Stanley Goldfarb
Washington Free Beacon, May 29, 2023
“The brutality of the fighting is not just portrayed as a glimpse into the darkness that takes over men’s souls in war but also is profoundly moving as he describes the commitment and valor of the Americans.”
REVIEW: To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945
by John C. McManus; Dutton Caliber, 448 pp., $35
To The End of the Earth is Professor John C. McManus’s final volume of a trilogy about the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater in World War II, and it is a masterpiece.
The conventional wisdom about the war in the Pacific is that the Marine Corps was the instrument of victory. Yet while the Marines fielded six divisions of troops, the Army contributed 18 divisions to the battles and fought alongside the Marines in both rapid amphibious landings, for which the Marines are so famous, as well as the brutal and bloody jungle fighting. McManus, who teaches U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, tells the story of the Army in the 44 months of Pacific war through the eyes of the troops fighting in the ghastly conditions of mud, disease, grisly injury, and fanatic Japanese resistance. He also presents the broad sweep of strategy and logistics that carried the day. In this volume he focuses on two campaigns—Luzon and Okinawa—out of the dozens of battles for the control of the Pacific theater.
By January 1945, the famous sea battles of Leyte Gulf had crippled the Japanese Navy, and the Marianas “Turkey Shoot” had decimated the Japanese Air Force. Conquest of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines archipelago, was the next Target of the massive military force led by General Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific. An amphibious invasion approximating Normandy was in the works.
The goal was twofold: secure more landing strips for the planned massive bombing of Japan and eliminate any barriers to an eventual amphibious invasion of the Japanese homeland. The other less concrete goal was to satisfy MacArthur’s desire to liberate Manila, the Bataan Peninsula, and the island fortress of Corregidor to compensate for his previous escape, at President Roosevelt’s order, in 1942. MacArthur had envisioned that the conquest of Luzon would be a lightning operation to capture the massive Clark Field, the American-built complex near Manila. It turned out to be anything but lightning. … [To read the full article, click here]
