This is part two of our show with Ian Toll, author of the Pacific War trilogy. Here’s part one.
In the second half of our conversation, we discuss…
The various command styles that shaped US military strategy in the Pacific,
How General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey became media darlings —controlling public opinion and war politics in the process,
The evolution of submarine warfare and Japanese defensive strategy,
Counterfactuals, including a world where the Allies invaded Taiwan,
Broader lessons for the future of warfare, especially in the Taiwan Strait.
Cohosting is Chris Miller, author of Chip War. Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.
Listen now on your favorite podcast app or watch on YouTube.
“What Becomes of a General?”
Jordan Schneider: Let's talk about the generals and admirals, starting with Chester Nimitz. You have this wonderful opening of him taking this secret train ride across America and reflecting on what he’s about to do. He’s trying to relax and play poker with his buddy, but at the same time, he understands the gravity of the situation.
Chris Miller: I was struck by the extent to which Nimitz has now been largely forgotten in American public discourse, but in your telling he emerges as probably the most important strategic thinker of the war in the Pacific. The contrast between him and MacArthur was striking to me, given that MacArthur is the one who’s remembered.
Ian Toll: One of the things that I always find very striking when you look at the admirals and officers, the leadership in the Navy during WWII, is that you have a group of men who have lived parallel lives since the age of 17 or 18 when they entered the Naval Academy. They have been shaped by a culture, by a context, a profession that had rigorous ideas about what leadership should look like. Yet when they reach the pinnacle of their careers, you realize these guys are very different. They have different personalities, different styles, and different ways of making decisions. They present themselves differently.
The full range of personalities comes through in the way that the leadership class — this is true in the Army as well — approached winning this vast, unprecedented war that they had been preparing for their entire lives.
Nimitz was the handpicked choice of FDR. FDR was not just confident in the role of commander in chief, but in particular, he had a parochial feeling about the Navy because he had served in a sub-cabinet position earlier in his career and because he had been president for such a long time and had personally pushed through and run a vast expansion in our Navy, the Two-Ocean Navy Act, which had occurred before the beginning of the war. FDR was very involved in personnel decisions at the highest level of the Navy. He selected admirals. Nimitz was his choice.
He had first offered the job of Pacific Fleet Chief to Nimitz nine months before Pearl Harbor. Nimitz had demurred. He said he thought he was too junior an admiral to take the position, and that for him to accept that command would arouse opposition and resentment among some of the other admirals, and he thought it was a bad idea. They gave it to Husband Kimmel instead.
When the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, when all of our battleships were knocked out of action in the first 15 minutes of the war, when Husband Kimmel was made to perform the role of the scapegoat for that, Nimitz was first to understand that it could have been him. It would have been him most likely, if he had been there. We would have remembered Nimitz very differently. That’s a snapshot of how historical contingency can cast such a long shadow down the decades. Nimitz could have been in the position of Husband Kimmel, a person that we remember solely because he suffered a terrible defeat.
But Nimitz’s great strength was that he had a gentle touch. His leadership style was based on personal warmth. After the trauma of Pearl Harbor, he showed up in Hawaii. He had a fifth of the Earth’s surface within his theater command. It was an enormous command of not just the Navy, but the Army, the Marines, the Air Force in his theater. He’s able to preside over this fractious group of people who are arguing over how to fight this war and to get them to work together and to forge a team out of what was a somewhat dysfunctional system managing inter-service operations in the 1940s.
He was the right man for the job. You said that you thought he was forgotten today. That’s true, but even more true of Ernest King, who was his direct superior. He was the Chief of Naval Operations. He is forgotten even by people who are interested in military history and the history of WWII.
But if you look at the major decisions that were made on the way that we would fight and win the Pacific War, the way that we would pick up the pieces after Pearl Harbor and put together an offensive, which less than four years later would force the surrender of Japan, it was Ernest King more than anybody else who had a blueprint in mind for how we would do that and who was in a position to impose that imprint on the rest of the Navy and all of the military services.
Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about the contrast of thinking styles that the admiralty ended up having to employ. There are scenes of big conference room debates where MacArthur says we should go left and Nimitz says we should go right. They’re making lots of different styles of arguments — some from a logistics perspective, others from a morale perspective. This represents a model of slow thinking and deliberation.
After they decide on a course of action, you have all of these plans and logistics, and you get the boats in place. But because of the nature of carrier warfare during the Pacific War, incredibly fast-twitched decision making is required. You have imperfect information because your scout plane may have seen something, and then you have to make a split-second call.
One of the admirals described it perfectly — “These carriers are boxers with glass chins, but they have enormous left hooks, and all we're doing is deciding when to swing and hoping for the best.”
It becomes very human at both levels of thinking. With slow thinking, you have all these personal histories that are intertwined. Everyone is thinking about their reputation and trying to save their people and resources. Then with the admirals’ decisions, soldiers who haven’t slept in 48 hours have to make these calls.
There’s this other approach where one commander delegates everything because he knows he needs to be sharp and fresh for the big thinking — when he has to make these enormous strategic calls.
These flag officers have to operate in very different modes, which you explored beautifully. I'm curious about your reflection on that and what it reveals about the nature of warfare and the nature of people at this moment in time.
Ian Toll: It’s true because the planning and anticipation of how these battles would go were important. Getting those decisions right, moving your forces into position at the right time — at Midway, most famously, Nimitz had a picture of what the Japanese plan was, thanks to this extraordinary intelligence achievement of breaking the Japanese codes. He was able to move what forces he had at that point, which were three aircraft carriers, into position to do battle. But after that, everything that happened was a contingency. It was chaos. There were a lot of chances involved. That battle could have gone the other way.
You had Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher, the two American admirals, making decisions with imperfect information, feeling their way through the fog of war. In the end, winning that battle narrowly with a pretty significant contribution of blind luck. You would see this again and again in naval battles in the Pacific. If the right plan is put in place, you’re improving the odds for your side. Yet there are still fast-twitch decisions that have to be made, these opportunistic decisions, probabilistic decisions when you don’t have all of the information you need.
Those are two entirely different ways of thinking about military command. They may play to the strengths or weaknesses of different personality types. But one of the things that Nimitz did particularly well was to develop a plan and to make sure that his subordinate commanders, his ocean-going commanders understood that plan and make sure they would execute this plan in the same way that he would if he were there commanding a task force at sea.
But then once they left, Nimitz was in his headquarters back in Hawaii, in Pearl Harbor, you’ve got Halsey or Spruance or whoever the task force commander is on the scene. Nimitz, although he was often tempted, never got on the radio and intervened and started forcing decisions. He delegated those tactical decisions, even in a major battle, without interfering — trusting to the judgment of his subordinates. Most of the time, that judgment was vindicated.
Chris Miller: Nimitz seemed to me the opposite of a gung-ho military leader stereotype. You use the words “leading by his personal warmth, being gentle.” That came through in the narrative. He felt like a grandfather figure to me. But it was super effective. The one time he came down hard on a subordinate with the “where is task force 37” telegram, it was the softest criticism you could imagine.I wanted to pick up on the fog of war.
Fog of war is a metaphor and fog of war is reality with the weather playing such a critical role in almost every battle.
Ian Toll: Fog of war is a very frequent metaphor in naval warfare and often becomes a literal problem.
Chris Miller: You felt the clouds rolling in and every single battle rolling in and out. Then the typhoon you have off of Leyte Gulf is extraordinary — you’re fighting a battle and then you’re also dealing with these ancient problems of seamanship at the same time. Talk about contingency, every single battle has this uncertainty: what will the weather be like in three days? Your ability to find or be found was hugely impacted in this era when radar was not very good by what were the cloud patterns. That was a great example of the contingency at every moment.
Ian Toll: The weather is this universal thing. I quoted Joseph Conrad, who was a sea captain before he was a novelist, and he’d been through a typhoon in exactly the same waters just off Formosa or Taiwan. It occurred to me as I was reading that description by Conrad, this is the same storm. It’s five decades, six decades later, but that’s Typhoon Alley.
