Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

by Max Hastings

THE WAR POLICIES of Chiang and Mao had this much in common: each sought to strengthen his own power base, rather than to assist in the defeat of the Japanese.

Communist forces developed a motivation, comradeship and sense of shared purpose quite unknown in Chiang Kai-shek’s army.

John Service, a U.S. diplomat who shared with John Paton Davies a growing respect for the Yan’an regime, met the Communist leaders in August. After years of contending with Chiang’s self-importance, pomposity and duplicity, Service was captivated by the charm, humour and apparent frankness of the Communists in general, and Mao Zedong in particular.

The choice for China was not between a corrupt, brutal, incompetent dictatorship and libertarian socialism. It lay between two absolutist systems, of which that of the Communists was incomparably more subtle and effective, possessed of wide appeal for peasants and intellectuals.

Americans, Thorne argues, are far less comfortable assessing movements and ideologies than categorising individuals. American policy in China represented a spectacular example of this proclivity.

MacArthur’s behaviour was markedly unimproved by his new responsibilities. Throughout the Okinawa campaign he delivered a stream of criticisms of its conduct, oblivious of the fact that he himself had done no better in the Philippines.

If Olympic took place, however, it would be directed by an officer whose military competence and even mental stability seemed increasingly questionable.

The “peace party” thought and spoke as if Japan could expect to be treated as an honourable member of the international community. There was no acknowledgement of the fact that, in Western eyes, the behaviour of the Japanese since Pearl Harbor, indeed since 1931, had placed their nation beyond the pale. Japan’s leaders wasted months asserting diplomatic positions founded upon the demands of their own self-esteem, together with supposed political justice. In reality, their only chance of modified terms derived from Allied fears that a host of men would have to die if an invasion of the homeland proved necessary.

An invasion of Manchuria by the Red Army offered the most obvious means of deflecting such a redeployment. Stalin’s masses could reprise what they were so spectacularly doing in Europe—saving the lives of Western Allied soldiers by expending those of Russians. As late as 6 August 1945, MacArthur told an off-the-record press briefing in Manila of his eagerness for the Soviets to invade Manchuria: “Every Russian killed is one less American who has to be.”

To destroy the Nazis, the Soviet Union had already contributed twenty-five times the human sacrifice made by all the Western Allies together. After months of equivocation, at Yalta Stalin presented his invoice for an eastern commitment. Moscow wanted from Japan the Kurile Islands and southern Sakhalin; from China, the lease of Port Arthur, access to Dalian as a free port, control of the southern Manchurian railway, and recognition of Russian suzerainty over Outer Mongolia.

Technological determinism is an outstanding feature of great wars. At a moment when armadas of Allied bombers had been destroying the cities of Germany and Japan for three years, killing civilians in hundreds of thousands, the notion of withholding a vastly more impressive means of fulfilling the same purpose scarcely occurred to those directing the Allied war effort. They were irritated, indeed exasperated, by intimations of personal scruple from scientists concerned with the weapon’s construction. As long as Hitler survived, the Manhattan team had striven unstintingly to build a bomb, haunted by fear that the Nazis might get there first. Once Germany was defeated, however, some scientists’ motivation faltered. Their doubts and apprehensions grew about the purposes to which their efforts might be turned.

Groves was bereft of tact, sensitivity, cultural awareness, and human sympathy for either the Japanese or the bevy of Nobel laureates whom he commanded. He harassed and goaded the scientists as if they were army engineers building a bridge. Yet his effectiveness demands the respect of history. His deputy, Col. Kenneth Nichols, described him as “the biggest sonofabitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable. He had an ego second to none…tireless energy, great self-confidence and ruthlessness. I hated his guts and so did everyone else, [but] if I was to have to do my part all over again, I would select Groves as boss.”

If it seems extraordinary that the architects of Pearl Harbor could be surprised by another nation’s duplicity, that the Japanese could suppose themselves to possess any negotiating hand of interest to Stalin, their behaviour was of a piece with the huge collective self-delusion which characterised Tokyo’s conduct in 1945.

the Japanese government wanted to end the war, but privately as well as publicly rejected unconditional surrender. Japan’s most notable pragmatist, Ambassador Sato in Moscow, vividly articulated in cables to Tokyo his conviction that nothing the Japanese government was minded to propose would prove acceptable to the Allies.

