Twilight of the Gods
The final volume of the magisterial Pacific War Trilogy from acclaimed historian Ian W. Toll, "one of the great storytellers of war" (Evan Thomas). Twilight of the Gods is a riveting account of the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in atomic blasts. Ian W. Toll's narratives of combat in the air, at sea, and on the beaches are as gripping as ever, but he also takes the reader into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo, where the great questions of strategy and diplomacy were decided. Lionel Barber of the Financial Times chose the second volume of the series (The Conquering Tide) as the preeminent book of 2016, calling it "military history at its best." Readers who have been waiting for the conclusion of Toll's masterpiece will be thrilled by this final volume. - Publisher.
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What Hacker News says
- Even more incredible, the USA landed on Saipan soon after the Allies landed in Normandy. The landing ships for operation FORAGER had to travel 1,000 miles across open ocean.
Recommended reading: The Fleet at Flood Tide by James Hornfischer, and Twilight of the Gods by Ian Toll.
- The conventional bombing of Japan was scheduled for massive increase. To quote Ian Toll's "Twilight of the Gods":
> If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. [...] At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan. According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.
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