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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ian W. Toll
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November 23, 2021 - February 9, 2022
As a result, it took me more than three times longer to produce this three-volume history of the Pacific War than it took the combatant nations to fight it.
But in 1940, as he ran for an unprecedented third presidential term, about three-quarters of all American newspapers opposed his bid for reelection, and FDR’s relationship with the press descended to its nadir.
On February 12, 1942, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Boston, Wendell Willkie, the defeated Republican presidential candidate in 1940, urged that MacArthur be recalled to Washington and placed in charge of directing the global war. “Bring home General MacArthur,” Willkie thundered. “Place him at the very top. Keep bureaucratic and political hands off him. . . . Put him in supreme command of our armed forces under the president. Then the people of the United States will have reason to hope that skill, not bungling and confusion, directs their efforts.”25
When Wake Island was taken by the Japanese, censors removed the name “Wake” and identified it only as “an island.” A correspondent asked, “Is there anybody in the navy who thinks that the Japs are under the impression that they have taken some other island?”
forthcoming trip would take the president to Chicago and San Diego, thence by sea to Hawaii, Alaska, and Puget Sound, and finally back across the continent by rail. The journey would last thirty-five days, one of the longest of his presidency.
FDR thus effectively chose his successor in a seemingly spontaneous, seat-of-the-pants exchange with the DNC chairman, even though his doctors had reason to doubt that he could survive another term in office.
The president being mindful of the old seaman’s superstition against beginning a sea voyage on a Friday, the ship waited until midnight to cast free her lines.
Later, after his escape to the United States, Quezon visited General Eisenhower in Washington and offered him an “honorarium”—the sum is not known—to compensate his past services in the Philippines. Eisenhower declined the offer, tactfully explaining that “the danger of misapprehension or misunderstanding . . . might operate to destroy whatever usefulness I may have to the Allied cause in the current war.”
The future European theater commander judged that the offer was improper under the circumstances, and would be exposed to public scrutiny in the long run. He was right on both counts.
One can scarcely imagine Douglas MacArthur soliciting the contrary views of a subordinate in such a setting.
Leahy was the senior American military officer of the Second World War, as determined by rank and date of original commission. He was the first admiral or general in the nation’s history to receive a fifth star. His influence shaped every major military and foreign policy decision of the war.
At that moment, a terrier-shaped dark silhouette ambles into the frame from MacArthur’s right, passes under their chairs, and continues out of the frame a few feet to Nimitz’s left.39
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.
When the guns paused, the marines could hear wounded and dying Japanese crying out in the night. Often they cried out for their mothers, as did dying men of all races.
Their efforts and sacrifices were recognized in a message from Admiral Halsey: “The sincere admiration of the entire Third Fleet is yours for the hill blasting, cave smashing extermination of 11,000 slant-eyed gophers. It has been a tough job, extremely well done.”
But it was a milestone of a kind, and also a foreshadowing of what was to come in the Pacific, especially in the later and better-known island battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In proportional terms, from the American point of view, Peleliu was the costliest battle of the Pacific campaign.
Of the 28,000 marines and soldiers who fought on the island, nearly 40 percent were casualties, including about 1,800 killed and 8,000 wounded. Nearly the entire Japanese garrison of 11,000 perished.
When first ordered by a unit commander to fly a suicide mission, the great fighter ace Saburo Sakai was stunned. “A great roaring sounded in my ears,” he recalled. “What was he saying? I was in a turmoil. I had a cold, sinking feeling of revulsion in my brain.”40 A pilot must always be ready to die in battle, said Sakai, but that did not include “wantonly wasting one’s life.”41
In fact, kamikaze operations had been studied, debated, and planned for more than a year prior to their first appearance in the Pacific.
But traditional bushido had not imposed an obligation to abhor retreat or surrender even when a battle had turned hopeless, and the old-time samurai who had done his duty in a losing cause could lay down his arms with honor intact.
That was the last of the Thirty-Six Strategies, a Chinese classic studied by twenty generations of Japanese warriors: “When overwhelmed, you don’t fight; you surrender, compromise, or flee. . . . As long as you are not defeated, you have another chance to win.”
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.
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.
a difficult thing and which you may not be able to understand. The Japanese, to the very end, believed that by spiritual means they could fight on equal terms with you. . . . We believed our spiritual confidence in victory would balance any scientific advantages.”
singular pronoun to refer to the forces under his command. “People of the Philippines,” he declared: “I have returned! By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.” He instructed the Filipino people to rise up and strike the enemy, and “Rally to me!”13
The following day, on the steps of the State Capitol in Tacloban, MacArthur would preside over a more formal ceremony with President Osmeña—a symbolic transfer of sovereignty back to the Philippines. He had not cleared this declaration with the U.S. State Department or the Department of the Interior, which held commonwealth authority over the Philippines. MacArthur was making his own U.S. foreign policy in Asia—not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.
“This force has concluded its attack and is retiring from the battle area in order to plan subsequent action.”28 Samuel Eliot Morison called Shima’s decision “the most intelligent act of any Japanese commander in the entire battle.”29
The sea was polluted by spilled bunker oil and littered with debris and floating bodies. Hundreds of Japanese sailors were seen among the flotsam, treading water or clutching wreckage. As usual, nearly all refused offers of rescue, even attempting to drown themselves when American ships approached.
Four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent to the bottom, including the Zuikaku, the sixth and last surviving carrier that had attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Some of those later mopping-up actions fell outside the time boundary set by historians to mark the end of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Even so curtailed, however, the sprawling contest had been the largest naval battle in history. It had involved nearly three hundred ships with combined displacement of about 3 million tons. The contending fleets were manned by about 200,000 men, enough to populate a midsized city. Combined losses were thirty-four ships, more than five hundred airplanes, and more than 16,000 casualties. The contest had included every conceivable variety of naval fighting, by
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The battle effectively brought the naval war for the Pacific to an end.
AS THE LAST, LARGEST, and most closely studied naval battle in history, Leyte Gulf is a subgenre unto itself. Generations of scholars have had their say, but pioneering new contributions appear year after year, and various controversies remain the subject of vigorous debate.
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
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He was proud to declare himself a naval meleeist in the tradition of Horatio Nelson, who won several such wipeout victories against the enemies of England during the Napoleonic Wars.
Fleet concentration for its own sake was Mahanian orthodoxy, which had reigned supreme when Halsey’s generation had passed through the Naval Academy. By 1944, advances in radio, radar, and aviation had changed the game, and the old rule of concentration was as obsolete as a square-rigger.
More than any other industrial nation, and certainly more than any other major combatant of the Second World War, Japan lacked self-sufficiency in raw materials.
severity. In August 1941, the West Texas crude oil spigots were entirely shut off. With no other viable source of oil, Japan was forced to tap into a finite and diminishing domestic stockpile. More than any other single factor, that crisis prompted the Tojo cabinet’s fateful decision to launch the Pacific War.
Moreover, only 3 percent of Japanese territory was arable land, and food imports were needed to stave off famine.
In August 1944, as Admiral Halsey took command of the Third Fleet, he and his Dirty Tricksters proposed a basic change in the deployment of Pacific Fleet submarines. They called it the “Zoo plan.”
“I
The highlight of Barb’s career came in July 1945, when she landed a party of commandos on the coast of Sakhalin Island, then Japanese territory. The attackers blew up a railroad train. This was the only mission of its kind in the Pacific War, and the only Allied ground operation in the Japanese home islands.
IN 1932, THE AIRPOWER VISIONARY BILLY MITCHELL, a retired army aviator, had called for the development of a heavy bomber with a flying range of 5,000 miles, a bomb-load capacity of 10,000 pounds, and a service ceiling of 35,000 feet. At the time, the idea had seemed futuristic and fantastic, like a machine conjured up in the imagination of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. But the 1930s was a decade of long strides in aviation. By 1940, as Hitler’s armies rampaged across Europe, aeronautical engineers believed that a very heavy, very long-ranged pressurized bomber had become feasible. With FDR’s
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Fuel and supplies would be brought in by sea, but the maritime umbilical cord was long—5,800 miles from San Francisco Bay—and the B-29s would have to compete with hundreds of other Allied military units for scarce shipping and other resources. The heavily loaded bombers would operate from bases that had not yet been built, on islands where enemy holdouts were still fighting in the hills. From Saipan, Tinian, or (especially) Guam, targets in Japan lay near the outer limit of the B-29’s operating radius. Relatively inexperienced aircrews would have to navigate over 3,000 miles of trackless
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Military police would arrest, imprison, interrogate, and torture any worker who so much as uttered the ship’s name.
THE U.S. NAVY’S RECOGNITION MANUAL did not have any silhouette matching the profile of the Shinano. Enright and his officers concluded that the stranger must be a Hiyo- or Taiho-class carrier. They did not suspect that their quarry was twice the tonnage of an Essex-class fleet carrier. No one in the Allied camp had a clue that such a ship existed.
The east coast of Leyte was well suited to amphibious logistics. Long white-sand beaches shelved abruptly to navigable water, and no coral reefs blocked the approaches.
Sailors raced to jettison the depth charges and launch the torpedoes before they cooked off. A witness on the destroyer Claxton, patrolling near the stricken ship, watched in astonishment as a nameless torpedoman charged directly into the flames to reach the torpedo tubes. “The power apparently was knocked out; so, with his whole body engulfed in flames, he manually cranked the tube mount out to starboard and, with a hammer, manually fired all five of the torpedoes.”33 That saved the ship from its own torpedoes, but the fires soon spread to the ammunition lockers and magazines, setting off a
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In the weeks since the invasion of Leyte, fierce monsoonal storms had battered the island’s eastern coastal plain. Twenty-five inches of rain had fallen since A-Day.
Fuel served as ballast for the lightly built “tin cans,” so a destroyer whose tanks were mostly empty was intrinsically unstable. The problem was exacerbated as new radar and communications devices were mounted on the masts and topsides of the little ships, raising their center of gravity.
The court’s formal report, issued in early January 1945, placed a “preponderance of responsibility” on Halsey for failing to dodge the storm, and faulted him for “errors of judgment under stress of war operations.”
