The human cost of pride

The battleship USS Missouri had been built for war, but this day she would vault the world into an era of peace. It was Sept. 2, 1945.

The Missouri’s decks and brasswork were polished to the nines, and the ceremonial deck bustled with admirals and generals. Lower-ranking officers and ordinary sailors perched like pigeons anywhere they could fit—on guns, overlooks, lookout platforms, even in the yardarms—trying to get as close as they could to the historic event about to take place. Few could believe this day had finally come: The treaty restoring world peace was finally going to be signed. Fewer still could believe it would happen on an American battleship anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Citizens of the world met the end of the war with a mixture of joy and relief, but both emotions were weighed down with weariness. The United States had sat out the war as long as possible before emerging as the driving force for victory. By then, the global death toll was more than 65 million.

The Allies had vanquished Nazis in the Atlantic theater and imperialists in the Pacific. Now, America’s victorious admirals and generals were some of the most famous people in the world, larger than life—rock stars before anyone knew what that meant. Following Japan’s surrender, grateful citizens turned out in droves to hear these men speak—in person, on the radio, and on newsreels.

Times, and our heroes, were simpler then. The humbler among them had gone quietly about winning the war. Others, though, loomed large in the public imagination—and in their own minds—and new historical analysis reveals the staggering human cost of that pride. It’s the brand of pride that arises from nearly unchecked power, from hero worship, and from the objectification of people who don’t look like us. This kind of pride would lead, arguably, to at least 250,000 unnecessary deaths—Americans and allies, military and civilian—and delay peace in favor of individual military glory.

When a nation goes to war, its people strive to put a human face to their conflict, anointing leaders they believe will properly represent the nation’s spirit. Some measure up—Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Gen. Colin Powell, for example. Others, like Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, prove to have feet of clay.

Today, as we face a potential Pacific conflict with China, we learn from the last Pacific war that humility saves and pride kills.

Men of war

As the representatives of former belligerents gathered on the Missouri, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who had been named to lead all the Allied participants in these proceedings, arranged himself in the same practiced, regal pose he had affected for most of his adult life. While other generals and admirals were transported to the Missouri by means of a traditional admiral’s “barge,” MacArthur had insisted on upstaging his perceived nemesis, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, by pulling up on a destroyer. MacArthur had spent much of the previous four years trying to create the impression that he—not his army but unambiguously and personally he—would win this war. He would use this day’s proceedings to further burnish his myth.

Also at the event was Fleet Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the 3rd Fleet. Halsey had selected the Missouri as his flagship and therefore saw himself as somewhat of a host for the proceedings. Despite Japan’s surrender, he felt little hospitality for the Japanese delegation. Halsey had sent out stern guidance on how he intended the Japanese to be treated—including the snarky order to “investigate and shoot down all snoopers, not vindictively, but in a friendly sort of way.” As we’ll see, this disdain was not new.

Standing toward the rear of the American delegation: Gen. Curtis LeMay, the Army Air Forces architect of the Allied rain of death over Japanese cities. LeMay had been an unapologetic advocate for waging total war. One of his more infamous lines: “There are no innocent civilians.” It wasn’t just bluster: The ­general had spent the latter part of the war doing his best to eliminate as many civilians as possible.

Nimitz: A humbler hero

In contrast, representing the United States for the Allied signatories on the Missouri that day was Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz. Nimitz was soft-spoken and kind. When asked to take command of the Pacific Fleet after the Pearl Harbor attack, he demurred, insisting there were admirals far more senior to him who ought to be given the opportunity first. President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought otherwise. After taking command of the fleet, Nimitz lived austerely. Despite his lofty four-star (and later five-star) rank, he shared his Pacific Fleet commander’s house with two other officers. He was the first Navy admiral ever to award an African American sailor—in this case Doris Miller—a Navy Cross for valorous action during the Pearl Harbor attack.

After the attack on Pearl in December 1941, Nimitz relieved Adm. Husband Kimmel as Pacific Fleet commander in chief, and for the United States conditions looked grim. The majority of our capital ships had been sunk in the Dec. 7 attack. American and Filipino forces were then routed near Bataan. Our British allies had surrendered in Singapore without much of a fight. Wake Island fell rapidly to a small Japanese force. Then, in quick succession, the Japanese took the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, Burma, Bougainville, Rabaul, and Sumatra. The empire looked unstoppable.

