Much has been written about the European Theater in World War II.
But the war in the Pacific Theater was the largest naval war ever fought. It covered the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and much of the fighting took place in remote, wild environments.
How did the conflict impact those environments heretofore untouched by the outside world? And what about the Indigenous peoples who lived there?
Ian W. Toll is the author of Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy and the Pacific War Trilogy—Pacific Crucible, The Conquering Tide, and Twilight of the Gods.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Ian joins Ross to explain how airbases were built on hundreds of Pacific islands during WWII and describe how the scale of development radically and irrevocably changed the ecosystems there.
Ian discusses how hundreds of shipwrecks from WWII have the potential to turn into environmental disasters at any time and weighs in on what we can do to avoid a modern-day war in the Pacific—and why it’s crucial.
Listen in for Ian’s insight on the logistical prowess of the US to ramp up shipbuilding during WWII and find out why Admiral Halsey ranked the bulldozer among the five most important weapons of the Pacific War.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy by Ian W. Toll
Ian W. Toll’s Pacific War Trilogy
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge
Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor of Nori and one of the co-founders here. Today I have with me Ian W. Toll, the author of Six Frigots, as well as his Pacific War trilogy, Pacific Crucible, The Conquering Tide, and Twilight of the Gods. Thanks for being here, Ian. It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me. It’s my sincere pleasure. I love your books. I’ve read this trilogy twice. Six Frigates I read recently, too, which is fantastic as well.
But I have to say, I think it’s pretty unlikely that you get a lot of climate or environmental podcast invitations. Is this your first?
Ian W. Toll: This is my first. Yes, this is my first. Actually, one of my oldest friends is the host of another environmental podcast, and I have sent him a couple of guests. But he had never asked me to do his podcast, and I never had expected it. So this was a pleasant surprise to be asked to do something outside my normal space, which is history.
Ross Kenyon: I think when you have guests on, too, I think people have a tendency to go into their regular spiel. So whenever you can break them out of it a little bit, I think it makes for better radio. Not to put the pressure on too much on you, but... I know you can probably feel a little bit of that now, given that you’re outside of your normal Ken. Maybe we can start there, though. I think people are super familiar with the European theater in World War II.
The Pacific, I think, is much more mysterious to most listeners. Of all the things that you could write thousands of pages about, how did you land on World War II’s Pacific theater?
Ian W. Toll: Yeah, well, really, I’d come at it in two directions. One, I’d always been really interested in Japan. I’d lived there as a child. From the ages of 11 to 14, my father’s company had transferred him there. So, you know, those are formative years, obviously, for anyone living in Tokyo. And so, you know, in a way, I still feel like the place is my home. And I had gotten very interested in the history of the Second World War, you know, back then when I was 12 years old.
And so that had just always been an interest. And then I separately got very interested in naval history. Not just during the era of World War II, but of the era of wooden ships, wooden sailing ships. Sounds like you just read some Patrick O'Brien and set you off or something. Yeah, Patrick O'Brien was definitely one of the authors who got me really fascinated that subject. He’s, for your listeners, is an English historical novelist who wrote a very long series of books about The British Royal Navy during the period of the Napoleonic Wars.
Really fantastic novel, some of the best historical novels I think ever written. And that’s part of what led me to my first book, Six Frigates, was I wanted to write about the kind of the beginnings of the U.S. Navy and try to set that story within the bigger story of the founding of the U.S. of the United States. The early foreign policy challenges that the country faced after the American Revolution. So I wrote that book, Six Frigates. And then, you know, I had not really planned to become an author, a professional author.
I had thought of Six Frigates as being one book, you know, one project that I would write. It was post 9-11. I thought I’d try something, you know, do something unusual. And if I could get it published, it’d be great. And then I’d go back to my life. But the book... Was successful enough commercially that my publisher wanted me to keep going. And we discussed several different ideas. And one was to write a big history, new naval history of the Pacific War.
And they loved that idea. They offered me a contract. I took it. I signed it. That one book turned into three. And here I am, you know, 15 years later, having written a huge trilogy about the Pacific War. Yeah. But I agree. The Pacific War is really its own thing. I mean, we talk about World War II in terms of theaters. Really, these were separate wars. And the Pacific War was a unique war in many ways. By far, the largest naval war ever fought.
It’s the only war ever fought across the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean. And it was a naval war, an air war, and an island war. And I think that, you know, we as Americans in particular, not being an island people, we tend to think of war principally as war on land, armies on land. And naval operations, you know, we instinctively think of those as sort of supporting or auxiliary operations. You know, in most wars that has been the case. In the Second World War in Europe, that was certainly the case.
