That most portentous of titles, Twilight of the Gods, is often filched from the Norse to provide unearned grandeur to codpiece fantasy or rock-and-roll biographies. For once, with Ian Toll’s Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945, the final installment in the historian’s Pacific trilogy, we have some content worthy of that name.
Military histories often struggle to strike a balance between the battlefield experience of individuals and larger strategic views of a war, but scale is an especially tricky problem for histories of the Pacific theater of World War II. Unlike the European theater, with its relatively straightforward battlefronts, the Pacific involved fiendishly complicated land-sea-air missions over ludicrous distances, naval battles in which opposing ships were never anywhere near each other, submarine warfare that’s difficult to sum up in any particular, and much more. There are numerous excellent histories on individual battles in the Pacific, but prior to Toll, the best account of the theater as a whole was Samuel Elliot Morrison’s elephantine naval history of World War II, which features eight volumes on the Pacific War alone. Toll has done a superb job synthesizing the scholarship into a 3,000-page trilogy, which might sound like a lot until you have trouble putting it down.
We now know that much of the war was over by July 1944, when the book opens. The United States had pulled off successful offensives across numerous island chains, defeated the Japanese carrier fleet at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and was making preparations to knock Tokyo out of the war for good. But for the combatants, there was no telling how much longer the war might take, especially given the Japanese willingness to contest every inch of their territory, dying almost to a man. U.S. naval and aerial bombardments were preposterous in their force but accomplished very little against Japan’s island fortresses, which had to be secured by painstaking and bloody infantry combat.
The scale of the U.S. Pacific fleet was fully Wagnerian. Task Force 58, the main carrier force, consisted of 12 to 14 new aircraft carriers. As Toll writes, “Nothing like it had ever been seen on the high seas, nothing like it has existed since 1945, and it is unlikely that a fighting fleet will ever again be built on such a scale.” It could launch over 1,000 planes in 30 minutes and strike opponents up to 200 miles away. The main fleet was so large that even pilots could never see the whole thing at once.
War had never been conducted across such distances, with the U.S. supply chain stretching across thousands of miles of ocean. Nature and geography were formidable adversaries alone. Three destroyers and 146 planes were lost to a single December 1944 typhoon, and even relatively eventless cruises could last weeks or months, exhausting the servicemen. The standard B-29 bombing route from Saipan to Japan was a grueling, 3,000-mile, 15-hour round trip, with risks inherent in every minute. The sophistication of U.S. logistics in overcoming these obstacles was dazzling. The Americans constructed 1,400 miles of roads on Okinawa in months. By the end of the war, the tiny island was handling more cargo per month than the port of New York in peacetime.
But logistics was the easy part. To build a port on Okinawa, they first had to take the island from well-entrenched, well-trained, and ideologically zealous Japanese soldiers. American combat units on Iwo Jima had a casualty rate over one-third; on Peleliu, some over had a casualty rate of 70%. William Manchester, a corporal at Okinawa, compared trench combat there to the bloodiest battlefields of World War I, Verdun and Passchendaele.
The fanaticism of the Japanese military is now the stuff of legend. American troops had encountered the banzai charge, a suicidal tactic in which masses of Japanese infantry stormed U.S. positions with swords and bayonets, on land as early as 1942. By the period covered here, the Japanese had perfected an aerial variant, the kamikaze, in which fighter pilots, their planes loaded with bombs and torpedoes, would attempt to crash their planes into U.S. ships. Although shocking, Toll notes that it was hardly an irrational tactic. At the start of the war, these suicide attacks would have been a waste of trained pilots, but by the last two years of the war most of those were long dead. “In 1944, there was a simple, pragmatic case for aerial suicide tactics. The new crop of Japanese aviators was simply not good enough to hit the enemy fleet using conventional bombing or torpedo attacks.” Often, these barely trained pilots were flying older and more primitive aircraft, and suicide missions expanded their range by eliminating any need to return. The vast majority of kamikazes were shot down before they could reach their targets, but they only had to be lucky once. They were a potent source of terror — opponents unafraid of death aiming straight for your deck.
Even at this late stage of the war, however, there was one last great naval engagement to be had, the Battle of Leyte Gulf on Oct. 23–26, 1944. Thanks to a blunder by U.S. Admiral William Halsey, who left the U.S. invasion fleet unguarded in order to pursue a Japanese decoy force and then mangled communicating his actions to his subordinates, the Japanese were nearly able to destroy the U.S. landing vessels. Disaster was averted thanks to subsequent Japanese reticence, but the larger course of the battle is still fascinating. It was “the largest naval battle in history,” involving 300 ships and 200,000 men and fought across a distance of 100,000 square miles.
Toll also gives U.S. submarine warfare its due as a key means of choking off Japanese shipping. Its importance in destroying Japanese logistics was surpassed only by one of the most unheralded, and impressive, operations of the war: the mass aerial mining of Japanese harbors. You might miss a ship on its route, but you’re almost sure to get it if you know where it’s going. Titled, with impeccable American bluntness, “Operation STARVATION,” the aerial mining was responsible, over a period of only five months, for nearly 10% of Japan’s shipping losses in the whole war.
Readers of this volume will all know how the war ended. But it’s invaluable to be reminded that American planners didn’t know their efforts would succeed until they did. Toll’s trilogy is as fine an account of their accomplishments as you can find anywhere.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
