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| B004LQ6UVM
| unknown
| 4.24
| 3,230
| Feb 01, 2011
| Feb 01, 2011
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really liked it
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The Destroyermen series is a long-lasting product: a fifteen-book series that goes on and on, but so far each book has been entertaining enough to sta
The Destroyermen series is a long-lasting product: a fifteen-book series that goes on and on, but so far each book has been entertaining enough to stand on its own while advancing the overall story only a little bit. In an alternate Earth occupied by lemur-like Lemurians and raptor-like Grik, it turns out that the World War II destroy Walker and its Japanese pursuers were not the first humans from our Earth to stumble through whatever portal brought them here. There is already New Britain, descended from British ships that crossed over centuries ago, and the Dominion, descended from Spanish Catholics. While New Britain was introduced in the previous book, where Matthew Reddy and his crew figured out that they are based in roughly what is Hawaii on this world, the Dominion moves into the chief villain role in this book when the Walker arrives at the capital of New Britain. Despite being very much a sea-going action thriller that is read by people who want battles and intrigue and banter between Lemurians and WWII sailors, Anderson does a good job of creating plausible alternate history empires. New Britain is very British culturally, but its politics have diverged significantly, as the East India Company has become a sinister "shadow government." The destroyermen and Lemurians also discover that (for reasons that kind of make sense but still seemed a bit tortuous), women are virtually chattel. Although the more salacious implications of this are only hinted at, there are a whole lot of British officers saying "Well, of course we don't like the system but what can we do?" while insisting they really love their wives. The Dominion seems to have combined the worst aspects of the Inquisition and the Aztec empire, and the one Dominion character we meet, the Dominion ambassador to New Britain, is the Big Bad of this book. In previous books, the Japanese and the Grik both began as essentially faceless orc enemies, but later became individual characters with some diverging from their "racial archetype," so it remains to be seen if the Dominion will remain unambiguously evil or if there will turn out to be some nuance and dissent there as well. Speaking of the Grik and the Japanese, much like the last book, we only get a few chapters showing cameos of our old foes and what they are up to on the other side of the world. Rising Tides is primarily split between Matthew Reddy and the Walker in New Britain, and his girlfriend Nurse Sandra and Princess Rebecca and their fellow survivors out on the seas, who have to survive hostile natives (of the non-human variety) and volcanic eruptions. The Destroyermen is a series for people who like the premise and the action and don't mind the story being dragged out for many, many books. A little bit gets added in each book, there are usually a few new characters introduced, but long-running plot threads like the war between the Grik and the humans and Lemurians, which side the Dominion will be on, and for that matter, when Reddy will finally be reunited with his nurse gal who was abducted two books ago, get stretched out across several volumes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 05, 2024
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Jun 18, 2024
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Jun 05, 2024
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Audiobook
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| B0DM5763YX
| unknown
| 3.74
| 105
| Oct 01, 2012
| Nov 25, 2013
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liked it
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In World War II history, the Battle of Leyte usually refers to the naval battle, more specifically the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which took place in Octob
In World War II history, the Battle of Leyte usually refers to the naval battle, more specifically the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which took place in October 1944. This was the Imperial Japanese Navy's last and final attempt at a "great decisive battle" which had been part of Japanese military doctrine for decades, in which they would throw everything they had into one big battle to destroy the enemy's forces. By this stage in the war, Japan was running out of literally everything, from ships to oil to men. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was their last hurrah, an all-or-nothing roll of the dice. They were crushed. If Midway is widely regarded as the turning point in the Pacific theater, Leyte Gulf was the knockout blow. After Leyte, there were still brutal months of fighting ahead, but it was just an inevitable grinding away of the stubborn remnants of Japan's forces. But this book is not about Leyte Gulf. It's about the Battle of Leyte itself, the amphibious assault on the Philippine island of Leyte. This was General MacArthur's promised return to the Philippines, and the first stage in cutting off Japan's access to the Pacific and laying the groundwork (literally) for an eventual Allied assault on the Japanese home islands. While not as famous as the naval battle (which by some accounts was the largest naval battle in history), the ground battle echoed the sea battle. As at sea, the Japanese decided that stopping the Americans at Leyte was worth an all-or-nothing effort, and poured their best remaining troops in the theater into Leyte. The resulting three months of combat, from October to December of 1944, were as harsh as any seen during the Pacific campaign. While the Japanese, inevitably, were outmanned and outsupplied, they fought ferociously and without surrender. The first American units into Leyte were often poorly supplied themselves, and soldiers on both sides spent weeks foraging for coconuts and roots and hiking through jungles practically naked at times. [image] By the end of the campaign, this changed: the Japanese were still starving, naked, and without any supplies or relief in sight, while the U.S. was landing fresh troops every day with plentiful supplies and vast stores of ammo. But the Japanese still didn't surrender, and as the author relates, American GIs became used to General MacArthur or other higher-ups publicly declaring that a battle was "over" or in the "mopping up" phase even while they were still digging Japanese fighters out of the jungles at considerable cost in American lives. Leyte: The Soldier's Battle, as described by Nathan Prefer, is really many soldiers' battles. This book is a painstaking blow-by-blow, battle-by-battle account of the taking of Leyte, with some of the more famous ones being the Battle of Breakneck Ridge and the Battle of Shoestring Ridge. We get accounts of many, many individual encounters, and the names of men who engaged in acts of heroism, often at the cost of their own lives. Unfortunately, while often thrilling individually, the entire narrative at times felt like the author basically collected all the Silver Crosses and Medals of Honor awarded during the campaign and pasted their descriptions into the narrative one by one, so we get a seemingly endless list of men who fought and died and did valorous things to take a hill or destroy a Japanese machine gun or save a platoon from ambush or cross a river or defend a position, etc. Prefer claims that many larger battles came down to the actions of one man. It seems that many encounters were turned by the initiative of one decisive leader, or by a single hero/lunatic who charged Japanese positions by himself, jumped into their trenches, and started killing people. After a while, these stories do just seem like reading out a list of medal winners, and there is more of this than analysis of the larger campaign. The reality is that regardless of how well any individual unit or soldier fought, the Japanese on Leyte were doomed from the beginning, as they simply had no more supplies or reinforcements coming, while the Americans had effectively infinite resources to bring in. Interestingly, this was predicted in the beginning by General Shigenori Kuroda, who was military governor of the Japanese-occupied Philippines. When told of the plan to fight off the approaching Americans, his (accurate) assessment of the situation was that Japan couldn't win, the Americans would inevitably prevail by sheer weight of numbers, and that therefore they should dig in and fight a delaying action while trying to negotiate peace. He was removed from his post for being "defeatist" and recalled to Japan in disgrace. After the war, he fared better than his replacement, General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Both men were arrested and tried for war crimes, but Kuroda, after spending several years in a Philippine prison, was pardoned by the President of the Philippines and allowed to return to Japan. General Yamashita, who had overseen the real fighting in Leyte, was sentenced to death for the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers, under what is now called the "Yamashita standard," which basically established that even if a commander didn't directly order his men to commit war crimes, he's still responsible if he chose to remain "willfully ignorant" of them. [image] Prefer does not write very much about the commanders on either side until the end. He talks a bit about MacArther and his gloryhounding, and about General Walter Krueger, whom he considers underrated. Krueger was born in Prussia to a military family and but for an accident of fate - his family emigrating to America when he was a child - he likely would have wound up serving in the Wehrmacht. Instead, he became an American officer in charge of the Sixth Army. MacArther spoke very highly of him, even though he was regarded as "plodding" and cautious by his peers. He had a high regard for his troops, and was known to inspect the feet of solders in the field, and demote or remove from command any COs who'd allowed their men to have inadequate footwear. [image] After the war, Krueger suffered one tragedy after another. He was poor and in debt, his wife died of cancer, his son was kicked out of the Army for alcoholism, and his daughter became a mentally ill alcoholic and stabbed her officer husband to death. He did get a named after him, though. Leyte: The Soldier's Battle was a thorough but sometimes repetitive account of an often overlooked aspect of the Pacific campaign, the doughboys fighting in the jungles while the ships and planes got all the glory. It didn't really add much to my knowledge of the Pacific campaign, though the accounts of hard fighting in horrific conditions reinforced just how miserable and ugly the war was for all participants. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 15, 2022
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Nov 25, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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Audible Audio
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| B0DM4CCVJF
| unknown
| 3.97
| 811
| Jan 01, 1982
| Dec 12, 2017
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it was amazing
| "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 � a date which will live in infamy � the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 � a date which will live in infamy � the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." There are dozens of books called Infamy, most of them about Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941 remains one of the most famous dates in American history, bigger than anything but 9/11 until 9/11. I read this book because I had previously read John Toland's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. Toland is a thorough, meticulous historian, and while some of the material in Infamy repeats things he wrote in Rising Sun, this is not just a collection of excerpts. He did independent research in tracking down the truth behind Pearl Harbor, including interviewing American and Japanese officials involved in the decision-making (many of whom were still alive when he wrote this in 1982), talking families into giving up old papers and letters, and sending FOIA requests to the NSA and the Department of the Navy. Infamy is not about the Pearl Harbor attack itself (Toland describes it very briefly), but about what led up to it, and the aftermath. The Blame Game There are many obvious parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In both cases, the American public was stunned by a shocking, unprovoked attack on American soil, experienced a brief moment of national unity, and then fell to demanding someone be held responsible. In both cases, there were, in hindsight, many steps that led to the attack, many warnings ignored, and many balls dropped that could have prevented it. And in both cases, there are conspiracy theories that persist to this day accusing people in high places � all the way up to the President himself � of being complicit. Toland makes a convincing case that there was plenty of blame to go around and that most of it didn't fall on the right people. [image] Kimmel stood by the window of his office at the submarine base, his jaw set in stony anguish. As he watched the disaster across the harbor unfold with terrible fury, a spent .50 caliber machine gun bullet crashed through the glass. It brushed the admiral before it clanged to the floor. It cut his white jacket and raised a welt on his chest. "It would have been merciful had it killed me," Kimmel murmured to his communications officer, Commander Maurice "Germany" Curts. Admiral Husband Kimmel was in command of Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. He watched the bombs falling and knew his career was over even before the fires were put out. Toland writes a poignant account of Kimmel walking into his office, taking the four stars of his temporary rank off his shoulders, and replacing them with his previous "official" rank of two stars, bringing a young serviceman almost to tears. Kimmel knew he'd shoulder responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack. It didn't matter whether he was really to blame: in the Navy, if something goes wrong under your watch, it's your fault. That's just the way it is. But in the aftermath, the cries for heads grew louder, and it soon became apparent that those heads would be Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the US Army commander at Pearl Harbor. Kimmel was willing to accept responsibility for his failure, but he wasn't willing to accept charges of dereliction, ineptitude, and negligence. He received death threats. People wrote letters to newspapers asking why he hadn't been court martialed and stripped of his pension, or demanding that he do the "honorable" thing and kill himself. His sons, also naval officers, caught some of the flack. As Kimmel saw himself made a scapegoat, with the threat of formal charges being held over his head, he began to fight back, starting by demanding a formal court martial. The Navy didn't actually want a court martial, because that would allow him to ask embarrassing questions on the public record, but they also didn't want to say they weren't going to court martial him, because that would outrage the public. Kimmel was shuffled off to a desk job until he retired the following year, but he spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name. The Knox Report "I think the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the exception of Norway." The first official report was compiled by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who went to Hawaii to conduct an investigation personally. Knox, who had been agitating to round up all Japanese immigrants even before Pearl Harbor, not only blamed the military for being unprepared, but claimed that local Japanese fifth columnists had aided the attack. Though these accusations were never substantiated, the Knox report was a bombshell that did much to shape public opinion. Knox spent the rest of the war trying to get all the Japanese in Hawaii interred. The Roberts Commission The Roberts Commission was the first of nearly a dozen investigations into Pearl Harbor in the years that followed. Headed by US Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, it found Admiral Kimmel and General Short guilty of "dereliction of duty" by failing to prepare adequately for a Japanese attack. The Knox Report and the Roberts Commission absolutely threw Kimmel and Short under the bus, and following the Roberts Commission, Kimmel became one of the most hated men in America. Notably, both reports hid the fact that Washington had received credible information from a number of sources that a Japanese attack was imminent; information that was withheld from the Hawaiian commanders. Toland comes down on the side of most historians, who in retrospect do not consider Kimmel and Short singularly responsible for their ill-preparedness. It's true that by December of 1941, everyone believed war with Japan was inevitable, and the US had contemplated the possibility of a Japanese attack on Hawaii as early as the 1930s. Toland also cites several high-ranking US officers who had previously written about Japan's penchant for "sudden, devastating surprise attacks." So an attack on Pearl Harbor wasn't actually unthinkable, though most military experts considered it such a long shot, with severe logistic and strategic challenges, that Japan would be foolish to attempt it. They weren't wrong. But they weren't counting on Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a military genius, a Japanese naval officer who'd spent time in the U.S., and an inveterate gambler. [image] Possibly no one else could have pulled off the Pearl Harbor attack. Yamamoto caught the Americans fully unprepared. The Cover Up The question of "Did anyone actually know Pearl Harbor was going to happen before it happened?" is a complicated one, and here is where Toland's book shines, as he goes into great detail about individual people and events. In some cases, Toland personally tracked them down for interviews, or delved into archived State Department and Navy records. He makes a compelling argument that there were many people who knew the Japanese were about to attack, and that they would probably strike at Pearl Harbor. The Pearl Harbor attack was obviously a "secret," but it was a rather open one in Japanese military circles; you can't send a carrier fleet across the Pacific to start a war without word getting around. So there are accounts of Dutch diplomats passing on information overheard to American consular officials, a Korean-American agent who had definite intelligence on the Kidō Butai fleet and sent it on, confident that he had warned America in time to give the Japanese a "hot reception." There were intercepted diplomatic communications that set off alarm bells for the translators and decoders, but which somehow didn't make their way to the desks of the President or the Secretary of the Navy until too late. There are even credible accounts of military personnel from Alaska to Hawaii picking up radio signals that, with hindsight, should have told them what was afoot. There was a message to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu asking the officials there to map out Pearl Harbor and its ships on a grid for the obvious purpose of bombing, a message that was decrypted and passed on to the Navy but not forwarded to Kimmel and Short. The story Toland assembles is a convincing one: there was plenty of information available that, had anyone put it together, made it obvious what was about to happen. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and some things are obvious only after the fact, but clearly mistakes were made. So, Kimmel knew that the Japanese might attack Hawaii "soon," but he didn't have concrete information about an imminent attack, concrete information that actually existed. He was not the only one who was outraged, after the war, to find out that intelligence had not been passed on to him that would certainly have altered his readiness posture. Why wasn't he given all the information? Part of it was a cover-up that persisted until well into the war: the Japanese code used to encrypt diplomatic communications had been broken, but the US obviously didn't want the Japanese to know their code had been broken. But some of the messages weren't passed on because of skepticism, or because intelligence officers ruled their domains jealously and possessively. This comes up a lot in Toland's book: the Washington bureaucracy hid things, there was infighting between Naval offices and between the Army and the Navy, and intelligence was treated as a prize to be jealously held onto, not, like, shared with people who actually need it. Toland, however, does a pretty thorough debunking of one of the more outrageous theories that still has some adherents: that FDR himself knew about the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, and deliberately failed to warn the commanders there because he wanted Japan to attack so that the U.S. could enter the war. Prelude to War In the last part of the book, Toland turns from the multiple reports and commissions that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor to the history that led up to it. This is ground he covered more thoroughly in Rising Sun, but in short: Japan was in a tough spot. They wanted to be a first-class power, but Japan had few natural resources, so realistically, they could only join the other great powers by engaging in colonialism like everyone else had. Unfortunately for them, Europe and America didn't want to see the rise of Japan as a rival. This was for a variety of reasons, of which racism was certainly one, but Japan's invasion of China had been met with severe disapprobation, and the US was threatening to cut off their oil. This would strangle the Japanese economy and all their imperial ambitions. The choice they were given was essentially: give up on being a world power, or go to war. Toland talks a lot about the diplomatic maneuvers in the years and then the weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. It's another tale of unfortunate mistakes and misunderstandings. Secretary of State Henry Stimson was a Japanophobe who was outright hostile to them; he took a hard line in situations where a softer approach might have left more room for negotiations. On the other hand, the Japanese had their own internal problems that often prevented them from giving a straightforward answer to American proposals. Worse, sometimes their responses were translated badly, in a way that gave the impression they were being duplicitous when they weren't. Right up until the night before the attack, Japan's envoys in Washington were still trying to negotiate a way out of armed conflict, unaware that the Kidō Butai fleet was on its way. I've read a lot of books about World War II now, and John Toland stands out for his research and his detail. Infamy isn't a completely objective recitation of historical facts; Toland is opinionated at times, though moderate in how he expresses it. But he did a lot of independent research and legwork, and he clearly believes that the Washington bureaucracy was more to blame for the Pearl Harbor attack than the unfortunate commanders in charge. FDR himself comes off as being somewhat mendacious and scheming, as he really did want America to join the war against Germany, which before Pearl Harbor was not something he could sell to the American people. So did he want, even expect, that Japan would give him the excuse he needed? Quite possibly. But Toland's description of his reaction in the aftermath is not of a man who had prior information. It was more that of a man who had received bad news he'd been dreading. Some other ignoble episodes in the book include the Census Department being put to work literally the night of December 7 assembling a list of every single Japanese name in North America and Hawaii; a task that census officials later denied they had ever worked on. There was also the shoddy treatment of men like Commander Laurance Safford and Captain Joseph Rochefort, Naval cryptographers who embarrassed their superiors by being right and had their careers derailed because of it. If you are interested in WWII history, not from the perspective of battles and campaigns, but the politics and causes, I would really recommend Toland's magnum opus, Rising Sun, but Infamy is an excellent investigation into how it started. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 30, 2022
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Oct 06, 2022
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Sep 30, 2022
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Audible Audio
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| 1980090696
| 9781980090694
| 1980090696
| 4.76
| 4,516
| Sep 01, 2020
| Sep 01, 2020
|
it was amazing
|
The third volume in Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy was as magnificent as the first two. It was also longer, by a lot. The author acknowledges in his f
The third volume in Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy was as magnificent as the first two. It was also longer, by a lot. The author acknowledges in his foreword that what was originally supposed to be a single book became a trilogy that took him longer to write than the war lasted. Twilight of the Gods covers the end stages of the War in the Pacific - 1944 and 1945. By this point, it was obvious to everyone, even the hardliners in Japan, that Japan could not hope to win the war. They could only hope to negotiate the terms of their surrender, and eventually even that hope was all but gone. Which did not prevent those final years from being the most horrific and bloody of the war, with more casualties on both sides than in all the years preceding. Toll describes many of the great battles of the Pacific War in great detail, but he looks at them primarily in strategic terms (how did the affect the course of the war?) and in political terms (how did they affect the calculus of leaders on both sides?). He also examines the leadership qualities of all the admirals and generals in charge, finding quite a few wanting in many respects. And without being overly gruesome, he describes the human cost, the horror, the bloody carnage, the shattered and broken men, the hell they endured, on the shores and aboard ships being attacked by kamikazes, and beneath the waves, where submarines played deadly cat and mouse with Japanese destroyers. For the Japanese as well, because Japanese soldiers suffered as well, and possibly more so, because their leaders treated their lives far more expendably than the Allies treated their own forces. It's easy to see the Japanese as the "villains," and Toll points out repeatedly that they earned their bad reputation. Other atrocities committed by the Japanese (notably in China) don't get as much coverage because these books are primarily about the Pacific theater, but in the Philippines, when MacArthur returned and American forces crushed the abandoned and unsupplied Japanese defenders, the Japanese brutally slaughtered civilians and their atrocities escalated as their final defeat became inevitable. Yet we also learn that even in the beginning, Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen were not all obedient, fanatical Samurai willing to casually throw their lives away, and as the corruption and ineptitude of their leaders, and the disaster it had brought to their country, became obvious even to the most loyal, dissent and even disobedience grew in the ranks. Some of the most tragic passages are towards the very end, where Toll collected some letters written by kamikaze pilots, including a sensitive university-educated poet, a Marxist, and a Japanese Christian, expressing how much they hated the war and what they were being asked to do... before they went out and did it and died. It's both inexplicable and not � they knew what they were doing was wrong and futile, and yet, how do you become a deserter and a coward, forsaking your country, knowing that all of your comrades will go and die in your place? [image] Chapter three was basically a summary of Eugene Sledge's book With the Old Breed, about the horrific battles of Peleliu and Okinawa, which I highly recommend. I won't do it justice by resummarizing Toll's summary. [image] There is a chapter about submarine warfare. Sub captains were competitive and rated by how much tonnage they sank. It is astounding how many thousands of tons of ships and cargo, oil and materials, and men, were sent to the bottom. One of the best hunters in the sub fleet was Commander Dudley Morton, and the USS Wahoo sank 19 ships and 55,000 tons before it failed to report back from its final mission. As submariners say, it is now on "Eternal Patrol." (Its wreck was finally discovered in 2006.) Early in the war, American submarines suffered from faulty torpedoes, which would occasionally circle around and sunk the sub that had launched them. There are a lot of rich technical details here, but even more about.... The B-29 Superfortress [image] This monster allowed the U.S. to bomb the shit out of anyone, anywhere, and bomb they did. It was also an enormously expensive program ($2B dollars in 1944!), and a huge windfall for Boeing. Like the chapter on submarines, the chapter on American aviation, the rapid innovation of new planes and pilot training programs, and the fearsome power of the B-29s, and the terror of flying in them under fire, is worth a book in itself. (There are so many things that stand out about the wastefulness of war, like the fact that at the height of the fighting, as Japan was running out of planes and pilots, the U.S. was churning out so many new planes every month that older planes that just needed minor repairs would simply be junked or tossed over the side to be replaced with a shiny new one.) [image] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ran for an unprecedented 4 terms and would not live to see the end of the war, figures prominently only in the first part of this volume, though American politics were a bigger part of the first book in the trilogy. A point that will seem very familiar to modern readers is FDR's relationship with the press. During WWII, the government imposed censorship that would never be accepted today. Some was "voluntary" � American newspapers were unabashedly on America's side in the war, even if they were willing to criticize how it was being conducted, so of course they didn't want to publish anything that might help the Axis. But gradually they stopped accepting this as an excuse, as censors took a very broad view of what might constitute "helping the enemy." Journalists started pushing back on restrictions, and the chummy atmosphere FDR had cultivated with the press began to deteriorate. Donald Trump blasted the media by calling it "Fake news," while FDR would just flatly call reporters and columnists who published things he didn't like liars. [image] Earnest King was the Commander in Chief of the US fleet and Chief of Navy Operations. As COMINCH, he was second only to Admiral Leahy, and he was the one who primarily gave Nimitz and the other admirals their orders. King, like most high-ranking naval officers at the time, considered the press a scourge. Their formative years as junior officers had seen a scandal in which rival admirals had washed the Navy's dirty linen in public; henceforth, most admirals considered journalists to be pests if not actively hostile, and not to be spoken to. King took the job as COMINCH on condition that he would not have to do press conferences. Ironically, King would eventually cultivate personal relationships with some members of the press, setting up a little "boys club" where they'd drink and shoot the breeze, and by so doing, King began playing them like a fiddle, selectively leaking information he wanted to disseminate while manipulating how they covered the Navy. He initially had no use for the press, but learned to have a lot of use for them. [image] Admiral Spruance was, like most of his peers, a "black shoe" admiral. The "brown shoes" were the aviators, and the new hotness, but black shoe admirals still mostly ran things. But Spruance was a genius, so much so that Admiral Halsey named him as his stand-in. The descriptions of Spruance's rather odd personality, his flat responses to military engagements, his habit of pacing decks, sometimes in bathrobe and slippers, his idiosyncratic brilliance, made me think that nowadays he might have been considered "on the spectrum [image] Admiral William "Bull" Halsey was put in charge of Task Force 58, which was the largest assembled naval force the world has ever seen. TF 58 was a flotilla of carriers, cruisers, and their accompanying destroyers, and they could basically sail anywhere they wanted to and swat whatever they wanted to. Halsey's nickname of "Bull" was rarely used to his face. He was blunt and belligerent and the press and the American public loved it. One of his most popular dictums was "“Kill Japs, kill Japs and keep on killing Japs.� He had a temper to go with his brashness. In one of the most notorious incidents of the war, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Halsey had taken TF 34 (part of TF 58) and gone in pursuit of what later turned out to be a decoy Japanese force. The lightly armed escort carriers he left behind desperately radioed for support when the real Japanese force of battleships came after them. Fleet Admiral Nimitz sent a radio query asking for TF 34's current location: TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS[8] The details of this require some explanation of cryptography (which Toll explains in the book), but basically, random "padding" was added to the actual message text to make it harder to decode. "The World wonders" was just padding that wasn't meant to be part of the message, but by mistake, Halsey was delivered a message from Nimitz that read "Where is Where is Task Force Thirty Four the world wonders?" Halsey interpreted this as a sarcastic rebuke sent over the airwaves, and had a four-star meltdown. His chief of staff had to calm him down and get him off the bridge, and Halsey sulked until finally turning TF 34 around... far too late to join what would later be known as the Battle of Samar. Nimitz, in his memoirs, would later admit that he knew where TF 34 was and that he was pointedly chiding Halsey � though the addition of "The World wonders" really wasn't his doing. Halsey comes off in this book as quite an interesting character, maybe second only to MacArthur for being an irascible, temperamental glory-hound. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, he made what most considered to be a tactical blunder, but his counterpart, Admiral Kiroto, made a mistake that canceled it out. Halsey would deny until the end of his life that he'd made a mistake, and would even rally his friends to dogpile any historian or journalist who said otherwise. [image] Douglas MacArthur was enormously popular back home, and not nearly as popular with his own troops, though few folks back home knew this. Hagiographic biographies full of fanciful embellishments were being published about him before the war was even over. He was a glory hound. He became a celebrity, and he knew how to pose for the cameras. Quite a few photo ops depicted him as "riding with the troops on the front lines" when he was actually just riding a jeep in Australia. He meddled in politics, both American and Australian and Philippine, and he was sometimes borderline insubordinate. At one point, he was seriously considering making a run for President, before he got slapped down. For all that, no one could say he lacked courage. He stood on the decks of warships watching kamikaze pilots blazing in, and walked on beaches within range of potential Japanese snipers, much to the dismay of his subordinates. His military genius may have been overestimated, but as a symbol he was enormously popular. As the U.S. began determining how it was going to launch the final siege against Japan, there is a big debate between the Luzon (Philippines) approach, or using Formosa (Taiwan) as the launching point. MacArthur favored Luzon, of course, because he wanted to keep his promise to the Philippines that he would return. Eventually he won this battle, and he did indeed return. From the Philippines, U.S. forces ground inexorably closer and closer to the Japanese home islands, finally landing on Okinawa. [image] Raising the flag on Iwo Jima was really just the beginning of the battle for Okinawa, which was in many ways even worse than Peleliu. It was hellish, the Japanese continued to behave atrociously (native Okinawans were not really considered "Japanese" and were treated not much better than the Japanese had treated any of their other colonized peoples), and the U.S. prepared for Operation Downfall: the invasion of Japan itself. Unconditional Surrender "Unconditional Surrender," the only terms the U.S. would accept, seems pretty unambiguous, right? But it turns out there was quite a lot of nuance to it. While in the popular imagination, this meant the Japanese would bow before their conquerors and accept a boot on their necks or whatever else the Americans saw fit to subject them to, there were backchannel negotiations going on even as the Americans publicly said "Unconditional Surrender!" and the Japanese publicly said "We will never surrender!" The negotiations were complicated and delicate, especially within Japanese circles. There was a "peace faction" that could never openly say they wanted to surrender, even though everyone knew they were going to have to. The militant faction openly claimed they would fight to the death (and that the indomitable spirit of the Japanese people would propel them to victory despite American numerical superiority and, uh, Japan running out of oil, planes, money, and food), even while they tried to reach a consensus about the terms of their surrender. The sticking point was the Emperor. A majority of the American public wanted Hirohito tried as a war criminal, and removed from his throne at the very least. But ensuring the safety of the Emperor and his family was the one thing the Japanese weren't prepared to yield on, and might have actually fought to the bitter end over. The most accurate thing to say about the unofficial "understanding" reached between American and Japanese negotiators would be that the Japanese "unconditionally surrendered," while having been made to understand that Hirohito would be allowed to stay on the throne, even if this was never promised or written in so many words. This was one of the most interesting chapters in the book, as the process of Japanese decision-making and the many miscommunications between Japanese and Americans, all with the backdrop of