Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

ON JULY 26, THE POTSDAM DECLARATION was released to the global press by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China. It demanded the immediate and unconditional surrender of Japanese armed forces, and warned that refusal would result in the “utter devastation” of the Japanese homeland: “Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.”107 Japan would never again be permitted to embark on a career of foreign conquest. The influence of the militarist caste would be completely and permanently eliminated. War crimes would be prosecuted in international tribunals. All foreign territories would be given up, and Japanese sovereignty would be forever limited to the home islands. Its forces overseas would be disarmed and permitted to return home in peace. The Allies would occupy “points in Japanese territory” for as long as necessary to ensure that the “self-willed militaristic advisers” were ousted and the military demobilized. Industry would be permitted to recover, and the economy would have access to international trade. Contrary to the propaganda disseminated by the Japanese regime, said the statement, “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation,” and a peaceful and responsible government would be instituted “in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”

“I think that the joint statement is a rehash of the Cairo declaration. The government does not think that it has serious value. We can only ignore it.

We will do our utmost to complete the war to the bitter end.”

that the Japanese ruling group was deadlocked, and the hardline “fight on” faction remained strong enough to arrest any move toward surrender.

The largest air raid of the war occurred on August 1, 1945, when 853 B-29s dropped more 6,486 tons of incendiaries, precision bombs, and aerial mines on cities and waterways throughout western Japan.

At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan.

After the war, the USSBS concluded that the “shot-calling” leaflets had been “one of the most spectacular moves in psychological warfare.”116 They had dramatized the powerlessness of Japan’s military and air forces, convincing many ordinary Japanese that defeat was inevitable.

Paul W. Tibbets Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel, led the group.

The accidents dramatized the necessity of leaving the atomic bombs unassembled until the planes carrying them were safely aloft. That meant sending assembly teams up with the aircrews.

August 6 began with a midnight briefing in a heavily guarded Quonset hut,

At 8:15 a.m., the Enola Gay’s bomb bay doors opened, and Little Boy’s restraining hook was retracted back into its slot. Ferebee told Tibbets, “Bomb away”

Joe Stiborik, a member of the Enola Gay’s crew, later recalled that everyone aboard remained almost completely silent during the long flight home. “I was dumbfounded,” he said. “It was just too much to express in words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to bring an end to the war, and we tried to look at it that way.”

An all-clear signal had sounded at 8:00 a.m.

Little Boy exploded at 8:16 a.m., 1,870 feet above the ground, only 550 feet wide of its aiming point. The nuclear chain reaction it triggered created a core temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius, igniting the air around it to a diameter of nearly a kilometer. The fireball engulfed the center of the city, vaporizing about 20,000 people on the ground.

The initial shockwave raced away from the epicenter at greater than the speed of sound, some 984 miles per hour.

Molotov took a page out of a folder on his desk and began reading the Soviet declaration of war against Japan,

The Soviet Union would consider itself at war with Japan on the following day, August 9, 1945.

Working in closely guarded secrecy for the past several months, the Soviets had prepared one of the largest and most overpowering ground offensives in history.

Japanese intelligence had failed to detect any sign of these vast preparations and troop movements.

Superb execution of those plans produced victory in only two weeks of combat.”

Japanese instrument of surrender aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

The Russian declaration of war, delivered to the Japanese precisely one hour before the planned attack in Manchuria,

Moscow’s sudden declaration of war extinguished their last hope of a negotiated armistice that would preserve some vestige of Japanese sovereignty.

Evidently, Sakomizu led the SWDC hardliners to believe that they would simply be presenting their views to Hirohito. Had they suspected that the emperor would rule directly to break the stalemate, they could have withheld their signatures and the meeting would not have been possible.

He turned to face the throne. “I propose, therefore, to seek the imperial guidance and substitute it for the decision of this conference.”

In its future postwar incarnation, the kokutai would be stripped of its traditional military carapace. What remained would be a more purely religious model based upon State Shinto and the continuity of the imperial ancestral line.

Pursuant to the emperor’s sacred decision, the army and navy would be not only disarmed and demobilized but actually extirpated.

During the final five days of the Pacific War, the political situation in Tokyo was explosive.

Anami informed overseas army headquarters that truce negotiations were underway, but until they bore fruit, the troops must fight on “even in the face of complete annihilation.”73

“it was a great importance to get the homeland into our hands before the Russians could put in any substantial claim to occupy and help rule it.”

A brainstorm by Jim Forrestal solved the impasse. The Allies need not accept or reject the Japanese proviso at all, he said; they could simply make an “affirmative statement” setting out their views on the emperor’s subordinate status. Such a statement would ignore the Japanese condition while implicitly reassuring the Japanese that Hirohito would be left on his throne.

“From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers, who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.” As for the future form of the Japanese government, it would be established “by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”

The army ministry at Ichigaya was a volcano. Rebellion was brewing among the younger radical officers. They spoke openly of a coup d’état.

it was not enough to have the emperor decide for surrender; it was necessary that the entire government, including the army, fall in line behind Hirohito’s decision.

The Japanese refer to the attempted coup d’état on the last night of the Second World War as the “Kyuˉjō Incident.

Both the coup plotters and the authorities knew that once the emperor’s voice went across the airwaves, there would be no turning back, and no revolt could possibly succeed.

he ordered the Hellcat and Corsair pilots to “investigate and shoot down all snoopers—not vindictively, but in a friendly sort of way.”9 Halsey’s wariness was well-founded. Twenty minutes later, radar scopes detected inbound bogeys. The combat air patrol and picket destroyers shot down eight Japanese warplanes during the next several hours.

No one could say whether the rank and file of the Japanese army and navy would obey the emperor’s surrender edict.

Demonstrations and mass suicides took place on the plaza outside the Imperial Palace.

The formal signing of the Instrument of Surrender would take place aboard the Third Fleet flagship Missouri, the ship christened by President Truman’s daughter and named for his native state.

As Admiral Nimitz came aboard, Halsey’s four-star pennant was hauled down from the masthead, and Nimitz’s five stars were broken out.

and no one wanted to risk offending MacArthur’s thin-skinned staff.

General Umezu and the other Japanese officers saluted, but the Americans did not reciprocate.

Kase saw rows of small Rising Sun flags, each representing a Japanese plane destroyed by the ship’s antiaircraft guns.

The Japanese stood waiting for four minutes, but the interval seemed an eternity.

“I felt them sink into my body with a sharp physical pain.

Never had I realized that staring eyes could hurt so much.”

uniform from that of any unranked GI.”48 The well-worn, unadorned khaki made a striking contrast to the colorful finery worn by several of the Allied signatories who stood behind him.

“The representatives of the Imperial Japanese Government and of the Imperial Japanese Staff will now come forward and sign.”

Finally MacArthur turned to Sutherland and said tersely, “Sutherland, show him where to sign.”52 Sutherland put his finger down on the line over the foreign minister’s name. Shigemitsu glanced up at Kase, who checked his watch and said that it was 9:04. With a few strokes of the pen, the foreign minister signed his name in kanji and added the time. With that, the Second World War was formally ended. When Shigemitsu