Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

by Max Hastings

MacArthur had landed Sixth Army on the wrong island. It was fortunate that this American strategic error was partially redeemed by a matching Japanese one. Terauchi’s folly in compelling Yamashita to reinforce failure enabled Krueger’s formations to inflict heavy losses, to destroy units which would otherwise have been awaiting the Americans on Luzon.

Leyte proved a worse defeat than the Japanese need have suffered, a more substantial victory than MacArthur deserved.

There is no dispute—outside modern Japan, anyway—about the atrocities carried out by the Japanese in China, merely about their scale: for instance, Japanese historians make a plausible case that “only” 50,000 Chinese were killed in the 1937 Nanjing massacre, rather than the 300,000 claimed by such writers as Iris Chang. Yet the overall scale of slaughter was appalling. In 1941 the Japanese launched their notorious “Three All” offensive, explicitly named for its purpose to “Kill All, Burn All, Destroy All.” Several million Chinese died. The survivors were herded into “protected areas” where they were employed as slave labourers to build forts and pillboxes.

Rural areas feared the depredations of the Nationalist army at least as much as those of the Japanese. Peasants had a saying: “Bandits come and go. Soldiers come and stay.” Modern Chinese historians argue, however, that the fact that their own people inflicted atrocities upon each other was, and remains, a domestic matter of no rightful concern to foreigners; that nothing done by Chiang or Mao mitigates the crimes of the Japanese.

It was characteristic of the cultural contempt which China harboured towards other societies that even in the darkest days of the Japanese war, almost all Chinese retained a profound disdain for the Americans and British. Additionally, as Christopher Thorne has argued, the U.S. never satisfactorily resolved its purpose. Did it seek to help China win its struggle against the Japanese? To create a strong China? Or to support the regime of Chiang Kai-shek?

Just as in Europe Soviet soldiers were doing most of the dying necessary to destroy Nazism, Washington hoped that in Asia the expenditure of Chinese lives might save American ones.

Some American personnel were making fortunes running a black market in fuel and supplies. Even as Chinese people were dying of starvation, some Nationalist army officers sold food to the Japanese.

During the first week of February 1944 Lt. Budd, railhead officer at Kunming, dispatched 250 trucks for Kweiyang. Of this number 192 trucks failed to report and were either hijacked or stolen outright by Chinese drivers.

to imagine that Chiang Kai-shek could forsake absolutism and corruption was akin to inviting Stalin to rule without terror, Hitler without persecuting Jews.

After almost three years of herculean effort by the United States, the employment of a quarter of a million Americans on the Asian mainland, Washington was obliged to confront the fact that the Japanese could do as they chose in China; that the country was as much a shambles as it had been in 1942, save that thanks to American largesse the regime’s leader and principal supporters, together with a few U.S. officers, were incomparably richer.

The U.S. no longer deluded itself that Japan’s forces in China could be defeated by the Chinese. Washington thus turned to the only other power capable of doing so—the Soviet Union. Through the winter of 1944–45, with increasing urgency Washington solicited Russian participation in the war against Japan. Chiang believed that he had played his cards with brilliant skill, by preserving American support for his regime on his own terms, without conceding any scintilla of domestic reform. Yet the consequence would be a great Russian army’s descent upon Manchuria, with the endorsement of the United States.

Sixth Army asserted that there were 234,000 Japanese troops on Luzon. MacArthur preferred his personal estimate—152,000. Krueger’s officers were much more nearly correct. Nothing, however, including substantial Ultra intelligence, would persuade the commander-in-chief to believe that his forces would face important resistance. Herein lay the seeds of much distress to come.