a Soviet advance in Manchuria complicating things, made this so much more complex than "The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan and Japan surrendered." There are two big questions I always have about the end of World War II: how culpable was Emperor Hirohito, really? And was nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki really the only alternative to an invasion? Toll does not answer either question definitively. Like most authors, he relies on a lot of primary sources, but primary sources in the Japanese high council meetings were not particularly forthcoming about any decision-making power the Emperor had, and MacArthur himself found it useful to depict Hirohito as a puppet of the military junta. What we can glean from discussions in which Hirohito took part is that he was not merely a figurehead. He couldn't exactly command the Japanese military to do something and make it so; Japan's constitutional monarchy limited his role. However, his blessing was needed to go forward, and even the militarists felt an almost religious reverence for the Emperor, so to act against his wishes would have been difficult. Hirohito giving his blessing to an unconditional surrender, even accepting that he would be in the hands of the Americans, to do with as they pleased, made unconditional surrender possible. But could Hirohito have ended the war even earlier, and did he want to? As for the atomic bombs, Toll covers the details of the flights over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the events before and after the bombing, and the dreadful effects of it. (He also spends a lot of time discussing the even more dreadful conventional firebombings of Japanese cities, which killed many more people even more horrifically.) But modern readers may be surprised just how little impact the bombs probably had at the time. The Japanese actually had a nuclear program of their own, though it had never gotten very far, so while they were skeptical that Americans had actually developed a fission bomb, they were not unfamiliar with the concept. But the loss of Hiroshima and Nagasaki really didn't impress them that much � they'd already suffered far more damage from B-29s. What really ended Japanese hopes for a conditional surrender was the declaration of war by the Soviet Union. Japan had hoped the Soviets would help them negotiate a more acceptable peace with the Allies, but Stalin was stringing them along, and in an almost Pearl Harbor-like move, ended the Japanese-Soviet neutrality pact and invaded Manchuria the next morning. That was when even the hardliners knew the jig was well and truly up. I've covered just a few of the highlights above. This book is so big and comprehensive, full of so many interesting battles, strategic decisions, personalities, military blunders, politics, and diplomacy... and it's just the last two years of the Pacific War. Ian Toll's trilogy ranks up there as one of my favorite non-fiction series of all time, and is a must-read for any WWII aficionado. ...more |
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| 4.24
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really liked it
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This is a grim fucking book, and I've read books about genocides and serial killers without flinching. Iris Chang is not neutral on this subject. She w This is a grim fucking book, and I've read books about genocides and serial killers without flinching. Iris Chang is not neutral on this subject. She wrote The Rape of Nanking in 1997 after learning that, although the event was well documented, there had never been an English-language book written about it. Her grandparents narrowly escaped Nanking during the war. It's clear from reading her writing that she had some feelings about the Japanese. In 1998 she confronted the Japanese ambassador to the United States on television. In the typical manner of Japanese politicians speaking about Japan's wartime record, the ambassador said, "There were perhaps some unfortunate incidents." [image] [image] [image] [image] These are not the worst images available. While the Japanese tried to cover up the massacre as it became a PR nightmare, Westerners in the city took a lot of photographs and even movie reels. There are thousands of pages of documentation and photographs. The facts are really indisputable, which has not prevented many Japanese (including government officials) from disputing them, which is the source of the author's palpable rage towards the end of the book. The story in simple summary: the Imperial Japanese Army's Shanghai Expeditionary Force arrived at Nanking in December of 1937, where one of Chiang Kai-Shek's generals, Tang Shengzhi, declared that Nanking would not surrender, but would fight to the death. Then he left about 10,000 untrained peasant soldiers to defend it and hightailed it out of the city. The IJA arrived, following a bombing campaign, took the city, and a six-week orgy of rape, looting, and mass murder on a scale perhaps never before seen in history ensued. Although atrocities continued throughout the Japanese occupation (as indeed the Japanese had been committing atrocities in China long before this), it was that initial period in which the worst horrors occurred. Chang details the atrocities in gruesome detail. They are well-documented, by the international residents of the city who witnessed it and did their best, often heroically, to save the defenseless Chinese. Chang herself went to Nanking to interview survivors. The book is divided into several parts, first telling the story from the perspective of the Japanese and their military campaign, then from the perspective of the Chinese, then from the perspective of international observers inside and outside of the city. The Unknown Holocaust The Holocaust tends to suck all the air out of the room when we talk about World War II atrocities, but in many ways, what happened in Nanking was even worse. The death toll may not have been as high (estimates are still disputed, with the Japanese still insisting on a death toll from the truly ridiculous 3K to a still absurd underestimate of 30K-60K, while most historians agree it was probably more like 100K-200K and some Chinese claim as many as 400K), but while the Holocaust was a brutal industrial scale genocide carried out with German efficiency, the Japanese in Nanking got.... creative. They ran wires through captives, chopped them up with swords, hung them by their tongues, used them for bayonet practice, stabbed them to death with needles, soaked them in gasoline and shot them, laughing as they went up in flames. They buried men to the waist and had dogs tear them apart, they drove over prisoners in tanks to use their bodies to fill ditches. They herded civilians into frozen lakes and forced them into the water to freeze to death. They committed thousands of acts of torture and dismemberment. There was also a "medical research" section that performed gruesome experiments on Chinese civilians, injecting them with poisons and venoms and vivisecting them, and which destroyed all records and was only revealed afterwards by the testimony of a captured Japanese officer. And then there were the women. Rape has happened in the aftermath of every captured city in history, but the Japanese turned Nanking into a city-wide orgy of nonstop gang rapes. When Chang refers to the entire event as "the Rape," it's not really figurative. Girls younger than 8, women older than 60, the Japanese herded women into streets and gang-raped them in broad daylight, raped women and girls literally to death, kept thousands as sex slaves, and killed any who resisted, killed any family members who tried to defend them, and often killed them anyway when they were done with them. There are numerous stories of pregnant women being raped, then bayoneted and their fetuses torn out of their bellies. The Japanese also forced fathers to rape their daughters, sons to rape their mothers, families to watch as every female from little girls to grandmothers were raped. What is perhaps most chilling in the aftermath is that Chang couldn't find a single instance of a Chinese woman admitting to having had a half-Japanese child, in the entire historical record. What she did find was appalling suicide rates and a lot of babies strangled at birth. The Rape of Nanking catalogs these atrocities, lots of them. Although describing the hell that Nanking went through might serve a purpose in itself, it would be of little historical value just to itemize the horrors unless there was something else to take away from this. Chang tries to offer some explanations for what caused Japanese military discipline to break down so badly, but the hard truth seems to be that it wasn't a breakdown: it was by design. All along their path to Nanking, the Japanese had been told that it was going to be open season on Chinese civilians. One of the more salacious stories is the infamous "Killing contest" between two IJA lieutenants, reported in Japanese newspapers. This contest was later disputed, with the descendants of the named lieutenants even suing (unsuccessfully) for slander, but regardless of whether two officers had a friendly little contest to see who could behead more Chinese on the way to Nanking, it was clear that this sort of behavior was not just allowed, but encouraged. Chang spends some time talking about the harsh indoctrination of the Japanese military, in which enlisted men were regularly beaten by officers and had to stand there and take it. Brutal hazing was a way of life, and it started in childhood under Japan's military dictatorship, so by the time these soldiers reached Nanking, they had spent much of their lives being relentlessly abused, and then turned loose on a helpless civilian population they'd been taught to think of as less than human. There is some evidence that the general in charge of the army (who was not even present during the initial occupation) was shocked and horrified by what happened, but less to his credit, he later spent more time trying to cover it up and then to deflect blame away from Prince Asaka, the Imperial commander who may or may not have ordered the pillaging, and certainly did nothing to stop it. The Westerners Who Tried to Intervene At the time the Japanese captured Nanking, there were a number of Westerners, mostly Germans and Americans, in the city. They established the "Nanjing Safety Zone," in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese took shelter. Japan was not yet at war with the United States, but they definitely didn't view the Americans as friendly. The Germans on the other hand were Japanese allies, and this led to one of the most ironic stories of the Nanking massacre: the heroic Nazi whom Chang calls the Oskar Schindler of Nanking. [image] John Rabe was the leader of the Nazi Party in Nanking. Yet it's not an exaggeration to say he probably saved literally hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives. While keeping the Nanjing Safety Zone open, Rabe took in as many refugees as he could, sheltering them (especially women) everywhere � in his house and at his workplace. He and his fellow Nazis found that displaying their Nazi armbands were often enough to deter Japanese soldiers, even as they interrupted them in the middle of an act of rape. He left Nanking shortly after the occupation, promising the Chinese that he would appeal directly to der Führer on their behalf. And then he disappeared from history, until Iris Chang, researching this book, tracked down his family and learned the rest of the story. Rabe really did make it back to Germany, and he really did send a letter to Hitler about the Rape of Nanking, asking the Führer to intercede with Japan for the hapless Chinese. This makes Rabe's granddaughter's claim that he was a Nazi because he believed in National Socialism but that he never knew about atrocities against the Jews, actually believable. Rabe got a visit from the Gestapo for his trouble, and was basically told to shut up. After the war, he and his family spent a few years in brutal poverty. Rabe was interrogated first by the Soviets, then by the British, and for a long time was denied "de-Nazification" that would have allowed him to find employment, because of his Nazi party leadership back in Nanking. Eventually the story of his humanitarian efforts convinced the committee to remove his black mark, and the people of Nanking, upon learning that Rabe had fallen on hard times, sent him money and care packages. Rabe died in 1950, still in poverty. It was only as a result of Iris Chang's research that his family finally decided to publish his memoirs (it had always been problematic to try to tell the story of a "good Nazi") [image] Robert Wilson was an American physician who ended up being one of the only doctors in Nanking. He was at one point literally the only person providing medical care to Chinese in the city, in the last surviving hospital, which was regularly being bombed. He worked around the clock to exhaustion, and when he wasn't treating injured civilians, he literally drove around the city rescuing Chinese women from rape. Being a Westerner kept him from getting shot, but only barely. He later testified before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. He died in 1967, still suffering physically and mentally from his experiences in China. [image] Minnie Vautrin was an American missionary. Like John Rabe and Robert Wilson, she created refuges for Chinese civilians in the International Safety Zone, and did her best to protect women from rape, often as Japanese soldiers with trucks would drive directly up to the Women's College where she worked and demand girls. She kept a diary of the atrocities she witnessed, and personally saved hundreds, possibly thousands of lives. Like Robert Wilson, she more than once put herself in front of Japanese rifles to shield people, and was on a few occasions slapped by angry Japanese soldiers. In 1940, she had a nervous breakdown and returned to the United States for medical treatment. The friend who sailed with her had to repeatedly keep her from throwing herself overboard. She was hospitalized, received electroshock therapy, and committed suicide a year later. The Author Who Broke The Rape of Nanking has been criticized in some quarters (mostly Japanese) as being polemical and unbalanced. I don't think that's fair, but it's definitely not objective. Chang wasn't trying to be "fair" to the Japanese or tell "both sides." I noticed immediately that one of Chang's primary sources on Japanese history and culture was Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an anthropological study written in 1946 that was the first in a genre of "books explaining Japan to Westerners." It was a bestseller in the United States and Japan in the 1950s, but it's had its share of criticism as well, and by 1997, when Chang wrote The Rape of Nanking, she could certainly have found some less dated references. It's clear that Chang was outraged as she wrote this book, and she is not sparing of the Japanese. While carefully disaverring that there was anything inherent in the Japanese character to cause the atrocities, and separating the Japanese people from Japanese society, Chang rails in the last section of the book about the Japanese government's continued (at least up to the 1990s) refusal to acknowledge what had happened. She talks about how Japanese textbooks to that time barely mentioned any of Japan's war crimes, or indeed that Japan had even been an aggressor in World War II, and the pervasive national amnesia on the subject, the nationalist right wing's threats against any who criticized the actions of Japan during the war, and outright denials by Japanese writers and politicians that the Nanjing Massacre even happened. She compares Germany's reparations over the Holocaust with Japan's lack of any form of reparations for their crimes, and points out how many Japanese soldiers, all the way up to Imperial officers, who admitted committing atrocities or at least being aware of them, escaped punishment. She is definitely on Team "Hirohito was a war criminal." This was personal for her, and Chang was obviously very, very angry. After reading it, it is hard not to be revolted, outraged, and yes, angry that a single person involved in this atrocity could have been allowed to walk around a free man enjoying life. It's easy to see how working on this book for years, traveling to Nanking to speak to survivors, looking at all those photographs of dead women with bayonets shoved up their vaginas, piles of severed heads, and children burned alive, could, well, unhinge someone. (continued in comments) ...more |
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Apr 11, 2021
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| 4.18
| 9,893
| Jan 01, 1955
| May 05, 2020
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really liked it
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This is a sparse war story with a lean storytelling style by the author of the Horatio Hornblower series. The Good Shepherd is a World War II story ab
This is a sparse war story with a lean storytelling style by the author of the Horatio Hornblower series. The Good Shepherd is a World War II story about a destroyer captain charged with escorting a convoy during the Battle of the Atlantic. Much of the book focuses on the minutiae of nautical maneuvers, but also on the inner thoughts of Captain George Krause, a Commander in the US Navy who faces 52 long watches playing cat and mouse with u-boats. It's 1942, and the United States has just entered the war. Krause is older than his fellow officers, but the captains of the other ships (some of whom are Polish, Canadian, and British allies) have been at war for two years, so he feels all of their eyes on him. Forester captures the tension of sea battles, the hard, cold logic of deciding when to chase, when to leave off, when to use the precious depth charges, when to go to the rescue of a sinking ship and when that would mean leaving many more unprotected. The invisible German U-boat commander is never seen, but one can easily imagine his crew suffering the same tension as Krause's � each one knows that the first to make a mistake or guess wrong dies. Despite this being a short novel that's mostly about sea battles, Forester manages to pack a lot of characterization into Commander Krause. We learn of his doubts, his desire to set an example and not let down his crew, his allies, or his country, while also not wanting to let his doubts and ambitions get in the way of his duty. Before the war, he was "fitted and retained" (meaning, in naval parlance, judged adequate but not good enough for promotion), and only got his promotion to Commander when the war began. He spares a few thoughts for the wife who left him, who couldn't understand his devotion to duty, and his upbringing. We learn he's a pious man. It's a very masculine novel, from an earlier age. I haven't read any of Forester's other books, but I enjoyed this one. ...more |
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| Liu, Ken
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| 1936896087
| 9781936896080
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| 4.15
| 1,177
| Sep 2011
| 2017
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it was amazing
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This novella is a brilliant exploration of time travel and the ethics of historiography, told in the form of a documentary � interviews, Senate hearin
