8 Bells Lecture | Ian Toll: War in the Pacific Island, 1942-1944

thank you John and it's an honor to be here at the Naval War College for the third time now I am often asked how did I get onto the subject of naval history I haven't served in the Armed Forces I'm a career civilian and there are many different ways in which I can answer that and if I if I could go on it at great length about it but I like to think about the study of war as a way of extracting information about societies that you could not get by studying any other aspect of their history and I'll illustrate what I'm what I'm trying to say by describing a exhibit I guess you would call it you might call it an outdoor artwork which is on the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge I live in San Francisco in the Marina District and I can walk to the bridge and on that walk there is this enormous section of steel lattice beam that is similar to the system that holds up the bridge and this beam had been taken over to the Berkeley School of Engineering and the Berkeley engineers had put 8 million pounds of pressure on this thing in order to see how well it would hold up so this is stress testing something that engineers do and it's good news for for all of us who live in San Francisco maybe even more for those who live across the bridge and we're in that this beam stood up quite well to that 8 million pounds of pressure war does to societies to systems of government and to individuals what the berkeley engineers did to that beam by putting enormous pressure on something by putting it under stress you extract information that you could not receive in any other way war is unique in that respect it tells us something about the underlying societies the fascist and militarist states of the axis believed that the democracies were inherently weaker systems and that if you put them under sufficient stress they would break World War two was I think at its very base a struggle between competing visions of how to organize a society and I've spent a lot of time and attention in this trilogy on the issues of media of press coverage of propaganda of the way that the war was presented to the civilian populations of the contending countries of the United States and of Japan I think at the heart of this question of how the big decisions were made you really have to go beyond the conventional lanes that we usually stay in as military historians you need to get into the realm of politics which of course is an entirely different animal and yet this division that we have developed between these different types of history I think meets right at this intersection where so many of these crucial issues have been decided and this has been one of my arguments in developing a new way of telling the story of this war World War two I think showed that the democracies once aroused were inherently stronger than the authoritarian and totalitarian models so why another history of the Pacific War aren't there an enormous mountain of books that have already been written yes of course that's true and there's a certain amount of I think World War two fatigue which I understand and I even share there has been a tendency I think in the world war two literature to try to pick increasingly narrow aspects of the con flicked to slice the pie more and more narrowly and to delve very deeply into relatively small subjects now that tendency I think over time results in a very rich literature and I think we understand the subject much better than we did in the past collectively but this trend toward increasing specialization also results over time in a historical literature which is fragmented and piecemeal military history has been treated as a sub-genre even there I say it as a kind of ghetto within the field hermetically sealed off from other important aspects of history it has been neglected in the halls of academia and I think there are different reasons for that but I think the fallacy that to study is to glorify is very much at the heart of it my last book Pacific crucible which dealt with really just the first six months of the Pacific War from the surprise strike on Pearl Harbor to the American counterpunch at Midway six months later was was well reviewed there was one review I remember that was a friendly review the reviewer said tol occasionally does stray out of his Lane into areas of politics for example diplomacy rather than sticking to the narrow path of naval history well I don't take that as a criticism but rather as a compliment I think the stay in your lane mentality can be a straightjacket and has been in military history I have strayed out of my lane from the very beginning of my career I did it in six frigates I intend to do it in all future works the Pacific War has larger dimensions politics diplomacy the management of a global Allied coalition foreign policy social history propaganda the organization of the economy for total war the planning for the post-war future in Asia all of these are important subjects that are usually completely omitted in histories of the Pacific War the question of how and when and how aggressively to fight the Pacific War relative to the war in Europe arose to the highest levels of politics and diplomacy it became an issue in electoral politics in night in the midterm congressional elections of 1942 and again in the presidential election of 1944 it was at the heart of anglo-american negotiations in the many allied conferences that took place during the war played into the future of Western colonialism in Asia and it was an ideological struggle the Pacific War between Japan's pan-asian vision of liberating Asia for the Asians which was inevitably a somewhat enticing proposition and the competing concept of a universal principle of democracy and self-determination I believe in a narrative style of history not as the only way to write