Chinese-developed apps like ByteDance’s Gauth andQuestion.AI have conquered US download charts, not by teaching but by offering quick solutions to math problems.
The landing screen Gauth shows you after you download and open the app
Measuring either by daily active users or by range of problem-solving capabilities, there are no dedicated non-Chinese competitors of this scale. Gauth’s strategy of usingTikTokcreators to advertise its app helped it explode in popularity, reaching nearly 700,000 downloads per day globally by March 2024.1 Meanwhile, Gauth and Question.AI advertise the ability to solve problems in “all school subjects” — including math, science, social studies, English, and foreign languages — with access to these solutions for free.
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These apps are a ticking time bomb for political outrage in the United States Congress. You can imagine representatives exclaiming, “This Chinese app encourages cheating, and it’s making our children dumber! Parents in China don’t let their kids use these apps!”
Today, we’ll explore the differences between Chinese homework apps and the versions Chinese tech companies offer overseas. We’ll analyze their solutions to math problems (it’s a universal language!), their censorship regimes for social studies questions, and the business strategies of their parent companies in the Chinese domestic market and abroad.
Gauth vs Doubao Loves Learning (豆包爱学)
ByteDance’s domestic equivalent to Gauth is called “Doubao Loves Learning” 豆包爱学 (rebranded from “Hippo Loves Learning” 河马爱学), but the overseas version is still far more popular. Globally, Gauth boasted more than two million peak daily active users (DAU) in 2024, while ByteDance’s equivalent app for the Chinese market only had a peak of ~800,000 DAU around the same time.
We begin by asking ByteDance’s apps to solve this integral:
Both of BytedDance’s apps produced correct solutions, but the user experience is substantially different:
The Product for the Chinese market, Doubao Loves Learning, shows the steps before the solution, while Gauth puts the solution first and the steps underneath.
Gauth is much more aggressive about prompting users to upgrade to the paid version of the app.
The explanations from Doubou Loves Learning were more detailed, including helpful tips like “The key to integration by parts is choosing the right functions for u and dv,” which did not appear in the free version of Gauth. The Chinese app also automatically graphs the integrand to help users visualize the problem.2
Interestingly, Gauth was able to solve trig integrals that Doubao couldn’t solve, indicating that they aren’t necessarily using the same models to solve problems. For integrals that require you to rewrite the integrand using a trig identity, Gauth usually produces the correct answer while Doubao flails.3
What’s going on here? It could be that ByteDance is investing more in the international version of its app because there is a much greater appetite for homework hacking tools outside China. Western education systems, in both high school and college, place such a large emphasis on homework, while China’s education system emphasizes testing above all else.
As ChinaTalk analyst Irene Zhang told me:
“Chinese kids take so, so many exams at school all the time, which renders homework cheating apps meaningless. I attended Beijing public schools for grades 1 through 7 during Beijing Ministry of Education’s “holistic education” era (素质教育; translation: “everyone stop assigning so much homework”), which technically required teachers to assign no homework for grades 1 and 2 and only up to 1.5 hours of homework per day for middle schoolers (grades 7-9 in China). In part to skirt these caps, we had morning quizzes and mock exams more days than not from grade 4 onwards — I even got extra credit as an annoyingly keen fifth-grader by helping teachers mark the voluminous amounts of pen-and-paper exams on hand. I’m sure it’s worse now. That means kids in homework-dominant systems like the US & Canada get so much more out of these apps than Chinese kids, for better or worse.”
Constant testing means students in China need to solve problems on their own under time constraints, so it truly is disadvantageous for them to cheat on their math homework with apps like these. Given the legacy of the education crackdown in China, is it still uncouth to monetize children’s learning too aggressively particularly for firms like Bytedance that have bigger GR worries domestically. Lastly, With such a huge discrepancy in daily active users, we should expect ByteDance to spend more resources on Gauth than on the domestic equivalent.
I want to be clear though — it takes college-level calculus problems to stump these apps. They provide correct solutions for the majority of problems you could expect to see in high school math classes, and they’re getting better with every update.
What about social studies and English problems? For writing-heavy questions, these apps offer answers similar to what you might expect from plugging the prompts into any LLM. But there is one difference — it appears that both versions of the app have some sort of censorship protocol that can be switched on and off. Here’s a review for Gauth on the App Store:
As of September 2025, Gauth is now willing to answer this question, as well as questions like, “What are some factors that caused Donald Trump to lose the 2020 presidential election?” But the fact that Gauth was at one point restricted from being critical of Trump suggests that ByteDance learned from the TikTok ban fiasco, expected political outrage in response to this app, and then liberalized Gauth’s censorship mechanism to avoid inconvenient accusations. Likewise, I was unable to find a red line for China-related topics.
Q: “What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989?”
However, Gauth isn’t immune to toeing the party line — it just tends to be more subtle about it:
Q: “How many terms is the president of China legally allowed to serve?”
Reader, the term limit in place before Xi was not informal — it was in the constitution! Doubao, on the other hand, is not willing to answer this question at all.4
Question.AI vs 作业帮
Question.AI’s largest user bases are the USA and Indonesia. While there is also a domestic version of Question.AI called Zuoyebang 作业帮 (“Homework Help”), the parent company by the same name primarily makes money in the Chinese market by selling smart learning tablets and dictionary pens, not homework solutions.
Zuoyebang was founded in 2015 by Hou Jianbin, who said the following about his company’s mission in a 2020interview:
NetEase Technology: In your understanding, what value does Zuoyebang create for users or for society?
Hou Jianbin: Internally, we usually say: “Learning changes destiny, Zuoyebang changes learning.”
As society develops, learning has become increasingly important for personal growth. For an individual to integrate into society, they must cross a threshold — and that threshold has been rising, becoming a high wall. The meaning of education is to enable a person to cross that high wall of social integration.
100 years ago, you could survive without being literate. Fifty years ago, graduating from middle school gave you enough knowledge reserves. But today, the knowledge and skills needed to enter society are much greater. So the cost of social integration for an individual is rising. It’s no longer just a question of “if you don’t study, you won’t make progress.” It’s become: “if you don’t study, you’ll be eliminated by society.”
Zuoyebang’s mission is to build a ladder to help more children better climb over society’s high wall.
A rather optimistic framing of a company that makes, among other things, a cheating aid and an NSFW chatbot.
Just like the first pair of apps, both Zuoyebang and Question.AI were able to solve the integration by parts problem we looked at earlier. Here’s what makes them different from the ByteDance products:
Question.AI shows ads before it lets you see the solutions to a problem or enter the app. Zuoyebang shows some ads, but far fewer than the international version.
Unlike Gauth, Question.AI does show the steps before the solution.
Zuoyebang’s Chinese app requires a Chinese phone number to see solutions, which Doubao does not.
Anecdotally, the solving algorithm seems a bit worse — Question.AI and Zuoyebang both produced the wrong answer when I asked them to solve the trig integral we looked at earlier.5
While Zuoyebang has not mastered the half-angle formula, the company’s Chinese app has several educational features that Question.AI doesn’t offer. These include digital planners, study guides, and a function to check students’ work after they’ve already attempted to do an assignment on their own, which is aimed at parents.
A machine-translated graphic introducing Zuoyebang’s tool for parents. Source.
Finally, Question.AI declined to answer questions about Tiananmen Square, calling such information “inappropriate.”
Are We Cooked?
The reality is that the versions of these apps for the Chinese market are more educational, less aggressively advertised, and far less widespread. Perhaps these companies are trying to avoid the ire of regulators in Beijing, and thus the features they push in the Chinese market — like time management tools, supplemental study guides, AI tutoring, and tools for involved parents — are more pro-learning. It could also be that the focus on testing in the Chinese education system legitimately makes these apps less useful. In any case, ByteDance and Zuoyebang have decided that cheating aids are the best way to make money in international markets, yet decline to use that same strategy for profitability at home.
As ChinaTalk’s resident math major, I worry that these apps are robbing students of the opportunity to develop their critical thinking skills. The only way to ensure students develop math ability, it seems, is to weigh final grades toward in-class assignments, tests, and open-ended projects. But how can the mental scaffolding that comes from repeatedly solving homework problems be built solely in the classroom? Students simply don’t spend enough time in class for that to be possible. In reality, I fear that richer students (and those with more involved parents) will be sent to extracurricular tutoring centers to ensure they aren’t automating their homework, while everyone else falls behind.
I don’t see much downside to banning apps like these in the USA — and if parents and teachers make regulators pay attention, that could legitimately happen.
This is the second article in our series about China’s AI Education Industry. You can check out the first installment here.
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Symbolab and Google’s Photo Math can only solve math problems without words; Chegg relies on humans to solve problems and offers zero free access to solutions.
As a nice bonus, the Gauth browser extension requires access to basically all of your browser data, but can’t be bothered to use proper notation for solutions like the mobile app does:
Here’s Doubao’s response when I asked about presidential term limits in Chinese:
“We are temporarily unable to answer this question, try another please!” (Notice the watermark that says, “内容由AI生成“ “This content was generated by AI”)
Jordan Schneider: Let's talk about the generals and admirals, starting with Chester Nimitz. You have this wonderful opening of him taking this secret train ride across America and reflecting on what he’s about to do. He’s trying to relax and play poker with his buddy, but at the same time, he understands the gravity of the situation.