This novella is a brilliant exploration of time travel and the ethics of historiography, told in the form of a documentary � interviews, Senate hearings, excerpts from TV documentaries, and journal entries. Ken Liu's notes at the end show that he did his research about a story that he obviously cared about, basing his fictional Senate hearings and textbooks and interviews on real ones. The SF gimmick in the story is the discovery of the Bohm-Kirino particle, a sort of quantum particle traveling outwards from observable events along with photons. The scientists after whom the particle is named discover a way for people to directly observe the Bohm-Kirino particles from any given point in the past � in other words, "time travel." They are not actually traveling back in time, only observing, but they can be direct eyewitnesses to history. The catch is that by observing a particular point in time, they absorb, and thus destroy, the Bohm-Kirino particles they observe. Thus, no point in time can be observed more than once, and the original observer is the only eyewitness to it. Liu does a good job of making this feel like a science fiction story with plausible quantum technobabble about the Bohm-Kirino particles and the process, but the sci-fi element is secondary to the real point of the story, which is our understanding of history, who owns the "truth" about historical narratives, and also a great big axe to grind with Japan. Akemi Kirino, one of the scientists who discovered the Bohm-Kirino particle and the method of observing the past, is a Japanese-American physicist married to Evan Wei, a Chinese-American historian who specialized in Classical Japan. When his wife opens the past to direct observation, Wei becomes obsessed with one specific part of it: the activities of the infamous in Harbin, China, during World War II. He allows relatives of the victims of Unit 731 to go back in time to verify the truth of what happens, and in the process, reopens old wounds between Japan and China that have never really healed. I was impressed with the emotional and philosophical weight of this story; Liu judiciously blends snippets of atrocity and inhumanity with anodyne news broadcasts, polemical Senate hearings, euphemizing politicians and diplomats, and very personal interviews. The personal consequences for Akemi Kirino and Evan Wei are woven into the international debate over allowing external "visitors" to go back and unearth (and indirectly, destroy) the past. It is, of course, an assumption on my part that Liu, a Chinese-American SF author most famous for translating Cixin Liu's Hugo-winning The Three-Body Problem, had personal reasons for choosing Japan's wartime atrocities against China as the historical inflection point for this story. But it's a thoughtful and not entirely one-sided exploration of the issue (I say not entirely because it's pretty obvious the author has some feelings about Japan here), and the story does address what happens when other people � historical oppressors and oppressed alike � want their turn to revisit history. ...more |
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| 4.34
| 560,007
| Feb 07, 2017
| Feb 07, 2017
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really liked it
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"A woman's lot is to suffer." There is a lot of suffering in this novel. Pachinko spans 80 years and four generations of the Baek family, Koreans who
"A woman's lot is to suffer." There is a lot of suffering in this novel. Pachinko spans 80 years and four generations of the Baek family, Koreans who move to Japan during the colonial era, and remain there, through the war and the reconstruction, through the rise of Japan as an economic power, and through marriages, births, deaths, and tragedies. Ethnic Koreans in Japan have suffered a long history of discrimination. Small numbers came to Japan during the colonial era, when Korea was under Japanese occupation, and more came in the turbulence of the 40s and 50s. They were never considered Japanese, and treated as a despised underclass, relegated to ghettos and low-status occupations, and subjected to stereotypes about Korean criminality, dirtiness, promiscuity, and violent tempers, which of course led many Koreans in Japan to actually becoming involved in organized crime, having few legitimate careers open to them. Sound familiar? To this day, third and fourth generation Korean-Japanese are still not considered Japanese citizens � they are "registered aliens" who must periodically renew their registrations, and can theoretically be "deported" to Korea, even if they have never set foot outside of Japan and don't speak a word of Korean. Sound familiar? There is a process by which ethnic Koreans (and other resident aliens) can become naturalized citizens of Japan, but it's difficult, and for Korean-Japanese it evokes complex sentiments about identity and citizenship. This is the cultural backdrop of Pachinko. Sunja Baek (or Baek Sunja if given properly, Korean and Japanese fashion, surname first) is the pretty daughter of a poor fisherman's family in Korea in the early 20th century. Her poor but happy family life is disrupted when a handsome, educated gentleman rescues her from a gang of Japanese schoolboys who were about to rough her up or worse. Koh Hansu is a wealthy Korean who was educated in Japan. Quite taken with teenage Sunja, they become a couple, and Sunja soon becomes pregnant. Sunja is delighted, thinking her handsome lover will marry her. To Sunja's shock, but certainly not the reader's, it turns out that Koh Hansu is already married and has a family back in Japan. Hansu is no scoundrel, however. He actually offers to provide for Sunja and their child, and wants to continue to be part of their lives. Sunja, however, is a very old-fashioned sort of girl, even if she did let herself get seduced by an older man who she thought was going to marry her. She is unwilling to shame her family by accepting a life as a rich man's mistress, and so she rejects him and resigns herself instead to a miserable life as a single mother in 1920s Korea, which makes being a single mother in 1920s America seem libertine. Sunja is rescued, however, by a kindly if sickly young Korean Christian named Isak ("Isaac"), who falls in love with her and offers to marry her and claim her child as his own. Sunja accepts the offer, and becomes his devoted and faithful wife. Isak brings her to Japan, and the saga of the Baeks goes on for several generations, with the book taking us to 1989, where an elderly Sunja, now a grandmother, looks back on her life and its many tragedies from a place that is more comfortable than she could ever have imagined, in her Korean fishing village before the second World War. Pachinko is a complex and well-plotted story about identity, ethnicity, and family. The story of the Baeks is the story of Koreans in Japan, suffering discrimination and heartbreak, living and working in Japan, speaking Japanese, but never being Japanese. Japanese claim they can spot Koreans, yet the fully-assimilated Koreans who speak perfect Japanese walk among them invisible. The feelings of Sunja's sons and grandsons have for their country which is not "their" country (born in Japan, they still have Korean passports) is complex, and plays a part in the tragic fate of one son who has inherited Sunja's inflexible morality. Meanwhile, Koh Hansu, never completely out of her life, has made a life for himself also, a prosperous "businessman" who has all along been part of what would become a major Yakuza organization. Sunja's other son becomes the rich proprietor of a series of pachinko parlors, a casino-like business dominated by Koreans and thus of course considered disreputable and associated with organized crime. Pachinko's author, Min Ja Lee, is Korean and spent years living in Japan to research this book, so it has the ring of authenticity, and Lee writes very compellingly about complicated characters with complicated motivations. If you like multigenerational family soap operas and historical fiction, two Mitchells come to mind by way of comparison: David Mitchell and Margaret Mitchell. If you like either of those two authors, you won't find this book disappointing. When I was a kid, we had a pachinko machine like this: [image] ...more |
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Jul 11, 2019
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Jul 02, 2019
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| 3.89
| 4,313
| Jun 06, 2019
| Jun 06, 2019
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really liked it
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Most books about war trauma, about the damage war does, about veterans who come home broken and create families that are broken or damaged as well, fo
Most books about war trauma, about the damage war does, about veterans who come home broken and create families that are broken or damaged as well, focus on Vietnam or Korea, or more recently, America's ongoing not-wars in MENA. But decades before those conflicts was World War II, a war America has mythologized as our last "good war." Only recently have we begun to deal with the damage that war also did to "The Greatest Generation," a generation of young men who came home to a country that didn't yet have the vocabulary to talk about PTSD, about Traumatic Brain Injury, about having to deal with surviving something your friends didn't and then keep quiet and smile because your family doesn't want to hear about it. Dale Maharidge's father was a WWII vet who survived the battle of Okinawa. His father was prone to fits of violent anger, which he only learned years later were almost certainly the result of Traumatic Brain Injury he sustained during close proximity to shelling on Okinawa. In what is a personal journey for the author, he sets out to find the man whose photograph his father kept on his wall, a fellow soldier who never came home. Along the way, he learns about TBI, interviews many other WWII vets, most of them in their 80s and 90s and in nursing homes, with not much time left but still often having difficulty talking about the things they experienced 70 years ago. He also learns about the process of identifying and repatriating war dead - a woefully underfunded project (at one point, an official tells him that their office has set a goal of identifying and recovering 350 bodies next year, with an estimated 70,000 to go). Yet the United States is the only country that puts even this much effort into it. This is part biography, part audible docu-drama about one man's attempt to exorcise his father's ghosts, with some information the public rarely hears about World War II. The sound quality is spotty at times, as the author had to include recorded phone conversations with very old men, and other times is interviewing people outside, on hikes through old cemeteries. But it's a good listen for anyone who is interested in World War II history, and also adds to our body of work about war trauma, and shows how wrong the country was to think the traumatized "Nam vet" was our first experience with soldiers coming home and not knowing how to cope. ...more |
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Jun 20, 2019
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Jun 24, 2019
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Jun 20, 2019
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| B00GS4WQ36
| unknown
| 4.27
| 26,831
| Mar 07, 1990
| Dec 10, 2013
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it was amazing
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How is a book about the 1948 Texas Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat so epic? Robert Caro makes it epic, by doing deep, laborious research, the How is a book about the 1948 Texas Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat so epic? Robert Caro makes it epic, by doing deep, laborious research, the kind he's spent his entire life doing for this multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Just reading his summaries of all the details, which he personally gathered, in interviews with people still alive 30 years later, and by actually scouring county by country vote tallies, you realize what a Herculean work he is undertaking. But why do we care about the 1948 Texas Democratic Senatorial primary? Because that was the make-or-break moment for Lyndon Johnson's political career. Had he lost � and he almost did, and as it was described by Caro, he should have � Johnson would never have become a U.S. Senator, would never have then become the most powerful man on Capitol Hill, and would never have become President. This, then, was a pivotal episode in Johnson's rise to power. But it wasn't just that. It was a signature event in American politics. It was the battle of old politics vs. new politics. It was also all the corruption and ugliness of Texas politics made manifest in one epic, historical contest. And it was all the ugliness and grandeur of Lyndon Johnson's character laid bare. After reading The Path to Power, the first volume of Caro's biography, I knew that Johnson was a magnificent, unscrupulous bastard, driven to achieve power like few men in history. But in Means of Ascent, Caro continues to give us an unflinching, somewhat admiring, but highly critical look at the man, and good gods, was that man an SOB. The first part of this volume covers Johnson's war years, in which, in typical fashion, he did exactly as much as he needed to to secure his political future, and spent the rest of his life spinning one (admittedly harrowing) flight under Japanese fire into months "fighting in the jungles of the Pacific," stories which he told and elaborated on so much that he apparently came to believe them. But the bulk of it is about a 1948 Texas political contest, in which Congressman Lyndon Johnson made his do-or-die bid for the U.S. Senate. Succeed, and his path to power would continue. Fail, and his political career would be over. We know, of course, what happened, because it's history, but the tale is still a suspenseful nail-biting epic. In order to set the stage, Caro first spends several chapters describing Johnson's opponent, Coke Stevens. [image] Just as in the first volume, Caro gave us a brief history of Texas, spanning entire generations before Lyndon Johnson was born, in this volume he gives us a mini-biography of Johnson's opponent in that long-ago Democratic primary. Coke Stevens was a man of the old school, a highly principled, self-taught, hard-working and thoroughly admirable Texan's Texan. Caro has been accused of burnishing Stevens' halo a bit. It's clear in this volume that Caro admired Stevens and disliked Johnson. There was much to admire about Stevens, but there were also a few details that Caro mentioned, but did not really delve into too deeply, and I think those things illustrate the deeply complicated legacy of Lyndon Johnson. To begin with, Texas politics was dirty. Caro spends a lot of time describing for us just how dirty it was � there were entire counties where blocks of votes were essentially bought wholesale. Political bosses, who still ruled some East Texas counties like warlords of old, would tell everyone in their domains how to vote, and in some cases, had lieutenants actually checking their votes to make sure they voted "correctly." It was an actual widespread practice to bring Mexicans from south of the border to vote illegally. This point is of particular interest because as you may know, in American politics today (2019), the question of "illegal voting" has become a frequent talking point. And while there seems to be little evidence that it's actually commonplace today, with modern voter rolls and more rigorous ballot monitoring, it might help to understand those who believe it's a legitimate concern, if you realize that at least at one time, it really was something that happened, a lot. But for some ballot boxes, the bosses didn't even bother with the formality of herding people into the polls to vote. They just wrote the totals the politician who'd bought them wanted, and delivered them. As Caro describes it, Johnson took this to unprecedented levels in the 1948 Democratic primary, but this was normal practice, and while Coke Stevens may have been too principled to directly encourage such actions, even Caro can't pretend that Stevens' supporters weren't doing it too, or that Stevens could possibly have been unaware of this. It was just how things were done in Texas. The Democratic primary was a nail-biter from start to finish. Johnson started out behind, and even after pulling every dirty trick in the book, he was still trailing the revered Governor of Texas. Caro talks about how Johnson was the first to engage in what are now usual political methods � he bought unprecedented amount of air time and newspaper columns. He had in-state and out-of-state contributors pouring money into his campaign. He was the first candidate to fly around in a helicopter, something that became a talking point and major attraction in his campaign. He was also a master of the political attack, and here is where he hurt Coke Stevens the most. As he manufactured outright lies about his opponent, accusing him of holding positions he clearly did not, slandering his character in ways that would have been unthinkable to anyone else, he did so having already realized Stevens' greatest weakness: his pride. One of the most frustrating elements of this story, as you listen and (if you're buying Caro's narrative) become sympathetic to Coke Stevens, is that all the way up until the 11th hour, Stevens could have cut Johnson off at the knees just by responding to his attacks and calling them out for the lies they were. But Stevens refused to do so until it was too late, because he considered it beneath him, and he was convinced that the people of Texas would know what he stood for. He had always been right before, but he'd never faced Lyndon Johnson. The primary was fought down to the wire, and in the end, Johnson "won" by a crucial 87 votes. This wasn't the end, though, as Caro takes us through the committees, the court battles, as Stevens tried to prove what he knew to be true, that Johnson had stolen the election. Each time, it seems like Johnson's number will finally be up, that truth and justice will prevail... and yet, in the end, things always fall Johnson's way. All of that being said, it's worth asking if we're being led to cheer the right guy? There can be little question that Coke Stevens was a better man than Lyndon Johnson. And yet, Johnson might have been the bastard we needed, not the bastard we deserved. Stevens was not just an old school statesman, he was also an old school conservative (back when Democrats could be conservative). That extended, for instance, to his racial views. Johnson, for all his many, many faults, including his ability to claim to be a liberal or a conservative depending on what his audience wanted to hear, actually believed in civil rights. Well, to a point. We know his history with MLK and the Civil Rights Act and I look forward to reading about that in more detail in future volumes, but while Johnson could never have been accused of putting principles ahead of his own ambitions, he was the guy who brought us the 1964 Civil Rights Act, something that Coke Stevens would certainly never have done. Is that enough to outweigh Johnson's sins? Is it enough outweigh Viet Nam? Maybe the rest of Caro's epic will answer those questions... ...more |
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| 1892391848
