Twilight of the Gods
Page 1
Twilight
of the
Gods
War in
the Western Pacific,
1944–1945
IAN W. TOLL
W.W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
To Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short, who were dealt a losing hand.
CONTENTS
List of Maps
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
LIST OF MAPS
The Pacific, 1944
Oahu, 1944
Peleliu, September–October 1944
Ulithi Atoll
The Battles of Leyte Gulf, October 23–26, 1944
Surigao Strait, October 25, 1944 256
The Bull Run: Battle off Cape Engano, October 25, 1944
Battle off Samar, October 25, 1944
Last Four Patrols of the Wahoo (SS-238), February–October 1943
Leyte, October–December 1944
Luzon: MacArthur’s Advance on Manila, January–March 1945
Iwo Jima, February–March 1945
Marianas Airbases, March 1945
Operation ICEBERG: Okinawa, April–June 1945
The Yamato’s Last Sortie, April 6–7, 1945
Southern Okinawa: The Last Phase, April–June 1945
Operation OLYMPIC: The Planned Invasion of Kyushu, Target Date, November 1, 1945
Third Fleet Operations Against Japan, July–August 1945
The Atomic Bombing Missions, August 1945
Allied Forces Enter Tokyo Region, August 1945
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In 2007, as I wince to recall, I set out to write a single-volume history of the Pacific War. The publisher of my first book, Six Frigates, offered a contract and paid me an advance. Two and a half years later, with my deadline six months away, I called my editor, Starling Lawrence, and gave him the good news that I had written almost 800 pages. The bad news, which I also gave him, probably holding the phone away from my ear, was that the narrative had only advanced through the Battle of Midway. I had covered six months of a forty-four-month war, and I had already exceeded the specified manuscript length by 300 pages.
On the same phone call, without pausing to mull it over, or even to demand the 800 pages, Star proposed a solution. Why not convert the project into a trilogy? The contract was amended, new deadlines were extended, and the advance increased (though not, alas, tripled). Volume 1, Pacific Crucible, was published in 2011; Volume 2, The Conquering Tide, in 2015. The first covered the initial six months of the war, from Japan’s surprise raid on Pearl Harbor to the devastating American counterpunch at Midway. The second told the story of the middle two years of the war, from mid-1942 through mid-1944, and the Allied counteroffensives in the south and central Pacific. This volume is the third and last, picking up after the Marianas campaign and covering the last year of the war, through the Japanese surrender in August 1945.
The reader may already have noticed that this book is longer than either of the previous two. That was neither expected nor intended. I had anticipated that the third book would be the easiest of the trilogy to write, perhaps even the shortest. Much of the research was already “in the can,” and the period to be covered was only a year, whereas The Conquering Tide had covered two years. With reckless confidence I predicted that the final volume would be out in 2018. When that became impossible, I vowed on Twitter that it would be out in 2019 “unless it killed me first.” Then 2020 arrived with the book finished but not yet in print. Luckily, tweets can be deleted, and as of this writing I am not dead, but Twilight of the Gods turned out to be the hardest book of the trilogy to finish. The reasons are various. The war got very large in late 1944 and 1945, in every dimension, and I found that I could not do justice to the story without giving it the additional time and space it seemed to need. Over the years I had collected a lot of research on subjects that lay along the periphery of the main narrative—for example, military-press relations, naval pilot training, Allied radio and leaflet propaganda, and the lives of evacuated Japanese schoolchildren—and I was determined to get it all into the book. (In the first two volumes, but not in the third, I had the option to say, “I’ll pick it up in the next one.”) 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.
