A great deal of the joy in writing a work of history comes from the detective investigation required to flesh out an episode or a subject and make it rise up off the page. Travel, archival searches, governmental databases, websites, and the works of other authors are just a few of the resources that we rely upon. The authors wish to thank James Zobel at the MacArthur Memorial Foundation in Norfolk, Virginia, for his tireless help in tracking down obscure documents pertaining to the general and his life. Visitors to Norfolk are encouraged to pay this underappreciated museum a visit, for it offers an abundance of information about MacArthur’s life as well as a vast number of his personal effects.
Head Archivist Dara Baker at the Naval War College was most helpful in tracking down the movements of Admiral Nimitz through the document known as the Nimitz Graybook. David Clark at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, was also very helpful in finding some of the more obscure details of the late president’s life. As with all presidential libraries, the Truman Library’s website offers exhaustive detail about his presidency and lifelong habit of letter writing. The papers of a great number of lesser Truman administration officials can also be found there. Visit www.trumanlibrary.org to have a look.
The US Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, should be a required stop for anyone with even a passing interest in history, showcasing the United States Navy—and so much more. The exhibits visitors can view include the spur belonging to John Wilkes Booth that caught on patriotic bunting as he leaped from the presidential box after shooting President Abraham Lincoln and the tomb of the legendary John Paul Jones. For this book, we were interested in the displays detailing the navy’s impact on the Pacific war as well as a large number of artifacts, including the pen Admiral Chester Nimitz used to sign the Japanese surrender documents and a sword surrendered by the Japanese delegation to the Allies on the morning of September 2, 1945. Also on display at the Naval Academy Museum are a number of flags that have played prominent roles in American naval history, including the Stars and Stripes flown by Commodore Matthew Perry when he sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and later displayed on board the USS Missouri on the morning of the Japanese surrender. The USNA museum is also in possession of the other American flag that flew aboard the Missouri, but it is not currently on display. Thank you to archivist Jim Cheevers for his assistance.
There is a fine Pearl Harbor display and film at the USNA museum, but for the greatest effect, readers are encouraged to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii. In addition to looking around a detailed museum and watching a vivid film detailing the attack and its aftereffects, visitors can travel by boat to the spot in the harbor where the Arizona still rests. Many of the men who died when she exploded and sank that Sunday morning are still entombed inside the ship. Many of those who survived the attack have requested that upon their deaths, their ashes would be placed within the Arizona so that they might be laid to rest with their former shipmates.
On display nearby, positioned so that its guns symbolically protect the memorial and the men of the Arizona, is the USS Missouri. The Mighty Mo is a museum ship now, and visitors can come aboard to see the precise spot on which the Japanese surrender documents were signed.
The authors would also like to thank the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, and distinguished World War II writer and researcher Brian Sobel.
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What follows are other resources utilized in this writing. This list is by no means exhaustive but will provide the readers with a road map to use in their own historical investigations.
Websites, Newspapers, and Archives: General Background Information
News Sources: New York Times, Life magazine, Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Washington Post, Spokane Daily Chronicle, Australian, Wall Street Journal, Times of India, Associated Press, U.S. News & World Report, New Yorker, Japan Times, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Marine Corps Chevron, Fox News, PBS, BBC.
Websites: Architect of the Capitol (www.aoc.gov); Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (www.clerk.house.gov); National Archives (www.archives.gov), especially dated February 26, 1945, entitled “Captured Japanese Instructions Regarding the Killing of POW”; Battle of Manila Online (www.battleofmanila.org); Congressional Medal of Honor Society (www.cmohs.org); Supreme Court of the United States (www.supremecourt.gov); FBI Records—The Vault (https://vault.fbi.gov); Office of the Historian (history.state.gov); Central Intelligence Agency (www.cia.gov); USS Indianapolis (www.ussindianapolis.org); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (www.thebulletin.org), especially Ellen Bradbury and Sandra Blakeslee, “The Harrowing Story of the Nagasaki Bombing Mission.”
