The Long Night

BUT NOT IN SHAME (427 pp.)--John Toland--Random House ($6.50).

"The past," argues John Toland, "must not be forgotten, or even forgiven--only understood." The unforgettable, in his chronicle of the Pacific war's first six months, is the unforgivable: the lunatic optimism of a U.S. totally unprepared for war. What is hard to understand today is how the nation survived that first half year of disaster and defeat.

To reconstruct this story of the war's long night, Historian Toland traveled almost 90,000 miles, interviewed 800 survivors, digested mountains of documents that ranged from official histories on both sides to the combatants' personal diaries (and married his Japanese interpreter). By smooth crosscutting from one battle arena to another and viewing events wherever possible through the eyes of the men and women who took part in them, he has turned out a panoramic history that is as suspenseful as a first-rate documentary--and often as moving as a novel.

The bare facts are grim enough.

For more than a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ambassador Joseph Grew had warned from Tokyo that the Japanese might make "an all-out, do-or-die attempt . . . with dangerous and dramatic suddenness." When it came, the joint U.S. Army-Navy Hawaiian defense plan had been circulated as a model of strategic planning to all Navy district commanders--but was not in effect in Hawaii on Dec. 7. Ten full hours after Japan's virtually unopposed destruction of the U.S. Pacific fleet, the enemy found Douglas MacArthur's Far East air force neatly arrayed for extermination on Clark Field in the Philippines. The only remaining major deterrent to Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia consisted of the British battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse--and they were sunk three days later. Though Corregidor held out for five months, General Jonathan Wainwright's surrender--"with broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame"--was the greatest capitulation in the history of U.S. arms.

Samurai v. Optimist. One of Toland's most effective devices is to flash from the misery of a hopeless battlefield to the wild unrealism of cables from Washington that demanded impossible resistance in high-flown language designed to impress world opinion. Commanders themselves could be dispiritingly callous: MacArthur, arriving safe in Australia as his troops made their last stand in Bataan, declared airily: "That's the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die--and the difference is just an eyelash." Too often, the difference was between the dedicated professionalism of the samurai and the bumbling optimism of U.S. commanders who maintained until the moment of attack that the Japanese would never be "stupid enough" to attack the mighty Pacific fleet and were incapable of mounting an independent carrier striking force.

Toland's meticulous investigation provides some fascinating footnotes. Major James Devereux, the gallant U.S. Marine Corps defender of Wake, did not send the famed message: SEND US MORE JAPS. The message was idly tapped out by an unknown signalman. Nor did the U.S.S. Houston sink four Japanese transports off Java's Bantam Bay. They were actually torpedoed in error by the Japanese cruiser Mikuma, Toland reveals. General Imamura assumed that the Houston was responsible, and his chief of staff was too embarrassed to contradict him.

On to Midway. The turning point of the war, according to Toland, came at 7:24 a.m., April 18, 1942, when Jimmy Doolittle took off from the carrier deck of the U.S.S. Hornet at the head of 16 B-25s. Though the raid on Tokyo did little actual damage, Toland reports that Japanese officials were astonished to find that their capital was so vulnerable, concluded that the nation was likely to panic under sustained air attack. The result was the Japanese decision to invade Midway and the Aleutians, the likeliest U.S. bomber bases. Dangerously overextended, they blundered into the Battle of the Coral Sea, in which a U.S. task force sank a Japanese carrier, first major ship to be sunk by the Allies.

Four weeks later at Midway, U.S. dive-bombers inflicted the war's first clear defeat on the Japanese, sinking four Japanese carriers. Long years of war were still to come, but thereafter the U.S. was never again to fight against hopeless odds.

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