In the author’s note for The Conquering Tide, I made the case for an episodic and discursive narrative, one that colors outside the lines of conventional specialized military history. I won’t repeat the manifesto here. Suffice to say that what was true then is even truer now. In the last year of the Second World War, even more than in other years and other wars, grand strategic decisions were an amalgamation of purely military calculations with politics and diplomatic statecraft. In both Europe and Asia, it was understood that the timing, scale, and scope of major operations had downstream implications for the postwar international order. In the United States, moreover, the epochal decisions of 1944 would be made in the glare of a national presidential campaign. Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “War is a continuation of politics by other means,” but in a constitutional democracy with a fixed election calendar, the dictum could just as well be reversed: “Politics is a continuation of war by other means.” In that spirit, I chose to begin this book with a long first chapter on the Honolulu strategy conference of July 1944, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with his Pacific theater commanders to plan the last phase of the campaign against Japan. The episode was immensely significant, both for the Pacific War and the future of Asia, but it has often been slighted in histories and biographies. I judged that it merited a longer, more nuanced telling, especially since an important new source has recently come to light—the diary of Robert C. Richardson Jr., commanding general of U.S. Army forces in Hawaii, who hosted General Douglas MacArthur during the conference and recorded MacArthur’s contemporary firsthand account of his discussions with FDR.
Thanks to all who have assisted my research in various ways: the late Adolphus Andrews Jr., for sharing his recollections of Iwo Jima and postwar Japan; Bill Bell, for forwarding his father William Bell’s diary on Task Force 38 air operations; Frank Dunlevy, for his father-in-law’s oral history of his service on the destroyer Johnston; Ronald Nunez, who gave me the diary of Admiral John Henry Towers; Chet Lay and Captain Michael A. Lilly (USN, ret.), who shared interesting details of Chester Nimitz’s friendship with the Walker family on Oahu (since published by Lilly in Nimitz at Ease). Colonel Robert C. Richardson IV (USAF, ret.) gave me his grandfather’s aforementioned diary, which General Richardson had willed his descendants to keep private until 2015. Ronald Russell, former editor and webmaster of the Battle of Midway Roundtable, reviewed the manuscript and provided valuable feedback, as he did for volumes 1 and 2. Among the Japanese who have assisted me in various ways are Susumu Shimoyama, Kazuhisa Murakami, Yukoh Watanabe, Kiyohiko Arafune, and Yukio Satoh. Eric Simonoff, my agent of eighteen years, has kept the faith through long delays and lapsed deadlines. I am grateful to the whole team at W. W. No
rton, including Nneoma Amadi-Obi, Rebecca Homiski, Bill Rusin, and especially Star Lawrence, who has always supported my instinct to stray outside the lanes while also letting me know when I may be straying too far.
Twilight of the Gods
Prologue
“Don’t argue with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
—AMERICAN APHORISM, ORIGIN UNKNOWN
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rapport with the press had deteriorated sharply since his first presidential term in office. Back in those honeymoon days of 1933, the newly sworn president had disarmed reporters with a fond and familiar manner—calling them by their first names, bantering about trivialities, writing birthday notes, and inviting their entire families to White House parties. His twice-weekly press conferences had been freewheeling and uninhibited. Filing into the Oval Office, the reporters were greeted by a cheerful, big-headed man in a well-worn, slightly rumpled suit, seated in his wheelchair behind a large mahogany desk. He was usually clutching a cigarette, and flecks of ash clung to the fabric of his sleeves. He took any question as it came, verbally and off the cuff. He kept the atmosphere light and mirthful. The president might remark that a reporter appeared hungover, for example, and ask the room for its opinion; or he might ask the security detail to confirm that a particular reporter had been frisked. He joked that he was running a “schoolroom,” and spoke to the journalists as if they were not especially bright grade school students: “No, my dear child, you have got that all wrong.”1 Listening to a question, he let his mouth drop open in a parody of deep attentiveness. His facial expressions, with vaudevillian exaggeration, conveyed amazement, bewilderment, and alarm. While considering his answer, he gazed up at the Great Presidential Seal—set in plaster in the ceiling overhead—drew in a long breath, puffed up his cheeks, and expelled the air in a long blast. These antics brought forth hearty laughter from the reporters.
