D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  They left me at the Ueno Zoo overnight and the next day they took me to a place with some other B-29ers and a bunch of other prisoners, the Omori Prisoner of War Camp, about twelve miles from downtown Tokyo. It was on a little island in Tokyo Bay, only a couple of hundred yards out in the bay. Thank God for that little separation because the subsequent fire raids burned down everything right across from us.

  At Camp Omori, Hap Halloran met Air Commander Robert Goldsworthy, who had also been tortured in a Kempeitai prison. “Sometimes I’d get so low that I wanted to quit,” Goldsworthy recalls, “and Hap would buck me up. And days when Hap would get like that I’d take him off to the side and buck him up…. We used to say ‘home alive in ’45.’ We knew it couldn’t go on much longer because our guys were devastating Japan from the air.”18

  DECISIONS

  On June 15, when General Curtis LeMay ended his incendiary campaign against Japan’s six largest cities, having turned them into charred wastelands, he began his attacks on smaller cities. His crews also targeted shipping and harbors, oil facilities, and railroads. By now, the enemy’s air defenses had been destroyed. “At this time,” LeMay recalled, “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.”19

  While LeMay’s “burn jobs,” as he called them, obliterated Japan’s urban culture, Admiral Halsey’s Task Force 38 cruised at will up and down the coast of Japan, shelling port cities and military installations, including Tokyo Harbor. Navy planes ripped up airfields and burned planes on the ground; and they attacked railroad trains and passenger ferries filled with women and children, attacks the Japanese considered more reprehensible than “Devil LeMay’s” napalm raids. Every Japanese citizen became a military target. “I did want every Japanese dead,” John Ciardi admitted. “Part, of it was our propaganda machine, but part of it was what we heard accurately. This was the enemy. We were there to eliminate them. That’s the soldier’s short-term bloody view.”20

  LeMay dropped leaflets as well as bombs, his own foray into psychological warfare. In bold red and black script, the leaflets warned the citizens of cities targeted for incineration to “evacuate at once!” On the other side of the leaflet were these words:

  THESE LEAFLETS ARE BEING DROPPED TO notify you that your city had been listed for destruction by our powerful air force. The bombing will begin within seventy-two hours.

  This advance notice will give Your military authorities ample time to take necessary defensive measures to protect you from our inevitable attack. Watch and see how powerless they are to protect you.21

  LeMay writes: “At first they thought we were bluffing…. There wasn’t any mass exodus until we knocked the hell out of the first three towns on the list. Then the rest were practically depopulated in nothing flat.” The leaflets had a crushing impact on civilian morale, producing defeatism and terror. Their government, the Japanese people realised, was powerless to protect them.

  With thousands of American and British heavy bombers on the way from Europe and with 5,000 more B-29s on order, LeMay was convinced he “could bomb and burn them until they quit,” avoiding a humanly costly invasion of the home islands.22 He informed General Arnold, however, that by October he would run out of cities to burn.

  On June 18, 1945, President Truman was scheduled to meet with his top military advisors. “I have to decide Japanese strategy—shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade?” the President wrote in his diary the day before the meeting. “That is my hardest decision to date.”23

  Truman was concerned about casualties, hoping to prevent “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”24

  At the meeting, General George Marshall presented an invasion plan, code-named Downfall. It was supported, although not enthusiastically, by the Navy and the Air Forces. Both services privately continued to believe that they could force a surrender short of an invasion, one by blockade, the other by conventional bombing. Downfall was a two-phase operation. The Americans would land on the Japanese island Kyushu on November 1 with over a quarter of a million assault troops, seize the southernmost part of the island, and build naval bases and airfields for the larger invasion of Honshu and the Tokyo Plain in March 1946, should it be necessary. The first landing was code-named Olympic, the second, Coronet. MacArthur would be in charge of the ground troops, Nimitz would command the naval forces. Olympic alone would be a combined operation larger than the Normandy invasion, requiring the entire American and British Pacific fleets, and 5,000 combat aircraft. Marshall told Truman that there would probably be 350,000 defenders on Kyushu. A precise estimate of American casualties might not have been mentioned at this meeting, but Truman had been led to believe that the number of dead Americans would probably be higher than 25,000 in the first thirty days.

  Airpower alone could not bring down Japan, Marshall was convinced, even combined with a tightened naval blockade. The ground troops would have to finish the job. Truman commented that the effect of Olympic would be to create “another Okinawa closer to Japan,” and approved the Kyushu operation, adding that they could decide “later” whether to proceed with Coronet.25

  There was no mention of the atomic bomb, which had not yet been tested. But as the meeting was breaking up, Truman asked Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who had sat silently through the proceedings, for his views. Speaking with some reluctance, McCloy suggested that the threat of the bomb might provide a “political solution,” making an invasion unnecessary. “I said I would tell them [the Japanese government] we have the bomb and I would tell them what kind of a weapon it is. And then I would tell them the surrender terms.”26 The Japanese, he said, should also be told that they could keep the Emperor. Truman said he would take this under consideration and hurried off.