You have those storms going through every year, and you could pick a description if one existed from 2,000 years ago, and you’d be describing the same storm. The navy and the navies of other countries in the Pacific today have got to deal with those same weather patterns. There’s something universal across time to that X factor of weather. I think that particularly comes to bear on naval warfare.
Jordan Schneider: The suspense of not knowing where the enemy ships are is foreign to a modern mind today. The 1940s are not ancient history, but there were no satellites. Radar was just starting. There were so many uncertainties that these folks were facing.
Ian Toll: You’re relying on your planes to be your eyes too. The patrol flights become absolutely essential. It’s very easy for a plane to fly directly over a ship and not see it in overcast weather. We saw that happen again and again where you had patrol planes moving out from these task forces. They’re supposed to be the first trigger to tell you if there’s an enemy there. There was much more of a sense, particularly earlier in the war, of the fleets being blind and having to make decisions without being certain where the enemy was, if the enemy was there, how far, what direction. That uncertainty, the tension and inherently the drama of that conflict.
Jordan Schneider: If Nimitz was a gentle, modern manager, Bull Halsey was the opposite. His famous quote was: “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be only spoken in hell. Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.” The guy was living up to his caricature, and then he embraced it.
There were numerous points where the mythos surrounding him was such that he was kept in positions longer than he would have been otherwise. FDR’s view was, “We’re already going to win, and it would be a weird sign to get this guy out of command.” His ethos was much more dualistic, reflecting the brutal mindset you needed to start these operations where you knew tens of thousands of people would die over the course of a fortnight.
Chris Miller: I was struck by the fact that some of the key, really costly errors that you describe were made by him, but it also seemed you were suggesting there’s strong evidence that the people under his command really loved him. Where’s the balance sheet there?
Ian Toll: There are some caveats to that. Halsey became very controversial within the ranks of the Navy in the last year of the war. He had some severe critics, including some of the rear admirals who were the task group commanders of the Third Fleet. These were the next generation of leaders — the guys who would be promoted into the senior positions in the immediate post-war period.
The piece that I think is often missing — and it’s true when you consider MacArthur’s career as well — is just how important their public images became.
They became important because the United States is a democracy that has elections during wartime, which makes us a little different from other democracies. The political influence of a military leader can become very great in wartime.
You had a new media environment. Film and radio, the ability to run the same photographs in newspapers all across the country. Many of these technologies that we take for granted today changed the political environment. When you had leaders like MacArthur and Halsey — I’ll put them in the same category — who were very good at speaking directly to the American people and to the rank and file of the military services through the media, they became media darlings. They became people that reporters always wanted to talk to because they wanted that quotable line, that photograph. It sold newspapers. The American people started to look at the war and understand it by listening to these very colorful, charismatic figures, and that became a political consideration.
1944 was an election year in the United States, and MacArthur was seriously considering running against FDR and was implicitly threatening to do that. At the same time, FDR was faced with the decision of whether to return to the Philippines. Halsey was making significant mistakes, most significantly in October 1944, when he made a mistake that could have led to disaster and only didn’t because of blind luck. It was well understood within the Navy that he had made this inexplicable error. There was a feeling that he should be held to account — that he should not be running the Third Fleet anymore, that he should be relieved of command, maybe put into a different position. But his political popularity, his profile with the American people as the unofficial face of the US Navy became a factor in the decision to keep him in place.
The interplay of politics, publicity, media, and the way that all of that influences the major decisions being made at the height of the bloodiest war in history — that is a fascinating story that hasn’t received as much attention in historical literature.
Chris Miller: I love the description of MacArthur’s press team as “the most well-oiled press team outside of Washington.” I learned a lot from that.
Ian Toll: MacArthur’s emergence as the principal hero — I don’t think it would be going too far to say that to the American people during the WWII, MacArthur was on a par with FDR as a national figure, a leader, a symbol. All of that happened extraordinarily fast. This was a lesson about the way media can work in wartime.
