Killing the Rising Sun

by Bill O'Reilly

  The blast blew two enormous holes in the hull. Indianapolis might have sunk right then and there if not for the damage control crews, who immediately sealed off the flooded compartments. Miraculously, the cruiser then sailed six thousand miles back to San Francisco under her own power for repairs.

  Once upon a time, Indianapolis was a jewel of the American fleet. President Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed his time aboard her teak quarterdeck so much that he requested it as his personal transport for numerous transatlantic crossings.

  Its reputation as a special ship was solidified in December 1941, when Indianapolis set sail from her berth at Pearl Harbor across from the ill-fated Battleship Row.3 When the Japanese launched their surprise attack two mornings later, Indianapolis was safe at sea, seven hundred miles to the southwest of Hawaii. The American battleships Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, California, and West Virginia were all sunk, with a loss of almost two thousand lives.

  But now Indianapolis’s luck has changed. The kamikaze attack has rattled many of the crew, some of whom have requested transfers to other ships before it sails back into battle.

  The War Department, however, does not consider Indianapolis unlucky. They see her return to America as an act of providence. Even as the damaged vessel is being retrofitted with the latest in communications and radar equipment, the War Department has secretly chosen Indianapolis as the ideal vessel to transport the components for two A-bombs all the way across the Pacific, where they will be assembled and prepared for detonation on the island of Tinian. Not a single member of the crew, not even the skipper, Captain Charles McVay III, will be told the truth about the mystery cargo that will soon rest in Indianapolis’s hold.

  * * *

  General Douglas MacArthur does not know much about the A-bomb either. In Manila, which he has not left since his wife and son arrived, the general is eagerly planning the invasion of Japan. US Navy chief of staff Admiral Ernest King and US Army Air Forces commander General Hap Arnold oppose the invasion, convinced that control of the sea and skies will eventually strangle the Japanese economically, making the massive loss of American life unnecessary. It is estimated that five million American soldiers, sailors, and marines will be needed, as well as one million British troops. Casualties on both sides are projected to number anywhere from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.4

  MacArthur disagrees with his navy and air corps counterparts. He believes that an island blockade will not result in unconditional surrender. He refutes the conventional notion that the Japanese are strong enough to put up anything more than a thin defense of their homeland, despite the fact that they still have four million soldiers in uniform and thousands of planes hidden throughout Japan for the specific task of carrying out kamikaze bombing.

  MacArthur believes his command of the largest amphibious landing in history will be successful. He sees glory. Others see death.

  A handful of generals from the European theater have been transferred to MacArthur’s command, but America’s most aggressive and successful general is not among them. General George S. Patton’s war is over. The fiery tactician will remain in Germany to oversee postwar rebuilding, entirely unwelcome in a Pacific theater of operations.

  As one American officer puts it: “Two prima donnas, two colorful personalities in the same theater, were one too many.”5

  * * *

  Ensconced inside his vast palace in Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito ponders whether or not to move to a secret mountain fortress that has been prepared for his safety.

  Japan’s cities are in ruins. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. Hirohito’s Imperial Japanese Navy has been almost destroyed. The nation is starving. There is growing resentment among famished civilians over the preferential treatment given to the Japanese military, particularly in terms of food distribution. Also, the emperor has known for two months that Russia wants to “secure a voice in the future of Asia”—a diplomat’s wording for impending invasion.

  But surrender is still not an option for Hirohito.

  Instead, he clings to the belief that his military leaders will be able to fight off an invasion of the homeland. New airplanes are being built. Twenty-nine new army divisions are being formed. Tanks and artillery are being stockpiled for the crucial battle.6

  “If we hold out long enough in this war,” Hirohito believes, “then we may be able to win.”

  * * *

  It is Saturday on Okinawa, the Sabbath for PFC Desmond Doss. It is to be a day of rest and prayer, even amid the ongoing battle for the Maeda Escarpment. His leg is bruised and bleeding from falling over the side of the cliff last night, and he can barely stand. As the sun rises, Doss leans back against a rock, thinking of his girlfriend back home and reading his Bible.

