Killing the Rising Sun

by Bill O'Reilly

  2. The army inspector general will formally conclude that General Yamashita never intended to completely evacuate Manila. Thus, the slaughter was “the consequence of a preconceived plan executed by the commander of Japanese Armed Forces in the Philippines, under orders from higher military command in Tokyo.” The inspector general will go on to state that “the reason and purpose of the Japanese in committing these many atrocities against primarily the Filipino people was because of their partiality, cooperation and friendliness toward America and Americans.”

  3. That order was issued at the battalion level to the renegade soldiers, sailors, and marines under the command of Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, who had defied orders to leave Manila and instead chose to fight to the last man. However, such a formal order was a rarity for the ill-disciplined troops under Iwabuchi’s command, and the majority of the killings of Filipino citizens were undertaken by small packs of men under no central authority. Iwabuchi committed suicide by hand grenade on February 26, 1945, leaving the Japanese troops without any leadership for the last week of the fighting. This only encouraged more slaughter.

  4. Faced with growing American military superiority in the Pacific and a lack of aircraft carriers and experienced pilots, the Japanese began utilizing suicide missions in the fall of 1944. There was no lack of Japanese personnel willing to volunteer. A plane piercing a ship’s hull not only tore open a gaping hole but spread fire and explosions that killed American sailors and destroyed aircraft. Official numbers vary, but at least forty-seven ships were sunk by kamikazes, including fourteen destroyers and three aircraft-carrier escorts. Almost five thousand American and British sailors were killed in the attacks and another five thousand wounded. The number of dead Japanese pilots stands at almost four thousand. Coming so close to the end of the war, the attacks promoted a genuine hatred for the enemy among the newly endangered sailors, many of whom were already dreaming of returning home. The attacks largely came to an end when a lack of pilots and airplanes made it impossible to continue, though they did not cease altogether: the last kamikaze attack took place on August 15, 1945.

  5. A slang term for an artillery coordinate.

  6. Report of Investigation of Alleged Atrocities by Members of the Japanese Imperial Forces in Manila and Other Parts of Luzon, Philippine Islands. The report is reproduced here complete with grammatical and punctuation errors. The Bayview and Manila Hotels are still in business.

  7. While eyewitnesses have testified that Basilone was killed by a mortar round, the official Marine Corps cause of death was small-arms fire.

  8. Designed by New Orleans boatbuilder Andrew Higgins, these landing craft featured a shallow draft and a ramp at the bow that was lowered once the boat reached dry land, allowing troops to run straight onto a beachhead. No less a military strategist than Adolf Hitler recognized the value of the Higgins boats utilized at the D-Day invasion, calling Higgins the “new Noah.” The LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicles and Personnel) was able to deliver thirty-six men plus eight thousand pounds of cargo and vehicles into a combat zone. Though used by American troops in amphibious landings in both the European and Pacific theaters of war, its plywood sides and rear gave it little defensive capability. There is a legend that when Higgins first developed the eponymous boat, years before the war, they were intended to help bootleggers land their cargoes of illicit liquor.

  Chapter Eight

  1. Known as “Big Cigar” by the men under his command, LeMay instituted many bombing strategies that would be used for decades to come. The Ohioan was known for subjecting aircrews to intense training but never asked them to do something he would not do himself. While flying B-17s in the European theater of operations early in the war, LeMay insisted on piloting the lead plane over dangerous targets, subjecting his aircraft to the most intense enemy antiaircraft fire. Men who chose to abort the missions out of fear were subject to court-martial.

  2. The Dresden bombings in Germany on February 13–15, 1945, were a catastrophic slaughter of civilians. Allied bombers dropped 3,900 tons of bombs, killing somewhere between thirty-five thousand and one hundred thousand people and leveling four square miles of the city. The firebombing of Tokyo killed four times as many and destroyed a much larger swath of the city. The most well-known among civilian bombings during the war, the German “Blitz” of London from September 1940 to May 1941, saw forty-five thousand tons of bombs dropped on the city, with the loss of one million homes and forty-five thousand civilian casualties.

  Chapter Nine

  1. Eleanor Roosevelt had been very fond of Truman’s predecessor, Henry Wallace, and was firmly against his removal from the ticket. Truman first met Eleanor at a White House reception in 1935, shortly after he was elected to the Senate; he thought her to be condescending. Between then and 1945 Truman had criticized her to family members, saying that she was too fond of the public eye and the sound of her own voice.

  2. Shipp was the middle name of Harry Truman’s grandfather, Anderson Shipp Truman. Margaret Truman later wrote of her father’s inauguration, “Where Stone got the idea that Dad’s middle name was Shipp no one has ever found out.”

  3. Originally, the words “So help me God” were not part of the oath of office. Some historians believe George Washington added them when he was inaugurated in 1789, while others argue he did not say the words but they were later attributed to him. Either way, they have remained a presidential tradition.

  Chapter Ten

  1. The great Albert Einstein is not among them. The theoretical scientist’s pacifist views have made him a security risk; with the exception of some minor work for the US Navy, Einstein has been virtually shut out of the war effort.

