Moscow remained the focus of Tokyo’s diplomacy. Japan was willing to surrender most (perhaps all) of the territory and commercial privileges it had won in the Russo-Japanese War forty years earlier. In return, it hoped to obtain oil and other needed raw materials from Siberia, and to retain the status of an independent “buffer state” in East Asia, balancing the interests of the USSR and the Anglo-American powers. With the backing of the SWDC, including the hardline faction, the Japanese government formally asked the Kremlin for assistance in arranging a truce and a negotiated peace with the Allies. These entreaties were conveyed simultaneously through the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo. The Japanese asked the Russians to receive a special diplomatic envoy in Moscow—Fumimaro Konoye, the royal prince and former prime minister who had been ousted from power in 1941.
The Russians listened to these plaintive entreaties and offered no encouraging reply, but did not reject them outright. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs, seemed to drag his feet. He was often unavailable; meetings were postponed, rescheduled, and then postponed again. Molotov asked Japanese ambassador Naotake Sato to provide more concrete proposals. The USSR would reply to the Japanese requests, he told Sato, after he and Stalin had returned from the Allied conference in Potsdam, Germany (July 17–August 2, 1945). The Japanese did not yet know or suspect that the Russians had already pledged to join the war against Japan. At Yalta, Stalin had fixed the date of the Soviet attack for three months after the fall of Germany. The Soviet dictator led the Japanese along with inconclusive diplomatic exchanges, intending only to buy time for his forces to redeploy from Europe. Throughout June and July, Russian troops, tanks, and artillery were traveling east by rail and massing on the Manchurian border. The point of Stalin’s characteristically devious game was to get his country into the last phase of the war against Japan, thus gobbling up territory on the cheap.
In an SWDC meeting of June 18, Hirohito gave the clearest signal yet that he was with the peace faction, stating, “I desire that concrete plans to end the war, unhampered by existing policy, be speedily studied and that efforts be made to implement them.”31 He wanted to know the timing of Prince Konoye’s mission to Moscow. Konoye later told American interrogators that he received “direct and secret instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity.” According to the SWDC staff secretary, Suzuki and Togo secretly agreed that if the Kremlin refused to mediate peace talks, they would appeal directly to the United States for terms.32
But the factions in Tokyo had agreed on nothing beyond a vague appeal to the USSR. Nothing more concrete or conciliatory would be tolerated by the army. The regime’s public policy was to fight to the bitter last, while its diplomatic activities were kept secret. Prime Minister Suzuki’s public statements remained as spirited and bellicose as ever. The very idea of surrender was anathema; even the peacemakers were working on the assumption that some kind of bargain could be struck. Privately, some in the ruling circle recognized that Japan would be forced to give up its entire overseas empire, but others expected to retain territories the nation had controlled in earlier decades, including Korea and Formosa. The army high command was willing and even eager to pull out of China and southeast Asia—but they intended to withdraw their troops under Japanese command, not to surrender and be disarmed. As for allowing an Allied occupation force on Japanese soil without a fight, any Japanese leader who proposed such a disgraceful idea was asking for a bullet between the eyes. Even now, in the summer of 1945, the men who ruled Japan were slow to recognize that they could not simply turn the hands of the clock back to 1941, or 1937, or 1931, or even 1905. They wanted peace, but they could not yet face up to the stark reality of their total defeat.
FOR AMERICAN SUBMARINES on patrol in the western Pacific, the spring of 1945 was a season of famine. They found few Japanese ships of any kind. “Gone were the fat, loot-laden convoys that tried to blast their way back to the Empire,” wrote Vice Admiral Charlie Lockwood, the Pacific submarine commander. “Vanished were the huge transports, piled high with munitions and packed to the rails with enemy troops, headed southward from the enemy’s homeland.”33 Sinking scores plummeted. In April, nineteen submarines managed to sink just eighteen enemy cargo ships of combined 66,352 tons, and ten warships of 13,651 tons. In May, the score declined to fifteen merchantmen of 30,194 tons and five warships of 4,484 tons.34 Most of the few remaining targets were found in the domain of Admiral Fife’s Subic Bay command—in the Java Sea, the Gulf of Siam, and close inshore along the coast of Indochina. Increasingly, U.S. submarines preyed upon the dilapidated little trawlers, junks, and sampans that were always found teeming in those waters. Most were innocently laden with noncontraband cargoes such as rice, grain, fish, coffee, sugar, or salt, and manned by Chinese, Thai, or Malayan crews. But they were plying the coastal trade between ports in Japanese-occupied territories, and that was enough to doom them. In a July 1945 patrol off the east coast of Malaya, the submarine Blenny sank sixty-three small craft with her deck guns. In most cases, but not all, skipper William Hazard gave the crews a warning before opening fire, allowing them to evacuate their vessels and take to their rafts and lifeboats.
