Richard B. Frank’s 2020 volume, Tower of Skulls, is not a piece of horror or science fiction, although from the title it sounds like it could be. This is a very important contribution to the field of World War Two historiography and is must reading for anyone interested in the Asia-Pacific War. Frank tells a complicated story clearly and efficiently.

Richard Frank is among the leading World War Two historians—his book on the Guadalcanal campaign is considered to be the definitive work on the subject. This is the first in a projected series of three volumes, and is subtitled “A History of the Asia-Pacific War July 1937-May 1942.” The subtitle makes clear that Frank is going to make the case (and indeed does) that the Pacific War—the beginning of which is thought by most to be the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—actually began four years earlier (with the Japan-China conflict) which should be regarded as the beginning of the “Asia-Pacific War.”

Japanese incursions into China started as early as 1931, but open warfare between the two nations began on July 7, 1937, when Japan invaded Manchuria following the Marco Polo Bridge incident in China, and then subsequently the Chinese heartland. Frank does a solid job of describing the strategic goals, the atrocities, the horrific causalities (into the hundreds of thousands), as well as detailing both Japan’s and China’s foreign policy aims in regards to Germany, the USSR, and the United States. These geo-political machinations enabled the Japanese militants to continue the war in China (which was bleeding both nations dry), and eventually led to two stark choices. One option for Japan was to seek to take advantage of Soviet weakness after Germany invaded the USSR in June of 1940, and take all of Manchuria (risking war with the USSR). The other was to bully the Vichy French and occupy French Indo-China. But such an occupation would likely risk war with the the European allies and the United States. The Netherlands (which had been overrun by Hitler’s armies in1940) still possessed the oil rich Dutch East Indies. Great Britain, too, was was teetering on the edge of defeat at the hands of the Nazis, while America was thought to be unready and unwilling to fight. Ultimately, the militants chose the latter “southern” course once Japanese intransigence brought about an American oil embargo on Japan which provided the necessary justification to go to war with the European allies.

There is so much in Frank’s narrative that it would take a lengthy review to do it all justice. I’ll leave that endeavor to you should you choose to read Tower of Skulls. But one important conclusion accomplished by Frank is his absolute demolition of those conspiracy theories that either Churchill or Roosevelt (or both) knew of the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and did little or nothing to stop it so as to bring isolationist America into the war against Germany and Japan. Frank presents and defends the sad but utterly inescapable conclusion that while American intelligence services and diplomats should have figured out what was to come, the Japanese did an excellent job of masking their true intentions and pulled off the successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. At the end of the day, American political and military officials simply could not believe that Japan would actually dare do such a thing. And so the watchdogs of the Pacific Fleet and Hawaiian air bases remained asleep at the switch on the morning of December 7, until the terse radio dispatch was sent to all commands soon after the attack began, “Air raid Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.”

I am sorry I didn’t get to this essential volume earlier as there was much here I didn’t know about the behind the scenes political maneuvering—the eventual basis for the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific War and which set in motion the post war tensions between the USA, Communist China, and The Soviet Union throughout the cold war. This is a remarkable book in its scope, yet remains brief and readable.

But this book has one very serious shortcoming. The twit (I mean the editor or publisher, and trust me my rude designation is well deserved) who decided not to use conventional footnotes or endnotes did the author (and the reader) a tremendous disservice. Frank’s extensive and dense notes are not numbered or listed in the text, but are collected by the page in the volume to which they refer (so, for example, there will be four “page fourteen” notes, but no way to tie these notes to the point they support, or that to which they refer in the text. This is maddening in a book like this where that information is both important and useful. Whoever did this, stop it!!!! Don’t do it again!!!!

Craig L Symonds’ 2013 book on the Battle of Midway is must reading for anyone interested in World War 2 and the war in the Pacific. The Battle of Midway took place on June 6, 1942. In the span of eight short minutes, the entire course of the war in the Pacific was transformed. Japan’s six month offensive to open the war (the Kudo Butai) was over and the Japanese war effort became an increasingly futile attempt to hold on to previously conquered territory. Three Japanese aircraft carriers were left in flaming ruins on the morning of June 6, shortly to sink. A fourth carrier was sunk later that day. The loss of these irreplaceable vessels, along with their veteran aircrews and carrier aircraft robbed Japan of its most valuable offensive weaponry. The battle for Guadalcanal began that August, with Japan reverting to a defensive posture using surface fleets (battleships and cruisers), land-based air, and desperately trying to resupply and hold on to island bases. The war in the Pacific had shifted to the Americans going over to offense and the Japanese taking up a defensive “hold on as long as you can” posture.

There are a number of excellent volumes on the Battle of Midway. Walter Lord’s 1957 Incredible Victory was largely based on interviews with participants, while Gordon Prange’s Miracle at Midway (1982) was a well-researched book from a noted scholar of the Pacific war. Parshall and Tully’s Shattered Sword (2007) drew heavily upon Japanese sources and clarified a number of myths and overlooked factors which led to the US Victory. Nerdy World War Two students loved it (I sure did).

Symond’s book draws upon the vast wealth of the previous studies and surpasses them all because Symond is a careful historian and also a great storyteller. Simply put, this is a book which recounts the Battle of Midway in a compelling, page-turning manner, yet without giving short shrift to the strategic importance or facts of the battle. If you read one book on the Battle of Midway (and you should) this is it.

An aside—one of the worst war movies ever made was the 1976 movie Midway. The worst war movie I’ve seen was Pearl Harbor, bumping Midway and Battle of the Bulge from that honor. Don’t even start me on these . . .

I recently finished volume two of Ian Toll’s Pacific War trilogy. I highly recommend the series to anyone interested in World War Two. Toll has given us a wonderful survey of the Pacific War.

The Pacific War has been a life-long interest to me, probably because when I was growing up I was fascinated by stories of those who fought in the Pacific—Sailors and Marines who later became Orange County Sheriffs and worked as security guards at Knott’s Berry Farm. They would often come into our family business (a Christian Bookstore) for coffee, to chat with my dad, and scarf down cake, pie, and other goodies which my folks provided for them. And they told war stories . . .

One security guard (“Bud”) who had been a medic, won the Navy Cross for rescuing several wounded Marines while under machine gun fire on Bougainville in 1943. You would never think of him as a war hero. Another (“little Eddie”) was on the cruiser Helena when it was torpedoed and sunk during the battle of Kula Gulf in July of 1943. He told of being stunned by the torpedo hits, going into shark-filled water at night, trying to avoid or diving under burning fuel oil, helping wounded buddies stay afloat, while treading water until rescued by a destroyer. The stories absolutely fascinated me then, and have ever since.

While a teen, I read the entire 15 volumes of Samuel Elliot Morrison’s History of Naval Operations in World War Two from cover to cover. I’ve read countless books on the War in the Pacific since, and so was glad to learn of Toll’s series. I read the first volume shortly after its publication and couldn’t put it down. Since my day job kept me very busy (and retirement still does), I only recently finished volume two of Toll’s series and will soon tackle volume 3 (the final volume).

Toll’s volumes are fast paced, well-researched, and draw upon first-hand accounts from both sides as well as utilizing a wealth of Japanese archival sources not available to previous historians such as Morrison. Major participants in the War (such as Nimitz, Halsey, MacArthur, Spruance, Yamamoto) are introduced and the controversies surrounding them are given fair treatment with a minimum of editorializing. Toll gives us sufficient detail to follow the various naval engagements, yet manages to keep the big picture strategic implications before the reader, which is not often the case when there is so much ground to cover.

The highest compliment I can pay Toll is that I learned much, and enjoyed his narrative immensely. This is really good stuff—the way military history and campaigns ought to be covered.

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked a sleeping Pacific Fleet moored in a line near Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. Battleships were the main target of the attack (since no American aircraft carriers were present). America’s battleship fleet was composed of World War One vintage warships, named for states. They had been modernized over time, but none had sufficient modern anti-aircraft weapons or torpedo protection.

Like many of you, in my youth I built several of Revell’s model of the USS Arizona. It was a rite of passage. Getting those tripod masts to fit was a real challenge. Painting the waterline red and getting it perfectly straight was even harder. So the fate of these ships has long been of interest to me.

The Arizona suffered a magazine explosion and was destroyed beyond repair. Many of you have visited the memorial. One thousand, one hundred and seventy-seven sailors died in the conflagration. The Battleship Utah (which had been demoted to a target ship) was anchored on the other side of the harbor, was sunk, and still remains at its berth as a war grave to this day (though few visit it). The Oklahoma took a number of torpedoes, and capsized in the shallow water with hundreds of men trapped inside. Four hundred and twenty-nine men died. Many survived within the ship for some time before dying from lack of oxygen—a more terrible manner of death is hard to imagine. But thirty-two of those trapped below decks were eventually rescued—an amazing ordeal and a heroic effort to cut through the hull to rescue them. The California sunk upright at the end of the line. The Nevada got underway but was run aground by its captain to keep his ship from sinking in the channel, so as not to block it. The Pennsylvania was in dry dock and suffered relatively minor damage. The Tennessee, West Virginia, and Maryland all sank at their moorings and were badly damaged.

What to do with the five salvageable warships? This is the subject of Avenging Pearl Harbor: America's Battleships Raised from the Dead. The author recounts what is truly a herculean effort by engineers and scores of tradesman, raising the ships out of the mud and muck, getting them seaworthy enough so they could return to ports in the American mainland so that they could be repaired and modernized and eventually return to the fight. It took a year or more to complete the work on most of them, but return to fight they did, including the Battle of Suriago Strait on October 24-25, 1944, when the Pennsylvania, California, Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee turned their guns on a Japanese fleet attempting to sneak through the straits at night (a part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf). The large Japanese fleet (with multiple capital ships) was utterly destroyed.

That story is well-known and often told (The Battle of Leyte Gulf). What Keith Warren Lloyd does in his book is describe the salvage operations in Pearl Harbor in conditions beyond human imagination. Each of these sunken battleships had thousands of pounds of meat, dairy, and produce in their freezers, human remains throughout, tons of petroleum products and toxic chemicals, along with tons of gunpowder and explosive shells in their magazines. We associate heroism with combat—rightly so. But I dare say it took very brave men to don primitive diving gear to go into these ships where toxic fumes filled the spaces below that had not flooded and which would kill them immediately if exposed.

All in all, it is a remarkable story of how tradesmen, divers, welders, carpenters and others did something thought impossible—raise giant warships from the dead to live and fight again. This is a well-told look at a triumph of good ole American know how and tenacity.

James Hallas’s 2019 book, Saipan: The Battle that Doomed Japan is a well researched and thorough volume covering an important battle, conducted in the mid-Pacific from June 15 until July 9, 1944. The Battle of Saipan (which is often obscured by the shadow of D-Day) is one of the key battles of the War in the Pacific, yet few know anything about it. My recent post on The Other D-Day: Operation Forager prompted me to pick Hallas’s volume from my shelf of purchased but “not yet read” books and give it a go.

There were a number of significant “turning points” in the Pacific theater: Midway, the Guadalcanal campaign, the relentless march of American forces up through the Solomon Islands into the Marshalls and the Marianas (including Guam, Tinian, and Saipan). The Japanese saw the Marianas as the anchor of their inner defense ring. If they could hold on to them, perhaps the Americans would tire of the protracted bloody war and offer Japan some sort of peace agreement. But if the Marianas fell to the Americans, Japan would suffer a calamity unsurpassed in the war to date.

I’ll leave the details of the battle to Hallas to tell, but those considering tackling Hallas’s book, here is some of the ground he covers,

Students of the Pacific theater of World War Two know that casualty rate for Marines and soldiers who landed at Tarawa and at Peleliu was about 25%, so we tend to speak of them as very “costly battles” which modern historians often contend were unnecessary (especially in the case of Peleliu). The casualty rate on Saipan was about the same. On the 77,000 who landed on the island, about 3,250 Americans died, with an additional 13,100 wounded (which does not include naval casualties of about 200 more). Japanese losses were at least 30,000, with 10,000 additional civilian deaths. Hallas describes the brutality of the battle in vivid and gory detail—throughout the book he describes the graphic nature of injuries and deaths among both American and Japanese combatants. I grant that it is important to understand the horrific nature of that sort of fighting, but I am not sure I needed to know in such graphic and repeated detail what swords, bullets, grenades, and artillery rounds can do to a human body.

Hallas describes the ferocity of the Japanese defense of the island, based upon the willingness of the Japanese soldier or sailor to die for the Emperor either at the hands of the “American devils,” or by suicide (usually by grenade). Hallas’s narrative is especially gripping when he describes the final Gyokusai (Banzai) charge of the island’s defenders on the night of July 7, when between 3-4 thousand of the remaining Japanese soldiers and sailors charged through weary and unprepared American defenders, accounting for a significant number of those Americans killed and wounded in the invasion. Low on weapons and ammunition, the Japanese used swords, spears, and hand grenades in their attack on American positions which continued without let-up or mercy until the attackers were killed or committed suicide. When the Gyokusai was over, so too was the battle for Saipan. But the scene of the dead of both armies left behind was grizzly.

Hallas mentions the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” tangentially, and only insofar as it relates to the invasion of Saipan. But given the massive loss of most of Japan’s remaining naval and army aircraft while attempting to come to the aid of Saipan’s defenders, in addition to a number of major naval units (including three aircraft carriers), it took time for the Japanese to fully realize the crushing extent of their defeat. The destruction of much of the remaining Japanese fleet and air power, coupled with the loss of the Marianas meant that for all intents and purposes, Japan was finished—”doomed” as the subtitle correctly indicates. Yet, as Hallas points out, the Japanese seemed completely incapable of accepting the obvious, and only deepened in their resolve to fight to the end. That was the worst possible take-away from the battle.

The loss of Saipan meant that the Japanese home islands were now in reach of the brand new American B-29 bombers and that destruction on a massive scale was about to fall upon Japan’s cities from the sky. Japan’s war minister (Hideki Tojo) resigned in disgrace when Saipan fell, while the Emperor now worried out loud about what was soon to come—the B-29 raids on Japan began in November of 1944. Chuichi Nagumo (who led the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway, had been relegated to a desk job on Saipan (after the disaster at Midway) committed suicide, along with the island’s commander, General Saito.

The difficulties, delays, the shortcomings with amphibious equipment, and the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese defenders were not lost on American war planners. If the Japanese would fight like this to keep Saipan, what would it be like to invade Japan? It is ironic that both atomic bombs which fell on Japan came from B-29s which were based on Tinian Island, just five miles north of Saipan.

Hallas’s Saipan is all in all a good book. The gore is tedious (even if some of it is necessary). The book truly suffers from a lack of good maps (there is one on the inside fly of the cover, but that is it). Thankfully Google maps covers Saipan and you can consult your phone whenever you want to figure out where something is taking place.

This is a much overlooked battle and well-worthy of your consideration. Hallas is a good place to start.