| 9781892391841
| 1892391848
| 3.63
| 808
| Jan 01, 2009
| 2009
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really liked it
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This short novel is a fun romp that bounces back and forth between semi-serious commentary on arms races and the morality of killing civilians to end
This short novel is a fun romp that bounces back and forth between semi-serious commentary on arms races and the morality of killing civilians to end a war, and copious shout-outs to monster movies and SF fandom. The premise is just this side of ridiculous, the sort of plot you'd find in one of the monster movies referenced in this book: as the War in the Pacific grinds to its inevitable denouement and the U.S. seeks a way to force the Japanese to surrender without having to invade Japan, there are two doomsday weapon projects running in parallel. While physicists develop the atomic bomb, a team of biologists have successfully irradiated mutant iguanas and created giant, fire-breathing monsters capable of destroying cities, if ever awoken from their drug-induced coma. The Navy, wanting to beat the Army to the bomb, wants to set up a demonstration of these fearsome monsters to a Japanese delegation, who will then run back to the Emperor and convince him to order a surrender before Japanese cities are stomped beneath giant, radioactive lizard-feet. Scientifically, it's pretty silly, but author James Morrow takes this idea and plays it straight, incorporating the kaiju plot with the actual history of World War II and the negotiations and speculation and multifaceted considerations that the U.S. and Japan took into account as they struggled towards the end of a war whose outcome everyone knew was already a foregone conclusion. The main character is Syms Thorley, a B-movie actor famous for stomping around Hollywood sets in a rubber monster suit, which is why the Navy hires him to put on a show for the Japanese delegation. There is a whole contrived set-up to explain why they think this will work, and why Thorley has to pretend to be a baby giant radioactive lizard, and the U.S. government building spectacular, detailed mockups of the Japanese cities that Thorley will stomp on, complete with tanks, Zeroes, and the Battleship Yamato, all of which will fire live ammo at Thorley in the big climactic rampage. Shambling Towards Hiroshima is narrated by Thorley as an aging actor making a living on the sci-fi con circuit, appearing at autograph sessions to rant about abolishing weapons of mass destruction while still haunted fifty years later by his participation in the top-secret WMD project the world never saw, the one that failed to prevent the nuclear age. While I got the impression Morrow was sort of serious about wanting this book to be read as an allegory, it was hard to take too seriously. It is, after all, about an actor trying to end World War II by pretending to be Godzilla. But Morrow isn't that serious about it, and his humor makes this book also a pleasure to read for fans of Godzilla movies and monster movies in general. There are self-aware winks at the genre and fandom throughout. As an alternate history novel, this was quite an unusual little gem. ...more |
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Mar 24, 2019
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| unknown
| 4.20
| 795
| Mar 14, 2017
| Aug 15, 2017
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liked it
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I have been working my way through quite a few World War II memoirs. One of my favorites was Tameichi Hara's Japanese Destroyer Captain. The title is
I have been working my way through quite a few World War II memoirs. One of my favorites was Tameichi Hara's Japanese Destroyer Captain. The title is pretty self-explanatory � Hara was the captain of a Japanese destroyer who saw some of the fiercest battles of the war. Hara's memoir is referenced frequently in this book about the crew of an American destroyer squadron. It's not the first-person perspective of a captain, but a writer collecting letters, news articles, and first-hand interviews many years after the fact. This makes Tin Can Titans a bit distant at times, as we are seeing things through the lens of history and an author who naturally covers his subjects with glory. Unlike Tameichi Hara's humility, stemming from natural and cultural inclinations, and as befits his role as someone who fought on the losing side, John Wukowitz paints his destroyermen as brave heroes worthy of the highest honors. Which is not to say that they didn't truly deserve those honors. The book is split between historical details to put events in their context, and first-hand accounts of officers and crew aboard the destroyers. Most of Destroyer Squadron 21 was fortunate enough to survive the entire Pacific War with few or no casualties. But some of them went down, and a lot of men died, and some of them had to endure severe hardships, from floating for hours in the ocean waiting to be rescued, to trying to survive on a jungle island with both Japanese and American patrols shooting at him. The first-person tales of heroism, though, didn't interest me as much as simply putting personal touches on the major acts of the war. The replacing of the weak Admiral Ghormley with Admiral "Bull" Halsey, and its enormous impact on the morale of the men of SouthPac. The increasing loathing Americans felt for Japanese soldiers as each side became more inhuman to the other. Nights out at sea listening to Tokyo Rose and her pathetic attempts at demoralization. Battles against swarms of Japanese air units, and finally, the advent of kamikaze tactics. It is much more "real" and immediate as recounted by men who lived it, even with the patina of decades. This isn't the best World War II memoir I've read - I prefer the first-person narratives. But it tells a different perspective than than the more frequently told carrier battles. Destroyers are small ships, just thin-skinned "tin cans," not much more than fast-moving delivery systems for torpedoes and depth charges. Against air attacks, they have only minimal AA defenses. Against submarines, they are playing cat and mouse, except the mouse is as big and deadly as they are. Against cruisers and battleships, they are Davids hurling stones at Goliath. But like David, sometimes those stones are lethal, and American destroyers sent more than their weight to the bottom of the sea. ...more |
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Mar 2018
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Mar 02, 2018
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Mar 01, 2018
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| B0DM24KLVC
| unknown
| 4.21
| 217
| Mar 01, 1999
| May 23, 2014
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liked it
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[image] Most everyone who knows anything about the Pacific War has heard of the Battleship Yamato - Japan's mighty flagship, one of the biggest warship [image] Most everyone who knows anything about the Pacific War has heard of the Battleship Yamato - Japan's mighty flagship, one of the biggest warships ever built. Unfortunately, it was built too late, to fight the previous war. World War II was a war of air power in which carriers would make battleships obsolete. The Yamato barely saw action before its final voyage, where it was sent to defend the Japanese homeland and was sunk within sight of port by American torpedo planes. [image] Requiem for Battleship Yamato is in the same genre as several similar memoirs I've read by German and Japanese WWII officers. Mitsuru Yoshida was a junior officer aboard the Yamato, and one of the few survivors, so his story is interesting for historical reasons, but he's no great storyteller, nor is his individual story that interesting, so his account is simply a dry narrative about serving aboard the Yamato, then setting out on what everyone knew was its last voyage. Unlike some other officers, like Tameichi Hara or Hans von Luck, Yoshida doesn't spend any time trying to justify himself or explain that he was really against the war all along - he was just a junior officer serving as he was told. There is one sad episode in his narrative in which he describes a Nissei crewman aboard the Yoshida who had family still back in California, and who died when the Yamato went down. Yoshida mentions writing to his mother in America after the war, and receiving a reply from her in which she was proud of her son's service, and his honorable death, despite the fact that he was fighting against her adopted country. This must have been the sort of divided mentality many Japanese-Americans, or Japanese with American relatives, felt, and indeed, Admiral Yamamoto and other high-ranking officers, who had lived and studied and traveled in the U.S., clearly had misgivings both moral and strategic about the entire premise of the war. Yoshida's memoir, however, is mostly just an account of the battle itself, and in its sparse prose and his very Japanese reflections on life and death and beauty, he humanizes an enemy that was deeply dehumanized to us during the war. (I cannot, however, make an observation like that without noting that in fairness, the Japanese were guilty of even more atrocious dehumanization of their foes.) He went into the ocean when the Yamato went down, and was rescued afterwards, and spent time in the hospital coughing up oil, and lived until 1979. Apparently his book was made into a movie in Japan in 1953... I'll have to track it down someday. ...more |
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Jan 04, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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Jan 06, 2018
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| B01N6F4SJA
| 4.01
| 70,443
| Mar 01, 2017
| Mar 01, 2017
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really liked it
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This was the book that the execrable Mr. Churchill's Secretary wanted to be. The theme is very similar - a bunch of upper-class Brits, ranging from a V This was the book that the execrable Mr. Churchill's Secretary wanted to be. The theme is very similar - a bunch of upper-class Brits, ranging from a Vicar's son (who isn't really "well off" but has still managed to get an Oxford education and stay friends with lots of aristocrats) to a family of girls living on an old baronial estate called Farleigh Place that now has to play host to an Army unit - are all pitching in to the war effort as England faces what appears to be the imminent threat of a German invasion in 1941. As with the above named book, one of the characters is a "Bletchley Park girl" while the male protagonist, whose injury in a plane crash before the war keeps him out of active service, finds himself working for MI5. In Farleigh Field is a bit of a cozy WWII mystery, with the mysterious dead parachutist found on the grounds, the suspicious return of one of the daughters' boyfriends from a German POW camp, and the MI5 guy trying to figure out who the German spy is while mooning over his childhood crush who is now kinda sorta engaged to the rakish, returning war hero. There is family drama (the girls fighting over boys, and boredom, and wanting more freedom from their conservative, protective parents), spy intrigue (one daughter found herself trapped in Paris when the Germans occupied it, with a fiancee who joined the Resistance), and of course the whodunnit or who's-gonna-do-it in Farleigh Field. Even a couple of cute kids get into the act, and there is an appearance by good old Winston Churchill in the climax. Like I said, this was the book that Mr. Churchill's Secretary wanted to be. While In Farleigh Field is a bit lightweight as historical novels go, it is at least written competently and the characters are each individual personalities. I liked it for what it was. 3.5 stars. ...more |
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Sep 23, 2017
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Sep 24, 2017
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Sep 23, 2017
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Audible Audio
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| B01KIQGKQI
| 4.32
| 23,014
| Jan 01, 2001
| Sep 27, 2016
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it was amazing
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This book joins other survival epics like Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage that make you repeatedly say "Holy shit, how did they survive that
This book joins other survival epics like Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage that make you repeatedly say "Holy shit, how did they survive that?" And also "Holy shit, I hope I never have to survive that!" Most people today, if they remember the Indianapolis at all, it's from the movie Jaws, when Robert Shaw tells Roy Scheider about the disaster and how a large number of the Indianapolis's crew was eaten by sharks. [image] The cruiser USS Indianapolis was once the flagship of President Roosevelt, but by the end of World War II, it had been mostly surpassed by newer, sexier cruisers. In July of 1945, it was given a secret mission - unknown to the crew, or even the captain, it was delivering Little Boy, the first atomic bomb, to the island of Tinian. After completing its mission, the Indy set off for the Philippines, where it was intended to join the fleet that would be launching the expected invasion of Japan. She never arrived. A Japanese submarine captain scored his very first kill that night, and sank the Indy. What happened next was a harrowing four-day survival story followed by questions and recriminations and blame that were not fully settled until over 50 years later. About a third of the crew died in the initial blast, or in the fires that swept the ship as it continued plowing, crippled, through the Pacific. Those who survived to abandon ship had worse ahead of them. There weren't enough life vests or rafts. Many of the men were forced to float adrift without cover or support. They banded together in human chains, and helped each other keep their heads above water, but for the majority of them, it was four days of floating in open ocean without food or water. Even the few who did make it to a raft had very little in the way of supplies. And then there were the sharks. The ocean was full of tiger sharks, makos, and hammerheads. They saw the hundreds of men floating on the surface as a buffet. This wasn't a random attack here or there, like most shark attacks - the attacks, as author Doug Stanton describes them, relayed to him by survivors, were the stuff of horror movies. Men lifted out of the water and carried away in the jaws of a huge shark. Men waking up next a companion floating next to him, only to realize that the lower half of his body was gone, eaten during the night. Sixty men were taken at once in one feeding frenzy. They mostly attacked at night, then left during the day (but never completely), only to return in force the next night. Stanton, who researched the story of the Indianapolis, talked to survivors (an ever decreasing number) who held a reunion decades later. He went through declassified naval documents, and tried to give as complete an account as possible. One of the reasons for the terrible disaster was a tragic series of errors and miscommunications. When the Indianapolis was sunk, they tried to get off a radio message - and unknown to them, their message was sent. And received! But the low-ranking radioman who received it and delivered it personally to a sleeping commander was brushed off. The message was ignored. (This was not quite as shocking as it may seem - late in the war, the Japanese made a habit of sending fake distress calls and other tricks on the radio, trying to mislead or confuse the Americans.) But nonetheless, despite not arriving on schedule, it took several days for the US Navy to realize that the Indianapolis was missing. By the time they finally sent out search and rescue ships, the survivors had been on the water for four days. Many of them died during that time. Some died with their rescue ships in sight. [image] Captain McVay, the Captain of the Indianapolis, was the first naval officer in US history to be court martialed for losing his ship in an act of war. Although all of the survivors agreed that what happened was not McVay's fault, the Navy had apparently decided, in the wake of this disaster that got a lot of press at the time, that the captain would be a scapegoat. The charge against him was basically that by failing to "zigzag" he had endangered the ship and caused its sinking. Ironically, Mochitsura Hashimoto, the captain of the submarine that sank the Indianapolis, was brought to Washington to testify for the prosecution, and instead told the court that even if McVay had put his ship on a zigzag course, it would have made no difference - he'd still have been able to sink it. Nonetheless, McVay was convicted, and his naval career was more or less dead-ended. Years later, in 1968, haunted by the boys who'd died under his command, and by the occasional hate mail from their families that he still received, he committed suicide. Many details of the Indianapolis's sinking were not declassified until 1959, and some details weren't released to the public until the 1990s. It was not until 2000 that the survivors of the Indianapolis got Congress to clear McVay's name and exonerate him. (Commander Hashimoto, who had become a Shinto priest, sent a letter in support of this.) In Harm's Way is a great book if you like true-life survival stories and histories. The most enthralling chapters, of course, are the gruesome days after the sinking, in which Stanton describes the survivors' trials - starvation, dehydration, shark attacks, drowning, some men still suffering third degree burns, their skin peeling away after days of exposure to sun and saltwater, men going mad and attacking each other, or drinking saltwater. The subsequent chapters are about the Navy's reaction to the disaster, and McVay's court martial. All of it is really interesting and I'm surprised this has never been given a Hollywood treatment. That may be largely because even up into the 1990s, the Navy considered it a black mark on the service and didn't want to disclose all the details of how the Indianapolis was sunk and then lost much of her crew. It's probably not a story they'd be happy to cooperate on. ...more |
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Jul 15, 2017
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Jul 16, 2017
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Jul 18, 2017
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Audible Audio
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| 1467664693
| 9781467664691
| 1467664693
| 3.97
| 1,234
| Oct 29, 2013
| Oct 29, 2013
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really liked it
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Eri Hotta, a Japanese historian, tackles a subject that much of her country, even today, has difficulty talking about - the events leading up to Japan