  Momentum for using the bomb—when it was ready—was already building. Reports about Japanese atrocities against American POWs were being headlined in newspapers and magazines, fueling demands for retribution. The American public—and many of Truman’s advisors—were also convinced that the Japanese would slaughter all prisoners of war in the event of an invasion. They were apparently not wrong. In August 1944, the Japanese government had sent a directive to commandants of POW camps. What later became known as the “Kill-All Order” called for “extreme measures” to be taken against prisoners when the military situation became “urgent…. Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of the prisoners 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.”27

  The American public was also weary of war and deeply alarmed by the rising numbers of American casualties. Over 64 percent of American battle fatalities in World War II took place in the one-year period between June 1945—the month of the Normandy and Saipan invasions—and May 1945. An invasion of the home islands would mean a large-scale redeployment of troops from Europe to the Pacific and yet one more battle—the bloodiest of them all—for Pacific assault troops like Eugene Sledge. “After [Okinawa] … we all knew that General MacArthur was already planning our role in the next damned landing, the biggest one in history … right down the gut to Tokyo. None of us veterans.” said Sledge, “expected to survive that epic carnage.”28

  The families of these men were as concerned as they were. That June, Marvin Kastenbaum’s father had four of his sons serving in the military, and another son had just been killed in April. One son was likely to be discharged early, but Jimmie Kastenbaum was with the infantry in the Philippines, Jack Kastenbaum was in Europe, awaiting transfer to the Pacific, and Marvin had been moved from Burma to China. “The prospect that Jack and Jimmie and I would converge on Japan from three different directions had to be a cause of some concern to my father,” Marvin wrote later.29

  The invasion that never happened was a real and awful th
ing to American fighting men. The assault troops had been chosen and were already in training. Over 766,000 Army, Marine, Navy, and Coast Guard personnel were assigned to Olympic alone, over twice as many men as participated in the initial landings at Okinawa and Normandy combined. To support such a massive amphibious force, MacArthur and Nimitz planned to assemble the largest fleet of warships ever assigned to a single campaign. Nearly 1,000 warships would have participated in operations off the coast of Kyushu. And almost half a million Purple Hearts were being made and stockpiled for the operation.30

  That July and August, Army intelligence intercepts reported an enemy buildup on Kyushu greatly in excess of what the Joint Chiefs had originally anticipated. Decoded messages indicated that the Japanese would have 900,000 troops on Kyushu by November and that they would be prepared to meet the Americans on the first high ground behind the beaches. Suicide squads were being trained to throw themselves on American tanks with handheld bombs capable of penetrating heavy armor, and Japanese military planners expected the 5,000 kamikazes they had held back for the invasion to destroy over 40 percent of the American fleet. The Emperor took a personal interest in developing plans for repulsing the American invasion. He attended ceremonies at court for the regiments being raised for the defense of the “divine homeland” and encouraged the formation of citizen suicide units.31

  Intelligence sources predicted a “titanic confrontation.” with possibly “unbearable” American losses—losses sufficient, perhaps, to force the Americans to back off from their demand for unconditional surrender.32 That, not victory, had become the only realizable aim of even the most diehard Japanese militarists. This is why the defeat at Okinawa was actually encouraging to the Japanese military. On Okinawa, a badly outnumbered force, cut off from supplies and without vigorous civilian support, had held off the invaders for almost a hundred days, inflicting frightful casualties. In a statement made after the war, Major General Masakazu Amano, an architect of defensive preparations on Kyushu, declared: “We were absolutely sure of victory. It was the first and only battle in which the main strength of the air, land and sea forces were to be joined. The geographical advantages of the homeland were to be utilized to the highest degree, the enemy was to be crushed, and we were confident that the battle would prove to be the turning point in political maneuvering.”33

  When American political leaders “said that the Japanese were likely to fight to the death rather than surrender unconditionally, they were not exaggerating what the Japanese government itself was saying,” writes historian Herbert Bix.34 The paradoxical effect of the decisive American victory at Okinawa was to discourage the Americans “while inspiring the Japanese.”35

  Japan had already been defeated militarily. Now, the American objective was to force a defiant government to surrender, a government that still had the support of its people. Residents of Tokyo hurled ridicule on their conquered Axis ally for surrendering unconditionally, verbally accosting Germans on the streets and in the trains. “The Tokyo papers,” Robert Guillain reports, “blamed Germany’s defeat on its lack of bushido. With bushido … one never dies, never surrenders unconditionally.”36

  While the President and his advisors planned the final stroke against Japan, a team of nuclear scientists at a secret facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was hurrying world-altering work to conclusion. At the same time, a new Air Force unit was conducting highly secret training operations in the Marianas. Flying stripped-down B-29s designed to achieve maximum speed and altitude, pilots and crews of the 509th Composite Group were dropping enormous pumpkin-shaped bombs, one to a plane, on a desolate island near Tinian. Their commander was thirty-year-old Colonel Paul Tibbets, who had been chosen to head this operation because he knew the B-29 better than anyone else in the air service. A year before arriving in Tinian, he had suggested to Curtis LeMay, while the general was in the States, en route to the Marianas, that he finish off Japan with low-level fire raids. (When LeMay decided—on his own—to go in low, he may have remembered Tibbets’s advice.)37 Now Tibbets was awaiting the arrival in the Marianas of a new kind of fire that he was sure would end the war.