Naval operations played a supporting role. And that was true in North Africa, but also in the European theater. In the Pacific, you really have to invert your way of thinking. And you have to think, I really think you need to begin by thinking of the Pacific War as a naval war and an air war, in which island operations fighting on, savage fighting on islands, that was an auxiliary type of operation. So we would take an island when we needed it as an air base or as a naval base or both.
But if you didn’t need that island for that purpose, you know, generally we would bypass these islands. And if there were Japanese soldiers on them, leave them behind to wither on the vine was the term. So really the principal kind of tactical strategic problem. Was to destroy Japanese naval power and then cut Japan off from its overseas sources of natural resources, its ability to support its overseas armies, to establish control of the sea in the Western Pacific, and then eventually to destroy Japan’s ability to defend its airspace, essentially wipe the cities and the industries out from the air, which is what we did in that very brutal war.
And then at that point, the war really is over and it just becomes a question of how exactly it’s going to end and critically how you’re going to force the Japanese to acknowledge the necessity to surrender, avoiding a bloody invasion.
Ross Kenyon: I like this reframing where we definitely give primacy to land forces in US history. I think it is also a result of geography and the conflicts that we’ve been involved with. One thing that struck me in reading your series is how rural and wild the environments are. When there’s fighting in Europe, it’s cities, there’s villages, maybe you’re out in the countryside and there’s hedgerows, but there’s also people living there. And I feel like with the exception possibly of Okinawa, oftentimes these are lightly inhabited or much less inhabited than other places where fighting is happening at the same time.
These are in some cases unspoiled wildernesses or very like subsistence livings have taken place on them, but not wildly transformed like Europe. Is this wild frame? Am I onto something here? Is that true?
Ian W. Toll: No, it’s absolutely true. You know, I mean, these were... When you look at the geography of the Pacific, you have Melanesia and Micronesia. Melanesia is really Southern Oceania, where you have large land masses in Guinea and large island groups there. The islands are relatively close together. And then in the Central Pacific, you have... Micronesia, which is really just a, it’s just an ocean with tiny atolls, atolls being the remnants of ancient volcanoes, you know, ring-shaped, essentially barrier islands enclosing lagoons. That’s the geography that goes on for literally thousands and thousands of miles across the equatorial region of the Central Pacific, what we call Micronesia.
And then the peoples, you have the Polynesian peoples and the Melanesian peoples who are somewhat distinct. And those nations today are among the most remote, still among the most remote nations, not very well known. I mean, many of them are paradises in terms of their extraordinary natural beauty, but they’re so far away from almost everywhere. And there’s so many of them that they haven’t really developed into tourist destinations. There’s really only a handful of places in the Pacific that are kind of well known for that reason, for being tourist destinations, obviously Kauai, but You know, you say maybe Fiji as well.
Beyond that, there’s, you know, many of these places are remote, they’re poor, they’re economically dependent on the outside world for support. They’re very lightly populated. They’re extraordinarily beautiful places. If you do visit, very few people do. And of course, that’s today, you know, 2022. You know, rewind to 1940. A lot of these places and these people had had little or no contact. With the outside world. You know, in some places in the interior of New Guinea, you had uncontacted peoples who kind of came into contact, obviously, with tragic, often with tragic results, with military forces that passed through during the war.
But really, you just have people who are living very much as they would have lived centuries earlier. In many of these places. And then you have, you know, Japanese forces, American forces, British Allied forces coming in, sweeping in, passing through, and then just vastly and forever changing the lives of these people, often for the worse, in some respects, perhaps for the better, but really kind of breaking that link they had to the way that they were living in the past.
Ross Kenyon: Perhaps the most readily at hand examples of this are cargo cults, but also the proliferation of spam throughout the entire Pacific. Are those good examples of this?
Ian W. Toll: Yes, yes. And the way that, you know, that kind of often that change in the diet that occurred as a result of that. So things like spam and other canned provisions, you know, just maybe it’s helpful to pick an example. You have the nation of today is called Yap. Back then, it was called the Caroline Island Group. And there’s a series of these atolls, enormous atolls. I mean, we’re talking lagoons that are often more than 100 square miles in area, enclosed by these very long, narrow barrier islands, more or less in a ring shape.
And there would be interest channels in which you could Bring a ship into the lagoon. The lagoons are often very good anchorages because there’s a shallow sandy bottom. And the barrier islands essentially act as natural breakwaters. And so, you know, you could bring a whole fleet into a place like Ulythi Atoll, which is one of the big atolls in Carolina Island Group. And essentially our Pacific fleet used this as its home base for the last year the Pacific War as its anchorage. Now, Ulithi Atoll was populated by, you know, probably on the order of maybe 400 people.
