The Pacific War: The Strategy, Politics and Players that Won the War (review)

The complex events surrounding World War II in the Pacific and Asia are such a broad topic that it is difficult to gain a bird's eye perspective. Relying on secondary sources, William Hopkins renders the general reader a service in providing a good overview. He does a fine job of integrating up from the military events into the domestic and global politics that motivate an intricate chain of actions.

The author's command of the available literature is good and his prose flows easily. A marine veteran, Hopkins describes the land campaigns in more detail than the major sea battles. The land campaign summaries are concise and provide a good overview. However, a scholar will find little that is new or unique in his approach and nothing novel in his analysis.

Hopkins starts with War Plan Orange, the well reported prewar plan to cross the Central Pacific, fight a major sea battle to gain superiority over the Japanese, relieve the Philippines, and either strangle via blockade or invade Japan. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American Navy wasn't strong enough to win the feet battles envisioned by Orange. An alternative strategy of making a long series of small island hops supported by land based airpower, starting in Australia and terminating in the Philippines, evolves. Hopkins records how, after the difficult fights in the waters around Guadalcanal, the American Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral King, resuscitated War Plan Orange in 1943. He also catches a little noted effort by King to return to a Central Pacific drive after Nimitz and the Pacific naval leadership began to endorse the south west Pacific island hopping alternative in early 1944. Hopkins records the "two prong" (Central Pacific plus Southwest Pacific) compromise that adds a few long moves that generate feet battles in the Central Pacific to the small hops required to advance land based aviation along the New Guinea coast to the Philippines.

The author frequently reports actions without underlining what is most important. With few exceptions, he repeats long held, conventional conclusions. He completely ignores the great risk that Halsey took off Santa Cruz and the near disaster he faced off Cape Torokina, Bougainville. Either could have lost U.S. carriers. Halsey admitted these difficulties and recounted the Torokina mistake in some detail. Hopkins has little to say about Admiral Spruance's almost single handed effort to cancel an early deep assault on a poorly defended island in the Marshalls in favor of landing on that bitter pill box, Tarawa, despite strong marine objection.

Instead of providing interesting vignettes of marine heroes Chesty Puller and Pappy Boyington, Hopkins might have explained how the two-prong compromise strategy risked events like Torokina, or how the huge leaps in the Central Pacific not supported by land based aviation differed dramatically from the pedantic southwest Pacific strategy.

In 1945, General MacArthur's flag flew high above those of all other American commanders in the purview of American public opinion. Most serious students of the Pacific war now recognize that MacArthur's skill at oratory and public relations far outshone his ability as a tactician, a strategist, or a practitioner of the operational art. Hopkins recounts that MacArthur's estimate of Philippine defenses was nothing short of fantastic, his conduct of the defense of those islands was bungled, and his Papua campaign deteriorated into a bloody, poorly handled operation. Australians won most of the New Guinea battles but received slight recognition from MacArthur

In the 1960s one of the official Army historians commented that MacArthur became fixated on returning to the Philippines instead of the defeat of Japan. Hopkins recounts how MacArthur's personal desires and his influence on domestic politics may have convinced Roosevelt to choose advance via the Philippines instead of via Formosa as the Joint Chiefs would have preferred. About MacArthur, Hopkins...