THE BIGGEST DECISION: WHY WE HAD TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB
BY ROBERT JAMES MADDOX
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car, released one over Nagasaki. Both caused enormous casualties and physical destruction. These two cataclysmic events have preyed upon the American conscience ever since. The furor over the Smithsonian institution’s Enola Gay exhibit and over the mushroom-cloud postage stamp last autumn are merely the most obvious examples. Harry S. Truman and other officials claimed that the bombs caused Japan to surrender, thereby avoiding a bloody invasion. Critics have accused them of at best failing to explore alternatives, at worst of using the bombs primarily to make the Soviet Union “more manageable” rather than to defeat a Japan they knew already was on the verge of capitulation.
By any rational calculation Japan was a beaten nation by the summer of 1945. Conventional bombing had reduced many of its cities to rubble, blockade had strangled its importation of vitally needed materials, and its navy had sustained such heavy losses as to be powerless to interfere with the invasion everyone knew was coming. By late June advancing American forces had completed the conquest of Okinawa, which lay only 350 miles from the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu. They now stood poised for the final onslaught.
Okinawa provided a preview of what an invasion of the home islands would entail. Rational calculations did not determine Japan’s position. |
Rational calculations did not determine Japan’s position. Although a peace faction within the government wished to end the war—provided certain conditions were met—militants were prepared to fight on regardless of consequences. They claimed to welcome an invasion of the home islands, promising to inflict such hideous casualties that the United States would retreat from its announced policy of unconditional surrender. The militarists held effective power over the government and were capable of defying the emperor, as they had in the past, on the ground that his civilian advisers were misleading him.
Okinawa provided a preview of what invasion of the home islands would entail. Since April 1 the Japanese had fought with a ferocity that mocked any notion that their will to resist was eroding. They had inflicted nearly 50,000 casualties on the invaders, many resulting from the first large-scale use of kamikazes. They also had dispatched the superbattleship Yamato on a suicide mission to Okinawa, where, after attacking American ships offshore, it was to plunge ashore to become a huge, doomed steel fortress. Yamato was sunk shortly after leaving port, but its mission symbolized Japan’s willingness to sacrifice everything in an apparently hopeless cause.
The Japanese could be expected to defend their sacred homeland with even greater fervor, and kamikazes flying at short range promised to be even more devastating than at Okinawa. The Japanese had more than 2,000,000 troops in the home islands, were training millions of irregulars, and for some time had been conserving aircraft that might have been used to protect Japanese cities against American bombers.
Reports from Tokyo indicated that Japan meant to fight the war to a finish. On June 8 an imperial conference adopted “The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War,” which pledged to “prosecute the war to the bitter end in order to uphold the national polity, protect the imperial land, and accomplish the objectives for which we went to war.” Truman had no reason to believe that the proclamation meant anything other than what it said.
Against this background, while fighting on Okinawa still continued, the President had his naval chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy, notify the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Secretaries of War and Navy that a meeting would be held at the White House on June 18. The night before the conference Truman wrote in his diary that “I have to decide Japanese strategy—shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade? That is my hardest decision to date. But I’ll make it when I have all the facts.”
Truman met with the chiefs at three-thirty in the afternoon. Present were Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Air Force’s Gen. Ira C. Eaker (sitting in for the Army Air Force’s chief of staff, Henry H. Arnold, who was on an inspection tour of installations in the Pacific), Navy Chief of Staff Adm. Ernest J. King, Leahy (also a member of the JCS), Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. Truman opened the meeting, then asked Marshall for his views. Marshall was the dominant figure on the JCS. He was Truman’s most trusted military adviser, as he had been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s.
Marshall reported that the chiefs, supported by the Pacific commanders Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, agreed that an invasion of Kyushu “appears to be the least costly worthwhile operation following Okinawa.” Lodgment in Kyushu, he said, was necessary to make blockade and bombardment more effective and to serve as a staging area for the invasion of Japan’s main island of Honshu. The chiefs recommended a target date of November 1 for the first phase, code-named Olympic, because delay would give the Japanese more time to prepare and because bad weather might postpone the invasion “and hence the end of the war” for up to six months. Marshall said that in his opinion, Olympic was “the only course to pursue.” The chiefs also proposed that Operation Cornet be launched against Honshu on March 1, 1946.
Leahy’s memorandum calling the meeting had asked for casualty projections which that invasion might be expected to produce. Marshall stated that campaigns in the Pacific had been so diverse “it is considered wrong” to make total estimates. All he would say was that casualties during the first thirty days on Kyushu should not exceed those sustained in taking Luzon in the Philippines—31,000 men killed, wounded, or missing in action. “It is a grim fact,” Marshall said, “that there is not an easy, bloodless way to victory in war.” Leahy estimated a higher casualty rate similar to Okinawa, and King guessed somewhere in between.
King and Eaker, speaking for the Navy and the Army Air Forces respectively, endorsed Marshall’s proposals. King said that he had become convinced that Kyushu was “the key to the success of any siege operations.” He recommended that “we should do Kyushu now” and begin preparations for invading Honshu. Eaker “agreed completely” with Marshall. He said he had just received a message from Arnold also expressing “complete agreement.” Air Force plans called for the use of forty groups of heavy bombers, which “could not be deployed without the use of airfields on Kyushu.” Stimson and Forrestal concurred.