And these are, this is a Polynesian people who in 1944 were living, you know, very much the same way their ancestors would have been living 100, 200, 300 years earlier. They had been, you know, in touch with missionaries, for example, they’d been Jesuit missionaries who had come in previous centuries to Introduced Christianity and then left. And then these people had once again been living with little or no contact with the outside world. Fishing, weaving their own clothes out of fibers, growing certain types of crops that will work in that environment.
And really just sort of living the way Native peoples would have lived in the Pacific in the past. And all of a sudden you have first the Japanese come in They’re fairly brutal. They use these people as kind of slave laborers, kill some of them. And then the Americans come in, and you can imagine how sort of bewildering this is to these Polynesian natives. As soon as they realize that the Americans are enemies of the Japanese, they say, okay, we’re for you. And, you know, as an American, you say, okay, well, what’s the right thing to do in that situation?
Obviously, you want to protect these people. You want to move them to a place where they’re not going to be directly affected by the combat or where they would be, say, molested by our own service troops. So in that case, we go to the chief. We send a civil affairs officer in. He talks to the chief of the tribe, convinces him to move the entire tribe to an island in the southern part of the lagoon. Where they’ll be sort of isolated from this, you know, we’re bringing 200,000 service people in, right, aboard these, in this fleet.
Most of them will be on the, living on the ships. But then there’s also, you’re building air bases on some of these islands. You’re turning one of the islands into a recreation. I mean, it’s like massive redevelopment occurring. And you say to this little group of people, you know, we will make sure that you have enough to eat for the duration of our stay. We will send doctors in to provide medical care if you want that. Okay, good. You know, Uncle Sam being generous.
That’s kind of what you want. But those people will never return to the way that they did things before. And this has happened to one specific people after another. And even to the extent of if you’re getting canned provisions, your metabolism may change, actually. And this seemed to happen to a lot of the Pacific peoples. Their metabolism changed to the point where actually it was difficult for them to survive on the sources of food that they had used before. And so then they’re sort of placed in this position of dependence that continues even beyond the end of the war.
So that’s the kind of thing that happened throughout the Pacific.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve definitely traveled places where this type of relationship had happened years ago, but still persisted where there’s dependence and gratitude at your coming. But there’s also this undertone of resentment too. Some places I’ve been, it hasn’t felt right, even though there has been voluntary commercial exchange happening. It felt something had happened here that wasn’t good.
Ian W. Toll: Just to continue, we’re talking about Ulythia. It’s a fabulous book. It was a memoir written by a Navy public affairs officer who was the guy who kind of went in initially and was in charge of developing the relationship with this group of Ulythians, Polynesian people. And he grows very fond of these people, also is fascinated in the same way as someone who kind of grew up reading Natural Geographic would just naturally be fascinated, coming into contact with a group of people that had been living with essentially no contact with the outside world.
It’s sort of poignant, but the old chief actually asks him if he’d like to take over and be the new chief. And he answers, well, I would have to actually get permission from my admiral and I don’t expect that my Admiral would give me permission to do that. In Ulythi Atoll, you had, you know, one of the more, I mean, there’s probably a thousand stories you could tell about an environmental catastrophe in the Pacific. But in Ulythi Atoll in November 1944, you had a mobile oiler, fleet oiler.
So these were ships, 25,000-ton ships, big ships, that essentially would go out and refuel American naval vessels and do it at sea. And so what they called underway replenishment. And this was a critical logistical innovation that the Navy was able to kind of perfect by the end of the Pacific War. We had these big carrier task forces roaming through the Pacific, traveling thousands of miles, you know, traveling very quickly, cruising at 20 knots and then dialing up 30 knots for combat operations. Huge fleets. I mean, the biggest fleets that had ever been assembled up to that time and actually much larger than any naval fleets that we have today in terms of either the number of ships or absolute tonnage.
So carrier task forces with 16 aircraft carriers supported by battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. You know, traveling very quickly. And so these fleet oilers would, you know, they’d load up from the commercial oilers, they’d take on fuel oil, aviation fuel, diesel fuel, and separate tanks. And then they would, they’d go out and they’d meet these carrier task forces out in some remote place at sea, and they’d refuel them at sea. And this became important, particularly in the Western Pacific because of the distances involved. The carrier task forces would not have to return to some centralized place to refuel.
They’d be able to refuel and keep on going and keep hitting, keep moving, keep the Japanese guessing about where they’re going to be, where they’re going to go. And this was an important factor in how we won the Pacific War. Well, so this oiler, it’s called the Mississinua, I believe named after a place in Ohio. And it had just refueled from a commercial tanker. So its tanks were full, fuel oil, as well as aviation fuel. And the Japanese had launched what they called Kaiten. And this was kind of the less well-known part of the kamikaze suicide campaign.
They had these manned, I guess you would call them manned torpedoes. They were essentially one-man submarines with a torpedo warhead that the idea was that you would drive them directly into the hull of a ship and the pilot, of course, would be giving his life. They launched a bunch of these things just outside of the atoll. They snuck in through some of the entrance channels. And one of these things hit the Mississinua, November 20th, 1944. Lit this thing up. The aviation fuel tanks went up.
The whole thing just caught fire very quickly. 63 of the crew, almost, I think it was like a crew of 80. So 63 of them went down with the ship, killed in action. And this ship very quickly just kind of burned out of control, rolled over, sank in 130 feet of water, I think, in the middle of this lagoon, enclosed lagoon. And for 60 years almost, it basically was undiscovered. The location of the wreck had not been identified. And despite the fact that it had, you know, however many thousands of tonnes of fuel in the tanks, it wasn’t leaking, or at least it wasn’t leaking much.
And then a typhoon hit, I think in 2001, a typhoon went there and it sort of disturbed the wreck, shifted it slightly and started leaking. It started leaking an enormous amount of oil into this lagoon, threatening the reefs, threatening the fishing, threatening the livelihoods of the Ulythian people who lived there. And so the U.S. government had a sort of an environmental catastrophe for which it felt responsible. And went in two years later with a salvage team, went down there and essentially pumped all the oil out in a successful cleanup slash salvage operation.
And so that’s a win. You know, I think there’s probably many other examples you point to where there hasn’t been a win like that. But that was an example where the U.S. government, I think, could say justifiably, you know, we went in there and we were able to pump out the oil and protect the reef and the fishing in this one atoll. And that’s 60 years later. So that just gives you a sense of how long these wrecks can be time bombs. And they’re all over the Pacific.
There’s hundreds of wrecks, many of which are still leaking. And at any time in the future, potentially, particularly in the shallower lagoons, a typhoon can shift the wreck. You’ll have another oil leak and we’ll have to be dealing with this, could be dealing with this for hundreds of years even in the future.
Ross Kenyon: It’s hard to read your books and not think about all of like, especially these atoll locations, which are protected anchorages for huge numbers of ships like Ulithi or Inuitok or Kwajalein for the, primarily for the Japanese, right?
Ian W. Toll: I mean, those, each of those places you just mentioned was, you had a, was a Japanese fleet base, which later became an American fleet base.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and I’m sure that changeover certainly had ships sink there. And it’s not like if it’s sinking in the open ocean, there’s at least the old adage, the solution to pollution is dilution, right? But you think if you have all these ships in this small area, I feel like that could permanently endanger a population that lives on an island, that ecosystem could be severely changed in an irreparable way. Yes. Yes. There are probably countless examples of this. I think in the Pacific, people probably most commonly think of nuclear war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then also the Pacific testing grounds too.
How did that even happen? How did we decide that this beautiful, open expanse of untouched natural environment was the safest place to do this?
Ian W. Toll: Well, I mean, I think that the post-war nuclear tests, I think it was just in a... I mean, that was an era when our government, maybe our society, was in the habit of thinking of a very small population of Polynesian people in the Marshall Islands as being, you know, you can pick them up and move them from one island to the next and their lives are not going to change that much. And we’re going to look after these people. We’re going to make sure they have enough to eat.
So... You know, destroying one of these many atolls, massive hydrogen bomb tests. It’s not doing any great damage. It’s just one of an infinite, seemingly infinite number of islands in the, you know, remote Pacific. And, you know, so those kinds of attitudes were prevalent. Now, of course, we look back and say that’s unacceptable. And I think it was. But it was a different time. It was, you know, a period in the Cold War when we... You know, I think probably there was a view that it was somewhat of a matter of life and death to test these weapons.
Soviets began testing as well. You know, we had that 10 year period of the 50s when the testing became almost like a signaling, a way of signaling. You know, you had a series of these tests where it seemed like the Soviets and the Americans were competing to, you know, who could fire off a larger, you know, above ground nuclear test. And fortunately, we left that period behind with a test ban treaty, which I think turns 60 this year. I’m not sure what more to say about it.
Really, I’m not an expert in that. Really, my expertise is focused mostly on the events of the Second World War themselves.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t mean to put you on the spot. And I could see how good faith someone might think that this part of the earth does feel functionally limitless, the most isolated, the least populated, and may in fact be the safest. And if there are in... Functionally innumerable number of atolls. What’s destroying one for the sake of the free world? I can kind of see why that attitude might have happened. And also with these atoll bases too. It’s a great anchorage. It’s for the greater good.
There is a huge number of these. Does it ultimately matter so much if one gets polluted and destroyed? I wonder to what degree they even thought about that.
Ian W. Toll: I think you’ve accurately represented prevailing attitude. Yeah, absolutely right. And the Marshall Islands were, you know, there was a lot of discussion about setting these up as independent countries or as international protectorates. And it was really a decision made with the input of the Navy in particular to actually retain these as territories, which they are to this day. And so I think that there was a feeling within the military especially that These very, very remote, small countries with very small populations were essentially ours by right of conquest.
And that it was a suitable place for us to do this kind of testing for the reasons that you said, how remote they were, how small the populations were, our feeling that we’re going to be able to do right by these very small populations. By moving them, just kind of moving them on 500 miles away to another atoll, they’re going to live their lives the same way. And we’re going to provide them with whatever they need.
Ross Kenyon: I’d like to move on to the land a little bit, even though we started this conversation saying that’s to some degree secondary. I think there are some obvious changes to the environment on land in the Pacific, especially if you read something like Eugene Sledges with the Old Breed, or if you watch the Pacific, the miniseries, you see just how destroyed these environments are where Okinawa in the show looks like the Western Front in World War I. It’s just a mud hell. It’s terrible. And so there’s some obvious environmental conclusions that one can draw up.
But also I want to read a block quote from your book, Twilight of the Gods, that really captured my attention. And I don’t think people realize the degree to which this terraforming took place. So here I am reading you. Tinian, the once verdant tropical island south of Saipan, was now the largest airbase in the world. Nearly half of its 39 square miles had been paved over to accommodate airfields for B-29s and fighters. North and West fields included eight great runways for super fortresses, each almost two miles long in the width of a 10-lane highway.
They were connected to parking aprons, hard stands, and fuel storage farms by 11 miles of taxiways. Most of a long ridge had been leveled to supply coral rock for this vastness of pavement and asphalt. From the air, a witness recounted Tinian resembled a giant aircraft carrier, its deck loaded with bombers. It sounds like Tinian is fundamentally and permanently changed by its war experience. Yeah. And surely this happened at places beyond Tinian too. How many islands were just radically irrevocably changed?
Ian W. Toll: You know, gosh, you’d have to go through and count them up. And, uh, I, I think it would, you know, probably run into the hundreds maybe. I mean, you have a lot of small islands that, uh, You would have built a seaplane base, for example. And so enormous amounts of concrete poured. Concrete made from coral in many cases, right? So you go and demolish a coral reef to turn that coral into concrete. On the larger islands, you had coral depositories. And the game would be to send the engineers in first to identify where is the coral rock?
Where can we quarry it? And then you need to establish that quarrying operation early in the process of redeveloping a place like Guam, for example. And then you’ve got to bring trucks in to take that crushed coral rock and move it to the airfield that you’re building. And then you’re just dumping enormous amounts of crushed coral rock directly into the runway beds. And so really just a huge amount of paving going on. So Tinian, which you mentioned, smaller island just off of Saipan in the Marianas.
If you open up Google Earth and you look at Tinian today, you still see the remnants of those long runways. These are two mile runways, you know, as wide as like an eighth lane highway. And these are the runways they had to build for the B-29, which is the largest plane ever put into combat operation up to that time. You know, very, very large planes by the standards of the 1940s. And so you can look at Tinian today and you sort of see the remnants of these overgrown airfields which take up most of the northern part of the island.
And yeah, it was the ability of the U.S. military forces to go in and do construction on a scale like that, which I think was one of the factors that most surprised the Japanese. They didn’t We realized that we could do what you would call logistics on that kind of a scale. The ability to build really huge air bases in the Western Pacific at the end of a 6,000 mile seaborne supply line and to do that very rapidly. That was an important factor leading to the American victory.
We didn’t think too much in terms of environmental impacts in the 1940s, but, you know, you pour that amount of concrete into an isolated island, and, you know, as you say, that island will just never, never be the same. That happened again and again all across the Pacific.
Ross Kenyon: I’d also be curious to know to what degree defoliants, and I mean, people think about Agent Orange in Vietnam, but I’m sure there’s huge amounts of DDT going on all these islands as anti-malarial prophylaxis and things of that nature, surely, right?
Ian W. Toll: Yep, yep. Napalm. Napalm was all over the Pacific as well. Also all over Korea. Didn’t really become notorious, I think, until Vietnam. I think it was Halsey, Admiral Halsey, who said when he was asked to kind of rank the five most important weapons of the Pacific War, it was the airplane, the submarine, radio, radar, and the bulldozer. I thought that was striking that he... Nominated the bulldozer as being one of the five most important weapons of the Pacific War.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, I think the work of Seabees is, it’s common in reading histories too, to see they’re all over the place, how much construction is actually taking place. And not just for forward airbases, things too. It’s also places like, again, with Eugene Sledge, it’s going to Pavuvu and the Solomons and having a recreational area or like a R&R zone and how many like hospital islands and other things that have to be created just logistically to sustain this amount of people in this unpopulated, distant area.
