Twilight of the Gods is a thrilling conclusion to Ian Toll’s thirteen-years-in-the-making “Pacific War Trilogy.” The longest and, Toll admits, hardest of the three to write, the final volume is nevertheless a taut narrative of the war’s complex final year. The reader knows the ending, but finding out how it gets there keeps us turning pages eagerly.
I had read several brief accounts of the somewhat misnamed Battle of Leyte Gulf, including Halsey’s alleged blunder chasing Ozawa’s fleet north. For me, though, the charge had remained an allegation, never proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Weren’t there multiple flattops left to defend Leyte? Hadn’t disaster been avoided? With the greater space allowed Toll–space and time he repeatedly insisted upon–the seriousness of Halsey’s gaffe becomes inescapable. It was a grievous error that cost the lives and well-being of real men, as well as their confidence and trust in superiors.
When Halsey took his Third Fleet north to engage and finish off, at last, the elusive Japanese surface fleet, he left sixteen escort carriers (CVEs) and twenty-two destroyers (DDs/DDEs) to defend the waters off Leyte Island. MacArthur’s invasion force had put ashore there barely a week earlier, but Japanese resistance had been less than formidable and IJN‘s Central Force, coming from the west, had been severely damaged by Allied torpedo bombing raids. Reports from scout planes indicated that Kurita had turned his fleet around and was fleeing. Maintaining a defensive posture off Leyte–as ordered he was ordered to do–became unsupportable for Halsey, who champed at the bit to go on the offensive. He still seethed at Spruance’s reluctance to pursue in the Battle of the Philippine Sea five months earlier. He would not make the same mistake.
Instead, he made a different one, almost surely more costly. His counter-attack force was a study in overkill: seventeen carriers, ten cruisers, six battleships, forty destroyers. A portion of this gigantic fleet left behind–a single task force to supplement the CVEs–would have made all the difference in the engagement that became known as the Battle off Samar. Instead, the bare-bones force that met Kurita’s fleet scrambled just to stay afloat and could do little to prevent it from unloading its full firepower on MacArthur’s ground forces.
Toll explains why escort carriers, whatever their number, were cannon fodder to Japanese surface ships: “Their greatest virtue, from the Navy’s point of view, was that they could be built and launched quickly and cheaply.” [262] They were small, slow, and flimsy. “Crews joked that ‘CVE’ stood for ‘combustible, vulnerable, and expendable,’ and their mordant appraisal was accurate on all three counts.” Thanks to Halsey’s rash decision, escort carriers and destroyers, their commanders and crew, became target practice for the mightiest battleship in the Japanese Navy. The mammoth Yamato sent shells weighing upwards of a ton and a half twenty miles across the sea at a terminal velocity of 1,500 feet per second upon escort carriers and destroyers one-eighth and one-twenty-eighth its size, respectively. Even “the Yamato‘s near-misses sent destructive shock waves through the lightly constructed [escort carrier]. Rivets tore loose, welds ripped open, electric power cut out, interior lighting was doused, radio transmitters and receivers were disabled, radar screens flickered out, and a table on the bridge fell over when one of its legs buckled.” [265]
Toll recounts actions of true heroism on the part of these little ships’ commanders and crew, including Commander Ernest Evans who turned his destroyer, Johnston, directly into the teeth of the oncoming gunships. While drawing fire away from the rest of the task force, Evans’ destroyer was able to disable an enemy cruiser with a torpedo strike before taking a direct hit from a secondary gun. The Johnston and her crew took more abuse as the battle progressed, until she finally sank. Evans was among the men who did not survive in the shark-infested waters long enough to be rescued.
That Kurita did not press his advantage by bombarding the Allies on Leyte has also been a controversy, difficult to explain and comprehend. Toll makes it comprehensible.
In all, Toll dedicates forty pages to chronicle the engagement and another twenty to Halsey’s aborted, inconclusive Battle off Cape Engano. The reader leaves the section convinced that Toll has made his case: a combination of hubris, sloppy communication, and fatigue-affected decision-making led to a near catastrophe.
Twilight of the Gods tells the story of the Pacific war’s final eleven months in just under eight hundred pages, time and space enough for a complete telling, a telling that allows the reader to more fully understand what it meant to be a soldier, sailor, or pilot in battlefront that covered 2.8 square miles, saw more than 30 million killed, including civilians, under some of the most inhuman war conditions in history.
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