Still, though outmanned and outgunned in the early days, the Pacific Fleet under Nimitz stacked ­victory upon victory over the next three years, systematically destroying the largest navy in the world. By May 1945, Japan was being effectively starved by ­submarine blockade and its naval and shore-based infrastructure progressively destroyed by carrier ­aircraft and strategic bombing.

And yet the empire was far from defeated. There were still as many as 6 million Japanese under arms. The empire recalled soldiers from China and Korea in an effort to field more than 40 active divisions, and also inducted every single male age 15 to 60 and every single female age 17 to 40—another 18 to 20 million defenders.

The Americans, of course, had an ultra-secret plan to cow Japan into surrender with a pair of bomb strikes unprecedented in human history. But even Manhattan Project scientists were uncertain whether the atomic bombs would work, so U.S. war planners were diverting forces from the European theater to prepare for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. Should an invasion become necessary, even the most optimistic estimates put the number of casualties at more than a million.

Japan would not be underestimated. In contrast with the Navy of today, the interwar Navy of the early 20th century had worked hard to develop true naval theorists and strategists. The brightest minds attended the Naval War College, where they studied strategic and operational concepts. Even prior to the Pearl Harbor bombings, most flag officers who would lead the American Navy in World War II had already spent a great deal of time thinking about how the Empire of Japan might be defeated, should it ever come to that.

Nimitz himself had studied Japan for decades and visited the country while commanding several of his ships. As a young ensign, he met and even became friendly with Japanese Adm. Togo Nakagoro, the son of a samurai, victor in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and still a great hero of Japan. Later, as a captain, Nimitz led part of the American delegation marching in Togo’s 1934 funeral procession. Seven years later, though, he found himself in conflict with Togo’s beloved nation.

An effective strategy must be focused directly on the defeat of the enemy. Nimitz knew each strategic objective he selected in his theater of operations should allow the Pacific allies to inch closer to defeating Japan, while minimizing the loss of American lives and materiel. Nimitz believed in bypassing ­secondary objectives, even those that possessed a degree of moral justification, such as the liberation of American citizens in the Philippines. Why? Because he opposed adding to the Allied death toll unnecessarily while also delaying Japan’s defeat.

What Nimitz did not foresee is that American military leadership, to include President Roosevelt himself, would permit pride and glory-seeking to actively subvert what any objective strategist might consider a commonsense plan for victory.

MacArthur: “I shall return”

By the time Gen. Douglas MacArthur came out of retirement to fight in World War II, he was, by law, too old to serve. He had served in the Philippines in the 1930s with a future president, Dwight Eisenhower, as his aide. Then a major, Eisenhower later expressed his dislike for MacArthur, perhaps in part because at age 50 MacArthur had acquired a 16-year-old Filipina mistress. Six months later, he took her to Washington as a “kept woman”—let’s be plain: kept girl—even while serving as Army chief of staff.

By 1941, MacArthur was again living in the Philippines, where he had been appointed by Philippine President Manuel Quezon to serve as field marshal of the Philippine Army. In that role, MacArthur donned a special uniform of his own design. It’s one you may remember, worthy of a character in a Hollywood movie: a leather bomber jacket, a striking set of aviator sunglasses, and an elaborate, nonregulation hat he wore everywhere, even indoors. He stuck with this get-up even after he was recalled to active duty, and even when he called on Roosevelt, his commander in chief. “Douglas,” FDR asked MacArthur one day, “why don’t you put on proper clothes when you visit me?”

When MacArthur was evacuated from the Philippines in March 1942, he made perhaps his most famous pronouncement, declaring, “I shall return.” It was also his greatest strategic blunder. A well-­considered strategic plan must not only decide on interim objectives, but also which objectives should be bypassed in order to accelerate the schedule of enemy defeat. MacArthur did not bother himself with such details. Rather, he operated on ego. And many Americans loved it.

