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

by Ian W. Toll

The western attack on the Transbaikal Front would require Red Army forces under Marshal R. Y. Malinovsky to cross arduous desert and mountain terrain, the Gobi Desert and the Altai Mountains, and to penetrate quickly into the heart of Manchuria to seize Mukden (now Shenyang). From the east, the First Far Eastern Front, commanded by Marshal K. A. Meretskov, would cross the Lesser Khingan mountain range and seize the city of Changchun, and then pour into northern Korea. The Second Far Eastern Front would provide support to the two wings while advancing into Manchuria from the north. The total number of Red Army troops involved in the operation was about 1.5 million, more than double the number of Japanese troops in the region—and the Soviet troops were mechanized. The Red Army, bloodied and victorious on the Eastern Front, was at its peak strength and efficiency—manned by veterans at all ranks, lavishly equipped, and superbly led. As one American military analyst has written: “Soviet plans were as innovative as any in the war. Superb execution of those plans produced victory in only two weeks of combat.”

Although the Soviet plan was called the “Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation,” it included auxiliary operations to occupy northern Korea, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, and the Kurile Islands. An amphibious landing in the Kuriles would commence one day after Japan’s surrender on August 15, and Red Army forces would quickly seize the rest of the chain, with offensive operations continuing even after Soviet representatives had accepted the Japanese instrument of surrender aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Stalin had also directed that contingency plans be drawn up to seize Hokkaido.

the Japanese surrender had been delayed by even a few weeks, Japan’s northern island might have passed forty-five years on ...

As reports came in from Manchuria, it was soon clear that the Red Army was attacking on three fronts simultaneously, with huge armored and mechanized columns. The army that had overpowered the German Wehrmacht now appeared to be turning its full fury on the depleted Kwantung Army. Japanese soldiers fought with their customary tenacity and courage, but they were overmatched in every respect: troop numbers, tanks, air power, logistics, and mobility.

Hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner by the Russians, many to be held as forced laborers in Siberia for years after the close of hostilities.

Ikeda replied, “The Kwantung Army is hopeless.” The once-elite army had been stripped of its best troops, equipment, and munitions to reinforce Formosa, the homeland, and other Pacific battlefields. Now it was merely a “hollow shell” of its former self. Suzuki let out a deep sigh at these words. “Is the Kwantung Army that weak?” he asked. “Then the game is up.” “The greater the delay in making the final decision, the worse the situation will be for us,” said Ikeda. To which Suzuki replied, “Absolutely correct.”

Now, the timing of Japan’s surrender would have consequences for the Soviet role in the postwar occupation. Sumihisa Ikeda had observed in his conversation with Prime Minister Suzuki, “The greater the delay in making the final decision, the worse the situation will be for us.” He meant that the Japanese now faced a quandary in which the longer they took to acknowledge the necessity of surrender, the greater the risk that the Soviet Union would claim a role in governing Japan. Many in the regime feared the growth of communist influence in Japan even more than the prospect of surrendering to the Western democracies.

Yonai remarked to a colleague at the navy ministry that the bombing of Hiroshima and the Soviet entry into the war were in a sense a “godsend,” because they had created a crisis that might be used to break the deadlock on the SWDC, and because they provided the army with a face-saving way to accept defeat.

WHILE THE SOVIET ATTACK was getting underway, the second atomic bomb was being prepared at the 509th Composite Group compound on Tinian, in a cinderblock warehouse off the flight line. “Fat Man” was a big bomb, worthy of its name.

The strike plane, Bockscar, was backed over the pit. Its bomb doors opened. With great care, the men hoisted the bomb into the plane and secured it. It was a snug fit.

Radioman Abe Spitzer of The Great Artiste recorded his sense of dismay: “There was no need for more missions, more bombs, more fear and more dying. Good God, any fool could see that.”

At various points during the Bockscar’s nineteen-hour odyssey, many of the crew apparently despaired of surviving, assuming that their airplane was going to crash or ditch at sea—and the commanders on Tinian were left wondering whether the strike plane with its precious cargo had already gone down. Bockscar survived only by making a wild emergency landing on Okinawa, engines running on fumes, where it nearly took out a row of parked B-24s. Many of these issues did not come to light until decades later. When they did, acrimonious charges were exchanged in print between various participants, including Tibbets and Sweeney.

At 77 tons, Bockscar was 30 percent heavier than the maximum weight recommended by Boeing. With

St. Elmo’s fire.

In Bockscar, there was no elaborate process to arm Fat Man, as there had been with Little Boy on the previous mission. The plutonium implosion lensing system was so complex that it had to be set up prior to the bomb’s being loaded onto the plane. Therefore, Captain Frederick L. Ashworth of the navy, the mission’s chief weaponeer, only had to climb into the Bockscar’s bomb bay, remove the green safety plugs, and insert the red live plugs. Now the weapon was armed.

For all the careful preparations on Tinian, however, something was amiss. At about seven, Ashworth and his assistant noted a blinking red light that should not have been on. The light began blinking faster. For a moment they panicked, believing that the bomb might be on the verge of detonating in flight, with unfavorable consequences for the Bockscar and its crew. Working quickly, with adrenaline surging, they unrolled the bomb’s blueprints and studied the circuitry. Then they removed the outer casing and examined the switches. Bizarrely, given the care apparently practiced by the technicians on the ground, two had been set in the wrong positions. They reset the switches, and the warning light went out. The two men replaced the casing, and did not breathe a word of what had happened until decades later.

Sweeney made the controversial decision to keep waiting. Another twenty-five minutes went by; still no sign of the missing plane. Later, it was discovered that The Big Stink was at 39,000 feet, the wrong altitude.

As the two Superfortresses arrived over Kokura, the city was shrouded in smoke and haze. Peering down through the Plexiglas nose section, the crew could identify certain landmarks—but the Kokura Arsenal, the designated aiming point, was obscured. Fires were burning in nearby Yawata, which had been hit by a conventional bombing raid the previous day, and brown smoke had drifted over Kokura. Additional smoke was created by a tar-burning operation at a local steel foundry—a civil defense measure intended to obscure visibility from the air.49 The city’s antiaircraft batteries opened fire on the Bockscar and The Great Artiste shortly after their arrival. At first, the flak bursts were low, but they crept steadily higher as the two planes circled at 30,000 feet. The 509th Composite Group had been ordered to use visual bombing, meaning that the bombardier was to identify the aiming point through his Norden bombsight before releasing the weapon. Sweeney banked around three times, making three successive bomb runs. Each time the bombardier stated that he could not see the aiming point. The antiaircraft bursts were creeping steadily closer.

Tension rose in the cockpits of both airplanes. Many of the airmen, according to their later accounts, thought the mission was likely to fail, possibly with the loss of both planes.

Although poor visibility was a notorious problem over Japan, they did not have authority to employ radar bombing. Given that pinpoint accuracy was hardly needed for an atomic bomb, the oversight seems inexplicable.

After an hour over Kokura, Sweeney decided to divert to the secondary target. He banked south and asked his navigator for a course heading to Nagasaki. While making the turn, according to Captain Ashworth, the Bockscar and The Great Artiste nearly collided. Then Sweeney’s elbow inadvertently brushed the cockpit selector button which

It took only twenty minutes to complete the 100-mile flight to Nagasaki. Bockscar arrived over the city at 11:50 a.m., more than two hours later than the planned drop time. The airplane had been in the air for more than eight hours, and its fuel reserve was near the point of no return. Looking down, Sweeney and his copilots saw with dismay that Nagasaki was fairly socked in, with “ 80 to 90% cumulus clouds at 6,000 to 8,000 feet.”51 The plane did not have fuel for more than a single bomb run, but the bombardier could not see the aiming point, the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works. In desperation, Sweeney said that he would authorize a radar drop on his own authority. The alternative was to dump the bomb into the ocean. But as the Bockscar entered the bomb run, the bombardier suddenly shouted that he had a visual fix: “I got it! I got it!” Forty-five seconds later, Fat Man fell from Bockscar’s bomb bay, and Sweeney banked hard to the right to evade. The Great Artiste followed.

The two planes circled the explosion, snapping photos and rolling cameras. As the mushroom cap spread, it appeared that Bockscar might be too close, and would be engulfed by the cloud. A member of the crew shouted: “The mushroom cloud is coming toward us!”54 Sweeney executed a second sharp right turn, away from the explosion. For a few breathless minutes the aircrewmen watched the expanding cloud in dread. The Bockscar cleared the hazard, but the maneuver burned additional fuel that could hardly be spared.

The bomb was about three-quarters of a mile off target, northwest of the planned aiming point, but it still managed to do the job it had been intended to do. Exploding at the midpoint between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south, and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works in the north, the bomb demolished both factories. Because the local press had not yet reported that an atomic bomb had hit Hiroshima, many residents were not prepared for the possibility that one or two B-29s could destroy a city. When the two planes winged in from the north at high altitude, some ignored the air raid sirens and remained where they were standing, watching the intruders as they soared overhead.

