Canter Bridge

It is a fortunate and powerful thing moment when a thinker trained for policy analysis finds his voice as a story-teller. That Ian Toll has lent that voice to narrating events in ‘the other war’ is a profound boon.

The persistent thread around which Toll weaves his story of the early war in the Pacific is the Alfred Thayer Bahan doctrine of concentration and battle wagons. The weaving is a subtle art in Toll’s hands, because the astonishingly brief moment between Pearl Harbor and Midway both debunked Bahan’s confidence in the battleship and proved that even Japan’s naval might was fallible when deployed without due concentration.

The author has delved deep into the minds of both Japanese and American warriors, from deck-swabbers and lowly engineers to admirals and their quirks. The result is a profoundly respectful telling, one that never allows the reader to forget that both strategy and humanity were as fully in play as it is possible to imagine.

Toll writes calmly, in fact the potency of his narrative may lie chiefly in the clear serenity of his pen. He wears his scholarship lightly, and so the reader’s attention is not distracted from the Real Thing, which in this case is the awful, unstoppable vengeance of an emerging global power whose butt had been shamefully kicked as Christmas, 1941, bore down on its complacent citizens. The world was at war, not us. Until suddenly, the war came knocking and the United States Pacific Fleet was a smoking ruins. Then we were all in, and fear flooded in where men had so recently slept.

The author tells us what is almost impossible now to conceive, except in the hands of a master teller: the deeply depressed American confusion after Pearl; the non-automatic nature of Roosevelt’s leadership; the barely drawn claws of the American isolationists; the stunningly improbable over-confidence of the post-Pearl Japanese; the can’t-shoot-straight incompetence of the American Navy in early 1942; the utter sacrifice of Wake, the Philippines, and other distant Pacific outposts as the U.S. marshaled its strength for what was possible; the unforeseeable success of a diverse pantheon of personalities and leadership styles among the American admiralty; and, above all, the stunning surprise that was the American victory at Midway.

So much of this should never have happened, could not have happened. Yet Toll’s patient prose, ever at the service of his story, shows us with nearly seventy-year-old surprise, how exactly it did happen.

An added bonus is the real insight that Toll provides into the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship and, more generally, into the prickly collaboration between a Britain wearied by war and expert in its dark arts and an America just now diving naively into its waters.

The news gets better: this is merely the first of three intended installments in Toll’s Pacific, violent story.