All Hell Let Loose (105 page)

By the time Okinawa was declared secure on 22 June, eighty-two days after Buckner’s initial landing, the army and Marines had lost 7,503 killed and 36,613 wounded, in addition to 36,000 non-battle casualties, most of them combat-fatigue cases. Additionally the US Navy suffered 4,907 dead and more than 8,000 wounded. Almost the entire defending force ashore perished, together with many thousands of native Okinawans, some of whom were incited by the army to commit suicide. The Japanese were largely successful in achieving their purpose: America’s losses persuaded the nation’s leadership that an invasion of mainland Japan would prove immensely costly. The consequences, however, proved very different from those Tokyo intended.

Minor ground operations continued through the weeks that followed: Australian forces landed on Borneo at MacArthur’s behest, and fought a bloody little campaign to secure its coastal regions; in the Philippines, US troops pushed back Yamashita’s shrunken perimeter in the mountains, and conducted a series of amphibious landings to liberate islands in the vast archipelago. Dogged efforts persisted to persuade Japanese stragglers to surrender: one prisoner, twenty-nine-year-old Sergeant Kiyoshi Ito, in civilian life a salesman from Nagoya, was persuaded to sign a leaflet for distribution by American troops:

Such appeals were almost entirely ignored until August 1945 and beyond, as they were also in Burma, where Slim’s Fourteenth Army was still mopping up Japanese remnants and preparing for Operation
Zipper
, an invasion of Malaya. There were many sour jokes among men fighting in the east on hearing news of VE-Day. A dispatch rider handed a signal bearing the news to the senior staff officer of a division in Burma. This dignitary called to his sergeant, ‘I’ve got a message here: the war in Europe is over.’ The NCO turned to his men and said, ‘The war in Europe is over. Five-minute break.’ Major John Randle, who had been fighting on the Burma front since April 1942, said of the mood in the summer of 1945, ‘We thought we would go on and on. We were wearing a bit thin by then. If my CO had said, “You have earned a rest,” even before we went back [into Burma] in early ’45, I would have taken it. But I would never have asked for it; you couldn’t put your hand up and say “I’ve had enough.”’

To the dismay of many senior Americans, MacArthur was designated supreme commander for
Olympic
, the invasion of Japan scheduled to commence in November with a landing on Kyushu. Meanwhile, LeMay’s bombers continued to incinerate the enemy’s cities, and Japanese industrial production approached collapse. On 10 July 1945, the US Third Fleet under Halsey closed in on Japan and began its own intensive programme of carrier air strikes against the mainland, inflicting carnage and destruction upon areas that had escaped the attentions of Twentieth Air Force. ‘In the forefront of the invader, his great carrier task force rampaged about … like a mighty typhoon,’ wrote naval officer Yoshida Mitsuru in awed frustration.

Stalin had promised to join the eastern war and launch a great Manchurian offensive in August. Against Japan as against Germany, there seemed every prospect that American lives could be saved by allowing the Russians to do some of the bloodiest business of smashing the enemy. Washington was remarkably naïve in failing to recognise that Stalin intended to engage the Japanese not to oblige the United States, but because he was determined to secure his own territorial prizes. Far from requiring inducements to commit his soldiers, the Soviet warlord could not have been deflected from doing so. Of all the belligerents, Stalin sustained the most clear-sighted vision of his own purposes. Through June and July 1945, thousands of Soviet troop trains shuttled eastwards across Asia, carrying armies which had defeated Germany to complete the destruction of Japan.

Meanwhile at a score of massive, closely wired installations across the United States, 125,000 scientists, engineers and support staff laboured to bring to fruition the Manhattan Project, greatest and most terrible scientific enterprise of the war. Laura Fermi, wife of Enrico, one of the brilliant principals at the Los Alamos research site, wrote later that she pitied the army doctors charged with the welfare of the scientists: ‘They had prepared for the emergencies of the battlefields, and they were faced instead with a high-strung bunch of men, women and children. High-strung, because altitude affected us, because our men worked long hours under unrelenting pressure; high-strung because we were too many of a kind, too close to one another, too unavoidable even during relaxation hours, and we were all crackpots; high-strung because we felt powerless under strange circumstances.’

In 1942 the British had made significant progress with research on an atomic bomb; their theoretical knowledge, indeed, was then greater than that of America’s scientists. But, with their own island embattled, they recognised that they lacked resources to build a weapon quickly. An agreement was reached whereby British and European émigré scientists crossed the Atlantic to work with the Americans. Thereafter, Britain’s contribution was quickly forgotten in Washington: the United States became brutally proprietorial about its ownership of the Bomb.

Technological determinism is a prominent feature of modern warfare, and this was never more vividly manifested than in exploitation of the power of atomic destruction. Just as it was almost inevitable that once an armada of B-29s had been constructed to attack Japan, they would be thus employed, so the United States’s commitment to the Manhattan Project precipitated the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Posterity sees the use of the atomic bombs in isolation; yet in the minds of most of the politicians and generals privy to the secret, these first nuclear weapons offered merely a dramatic increase in the efficiency of the air attacks already being carried out by LeMay’s Superfortresses, and provoked negligible expressions of moral scruple back home.

