Likewise, Curtis did not think a moral boundary was crossed. Later, he wondered if people thought it “much more wicked to kill people with a nuclear bomb, than to kill people by busting their heads with rocks. I suppose they believe also that a machine gun is a hundred times wickeder than a bow and arrow.”
“Having found the bomb,” President Truman said, “we have used it. We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans.” A few days later, he explained his motives in a letter to the U.S. Federal Council of Churches of Christ. He told the Christian leaders, “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”
Few people now reflect that samurai swords killed more people in WWII than atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, “The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.”
Marine veteran and historian William Manchester wrote, “You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan’s home islands—a staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese—and you thank God for the atomic bomb.” Winston Churchill told Parliament that the people who preferred invasion to dropping the atomic bomb seemed to have “no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves.”
Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida led Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1959, Fuchida told Paul Tibbets: “You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they’d die for the Emperor. . . . Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary. . . . Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know.”
But perhaps the greatest lifesaving function served by the atom bombs was that they shortened LeMay’s firebombing of Japan. Secretary of State James Byrnes said the atom bombs did not cause “nearly so many deaths as there would have been had our air force continued to drop incendiary bombs on Japan’s cities.” In March, Curtis had dropped 13,800 tons of liquid fire on Japan. Beginning in September, he was prepared to drop 115,000 tons a month.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the atomic bombing at Hiroshima was that it didn’t motivate the Spirit Warriors to save the lives of their countrymen. But then again, what did 100,000 deaths matter to them? These were the guys who wrote off 150,000 Japanese boys in New Guinea. They still controlled coastal China and Manchuria. Singapore was secure. There was a little trouble in the Philippines, but the Japanese hadn’t surrendered to MacArthur yet. The samurai-imposters still held thousands of teenage sex slaves who were being raped forty to seventy times a day. The Spirit boys were ready to sacrifice 20 million civilians. So what if atom bombs were killing civilians? What was the big deal? Let them eat acorns.
The military sent a delegation of seven to survey the damage at Hiroshima. As they landed in the atomic wasteland, an officer ran up to their plane. He had a harlequin face—one half was scorched, oozing red pus. The other half, unexposed to the bomb’s rays, was normal. He proved himself to be a true-blue Spirit guy when he pointed to his face and exclaimed, “Everything which is exposed gets burned, but anything which is covered even only slightly can escape burns. Therefore it cannot be said that there are no countermeasures.”
“Hiroshima brought no instantaneous prostration of the Japanese military,” Curtis recalled. “We were still piling on the incendiaries. Our B-29s went to Yawata on August 8th, and burned up 21 per cent of the town, and on the same day some other 29s went to Fukuyama and burned up 73.3 per cent. Still there wasn’t any gasp and collapse when the second nuclear bomb went down above Nagasaki on August 9th. We kept on flying.”
On August 9, a pika-don over Nagasaki killed 70,000. Japan had some other bad news that day. At 1 A.M. that morning, over one million Soviet troops had invaded Manchuria. Three months earlier, Joseph Stalin had signaled his intention to fight when he allowed the USSR-Japan Nonaggression Act to lapse. In response, the Spirit Warriors withdrew many of their troops to the Korean border. Millions of Japanese civilians living in Manchuria—the emperor’s “pioneers”—were not told they had been abandoned by their military. At least 180,000 Japanese civilians died when the Soviets raped and tortured them, and the Manchurian natives rose up with pitchforks against their recent Japanese masters. Fleeing Japanese mothers were forced to abandon thousands of children to the care of the locals. The Soviets dragged 700,000 Japanese prisoners back to the gulag, many never to return.
That same day, the six-man Supreme Council for the Direction of the War met in Tokyo. Any rational military person might have admitted to having a bad day. The Japanese people were starving. Curtis was toasting their ancient cities off the map. Pika-dons were vaporizing neighborhoods. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were scrambling for their lives in the Manchurian wilderness.
But the war minister urged his colleagues to look at the bright side. No sense in being gloomy. General Korechika Anami ticked off Japan’s remaining strengths. He reminded the cabinet that all Japanese men from fifteen to sixty and all women from seventeen to forty were now in the fight. Japan had 32 million warriors out there practicing with really sharp bamboo spears. Why give up before the real fight began?
“With luck, we will repulse the invaders before they land,” added General Yoshijiro Umezu.
Luck? The Americans had a $3 billion airplane dropping $2 billion bombs. Luck.
Elderly prime minister Kantaro Suzuki tried to state the obvious to the War Cabinet. “We cannot carry on this war indefinitely,” he said. “There is no way left for us but to accept the Potsdam Proclamation.”
War Minister Anami’s face flushed. Where was the prime minister’s Yamato damashii?
“Who can be one hundred per cent sure of defeat?” General Anami thundered. “We certainly can’t swallow this proclamation.”
