The American Military - A Narrative History

by Brad D. Lookingbill

  In early 1945, Eisenhower ordered a riposte that crushed the residual German units in the Ardennes. Approximately 1.4 million combat troops – the largest field command in American history – began pushing through the Siegfried Line. Some maneuvered between small, truncated pyramids of reinforced concrete called “dragon's teeth.” The Americans and the British headed eastward, while the Russians rolled westward. Their vise on Germany tightened that March.

  The Allied forces from the west reached the Rhine, taking the city of Cologne and the bridge at Remagen. Engineers assembled more bridges, which enabled the infantry and armored divisions to sprint over the waterways. They overran the valley of the Ruhr, where more than 300,000 Germans were captured. Although the Third Reich clung to power, the 101st Airborne reached Berchtesgaden. However, Eisenhower decided to stop his drive at the River Elbe, west of Berlin, allowing the Russians to seize the city. As the German defenses collapsed, the Red Army conducted an orgy of rape, murder, and mayhem. With Patton's Third Army held in abeyance, the Soviets also seized Prague, the Czech capital.

  Elsewhere, Americans observed the crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. In previous years, trains of cattle cars hauled human cargo to mass death in concentration camps. The gas chambers and crematoria provided the modern mechanisms for genocide. The Nazi regime systematically exterminated 6 million Jews and countless others. Eisenhower gazed upon the piles of naked bodies and issued a stark order after visiting a subcamp of Buchenwald: “I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place.” The emaciated survivors testified to the horrors of the Holocaust. That fall, the Allies brought 24 German officials to trial in Nuremberg as “war criminals.”

  The war in the European theater of operations climaxed, although the last German garrisons fought with fanatical determination. With Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945, Vice President Harry Truman became the commander-in-chief and began planning for the American occupation of Germany. Following Hitler's suicide in a Berlin bunker, the Nazi regime surrendered unconditionally on May 8 – VE Day. Thanks to victory in Europe, Allied forces brought an end to the evils of the Third Reich.

  Japanese Resistance

  As American troops secured more islands in the Pacific theater of operations, Japanese resistance became stronger rather than weaker. Militarists on the defensive invoked the spirit of bushido, that is, the way of the warrior that recalled national traditions. They stressed ancient tenets to encourage soldiers, sailors, and airmen to fight to the end. Instead of making rational calculations about retreating or surrendering, scores made fanatical stands or launched suicidal charges. U.S. commanders recognized that they faced a defiant enemy while advancing toward Japan's home islands.

  On January 20, 1945, General Curtis LeMay assumed command of XXI Bomber Command to intensify the aerial offensive against Japan. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, he entered the Army Air Corps through the ROTC program at Ohio State University and honed his skills by leading air strikes against Germany. His subordinates referred to him as “Old Iron Pants.” He abandoned the concept of daylight, precision bombing in the Pacific, which seemed incapable of forcing the enemy to capitulate. After arriving in the Marianas, he ordered his squadrons to conduct area bombings at night that destroyed Japan's major industries and cities. Flying at lower altitudes permitted aircraft to carry heavier payloads. After test raids against Nagoya and Kobe, the strategic bombing campaign concentrated on Tokyo.

  On March 9, B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries on Tokyo. The M-69 projectile spewed burning gelatinized gasoline on targets. When the firestorm finally ceased burning, more than 80,000 Japanese had perished and another 40,000 were injured. Bomber crews leaving the scene observed the blaze from the sky for more than 150 miles. Eventually, the bombardments killed as many as 250,000 civilians. American ordnance damaged many industrial plants beyond repair. One of the air raids destroyed Japan's nuclear research laboratory. “If the war is shortened by a single day,” LeMay declared without remorse, then “the attack will have served its purpose.” While ramping up the sorties over the urban areas, the general also directed an airborne mining operation that targeted Japanese waterways and ports. Although U.S. squadrons struck the home islands night after night, fighter interceptors occasionally downed vulnerable bombers returning to the Marianas.