His paranoia, however, had worsened. He attributed Washington’s supposed lack of support for his operations to “treason and sabotage.” He was an unremitting critic of Eisenhower’s campaign in Europe, and indeed of everything done by the supreme commander who once served under him as a colonel. When the U.S. Treasury forwarded a draft of a proposed advertisement promoting War Bond sales on which his own name appeared below Ike’s, he wrote angrily that unless he was listed before his former subordinate, he refused to feature at all. Later, in July 1945, he was enraged to discover that Eisenhower was briefed on the atomic bomb before himself. More seriously, his confidence in his chief of staff had been fatally weakened by the scandal about the presence of Sutherland’s Australian mistress at Tacloban. Sutherland kept his title, but for the Luzon campaign MacArthur relied increasingly on the counsel of Brig.-Gen. Courtney Whitney, an ambitious officer much given to bombast, neither liked nor respected by anyone else.

considering the later U.S. firebombing of Japan and decision to bomb Hiroshima, it is useful to recall that by the spring of 1945 the American nation knew what the Japanese had done in Manila. The killing of innocents clearly represented not the chance of war, nor unauthorised actions by wanton enemy soldiers, but an ethic of massacre at one with events in Nanjing in 1937, and with similar deeds across Asia. In the face of evidence from so many different times, places, units and circumstances, it became impossible for Japan’s leaders credibly to deny systematic inhumanity as gross as that of the Nazis.

visited MacArthur on 10 March and reported in some alarm to Roosevelt: “There are unmistakable evidences of an acute persecution complex at work. To hear some of the staff officers talk, one would think that the War Department, the State Department, the joint chiefs of staff—and, possibly, even the White House itself—are under the domination of ‘Communists and British Imperialists.’” Sherwood thought the atmosphere at SWPA headquarters profoundly unhealthy. While MacArthur’s demeanour became ever more autocratic, his interest in accepting responsibility for military operations in the Philippines diminished. The clearance of Luzon was a mess, because he and Krueger showed themselves far less competent commanders than was Yamashita.

catastrophe, but MacArthur’s obsession with seizing the city created the circumstances for it. The U.S. lost 8,140 men killed on Luzon. Around 200,000 Japanese died there, many of disease. If the exchange ran overwhelmingly in America’s favour, those same enemy forces could have gone nowhere and achieved nothing had the Americans contented themselves with their containment. SWPA’s supreme commander compounded his mistakes by embarking upon the reconquest of the entire Philippines Archipelago, even before Luzon had fallen. MacArthur presided over the largest ground campaign of America’s war in the Pacific in a fashion which satisfied his own ambitions more convincingly than the national purposes of his country.

Was the island worth the American blood sacrifice? Some historians highlight a simple statistic: more American aircrew landed safely on its airstrips in damaged or fuelless B-29s than Marines died in seizing it. This calculation of profit and loss, first offered after the battle to assuage public anger about the cost of taking Iwo Jima, ignores the obvious fact that, if the strips had not been there, fuel margins would have been increased, some aircraft would have reached the Marianas, some crews could have been rescued from the sea. Even if Iwo Jima had remained in Japanese hands, it could have contributed little further service to the homeland’s air defence. The Americans made no important use of its bases for offensive operations.

maritime losses brought the Japanese economy to the brink of collapse even before the USAAF’s bomber armadas began their work in earnest. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which was unlikely to reach conclusions biased in favour of the navy, declared in its 1946 report: “The war against shipping was the most decisive single factor in the collapse of the Japanese economy and logistic support of Japanese military and naval power. Submarines accounted for the majority of vessel sinkings.”

the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can only properly be understood against the background of the air campaign which preceded the nuclear explosions, killing substantially larger numbers of people before the grotesque nicknames of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” imposed themselves upon the consciousness of the world.

It therefore seemed all the more irksome that men were obliged to continue to die because the enemy declined to recognise the logic of his hopeless predicament.

In September 1942 the B-29 Superfortress, largest bomber the world had ever seen, made its maiden flight. This was the aircraft designated to wreak havoc upon Japan. Its size and sophistication, indeed the hubris of its very creation, represented monuments to American wealth and ingenuity. Each aircraft cost over half a million dollars, five times the price of an RAF Lancaster. The construction of a B-29 required 27,000 pounds of aluminium, over a thousand pounds of copper, 600,000 rivets, nine and a half miles of wiring, two miles of tubing. It was the first pressurised bomber in the world, with an operating radius of sixteen hundred miles, a crew of twelve and a battery of defensive armament.

The logistics were amazing, and appalling. Each B-29 sortie required 20 tons of fuel, munitions and supplies. These were carried to the Chinese bases by B-29 transports, each of which burnt 28 tons of fuel to shift a 4.5-ton payload. The shuttle was soon taken over by C-109 aircraft, to spare the bombers. Flying the Hump airlift to Kunming was one of the most dangerous and unpopular missions of the war, involving a cumulative loss of 450 aircraft. Crew efficiency and morale were notoriously low. Airmen obliged to bail out found themselves in some of the wildest country in the world, populated by tribesmen who sometimes spared their lives, but invariably seized their possessions. One crew walked 250 miles in twenty-nine days before reaching friendly territory.

Enemy action accounted for a third of B-29 losses; the remainder were technical or self-inflicted. On 14 December, before a mission against a Bangkok bridge, pilots questioned the risks of dropping mixed loads of five-hundred-and thousand-pound bombs, which seemed liable to overtake each other and collide in the air. They were overruled and threatened with court-martial if they did not fly. Over the target, bombs indeed exploded amid the American formations. Four aircraft were lost. On other occasions, gun blisters blew out, engine failures persisted. Aircrew morale plumbed new depths.

This experienced combat pilot found himself, like most of his comrades, bitterly dismayed by the experience of operating B-29s. “There is no getting around it,” he wrote in December, “we are all scared and scared plenty. This stuff of losing crews on every mission is a hard pill to swallow. It wouldn’t be quite as bad if our losses were just because of the enemy, however planes ditch out in the middle of the Pacific because of engine failure and other mechanical troubles. The thought of landing a $600,000 plane and twelve men on a rough ocean at night, a thousand miles from nowhere, makes men out of boys and puts gray hairs on the men…

After 1945, neither LeMay personally nor the air force as an institution welcomed the overwhelming evidence that Japanese industry was already being strangled to death by the American naval blockade when B-29 bombs began to fall upon it; that aerial bombardment in the last five months of war contributed little towards the destruction of Japan’s war-making powers, though much towards punishing the Japanese people for their nation’s aggression,

by the time the Twentieth Air Force achieved the strength and competence to inflict major damage on the industrial cities of the enemy, Japan’s war-making powers were in terminal decline from blockade.

Had LeMay’s force been instructed to spend the rest of the war tightening the blockade, it would almost certainly have made a more useful contribution than by continuing the incineration of cities.

On 1 June, a formation met a thunderstorm and violent turbulence, which inflicted a disaster greater than Japanese defences ever achieved: a B-29 tried to reverse course with its accompanying fighters, and met the following formation head-on. A shocking twenty-seven aircraft and twenty-four pilots were lost.

By August 1945 the Superfortresses had attacked sixty-six Japanese cities. Firebombing had made homeless a quarter of the nation’s urban population, and killed at least 300,000 people—all statistics are unreliable. The Twentieth Air Force had lost 414 aircraft on combat operations: 148 of these to enemy action, 151 to “operational causes,” 115 “unknown.” A further 87 were lost in training accidents. 2,822 aircrew were killed or missing, of whom 363 eventually returned from Japanese imprisonment. The $4 billion cost—double that of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb—paled in comparison with the $30 billion which the United States spent on European bomber operations, or with the $330 billion total cost of America’s war effort.

the U.S. in 1945 was a prisoner of great industrial decisions taken years earlier, in quite different strategic circumstances. In 1942, the commitment to build the B-29 long-range bomber was entirely rational. The programme reached technological maturity and large-scale production too late to make a decisive impact on the war. Yet it was asking far too much of the U.S., never mind of its senior airmen, to forgo the use of these aircraft, at a time when the enemy was still resisting fiercely, and killing many Americans. In the circumstances then prevailing—an essential caveat for any historian to emphasise—the B-29s were bound to be employed. When precision bombing failed, as continued to be the case even when attempted under LeMay’s direction in the spring of 1945, the cities of Japan were doomed to suffer the same fate as those of Germany. Rather than the will of commanders, it was the existence of a specific weapons system, the B-29 Superfortress, which impelled the incineration of several hundred thousand Japanese.

