Ashworth and Sweeney commandeered a jeep and had the driver take them to a communications center, but “the guy manning it said, ‘I’m too busy, get out of here,’” Ashworth recalls. So they went over to General Jimmy Doolittle’s tent and Ashworth told a staff officer, “We have just dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki and need to inform Tinian.” Doolittle’s aide told them they had better see the general first. Doolittle had just transferred the headquarters of Eighth Air Force from England to the Pacific, in preparation for the invasion of Japan. He was all business. There would be no messages sent until they told him what they had hit. Ashworth pulled the target map out of his leather pouch. “Doolittle looked at it for a while and said, ‘You know, General Spaatz will be far happier that it went off over there than if it had over the city, because there will be far fewer casualties.’ Then he let me send my detailed letter message. After this, we returned to the plane. It was refueled and we flew back to Tinian. On the way we heard on Armed Forces Radio that the Russians had entered the war against Japan.”
There was no word of the surrender of Japan, however. That got some of the men thinking that they might be flying another of these missions very soon. They flew the rest of the way m a somber mood, smoking cigars, drinking pineapple juice, and listening to the tunes of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey.
At 10:50 P.M., Bockscar landed on Tinian, twenty hours after taking off. No one was there to greet them except their ground crew and one photographer—and Paul Tibbets, standing at a distance with a high-ranking Navy officer. (In a recent revision of his memoirs, Tibbets claims he had gone to bed, but that seems unlikely. Sweeney says he was there, and Tibbets would have wanted to attend the post-flight briefing.)
The next morning, Tibbets thought he would have to make a difficult decision: “what, if any action should be taken against the airplane commander, Charles Sweeney, for failure to command.” But LeMay made the decision for him. After a press conference on Guam, in which nothing came out about the problems the crew experienced, LeMay called together Sweeney and Tibbets. “You fucked up, didn’t you, Chuck?” LeMay confronted him. Sweeney did not respond. LeMay turned to Tibbets and told him that an investigation into the conduct of the Nagasaki mission “would serve no useful purpose.”19 So a cloak of official secrecy was thrown over the operation.
That evening, in a meeting in the Imperial Library, the militants in the Japanese cabinet were still arguing for a continuation of the war, for a suicidal battle on home soil. But the double blow of the second bomb and the Russian invasion of Manchuria gave Emperor Hirohito the leverage he had been recently seeking. He feared—as did the moderates in the cabinet—that the people might eventually revolt against the regime if it allowed the war to continue for much longer. He wanted to end the war, not to save his subjects from further suffering, but to preserve his own authority and that of the Imperial system. We must “bear the unbearable,” he told the cabinet in the early hours of August 10.20
Later that morning, President Truman received Japan’s “conditional” acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Japan would surrender, but only if the Emperor retained his sovereignty. To this Truman consented, over Secretary of State Byrnes’s strong objections, with the stipulation that the Emperor would submit to the authority of the Supreme Allied Commander in Japan. The Emperor would stay, but the institution was now under the control of the United States, which was quite different from recognizing the Emperor’s power as a condition of surrender. As Truman wrote in his diary, if the Japanese people want to keep the Emperor “we’d tell ’em how to keep him.”21
While the Japanese considered this counterproposal, Truman suspended all B-29 bombing raids and further use of the atomic bomb. “Our production facilities were operating at such an accelerating rate,” Groves wrote later, “that the materials for the next bomb would be ready for delivery to the field momentarily.” During this period, seven “pumpkin” raids were made on Japan “in preparation for further atomic attacks, if they should become necessary.” And General Groves’s people at Los Alamos and Tinian remained in a state of high readiness to prepare additional bombs immediately should peace talks break down.22
After receiving no word from the Japanese for three days, Truman had Marshall order an all-out bombing attack on August 14. It was the most awesome air display of the war; more than 2,000 planes participated. “On the third day, we got orders for a maximum effort,” Fred Olivi recalls. “Everything that could fly was supposed to fly against the Japanese empire. Our crew participated in that raid in a plane called Straight Flush. Other aircraft from islands closer to Japan got to the empire first so I think the bombs we dropped were the last bombs that were dropped on Japan.”
When Chuck Sweeney and his crew returned to Tinian, after dropping a “pumpkin” on the Toyoda Auto Works at Koromo, the booze was flowing and bedlam had broken out on the island. Japan had surrendered. World War II was over. It was August 15 in the Marianas. Back in the United States, across the International Dateline, it was still Tuesday, August 14, 1945.