Truman summed up. He considered “the Kyushu plan all right from the military standpoint” and directed the chiefs to “go ahead with it.” He said he “had hoped that there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other,” but “he was clear on the situation now” and was “quite sure” the chiefs should proceed with the plan. Just before the meeting adjourned, McCloy raised the possibility of avoiding an invasion by warning the Japanese that the United States would employ atomic weapons if there were no surrender. The ensuing discussion was inconclusive because the first test was a month away and no one could be sure the weapons would work.
In his memoirs Truman claimed that using atomic bombs prevented an invasion that would have cost 500,000 American lives. Other officials mentioned the same or even higher figures. Critics have assailed such statements as gross exaggerations designed to forestall scrutiny of Truman’s real motives. They have given wide publicity to a report prepared by the Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC) for the chiefs’ meeting with Truman. The committee estimated that the invasion of Kyushu, followed by that of Honshu, as the chiefs proposed, would cost approximately 40,000 dead, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing in action for a total of 193,500 casualties.
That those responsible for a decision should exaggerate the consequences of alternatives is commonplace. Some who cite the JWPC report profess to see more sinister motives, insisting that such “low” casualty projections call into question the very idea that atomic bombs were used to avoid heavy losses. By discrediting that justification as a cover-up, they seek to bolster their contention that the bombs really were used to permit the employment of “atomic diplomacy” against the Soviet Union.
The notion that 193,500 anticipated casualties were too insignificant to have caused Truman to resort to atomic bombs might seem bizarre to anyone other than an academic, but let it pass. Those who have cited the JWPC report in countless op-ed pieces in newspapers and in magazine articles have created a myth by omitting key considerations: First, the report itself is studded with qualifications that casualties “are not subject to accurate estimate” and that the projection “is admittedly only an educated guess.” Second, the figures never were conveyed to Truman. They were excised at high military echelons, which is why Marshall cited only estimates for the first thirty days on Kyushu. And indeed, subsequent Japanese troop buildups on Kyushu rendered the JWPC estimates totally irrelevent by the time the first atomic bomb was dropped.
Another myth that has attained wide attention is that at least several of Truman’s top military advisers later informed him that using atomic bombs against Japan would be militarily unnecessary or immoral, or both. There is no persuasive evidence that any of them did so. None of the Joint Chiefs ever made such a claim, although one inventive author has tried to make it appear that Leahy did by braiding together several unrelated passages from the admiral’s memoirs. Actually, two days after Hiroshima, Truman told aides that Leahy had “said up to the last that it wouldn’t go off.”
Neither MacArthur nor Nimitz ever communicated to Truman any change of mind about the need for invasion or expressed reservations about using the bombs. When first informed about their imminent use only days before Hiroshima, MacArthur responded with a lecture on the future of atomic warfare and even after Hiroshima strongly recommended that the invasion go forward. Nimitz, from whose jurisdiction the atomic strikes would be launched, was notified in early 1945. “This sounds fine,” he told the courier, “but this is only February. Can’t we get one sooner?” Nimitz later would join Air Force generals Carl D. Spaatz, Nathan Twining, and Curtis LeMay in recommending that a third bomb be dropped on Tokyo.
Only Dwight D. Eisenhower later claimed to have remonstrated against the use of the bomb. In his Crusade in Europe, published in 1948, he wrote that when Secretary Stimson informed him during the Potsdam Conference of plans to use the bomb, he replied that he hoped “we would never have to use such a thing against any enemy,” because he did not want the United States to be the first to use such a weapon. He added, “My views were merely personal and immediate reactions; they were not based on any analysis of the subject.”
Eisenhower’s recollections grew more colorful as the years went on. A later account of his meeting with Stimson had it taking place at Ike’s headquarters in Frankfurt on the very day news arrived of the successful atomic test in New Mexico. “We’d had a nice evening at headquarters in Germany,” he remembered. Then, after dinner, “Stimson got this cable saying that the bomb had been perfected and was ready to be dropped. The cable was in code . . . ‘the lamb is born’ or some damn thing like that.” In this version Eisenhower claimed to have protested vehemently that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” “Well,” Eisenhower concluded, “the old gentleman got furious.”
Myth holds that several of Truman’s top military advisers begged him not to use the bomb. In fact, there is no persuasive evidence that any of them did. |
The best that can be said about Eisenhower’s memory is that it had become flawed by the passage of time. Stimson was in Potsdam and Elsenhower in Frankfurt on July 16, when word came of the successful test. Aside from a brief conversation at a flag-raising ceremony in Berlin on July 20, the only other time they met was at Ike’s headquarters on July 27. By then orders already had been sent to the Pacific to use the bombs if Japan had not yet surrendered. Notes made by one of Stimson’s aides indicate that there was a discussion of atomic bombs, but there is no mention of any protest on Eisenhower’s part. Even if there had been, two factors must be kept in mind. Eisenhower had commanded Allied forces in Europe, and his opinion on how close Japan was to surrender would have carried no special weight. More important, Stimson left for home immediately after the meeting and could not have personally conveyed Ike’s sentiments to the President, who did not return to Washington until after Hiroshima.
