by Craig Nelson
Okinawa meant 82,000 Allied casualties, with over 14,000 dead, while Japan lost over 77,000 servicemen. The civilians on Okinawa had been told that American GIs routinely raped and murdered Asian women, and that if any American wanted to become a marine, he had to first murder his parents. A high percentage of the estimated 42,000 to 150,000 of the island’s residents who perished committed suicide.
• • •
It had taken almost three years since Pearl Harbor for Nimitz and MacArthur to fight their way close enough to directly bomb the enemy’s home islands. The task would be assigned to B-29s based in the Marianas under Curtis LeMay. For these crews, a round-trip to Tokyo ran three thousand miles, meaning fuel could run out on the way home, forcing a ditch into the ocean. If LeMay failed, however, and Japan had to be invaded by land forces, military intelligence estimated that half a million Americans would die.
Over Nazi Germany, the air forces had learned to come in at extremely high altitude, in formation, with guns and fighters blazing, to precisely bomb specific targets in daylight. This technique hadn’t worked at all in the Pacific war, and LeMay was ordered to craft a solution. Tokyo now had few fighters trained in nighttime operations, no more barrage balloons, and few antiaircraft guns aimed at low-altitude targets. So “Iron Ass” LeMay (a name inspired both by the Bell’s palsy that kept him from being physically able to smile and by his bellicose demeanor) went with the opposite of everything that had been tried and refined so far. His B-29s sortied at night, at a mere five thousand feet, one at a time. Instead of explosive ordnance, their bays were filled with napalm and phosphorous.
On the nights of March 9–10, 1945, 334 B-29s fire-bombed the capital of Japan with two thousand tons of incendiaries. Fourteen of those planes were lost at sea; five of the fourteen were rescued by the navy. At midnight on the eleventh, reconnaissance photographs were finally printed, and what they revealed stunned the American air force chiefs. Over sixteen square miles of Tokyo had been destroyed, a greater area of damage than what nuclear weapons would inflict on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The fires produced with this early form of napalm were so hot that window glass melted, and victims trying to escape the conflagration by jumping into canals, sewers, and streams were boiled alive. One-quarter of the capital was gone, with 267,171 buildings demolished and over a million left homeless. It would take almost a month to excavate the dead—almost eight-four thousand men, women, and children.
“I heard the huzzle-huzzle of something falling, and I ducked and crouched in a corner,” Gustav Bitter, a priest living in Tokyo, remembered. “It struck beside me, with a noise like a house falling, and I leaped a fine leap into the air. I must have shut my eyes, for when I opened them again, I was in a world of fairyland. On every tree in the garden below, and on every tree so far as the eyes could see, some sort of blazing oil had fallen, and it was dancing on the twigs and branches with a million little red and yellow candle-flames. On the ground in between the trees and in all the open spaces, white balls of fire had fallen, and these were bouncing like tennis balls. . . . [Watching the firebombs from a distance] was like a silver curtain falling, like . . . the silver tinsel we hung from Christmas trees in Germany long ago. And where these silver streamers would touch the earth, red fires would spring up . . . and the big fire in the center sent up a rising column of air which drew in toward the center the outer circle of flame, and a hot, swift wind began to blow from the rim toward the center, a twisting wind which spread the flames between all the ribs of the fan, very quickly. Thus, everywhere the people ran there was fire, in front of them and in back of them, and closing in on them from the sides. So that there were only a very few who escaped.”
The Japanese would call these days the Raid of the Fire Wind and the Raid of the Dancing Flames. Eight-year-old Japanese survivor Haruyo Nihei: “The bombs were falling like rain. The wind was very strong, like a typhoon, and the fire was like a tornado crawling around the ground. My father, my mother, my sister, and I held hands and ran away through the fire. Then a gust of wind blew me away and I was on my own in a sea of fire.” She fell in a crowd of people and passed out. “I heard a voice: ‘Japanese don’t die like this. Japanese must survive. You must not sleep.’ I was pulled out of the bottom of a pile of people, and I discovered that the person talking to me was my father. Then I looked at where I had been. There was a mountain of black, dead bodies. I was the only survivor under all those dead people.” On the twelfth, LeMay used the same weapons on Nagoya; on the thirteenth on Osaka; on the sixteenth, on Kobe; on the nineteenth, again on Nagoya. By mid-June, urban Japan had been completely annihilated.
One of those involved in incendiary planning, Robert McNamara—who would become secretary of defense for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—remembered, “LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not if you win?”
The summer would bring mop-up operations, with certain key targets precision-bombed beyond recognition, sixty smaller cities firebombed into oblivion, and the Japanese coastal waters so extensively filled with mines dropped by LeMay’s B-29s that her naval traffic was entirely halted. One ship that took its place at the forefront of this assault was the new USS Hornet, which served in the forward combat zone, often a mere forty miles from Japan, for fifteen continuous months. Her new flyboys knocked out 1,410 Japanese planes, a World War II record, with 72 destroyed in one day, a US Navy record. On June 18, President Harry Truman approved Operation Downfall, an invasion of the Japanese home islands. He asked about projected casualty figures and was not given a meaningful answer.
