The Second World War (91 page)

For the fighting troops Okinawa had been the grimmest of all Pacific battles. The American army divisions lost 4000 killed, the Marine Corps 2938; 763 aircraft were destroyed and 38 ships sunk. The Japanese lost 16 ships and an almost incredible total of 7800 aircraft, over a thousand in kamikaze missions. The Japanese servicemen on the island – shore-based sailors as well as front-line riflemen, clerks, cooks, Okinawan labour conscripts – found ways of dying almost to the last man. The American total of prisoners, including men too badly wounded to commit suicide, was 7400; all the others, 110,000 in number, died refusing to surrender.

Okinawa left an awful warning of what awaited the American forces as the Pacific war drew in towards the perimeter of the Japanese home islands. It was the first battle for a large island on the approaches to the empire’s heartland, and its cost and duration hinted at far worse ordeals to come once the United States Navy advanced to land soldiers and Marines on the shores of the Inland Sea. From a source never satisfactorily identified, the figure of ‘a million casualties’, even ‘a million dead’, had begun to circulate among American strategic planners as the number of losses to be expected in an invasion of Japan. It cast a terrible shadow over their discussions of how the victorious campaign in the Pacific was to be brought to an end without a national tragedy.

So far – and this implies no slur on the courage, dedication and self-sacrifice of the American sailors, Marines and soldiers who fought and died in the front line – the Pacific war had been a small war. The number of major ships engaged exceeded that deployed in any other theatre: with a dozen battleships, fifty aircraft carriers, fifty cruisers, 300 destroyers and 200 submarines, the Pacific Fleet in 1945 was not only the largest navy in the world but the largest navy that had ever existed; it had extinguished the Imperial Japanese Navy, whose few units still afloat lacked the fuel for them to put to sea. The American naval air force, 3000 strong, was also the largest in being; in addition the navy and the US Army Air Force had tens of thousands of shore-based aircraft, including the B29 Superfortress, 250 of which had begun to operate regularly against Japanese cities since March, with devastating effect.

The Pacific war had been an enormous war in its geographical scope, encompassing over 6 million square miles of land and ocean. In terms of human numbers, however, the war had been quite small compared to that fought in Europe. There the Soviet Union had mobilised 12 million men against Germany’s 10 million, and the theatre had also engaged most of Britain’s 5 million and about a quarter of the United States’ 12 million. In the Pacific, by contrast, although the Japanese had mobilised 6 million men, five-sixths of those deployed outside the home islands had been stationed in China; the number committed to the fighting in the islands had perhaps not exceeded that which America had sent. Between 1941 and 1945 a million and a quarter United States servicemen were posted to the Pacific and China-Burma-India theatres; of these, however, only 450,000 belonged to army or Marine divisions, and of those twenty-nine divisions only some six army and four Marine divisions were involved in regular periods of prolonged combat. Compared to the European theatre, where in mid-1944 300 German and satellite divisions confronted 300 Russian and seventy British and American divisions, the ‘ground combat’ dimension of the Pacific war was small indeed – if one sets aside the appalling casualties suffered by the Japanese island garrisons.

In the aftermath of Okinawa, its scale suddenly threatened to swell exponentially. The surrender of Germany meant that all of the ninety divisions the United States had mobilised and most of the British Empire’s sixty could be made available for the invasion of Japan, together with whatever proportion of the Red Army Stalin decided to allot as soon as he declared war (as he had undertaken to do, once Germany was defeated, at Tehran in November 1943). According to the Okinawan experience, however, even numbers such as these could not guarantee that the defeat of the Japanese on their home territory would be quick or cheap. Okinawa and Japan were similar in terrain, but Japan offered a defender a vast succession of ridge, mountain and forest positions from which to hold an invader at bay. The prospect appalled the United States’ decision-makers. Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out to President Truman at a meeting on 18 June that the army and Marine divisions had suffered 35 per cent casualties on Okinawa, that a similar percentage could be expected in an attack on Kyushu, the first of the Japanese home islands selected for invasion, and that, with 767,000 men committed to the operation, the toll of dead and wounded would therefore amount to 268,000, or about as many battle deaths as the United States had suffered throughout the world on all fronts so far.

