Sea Control - Sea Control 229 - Author Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates and the Pacific Trilogy

Episode Date: February 28, 2021

Links1. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, Ian W. Toll, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.2. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942, Ian W. Toll, W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.3. The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944, Ian W. Toll, W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.4. Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945, Ian W. Toll, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.5. Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila, James Scott, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Hey folks, Jared here. This week I'm joined by author Ian W. Toll to discuss his book, Twilight of the Gods, his Pacific War trilogy, and we touched briefly on his initial work, Six Frigates, as well. You may have noticed we just completed our site migration at SimSec. This was necessary to improve our service. It's providing a reliable, stable site where you can find everything you ever wanted to know about maritime security, sea power, and all manner of content of and related to the sea. On behalf of myself and the Sea Control Team, I want to thank you, the listeners, for hanging with us through that process and our internal team here at SimSec that bailed through a number of unforeseen roadblocks. So if you experience any site

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The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drach, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology. Hello, Hashibates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we're joined by author Ian Toll

to discuss his most recent book, Twilight of the Gods, the third book in his trilogy on the Pacific War. Ian, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So can I ask you to start by telling the audience a bit about your background, please? Sure, yeah. I've had sort of an eclectic background. I started out as essentially a Capitol Hill staffer working for the recently deceased Paul Sarbanes. Then I went up to Albany and worked in the first Cuomo administration. I went to the Kennedy School, got a master's degree there. And I worked at the Fed and then at several different financial firms on Wall Street. I started doing this full time after September 11th. And the idea I had was to write a book about the founding of the U.S. Navy,

a subject that had fascinated me. I'd read essentially everything I could get my hands on about the subject. And I had realized that I had just over as a hobby really had built up a knowledge base about the subject. And I thought I could write. And after 9-11, I wanted to try something different. I wrote a book proposal and a first chapter, and it just happened to be kind of the right idea at the right time. So that was sold in an auction. And I had thought that book, Six Frigates would be just a sort of a diversion from my career path. But after it was successful, my editor essentially sat me down and said, what are you thinking of doing next? And I said, well, there are a few different things I could write about. But I've always thought that there

was a book to be written about the Pacific War taking a new approach, particularly in the architecture of the narrative. And he said, fine, let's do that. I'll give you an advance. So that was originally envisioned as a single book. As I started the research and writing process, I realized, you know, I'm going to go on for 2000 pages at this pace. And he was good enough then to say, let's convert it into a trilogy. And so that's what I've been doing all these years later. The third book of the trilogy is out. That's the story of my life right there. Thanks. We're going to divert almost immediately from the script. Why did you decide, what captured your imagination about the Navy? Because you talk about six frigates and you thought this was just going to be a diversion. Six frigates at this point, that thing is going to be on the CNO's reading list for as long as there's a United States Navy. Your first book is like a foundational text for us now. What captured your imagination about the Navy and made you decide that you wanted to write about both six frigates and then everything that came after? Yeah, well, I came at it really from a couple of different directions. One, I'd always been fascinated with the history and the literature of the sea. And, you know, so coming up through high school and college, you know, all of the classic texts that had been assigned in class, you know, Moby Dick, novels of Joseph Conrad, for example, those had always really gotten into my blood. I mean, even going back to the Iliad, there's something about the, you know, the literature and the lore of the sea that had just kind of gotten into my blood over time. I'd spent a lot of time on recreational sailboats. And then secondly, you know, my observation had been that naval history had always been really a genre within military professionals, right?

