A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (128 page)

By that time, only Emperor Hirohito was pressing his Supreme War Council to seek peace, although recently released Japanese documents have questioned how sincere this “peace offensive” was. Hirohito himself vacillated between resistance and surrender.
⁷⁶
Surrounded by American submarines, which had completely sealed off Japan and prevented importation of any raw materials from China, the country was now subjected to heavy air bombardment; and having lost virtually its entire navy, it faced direct invasion. Within the Japanese hierarchy, however, a sharp division arose between the military commanders directing the war, who had no intention of surrendering, and a peace or moderate faction. The warlords carried the day.

In June 1945, Japanese military leaders issued Operation Decision, a massive defense plan of the home islands in which some 2.5 million troops, backed by a civilian militia of 28 million, would resist the American invaders with muzzle loaders if necessary. Women “practiced how to face American tanks with bamboo spears,” according to Japanese historian Sadao Asada.
⁷⁷
Almost 1 million soldiers would attack the Americans on the beaches, supported by midget submarines used as manned torpedoes and more than ten thousand suicide aircraft, many of them converted trainer planes.

Aware that no hope for victory remained, the warlords promised to fight to the bitter end, and they treated the Potsdam Proclamation, issued in July by the United States, Britain, and China, with utter contempt. Although the Potsdam Proclamation stated that the term “unconditional surrender” applied only to military forces, it also made clear that Japan’s home islands would be occupied, that she would lose all overseas possessions, and that a new elected government would have to replace the imperial military rule. One sticking point that remained was the fate of Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese people, in the tradition of the Shinto religion, regarded as a god. Would he be a war criminal subjected to the same kinds of trials as the Nazi killers, even though the Allies had specifically exempted Hirohito from reprisals? And even if he was exempted, would that change the opinion of the same warlords who had ordered the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March? Reports had already leaked out about Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and Asians trapped inside the Japanese Empire. As the Allied noose tightened, the Japanese became even more brutal toward their prisoners. In Burma and elsewhere, Japanese slave-labor camps, though lacking the merciless efficiency of the Nazis, nevertheless imitated them in a more primitive form, stacking masses of bodies on teak logs and firing the pyres. As one observer reported,

 

When the bodies started to char, their arms and legs twitched, and they sat up as if they were alive. Smoke came out of their burned-out eyes, their mouths opened, and licks of flames came out….
⁷⁸

 

Ground Zero

On July 16, 1945, at a desolate spot 160 miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the United States tested a weapon that would make even the most hardened and suicidal Japanese leaders change their minds. The device, referred to by the Los Alamos technicians as the gadget (and never as an atomic bomb), represented an astounding technological leap and an acceleration of the normal peacetime process needed to do the job by a factor of three, compressing some fifteen to twenty years of work into five. Yet the test was only that, a test. No bomb was actually dropped. Instead, a device sitting atop a huge tower in the New Mexico desert was detonated through cables and wires from bunkers thousands of yards away. Few, however, were prepared for the fantastic destructive power released at the Trinity bomb site on July sixteenth. A fireball with temperatures four times the heat of the sun’s center produced a cloud that reached thirty-eight thousand feet into the sky while simultaneously turning the sand below into glass. The cloud was followed by a shock wave that shattered windows two hundred miles away and hurricane-strength winds carrying deadly radioactive dust, the dangers of which few perceived at the time. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell reported that the air blast that came after the fireball was “followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we were puny things, were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.”
⁷⁹

All along, the U.S. government had intended to use the weapon as soon as it became available on any of the Axis powers still in the war. Truman said he “regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.”
⁸⁰
Nor did he find the actual decision to use the bomb difficult. The former army artillery major recalled that giving authority to use the atomic bomb “was no great decision, not any decision you had to worry about,” but rather called the bomb “merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousnss.”
⁸¹
Thus, both the condition and the attitude of Japan in late July, as the invasion and the bombs were being readied, remains the key issue in determining how necessary the use of the bombs was. At the same time, the American public had started to expect some of the troops in Europe to come home, forcing the army to adopt a point system based on a soldier’s length of service, military honors, and participation in campaigns. The perverse effect of this was that “for the first time in their army careers, the officers and men became seriously concerned with medals.”
⁸²
Having defeated the Germans, few servicemen wanted to be transferred to fight the Japanese, which was an increasingly likely prospect.