history I think there are other ways to write history but I believe that the narrative style of history which combines scholarly rigor with a storytelling sensibility can and does have great power complicated storytelling I believe can be in its in a sense a kind of argument in its own right and ever since I first realized that I had a real obsession with history probably at about the age of 12 I have sought out authors who managed to pull this off to bring some of the storytelling techniques that a novelists or dare I say that even film makers might use to bring the reader into the story and I have found that for all the enormous number of books that are published each year books that really walk that line between respect for the subject but great storytelling or are as rare as a unicorn and when I find them I seize upon them and read them regardless really of what the subject is the scholars approach of offering a thesis then marshalling evidence has real power and has most often led to some of the deepest insights into history and as Gordon Wood has observed popular historians depend on the work of academic historians while the reverse is not necessarily true but I think comparing the two directly is beside the point really it's like asking what's a better tool a hammer or a wrench you need more information to answer the question at its best the narrative style actually accomplishes something I think that the more clinical approach does not accomplish it brings us closer to the experiences of those who were there who made the decisions and it puts us into their shoes it allows us to see through their eyes and that brings a richer and for and more satisfying way of understanding why and how important decisions were made in history whatever else it is it's also a genre of literature and that has always been true since history was first written down Herodotus the acidities Plutarch Salas Tacitus Edward Gibbon Henry Adams Winston Churchill they were all storytellers Theodore Roosevelt said that he thought imagination was the most important quality of a historian it's a very provocative point isn't it the ability to put oneself into the mindset of people living in the past is actually a real challenge a very difficult thing to do my purpose is to assimilate many different contending competing points of view into one narrative and I have always thought that the highest praise that someone might offer me from my work is that I could not put it down I could not put it down there is no higher praise I believe I think we have had a dearth of good narratives addressing the Pacific War in all of its vast and terrible sweep and I think I can claim that my trilogy is the first history of the entire Pacific War to be published in at least 25 years and the first multi-volume history of the Pacific War to be published since Samuel Elliot Morrison's series published in the 40s and 50s the Pacific War was by a vast margin the largest naval war ever waged it was in all likelihood and we can hope the largest naval war that will ever be waged it was the only naval war that has ever been waged across the entire length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean in ocean so large that you could fit all of the world's land masses into it with room to spare it was the only instance in which opposing fleets of aircraft carriers met in battle and there were five such battles in the war it provided the most complete demonstration of the means by which submarines could destroy enemy supply lines it led to a fundamental revolution in naval doctrines putting an end to the era of the big gun battleship as the queen of naval power and establishing carrier aviation and submarines as the principal means of waging war at sea I think there has been a tendency axiomatic I think of all military history to treat a naval warfare as a sub-genre of a sub-genre that is to say we are land dwelling species so it's natural for us to think of more on land as the main plot and naval war as a sub-genre that should be handled by specialists who write naval history and nothing else I think our popular entertainment in many cases has reinforced a popular misimpression that the Pacific War was principally a war fought on Islands an island hopping campaign waged by the army and especially the Marines against Japanese troops in jungles and on remote Pacific atolls and indeed it might be said that for many Americans who don't know much about the Pacific War it was a conflict that began with Pearl Harbor it continued with a trans-pacific campaign of bloody Island fighting most famously at Iwo Jima and ended at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but one need only glanced at a map of the Pacific to grasp that this war was principally a naval and air campaign in which the destruction of the Japanese Navy was the Paramount factor leading to the Allied victory and Marines might seize remote Pacific Islands in savage and valorous combat really in some of the most awful combat I think in our history but they could only do that after being delivered safely to the beaches and supported by ship-to-shore bombardment and air support conquering an island in the Pacific was almost never a goal in its own right and when an island served no purpose it was simply bypassed its garrison left to wither on the vine an island was seized when it was needed as a new sea or air base with a new harbour blasted out of the coral with an airstrip carved out of the jungle to allow the fleet and the bombers to consolidate their westward advance and to gather their strength for the next offensive push any big historical narrative dealing with the entire Pacific War in my view should have the naval campaign at the spine of the narrative and I have worked in that spirit the Pacific War was the largest bloodiest most technologically complex amphibious war in history