So the naval historians were specialists who wrote about naval history and didn't, and this is a generalization, but I think it's largely true, didn't see their mission as integrating the naval history into the broader history of the country. And particularly as regards the period of the early American Republic, the early part of our history between the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the establishment of a Navy, you know, was essentially a fundamental kind of development in the country's relationship with the rest of the world. If you think about it, the Navy, particularly at that period of time, that was the only way to assert American military power overseas. So the very existence of the Navy posed these kind of basic questions. What kind of nation do we want to be? What's our relationship going to be with the great powers of Europe? And so it forced the country to sort of confront some of these early foreign policy decisions. And when I looked through the historical literature on the subject, what I found were a lot of studies that were dealing with the Navy from the perspective of the naval historian, rather than integrating the story into the broader story of how the country went from establishing its independence in a tenuous way during the American Revolution to becoming essentially 30 years later,

a country that had to be reckoned with as a major regional power. And anyone who looked at the U.S., say in 1815, could foresee that it was going to become a major power. And so the story of the establishment of our Navy was really the story of the establishment of our country. And I wanted to integrate all of those threads into one history in a way that I thought hadn't been done before. Thanks. Now, I realized as I was prepping for this that I had thought of you as a naval historian this whole time, and that's probably because I started with six frigates and then didn't really do any digging into the background. But there are significant portions of all three of these books of the Pacific Trilogy that discuss operations ashore, whether it's the Army or the Marine Corps.

You talk about the Army Air Force's role, particularly in the second book, when you talk about the seizure of Saipan and what the purpose of the seizure of Saipan was. How do you see yourself, though, if not as a naval historian? Well, really, I think of myself as a writer who wants to tell stories. And, you know, I had chosen to tell the story of the founding of the U.S. Navy for some of the reasons that we went over. You know, my interest in the history of the sea and in naval history kind of carried me naturally to the Pacific War, which is, of course, you know, by a huge margin, the largest naval war ever waged. That said, it's the storytelling and it's the integration of, you know, what has been this sort of, I hesitate to use the word, but I think

it fits maybe a ghetto, a kind of an academic ghetto, where, you know, those who have devoted their lives to writing naval history really haven't, in general, again, generalizing, haven't seen their mission as, you know, how do we integrate the threads of this history into the bigger story? So when you come to the Pacific War, you know, it's a sea war and an air war before anything else. It was not a land war. Land campaigns, and this is a way of thinking that you really have to force yourself, I think, to adjust to, you know, World War II in Europe was a land war and an air war in which sea operations were playing a supporting role, an important supporting role. When you move to the Pacific, you have to invert that, you know, and you have to make that

adjustment at the very beginning if you want to understand this conflict. It was a sea war and an air war in which land operations were a supporting operation. So when our forces needed a naval base or an air base, we sent in the Marines or the Army or both to seize that contested island. But once you've taken it, it's essentially its value was as a naval base or an air base. And so in order to tell the story of the Pacific War, the approach I took was to place the naval war at the spine of the narrative. But then to tell the whole story, you really have to then ignore the kind of boundaries you've set for yourself. And so I really just told the story of this big complex war in the way that I thought was most faithful to the history and which,

you know, also, you know, engaged the reader, attempt to engage the reader and keep the reader's interest through a long story. So you had a great intro to Twilight of the Gods, where you discussed how that book grew compared to the other two volumes. How did that book evolve? And why did it expand so significantly? Yeah, so just for the readers who are not completely familiar, the first book, Pacific Crucible, really just told the story of the first six months of the war. So it's the attack on Pearl Harbor, and then the American counterpunch at the Battle of Midway and everything that happened in between. But that's six months of war. There's also quite a bit of background in that book. The second book, The Conquering Tide,

It tells the story of the Allied counteroffensive, both in the South and the Central Pacific. And that book really covers two years of war from mid-1942 through the Marianas campaign in July 1944. So the third book then just covers the last year of the war. And because I was going from writing a long book that had covered two years of war to what I expected to be another long book covering only a year of war, I didn't anticipate that the third book would be longer, but it is. It's about one third longer than the previous two volumes. And there are a number of reasons for that. It's partly because war got very large and, you know, in every dimension. and in order to really tell the whole story, I thought it needed additional time and space. It was partly because I had picked up the threads of some of the research that kind of lies along the periphery of the story. And I thought there was a lot of good material there and I wanted to

