The men fighting on Okinawa shared the American people’s frustration. They demanded: why not stage an amphibious assault to outflank the defences? Why not use poison gas? Why fight this war, in its last phase before inevitable victory, in a fashion that suited Japanese suicidalists? None of these questions was satisfactorily answered. The officer commanding Tenth Army was the unimaginative Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. For more than two months he conducted a campaign which seemed to its participants close kin to those of the First World War in Flanders. He launched repeated frontal attacks on fixed positions which slowly gained ground, but cost heavy casualties. The US Marine Corps fared no better on Okinawa than the army units to which it liked to condescend. For once, MacArthur was probably right when he argued that the best course would be to seal off the Japanese garrison in the south of the island, leaving it to rot while US forces addressed mainland Japan.
The Japanese never supposed that their stand on the island would achieve decisive results. They placed faith, instead, on an air assault of devastating intensity against the US fleet, in which the key role was played by kamikazes. Suicide planes had been used with some success in the Philippines since October 1944. Though the Allies found this method of war-making repugnant, from their enemies’ standpoint it was entirely rational. A post-war Japanese historian commented impatiently: ‘There have been innumerable Japanese critics of the kamikaze attacks. Most of them, however, seem to have been made by uninformed people who were content to be mere spectators of the great crisis which their nation faced.’
Against overwhelming US air power, poorly trained Japanese pilots employing conventional tactics suffered punitive losses. By planning for their deaths as a certainty rather than a mere probability, fuel loads could be halved and destructive accuracy much increased. The resultant air campaign off Okinawa inflicted heavier losses on the US Navy than had been contrived by the capital ships of the Combined Fleet at any moment of the war. In its closing months, Spruance’s ships were obliged to fight some of their toughest and most prolonged actions.
Cmdr. Fitzhugh Lee, executive officer of Essex, described his experience of monitoring the Japanese bomb and torpedo strikes from the huge carrier’s Combat Information Centre:
I can remember spending many unhappy hours in CIC watching these blips coming at us, knowing what they were doing, and hoping that our guns would shoot them down, seeing them turn around on the radar screen, and then knowing that the torpedoes were in the water and on their way to you. Those minutes seemed like years, when you are sitting there waiting to see whether you’re going to get hit. CIC was not a happy place to be. It was interesting psychologically … my first experience of real fear – being in the face of what you thought might be death at any moment … Here you sat around these radar screens and watched these things happen with young seamen who were eighteen or nineteen years old, just off the farm or out of the shoestore … Their reactions were for the most part wonderful. Every once in a while you’d find one that couldn’t take it … I found that I could spot when somebody was getting a little hysterical … If he got very emotional, it would spread so you had to think of something quick – get him out … We had a few who lost control of themselves and started weeping, crying, praying.
The image of Japan’s kamikazes taking off to face death with exuberant enthusiasm is largely fallacious. Among the first wave of suicidalists in the autumn of 1944, there were many genuine volunteers. Thereafter, however, the supply of young fanatics dwindled: many subsequent recruits were driven to accept the role by moral pressure, and sometimes conscription. Their training was as harsh as that of all Japanese warriors, and attended by the same emphasis on corporal punishment. Kasuga Takeo, a mess orderly who served at Tsuchitura, a kamikaze base, testified to the melancholy and sometimes hysteria which attended the pilots’ last hours. Some smashed furniture or sat in mute contemplation, others danced in frenzy. Takeo spoke of a mood of ‘utter desperation’. Peer pressure, a dominant social force in Japan since time immemorial, achieved its apogee in the kamikaze programme.
A Japanese historian wrote later, with a lyricism incomprehensible to most Westerners, about the doomed fliers of this period: ‘Many of the new arrivals seemed at first not only to lack enthusiasm, but indeed to be disturbed by their predicament. With some this condition lasted only a few hours, with others for several days. It was a period of melancholy that passed with time and eventually gave way to a spiritual awakening. Then, like an attainment of wisdom, care vanished and tranquillity of spirit appeared as life came to terms with death, mortality with immortality.’ He cited the example of one Lt. Kuno, who arrived unhappy at his operational airfield, but before his last flight became positively jaunty, and insisted on stripping his plane of all non-essential equipment. The writer expressed regret, however, that ‘a few of these pilots, unduly influenced by a grateful and worshipping public, came to think of themselves as living gods and grew unbearably haughty’.
Most were merely distressed. One young trainee mused grimly as his country’s plight became plain: ‘Now the wholesale attack by the enemy with enormous material superiority begins. The last katastrophische stage described in All Quiet on the Western Front is soon to approach.’ Likewise a twenty-year-old bomber pilot, Norimitsu Takushima, wrote in his diary: ‘Today the Japanese people are not allowed freedom of speech and we cannot publicly express our criticism … The Japanese people do not even have access to enough information to know the facts … This is just one example of the routines and demagoguery that have become the moving forces of our society … We are going to meet our fate led by the cold will of the government. I shall not lose my passion and hope until the end … There is one ideal – freedom.’ On 9 April 1945, Takushima’s plane vanished on an operation.