amphibious war striking an enemy on land by way of sea was the most difficult and precarious of any type of major military operation prior to the Second World War the largest and most relevant precedent was the glibly campaign in the Dardanelles during the First World War and that gave very little reason for confidence in order to be sure of success the amphibious attacker must possess overwhelming advantages by its nature it required close cooperation between the services between the army the Navy the Marines between the different arms of the Navy logistics aviation and therefore amphibious were exposed and exacerbated all of the latent inter-service antagonisms and rivalries consider that at the time of Pearl Harbor and throughout the Second World War there was no defense department there was a Navy Department and a War Department each headed by a civilian cabinet secretary who reported directly to the president there was no Joint Chiefs of Staff a prior to Pearl Harbor that body was convened as an ad-hoc committee in order to have some sort of structure with which to meet the British in the first wartime summit but the JCS throughout the war operated with no statutory authority and had no chairman so Admiral Ernest King the Chief of Naval Operations and a general marshal army chief of staff had to muddle toward consensus and if and when they disagreed there was no mechanism to resolve that dispute except to go directly to President Roosevelt and ask him to resolve it and of course they didn't want to do that so they were forced to work together forced to muddle toward consensus and that's how the big decisions of that war were made they all knew that even as they were fighting this unprecedented global conflict they were looking to the post-war future and they knew that there was an enormous struggle looming in the postwar future that Congress was determined to unify the services into a single Defense Department and that the parochial interests of the different services would be very much at stake and that represented a kind of game within the game that was waged during the Second World War the Marines had more than any other military organization studied of amphibious war had trained for it had developed new tactical doctrines and had developed the landing craft that would be needed to fight this unprecedented amphibious war in the Pacific even so the entire enterprise had to be developed very much on the fly and there was quite a bit of learning how to fight by fighting in the Pacific War and I think this revealed the remarkable talent in the ranks of the American military and particularly the very high quality of leadership that we had and I think this institution in the case of the Navy has something to do with that consider in 1900 when the senior Admirals and generals who fought the Second World War had entered the service academies around 1900 1905 radio was brand new it was just being developed I think it was first used at sea in naval conflict in the russo-japanese war of 1905 1906 submarines were experimental vessels that usually posed a greater threat to their own crews than they did to the enemy the Wright brothers got off the ground I believe in 1903 the entire history of aviation took place during the careers of Admiral King Admiral Nimitz general Marshall and so forth it was a coal powered fleet that had to be changed to an oil-powered fleet new engines reciprocating engines were replaced by turbine engines and so I think it's remarkable that virtually all of the senior American military commanders of the Second World War were forced to develop their understanding of these new technologies in the course of their careers and yet they were there and they were ready to fight this war when it was thrust upon us in December 1941 I also think that it's interesting and noteworthy that virtually all the major American military commanders of the Second World War perhaps with the exception of General MacArthur were almost completely unknown outside the Armed Forces in 1939 the Navy in the Navy almost none of the Admirals who fought the Second World War had combat experience prior to the war and yet the services had preserved and developed this vital intellectual capital over the course of the peacetime in the Navy all officers headed to higher rank virtually had to come through the Naval War College so they had studied and prepared for this Pacific War and were to a remarkable degree ready to to fight this terrible conflict the Pacific War of course that was the largest naval war in history and as I've said the largest and most complex amphibious war in history was a secondary theatre Europe first was the fundamental basis of the global Allied strategy and yet the Pacific War so often required more attention because of constant emergencies early in the war the logic of Europe first I believe was unassailable but it raised subsidiary questions that were a constant source of conflict granted that we were going to regard Nazi Germany as the prime enemy and devote the majority of our shared Allied effort to defeating Nazi Germany first could a the counter-offensive against Japan be launched prior to the defeat of Nazi Germany and what exactly were the ratios the British I think would have liked us to fight with maybe 5% of our total strength in the Pacific Admiral King in the Navy would have liked something more like 30% well that's an enormous difference isn't it and this was a source of a constant struggle pitting the Americans against the British in many cases the army against the Navy the Navy against the Marines the Army Air Forces against the Army and also the Navy the naval aviators against their traditional naval line officers the surface Navy it pitted MacArthur against everyone who did not share his view that he should immediately receive more troops and ships and airplanes regardless of what was