Ian W. Toll: Just warehouses. I mean, you know... Guam, which really became the kind of the main backstop for our invasion of Japan, at least prior to Okinawa. Just the sheer amount of warehouse, inside warehouse space you need and the amount of construction that requires. It was just done on a scale that was pretty extraordinary. I mean, it would be eye popping today. And this was in the 1940s it was done, was the amount of building that occurred in these places. I think by one estimate, for example, the total amount of development of all kinds done on Okinawa from our invasion In April 1945 to a year later was estimated to be essentially tantamount to building up the entire state of Rhode Island from virgin forest land.
Within a year? Within a year. Wow. In terms of the roads, the housing that was built, the Where’s the James Michener story about concrete? Well, he did get into it, actually. If you read Tales of the South Pacific. Sounds like it needs a reread at this point, but yes. Yeah, no, he actually was witness to, it was during the invasion of the Gilberts. It was the sledgehammer operations, and it was one of the small outlying islands that was taken with the purpose of building an auxiliary air base.
And there was a very small Japanese garrison there. The Marines, you know, I think like four battalions went in. And then they brought in the Seabees almost immediately while the Japanese were still shooting to start clearing and expanding this airfield. And it’s just a chapter later in that book. But Mischner was a good storyteller. And I think that was maybe his best book of the 50 or so that he wrote.
Ross Kenyon: I think I’ve read probably 15 or 20 of them. And yeah, some of them are better than others. We can say that. He definitely was the guy who liked to just get the rough draft out and then just send that directly to the publisher. He is amazingly prolific, and that’s probably part of it. As someone who’s written multiple books, surely you envy that pace. Yeah. Was there anything as transformative for the Pacific besides World War II? Surely this is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the...
Except maybe settlement. Settlement at all. And then after that, it’s this.
Ian W. Toll: Yeah, sure. And if you take the whole Pacific... I mean, you know, the Pacific, you know, it’s about a fifth of the world’s land surface area, right? So you could take all the world’s landmasses combined and fit them into the Pacific and you still have some Pacific Ocean to spare. So, you know, to generalize about a region that large, you know, has there ever been any one thing that certainly the Pacific War, there’s nothing else like it. We’ve never had a war. We’ve never had a war that fought across that ocean before.
Since then, we can hope that we never will again. Certainly the sort of transformative power of those less than four years has got to be unique in the history of the Pacific. Are there any lessons or conclusions you’ve been able to draw from your research that might aid us in mapping a course for the future? Well, I mean, there’s a lot of ways I could answer that, I suppose. I mean, much as war fascinates me, and it’s been my profession now for 20 years, I think it’s clear that the real lesson is that it’s to be avoided.
And today, in the Western Pacific, between Taiwan, North Korea, there’s a lot of danger there. There’s a lot of flashpoints that potentially could lead to war. Our attention has been somewhat diverted by Russia and Ukraine, but... This might be the most dangerous region in the world right now. What is the answer? Well, you know, listen to our war gamers and our planners. The Chinese would have an awfully tough time taking Taiwan, but we really don’t want them to try. We really don’t want to have to fight that war.
It would be a terrible war. So, I mean, it’s a very open-ended question you asked, so I’ll give you a very open-ended answer. Let’s try to avoid another war. In the Pacific, in particular, to try to avoid going to war over Taiwan. And what does that imply? Implies an effective deterrent. The Chinese have to believe us when we say we’re going to defend, the Taiwanese defend themselves. But also to try to, through diplomacy, arrest any sort of a tendency among the Taiwanese people to try to move toward a Declaration of Independence, which would provoke China.
You know, this kind of awkward policy of one China, this idea that we’re all going to agree to the fiction, that it’s one country with two systems and someday we’ll be reunited under circumstances that are kind of vague. That thing, maybe we need to keep that policy together with scotch tape and chewing gum for another 20 years until circumstances there change to the point where you don’t have the immediate danger of a war. So I guess that would be the conclusion. Let’s just try to avoid another war in the Pacific.
The first one was bad enough.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. A story that you bring up in the book that is really important, and also it’s just the least sexy part of war, insofar as this is even appropriate terminology at all, is logistics and how much of this war was won and lost on the basis of material resources, Ending up in the right places without interruption. Japan, of course, does not do a good job at this by the end of the war. How could they? Whereas the US, the logistical prowess, which you’ve illustrated too, by being able to build that amount of infrastructure on isolated atolls and islands, surely that is a logistical feat that has not been replicated too many times in world history.
