Bombing Japan
There were no ‘good’ options for ending the war in the Pacific
Looking back on the D-Day invasion of Normandy 20 years after the event, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
informed an astonished young historian, Stephen Ambrose, that boat builder Andrew Jackson Higgins was the man responsible for victory in World War II. Eisenhower explained that the flat-bottomed landing craft known as LCVPs (Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel), which could carry troops directly onto enemy beaches, had made large-scale amphibious invasions possible. Without the ability to conduct amphibious invasions, the entire American military strategy to invade North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy would
not have been possible — much less the over 200 amphibious landings conducted across the Pacific.
After the success of the Normandy landings in June 1944, the importance of amphibious operations in Europe receded. But as Allied troops closed in on Berlin in spring 1945, amphibious landings in the Pacific were not only becoming ever more vital to American operations against the Japanese, but more difficult and bloody.
The Japanese Imperial Army had changed tactics, fortifying their defenses further inland off the landing beaches, and fighting with unprecedented intensity and ferocity as the Americans moved closer to mainland Japan. It took the Americans 36 days before victory could be claimed at Iwo Jima, an uninhabited island, at the cost of 6,821 American lives against approximately 20,000 Japanese troops. Imperial fighters vowed that death was preferable to surrender, and only 200 Japanese survived the battle — a fatality rate of better than 99%.
In the ensuing invasion of Okinawa, Japanese territory that was heavily populated, savage fighting, fanatical Japanese resistance and increasing bloodshed characterized the 82-day campaign. By the time the Americans could claim victory on June 22, 1945, over 12,000 Americans, 93,000 Japanese and 140,000 civilians on Okinawa lay dead. Symbolic of the Japanese fighting spirit, kamikaze suicide pilots killed almost 5,000 American sailors off Okinawa, the worst battle death toll suffered by the U.S. Navy in World War II.
After assuming the presidency in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in April, at the conclusion of the Okinawa campaign in summer 1945 President Harry S. Truman asked his advisors a serious query: Was the upcoming American invasion of the Japanese home islands, codenamed Operation Downfall, looking at Okinawa-level resistance from one end of Japan to the other?
Another year of casualties?
Although American troops had not yet landed in Japan, the war was being felt in the homeland islands by pressure from American sea and air power. First, the American submarine fleet was carrying out a devastating campaign in the sea lanes between mainland China, the Philippines and beyond, sinking Japanese merchant shipping at such a rate that starvation loomed within a year. Second, American B-29 bombers flying from the Mariana Islands were conducting annihilating raids by dropping incendiary bombs from low altitudes on Japanese cities. With the Japanese labor force and workshops spread out in residential areas containing much wooden construction, the firebombing campaign was crippling Japanese industry and urban productivity.
The American strategy to invade Japan with ground troops, Downfall, was planned in two stages. The first was codenamed Operation Olympic, which would see a massive American and British amphibious force launched from Okinawa to invade the southern Japanese mainland island of Kyushu on Nov. 1, 1945. Then, using Kyushu as a launching point, Operation Coronet would land on Honshu south of Tokyo and drive toward the capital city on March 1, 1946. For the initial Olympic invasion of Kyushu, it was projected that 14 infantry and Marine divisions would be used from existing assets in the Pacific. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff estimated that the Allies would face six divisions and 300,000 Japanese troops on Kyushu, and projected 125,000 casualties could be expected after 120 days of fighting. When Gen. George Marshall questioned the numbers, MacArthur lowered the estimate to 105,000 casualties.
What the Americans did not know was the Japanese had anticipated that the invasion would begin at Kyushu, and they moved troops from other parts of Asia there as part of Operation Ketsugo. The actual strength of Japanese forces on Kyushu in August 1945 totaled 14 divisions and over 900,000 men (a subsequent projection on the actual numbers forecast that American casualties would have been over 380,000 — a sobering number for a single campaign, considering that total American combat deaths in World War II were approximately 416,000.
Besides professional forces, the Japanese military sought to enlist the entire Japanese population as resistance fighters. Propaganda not only portrayed Americans as demonic and inhuman, but called for 100 million to die in “glorious” defense of their Emperor and homeland. Lacking weapons, women and children were drilled to resist the invaders with sharpened bamboo sticks. While the U.S. Navy estimated that the invasion of Kyushu would face 2,500 potential kamikazes, because of the shorter distance overland to reach the landing fleets it appeared that kamikaze aircraft would be able to attack more effectively, and if available trainer aircraft were included and used for kamikaze attacks the potential Japanese air fleet rose to over 10,200 planes.
Various parts of the U.S. government produced casualty estimates in summer 1945, and the general trend among these showed that as estimates of actual Japanese strength rose, casualty estimates also drastically increased. To cite one study conducted by future Nobel Prize recipient William Shockley for Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s office, if the civilian population resisted the Americans would suffer 400,000 to 800,000 dead along with somewhere between 5 million and 10 million Japanese dead before the war could be won. In a memorandum to the president on July 2, 1945, Stimson wrote, “Once started in actual invasion, we shall in my opinion have to go through with an even more bitter finish fight than in Germany. We shall incur the losses incident to such a war and we shall have to leave the Japanese islands even more thoroughly destroyed than was the case with Germany.”
The stage was set for a debate among the highest levels of the American government: Gen. MacArthur wished to push forward with the Olympic invasion, but Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Ernest King disagreed, believing that the costs would be too high. Under these uncertain circumstances, President Truman would have to decide whether to go forward with the planned invasion despite discord among his service branch chiefs.
Choices
This was the general situation when Truman departed for the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 to meet with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill over postwar policies in Europe and Germany. Another complicating angle on how best to end the war in the Pacific was Soviet intentions in the region. At Yalta, Stalin had promised Roosevelt that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan three months after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the Red Army was preparing a massive blow against the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria.
At 05:29:45 in the morning on July 16, 1945, a plutonium bomb codenamed Trinity was detonated in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico, ushering in the nuclear age. The Manhattan Project was a success: Now, the question remained whether the new weapon would be enough to end the Pacific War.
At 05:29:45 in the morning on July 16, 1945, a plutonium bomb codenamed Trinity was detonated in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico, ushering in the nuclear age. The Manhattan Project was a success: Now, the question remained whether the new weapon would be enough to end the Pacific War.
Truman and Stalin had a bland exchange over the news at Potsdam, both men guarded over the extent of their real knowledge of the bomb, before issuing the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945, which called on Japan to unconditionally surrender or face the alternative of “prompt and utter destruction.”
Events moved rapidly. On Aug. 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; on Aug. 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and began Operation August Storm, the invasion of Manchuria, the next day; and on Aug. 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. It is estimated that with radiation poisoning the two bombs ultimately killed approximately 226,000 people in the ensuing months. After a Japanese reply on Aug. 10 that attempted to subvert Allied rule to the Emperor was rejected, and an attempted palace coup by young Japanese militarists was stopped, on Aug. 14 Hirohito went on the radio. The Emperor told the Japanese that by “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is un-sufferable,” they would secure peace for future generations. The American government accepted the statement as consistent with the Potsdam terms.
Operation Downfall never took place. The plans for Downfall would have dwarfed the amphibious invasion of Normandy, and the ensuing campaign to pacify the Japanese home islands and population never occurred. No Japanese military unit surrendered during all of World War II, and the signing ceremony aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, signified the first national military defeat Japan had suffered during the 2,600-year reign of the Showa emperor. A unique combination of events brought about the sudden climax and downfall of the Japanese Empire, and as horrible as those events were, it is most likely that greater tragedy and horrors were lost in the mists of history because of them.