The president did not always reply directly—or truthfully, or at all—but he tolerated follow-up questions and engaged in informal back-and-forth exchanges. White House stenographers recorded every word of his 998 press conferences, including the small talk and badinage that opened each session. The transcripts run to many thousands of pages and occupy more than four cubic feet at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York.
By 1941, the first year of his third term in office, there were still flashes of that old warmth and wit—but now, more than in years past, White House reporters saw Roosevelt as a quicksilver character, temperamental and even inscrutable, a man of unfathomable depths. In one moment he lit up the room with his famous high-wattage smile; in the next he turned sour and snappish. It was not in FDR’s nature to shout, or even to raise his voice, but there was often a cantankerous undercurrent to his banter, and if he did not like a question he was liable to give a reporter the rough side of his tongue. According to Merriman Smith, a United Press correspondent, the president “could be as rough and tough as a Third Avenue blackjack artist, or he could be utterly charming, disarming and thoroughly likeable. It just depended on the question, who asked it and how Mr. Roosevelt felt when he got up that morning.”2
Calling out individual newsmen to rebut stories they had written, he pressed home his cross-examinations with the zeal of a courtroom litigator. Intolerant of euphemisms such as “error” or “inaccuracy,” FDR accused individual reporters of printing “lies”—or if that wasn’t clear enough, “plain lies” or “deliberate lies.”3 The term “lie” characterized the motive of the perpetrator, leaving no room for the possibility that an honest mistake had been made, but that was precisely his point. Deploring the trend toward “interpretive journalism,” he dogmatically insisted that newspapers should have no role in news analysis or commentary, even in the editorial pages. Syndicated columnists, said FDR, were “an unnecessary excrescence on our civilization.” They trolled for gossip—“buzz, buzz, buzz,” he called it—and passed those tidbits off as news. He labeled Drew Pearson, the most widely read columnist of the era, a “chronic liar.”4
At a press conference in February 1939, when questions implied that FDR was attempting to circumvent congressional restrictions on arms shipments to Europe, he launched into a tirade. “The American people are beginning to realize that the things they have read and heard . . . have been pure bunk—b-u-n-k, bunk; that these people are appealing to the ignorance, the prejudice, and the fears of Americans and are acting in an un-American way.”
Asked whether he believed the offending papers had deliberately misled their readers, FDR answered with a question of his own.
“What shall I say? Shall I be polite or call it by the right name?”
“Call it by the right name,” said one of the newsmen.
“Deliberate lie.”5
He read four or five newspapers each morning, usually before rising from bed. Roosevelt was a pious man who rarely swore, but the morning editions often put him into a seething fury, prompting a “damn,” or in severe cases a “goddamn.” As he read, his face darkened, his chin hardened, and his eyes glittered wrathfully. He might tear the offending story from the paper and bring it with him to the Oval Office, where he would thrust it into the hands of his press secretary, Stephen T. Early, complaining: “It’s a damn lie from start to finish.”6 He became convinced that most of the American press—85 percent was the proportion he often cited—was functioning as a mouthpiece for the embattled oligarchy. The “Tory press,” said Roosevelt, was shrewd, malevolent, and unscrupulous. It was owned and controlled by a cabal of rich conservatives who hated him personally and served up a daily diet of vitriol aimed at him, his political allies, his staff, and even his family.