On July 8 the Combined Intelligence Committee submitted to the American and British Combined Chiefs of Staff a report entitled “Estimate of the Enemy Situation.” The committee predicted that as Japan’s position continued to deteriorate, it might “make a serious effort to use the USSR [then a neutral] as a mediator in ending the war.” Tokyo also would put out “intermittent peace feelers” to “weaken the determination of the United Nations to fight to the bitter end, or to create inter-allied dissension.” While the Japanese people would be willing to make large concessions to end the war, “For a surrender to be acceptable to the Japanese army, it would be necessary for the military leaders to believe that it would not entail discrediting warrior tradition and that it would permit the ultimate resurgence of a military Japan.”
Small wonder that American officials remained unimpressed when Japan proceeded to do exactly what the committee predicted. On July 12 Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo instructed Ambassador Naotaki Sato in Moscow to inform the Soviets that the emperor wished to send a personal envoy, Prince Fuminaro Konoye, in an attempt “to restore peace with all possible speed.” Although he realized Konoye could not reach Moscow be- fore the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov left to attend a Big Three meeting scheduled to begin in Potsdam on the fifteenth, Togo sought to have negotiations begin as soon as they returned.
American officials had long since been able to read Japanese diplomatic traffic through a process known as the MAGIC intercepts. Army intelligence (G-2) prepared for General Marshall its interpretation of Togo’s message the next day. The report listed several possible constructions, the most probable being that the Japanese “governing clique” was making a coordinated effort to “stave off defeat” through Soviet intervention and an “appeal to war weariness in the United States.” The report added that Undersecretary of State Joseph C. Grew, who had spent ten years in Japan as ambassador, “agrees with these conclusions.”
Some have claimed that Togo’s overture to the Soviet Union, together with attempts by some minor Japanese officials in Switzerland and other neutral countries to get peace talks started through the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), constituted clear evidence that the Japanese were near surrender. Their sole prerequisite was retention of their sacred emperor, whose unique cultural/religious status within the Japanese polity they would not compromise. If only the United States had extended assurances about the emperor, according to this view, much bloodshed and the atomic bombs would have been unnecessary.
A careful reading of the MAGIC intercepts of subsequent exchanges between Togo and Sato provides no evidence that retention of the emperor was the sole obstacle to peace. What they show instead is that the Japanese Foreign Office was trying to cut a deal through the Soviet Union that would have permitted Japan to retain its political system and its prewar empire intact. Even the most lenient American official could not have countenanced such a settlement.
By late July the casualty projection 31,000 that Marshall had given Truman at the June 18 strategy meeting had become meaningless. |
Togo on July 17 informed Sato that “we are not asking the Russians’ mediation in anything like unconditional surrender [emphasis added].” During the following weeks Sato pleaded with his superiors to abandon hope of Soviet intercession and to approach the United States directly to find out what peace terms would be offered. “There is ... no alternative but immediate unconditional surrender,” he cabled on July 31, and he bluntly informed Togo that “your way of looking at things and the actual situation in the Eastern Area may be seen to be absolutely contradictory.” The Foreign Ministry ignored his pleas and continued to seek Soviet help even after Hiroshima.
“Peace feelers” by Japanese officials abroad seemed no more promising from the American point of view. Although several of the consular personnel and military attachés engaged in these activities claimed important connections at home, none produced verification. Had the Japanese government sought only an assurance about the emperor, all it had to do was grant one of these men authority to begin talks through the OSS. Its failure to do so led American officials to assume that those involved were either well-meaning individuals acting alone or that they were being orchestrated by Tokyo. Grew characterized such “peace feelers” as “familiar weapons of psychological warfare” designed to “divide the Allies.”
Some American officials, such as Stimson and Grew, nonetheless wanted to signal the Japanese that they might retain the emperorship in the form of a constitutional monarchy. Such an assurance might remove the last stumbling block to surrender, if not when it was issued, then later. Only an imperial rescript would bring about an orderly surrender, they argued, without which Japanese forces would fight to the last man regardless of what the government in Tokyo did. Besides, the emperor could serve as a stabilizing factor during the transition to peacetime.
There were many arguments against an American initiative. Some opposed retaining such an undemocratic institution on principle and because they feared it might later serve as a rallying point for future militarism. Should that happen, as one assistant Secretary of State put it, “those lives already spent will have been sacrificed in vain, and lives will be lost again in the future.” Japanese hard-liners were certain to exploit an overture as evidence that losses sustained at Okinawa had weakened American resolve and to argue that continued resistance would bring further concessions. Stalin, who earlier had told an American envoy that he favored abolishing the emperorship because the ineffectual Hirohito might be succeeded by “an energetic and vigorous figure who could cause trouble,” was just as certain to interpret it as a treacherous effort to end the war before the Soviets could share in the spoils.
There were domestic considerations as well. Roosevelt had announced the unconditional surrender policy in early 1943, and it since had become a slogan of the war. He also had advocated that peoples everywhere should have the right to choose their own form of government, and Truman had publicly pledged to carry out his predecessor’s legacies. For him to have formally guaranteed continuance of the emperorship, as opposed to merely accepting it on American terms pending free elections, as he later did, would have constituted a blatant repudiation of his own promises.