“We fought,” soldier Koshu Itabashi later observed, “until the very end. No one considered the possibility that Japan could lose. We were like Sergeant Yoko and Lieutenant Onoda—the men who emerged from the jungles, one in Guam, the other in the Philippines, in the 1970s—who couldn’t imagine that Japan had been defeated. That’s the way the whole country felt.”
But Suzuki was right. The end had come and even the emperor realized it.
“Went to Kumagaya on August 14th,” Curtis wrote. “[Forty-five] per cent of that town. Flew our final mission the same day against Isezki, where we burned up 17 per cent of that target. Then the crews came home to the Marianas and were told that Japan had capitu lated.”
Later that day, in an amazing display of Orwellian doublespeak, Emperor Hirohito portrayed himself in his surrender speech as a peace-loving guy who had suffered some setbacks in his efforts to help Asia. He said it was “far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement,” and that “We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to assure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia.” Hirohito’s “stabilization” had brought final “peace” to almost 30 million Chinese, 4 million Indonesians, 1.8 million Indians, 1 million Vietnamese, 2.5 million of his own people, and hundreds of thousands of American, Korean, Australian, New Zealand, British, Dutch, Filipino, and Malaysian dead. The emperor never said the words “surrender,” “defeat,” “apologize,” or “sorry.” He just told his shinmin they had to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable.”
Flyboy Charlie Brown remembered the last day of the war at the Ofuna POW camp:
We had heard from an American prisoner shot down on August seventh that the Americans had dropped a bomb on a city and wiped it out. We thought he was mentally off.
On August fourteenth, the guards lined up in front of the office. We could tell from their demeanor the war was over.
First they started drinking. One drunken guard tried to kill him
self. He sat down on a step and stuck a knife in his stomach. They took him off to the hospital in an ambulance.
And that was all Charlie Brown remembered. The doctors later told him he had no memory of the next two weeks because of a vitamin A deficiency. Like injured Flyboy Phil Vonville, who lost consciousness only after he had eased his plane onto the carrier deck, Charlie’s spirit had kept his weak body alive. Then, after he realized his side had won, his system shut down to rest.
Flyboy Bill Connell, the last man off Chichi Jima alive, was digging caves on a work detail the day of the surrender. Now only one hundred pounds hung on his six-foot frame. Two weeks later, he sent a message home. “The telegram said, ‘I’m well, happy, flying home.’ That’s the first time my mom and dad even knew I was alive.”
Flyboy Robert Goldsworthy recalled his first moments of freedom aboard a U.S. hospital ship: “We lived like pigs for so long. All of a sudden there were nurses with starched uniforms, clean, smelling good. But my greatest thrill took place a few hours earlier, when I first boarded the ship. I had beriberi, my ankles were swollen. I had amoebic dysentery and I had yellow jaundice, and I weighed about eighty-five pounds. I was lifted onto the deck by two sailors and I stumbled over to the railing and looked at Omori prison camp and shook my fist and yelled, ‘You bastards, I beat you.’”
Now the 31,617 American POWs were free. And after fourteen years of war, Japan also released all its Chinese POWs. There were 56.
George Bush was training with a new squadron in Virginia Beach when he heard the news:
It was unbelievable joy, rejoicing with our fellow pilots down the street, with this tremendous outpouring of emotion. We were free to live normal lives. The killing would be stopped—nine of the fourteen original pilots of our squadron had been lost.
I remember laughing, yelling—crying, too. The impact of the announcement was unbelievable. We jumped and yelled and cried like kids. We were kids—seasoned by war, but kids.
Billy Mitchell begat Hap Arnold who begat Curtis LeMay. They were right. Flyboys could win a war. Japan was defeated without an invasion. For the first time, a nation was defeated by air power. The navy Flyboys had cleared the air of opposition and then the army air force Flyboys had burned down Japan.
Dutch Van Kirk, the navigator on the Enola Gay’s Hiroshima mission, told me, “The atom bomb didn’t end the war. It helped the emperor make a decision.” Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki said, “It seemed to me unavoidable that in the long run Japan would be almost destroyed by air attack so that merely on the basis of the B-29’s alone I was convinced that Japan should sue for peace. . . . I myself, on the basis of the B-29 raids, felt that the cause was hopeless.” Emperor Hirohito wrote, “Thinking of the people dying endlessly in the air raids I ended the war.” Prince Fumimaro Konoe said, “Fundamentally the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.” “After the war, pollsters asked civilians why they came to doubt that Japan would win the war. The largest response for one category (over one-third) was ‘air attack.’”
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded:
It seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered 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.
Many more Japanese civilians died from gasoline in the fire war than were killed by atomic energy. Japan was in ruins. Five months of napalm rain had burned out an incredible 20 percent of Japan’s housing. An astonishing 15 million people were homeless.
America paid a price for operations over Japan. In all, 544 navy aircraft were lost during operations against the home islands, or about 19 percent of total losses during the Pacific war. B-29 losses for all operations totaled 414. B-29 aircrew casualties numbered 2,897, of which 2,148 were deaths. Another 334 Superfortress crew members were listed as captured or interned, of whom 262 survived.
On Wednesday, August 29, 1945, navy lieutenant John Bremyer took off in an airplane from Iwo Jima bound for Tokyo Bay. John was exhausted. He was on the last leg of a record-breaking 120-hour, 9,500-mile-long trip that had taken him through twelve time zones. His journey began at Annapolis the Thursday before, on August 23. His mission was to deliver a wooden box to Admiral Bull Halsey on the USS Missouri. Lieutenant Bremyer had been ordered never to allow the box out of his sight. He slept with the box, it was at his side when he ate, he even took it to the bathroom.
On that Wednesday, Lieutenant Bremyer completed his mission when he handed the box to Admiral Halsey on the Missouri. Then the weary lieutenant slept for two days.
Inside the box was a linen bag. Wrapped carefully in the bag was a ninety-two-year-old American flag that had been displayed at the Naval Academy’s museum. It had thirty-one stars. It was the flag Commodore Perry had brought ashore to Japan in 1853. Perry’s visit had “propelled Japan onto its ultimately disastrous course of global competition with the Western powers.” Now the Americans would return to the same spot, once again supremely powerful.
On September 2, 1945, the USS Missouri lay just four and one half miles northeast of the spot where Commodore Perry had anchored his ship. No one remarked on it at the time, but General MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz were ferried out to the Missouri in the destroyer Buchanan, named for the first U.S. military man to set foot on Japanese soil.
Two hundred and sixty “Allied ships ringed the Missouri in concentric circles of power.” A nine-member Japanese delegation traveled from Tokyo to Yokohama for the surrender ceremony. They traveled the same route that emissaries had trod to shuttle messages between Commodore Perry and the last shogun. Now they passed through burned-out cities.
The Japanese signed the surrender document at 9:04 A.M. The war had lasted 1,364 days, 5 hours, and 44 minutes. General MacArthur signed for the United Nations. Admiral Nimitz signed for the United States.
At the end of the ceremony, MacArthur walked over to Admiral Halsey and asked, “Bill, where the hell are those airplanes?” Halsey gave the signal, and soon Flyboys provided the thunderous exclamation mark to the proceedings. Fifteen hundred navy carrier aircraft and five hundred B-29s darkened the sky over Tokyo Bay.
Both President Truman and General MacArthur addressed the U.S. in a live radio hookup. Like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, they couched their remarks with repeated references to “civilization” and their Christian god. Truman’s speech was almost religious in tone. The Japanese were “forces of evil” who had posed a “mighty threat to civilization.” It was “God’s help” that “brought us to this day of victory” over those who were out to “destroy His civilization.” Truman used the words “God” and “civilized” five times each—as often as he said the word “America.”
MacArthur called the war a “holy mission” in which a “merciful God” had ensured “the survival of civilization.” He seemed to be offering Japan one last chance at civilization when he intoned: “We stand in Tokyo today reminiscent of our countryman, Commodore Perry, 92 years ago. His purpose was to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade and commerce of the world. But alas the knowledge thereby gained of western science was forged into an instrument of oppression and human enslavement.”
The rhetoric was high blown, but most on the Missouri had more mundane feelings of relief. “Well, it was over and done,” Curtis LeMay later wrote. “And whoever was down was down, and whoever was living was living. Like many other folks, probably, I stood there and felt pretty tired.”
; On October 4, 1945, just one month after the surrender ceremony, a storm began to form in the Pacific. The winds started slowly in the Marianas, where Curtis’s B-29s had once taken off to strike Japan. As if in a revengeful fury, the storm gathered mass and strength as it blew northward. Navy weathermen tracked the storm for days and predicted it would sputter into China. But on October 9, the kaze seemed to change its mind and headed straight for where the Americans were massed on Okinawa.
By 2 P.M., the kaze was blowing ninety-five miles an hour. The rain blew “horizontal, more salt than fresh.” Huge U.S. Navy ships anchored off Okinawa were blown sideways, their heavy anchors dragging the bottom. Forty-foot walls of water came roaring through like locomotives. A midday darkness fell on “a scene of indescribable confusion as dragging ships collided or . . . disappeared into the murk.”
By 4 P.M., the kaze was blowing 115 miles an hour with gusts up to 140 miles an hour. As if to intentionally inflict maximum damage, the wind then shifted and tore grounded boats off reefs and blew them back across the bay, “dragging their anchors the entire way.” Ashore there was only misery. “Twenty hours of torrential rain soaked everything, made quagmires of roads and drowned virtually all stores, destroying most of the tents and flooding the rest.” Some Quonset huts were lifted whole and moved hundreds of feet, others were torn to bits, the galvanized iron sheets ripped off, the wallboards shredded and the curved supports torn apart. The kaze destroyed 80 percent of Okinawa’s houses.
When it was over, 12 ships lay on the bottom of the ocean and 222 were grounded. One hundred thirty-three of these were damaged beyond repair. Famed U.S. Navy historian Samuel Morison later concluded: “This was the most furious and lethal storm ever encountered by the United States Navy.”
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