Chris Miller: I was struck by the extent to which Nimitz has now been largely forgotten in American public discourse, but in your telling he emerges as probably the most important strategic thinker of the war in the Pacific. The contrast between him and MacArthur was striking to me, given that MacArthur is the one who’s remembered.
Ian Toll: One of the things that I always find very striking when you look at the admirals and officers, the leadership in the Navy during WWII, is that you have a group of men who have lived parallel lives since the age of 17 or 18 when they entered the Naval Academy. They have been shaped by a culture, by a context, a profession that had rigorous ideas about what leadership should look like. Yet when they reach the pinnacle of their careers, you realize these guys are very different. They have different personalities, different styles, and different ways of making decisions. They present themselves differently.
The full range of personalities comes through in the way that the leadership class — this is true in the Army as well — approached winning this vast, unprecedented war that they had been preparing for their entire lives.
Nimitz was the handpicked choice of FDR. FDR was not just confident in the role of commander in chief, but in particular, he had a parochial feeling about the Navy because he had served in a sub-cabinet position earlier in his career and because he had been president for such a long time and had personally pushed through and run a vast expansion in our Navy, the Two-Ocean Navy Act, which had occurred before the beginning of the war. FDR was very involved in personnel decisions at the highest level of the Navy. He selected admirals. Nimitz was his choice.
He had first offered the job of Pacific Fleet Chief to Nimitz nine months before Pearl Harbor. Nimitz had demurred. He said he thought he was too junior an admiral to take the position, and that for him to accept that command would arouse opposition and resentment among some of the other admirals, and he thought it was a bad idea. They gave it to Husband Kimmel instead.
When the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, when all of our battleships were knocked out of action in the first 15 minutes of the war, when Husband Kimmel was made to perform the role of the scapegoat for that, Nimitz was first to understand that it could have been him. It would have been him most likely, if he had been there. We would have remembered Nimitz very differently. That’s a snapshot of how historical contingency can cast such a long shadow down the decades. Nimitz could have been in the position of Husband Kimmel, a person that we remember solely because he suffered a terrible defeat.
But Nimitz’s great strength was that he had a gentle touch. His leadership style was based on personal warmth. After the trauma of Pearl Harbor, he showed up in Hawaii. He had a fifth of the Earth’s surface within his theater command. It was an enormous command of not just the Navy, but the Army, the Marines, the Air Force in his theater. He’s able to preside over this fractious group of people who are arguing over how to fight this war and to get them to work together and to forge a team out of what was a somewhat dysfunctional system managing inter-service operations in the 1940s.
He was the right man for the job. You said that you thought he was forgotten today. That’s true, but even more true of Ernest King, who was his direct superior. He was the Chief of Naval Operations. He is forgotten even by people who are interested in military history and the history of WWII.
But if you look at the major decisions that were made on the way that we would fight and win the Pacific War, the way that we would pick up the pieces after Pearl Harbor and put together an offensive, which less than four years later would force the surrender of Japan, it was Ernest King more than anybody else who had a blueprint in mind for how we would do that and who was in a position to impose that imprint on the rest of the Navy and all of the military services.
Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about the contrast of thinking styles that the admiralty ended up having to employ. There are scenes of big conference room debates where MacArthur says we should go left and Nimitz says we should go right. They’re making lots of different styles of arguments — some from a logistics perspective, others from a morale perspective. This represents a model of slow thinking and deliberation.
After they decide on a course of action, you have all of these plans and logistics, and you get the boats in place. But because of the nature of carrier warfare during the Pacific War, incredibly fast-twitched decision making is required. You have imperfect information because your scout plane may have seen something, and then you have to make a split-second call.
One of the admirals described it perfectly — “These carriers are boxers with glass chins, but they have enormous left hooks, and all we're doing is deciding when to swing and hoping for the best.”
It becomes very human at both levels of thinking. With slow thinking, you have all these personal histories that are intertwined. Everyone is thinking about their reputation and trying to save their people and resources. Then with the admirals’ decisions, soldiers who haven’t slept in 48 hours have to make these calls.
There’s this other approach where one commander delegates everything because he knows he needs to be sharp and fresh for the big thinking — when he has to make these enormous strategic calls.
These flag officers have to operate in very different modes, which you explored beautifully. I'm curious about your reflection on that and what it reveals about the nature of warfare and the nature of people at this moment in time.
Ian Toll: It’s true because the planning and anticipation of how these battles would go were important. Getting those decisions right, moving your forces into position at the right time — at Midway, most famously, Nimitz had a picture of what the Japanese plan was, thanks to this extraordinary intelligence achievement of breaking the Japanese codes. He was able to move what forces he had at that point, which were three aircraft carriers, into position to do battle. But after that, everything that happened was a contingency. It was chaos. There were a lot of chances involved. That battle could have gone the other way.
You had Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher, the two American admirals, making decisions with imperfect information, feeling their way through the fog of war. In the end, winning that battle narrowly with a pretty significant contribution of blind luck. You would see this again and again in naval battles in the Pacific. If the right plan is put in place, you’re improving the odds for your side. Yet there are still fast-twitch decisions that have to be made, these opportunistic decisions, probabilistic decisions when you don’t have all of the information you need.
Those are two entirely different ways of thinking about military command. They may play to the strengths or weaknesses of different personality types. But one of the things that Nimitz did particularly well was to develop a plan and to make sure that his subordinate commanders, his ocean-going commanders understood that plan and make sure they would execute this plan in the same way that he would if he were there commanding a task force at sea.
But then once they left, Nimitz was in his headquarters back in Hawaii, in Pearl Harbor, you’ve got Halsey or Spruance or whoever the task force commander is on the scene. Nimitz, although he was often tempted, never got on the radio and intervened and started forcing decisions. He delegated those tactical decisions, even in a major battle, without interfering — trusting to the judgment of his subordinates. Most of the time, that judgment was vindicated.
Chris Miller: Nimitz seemed to me the opposite of a gung-ho military leader stereotype. You use the words “leading by his personal warmth, being gentle.” That came through in the narrative. He felt like a grandfather figure to me. But it was super effective. The one time he came down hard on a subordinate with the “where is task force 37” telegram, it was the softest criticism you could imagine.I wanted to pick up on the fog of war.
Fog of war is a metaphor and fog of war is reality with the weather playing such a critical role in almost every battle.
Ian Toll: Fog of war is a very frequent metaphor in naval warfare and often becomes a literal problem.
Chris Miller: You felt the clouds rolling in and every single battle rolling in and out. Then the typhoon you have off of Leyte Gulf is extraordinary — you’re fighting a battle and then you’re also dealing with these ancient problems of seamanship at the same time. Talk about contingency, every single battle has this uncertainty: what will the weather be like in three days? Your ability to find or be found was hugely impacted in this era when radar was not very good by what were the cloud patterns. That was a great example of the contingency at every moment.
Ian Toll: The weather is this universal thing. I quoted Joseph Conrad, who was a sea captain before he was a novelist, and he’d been through a typhoon in exactly the same waters just off Formosa or Taiwan. It occurred to me as I was reading that description by Conrad, this is the same storm. It’s five decades, six decades later, but that’s Typhoon Alley.
USS Langley during the Great Typhoon Cobra, December 19, 1944, Philippines. Source.
You have those storms going through every year, and you could pick a description if one existed from 2,000 years ago, and you’d be describing the same storm. The navy and the navies of other countries in the Pacific today have got to deal with those same weather patterns. There’s something universal across time to that X factor of weather. I think that particularly comes to bear on naval warfare.
Jordan Schneider: The suspense of not knowing where the enemy ships are is foreign to a modern mind today. The 1940s are not ancient history, but there were no satellites. Radar was just starting. There were so many uncertainties that these folks were facing.
Ian Toll: You’re relying on your planes to be your eyes too. The patrol flights become absolutely essential. It’s very easy for a plane to fly directly over a ship and not see it in overcast weather. We saw that happen again and again where you had patrol planes moving out from these task forces. They’re supposed to be the first trigger to tell you if there’s an enemy there. There was much more of a sense, particularly earlier in the war, of the fleets being blind and having to make decisions without being certain where the enemy was, if the enemy was there, how far, what direction. That uncertainty, the tension and inherently the drama of that conflict.
Jordan Schneider: If Nimitz was a gentle, modern manager, Bull Halsey was the opposite. His famous quote was: “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be only spoken in hell. Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.” The guy was living up to his caricature, and then he embraced it.
There were numerous points where the mythos surrounding him was such that he was kept in positions longer than he would have been otherwise. FDR’s view was, “We’re already going to win, and it would be a weird sign to get this guy out of command.” His ethos was much more dualistic, reflecting the brutal mindset you needed to start these operations where you knew tens of thousands of people would die over the course of a fortnight.
Chris Miller: I was struck by the fact that some of the key, really costly errors that you describe were made by him, but it also seemed you were suggesting there’s strong evidence that the people under his command really loved him. Where’s the balance sheet there?
