Spruance's battle fleet tried hard to ensure that the Iwo Jima invasion would be less deadly for the Marines than previous invasions. The island was subjected to almost constant air and naval bombardment before the February landings. Once again the intended softening up had little effect. The Marines faced an enemy dug into Iwo Jima's core rock, especially into its one volcanic peak, Mount Surabachi. Interconnected tunnels led to stoutly protected artillery, mortar and machine-gun emplacements. The prudent commander of Iwo Jima's garrison kept his troops underground during the pre-landing pyrotechnics, allowed the Marines to reach the beaches virtually unopposed, but then had his men emerge to contest every yard of the Americans' advance. Whereas the U.S. commanders had hoped to take the island in a matter of days, the killing went on for over a month.
Here also the Allies were beset by dense flights of kamikazes. To combat them, radio intelligence units teamed up with radar to warn of the approaching waves. Most of the suicide planes were shot down, but enough of them got through the screen to sink an escort carrier and damage five other ships.
Iwo Jima gained a legendary status in the war's history at least in part because of Joe Rosenthal's photograph of Marines triumphantly raising the American flag atop Mount Surabachi. Meatgrinder Hill might have made a more fitting symbol: it was taken and lost by the Marines five times before it was finally held. Of the twenty-two thousand in the Japanese garrison, only a few hundred gave themselves up as prisoners.
The objective was finally gained. Superfortress raids on Japan were stepped up. Iwo Jima did become a haven for damaged bombers. By the end of the war some twenty-four hundred B-29 landings were made there. As one B-29 pilot said after an emergency landing on Iwo Jima: "Whenever I land on this island, I thank God and the men who fought for it."
Okinawa: The Pacific War's Final Battle
The struggle for Okinawa, the southernmost of Japan's four main home islands, followed the same script as that for earlier islands, only writ much larger. On an island that stretched more than sixty miles in length, the Japanese garrison was a large one, and the soldiery were dug in on a scale surpassing that of anything previous. The underground warren of defenses even included a rail line to carry ammunition to the firing emplacements. The general in charge was another who rejected beach resistance and banzai charges in favor of conserving his men to kill methodically from behind their buttresses of concrete, steel and carved rock.
Japanese plans for this last-ditch stand included a much greater use of suicide weapons. The high command, which no doubt included men steeped in the tradition of haiku, kept coming up with poetic names for their awful devices. To "Divine Wind" kamikazes, they added kaiten, or "turned toward heaven," for human-guided torpedoes launched from submarines. Ohka, or "cherry blossom," stood for small rocket-powered sacrificial wooden aircraft. Fukuryu, or "crouching dragons," were suicidal divers who swam out to sea to fasten themselves, along with powerful mines, to invasion craft. As for the kamikazes, the Japanese invented a new term: kikusui, "floating chrysanthemums*'' for massed attacks of the immolating aircraft.
To these death-dealing smaller weapons they added a suicidal naval fleet. Desperately short of fuel, they filled their superbattleship Yamato with just enough gasoline for a one-way voyage and sent off with her the cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers. The warships were either to go down fighting or to beach themselves on the island and add their crews to the ranks of the defenders.
The Allied decision that the island must be taken was based on securing a staging area essential to the invasion of Japan. From airfields on the island, preassault bombardments could be intensified, and planes could provide air cover for the landings. Its great expanse could also serve as a huge supply base supporting the attack.
The Allied fleet for the invasion, now including a task force of 22 British ships, was more enormous than ever: 3,025 vessels that included 18 carriers. No less than six Radio Intelligence units were aboard the command ships. After a weeklong bombardment and the taking of small ancillary islands providing logistic bases and a useful anchorage, the initial landings were made on April 1, Easter Sunday, 1945. The first reports were euphoric: virtually no opposition on the beaches and very little as the troops swept inland. In the first hour the Americans put ashore sixteen thousand men and on the first day fifty thousand, with the eventual buildup running into hundreds of thousands.