“I had occasion to meet some of Doolittle’s fliers at an air show after the war, and one of them signed their hook for me,” recalls Fred Olivi. “It says ‘from the first to the last.’ They were the first to bomb Japan and we were the last”
In New York City a crowd estimated at two million jammed Times Square and the surrounding area in the biggest celebration in the nation’s history. The “din,” said the New York Times, was “overwhelming.”23
It was victory, but at what a cost! An estimated 60 million people died worldwide, almost forty million of them civilians. New research indicates that as many as 27 million Russians died. China lost at least fifteen million people, Poland six million, Germany over four million, Japan over 2,700,000, among them 1,270,000 members of the armed forces killed in the years between Pearl Harbor and the surrender. (The number of Japanese killed was approximately 3 to 4 percent of the country’s 1941 population of 74 million.) Millions of innocents died in calculated acts of violence and annihilation. In the bombing of England, Germany, and Japan, 1.5 million people perished, more than half of them women. The Germans, the Russians in Germany, and the Japanese in China murdered political and racial enemies in staggering numbers. And to defeat Fascist and Fascist-style regimes, the Allies lost twice as many fighting men as the Axis, among them 405,399 Americans, including over 100,000 in the Pacific.24
A NAVAL CONSTRUCTION BATTALION CELEBRATES THE END OF THE WAR (NA).
Although there was no Pacific equivalent in monstrous scale to the Holocaust, the Japanese military committed tens of thousands of atrocities against citizens and soldiers that fell under its control. Worst of all were the experiments of Unit 731, the top secret Manchurian center of the Japanese army’s extensive experiments in bacteriological warfare. Several historians have documented the gruesome research conducted on live prisoners by the scientists of Unit 731, under the direction of General Shiro Ishii, a medical doctor. Experimenters drilled holes into live bodies and removed entrails; limbs were “frozen until they gave off a sound like a plank of wood when struck; eyeballs [were] forced out by the application of massive pressure to the head; bodies [were] reduced to a fifth of their weight by dehydration; knives [were] inserted into the various organs of living subjects to see which produced the quickest death; malnutrition and frostbite [were] carefully simulated, with all their agonies; Chinese civilians, Russian ‘spies,’ Manchurian ‘bandits,’ [and] American and British prisoners of war [were] infected with germs of every kind.” These were sprayed onto their bodies, injected into them with needles, shot into them with bullets, or transmitted by fleas and rats that were released into the prisoners’ compounds. When prisoners refused to eat food contaminated with potassium cyanide, they were machine gunned. The bodies of the victims of these experiments were burned, and when they didn’t burn thoroughly, were put into a pulverizing machine. After the war, Japanese engineers blew up the buildings and burned all the incriminating evidence.*
&
nbsp; It was too much death to contemplate, too much savagery and suffering; and in August 1945 no one was counting. For those who had seen the face of battle and been in the camps and under the bombs—and had lived—there was a sense of immense relief. They had survived the greatest explosion of violence in human history, a war so terrible that even the atomic bomb was seen by some as an instrument of deliverance.**
“When the atom bomb ended the war, I was in the Forty-fifth infantry Division, which had been through the European war so thoroughly that it needed to be reconstituted two or three times,” writes historian Paul Fussell. “We were in a staging area near Rheims, ready to be shipped back across the United States…[to] the Philippines. My division…was to take part in the invasion of Honshu…. I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rule platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was felt to be adequate for the next act. When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that ‘Operation Olympic’ would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all.”25
In Okinawa, Eugene Sledge and his regiment received the news of the bombs and the surrender “with quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief. …Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy, the survivors of the abyss sat hollow eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.”26
On August 15, when the Emperor spoke for the first time ever to his people, telling them the war was over, the American airmen in the Omori prisoner-of-war camp were going to work. “I didn’t hear it and wouldn’t have understood it anyway” recalls Hap Halloran. “The day the war ended for us was August 29, when the [Navy] came into Tokyo Bay.”
Evacuation of prisoners held in Japan was to begin after the representatives of the Japanese government formally signed the articles of surrender on September 2. But when Bull Halsey was presented with evidence that prisoners were still being brutally treated, he sent a rescue mission to Tokyo Bay on August 29. It was commanded by Harold Stassen, the future governor of Minnesota and presidential candidate. “We saw about six landing craft with American flags flying,” says POW Fiske Hanley. “It was the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen in my life.” Frank “Foo” Fujita, one of the few Japanese-Americans to be captured in the Pacific war, became so excited he jumped into the bay and swam out to meet them, along with about a dozen other prisoners.
“After I had made about forty yards, my strength left me and I started to sink. I was completely underwater but somehow managed to get my head up for one more breath…. The next thing I knew…the two largest hands ever created on earth…were pulling my frail 110 pounds out of the water. As the other landing craft picked up the rest of the swimmers, I lay on the deck too exhausted to move.
“As the boats pulled in the Omori docks, the whole camp was crowded at the little island’s edge, and from somewhere American, British, and Dutch flags appeared and were being wildly waved…. We [were] about to be the first POWs liberated from Japan.
“All the POWs in camp were whooping and yelling as the landing party came ashore…. [Then] the Japanese camp commander…came storming to the dock and walked up to the commodore [Stassen] and…shouted: ‘What are you doing here? The war is not over, officially. You must not do this!’”
Stassen was ready for him. “We are taking these prisoners of war out of here, starting right now! What’s more, you are to have every Allied prisoner in the Tokyo area right here by tomorrow morning so that we can take them too!”
