THE MISSION OF THE ALLIED FORCE WAS FULFILLED AT 0241, LOCAL TIME, MAY 7TH, 1945.
FIFTY-THREE
DOWNFALL
“ANOTHER HARD JOB STILL LIES AHEAD IN THE PACIFIC,” ANNOUNCED Ernie King in a press statement the day Germany surrendered.1
In late 1944 MacArthur had garnered the headlines, wading ashore at Leyte and announcing to the world, in a rare use of the first person, “I have returned.”* But over the last twelve months, it was the Navy’s string of victories in the Philippine Sea, the Leyte Gulf, and the East China Sea that closed the ring around Japan. The Navy had severed Japan’s supply lines. The Navy had cut off more than a million Japanese soldiers in China from their homes. And Japan lay within the Pacific Ocean Areas. Navy territory.
The capture of the main Mariana Islands—Saipan, Tinian, and Guam—gave Hap Arnold’s Twentieth Air Force a platform from which to smash what little Japanese industry had not been starved by lack of raw materials. In March, Major General Curtis LeMay, Arnold’s Pacific bomber commander, ordered a change in tactics from precision bombings to mass wave attacks. The bombers, he decreed, would go in with no machine-gun ammunition and at low altitudes, enabling them to squeeze more weight into their bomb bays. They would carry mostly incendiary bombs, not explosives, and would torch entire sections of cities, rather than specific plants or shipyards. Japan’s factories—along with the workers who labored in the factories, and the homes of those laborers, and the families living in those homes—would be turned to charcoal.2
LeMay’s flaming scythe began swinging on the night of March 9–10. Three hundred B-29s carrying 2,000 tons of incendiaries flew low and level over Tokyo and set the city ablaze. Wooden houses went up like kindling, superheated winds sucked oxygen out of living beings, and a firestorm—wildfire hot enough to generate storm-force winds—ripped through the metropolis.
In the inferno, 83,000 people were killed, more than 40,000 wounded, and another million left homeless. Crews in the last bomber waves could smell burning flesh at 5,000 feet, and as the silver dragons flew back to the Marianas, tail gunners could make out the city’s glow from 150 miles away. Radio Tokyo described the capital as “a sea of flames.”3
The scene repeated itself over eleven nights. Nagoya. Osaka. Kobe. Six of Japan’s largest industrial centers, with a combined population of eight million people, were lit up in LeMay’s firebombing campaign. Between a quarter and two-thirds of each city was burned or flattened, and in the carnage a quarter million or more died. The destruction was so complete that LeMay’s staff estimated that by October 1, 1945, there would be no strategic targets left. Japan was on the verge of annihilation.4
• • •
Marshall was not so sure. The air campaign over Germany had been sustained much longer than LeMay’s effort. Firestorms had turned Hamburg, Dresden, and swaths of Berlin into briquette pits, and for the war’s last year bombers had flailed Germany from west and south. Yet the Third Reich refused to die until it was overrun on the ground.
Japan was even more militant than Germany. Its young samurai killed or were killed; the bushido code allowed no other fate. Long after fighting had ended on Mindanao, Luzon, and Saipan, isolated soldiers would pop out of the forest for a final banzai charge. Japanese civilians—women and children—threw themselves off cliffs and into the sea. Japan’s battleships sallied on one-way missions, and thousands of kamikaze attacks in flying rockets and converted trainers demonstrated that Nippon’s pool of men willing to die for their emperor had not yet run dry.
“There wasn’t any question that the toughest individual fighter we ran into in this war was the Jap,” said Marshall’s planning chief years later. “Here were small groups of them on those islands out there who were eating roots and there were even reports they were resorting to cannibalism . . . but every time we cleaned up one of [those islands] we got a bunch of people killed.”5
• • •
On Monday afternoon, June 18, Harry Truman sat at his desk and listened carefully as Leahy, Stimson, Marshall, and King spoke of death. Death the nation could expect to suffer in Operation DOWNFALL, the two-stage invasion of Japan.
The Joint Chiefs and MacArthur had planned Operation OLYMPIC, the invasion of Kyushu, to commence in November. About four months later, they would launch another invasion, code-named Operation CORONET, against Japan’s main island of Honshu. MacArthur would command the first invasion with an army of 750,000 soldiers. For the second, he would lead just over a million.
The question weighing on Truman’s mind was how many of those American soldiers would be buried in Japanese soil before the war ended.