include it. And so each time I had the kind of the dilemma of whether to include something, you know, just to pick an example, naval pilot training in the United States. I could have covered that in either of the previous two volumes. I hadn't, but I had this stuff, you know, this research that I thought was important to incorporate into the narrative. And so a lot of those individual choices I made resulted in a longer book. And then finally, you know, as with all the books I've written, I've tried to do justice to the sort of the subtle foreign policy and political issues involved in the way wars begin and the way they end. And telling the story of how the pacific war ended that's a big story and it's a complicated story and uh and to do

justice to the subtleties of it just required a little bit more space thanks so one of the things that was really noticeable to me as a reader was the pace of the book i mean it's a large book but it reads very quickly there was not a lot of space in between options or what i would refer to as side quests sometimes you get these books and you'll be reading along reading along in this you know operation operation operation then there'll be side quests for the reader here whether it's talking about here's a chapter on logistics or here's a chapter on something else it didn't seem like there were a lot of those side quests though and maybe they were just rolled into the narrative of the operations i didn't even notice it but i found myself thinking about

it as i read it's like oh this this feels analogous to nimitz's campaign idea based on relentless tempo to push the japanese back before they could adapt is that a conscious choice or is that something that just happened? Yeah, no, it's a conscious choice. And I think it has to do with just this sort of storytelling impulse, which is something that I've had, I think, since the beginning, since I started doing this. I believe that history should be page turning. I think that it can be. And many of the best histories and biographies have that kind of propulsive momentum in the narrative. And so when I think back to the authors who taught me how to do what I was doing, taught me in the sense that I read their books and tried to understand what they were doing.

This symptom of forward movement in the story is essential. And it's, it's something I've worked hard on doing. And I think it involves, you know, some of the fundamental storytelling techniques, borrowing even from novels, but it also requires producing long first drafts and then taking a lot of material out and uh and that's what i've done since the beginning um you know i probably write on average um two to two and a half words for every one that ends up in a final draft so the drafts are more than twice as long the first drafts are more than twice as long as the final drafts and um and it's that that you know willingness or that process of taking a lot of material out that drives you toward a narrative that moves forward quickly now you mentioned

before that you had done quite a bit of reading about just the navy in general i imagine a lot of that was about the pacific war as well before you ever started writing this trilogy keep what were some of the new discoveries to you as you went through and i know there there will have been a lot but if you could just pick a few examples of what were new discoveries for you as you wrote uh twilight of the gods in particular and then the pacific trilogy in general yeah well Well, I mean, like virtually everybody else, I'm fascinated by Douglas MacArthur as an individual. He really is a sort of a singular figure in American history. Historians have generally been hard on MacArthur, and I've continued that tradition. I've been pretty hard on him

in this book as well for his pattern of vanity, or some would say even narcissism. He was deceitful, manipulative. He tended to treat his staff as if it was a court. It was a tight circle of loyalists. He accepted what you might even argue was a bribe from the Philippine government in an extraordinarily improper transaction. So there's a long charge sheet against him. On the other hand, you also have to credit MacArthur with having a certain kind of vision. He understood that the Pacific War was essentially a contest between, you know, competing visions for what Asia should become. And he pulled off the hat trick of forming a kind of a bond of trust with the people of three different Asian countries, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea. And, you know, he clearly was the right person to serve in the role of commander in chief of the Allied occupying force in Japan after the war.

And, you know, he, maybe more than any other single individual, brought about Japan that we, you know, today count as our most important ally in the region, a successful democratic country. So, you know, it's a balanced kind of picture with MacArthur. But, you know, I had known that he had flirted with politics during the Second World War. I think until I really got stuck deep into this research, I didn't realize just how far he had gone. He had essentially allowed himself to be run as a dark horse candidate for president in the Republican primary campaign of 1944. And he wasn't, he never explicitly acknowledged that he was doing that, but he certainly allowed the people around him, including his staff and his political allies in Washington, to essentially present him that way. That's essentially posing a kind of a challenge to the commander in chief at a time of war. And it's something I just don't think you could imagine that happening in today's military.

