'Twilight of the Gods' Review: A Blood-Soaked Peace
By: Jonathan W. Jordan (WSJ)
A tale-telling axiom holds that complex narratives—whether from a writer’s quill, the pulpit or a Hollywood storyboard—are best broken into threes. From Sophocles to Coppola, the trilogy has thrived as a means to carve an enormous meal into manageable courses.
World War II, history’s most complex bloodbath, often seems to require such treatment, and over the decades the war’s two billion individual stories have been compiled into dozens of memorable (and not-so-memorable) three-volume sets. The best known of recent threepeats is Rick Atkinson’s “Liberation Trilogy,” a brilliant study of the U.S. Army in the Europe and the Mediterranean. James Holland (“Normandy ’44”) has released two of his three volumes on the Anglo-American war against Germany, and for the hard-core history geek, David M. Glantz offers a three-part deep dive into the Stalingrad campaign. Novelist James Jones (“From Here to Eternity”) drew the Pacific War’s thin red line through three volumes, while respected historian Richard B. Frank (“Tower of Skulls”) recently launched his first of three volumes on the Asian-Pacific struggle. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Frank’s series will rise to the level of Ian W. Toll’s Pacific War trilogy, now capped by “Twilight of the Gods.”
Mr. Toll, who has spent his literary career chronicling the U.S. Navy, built a solid foundation for the war’s final act in the first two volumes. The opening work, “Pacific Crucible” (2011), spanned the Navy’s disaster at Pearl Harbor to its redemption at Midway. The second installment, “The Conquering Tide” (2015), spotlighted America’s hard-won education in amphibious landings, from the six-month charnel house of Guadalcanal to the red-tinged tides of Guam. In “Twilight of the Gods,” he carries the reader through the war’s violent death rattles, spanning Peleliu to Okinawa.
The Pacific War’s complexity—and brutality—resist detailed depiction. The 8,800-mile American odyssey from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay was dominated by saltwater, airstrips and islands few had heard of before 1941. Chinese, Dutch, Australians, Indians, Filipinos, British, Burmese and New Zealanders played major supporting roles in a conflict we often think of today as “U.S. versus Japan.” Setting the table of personalities, objectives, resources and innovative weapons systems is an immense job for any historian.
As in his previous volumes, Mr. Toll launches his storyline with a recap of the “what next?” questions facing the American high command after a crucial turning point: in this case, the hard-won conquest of the Marianas Islands, the key to the bombing of Japan. The narrative weighs anchor with President Roosevelt sailing to Pearl Harbor to confer with Gen. Douglas MacArthur of the Army and Adm. Chester Nimitz of the Navy over two competing visions of how to win the war with Japan. Throughout the book, the reader is recalled to Washington between deployments to the Western Pacific, where bloody fighting rages.
As his narrative rolls through the Philippine Sea, Peleliu, the Philippine islands, Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Mr. Toll introduces the reader to America’s battle captains of the waves. Adm. Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet, was an eccentric thinker who delegated nearly everything to his subordinates. “Spruance did not fit the conventional mold of a wartime fleet commander,” Mr. Toll writes. “He was aloof, introverted, and monkish. . . . On an average day at sea, Spruance paced for three to four hours around the forecastle of the Indianapolis while dressed in a garish Hawaiian floral-print bathing suit, no shirt, white socks, and his regulation black leather shoes.” Yet, he continues, Spruance’s “insistence upon delegating authority down the line of command tended to bring out the best in subordinates.” Because Spruance’s résumé included spectacular victories at Midway and the Philippine Sea, Roosevelt would tolerate eccentricities.
Third Fleet’s Adm. William Halsey, nicknamed “Bull” by the press, jumps off the pages as an instantly likeable, Pattonesque leader whose reputation was cemented with his victory at Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval battles in history. “He was a profane, rowdy, fun-loving four-star admiral who laughed at jokes at his own expense and fired provocative verbal salvos against the enemy.” His rapport with the press would yank him out of trouble on more than one occasion and propel him to the rank of five-star fleet admiral.
Lesser lights are no less interesting. Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher, commander of the 16-carrier kraken that ruled the Pacific in the fall of 1944, and John McCain, the Navy’s affable air commander (and grandfather to the future senator), are among the second-deck stars whom Mr. Toll sympathetically dissects.
Mr. Toll’s interest in the evolution of weaponry dots the pages of “Twilight of the Gods.” The big Essex-class aircraft carriers and their unruly children, Hellcat fighter-bombers, play critical roles, as does the ultimate piece of the war’s power game: the atomic bomb. Doppler radars, proximity fuses, air-dropped mines and napalm raise the curtain on modern warfare. Carrier combat, no longer the “whites of the eyes” affair of 1941, morphed into a long-range campaign in which, Mr. Toll notes, “often the crews of the ships did not even lay eyes on a hostile plane.”
Yet on the ground Marines laid eyes on many enemies, human and natural. On Peleliu, a wasteland Mr. Toll compares to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mordor, “clouds of large greenish-blue flies fed off the unburied dead and tormented the living. Sudden torrential rainstorms came in the late afternoon, and sometimes at night. There was no escape from the relentless artillery and mortar barrages.” Worse horrors faced the doomed enemy: “When the guns paused, the marines could hear wounded and dying Japanese crying out in the night. Often they cried for their mothers, as did dying men of all races.” Of the cave-dwelling Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima, he writes: “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.”