Only a small number of scientists grasped the earth-shaking significance of atomic power. Churchill revealed the limitations of his own understanding back in 1941, when asked to approve the British commitment to developing a nuclear weapon. He responded that he was personally satisfied with the destructive power of existing explosives, though he had no objections to undertaking development of a new technology which promised more. The exchanges between Truman – who had become president following the death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945 – Stimson, Marshall and others avowed an understanding that the Bomb could prove a weapon of devastating power, but little hint that this would inaugurate a new age for mankind. Marshall, for instance, until August 1945 ordered continued planning for
Olympic
; he was unconvinced that even if the atomic bombs were dropped and worked as planned, they would terminate the war.

Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, directing the Manhattan Project, was committed to utilisation of the new weapons at the earliest possible date. He was wholly untroubled by the agonising of such scientists as Edward Teller, who wrote almost despairingly to a colleague: ‘I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.’ The only issue that was significantly discussed was whether a demonstration of the Bomb, rather than its use against an urban target, might achieve the desired effect. Following a 14–16 July weekend of intense debate among a panel of scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer, they reported: ‘Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects … We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.’

Even Teller convinced himself – by no means foolishly – that the best hope for the future of mankind lay in a live demonstration that would show the world the unspeakable horrors unleashed by the use of such weapons. The atomic enterprise had a momentum of its own, which only two developments might have checked. First, Truman could have shown extraordinary enlightenment, and decreed that the Bomb was too terrible to be employed; more plausibly, the Japanese might have offered their unconditional surrender. Yet through mid-summer 1945 intercepted secret cable traffic, as well as Tokyo’s public pronouncements, showed obdurate Japanese rejection of such a course.

Objectively, it was plain to the Allies that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, for both military and economic reasons, and thus that the use of atomic weapons was unnecessary. But the prospect of being obliged to continue addressing pockets of fanatical resistance all over Asia for months, if not years, was appalling. A belief persisted in Tokyo that stalwart defence of the home islands could yet preserve Japan from accepting absolute defeat. Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, chief of the Japanese general staff, fantasised in characteristically flatulent terms in a May newspaper article: ‘The sure path to victory in a decisive battle lies in uniting the resources of the Empire behind the war effort; and in mobilising the full strength of the nation, both physical and spiritual, to annihilate the American invaders. The establishment of a metaphysical spirit is the first essential for fighting the decisive battle. An energetic commitment to aggressive action should always be emphasised.’ Staff officer Major Yoshitaka Horie delivered a current-affairs talk to army cadets which precipitated a reprimand from an officer of the Army Education Directorate, who said: ‘Your lectures are so depressing that officers who hear them will start losing the will to fight. You must end on a high note, assuring them that the Imperial Army is still in fighting mood.’

Some of those who are today most critical of the use of the bombs ignore the fact that every day the war continued, prisoners and slaves of the Japanese empire in Asia continued to die in thousands. Perversely, the Allies might have done more to confound Japan’s militarists by publicly announcing that they did
not
intend to invade the mainland, but instead to continue starving and bombing the Japanese people until they surrendered, than by preparing for
Olympic
. Truman’s greatest mistake, in protecting his own reputation, was failure to deliver an explicit ultimatum before attacking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Western Allies’ Potsdam Declaration, issued on 26 July, threatened Japan with ‘prompt and utter destruction’ if it failed to surrender forthwith. This phrase was pregnant with significance for the Allied leaders, who knew that the first atomic bomb had just been successfully tested at Alamagordo. But to the Japanese, it merely heralded more of the same: fire-bombing and eventual invasion.

By the high summer of 1945, Japan’s rulers wished to end the war; but its generals, together with some politicians, were still bent upon securing ‘honourable’ terms, which included – for instance – retention of substantial parts of Japan’s empire in Manchuria, Korea and China, together with Allied agreement to spare the country from occupation or war crimes indictments. ‘No one person in Japan had authority remotely resembling that of an American president,’ observes Professor Akira Namamura of Dokkyo University, a modern Japanese historian. ‘The Emperor was obliged to act in accordance with the Japanese constitution, which meant that he was obliged to heed the wishes of the army, navy and civilian politicians. He was able to take the decision to end the war only when those forces had invited him to do so.’ Even if this assertion was open to the widest variety of interpretations, as it remains today, it was plain that Hirohito could move towards surrender only when a consensus had evolved within Japan’s leadership. This was narrowly achieved in mid-August 1945, but not a day before.

Many modern critics of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demand, in effect, that the United States should have accepted a moral responsibility for sparing the Japanese people from the consequences of their own leaders’ obduracy. No sane person would suggest that the use of the atomic bombs represented an absolute good, or was even a righteous act. But, in the course of the war, it had been necessary to do many terrible things to advance the cause of Allied victory, and to preside over enormous carnage. By August 1945, to Allied leaders the lives of their own people had come to seem very precious, those of their enemies very cheap. In those circumstances, it seems understandable that President Truman failed to halt the juggernaut which carried the atomic bombs to Tinian, and thence to Japan. Just as Hitler was the architect of Germany’s devastation, the Tokyo regime bore overwhelming responsibility for what took place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If Japan’s leaders had bowed to logic, as well as to the welfare of their own people, by quitting the war, the atomic bombs would not have been dropped.