The horrors of Nagasaki faithfully replicated those in Hiroshima three days earlier. Those who had taken shelter emerged afterward to find a dystopian hellscape, the sun blotted out and fires advancing, the terrain reshaped and unrecognizable. As in Hiroshima, the cloud of dust and smoke overhead eclipsed the sun, and the scene was suffused in a macabre reddish glow. The region around ground zero was made up mostly of smaller wooden dwellings of traditional Japanese architecture, and they had been almost entirely flattened, vaporized, or burned away.

As in Hiroshima, survivors instinctively headed for the river—in this instance, the Urakami River. Thousands clustered along its banks and plunged into its water, hoping to soothe their wounds or take a drink. Soon the river was a great floating mortuary, and the ebb tide carried the mass of bodies down to the harbor and out to sea. About an hour after the blast came the same hideous rain that had fallen on Hiroshima—strangely large globules of sticky black paste, hard and heavy enough to cause physical pain as it fell on people caught out in the open.

Fat Man had fallen only half a mile from Urakami Cathedral, the largest and most famous church in Japan. The great stone edifice was almost completely leveled; only a few partial walls and one of the two bell towers stood among the rubble. The surrounding residential district was wiped out. For four centuries, since the arrival of the first Spanish and Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, the coastal region around Nagasaki had been a beachhead for Japanese Christianity. Since about 1700, the Urakami Valley had been the epicenter of this small but resilient community of faith, which had survived repeated campaigns of persecution, often by worshipping in secret. An estimated 10,000 Japanese Christians died in the atomic blast, or succumbed to their wounds soon afterward.

Unlike Hiroshima, which occupied a flat alluvial plain, Nagasaki was divided by hills and ridges. The uneven terrain shielded outlying districts of the city from the worst effects of the bomb. A steep ridgeline west of Urakami Valley absorbed most of the blast wave and radiation and largely spared the rest of Nagasaki. The hills facing ground zero were scorched, with most of the structures and vegetation burned away, giving them the appearance (said one witness) of a “premature autumn.”57 But on the other side of the ridge, one found another world, where the grass and trees were still green and most of the buildings appeared undamaged.

As surveyors collected data from both atomic bomb sites, it was soon clear that the Nagasaki bomb had packed a bigger punch. Fat Man’s yield was about 30 percent greater than Little Boy’s, and the bowl-shaped topography of the Urakami Valley had amplified the force of the explosion. The second bomb had done considerably more damage to comparable structures at a comparable distance from the hypocenter.58 As in Hiroshima, precise casualty figures were hard to pin down. It is believed that 40,000 to 75,000 residents of Nagasaki were killed on August 9 or shortly thereafter, with another 70,000 dead by the end of 1945.

The Missouri anchored off the Miura Peninsula, near the historic coastal town of Kamakura. Mount Fuji loomed to the west, just 40 miles away.

For the carrier air groups, the first days of peace were as busy as any they had experienced during the war. Between August 16 and September 2, Task Force 38 pilots flew a total of 7,726 sorties, more than in any comparable period of the war.21 Carrier planes dropped leaflets on Allied POW camps, urging the prisoners to remain in the vicinity of their camps until Allied personnel could reach them. “The end is near,” one such leaflet stated. “Do not be disheartened. We are thinking of you. Plans are underway to assist you at the earliest possible moment.”22 Relief parcels containing food, clothing, medicine, and cigarettes were dropped by parachute. In Tokyo Bay, a number of prisoners actually made their way to the waterfront and began shouting and signaling to U.S. patrol vessels.

Mick Carney, to whom Tozuka surrendered with a deep bow, found the situation disorienting, even alarming: “Little kids in the street made the V sign at us. How do you interpret this thing?” He found the friendly attitude of the Japanese “scarier than if we’d found a sullen or resistant attitude. . . . The thing was weird.”25

Bomb damage was evident everywhere at Yokosuka, and many of the facilities were filthy. A marine officer recalled, “They had evidently given up; the floors in the barracks had not been scrubbed in months, they were half an inch or an inch deep in mud. The facilities were in terrible conditions. The cesspools were emptied daily and the waste matter carried away in wooden carts and oversized buckets, all of which leaked. We had swarms of flies in the streets, in the barracks, in the mess halls, and it took us several months to renovate the sewage system to clean up this place. I was worried about the health of the men.”26 When Admiral Halsey went ashore later that afternoon, he found the officers’ club “overrun with rats of an extraordinary size and character.”

The airlift into Atsugi commenced on August 28, when advance elements of the 11th Airborne Division landed in the first C-54 transports. They were greeted cordially by the Japanese staff, with salutes and handshakes, and escorted to barracks recently occupied by kamikaze pilots, which had been carefully cleaned and prepared for their arrival. They were offered a fresh-cooked meal served in the mess hall. By August 30, more than three hundred C-54 Skymasters were shuttling continuously between Okinawa and Atsugi, a flight of 980 miles. They landed at Atsugi at the rate of about twenty per hour, or one every three minutes. Task Force 38 carrier planes provided fighter escort along the route.

