitudes. The Mitsubishi A7M “Reppu,” successor to the Zero, had a rate of climb rivaling that of the Hellcat and the Mustang, and a service ceiling of 40,000 feet. Its Allied codename was “Sam.” The Kawanishi N1K2-J Shinden-Kai, developed from an earlier floatplane fighter, was a fast, powerful, maneuverable aircraft with brawny defenses and almost twice the standard firepower of the Zero. The Americans had seen a few Shinden-Kais over the Philippines and Formosa, and given it the identification codename “George,” but they were not yet fully aware of the new fighter’s capabilities. The J2M “Raiden” (“Thunderbolt”) was a powerful Mitsubishi interceptor designed to take on American heavy bombers. Its speed in level flight surpassed 400 miles per hour, and it was armed with four 20mm cannon, more than enough firepower to bring down a B-29. The Allies called it “Jack.” Sam, George, and Jack were high-powered machines that needed skilled pilots, of whom only a few remained in the Japanese air corps.

JAPANESE CIVILIANS REGARDED the B-29s with curiosity, fascination, and even admiration. Whenever the tiny silver crosses appeared overhead, they crowded out into the streets, craning their necks and pointing to the sky. “We went through those early bombings in a spirit of excitement and suspense,” wrote a Tokyo journalist. “There was even a spirit of adventure, a sense of exultation in sharing the dangers of war even though bound to civilian existence.”10 Police and civil defense authorities shouted at the spectators, but many were too excited to retreat into their underground shelters. They wanted to see what was happening. With a touch of irony, perhaps, civilians spoke of the “honorable visitors” and referred to the Superfortress as “B-san” (“Mr. B”). A man in Tokyo watched a “splendid” formation of B-29s through his telescope, describing details of their design and operation to awestruck neighborhood children.

Guam was nicknamed the “Pacific Supermarket,” and the nickname was well earned. Describing the cavernous arch-ribbed warehouses he found on Orote peninsula, the war correspondent Ernie Pyle had observed: “You could take your pick of K rations or lumber or bombs, and you’d find enough there to feed a city, build one, or blow it up.”

Even now, in the late stages of a war of unprecedented brutality, American leaders were loath to admit that they had abandoned their policy against terror bombing. Firebombing Japanese cities demanded a plausible military pretense. USAAF target selectors argued that much of Japanese industrial production occurred in residential districts, where a cottage industry of small “feeder” or “shadow” workshops produced components for major plants. These were said to be the real target of the mass incendiary raids. But after the burning of Dresden, which occurred just three weeks before the first big firebombing raid on Tokyo, the moral objections seemed rather quaint. If the Germans had invited such retribution, so had the Japanese. Later, LeMay acknowledged that Japanese war crimes had provided a justification, at least in his own mind: “I was not happy, but neither was I particularly concerned, about civilian casualties in incendiary raids. I didn’t let it influence any of my decisions because we knew how the Japanese had treated the Americans—both civilian and military—that they captured in places like the Philippines.”56 It was no coincidence that the world learned of Japanese atrocities in Manila just two weeks before the start of the firebombing campaign.

According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the air raid killed 88,000, injured 41,000, and left almost a million homeless. About 267,000 houses were completely burned down. Sixteen square miles of the city lay in ashes.89 In later revised estimates, the Japanese government put the death count at more than 100,000; other estimates ranged as high as 125,000. The actual number is not known, partly because the fires consumed most official registration records for the districts that were destroyed, and partly because the police and army personnel despaired of making an accurate body count. One Tokyo official told USSBS interrogators after the war, “The condition was so terrible I could not well describe it. After a raid I was supposed to investigate, but I didn’t go because I did not like to see the terrible sights.”90 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 Japanese press downplayed the scale of the catastrophe.

The most deadly and versatile antiaircraft gun of this period was the mid-ranged 40mm Bofors, which fired a 2-pound projectile with a muzzle velocity of 2,890 feet per second and a cyclic rate of 160 rpm per barrel, and held a flat trajectory to a range of nearly two miles. The Bofors could hit a steeply diving kamikaze when it was still more than a mile away, and the 40mm rounds would begin to take the plane apart—sawing off its wings, tearing away chunks of the fuselage, shattering the windshield and canopy, shooting away the propeller. The engine and frame, being the heaviest and sturdiest portions of the airplane, might continue forward for a brief time—even after the rest of the plane was gone—until finally nosing down into the ocean. Lieutenant Robert Wallace, an antiaircraft gunnery officer on the Idaho, concluded of the Bofors gun: “No kamikaze could get past even a single quad-40 if its people knew what they were doing.”85 The full potential of the larger 5-inch/38 caliber gun was realized with the introduction of the VT (variable time) fuse, also known as the “influence” or “proximity” fuse, which placed a small short-ranged Doppler radar directly into the shell itself. This technological marvel solved the problem of detonating a shell in close proximity to a small, rapidly moving target—the enemy airplane—rather than below or behind it.86 To witnesses, the successful performance of a 5-inch VT-fused shell was a spectacular sight. If the target aircraft was a bom...

