Here’s a sampling:
Kawasaki 35% Portland
Shimizu 42% San Jose
Hiratsuka 46% Battle Creek
Toyohashi 67% Tulsa
Hammatsu 60% Hartford
Kofu 78% South Bend
Hitachi 72% Little Rock
Tokyo 40% New York
Yokohama 57% Cleveland
Chiba 41% Savannah
Nagoya 40% Los Angeles
Gifu 69% Des Moines
Takahatsu 67% Knoxville
Himeji 49% Peoria
Kobe 55% Baltimore
Osaka 35% Chicago
Shimonoseki 37% San Diego
Moji 24% Spokane
Nagaoka 55% Madison
These percentages refer not to area bombed or area damaged but to area obliterated, gone, burned, turned to ash. This wasn’t artillery damage in which one wall crumbled and the family huddled in another room. These percentages referred to wastelands—flat, desolate ash deserts.
This was unprecedented urban damage. The 1871 Chicago fire destroyed three square miles and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed four square miles. Chicago’s mate city on the air force map, Osaka, lost more than twice as much area as those two disasters combined: 16.4 square miles.
Japan was being burned into the Stone Age. Millions took to the hills, roaming the countryside. One Japanese author wrote: “It was possible to look across acres and acres of desert-like space where once had stood a bustling community of workers’ homes and small factories. Now there was nothing but heaps of ashes, bits of corrugated iron, bricks, concrete blocks, a few twisted girders, and here and there the shell of a burned-out concrete building. Skeletons of motor vehicles, including fire engines, dotted the landscape.”
Curtis was clearly much more effective than the American bombers had been in Europe. Bombing destroyed seventy-nine square miles of Germany’s urban area. Curtis destroyed more than twice as much urban area in Japan: 178 square miles. Germany’s capital, Berlin, lost 10 square miles. Tokyo lost 56.3 square miles. In fact, the damage in just two Japanese cities, Tokyo (56.3 square miles) and Osaka (16.4 square miles), nearly equaled all the damage done to all German cities put together.
Hap Arnold now told President Harry Truman that “conventional bombing could easily end the war.” And Curtis told the Joint Chiefs in Washington, “We could bomb and burn them until they quit.” His only problem was that “by October he would run out of cities to burn.” Already American napalm had killed more than 400,000 Japanese and injured nearly 500,000. It had destroyed 2.5 million homes. Thirty percent of the urban population—9 million people—was homeless, trudging through the land with vacant stares and empty bellies.
Flyboys completely dominated Japan’s skies. Curtis later wrote that by this time, “it was actually safer to fly a combat mission over Japan in a B-29 than it was to fly a B-29 training mission back in the United States. Truth. The fatality rate in the training program was higher than the rate in combat.” And after the B-29s burned out all of Japan’s cities, there were other aggressive plans if Japan did not surrender. “The rice paddies might be sprayed with oil, defoliants, or biological agents, and the production of fertilizer further attacked.”
Total war indeed. Even before Pearl Harbor there had been food shortages in Japan. Now “theft of produce still in the fields led police to speak of a new class of ‘vegetable thieves’ and the new crime of ‘field vandalizing.’” A majority of the population was malnourished. “Workers had to barter for food in the countryside and absenteeism rose to 40% in the major cities.” “Food rationing was so strict then that we had no salt or soy sauce, and only about a thumbnail-size dollop of miso paste per person per day,” Motokazu Kumagaya remembered. “For vegetables we were lucky to be able to eat the leaves grown in a vacant lot. I was so hungry that it was a chore to climb the stairs. One day when we returned home, we found that even though we had locked the house tightly, a thief had entered. Nothing was missing except our small amount of rice and miso soup. We looked dumbfounded at each other, amazed that someone was worse off than we.”