The public adored his bravado, and American ­magazines and factories were papered with posters of MacArthur striking a heroic pose. But his promise to return to the Philippines actually amounted to a declaration of U.S. policy. And this three-word oath, one we still quote today, forced Roosevelt into a strategic campaign that likely lengthened the war by months and increased the number of Allied casualties by tens of thousands.

The general’s self-aggrandizement did not stop at ­verbal unrestraint. As historian and author John C. McManus points out in his book Fire and Fortitude, “While his troops were fighting and dying, MacArthur orchestrated his own award of the Medal of Honor—not for exhibiting the kind of heroism the medal was created for, but for defending, and I hasten to point out, losing, the Philippines.” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall said MacArthur’s award was granted “to offset any propaganda by the enemy directed at him for leaving [the Philippines],” but McManus finds the award “incredibly inappropriate and overtly political, if not downright appalling.”

MacArthur’s excess body count extended beyond the Philippines—for example, 1,200 unnecessary dead, when he organized the taking of Peleliu to ­“protect his flank.” Peleliu is 730 miles away from Leyte. In Civil War terms, this would have been like Sherman ordering the capture of Oklahoma City to protect his flank while advancing on Atlanta.

The general’s misadventures were little more than a bacchanal of ego, with the fallout borne mostly by men of low rank—and their families. His promised return to the Philippines delayed the Okinawa ­offensive, the final major land campaign of the war, by more than six months, burning through vast military resources that might have been used to neutralize forces in Japan proper. It also generated more than 60,000 American casualties, in addition to the more than 150,000 fatalities among the Filipino population MacArthur claimed to have been trying to protect.

Halsey: “Only in hell”

Toyoko Inoue, a Japanese schoolgirl, had things to protect, too: her nation and way of life—at least that’s what they told her at school. Toyoko was just 15 years old as the war neared its end.

“They were practicing with sharpened bamboo sticks,” said her son, James Belcher Jr. There were “squads of kids that were being trained. And my mother was one of those girls. She was told that you have to kill one American before you can go to heaven, or the equivalent of heaven.”

Belcher is Japanese American. His father, James Belcher Sr., a survivor of the sinking of USS Indianapolis, met his mother, Toyoko, after the war. James Jr. recalls a conversation with Toyoko about those last desperate days, as Japanese citizens faced what seemed an inevitable American invasion. He asked her about learning to fight off the American barbarians with sticks: “So you were doing this … for the government? For the protection of the country? She said, ‘No, no, I was doing this because of my brothers and sisters and my grandparents. I had to protect them.’”

Popular lore has it that such attitudes sprang from bushido, the Japanese warrior ethic that gave rise to the kamikaze. And from a top-down perspective, ­perhaps some of it did. But much of the rhetoric used by Japanese leaders to justify such tactics came—direct and unedited—from the mouth of an American, Adm. William Halsey.

To Nimitz, Bull Halsey was both a blessing and a curse. Early in the war, as the Japanese racked up victories, American admirals were still learning how to fight. Nimitz had concluded that the commander of the South Pacific area, Vice Adm. Robert Ghormley, had become dispirited and exhausted, so he put Halsey in charge. Halsey was an aggressive warrior who took the fight to the enemy. As historian Samuel Morison observed, “[Halsey’s] appointment … at the darkest moment of the Guadalcanal campaign lifted the hearts of every officer and bluejacket.”

But Halsey had a dark side. For example, he was well aware of the American tendency to use racial slurs when referring to the Japanese people. Dehumanizing the enemy makes it easier to kill them and has been common throughout history. Halsey amplified that depravity exponentially.

According to historian John Dower, the admiral told a news conference in early 1945 that he believed the Japanese “were a product of mating between female apes and the worst Chinese criminals who had been banished from China.” These comments were picked up in Japan and transmitted to the populace, as Halsey knew they would be.

While Halsey had earned fame with his audacity in battle, that fame emboldened him in his vicious war of words. He extended his pronouncements beyond enemy combatants to Japanese civilians. A few of his most outrageous remarks:

“We will let our occupation forces loose in Tokyo. That will be a liberty town we will all really enjoy.”