In the pantheon of FDR’s archenemies, four newspaper moguls sat on high pedestals. William Randolph Hearst’s national newspaper chain often published identical editorials denouncing Roosevelt and his policies. Media analysts correctly surmised that the invective was orchestrated by the “chief” himself, who wired instructions to his editorial rooms from his garish castle at San Simeon on the California coast. Robert R. “Bertie” McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, openly despised Roosevelt and everything he stood for, and his paper—the second city’s leading daily and one of the nation’s most widely read newspapers—disparaged the administration without even the pretense of objectivity. McCormick’s cousin, Joseph M. Patterson, was founder and owner of the New York Daily News, the nation’s first tabloid. With its big-photograph format and sensationalist coverage of crime, sports, and sex scandals, the Daily News prospered throughout the Depression years, and its circulation eventually overtook that of the New York Times. Patterson had once called himself a socialist, and was initially sympathetic to the New Deal, but in 1940 he threw in with the isolationist movement and his paper turned sharply against FDR. Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, Joseph’s younger sister and Bertie McCormick’s cousin, was an eccentric and profane misanthrope who bought two Washington newspapers from Hearst and merged them into one: the Washington Times-Herald. By the late thirties, the Times-Herald had won the capital’s circulation battle and was one of the most profitable newspapers in the country. It was a blatantly partisan broadsheet that attacked the administration nearly every day, and sometimes several times per day in as many as four daily editions. Scurrilous anti-FDR editorials, signed “Cissy Patterson,” appeared on the front page. Newsboys hawked the paper on every downtown corner, and one or two were usually found shouting the latest headlines from the sidewalk just outside the White House gates.
None of the four was a stranger to FDR. McCormick and Joseph Patterson had been his Groton schoolmates, and he and Eleanor had been friendly with Cissy Patterson when she was a young debutante on the cotillion social circuit. Earlier in his career, Roosevelt had counted Hearst as an ally and had even called him a “friend.” His antipathy toward them, and theirs toward him, was intimate and deeply personal. Since three of the four were blood relatives, and the fourth (Hearst) was linked to the others by long-standing friendships and business dea
lings, FDR tended to regard the Hearst-McCormick-Patterson newspapers as a united front. 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 the campaign trail, Roosevelt often went out of his way to denounce the newspapers, charging that they were failing to perform their vital role in American democracy. The press, he said, was a profit-seeking enterprise that found sensationalism and gossip more lucrative than sober, accurate reporting, and was polluting the nation’s civil discourse. That fall in the New York Times, Arthur Krock cited the president’s determination “to preach a class war against the press,” and his “steady implications that the press is unreliable and often venal.”7
After he defeated the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie in a popular and electoral landslide, the attitudes of many newsmen, editors, radio broadcasters, and columnists hardened against the president. FDR had broken 150 years of precedent by running for (and winning) a third term in office. Now more than ever, journalists felt a constitutional duty to defy the powerful president and keep him in check.
Looking back from the present, when his legacy has been engraved in marble, it is difficult to sense how polarizing and controversial a figure FDR was in his own time. It was taken for granted in media circles, even among journalists who liked him personally and were sympathetic to his policies, that FDR was an incorrigible trickster. He had often shown that he could manipulate or circumvent the press. He spoke directly to the American people by radio, and had done so with great success—but radio was still a fairly new medium, and many were concerned that it provided a means to weaponize political demagogy. On several occasions, during the debate between isolationists and interventionists over U.S. involvement in the European war, the president implied that his critics were treasonous. The critics, in turn, worried about the inevitable expansion of presidential powers in the event that the United States joined the war against Hitler. Anyone middle-aged or older could remember the repressive censorship regime imposed during the First World War. The “dignity” of President Woodrow Wilson had been held inviolable, and any criticism of the president or his policies, no matter how mild or well-meaning, had been grounds to prosecute or shut down an offending newspaper. FDR had served in Wilson’s administration as assistant secretary of the navy, so he bore a share of responsibility for those earlier abuses. H. L. Mencken, recalling the travesties of 1917–1918, warned his colleagues that it was their duty, in wartime even more than in peace, “to keep a wary eye on the gentlemen who operate this great nation, and only too often slip into the assumption that they own it.” If the newspapers did not resist with determination, they would yield to “a squeeze play that politicians have been working on them since the cradle days of the Republic.”8 And there matters stood on December 7, 1941, when the biggest news story of the twentieth century broke in the skies over Pearl Harbor.