Ian Toll: There are some caveats to that. Halsey became very controversial within the ranks of the Navy in the last year of the war. He had some severe critics, including some of the rear admirals who were the task group commanders of the Third Fleet. These were the next generation of leaders — the guys who would be promoted into the senior positions in the immediate post-war period.
The piece that I think is often missing — and it’s true when you consider MacArthur’s career as well — is just how important their public images became.
They became important because the United States is a democracy that has elections during wartime, which makes us a little different from other democracies. The political influence of a military leader can become very great in wartime.
You had a new media environment. Film and radio, the ability to run the same photographs in newspapers all across the country. Many of these technologies that we take for granted today changed the political environment. When you had leaders like MacArthur and Halsey — I’ll put them in the same category — who were very good at speaking directly to the American people and to the rank and file of the military services through the media, they became media darlings. They became people that reporters always wanted to talk to because they wanted that quotable line, that photograph. It sold newspapers. The American people started to look at the war and understand it by listening to these very colorful, charismatic figures, and that became a political consideration.
1944 was an election year in the United States, and MacArthur was seriously considering running against FDR and was implicitly threatening to do that. At the same time, FDR was faced with the decision of whether to return to the Philippines. Halsey was making significant mistakes, most significantly in October 1944, when he made a mistake that could have led to disaster and only didn’t because of blind luck. It was well understood within the Navy that he had made this inexplicable error. There was a feeling that he should be held to account — that he should not be running the Third Fleet anymore, that he should be relieved of command, maybe put into a different position. But his political popularity, his profile with the American people as the unofficial face of the US Navy became a factor in the decision to keep him in place.
The interplay of politics, publicity, media, and the way that all of that influences the major decisions being made at the height of the bloodiest war in history — that is a fascinating story that hasn’t received as much attention in historical literature.
Chris Miller: I love the description of MacArthur’s press team as “the most well-oiled press team outside of Washington.” I learned a lot from that.
Ian Toll: MacArthur’s emergence as the principal hero — I don’t think it would be going too far to say that to the American people during the WWII, MacArthur was on a par with FDR as a national figure, a leader, a symbol. All of that happened extraordinarily fast. This was a lesson about the way media can work in wartime.
General Douglas Macarthur, 1945, Harold von Schmidt for Look Magazine. Source.
In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor — I’m talking four or five days after Pearl Harbor — you had a sense of rage among the American people, anger at the Japanese, but also at our own military leadership, our Navy leadership in particular. How could you let this happen? How could we be blindsided like this in the heart of our fleet base? There was a sense of shame, a sense that we’d been humiliated. It was inexplicable.
Then, almost immediately, another storyline emerged from the Philippines, where the Japanese are invading and the Philippines’ beleaguered army is outmanned, outnumbered, and too far away for us to support them because of what had happened at Pearl Harbor. They’re fighting for their survival. MacArthur stepped in with a very aggressive and effective media strategy to shape the way that story was told and give the American people another storyline — a heroic storyline.
People who had been conditioned by movies to understand complex events through heroic narratives — MacArthur was stepping right into that and very effectively using media, photographs, the daily cables that he was writing describing the war, to establish himself as a singular figure. That continued right through the Korean War when he was fired by Harry Truman and almost caused a revolt within the Democratic Party. For ten years, MacArthur was able to ride that successful media strategy.
That’s interesting to me because in an authoritarian or fascist model of government, you don’t have that. You don’t have the ability of individual military leaders to challenge the political leadership by appealing directly to the people through the media and the press.
Jordan Schneider: There were a few other media beats that I thought were fascinating. One was this debate in October of 1944, just a few weeks before the presidential election, of whether or not to let the public know that the Japanese had sunk a carrier. One admiral said, “No, please don’t tell the Japanese that this carrier has sunk.” Another was saying, “There will be an enormous scandal if we don’t tell the American people the facts a few weeks before the election.”
But I think my favorite arc was with King and the press corps in Washington.
Ian Toll: The culture of the Navy had inculcated this anti-media, anti-public relations philosophy that it’s dangerous to play with the media. They can divulge your secrets. You should lie low. We should be the silent service. We’ll tell the American people what happened after we win the war. There was a joke going around that King’s philosophy of disclosure and media was, “We’ll tell the media and the American people absolutely nothing about what’s happening until the day the Japanese surrender, and then we’ll put out a two-word press release — ‘We won.’”
For a thousand reasons, that became a problematic, unsustainable approach. The Army — particularly MacArthur — was stepping into this void and shaping the way the American people understood the Pacific War to be unfolding. There was an understanding among all of the military services that as soon as the war was won, there was going to be a complete reorganization of the services. What we have today — a Secretary of Defense, a Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, a way of managing the different military services and forcing them to work together — none of that existed in the 1940s. It was understood because FDR had essentially decreed it — “We will reform and reorganize the military, but let’s get the war done first.”
The Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force — they all had their own agendas, and they were positioning themselves for this immense reform, this bureaucratic refashioning that they knew was coming. For all of these reasons, King was eventually convinced: “I can’t just ignore the media. This is a democracy. I’ve got to have some strategy.”
It was his own lawyer, who was a former reporter, who proposed: “Why don’t you start off-the-record briefings? Just get a bunch of reporters together in Washington. We’ll meet somewhere — not at your office, but at my house. We’ll get these guys together. We’ll have ground rules.” It would be what would today be called a deep background briefing, meaning you’re not going to use any of what’s disclosed. None of it’s going to be written up into any article. You’re not going to source anything. You’re not going to quote King, but it’s going to help you understand what’s happening. That will contribute to the way that you write the stories that you can write.
King thought this was crazy. “Why would you trust a bunch of reporters under these kinds of ground rules?” He was persuaded that if you get reputable reporters, they will adhere to these ground rules. After the first three hours of sitting with 20 reporters in Alexandria, Virginia, at his lawyer’s house, he realized, “This is exactly what I need to be doing because I’m getting these guys on side. I can then begin manipulating press coverage a little bit.” Even more than that, this was an opportunity for him to explain at a high level the strategic issues that they were dealing with to a bunch of guys who really were outsiders, but who were highly intelligent. King realized this was actually helping him to shape his own thinking in a beneficial way. For the rest of the war, he continued doing these deep background briefings.
I think that was an interesting arc. It helps us understand a little bit about who King was, but it also illuminates these issues that are unique to running a war in a democracy — different from the kind of challenges that Stalin, Hitler would face.
On Submarines and Taiwan Contingencies
Chris Miller: I was struck by the centrality of submarine warfare in the struggles that Japan faced. There have been some books on this in the past several decades, but relative to the Battle of the Atlantic, which takes center stage in histories of the war in Europe, the fact that the Japanese faced and lost the Battle of the Pacific in terms of shipping is central. I was struck by the way that you brought submarine warfare to life, with the USS Wahoo as a great case study. Upstream of that was the question of torpedoes — how do you get torpedoes that actually work, which ends up being a technical bureaucratic struggle.
Give us a bit of a glimpse into the trajectory of submarine warfare and its impact on the scope of the war.
Ian Toll:What you have in the submarine war — in any war of commerce, the Battle of the Atlantic being another example — is a cumulative way of fighting the war. You want to sink a certain amount of shipping, sink oil tankers, and little by little diminish the ability of your enemy to carry on the war. You’re attacking the economic underpinnings, the logistics underpinnings of the war. It’s a very different kind of campaign.
The war that the rest of the Navy is fighting, the Army is fighting, the Marines are fighting — you can diagram it on the map. We’re going to take this group of islands, and then we’re going to move, and we’re going to take this group of islands. We’re going to fight a naval battle here, and you could diagram the naval battle, and then you could show how that opens the way for us to make this next westward thrust, always moving closer to the Japanese islands.
Submarine warfare became death by a thousand cuts.
Sink one oil tanker at a time. There’s a cumulative effect that caused Japan’s war economy to sputter and run out of gas, and its ability to carry on the war became critical in the last year of the war.
You have to tell these stories side by side. You have to realize these were almost entirely separate campaigns. There’s very little direct coordination between these two campaigns, and they’re both important and they’re working together. That wasn’t the way the submarines had been envisioned before WWII.
An interesting part of the story is how the submarine commanders themselves came to realize: “We’re not using this resource in the optimal way if we’re using them to support fleet movements or to go out and be eyes and ears for the fleet.” This is the way fleet submarines — these diesel submarines — had been built with a very different role in mind. They were going to operate at the edges of these task forces as they went out. They weren’t going to fight the kind of long, solitary cruises where they’re going primarily to sink oil tankers and freighters.
It wasn’t until 1943 that the Navy realized we’re not using this resource the way we should. What we should do is largely disconnect the Navy submarines from what the rest of the fleet is doing and just send them out there to try to sink oil tankers. Let’s try to starve Japan of oil and other resources. Once they did that, once they fixed the torpedo problem, it became clear to the Japanese that they had nowhere to go.
Japan is a country poor in natural resources. It always has been. It has negligible oil production. It has always relied on importing oil. Their decision to attack us at Pearl Harbor was largely about oil. They had an oil stockpile, and they needed more. We had cut off the supply of Texas oil. They needed to go down to Borneo to take the Dutch and British oil fields there and replace that supply. Then they have the problem of transporting that oil from what is today Indonesia to Japan — 3,000 miles, an artery that if we could sever would cause the entire Japanese Imperial project to bleed out. That was what happened in 1944 and 1945.