Eri Hotta, a Japanese historian, tackles a subject that much of her country, even today, has difficulty talking about - the events leading up to Japan's disastrous decision to go to war with the United States. It's more an indictment than an apologetic - you can sense Hotta's desire to be as even-handed as possible while acknowledging that Japan's actions were short-sighted, ill-advised, and driven by petty egos, intercultural blunders, miscommunication, arrogance, delusion, and multiple failures of will. Of course outside of Japan's far right nationalist circles, hardly anyone today tries to defend Japan's imperialism in the first half of the 20th century, let alone their conduct during World War II, but much of modern Japan prefers to look away from that entire time period. (Though Hotta does name a few other Japanese historians who have taken it on.) This book is specifically about everything that led to Pearl Harbor, and so it begins in the early 20th century (with some references to the historical background of the Meiji Restoration that still informed the attitudes of many of Japan's leaders) and ends with the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the die was cast. The most interesting question, of course, is always "Why would Japan do this?" The easy answer is that Japan was being hemmed in - the United States and Britain were constraining Japan's ability to expand and extract resources from the rest of the Pacific, imposing economic sanctions over their invasion of China (which Japan called throughout "the China Incident," never acknowledging it as a war), and enforcing earlier treaties that limited the ratio of warships that Japan could build. Japan had imperial ambitions and wanted to be recognized as a great power herself. The Japanese had a keen sense of how the West saw them as inferiors, and had also spent centuries under the shadow of China. You could almost say that Japan went to war because they wanted to sit at the big kids table and the other big kids wouldn't let them. Of course there were other options. Both sides could have made concessions, and indeed, both sides were willing to. But Japan was in an inferior position and was never going to get everything they wanted. So how did they make the decision to go to war, a decision that every thinking person knew beforehand, not just with historical hindsight, would prove to be disastrous? Japan could never have won the war. Despite the "Japan Banzai!" attitude that prevailed once war got underway, the delusional propaganda the Japanese government fed its people, the cold hard facts were indisputable - the United States' manpower and production capacity was many times that of Japan's even before the US shifted to wartime production. The Japanese strategy was to knock out the Pacific fleet in Hawaii, consolidate gains in the Pacific and Dutch East Indies, and then present the reeling, demoralized U.S. with a fait accompli and enter into negotiations. The idea was the U.S. would be too shocked and lacking in political will to engage in a prolonged war for Pacific possessions the American public didn't really care about. So the Japanese, after their surprise victories, would be able to say "Look, just let us keep what we have now and we can end this unpleasantness." This was a severe miscalculation on many levels, but it was one that Japanese diplomatic and strategic blunders pushed them into. [image] There is a lot of blame to go around, but a lot of the blame, according to Hotta, would seem to fall on the shoulders of Yosuke Matsuoka, an ambitious, self-aggrendizing career politician who, ironically, spent his childhood in the United States, graduated from the University of Oregon, and was a baptized Christian. When he returned to Japan, he rose through the bureaucracy to eventually become Japan's Foreign Minister. Matsuoka seemed to have that talent many men do, especially ambitious and somewhat amoral men, to embrace contradictions without cognitive dissonance. He was a Christian in the U.S. but a Buddhist in Japan. He was for war and against it. He saw no contradiction in signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and yet trying to convince the U.S. later that it didn't really mean anything and that Japan could still be friends with the U.S. even if the U.S. went to war with the Axis. Most damningly, during the frantic last ditch efforts to negotiate peace with the U.S. even while they were preparing for war, Matsuoka sabotaged many of those efforts because he saw them as undercutting his own position. [image] Prince Konoe, the Prime Minister who appointed Matsuoka, comes off looking quite weak, being unable to restrain the Foreign Minister whom he appointed. He also tries to negotiate peace with the U.S., but is stymied by Matsuoka, and by the feuding Army and Navy. This was a pattern throughout 1940 and 1941 - Japan's government was divided into multiple factions, with the Imperial Army and Navy acting as independent, sometimes opposing, sides, each wanting to dictate the direction of the coming war according to their own needs and capabilities. The civilians in the government might side with the Army or Navy or neither, while civilian and military leaders alike had to be mindful of their rebellious underlings - Japan at this point had something of a tradition of firebrand young officers leading mutinies and assassinations of senior officers whom they thought were not sufficiently zealous or supporting of the military. Military officers and senior government officials alike had been killed, and much of what happened in China was, at least on the surface, commanders on the ground letting their troops get out of control (or actually directing them to do so), contrary to the orders of their superiors back in Japan. Even though everyone was in theory a servant of the Emperor, whose own powers were theoretically limited by the Japanese Constitution (which gave him nominal but little actual legal authority), no one was really "in charge" of everything. In this environment, what happened was a tragic farce of high ranking officials saying one thing in public meetings while expressing the opposite opinion in private. No one wanted a war with the U.S. - every study, exercise, and projection they conducted showed that Japan couldn't possibly win. And yet they began sidling and stumbling towards the point of no return, all the different parties eying one another and hoping someone else would step up and say "Wait a minute, we shouldn't do this!" There was even more of this in the last-minute negotiations in Washington, which involved, among other things, an optimistic peace proposal presented to the Japanese Prime Minister as a solid offer from the U.S. when in fact it was really just a list of propositions resulting from informal negotiations by a pair of unofficial diplomats operating through back channels. Both sides were operating under misapprehensions as to what the other side was actually offering and on whose authority the offer was made. This sort of thing happened a lot, and did much to convince the U.S. that Japan acted duplicitously, and convince Japan that the West couldn't be trusted. "Climb Mount Niitaka" Even as the Pearl Harbor strike force was sailing for Hawaii, negotiations were still underway. Admiral Yamamoto was prepared to turn back even until the last minute, if he received orders from Tokyo to call it off. But he didn't, and so came the famous order "Climb Mount Niitaka" - meaning, attack. This led to one of the many additional small tragedies of the war, because back in Washington, the Japanese ambassadors were ordered to deliver Japan's declaration of war just before the attack. Due to technical difficulties in decrypting their orders from Tokyo, they delivered the message late, thus the infamous "sneak attack." (As a practical matter, it wouldn't have made a difference if they had delivered the declaration before the actual attack, since the U.S. would still have had only a few hours notice.) This was a personal tragedy for the Japanese ambassadors, who had been sincerely trying to negotiate peace in the belief that this was what their government wanted, unaware that the decision to go to war had already been made. The Japanese ambassador's final meeting with Secretary of State Cordell Hull was thus an acrimonious one. [image] Hotta isn't able to resolve the lingering historical question of Emperor Hirohito's role in the war, but her position seems to be more sympathetic, while not absolving Hirohito completely. According to her, the Emperor also seemed to embrace contradictions - he wanted peace, but was willing to lead Japan in war. He was involved in many high-level meetings at which his role was expected to be merely ceremonial, and yet he sometimes broke tradition and interrogated or scolded his generals and admirals and cabinet ministers. He was probably unaware of Japanese atrocities, but he was certainly aware of, and approved, Japanese aggression. Many officials after the war were complicit in hiding the extent of Hirohito's knowledge and involvement in actual war planning, but it is hard to see Hirohito as a complete innocent here. More interesting than "How much did he know, and how involved was he?" is the real question � "Could he have stopped it?" Were there points at which Emperor Hirohito could have prevented war by calling a halt to their plans? His authority was apparently a bit fuzzy legally - technically he did not have the Constitutional authority to dictate government policy or forbid the military to do anything. And yet, he was the Emperor, and no final decision could be executed without his nominal approval. There have been suggestions in the post-war years that the Emperor himself could have been assassinated if he had tried to go against what the military leaders wanted. So we will probably never know if Hirohito could have stopped the war, let alone whether he actually wanted to. Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy does a good job of explaining the ins and outs of negotiations, diplomatic situations, and rationales from both the Japanese and American sides. I am not sure it presents a lot that's new (I've learned much of what Hotta presents here from other books about World War II), but with its focus on the prelude to the war and the personalities involved, it examines an interesting facet that most histories summarize much more briefly, since people are more interested in what happened once the fighting began. Hotta doesn't really interject her own viewpoint very often, other than acknowledging that Japan's leaders bore responsibility for their decisions, and that they were frequently guilty of wishful thinking and ignoring what they didn't want to hear. ...more |
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it was amazing
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An appropriate read for Memorial Day weekend. [image] Since I became interested in World War II history, particularly in the Pacific Theater, largely th An appropriate read for Memorial Day weekend. [image] Since I became interested in World War II history, particularly in the Pacific Theater, largely through WWII wargames, I have been reading and playing a lot of books/games that cover the war from the grand strategic level. Most history books are written at a general's eye level, covering the fleets, the armies, the movement of troops across vast distances, major battles and their outcomes summarized in a few paragraphs. We know, abstractly, that "a fierce and bloody two-month battle for Pelelieu" means thousands of troops spending months in hellish conditions fighting for their lives, a level of discomfort and fear few of us can imagine. But in most history books, that's all waved away with a brief description of casualty figures - in a wargame, it's a roll of the dice and a flipped cardboard counter. Eugene B. Sledge wrote what is now considered a classic among World War II memoirs, a description of Pacific fighting from an enlisted man's view. He was never an officer, or even an NCO, just a line troop with the 1st Marines. So while he is able to note the strategic significance of the battles he was in with historical hindsight, mostly what he is describing is what he perceived at the time (produced from notes he took as he was there), the view of an enlisted man who often had no idea why they were being told to go to this particular island or take that particular hill. EB Sledge (called "Sledgehammer" by his comrades) was with the 1st Marines, "the Old Breed," through the campaigns of Peleliu and Okinawa. Physical Discomfort Think about the worst discomfort you've ever felt. Maybe some time when you were extremely hungry or thirsty and there was no food or water immediately at hand. Or maybe you were stuck in traffic and you really, really needed to pee. Or maybe (if you are into the outdoors) you have been on a miserable hike when you suddenly had a case of the runs. Use your imagination, but add "hungry, tired, exhausted to the limits of your endurance, need to shit and there is no toilet or TP or privacy or even a trench anywhere and several thousand men are all crowded together in the same situation and also you're under heavy shelling and your buddies are getting blown to bits right and left." Let that sink in again - you're on a jungle beach being shot at, and you and everyone around you also has diarrhea and there is no TP. Few books really convey how hellish war is like this one, and even in his years-later narration, EB Sledge can't really convey to his readers the visceral horror he felt, and still remembers. It wasn't just the danger they faced in all their many battles, but the physical deprivation and hellish conditions. On those Pacific islands no one had ever heard of before the war, there was malaria and vicious biting insects and no facilities at all, and he describes beaches that have become open cesspools, in which the Marines had to sleep and fight, with little cover. Peleliu was 120 degrees when the 1st Marines hit the beaches to take on an entrenched enemy that was waiting for them with withering mortar and machine gun fire. Individual moments Sledge describes kind of get at what they endured every single day - it's not just the battles, but the truck that brought water to a remote unit, except the water was in a 55-gallon drum. Imagine a bunch of men standing around looking at a 55-gallon drum of water at the bottom of a truck bed, on a tilting coral slope, in 120-degree heat, thinking "How the fuck are we supposed to get this out of there?" It's not surprising Sledge describes more than once how a brave, tough veteran marine will suddenly snap and lose it, behaving suicidally, hysterically, or just collapsing, unable to go on. EB Sledge is one of ten men in his regiment who survived Peleliu and Okinawa without ever being wounded. He reports the moment, while on Peleliu, that he suddenly heard a voice saying "You will survive the war." He looked around and asked his buddies if they'd heard someone speaking. They hadn't. He believed it was God speaking to him, and like Private Ryan, decided this meant he had to make his life somehow worth his surviving. Death Trap [image] By Peleliu, the Marines were used to taking islands from the Japanese. They knew what to expect - they'd come ashore and the Japanese would try to swarm them in suicidal "Banzai charges" that were Japanese infantry doctrine up to that point, no matter that it had repeatedly proven ineffective against disciplined troops. But Peleliu was different. The Japanese were finally (too late) realizing that they needed to change their tactics, and so they set up Peleliu as a death trap. The commander of Japanese forces spent weeks preparing the island beforehand. They dug a small city of tunnels and caves beneath the coral mountains of this island, and set up pillboxes and machine gun nests to cover every approach, so no matter where the Marines landed, they would immediately be exposed to withering fire. No Banzai charges this time. The ironic thing is that Peleliu was made a strategic objective by the Americans because of its airfield, which was thought to be a possible threat to Allied shipping. So it was decided Peleliu needed to be taken as a first step in MacArthur's campaign to retake the Philippines. But the admiral in charge thought, based on previous experience, and overconfidence, that after softening the island up with heavy shelling (in fact, the Navy poured ordnance on Peleliu until they ran out of targets) the Marines could clear out the Japanese in a couple of days. He did not know about the underground fortifications, and the shelling, for all the noise and destruction, which should have practically scoured the island of Japanese, in fact barely touched them. So when the Marines landed, they found themselves in a death trap that eventually inflicted upwards of 65% casualties and took two months of heavy fighting before it was considered secured. (Even Sledge did not know that in fact, some Japanese remained hidden beneath Peleliu until 1947...) Afterwards, military historians generally were of the opinion that the Peleliu campaign was unnecessary - the Americans could have simply bypassed it and ignored the entrenched Japanese, who didn't have much air power left to threaten them with anyway. Losing Your Humanity Savagery was evident on both sides, though far more so on the Japanese. Sledge initially is able to feel some empathy for the Japanese troops who he knows are men like him, fighting in conditions just as miserable as his own. But the Japanese are suicidally brave and murderous. They do not surrender, they will lure American medics to their wounded and then blow themselves and the medics up with grenades. Their snipers will deliberately target men on stretchers and medical corpsmen, and Sledge describes finding the corpses of American Marines who'd had their penises cut off and stuffed into their mouths. It doesn't take long before the Marines are incapable of pity for the enemy. They start collecting war trophies, and gold fillings out of the teeth of Japanese corpses. Sledge witnesses one young Marine cut open the face of a fatally wounded Japanese soldier to pry his gold teeth out of him. Sledge yells at the Marine to put the Jap out of his misery. The Marine just curses him, until someone else puts a bullet in the Japanese soldier's head. Then one day Sledge himself starts pulling a gold tooth out of a corpse. A medical corpsman tells him "You shouldn't do that - he could be carrying diseases." Sledge says he hadn't thought of that. He only realizes afterwards that the corpsman wasn't really worried about disease - he recognized that Sledge was about to cross a moral threshold, and talked him out of it. Sledge sees another Marine start collecting severed hands, which is too much for him, and the ghoulish collector is finally forced to bury his prize when other Marines tell him they don't want it stinking up the place. Men tumble to the bottom of ravines and have to climb out, covered with maggots because the bottom of the ravine was filled with rotting corpses. Okinawa - digging in among the corpses After Peleliu, the Old Breed went on to Okinawa. This was the final rolling up of the Empire of Japan - by now, the war was clearly lost for Japan, and yet the miserable, bloody fighting continued. There are corpses everywhere, as on Peleliu, often left unburied and putrefying in the hot sun. At one point, Sledge is ordered to dig a foxhole at the specified five yards apart, and upon digging, pulls up swarms of maggots. Then there is a stench, and then he discovers he is literally digging through a Japanese corpse. He calls his NCO over and says he can't do it. The NCO orders him to keep digging. Sledge is on the verge of vomiting and cannot continue, until a senior NCO finally comes by, and tells him to dig a few feet over. He does so, but still smells the rotting Japanese soldier. Sledge encounters an elderly Okinawan woman in a hut, who opens her kimono to reveal a hideously infected, gangrenous wound in her abdomen, no doubt from the shelling that happened during the initial invasion of the island. Then she grabs his rifle and points it at her forehead, begging him to pull the trigger. He doesn't, and goes to find a medic, only for another Marine to walk into the hut and calmly shoot her. The book is full of small stories like this, decent men snapping, breaking, going feral, or just losing their will to live, and then afterwards having to live with what they have been through. With the Old Breed is a gripping war memoir that won't tell you much about the war on a large scale, but a great deal about the war as it appeared to a grunt, and just how awful it was. The remarkable thing is that despite the horrors Sledge endures, he writes like someone who emerged basically intact, mentally and physically. He doesn't talk much about his own nightmares or PTSD, if he had any, only about the horrible loss he felt when his friends died, the horrible waste of life he perceived all around him, the regret that any of this had to happen at all. He does not analyze the causes of the war or why they were fighting, or evaluate the competence or planning of the general and admirals. The only officers who mattered to them were their unit commanders, who could make day to day living miserable or less miserable, as well as having enormous impact on their morale. When FDR dies, it's of little significance to the 1st Marines - all they care about is whether Truman will prolong the war or shorten it. Likewise, when they hear that Germany has surrendered, it has little meaning for them - they are still fighting the Japanese, and fully expect that they will have to invade Japan itself in what is sure to be the bloodiest battle yet. With the Old Breed is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in World War II history, but especially for anyone who find war memoirs interesting and would like to know what war looks like to someone who's just another rifleman, not a general or a destroyer captain or a pilot, but a Marine whose job was to hack through jungles and shot and get shot at until the shooting is over. Read this book, and be grateful you will never have to go through that. ...more |