  A week has passed since Doss’s squad launched their attack. The seesaw battle for the escarpment continues; the Japanese are utilizing a “reverse slope” defense, in which the Americans are allowed to occupy the forward portions of the summit but the crest and the reverse side of the mountain remain in Japanese hands. In the process, the Americans have been pushed off the summit many times, only to fight back and regain the high ground. Each day, PFC Doss has climbed the great rope ladders to treat the American wounded. His uniform has turned the color of dried blood from all the men he has treated, frantically performing first aid amid grenades and small-arms fire. Doss refuses to seek cover as he applies tourniquets, stanches blood flow, injects morphine, and drags men from the line of fire. B Company has been reduced from 200 to 155 men, and it is Doss who has tended to each of the fallen. Alive or dead, he has lowered their bodies off the escarpment to safety.

  As Doss reclines in the shade, a colonel suddenly stands over him. Senior officers have no place on the front lines, so this man’s appearance is highly unusual.

  “How are things up there on the hill?” the colonel asks as Doss struggles to rise to his feet. Seeing that Doss’s leg is injured, the colonel motions for him to sit back down.

  “I haven’t been up there this morning, sir.”

  “I want to see how our artillery is doing,” the colonel replies, then walks over and begins climbing the cargo nets to the top.

  Doss watches the colonel clamber unsteadily up into the combat zone. It seems like just a matter of seconds before the cry of “Medic!” is shouted down over the side.

  Despite the Sabbath, Doss quickly climbs up the rope ladder and comes upon the listless colonel lying on a rock, badly shot up.

  The officer is losing blood rapidly. Doss compresses the wound with a surgical dressing, then pulls a liter of plasma from his first-aid bag. Around him, the men of B Company lay down suppressing fire to protect Doss.

  The medic pokes a transfusion needle into a vein. In order for the plasma to flow into the colonel’s body, the bag must be elevated. The private rises up from his crouched position. Kneeling, exposed to fire, he holds aloft the plasma bag.

  A litter arrives. The colonel is eased over the side of the cliff, alive thanks to Desmond Doss. But not for long—the colonel dies before reaching the rear aid station.

  Doss’s wounded leg throbs, but he remains on the summit. The company has no other medic. An American attack on a well-fortified pillbox fails, and more men fall. The dead and dying are spread out across the escarpment as the order to fall back is issued.

  Every able soldier retreats to safety, scrambling back down the cargo net. Left atop the cliff are Doss, a hundred wounded Americans, and the Imperial Japanese Army.

  Doss refuses to leave. “I knew these men; they were my buddies, some had wives and children. If they were hurt, I wanted to be there to take care of them,” Doss would later write.

  Working tirelessly, exposed to thick gunfire and exploding shells, the private treats every one of the fallen. The wounded who can shoot provide covering fire as they await their turn to be rescued. Ignoring the searing pain in his leg, Doss grabs each of them under the shoulders or by the heels and drags them to the edge of the cliff.

  A
s a child, Desmond Doss once helped rescue victims of a flood. It was then that he was taught a special knot with which he could fashion a sling using a short section of rope. The memory of that knot, something that he had not thought of for twenty years, suddenly comes back to him. Using this impromptu technique, Doss lowers man after man over the side, then rushes back across the escarpment to get another. “Just get one more,” he says to himself over and over. “Just one more.”

  Japanese soldiers take aim at Doss, but they miss. When they advance with bayonets, sometimes coming within just a few feet of the medic, wounded Americans summon the strength to shoot the Japanese soldiers dead.

  By nightfall, PFC Desmond Doss has single-handedly saved the lives of seventy-five men.

  “I can state without reservation that the actions of this man were the most outstanding display of bravery I have ever seen,” First Lieutenant Cecil Gornto will marvel.