The Spirit Warriors, who continued to enjoy fine meals in Tokyo, showed their concern by promulgating a document entitled “Eat This Way—Endless Supplies of Materials by Ingenuity.” Pulitzer Prize- winning historian John Dower described it:
The emperor’s loyal subjects were encouraged to supplement their starch intake by introducing such items as acorns, grain husks, peanut shells, and sawdust to their household larder. (Sawdust, it was explained, could be broken down with a fermenting agent, transformed into a powder, and mixed in a ratio of one to four with flour to make dumplings, pancakes, or bread.) For minerals, people were encouraged to introduce used tea leaves and the seeds, blossoms, and leaves of roses to their diet. Protein deficiencies could be remedied by eating silkworm’s cocoons, worms, grasshoppers, mice, rats, moles, snails, snakes, or a powder made by drying the blood of cows, horses, and pigs. Well sterilized, the researchers reported, mice and rats tasted like small birds, but it was important to avoid eating their bones since it had been demonstrated that this caused people to lose weight.
There were similar articles, such as “How to Eat Acorns” and “Let’s Catch Grasshoppers.” People spoke of an “onion existence, with the clear implication of weeping as one peeled off layer upon layer of precious belongings” to trade for some barley or potatoes. Sumo wrestlers were not fat anymore. The zoos were empty; the animals had been eaten.
With the labor force enfeebled and raw materials scarce, industrial production shrank to 50 percent of what it had been before Pearl Harbor. These material statistics demonstrated that Japan had lost the war. “But in Japanese military doctrine, material things did not signify. Spirit was crucial. A white soldier might be twice as big as a Japanese soldier, but that meant nothing, because the white man’s heart was small.” The Spirit boys made this point by exhibiting a crashed B-29 in a Tokyo park. Next to the enormous American airplane was a replica of the tiny pursuit plane that had rammed the B-29 to bring it down. It was proof that small could conquer big.
As a further example, after sixty-seven days of being tortured by the Kempetei, Flyboy Hap Halloran was tossed in the back of a truck and taken to the Tokyo zoo. He was stripped naked and tied to the bars of a monkey cage to show the malnourished and burned shinmin that they could still win.
“The purpose was to let civilians come by,” Hap recalled. “Do not fear these B-29 people. Look at this one. My body was covered with running sores from the bedbugs, lice, and fleas, and I had lost ninety pounds by then. You’re standing there just kind of holding on trying to act like an air corps guy, you know, with dignity. Maintain your dignity the best you can.”
The French ambassador to Japan wrote to Paris about the Spirit Warriors’ mind-set: “Are they sincere or are they intoxicated? The only thing certain is that they refuse to see the possibility of defeat. As for the people, they have no definite attitude; they are resigned to all physical suffering and . . . [are] confident in their leaders.”
When their Nazi allies surrendered in May, Tokyo residents heaped ridicule on Germans in the streets. A diplomat commented, “The Tokyo papers blamed Germany’s defeat on its lack of bushido. With bushido . . . one never dies, never surrenders unconditionally.”
The Spirit boys prepared for the “final decisive battle.”
The battle plan was called Ketsu-Go or “Decisive Operation.” The entire civilian populace—armed with bamboo spears and plenty of Yamato damashii—would shatter-jewel the hell out of the gaizin.
On June 8, the emperor sanctioned Ketsu-Go as “The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War,” which “proclaimed that Japan must fight to the finish and choose extinction before surrender.” The Spirit Warriors were ready and eager to sacrifice any and all Japanese to their impossible dream. The Americans would be fought “in the interior” rather than “at the water’s edge.” Japan would use “sure victory
weapons,” “body-smashing” or “special attack” weapons. These kamikaze tactics would “exchange” the life of a pilot for a military gain. Japan would become one big Iwo Jima. The army and the emperor were going to manage the war from vast underground caves in the Matsuhiro Mountains northwest of Tokyo. Every citizen was mobilized for the glorious effort. All men ages fifteen to sixty and all women ages seventeen to forty were organized in the “Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps.” All school classes were suspended under the “Decisive Battle Educational Measures Guidelines.” Students would fight, and their schools would become military bases.