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May 26, 2016
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May 29, 2016
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May 26, 2016
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| 4.62
| 6,523
| Sep 21, 2015
| Sep 21, 2015
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it was amazing
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The Conquering Tide is the second book in Ian Toll's epic non-fiction series covering the entire War in the Pacific. The first book Pacific Crucible,
The Conquering Tide is the second book in Ian Toll's epic non-fiction series covering the entire War in the Pacific. The first book Pacific Crucible, covered 1941 and 1942 - Pearl Harbor to Midway, plus the prelude to the war. This book covers the bulk of the Pacific campaign after Midway, during which Japan's position deteriorated from their peak ascendancy, with America reeling, the Dutch East Indies under Japanese control, and Commonwealth nations from India to Australia threatened by invasion, to the dire straights the Japanese inevitably found themselves in only a couple of years later, with attrition and America's vastly superior industrial might combining with frankly stupid and outmoded attitudes among the Japanese high command to bring about a defeat that Admiral Yamamoto foresaw from the beginning. The Conquering Tide ends in 1944, leaving Toll's third volume to cover the end of the war, the planning for an invasion of Japan that never happened, the atomic bombs, and the aftermath. This is one of those big multi-volume epics that may be daunting to someone who's not a historian, but I encourage anyone with any interest in World War II, and the Pacific War in particular, to tackle Ian Toll's entire series, of which only the first two books are out yet and this is the second. The first book had me preordering the second as soon as I finished it, and now I eagerly await the third. Large as they are, these books don't read like dense historical textbooks. They are energetic and detailed accounts of the men who fought the war on both sides, with the most attention given to the commanders, of course, but also describing battles in detail, from eyewitness accounts and after-action reports, so the reader gets a grand view of the entire campaign, but also zooms in to the torpedo-bombing of individual ships, and the wartime lives of Americans and Japanese. The first book included a great deal of political background - what led Japan to its fateful (and catastrophic) decision to go to war with the U.S., and how the entire country went from rising modern nation to nationalist imperial power forswearing all the civilized principles they had previously subscribed to. Everyone knows, or should know, about Japanese atrocities committed during the war, a subject Toll refers to only in passing for the most part, but what was also mentioned in the first volume was that up until World War II, and during the Sino-Russian war in particular, the Japanese scrupulously adhered to international rules of war, and were known for treating their POWs with the utmost respect. So what happened? There's less about Anglo-American politics in this book, the relationship between FDR and Churchill being largely covered in the first, but as the situation on the Japanese homefront becomes more dire, Toll describes how it affected the Japanese population. By nature accustomed to trusting and obeying their leaders, the Japanese people nonetheless were neither stupid nor passive sheep, and while the military dictatorship strictly controlled the press and allowed only stories of glorious victories, then "strategic withdrawals," then "luring the enemy closer in order to destroy them once and for all" to be broadcast, the civilian population eventually realized that the war was not going well. (The authorities also couldn't cover up all the bodies coming home, and while returning sailors, soldiers, and airmen were expected to keep their mouths shut, word got out.) As Japanese propaganda became increasingly detached from reality, it only undermined trust, especially as deprivations became more severe and civilians were told to eat less and work more, even while it was common knowledge that the army ran the black market and high-ranking officers were still enjoying fine dining and geishas. But that's only part of the book - most of it is about the military campaign, and while there is still plenty of ship-to-ship and air combat action, in '42 to '44 we enter the bloody island-hopping phase of the war, and American Marines and Japanese Imperial soldiers die by the thousands on tiny atolls none of them could name or locate on a map. Their living conditions are terrible, the climate and native flora and fauna makes life miserable, and the fighting is horrific. You can also see here the seeds of the eventual decision to use atomic bombs on Japan being planted. This is a debate that will probably never be settled (though I look forward to how Toll addresses it in the third book), but one of the primary justifications of the use of atomic weapons is the purported belief that Japan would never have surrendered otherwise, and that an invasion would have been even more horrifically costly, to both sides. After reading accounts of how Japanese soldiers threw themselves at the Americans in suicidal "Banzai" charges, how over and over again they chose to die rather than surrender (Japanese sailors whose ships had sunk would typically refuse rescue from American ships), how they had to be dug out of caves and bunkers the hard way, with bombs and flamethrowers, how they would booby-trap bodies or even call to American medics and then pull the pin on a grenade, and how even Japanese civilians threw themselves off cliffs after the battle of Saipan, mothers holding onto their babies, and were praised for their dedication and patriotism - it is easy to see how the U.S. came to that conclusion. Japan never had a chance of winning the war - its fate was sealed on the morning of December 7, 1941. But one can imagine, in an alternate history, how they might have had a chance to end the war differently, perhaps with the negotiated peace that was their original plan. This volume and the one preceding it traces how and when things went wrong for Japan, leading to their inevitable utter capitulation. Several key battles, had they gone slightly differently, had luck favored one side a little more, or had commanders not made a few understandable errors, would have significantly altered the course of the war, at least in the short term. Japan was always fighting an enemy that simply had the power to replace ships and planes and men at a rate far greater than they could ever match, with American's production growing and her military technology ever improving even as Japan's resources dwindled, but with better intelligence, and better decisions, and better use of their forces, Japan would have been an even more difficult adversary to defeat than they were. The fighting spirit of the Japanese soldier was impressive, but over the course of the war they went from being despised, untrained savages held in contempt, in the beginning, to feared jungle ninjas with supernatural powers, until eventually the Americans realized they were just men, like themselves, capable of great bravery and fortitude but also capable of being demoralized, starved, and exhausted. In the end, it was the Japanese high command that did in the IJN and the IJA - with bad decision after bad decision (starting with attacking the U.S. in the first place, of course), like maintaining a cumbersome inter-service separation, and refusing to rotate their best pilots away from the front to let them recover, and telling overworked and underfed civilians to do calisthenics to keep up their spirits. All of this is detailed in this book. There is no portrayal of Japan as monolithically evil or the U.S. as unambiguously the "good guys," just an account of what set these powers against each other and how they went at it. ETA: Third book finally released! ...more |
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| 4.60
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| Nov 14, 2011
| Nov 08, 2011
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it was amazing
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As a wargamer, World War II is one of my four main eras of interest, and while I love me some Eastern Front tank action (PanzerBlitz!), the Pacific th
As a wargamer, World War II is one of my four main eras of interest, and while I love me some Eastern Front tank action (PanzerBlitz!), the Pacific theater of war is something I had less knowledge of until now, except in broad strokes. This non-fiction book reads like a novel. Pacific Crucible only covers the Pacific War from 1941 until 1942, beginning with Pearl Harbor and ending at Midway, and making the author's second volume, The Conquering Tide, something I dove into with the eagerness of an eagerly awaited sequel, the first book I've ever preordered on Audible. Ian W. Toll's thick, detailed, but never-boring account of the first couple of years of America's entry into the war covers it from all angles � the political factors leading up to Japan's decision to go to war, the cultural issues that made them commit to a course of action that many of their leaders knew even at the time was almost certainly doomed to failure. The courting of FDR by Churchill, who desperately wanted (needed) the US to join the war against the Axis, and regarded Pearl Harbor as the salvation of Britain. But these high-level politics, including an assessment of Emperor Hirohito and his participation in the planning for the war, then take a backseat to the story of the fighting men on both sides. Toll gives brief biographical sketches of all the major admirals and generals, both the famous and some of the less well-known. Yamamoto, Nagumo, Kimmel, Nimitz, King, and many lower-ranking commanders are all here. The Navy is the star of the show, at least in the early war; General MacArthur makes little more than a cameo, as an occasional political foil for Admiral King, and few of the IJA generals are mentioned by name. Everyone with any knowledge of World War II knows about Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor. [image] A revered war hero even after the war (which he did not survive), and respected even by his enemies, Yamamoto is described in detail from second-hand and documented accounts by Toll as an ethical, not unflawed man who had great perceptiveness and played the political game well (several times forcing the rest of the Japanese high command to let him have his way by threatening to resign), but made some critical mistakes which even some of his subordinate officers commented on. Yamamoto was an early opponent of going to war against the US. He had been to America and seen what its industrial and manpower potential was. He knew there was no hope of Japan winning a prolonged war against the United States. Yet when war was declared, he served the Emperor. On the American side, Admiral Chester Nimitz earned the most fame as the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, replacing the hapless Admiral Kimmel, who watched his command (and his career) burn outside his window at Pearl Harbor. But Admiral Ernest King, as Toll points out, has somehow remained almost a non-entity in the post-war historical account, despite being Nimitz's boss, the Commander in Chief of the entire US Navy. [image] Like his counterpart, Admiral Yamamoto, King was a gruff and authoritarian commander with probably more humanity and sense of humor than most of his peers gave him credit for. Like Yamamoto, King was also apparently fond of extra-marital dalliances (Congress was at one point annoyed that the COMINCH was allegedly using his personal yacht as a place for trysts). King was an old-school officer who was not easily persuaded of the value of new developments like communications intelligence and cryptography, unlike Nimitz, who made great use of the work of Naval cryptographers like Captain Joseph Rochefort, in command of Station Hypo which cracked many of Japan's codes. [image] Rochefort was very poorly treated by the Washington establishment, which took credit for his work, and actively lied about his accomplishments and fitness, because he had angered some of his superiors by being right when they were wrong. There are so many stories here, beyond the lists of ships and battles. For example, inter-service rivalry was a severe problem that plagued both the US and Japan. You would think that during an all-out war, the Army and the Navy would be able to confine their rivalry to the annual football game, but in fact, combined operations were the exception rather than the rule. Army airmen and navy pilots came to blows after battles, over recriminations and blame-taking and credit-stealing. Press reports after the battle of Midway, for example, credited Army bombers with destroying the Japanese aircraft carriers, because it was the Army flyboys who made it back to the States first to regale reporters with their exploits. In fact, the Army planes didn't hit a single Japanese ship - it was all the Navy. [image] On the Japanese side, it was even worse - the IJN admirals and IJA generals were like old-fashioned daimyo in command of rival clans. The army regarded the navy as nothing more than a troop delivery system. The navy regarded the army as unsophisticated grunts trying to steal their glory and curry favor with the Emperor. Of course, the lesson both sides would learn, and learn hard, was the ascent of air power as the determining factor in naval warfare. This is one of the most interesting strategic and technological factors explained here. Toll observes that a sailor at the beginning of the 20th century would have found it easier to serve on a ship from centuries earlier than on the ships he'd see at the end of his career. The admirals in command of the war had entered the navy when radio was still a new-fangled invention, and they were all inculcated with the naval doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote what was to be the Bible of naval strategy for every seagoing nation from its publication in 1890 right up to World War II. American and Japanese naval officers alike had learned Mahan's doctrines by heart, and his principles of sea power advocated, among other things, the preeminence of battleships - massive firepower concentrated into large, unsinkable floating fortresses. As the fate of the Battleship Yamato would demonstrate, this would prove to be utterly wrong in the age of aircraft carriers. [image] Pacific Crucible covers the early Pacific War, during which Japan seemed unbeatable. They were prepared, they had more ships and planes, they had a highly dedicated and highly trained military � and one whose competence they had very deliberately hidden from the Western powers, allowing the arrogant British and Americans to believe their racist assumptions about the pathetic abilities of Japanese pilots and soldiers. When the Japanese pulled off a brilliantly executed attack on Pearl Harbor, followed by operations across the Pacific that virtually kicked the British and Dutch right out of the South Seas and soon threatened Australia, Hawaii, and Alaska, it came as a nasty shock. In particular, Western airmen had never encountered the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. [image] These things terrorized the skies - lacking features that most fighter planes had, like armor and larger engines and self-sealing fuel tanks, they were pure maneuverability, and no Western plane was a match for them in the air until American pilots started devising tactics for taking them on. Despite Japan's many early successes, though, the clock was running from the moment they attacked Pearl Harbor. They had limited resources, and (as Yamamoto and others had predicted) they badly underestimated American resolve and military power. Midway, that great battle in which, armed with superior intelligence, Admiral Nimitz committed the US fleet and sank four of Japan's prize carriers, is historically seen as the turning point in the war. [image] The reality is that even if the US had lost the Battle of Midway, it would probably only have prolonged the war, but not changed the outcome. Pacific Crucible tells the story of the men, the ships, the planes, and the battles in that crucial early period when the outcome really did seem uncertain to both sides, and it's both deep and broad, being not just a series of battle reports, and much more than a history of events, but including all of these things in a well-woven narrative that kept me listening for many hours and not wanting to get out of my car, because I wanted to hear what happened next, even though of course I knew because it was history. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in World War II, and have immediately begun the second book, covering 1942 until the end of the war. Apparently Ian Toll is actually going to write a trilogy covering the Pacific War. ETA: The third book has finally been released! ...more |