In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor — I’m talking four or five days after Pearl Harbor — you had a sense of rage among the American people, anger at the Japanese, but also at our own military leadership, our Navy leadership in particular. How could you let this happen? How could we be blindsided like this in the heart of our fleet base? There was a sense of shame, a sense that we’d been humiliated. It was inexplicable.
Then, almost immediately, another storyline emerged from the Philippines, where the Japanese are invading and the Philippines’ beleaguered army is outmanned, outnumbered, and too far away for us to support them because of what had happened at Pearl Harbor. They’re fighting for their survival. MacArthur stepped in with a very aggressive and effective media strategy to shape the way that story was told and give the American people another storyline — a heroic storyline.
People who had been conditioned by movies to understand complex events through heroic narratives — MacArthur was stepping right into that and very effectively using media, photographs, the daily cables that he was writing describing the war, to establish himself as a singular figure. That continued right through the Korean War when he was fired by Harry Truman and almost caused a revolt within the Democratic Party. For ten years, MacArthur was able to ride that successful media strategy.
That’s interesting to me because in an authoritarian or fascist model of government, you don’t have that. You don’t have the ability of individual military leaders to challenge the political leadership by appealing directly to the people through the media and the press.
Jordan Schneider: There were a few other media beats that I thought were fascinating. One was this debate in October of 1944, just a few weeks before the presidential election, of whether or not to let the public know that the Japanese had sunk a carrier. One admiral said, “No, please don’t tell the Japanese that this carrier has sunk.” Another was saying, “There will be an enormous scandal if we don’t tell the American people the facts a few weeks before the election.”
But I think my favorite arc was with King and the press corps in Washington.
Ian Toll: The culture of the Navy had inculcated this anti-media, anti-public relations philosophy that it’s dangerous to play with the media. They can divulge your secrets. You should lie low. We should be the silent service. We’ll tell the American people what happened after we win the war. There was a joke going around that King’s philosophy of disclosure and media was, “We’ll tell the media and the American people absolutely nothing about what’s happening until the day the Japanese surrender, and then we’ll put out a two-word press release — ‘We won.’”
For a thousand reasons, that became a problematic, unsustainable approach. The Army — particularly MacArthur — was stepping into this void and shaping the way the American people understood the Pacific War to be unfolding. There was an understanding among all of the military services that as soon as the war was won, there was going to be a complete reorganization of the services. What we have today — a Secretary of Defense, a Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, a way of managing the different military services and forcing them to work together — none of that existed in the 1940s. It was understood because FDR had essentially decreed it — “We will reform and reorganize the military, but let’s get the war done first.”
The Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force — they all had their own agendas, and they were positioning themselves for this immense reform, this bureaucratic refashioning that they knew was coming. For all of these reasons, King was eventually convinced: “I can’t just ignore the media. This is a democracy. I’ve got to have some strategy.”
It was his own lawyer, who was a former reporter, who proposed: “Why don’t you start off-the-record briefings? Just get a bunch of reporters together in Washington. We’ll meet somewhere — not at your office, but at my house. We’ll get these guys together. We’ll have ground rules.” It would be what would today be called a deep background briefing, meaning you’re not going to use any of what’s disclosed. None of it’s going to be written up into any article. You’re not going to source anything. You’re not going to quote King, but it’s going to help you understand what’s happening. That will contribute to the way that you write the stories that you can write.
King thought this was crazy. “Why would you trust a bunch of reporters under these kinds of ground rules?” He was persuaded that if you get reputable reporters, they will adhere to these ground rules. After the first three hours of sitting with 20 reporters in Alexandria, Virginia, at his lawyer’s house, he realized, “This is exactly what I need to be doing because I’m getting these guys on side. I can then begin manipulating press coverage a little bit.” Even more than that, this was an opportunity for him to explain at a high level the strategic issues that they were dealing with to a bunch of guys who really were outsiders, but who were highly intelligent. King realized this was actually helping him to shape his own thinking in a beneficial way. For the rest of the war, he continued doing these deep background briefings.
