Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, had named his aircraft for his mother “Enola Gay Tibbets” (1893–1983) who herself was named after the heroine of the novel "Enola; or, Her Fatal Mistake."
Posted on 08/01/2021 12:40:44 PM PDT by Retain Mike
As we approach VJ-Day I am reminded that a few months ago, I attended a memorial service for a friend I had known since the 70’s. He was the oldest living graduate from the University of Oregon Army ROTC program. He graduated in June 1944 and went with the 10th Mountain Division into Italy where it reached the front January 20, 1945. The Army made continuous use of its special capabilities causing this 16,000-man division to incur 25% casualties in the 102 days until the German surrender on May 2. The rifle companies in which he served suffered about 83% casualties. In his company, he was the only one of eight officers to make it all the way to May 1945. He was never injured but received two Silver Stars for valor. The 10th Mountain Division was scheduled to be transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japanese home islands. His life like those of many others was saved by the atomic bombs, so he was able to go home, become a banker, and enjoy 72 wonderful years of marriage .
It has now been 76 years since dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II. The generations which made the grave decisions for that war have left us. His generation which endured the cruel tragedies required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly vanishing. As personal knowledge like his becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without response to the moral exhibitionism of revisionists who maintain their premeditated ignorance when faced with the mass of information available from familiar or obscure archives and books. Safely remote in time they present asymmetrical, contra-factual analyses about what a needless and criminal decision the United States had made.
I present this essay as a starting point for those interested in countering arguments presented. In that regard, the bibliography is probably more valuable because the points mentioned are at least truthful and fairly comprehensive even if they might occasionally lack in wordsmithing. I hope for those interested there are a few good letters and rebuttals that can be found herein.
In support of dropping the atomic bombs, historians often cite the inevitability of horrifying casualties, if troops had landed on the Home Islands. They point to early estimates that extrapolated from 20,000 American and over 240,000 Japanese deaths on Saipan and Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions.
This widely known estimate arises from studies preceding the full recognition by planning staffs of the American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. It does not consider the experience of the allies during the final months of defeating German resistance or realization of the doubling of Japanese divisions in the Home Islands. Also, it does not include the possibility that the Imperial Japan War Faction would spirit the Emperor to a remote location and continue the war long after the Tokyo/Yokohama region had been conquered.
For Harry Truman, Henry Stimpson, and George Marshall their own combat memories penetrated current realities. They were determined to pursue any alternatives rather than procure countless American deaths in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults matching the D-Day landings. The experiences of Pacific campaigns proved the Japanese would not crack morally or psychologically. The suicides and killing of Japanese civilians by their own combat forces on the islands of Saipan and Okinawa proved the Japanese saying that “we will fight until we eat stones”. Imperial Japan had incorporated their urban civilian population into a distributed manufacturing infrastructure making individual homes into cottage industries. Reconnaissance photos taken to assess bomb damage revealed factory equipment in most burnt out homes. With such a spiritual and material national unity committed to waging war, the incendiary raids and atomic bombs were no longer indiscriminate or disproportionate. The Japanese War Faction though remained unmoved and resolved to wage Total War of upmost savagery rather than contemplate the shameful reality of surrender.
Secretary of War Henry Stimpson in July 1945 prepared a study for invading Japan to answer the inevitable Congressional questions of why there still needed to be huge selective service call ups when the US now fought on a single front. In his summary William B. Shockley the director of the study said, “If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan’s has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including 400,000 and 800,000 killed.” This summary aligns those evolving studies by Pentagon and Western Pacific intelligence staffs, as well as Herbert Hoover’s informal analytical group.
This last estimate could have easily involved the upper range of numbers had the invasion occurred. Kyushu and Honshu at over 100,000 rugged square miles mathematically enable at least 500 vast redoubts; complex fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses on Okinawa. Stimpson had been an artillery officer in WW I, had seen the terrain of Japan firsthand, and told Truman it promised a more bitter struggle than the allies had experienced in Germany. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to stubborn defense of major cities just as the Germans carried out in Berlin, where 81,116 Russians died and 280,251 were wounded.
The Americans understood the Japanese would be waiting for them, because the uncertainty caused by the “island hopping” strategy had ended. Experience had taught the Japanese to identify the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed to subdue their homeland. American intelligence already noted repositioning of divisions into southern Kyushu to counter the first phase of the invasion and could find no alternative sites. There would be few opportunities for maneuver, but instead combat would demand battles of attrition reminiscent of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and WW I trench warfare.
Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”. General Marshall said, “War is the most terrible tragedy of the human race and should not be prolonged an hour longer than absolutely necessary”. Yet even early estimates were over three times the casualties suffered by Americans during D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa combined. Through these and other battles the American people had absorbed a profound shock caused by a million combat and combat related casualties since June 1944 compared to a quarter million in the previous two and a half years. After VE day Stimson perceived the first signs of war weariness and said, “the country will not be satisfied unless every effort is made to shorten the war”.
With that reality in mind Harry Truman appointed a civilian committee to provide recommendations about the alternative of using the atomic bomb. Henry Stimson would chair. The members would be James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard and chairman of the National Defense Research Committee; Karl T. Compton president of MIT; Vannevar Bush president of the Carnegie Institute in Washington and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development; Ralph A. Bard Undersecretary of the Navy and a former Chicago financier; William L. Clayton Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs with specialty in international trade; George L. Harrison president of New York Life Insurance Company and Stinson’s special assistant on matters related to the atomic bomb project; and Jimmy Burns as Truman’s personal representative. Later an advisory committee of four physicists actively involved in development joined them. They were Enrico Fermi and Arthur H. Compton of the University of Chicago; Ernest O. Lawrence of the Radiation Laboratory at University California Berkley; and J. Robert Oppenheimer head of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bombs were being assembled.
The committee and scientific panel reached three unanimous conclusions, which Truman reluctantly agreed to, because he could see no alternative.
The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible.
It should be used against war plants surrounded by worker’s homes and other buildings susceptible to damage, in order to make as profound a psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.
It should be used without warning.
For their part, the Japanese maintained the honorable sacrifice of 20 million Japanese lives was essential for planning final mainland battles. Those 20 million deaths or casualties would have occurred in a population of only 72 million. They contended this limitless slaughter would inflict millions of American casualties and grind them into a stalemate that would convince the allies to abandon the Potsdam Declaration. In preparation, they had redeployed veteran Kwantung divisions and other selected troops from China and mobilized home defense armies. They drafted able citizens 17-60 years old into the Peoples Volunteer Corps and Home Defense Units to assume infrastructure duties of army units and to stay behind invaders for suicide missions using light weapons, explosives, and biological agents. Any food shortages caused by the blockade would first call for killing of allied prisoners, and then starvation of as many of their own people as necessary to sustain their armies and civilian militias.
Much was unknown throughout the war about military capabilities because America found The Home Islands generally impenetrable except for cryptographic intelligence and reconnaissance photos. The allies had no agents in the Home Islands and most communication was by land line. Americans had to rely upon their primary principle of intelligence analysis to minimize uncertainties by deciding the enemy will focus their command economy on realization of the most devastating weapon capabilities. The true extent of those unknown capabilities could not be incorporated into plans and would only be discovered by suffering their consequences during invasion.
The increasingly feeble response to B-29 bombing missions caused the U.S. to significantly underestimate the Japanese air force. Swarms of kamikaze airplanes with sufficient aviation fuel were concealed for one-way trips to attack the invasion fleet. The kamikazes would concentrate on killing soldiers on the amphibious ships and seldom attempt to attack the carriers protected by nearly impenetrable screens of combat air patrols and anti-aircraft artillery. At the Battle of Okinawa, they had proved a devastating weapon destroying or damaging nearly 400 ships and killing or wounding nearly 10,000 sailors. The planes flew long distances on a few know routes. In the Home Islands, they would fly from camouflaged airfields, take unpredictable flight paths using mountainous terrain to evade radar, and attack the static amphibious fleet while it discharged troops and supplies onto the invasion beaches. They had also discovered their hundreds of wooden aircraft were nearly invisible to radar and immune to the proximity fuse of anti-aircraft artillery. Only after occupation did the U.S. also become aware of the extent of suicide boats and mini-submarines stockpiled for the invasion.
Americans had information from China they could face undefined biological warfare. These biological pathogens had already been tested on several hundred thousand in Chinese villages and on prisoners of war. In confirmation occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. They discovered military leaders planned to direct civilian militias to stay behind the advancing Americans to infuse pathogens into food and waters sources, to release infected animals and insects into American compounds, and to infect themselves with choleras and plaque germs.
The decision to invade also had to include speculations about Japan’s nuclear program. As WW II began, the U.S. knew Japanese intellectuals included accomplished physicists such as Yoshio Nishina. Analysts knew he was a staunch Imperial nationalist and a capable leader; so capable that two of his students later won Nobel prizes. Analysts knew he built Japan’s first cyclotron in 1940.
A definite insight into Japan’s progress came in May 1945 as Germany surrendered. Admiral Doenitz ordered all submarines to proceed to allied ports. The U-234 proceeded to Portsmouth where our Navy discovered its cargo contained 560 kilos of uranium oxide intended for the Japanese to refine into fissionable material. Possibly cumbersome devices might have resided beneath peasant huts to devastate the buildup of forces.
After the war, interrogators discovered Nishina was given a substantial budget to build an atomic bomb. When the Americans reached Tinian and B-29’s could reach Japan further efforts were concentrated at the huge industrial facilities in Hungnam North Korea. One day after the Nagasaki bomb, Japan exploded what was described as an experimental nuclear device off the coast of Hungnam. Stalin’s forces advanced beyond Hungnam to the 38th parallel and Japanese equipment and scientists vanished inside the Soviet Union. No further information emerged.
Hirohito appointed a Peace Faction in January 1944, based of navy and army staff studies determining Japan could wage war successfully only until June-July 1943. The faction was to ensure an Imperial decision to authorize negotiations was timed to the emergence of common citizen war-weariness, while allowing sufficient catastrophic slaughters to satisfy military honor styled as romantic self-sacrifice. There would be no genuine peace efforts, because the dominate military caste had often used assassination to still opposition.
Hirohito’s government then conducted an excruciating brand of political kabuki through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, looming starvation, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths. Too few leaders could discover the courage to contemplate that national suicide would not be required to bring about a condition preserving personal and national honor. Nearly a million of those lives might have been saved if the Japanese public and military had been forced to accept the truth about their crumbling empire and the inevitability of surrender. Even if Hirohito had used the fall of Germany on May 8 as a reason, a half million lives would have been saved.
Revisionists claim Japan was seeking surrender before the last meetings of Hirohito and his advisors, but history reveals Japanese negotiation initiatives proved too vacuous to make dropping the bombs unnecessary. These supposed negotiations cite proposals Foreign Minister Togo directed Ambassador Sato to offer to Molotov. In those proposals, Japan intended bribing the Russians into neutrality with conquered Chinese territory. The Soviets would then mediate settlement terms preserving Japanese visions of peace with honor. This vision contemplated maintaining Japan’s Imperial, militaristic national structure and retaining the core empire of Home Islands, Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa. The first June 29 contacts ignored attributes of surrender with proposals the Russians considered too vague to answer. The August 2 proposals accepted the Potsdam Declaration as only one basis for further study. When Ambassador Sato finally saw Molotov on August 8, two days after the Hiroshima bomb, he received a war declaration instead of answers to his latest proposals. U.S. cryptologists reading the diplomatic code confirmed Togo’s Russian contacts were ineffectual. American intelligence also knew those involving Allen Dulles in Switzerland lacked any interest by Japanese leaders.
The pattern of Japanese contacts demonstrated an unwillingness to accept any responsibility for understanding Western expectations for negotiation strategies. The fact America had destroyed its navy, massacred its island garrisons, and bombed its cities into cinders should have prompted Japanese proposals embracing a Western style of clarity. Instead, they ignored their manifest obligation to bring forward substantive questions and proposals and chose to greet the Potsdam Declaration with silence.
The Japanese Cabinet and High Command debated the Final Battles arguments into utter physical and mental exhaustion for eleven hours following the second atomic bomb at Nagasaki on August 9. During those days, they contemplated the reports of Yoshio Nishina and Bunsaku Arakatsu confirming the Americans had released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the devastating atomic weapon Japan had been developing. During those conferences at the Imperial Palace, they also saw much of Tokyo about them had been blasted and burned into a wasteland. The facts of these deliberations confirm the assessment in June 1945 by Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, and Robert Oppenheimer that no creditable demonstration of the atomic bomb could be devised to end the war.
For the final meeting, Hirohito reluctantly invited Baron Hiranuma, who had fiercely disapproved the Pearl Harbor attack. He maintained the United States could not be provoked into war by Japanese conquest of British, French, and Dutch colonies. But the baron was also a renowned prosecutor who could ask the hard questions now essential. He asked Foreign Minister Togo to consider whether he had ever made concrete proposals to the Russians. He asked the war ministers if they had any counter measures to the relentless air attacks by the American Army and Navy. Hiranuma reminded Hirohito that the Emperor’s spiritual essence was the foundation for Japan’s future, enduring independent of any government imposed by surrender, and asked whether a final battle was truly necessary to preserve that spiritual essence. There was no rebuttal to his questions, but the War Faction remained unyielding.
Here was illuminated the decisive role Kokutai played in determining the surrender. Any influential Japanese lived within an intimate spiritual three-dimensional fabric of Emperor, citizen, land, Bushido, ancestral spirits, government, and Shinto religion. In subjection to this merging of spiritual and political authority, the average citizen forfeited individuality and was drafted into this collective soul defining Japan. All able citizens served as soldiers or as civilian militia and awaited the decision of the Empire’s ruling oligarchy.
Though the two factions remained at impasse, the two atomic bombs allowed Hirohito, the Son of Heaven, to speak the “Voice of the Crane” in the sweltering, underground bunker. The bombs would be regarded as a force of nature equivalent to an earthquake or typhoon against which even a god/king was helpless. Only submission to such a force of nature could be proportional to the absolute disgrace of surrender following over 2,600 years of martial invincibility. Only Hirohito could make that submission, because he held the sacred, heaven created throne inherited from Imperial ancestors. He would bear the unbearable, conclude the war, and transform the nation.
The atomic bombs event removed the Final Battles argument allowing the War Faction to relent, allowing Hirohito to assume his unprecedented roll, and requiring no one to lose face. Their cabal remained within the fabric of Japanese from all eras who had sacrificed for Emperor and Empire. Only then did Japan contact Swiss and Swedish foreign offices to commence the negotiations leading to surrender.
The atomic bombs accomplished the requirements of unconditional surrender. As detailed in the Potsdam Declaration. Japan eliminating its Emperor was never a condition. By accepting the Declaration, Japan abandoned the militarism that had committed the country to Asian conquest. The Emperor’s and the government’s authority became subject to the Supreme Allied Commander. Their authority was later subject to the Japanese citizens’ free expression for determining a post war government that eradicated multi-millennial martial and Imperial characteristics.
The American citizens and their leaders who had suffered through two bloody deluges in the twentieth century approached the summer of 1945 with several imperatives. After witnessing the feeble responses to a resurgent Germany following WW I, they would not tolerate a peace requiring anything less than total submission. They found intolerable the idea of allowing a blockade to operate interminably, while deferring to the War Faction any decision about whether Japanese and allied prisoner deaths met their 20 million lives standard. They would not accept months of diplomatic dithering accompanied by additional hundreds of thousands of civilian and military deaths throughout Asia. They would not suffer the uncertainty of allowing an opportunity for Japan’s nuclear program to produce atomic weapons to repel an invasion.
As far as the country was concerned, the only innocent civilian lives at stake were the common men and women become citizen soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who would have had to invade Japan; people like my friend of fifty years. The Greatest Generation, their parents, and grandparents, who had lived into and through this most awful period of history, would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge in some incestuous moral orthodoxy such as that found so attractive in this latter time.
Partial bibliography:
Hell to Pay, D. M. Giangreco
The Atomic Bomb and the End of WW II, The National Security Archive
The Making of the Atomic Bomb Richard Rhodes
Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the WW II Era, Sheldon H. Harris, PhD
Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, (1971) David Bergamni His book gets a bad rap in some places, because he was the first to publish the type of contrary information my other two references on Hirohito’s life presented 18 and 29 years later.
Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring, Gordon Prange
The Secret Surrender, Allen Dulles
Hirohito, (1989) Edward Behr A quote by film director Akira Kurosawa illustrates the transformation of that generation of Japanese people, who before were resigned to the slogan “Honorable Sacrifice of Twenty Million”.
“When I walked the same route back to my home (after the Emperor’s broadcast), the scene was entirely different. The people in the shopping street were bustling about with cheerful faces as if preparing for a festival the next day. If the Emperor had made such a call (to follow the above slogan) those people would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it….In wartime we were like deaf-mutes.”
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. (2000) Herbert P. Bix
Point of No Return Wilbur H. Morrison Hiroshima 71,379 dead, 68,023 seriously injured; Nagasaki 35,000 dead 60,000 injured More B-29 crewmen died in accidents than through enemy action
Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the WW II Era, Sheldon H. Harris, PhD
Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb, Robert K Wilcox
10th Mountain Division https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_Mountain_Division#World_War_II
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb” http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf
Potsdam Declaration http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/P/o/Potsdam_Declaration.htm
Battle of Okinawa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
Cornerstone of Peace (Okinawa) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_of_Peace Over 240,000 names recorded including 14,000 from the U.S.A.
Battle of Saipan http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-saipan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saipan
Battle of Iwo Jima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima
Normandy landings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_Landings
The Battle of the Bulge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
Battle of Berlin Facts http://www.worldwar2facts.org/battle-of-berlin-facts.html
Japan geography: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/geography/Indonesia-to-Mongolia/Japan.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html Okinawa redoubt was about 100 sq mi
Allied POWS Under the Japanese http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/rg331-box%201321-jap%20pow%20camps.htm Military prisoners were 34,000 in Japan, 70,000 outside Japan, and 112,000 civilians. There were already 142,000 Anglos and Pilipino victims of criminal killings.
Statistics of Japanese Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources* http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM As a tactic of administering conquered lands, the Japanese had murdered 6 million Asians from 1937 to 1945.
About Unit 731 https://unit731.org/
Declassified photos - 'B-29' "Enola Gay" ----- WWll http://www.alternatewars.com/Bomb_Loading/Bomb_Guide.htm
Largest assembly of U.S. Navy ships ever http://www.warbirdinformationexchange.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=52966
Japan's War in Colour | 2004 Documentary with never seen before films https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJLE2pnN9WY
A Navy officer’s sudden mission meant carrying a flag 9,000 miles and standing up his fiancee on date night https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-navy-officers-sudden-mission-meant-carrying-a-flag-9000-miles-and-standing-up-his-fiancee-on-date-night/
And you completely leave out the role Churchill had in getting the U.S. Churchill basically manipulated Roosevelt and got the Allies to become Stalin's butler. Churchill screwed over the U.S. more than any leader during WWII.
“According to one site, it means “black fox” in the Cherokee language,”
Interesting...never heard that before.
Heh. ;-)
Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, had named his aircraft for his mother “Enola Gay Tibbets” (1893–1983) who herself was named after the heroine of the novel "Enola; or, Her Fatal Mistake."
Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb by Robert K Wilcox
Mine, too.
I cannot read the article or comment on it because it is not imperative to me. I wish that the thread would just go away because every time that I see the title I feel a bit ill inside.
My uncle was killed in the battle of Midway by a Kamikaze attack... and I hold no ill-will. Those days are over, Japan survived and modernized. They went from an agrarian royalty-based system to a modern royal-figurehead democracy. But without the Bomb, the war would have stretched out for years, and they would still be worshiping a god-king.
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb”
essay by Paul Fussell, The New Republic August 1981
Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I’ve remembered all this time. It’s been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed I’ve come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of “verse,” thus:
In life, experience is the great teacher.
In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.
For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality suggests that it enshrines a most useful truth. I bring up the matter because, writing on the forty-second anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I want to consider something suggested by the long debate about the ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. Namely, the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views about that use of the atom bomb.
The experience I’m talking about is having to come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death. The experience is common to those in the marines and the infantry and even the line navy, to those, in short, who fought the Second World War mindful always that their mission was, as they were repeatedly assured, “to close with the enemy and destroy him.”
Destroy, notice: not hurt, frighten, drive away, or capture. I think there’s something to be learned about that war, as well as about the tendency of historical memory unwittingly to resolve ambiguity and generally clean up the premises, by considering the way testimonies emanating from real war experience tend to complicate attitudes about the most cruel ending of that most cruel war.
“What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?” The recruiting poster deserves ridicule and contempt, of course, but here its question is embarrassingly relevant, and the problem is one that touches on the dirty little secret of social class in America. Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.”
People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” And there’s an eloquence problem: most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were not elaborately educated people. Relatively inarticulate, most have remained silent about what they know. That is, few of those destined to be blown to pieces if the main Japanese islands had been invaded went on to become our most effective men of letters or impressive ethical theorists or professors of contemporary history or of international law. The testimony of experience has tended to come from rough diamonds—James Jones’ is an example—who went through the war as enlisted men in the infantry or the Marine Corps.
...more at the link...
I watched a professor from UNC a few weeks ago who talked about it.
It was on C-SPAN.
Nope. Read what I said carefully. The read American Betrayal.
Nope.
Kamikaze attack at Midway? Sounds a bit early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
The attacks began in October 1944, at a time when the war was looking increasingly bleak for the Japanese. They had lost several important battles, many of their best pilots had been killed, their aircraft were becoming outdated, and they had lost command of the air.
Before the formation of kamikaze units, pilots had made deliberate crashes as a last resort when their planes had suffered severe damage and they did not want to risk being captured, or wanted to do as much damage to the enemy as possible, since they were crashing anyway.
One example of this may have occurred on 7 December 1941 during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
First Lieutenant Fusata Iida’s plane had taken a hit and had started leaking fuel when he apparently used it to make a suicide attack on Naval Air Station Kaneohe.
Before taking off, he had told his men that if his plane were to become badly damaged he would crash it into a “worthy enemy target”.
Another possible example occurred at the Battle of Midway when a damaged American bomber flew at the Akagi’s bridge but missed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze#History
"The Japanese had developed an atomic weapon."
WRONG! They hadn't even figured out how to make U-235, and they had exactly ZERO nuclear reactors. No reactors, no Pu-239. So not only did they NOT have an atom bomb, they hadn't even developed the technology to produce fissile material.
That was back in the day when the word gay had a completely different meaning before the queers hijacked it.
I feel the same way. My father had just finished Navy boot camp when the first bomb had dropped. A month later he was on a ship clearing mines in Japanese waters.
#1:
The Japanese military command killed more of its own forces than the Allies did. Whenever they left Japanese troops to die, to defend to the last man, as was the case at places like Iwo Jima (and which was a frequently-used tactic), they received no further resupply. Those troops were completely abandoned. In the end, the failure to supply these troops in the field resulted in massive numbers of deaths from privation (disease, starvation, and dehydration). Those numbers, combined with mass suicides, exceeded the number killed in combat by the Allies.
The significance of these facts was not lost on the decision-makers in DC.
#2.
Despite all of the defeats the Japanese had suffered at the hands of the Allies, their Army was still virtually intact because all the defeats had been involved primarily naval forces and naval infantry. They still had a virtually full-strength army at their disposal to defend the homeland.
#3:
The commander of the Japanese armies was General Anami Korechika. General Korechika was so radical that when Emperor Hirohito addressed the nation by radio to tell them they had lost the war (which was his way of burning the bridges and undermining the cause of those who wanted to keep fighting), he committed sepuku (ritual suicide). If you think a man so committed to the sovereignty of Japan that he would cut out his own guts to protest not following through with plan to resist at all cost would not have employed that relatively intact army to inflict maximum casualties on the invading allies, you do not understand the Code of Bushido as it had been re-interpreted by the mid-20th Century Japanese professional military.
#4:
The first phase of Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of the Japanese islands, was to have begun with putting 705,000 Allied soldiers ashore on the southern island of Kyushu. That’s five times as many men as went ashore on D-Day. So the Allied Command anticipated resistance so fierce that it would take five times as many soldiers to overcome as the invasion of Europe. Five times more men than D-Day.
But that wasn’t the end of it. There was another phase still to come. Six months later, another 1.2 million soldiers were to have put ashore at Tokyo.
That’s nine times more than D-Day. Combined with the Kyushu invasion, the Allies were looking to commit fourteen times more men than D-Day to the invasion of Japan.
#5.
Allied intelligence estimated a total Japanese force of 350,000 would be defending Kyushu island. Except that (because of its proximity to Okinawa) the Japanese guessed (correctly) that the initial Allied landing would be at Kyushu and began reinforcing their contingent there. By the time of the surrender, there already were 735,000 Japanese soldiers on Kyushu and in just a few more weeks the number probably would have been more than a million.
So the cost to take Kyushu island alone would have been staggering, and that landing force might have been too degraded to have any ability to support the second phase of the invasion at Tokyo.
#6.
All western accounts of the conditions in the Japanese homeland (including Louie Zamparini’s “Unbroken”) support the contention that the Japanese were preparing to fight to the last man.
When the war ended and their guards abandoned the prison camp where he was being held, Zamparini and the other escaped prisoners hijacked a train and rode more than a hundred miles across the Japanese countryside to reach the nearest Allied base.
One detail Zamparini notes in his book is that the only males he saw while on this journey were the elderly and infants or toddlers. Because all adult men and older boys had long since been conscripted. But by that time they also were conscripting pre-schoolers to train them as ammo-bearers for when the invasion finally came. Because even a child of four or five could be employed to pull a Radio Flyer-style wagon loaded with ammunition from one Japanese defensive position to the next.
Even men who had been spared military service because their work had been deemed too vital to the war effort were being trained as suicide bombers. The were given the WWII equivalent of a suicide vest and trained how to dig a hole to hide in so they could wait for an Allied tank or other military vehicle to pass. Then they were supposed to crawl under this passing vehicle and detonate the exploding vest.
#7.
Relentless US carpet bombing of the Japanese islands already had destroyed all cities with a population of more than roughly 50,000, yet the Japanese continued to fight on as if there was a chance they might yet win. But the higher-ups knew better. Even before Hiroshima, they knew the war was lost.
But they still believed the American will to fight was weak. That Americans were too soft-hearted, and if they could kill enough of them when they tried to invade the Japanese homeland, there would be such a great hue and cry from the American citizenry that the American government would be forced to offer Japan lenient terms for a surrender.
And to achieve that objective, they would willingly have killed every man in Japan apart from the royal family.
Taking Japan by force doubtless would have been the bloodiest operation of the entire war and almost certainly would have cost more American lives in particular than the rest of the war did.
Truman, BTW, did NOT order the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He simply left in place orders already issued by FDR to do so. Those orders detailed the first two strikes in particular but then stated that if the Japanese had not surrendered, the bombings should continue as readily as more bombs could be made available.
By December of 1945, the two new nuclear reactors Leslie Groves had overseen the building of in Washington state were producing enough Pu-239 each month to build four more atom bombs the size of the Nagasaki bomb. So beginning in 1946, the US would have been nuking another Japanese city every week, forever, if necessary.
Thanks for the post. The estimates I found did not include the possibility or probability that the Imperial Japan War Faction would spirit the Emperor to a remote location and continue the war long after the Tokyo/Yokohama region had been conquered. I computed that Kyushu and Honshu at over 100,000 rugged square miles mathematically enabled at least 500 complex fortifications comparable to that used to inflict most losses on Okinawa.
That so-called "experimental nuclear device" could not have been even what we now refer to as a mere "dirty bomb." I could have - at best - been some kind of "proof of concept" mock-up. To make this bold statement without more context is highly deceptive.
Yellow cake - even if finely dispersed by a conventional chemical explosion in the air above a large city - would have a miniscule radiological effect. Natural uranium is 99.7% U-238, with a half-life of 4.5 billion years and hence very low in radioactivity.
Modern "dirty bombs" (which have yet to be deployed, so we can only speculate) would undoubtedly by loaded with highly radioactive and biologically active (i.e., quickly resorbed) radioisotopes derived from the waste of nuclear reactors.
Japan, in 1945, didn't have the resources to manufacture a "dirty bomb" - and it certainly didn't have the know-how and resources necessary to manufacture a working atomic bomb - which would require enriched uranium (or plutonium, which is even more difficult to produce). (Remember that the Manhattan Project cost some $2 billion, and involved scores of the top scientists of the era - Japan had nothing comparable.)
Regards,
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