As solitary commerce-raiding cruises became less productive, the submarine fleet had to devote itself to new missions involving closer cooperation with other Allied forces. During the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns, submarines acted in versatile roles—to scout the Japanese coast, sink enemy picket boats, and provide early warning of kamikaze strikes. They scouted and charted enemy minefields, and laid mines themselves in channels traversed by enemy shipping.35 Supporting technologies advanced by giant steps. By the spring of 1945, U.S. subs were equipped with new sonar and radar systems that made them considerably more deadly as hunters, and new radio transceivers enabled them to send and receive communications even while submerged. Lockwood and LeMay, whose respective headquarters were now neighbors on Guam, collaborated personally to improve recovery rates for downed Superfortress aircrews. By February 1945, at least four submarines were stationed directly along the flight line of each B-29 bombing mission. They called themselves the “Lifeguard League.” Procedures improved continuously, though never at a pace to satisfy either Lockwood or LeMay. By June, Lifeguard League submarine crews were coordinating directly by radio with the aircrews of the navy “Dumbos”—search and rescue patrol planes—as they patrolled overhead.36
Japan’s last remaining viable sea link to Asia was through the Sea of Japan, the “back door” between the enemy’s home islands and its vital territories of Korea and Manchuria. No American submarine had attempted to penetrate that largely enclosed marginal sea since the destruction of Mush Morton’s Wahoo in September 1943. In the interim, the Japanese had upgraded and fortified their antisubmarine defenses in the three main entrance and exit routes. The narrow northern lanes at La Perouse and Tsugaru Straits were heavily patrolled by aircraft and small craft and guarded by coastal artillery. Tsushima Strait, between Kyushu and Korea, was 40 miles wide, but a powerful warm current ran north through it, and it was one of the most heavily mined seaways in the world. Lockwood had taken an interest in new frequency-modulated (FM) sonar systems that might enable a submarine to thread the Tsushima mine barrier, and by 1945 the technology had matured enough that it seemed worth the obvious risks. After conducting tests in dummy minefields off Pearl Harbor, Lockwood sold the idea to King and Nimitz. The operation was dubbed BARNEY.
On June 4, 1945, a nine-submarine wolfpack crept into Tsushima Strait. They entered in three groups of three, each taking a slightly different route through a four-layered mine barrier. They stayed deep, below 150 feet, with their FM sonar sets tilted upward to “see” the locations of floating mines. As each boat snuck through the forest of steel mine cables, eluding the faint, ghostlike images depicted on the FM sonar scopes, the seconds passed like minutes, and minutes like hours. The Flying Fish remained submerged for sixteen hours
, near the limit of her battery’s endurance, while her crew panted and sweated in the oxygen-deprived confines of her hull.37 On the Tinosa, a mine cable scraped along the length of the outer hull, making a noise that every man on her crew could identify with hideous clarity. Would it pull the mine down and blow the boat apart? One sailor recorded in his diary that the tension aboard the Tinosa was so severe that “if you dropped a penny on the deck, people would be on the ceiling.”38
All nine made it safely through to “Hirohito’s private bathtub,” where they commenced a three-week rampage, sinking a total of twenty-eight ships for 54,784 tons.39 With its maritime economy teetering on the brink of collapse, Japan could not afford to lose those ships. The Bonefish was destroyed in Toyama Bay on June 19 by the Japanese frigate Okinawa and a flotilla of smaller patrol craft. The remaining eight survived and escaped the enclosed sea by dashing through La Perouse Strait, the same northern passage where the Wahoo had met her end two years earlier. Their tactic was to stick together and remain on the surface, using their surface guns to fight off any Japanese destroyers or patrol craft that tried to stop them. But a welcome heavy fog concealed their daring high-speed surface run on June 24, and they encountered no opposition. They returned directly to Pearl Harbor, arriving on July 4. The Bonefish and her crew were mourned, but twenty-eight sinkings were deemed an acceptable result. Lockwood had hoped for more, but Operation BARNEY had productively capped the remarkable wartime career of the Pacific submarine fleet.