Then came the crunch. Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, knowing he lacked the strength to defend the entire island, had concentrated his defenders on the craggy terrain of the southern sector. From their elaborate subsurface quarters, the Japanese soldiers trundled out huge mortars, uncovered powerful antitank guns and emerged for sudden counterattacks. They made the Marines and GIs pay dearly for every advance and stretched the campaign out for weeks, delaying plans for the invasion of the mainland.
Japanese resistance forced much of the protecting Allied fleet to remain in place, making it vulnerable to the suicide weapons. The Americans had precluded one use of sacrificial offense when, in taking the outlying islands, they had found and destroyed some two hundred and fifty explosives-laden plywood boats cached there to smash their loads against Allied ships. Still the Allies had to defend against the ohkas and kamikazes. The ohkas were ferried in by regular planes and, over their targets, released to dive to the destruction of their pilots and, so it was hoped, the warships below. As for the kamikazes, an appeal went over all Japan to assemble nonmilitary and obsolete aircraft to provide wings for self-sacrificing pilots.
On April 6, Japanese commanders sent aloft the first of ten kikusui raids. Regular pilots led the waves of kamikazes off fields on Taiwan and the homeland island of Kyushu and guided them to the Allied ships.
To counter these attacks, American intelligence units figured out when the mass kamikaze flights were launched and how long they would take to reach the Allied fleet. Marine Colonel Bankston Holcomb would then relay the information to Admiral Spruance. "He always listened," Holcomb later recalled, admiring how coolly Spruance issued his orders for meeting the incoming suicide planes. Once forewarned, navy gunners shot down an estimated sixty to ninety percent of the kamikazes and ohkas short of their targets.
Even so, the carnage was great." A total of 34 warships were sunk and 368 damaged, including 8 carriers, 4 escort carriers, 10 battleships, 5 cruisers and, because of their exposure in forward picket lines, 63 destroyers. Casualties among shipboard crews were the heaviest in the war.
British ships in the fleet fared better because of their armor-plated decks. None of their ships were sunk, although all four of their carriers as well as other vessels were damaged.
Meanwhile, on April 7 the suicide sortie of Japanese surface ships formed around the Yamato and arrived to do battle against Spruance's fleet. It goes almost without saying that Allied codebreakers knew the makeup of the fleet and the exact route and schedule of its approach to Okinawa. Sightings by a submarine and a B-29 confirmed the decrypts. Admiral Marc Mitscher, in charge of the Allied fleet's Task Force 58, had his riposte all worked out. One of his groups of strike aircraft was to concentrate on the Yamato, a second on the Yahagi, and after sinking these prime targets, all units would go after the eight destroyers. The Americans launched 386 aircraft against the suicide force, including 98 torpedo bombers.
It was no contest. Torpedo after torpedo slashed into the Yamato, causing her to roll over and go down, taking the fleet's admiral with her. The U.S. planes quickly dispatched the Yahagi and sank four of the destroyers. The other four limped back to Japan, three of them badly damaged. The Japanese navy had virtually ceased to exist.
The land battle of Okinawa continued until the beginning of July. Seeing their resistance crumble, Ushijima and his fellow general Isamu Cho killed themselves on June 22, leaving only ten days of American mopping-up operations to follow. This final battle of the Pacific war was also the bloodiest. Allied losses included over 12,000 army and navy men killed. More than 100,000 Japanese troops di
ed. Because they callously used natives of the island as little more than cannon fodder to buy time for the buildup of defenses, an estimated 150,000 civilians were killed or joined in mass suicides.
Japan: The Greatest Battle Never Fought
In the early months of 1945 there seemed to be no alternative to preparing for the staged invasions of Japan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff settled on a plan for two major landings. The first, code-named Olympic, would invade the southern island of Kyushu on November 1. If Japan had still not surrendered by March 16, 1946, the follow-up would come. Code-named Coronet, it would target the main island of Honshu, whose broad Kanto Plain led to Tokyo. Douglas MacArthur was designated as commander in chief of the United States Army forces in the Pacific, including its air force units. Admiral Nimitz was designated the commander of all U.S. Navy units, while General Carl Spaatz was placed in charge of the Strategic Air Force.