  Commander (later Vice Admiral) Frederick L. Ashworth, who would fly on the Nagasaki mission, had picked Tinian as the base for Tibbets’s operation. At the time, Ashworth was a thirty-five-year-old Navy commander working at Los Alamos for Major General Leslie Groves, administrator of the Manhattan Project, the vast scientific and industrial enterprise—unprecedented in size—created in 1942 to build the world’s first atomic bombs. “I was what was known as a weaponeer,” Ashworth said in a recent interview.

  THERE: WERE TWO OF US, BOTH Navy men. The other was Captain William “Deak” Parsons [the Manhattan Project’s chief of weapons development], who flew on the Hiroshima mission. We were in charge of the bombs, since the crews knew nothing about them.

  In February 1945 General Groves sent me to Guam to deliver a letter from Admiral King to Admiral Nimitz, saying that a highly secret … “new weapon will be ready in August of this year for use against Japan by the 20th Air Force.” …

  The letter asked Nimitz to provide the necessary support for this operation, and it also said that the bearer would search for a proper base for this operation in the Marianas.

  I went back to Washington to pick up the letter. I had a money belt with a zipper on it and I put it in there, under my khaki uniform shirt. When I got to Guam, the admiral’s aide escorted me to Nimitz’s office and I told Nimitz that I had to deliver the letter to him with no one else in the room. After his aide left, I pulled up my shirt, unzipped this sweaty old money belt, and handed him the letter. He read it and said grimly, “Don’t they know we’ve got a war going out here? This is February now. You’re talking about August. Why can’t we have it out here sooner?” Nimitz wanted it to be available for Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

  I told him that this was the schedule and it was a very tight schedule. He wasn’t happy with this. He thanked me and I left his office.

  I went from there to Tinian, after scratching Guam and Saipan as sites for the operation. Tinian was a natural because it had the longest runway in the world. The island commander took me to a spot on the north end of the island and I thought this is the place to put it. It was isolated from the other bomber groups on Tinian and would be ideal for top secret operations.38

  After training at desolate Wendover, Utah, the 509th began arriving in Tinian in late May. Tibbets was confident his group of 1,800 men “would do the work of two million soldiers.”39 “The 509th was totally isolated within its own compound, connected by taxiways to North Field,” recalled Major Charles Sweeney, the B-29 test pilot from North Quincy, Massachusetts, who was in charge of training exercises. “The compound was enclosed by a high fence with a main gate that was guarded around the clock by armed sentries…. This area contained the only windowless, air-conditioned buildings in the Pacific…. Here the various components of the bombs would be assembled…. Anyone trying to gain access without proper clearance could be shot.”40

  Tibbets and Sweeney were the only members of the 509th who had been officially informed that the unit was preparing to drop an atomic bomb. “The men were only told what they needed to know to do their jobs,” Tibbets says, although it is likely that the bombardiers, at least, soon figured out what they would be asked to do. Tibbets had little contact with the Los Alamos scientists and no interest whatsoever in the deep physics behind the bomb. “They told me it would explode with the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT…. All’s I could say was that’s going to be a damn big explosion.”41

  J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos laboratory, explained to Tibbets that once the atomic bomb was released the delivery plane would have to make a dizzying 155 degree diving turn to get as far away from the point of explosion as possible. Otherwise the delivery plane was likely to be blown out of the sky. “This was difficult to do,” Tibbets found out, “[without] snapping the tail off the airplane.” In dry runs over the island
of Rota, and later over Japan itself, Tibbets had his pilots practice these radical turns after releasing a single 10,000-pound bomb. These bombs were the shape and color of a pumpkin and the same size as the plutonium bomb that would be used against Nagasaki.* “I wanted them to get shot at,” says Tibbets. “I wanted them to experience every possible emergency before they had an atom bomb and were really playing for keeps. I wanted the Japanese to see planes, flying alone, and to think they were on reconnaissance operations.”

  Tibbets planned to fly these “pumpkin runs” himself but LeMay insisted the Army could not risk having him fall into enemy hands, with knowledge of the bomb.42

  Other airmen on Tinian resented Tibbets’s “glory boys.” They had the best living quarters on the island and flew the safest missions—and some of them bragged to friends in the other bomber groups that they were personally going to win the war. “The other guys had lost a lot of crews and they had to come in low, while we went in high where they couldn’t get any antiaircraft or fighters up to us, so we were relatively safe,” says airman Raymond Biel. “And we had brand-new planes and were getting the best of treatment from the government. To the other men, it didn’t seem we were doing anything to end the war.”43

  On July 29, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz arrived from Europe, via Washington, D.C., to take command of the Strategic Air Forces, which was created expressly for the atomic bomb missions. LeMay was made his chief of staff. Spaatz carried with him top secret orders drafted by Groves and approved by Truman: