|
Posted on 04/23/2004 12:00:05 AM PDT by snippy_about_it
|
|
 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
|
| Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support. The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer. If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions. We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.
|
 AS VICE PRESIDENT, Harry Truman had not known about the development of the atomic bomb. On the day he assumed the presidency at the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had spoken to him briefly and told him that the United States was working on a weapon of extraordinary power. Twelve days later, on April 25, 1945, Stimson and Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, briefed President Truman in detail on the secret of the atomic bomb.  Major General Leslie R. Groves The bomb had not yet been tested. Once it was proved to work, Truman would consult with allies and advisors, but the decision on whether to use it would be his. Truman said later that he had no great difficulty in reaching the decision. The question before him was how to end the war and save lives. He regarded the atomic bomb as a weapon -- an awe-some one, to be sure -- but still a weapon to be used. On Truman's orders, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima August 6. Another B-29, Bockscar, dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki August 9.  The unconditional surrender of Japan followed on August 15. For the next fifty years, however, Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb would be questioned again and again, and the retroactive judgment would often be harsh. To understand the decision, it is necessary to examine the circumstances and the options as Truman saw them in the summer of 1945. World War II would eventually cost the United States more than a million casualties. It consumed the nation's energies and resources to an extent never experienced before or since. When Truman became President in April 1945, US casualties were averaging more than 900 a day. In the Pacific, the toll from each successive battle rose higher.  The war ended in Europe on V-E Day, May 9, but Japan fought on. The eventual military outcome of the Pacific war had been effectively sealed since the US took the Marianas in 1944, but the Japanese refused to accept defeat. In 1945, the war had finally come home to Japan. B-29s from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian were striking the Japanese homeland regularly, systematically destroying the industrial cities on Honshu and Kyushu. The US Navy and the Army Air Forces had cut off Japan's supply lines. Nevertheless, the war threatened to drag on into 1946. US and Allied forces prepared for a difficult and costly invasion of the Japanese islands. Bushido and Kamikaze As Japan's desperation worsened, the ferocity of the fighting intensified. The code of bushido -- "the way of the warrior" -- was deeply ingrained. Surrender was dishonorable. Defeated Japanese leaders preferred to take their own lives in the painful samurai ritual of seppuku (called hara kiri in the West. Warriors who surrendered were not deemed worthy of regard or respect. This explains, in part, the Japanese mistreatment, torture, and summary execution of POWs). There was no shortage of volunteers for kamikaze missions or of troops willing to serve as human torpedoes or to ride to honorable death on piloted buzz bombs.  Japan was dead on its feet in every way but one: The Japanese still had the means -- and the determination -- to make the invading Allied forces pay a terrible price for the final victory. Since the summer of 1944, the armed forces had been drawing units back to Japan in anticipation of a final stand there. The Japanese were prepared to absorb massive casualties. According to Gen. Korechika Anami, the War Minister, the military could commit 2.3 million troops. Commanders were authorized to call up four million civil servants to augment the troops. The Japanese Cabinet extended the draft to cover most civilians (men from ages fifteen to sixty and women from seventeen to forty-five).  General Korechika Anami The defending force would have upwards of 10,000 aircraft, most of them kamikaze. Suicide boats and human torpedoes would defend the beaches. The Japanese Army planned to attack the Allied landing force with a three-to-one advantage in manpower. If that failed, the militia and the people of Japan were expected to carry on the fight. Civilians were being taught to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks. Construction battalions had fortified the shorelines of Kyushu and Honshu with tunnels, bunkers, and barbed wire. As late as August 1945, the Japanese Army thought it could destroy most of the invading force and that there was a fair chance the invasion could be defeated. Invasion Plans and Casualty Estimates US military opinion was divided on what it would require to induce Japan's surrender and finally bring the war to an end. Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanding US forces in the western Pacific, believed an invasion of the Japanese home islands would be necessary.  Gen. H. H. Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces Gen. H. H. Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, and Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay (whose XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas was pounding Japan relentlessly) believed that B-29 conventional bombing could do the job. Adm. William D. Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff, and Adm. Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, were not fully in accord with Marshall and MacArthur, either.  Gen. Douglas MacArthur Truman was aware of the differences among the military leaders but was satisfied that they had been reconciled with Marshall. Furthermore, Truman respected Marshall deeply and regarded him as the nation's chief strategist, so Marshall's opinion carried particular weight. The plan called for an invasion in two stages. Operation Olympic, a land invasion of Kyushu, southernmost of the Japanese main islands, was to begin November 1, 1945. Operation Coronet, planned for March 1, 1946, would be an invasion of Honshu, the largest island. The Joint Chiefs expected the two-stage invasion to involve some five million troops, most of them American. The invasion was to be preceded by a massive aerial bombardment, reaching maximum intensity before troops went ashore on Honshu.  