An important question troubling Allied leaders, especially Harry Truman after he became president, was the number of Allied casualties likely to result from these invasions. During the final week of July, at the Big Three conference in Potsdam, Germany, Marshall gave his answer, based on estimates received from his subordinate commanders. Truman later wrote that Marshall told him that the invasions would cost "at a minimum one-quarter of a million casualties and might cost as much as a million." Even the lesser total would outnumber by far all losses in the Pacific campaign, including those at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and would exceed Western Allied casualties in Europe from D-Day through the Battle of the Bulge.
Certainly the million figure seized the attention of Winston Churchill. He wrote, "To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British—or more if we could get them there; for we were resolved to share the agony."
MacArthur's judgment concerning the numbers was conditioned by his obsession with commanding the greatest amphibious invasion in history, one that would surpass Eisenhower's forces on D-Day by a wide margin. Since the question of unacceptable casualties might jeopardize this glory-seeking prospect, he seized every opportunity to play down both the estimate of Japanese strengths on the islands and the expectations of Allied losses. He let it be known that he did not anticipate a "high rate of loss" in the attacks on Japan and assured military planners, "The invasion of the Tokyo plain should be relatively inexpensive." He was opposed to "the slightest thought of changing the Olympic operation."
To take this stand, he had to fly in the face of his own codebreakers. As decrypts from those times have been declassified, they have accentuated the horrors that lay in wait for Allied invaders. The Japanese high command had come to the same conclusion reached by Allied leaders: that on Kyushu only three beaches were suitable for large-scale landings. Japanese planners made those beaches the most formidable death traps their fervid imaginations could devise.
Broken message after broken message detailed the enormous buildup of troops on the islands. To the two general armies, numbering two and a half million men, the Japanese added reinforcements from the Asian mainland—four divisions from Manchuria, others from Korea and north China. Additional troops came from the northern Kuril Islands and Hokkaido. Levies of remaining manpower called for raising new divisions totaling more than a half million men. In addition, there was the National Volunteer Corps—twenty-five million untrained children, old men, and women serving as a labor force but ready to convert to warriors armed with sharpened bamboo spears, pitchforks, rusty bayonets and even dynamite charges strapped to their bodies.
If the underground fortresses built by the Japanese on Pacific islands had presented deadly barriers to American GIs, these were nothing compared with the networks of subterranean tunnels, corridors and firing points constructed for defense of the homeland. Heavy guns mounted on rails could roll out from behind steel doors, fire their shots and retreat behind the closing doors before an answering shot could be made. Decrypts warned of the construction of underground hangars and concealed bases for aircraft. Acres of mines were sown in harbors and coastal areas. The National Volunteer Corps labored throughout the torrid summer to build bunkers, field fortifications and connecting tunnels along the shoreline.
Most of all, the high command relied on its newest weapon—the willingness of the young to die in suicide missions. As revealed by a steady stream of decrypts, plans called for a massive employment of this horrible strategy. Thousands of planes, largely obsolete, were rounded up to serve in kamikaze operations. A Japanese aircraft firm began designing a craft specifically for carrying a one-thousand-pound bomb on suicide missions. Hundreds of kaitens and ohkas awaited their sacrificial moment. At naval bases, midget submarines were stashed in sardinelike rows, most of them scheduled to be used as suicide craft. Fukuryu frogmen waited to turn themselves into human mines. Along the coasts riflemen dug themselves into fortified pits, expecting to die in the preinvasion bombardments but hoping to survive long enough to take a few Americans with them. Perhaps saddest of all were the new aircraft specially built with reusable landing gears: since the planes were destined to go only one way, why waste scarce rubber when the planes on takeoff could drop their wheels?
