Tower of Skulls by Richard Frank

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, July 1937 - May 1942
By Richard B. Frank
WW Norton, 2020

Richard Frank (author of, among other things, two very good studies of Guadalcanal and the end of the Japanese Imperial army) intends his immense new book Tower of Skulls to be the first installment in a projected trilogy dealing with the Asia-Pacific War and its gradual morphing into the Pacific Theater of WWII. Only casually instructed in 20th-century history, most Americans in 2020 might reflexively say that Asia-Pacific War began when the Japanese attacked the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor in 1941, but Frank refreshingly spends the first half of this first volume writing about the long preliminary hostilities between China and Japan. It’s only in Chapter 11 (out of 18) that Pearl Harbor is finally attacked.

Frank is a fantastic writer and a shrewd judge of narrative focus, and so despite the innumerable times the events of that attack have been chronicled in the last 80 years, his account is riveting reading. This is just one of the many occasions on which he has the sense to step back and let official documents hammer home some of his dramatic beats, as when Secretary of State Cordell Hull, seething with the knowledge the attacks, meets with Japanese emissaries:

Nomura and Kurusu arrived at the State Department at 1405 (2:05 p.m.). Under Roosevelt’s instructions not to reveal knowledge of the attack, Hull received them at 1420 (2:20 p.m.). The secretary did not ask them to sit. Nomura apologized for their tardiness. He explained his government had ordered him to deliver the message at 1:00 p.m. - why, his government had not explained - but decoding the cable had caused the delay. Although Hull already knew the contents of the memorandum, he proceeded to adjust his black-ribboned pince-nez and read it as though for the first time. Then he looked at the Japanese representatives and, according to his aide, said:

In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions - infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.

“Alistair Cooke, then a rising reporter for the British Broadcasting Corporation, knew Hull well and demurred with this official version as a ‘pale, formal paraphrase of the Secretary’s words,’ Frank writes. “Cooke earnestly lamented the loss of Hull’s actual ‘abusive idiom, deriving half from animal biology, half from the Bible, of which the Tennessee mountaineers need never be ashamed.’” 

Frank dedicates this volume to the great American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and it’s the highest possible compliment to Frank that this connection is evident on every page of Tower of Skulls. The broader political and military backdrop is always skillfully evoked, but it’s people who drive this story, and vividly human moments that are its most memorable scenes, as during the infamous Bataan Death March:

Exhaustion from the siege and the toll of the march soon sent men collapsing to the ground. Some guards would permit other prisoners to help the fallen, but all too often if a prisoner remained recumbent, a guard would put a bayonet through his temple, and if the body still wiggled, fire a round into his head. An American surgeon, Alvin Poweleit, saw a dead American every couple of yards and even more Filipinos. Another officer began counting just beheaded bodies; he counted twenty-seven in an equal number of miles before he stopped, as the task was causing him too much stress.

Tower of Skulls, with its great sweep and its 150 pages of often-peppy endnotes, takes its place in the enormous catalog of writings on the Pacific Theater as one of the strongest entries in many years. Readers curious to know the deep roots of the subject could hardly do better than starting here.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.