Neither was a cultured man. Their brutal choice of words, contempt for human suffering displayed during and after the war to justify their commands’ actions, taste sour, even foul, to later generations.

Relatively few successful warriors are sensitive men or congenial fireside companions. Most possess an elemental commitment of an intensity happily unusual in civilised societies. They must daily give orders which bring death upon their own people, as well as the enemy. It is understandable that generations reared in peace, in the privileged circumstances of our twenty-first-century lives, should feel a revulsion towards the personal characters of Harris and LeMay. Yet such men are useful, indeed indispensable, in a war of national survival. Not every successful warrior needs to be an Attila, but he is unlikely to be Chaucer’s “parfit gentil knight.”

gentleman soldier, was implacably hostile to bombing civilians. In a staff memorandum of June 1945, one of MacArthur’s closest aides, Brig. Bonner Fellers, described American air raids on Japan as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.” Whatever the general might have ordered LeMay to do, he would not have permitted him systematically to raze enemy cities.

The material damage inflicted upon Japanese industry by LeMay’s offensive was almost irrelevant, because blockade and raw-material starvation had already brought the economy to the brink of collapse. Many raids burnt out factories where production was already flagging or halted. Yet no nation could regard with indifference the destruction of a large proportion of its urban housing, whatever the protestations of the Japanese military to the contrary. It seems essential to acknowledge the psychological impact of the B-29 campaign. No human being of any culture could fail to be impressed, indeed awed, by such a display of the enemy’s might and his own nation’s impotence. It seems impossible to doubt that, when Japanese surrender eventually came, it was influenced in some degree by the U.S. bomber offensive which preceded and indeed followed Hiroshima. It remains unlikely that the Twentieth Air Force’s contribution justified its huge moral and material cost to the United States. It seems absurd, however, to deny its contribution to the collapse of Japan’s will to resist.

Australians’ theatre of war was overwhelmingly dominated by, and dependent upon, the United States. Their historic British mentor and protector had been found wanting in the hour of need. With notable abruptness, they embraced the United States. In the case of their womenfolk, this was not merely figurative. American servicemen, of whom a million staged through Australia, were delighted by the warmth of their welcome from Australian girls, to whom the war granted a new sexual freedom. U.S. Navy crews were amazed to perceive crowds of teenagers—“pogey-bait”—waving in frenzied welcome as their ships approached Sydney harbour.

As commander-in-chief of the Australian Army, Gen. Thomas Blamey inspired little confidence within his own society, and less outside it. Argument persists in Australia today about whether Blamey bears responsibility for some of the army’s worst wartime misfortunes, or merely faced difficulties which reflected the schisms besetting his nation. He was a conceited, corpulent, devious autocrat, sixty in 1944. Like most of those who served under him, he was a citizen soldier. He started life as a teacher and lay preacher, then found his way into the First World War through service in cadet and militia units. With the dramatic wartime expansion of the Australian Army, by 1918 he was a thirty-four-year-old brigadier, chief of staff to a corps commander. Between the wars he served as commissioner of the Victoria Police. In this role he earned an ugly reputation for corruption and politicking, which prompted his sacking in 1936. In a small world, however, this small man secured the appointment of army commander-in-chief in 1939, and kept it to the end.

The best that can be said for Blamey was that his government deserved the real responsibility for tolerating his weakness, incompetence and self-indulgence, when he provided a host of reasons to justify dismissal.

Just 4 percent of British and American POWs had died in German hands. Yet 27 percent—35,756 out of 132,134—of Western Allied prisoners lost their lives in Japanese captivity. The Chinese suffered in similar measure. Of 41,862 sent to become slave labourers in Japan, 2,872 died in China, 600 in ships on passage, 200 on the land journey, and 6,872 in their Japanese workplaces.