“Special attack” or suicide tactics, it was announced, would save the realm. The “Divine Wind Special Attack Corps” would kamikaze American ships. Powerful motorboats —”Ocean Shakers”— with large dynamite charges in their bows would ram ships that approached Japan’s shores. “Turning of the Heavens” was the name for a human-guided torpedo shot from a submarine that left no chance for the human’s survival. “Crouching Dragon” men wore underwater breathing suits and huddled on the ocean floor waiting to poke surface-landing craft with explosive-tipped poles. Tiny biplanes would ram B-29s. Children trained to carry backpacks of explosives and to throw themselves under the treads of tanks were called “Sherman carpets.” Meanwhile, the biological-warfare Unit 731 developed “Cherry Blossoms at Night,” a plan to have kamikaze pilots infest California with disease. Planes loaded with plague-infected fleas would take off from a submarine and contaminate San Diego.
It was madness, but the Japanese leadership saw only wisdom in this leap into the pit. Foreign Minister Shidehara wrote a close friend, “If we continue to fight back bravely, even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed, injured, or starved, even if millions of buildings are destroyed or burned there would be room to produce a more advantageous international situation for Japan.” And it wasn’t only high officials who were ready to toss the shinmin into the cauldron. One army officer in Osaka wrote, “Due to the nationwide food shortage and the imminent invasion of the home islands, it will be necessary to kill all the infirm old people, the very young and the sick. We cannot allow Japan to perish because of them.”
It was all so simple. As Admiral Takijiro Onishi, the father of the “special attack” idea, declared, “If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in kamikaze effort, victory will be ours!” But 20 million was an understatement. “Behind the suicide craft were nearly three million well-rested troops and 32 million civilians who were being trained in the use of primitive weapons in order to make a heroic last stand.” This was “more than the combined armies of the United States, Great Britain and Nazi Germany.” But Japan lacked cloth for uniforms. So henceforth, the combatants would all be in civilian dress. “By deliberately eliminating any distinction between combatants and noncombatants, they would compel Americans to treat all Japanese as combatants or fail to do so at their peril. It was a recipe for extinction.”
Years later, I asked Fumio Tamamura about Japan’s final plans. “The military encouraged a strong belief in kamikaze,” Tamamura-san said. “Some divine providence would do away with the invaders. There was no counter to the military. There was no resistance movement in Japan. If the Americans had invaded, the Japanese would have fought to the last man.”
The overall American invasion plan was called “Downfall.” The first phase was “Operation Olympic,” a frontline assault on the southern island of Kyushu by 767,000 troops planned for November 1, 1945. Kyushu would then be the staging area for “Operation Coronet,” the March 1, 1946, invasion of the main island of Honshu.
General MacArthur told Secretary of War Stimson that the invasion would “cost over a million casualties to American forces alone.” A War Department report concluded that “defeating Japan would cost the Japanese five to ten million deaths and the United States between 1.7 and 4 million casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities.” President Truman later said, “If we had had to invade Japan, a million soldiers on both sides would have been killed and a million more would have been maimed for life.” But secret intercepts indicated that Japanese defenses were far in excess of original estimates, meaning casualties would be much worse.
History’s biggest bloodbath was in the making. U.S. Navy losses in just the battle of Okinawa—which followed the battle of Iwo Jima—had “exceeded the Navy’s total losses from all previous wars combined.” D-Day at Normandy was accomplished with 175,000 invading troops. Seven million American troops were in the Pacific now. Normandy’s casualties would be easily surpassed in the sideshow invasion of the Malay Archipelago, where 200,000 British troops were scheduled to fight for seven months to retake Singapore. The U.S. Office of War Information recommended efforts to gird the nation “for the heavy losses which undoubtedly would occur.”
At the time, Japan held 350,000 Allied prisoners of war. Vice Minister of War Shitayama issued an order to POW camp commandants instructing them what to do in the event of an invasion:
When the battle situation becomes urgent the POWs will be concentrated and confined in their location and kept under heavy guard until preparations for the final disposition will be made. Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual disposition may be made in certain circumstances. Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, and whether it is accomplished by means of mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, or decapitation, dispose of them as the situation dictates. It is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.
Flyboy Charlie Brown, shot down on February 16, was wasting away in the Ofuna POW camp when he got the word. “It was a casual comment as one of the guards was tapping me on the head with a bamboo stick,” Charlie told me. “The guard said, ‘If there is an invasion you will all die.’”