The Bataan flew over the waist of the Miura Peninsula, low enough that the great bronze Buddha at Kamakura could be seen from the windows. Then it made a wide turn over Tokyo Bay, providing a fine view of the Third Fleet at anchor.

MacArthur would not carry a sidearm for his entire six-year stint in occupied Japan. General Kenney, MacArthur’s air commander, said that he realized only in retrospect that the gesture was a masterstroke of psychology, because “it made a tremendous impression on the Japs to see us walking around in their country unarmed and simply with utter disregard of danger from the nation of 70 million people we had defeated. To them it meant that there was no doubt about it. They had lost.”29

Thousands of armed Japanese troops lined the roadway, at intervals of about two meters, facing outward with their backs to the road in the “present arms” position. This, the Americans learned, was a gesture of respect.

Later, in the hotel lobby, MacArthur was reunited with General Jonathan M. Wainwright, who had been left behind as commanding officer on Corregidor in March 1942, and had surrendered the island to the Japanese in May 1942. Wainwright had been held at a camp in Manchuria, along with other senior officers including British general A. E. Percival, who had surrendered Singapore in February 1942. Both officers were down to skin and bones, and their appearance greatly angered the Allies.

The Japanese authorities had petitioned MacArthur to delay the American entrance into the capital by another week, in order to provide sufficient time to disarm the troops in the area, and he had agreed.36

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 he stepped aboard, a second five-star triangular flag was unfurled at the masthead, at exactly the same height as Nimitz’s pennant. This arrangement was unprecedented. Naval protocol dictated that only one pennant should fly on a warship at any time—for the senior admiral on board—but this was an unprecedented day, and no one wanted to risk offending MacArthur’s thin-skinned staff.

Mick Carney noticed that MacArthur was friendly and familiar with Halsey, whom he addressed as “Bull,” but somewhat colder and more formal toward Nimitz.

As the participants took their places, one correspondent noted that there were more three- and four-star American generals and admirals standing on the little veranda deck than the United States had ever commissioned prior to the Second World War. Many of the navy’s leading figures of the Pacific War were present, including Turner, McCain, Lockwood, Radford, Bogan, Towers, the two Shermans, and the two Spragues—but notably lacking Spruance and Mitscher, whom Nimitz had asked to stay away, in case a well-timed kamikaze attack should decapitate the high command at one stroke. The Marine Corps was represented by Lieutenant General Geiger and two brigadiers. Representing the U.S. Army and USAAF, standing in ranks with their backs to the great 16-inch gun turret, was a khaki phalanx whose first row included Generals Krueger, Eichelberger, Kenney, Spaatz, Stilwell, and Richardson. General Sutherland, MacArthur’s deputy, stood with the emaciated former POWs Wainwright and Percival, who would stand directly behind MacArthur as he signed the surrender document.

the Japanese delegates were transferred into a motor launch to be taken to the Missouri. As they approached the great battleship, they looked up and saw rows of American sailors lining the rails, gazing down at them in stony silence. The Japanese came aboard at the starboard gangway, one by one, under the hard gaze of a row of armed marines.

On a bulkhead by the captain’s cabin, prominently displayed in a glass case, was the thirty-one-star American flag that Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” had flown ninety-two years earlier, when they had anchored in these same waters.

The foreign minister removed his hat and gloves and placed them on the table. A moment of confusion followed, as he studied the two copies of the surrender agreement, unsure of where to sign. Shigemitsu read English perfectly, so there did not appear to be any reason for the delay. Halsey suspected that he was stalling, and suppressed the urge to slap the foreign minister and shout “Sign, damn you! Sign!”51 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.

As the Japanese descended the gangway to the waiting motor launch, the drone of aircraft engines was heard in the south. They looked up as the drone gradually ascended to a roar. A hundred B-29s thundered overhead at low altitude, under the cloud ceiling, in precisely spaced formation. Then came an armada of 450 carrier planes, Hellcats, and Corsairs, from Task Force 38. They approached from the east, crossing the track of the B-29s at right angles, and continued over Yokohama and Tokyo. The carrier planes were stacked from about 200 to 400 feet, nearly masthead altitude, lower than the Superforts. The flyover lasted for a full thirty minutes. The engines of the low-flying warplanes were so loud that men on the deck of the Missouri had to raise their voices to make themselves heard. Mick Carney called it “a terrific show, awe-inspiring,” and added that the massed aerial parade “would certainly have given pause to anybody that wanted to start anything again.”56