Archives: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum; United States National Archives; Princeton University Library, The Manhattan Project—US Department of Energy; The George C. Marshall Foundation; US Department of State—Office of the Historian; Library of Congress—Carl Spaatz Papers; Congressional Record, V. 145, Pt. 8, May 24, 1999, to June 8, 1999; Congressional Record, V. 146, Pt. 15, October 6, 2000, to October 12, 2000; National Library of Australia—Trove (archives of the Argus); US Naval War College (especially the Nimitz Gray book); Harry S. Truman Library and Museum; Records of the United States Marine Corps; US Naval Institute Naval History Archive; US Army Center of Military History Combat Chronicles of US Army Divisions in World War II.
Peleliu
Adam Makos with Marcus Brotherton, Voices of the Pacific; E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed; John C. McManus, Grunts; John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945; Major Frank O. Hough, USMC, The Assault on Peleliu.
MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences; Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 13: The Liberation of the Philippines—Luzon, Mindanao, the Visayas, 1944–1945; Robert Ross Smith, Triumph in the Philippines (United States Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific); Gavin Long, MacArthur.
Truman
Jon Taylor, Harry Truman’s Independence: The Center of the World; Sean J. Savage, Truman and the Democratic Party; David M. Jordan, FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944; Jules Witcover, No Way to Pick a President; Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman; Steven Lomazow and Eric Fettman, FDR’s Deadly Secret; Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project; Thomas Fleming, Truman; David McCullough, Truman; Margaret Truman, Bess W. Truman; Steve Neal, ed., Eleanor and Harry: The Correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman; J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan.
Hirohito and Japan
Arne Markland, Black Ships to Mushroom Clouds: A Story of Japan’s Stormy Century 1853–1945; Francis Pike, Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War, 1941–1945; Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan; Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb; D. M. Giangreco, Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945–1947; Douglas J. MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals; Hutton Webster, Rest Days: The Christian Sunday, the Jewish Sabbath, and Their Historical and Anthropological Prototypes; Edward J. Drea, In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army; Noriko Kawamura, Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War; Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific; E. Bartlett Kerr, Surrender and Survival: The Experience of American POWs in the Pacific, 1941–1945; David M. Glantz, Soviet Operational and Tactical Combat in Manchuria, 1945: “August Storm”; Stephen Harding, Last to Die: A Defeated Empire, a Forgotten Mission, and the Last American Killed in World War II.
Air Corps
Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 1907–1960; Samuel Russ Harris Jr., B-29s Over Japan, 1944–1945: A Group Commander’s Diary; James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara; Edwin P. Hoyt, Inferno: The Fire Bombing of Japan, March 9–August 15, 1945; Graham M. Simons, B-29: Superfortress: Giant Bomber of World War 2 and Korea; Robert O. Harder, The Three Musketeers of the Army Air Forces: From Hitler’s Fortress Europa to Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War.
Trinity and Atomic Bombs
Everett M. Rogers and Nancy R. Bartlit, Silent Voices of World War II; Robert James Maddox, ed., Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism; Gar Alperovitz et al., The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb; Robert Cowley, ed., The Cold War: A Military History; Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War; Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima; John Hersey, Hiroshima; Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath; Al Christman, Target Hiroshima: Deak Parsons and the Creation of the Atomic Bomb; Charles Pellegrino, To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima; Gerard DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., The End of the Pacific War: Reappraisals; Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki: August 1945; Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center; Samuel Glasstone, ed., The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
USS Indianapolis and US Navy
Richard F. Newcomb, Abandon Ship!: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the Navy’s Greatest Sea Disaster; Doug Stanton, In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors; Edwyn Gray, Captains of War: They Fought Beneath the Sea; Christopher Chant, The Encyclopedia of Code Names of World War II; Raymond B. Lech, The Tragic Fate of the U.S.S. Indianapolis: The U.S. Navy’s Worst Disaster at Sea; Walter R. Borneman, The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King—the Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea; Kit Bonner and Carolyn Bonner, USS Missouri at War.