It’s an amazing feat. And certainly the biggest part of the story that is the most ignored is
Ian W. Toll: Yeah, it is. And how much shipping had to be built to do that? Just given the geography, moving the troops, the supplies, everything, moving it 6,000 miles across the Pacific. We needed fleets of cargo ships and oil tankers and floating dry docks and refrigerated hospital ships, ammunition ships. And almost all of the ships in those fleets were In 1945, at the end of the war, when we’re moving into places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, were built during the war. So these fleets did not exist before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
And so you basically had the shipbuilding industry in the United States ramp up to a degree that really no one saw coming. I mean, even American planners, I don’t think, dared to think that we could build as much shipping as we did. In a very concentrated period of time, using shipbuilding methods that had never been used before in some cases. Henry Kaiser, who essentially had a big civic civil engineering company, but had never built ships before, entered bids to start building ships at Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California.
And, you know, he and his engineers just sort of came up with a way to do shipbuilding that had never been done before, which would build the ship in sections elsewhere, ship it in, bring it in on railways, assemble it, and very, very quickly build these ships, these Liberty ships and these Victory ships. And let’s be, you know, painfully honest about it, these were terrible ships. These were ships that were not built to make more than maybe one round trip voyage, maybe two round trip voyages across the Pacific before they’d have to be scrapped.
But they didn’t need a long lifetime. What needed to be done was to build these things very, very quickly and in very large volumes. And that’s what they were able to do. And it was pretty remarkable. I mean, I suppose this is not the podcast where you are going to sort of laud the virtues of American capitalism at great length. But the ability of American industry to ramp up very quickly to meet that challenge, it was pretty extraordinary. It really was.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it absolutely is extraordinary. Even if you were critical of it, I don’t know how you could avoid admitting that it’s extraordinary. That level of mass production and planning is amazing. As we’re getting close to wrapping up here, I’ve never read Alfred Thayer Mahan, but I was curious to what degree you think his work holds up or is still relevant.
Ian W. Toll: Well, so, you know, Mahan is sort of an interesting case. So he was a, for your listeners who don’t know, he was an American naval officer in the 19th century who essentially became a historian of naval power. And he was a very prolific author, you know, really kind of started around age 50 and knocked out a bunch of books very, very quickly and became this kind of international guru. And you had one major naval power after another who were essentially, you had the leaders reading his books and designing their navies literally kind of based on his recommendations.
So in the 1880s and 1890s, he was probably the single most influential intellectual slash historian slash analyst in terms of the way that the major naval powers were thinking about Building the next generation and they’re building up the fleets of the future. So his influence was deeply felt, not just in the United States, but in Great Britain, in Germany, in Japan, in France, and essentially all of the countries that were building big fleets at that time. At that time, his recommendation was what you have to do is build fleets of battleships of the largest class.
And these battleships have to be designed and trained to act together as a fleet. And you had to keep these fleets together. And essentially, the way you win a naval war is you, with your concentrated fleet, you meet the enemy’s fleet in battle and destroy it in one massive battle, essentially. And that’s how you should use your naval power. Now, his ideas, I think, were suitable for 1900, 1905, 1910. But, you know, even as he was, he died in 1914, a year before the beginning of the First World War, the technology was changing so rapidly at that time that this kind of, these Mahanian orthodoxies very quickly became obsolete.
You know, you had air power beginning Wright Brothers in 1903, and you had radio coming in, so you had the ability to actually contact your fleet commander from shore, which had never happened before in naval history. You had the submarine aircraft. You know, you had the coal-powered ships turning into oil. You know, a lot of different technological changes coming in a very rapid kind of period of time. So that if you talk about Mahan’s, in terms of his, what they called that kind of big gun, big battleship, Mahanian orthodoxy, that became obsolete.
And by the Second World War, it was really irrelevant. And mainly it’s interesting because some of those orthodoxies continue to sort of have a hold over naval officers, particularly in Japan.
Ross Kenyon: In Japan especially, right? They’re always seeking this like one big battle. If they could just get the American fleet out in the open, right, they could have their like last shot at it.
Ian W. Toll: Yeah, that’s right. And so that influence of that Mahanian way of thinking persisted. And as you say, the Japanese were kind of the slowest to let go. And that became a real factor, you know, kind of leading to the defeat of the Japanese Navy. And so that’s the kind of story of Mahan. But as a historian, you know, I’m working on another book right now, and I’m reading his analysis of the War of 1812 and the Great Lakes. And, you know, it’s fantastic. I mean, the guy really was, I wouldn’t say he’s definitely, his books are not The kind of books that are quick reads, you know, it’s hard going.