Despite the overwhelming proofs of the grim ordeals faced by Allied invaders, MacArthur continued to assert that the invasions would not involve serious losses. As Drea has pointed out, MacArthur consistently dismissed codebreakers' evidence "that failed to accord with his preconceived strategic vision."
Encouraged by the colossal defensive preparations being carried out by their people, Japanese planners clung to an unrealistic but persuasive goal: that their trained military forces and their multitudes of sacrificial volunteers could inflict such mayhem on the invaders that the Allies would agree to a negotiated peace.
To compel Japan to surrender, the Allies assembled a force of five million men. These were largely American but also included three British Commonwealth infantry divisions, a contingent of supporting RAF fliers and the British Pacific Fleet. Troops idled by the end of the war in Europe were being shipped to the Pacific theater as quickly as the transport system allowed. Seeking all possible help, the Joint Chiefs urged FDR, at his Yalta meeting with Churchill and Stalin, to exact Russia's promise to come into the war and join in the attack on Japan. The U.S. chiefs told the president and the prime minister to make whatever concessions were necessary to ensure USSR participation.
Meanwhile, Allied warships and aircraft were doing their utmost to reduce Japan to a wasteland. Almost with impunity navy ships cruised along the coasts and shelled inland targets. Carrier-based aircraft heaped destruction on airfields, naval bases, shipping, rail lines and communications. Superfortresses added another form of attack to their high-level daytime bombing. At night they swept in at low altitudes to drop thousands of incendiaries on Japanese cities. In one raid the Superforts burned out sixteen square miles of Tokyo. Five other cities were similarly devastated, which left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.
Magic decrypts now seized center stage. They revealed that Japanese diplomats, blind to the fact that Stalin had already pledged to come into the war on the Allies' side, had traveled to Moscow to persuade the Russians to act as intermediaries for peace negotiations. The decrypts also made clear that although a peace faction had been formed at the upper levels of power, its leaders could not prevail against the military hierarchy.
The sticking point for the Japanese, as it had been for the Germans, was the idea of "unconditional surrender." Early in the war, on the final day of the summit meeting in Casablanca, Roosevelt had used the term when ad-libbing in a press conference. The extreme term greatly distressed Winston Churchill, who recognized how it would block any hope of a negotiated surrender. Once an Allied leader pronounced it, though, the term stuck. Anyone questioning it ran the risk of being judged guilty of "appeasement." For the Japanese it had the inadmissible meaning of dethroning the emperor.
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nbsp; The concept of unconditional surrender was discussed when Truman arrived in Potsdam, Germany, for his first Big Three conference, as recounted by David McCullough in his Truman biography. Churchill and Stalin were in favor of easing it to allow the monarchy to be preserved. Along with his chief advisers, Truman was not so sure. The president had his reason for thinking the Japanese would agree to an outright unconditional surrender. He had delayed the start of the conference to July 17 because he knew that, on the day preceding, the first atomic bomb was scheduled to be tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The test was successful, meaning that the Allies now had the power to end the war on their own terms. Churchill was told explicitly that the "babies" had been "satisfactorily born." Truman told Stalin, almost as an aside, only that the Allies now possessed "an entirely novel form of bomb, something quite out of the ordinary, which we think will have decisive effects upon the Japanese will to continue the war."
Truman, Churchill and the representatives of China issued the Potsdam Declaration,, offering Japan "an opportunity to end the war" before Allied military power completely destroyed the Japanese forces and reduced the homeland to utter devastation. The declaration took into account what decrypts had been disclosing about the divided states of mind among Japanese leaders, demanding that the nation decide "whether she will continue to be controlled" by those who had brought her "to the threshold of annihilation" or whether she would follow "the path of reason." It set down hard terms for the disarmament of the military and the elimination of those who had "deceived and misled" the people. It did limit the call for an unconditional surrender to "all of the Japanese armed forces."
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