Yet some such young men professed that they went willingly: Lt. Kanno Naoishi, regarded by his peers as one of Japan’s most colourful fighter pilots, had rammed a B-24 and escaped with his life, but did not expect to survive for much longer. Aircrew travelled between postings with a small bag of personal effects, chart pencils, underwear, bearing their names; his was jauntily inscribed ‘personal effects of the late Lt. Cmdr. Kanno Naoishi’, for he assumed his own death, and the consequent posthumous promotion granted to every flier who fell. In one of innumerable last letters left behind by kamikazes for their families, Hayashi Ichizo wrote in April 1945: ‘Mother, I am a man. All men born in Japan are destined to die fighting for the country. You have done a splendid job raising me to become an honourable man. I will do a splendid job sinking an enemy aircraft carrier. Do brag about me.’ Ichizo died off Okinawa on 12 April 1945, aged twenty-three. Nakao Takenonori wrote likewise to his parents on 28 April: ‘The other day I paid my visit to Kotohira Shrine and had a picture taken. I told them to send the finished photo to you. Just in case, I enclose the receipt … Please do not get discouraged, and fight to defeat America and Britain. Please say the same to Grandmother. I will leave behind my diary. Although I did not do much in my life, I am content that I fulfilled my wish to live a pure life, leaving nothing ugly behind me … I wish to express my thanks to my uncle and many other people … Wishing you the best for your future.’
The US Navy found the experience of combating the kamikazes among the bloodiest and most painful of its war. Japanese airmen carried out almost 1,700 sorties to Okinawa between 11 March and the end of June 1945. Day after day, ships’ crews manned their guns to mount continuous barrages against diving, twisting attackers. Most of the pilots perished under the American fire, but a few always got through to immolate themselves on the flight decks and superstructures of the warships, with devastating effect as gasoline ignited, munitions exploded and sailors protected only by anti-flash hoods and gauntlets found themselves caught in blazing infernos. On 12 April, almost all of 185 attackers were destroyed – but the Americans lost two ships sunk and fourteen damaged, including two battleships. On the 16th, the carrier Intrepid was hit. On 4 May, five ships were sunk and eleven dama
ged. Between the 11th and 14th, three flagships were badly damaged, including the carriers Bunker Hill and Enterprise. From 6 April to 22 June, throughout the theatre of war there were ten major suicide attacks by day and night involving 1,465 aircraft, plus a further 4,800 conventional sorties. Kamikazes sank twenty-seven ships and damaged 164, while bombers sank one and damaged sixty-three. About 20 per cent of kamikaze assaults scored hits – ten times the success rate for conventional attacks. Only the overwhelming strength of the US Navy enabled it to withstand such punishment.
By the time Okinawa was declared secure on 22 June, eighty-two days after Buckner’s initial landing, the army and Marines had lost 7,503 killed and 36,613 wounded, in addition to 36,000 non-battle casualties, most of them combat-fatigue cases. Additionally the US Navy suffered 4,907 dead and more than 8,000 wounded. Almost the entire defending force ashore perished, together with many thousands of native Okinawans, some of whom were incited by the army to commit suicide. The Japanese were largely successful in achieving their purpose: America’s losses persuaded the nation’s leadership that an invasion of mainland Japan would prove immensely costly. The consequences, however, proved very different from those Tokyo intended.
Minor ground operations continued through the weeks that followed: Australian forces landed on Borneo at MacArthur’s behest, and fought a bloody little campaign to secure its coastal regions; in the Philippines, US troops pushed back Yamashita’s shrunken perimeter in the mountains, and conducted a series of amphibious landings to liberate islands in the vast archipelago. Dogged efforts persisted to persuade Japanese stragglers to surrender: one prisoner, twenty-nine-year-old Sergeant Kiyoshi Ito, in civilian life a salesman from Nagoya, was persuaded to sign a leaflet for distribution by American troops:
My comrades! You, who valiantly decided to resist to the end …
PLEASE PAUSE A WHILE BEFORE DYING AND THINK!
OFFICERS, NCOs AND MEN!
… I need not tell you the plight we are in, when our isolated homeland is fighting against the whole world. Is it not only a matter of time? Please try to think reasonably. Leave it to Fate to decide the war. Come what may the Japanese people, with their glorious history of 3,000 years, will never be exterminated. Comrades, why not consider your past and live anew to rebuild Japan? Throw away your weapons and come out of your positions. Take off your shirts and wave them over your heads and approach the US positions in daylight, using the main roads. Then your worries will be over and you will receive humane treatment.
I STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT THIS IS THE ONLY WAY AND THE BEST WAY LEFT TO SERVE OUR COUNTRY!
An NCO of the Japanese Army, now a prisoner of war.