Mr. Toll takes a short detour to the home front during the war’s last year. Accounts of housing shortages in California, the hazards of flight training and the rancor of the 1944 election provide glimpses of how Americans viewed the surreal world of mass killing a world away. And while his is an American story, Mr. Toll writes insightfully about the enemy home front, making fine use of Japanese sources and dropping hints of the demons possessing—and devouring—the other side. “The sack of Manila exposed the worst pathologies of Japan’s military culture and ideology,” he writes. The emperor’s soldiers “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.”
More sympathetic is his treatment of the Japanese navy’s decision to sacrifice itself at Leyte Gulf. In a senior army-navy conference in Tokyo, he writes, “sobbing freely, Rear Admiral Tasuku Nakazawa of the Naval General Staff replied on behalf of the navy: ‘Now the Combined Fleet of the Empire of Japan wishes to be given a place to end her life.’ ” Plan Sho, Japan’s attack against the Third Fleet at Leyte, “offered the ‘last chance’ for the treasured fleet to ‘die a glorious death.’ ”
Yet on the ground Marines laid eyes on many enemies, human and natural. On Peleliu, a wasteland Mr. Toll compares to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mordor, “clouds of large greenish-blue flies fed off the unburied dead and tormented the living. Sudden torrential rainstorms came in the late afternoon, and sometimes at night. There was no escape from the relentless artillery and mortar barrages.” Worse horrors faced the doomed enemy: “When the guns paused, the marines could hear wounded and dying Japanese crying out in the night. Often they cried for their mothers, as did dying men of all races.” Of the cave-dwelling Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima, he writes: “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.”
Mr. Toll takes a short detour to the home front during the war’s last year. Accounts of housing shortages in California, the hazards of flight training and the rancor of the 1944 election provide glimpses of how Americans viewed the surreal world of mass killing a world away. And while his is an American story, Mr. Toll writes insightfully about the enemy home front, making fine use of Japanese sources and dropping hints of the demons possessing—and devouring—the other side. “The sack of Manila exposed the worst pathologies of Japan’s military culture and ideology,” he writes. The emperor’s soldiers “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.”
More sympathetic is his treatment of the Japanese navy’s decision to sacrifice itself at Leyte Gulf. In a senior army-navy conference in Tokyo, he writes, “sobbing freely, Rear Admiral Tasuku Nakazawa of the Naval General Staff replied on behalf of the navy: ‘Now the Combined Fleet of the Empire of Japan wishes to be given a place to end her life.’ ” Plan Sho, Japan’s attack against the Third Fleet at Leyte, “offered the ‘last chance’ for the treasured fleet to ‘die a glorious death.’ ”
Though “Twilight of the Gods” spans a little over a year, this is the longest volume of Mr. Toll’s trilogy. In some ways its story is the most morally complex, treating life-and-death decisions made on the cusp of victory and defeat. In Mr. Toll’s view, both sides dipped their hands in blood. Holding aside Japan’s penchant for mass slaughter of civilians, a staple of most Pacific War narratives, the American bombing of Japanese cities poses lingering moral questions—as does Japan’s refusal to surrender when all knew the war was lost. The role of MacArthur’s publicity-driven ego in his decision to take Manila, the impressment of children by the Japanese (to work under fire in munitions factories and train with spears to repel heavily armed American soldiers) and the use of kamikaze and other forms of suicide attack fall under Mr. Toll’s factual, though not overly judgmental, scrutiny. War, after all, is hell.
The author’s strength lies in teasing out vivid details of the complex air and naval operations. Describing a line of B-29 bombers preparing for a bombing raid on Tokyo, he writes: “The Wright Duplex-Cyclone engines began firing to life. They coughed, caught, whirred and backfired thunderously, expelling clouds of exhaust smoke. Then the doors, hatches, and bomb bays were slammed closed, and the lead planes began inching out of their hardstands and trundling down the taxiways. . . . The commingled roars of so many great engines caused the air and ground to vibrate. One witness was reminded of the Indianapolis 500.”
Seven pages later, after the bombers do their work, Mr. Toll surveys the carnage wrought on 100,000 Tokyo inhabitants killed in one night’s serial slaughter: “Corpses were stacked like cordwood. They looked like charcoal mannequins, shrunk to three-quarters of their size, their facial features burned beyond recognition. Men could not be distinguished from women; smaller figures, children, died alongside their parents. The bodies were burned on the spot, or loaded into trucks to be buried in mass graves, or cremated in bonfires on the outskirts of the city.” From May to August 1945, the Army air forces dropped over 34,000 tons of bombs—the equivalent of more than one atomic bomb—on Japan each month.
In a conflict dominated by ships and saltwater, the final word was uttered by the Air Force, which ended the war by dropping the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mr. Toll describes a Japan that desired to end the war but was fatally divided between “never surrender” and peace factions that delayed firm action until the incineration of two cities cut short the debate.
In “Twilight of the Gods,” Mr. Toll weaves a brilliant final act depicting one of humanity’s epic tragedies. This book and its predecessors set a high bar for historians of the Pacific War.
—Mr. Jordan is the author of “American Warlords: How Roosevelt’s High Command Led America to Victory in World War II.”
Who is online
28 visitors