  “I wasn’t trying to be a hero,” Doss will tell a newspaper reporter much later in his life. “I was thinking about it from this standpoint—in a house on fire, and a mother has a child in that house, what prompts her to go in and get that child?

  “Love,” he will respond, answering his own question. “I loved my men and they loved me … I just couldn’t give them up, just like a mother couldn’t give up the child.”7

  * * *

  Thanks to the courage of men like PFC Desmond Doss, the Battle of Okinawa is finally won. The date is June 23, 1945. Due to its proximity to Japan, the island now becomes the staging point for the invasion.

  The battle for Okinawa has raged for eighty-two days. More than twenty thousand Americans are dead. Of the half-million Americans who came ashore, one-third have either been killed or wounded.

  America did not enter this war by choice, but the days when men fought to avenge the tragedy of Pearl Harbor are long since past. The world will not be safe until Japan is defeated. Yet Japan has not capitulated to another nation in more than two thousand years.

  Emperor Hirohito has the power to change all that.

  He refuses.

  Hirohito’s nation is certainly defeated. The emperor’s subjects are bleeding and destitute; their land is aflame. But Hirohito is not even contemplating surrender to the hated Americans.

  However, unbeknownst to the emperor, a force more powerful than any he has ever experienced is about to be unleashed.

  The horror of the atomic age will begin in exactly forty-four days.

  12

  GORA HOTEL

  HAKONE, JAPAN

  JUNE 24, 1945

  7:00 P.M.

  A light summer wind brings refreshment to a doomed nation.

  In the shadow of the snowcapped volcano Mount Fuji, on an evening when the springtime cherry blossoms have long since fallen from the trees, former Japanese prime minister Koki Hirota is desperate—though trying very hard not to appear that way. Three years from now he will hang by the neck until dead for his part in horrendous Japanese war crimes, but tonight Hirota is attempting to perform the humanitarian act of ending the war, albeit on Japan’s terms.

  Yet he cannot do this without help from the Russians, which is why the Soviet ambassador to Japan, Yakov Malik, now sits opposite him. The Gora Hotel is fifty miles southwest of Tokyo, in the town of Hakone, making it an unlikely spot for a high-level negotiation, but this is the Russian’s choice. He far prefers Hakone to the Japanese capital. Malik enjoys the famous local onsen—hot springs—but more important, he appreciates that this wooded resort would be an odd target for American bombers.

  The sixty-seven-year-old Hirota is a slender man with a thin mustache, a lifelong diplomat skilled in the deft words and subtle innuendo required of professional statesmen. Malik is broad and gruff, a thirty-nine-year-old foreign affairs officer whose diplomatic talent is of the more brusque Russian variety. His natural arrogance is heightened by his awareness that the Japanese are dealing from a position of great weakness.

  The Russians have already declared that they will not renew their 1941 nonaggression pact with Japan on the grounds that the Nippon alliance with Germany makes them an enemy of the Soviet Union. Every day, thirty trainloads of Russian troops and tanks travel to Manchuria in anticipation of a late-summer offensive that the Japanese naively believe will never take place. This misjudgment has led Emperor Hirohito to shift thousands of Japanese troops from Manchuria back to defend the home islands, allowing the Russians to move right in.

  As a veteran negotiator, Hirota knows better than to address the obvious. The emperor himself has authorized this discussion; the fall of Okinawa has made Hirohito desperate to find a way to convince Malik to help Japan seek peace. But the former prime minister has been ordered to proceed as if there is no sense of urgency about ending the war, when in fact the Japanese need an answer from the Russians almost immediately. Hirota begins by skirting the issue of peace, making a halfhearted joke about a new military alliance between the Imperial Japanese Army and the Red Army.

  “Our future relations,” Malik bluntly replies, in a subtle reminder that Russo-Japanese history has been fraught with conflict, “will have to be based on concrete actions.”

  With that, the meeting abruptly comes to an end.