Such appeals were almost entirely ignored until August 1945 and beyond, as they were also in Burma, where Slim’s Fourteenth Army was still mopping up Japanese remnants and preparing for Operation Zipper, an invasion of Malaya. There were many sour jokes among men fighting in the east on hearing news of VE-Day. A dispatch rider handed a signal bearing the news to the senior staff officer of a division in Burma. This dignitary called to his sergeant, ‘I’ve got a message here: the war in Europe is over.’ The NCO turned to his men and said, ‘The war in Europe is over. Five-minute break.’ Major John Randle, who had been fighting on the Burma front since April 1942, said of the mood in the summer of 1945, ‘We thought we would go on and on. We were wearing a bit thin by then. If my CO had said, “You have earned a rest,” even before we went back [into Burma] in early ’45, I would have taken it. But I would never have asked for it; you couldn’t put your hand up and say “I’ve had enough.”’
To the dismay of many senior Americans, MacArthur was designated supreme commander for Olympic, the invasion of Japan scheduled to commence in November with a landing on Kyushu. Meanwhile, LeMay’s bombers continued to incinerate the enemy’s cities, and Japanese industrial production approached collapse. On 10 July 1945, the US Third Fleet under Halsey closed in on Japan and began its own intensive programme of carrier air strikes against the mainland, inflicting carnage and destruction upon areas that had escaped the attentions of Twentieth Air Force. ‘In the forefront of the invader, his great carrier task force rampaged about … like a mighty typhoon,’ wrote naval officer Yoshida Mitsuru in awed frustration.
Stalin had promised to join the eastern war and launch a great Manchurian offensive in August. Against Japan as against Germany, there seemed every prospect that American lives could be saved by allowing the Russians to do some of the bloodiest business of smashing the enemy. Washington was remarkably naïve in failing to recognise that Stalin intended to engage the Japanese not to oblige the United States, but because he was determined to secure his own territorial prizes. Far from requiring inducements to commit his soldiers, the Soviet warlord could not have been deflected from doing so. Of all the belligerents, Stalin sustained the most clear-sighted vision of his own purposes. Through June and July 1945, thousands of Soviet troop trains shuttled eastwards across Asia, carrying armies which had defeated Germany to complete the destruction of Japan.
Meanwhile at a score of massive, closely wired installations across the United States, 125,000 scientists, engineers and support staff laboured to bring to fruition the Manhattan Project, greatest and most terrible scientific enterprise of the war. Laura Fermi, wife of Enrico, one of the brilliant principals at the Los Alamos research site, wrote later that she pitied the army doctors charged with the welfare of the scientists: ‘They had prepared for the emergencies of the battlefields, and they were faced instead with a high-strung bunch of men, women and children. High-strung, because altitude affected us, because our men worked long hours under unrelenting pressure; high-strung because we were too many of a kind, too close to one another, too unavoidable even during relaxation hours, and we were all crackpots; high-strung because we felt powerless under strange circumstances.’
In 1942 the British had made significant progress with research on an atomic bomb; their theoretical knowledge, indeed, was then greater than that of America’s scientists. But, with their own island embattled, they recognised that they lacked resources to build a weapon quickly. An agreement was reached whereby British and European émigré scientists crossed the Atlantic to work with the Americans. Thereafter, Britain’s contribution was quickly forgotten in Washington: the United States became brutally proprietorial about its ownership of the Bomb.
Technological determinism is a prominent feature of modern warfare, and this was never more vividly manifested than in exploitation of the power of atomic destruction. Just as it was almost inevitable that once an armada of B-29s had been constructed to attack Japan, they would be thus employed, so the United States’s commitment to the Manhattan Project precipitated the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Posterity sees the use of the atomic bombs in isolation; yet in the minds of most of the politicians and generals privy to the secret, these first nuclear weapons offered merely a dramatic increase in the efficiency of the air attacks already being carried out by LeMay’s Superfortresses, and provoked negligible expressions of moral scruple back home.
Only a small number of scientists grasped the earth-shaking significance of atomic power. Churchill revealed the limitations of his own understanding back in 1941, when asked to approve the British commitment to developing a nuclear weapon. He responded that he was personally satisfied with the destructive power of existing explosives, though he had no objections to undertaking development of a new technology which promised more. The exchanges between Truman – who had become president following the death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945 – Stimson, Marshall and others avowed an understanding that the Bomb could prove a weapon of devastating power, but little hint that this would inaugurate a new age for mankind. Marshall, for instance, until August 1945 ordered continued planning for Olympic; he was unconvinced that even if the atomic bombs were dropped and worked as planned, they would terminate the war.
Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, directing the Manhattan Project, was committed to utilisation of
the new weapons at the earliest possible date. He was wholly untroubled by the agonising of such scientists as Edward Teller, who wrote almost despairingly to a colleague: ‘I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.’ The only issue that was significantly discussed was whether a demonstration of the Bomb, rather than its use against an urban target, might achieve the desired effect. Following a 14–16 July weekend of intense debate among a panel of scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer, they reported: ‘Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects … We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.’
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