I think that was an interesting arc. It helps us understand a little bit about who King was, but it also illuminates these issues that are unique to running a war in a democracy — different from the kind of challenges that Stalin, Hitler would face.
On Submarines and Taiwan Contingencies
Chris Miller: I was struck by the centrality of submarine warfare in the struggles that Japan faced. There have been some books on this in the past several decades, but relative to the Battle of the Atlantic, which takes center stage in histories of the war in Europe, the fact that the Japanese faced and lost the Battle of the Pacific in terms of shipping is central. I was struck by the way that you brought submarine warfare to life, with the USS Wahoo as a great case study. Upstream of that was the question of torpedoes — how do you get torpedoes that actually work, which ends up being a technical bureaucratic struggle.
Give us a bit of a glimpse into the trajectory of submarine warfare and its impact on the scope of the war.
Ian Toll: What you have in the submarine war — in any war of commerce, the Battle of the Atlantic being another example — is a cumulative way of fighting the war. You want to sink a certain amount of shipping, sink oil tankers, and little by little diminish the ability of your enemy to carry on the war. You’re attacking the economic underpinnings, the logistics underpinnings of the war. It’s a very different kind of campaign.
The war that the rest of the Navy is fighting, the Army is fighting, the Marines are fighting — you can diagram it on the map. We’re going to take this group of islands, and then we’re going to move, and we’re going to take this group of islands. We’re going to fight a naval battle here, and you could diagram the naval battle, and then you could show how that opens the way for us to make this next westward thrust, always moving closer to the Japanese islands.
Submarine warfare became death by a thousand cuts.
Sink one oil tanker at a time. There’s a cumulative effect that caused Japan’s war economy to sputter and run out of gas, and its ability to carry on the war became critical in the last year of the war.
You have to tell these stories side by side. You have to realize these were almost entirely separate campaigns. There’s very little direct coordination between these two campaigns, and they’re both important and they’re working together. That wasn’t the way the submarines had been envisioned before WWII.
An interesting part of the story is how the submarine commanders themselves came to realize: “We’re not using this resource in the optimal way if we’re using them to support fleet movements or to go out and be eyes and ears for the fleet.” This is the way fleet submarines — these diesel submarines — had been built with a very different role in mind. They were going to operate at the edges of these task forces as they went out. They weren’t going to fight the kind of long, solitary cruises where they’re going primarily to sink oil tankers and freighters.
It wasn’t until 1943 that the Navy realized we’re not using this resource the way we should. What we should do is largely disconnect the Navy submarines from what the rest of the fleet is doing and just send them out there to try to sink oil tankers. Let’s try to starve Japan of oil and other resources. Once they did that, once they fixed the torpedo problem, it became clear to the Japanese that they had nowhere to go.
Japan is a country poor in natural resources. It always has been. It has negligible oil production. It has always relied on importing oil. Their decision to attack us at Pearl Harbor was largely about oil. They had an oil stockpile, and they needed more. We had cut off the supply of Texas oil. They needed to go down to Borneo to take the Dutch and British oil fields there and replace that supply. Then they have the problem of transporting that oil from what is today Indonesia to Japan — 3,000 miles, an artery that if we could sever would cause the entire Japanese Imperial project to bleed out. That was what happened in 1944 and 1945.
You can tell this story with statistics. There were X many fleet boats that were going out. They were going on patrols of this average length for X many weeks. They were sinking X amount of ships on average. Those statistics will tell a story. But in order to bring the reader into what’s happening, you’ve got to show an individual boat and say, “Let’s imagine what it’s like to go on this cruise on the Wahoo and to see it from the perspective of those who were in the crew.” Use the example of that one very successful submarine and her career to illuminate the larger story.
Jordan Schneider: The Wahoo arc had aspects of a video game — we had to line up the shot and execute these crazy trick shots down the chute, diving while everything exploded around us. But it ties back to larger strategic questions. The bottom-up tactical innovations were fascinating, both understanding that the torpedoes were wrong and realizing we shouldn’t be going around with the carriers. We should be positioned between Japan and China to shoot down oil tankers.
