Book Review: Last to Die

Last To Die:A Defeated Empire,A Forgotten Mission,and the Last AmericanKilled in World War IIby Stephen HardingDa Capo, 2015Veteran journalist and military historian Stephen Harding's terrific new book Last to Die contains even more details than are listed in its bloated, spell-it-out-for-the-slow-kids subtitle “A Defeated Empire, A Forgotten Mission, and the Last American Killed in World War II” - and they're mostly riveting details, never before given such caring and extensive accounting. The “Defeated Empire” of the subtitle is of course Hirohito's Japan, which surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945 when the emperor gave his famous radio address announcing that Japan was out of the war. As Harding notes, it was an announcement that was met with extremely mixed reactions, including among Hirohito's own people:

Hirohito had been under no illusion that his August 15 radio address announcing the decision to surrender would be immediately accepted by all senior members of the government and the military, yet even he was shocked by the events that unfolded in the hours and days following the broadcast. The announcement had sparked an army-led coup intended to reverse the emperor's surrender order, and naval and air units at various points around the country were still in open revolt, vowing to fight on to the last man. Should such pointless and ultimately futile military action convince the Allies that Hirohito was unable to enforce his surrender decision or, worse, that his government's agreement to the Allied ultimatum was simply a delaying tactic meant to give Japan more time to organize its defense against an Allied invasion, the consequences for Hirohito's much-diminished empire could well be catastrophic.

A small but vital part of that military mutiny against Hirohito's surrender order was a group of fighter pilots from the Japanese Imperial Navy, the elite Kokotai air group based at Yokosuka, among whose members, Harding writes, were “some of the most experienced, talented, and successful pilots in what was left of Japan's naval air service.” (That run of near-tautological adjectives strung together like hooks on a trout line is of a piece with the “pointless and ultimately futile” from the preceding quote; this is an author who occasionally lays it on thick, God love him). The Kokotai's determination to patrol Japan's air space until formal surrender documents had been signed – which wouldn't happen until September 2^nd – brought its fighter planes into a confrontation with the “forgotten mission” of Harding's enormous subtitle, a group of American B-32s assigned to the 20^th Reconnaissance Squadron and tasked with photographing military airfields east of Tokyo in order to confirm that they were standing down.And in that short confrontation died “the last American killed in World War II,” Tony Marchione, the “loving, all-American son of immigrant parents” who's painted in purely heroic terms by Harding as “almost like a caricature of the clean-cut, self-effacing, and resolutely brave serviceman portrayed in the scores of rousingly patriotic movies made during the early 1940s.”Harding's book, which includes – indeed, is composed of - long and interesting digressions on everything from Marchione's personal life to the weapons and technology of the Allied forces at the end of the war to the intricacies of the Japanese military, never aims to do much more than narrate that rousingly patriotic 1940s movie, and the job he does of it is never less than interesting. Tony Marchione's story is one of millions born of the war; he himself would likely not have thought that his singular bad luck to be the last soldier killed in World War II necessarily made his story book-worthy, but Harding has served him well just the same.