Truman’s comment was that he ‘hoped there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other’. The Joint Chiefs’ plan, worked out in Washington at the end of May 1945, called for an invasion of Kyushu (codenamed Olympic) in the autumn of 1945 and an assault on the main island of Honshu (codenamed Coronet) in March 1946. It had been agreed with difficulty. The army, whose view had been largely fixed by MacArthur, insisted that only an invasion would definitively finish the war. The navy, to which the US Army Air Force commanders lent unspoken support, argued that the seizure of bases on the coast of China from which close-range strategic air bombardment could be mounted would reduce Japanese resistance without the need to risk American lives in an amphibious landing. Strategic bombing, however, had thus far inflicted little damage on the home islands and had had insignificant effect upon its government’s will to war. MacArthur’s view therefore prevailed.

Before the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued their directive for Olympic and Coronet, however, the strategic bombing campaign had taken a different turn. Like the British bomber chiefs in 1942, the Americans had been constrained to abandon the belief – which they had held much more dogmatically than the British – that the bomber was a precision tool and to accept that it had to be used as a blunt instrument. They had been driven to that change of doctrine by the success of the Japanese (in imitation of Speer’s programme in Germany in 1943-4) in dispersing production of weapon components away from the main industrial centres to new factories which could not be easily located or hit by the Twentieth Air Force. In February 1945 General Curtis LeMay arrived in the Marianas, which had become the main base for the Superfortresses of XXI Bomber Command, to implement new bombing tactics. Targets were to be subjected not to precision high-level daylight strikes by high explosive but to low-level drenching by incendiary bombs at night, exactly the method by which ‘Bomber’ Harris had made his ‘thousand-bomber raids’ an instrument of terror in 1942 and created firestorms in one German city after another. The incendiary bomb LeMay’s aircrew used, however, being filled with jellified petrol, was a far more efficient agent of conflagration than the RAF’s; more important, Japan’s flimsy wood-and-paper cities burned far more easily than European stone and brick.

On 9 March Bomber Command attacked Tokyo with 325 aircraft armed exclusively with incendiaries, flying at low altitude under cover of darkness. In a few minutes of bombing the city centre took fire and by morning 16 square miles had been consumed; 267,000 buildings burned to the ground, and the temperature in the heart of the firestorm caused the water to boil in the city’s canals. The casualty list recorded 89,000 dead, half as large again as the number of injured survivors treated in the city’s hospitals. Losses to the bombers were below 2 per cent and were to decline as the campaign gathered force. LeMay’s command soon rose in strength to 600 aircraft and brought one city after another under attack; by mid-June Japan’s five other largest industrial centres had been devastated – Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama and Kawasaki – 260,000 people had been killed, 2 million buildings destroyed and between 9 and 13 million people made homeless.

The destruction continued relentlessly, at virtually no loss to the American bomber crews but at appalling cost to Japan; by July 60 per cent of the ground area of the country’s sixty larger cities and towns had been burnt out. As MacArthur and other military hardheads had argued, however, the devastation did not seem to deflect the Japanese government from its commitment to continuing the war. In early April, after failing to draw China into a separate peace, Koiso had been replaced as Prime Minister by a moderate figurehead, the seventy-eight-year-old Admiral Kantaro Suzuki; Tojo, though a deposed Prime Minister, nevertheless retained a veto over cabinet decisions through his standing in the army, and he and other militarists were determined to fight it out to the end. This determination exacted sacrifices which even Hitler had not demanded of the Germans in the closing months of the war. The food ration was reduced below the 1500 calories necessary to support life, and more than a million people were set to grubbing up pine roots from which a form of aviation fuel could be distilled. On the economic front, reported a cabinet committee instructed by Suzuki to examine the situation, the steel and chemical industries were on the point of collapse, only a million tons of shipping remained afloat, insufficient to sustain movement between the home islands, and the railway system would shortly cease to function. Still no one dared speak of peace. Tentative openings made in May through the Japanese legation in Switzerland by the American representative, Alan Dulles, were met with silence; over 400 people were arrested in Japan during 1945 on the mere suspicion of favouring negotiation.