  U.S. commanders wanted to build air bases on Iwo Jima, a tiny island between the Marianas and Tokyo. Just over 4.5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, it smelled of sulfur from the dormant volcano of Mount Suribachi. Inland from the beaches, the Japanese possessed two operational airfields with a third under construction. Their radar stations forewarned the home islands about B-29 flights. They also built 800 pillboxes, 3 miles of tunnels, and deep concrete bunkers to protect 21,000 troops.

  Operation Detachment began on February 19, 1945, when the men of the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions sank their boots into an unforgettable mixture of surf, sand, and ash. Mauled by Japanese shells and gunfire along the shoreline, they advanced yard by yard against the complex of entrenchments and arms. They overcame minefields and machine guns in addition to howitzers, mortars, and rockets. A few days later, an American photographer captured a picture of five Marines and a Navy medic raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi.

  Even if Americans appeared triumphant, the battle raged for another month in hostile enclaves around the island. Marines entered the Motoyama Plateau, which included hot spots such as Hill 382, “Turkey Knob,” and “The Amphitheater.” Under the cover of close air support, a handful of “Zippo” tanks equipped with flamethrowers cleared key emplacements. More than 20,000 Japanese died in ghastly combat or from ritual suicide, while they inflicted almost 30,000 casualties on the Americans. Once the Battle of Iwo Jima ended, engineers began constructing air bases for launching more bombing runs against Japan.

  The Ryukyu chain of islands included Okinawa, which loomed just 350 miles south of Japan's home islands. Some 60 miles long, it ranged in width from around 18 miles to merely 2 miles. Defending four airfields, Japanese strength amounted to over 100,000 soldiers. The 77th Infantry Division quickly captured the uncontested Kerama Islands to the west of Okinawa, where U.S. forces would conduct the largest amphibious assault of the war.

  In Operation Iceberg, the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions under General Roy S. Geiger landed on Okinawa on April 1. From the northern beachhead, they moved inland with little opposition. However, Japanese resistance soon turned deadly. Marines cleared the Motobu peninsula yet continued to encounter guerrilla raids. General Simon Buckner commanded the Tenth Army, which faced a network of fortifications among the hills and escarpments on the island's southern end. The hand-to-hand combat slowed the advance, but some 300,000 Americans slugged their way through the defenses. Without flinching, they pressed onward through monsoons and mud to secure the airfields. They eventually took the Kakazu Ridge, Conical Hill, and Sugar Loaf Hill, although the Shuri Line remained an enemy bastion for weeks. A Japanese counterattack on May 4 failed due to naval gunfire, artillery barrages, and aerial bombardment.

  While providing support in the Ryukyuian waters, the Fifth Fleet endured desperate attacks from the remnants of the Japanese Navy. Submarine patrols monitored offshore movements, as Task Force 58 operated to the east of Okinawa with as many as eight destroyers and 13 carriers. They battled against multiple kamikaze waves from Kyushu in addition to individual kamikaze sorties from Formosa. Furthermore, land-based motor boats launched suicidal strikes against U.S. warships. Underwater divers strapped explosives to their bodies as well. A Japanese task force conducted another futile operation, but American torpedo bombers pummeled the battleship, destroyers, and cruisers.

  Japanese forces on Okinawa offered the strongest resistance at the Yaeju-Dake position, which American troops dubbed the “Big Apple.” American firepower eventually annihilated every machine gun nest and foxhole on the high ground, where desperate men made their last stands. Hiding in caves and tunnels, Japanese officers ordered
them to defend the narrow pocket “to the death.” All too many chose suicide over surrender.

  The Battle of Okinawa became a bloodbath, but it largely ended on June 22. Officially, 7,613 Americans were killed in action or remained missing on the island, and another 4,900 died at sea. Thousands more received wounds that kept them in military hospitals for months. A shell fragment struck Buckner, making him the highest-ranking American killed by enemy fire in the war. As many as 140,000 Japanese perished, including thousands of Okinawans.

