A World at Arms (170 page)

The Allies not only coped with the kamikazes, though with heavy losses, but they also succeeded in beating off the one Japanese surface naval attempt to interfere with the Okinawa landing with practically no casualties. The Japanese super-battleship
Yamato,
her damage from the battle near Leyte of the preceding October repaired, was sent out on April 8, escorted by a light cruiser and several destroyers. Sighted on the next day, the
Yamato
was attacked by waves of carrier–based planes, which sent torpedoes into the huge ship and dropped bombs on it. The
Yamato,
the escorting cruiser, and three of the destroyers were sunk with over 3000 men. There is some argument over whether this was intended as a deliberate suicide mission; but without air support the sortie was certain to have that result and, unlike the kamikaze, to no effect.
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On Okinawa itself, the defeat of the Japanese counter-offensive was followed by a renewed American attack. Concentrating on the eastern flank of the Shuri Line, the Americans pounded forward in driving rain. On May 21, Ushijima decided to abandon what his troops still held of the line and pulled back into the mountainous southwest corner of the island. There the remnants of the Japanese 32nd Army were destroyed
in the following four weeks of bitter fighting. The American casualties included General Buckner, killed on June 18; Ushijima committed suicide four days later. Over 100,000 Japanese soldiers had died on the island as had tens of thousands of Okinawa civilians. American casualties numbered 75,000, an indication of what could be expected. After the temporary designation of a Marine Corps general, General Stilwell was appointed to take Buckner’s place in command of 10th Army, but it was expected to take a long time to rebuild the divisions which had conquered the island. The Japanese had shown here as on Iwo Jima that the closer the Allies came to Japan the harder the fighting. The reaction to victory on Okinawa in Washington and to defeat in Tokyo was astonishingly similar: grim determination.

The basic question in June of 1945, during the final days of the three months’ battle for Okinawa, was whether to go forward with “Olympic,” the Kyushu invasion, as planned, or to try first some other operations preliminary to an invasion in the Tokyo Bay area of Honshu, or, alternatively, to try to starve the Japanese out without any further invasions at all. General MacArthur, who was consulted by Marshall, was clear and emphatic in his response: the Kyushu landing was the wisest choice; all other operations were sure to run up the casualties to no great advantage, and the longer Olympic was postponed, the harder and costlier it would become. It would benefit greatly from a Soviet invasion of Manchuria, but in any case, Olympic was the only reasonable next step.
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The navy leadership, both Nimitz and King, had come to the same conclusion, and the air force commanders were also of this opinion.

President Truman was clearly disturbed by the casualties incurred in the Okinawa campaign and wanted a careful review of the alternatives before giving the green light for Olympic and Coronet, operations which were expected to involve even more desperate fighting with an even higher cost in lives. On June 18 he held a conference at the White House with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General Eaker representing General Arnold) and the Secretaries of War and the Navy.
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The President’s advisors were unanimously in favor of Olympic in spite of the anticipated cost in lives, though the possibility that the dropping of newly available atomic bombs (reviewed below) might end the war before that invasion had to be launched was mentioned. It was agreed by all that Olympic was needed as the next step, whether or not Coronet would follow. If the Japanese surrendered after an initial defeat in the home islands, well and good. If they did not, the possession of southern Kyushu would
provide the essential base for
either
strangling the main island of Honshu or for landing on it if that were to be decided on. Olympic would be launched and the preparations for Coronet were to go forward. The President would try to get whatever assistance the United States could obtain from Russia in the war, but the Americans would go ahead. “He had hoped that there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other. He was clear on the situation now and was quite sure that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should proceed with the Kyushu operation.”
^m

On July 10, Admiral Halsey began with the preliminary operations for Olympic.
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In the Philippines and elsewhere, the American armed forces began massive preparations for the landing operation, even as the Japanese, who expected such an assault at essentially the very places the Americans had in mind, made their own elaborate preparations to meet it. A most interesting post-war analysis of the planned invasion by a British team which looked at records and interviewed officers from both sides points to an enormous battle, greatly affected by a huge Japanese commitment of suicide planes and torpedoes.
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While these preparations for Olympic were going forward, another major Allied offensive was being planned for Southeast Asia. As the campaign in Burma was ending in the largest Allied victory over the Japanese army in World War II, the British looked toward the reconquest of Singapore. A new British army, the 12th, was formed to direct the final clearing of Burma, while the 14th, fresh from its success in the Burma campaign, was to be the main land force for operation “Zipper,” the series of actions designed to retake Singapore and open the Molucca Straits to Allied shipping.
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The preparations for “Zipper” were to be influenced by two new factors. Thought eventually scheduled for September 9, 1945, the size and possible success of the operation was very much affected by the decision of London after victory in Europe to release soldiers with long service overseas (three years four months). This meant stripping the forces in Mountbatten’s command and led to one of the few British World War II revivals of the bitter arguments between military and civilian leaders which had been such a prominent feature of World War I.
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The problem was resolved but left plenty of hard feelings. There was certainly no doubt in anyone’s mind that Zipper had to go forward.
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The second factor affecting Zipper was that Mountbatten could not
have all the carrier air support he wanted because carriers were needed in the Pacific, and he could not expect to keep all his resources after Zipper because of the British commitment to a major role in Coronet. The assumption was that Zipper would take place while Olympic was under way. Thereafter all other operations, follow-up actions in Southeast Asia as well as operations elsewhere, were to be subordinated to the anticipated enormous needs of Coronet.