One of the big themes is that technological innovation and change happened from 1941 to 1945, but more important were the failures of imagination. Starting with Pearl Harbor, there was this long evolution of understanding that carriers mattered more than battleships, then understanding that submarines were crucial, then not taking territory, and finally realizing we could skip islands without killing everyone. On the Japanese side, we’ve talked about the Kamikazes but haven’t discussed the infantry side much — going from Banzai charges 万岁突击 to honeycombing into ancient mountains. The fact that there was so much room to get better, even during moderate technological change rather than super rapid change, came through in your narrative.
Ian Toll: Japanese infantry tactics evolved, that was an important change. It happened primarily in the last year of the war when individual army commanders realized they had been using their army entirely wrong. If their goal was to exact the greatest possible price as the Americans came across the Pacific island by island, shrinking the ring around Japan’s home islands, then they needed to dig into the ground and make the Americans come to them — put five or six of their guys for every one of the Americans.
The Army abandoned the banzai charge entirely and began digging in. You saw this most effectively at Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
Jordan Schneider: The fact that you can become 50% more effective by using the same available tools in a different way isn’t something you’d expect given how many experiments were being run. Even in Okinawa, they still talked themselves into some stupid attack because of the instinctive doctrines they’d been drilled in for decades.
Ian Toll: Their sense of honor, too. In Okinawa, you had a defensive line of fortifications that crossed the island. Okinawa is a long, narrow island about 60 miles long and maybe 9-10 miles wide. At the narrowest point, they picked rocky mountainous ground in the southern part of the island and built an extraordinarily ambitious string of tunnels and caves across the island.
If they were going to hold out, buy time, and inflict casualties on the Americans, they should have stayed in that high ground to use the advantages of terrain and prepared defensive positions. But once the Americans were ashore and had taken the major airfields, they immediately started preparing Okinawa as a stepping stone to Kyushu. They would use those airfields to bomb the Japanese homeland.
This created immense pressure within the Japanese army — “we’ve got to do something about this. We can’t just stay here. We’ve got to contest what the Americans are doing with the rest of the island.” Again and again, they sallied out from these defensive fortifications, got mowed down, suffered terrible casualties, and eventually realized they had to go back to this blueprint of trying to survive as long as possible while taking as many Americans with them as they could.
It was an evolving understanding of what the ideal tactics were in these battles. But there was also a subtle interplay of politics, policy, and the way military strategic decisions were made. You see that in Japan, you see that in the US, you see it in Great Britain. That’s part of the picture that’s important to illuminate and becomes relevant when we talk about the way different countries and regimes will wage war even when they have similar tools.
Jordan Schneider: It’s hard to second-guess wartime decisions because there was so much unknown in 1941 and 1942 about what carriers could do, what submarines could do, and what the Japanese political system looked like. Coming back to submarines — if the US just 10x’ed that effort, there’s a world in which very few people have to die because Japan decides to starve. Japan ends up starving, and that’s all she wrote.
Island hopping is another live debate about whether the US could have skipped more islands, Iwo Jima being the main one that people still argue about today. What do you think is the most interesting operational strategy or broader open questions when it comes to the way the war was fought in the Pacific that you’re excited to see more historians take on?
Ian Toll: There are a number of issues. What we found as we went along with this war was that we could go much faster — we could close the ring around Japan much more quickly than we thought. This is partly because we surprised ourselves with just how quickly we were able to mobilize our economy to get ships and troops and planes out into the Pacific.
But if you were to refight the war knowing what you knew in 1945, and if you were able to deal with the political challenge presented by MacArthur, who really was a force of nature all his own and who had the ability to shape decision making because of his political influence, what you would probably do is focus essentially all of your effort in a direct attack on Japan from Hawaii, moving directly through the Central Pacific (which is one of the routes we took), but not diverting into the South Pacific.