“The only good Jap is a Jap who’s been dead for six months.”

“When we get to Tokyo … we’ll have a little celebration where Tokyo was.”

“Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”

Halsey even suggested that American occupiers should castrate all Japanese males and spay all females.

It does not matter whether Americans believed this racist bombast. What matters is the human cost and, from a military perspective, the effect his words likely had on the progress of the war. “Halsey’s ­pugnacious tirades … contradicted and undermined themes of Allied propaganda,” writes historian Ian Toll. “Halsey simply gave vent to his feelings without pausing to think of the consequences.”

Soon Halsey’s fame exceeded that of Nimitz himself. He reveled in it, going to extremes to stand apart from other naval leaders. But his hyperbole actually hardened Japanese resolve. His statements were repeated verbatim and without exaggeration by Japanese leaders, contributing to the perception that they would not survive an American occupation, and would therefore have to fight to every last man, woman, and child. It is impossible to calculate the influence of Halsey’s racist rhetoric on Japanese leaders. Some wanted to dig in, to continue the fight, and used Halsey’s words to justify doing so. Might others have capitulated sooner had they not feared the admiral would make good on his dehumanizing threats?

Nimitz understood the problem but could not ­figure out how to moderate Halsey. To be clear, as a senior Navy leader, it was Halsey’s job to kill the enemy. However, to the extent that his rhetoric made the job of defeating Japan harder, it was inexcusable. And even as Nimitz moved to a reasoned strategy, Halsey continued to cultivate his own fame.

The American media helped. On July 23, 1945, he and his catchphrase “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and then kill more Japs” appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

LeMay: “There are no innocent civilians”

No American officer agreed with Halsey more than Army Air Forces Gen. Curtis LeMay. His philosophy of war: “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.” In the spring of 1945, LeMay intentionally targeted the poorest areas of Tokyo with firebombing attacks because houses of the destitute were built closer together and constructed of wood and paper. This made them more likely to burn out of control. LeMay’s near-maniacal disregard for human life would one day make him the perfect template for director Stanley Kubrick’s portrayal of the psychopathic general Jack D. Ripper in the 1964 Hollywood movie Doctor Strangelove. LeMay himself later admitted that if America had lost the war, he would probably have been tried as a war criminal.

To be clear, all sides targeted civilians during World War II in order to terrorize them into surrendering. Though this tactic had worked precisely nowhere, LeMay perpetuated it late into the war. In early 1945, he deployed enough napalm over Tokyo to kill well over 100,000 ­civilians. This became the deadliest act of war in human history—deadlier than either of the atomic strikes on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Did these raids have their intended effect of breaking the will of the Japanese people? Evidence indicates they did not. Japanese leaders simply began the mass migration of populations out of city centers. The people themselves, meanwhile, met the attacks with hardened stoicism, ­reinforcing the government’s narrative that the Japanese people would do better to arm schoolgirls like Toyoko Inoue rather than surrender to the Americans.

In contrast with LeMay’s sadistic yet conventional firebombing, evidence has shown that the atomic bombs were helpful in ending the war. At the very least, Japanese Emperor Hirohito used them as justification to accept terms of a surrender that his military commanders did not want.

The outcome of all this is that tens of thousands of American lives were lost pursuing flawed strategies to appease glory seekers. While the enemy did the actual killing, in many cases it was our own leaders who put them in a position to do so by elevating ambition and pride above sound strategy—and humanity. As with King David, it was the sin of pride that spidered out to afflict nations.

—Capt. William Toti, a 26-year Navy veteran and retired submarine commander, is co-host of the podcast The Unauthorized History of the Pacific War

For more about this writer, see Backstory in this issue.

Of the more than 16 million U.S. service members who fought in World War II …

• 70% served in the Army (including Army Air Forces)
• 26% served in the Navy
• 4% served in the Marines
• 291,557 died in battle
• 113,842 died in non-theater service
• 670,846 suffered non-mortal wounds
• 167,278 are still living as of Sept. 30, 2022*

*According to the National WWII Museum, these vets are dying at a rate of 180 per day.

Sources: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National WWII Museum