happening elsewhere and this resulted in a solomon-like decision to divide the theater between the Army and the Navy the lecture next week I think Crossman wrote a sailor in the white house which is a very interesting book FDR was a Navy man at heart he had served as assistant secretary of the Navy for almost the entire two terms of the Woodrow Wilson administration served longer in that job than any other job in his career except the presidency itself he was in addition one of the largest collector of naval historical documents and ships and prints and other such memorabilia as president he had been instrumental in gathering together the historical documents of the early American Navy and publishing those a resource which I found to be tremendously useful in writing six frigates MacArthur used a very aggressive public relations strategy and even politics to obtain more troops and ships and planes and to ensure that the road to Tokyo would lead through the Philippines he became a stocking horse for the Republican presidential nomination in 1944 while then and later denying that he ever knew anything about it and so allocation of military assets to his theater became a point of attack in that bitterly fought presidential campaign of 1944 that wartime campaign and it embittered the campaign because both FDR and his rivals I think both thought that the other side had politicized the war and FDR could not reply in many cases because of wartime secrecy he used to tell a story which was not true actually it was a joke about the Marines on Guadalcanal there are two Marines at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal one says to the other the original form of the joke is if you want to get a I can tell you how to do that I would say that if you want to kill a Japanese soldier here's what you do you walk up the hill and you shout to hell with Hirohito the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese soldier is going to pop his head up and then you shoot him and so the Marine said all right I like that idea I'm going to do that he walked up the hill he shouted to hell with Hirohito and it wasn't loud enough so he said to hell with Hirohito and the Japanese soldier popped his head up and said to hell with FDR and so the Marines slung his rifle over shortly walked back down the hill and his friend said well what happened I didn't hear a shot and he said well I know we're supposed to win this war but I'll be damned if I'm going to shoot another Republican there are of course almost a limitless number of FDR biographies there are smaller but still very large number of McArthur biographies they tend to forcefully emphasize the political dimension of decisions that were made but often tend to slight the very real and difficult military strategic choices that faced the leadership in the Pacific and I think that may simply be to return to the theme I brought up earlier that we've had this division of military history and political history and what happens when you have to confront a question for example of how to interpret the Honolulu Conference of the Pacific strategy conference this was when FDR visited Oahu in July 1944 and summoned MacArthur from Australia to meet with him and Admiral Nimitz and Admiral Leahy to decide a number of important decisions the most significant and immediate decision was do we invade the Philippine island of Luzon the large northern island of Luzon where Manila was MacArthur argued that we had to do that that it was militarily the right decision but also politically the right decision Nimitz argued I think in a pro-forma way for an alternative that we ought to land on the island of Formosa present-day Taiwan almost all of the treatments of this subject that I have read have failed to do it justice and I think that there has been a tendency of the political biographers to forcefully emphasize the political dimensions of this meeting and the military historians who are more well-versed on the purely military issues that we're being decided have in many cases followed dutifully in the footsteps of the political biographers because they feel as if this is a field that is beyond their area of authority and so what we have is in many cases evidence free speculation of a kind of secret handshake between MacArthur and Roosevelt a proposition for which there is no evidence and which I find to be completely implausible and so I will deal with that subject at greater length in my third volume I don't want to go on forever so I'll close so we can have questions but I would like to close by quoting Theodore Roosevelt who was one of my colleagues in the subspecialty of early American naval history and who had an important role to play in the creation of this institution TR published at age 22 while a law student at Columbia his the book the naval war of 1812 which was a major work on that subject which remains remarkably current even after 130 years in TR as I said took the rather provocative provocative view that the most important quality of the historian was imagination his word in this quote when I came across it rang true to me in a very powerful way however accurate this historian may be he cannot be in the broadest sense truthful unless he has the power to visualize to himself what he is found in the past unless he has the power not merely to visualize it himself but to put it down in words so that his readers can visualize it also he must paint for us the life of the plain people the ordinary men and women of the time of which he writes the instruments of their labor the weapons of their warfare the wills that they wrote the bargains that they made the songs that they sang when they feasted and made love he must use them all you must never forget that no event stands out entirely isolated he must trace from there its obscurity and humble beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of