A World at Arms (168 page)

With relatively little debate, the American air force embraced in the last stages of the Pacific War the concept of area attacks which it had so long opposed in Europe, where it had for years been advocated and practiced by the Royal Air Force. In the face of a series of ever bloodier battles at the front, there were few if any qualms about launching a rain of death on Japan’s cities, which now experienced what the Japanese air force had first visited on China and which the Japanese balloon operation had been designed to do on an even larger scale to Canada and the
United States. With another big raid on Nagoya, the B-29s had made their contribution to the preparations for the Okinawa landing.
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PLANS FOR THE DEFEAT – AND DEFENSE – OF JAPAN

The invasion of Okinawa had become the last in the series of operations preliminary to the assault on the Japanese home islands themselves. Planning for those supreme efforts, for which Okinawa was to provide a major base, was well under way in early 1945. The central concept in American planning for the defeat of Japan was the invasion of the home islands in two stages, first a landing on the southern island of Kyushu, “Olympic,” scheduled for September 1, 1945, to be followed by an even larger landing on the main island of Honshu, “Coronet,” which was to take place on December 1. Both tentative landing dates had to be postponed because of fierce Japanese resistance, “Olympic” to November 1, 1945, and “Coronet” to March 1, 1946. There was some discussion in Washington about the possibility of avoiding such landings, and the enormous casualties they were certain to cost, by strangling Japan through blockade, encirclement and bombardment from the sea and air, but the weight of opinion among the Chiefs of Staff was in favor of the landings. It was agreed that British naval forces would participate in these operations, and the anticipation of this increase in available warships was an argument Admiral King and James Forrestal, who had become Secretary of the Navy after the death of Knox, used to counter the proposal that vast additional warships had to be built to replace the heavy losses expected in this Pacific version of “Overlord.”
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The actual operation “Olympic” was to be carried out by the American 6th Army, staged primarily from the Philippines and Okinawa, and including both army and marine divisions. Two very small islands off the west coast of Kyushu would be seized as emergency bases a few days before two corps of army and one of marine divisions would land on the southern shore of Kyushu, primarily around Kagoshima Bay. The intent was to take only enough of Kyushu to provide naval and logistic bases and to make possible land-based air support for “Coronet,” the supreme operation of the war in the Pacific.

“Coronet,” unlike “Olympic,” could not be mounted with the forces already in the Pacific theater of war; the more than twenty–five divisions needed were simply not available. From the Pacific would come the American 8th Army and the new 10th Army organized for the Okinawa operation and expected to be reorganized and refilled with replacements in time for the big landing south and east of Tokyo.
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The third American army destined for “Coronet” was, however, fighting in Europe
as these plans were being made. The American 1st Army, which had landed in Normandy on D-Day, was destined for the Pacific; on May 1, 1945, it was pulled out of the line in the last stage of the battle against Germany, and its headquarters was reactivated in Manila on August 1.

Both Olympic and Coronet were to be preceded by very lengthy air and sea bombardment, while Coronet would also involve the participation of a corps of three to five divisions from the British Commonwealth as well as a French corps. In addition, it was assumed that the contingent from the Royal Navy already attached to the American fleet in the Pacific would grow, and that British long-range bombers based in the Philippines would play a part in the bombing of Japan’s home islands before and during the great land battle that was expected.
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The discussion for United States-British cooperation in the final assault on Japan did not always go smoothly–any more than it had in the planning for the Normandy invasion–but was close and trusting all the same. Thus the outline of the plan for Olympic, with the target landing date of November 1 was sent to the British on June 12, 1945, a few days
before
President Truman formally approved the operation.
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The whole problem of redeploying one and a half million Americans and almost half a million British soldiers and airmen from Europe to the East Asian and Southeast Asian theaters of war was likely to be immense, but it could be, and surely would have been mastered.
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The gist of a report of early April on the unwillingness of the Japanese to accept unconditional surrender from the Swedish Minister in Tokyo, which was passed on to the British, elicited the Foreign Office comment on May 9: “the Japanese will have to have a much harder knock than they have yet had.”
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In this endeavor, the British were no less determined to share than the Americans.
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The projected invasions of Japan were clearly not going to be substantially aided by Chinese Nationalist troops and were, therefore, thought to require a massive engagement of Japanese forces in Manchuria by a Red Army attack, somewhat similar to the way the Normandy invasion pre-supposed the tying down of much of the German army by the Russians on the Eastern Front. There had been earlier discussions of this question in the American staffs and between the Americans and the Russians; now the commander designated for the Allied invasion, General MacArthur, repeatedly stressed to Washington the essential character of a major Red Army operation in Manchuria.
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Because the invasion of Japan was expected to be horrendously costly, there was concern that the Japanese army on the mainland of Asia might well continue fighting there for a long time, even after the occupation of the home islands, and because it was assumed that the Soviet Union
would move to attain its objectives in East Asia after the end of the European war in any case, it only made sense to have them join in the fighting while it was still difficult rather than wait until the struggle was over. The time tables worked out at Yalta and Potsdam, and the shipments of American supplies for the Red Army to use in its campaign against Japan, were keyed to Soviet participation at a date well
before
the Olympic landing. The intent was to make Japanese reinforcement of the home islands from Manchuria, North China, and Korea impossible during the fighting in Japan.