Earlier that month, former president Herbert Hoover had sent Truman a memorandum suggesting that an invasion of Japan would cost one million American lives. Truman forwarded the memo to Stimson for analysis, since the Joint Chiefs had been working with a number closer to half a million total casualties—killed, wounded, and missing.6
All of these numbers were little more than guesswork. At the June 18 meeting Marshall told Truman there was no reliable projection of U.S. killed and wounded. Considering only Kyushu, the smaller of the two islands, Marshall gave Truman a rather vague ratio of American and Japanese losses, from which he concluded that during the first thirty days on the island American casualties would not exceed the proportionate price the nation paid for Luzon. That was about 31,000 casualties. Of course, those casualties were only a down payment for the first thirty days. In the end, no one could say whether the entire population of Japan would rise up against the invaders in a national hara-kiri.7
Leahy approached the question of casualties from a different angle. On Okinawa, he pointed out, U.S. forces suffered a 35 percent casualty rate. He asked Marshall the size of the force he planned to use for OLYMPIC, and the general replied that 766,000 troops would be used. No one got out a pencil and paper to do the math, and King pointed out that Kyushu offered more attack options than Okinawa did. But it was easy to see that if the Okinawa ratio held, total casualties on Kyushu might top 268,000.8
And Kyushu, of course, was only Step One. Another 1.2 million enemy soldiers awaited on Honshu, and that meant more Americans would die.9
Japanese military casualties would depend on how many soldiers the Emperor fielded. The math itself was easy: take the total number of Japanese soldiers—350,000 on Kyushu—and subtract a tiny fraction of those left alive but too badly injured to commit suicide. That would give you the number of Japanese combat deaths. Civilian deaths could not be predicted, but as in all wars, they would be far more numerous. Many would be self-inflicted; at Saipan around a thousand old men and mothers with children, terrified of the American murderers and rapists they had heard so much about, leaped to their deaths from “Suicide Cliff” and other promontories.10
Truman’s war chiefs were divided on the wisdom of invasion. Hap Arnold’s planners argued that conventional air bombardment would bring Japan to her knees. By the time of the invasion, he predicted, there would be virtually no industrial centers left; large portions of Japan’s major cities would simply cease to exist.*11
Admiral Leahy believed a naval blockade, combined with air bombardment, would force the island nation to surrender on reasonable terms. Nippon no longer had access to oil or steel. She had little in the way of food, and the Joint Chiefs were considering a plan to drop salt over rice paddies to spoil crops as they were ripening. A blockade might take more time and more money, but it would cost fewer American lives.12
King agreed with Leahy. Letting fortified islands starve had worked magnificently for Rabaul and Truk. Blockading Honshu would simply be a “die on the vine” strategy writ large. King later wrote of his private objections to invasion: “I have said many times we (U.S.) didn’t have to get in such a fix if we could merely wait for the effective Naval Blockade to starve the Japanese into submission for lack of oil, rice and other essentials. The Army, however, with it
s complete lack of understanding of ‘Sea Power’ insisted on a direct invasion and occupational conquest of Japan proper—which I still contend was wrong!”13
Marshall would not countenance a war lasting into late 1946. As in Europe, he looked for the fastest and surest way to end the fighting. A week before the June 18 meeting, in a speech to the Maryland Historical Society, he spoke words close to his heart: “In a war, every week of duration adds tremendously, not only to the costs, but in casualties measured in lives and mutilation. . . . The full impact of the war comes more to me, I think, in some respects than it does to anyone in the country. The daily casualty lists are mine. They arrive in a constant stream, a swelling stream, and I can’t get away from them.”14
As with Nazi Germany, Marshall believed Japan’s will to resist would be broken quickest by invasion, not by blockade or bombardment. Fanatical resistance on Okinawa and Saipan, Japan’s legendary contempt for surrender, and its apparent indifference to LeMay’s firebombing in March convinced him that a blockade would lengthen the war, producing more casualties than would be saved. Airmen shot down and naval victims of kamikaze attacks, to say nothing of Russian and Japanese casualties in Manchuria, would pile up as Japan held out for months, perhaps years.15
Marshall later described his mind-set the day he urged invasion on Truman: “We had to assume that a force of 2.5 million Japanese would fight to the death, fight as they did on all those islands we attacked. We figured that in their homeland they would fight even harder. We felt this despite what generals with cigars in their mouths had to say about bombing the Japanese into submission. We killed 100,000 Japanese in one raid in one night, but it didn’t mean a thing insofar as actually beating the Japanese.”16
However mixed their inner feelings, at the White House meeting the Joint Chiefs appeared united. General Arnold’s representative, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, fell in line with Marshall, pointing out that air casualties would run about 30 percent per month if bombers attacked an enemy able to focus all its domestic resources on antiaircraft defense. King voiced his general agreement with Marshall, and emphasized the importance of taking Kyushu as a springboard for air and naval operations. Leahy, who had told the Joint Chiefs he would go along with the invasion only if they persuaded President Truman, questioned Marshall’s estimates, but never openly disagreed with Marshall’s premise that an invasion was a prerequisite to Japan’s surrender.17
Stimson, recovering from a migraine headache that morning, said he favored invasion. But before taking that last step, he suggested that the Allies find a way to reach out to what he called “the submerged class” in Japan. He believed a silent majority opposed the war; this underclass would fight tenaciously if their islands were invaded by white soldiers, but they also might force Japan to give up before an invasion became necessary.18
After listening to his war chiefs, Truman summarized the consensus. He said he understood the Joint Chiefs were unanimous in recommending an invasion of Kyushu in November as the “best solution under the circumstances.” The chiefs said they agreed.19
With nothing left to discuss, the meeting began to break up. As the participants stood up to leave, Truman noticed Jack McCloy standing silently off to one side. Realizing that the undersecretary had not voiced any opinion, he asked McCloy what he thought.