After their cities were destroyed and their sea-lanes shut down, military leaders in Tokyo met to discuss their next course of action. None of them could even consider the possibility of surrender. In the Pacific war, not one Japanese unit had surrendered, ever; the most popular slogan in the Imperial Japanese Army canon was “Duty is a heavy burden, but death is light as a feather.” The Japanese government instead decided to inspire every man, woman, and child in Japan to resist to the very end, to fight to the last survivor of Yamato blood. Newspapers and radio stations announced this new policy; planes dropped leaflets over rural areas promoting it. The horrors of an American invasion were described in lurid detail, and the leaders of what was left of Dai Nippon Teikoku created a new slogan: Ichioku gyokusai!—“One hundred million die for the country!”—telling every Japanese man, woman, and child to give their lives for the nation and perish “like shattered jewels.”
The Japanese military still believed that they could negotiate with the Americans for better terms than unconditional surrender, with the nation’s military leaders remaining in power. Major General Masakazu Amano said, “The geographical advantages of the homeland were to be utilized to the highest degree, the enemy was to be crushed, and we were confident that the battle would prove to be the turning point in political maneuvering.”
Operation Downfall meant the Allies would have to subdue 4–5 million Japanese soldiers and 27 million civilians. The campaign would start with poison gas dropped on twenty-five cities, producing 7–8 million deaths, and causing mass panic. Operation Olympic then invaded the southern island of Kyushu on November 1, her beaches getting code names from the Pentagon as a tribute to the American automobile industry: Buick, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Cadillac. Operation Coronet, the invasion of Tokyo, was planned for March 1, 1946. General MacArthur estimated he would need seven hundred thousand men for all of Downfall, a number that seemed wildly optimistic when Japan sent six hundred thousand men to defend Kyushu—nearly as many as the Allies were planning on using for the whole country.
Would an invasion at a tremendous cost of Allied lives mean victory in any real sense? After the horror of Okinawa, Nimitz told King that he did not support Ol
ympic, and King in turn told Marshall and Stimson that planning could proceed, but the US Navy could not agree to these operations.
• • •
In June 1945, the captured Raiders were moved to Peiping. DeShazer’s health had by now so rapidly deteriorated that he came to believe he, too, would die at any moment: “I got out of bed and sat on the little bench one morning after I had prayed it all out with God. I was so weak that my heart could have stopped very easily. . . . I didn’t know what to expect. I just prayed that God would make me better. I made up my mind to sit there until I either passed out or God healed me. It was not long before the voice of God broke into my thoughts. This was different from anything I had experienced before. . . .
“ ‘It is the Holy Spirit who is speaking to you,’ the mysterious voice said. ‘The Holy Spirit has made you free!’ I immediately began to wonder if I was going to get out of prison. The voice said, ‘You are free to do as you please. You can go through the wall or jump over the wall. You are free.’ I couldn’t figure that out.”
On August 10, DeShazer was told by the mysterious voice to “start praying. . . . I asked, ‘What shall I pray about?’ ‘Pray for peace, and pray without ceasing,’ I was told. I had prayed for peace but very little, if at all, before that time, as it seemed useless. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the Holy Spirit told me, ‘You don’t need to pray anymore. The victory is won.’ I was amazed. I thought this was quicker and better than the regular method of receiving world news. . . . At this time the voice of the Holy Spirit spoke to me clearly: ‘You are called to go and teach the Japanese people and to go wherever I send you.’ ”
Jake was frightened by this idea. He had no talent or skills as a public speaker; he couldn’t even tell a joke that well. He was short and lacked a commanding, inspiring presence and had no training as a theologian, or education as a preacher.
The day before Jacob DeShazer was told that the war was over, New York Times journalist Bill Laurence was part of a crew flying over one of the few Japanese cities that had spared LeMay’s firebombing campaigns—Nagasaki:
Despite the fact that it was broad daylight in our cabin, all of us became aware of a giant flash that broke through the dark barrier of our arc-welder’s lenses and flooded our cabin with intense light.
Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous, white smoke rings. Next they saw a giant pillar of purple fire, ten thousand feet high, shooting skyward with enormous speed.
Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.
At one stage of its evolution, the entity assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, with its base about three miles long, tapering off to about a mile at the top. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white. Then, just when it appeared as though the thing has settled down into a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the height of the pillar to a total of forty-five thousand feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand Old Faithful geysers rolled into one.
It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down. In a few seconds it had freed itself from its gigantic stem and floated upward with tremendous speed. But no sooner did this happen when another mushroom, smaller in size than the first one, began emerging out of the pillar. It was as though the decapitated monster was growing a new head.