The Soviet Union had every intention of going forward with the agreed upon attacks in Manchuria. Detailed planning began in March 1945. Some shifts of headquarters to the Soviet Far East began that month, but the major redeployment took place in May, June, and July, as the fighting in Europe ended. Two Front (Army Group) and four army headquarters headed east on the Transsiberian railway, with special attention to sending experienced commanders and units for a role in the expansion of the Red Army in the Far East from forty to eighty divisions.
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The Soviet plan for a major offensive looked to a huge pincer operation from the eastern and western sides of Manchuria and beginning any time after July 25, 1945.
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Long before that date, the endless Soviet trains heading eastward across the Soviet Union were observed with anxiety by the Japanese–whose reports were deciphered, presumably with relief, by the Western Allies-and by the representatives of neutral powers in the country.
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The Soviet government clearly looked toward major operations on the ground and was also preparing for the possibility of Japanese air attacks when hostilities began, and even cooperated minimally, and at a very much lower level than originally promised, with the Americans.
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As Japan’s sun was sinking rather than rising, the Indian nationalist leader Bose, who had once staked his hopes on a German and Japanese victory in the war, tried to hitch his wagon to the rising Soviet star,
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but died in an airplane crash on the way to Moscow. Once preferring Japanese and German colonial policies to those of Britain, he had discovered too late the advantages of Soviet imperialism.

The Japanese were expecting an Allied invasion attempt and were doing what they could to prepare for it. The major political measure was the converse of the arrangements the United States and Great Britain had made for the entrance of Russia in the Pacific War. In a long and agitated series of exchanges and negotiations, the government in Tokyo tried to assure the continued neutrality of the Soviet Union. The government hoped for this in the face of both the doubts of its own ambassador in Moscow, Sato Naotake, and its own unwillingness in the
winter of 1944–45 to make such substantial offers of concessions to the Soviet Union as might conceivably have raised doubts in Stalin’s mind. As the April deadline for denunciation of the 1941 Neutrality Pact approached, the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo was still hopeful, but a formal Soviet note of April 5, 1945, declared that the Neutrality Pact would be allowed to expire rather than be renewed.
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In the months after the Soviet Union had denounced the Neutrality Pact, the Japanese government wanted to reopen negotiations for some new treaty, but their own ambassador was doubtful and the Soviet government was not encouraging. The Soviets were helpful in the repatriation of Japanese diplomats from the positions of Europe being occupied by the Allies in the spring of 1945 - but they may well have been thinking of the fate of their own diplomats in Japanese-controlled areas once they had attacked Japan. It was far too late for hints of extensive Japanese concessions to move Moscow.
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Whatever the civilian authorities in Tokyo believed or hoped, the Japanese Army General Staff was fairly certain by late January 1945 that the Soviet Union would enter the Pacific War against Japan but made little serious preparation in time to meet a contingency which had been on their mind for a decade.
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Although far less important to the Japanese than their relations with the Soviet Union, the question of Portugal’s possessions in East Asia–parts of Timor in the East Indies and Macao on the south China coast–also worried the Japanese. Especially after the break with Spain due to Japanese atrocities in Manila, and Turkey’s break of relations with Japan under Allied pressure, Tokyo wanted to preserve one of its few remaining listening posts in Europe.
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From its shrinking diplomatic corps in Europe, the Japanese hoped to receive information on Allied plans, troop redeployments, and other political and military details. It may all have been bad news, but the Japanese military leaders certainly wanted it anyway.
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The only field of political activity on which the Japanese could record any advance in 1945 was, as in the case of Germany the preceding year, in its dealings with a satellite government. As the Germans had become worried about the loyalty of Hungary and had occupied that country in March 1944, so the Japanese became concerned about the situation in French Indo-China and proceeded to occupy all of it in March 1945. Worried that with the liberation of France the local French colonial authorities might transfer their loyalties from a Vichy regime, now evacuated to Germany, to the de Gaulle government, now installed in Paris, the Japanese broke the agreements they had made with Vichy in 1940 and 1941 and effected a coup on March 9, 1945.
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They extended their
control over the whole of the area in a quick move which, like their earlier steps in the French colony, was not resisted.

The replacement of the French colonial administration by Japanese military rule and a tentative beginning of a new local self–government was to pave the way for further dramatic changes later. When Japan surrendered in August, the way was open for Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh to stage a coup and take over. If the French were to reestablish themselves, it would have to be not against the Japanese but against a local coalition of Communists and nationalists.

The Japanese military leaders had a rather realistic picture of what was ahead, and it was this picture which had contributed to their decision to take over direct control of French Indo-China. In late January they expected that by the middle of 1945 the Americans, after heavy bombing of the home islands, would land on them, while the British were expected to stage a landing in Malaya. They expected continued resistance from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists and described the peoples of the occupied “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” as all uncooperative. The Soviet Union would enter the Pacific War in the second half of the year, a time by which the Japanese Army General Staff expected Germany to have been defeated. In the face of all these developments, Japan would fight on.
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A supplementary appreciation similarly sent to Japanese military attaches in Europe on March 8 discussed the plans to meet the expected invasion of the home islands after the serious impact of the intervening defeats on Luzon and Iwo Jima. The Japanese war effort would now have to be reoriented to take account of the loss of access to the empire won in Southeast Asia earlier in the war. Shipping losses were described as Japan’s “severest difficulty,” and the biggest air raids were–quite correctly–assumed to be still ahead. The Japanese would do their best to fight off the anticipated invasion.
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How did the Japanese expect to fight and to what purpose? In Southeast Asia, they moved in the direction of concentrating their forces at key points, withdrawing troops from outlying regions and islands, and using a variety of means including hospital ships to facilitate these troop movements.
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They especially hoped to hold on to Singapore, and they proclaimed the independence of the Dutch East Indies though retaining effective control. As for the home islands, a new command structure was established in early April. The 1st Army and an attached air command would direct the defense of northern Honshu and Hokkaido from a headquarters under Field Marshal Sugiyama Hajime in Tokyo; the 2nd Army under Field Marshal Hata Shunroku would defend western
Honshu and the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku from headquarters in Hiroshima.
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