Nor was that all. Regardless of the emperor’s actual role in Japanese aggression, which is still debated, much wartime propaganda had encouraged Americans to regard Hirohito as no less a war criminal than Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. Although Truman said on several occasions that he had no objection to retaining the emperor, he understandably refused to make the first move. The ultimatum he issued from Potsdam on July 26 did not refer specifically to the emperorship. All it said was that occupation forces would be removed after “a peaceful and responsible” government had been established according to the “freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” When the Japanese rejected the ultimatum rather than at last inquire whether they might retain the emperor, Truman permitted the plans for using the bombs to go forward.
Reliance on MAGIC intercepts and the “peace feelers” to gauge how near Japan was to surrender is misleading in any case. The army, not the Foreign Office, controlled the situation. Intercepts of Japanese military communications, designated ULTRA, provided no reason to believe the army was even considering surrender. Japanese Imperial Headquarters had correctly guessed that the next operation after Okinawa would be Kyushu and was making every effort to bolster its defenses there.
General Marshall reported on July 24 that there were “approximately 500,000 troops in Kyushu” and that more were on the way. ULTRA identified new units arriving almost daily. MacArthur’s G-2 reported on July 29 that “this threatening development, if not checked, may grow to a point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one (1) which is not the recipe for victory.” By the time the first atomic bomb fell, ULTRA indicated that there were 560,000 troops in southern Kyushu (the actual figure was closer to 900,000), and projections for November 1 placed the number at 680,000. A report, for medical purposes, of July 31 estimated that total battle and non-battle casualties might run as high as 394,859 for the Kyushu operation alone. This figure did not include those men expected to be killed outright, for obviously they would require no medical attention. Marshall regarded Japanese defenses as so formidable that even after Hiroshima he asked MacArthur to consider alternate landing sites and began contemplating the use of atomic bombs as tactical weapons to support the invasion.
The thirty-day casualty projection of 31,000 Marshall had given Truman at the June 18 strategy meeting had become meaningless. It had been based on the assumption that the Japanese had about 350,000 defenders in Kyushu and that naval and air interdiction would preclude significant reinforcement. But the Japanese buildup since that time meant that the defenders would have nearly twice the number of troops available by “X-day” than earlier assumed. The assertion that apprehensions about casualties are insufficient to explain Truman’s use of the bombs, therefore, cannot be taken seriously. On the contrary, as Winston Churchill wrote after a conversation with him at Potsdam, Truman was tormented by “the terrible responsibilities that rested upon him in regard to the unlimited effusions of American blood.”
Some historians have argued that while the first bomb might have been required to achieve Japanese surrender, dropping the second constituted a needless barbarism. The record shows otherwise. American officials believed more than one bomb would be necessary because they assumed Japanese hard-liners would minimize the first explosion or attempt to explain it away as some sort of natural catastrophe, precisely what they did. The Japanese minister of war, for instance, at first refused even to admit that the Hiroshima bomb was atomic. A few hours after Nagasaki he told the cabinet that “the Americans appeared to have one hundred atomic bombs . . . they could drop three per day. The next target might well be Tokyo.”
Even after both bombs had fallen and Russia entered the war, Japanese militants insisted on such lenient peace terms that moderates knew there was no sense even transmitting them to the United States. Hirohito had to intervene personally on two occasions during the next few days to induce hardliners to abandon their conditions and to accept the American stipulation that the emperor’s authority “shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.” That the militarists would have accepted such a settlement before the bombs is farfetched, to say the least.
Some writers have argued that the cumulative effects of battlefield defeats, conventional bombing, and naval blockade already had defeated Japan. Even without extending assurances about the emperor, all the United States had to do was wait. The most frequently cited basis for this contention is the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, published in 1946, which stated that Japan would have surrendered by November 1 “even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Recent scholarship by the historian Robert P. Newman and others has demonstrated that the survey was “cooked” by those who prepared it to arrive at such a conclusion. No matter. This or any other document based on information available only after the war ended is irrelevant with regard to what Truman could have known at the time.
What often goes unremarked is that when the bombs were dropped, fighting was still going on in the Philippines, China, and elsewhere. Every day that the war continued thousands of prisoners of war had to live and die in abysmal conditions, and there were rumors that the Japanese intended to slaughter them if the homeland was invaded. Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later. Available evidence points to the conclusion that he acted for the reason he said he did: to end a bloody war that would have become far bloodier had invasion proved necessary. One can only imagine what would have happened if tens of thousands of American boys had died or been wounded on Japanese soil and then it had become known that Truman had chosen not to use weapons that might have ended the war months sooner.
Robert James Maddox teaches American history at Pennsylvania State University. His Weapons of War: Hiroshima Fifty Years Later is forthcoming from the University of Missouri Press.
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TOKYO, 1945
The author entered the conquered capital days after the surrender to meet high officers of the Imperial Navy
BY JAMES A. FIELD, JR.