In midsummer the American government began both to lose patience at Japan’s intransigence and to yield to the temptation to end the war in a unique, spectacular and incontestably decisive way. They were aware through Magic intercepts that the Suzuki cabinet, like Koiso’s before it, was pursuing backdoor negotiations with the Russians, whom it hoped would act as mediators; they were also aware that a principal sticking-point in Japan’s attitude to ending the war was the ‘unconditional surrender’ pronouncement of 1943, which all loyal Japanese recognised as a threat to the imperial system. However, since the Russians mediated in no way at all, and since the Potsdam conference following the surrender of Germany indicated that unconditional surrender need not extend to the emperor’s deposition, America’s willingness to wait attenuated during the summer. On 26 July the Potsdam Proclamation was broadcast to Japan, threatening ‘the utter destruction of the Japanese homeland’ unless the imperial government offered its unconditional surrender. Since 16 July President Truman had known that ‘utter destruction’ lay within the United States’ power, for on that day the first atomic weapon had been successfully detonated at Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert. On 21 July, while the Potsdam meeting was in progress, he and Churchill agreed in principle that it should be used. On 25 July he informed Stalin that America had ‘a new weapon of unusually destructive force’. Next day the order was issued to General Carl Spaatz, the commander of the Strategic Air Forces, to ‘deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki’. The attempt to bring the Second World War to an end by the use of a revolutionary super-weapon had been decided.

The search for a revolutionary weapon was one of the most immediate and persistent outcomes of the industrialisation of war in the mid-nineteenth century, and both a logical and an inevitable extension of the revolution in war which preceded it. Until the fifteenth century, warfare was a muscular activity, and decision on the battlefield went to the side which could sustain muscular effort longer than the other. The invention of gunpowder changed that; by allowing energy to be stored in chemical form, it made the weak man the equal of the strong and transferred advantage in war to the side which possessed superior intellectual quality and morale. The first attempts to draw on the products of industrialisation for military purpose therefore took the form of multiplying the power of chemical energy by accelerating the rate at which projectiles could be discharged; breech-loading and magazine rifles and then the machine-gun were the result. Their purpose was to nullify morale and intellectual quality by weight of metal.

When human resilience and adaptability demonstrated that the fighting man of the industrial age could survive even quantum leaps in firepower, military inventors changed their tack. They began to apply their inventiveness not to the problem of killing or disabling warriors
en masse
but to attacking and destroying the protective systems in which they took shelter – on land, fortifications; at sea, armoured ships. Human ingenuity had sought a means of destroying ships by stealth even before the industrial age, and the idea of the submarine and the torpedo had found primitive forms in sailing days. Between 1877 and 1897 both the torpedo and the submarine emerged as practicable weapons and did indeed transform the nature of naval warfare. The tank, which appeared in 1916, promised a comparable transformation of land warfare.

The promise, however, proved illusory. Tank and submarine, though they appeared to be strategic weapons in essence, were more or less quickly revealed to be tactical; that is to say, they were susceptible to counter-measures at the point of encounter and they struck at the products, not the structure, of an enemy’s war-making system. However great the human losses and material damage they inflicted at the battlefront, the enemy, as long as he could replace those losses and repair that damage from his internal resources, might continue to wage war. The production of tanks and submarines, as those committed to battle were destroyed and had to be replaced from current output, itself became a charge on industrial capacity and therefore merely raised instead of reducing the price of victory.