Two Nakajima “Kate” torpedo planes now began a run at the Idaho, attacking on her port quarter. A 5-inch VT shell triggered the first Nakajima’s bomb, destroying the aircraft so comprehensively that no wreckage or debris was seen falling into the ocean. The second Kate kept coming, momentarily shielded by the smoke from its destroyed twin. A 20mm mount finally stopped that plane at point-blank range, perhaps as near as 20 feet from the Idaho’s port quarter. Its bomb detonated, hurling wreckage and shrapnel over the deck, flooding eight of the ship’s torpedo blisters, and injuring a dozen men. From his station forward of the Idaho’s superstructure, Lieutenant Wallace thought the plane must have hit the ship. “A bomb exploding so close to you does not make a booming sound, as heard in the movies,” he observed; “It makes a crackling sound, like lightning.”

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.”91 The news was greeted with shock, grief, and apprehension about the future course of the war. Younger men had no memory of a time when FDR had not been president of the United States. A sailor on an attack transport off Hagushi recalled: “Few of us spoke, or even looked at each other. We drifted apart, seeming instinctively to seek solitude. Many prayed. Many shed tears.”

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...

No-man’s-land was kept illuminated all night long by the use of starshells and parachute flares. The Americans were on constant guard against night infantry attacks, by small parties of stealthy infiltrators or by company-sized bayonet charges, with the attackers shouting “Nippon Banzai!” Japanese soldiers were known to wear captured American helmets and uniforms and to walk nonchalantly into the American lines, where they would suddenly open fire. On Okinawa, the enemy could be coming from any direction, at any time. From the Japanese lines, of course—but they could also approach from the flanks, or from behind, via tunnels or bypassed positions.

In his diary and his subsequent memoir, Leahy betrayed no sense of responsibility or culpability for the new president’s relative ignorance. One is struck by this lack of self-awareness in a Washington statesman otherwise respected for his wisdom and good judgment. Whatever he knew or did not know about the state of FDR’s declining health, Leahy had been at the late president’s elbow for most of the last year of his life. He certainly knew enough to anticipate that Truman might be thrust into the role of commander in chief at any moment. 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.

MacArthur argued for a direct invasion of Japan at the earliest possible date. Pecking away at the coast of China, he said, would only waste time, lives, and treasure. The Japanese could not be defeated by blockade and bombing alone, he said—and he pointed to the example of their German allies, who had refused to surrender even after their cities had been reduced to rubble. “The strongest military element of Japan is the Army which must be defeated before our success is assured. This can only be done by the use of large ground forces. . . . Just as is the case with Germany, we must defeat Japan’s Army and for that purpose our strategy must devise ways and means to bring our ground forces into contact with his at decisive points.”

The same institutional defects that had produced Japan’s irrational decision to launch the war in 1941 now prevented a rational decision to end it. There was no real locus of responsibility or accountability in Tokyo. Power was dispersed in piecemeal fashion across various military staffs and bureaucracies. Army and navy leaders were figureheads who could be manipulated, deposed, replaced, or even killed by younger officers down the ranks. A sudden turn from war toward peace would require the compliance of many widely scattered interests and players, including officers in the middle ranks of both services. A stubborn lack of consensus, combined with the chronic threat of revolt, explained what the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey called the “unusual time-lapse between the top civilian political decision to accept defeat and the final capitulation.”

The Japanese did not yet know or suspect that the Russians had already pledged to join the war against Japan. At Yalta, Stalin had fixed the date of the Soviet attack for three months after the fall of Germany. The Soviet dictator led the Japanese along with inconclusive diplomatic exchanges, intending only to buy time for his forces to redeploy from Europe. Throughout June and July, Russian troops, tanks, and artillery were traveling east by rail and massing on the Manchurian border. The point of Stalin’s characteristically devious game was to get his country into the last phase of the war against Japan, thus gobbling up territory on the cheap.

But the factions in Tokyo had agreed on nothing beyond a vague appeal to the USSR. Nothing more concrete or conciliatory would be tolerated by the army. The regime’s public policy was to fight to the bitter last, while its diplomatic activities were kept secret. Prime Minister Suzuki’s public statements remained as spirited and bellicose as ever. The very idea of surrender was anathema; even the peacemakers were working on the assumption that some kind of bargain could be struck.

As for allowing an Allied occupation force on Japanese soil without a fight, any Japanese leader who proposed such a disgraceful idea was asking for a bullet between the eyes. Even now, in the summer of 1945, the men who ruled Japan were slow to recognize that they could not simply turn the hands of the clock back to 1941, or 1937, or 1931, or even 1905. They wanted peace, but they could not yet face up to the stark reality of their total defeat.

Sato was on time to the minute for his appointment at Molotov’s office in the Kremlin. As the Japanese ambassador commenced his formal greetings, Molotov cut him off and invited him to take a seat, adding that he had a formal statement he wished to read. Molotov took a page out of a folder on his desk and began reading the Soviet declaration of war against Japan, pausing at intervals for the translator. He stated that his government was acting in response to the request of the Allied governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China, which had invited the Soviets to join in the Potsdam Declaration. (That was false.) The USSR was acting to “bring peace nearer, free the people from further sacrifice and suffering and give the Japanese people the possibility of avoiding the dangers and destruction suffered by Germany after her refusal to capitulate unconditionally.”38 The Soviet Union would consider itself at war with Japan on the following day, August 9, 1945. Molotov did not offer any justification or rationale for abrogating the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, which was scheduled to expire the following year. With genteel sarcasm, Sato thanked Molotov for his diligent labors in the cause of peace. The ambassador received a copy of the document and was shown the door.

As the Russians poured into the combat zone, they committed mass civilian atrocities on a scale and ferocity that matched those committed against German civilians earlier that year. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner by the Russians, many to be held as forced laborers in Siberia for years after the close of hostilities.