  2. Szilard will be thwarted in his efforts to speak to Harry Truman about what he perceives to be an impending arms race. Truman believed Szilard was misguided in wanting to share the A-bomb’s technology with other Allied powers.

  3. Even before the Manhattan Project got under way in 1942, the Soviets knew America was pursuing the bomb. Their code name for this effort was ENORMOZ—“enormous.” German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs and American scientist Theodore Hall were both Los Alamos employees who also spied for the Russians. Fuchs was convicted as a spy in 1950 and sentenced to fourteen years in prison, of which he served nine; Hall was never charged. There were many more spies within Los Alamos. Though their code names are known, their identities have never been discovered.

  4. Known for her fiery, outspoken ways, Katherine Puening Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos to be with her husband in July 1945. He was not her first spouse; in fact, she had been wed three times before marrying Robert Oppenheimer on November 1, 1940. Among her past husbands was a known Communist Party member who died while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. This led FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate her loyalty to the United States in 1944. She was cleared of all charges. Kitty and Robert Oppenheimer remained married for the rest of his life, years that included frequent marital fighting and her downward spiral into alcoholism.

  5. The gods are collectively known as “Trimurti” in Sanskrit, meaning “having three forms.” This is coincidentally close to Trinity. Later in life, Oppenheimer will also state that the name came from the sonnets of John Donne and the line “Batter my heart, three person’d God.”

  6. Hindu scholars say the passage refers to the god Vishnu, who is trying to persuade a prince to do his duty. Vishnu quotes the line about being a destroyer of worlds while trying to impress the prince with his power by transforming himself into a being with several arms.

  Chapter Eleven

  1. Okinawa is seventy miles long and averages seven miles wide. The island is part of the Ryukyu archipelago, which Japan annexed in 1879. The island population at the time of the American invasion was approximately 450,000; an estimated 150,000 either committed suicide or were killed in the battle.

  2. Five thousand of the American dead in the Battle of Okinawa are sailors killed in kamikaze attacks. An additional thousand more Americans w
ill be pulled off the line with shell shock from enduring the prolonged Japanese artillery bombings. Japan’s Okinawa casualties will number more than a hundred thousand dead soldiers.

  3. Battleship Row was the name given to the dockside location of American battleships in Pearl Harbor. Eight such vessels, all named for states, were in port on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked: Nevada, Arizona, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Maryland, and California. The USS Utah was also in port, but moored in a different portion of the harbor, at the time of the attack. West Virginia and California were later refloated and returned to service. The wreckage of Utah and Arizona can still be seen where the ships sank, as memorials to the men who died. The bodies of sailors within the sunken vessels have never been removed.

  4. The two-part invasion of Japan was collectively known as Operation Downfall. The first attack would be the invasion of Japan’s southernmost island, Kyushu, called Operation Olympic. The second would be the invasion of Honshu, the island on which Tokyo is located. This plan was code-named Operation Coronet.

  5. There is nearly a six-year age difference between Patton and the older MacArthur. They first met on September 12, 1918, during World War I’s Saint-Mihiel offensive. In 1932, MacArthur ordered then major Patton to disperse protesters who had occupied parts of Washington, DC. Historians still debate as to who was the better general.

  6. The Japanese had been preparing defenses and massing troops on Kyushu since early in 1945. An estimated 750,000 troops were massed around the beachheads in anticipation of the American invasion. Despite heavy aerial bombardment, Japan’s factories were still functioning and capable of building new weapons of war, staffed by Japanese laborers and Allied POWs.

  7. Two weeks later, on May 21, 1945, a grenade exploded against the bottom of PFC Doss’s boot. Severely injured, he bandaged his own wounds, then waited several hours while other wounded men were rescued before allowing himself to be placed on a stretcher. On the way back to the aid station, he suffered a compound fracture when hit by Japanese sniper fire. Using a rifle for a splint, Doss ignored the bone protruding from his arm and crawled to safety. Doss spent the remainder of the war in the hospital. While there, he realized that he had lost his Bible in the thick of battle. When word got back to his unit, the soldiers conducted a thorough search of the Maeda Escarpment once the battle was won; they did not stop searching until Doss’s Bible was found. Doss received the Medal of Honor from President Harry Truman at a White House ceremony on October 12, 1945, the first noncombatant to receive the nation’s highest military award for valor. Doss then spent the next five years in and out of the hospital receiving treatment for his many wounds. Doss had dreams of becoming a florist, but his injuries and the loss of a lung to tuberculosis made regular employment impossible. Desmond Doss died on March 23, 2006, at the age of eighty-seven.