Casualty estimates varied. Military planners figured the invasion of Kyushu alone would take between 31,000 and 50,000 US casualties in the first thirty days and that the combined US losses from Operations Coronet and Olympic would exceed 500,000. President Truman believed that, unless he used the atomic bomb, an invasion was necessary and that the casualties would be enormous. Strategic Bombing The capture of the Marianas in the summer of 1944 had given the AAF bases 1,300 miles from Tokyo. B-29s from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian could reach all the major cities in Japan, including the big industrial cities on Honshu. B-29s operated at altitudes too high for Japanese fighters to stop them. In January 1945, General LeMay took over XXI Bomber Command. On the night of March 9-10, he launched a massive mission -- 334 B-29s -- to drop incendiary bombs on Tokyo. It was the most destructive raid in history. The official casualty report listed 83,793 dead and 40,918 wounded. Sixteen square miles of Tokyo were destroyed that night. In Operation Starvation, conducted concurrently with the bombing campaign, B-29s mined the waters along the Japanese coast, cutting off maritime transportation and the import of food and raw materials.  Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay The long-range B-29, which first struck Japan in June 1944 from bases in China, inspired fear and awe. The Japanese called it "B-san," or "Mr. B." General Arnold, on a visit to Guam in June 1945, expressed his belief that the B-29 campaign "would enable our infantrymen to walk ashore on Japan with their rifles slung." The B-29s systematically laid waste to Japan's large industrial cities. LeMay told Arnold there would soon be nothing left to bomb or burn, except for Kyoto (the old capital) and four other cities -- Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Kokura -- that were barred for routine B-29 missions. These four were, of course, on the target list for the "special bomb." The Emperor Takes a Hand  By the summer of 1945, the Japanese government had split into a peace faction (including Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki) and a war faction (General Anami and the military). The war faction was powerful, but the peace faction was gaining an extraordinary ally: the Emperor, Hirohito. Regarded as divine and the embodiment of the Japanese state, the Emporer supposedly "lived beyond the clouds," above politics and government. In fact, he was interested and well informed. While he did not interfere, he was often present at important meetings. The B-29 missions strengthened Hirohito's growing belief that Japan should not be devastated further in a losing cause. On March 18, he toured areas of Tokyo that had been firebombed March 9-10. The experience persuaded him that the war must end as quickly as possible. Hirohito shattered precedent at a meeting of the Supreme War Council June 22, openly stating his criticism of the military: "We have heard enough of this determination of yours to fight to the last soldiers. We wish that you, leaders of Japan, will now strive to study the ways and means to conclude the war. In so doing, try not to be bound by the decisions you have made in the past." Anami and his faction managed to sidestep the Emperor's rebuke. All concerned -- including the Emperor -- hoped that the Soviet Union could be persuaded to act as an intermediary and help end the war on a more acceptable basis than unconditional surrender. The rationale for this, as the Japanese saw it, was that Japan's neutrality had allowed the Russians to concentrate on their real enemy, the Germans, and that in the postwar world, the Soviet Union would find a strong Japan useful as a buffer between its Asian holdings and the United States. Through July and into August, Japan continued to hope it could negotiate terms, including concessions for control of the armed forces and the future of its military leaders. The passage of time and the repeated publication of pictures from Hiroshima and Nagasaki have transformed Japan's image to that of victim in World War II. In the 1940s, Japan's image was different.  The Allies had imposed unconditional surrender on Germany. The United States was not inclined to make deals with the Japanese regime responsible for Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march, the forced labor camps, habitual mistreatment of prisoners of war, and a fifteen-year chain of atrocities stretching from Manchuria to the East Indies. Options Basically, President Truman and the armed forces had three strategic options for inducing the Japanese surrender: Continue the firebombing and blockade. After the war, the Strategic Bombing Survey would conclude that without the atomic bomb or invasion, Japan would have accepted unconditional surrender, probably by November and definitely by the end of the year. In 1945, however, the AAF was not able to persuade General Marshall that this strategy would work.  Invasion. Neither Marshall nor Truman was convinced that LeMay's B-29 bombing campaign could bring a prompt end to the war. In their view, the only conventional alternative was invasion. Use the atomic bomb. Within a few years after World War II, the specter of global nuclear war (combined with visions of Hiroshima) would imbue the bomb with special horror. In 1945, the perspective was different. Doubts about use of the atomic bomb were mostly of a strategic nature, reflecting the belief that an invasion might not be necessary or that bombing and blockade would be sufficient. (Use of the bomb to end the war eventually saved Japanese casualties, too. The incendiary bombs from B-29s were taking a terrible toll. The attack on Tokyo in March killed more people than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.) Truman was acutely aware that hesitation would be paid for in blood. The Japanese refusal to surrender led to 48,000 American casualties in the battle for Okinawa between April and June. Kamikaze attacks in that battle sank twenty-eight US ships and did severe damage to hundreds more. The Japanese force on Okinawa was only a fraction the size of the one waiting in the home islands.      |
You and others might be interested in a thread Sam did awhile back that discussed what was planned and might have happened if we didn't take this course.
The FReeper Foxhole Remembers the Invasion of Japan - Operation Olympic(11/1/1945) - Aug. 15th, 2003
(An Invasion Not Found in History Books)
I would agree with the General.
It's our mission and we thank you and our readers for their input that keeps us going. There is so much to learn and so much we must never forget.
I think you err here Valin. This sounds like a MALE language pattern. ;-)
It's Friday. Overtime this week?
Excellent point Matthew. Thanks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
