Twilight of the Gods by Ian Toll

Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945
By Ian W. Toll
WW Norton, 2020

Ian Toll concludes his trilogy of books about the Pacific Theater of the Second World War with the longest book of the three, Twilight of the Gods, in which he quite rightly points out that in 1944 and ‘45, the war got very much bigger. The stories told in the previous two volumes, Pacific Crucible and The Conquering Tide were epic enough in their scope and detail, but they tend to feel a bit provincial compared to the final act in an epic struggle between the Allies and the Empire of Japan. 

This final volume chronicles sign-post incidents in that struggle like the battles for Manila and Okinawa, the thrilling, deadly duels between warships and their accompanying swarms of fighter aircrafts, and, in a vivid episode, the massive assault on Iwo Jima:

The bombardment force, which had arrived off Iwo Jima the same day the carrier planes hit Tokyo, buried the islands under an avalanche of high-explosive shells. Wrapped in a shroud of smoke and flame, nothing of Iwo Jima could be seen from the fleet, except (sporadically) the peak of Mt. Suribachi. The projectiles arced toward the island in parabolic trajectories, high and low, according to the caliber of the gun and the distance that each warship lay offshore. The successive explosions merged into a solitary, unbroken roar. Men watching from the rails of the ships felt the blast concussions in their viscera.

Toll skillfully shifts his narrative focus throughout all of this from the broad-scale operational side of things to the personal and even anecdotal. “If ending the war was so easy,” we read in one such close-focus moment, when the grieving parent of dead Japanese soldiers vents anger over the Emperor’s surrender, “if the emperor wielded the power to simply call it off, why hadn’t he acted earlier? ‘Your Majesty,’ one said, ‘because of this my sons have all died in vain, a dog’s death.’”

Naturally, the book’s tragic, dramatic high point deals with the main reason for that abrupt surrender: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Toll narrates this gruesomely familiar part of his story with the solemnity of a modern-day morality play; every detail is familiar from earlier accounts, but he imbues them a very readable austerity, as when he’s dealing with the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima:

Little Boy exploded at 8:16 a.m., 1,870 feet above the ground, only 550 feet wide of its aiming point. The nuclear chain reaction it triggered created a core temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius, igniting the air around it to a diameter of nearly a kilometer. The fireball engulfed the center of the city, vaporizing about 20,000 people on the ground. Thermal and ionizing radiation killed virtually all people within a kilometer of the surface of the fireball, burning them to death or rupturing their internal organs. Farther out, in successive concentric circles around the epicenter, people were exposed to gamma rays, neutron radiation, flash burns, the blast wave, and firestorms … Later, investigators found the shadows of people caught within the inner radius around the hypocenter. They had been vaporized, but their bodies had left faint silhouettes on the pavement or on nearby walls.

Twilight of the Gods (the title’s meaning is a bit of a mystery to me) traffics in such familiar narratives throughout its length, always guided by Toll’s spare eloquence and obvious mastery of his vast array of source materials. The Pacific Theater has had entire libraries of histories written about it over the last seven decades (with many, many more such histories to come, since 2021 marks a nice clean 80 year anniversary of its beginning), and Toll has written a trilogy fit to stand with some of the best of them.

—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.