Of 130,000 Europeans interned in the Dutch East Indies, almost all civilians, 30,000 died, including 4,500 women and 2,300 children. Of 300,000 Javanese, Tamils, Burmans and Chinese sent to work on the Burma–Siam railway, 60,000 perished, likewise a quarter of the 60,000 Western Allied prisoners. There seemed no limit to Japanese inhumanity. When a cholera epidemic struck Tamil railway workers at Nieke in June 1943, a barracks containing 250 infected men, women and children was simply torched.

It is thus hard to dispute that the Japanese maltreated captives as a matter of policy, not necessity. They flaunted the cultural contempt with which their soldiers were taught to regard inferiors of their own society, never mind enemies who preferred captivity to death. A people who adopt a code which rejects the concept of mercy towards the weak and afflicted seem to place themselves outside the pale of civilisation. The casual sadism of the Japanese towards their prisoners was so widespread, indeed almost universal, that it must be considered institutional. There were so many cases of arbitrary beheadings, clubbings and bayonetings in different parts of the empire that it is impossible to dismiss these as unauthorised initiatives by individual officers and men. The indifference which the Japanese navy showed towards prisoners in its charge who found themselves struggling in the sea after their ships sank was shameful by any standard.

Many captured American airmen were beheaded, not only in the last days of the war, but even in the period immediately following the Japanese surrender.

Any society which can indulge such actions, whether or not as alleged acts of retribution, has lost its moral compass. Much Japanese behaviour reflected the bitterness of former victors about finding their own military fortunes in eclipse, becoming the bombed instead of the bombers. More than sixty years later, there still seems no acceptable excuse. The Japanese, having started the war, waged it with such savagery towards the innocent and impotent that it is easy to understand the rage which filled Allied hearts in 1945, when all was revealed.

War is inherently inhumane, but the Japanese practiced extraordinary refinements of inhumanity in the treatment of those thrown upon their mercy.

in Tokyo, the defence of Okinawa was deemed vital to Japan’s strategy for achieving a negotiated peace. If the U.S. could be made to pay dearly enough for winning a single offshore island, reasoned the nation’s leaders and indeed its emperor, Washington would conclude that the price of invading Kyushu and Honshu was too great to be borne. They were correct in their analysis, but utterly deluded about its implications.

No vessel of the Japanese navy carried rafts or lifebelts, for such accessories might suggest that it was desirable to survive defeat.

When TF57 departed, it had completed just eleven air-strike days, dropping 546 tons of bombs and firing 632 rockets. It claimed 57 enemy aircraft destroyed, for the loss of 203: 32 to suicide attacks; 30 in a hangar fire; 33 to enemy flak or fighters; 61 in deck landing accidents; and 47 to “other causes.” It was a sorry story, indeed one of the most inglorious episodes of the Royal Navy’s wartime history. The misfortunes of the fleet reflected the fact that Britain, after almost six years of war, was simply too poor and too exhausted to sustain such a force alongside the United States armada.

OKINAWA was declared secure on 22 June, eighty-two days after the landings of Buckner’s assault force. The U.S. Navy had lost 4,907 men killed, the army 4,675, the Marines 2,928. Another 36,613 men had been wounded ashore, over 8,000 at sea. A further 36,000 soldiers and Marines became non-battle casualties, many of them combat-fatigue cases.

The only tactical option which Buckner never explored, and which might have enabled his forces to prevail more quickly, was that of launching attacks in darkness. The difficulty, however, is that night operations demand exceptionally high motivation and tactical skills, to prevent those carrying them out from simply disappearing, “going to ground,” rather than pressing home an assault. It is doubtful that Tenth Army possessed such qualities.

The prospect of invading Kyushu and Honshu in the face of Japanese forces many times greater than those on Okinawa, and presumably imbued with the same fighting spirit, filled those responsible with dismay. At the end of June 1945, staff planners assumed that Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, would take place four months thence. To the U.S. chiefs of staff, however, any alternative which averted such necessity would be deemed welcome.

If Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were less than effective on the battlefield, Mao Zedong’s guerrillas lacked either the will or the combat power to do more than irritate the Japanese. By