Implacable Foes

The War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

Review by Shannon Granville

Article published on: June 1, 2024 in the Army History Summer 2024 issue

Read Time: < 5 mins

By waldo heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio
Oxford University Press, 2017
Pp. xvi, 714. $24.95

Implacable Foes: The War in the Pacific, 1944–1945, was one of three recipients of the 2018 Bancroft Prize for American history writing from Columbia University. Its authors, Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, took on the daunting task of writing a single-volume history of the final eighteen months of World War II in the Pacific Ocean. Even more ambitious, their history covers not only the actual fighting but also the higher-level decision-making and underlying economic and social factors that shaped the course of the conflict.

Although the United States entered the war in December 1941 with a “Europe First” grand strategy, the Japanese threat in the Pacific meant that a nearly equal proportion of U.S. military resources soon flowed to both fronts. The narrative of Implacable Foes begins in late 1943 when the United States and its Pacific Ocean allies had managed to halt the Japanese expansion and were preparing to drive Japanese forces out of their island fortifications and entrenchments. The authors give detailed accounts of the major combat engagements in the Pacific during this period, from New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to the landings at Okinawa. Central to this push was the American war economy, as assembly lines ran around the clock to produce the ships, munitions, and related supplies needed to retake occupied islands and control the surrounding seas. At the same time, the authors make it clear that the fighting in the Pacific took place on many different levels, and highlight various instances in which interservice rivalries and personality conflicts among key political and military leaders exacerbated disagreements over strategy and policy. Even as Allied forces advanced across the ocean, the U.S. political leadership had to contend with a public that was tiring of war and anxious to know how much more hard work and difficulty would be needed to secure Japan’s surrender. Implacable Foes suggests that this sense that U.S. public opinion would not support a lengthy war of attrition on the Japanese mainland, at the cost of many thousands of lives on both sides, was a contributing factor to President Harry S. Truman’s authorization of the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This is by no means a novel argument about the climatic decision-making of the war. However, it does emphasize the idea that purely logistical calculations of troop strength and material resources are but one element of many in military history.

Implacable Foes is at its best when it looks at the unique aspects of the war in the Pacific. The vastness of open water between the U.S. West Coast and the Pacific Ocean island chains forced Allied logisticians to figure out new ways to keep the fighting forces supplied over long distances. Tropical diseases like malaria felled soldiers, sailors, and marines as readily as a burst of Japanese bullets. The enemy’s approach to combat, in general, was unlike that of any other foe: imperial Japanese forces almost always chose death over surrender, often in the form of suicide attacks. As the authors point out in the introduction, “no organized unit of the Japanese Imperial Army surrendered during the entire Pacific war until they were ordered to do so by the emperor” at the end of the war (7). Allied troops therefore had to spend considerable time in mopping-up operations, using grenades and flamethrowers to eliminate scattered pockets of Japanese soldiers hidden in countless bunkers, caves, and trenches. The crude, brutal nature of the ground war in the Pacific often took a heavy mental toll on those who fought—though by this point in the conflict, doctors were more likely to regard service members affected by “combat fatigue” as casualties rather than cowards and offer them treatment and care. The Allied armed forces did their best to counter the myriad tactical, logistical, and medical problems posed by wartime, and the authors present a compelling account of the various innovations in warfare that came about because of the military’s experiences in the Pacific.

Even for a book of this length, Implacable Foes is not a comprehensive account of the war. Heinrichs and Gallicchio are writing primarily about the conflict in the Pacific Ocean, not the broader Asia-Pacific Theatre. Those who are interested in, for example, the later years of the China-Burma-India campaigns or the final struggle between France and Japan over Indochina will need to consult other sources. However, the title of the book itself is also a little misleading. As another reviewer noted, “The Japanese story is told only enough to make sense of the American story.”¹ U.S. signals intelligence had been able to intercept Japanese diplomatic communications (code-named Magic) even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the book does include information from these and other wartime sources to provide a window into high-level strategic discussions among the Japanese leadership. Nevertheless, for a volume titled Implacable Foes—in the plural—the fact that it is so overwhelmingly devoted to the U.S. perspective does diminish the strength of the historical narrative.

One other note of caution for potential readers: in the paperback review copy received by this magazine, at least five of the twelve maps are printed in ways that cut off text or other information. An online preview of the book’s electronic format, however, does not show any such formatting issues with the maps. It is difficult to know whether this problem is unique to the specific review copy received or to a more general issue with the printing of the paperback edition. Readers should check their copies for map quality.

For those interested in gaining a broad general sense of the scope of U.S. activity and decision-making during the later years of the conflict in the Pacific Theater, Implacable Foes is a solid work. Waldo Heinrichs (who passed away in 2019) served as an infantry soldier in World War II in the European Theatre, and the combat-oriented sections show an attention to detail that hints at an author’s personal understanding of the experiences of frontline troops. The sections dealing with the home front and the war economy are also strengths of the book. Even without a more complete picture of the Japanese side of the war, it tells the story it sets out to tell.