Even as the preparations for Olympic and the planning for Zipper and for Coronet went forward, other developments were under way which ended the war before any of these landing operations had to be carried out. These developments, intersecting in time and in part influencing each other, were the plans for dropping atomic bombs on Japan, internal debates about ending the war in the Japanese government, and the Soviet entrance into the war. The decisions about the first of these issues would be greatly influenced by American partial knowledge about the discussions within the Japanese government from decoded Japanese diplomatic correspondence.

The atomic bomb project had originally been designed in what was believed to be a race with Germany to build weapons of tremendous power. It was assumed that if the Germans made such weapons they would certainly use them; and it was the fear that German scientific and engineering genius would first accomplish this goal that had inspired, perhaps driven would be a more accurate term, the effort in Britain and the United States to try to get ahead of the Germans. In that effort, there was a built–in assumption that, when ready, such bombs would be used against Germany. Two other decisions were also arrived at in the course of the combined American-British atomic bomb project. It was agreed that the weapon would be utilized in the war only by agreement between the two powers, and it was also decided that, while the need for raw materials required for bomb production involved Canada and the Belgian Congo, the two governments cooperating in the main project would not share their knowledge with others, and in particular not with the Soviet Union.

Both decisions reflected an awareness of the possibility that the new weapon could either greatly affect the post-war international situation or at least off-set the major reduction in their armed forces which both Washington and London expected to make after World War II as they had after World War I.
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The American and British leaders may also have been influenced by their knowledge of Soviet espionage activities directed at the atomic facilities, a knowledge which was quite fragmentary at the time but substantial all the same. Furthermore, although neither London nor Washington appears to have been aware of the massive
Soviet atomic bomb project under way at least since 1942, it most certainly was known that the Soviet Union had steadfastly refused to share with its allies any information on its own weapons research projects and had been most reticent about exchanging even routine intelligence.

By 1943 the British and by late 1944 the American governments had reached the conclusion that Germany had dropped out of the atomic bomb race. By the last months of 1944 however, it had become reasonably certain that the first of the two types of bombs being built, one based on uranium, the other based on plutonium, would be ready in the late spring or summer of 1945, when the enormous special facilities for refining and making the materials needed for bombs were expected to have produced a sufficient quantity for a few of the new weapons.
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Although it was correctly assumed that by then the European war would be nearing its end so that there would be no point to dropping the bombs on Germany, the prospect of reducing the war against Japan below the expected year-and-a-half after the defeat of Germany looked very inviting, especially in the shadow of growing casualty lists from the Pacific War.

Roosevelt had always opposed the use of gas or biological warfare except in retaliation. On the other hand, he had evidently assumed that the atomic weapons, when available, would be employed as essentially very much larger explosives.
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It is clear that Truman, when briefed on the bomb project after his accession, was brought into the same assumption; and although his papers show some questioning of this assumption, they invariably also show him coming back to it.
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If the new devices worked, and most but by no means all informed about the project believed they would, and if they were even remotely as destructive as anticipated, and on this point also there were divergent estimates, then their use might shock the Japanese into surrender, ownership of them enhance the general diplomatic position of the United States, and knowledge of their potential discourage any and all nations from ever again resorting to war.

It was the first of these which was by far the most important issue at the time. This was so not only because of the experience of Okinawa and the anticipation of a terrible battle on the home islands of Japan, but because of the coincidence in timing between the availability of the first atomic bombs, the interval between the Okinawa battle and “Olympic,” and also because of American knowledge of the internal debate over surrender in Tokyo. It was assumed in Washington, surely correctly, that once the Olympic landing had begun, the Japanese would fight to defend at least the home island of Kyushu with determination and to great effect. The estimates of American intelligence, that Japan
had about ten thousand planes–about half of them kamikazes–and two million soldiers in the home islands, were for once essentially accurate.
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But before these forces engaged the American invasion, even while the American naval, air, and land preparations for it were under way, the Japanese were reviewing their options–and the Americans knew about it.
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In the Japanese government, several key leaders were seriously trying to think of ways to end the war.
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For the most part, as already mentioned, they could not, or would not, think of a surrender, but there were those who hoped that Japan could obtain the cooperation of the Soviet government in arranging peace on terms which did not require a surrender or involve the occupation of the home islands by foreign troops. It is not clear why these Japanese imagined that the Soviet Union, which had given notice of the termination of the Neutrality Pact, had been defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, had hopes of revising the peace made at the end of that war, and had been successful in beating off Japanese border attacks in 1938 and 1939 should have been expected by the peace advocates in Tokyo to have any interest in aiding Japan to maintain portions of her power in East Asia, as well as to break openly with her American and British allies in the hour of victory in Europe. There is, however, plenty of evidence that it was in line with this concept that the Japanese tried to enlist the Soviet government in June and July of 1945.
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The leaders in Moscow had no interest in such approaches, and passed on some of them to their allies. These approaches, however, had the important effect of alerting the Americans and British to the internal deliberations of the Japanese, because they were intercepting and decoding the radio instructions from the Tokyo government to the Japanese embassy in Moscow and the reports of the ambassador there back to his government. Furthermore, in addition to reporting the negative reaction of the Soviet government, Ambassador Sato also sent his own views to Tokyo. He called the Japanese approaches to Moscow ridiculous and futile and recommended that Japan instead accept the Allied call for unconditional surrender,
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a suggestion independently sent to Tokyo by several other Japanese diplomats in Europe.
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