But it happened then. You know, I spent quite a bit of time going through the archives at the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia. And that really was a significant blot, I think, on his career. So that's one example. As always, I mean, the story of the Pacific War is a story of logistics. I always became, you know, was always fascinated with the process of being able to project so much military power across the largest ocean in the world. But, you know, as I got stuck in, this is one of these facets of the campaign where you want to include a lot about it because it's such an important part of the story of the Allied victory in the Pacific. But it doesn't always lend itself to good storytelling. And so, you know, my approach with logistics was to try to constantly and really every part of the narrative to include just a little bit more in terms of detail and insights about how this massive endeavor to project this much military force to move these enormous fleets across the Pacific, to keep them at sea, to establish the air bases and the supply depots.

I tried to make that sort of part of the background music of the narrative by just including a little bit about it in each part of the story. It was definitely appreciated. I mean, the story of the Pacific War, I know I referred to it as a side quest earlier, but the story of the Pacific War is absolutely the story of logistics and the ability. I'm trying to remember the name of the Fleet Replenishment Squadron or Service Support Squadron, I think it was, that supported the Navy going across. That is the story of the Pacific War and that ability to project power. Did you get a chance to visit any of these battlefields as you were working on this? Yeah, I did. I spent about two weeks in Guadalcanal

and Tulagi back in 2012, I guess it was. And that was an extraordinary trip, really. I mean, Solomon Islands were, you know, they are today, as they were then, really a pretty obscure place you know, backwater, Pacific backwater. There's not a lot there. You know, the jungle has sort of swallowed most of what remained of the battles that were fought there. There are places where you can go and find, you know, rusting tanks and so forth. And of course, Henderson Field, which was the airfield that was essentially the central asset that we fought over on Guadalcanal, that now is their main airport. Their capital, Honorea, essentially is on the site of the American Marines camp. You know, I did some diving there. I dove on some of the wrecks.

And all of that is really useful in terms of just getting a feel for the place. And I think that in ways that are hard to define sort of seeps into the narrative. But yeah, other than that, I mean, you know, I lived in Japan as a child. I traveled to the Philippines and Hawaii. And I I had intended, I would have last year, gone to Guam and Chuuk, which is the Federated States of Micronesia. Then it was called Truk. That was the main Japanese naval base outside the home islands. I was going to do some scuba diving there. And I had to cancel that trip because of the pandemic.

And hopefully I'll be able to do that maybe next year. Did you know anything about the Battle of Manila before you started writing about it? Because I was, I mean, I think I had heard that in the historical narrative beforehand, but never done any sort of real deep dive into it until I read Twilight of the Gods. And suddenly I find myself ordering all these books on Amazon, trying to improve my knowledge base, having read Twilight of the Gods now. That was, it was new to me, I'll say it that way. Yeah, well, I, you know, I knew that it had been a particularly awful battle in which the Japanese garrison had fought, you know, as they traditionally did to the last man. that it had resulted in essentially the leveling of the old part of the city

and that the Japanese atrocities in the Philippines generally, but especially during that last stage of the battle for Manila had been one of the darkest chapters of the Pacific War and one of their greatest atrocities ranking really ranking with the rape of Nanking in terms of the depravity of it.

And so I knew all of that. Of course, when you get deeper into the subject, it's revealed in a much more granular way just what happened. It wasn't a particularly awful chapter of the Pacific War. One of the fascinating what-ifs is, you know, what if we had bypassed on Wendell King, the chief of naval operations, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff planning organization had strongly argued that we should have bypassed the island of Luzon, which is the main northern island in the Philippines where Manila is, and taken the island of Formosa, today Taiwan. on. Ultimately, that dilemma was resolved in favor of going back to Luzon for complicated reasons, both military and political, that I go into in this book. But if we had bypassed Luzon, Manila would have been saved, I think. And that may have, in turn, affected the entire subsequent history of the Philippines. There's a lot of those. There's a lot of what-ifs in the Pacific. There were a lot of military decisions that were made, particularly in the last year of the Pacific War, that really had significant downstream implications for the future of Asia. And I think it's important to consider that those are speculative sorts of exercises, and they're a bit controversial for that reason.