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1945, I was a naval officer in Norfolk, Virginia, contemplating my inevitable return to the Western Pacific, when two bombs were dropped, the Soviets entered the war, and the Japanese emperor prevailed on his government to throw in the towel. On August 28 the first occupation forces arrived; on September 2 the formal surrender took place. A few days later Rear Adm. R. A. Ofstie, for whom I was working, called me down the hall and asked if I would like to go to Japan.
Admiral Ofstie had been appointed senior naval member of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which, after a big effort at assessing the virtues of this form of warfare in Germany, was now about to extend its attentions to Japan. But the Pacific war had been a dominantly naval affair, and while there had been plenty of dropping of bombs, it was not what was generally considered “strategic” bombing. No doubt this would be clarified in time. Although demobilization was beginning and I had plenty of points to get out, Japan sounded interesting, so I said I would go.
Admiral Ofstie was a gifted and experienced officer who had served on Admiral Nimitz’s staff and commanded first the Essex and then a division of six escort carriers. Before the war he had been an assistant naval attaché in Tokyo, and his familiarity with those he was about to visit was perhaps a governing reason he had been selected for the job. The other six interrogating officers divided up the war largely on the basis of experience. I, having been through the recapture of the Philippines, drew that campaign.
My unexpected tour of postwar duty began agreeably. I had priority-one air passage, and the luck of the draw got me aboard a Clipper flying boat, under charter from Pan Am, which provided a rare experience of agreeable air travel: takeoff out through the Golden Gate in a fine sunset, a big table set up in the cabin with a cooked meal, and then a comfortable six-and-a-half-foot berth. We settled down in Honolulu Harbor at eight-thirty, and that afternoon it was on to the west—from this time on by Navy transport plane with utilitarian seating. The next morning we reached Guam.
We might have expected some hostility, but all our contacts with Japanese were orderly, correct, and even friendly. |
There, while our group was assembling, we worked on planning problems. Late on the night of October 2, in very bumpy weather, I flew up to Japan, pausing for a midnight breakfast of baked beans on Iwo Jima, where a large airstrip had been installed, and then heading on to Tokyo Bay to see the damage. It was impressive. From the airport at Kisarazu we went across the bay by B-25 bomber to the big naval base at Yokosuka and then by jeep down to Yokohama, largely destroyed except for steel and concrete buildings. Yokosuka seemed strangely deserted; since the Japanese armed forces had been abolished by General MacArthur, everybody had gone home, leaving only a handful of laborers and a few aircraft, largely experimental types but including, interestingly, a Navy F6F fighter in apparently good condition. We never did learn how it got there.
On October 5 a couple of were ordered into Tokyo, some twenty miles away, to check out the possible office accommodations. So at 8:00 A.M. Commander Thomas Moorer (who would later be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and I strapped on our sidearms and headed into town in a jeep. The destruction along the way was extensive, with very large areas burned flat but dotted with rusting steel safes—everybody seemed to have had one—and intermittent chimneys. There did remain fairly considerable islands of built-up areas, and there, whenever our jeep slowed, dear little children would appear waving and shouting, “Hurro, hurro,” and then when we sped up, “Kootebai, kootebai.” We were later told that a fair number of those who could afford it had sent their women to the hills to avoid the horrors of occupation. But they had little understood the American GI, homesick and far from home, happy that the shooting was over, lover of small children, and well armed with chocolate and chewing gum. In due course the exiles somewhat sheepishly returned. And this was the last time we carried sidearms.
In Tokyo we managed to find the landmark Meiji Building, where we were assigned the seventh floor, with windows overlooking the palace grounds; a short distance away was the Dai Ichi Building, where General MacArthur held sway. The Meiji Building was a conventional modern office building with nothing exotic except for the men’s rooms, where half the stalls required squatting rather than sitting. The B-29s had been told to stay away from the palace grounds, so these major buildings around it had escaped serious damage. On the grounds all we could see were trees, plus some very large carp in some pretty dirty water in the moat. The substitute emperor, General MacArthur, arrived every morning at a dignified hour from the American Embassy, where he had taken up his quarters.
We busied ourselves working out a protocol that would permit our Naval Analysis Division to fit peacefully into the Strategic Bombing Survey. It was difficult. Some Air Force extremists apparently wanted us to admit that the Navy had contributed nothing to the strategic bombing effort and hence nothing to victory. No doubt this was true in the strictest sense, but that overlooked the three-year campaign that had given the B-29s their bases within bombing range of Tokyo and the shipment of construction material for airstrips, barracks, machine shops, and other ancillary gear and of great quantities of fuel and ammunition. So the purpose was broadened to an assessment of air power in the naval war and of the naval war in general. With this in mind we got permission from General MacArthur to retain a nucleus of officers from the newly abolished Japanese military to provide information and research and to produce officers for interrogation.
As we began the search for documents, we met problems: the papers had been “burned in air raids” or “destroyed by ill-advised people” and so on. Interrogations were also hard going at the start. We thought it natural to begin at the beginning: “Where were you when the war began?” But this went slowly, perhaps because of fear of war crimes problems or just because of the unprecedented nature of the exercise. But we found that when we began at the middle or end of the war and got people engaged, it was easy to work backward. In the end we recorded 118 interrogations, an extremely valuable body of material on the entire course of the Pacific war.