Then, said Fiske Hanley, “the meanest-looking Marines I’ve seen in my life climbed off those boats and surrounded the camp. They loaded us onto those landing craft and took us out to a beautiful hospital ship, the Benevolence, and we were in heaven. We ate till it came out of our ears.” Hap Halloran shoved down eighteen Milky Way bars in two hours.27
“When I stepped on that hospital ship, all my senses were suddenly bombarded with new experiences,” recalls Halloran’s prison comrade, Robert Goldsworthy. “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.’ Then I took a big deep breath of free air.”28
That evening, all the ships of the liberation task force were lit, breaking the wartime procedure of blacking out ships at night. “It was a wonderful picture,” says one Marine, “with all the ships flying large battle flags both at the foretruck and the stern. In the background was snowcapped Mount Fuji.”29
During the next two weeks, more than 19,000 Allied prisoners were liberated. Freedom came for some prisoners a little earlier, when their Japanese guards capitulated. On the morning of August 15, Lester Tenney and other prisoners on the brink of death at Fukuoka Camp No. 17 were about to enter the coal mine when the guards told them to turn around and walk back to camp. The Japanese ordered everyone into the mess hall and passed out full Red Cross boxes. Everyone knew they were about to be freed. But when? Would it be that night? They were looking for a sign. Tenney, who spoke Japanese better than most of the other prisoners, was prodded to go out into the prison yard and greet one of the guards, without saluting or bowing. “I took the challenge. Out of the barracks I went, and I walked on the parade ground until I saw a guard. With one mighty heave of my hand, I waved at him and said, ‘Hello.’ He smiled at me, bowed, and said in English, ‘Hello.’…
“The war was over!”30
On August 31, the most famous POW of the war, General Jonathan Wainwright, the commander Douglas MacArthur had left in charge of Corregidor, arrived in Tokyo and was taken to the Grand Hotel, where he had an emotional reunion with Mac Arthur.
Wainwright had just been released from a Manchurian POW camp four days earlier. “I rose and started for the lobby,” MacArthur described that meeting in his memoirs, “but before I could reach it, the door swung open and there was Wainwright. He was haggard and aged. His uniform hung in folds on his flesh less form. He walked with difficulty and with the help of a cane. His eyes were sunken and there were pits in his cheeks. His hair was snow white and his skin looked like old shoe leather. He made a brave effort to smile as I took him in my arms, but when he tried to talk his voice wouldn’t come.
“For three years he had imagined himself in disgrace for having surrendered Corregidor. He believed he would never again be given an active command. This shocked me.” MacArthur embraced him and said, “Your old corps is yours when you want it.”31
GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR’S REUNION IN JAPAN WITH GENERAL JONATHAN WAINWRIGHT (NA/SC).
Two days later, a destroyer took Wainwright to the battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, flying the American flag that had flown over the Capitol building in Washington the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Standing at a place of honor in the center of the deck with General Sir Arthur K. Percival, who had surrendered the British forces in Singapore and spent the balance of the war in a prison camp, Wainwright watched MacArthur sign the instrument, of capitulation. MacArthur presented the first fountain pen he used to Wainwright, the second to Percival. After all the delegates signed the surrender document, the general, dressed in plain
suntans, like the other American officers, spoke: “Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.”32
ADMIRAL NIMITZ AND GENERAL MACARTHUR ON THE MISSOURI FOR THE JAPANESE SURRENDER (NA).
At that moment 462 silver B-29s filled the sky, flying low over the stately, slate-gray battleship. They made a long majestic turn and disappeared in the mists hiding Mount Fuji. Standing on the deck of the Benevolence, Hap Halloran looked up and cried tears of happiness.
As the big leather folders containing the surrender documents were gathered, a GI was heard to say: “Brother, I hope those are my discharge papers.”33
So the most destructive war in history came to an end. And it concluded, fittingly, in a holocaust that made it clear to every living man and woman that humanity could not survive another total war.
It was Douglas MacArthur, speaking by radio broadcast to the American people from the deck of the surrender ship, who uttered the first words of what everyone hoped would be a new era of peace.
“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way….
“We have had,” the general concluded, “our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.”34
*✶Even before the war was officially over, Japanese commanders of prison camps and bacteriological warfare experiments destroyed documentation of their villainy, making it difficult to prosecute and convict them. But a number of them received what they deserved at some fifty local military tribunals that were convened all over Asia, and later in the Soviet Union. The Allies made a distinction between “major” war criminals—military and political leaders involved in what was seen as a “conspiracy to wage wars of aggression,” beginning in Manchuria—and “minor” criminals, those charged with specific atrocities. In all, roughly 5,700 Japanese were indicted for these minor, or Class B and C, war crimes. Nine hundred and eighty-four convicted war criminals received death sentences (920 were actually executed) and approximately 3,500 were sentenced to prison terms. Many of those who committed some of the most heinous crimes were impossible to track down, and researchers and officials who were part of the notorious Unit 731 received secret immunity. The Americans, who controlled the trials, exempted them, including Dr. Ishii, from prosecution for turning over their research to U.S. Army and intelligence officials.
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 42