triumph have shaken the world thank you very much for your time and the opportunity Thank You Naval War College I'd be happy to entertain any questions if there are any yes sir that's a sensitive issue I was asked that actually at an event Jim horn Fisher asked me that many of you may know Jim horn fisheries a terrific historian his last book was Neptune's Inferno about the naval battles off of Guadalcanal he asked me that while I was standing next to my editor star Lawrence yes so he he put me on the spot I think fall 2018 is a reasonable target yes sir thank you Joe yes sir today I understand that the military will all join together in a battle it advanced is this when when did they get this cooperative spirit the different services we would get together in plant well I think a lot of it was World War two they were forced to plan together a lot of the planning apparatus of the Joint Chiefs was created after the attack on Pearl Harbor there were very limited mechanisms for joint planning prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and this was one of I think the legitimate criticisms of the peacetime armed forces so I think a lot of it began under the under the tremendous stress of this immediate emergency after this devastating strike on Pearl Harbor didn't actress get involved yes Congress threatened to vice by force of law combine the services into a department of defense during the conflict and there were several bills introduced 1940 to 1943 eventually general Marshall successfully argued to congressional leaders that this issue should be postponed until the post-war period because it would create too much chaos in the ongoing management of the war and would also expose these very strong parochial service interests yes sir all right whitey Roosevelt tolerate MacArthur well it's a very good question MacArthur in the first months of the war really became suddenly very very famous and was the best-known most popular military leader in fact I think the Gallup polls had already begun to ask this question who which Americans do you admire most and as of 1942 the three most highly admired Americans according to that poll were Franklin Roosevelt Eleanor Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur and so he had he had an immense immense standing with the American people and I think that alone made it very difficult to to fire him of course Truman eventually did there are others I think who have argued that perhaps Roosevelt was playing a shrewd game and that by allowing this kind of political excitement in 1944 among certain important leaders in the Republican Party to coalesce around this very unrealistic idea of drafting MacArthur as a as it become a second McClellan to run against the commander-in-chief in wartime that by doing that he took some of the wind out of the sails of the Republican candidate who eventually got the nomination Thomas Dewey a Governor of New York and so there's that that subplot as well I think in addition that Roosevelt did respect MacArthur's abilities as a general and felt personal responsibility to not only keep MacArthur in place to allow him to have his half of the Pacific into a lavender return to the Philippines because MacArthur himself I mean sorry Roosevelt himself at ordered MacArthur to leave his forces in Bataan and Corregidor and go to Australia so he was personally implicated in that decision why didn't he why didn't you find God right away they find people grow loud well I I think a lot of it has to do with the way the news was presented to the American people in that first month of the war and so the the fact that our entire battle line was knocked out at Pearl Harbor eight battleships knocked out of action was regarded as a disgrace and someone would have to pay for that disgrace three weeks later when it became clear that our defenses in the Philippines were going it very quickly crumble by that time the mood of the press and I think maybe the American people had shifted and now we were looking for uplifting stories and so MacArthur's very significant command failures in the Pacific we're never exposed to scrutiny in the same way but I I agree I don't think that there's a great deal of logic or justice in that disparity but a lot of it I really do believe had to do with the way these events were being presented to the American people at the time yeah following up on that MacArthur was so much different in that he was in the field in the battle his family - surprisingly you know like I get the impression he strongly protested his order to leave it was really less from or did he see his family in himself in that same vein is somebody who should should be out of the conflict and survived fighting in I think I think the available evidence is that MacArthur expected to stay there and to either die or be captured with his family with his wife and at that time four-year-old son and was committed to stay and was ordered away by Roosevelt and from that time I think it's it's only human to want to return to the Philippines and liberate Luzon in particular and so you know MacArthur's often been criticized for having this very one-dimensional idea that first we get the Philippines back and then we worry about Japan and you know at the time many Navy leaders but also George Marshall and others in the army pointed out that it it may be smarter to try to get a quick checkmate here by going directly to to Japan and if we win the war then the Philippines are liberated anyway the decision to go back to Luzon in my view was correct not only for political reasons but even for military reasons and the reasons for that and this is complex and I could go on probably excessive length about it and I will deal with this in my third volume the principle alternative that had been offered by the Navy the invasion of Formosa and establishing positions on