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Sep 13, 2015
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Sep 21, 2015
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Sep 13, 2015
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| B0DM1HPGRJ
| 4.30
| 5,823
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| Jun 24, 2014
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it was amazing
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This is the third big book on the Pacific War I have read recently. Ian Toll's first two books (of a planned trilogy), Pacific Crucible and The Conque
This is the third big book on the Pacific War I have read recently. Ian Toll's first two books (of a planned trilogy), Pacific Crucible and The Conquering Tide, were a magnificent historical account of the war from both sides. So given that this book covers much the same ground, though it was written much earlier, I will do a lot of comparing with Toll's books, though I think Toland's book is equally good and you will not find it at all repetitive to read both authors. As thick as this book is, it's only one volume, whereas Ian Toll is writing three whole volumes on the entire war in the Pacific. Thus, while Toll devotes a great deal of attention to the politics and individual political and military leaders on both sides of the conflict, The Rising Sun, as its title indicates, focuses mostly on Japan. Naturally the planning and personalities on the American and British (and later Chinese and Soviet) sides are mentioned, but mostly only inasmuch as they were pitted against their Japanese counterparts. One of the things most striking about Toland's narrative is that he lays out all the blunders that were made by both Japan before, during, and after the war. These margins where the errors occurred and where history could have been changed are one of the things I find most interesting in non-fiction histories, when competently examined. Let's start with whether or not war was inevitable. Did we have to go to war with Japan? The basic historical facts are well understood: the Japanese wanted a colonial empire, and Europe and the US didn't want them to have one. When the Japanese invaded China, the US put an oil embargo on them. This would inevitably strangle the Japanese economy, as for all its rising technical prowess, Japan remained a tiny resource-impoverished island. So the Japanese pretty much had no choice but to give up their ambitions or go to war. We know which one they chose. The question for historians is whether or not this could have been averted. Ian Toll seems to think that war was inevitable - the Japanese and the West simply had irreconcilable designs. But John Toland seems to, not exactly argue, but present a great deal of evidence, that miscommunication and misfortune had as much to do with Japan and the US being put on a collision course as intransigence. Of course Japan was never going to give up their desire to be a world-class power, which means there was no way they would have accepted the restrictions imposed on them forbidding them fleets or territory on a par with the West. Whether the West could have been persuaded to let Japan take what it saw as its rightful place at the grown-ups table is debatable. But in the first few chapters of The Rising Sun, John Toland describes all the negotiating that went on between Japanese and American diplomats. The Japanese were split into factions, just as the Americans were. Some wanted peace no matter what; some were hankering to go to war and really believed their jingoistic propaganda that the spiritual essence of the Japanese people would overcome any enemy. But most Japanese leaders, from the Imperial Palace to the Army and Navy, were more realistic and knew that a war with the US would be, at best, a very difficult one. So there were many frantic talks, including backchannel negotiations among peacemakers on both sides when it became apparent that Secretary of State Henry Stimson and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo were not going to deescalate. [image] [image] There were a number of tragedies in this situation. Sometimes the precise wording of some of the phrases used in Japanese or American proposals and counter-proposals were mistranslated, resulting in their being interpreted as more inflexible, or disingenuous, than they were intended, causing both sides to mistrust the other. Sometimes communications arrived late. There was also a lot of particularly labyrinthine political maneuvering on the Japanese side, where political assassinations were commonplace at that time and the position of the Emperor was always ambiguous. Toland apparently interviewed a very large number of people and read first-hand accounts and so is able to reconstruct many individual talks, even with the Emperor himself, putting the reader in the Imperial throneroom as Hirohito consults with his ministers, and then in telegraph offices where communiques are sent from embassies back to Washington. Toland doesn't definitively state that war could have been avoided, because it's still not clear what mutually agreeable concessions might have been made by either side, but what is clear is that both Japan and the US could see that war was looming and neither side really wanted it. At least initially, everyone except a few warmongers in the Japanese military did everything they could to avoid it. Unfortunately, diplomatic efforts were for naught, and the Emperor was eventually persuaded to give his blessing to declare war. [image] Admiral Yamamoto knew very well that Japan had no hope of winning a prolonged war, which was why when war happened and he was put in charge of the Japanese fleet, he planned what he hoped would be quick, devastating knock-out punches - Pearl Harbor and Midway - that would sink the US back on its heels and persuade the Americans to negotiate an honorable peace before things went too far. This was unlikely after Pearl Harbor. Nobody on the Japanese side seemed to realize just how pissed off America would be by this surprise attack (though the unintentionally late formal declaration of war - delivered hours after the attack when it was supposed to have been delivered just prior - certainly didn't help). But it was a forlorn hope after the debacle at Midway in which, aided by superior intelligence from broken Japanese codes, the US fleet sank four Japanese carriers. Many military historians grade Yamamoto poorly for this badly-executed offensive, which rather than delivering a knockout punch to the US fleet, proved true his prophecy that "The Americans can lose many battles - we have to win every single one." The bulk of the book covers the war itself, including all the familiar names like Guam, Guadalcanal, Wake Island, Corregidor, Saipan, Okinawa, Iwo Jima. Toland does not neglect the British defense of India, the tragic fate of Force Z, which blundered on ahead to its doom despite lack of air cover and thus heralded in the new reality that air power ruled above all, and the multi-sided war in China in which communists and nationalists were alternately fighting each other and the Japanese, with both sides being courted by the Allies. Any military history will cover the battles, but Toland describes them vividly, especially the first-hand accounts from the men in them - the misery and terror, and also the atrocities, like the Bataan Death March, and the miserable conditions of POWs taken back to Japan [image] One of the things evident in many of these battles was just how much is a roll of the dice. Human error, weather, malfunctioning equipment, pure luck, over and over snatched defeat from the jaws of victory or vice versa. Inevitably, the US had to win - they simply had more men, more equipment, more resources. The Japanese began going hungry almost as soon as the war began, while the Allies, initially kicked all over the Pacific because they were caught off-guard, began pouring men and ships and, often most importantly (!), food - well-fed troops - into the theater. Still, individual battles often turned on whether or not a particular ship was spotted or whether torpedoes hit. Luck seemed to favor the Americans more often than not, but I found Toland's descriptions particularly informative in recounting how little details about equipment, and the human factor - decisions made by individual commanders, and how the willingness to take risks or an unwillingness to change one's mind - often determined the outcome of a fight. Who were the war criminals? Two of the other big questions I find most interesting about World War II are the ones that will probably never be answered satisfactorily. First: was Emperor Hirohito a war criminal? [image] I was in college in 1989 when Emperor Hirohito (more properly known as the Showa Emperor) died. I had a friend who was a Japanese exchange student. She was grief-stricken. All of Japan mourned. There is a particular narrative I heard growing up. It is one that was pushed heavily by the Japanese from approximately the moment the decision was made to surrender until about the time Hirohito died. According to this version of history, Hirohito was a figurehead, a puppet of Japanese military leaders. He had no real decision-making power, and any active resistance on his part would have led to his being killed. Thus, he was not responsible for the war or any of Japan's war crimes; he was an innocent, born to assume a hereditary throne and assume a position of purely symbolic importance. I was a little shocked when I read an article in some British tabloid denouncing Hirohito upon his death and cheering that the "war criminal" was now in hell. Yet while neither view is strictly accurate, it is certainly more complicated than the sanitized version that was accepted for so long. This sanitized version was in fact produced in part by the US, particularly Douglas MacArthur, from the moment the war ended, as a deliberate strategy to secure faster Japanese cooperation and reconciliation. It was predicted that trying Hirohito as a war criminal - as about one-third of the American public wanted to do at the time - would have resulted in widespread guerrilla warfare and the need for a much longer and more active occupation of the Japanese homeland. When the Japanese finally began negotiating terms of surrender, one of the sticking points, the one thing they tried to carve out of the demand for an "unconditional" surrender, was that the Emperor would retain his status (and, by implication, not be charged with war crimes). So, how active was Hirohito in the war planning? According to Toland, he was very much involved from the beginning, and had far more than symbolic influence over his cabinet, ministers, and military. Could he have simply forestalled a war by telling them not to go to war? Maybe. While political assassination was common, it seems unlikely that anyone would have dared laying a hand on His Majesty himself. And according to the cabinet meetings and private conferences Toland describes, even the most zealous Japanese leaders felt unable to proceed without getting a final say-so from the Emperor. So if Hirohito had been resolutely against a war, it seems likely that the militarists would have had a much harder time getting one. At the same time, Hirohito was in many ways bound by his position. Traditionally, the Emperor did not make policy, he simply approved it. He wasn't supposed to veto anything or offer his opinion, he was just supposed to bless the decisions that had already been made. Hirohito, especially later in the war, departed from this tradition more than once, shocking his advisors by taking an active role or asking questions during ceremonies that were supposed to be mere formalities. Personally, he seemed to be a rather quiet, studious man who would have been much happier as a scholarly sovereign and not the Emperor of an expansionist empire. He possessed a genuine, if abstract, concern for the Japanese people, and this motivated him later to accept surrender and even put himself in the hands of the Allies, whatever they might decide to do with him. Almost certainly, he also had no direct knowledge of Japanese atrocities. So, Hirohito was no Hitler. Still, neither was he the uninvolved innocent that it became politically expedient to portray him as after the war. Hideki Tojo, on the other hand, the Minister of War and Prime Minister, who was tried and executed as a war criminal, probably deserved it. Initially lukewarm about going to war with the US, he became a zealous prosecutor of the war, as well as an increasingly megalomaniacal one who seized more and more authority for himself, quashed all dissent, and most damningly, towards the end, when most Japanese leaders were seeing reality and talking about terms of surrender, was one of the hold-outs who insisted Japan should fight to the end. Along with a few other generals who were willing to see Japanese civilians take up bamboo spears and die by the millions fighting off an Allied invasion, Tojo deliberately prolonged the fighting well after it was obvious to all that Japan was finished. I think it is not unfair to say that he caused hundreds of thousands of needless deaths on both sides. Did we have to drop the bomb? [image] Toland spends only a little time, in the last few chapters, talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the decision leading up to the use of the atomic bomb on Japan. This is another very loaded historical question in which there are people with strong opinions on both sides. Some have argued that the US didn't need to use the bomb - Japan was already negotiating surrender - and that we did for reasons ranging from racism to a desire to demonstrate them as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. Others claim that Japan was fully willing to fight to the last spear-carrying civilian, and that the atomic bombs saved millions of lives on both sides by preventing the need for an invasion. Entire books have been written about this subject, and Toland, as I said, does not try to dig into it too deeply, but he does represent much of what the Americans and Japanese were thinking and saying at the time. The case he presents would suggest that the truth, unsurprisingly, is somewhere in between. Yes, the Japanese knew they were going to have to surrender and were already trying to negotiate an "honorable peace." But it's not at all clear that it was the dropping of atomic bombs (I was surprised to learn the Japanese actually knew what they were, and indeed, Japan had already started its own nuclear program, though it hadn't gotten very far) that convinced the holdouts to agree to an unconditional surrender. At the time, the atomic bombs did not seem all that impressive to them - they were already willing to endure horrific casualties, and the firebombing of Tokyo had killed many more people than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was more likely the declaration of war by the Soviet Union, when Japan had been hoping the Russians would help them negotiate peace, that was the deciding factor. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just drove home their inevitable defeat. Could we have gotten an unconditional surrender when we did without the atomic bombs? We will probably never know. But only a few people at the time really appreciated what new era had been ushered in. Harry Truman, interestingly, said afterwards, and continued to say, that he gave very little thought to the decision to use the bombs, and felt no moral angst about it. Indeed, two more bombs were being prepared for use when the Japanese finally did surrender. If you want one volume that covers the entire span of the war against Japan, I think this monumental work by John Toland leaves very little out, and I highly recommend it to WWII historians. However, I also encourage interested readers to then seek out the more recent works by Ian Toll, who devotes more pages to the American commanders as well, and talks about some of the political issues among the Allies that Toland treats more briefly, as well as going into even more detail about individual battles. ...more |
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Jun 18, 2024
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Nov 25, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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it was amazing
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Oct 06, 2022
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Sep 30, 2022
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2021
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Aug 30, 2021
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really liked it
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Apr 14, 2021
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Apr 11, 2021
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really liked it
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Mar 07, 2021
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Mar 07, 2021
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it was amazing
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Jun 07, 2020
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Jun 08, 2020
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really liked it
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Jul 11, 2019
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Jul 02, 2019
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really liked it
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Jun 24, 2019
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Jun 20, 2019
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it was amazing
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Apr 13, 2019
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Mar 22, 2019
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really liked it
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Mar 24, 2019
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Mar 02, 2018
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Mar 01, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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Jan 06, 2018
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really liked it
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Sep 24, 2017
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Sep 23, 2017
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it was amazing
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Jul 16, 2017
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Jul 18, 2017
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really liked it
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Feb 10, 2017
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Feb 04, 2017
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it was amazing
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May 29, 2016
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May 26, 2016
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it was amazing
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Oct 12, 2015
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Sep 21, 2015
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it was amazing
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Sep 21, 2015
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it was amazing
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Jan 05, 2016
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Aug 31, 2015
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