As the first mushroom floated off into the blue, it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, white outside, rose-colored inside. It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about two hundred miles.
• • •
On June 22, Hirohito had announced to the Supreme War Leadership Council that it was time to end the war, but it took the dream to end all dreams—the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and of Nagasaki on August 9, as well as the collapse of talks with the Soviet Union and that nation’s declaring war against Japan—before Japanese leaders could stop thinking they should fight to the end, and start thinking that this was the end. Later the emperor explained, “I was told that even Tokyo cannot be defended. I thought that the Japanese race will be destroyed if the war continued,” and of the warmongering fascists who claimed he was a god, “I told them I am not a god, for the structure of my body is no different than that of a normal human being. I continued to tell them that it is a nuisance to be called such.” Hirohito had one condition for the surrender—that he remain in power—and he did. The nation’s grossly ineffectual leader in the rush to war could, it turned out, be effective after all.
On the morning of August 15, 1945, the entire population of Japan, including the farmers laboring in distant fields and citizens living overseas, were told that, at noon, they must stop whatever they were doing and listen to the radio. Though everyone hurried to make ready for this once-in-a-lifetime event, most already knew what the announcement would be. The great empire that Dai Nippon Teikoku had won for itself in the first half of the twentieth century was now entirely gone, and the foreign barbarian hordes would be invading their homeland at any minute. The broadcast would give instructions and inspiration so that all those of Yamato blood could sacrifice their lives fighting against the incoming Anglo-Saxon wave.
What the people of Japan heard that day at noon was not just unexpected, it was unimaginable. First, the national anthem played. Then a voice spoke, a voice they’d never heard before. The voice was strange, high-pitched, thin and nasal, and it spoke an odd form of Japanese, a dialect hundreds of years old that few could understand clearly. For the first time in the history of the Chrysanthemum Throne, the emperor was speaking directly to his mortal people.
The voice told them senso owari, “the war is over.” It said that the emperor was no longer the Son of Heaven, but an ordinary man. It said that events “did not turn in Japan’s favor, and trends of the world were not advantageous to us. . . . The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs to kill and maim extremely large numbers of the innocent, and the heavy casualties are beyond measure. To continue the war further could lead in the end not only to the extermination of our race but also to the destruction of all human civilization. . . . My vital organs are torn asunder.” The voice said it was time for the Yamato race to “endure the unendurable, and bear the unbearable.”
Just before the announcement, an urgent Japanese army telegram had been sent to all camps and bases, recommending that anyone who had mistreated prisoners or local populations immediately vanish into anonymity. Over the next four weeks 1,066 Allied planes would fly over nine hundred sorties, dropping forty-five hundred tons of supplies over 150 POW camps across Japan and East Asia. Along with medicine, food, cigarettes, magazines, chocolate, and chewing gum, the bursting canisters included leaflets that implored, “Do not overeat.”
After arriving in Japan aboard a C-54 Skymaster named Bataan on August 30 the sixty-five-year-old General Douglas MacArthur and his American contingent were indignant to see, on every street corner, Japanese sentries with their backs turned to the Allied convoys. What Americans thought of as an insult, however, the Japanese considered a sign of honor. Shamed by defeat, the soldiers of Dai Nippon Teikoku were not worthy enough to look directly into the face of the American victors.
On September 2, accompanied by 260 Allied warships, MacArthur appeared on the last of the great American dreadnoughts, the USS Missouri—Admiral Halsey’s flagship—to accept the Japanese Empire’s surrender in Tokyo Bay. The general had postponed the ceremony so that officials from China, Russia, England, the Philippines
, and other countries involved in the Pacific theater could attend. The flag raised at morning colors was the same Stars and Stripes that had flown over the Capitol in Washington on December 7, 1941, while the bulkhead overlooking the ceremony displayed the thirty-one-star banner Commodore Matthew Perry had flown on his Powhatan in 1853, when he initiated the gunboat diplomacy that forced Japan into America’s embrace. Narrow enough to fit through the 110-foot-wide Panama Canal and twenty-two stories in height, the USS Missouri was sent to Tokyo Bay since the president was from that state, and his daughter, Margaret, had christened the battleship on January 29, 1944, in Brooklyn (Missouri now sits at anchor in Pearl Harbor at Ford Island; Perry’s flag is still there, under glass). Since the onetime greatest naval power in all the world no longer had a single seaworthy vessel, destroyer Landsdowne had to ferry the Tokyo delegation to the signing.
Attending the ceremony were Mitsuo Fuchida, Joseph Stilwell, James Doolittle, and Japanese Foreign Office secretary Toshikazu Kase, who had been assigned to prepare a report on the surrender for his emperor. What would the Americans do now? everyone in Japan wondered. Of the 7 million Tokyo residents who’d survived the Raid of the Dancing Flames, 5 million were so overcome by fears of Allied vengeance that they’d fled to the country to hide.
MacArthur instead announced, “It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance, and justice.”