the China coast the more military analysts looked at that option the less they liked it and it became clear by August 1944 that the army didn't have enough troops particularly enough service troops available in order to launch that operation and so Luzon in a sense won by default yes sir in the advertisement before hasn't worth it to hear this talk here imagine that capturing the marianas and that yeah I think the marianas the capture the marianas in in july 1944 did spell the end of any remaining hopes that japan might have had to try to reverse the tide of conquest that was washing over them the Marianas Islands Saipan and Guam are within bomber range of Tokyo with our very long-range bombers the b-29 which was just coming into service at that point it was a Saipan was the first island in which there was a large civilian Japanese population and that had immense significance through the leadership size in Tokyo and there was this immense naval battle the Battle of the Philippine Sea also remembered as the Marianas turkey shoot in which Japanese carrier air power was really irreparable Ede destroyed and so for all of those reasons really it was clear even to the Japanese leadership at that point that they had lost the war and the last 13 months of the war became this this attention between we know we've lost and yet we're not going to surrender and and the Japanese government fell Hideki Tojo was driven from power immediately after the fall the Marianas and so I do believe that was the decisive victory of the Pacific War Jim Horn Fisher has a book coming out on the marianas which I would recommend he's a very good author one more question doesn't back to the Philippines yeah it seems to me it went back in late my sense of history is the MacArthur criticized Wainwright for surrendering do you want him to fight to the death is that correct yes he what he did criticize him privately of course later he recommended that he'd be decorated but yet MacArthur was a you know I'm not a psychologist but I I think some have have proposed that he may have had a personality disorder like a narcissistic personality disorder or something like that well you know psych psychological history has a very bad name but MacArthur really was a confabulate er uh meaning that he would fill in his memory with self-serving versions of what had happened previously and you know as a historian you see this happen again and again where he's got many different versions of something that happened earlier and and they're all in conflict and in every case there's a reason why he's remembering that something happened that way because it puts him into a better light MacArthur is in many ways I think a very unattractive personality from his soaring reputation during the war I think his star has fallen very dramatically among historians and biographers probably that's been a more dramatic decline than for any other important historical figure of that era and and yet MacArthur was also an immensely talented person he was I believe absolutely brilliant and he had a sense of stage craft and showmanship which was often destructive but which was very effective immediately after the Japanese surrender and when he served essentially as a kind of latter-day Shogun over the Japanese and so I think that combination of qualities worked well for the occupation of Japan after the Second World War yes you discover any documents in your research that changed the way you thought about anything I mean inevitably you probably have some preconceived notions about a certain topic or subject I'm curious to know whether or not any of your research what that is well I um you know I've turned up a lot of very interesting stuff in archives in many cases it's it's simply kind of sharpening a point particularly because many of these issues have been studied now for several generations of historians but just to give you an example general Robert C Richardson was the commander of Army forces in the Pacific Ocean area so in Nimitz's theater he was the Army's top general and his personal Diaries have been kept private until just six months ago when his grandson made them available to researchers and those diaries depict a real struggle between the army and navy in the nimitz headquarters that I think cast things in a slightly different light Nimitz was a great leader one of the most respected leaders of that war possibly the most respected a naval warrior in the history of the u.s. Navy even Richardson's a portrait of him cuts against that a bit and depicts an admiral who was had spent his entire adult life in the Navy and was very committed to the Navy's parochial interests of course Richardson is not a unbiased observer and yet these Diaries going on at great length with great specificity I think give us a slightly more nuanced picture of what was happening in this fleet headquarters during the war yes sir wily sequential in some taneous strategies in Pacific not the difference between both the principle directions yeah and you're right it really was two different campaigns the submarines really fought their own war in the Pacific and because of the inherent secrecy of undersea operations this slow but then very dramatic garrotting of Japanese sea communications so vital to their economy particularly oil Japanese have negligible domestic oil production therefore their entire economy their entire war effort relied upon this tenuous link of running tankers between their captured Dutch East Indies oil fields in Borneo and Sumatra and the home islands and a aggressive fleet of submarines operating in the western Pacific sinking those tankers would essentially kick the the foundations out of the entire Japanese imperialist project that is in fact what happened but as you say the sequential campaigns that the counter-offensive across the Pacific one operation after another one Island