"Air planners, however, were developing a new set of targets based on the success of Allied bombing efforts in the European Theater of Operations: namely Japan's rather primitive transportation network. The aim would have been to take out the rail and road network as Allied tactical and strategic bombing attacks in spring 1944 had done in northern France. There is no doubt that such a campaign would have quickly succeeded. And the results would have been catastrophic for the Japanese people, who were at that time hovering on the brink of mass starvation."
I had forgotten about this little gem. As I recall, there were places where taking out one bridge or road would really shut things down for vast areas.
Sudden Victory
Williamson Murray
Proceedings, August 2005
Sixty years ago millions of young Americans were either in the Pacific preparing for Operation OLYMPIC, the long awaited invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, or on their way from the United States and Europe to the huge island bases from which the largest landing operation in history was to occur. On 1 November 1945 nine divisions were to come ashore on the island of Kyushu with no less than 1,300 ships to lend support. An additional division was to land on the smaller islands lying off Kyushu to protect the landing force, while three divisions were to remain on ships waiting to come ashore as the immediate reserve force. Behind them would stand a massive pipeline of divisions and replacement combat troops staging across the Pacific back to the United States. Awaiting them ashore would be at least half-a-million Japanese regular army soldiers, backed by militia mobilized from Kyushu's population, well over 5,000 Kamikaze aircraft and thousands of suicide small boats. Operation OLYMPIC had the prospect of turning into an unimaginable blood bath—especially when one considers the possible collateral casualties among Kyushu's civilian population.
And yet a whole generation of diplomatic and political historians, few of whom know foreign languages or have studied other cultures, have argued that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not necessary; that the Imperial Japanese government was about to surrender; that the United States should have demonstrated the bomb on an isolated piece of terrain before dropping these terrible weapons on populated cities; and that the landings on Kyushu should have gone forward in place of the dropping of the bombs, because American casualties would not have been heavy, especially in comparison to the suffering that encompassed the populations of the doomed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The realities of the hard decision-making of spring and early summer 1945 underlines how far removed such critics are from the real world. Their argument that the Japanese government was on the verge of surrendering rests largely on the messages a few courageous members of Japan's foreign office sent to their embassy in Moscow asking that the Soviet government intervene to end the war in the Pacific. The terms that the Japanese foreign office suggested as acceptable would have involved: a retreat from Chinese territory conquered since the "Marco Polo" bridge incident in 1937, but Manchuria and Korea would remain in the Japanese sphere of interest; withdrawal from the conquests in Southeast Asia and the Pacific; a demobilization of the military, but conducted by the Japanese government; no occupation of the Home Islands; and the Japanese government would be in charge of its own war crimes trials. These were even milder terms than the Allies had accorded the Germans in 1919 at Versailles, and everyone in the world in 1945 knew how successful those terms had proved to be. Even the Japanese ambassador in Moscow recognized how far removed from reality such terms were.
But the significant point is that the foreign office diplomats who were suggesting a negotiated peace had virtually no influence over the Japanese government. In summer 1945 the Japanese military leaders were in firm control, and they had no intention of losing their position. As they had displayed throughout the 1930s, Japanese officers were willing to use any means to suppress dissent, including assassination, murder, coups, and concentration camps for those unwilling to go along with a criminal regime, whose behavior from 1937 on had rivaled that of the Germans.
What was it then that kept the Japanese military in the war in the face of the catastrophic defeats they had suffered over the past two years and their current hopeless situation as American ships and aircraft ravaged the Home Islands? Quite simply they hoped the Americans would provide them with the opportunity to die with honor, even if they took the whole of the Japanese nation down to destruction with them. For most Japanese officers, surrender in any form was unacceptable. A few optimists among them believed that their forces could defeat an amphibious assault on Kyushu, or, if not, impose such heavy casualties on the attackers that Japan could achieve "acceptable" peace terms. But most Japanese officers appear not to have considered the political or strategic parameters within which they were acting. To them, their honor and that of the nation were indistinguishable.
The suggestion that the American government should have demonstrated the bomb to the Japanese before its use against populated centers has more merit. A number of American scientists involved in developing these weapons actually suggested such a course at the highest levels of government. Here, the historian possesses almost unlimited time to consider the possibilities. Those making the decisions in 1945 did not. American leaders, civilian as well as military, had over the course of the previous four years been involved in the conduct of a great war in which the fate of the United States and the world had hung in the balance. They had been working twelve hours a day (or more), seven days a week, 365 days a year. With limited time at their disposal, the decision makers only considered the possibility the United States might announce a demonstration, not that it might simply drop the bomb off Tokyo Bay. Here, they confronted the fact that no one, including the scientists, knew whether the bombs were going to work. A flawed demonstration might well rob these new weapons of their psychological impact. And so America's civilian and military leaders decided there would be no demonstration.
The question of casualties that invading Allied troops might have suffered confronts the harsh reality of the terrible killing battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the first case, 21,000 Japanese defenders inflicted 30,000 casualties (6,000 killed in action) on the attacking Americans. In the second case, the Japanese Thirty-Second Army of 110,000 regular soldiers and auxiliaries inflicted nearly 40,000 casualties on the American Tenth Army—with 26,000 more falling ill from malaria, dysentery, and assorted other diseases. Moreover, Kamikaze pilots inflicted 12,000 casualties (almost 5,000 dead) on the U.S. Navy's surface fleet supporting the invasion. By the end of the fighting on both islands, nearly all the Japanese were dead—with tens of thousands of Okinawan civilians killed or maimed as a result of collateral damage. Both operations set a grim precedent for what would have happened to Japanese and Americans alike had Operation OLYMPIC gone ahead as planned.