  In spite of the awful carnage, the slog across the Pacific brought U.S. forces to the doorstep of Japan. American control of critical landing strips permitted aircraft to “firebomb” Japan's major cities, while naval vessels operating offshore stifled Japan's maritime commerce. Moreover, the battlefields of Iwo Jima and Okinawa shaped the strategic thought of those planning future operations for the home islands. Given the sheer brutality of the fighting, the combatants on all sides came to believe that it was a war without mercy.

  Atomic Warfare

  Atomic warfare was American-made. The U.S. possessed a unique combination of capital, resources, talent, space, and time to build atom bombs. Although programs for nuclear weapons research appeared in Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, only one altered the course of history.

  Due to the transplantation of highly educated refugees, Europe bestowed an extraordinary intellectual endowment upon the U.S. Over time, scores of physicists fled their academic posts in Germany to come to America, including Leó Szilárd, a Jew. Enrico Fermi, an Italian with a Jewish wife, emigrated from Rome to New York. Another Jewish immigrant, Albert Einstein, initially caught Roosevelt's attention with a letter about the military potential of radioactivity. Few doubted the scientific principles of nuclear fission, but the technological challenges of producing a deliverable weapon seemed daunting.

  In 1942, the Roosevelt administration took action to make a deliverable weapon possible. Vannevar Bush headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which coordinated federally sponsored “wizardry” at university and industrial laboratories. The Top Policy Group also included Secretary of War Stimson and Army Chief of Staff Marshall. Under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist from the University of California at Berkeley, scientists gathered in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to design an atom bomb. The War Department spent more than $2 billion, employed 150,000 people, and required the cooperation of research and development facilities across the U.S. From the Army Corps of Engineers, General Leslie Groves managed the project code-named the “Manhattan Engineering District.” The prospects for nuclear power notwithstanding, the impetus for the Manhattan Project derived from fears that other nations – particularly Nazi Germany – would build the atom bomb first. On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear fireball rose above a test site in the Sonoran desert.

  Meanwhile, the Truman administration planned for Operation Downfall, which forecast an American invasion of Japan's home islands from staging areas on Okinawa. The high command intended for the first phase, which was code-named Olympic, to commence on November 1, 1945. Supported by a large naval armada and a heavy bomber fleet, the projected landing force of 14 divisions would assail the southern island of Kyushu. Code-named Coronet, the second phase would begin on March 1, 1946. With 25 divisions assaulting the beaches of Honshu, they expected to converge gradually on Tokyo. Some estimates of American casualties for the combined operations exceeded a million. Truman approved the war plans but hoped to find a way of preventing “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to another.”

  At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, Truman met with fellow Allied leaders for two weeks. He briefly conversed with Churchill, who lost his seat at the table to Clement Attlee, the new British prime minister. Stalin reaffirmed his pledge to wage war on Japan, while Truman received a top-secret telegram about the completion of the Manhattan Project. As a stressful session at Potsdam ended, Truman casually mentioned to Stalin “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Through an interpreter, the latter encouraged the former to make “good use of it against the Japanese.” On July 26, they issued the Potsdam Proclamation. It called for “the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces” and warned of “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused.

  Japanese leaders responded with an official “silence” known as mokusatsu, which the Truman administration interpreted as an outright rejection of the Potsdam Proclamation. Emperor Hirohito and Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, the new premier, seemed unshaken by the dire warnings. Whatever the ramifications, Tokyo circulated “peace feelers” that garnered no interest in Moscow. “I regarded the bomb as a military weapon,” Truman wrote in the wake of Japan's defiance, “and never had any doubt that it should be used.”