Interrogations, of course, brought up the language barrier, and there the Japanese had it all over us. Just about all their naval officers could speak some English; some were fluent but preferred to use interpreters. One of our interpreters was absolutely first-class; others were making progress. Those of us doing the interrogating had in effect an immersion course in naval Japanese, but even with a focused vocabulary two months is a short time. Still, we got some encouragement from the extent of Japanese transliteration of foreign terms: rajio for “radio,” bata for “butter,” biru for “beer.”
Hastily recruited, we had come to Japan unknowing or unthinking about what would greet us there. To most it was just a new assignment, another change of duty, something to which naval officers are accustomed. To the few who had been in Japan before the war, there were no doubt familiar aspects, but this was a new and different country. In the years since Pearl Harbor, Japan had subjugated a very large oceanic vacuum, with unopposed or barely opposed carrier strikes, from the Hawaiian Islands to Southeast Asia to northern Australia to Ceylon. It had occupied the islands of the Central Pacific, the Philippines, and Dutch East Indies, Indochina, Malaysia, and Burma.
But things had changed. From the shattering blow to Japan’s carrier strength at Midway in June 1942 and the failure to retake Guadalcanal, it had all been downhill, slowly at first and then, as the new American Navy came into commission, by leaps and bounds. The loss of Saipan in 1944 had provided the Americans with bomber bases within range of the homeland, permitting increasingly dev astating air attacks; the loss of the Philippines had cut off access to the Southern Resources Area for which the country had gone to war. By the summer of 1944, if not earlier, Japan was in bad straits. The armed forces ran short of both fuel and pilots; the food supply began to pinch; the few automobiles that remained on the streets were running off charcoal. With surrender there had been some concern that the occupation forces would attempt to live off the land, but in a mixture of wise policy and impressive logistics all our food came with us.
So also did tobacco. This was the cigarette-smoking age, and a batch of naval officers, American and Japanese, could produce a sizable quantity of butts in a day. When the Meiji Building janitor appeared at the end of the afternoon to empty wastebaskets, he carefully separated out every single butt. Despite their shortage of strategic materials, the Japanese had managed to fabricate a supply of miniature brass pipes, with curved stems and bowls just the diameter of a cigarette; with these they could get half of the good out of a butt without burning their fingers. And get American tobacco! The janitor must have done a good business off us.
But not everyone in Tokyo could benefit from the soothing effects of American nicotine. Given the strains of a long and lost war and the destruction inflicted by the bombing campaign—deaths in the great March 9, 1945, fire raid on Tokyo had exceeded those of either of the atomic bombs—one might have expected some demonstrations of hostility. In fact none developed, and our contacts with individual Japanese, whether naval officers or waitresses, were orderly, correct, and even, as time went by, friendly.
Early on, before our interrogation schedule got into full swing, some of us toured the city. Although I am tall and my uniform made me even more conspicuous, so that I felt at the start a little like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, I got no stares or double-takes anywhere. Except that pedestrian traffic seemed a little sparse and auto traffic sparser—understandable enough with half the urban area burned flat, 120,000 killed and wounded, and 1,000,000 homeless—the central city seemed in many respects to have returned to normal. Out walking one afternoon, I happened upon an outdoor symphony concert being given in the tidied-up shell of a bombed-out building. The orchestra members were all in black tie, the conductor was an Austrian, the music was Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Was there a message here? Only the environment seemed out of place, a reminder of the tragedies that had so recently transpired. Vita brevis est; ars longa.
What we had come for, of course, was to gain an assessment of the war, particularly of the naval war as seen from the other side of the horizon. Here the interrogations were of great value, and the officers who had been in positions of high command responsibility seemed to have the most to offer. Among these were three statesmen admirals: Kichisaburo Nomura, who had been the naval attaché in Washington during the First World War and the foreign minister in 1939 and 1940 before becoming Japan’s ambassador to Washington; Osami Nagano, who had served as chief of the Naval General Staff during most of the war; and Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister from 1937 to 1939, the prime minister in 1940, and the navy minister again in 1944-1945. Of those on wartime active duty, the most important were perhaps Admiral Nagano; Adm. Soemu Toyoda, the third and last commander in chief of the combined fleet following the deaths of Yamamoto and Koga; and three vice admirals and fleet commanders: Shigeru Fukudome, who had served two tours as chief of staff of the combined fleet; Takeo Kurita, who had commanded the battleships at Saipan and Leyte; and Jisaburo Ozawa, who had commanded the carriers.
The main impression we got from Japanese officers was of how pessimistic they had been about the war, and for how long. |
Although we mainly retraced the courses of the campaigns and battles, inevitably there were surprises. We had known that very early in the war a Japanese submarine had surfaced and fired a few shells at some oil tanks near Santa Barbara, but not that a floatplane launched from a submarine off the coast of Washington had flown undetected over Puget Sound, the Bremerton Navy Yard, and Seattle. The fact that the Japanese had made an attempt, however abortive, to build a nuclear bomb was also news. Since the subject was rather beyond our purview and we had no Japanese expert available, the details of why the project was abandoned remained hazy, centering on either a destructive laboratory explosion or a lack of industrial resources, particularly electrical capacity. Oddly, nobody in America seems to have picked up on this until some of the next generation, having overlooked such trifles as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in favor of guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, found themselves rather undercut by the revelation.