You can tell this story with statistics. There were X many fleet boats that were going out. They were going on patrols of this average length for X many weeks. They were sinking X amount of ships on average. Those statistics will tell a story. But in order to bring the reader into what’s happening, you’ve got to show an individual boat and say, “Let’s imagine what it’s like to go on this cruise on the Wahoo and to see it from the perspective of those who were in the crew.” Use the example of that one very successful submarine and her career to illuminate the larger story.
Jordan Schneider: The Wahoo arc had aspects of a video game — we had to line up the shot and execute these crazy trick shots down the chute, diving while everything exploded around us. But it ties back to larger strategic questions. The bottom-up tactical innovations were fascinating, both understanding that the torpedoes were wrong and realizing we shouldn’t be going around with the carriers. We should be positioned between Japan and China to shoot down oil tankers.
One of the big themes is that technological innovation and change happened from 1941 to 1945, but more important were the failures of imagination. Starting with Pearl Harbor, there was this long evolution of understanding that carriers mattered more than battleships, then understanding that submarines were crucial, then not taking territory, and finally realizing we could skip islands without killing everyone. On the Japanese side, we’ve talked about the Kamikazes but haven’t discussed the infantry side much — going fromBanzai charges 万岁突击 to honeycombing into ancient mountains. The fact that there was so much room to get better, even during moderate technological change rather than super rapid change, came through in your narrative.
Ian Toll: Japanese infantry tactics evolved, that was an important change. It happened primarily in the last year of the war when individual army commanders realized they had been using their army entirely wrong. If their goal was to exact the greatest possible price as the Americans came across the Pacific island by island, shrinking the ring around Japan’s home islands, then they needed to dig into the ground and make the Americans come to them — put five or six of their guys for every one of the Americans.
The Army abandoned the banzai charge entirely and began digging in. You saw this most effectively at Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
Jordan Schneider: The fact that you can become 50% more effective by using the same available tools in a different way isn’t something you’d expect given how many experiments were being run. Even in Okinawa, they still talked themselves into some stupid attack because of the instinctive doctrines they’d been drilled in for decades.
Ian Toll: Their sense of honor, too. In Okinawa, you had a defensive line of fortifications that crossed the island. Okinawa is a long, narrow island about 60 miles long and maybe 9-10 miles wide. At the narrowest point, they picked rocky mountainous ground in the southern part of the island and built an extraordinarily ambitious string of tunnels and caves across the island.
If they were going to hold out, buy time, and inflict casualties on the Americans, they should have stayed in that high ground to use the advantages of terrain and prepared defensive positions. But once the Americans were ashore and had taken the major airfields, they immediately started preparing Okinawa as a stepping stone to Kyushu. They would use those airfields to bomb the Japanese homeland.
Tsuruta Gorō, Paratroops Descending on Palembang, 1942. Source.
This created immense pressure within the Japanese army — “we’ve got to do something about this. We can’t just stay here. We’ve got to contest what the Americans are doing with the rest of the island.” Again and again, they sallied out from these defensive fortifications, got mowed down, suffered terrible casualties, and eventually realized they had to go back to this blueprint of trying to survive as long as possible while taking as many Americans with them as they could.
It was an evolving understanding of what the ideal tactics were in these battles. But there was also a subtle interplay of politics, policy, and the way military strategic decisions were made. You see that in Japan, you see that in the US, you see it in Great Britain. That’s part of the picture that’s important to illuminate and becomes relevant when we talk about the way different countries and regimes will wage war even when they have similar tools.
Jordan Schneider: It’s hard to second-guess wartime decisions because there was so much unknown in 1941 and 1942 about what carriers could do, what submarines could do, and what the Japanese political system looked like. Coming back to submarines — if the US just 10x’ed that effort, there’s a world in which very few people have to die because Japan decides to starve. Japan ends up starving, and that’s all she wrote.
Island hopping is another live debate about whether the US could have skipped more islands, Iwo Jima being the main one that people still argue about today. What do you think is the most interesting operational strategy or broader open questions when it comes to the way the war was fought in the Pacific that you’re excited to see more historians take on?
Ian Toll: There are a number of issues. What we found as we went along with this war was that we could go much faster — we could close the ring around Japan much more quickly than we thought. This is partly because we surprised ourselves with just how quickly we were able to mobilize our economy to get ships and troops and planes out into the Pacific.
But if you were to refight the war knowing what you knew in 1945, and if you were able to deal with the political challenge presented by MacArthur, who really was a force of nature all his own and who had the ability to shape decision making because of his political influence, what you would probably do is focus essentially all of your effort in a direct attack on Japan from Hawaii, moving directly through the Central Pacific (which is one of the routes we took), but not diverting into the South Pacific.
Take islands within bombing range of Japan and focus on cutting their supply lines with submarines in particular, then establishing the ability to bomb the Japanese homeland directly, which we did as well. If you took a more aggressive “close the ring around Japan quickly” approach, you would probably see a scenario where the war ends six months earlier and without using the atomic bomb.
That’s counterfactual history, but if you went back and applied the lessons that you got from the war itself, if you were able to use that wisdom of hindsight as you were doing it, we could have seen a shorter war or more efficient war, perhaps a war with fewer casualties, and that would force Hirohito and the ruling circle in Japan to recognize their error and that they needed to surrender.
One of the — at a high level — another counterfactual within the Pacific that is often forgotten by people who are familiar with the history is that we came very, very close to landing troops in what we then called Formosa, and today call Taiwan. It was Admiral King and most of the Navy planners, at least in Washington, who believed this was the key to forcing an end to the war — taking Taiwan.
It was Raymond Spruance, the Fifth Fleet commander or ocean-going fleet commander in the Western Pacific, who took the lead in saying we should bypass Taiwan. We should take Okinawa. Okinawa was smaller. The island is large enough for our purposes, essentially to establish as a stepping stone to an invasion of Japan as an air base, but will not commit us to this enormous undertaking of taking this very large mountainous island that has been a Japanese colony for 50 years.
What if we had taken Taiwan? It’s interesting to imagine how history might have unfolded. Would that have involved us in the Chinese Civil War, for example? That’s an interesting counterfactual. But if and when China does seriously consider rolling the dice and moving against Taiwan, it’s going to encounter many of the same issues that led our military to decide not to take that step in 1944.
It’s a large, mountainous, rugged island. It would require you to establish air supremacy over the island and naval supremacy at a beachhead to be able to maintain a continuous flow of supplies over that beachhead. Taiwan is 100 miles from China. That’s five times the width of the English Channel. These are immense problems that are not unlike some of the problems that we ended up solving in the 1940s, but should probably prompt military planners in China to think very seriously about this history and the nature of the challenge.
Jordan Schneider: We’ve run two articles in the past year, one on the debate around Operation Causeway and the other Operation Sho-2Go 捷2号作戦, which is the Japanese plan to ward off the Americans. They built all these relatively similar things that you saw in the context of Okinawa and Iwo Jima with all these tunnels.
I don’t think Americans on Formosa change a lot when it comes to the Chinese Civil War. The Americans were also thinking about invading Ningbo 宁波市, in Mainland China, and using that as a base to bomb Taiwan. The Americans did show up on mainland China after the war but did not stay long.
It seems to me that even if the Americans showed up in China, we would have pulled out really fast, like we did in a lot of the rest of the Pacific. The Korean War only happens because the Chinese Civil War happens the way it does and then everyone was on edge at that. Mobilizing America to do even more than what it did, which was already a lot when it came to giving Chiang Kai-shek 讲解可 a lot of weapons to fight in the late 1940s, seems to me to be a hard counterfactual to consider.
It was the Japanese invasion in the first place, which gave Mao Zedong 毛泽东 a shot. Can you imagine the world in which America went in with Chiang Kai-shek in 1946 and 1947?
Ian Toll: No, it’s unlikely. Our military services really felt an immense sense of relief that we did not have to invade Japan and had shared a realization of how costly that operation would be. To become involved in a civil war in a vastly greater country on the mainland of Asia would have compounded all of those issues.
But counterfactuals are always going to be somewhat controversial. There are many historians who think they’re not worth discussing at all. But so much happened in those last few weeks of the Pacific War that you’re almost forced to acknowledge that things could have gone differently.
The Red Army poured across the Manchurian border on August 9th, the same day we hit Nagasaki — a sudden declaration of war. Stalin let his war machine loose in Manchuria. If the war had lasted two weeks longer, if the Japanese surrendered less than a week later, if they had held out until the end of August? Would you have had a red army in Korea in a bigger way?
Stalin ordered his army to take Hokkaido. He wanted Hokkaido. He could have gotten Hokkaido if the war had gone on a few more weeks. Then you might have seen Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, as the East Germany of Japan for 45 years through the Cold War.
All of those kinds of counterfactuals you have to take seriously, given how volatile the situation was. The real question about whether Japan would surrender, whether it would make any organized surrender at the end of the war at all, or whether the place would have collapsed into civil war and prevented any organized end of the Pacific War. Very different paths for Japan and for all of Asia in those final weeks.