Take islands within bombing range of Japan and focus on cutting their supply lines with submarines in particular, then establishing the ability to bomb the Japanese homeland directly, which we did as well. If you took a more aggressive “close the ring around Japan quickly” approach, you would probably see a scenario where the war ends six months earlier and without using the atomic bomb.
That’s counterfactual history, but if you went back and applied the lessons that you got from the war itself, if you were able to use that wisdom of hindsight as you were doing it, we could have seen a shorter war or more efficient war, perhaps a war with fewer casualties, and that would force Hirohito and the ruling circle in Japan to recognize their error and that they needed to surrender.
One of the — at a high level — another counterfactual within the Pacific that is often forgotten by people who are familiar with the history is that we came very, very close to landing troops in what we then called Formosa, and today call Taiwan. It was Admiral King and most of the Navy planners, at least in Washington, who believed this was the key to forcing an end to the war — taking Taiwan.
It was Raymond Spruance, the Fifth Fleet commander or ocean-going fleet commander in the Western Pacific, who took the lead in saying we should bypass Taiwan. We should take Okinawa. Okinawa was smaller. The island is large enough for our purposes, essentially to establish as a stepping stone to an invasion of Japan as an air base, but will not commit us to this enormous undertaking of taking this very large mountainous island that has been a Japanese colony for 50 years.
What if we had taken Taiwan? It’s interesting to imagine how history might have unfolded. Would that have involved us in the Chinese Civil War, for example? That’s an interesting counterfactual. But if and when China does seriously consider rolling the dice and moving against Taiwan, it’s going to encounter many of the same issues that led our military to decide not to take that step in 1944.
It’s a large, mountainous, rugged island. It would require you to establish air supremacy over the island and naval supremacy at a beachhead to be able to maintain a continuous flow of supplies over that beachhead. Taiwan is 100 miles from China. That’s five times the width of the English Channel. These are immense problems that are not unlike some of the problems that we ended up solving in the 1940s, but should probably prompt military planners in China to think very seriously about this history and the nature of the challenge.
Jordan Schneider: We’ve run two articles in the past year, one on the debate around Operation Causeway and the other Operation Sho-2Go 捷2号作戦, which is the Japanese plan to ward off the Americans. They built all these relatively similar things that you saw in the context of Okinawa and Iwo Jima with all these tunnels.
I don’t think Americans on Formosa change a lot when it comes to the Chinese Civil War. The Americans were also thinking about invading Ningbo 宁波市, in Mainland China, and using that as a base to bomb Taiwan. The Americans did show up on mainland China after the war but did not stay long.
It seems to me that even if the Americans showed up in China, we would have pulled out really fast, like we did in a lot of the rest of the Pacific. The Korean War only happens because the Chinese Civil War happens the way it does and then everyone was on edge at that. Mobilizing America to do even more than what it did, which was already a lot when it came to giving Chiang Kai-shek 讲解可 a lot of weapons to fight in the late 1940s, seems to me to be a hard counterfactual to consider.
It was the Japanese invasion in the first place, which gave Mao Zedong 毛泽东 a shot. Can you imagine the world in which America went in with Chiang Kai-shek in 1946 and 1947?
Ian Toll: No, it’s unlikely. Our military services really felt an immense sense of relief that we did not have to invade Japan and had shared a realization of how costly that operation would be. To become involved in a civil war in a vastly greater country on the mainland of Asia would have compounded all of those issues.
But counterfactuals are always going to be somewhat controversial. There are many historians who think they’re not worth discussing at all. But so much happened in those last few weeks of the Pacific War that you’re almost forced to acknowledge that things could have gone differently.
The Red Army poured across the Manchurian border on August 9th, the same day we hit Nagasaki — a sudden declaration of war. Stalin let his war machine loose in Manchuria. If the war had lasted two weeks longer, if the Japanese surrendered less than a week later, if they had held out until the end of August? Would you have had a red army in Korea in a bigger way?