Regardless of the fact that Japan had launched no new offensives, their capability to resist a large-scale invasion, with bloody results, still remained. No one doubts that in the absence of the bombs an invasion would have occurred.
⁸³
Instead, liberal critics challenge the casualty estimates of the American planners. Based on Japan’s remaining military forces, and using Iwo Jima and Okinawa casualty rates as a barometer, strategists concluded that between 100,000 and 1 million American soldiers and sailors would die in a full-scale invasion. In addition, using as a guide the civilian casualties at Manila, Okinawa, and other densely populated areas that the U.S. had reconquered during the war, the numbers of Japanese civilians expected to die in such an invasion were put at between 1 and 9 million. Critics charge that these numbers represented only the highest initial estimates, and that expected casualty rates were scaled down.

In fact, however, the estimates were probably low.
⁸⁴
The figures only included ground-battle casualties, not
total
expected losses to such deadly weapons as kamikazes. Moreover, the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered its estimates, at best, only educated guesses and that the projections of Japanese resistance severely understated the number of Japanese troops.
⁸⁵
Equally distressing, intercepts of Japanese secret documents revealed that Japan had concentrated all of its troops near the southern beaches, the location where the invasion was planned to begin.
⁸⁶
This proved particularly troubling because the first round of casualty guesses in June was based on the anticipation that Japan’s forces would be dispersed. Indeed, there were probably far more than 350,000 Japanese troops in the southern part of Kyushu—a fact that could yield at least 900,000 American combat casualties.

Other models used for estimates produced even more sobering predictors of Japanese resistance. At Tarawa, of 2,571 enemy soldiers on the island when the U.S. Marines landed, only 8 men were captured alive, indicating a shocking casualty rate of 99.7 percent; and in the Aleutians, only 29 out of 2,350 surrendered, for a fatality rate of 98.8 percent. Worse, on Saipan, hundreds of civilians refused to surrender. Marines watched whole families wade into the ocean to drown together or huddle around grenades; parents “tossed their children off cliffs before leaping to join them in death.”
⁸⁷
It seems clear, then, that no matter which estimates are employed, more than a million soldiers and civilians at least would die in an invasion under even the rosiest scenarios. If the bomb could save lives in the end, the morality of dropping it was clear. Perhaps more important than the what-ifs, the Japanese reaction provides sobering testimony of the bombs’ value, because even
after
the first bomb fell, the Japanese made no effort whatsoever to surrender.

Recent research in classified Japanese governmental documents confirms the wisdom of Truman’s decision. Historian Sadao Asada argues that it was most likely the atom bomb that finally overcame the warlords’ tenacious (and suicidal) opposition to surrender. Asada concludes from postwar memoranda left by the inner councils that “the atomic bombing was crucial in accelerating the peace process.” Although some hard-liners were also concerned about the possibility of a concurrent Soviet/U.S. invasion, that fear merely served as the coup de grâce. The memoirs of the deputy chief of the Army General Staff confirm this when he noted, “There is nothing we can do about the…atomic bomb. That nullifies everything.”
⁸⁸

Truman never had the slightest hesitation about using the bomb, leaving left-wing scholars to scour his memoirs and letters for even the slightest evidence of second thoughts. He promptly gave his approval as soon as the Trinity test proved successful. Moreover, Truman planned to drop the existing bombs in a fairly rapid sequence if the warlords did not surrender, in order to convince Japan that Americans had a plentiful supply.