There's only so much you can do with speculation. And yet, I do think that anyone who's interested in the situation in Asia today, you know, it pays to go back and look at how different decisions in the last year of the Pacific War could have altered the subsequent history in that region. So did you then find a... I'm sorry, on the Battle of Manila, one thing on the Battle of Manila, I just wanted to recommend my colleague, James Scott, who's another author at the same publishing house as me. He's written several good books about the Pacific, but he wrote this book, Rampage, last year, which was, I think, probably the most detailed study of the Battle of Manila that's been in print so far. Yeah, that's great. We will include that as a link in our show notes. Do you then find a favorite subject to write about as you went through this, either in Twilight of the Gods or all three books, really? Well, yeah, I mean, returning to the theme we discussed earlier, I've always been particularly interested in the, you know, writing about ships operating at sea, really going back to even before Six Frigates days. You know, the author Patrick O'Brien, I'm sure many of your listeners have delved into O'Brien's historical novels about the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, you know, Melville Conrad, the themes of kind of the naturalist themes in literature about the sea. I love writing about that. I love writing about ships operating at sea. And probably I had, you know, the single most satisfying passage in this book for me as a writer was to write about the typhoon that hit the Third Fleet in December 1944.

for, you know, digging through the texts on, you know, navigation and on storms to a storm of that magnitude. But I drew extensively on oral histories to try to describe exactly what it was like to be at sea in a typhoon like that. And so yeah, I mean, just in terms of my own kind of preferences, that kind of writing is one that I find a lot of professional satisfaction in doing. Thanks. We covered MacArthur already quite a bit, but you brought up the typhoon. What were your final thoughts on Halsey, having written this now? Halsey is less controversial than MacArthur from a political standpoint, but he remains controversial from a naval officer, tactician standpoint.

Yeah. So, I mean, Halsey is a character who became very famous very quickly in the early part of the war. And I think that was almost by accident. And he happened to be the fleet admiral at that time who commanded what essentially what remained of the Pacific Fleet after the strike on Pearl Harbor. So he was the fleet commander in the early operations of the war. Chester Nimitz, like most naval officers, preferred to keep a very low profile when dealing with the press. and uh and halsey you know in his first interactions with the press after some of the early carrier raids of the pacific war found that um you know he was good at kind of good with sound bites good with quick with a quotable line and so the press really took him and they did something

similar to what they did with macarthur they sort of blew him up and made him a kind of a symbol of the naval war in the Pacific. And he became, for many Americans, the face of the Navy. And that was true right through the end of the war. The Navy, I think, was different from the Army in that there really was a culture of, you know, I like to call it team before player. There was a feeling in the service that individual naval leaders should not try to seek a big stage for themselves. That partly It went back to those of your listeners who know about the history of the period of the early 20th century. There had been this nasty feud between two American officers who had fought a naval battle during the Spanish-American War, Samson and Schley, and the admirals who fought the Second World War had gone through the Naval Academy at the height of that scandal, essentially.

And they had all agreed among themselves, we're not going to let that happen again. We're not going to seek a public profile. We're going to keep the press at arm's length. We are going to be in essentially sort of a faceless service in which no one leader or group of leaders would, you know, seek the limelight. Halsey essentially sort of violated that understanding, that culture. On top of that, he made a number of significant command errors in the last year of the war. By the end of the war, I think it's safe to say that many of his subordinates, particularly the aviation admirals who served under him in the Third Fleet, had concluded that he essentially was not qualified to command the fleet at sea by 1945 because of the headlong pace of change in the technology and the doctrines that resulted from this creation of this enormous fleet of aircraft carriers. You know, not to be too long-winded about this, but I think, you know, with Halsey, the conclusion has to be he fell in love with his own public image in a way that was damaging and then compounded that with a series of decisions that I think you can fairly say were poor decisions that were costly in terms of the lives of American servicemen. So it's a pretty damning picture overall.