But as a thinker, I mean, sort of the clarity and the power of his analysis really does jump off the page even, you know, 130 years later.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so happy you went to what you’re working on next as we’re starting to conclude here. What is it about? I know Six Frigates, though, you get into 1812. So surely it’s not another book that touches on that, or is it? It’s about the War of 1812 on the Great Lakes. Oh, really? Oh, so it’s in greater detail.
Ian W. Toll: Okay. My working title is The Freshwater War. And it’s essentially about the war on the Canadian borderlands, including the naval war on Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and Lake Champlain. I didn’t cover that at all in six frigates, although I did, as you say, I wrote about the War of 1812, but not that part of the war.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. I guess seemingly a brownwater navy would be less controversial to the Jeffersonians than the bluewater one, right? Politics might be simpler.
Ian W. Toll: Yeah, I would say so. The fleets that we built on the Great Lakes were actually quite large. Wow. On Lake Ontario, they were building brigs of, say, 900 tonnes. But at the end of the war, British actually launched a three-decker Ship of the Line, which was larger than the Victory, which was Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar. Ship you can still visit at Portsmouth, England. Really a massive, massive ship built on Lake Ontario, which was landlocked again, right? I mean, there was no way to get a big ship down the St.
Lawrence. So these ships had to be built in what was then effectively a wilderness. And they were launched onto these lakes where they were landlocked. We were building two ships of the line, similar dimensions, which we would have launched, but the war ended. So there was a, you know, naval building construction on a pretty big scale.
Ross Kenyon: I think the War of 1812 is fascinating and these early American foreign policy entangles and also the wars with Barbary pirates. A lot of you detail is also super interesting. Why are these so neglected? It gets almost less attention than something like Korea.
Ian W. Toll: Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, the War of 1812 has been obscure for a lot of reasons, partly because it wasn’t a necessary war. You know, you could have taken that war right out of American history. I think you said that if you had rapid communication, that never would have happened, right? Would not have happened if you’d had a transatlantic telegraph cable because the British had repealed this order in council, which was one of the reasons that we declared war. That happened before our declaration of war.
And, you know, frankly, the War of 1812 has been hard to explain. Historians have constantly, even now, struggled to sort of explain why this war was fought, you know, what the long-term consequences were, if any. It was not an American victory. It was not really an American defeat either. Sort of fought it to a draw. But I think the bigger issue, honestly, the reason why that whole period of American history continues to be a little bit obscure is because if you just think about how history is taught in schools, there’s a lot of history to teach in a short period of time.
You know, say you’ve got, if it’s high school, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a year to teach American 19th century history. Well, you’ve got to do the revolution. That’s the 18th and 19th century. You’ve got to do the revolution. It’s critical. The American Revolution is an absolutely foundational part of our history. Then you’ve got the struggle over the Constitution, adopting the Constitution. What is the Constitution? So you’re trying to teach high school students these things. These are complex events. And then almost immediately, you get into the 19th century and you’re dealing with slavery and the struggle between the North and the South and the westward movement, the settlement of the West.
Then you’ve got the Civil War. Then you’ve got the Industrial Revolution. So really, it’s a lot of events there that have to be shoved into the framework of a high school or a college history class. And something’s going to be neglected, right? Something’s going to be neglected. And so that period of the early American Republic after our Constitution is adopted, but before we’ve really started to get into the sectional crisis and the struggle between the North and the South. I just think inevitably, practically speaking, you end up sort of glossing over a lot of really fascinating, complicated history there without being able to sort of devote the time necessary to really explain what was happening there.
And so I think that’s part of the reason, really.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I suppose the same thing happens with the French and Indian War too. Does anyone even know about that for seven years of war? Like no one, just whatever, revolution, civil war, you’re in, you’re out, you get to World War I.
Ian W. Toll: It does mean that there’s a role for someone like me to actually write these books and there are going to be people out there who are interested in reading them. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: It’s me. It’s basically, it’s someone like me. If you’re listening and you like the timbre of this conversation, as I’m fond of saying, Ian W. Toll’s War in the Pacific Trilogy is fantastic. Six Furgates is also a great early American naval history and also foreign policy history too. And it touches on a lot of the great philosophical fights between Federalists and Anti-Federalists too. Just great writing. I find it to be really readable to a lot of stuff. I’ve read a lot of books like this for a general audience or like light academic audience.
Most of them are not this readable. So thanks for being here, Ian. I can celebrate you as much as you would like. I don’t want to make you blush too much, but it’s good stuff.
Ian W. Toll: I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you’ve said. I really enjoyed this conversation. It’s been good.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks so much for listening. If you like what we do here, please give us a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks so much for listening and have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media.
We will catch you next time.