The potential casualty figure of 100,000 U.S. casualties for an invasion of Kyushu is bandied about by most of those academics who argue that the United States never needed to drop the bombs. Considering the fact that well over 100,000 Japanese died from the two bombs, the U.S. casualty number does not seem too large for the United States to have suffered instead of dropping the bombs, or so their argument goes. It is of course only in academic terms that most are willing to bandy around such numbers. One wonders how enthusiastic such academics might have been for not dropping the bomb had they been nineteen year-old Marines or soldiers waiting on Okinawa for the invasion to begin. Moreover, one wonders how the American people would have reacted in late 1945 had they discovered that the American president had not dropped the bomb, and U.S. military forces had suffered 100,000 casualties in an invasion?
Given the precedents of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where then does the estimate come from that an American invading force would have suffered "only" 100,000 casualties in an invasion of Kyushu. The original figure came from MacArthur's headquarters in May 1945, early in the planning processes for the coming invasion. It was the only hard figure to emerge from what was an immensely complex and difficult planning effort that in August 1945 was beginning to move into high gear. At the time of the May estimate, it reflected the fact that the intelligence gained from the breaking of the Japanese high level ciphers—Magic—indicated there were approximately 200,000 Japanese soldiers stationed on Kyushu, with half that number defending the southern beaches. Considering the exchange ratios on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the estimate made relative sense at that time. And that is the crucial issue, because the intelligence picture of the size of Japanese forces on Kyushu began to undergo a drastic change in the late spring.
To the horror of planners and invasion commanders, Magic indicated in June and July that the Japanese were sending massive reinforcements to Kyushu, from Honshu, Hokkaido, Korea, and elsewhere. By the end of July the number of Japanese troops defending the island had risen to 535,000. Moreover, the identification of two army headquarters in the south—only one in the north—indicated the Japanese expected the invasion to come at the exact place where American planners had targeted the amphibious landings to occur. As the Japanese deployed their ground forces to meet the Americans in southern Kyushu, they moved the deployment of their Kamikazes toward the same area. As one of the foremost historians of the Pacific War, Edward J. Drea, described the situation by the end of July: "From the U.S. point of view, the odds were swinging against them: the defenders would soon equal or outnumber the attackers. This was, as [MacArthur's chief of intelligence, Major General Charles A.] Willoughby candidly put it, 'hardly a recipe for success.'"1
There was another alternative to invasion and the bombs, which the Americans had not yet fully examined, but which might well have been chosen, given the threat Japanese preparations on Kyushu were presenting: blockade. Richard Frank, in his outstanding book on Japan's surrender, argues that Admiral Chester Nimitz, CINCPAC, was about to raise with Admiral Ernest King, the CNO, the possibility of canceling the invasion and executing a blockade of the Home Islands.2 In such a case, the conventional bombing of Japan would have undoubtedly continued. Such a strategy would have certainly reduced substantially the numbers of casualties that U.S. forces might have suffered.
On the surface a blockade, as opposed to an invasion, appears to have a certain attractiveness, given the casualties that the latter might have caused. What that argument misses is what a blockade and a continuation of the strategic bombing offensive would have done to the Japanese people. By August 1945 the B-29s were almost out of cities to ravage. Air planners, however, were developing a new set of targets based on the success of Allied bombing efforts in the European Theater of Operations: namely Japan's rather primitive transportation network. The aim would have been to take out the rail and road network as Allied tactical and strategic bombing attacks in spring 1944 had done in northern France. There is no doubt that such a campaign would have quickly succeeded. And the results would have been catastrophic for the Japanese people, who were at that time hovering on the brink of mass starvation. The destruction of the transportation network would have made the distribution of foodstuffs throughout the Home Islands impossible, even had Japan surrendered in the fall. As it was, when the Americans arrived in Japan in August 1945, they were barely able to avoid mass starvation throughout the country, even though they assumed control of the transportation network in largely undamaged conditions. How many would have starved to death or died of disease is impossible to estimate, but the numbers could easily have been in the millions, far more than the numbers of Japanese who died as a result of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is one other unintended effect that the dropping of the atomic bombs conferred on mankind. By the early to mid-1950s the terrible secondary effects of the bombs' radiation, innumerable cancers and other diseases, had become clear to scientists and doctors. Their reports worked into the consciousness of those responsible for the conduct of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and that knowledge undoubtedly affected how the opposing sides considered the potential use of nuclear weapons. The fact that the even more terrifying descendants of the bombs used on Japan were never used in the Cold War may well reflect the knowledge gained from the impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
With the perspective of 60 years, we can see far more clearly that the terrible events that happened in the skies over Japan in August 1945 prevented even more terrible events from occurring during the Cold War. Harry Truman, an American president who had confronted personally the horrors of ground combat, faced up to his responsibilities to the servicemen and women under his command and ordered the bombs dropped. By so doing he ended the Second World War and prevented an even more horrific chapter from having been written. As Harry Truman so simply stated about his presidency: "The buck stops here."
Edward J. Drea, "Previews of Hell," Military History Quarterly, Spring 1995, p. 78. back to article
Richard B. Frank, Downfall, The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York, 1999), p. 276. back to article
Dr. Murray, senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses and professor emeritus of history at the Ohio State University, is the author or co-author of numerous works, including A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2000). |
