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

by Ian W. Toll

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, as for the sailor who wrote his wife to condemn the “union devils and high wage workers that I loathe so intensely.”

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.

The result was unprecedented savings and a near-quintupling of household wealth. Personal savings, deposited in banks or invested in war bonds, grew from $8.5 billion in 1940 to $39.8 billion in 1944.8

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.

Venereal diseases hit the advanced pilot training squadrons especially hard. Medical authorities distributed films exhorting servicemen to practice safe sex. Bill Davis especially liked one entitled: “Flies Breed Germs, Keep Yours Closed.” In it, a doctor informs a sailor that he has contracted venereal disease. “I must have gotten it in a public toilet,” said the sailor. “That’s a hell of a place to take a date,” replied the doctor.49

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.

No one knows how many innocent souls perished in the Battle of Manila, but the figure was certainly enormous—perhaps more than 100,000.

When Kuribayashi learned that senior officers were lingering at headquarters, with pretended bureaucratic and administrative tasks, he ordered them to “get out on site as much as possible and devote themselves to leading from the front.”

In the first five days of the battle, the marines suffered an average of more than 1,200 casualties per day.

V Amphibious Corps had taken 13,000 casualties, including 3,000 dead. The worst-hit units had lost their commanders, their officers, and their NCOs, and then adjusted to the arrival of new commanders, officers, and NCOs, and then lost the replacements.

The Seabees of the 133rd Naval Construction Battalion had erected six water distillation units. The energy-hungry machines converted saltwater into potable processed water, which was trucked to the front lines in five-gallon cans. By March 6, the distillers were producing enough drinking water to fill three canteens per marine on the island each day. Meanwhile, in the Japanese caves and bunkers, water stockpiles were rapidly diminishing and men were beginning to succumb to the ravages of thirst.

Never before in the Pacific War had the marines attacked at night. It was not in their doctrine or training to do so. But General Erskine had been arguing for some time that a battalion-sized night infiltration attack would catch the Japanese by surprise. Erskine requested and received permission from General Schmidt to launch his attack before dawn on March 8.

When the marines seized terrain above their bunkers, the Japanese sometimes set charges and blew themselves and their enemies to Kingdom Come. It was a horror reminiscent of the “mining” attacks along the Western Front during the First World War, or the siege of Petersburg in the American Civil War.

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.

For officers of the 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, the casualty rate was a staggering 108 percent.

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.

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?”2

They enjoyed the pageantry of the war, the singing and marching, the invitation to trample and spit on American and British flags, the monthly reading of the Imperial Rescript on Education, and the group calisthenics each morning, when they all stripped to the waist (girls included) and chanted: “Annihilate America and England! One-Two-Three-Four! Annihilate America and England! One-Two-Three-Four!”

Indiscriminate terror bombing of German cities had culminated in the firebombing of Dresden on the night of February 13–14, 1945, killing an estimated 35,000 German civilians.

LeMay was one of history’s most prolific killers, but he felt a “natural inborn repugnance” against sending his airmen to their deaths.

territory. Losing aircrews to inevitable circumstances was bad enough, but losing them to poor tactical decisions by a ground-based commander was different: “That’s when it really comes home to you.”

The Shitamachi was chosen, in short, because it would burn better than any other part of the capital.

According to a pilot of the 498th Bombardment Group on Saipan, “a dead silence” followed the news that they would be hitting Tokyo at night. But when the briefers told them that they would fly over the heart of Tokyo at altitudes of between 5,000 and 7,000 feet, “a huge gasp was then heard from the crew members.”64 Compared to past missions, that was nearly 5 miles closer to the ground.

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 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.

The same day that the news of FDR’s death was cabled around the world, momentous political developments were announced in Tokyo. Prime Minister Koiso and most of his cabinet had been ousted from power.

A week later, Radio Tokyo reported that the enemy had lost half of the 1,400 ships he had brought to Okinawa, including four hundred sunk, with casualties of no fewer than 800,000! These shocking losses, the announcer declared, had driven the Americans “into the black depths of confusion and agony.”12

Living in the shadow of imminent death, they strolled contemplatively through these pastoral surroundings.