Jordan Schneider: Another lesson when we’re talking about the Taiwan contingency today is that we spoke earlier in this conversation about how the die was already cast by January 1942 because American industrial might was what it was. But the balance of industrial forces plays out over longer time horizons and longer wars versus shorter wars. The importance of smaller technical decisions or point-in-time technological advantages can be amplified such that you don’t have these big national industrial tests of will.
Thankfully, we haven’t had too many of them when it comes to great powers going against each other since 1945. There’s a lot more uncertainty in the smaller wars where the national commitment level is one of the most important variables, which you’re gauging and adjusting for over time, as opposed to these scenarios where two empires are going all out to the death against each other, and then you can stack up the factor endowments and have a good sense of where it’s all going to end up.
Reading Recommendations
Jordan Schneider: You want to recommend some books, Ian? What have you read recently? Doesn’t have to be anything to do with this, but whose writing has impressed you of late?
Ian Toll: In These Times: Living in Britain Through the Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, which is a book by Jenny Uglow about Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. I have an interest in home front histories of all wars, the way societies deal with wars, the way they shape economies and politics.
Jordan Schneider: And maybe just some — are there voices or memoirs or letters? Many of these Americans and Japanese who lived through the Pacific War, they’re stylish writers. Which ones are the ones that stick with you these many years after writing this?
Ian Toll: Kiyosawa’s A Diary of Darkness. Kiyosawa was a scholar who was tarred as a liberal and marginalized in Japanese society, but he kept a daily diary through the end of the Pacific War that was superb in its observations of everyday life in Japanese at the time. He was a scholar who knew a little about politics, and his horror at the way Japanese media coverage was manipulated is recorded in the diary. The Japanese people were being lied to.
That’s a very good book that few people have read. It’s one of these books that was translated in the 1960s and published. Virtually no one read it, and today it’s almost entirely unknown. That’s one good example.
A US memoir, there are many that are very good. There’s a book by someone named Anthony Weller, who was an American correspondent who went into Japan immediately after the surrender. His book is called First into Nagasaki, and it includes a lot of the dispatches he wrote at that time, which were quashed by the American censors and never saw the light of day.
The book is partly about his visit to Nagasaki a week after the surrender, but there are also a lot of dispatches about Japan and about interviews with freed American and British and Australian POWs. It’s a terrific book. And again, one of these books that I don’t think has been very widely read, it is a neglected classic.
Jordan Schneider: Great. And I want to shout out a place. Yakushima, I ended up there in February of 2020. It’s this island off Kyushu. I was stuck because China already had COVID and America didn’t have COVID yet, and I was trying to stay in Asia.
And I’m really happy that Yakushima isn’t a place that now has to be associated like Okinawa or Iwo Jima as a horrific battle happening there. It’s one of the most magical places I’ve ever been. It’s a giant rainforest.
Jordan Schneider: Exactly. It has enormous trees, and it’s really inconvenient to get to. There aren’t a lot of tourists, and America didn’t have to invade it because we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we’re not in the worst of all possible timelines. The path where you have that invasion of Kyushu, where a few more million people would have died, is something that is hanging over the specter of your final book. People should all go to Yakushima and be thankful that we haven’t had a nuclear war since 1945.
第三，我找了8分钟简单英文视频跟读练习。这个视频名字就叫“English learning methods How to speak english fluently”，特别简单，不仅适合跟读练习，还能如标题学到英语学习的方法，最后还能在每天跟读的时候获得很多信心。这篇文章里分享了7个简单有效的英文学习方法（这里安利下莫不谷在游荡者专门写了语言学习的攻略文章，是付费注册游荡者后后台就可以查看的内容）：
listen to english everyday每天听英语；
speak everyday even alone即使独自一人也每天说英语；
dont be afraid of mistakes不要害怕说错；
learn and use small sentences学习使用小短句；
copy and repeat after native speakers和母语者跟读重复；
think in english用英语思考；
talk with others and record yourself和别人用英语聊天然后记录下来。
September 3 will mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and Xi Jinping will host Vladimir Putin in Beijing for a military parade to mark the occasion. For both men, it will be an opportunity to assert the civilizational agendas they are pursuing.
Xi and Putin see themselves as men who inherited a baton from their forefathers to continue a struggle against outside enemy forces who have always wanted to eliminate their countries’ distinct national characteristics and subjugate them.
For both, the war was personal. During World War II, Xi’s revolutionary father Zhongxun concentrated his energies against the Nationalists and was never near Japanese forces. Yet Jinping’s mother Qi Xin personally witnessed the Japanese seizure of Beijing, was nearly killed by enemy cavalry, and witnessed atrocities committed by imperial forces. Xi Jinping even lost a first cousin, only an infant, to the fires of war.
Putin’s family also suffered. His father was severely wounded in combat against the Nazis and survived the Siege of Leningrad, where an elder brother died. His maternal grandmother was slain by Nazi occupiers.
For both Xi and Putin, victory then was costly, but incomplete. Although the war concluded before they were born, it resonates with them differently from other contemporary world leaders. Xi and Putin believe that “hegemonic forces” still want to impose a foreign model upon them and block their rightful place in the world. Now, they want to use the memory of the war to inoculate future generations against Western values and legitimate the global order they envision.
Having witnessed the chaos their nations faced for much of the twentieth century, both are deeply preoccupied with the question of political order. Xi Jinping was incarcerated and exiled during the Cultural Revolution and feared state collapse during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Vladimir Putin famously saw the collapse of Soviet power in East Germany as a young KGB officer. Both Xi and Putin believe that their rise to power stopped centrifugal forces, supported by the West, that threatened to tear their nations apart before they came to power.
Commemorating World War II serves that mission. Both men clearly believe that their nations need a sense of idealism, sacrifice, and commitment to survive. History as moral education is a powerful tool for that purpose. World War II was a moment that showed their nations could achieve extraordinary victories.
Xi and Putin see the suffering their peoples experienced as something that deserves only the most profound respect both at home and abroad. The anniversary has been turned into an instrument to instill loyalty to the state among a younger generation. That message is especially significant for their militaries, as Russia continues its war against Ukraine and China prepares the People’s Liberation Army for a possible war on Taiwan.
It is also a time to remind the outside world what China and Russia think they deserve as major contributors to victory in World War II. At the war’s end, both nations were recognized as major powers. For Putin, Yalta meant Russia was given special rights in its so-called “near abroad.” For Xi, the defeat of Japan meant Taiwan should rightfully return to the Chinese mainland. Beijing and Moscow see American activities in their neighborhoods as a return to the power politics that led to war decades ago.
That is why Xi and Putin obsess over a perceived grievance that diminishes the contributions of the countries' role in the war. Control over history is literally a matter of regime security and strategic imperatives.
The Chinese Communist Party opposes any attempts to deny the Nanjing Massacre and the horrific biological and chemical warfare experiments on human beings at Unit 731 in Manchuria. Two movies, one on each of those topics, are being released this year in China. The party also opposes the largely accurate narrative that the communists sat out much of the war against the Japanese.
In Russia, former Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky used the words “human scum” to refer to anyone who debunked the legend of Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen, who allegedly all died fighting off the Nazis outside Moscow.
Yet questions remain about the long-term efforts by Xi and Putin to immortalize their regimes and their use of the memory of World War II for that purpose. The story of Chinese and Russian history is often one of unintended consequences. Mao Zedong launched his Cultural Revolution to prevent capitalism from appearing in China. It was such a disaster it triggered Reform and Opening. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to save the Soviet Union destroyed it.
Putin sees the war against Ukraine as a sort of sequel to World War II that can help him recast another generation of Russians according to his vision. He sneered as young people fled the country to avoid the draft, describing them as “scum and traitors” that Russians would “simply spit out” “like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths.” He seeks to politically empower veterans – for instance through his Time of Heroes program to get them elected on his party’s ticket. Patriotic education has contributed to the militarization of society. The economy is now hardened against sanctions and geared to fight a long-term war. Yet what will Russia do without its most talented young people if they flee or die on the battlefield? Will Russians become exhausted by the war? And how long can prolonged competition with the West last with an economy whose future has been mortgaged on the war?
Xi can only use the memory of war and the possibility of potential war in the future. He uses the revolutionary legacy, of which the war against Japan was a part, to achieve what he calls “self-revolution.” It is a call to vigilance, a call to “eat bitterness,” a call to yet another young generation of Chinese to devote their lives not just to themselves but also to national rejuvenation. Yet Xi does not want his relationship with the West to go completely off the rails. Unlike Putin, he wants to benefit from economic, financial, and technological ties while he can. The question is whether Xi can achieve both struggle and pragmatism at the same time.
As for the international community, the commemoration in Beijing will likely not fundamentally change any feelings in the West towards Russia or China. No Western nation is convinced that the Ukrainians are Nazis, as Putin falsely alleges. And although China has sought to avoid economic and reputational costs, it has unambiguously been a major facilitator of Russia’s war machine. The military parade, along with the recent treatment of Japanese citizens and military exercises around Taiwan, might frighten China’s neighbors more than win them over with the memory of China’s role in the defeat of Imperial Japan.
No historian can deny the contributions of China and Russia in the defeat of fascism in World War II. But the war’s role in justifying authoritarianism at home and expansion abroad is not a tribute that will inspire everyone.