Stalin ordered his army to take Hokkaido. He wanted Hokkaido. He could have gotten Hokkaido if the war had gone on a few more weeks. Then you might have seen Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, as the East Germany of Japan for 45 years through the Cold War.
All of those kinds of counterfactuals you have to take seriously, given how volatile the situation was. The real question about whether Japan would surrender, whether it would make any organized surrender at the end of the war at all, or whether the place would have collapsed into civil war and prevented any organized end of the Pacific War. Very different paths for Japan and for all of Asia in those final weeks.
Jordan Schneider: Another lesson when we’re talking about the Taiwan contingency today is that we spoke earlier in this conversation about how the die was already cast by January 1942 because American industrial might was what it was. But the balance of industrial forces plays out over longer time horizons and longer wars versus shorter wars. The importance of smaller technical decisions or point-in-time technological advantages can be amplified such that you don’t have these big national industrial tests of will.
Thankfully, we haven’t had too many of them when it comes to great powers going against each other since 1945. There’s a lot more uncertainty in the smaller wars where the national commitment level is one of the most important variables, which you’re gauging and adjusting for over time, as opposed to these scenarios where two empires are going all out to the death against each other, and then you can stack up the factor endowments and have a good sense of where it’s all going to end up.
Reading Recommendations
Jordan Schneider: You want to recommend some books, Ian? What have you read recently? Doesn’t have to be anything to do with this, but whose writing has impressed you of late?
Ian Toll: In These Times: Living in Britain Through the Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, which is a book by Jenny Uglow about Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. I have an interest in home front histories of all wars, the way societies deal with wars, the way they shape economies and politics.
Jordan Schneider: And maybe just some — are there voices or memoirs or letters? Many of these Americans and Japanese who lived through the Pacific War, they’re stylish writers. Which ones are the ones that stick with you these many years after writing this?
Ian Toll: Kiyosawa’s A Diary of Darkness. Kiyosawa was a scholar who was tarred as a liberal and marginalized in Japanese society, but he kept a daily diary through the end of the Pacific War that was superb in its observations of everyday life in Japanese at the time. He was a scholar who knew a little about politics, and his horror at the way Japanese media coverage was manipulated is recorded in the diary. The Japanese people were being lied to.
That’s a very good book that few people have read. It’s one of these books that was translated in the 1960s and published. Virtually no one read it, and today it’s almost entirely unknown. That’s one good example.
A US memoir, there are many that are very good. There’s a book by someone named Anthony Weller, who was an American correspondent who went into Japan immediately after the surrender. His book is called First into Nagasaki, and it includes a lot of the dispatches he wrote at that time, which were quashed by the American censors and never saw the light of day.
The book is partly about his visit to Nagasaki a week after the surrender, but there are also a lot of dispatches about Japan and about interviews with freed American and British and Australian POWs. It’s a terrific book. And again, one of these books that I don’t think has been very widely read, it is a neglected classic.
Jordan Schneider: Great. And I want to shout out a place. Yakushima, I ended up there in February of 2020. It’s this island off Kyushu. I was stuck because China already had COVID and America didn’t have COVID yet, and I was trying to stay in Asia.
And I’m really happy that Yakushima isn’t a place that now has to be associated like Okinawa or Iwo Jima as a horrific battle happening there. It’s one of the most magical places I’ve ever been. It’s a giant rainforest.
Ian Toll: Where the animated film Princess Mononoke was set.
Jordan Schneider: Exactly. It has enormous trees, and it’s really inconvenient to get to. There aren’t a lot of tourists, and America didn’t have to invade it because we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we’re not in the worst of all possible timelines. The path where you have that invasion of Kyushu, where a few more million people would have died, is something that is hanging over the specter of your final book. People should all go to Yakushima and be thankful that we haven’t had a nuclear war since 1945.
Mood Music:
 | A guest post by
|
I’ve read a lot about Doolittle’s raid over the years, to include his autobiography I Could Never be so Lucky Again (itself a remarkable book).
But Toll’s account is the most gripping one I’ve ever read. It remains almost unfathomable even today to understand how Doolittle and his crews managed to pull it off.