On August 6, 1945, two B-29s flew over Hiroshima, one of them a reconnaissance/photo plane, another the
Enola Gay,
under the command of Colonel Paul Tibbets, which carried the atomic bomb. American aircraft two days earlier had dropped three-quarters of a million warning leaflets informing citizens of Hiroshima that the city would be obliterated, but few Japanese had heeded the message. Rumors that Truman’s mother had once lived nearby or that the United States planned to make the city an occupation center or just plain stubbornness contributed to the fatal decision of most inhabitants to remain.

Tibbets’s payload produced an explosion about the size of 20,000 tons of TNT, or about three times the size of the August first raid, when 820 B-29 bombers had dropped 6,600 tons of TNT on several cities. More than 66,000 people in Hiroshima died instantly or soon after the explosion; some 80,000 more were injured; and another 300,000 were exposed to radiation. The Japanese government reacted by calling in its own top atomic scientist, Dr. Yoshio Nishina, inquiring whether Japan could make such a weapon in a short period.
⁸⁹
Clearly, this was not the response of a “defeated” nation seeking an end to hostilities. After nothing but a deafening silence had emanated from Tokyo, Truman ordered the second bomb to be dropped. On August ninth, Nagasaki, an alternative target to Kokura, was hit. (The B-29 pilot, ordered to strike a clear target, had to abandon munitions-rich Kokura because of cloud conditions.) The deadly results were similar to those in Hiroshima: nearly 75,000 dead.

After Nagasaki, Japanese officials cabled a message that they accepted in principle the terms of unconditional surrender. Still, that cable did not itself constitute a surrender. Truman halted atomic warfare (an act that in itself was a bluff, since the United States had no more bombs immediately ready), but conventional raids continued while the Japanese officials argued heatedly about their course of action. Indeed, for a brief time on August tenth, even though no Japanese reply had surfaced, Marshall ordered a halt to the strategic bombing. On August fourteenth, the Japanese cabinet was still divided over the prospect of surrender, with the war minister and members of the chiefs of staff still opposing it.

Only when that gridlock prevented a decision did the new prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, ask Emperor Hirohito to intervene. By Japanese tradition, he had to remain silent until that moment, but allowed to speak, he quickly sided with those favoring surrender. Hirohito’s decision, broadcast on radio, was an amazing occurrence. Most Japanese people had never before heard the voice of this “god,” so to lessen the trauma the emperor had recorded the message, instructing his citizens that they had to “endure the unendurable” and allow American occupation because the only alternative was the “total extinction of human civilization.”
⁹⁰
Even then, aides worried that militarists would attempt to assassinate him before he could record the message. He told his subjects, “The time has come when we must bear the unbearable…. I swallow my own tears and give my sanction to the proposal to accept the Allied proclamation.”
⁹¹
Even in defeat, however, the emperor’s comments gave insight into the nature of the Japanese thinking that had started the war in the first place: the massacre of two hundred thousand Chinese at Nanking apparently did not count when it came to “human civilization”—only Japanese dead. American commanders ordered their forces to cease fire on August fifteenth, and on September second, aboard the USS
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay, General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, along with representatives of the other Allied powers in the Pacific, accepted the Japanese surrender. American planes blackened the skies above, and most of the ships in the Pacific fleet sailed by in a massive display of might. As one veteran at the ceremonies observed, “We wanted to make sure they knew who won the war.”
⁹²

Most Americans seemed undisturbed by the use of atomic weapons to end the war. Far from causing “nuclear nightmares,” as activists liked to imply later, some 65 percent of Gallup Poll respondents claimed they were not concerned about the bomb or its implications.
⁹³
Truman remained unmoved in his view that the bomb’s use was thoroughly justified. When the head of the atomic bomb project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, commented to Truman that some of the scientists “felt like they had blood on their hands…, [Truman] offered him a handkerchief and said: ‘Well, here, would you like to wipe off your hands?’”
⁹⁴
Years later, when a crew filming a documentary on Hiroshima asked Truman if he would consider a pilgrimage to ground zero, he caustically responded, “I’ll go to Japan if that’s what you want. But I won’t kiss their ass.”
⁹⁵