Tolstoy argues—in the context of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia—that great events possess an impetus of their own, independent of the will of national leaders and commanders. Had he lived through 1945, he would have judged the countdown to the dropping of the bombs a vivid demonstration of his thesis.

The Japanese continued to delude themselves that they had time to talk, time to probe and haggle with each other and with the Allies. They believed that their ability to extract a huge blood price from their enemy before succumbing represented a formidable bargaining chip. Instead, of course, this helped to undo them. It seems irrelevant to debate the merits of rival guesstimates for Olympic’s U.S. casualties—63,000, 193,000, a million. What was not in doubt was that invading Japan would involve a large loss of American lives, which nobody wished to accept. Blockade and firebombing had already created conditions in which invasion would probably be unnecessary. New means now promised a summary termination of Japan’s defiance, and perhaps also pre-emption of the Soviet onslaught.

Hitler set a standard of evil among those whom the Allies fought in the Second World War. Some historians, not all of them Japanese, argue that Japan’s leaders represented a significantly lesser baseness; and certainly not one which deserved the atomic bomb. Few of those Asians who experienced Japanese conquest, however, and knew of the millions of deaths which it encompassed, believed that Japan possessed any superior claim on Allied forbearance to that of Germany. Post-war critics of U.S. conduct in the weeks before Hiroshima seem to demand from America’s leaders moral and political generosity so far in advance of that displayed by their Japanese counterparts as to be fantastic, in the sixth year of a global war. Their essential thesis is that America should have spared its enemies from the human consequences of their own rulers’ blind folly; that those in Washington should have displayed a concern for the Japanese people much more enlightened than that of the Tokyo government.

Moscow had made no new demands that would further compromise Chinese or American interests. Stalin was not insisting upon a Soviet occupation zone in Japan, as he had intimated to Harry Hopkins that he would.

it is a matter of fact that when Stalin’s armies attacked in August, the Soviet leader held open the option of seizing Hokkaido, and almost certainly would have done so had Japanese resistance persisted.

Truman’s and Byrnes’s attitude was certainly ruthless, but it lacked neither realism nor statesmanship. They understood, as some people in the West did not yet understand, the depth of evil which Stalin’s Soviet Union represented.

Mokusatsu, silence in the face of unacceptable words or deeds, is among the principal behavioural tools of Japanese society.

Hirohito has so often been credited with a role as Japan’s principal peacemaker that it is important to emphasise his rejection of the Potsdam terms. If the emperor had intervened decisively at this point, rather than a fortnight later, all that followed might have been averted. As it was, this hesitant, inadequate divinity continued to straddle the fence, wanting peace yet still recoiling from acknowledgement of his nation’s defeat, and history took its course.

The bomb was only the foremost of many huge issues with which these mortal men, movingly conscious of their own limitations, strove to grapple.

The U.S. had already participated in bombing campaigns which killed around three-quarters of a million German and Japanese civilians, and to which public opinion had raised little objection. It is much easier to justify the decision to drop the atomic bombs than the continued fire-raising offensive of the Twentieth Air Force.

given Allied perceptions that if Hitler and his immediate following could be removed, Germany would quickly surrender, it is overwhelmingly likely that if an atomic bomb had been available a year earlier, it would have been dropped on Berlin. It would have seemed ridiculous to draw a moral distinction between massed attacks on German centres of population by the RAF and USAAF with conventional weapons, and the use of a single more ambitious device to terminate Europe’s agony.

From August 1945 onwards Truman and other contemporary apologists for the bomb advanced the simple argument, readily understood by the wartime generation of Americans, that it rendered redundant an invasion of Japan. It is now widely acknowledged that Olympic would almost certainly have been unnecessary. Japan was tottering and would soon have starved. Richard Frank, author of an outstanding modern study of the fall of the Japanese empire, goes further. He finds it unthinkable that the United States would have accepted the blood-cost of invading Kyushu, in light of radio intelligence about Japanese strength.