  Upon Truman's orders, U.S. warships delivered two atom bombs to Tinian. Colonel Paul W. Tibbets commanded the 509th Bombardment Group, which operated under LeMay's supervision. His bomber crew loaded the Little Boy, a weapon that contained a large quantity of Uranium-235 fissionable material at one end and a smaller amount of the same material loaded into a gun at the other. Triggering the gun propelled the smaller into the larger, thereby creating a nuclear explosion. At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a B-29 named the Enola Gay dropped the bomb over the city of Hiroshima. The blast immediately killed 80,000 Japanese, but the death toll from radioactivity and infections reached 140,000 by the end of the year.

  Figure 12.5 Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., pilot of the Enola Gay, August 6, 1945. Record Group 208: Records of the Office of War Information, 1926–1951, National Archives

  No word of surrender came from Tokyo, because the home government tarried. Shortly before midnight on August 8, the Soviet Union hastened to enter the war and attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria. Consequently, Truman ordered the second atom bomb dropped as soon as possible. Called the Fat Man, the weapon used plutonium instead of uranium as a fissionable material. It imploded upon the detonation of the TNT casing, which caused a chain reaction with devastating effects. On August 9, Major Charles Sweeney piloted a B-29 named the Bockscar over its primary target, Kokura. Due to hazy conditions, the bomber turned toward Nagasaki. At 11:02 a.m., the bomb fell on target and immediately killed 36,000 Japanese. As helpless civilians wandered the streets of Nagasaki, the fatalities eventually reached 70,000.

  In the wake of the blasts, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey evaluated the military effectiveness of atomic warfare. They estimated that the damage and casualties caused by one atom bomb at Hiroshima would have required 220 B-29s carrying 1,200 tons of incendiary bombs, 400 tons of high-explosive bombs, and 500 tons of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs. At Nagasaki, it would have required 125 B-29s carrying 1,200 tons of bombs to approximate the damage and casualties of one atom bomb. The second explosion surpassed the first in sheer intensity, but the hilly topography of the target area reduced the impact comparatively. At ground zero in both cities, the heat charred corpses beyond recognition.

  Horrified by the unforgettable fire of atomic warfare, Japanese leaders came to terms with the U.S. The emperor urged the Suzuki ministry to accept surrender as long as he retained the throne. However, the Truman administration insisted that the emperor's authority become subject to the Allied supreme commander. Though threatened by a military coup, the emperor himself announced Japan's capitulation in a radio message on August 14. On September 2, General MacArthur and other Allied representatives received the formal surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The American occupation of the home islands ensued thereafter.

  Conclusion

  World War II leveled whole cities, dismembered entire nations, and reconfigured modern life. With the theaters of operations outside the western hemisphere, the U.S. developed the mass-production techniques that revolutionized military affairs. The wartime materials that came from American factories exceeded the annual production levels for the Axis Powers combined. As the infusion of arms quickened the tempo of fighting, th
e Allied forces worked together to overwhelm Germany, Italy, and Japan on every front. The GIs liberated the people of North Africa and western Europe from the Third Reich, while the Red Army swept across eastern Europe. From the Solomon archipelago to the Ryukyu chain, U.S. forces smashed the Empire of Japan. Great leaders such as Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, Nimitz, and LeMay steered men and women in uniform to final victory. Able to harness science to the purposes of warfare, Americans transformed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into fireballs.

  Atomic warfare accelerated the end of hostilities and saved the lives of many Americans, but it also insinuated, as MacArthur observed at the time, that “Armageddon will be at our door.” A whole generation of warriors defended the U.S. and invested themselves in the fate of the twentieth century. Their values envisaged a global struggle with more options for winning, which included ones that substituted firepower for manpower. Respecting the tenets of civil society, the Roosevelt administration employed the entire nation in the war effort. Furthermore, policymakers sought alternatives to the conventional strategies and tactics that produced enormous casualties among the GIs on the front lines. Military personnel remained a vital instrument of war, to be sure, but they often deferred to the logistics that achieved command of the seas and the skies. The myth of a good war glorified the triumph of the world's first superpower, even if it glossed over the foreboding implications of the mushroom clouds.