You know, Halsey is someone who is always going to be remembered for the kind of fearless and rousing leadership he showed early in the war. And if he had essentially retired or, you know, taken some other position ashore after 1942 or mid-1943, he would be remembered as one of the greatest American naval leaders in history. Thanks. So you mentioned before, you know, writing two, two and a half words to everyone that actually winds up on your page. Was there anything that you cut that you would really like to have included here? I had intended to write quite a bit more about the experience of American and allied POWs in the Pacific, which is, of course, a subject that has received a lot of attention, rightfully. When it came right down to it, I found that I couldn't do that without maintaining the pace that I wanted to maintain. The book is long, and something had to come out. I also did little or nothing about the Japanese submarines. You know, that's a story worth telling. But again, it really just came down to a question of editorial judgment calls. I don't know, maybe there's a future book there. You know, the Japanese submarines were, in many ways, you know, as effective as our own if you sort of take ton for ton. They achieved some extraordinary things. There was some extraordinary valor as there was in every aspect of Japanese military operations. I just wasn't able to fit it into this narrative. Thanks. So what sort of things are you reading now? I mean, who do you read?

You know, I keep a pretty varied diet in terms of my reading. I've been reading a lot about science and physics lately. Sean Carroll's book, Something Deeply Hidden, which is mind bending. I understand maybe 10% of it. But for some reason, I'm still engaged even with the 90% that is baffling to me. I just finished Avi Loeb's book, Extraterrestrial. He is a astronomer at Harvard who wrote about this fascinating object that came through our solar system called Uma Amua and has the rather hair-raising idea that this might have been a piece of technology creating real civilization. Again, this is the chairman of the astronomy department at Harvard, so it makes you sit up and take notice. I just downloaded into my Kindle a book on Vichy France by Robert Paxton, a Columbia professor. You know, like most Americans, I regard Vichy as essentially a collaborationist regime, which it was. There was also a bigger story about forces in France, which I knew very little about. And I wanted to understand that better, partly because William Leahy was the senior American naval officer of the Second World War, a five-star naval officer who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. One of his positions during the war was as ambassador, FDR's ambassador to Vichy France in his memoir.

He wrote a bit about that regime. So I wanted to learn a little more. So we're almost out of time here, but where are you headed from here? Maybe you have or have not had this conversation with your editor yet, but what's your next project? I'm pursuing a few different projects. One, I'm trying my hand at history. I want to write in this genre of alternative history, which is one where I think there's a lot of promise in it, although most of what's been written is not that good, I think.

And so I want to see if I can do something else with that. Second World War, I'm particularly interested in the issues of intelligence, propaganda, and logistics. And there are a number of stories that I can see teasing out of those subjects in order to continue writing about the history of that conflict. And my final question, so were any of the individual episodes that you covered in Twilight of the Gods or any other part of the Pacific Trilogy compelling enough to get you to revisit them in greater detail? Might they become their own book? Yeah, I mean, as I said, I think that the propaganda war is one that I think is, you know, hasn't received as much attention. And, you know, the Second World War was really two wars fought at the same time on opposite sides of the world. And a fuller kind of treatment of the story of how we tried to directly appeal to the Japanese people, the leaders, the soldiers on various islands, and tried to convince them to change their way of thinking to accept that they were going to be defeated. All of that was an important part of how we were able ultimately to convince the Japanese to surrender something that was anathema to them so that we didn't have to fight our way into that country. And I think that's an important story. And there's more to be told there.

Well, unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Ian Toll. Ian, where can we find you online? Well, I'm on Facebook and Twitter, and I've got a website. And if you just search my name, all of that stuff should come up. Thank you again for joining us. And to listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Sea Control is edited and produced by Ed Salo, William McQuiston, and Jonathan Selton. Thank you. We'll be right back.