ChinaTalk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
For more with Joseph Torigian, check out our podcast on his first book on CCP power struggles.
And the two-part five hour epic we did covering his monumental biography of Xi Zhongxun.
For the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan, ChinaTalk interviewed Ian Toll about his Pacific War trilogy, which masterfully brings America’s bloodiest war — and the world’s only nuclear war — to life. Ian’s detailed scholarship creates a multisensory historical experience, from the metallic tang of radiation after the bombs were dropped to the stench of Pacific battlefields.
Ian’s forthcoming book, The Freshwater War, will explore the naval campaign the US fought against Britain on the Great Lakes between 1812 and 1815.
Today our conversation covers….
How Ian innovates when writing historical narratives,
Whether Allied victory was predetermined after the US entered the war,
Why the Kamikaze were born out of resource scarcity, and whether Japanese military tactics were suicidal as well,
How foreign wars temporarily stabilized Japan’s revolutionary domestic politics,
How American military leadership played the media and politics to become national heroes,
Lessons from 1945 for a potential Taiwan invasion.
Cohosting is , author of Chip War. Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.
Jordan Schneider: I want to start with your closest scholarly forebearer, Samuel Eliot Morison. He was FDR’s buddy who ended up getting presidential approval to be embedded in the fight in the Pacific. Over the next 20 years, he published a 15-volume, 6,000-page history of United States naval operations in World War II.
For this show, aside from reading your 2,000 pages, I also read a few hundred pages of Morison, which — while there are echoes — feels like it was of a different time, era, and audience. When reflecting back on where you chose to spend your time in research and pages, compared to what he thought was most interesting and vital, what were the things that you both agreed needed the full treatment? What were things that you felt comfortable writing in the 21st century that you could spend less time on? What were some of the themes that you wanted to emphasize to a greater extent than he did in his book?
Ian Toll: Well, Morison will always be the first, if not the greatest, historian of the Pacific War. It’s an unusual case because Morison pitched the president of the United States — who was himself a former assistant secretary of the Navy — this idea. FDR ran the Navy day-to-day during the Woodrow Wilson administration and was fascinated with naval history going all the way back to the American Revolution. He was a collector and an antiquarian.
FDR was unique as a president in anticipating the importance of research and writing to document the history of this war, even before it began to unfold.
Samuel Eliot Morison, a historian at Harvard who was well-established in the field, said, “Why don’t you just put me in charge of this whole project and let the Navy know that I get an all-access pass to the Pacific War as it’s happening? I will produce a multi-volume official history — but really a history written by me, Samuel Eliot Morison, with all of my strongly opinionated views, having witnessed many of these events, in some cases from actually being aboard a ship in a task force as it went into battle.”
Morison’s concern was to write the first draft of the history, and he did a remarkable job. He had access in a way that no outsider could possibly have had. He became personal friends with many of the admirals who fought that war and was a direct witness to many events. That was true in Okinawa, where he was aboard a ship in the task force and could work his personal impressions into the narrative.
All of that is very unique. Morison was seeing the war through the eyes of his contemporaries. He was very much involved in the debates that the admirals had as they were rolling across the Pacific. He was probably less interested than I am in the way that the war was experienced by the ordinary sailor, soldier, and airmen, and more interested in grand strategy.
I like to pull those together — the way the war unfolded in the eyes of those who fought it, but then also returning to the conference rooms where the planning unfolded. I wanted to understand how the politics of inter-service rivalries in the US military affected decisions — that was an important story unique to the Pacific because of the divided command structure.
This Solomon-like choice to say the South Pacific will be MacArthur’s domain — the US Army will be in charge of the South Pacific, the Central and North Pacific will be Nimitz’s domain — meant we were really going to divide this enormous ocean into two theaters. We were going to let the Navy have one, let the Army have one. That was to establish peace within this large and fractious military.
In some ways, that was a suboptimal decision. In other ways, it seemed to work out fine because the United States had the ability to mobilize such an enormous war machine, such that we could fight two wars in the Pacific.
We fought two parallel counteroffensives — one south of the equator, one north of the equator. Because we had the ability to do that, the Japanese really were unable to concentrate their diminishing forces to meet either prong of this two-headed offensive.
Jordan Schneider: As you’re thinking about how to devote your research time and the pages that you allocate to these stories, can you reflect a little about your process of having all these simultaneous strains of the experiences of these individual soldiers, as well as these grand debates between MacArthur and Nimitz and the president about how to put all the pieces on the chessboard? What was both the research as well as synthesis process for you in this comprehensive history?
Ian Toll: My process, from when I first began doing this about 25 years ago, is to read everything. Now, with the Pacific War, you can’t literally read everything. The first book I wrote, Six Frigates, about the founding of the US Navy, I felt at times I was touching almost everything that had been written. That will never be the case with a war this big.
But to read very, very widely — histories, the original documents, the planning documents, the action reports, the memoirs, the letters, the letters of the military commanders and the lowest ranking soldier and sailor who experienced these events. Casting a wide net and spending years. before sitting down to write, going out and gathering up an enormous amount of material, and looking at the subject from every different angle.
Then there’s a middle step, which is important and often neglected by a lot of historians, which is to take all of that material and file it in a way that when you come back to the part of the narratives that you’re writing, you can immediately put your hands on that source to work it in. It is an information management issue, which requires a lot of thinking about how to do the research initially and how to organize it so you can then use it in the writing.
Eventually, it just becomes many thousands of documents organized in a certain way, a narrative that is going to unfold. The narrative is iterative in the sense that I may go down a blind alley and decide I need to throw that out. I throw hundreds of pages out. I’m doing it again with the book I’m writing now. To try to give the reader a sense that you’re shifting between different perspectives constantly — the perspective of Nimitz and his staff at Pearl Harbor planning an operation, then shifting immediately to the perspective of Marines in the Fifth Regiment who are landing on a beach and then carrying out the operation that you were just seeing how this was planned, then shifting to the Japanese perspective and shifting back to the US home front.
It’s a constantly shifting narrative, in which you’re looking at the same subjects from a different point of view, but then integrated into a narrative that unspools a little bit the way a novel would.
Chris Miller: How did you learn to do that, shifting perspective so smoothly? Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, shift from Nimitz’s room where he’s looking at the map, then shift to Iwo Jima.” But you do that in a way that few narrative histories do. Jordan and I both agreed that we’ve never read a 2,000-page history and wanted another page until we read yours. How do you learn that scene shifting? What were you looking at as examples? What were you reading that gave you a model for this type of vast, sweeping narrative history?
Jordan Schneider: To give a sense of what Ian does — one of my favorite scenes was Hirohito’ssurrender speech, which covers 30 pages. First, there was a debate over whether or not to surrender in the first place. Then 10 pages of incredible palace drama — is there going to be a coup? Then, there was a coup, and it failed. Then the scene moves to NHK, and the phonograph is being placed, and the guy bows at the emperor’s photograph. Then you have these scenes all across Imperial Japan of different people responding to hearing the emperor’s voice in different ways.
The speech was in archaic Japanese, so people didn’t even know what it was saying. Some people decided, “Okay, if we’re going to surrender, then that means I need to do my final Kamikaze run.” Other people were saying, “Oh my God, thank God.”
It sounds overwhelming and kaleidoscopic, but it is actually one of the most incredible pieces of literature that I have consumed. Where does that all come from? How do you develop this skill?
Ian Toll: Well, I really appreciate the praise. It’s praise that keeps me going because this is hard work. I’ve been doing this full-time since 2002. That’s when I signed my first book contract. That’s 23 years, and I have four books to show for it. Part of the answer is that I take a lot of time. I throw a lot of work out. Probably a lot of that work is good, but it doesn’t work within the narrative pacing that I was going for. It’s a lot of following instinct.
I said in an author’s note that there’s room for innovation in this genre of historical narrative. It’s been a genre that has been trapped within certain ideas about narrative conventions — the idea that if you use the storytelling techniques of a novel or even a film, you might be compromising the scholarly purpose of the work. I don’t believe that’s true.
You can borrow from the techniques of novels or even films, in a way that may illuminate certain issues that you’re writing about, that may bring the reader closer to the way it felt for the participants to be there. I use research that I’ve accumulated over many years and have cast a very wide net to try to find material that hasn’t received as much attention as it should have in previous works.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about that filmic quality.. There are these moments of terrific awe-inspiring beauty that you point to — these ships blowing up and these massive artillery barrages, the sunrise over Mount Fuji that the admirals see as they’re pulling into the harbor, about to accept the surrender of the Japanese and the way that they see that as this flag that they’ve been fighting against and finding on people’s corpses for the past six years.
Your book made me watch some more World War II Pacific movies, and I was disappointed, honestly, with what I saw relative to the incredible Technicolor visions that you and your narrative painted in my head. How did you develop that sensibility and when did it become clear to you that you needed to make sure that your readers have some of the images that were in these soldiers’ heads in ours as well?
Ian Toll: As I’m coming through these sources, I often zero in on these images, descriptions of images. One of the things you’ll find if you start reading Pacific War narratives again and again is that you will have an American from Illinois who had never traveled beyond a few miles where he was born, seeing these extraordinary things in the Pacific, this exotic, remote part of the world.