after another one battle after another took place in parallel with what was a cumulative ship by ship destruction of those Japanese supply lines and so it was really two different campaigns that intersected only occasionally and this I don't think was fully appreciated at least outside the highest command levels of the Navy until after the war and the submarine errs having sunk something like sixty percent I believe is the figure of the total tonnage and the Japanese Merchant Marine while suffering very high casualties relative to the small number of personnel that served in submarines demanded after the war recognition of that extraordinary accomplishment and I believe that they have received it rightfully lecher commercial is he dies in her painting services yeah I would say I would say that the answer to that is yes he did rise above the parochial interests of the army it was a process but I can point to several specific instances in which he favored a course of action that seemed to benefit the the Navy's way of thinking about how to fight the war we had discussed this question of luzon versus Formosa well Marshall was really coming down hard on MacArthur at that point and saying liberating the Philippines is not the ultimate objective here defeating Japan is the ultimate objective the liberation of the Philippines follows from that and and had really taken on MacArthur directly so I think there I think he was in in many ways the single most indispensable military leader of the Second World War I so think that in the literature journalists and historians and biographers are similar in this sense we like conflict and we tended to emphasize conflict the struggle between Marshall and King is very much at the heart of global policymaking during the Second World War they didn't particularly like each other and yet they were partners as well and they had constant recurring conflicts over many issues and yet in almost every case they managed to work those issues out through negotiations rather than having to appeal to Roosevelt to solve them and so I think it's it's best to think of the king Marshall partnership as being at the heart of the American war effort intrigued by your early comments about a popular history and academic history having served a one-way relationship unhappy report here in our China policy course we do use quite a bit of popular history including air lotteries book about zero to ten chapter on them is General MacArthur as way of looking at the bigger cause of the social institutional behind the war not just the person itself supposed to use of ography differently if you were to make a case for popular history to a group of academic historians how do you do it well what would you say is about if you think that one way really well first of all I would I would just at the risk of repeating myself say I don't think that the narrative form of history should replace the more academic develop a thesis martial evidence than restate the thesis in light of the evidence I don't think that those two that one has to replace the other I believe the dirt is value in both approaches I think the narrative and storytelling approach the great power that it has is that it can bring you closer to the perspectives of those who were making decisions at the time and the point is obvious in unit it is worth repeating that at the time that these events took place no one could see into the future as a historian you have to then play a sort of trick on your own mind where you forget whatever you know so confronting these critical decisions in the Pacific in July 1944 well I have no idea what's going to happen in the future there are many who believe that Japan would continue to fight through 1947 except for a very small circle of American leaders no one knew about the Manhattan Project no one knew that there was such a weapon a possibility of such a weapon and so you're viewing all of these the narrative approach I think has the potential at its best to bring you closer into the way that these individuals were thinking about the world that they confronted at that time there's more than to see our score house broad appeal district right playing a trick on yourself as the writer but then inviting the reader into that kind of process of let's forget that we know how this ends and let's try to put ourselves into that room when we don't have that that knowledge that comes with the perspective of posterity yep it will damage some Japanese sleep overall from our summaries are the I just looked at these statistics from the Janik carrier air got more of the Japanese fleet but not by an enormous margin so the submarines got almost as much of the Japanese naval tonnage as did carrier air yeah go back to your comments on that your first strategy arguments that went through and all the forces that macarthur units eventually got is there any evidence personal research that Beijing into France with the ladle presently a few forces that he got horse is an industrial build oh yeah by 1944 there was just so much you know war material arriving on the frontiers of all of these all in all of these theaters that there really wasn't any significant constraint on being able to launch the invasion of France in the same month as the Marianas campaign which i think is really the most extraordinary testament really to the potential industrial potential of this economy yeah okay I think we've used up the hour and you have to get on to pass well thank you very much for being here the other questions you have books to sign up so I'll be here for a little bit thank you very much

Channel: U.S. Naval War College

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Keywords: Pacific War, WWII, World War Two, Japan, United States Navy, Naval War College, Marianas, Pacific Ocean

Id: E6XNQqXlcco

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2016