After flying hundreds of tactical missions over Kyushu, in support of the invasion of Okinawa, LeMay’s B-29s resumed their strategic bombing campaign against Japanese cities and industries. Growing armadas of Superfortresses returned again and again to hit the aircraft plants in greater Tokyo and Nagoya, and the remaining industrial areas of Osaka, Kawasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama. Faced with raw materials shortages and crippling airstrikes, the Japanese largely abandoned any hope of replacing their aircraft losses. Indiscriminate firebombing of the urban centers continued and intensified. On April 13, northwest Tokyo was hit by 327 Superforts carrying a mix of incendiaries and 500-pound general-purpose bombs. The citizens had learned to run away, rather than stay and fight the fires, so the casualty figures were lower than during the great March 9–10 raid. Otherwise, the results on the ground were much the same: 11 square miles of the city burned to the ground. Two days later, another major strike hit Kawasaki, south of Tokyo, and destroyed much of the city. Tokyo was largely burned out by that time, but the Superfortresses returned to the capital several more times. A five-hundred-plane daylight raid targeted the southern and central downtown districts on May 24. Two nights later, when some of the fires of the May 24 raid were still burning, another massive attack dropped 3,252 tons of M-77 bombs into Ginza and Hibiya, upscale downtown commercial and residential neighborhoods bordering upon the Imperial Palace.
After seven major incendiary raids, there was not much of Tokyo left to bomb. Half of the great metropolis, about 57 square miles, lay in ashes. The population had declined by about 50 percent, and homeless refugees would continue their exodus until the end of the war.
In late March, the 313th Bombardment Wing began laying mines in Japanese harbors and inland waterways, a campaign aptly called Operation STARVATION. LeMay initially resisted taking on this new mission, regarding it as yet another exasperating diversion from his main strategic bombing program—but aerial minelaying ultimately proved to be one of the single most productive uses of the B-29s. In an initial weeklong blitz, the planes dropped hundreds of mines into Shimonoseki Strait, the channel between Kyushu and Honshu. Surprised by this sudden rain of mines into a vital shipping chokepoint, the Japanese lacked effective countermeasures. The Americans dropped a variety of different mine types—acoustic, magnetic, and pressure-triggered devices—that sank to various depths. Japanese minesweepers were overwhelmed, lacking the equipment or know-how to locate more than a fraction of the mines. Some were equipped with diabolically clever arming devices, including timed delays and counters that did not activate the warhead until a specified number of ships had passed over. The pressure mine, triggered by fluctuations in water pressure caused by a passing ship, could not be detected at all by the minesweepers. The Japanese called it “the Unsweepable.”40
In April and May, the 313th Wing Superforts mined all major waterways in the Inland Sea, the Kure-Hiroshima anchorages, the naval base at Sasebo, the ports of Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka, the Bungo Suido Strait, and the major ports on the Sea of Japan. When minesweepers began making progress in clearing Shimonoseki Strait, waves of B-29s rained thousands of new mines into it. The assault effectively shut down this vital western gateway to Japan’s Inland Sea. In growing desperation, Japanese merchant sea captains tried to force the minefields, hoping and praying for good luck. Many ships vanished in gigantic towers of whitewater.
Operation STARVATION eventually sowed more than 12,000 mines into Japanese waters. Though it spanned only the last five months of the Pacific War, the campaign sank or otherwise disabled 1,250,000 tons of shipping, accounting for 9.3 percent of all Japanese shipping losses during the war. The missions were usually flown at night, over areas that were not strongly defended by antiaircraft batteries. In 1,529 aerial minelaying sorties, only fifteen B-29s failed to return, representing a loss rate of less than 1 percent. USSBS analysts concluded that the deadly campaign should have been launched earlier and laid on with greater weight: “Minelaying has been the most economical in both men and material of all types of warfare against shipping.”41
The Twentieth Air Force was growing rapidly as reinforcements flew in from China and the United States. By July it was brought up to five wings, totaling more than 1,000 B-29s, with total personnel (including flight crews, administrative personnel, and ground support units) of 83,000. The 58th Bombardment Wing, which redeployed from China and India following the dissolution of the 20th Bomber Command, set up shop on West Field, Tinian. The newly activated 315th Bombardment Wing operated from the just-completed Northwest Field on Guam. Equipped with the new AN/APQ-7 Eagle radar system, the 315th Wing Superforts executed a series of pinpoint strikes on Japan’s largest oil refineries, storage complexes, and pipelines. Using radar alone, the specially trained aircrews could hit their targets with deadly precision, even when bombing through impenetrable cloud cover. During the last six weeks of the Pacific War, maximum effort bombing missions—huge strikes involving six hundred or seven hundred Superfortresses—hit Japan two to three times a week. The pilot Charles Phillips wrote of those late-war missions: “We could pick any city and burn it to the ground at will, in good weather or bad, visually or by radar.”42
Performance and maintenance metrics improved by leaps and bounds. The average engine life of the once-troublesome Wright R-3350 engines was tripled, from 250 hours to 750 hours. Mission abort rates fell to under 10 percent. P-51 Mustangs joined up with the northbound B-29s from their newly expanded airbases on Iwo Jima. They easily massacred the Japanese fighters that rose to intercept the incoming formations, scoring a cumulative shootdown ratio of approximately eight to one. After mid-June, Japanese interceptors were rarely seen by the American aircrews. B-29 loss rates fell to under 1 percent per mission. By the end of the war, as LeMay was fond of saying, it was statistically safer to fly a bombing mission over Japan than to fly a training mission at home.
ON JULY 1, THE THIRD FLEET was back at sea, radio silent, northbound for Japan. An armada of 105 ships, including seventeen aircraft carriers and eight battleships, was arrayed in three task groups. By a fair margin, it was the most powerful naval striking force ever assembled in history. Its mission was to operate against the Japanese home islands, launching airstrikes along the coasts of Honshu and Hokkaido, hitting cities, factories, dockyards, and shipping and transportation facilities. It would strike “virgin” targets in Japan’s northern regions, which lay beyond the range of the B-29s. And it would attempt to finish off the last vestiges of the Japanese fleet, at anchor in T
okyo Bay and the Inland Sea. Admiral Halsey and his force would be at sea for several weeks, rearming and refueling from logistics ships and tankers that would meet him at predetermined times and coordinates, and then returning again and again to strike the home islands with unprecedented fury.
On July 10, before dawn, the fleet maneuvered into a launch point about 170 miles southeast of Tokyo. The initial fighter sweep caught the Japanese completely by surprise. In a long and busy day of air operations over greater Tokyo, the carrier planes dropped 454 tons of bombs and fired 1,648 rockets on industrial facilities, dockyards, bridges, power stations, and airfields. No Japanese fighters rose to offer resistance. Antiaircraft fire claimed ten U.S. planes; five more were lost to operational accidents.43
Vanishing into the Pacific void, the fleet raced north, and then doubled back to descend suddenly upon northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido, which had never yet been struck by enemy bombing raids. Barnstorming over the region’s many harbors, carrier planes dropped bombs and fired rockets into ships at anchor, returning with claims of twenty-four ships destroyed and many more damaged. They destroyed planes on the ground, parked wingtip to wingtip alongside remote northern airstrips; they hit and destroyed ammunition dumps, buildings, radio stations, factories, and warehouses. Others targeted the rail infrastructure, tearing up railyards, destroying bridges, and smashing locomotives and boxcars. Honshu and Hokkaido were linked by a cross-channel rail ferry system. The carrier airmen sank four rail ferries and hit several more, which were forced to run aground. This single day’s work cut coal shipments from Hokkaido to Honshu by about 50 percent.44 It was poor flying weather, wet and cloudy with poor visibility, and many of the strikes were cancelled; but Task Force 38 still managed to complete 871 sorties before nightfall.45 According to Admiral Radford, “Aerial opposition was practically nil.”46
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