Often they’d describe the sunsets, and you’d get a sense that they are having a sublime, ineffable experience seeing these things. That grabs my attention when I see it. Then I want the reader to see that image, but then also get a sense of how that felt for people who had not traveled widely before being thrown into this extraordinary war.
On that subject, there’s a whole genre of wartime art. You have talented watercolorists working on a destroyer who took a sketchbook along and brought back images, which are particularly important because you weren’t permitted to take a camera with you in the Pacific War. You had to have special authorization to have a camera. The art sometimes is useful to see the war through the eyes of the people who were there.
Those aspects of the Pacific War narratives always jumped off the page for me. Then I tried to in turn weave them into the narratives.
Jordan Schneider: There’s beauty and there’s also horror. You spend a lot of time describing deaths. Even when people aren’t literally dying, the smell of some of these battlefields and the smell of the corpses is another thing that’s going to live with me for a while. That contrast struck me — these incredible sunsets and these spectacular displays of mechanical might and fleets that are extending farther than the eye can see. Then every once in a while, they blow up and people die horrific deaths because of what all these machines can do. How did you try to do justice to that as well?
Ian Toll: In the case of the Pacific War or any other war, really any other aspect of World War II, there’s plenty of carnage in the historical record. These things happened. The challenge becomes describing those in a way that gives the reader a sense of what it was like to be there. You’re right about the smell — that’s another thing that just jumps off the page. If someone describes a smell, whether it’s the awful smells that you get on a battlefield or even the smell of flowers on a beach, those tend to leap out at me, and then I try to find a way to work those in.
We have five senses. If you can get three out of four of the physical senses into a description of a battle scene, you’re able to reach the reader through more than one route. Those images, those impressions, tend to build on themselves. If you can get many of them into a narrative — not doing what a novelist does where you make it up, you need to pull these details from first-hand accounts that are reliable — but if you get many of them, that tends to build to where the reader gets a sense of what it was like to be there.
Jordan Schneider: This is my big note for the Chip Wars revised edition. Chris, we need more smell in it.
Chris Miller: You know, the place that really stood out for me in the book was on Iwo Jima, which everyone knows is this absolute bloodbath. But the discussion of the sulfuric volcanic ash all around in these subterranean caves — you got smells and also tastes, talking about the water being sulfuric in its taste. It felt like I was walking into Mordor, but it wasn’t made up in Tolkien’s mind. It was a hellhole on Earth.
Jordan Schneider: The smell and the taste that’s going to live with me forever is the Enola Gaydropping the bomb and the pilots tasting metal because of the radiation. They hadn’t looked back, but they knew that the bomb had gone off because they felt it in their molars. What more can you ask for from a historian?
Ian Toll: That detail really grabbed my attention too. That’s in one of the pilot accounts, I believe. You had this electric taste in your mouth from the explosion, from the bomb. They noticed that at the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico, as well.
Chris Miller: You have these juxtapositions of extraordinary heroism and extraordinary barbarism on both sides. A lot of military histories tend in one direction or the other and don’t balance out both. You show them both being constantly present in different ways, competing impulses. Can you walk us through the ethics of what you’re recounting and how you, as a historian, try to properly balance these two competing impulses?
Ian Toll: You mean the impulses to acknowledge the humanity and suffering of the enemy — it’s part of what makes good war histories memorable, is that you have a situation in which it’s impossible for people on the battlefield not to feel a sense of hatred toward the enemy. This is murder on a mass organized scale. Then you have a war like the Pacific War, where, in some ways, that hatred reached a pitch that we haven’t seen, at least in any other American war — this dehumanization and hatred that was felt. Much of it was justified, honestly.
To evoke that for the reader, that sense of hatred, that sense that many Americans had that the Japanese were somehow less than fully human and that this justified wiping out their cities — to feel that in a visceral way for the reader because of the way you’ve shown how the war was experienced by the Americans who experienced it, by the POWs, by the civilians who were caught in the war zone in the way of rampaging Japanese armies. But then at the same time to acknowledge, to fully understand the humanity of the Japanese and the suffering of the Japanese.
It comes down to weaving these different perspectives together into one integrated narrative. Many others have done it well — such as John Toland’s book, The Rising Sun, which I recommend. He was one of the first to write the history of that war from the Japanese perspective in a way that was broadly sympathetic to the Japanese people and their suffering, while acknowledging that the Japanese militarists had tyrannized and abused that country and eventually brought on the immense suffering of 1944 and 1945.
The Kamikaze — A Problem of Scale
Jordan Schneider: The kamikaze dynamics that we get into in 1944 and 1945 are some of the most artful sections. The training system for Japanese airmen was incredibly selective, where a thousand people joined and only a hundred made it out the other side.
That led to this very elite core of fighter pilots, but ultimately, they were short of decent pilots such that pilots were so useless by 1942 and 1943 that the most efficient tactical maneuver to spend the least steel to deal the most damage on American ships was to use pilots as the 1940s version of guided homing missiles. It’s much easier to teach someone to fly into a plane than it is to dogfight with a Zero.
On one hand, it makes sense. On the other hand, you’re sending people to their deaths. On a lot of these missions, which aren’t literally suicide missions, you have Americans who are at some level doing the same thing, with flights that go off carriers where 12 planes go out and one or two make it back. But there is something that is particularly resonant and horrific about Kamikaze flights. My guess is, 500 years from now, if people are talking about anything when it comes to the Pacific War, the Kamikaze flights are going to be one of the three lines that people still remember.
How did you approach that? What are the different aspects of the story that you wanted to hit as you were describing the different parts of the Kamikaze story?
Ian Toll: The Japanese had trained what may have been pound for pound the best cadre of carrier pilots in the world at the beginning of the war. They were superb. There had been a national selection process, extremely difficult — tougher than getting into Stanford today — for getting accepted to naval pilot training in 1939-1940. Then they went through this extremely rigorous pilot training process that built these superb pilots. But they never thought seriously in Japan about the problem of expanding that training pipeline to produce many more pilots in order to fight a war on the scale of the Pacific War.
When their first team of pilots was killed off in 1942-43, with few left by 1944, they did not have a next generation of pilots to come in and carry on the fight. The decision to deploy Kamikazes on a mass scale was tactically correct in a sense. If you have pilots who you cannot afford to train — you don’t have the time, the fuel, the resources to train pilots to effectively attack ships using conventional dive bombing attacks, conventional aerial torpedo attacks, the kinds of attacks that the Japanese had used effectively in the early part of the war — then maybe what you do is train the pilot to fly a plane with a bomb attached to it into a ship like a guided missile. Maybe that’s simply the best tactical use of the resource that you have.
That is ultimately what persuaded the Japanese to go ahead and deploy Kamikazes on basically their entire air war — their entire air war was a Kamikaze war in the last year of the war. Then you have, on top of that, this question of the morality of sending 20-, 21-, 22-year-old men to their certain deaths in this situation.
The part of the story that has been neglected and forgotten in the West is that this was immensely controversial, even in Japan. The Kamikazes came to be revered. But at the outset, even within the military, within the Navy — the Navy was mainly the Kamikaze service that launched the Kamikazes — there was immense opposition to this within the ranks of the Japanese Navy. It took time for this to be accepted, but this was the way they were going to fight this war.
Trying to understand what it was like to be a Kamikaze pilot, to draw upon these letters and diaries that have been published, many of them in English, but then also what it did to the crew of a US ship to know that they were under this kind of attack. The unique sense of horror that they felt operating off of Okinawa in particular — the height of the Kamikaze campaign — where 34 ships were sunk, and many more were badly damaged with US Navy casualties running well into the thousands. Certainly, more Navy personnel were killed than Army or Marines at the Battle of Okinawa, as bad as the ground fighting was. That unique sense of horror and loathing that they felt as these planes came in making beelines, flying suicide runs, and doing terrible damage.
Chris Miller: I was struck by the other facet of how the Kamikazes emerged. There’s the logic of how you most efficiently use your limited number of airplanes and pilots to sink ships. But it also seemed like the Japanese army and all of its island defenses were pursuing a Kamikaze strategy. In all these island campaigns, 90% plus of the Japanese garrisons were killed. They would start the battle knowing they would lose, but trying to exact as much punishment as they could, which at a strategic level is rational, but tactically a brutal way to fight a campaign.
I found myself wondering, did the Japanese army have its own version of the Kamikaze mentality? Was the entire war effort on Japan’s side suicidal after 1942? It was obvious to everyone that the production differences were large enough that Japan would definitely lose. Is there something to that analysis?
Ian Toll: Absolutely. You could say that Kamikazes are a metaphor for the entire project of Imperial Japan, particularly after Midway and Guadalcanal when we reached the second half of the Pacific War, when it was clear that Japan was going to lose the war. Whatever that meant — losing could be many different versions of losing the war. But historians have traced a cultural change that occurred in the Japanese military after the Russo-Japanese War and then after the First World War, in which the Japanese Army leadership convinced itself, “We have got to do something about this problem of our soldiers surrendering. That’s not acceptable.”