Every citizen-fighter was exhorted to kill at least one barbarian invader before dying in turn. These preparations proceeded under the new national slogan: “The Glorious Death of the 100 Million.”29

July 15 brought a new milestone in the war: the first naval bombardment of the enemy’s homeland.

On the sixteenth, Task Force 38 withdrew to the east and rendezvoused with its fueling and logistics group. Sidling up alongside the fleet oilers, the great fleet drank 379,157 barrels of fuel. Simultaneously, 6,369 tons of ammunition and 1,635 tons of supplies and provisions were transferred from the storeships into the fleet’s storerooms and magazines.

In a coup de grâce on July 26, carrier planes pulverized two dozen Japanese warships riding at anchor, effectively wiping out the last remnants of Japanese naval power. “By sunset that evening,” wrote Halsey, “the Japanese navy had ceased to exist.”53

They wanted a blank check for a project whose details were also left blank, and they got it. The total cost of the Manhattan Project eventually grew to $2 billion.

Truman and his party moved into a three-story stucco house on Kaiserstrasse, which the Americans called the “Little White House.” Listening devices had been placed throughout the house, and the service staff included several Soviet NKVD agents.

Truman wondered whether the other man had grasped the significance of what he had been told. He did not know or suspect that Soviet espionage had successfully penetrated the Manhattan Project, and that the Russians were already well informed about the bomb.

In Tokyo, on August 8, Prime Minister Suzuki summoned the Big Six to another meeting of the SWDC, but was informed that certain members could not attend because they had been detained by other duties. A full forty-eight hours after the first atomic bomb had been dropped, no change in Japanese policy was even possible, because the ruling council did not have a quorum.

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.

In Hagushi Anchorage off Okinawa, the air was so thick with celebratory flak that several sailors were killed.

“I thought of committing suicide, but was unable to go through with it,” a soldier in southern Kyushu later admitted. “ ‘I’ll be reborn seven times and attack America,’ I vowed. With this, I permitted myself to continue living.”119

In New York, a crowd of 60,000 poured into Times Square, where the electronic billboard on the angled building between Broadway and 7th Avenue was flashing: “Japs Surrender!” A Life magazine photographer snapped an iconic photo of a sailor kissing a nurse.

Halsey was not convinced that the peace would stick—and even if the Japanese government really meant to surrender, there was every reason to expect kamikaze attacks by defiant pilots. In a message that prompted hearty laughter throughout the fleet, he ordered the Hellcat and Corsair pilots to “investigate and shoot down all snoopers—not vindictively, but in a friendly sort of way.”9

Members of the imperial family were dispatched to bases and headquarters all across Asia, acting as personal representatives of Hirohito, to ensure that all overseas Japanese armies laid down arms. When Tokyo requested safe conduct for the aircraft transporting these emissaries, MacArthur quickly assented.16

Mick Carney, to whom Tozuka surrendered with a deep bow, found the situation disorienting, even alarming: “Little kids in the street made the V sign at us. How do you interpret this thing?” He found the friendly attitude of the Japanese “scarier than if we’d found a sullen or resistant attitude. . . . The thing was weird.”25

When Admiral Halsey went ashore later that afternoon, he found the officers’ club “overrun with rats of an extraordinary size and character.”

General Kenney, MacArthur’s air commander, said that he realized only in retrospect that the gesture was a masterstroke of psychology, because “it made a tremendous impression on the Japs to see us walking around in their country unarmed and simply with utter disregard of danger from the nation of 70 million people we had defeated. To them it meant that there was no doubt about it. They had lost.”29

An hour later, the general came back down to the dining room, where he was served a steak dinner. His aides fretted about the risk of poison, but MacArthur serenely replied, “No one can live forever,” and cut into his meat.32 The hotel manager later thanked MacArthur for his trust, adding that he and his staff were “honored beyond belief.”33

As the participants took their places, one correspondent noted that there were more three- and four-star American generals and admirals standing on the little veranda deck than the United States had ever commissioned prior to the Second World War.

but notably lacking Spruance and Mitscher, whom Nimitz had asked to stay away, in case a well-timed kamikaze attack should decapitate the high command at one stroke.

Japan. In other words, Tokyo set out to make enemies of its primary trading partners, while making allies of nations that could do nothing to make good the inevitable shortfalls, leading to an entirely foreseeable economic and energy crisis. As