  A desperate Hirota successfully requests a second session just hours later. He begins by feinting in a new direction, offering to enter into a trade agreement with the Soviets: Japanese rubber and lead from its conquered territories in Southeast Asia in exchange for Soviet oil.

  “Russia has no oil to spare,” Malik replies, his thick face impassive.

  Having no other choice, Hirota finally gets down to business.

  “Japan,” Hirota admits, “seeks an early peace.”

  This is an astounding statement, overturning more than a decade of Japanese aggression and effectively ending its attempts to build an Asian empire. Yet if Malik is aware that he has just been a party to history, he shows no sign of it.

  “His Excellency, Mr. Hirota, must be well aware that peace does not depend upon Russia.”

  The Americans and British have publicly stated that World War II will only be finished when the Axis powers “unconditionally surrender.” Thus, the war in Europe did not end until Germany was completely crushed. “Unconditional surrender will only mean that our national structure and our people will be destroyed,” is how naval admiral Kantaro Suzuki explained the matter to Emperor Hirohito. Tonight’s negotiations are not just about the future of Japan but also about the survival of the 2,500-year-old imperial tradition.

  However, if the Soviets can intercede on behalf of Japan, convincing the United States and Great Britain that unconditional surrender is unnecessary, that humiliation may be averted.

  Instead of giving up, Japan simply wants to stop fighting.

  They do not plan on returning the lands they have already conquered in Southeast Asia and China. They also wish to be spared the fate of Nazi Germany, which now endures the indignity of being occupied by American, Russian, French, and British troops, its former leaders soon to be put on trial for war crimes. The punishment for such transgressions, as Koki Hirota well knows, is usually death.

  Hirota desperately needs the Russians’ help to make this outcome possible.

  But that will not happen. Ambassador Malik will not give him the answer he wants. In fact, the Russian refuses to give any answer at all.

  The two men talk well into the night, ending their discussion with a round of coffee and liqueurs. The mood is cordial, if strained.

  A frustrated Koki Hirota returns to Tokyo, the future of his nation and his emperor still uncertain. He longs to quit these frustrating negotiations, for in his gut Hirota knows that the Russians will never intervene on behalf of Japan.

  Japan, the aggressor nation, will not survive. And neither will Koki Hirota.1

  13

  ALAMOGORDO, NEW MEXICO

  JULY 16, 1945

  1:00 A.M.

  Robert Oppenheimer paces, a mug of coffee in one hand
and a hand-rolled cigarette in the other. Sunday night has become Monday morning. His face is lined, his every movement betraying extreme tension. A hard rain hammers the tin roof above him. Outside this mess hall, lightning crackles and thirty-mile-per-hour winds lash the former cattle ranch now known simply as base camp.

  In less than three hours, the Trinity A-bomb test is due to take place ten miles from where Oppenheimer now fidgets. Five armed guards stand watch at the base of the tower containing Oppenheimer’s precious “gadget,” making sure that absolutely no one touches or meddles with the explosive. These soldiers will remain there until thirty minutes before the detonation, then get into jeeps and drive away as quickly as possible. Since a weapon like this has never been exploded before, not even a great scientific mind like Oppenheimer knows how big or far-ranging the blast will be.

  But there can be no test unless this storm ends. It is anticipated that the bomb will release deadly radioactive particles into the air. Scientists have long known that these waste products of a nuclear reaction are hazardous to human and other forms of life. High winds would carry them across the desert to urban areas, and rain would intensify the damage by saturating the ground with radioactive fallout. Rough weather would also prohibit observation aircraft from taking off. And on a very practical level, rain might ruin the electrical connections necessary to the bomb’s detonation.

  Throughout the night, Oppenheimer has tried to calm himself. He ignored suggestions that he go to his tent and sleep, instead remaining in the dining hall. At first, he attempted to sit still and read from a book of poetry, but that has proven impossible. Cigarettes and black coffee are his only solace right now.