We learned a good deal about the Japanese passion for internal security. The battleships Yamato and Musashi, at sixty-four thousand tons the largest ever built, had mounted the largest main batteries ever. But exactly how big were those guns? We asked Admiral Kurita their bore—they had belonged to his command, and the Yamato had been his flagship—and he replied, “I never knew. It was very secret. About forty-five centimeters, I think. Neither did I know the maximum speed of the Yamato. But in formation she was going twenty-six knots.”
Curiosities and tactical details apart, the main impression we all got was of how pessimistic many Japanese naval officers had been about the war, and for how long. Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the combined fleet at the beginning, had opposed the conflict; before Pearl Harbor he had predicted that he could run wild for six months and carry on somehow for a year or so, “but after that I do not know.” Nagano had thought that two years would be about the limit Japan could sustain, and in retrospect he saw the failure to recapture Guadalcanal as the turning point, as did Kurita. Some thought the balance had turned at Midway. Mitsuo Fuchida, who had been the flight leader of the attack on Pearl Harbor, told us he had expected a three-year war and thought Japan could hold out for two. He had anticipated the loss of half the Japanese carriers in the attack on Pearl, but nobody laid a glove on them, and this and other early successes led to the delusion they called “victory disease.”
One officer of whom we heard rumors but never interviewed was Rear Adm. Sokichi Takagi, a member of the Naval General Staff secretariat, who from at least the time of Midway had been much concerned about the future. Ordered to produce a study of the lessons of the war to date, Takagi in late 1943 and early 1944 had systematically analyzed the losses so far and concluded that success was impossible and a compromise peace necessary. But his conclusions never saw the light of day; the army was in control, and the fear of assassination was too strong.
Even at the highest levels this was true. Admiral Toyoda told of a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council on June 6, 1945, when ending the war had been under active consideration for more than a month. The group concluded that “the nation’s war power was bound to decline very rapidly. [But] that is not to say that anyone there expressed the opinion that we should ask for peace; for when a large number of people are present like that, it is difficult for any one member to say that we should so entreat. So the decision was that something must be done to continue this war.”
Both Germany and Japan kept fighting for more than a year in causes that were doomed; only the logical Italians took the rational way out. Admiral Fukudome had all along thought the outcome was doubtful; with the loss of the Marianas, “I felt that the last chance had slipped from us definitely; [the] fact that I realized that, however, does not mean that it had any effect upon our determination or will to fight.” Similarly, when Admiral Kurita turned back briefly under a heavy air attack while en route to oppose the Philippine landings, Admiral Toyoda ordered him on: “There would be no sense in saving the fleet at the expense of the loss of the Philippines.”
In any event both fleet and Philippines were lost. Still, with its empire divided and its resources cut off, Japan fought on, necessitating very hard campaigns for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Despite further changes of government in Tokyo and the underlying pessimism (or realism) of numerous senior civilians and naval officers, every setback produced merely statements of defiance and continued resistance, until the atomic bombs fell and the Soviets came in.
But even then the will to fight endured. “I do not think it would be accurate to look upon use of the Atomic Bomb and the entry and participation of Soviet Russia into the war,” said Admiral Toyoda, “as direct cause of termination of the war, but I think that those two factors did enable us to bring the war to a termination without creating too great chaos in Japan.”
Some chaos there was. attempts were made to seize and destroy the recording of the emperor’s surrender statement before it could be broadcast, to suborn parts of the Tokyo garrison, and to kill cabinet ministers. The lord privy seal spent the night cowering in the palace basement; the prime minister got over his garden fence just before the troops came in the front door. There was talk of suicide attacks on the American fleet, and the authorities had a hard time guarding supplies of fuel and ammunition. Also, there were a number of suicides among the military, including the war minister; the commander of the Tokyo military district; Adm. Takajiro Onishi, the founder of the kamikaze corps; and Adm. Matome Ugaki, chief of staff to Admiral Yamamato in the early months of the war, who took off in an airplane and killed himself by crashing into the sea. Both because of his interest as a subject for interrogation and because he had fired on me from the Yamato one morning off the Philippines, I regretted his passing.
These ructions turned out to be mercifully brief, although some Japanese thought it fortunate that bad weather had delayed General MacArthur’s arrival by a couple of days. Had we known about them before our arrival, which we had not, we would have found the general peace and good order that prevailed a bare month later even more remarkable than we did. As it was, our interrogations and search for documents started up promptly, as if they were the most normal thing in the world, and ran in a steady stream, morning and afternoon.