McCloy said they should look for a political solution that did not require an invasion. Fixing his eyes on Truman, he referred obliquely to the “new weapon.”
His reference to a “new weapon” brought shocked looks from around the room. “It was just like mentioning Skull and Bones at Yale,” he said later. “You shouldn’t have said that out loud, yet everyone knew it was there.”20
McCloy had brought the atomic bomb into the question of Japan’s fate, and Harry Truman told his advisers to sit down again. They had one more item to discuss.
FIFTY-FOUR
“COME AND SEE”
HENRY STIMSON’S SEVENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD MIND KEPT RETURNING TO THE S-1 project. He and Mabel never had any children, so he never had to contemplate the life his grandchildren would inherit. But other men had children, and grandchildren, and Stimson’s thoughts swirled around the mystery of what a nuclear bomb meant to a world that would soon outlive him.1
The idea that mankind could tap into a fantastic source of power reached into Stimson’s aged chest and electrified his mind. The project humbly known as S-1, whose crinkled file pages lined a section of his office safe, would change man’s relationship to nature and nations’ relationships to their neighbors.
Picturing an atomic arsenal as a diplomatic tool as much as a military one, at the end of 1944 he had asked FDR to reveal the secret to the secretary of state. In his last meeting with Roosevelt, Stimson also suggested that new controls over the weapon should be proposed “before the first projectile is used.”2
At the close of Truman’s first cabinet meeting, Henry Stimson referred obliquely to a powerful weapon under development. But in the commotion of power’s transition—and the jostling among cabinet members who had not been cleared for the secret—he could say little else.
After giving Truman several days to adjust to his new office, Stimson felt that “S-1” could wait no longer. On April 24, he wrote the new president:
I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.3
Truman summoned his war secretary to the White House the next day.
Acquainting Truman with details of the bomb, Stimson said its destructive power made it “the most terrible weapon ever known in human history.” In time, he said, its secrets would undoubtedly spread to other nations. Statesmen would be called upon to develop “thorough-going rights of inspection and internal controls” sufficient to prevent the weapon from being used irresponsibly. With these controls, he said, a new relationship between mankind and the atom offered an opportunity “to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved.”4
The Missourian was transfixed by what he heard. Henry Stimson, the old man of the cabinet, was talking about nuclear proliferation, international inspections and controls, and peace through nuclear deterrence. Other men focused on the tactical effects of the bomb; only Stimson, a man born shortly after the Civil War’s end, seemed to grasp its long-term implications.
The meeting left a deep impression on Truman. In his memoirs, Truman would write, “I listened with absorbed interest, for Stimson was a man of great wisdom and foresight. . . . Byrnes had already told me that the weapon might be so powerful as to be potentially capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an unprecedented scale. . . . Stimson, on the other hand, seemed at least as much concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten this war.”5
• • •
Long before he met with Truman, Stimson concluded that the weapon should be used if Japan did not surrender first. Stimson’s task was to end the war, and in October 1942 he had ordered General Leslie Groves to produce a working bomb “at the earliest possible date so as to bring the war to a conclusion.” If a single day of fighting could be saved, he told Groves, “save that day.”6
In May 1945 he asked Marshall whether an invasion of Japan could be postponed long enough to try ending the war with atomic weapons. Marshall mulled that one over. General Groves was on track to have a gun-method weapon ready by August 1. The gun version, nicknamed “Little Boy,” was essentially a long tube that fired a wedge of uranium-235 into a larger piece of the same material. When the pie became whole, the mass of uranium would become unstable and
explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. Or, perhaps, with the force of 2,000 tons of TNT. Or perhaps nothing at all. No one really knew, though the scientists thought it would produce a big reaction. And it could be dropped without a preliminary test.
A second bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” used conventional explosives to squeeze plutonium from a big, loose ball into a small, compact one. This implosion method would require testing before it could be used in combat, but Marshall told Stimson he thought it would be possible to have both bombs ready before “the locking of arms came and much bloodshed.”7
On May 29, Stimson, Marshall, and McCloy discussed ways to warn Japan and which targets to choose. Marshall suggested hitting a purely military target, such as a naval installation, with the first bomb. He also believed some kind of warning should be given to Japan’s citizens, designating a number of manufacturing areas that the United States intended to destroy with a short time to evacuate. “We must offset by such warning,” he said, “the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.”8
Planning military operations around an unprecedented weapon was not easy, given the veil of secrecy concealing it even from those charged with its use. Admiral King, for instance, could not tell anyone on his staff—not even his intelligence chiefs—of the bomb’s existence. In early summer he called in Captain William Smedberg, his intelligence head, and told him, “Smedberg, now this is very, very secret, what I’m going to say to you. I want you to go back and I want you and your staff to work and in the next two or three days I want you to tell me when you think the Japanese will surrender if the most awful thing you can imagine happens to them in, say, the next two or three months.”9
A baffled Smedberg returned to his office with no idea of what King was talking about. “The most awful thing you can imagine,” he supposed, was a big earthquake. Japan had a long history with them, and he knew the Allies had discussed packing a line of freighters with explosives and detonating them along a fault line. Perhaps that was what King meant.10
American Warlords Page 56