Flyboys were already dying. As revenge for B-29 attacks in May and June, Professor Fukujiro Ishiyama, director of external medicine at Kyushu Imperial University, had strapped eight captured American crewmen to operating tables. The professor didn’t administer an anesthetic. He began to cut.
He sliced out one Flyboy’s lung and placed it in a surgical pan. The patient was alive. Then he slit his lung artery and watched the boy gurgle to death in his own blood. Another boy had his stomach cut out—while conscious. Professor Ishiyama then cut five of the boy’s ribs, slit an artery, and watched to see how long his heart would pump before he died. Professor Ishiyama bored a hole in one Flyboy’s skull. Then he inserted a knife and twisted it around in his brain. The professor wanted to see what parts of the boy’s body jumped and jerked with each turn of the knife.
On July 26, 1945, President Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration. “Japan shall be given an opportunity to end the war,” it stated. Japan could surrender or face “utter and complete destruction.”
On August 1, American napalm burned out 80 percent of Hachioji, a major rail terminus near Tokyo. On the same day, Nagaoka, about the size of Madison, Wisconsin, was 65 percent destroyed. B-29s dropped 1,466 tons of napalm on Toyama on the west coast of Honshu and burned out a remarkable 99.5 percent of that city.
On August 2, “Mr. B-29,” Paul Tibbets, along with his bombardier, Tom Ferebee, walked into Curtis LeMay’s office on Guam. “The cigar-chomping LeMay was almost casual as he led his visitors to a map table and uncovered the charts and reconnaissance photos that were taped to its surface. ‘Paul,’ he announced through a cloud of cigar smoke, ‘the primary’s Hiroshima.’”
Hiroshima housed the headquarters of the army that would defend Kyushu from American landings. Forty-three thousand soldiers crowded among Hiroshima’s 280,000 civilians, and there were a number of military installations and factories manufacturing military supplies.
On August 4, “720,000 leaflets were dropped on [Hiroshima] urging everyone to get out and indicating that the place was going to be (as the Potsdam Declaration had promised) obliterated.” The leaflets warned, “Evacuate no
w!” A day later, the cities of Nishinomiya-Mikage, Saga, Maebashi, and Imabari (which had also been warned by leaflets) were aflame.
At 2:45 A.M. on August 6, Paul Tibbets took off from Tinian in a B-29. He had named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay. At 5:55 A.M., he looped around Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi as he waited for two other B-29s to catch up with him. Looking down from the cockpit, he ruminated that the horrendous battle for Iwo Jima had been worth its cost: “The island, which had become Japan’s prime defensive outpost, lay directly on the route our bombers flew on their mission from the Marianas to Tokyo. Without it, our mission would have been more difficult.” At 6:07 A.M., the three planes rendezvoused over Mount Suribachi and headed for Japan.
At 08:15:17, Tom Ferebee sighted Hiroshima’s Aioi Bridge in his Norden bombsight and yelled, “Bomb away!”
Just over one pound of uranium —.85 kilograms—fell through the air. It traveled nearly six miles in forty-three seconds. At 8:16 A.M., the uranium detonated 1,900 feet above the Shima Hospital, 550 feet from the Aioi Bridge aiming point. The explosion created “a blinding pulse of light for perhaps only a tenth of a second.”
“Pika-don,” the survivors called it. Pika (flash) don (boom). Flash-boom. Pika-don. Thirty seconds after the pika, explosive wind blew out windows 6.6 miles away. Within eight minutes, a mountain of smoke and debris arose as tall and massive as Mount Everest. An estimated 140,000 people would die.
To Curtis and many Flyboys, the atomic bomb was not the destructive quantum leap many have since claimed. Plain old fire killed most of the Hiroshima victims, and Curtis had killed almost as many in Tokyo with napalm. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stated that the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was the equivalent of 220 fully loaded B-29s. “Accordingly, a single atomic explosion represented no order-of-magnitude increase in destructiveness over a conventional air raid.”
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