We victors were too busy to think much about spoils, but I did accept a fine samurai sword from a former staff officer of the 2d Air Fleet who about a year earlier had been doing his best to sink me. Another gift I didn’t know how to cope with came from Capt. Toshikaza Ohmae of the Naval War College, an officer who had become a major source of information and facilitation of our interviews. I went out to see him when weather was getting cool and heat was short. The tables at which we worked were covered with blankets that extended to the floor, enclosing electric heaters so that at least our feet would stay warm. On the wall of the room we were using there hung a sizable oil painting, perhaps five feet by eight feet, of a tempestuous marine scene. When I admired it, I was told that it represented the original kamikaze, or “divine wind,” which in 1281 demolished an invading Mongol fleet. Totally unexpectedly Ohmae asked me, “Would you like it?’ Uncertain at first of what he had said and puzzled about the etiquette of the situation, I asked him to repeat. Then I thanked him but said I thought it belonged where it was. What did not occur to me, under the pressure of the moment, was that where it was was about to be abolished as soon as we left Tokyo.
On one occasion I did acquire a little loot. One afternoon, with some rare spare time, I took my only excursion outside Tokyo, driving out to the west in pretty country with a fine view of Mount Fuji. Happening upon a naval air station, I drove in to investigate. It was deserted, without even a watchman that I could find. But I did find a warehouse with all sorts of good things made to military specifications sitting purposelessly on open shelves. There is, of course, only so much a man can carry, so I had to restrain myself, but I did get a parachute to provide my wife with some silken yard goods and a bomber navigator’s compass that I found useful for my sailboat.
Only twice did I get inside Japanese houses, both times courtesy of a colleague who had worked in Tokyo before the war. The first time was when he found that some acquaintances of his were having a kind of tag sale of kimonos and silks, priced high in yen but low in cigarettes. What they really wanted was penicillin; this was surprising, for the stuff had come into production only during the war. The second time was when he took me along to lunch at the home of a minor-league captain of industry. The house was not particularly large but was certainly comfortable: a central court and pool with puddle ducks, a marble Caucasian nude in the middle and another one inside over the fireplace, much kneeling and scraping by the servants. The food was delicious: wild duck and salmon. Clearly not everyone was on short rations. The host and hostess were very pleasant; he appeared to have a considerable hangover.
I doubt we would have felt like going to a Nazi party just months after V-E Day, but this seemed the most natural thing in the world. |
For our part we entertained little. We did have to dinner Captain Ohmae, who had been so helpful in arranging and scheduling. Additionally we (I mean, the admiral) had Ambassador Nomura for dinner one evening. Two other bigwigs had been asked but did not show up, but Nomura was all we needed. Dignified and affable, he was an impressive presence, and he endeared himself to us by bringing along two or three bottles of the imperial household’s Old Suntori five-chrysanthemum Japanese scotch. It was good.
By the time we were down to our last two or three scheduled interrogations we were under orders to make an early departure. On November 22 the staffs of the War College and Liaison Office gave us a farewell dinner. This may seem odd. After all, they had lost their navy, their careers were ended, and their country was in ruins. But in their relations with us they were always disciplined and professional: the nuclear bombs had been merely technically interesting; the much worse fire raids were a matter of course; they knew who had started the war; and they worked hard to make friends. I doubt very much that we would have felt like going to a Nazi party only months after V-E Day, but this seemed the most natural thing in the world.
In any case it was done up in fine style: sushi, a soup consisting of meatballs and spaghetti in water, broiled sparrow, baked eel, sukiyaki (beef provided by us), and sake and whiskey (the latter provided by us as well). Also a clutch of very attractive geisha, equipped with a windup gramophone and a stack of records of Japanese popular music. A fine time was had by all, so much so that the affair ran overtime, the sake ran out, and in the absence of either water or ice we were reduced to drinking whiskey neat, with predictable results. I remember a serious discussion of Buddhism and the emperor system with one of my neighbors at the table and that my other neighbor was unable to stand up when the party was over. Fortunately all of us conquerors made it.
That was the grand finale. The next afternoon I got a ride down to the airport at Kisarazu and headed out to Pearl, Oakland, and Washington. There we settled in for a few months of editorial work on our two volumes of Interrogations and one volume of Campaigns of the Pacific War. After that it was demobilization.
The endings of major wars are important punctuation marks in history, but history, being change, goes on, and in a way the story never ends. Two examples: First, having been through the affair and having talked to a fair number of Japanese participants, I published shortly after getting out of the Navy a small book on the Japanese side of the Battle for Leyte Gulf. It sold reasonably well in America, but it did really well in Japan, which had been starved for honest accounts of the war. Soon I found myself a millionaire in yen blocked from free exchange. That was about enough for a summer trip to Japan for my wife and me, to give her a look at the place, to give me a look at something outside Tokyo, and perhaps to call on some of my acquaintances. Unfortunately my Japanese publisher had used the proceeds to subsidize publication of an uncle’s poetry, and poetry didn’t sell like naval war. The publisher went bankrupt, his creditors descended and stripped his office bare, and not a yen did I receive. I still haven’t been back.
The second event, of rather more significance than my troubles with publishers, was the postwar career of Mitsuo Fuchida, the highly intelligent and attractive leader of the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war Fuchida converted to Christianity, and in 1952 he became a Christian missionary. As a naval aviator he had never been farther east than the air over Pearl Harbor, but the banner of the cross took him farther than that of the Rising Sun. In 1959 he toured North America and reached as far as Brooklyn, as a member of the Worldwide Christian Missionary Army of Sky Pilots.
James A. Field, Jr., is Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations Emeritus at Swarthmore College.
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