They actually altered the military manuals and the standing orders to say, “You shall not surrender in any circumstance. There will never be any surrender in the Japanese Army.”That was a very fateful decision because once you’ve put your soldiers in that situation, which they know they’re not going to survive, that they’re going to fight to the last man, that alters the psychology on the battlefield and leads inevitably to a much more brutal environment.
On one island after another, starting most famously on the Aleutian island of Attu in the spring of 1943, you had entire Japanese garrisons fighting and dying to the last man. This being celebrated in Japan by a press that was being very closely guided and censored by the regime, building in Japan a sense that this is an extraordinary act of bravery, of commitment, of fanaticism that the allies, the Americans, would never be able to match.
This was going to be the secret weapon for the Japanese, showing that they were willing to make much greater sacrifices than their enemies were.
As the war went on and US forces drew closer to Japan, the story changed to, “This is how we’re going to protect the homeland. We’re going to show the Americans that the cost of invading our homeland, of trying to occupy our homeland, is so great that they won't want to pay it.” It became a question of whether they could force the Americans to the negotiating table to resolve this conflict in a way in which Japan would have to acknowledge its defeat. That would mean giving up some portion of its overseas empire, but preserving its emperor system and keeping American and allied troops out of Japanese territory. That became a driving obsession of the Japanese leadership in the last year and a half of the war.
These fanatical demonstrations, fighting to the last man on one island after another, the Kamikazes, all became a kind of theater. A way of showing the Americans, “This is what you’re dealing with. We’re different from other people. We’re willing to die — the whole country will die to the last man, woman, and child if necessary.” Wouldn’t it be better to sit down and negotiate some solution to this war, which leaves us with some vestige of the Imperial project intact?
Inside Japan’s Imperial Project
Jordan Schneider: There’s of course the irony that by the time the Americans land, MacArthur says, “Actually, when we got here, we were taking a big bet that they wouldn’t want to fight anymore.” Somehow, someone snapped a finger and the rebellion turned off, or we would be in trouble. We didn’t have enough troops to do this. But the fact was, once the war was done, the war was done. The only people still fighting were five guys in the hills of the Philippines who just didn’t get the message or something.
Another contrast is why Nazi Germany took it to the end and why the Japanese took it to the end. With Nazi Germany, it was one guy and all the generals. Definitely by late 1944, you had a whole plot. Everyone saw the writing on the wall, and there was a wide consensus — enough to have a whole conspiracy. You had these back-channel feelers to the English. But because of the lack of a focal point and because you had a consensus, even though you had dissenting voices, they weren’t able to mobilize even as much as the Operation Valkyrie folks were.
You have this thesis in Japan of, “If we just show them how crazy we are, then they’ll come to the negotiating table.” But they never really tried to do the negotiating in the first place, aside from this conversation with the Soviets, which anyone really could have seen wasn’t actually going anywhere.
Let’s talk about elite Japanese politics as well, starting in the second half of the war. Even though everyone was doing these suicide missions, even though everyone knew they were on this national suicide mission by 1943, a few million more people had to die before we got to the inevitable conclusion. Why is that?
Ian Toll: To understand what was happening in Japan’s ruling circle in the last year of the war, it’s necessary to go back to the beginning of the 1930s and understand how Japan descended into militarist tyranny. The story is one of extraordinary turmoil, chaos, revolutionary energy, assassinations, uprisings, and almost a complete breakdown of discipline within the ranks of the army, but also the Navy.
Again and again, hot-headed extremist officers and factions of younger mid-ranking officers threatened the Japanese leadership at gunpoint, forcing a much more right-wing, fanatical, imperialist, and aggressive foreign and domestic policy. Increasingly, the generals and admirals were running every aspect of military, foreign, and domestic affairs. The army took over the Japanese education system in the 1930s.
“Always Struggling for the Nation”, Japanese WWII Propaganda. Source.
What happened with the China incident — the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 — and then the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war with Great Britain and the US beginning in 1941, was that these large foreign wars tended to heal, or at least stabilize, this domestic turmoil within Japan.
The leadership saw war as a way to maintain a fragile peace and stability within a society that was in many ways very revolutionary.
As you approach the end of the Pacific War, the problem isn’t whether to surrender or not. The problem is that whatever Japan did as a country — if they surrendered, if they initiated negotiations, if they tried to use diplomacy to get out of this war — there was the threat of a resumption of these assassinations, a civil war. You could have a civil war between different elements within the Army. You could have fighting between the Army and the Navy. This was seen in Japan as a real danger.
To complicate the picture even more, in the US we had a window — imperfect, but we had a window — into what was happening within the ruling circle in Japan because we were reading their diplomatic mail. We had broken their codes, communications between the foreign ministry in Tokyo and Japanese embassies throughout the world. We were intercepting those messages, decoding them, and reading them.
We were aware that the Japanese, by the spring of 1945, had seen their last hope as bringing Stalin and the Soviet government in to mediate between the US and Great Britain. The Japanese had a historical precedent for this. The end of the Russo-Japanese War ended with a negotiated peace between Russia and Japan, which had been mediated by the US. Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for Peace for that mediation.
They were trying to replicate what they had seen as the acceptable end to the Russo-Japanese War — a negotiated settlement which allowed them to maintain and build their empire. Here, they would like to try to negotiate a truce. They were deeply divided within the ruling circle over what such a negotiated arrangement might look like. But the point often forgotten in the West is that it wasn’t just a division — it was a fear of a descent into complete chaos and civil war, which would make it impossible for the Japanese government to do anything in an organized way.
Our leaders understood enough of that dynamic that we saw the necessity of strengthening the peace faction within the ruling circle, and neutralizing the Army in particular, which wanted to fight on. The atomic bomb became a means to that end.
Chris Miller: But the violence of Japanese politics in the ’20s and ’30s ends up seeming like a really important driver of the violence of Japan’s war effort and even the suicide dynamics that we just discussed. You get some of that in Japanese army politics in the ’20s and ’30s as well. It’s almost as if the Japanese army took over the entire country not just in terms of running the schools, but in terms of running the culture to a substantial degree.
Jordan Schneider: Yamamoto famously was doing his best to talk everyone out of bombing Pearl Harbor. But then at a certain point, he says, “All right, you guys are dumb enough to do it. Might as well do the dumb thing the smart way.”
The thing that strikes me about the tension of this narrative history is that once you get to Pearl Harbor and the American political reaction to it, that is your turning point — America’s decision to fight this war in the first place. Regardless of whether Midway had gone this or that way, if the Marines had gotten kicked off of Guadalcanal, you have such an enormous material imbalance between the Americans and the Japanese.
If, because of Japanese politics, you’re taking off the table Japan ever wanting to cash in their chips and negotiate, then it seems like a US victory was inevitable. What do you think about that inevitability question? If it’s all inevitable, aside from the human drama of the smells and the visuals, what is the point of spending so much time and energy studying the Pacific War?
Ian Toll: It’s an issue that will never be resolved. It’s the question of whether we want to take a determinist approach to understanding WWII. I probably lean a bit more toward the determinist way of thinking about it.
Winston Churchill, in his post-war memoir of WWII, had a famous passage in which, as soon as he had heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, “So we had won after all.” Meaning that this entire conflict, including the conflict with Nazi Germany, was now going to be settled. It was just a question of the proper application of military power. Now, that was written many years later. I think it was deliberately provocative in that mischievous, Churchillian way. But I do think it is true that before the attack on Pearl Harbor, you had a deeply divided political situation in Washington in which the isolationist movement was perhaps gaining strength in the fall of 1941.
This is a movement that had strength in both the Democratic and Republican parties. It had strength in every region. It was a formidable force in our politics, a sense of real moral fervor around the idea that we were not going to be dragged into a global war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, that movement collapsed overnight. When I say overnight, I mean literally overnight. FDR asked for a declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It passed both houses of Congress. I think there was one dissenting vote in the house. There was a unanimous vote in the Senate.
It does not go too far to say that this one decision the Japanese made to attack and launch a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor completely altered the domestic politics around going to war against Japan. Three days later, Hitler made the curious decision to declare war on the United States when we hadn’t declared war on him.
Then it was a global war, and the largest economy in the world — the economy with the greatest latent military power — was a combatant.
Not only were we combatant, but we had the broad public political consensus that we needed to quickly mobilize our economies for war, which we did. I think that was the turning point. It was the attack on Pearl Harbor and the reaction — the political reaction within the US — that really made it inevitable that not just Japan, but Nazi Germany would be finished within three to four years.
The one other major contingency is that the Soviets were able to stop the German attack on the Eastern Front and stabilize that war and survive long enough so that Allied supplies could get in, allowing them to turn the tide. If there had been some surrender on the Eastern Front, that could have taken the entire war, including the Pacific War, in a different direction.
“What Becomes of a General?”
Jordan Schneider: Let's talk about the generals and admirals, starting with Chester Nimitz…
Paid subscribers get early access to the rest of the conversation, where we discuss…
The various command styles that shaped US military strategy in the Pacific,
How General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey became media darlings —controlling public opinion and war politics in the process,
The evolution of submarine warfare and Japanese defensive strategy,
Counterfactuals, including a world where the Allies invaded Taiwan,
Broader lessons for the future of warfare, especially in the Taiwan Strait.
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