  Chapter Twelve

  1. Hirota was prime minister of Japan in 1937, shortly before the second Sino-Japanese War began in July of that year. After World War II, he was prosecuted for war crimes based on his knowledge of, and tacit complicity in, the Rape of Nanking. The Tokyo war crimes tribunal convened in April 1946. Hirota was hanged at Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison on December 23, 1948.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1. Churchill’s approval rating stood at 83 percent in May 1945, but he was such an effective war leader that many in Britain feared he might begin a war against the Soviet Union rather than putting an end to the fighting once the Japanese were defeated. With the war in Europe over, the nation turned its focus to rebuilding. British voters were enchanted by the socialist policies of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, whose slogan was “Let us face the future” and who promised to nationalize industries to benefit the working man, causing Churchill’s Conservative Party to lose in a landslide. The lifelong politician was later again elected prime minister and served from 1951 to 1955, finally leaving office at the age of eighty due to deteriorating health.

  2. Truman was an artillery officer in World War I. His unit provided fire support for Patton’s tank brigade in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Also in that battle was a soldier from Brooklyn named John O’Reilly, grandfather of Bill O’Reilly.

  3. Thirty-two-year-old Frank Oppenheimer, a particle physicist, is a scientific director for the Manhattan Project. He has spent the war at various research facilities, and only came to Los Alamos for the final weeks leading up to Trinity.

  4. Stalin was late for two reasons: First, he wanted to show up Truman, letting his tardiness indicate that he was the more powerful of the two men. Second, deeply afraid of flying, the Soviet leader chose to travel a thousand miles by train through territory that until very recently had been an active combat zone, with all the precautions that entailed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1. It was not until September 18, 1947, that the US Air Force became a separate entity; army personnel controlled the air force during World War II.

  2. Ketsu-Go—Operation Decision—was the official policy of defending Japan to the death. As historian William Manchester points out in American Caesar, “Manning the nation’s ground defenses were 2,350,000 regular soldiers, 250,000 garrison troops, and 32,000,000 civilian militiamen—a total of 34,600,000, more than the combined armies of the United States, Great Britain, and Nazi Germany.… Their weapons included ancient bronze cannon, muzzle loading muskets, bamboo spears and bows and arrows. Even little children had been trained to strap explosives around their waists, roll under tank treads, and blow themselves up. They were called ‘Sherman carpets.’”

  3. The kaiten torpedo was first developed in summer 1944. Essentially a one-man submarine with an explosive charge that activated upon ramming another vessel, the kaiten was launched from a larger host submarine. The program was largely ineffective in comparison with the kamikaze airplane suicide attacks.

  4. The mistake came about because Japanese submarines relied upon the sound of explosions to confirm a sinking, lacking visual confirmation because they were forced to dive soon after firing their torpedoes. This, plus an Imperial Japanese Navy habit of inflating the number of sinkings of American vessels in order to please superiors, often led to false reports.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1. Estimates of the number of people killed by Stalin range from as low as twenty million to as high as sixty-two million “unnatural deaths” during Stalin’s time as Soviet leader. The man who is credited with saying that “death solves all problems” and “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” murdered his own citizens through executions, artificial famines, forced-labor camps, incarceration, and torture.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1. American forces captured Japanese codebooks during the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, allowing intelligence units based in Pearl Harbor to read top secret enemy documents. Operation Magic is the code name for the program whose focus is decrypting Japanese messages; the men who decode them call themselves Magicians.

  2. An invasion is more than just the act of sending men ashore; soldiers need to be fed, armed, and cared for in case of injury. MacArthur was awaiting the arrival of troops from Europe, as well as stockpiling weapons, ammunition, landing vessels, food, and hospital supplies.

  3. There are conflicting theories as to why sonar was not installed. The most convincing is that the navy was in a rush to put the Indianapolis back to sea.

  4. In Morse code, this is a system of three dots, three dashes, then three more dots.

  5. Handy was serving in that capacity while General George C. Marshall was in Potsdam with President Truman.

  6. Just one week after his rescue, Captain McVay was asked to stand before a board of inquiry into the sinking of the Indianapolis. It was found that McVay was at fault because he had stopped the antisubmarine zigzag evasion pattern shortly after nightfall. Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of all naval forces in the Pacific, opposed a court-martial; however, he was overruled by navy leaders in Washington. McVay was found guilty in 1945, thoug
h many of the Indianapolis’s surviving crew believed he was made a scapegoat. McVay’s conviction was later set aside at the request of Admiral Nimitz and McVay retired in 1949 with the rank of rear admiral.

  Chapter Seventeen

  1. Empowered by possession of the atomic bomb and determined to minimize the Soviet Union’s role in the postwar Pacific, Harry Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration before showing it to the Russians. Thus, in a diplomatic slap in the face, the Soviets were not allowed to sign the definitive mandate about the ending of the war. They retaliated by accelerating their timetable for the invasion of Manchuria, in an attempt to get a toehold in Japanese-held territory before the end of the war.

  2. Later reports would find that eight American POWs were being held in the Hiroshima Castle.

  Chapter Eighteen

  1. A crew consists of the aircraft commander, copilot, navigator, bombardier, electronics countermeasures officer, tail gunner, flight engineer, assistant flight engineer, ordnance expert, and two radar operators. Tibbets will also carry a twelfth crew member on the Hiroshima mission as weaponeer, in charge of arming the bomb.