If America’s leaders found difficulty in comprehending the unprecedented force they were about to unleash, the Japanese were unlikely to show themselves more imaginative. More than that, the war party in Tokyo, which had crippled Japan’s feeble diplomatic gropings, was committed to acceptance of national annihilation rather than surrender. If LeMay’s achievement in killing 200,000 Japanese civilians and levelling most of the country’s major cities had not convinced the likes of General Anami that surrender was inevitable, there is no reason to suppose that a mere threat of atomic bombardment would have done so.

Japan had done nothing in China and South-East Asia throughout its occupation, or in the prison camps of its empire, to make any plausible moral claim upon terms less rigorous than those imposed upon Germany. Japan would certainly have used atomic weapons if it possessed them. The nation had gambled upon launching a ruthless war of conquest. The gamble had failed, and it was time to pay.

Japan bears overwhelming responsibility for what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because her leaders refused to acknowledge that their game was up.

The 8,900-pound device created temperatures at ground zero which reached 5,400 degrees and generated the explosive power of 12,500 tons of TNT. All but 6,000 of the city’s 76,000 buildings were destroyed by fire or blast. The Japanese afterwards claimed that around 20,000 military personnel and 110,000 civilians died immediately. Though no statistics are conclusive, this estimate is almost certainly exaggerated. Another guesstimate, around 70,000, seems more credible.

To the embarrassment even of many capitalists, the prospect of an end of hostilities caused the New York Stock Exchange to fall sharply. A correspondent of the London Sunday Times wrote: “It is always unedifying when moneyed interests are revealed as benefiting or believing themselves to benefit more from war than from peace.”

A British corporal of Fourteenth Army in Burma, George MacDonald Fraser, noted: “It is now widely held that the dropping of atomic bombs was unnecessary because the Japanese were ready to give in…I wish those who hold that view had been present to explain the position to the little bastard who came howling out of a thicket near the Sittang, full of spite and fury, in that first week of August. He was half-starved and near naked, and his only weapon was a bamboo stave, but he was in no mood to surrender.”

the extraordinary aspect of Japanese behaviour in the wake of the 6 August bombing was that the event seemed to do almost nothing to galvanise Japanese policy-making, to end the prevarication which was already responsible for so much death.

The Guandong Army’s commanders found themselves in the same predicament as the British in Malaya and the Americans in the Philippines in December 1941: struggling to defend wide fronts with weak forces and negligible air support. It was now the turn of Japan’s most cherished colony to suffer the fate which had befallen the West’s imperial possessions in Asia almost four years earlier.

As so often in Japan’s high command, however, evasion of unpalatable reality prevailed over rational analysis of probabilities.

Slim of Fourteenth Army was surely right when he observed that while Japan’s commanders were physically brave men, many were also moral cowards.

in those days the conduct of its leaders was extraordinary. They seemed to care nothing for the welfare of Japan’s people, everything for their perverted concept of personal honour and that of the institution to which they belonged.

Even had Japan chosen to reject the Byrnes note, it is most unlikely that an American invasion of the home islands would have been necessary. The Soviets were within days of reaching the Pacific coast and establishing themselves in the Kuriles. LeMay’s B-29s were preparing to launch a systematic assault on Japan’s transport network, against negligible opposition, which would quickly have reduced much of the population to starvation. Historians have expended much ink upon measuring the comparative influence of the atomic bombs against that of Soviet intervention in persuading Japan to surrender. This seems a sterile exercise, since it is plain that both played their parts. “For Japan’s civilian politicians,” asserts Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando, “the dropping of the atomic bombs was the last straw. For the Japanese army, it was the Russian invasion of Manchuria.”

Considering the plight of civilians and captives, dying in thousands daily under Japanese occupation, together with the casualties that would have been incurred had the Soviets been provoked into maintaining their advance across mainland China, almost any scenario suggests that far more people of many nationalities would have died in the course of even a few further weeks of war than were killed by the atomic bombs. Stalin would almost certainly have seized Hokkaido, with his usual indifference to losses. Robert Newman suggests that 250,000 deaths would have occurred in every further month the war continued. Even if this is excessive, it addresses a plausible range of numbers. Starvation and LeMay’s fire-raisers would have killed hundreds of thousands more Japanese by the late autumn of 1945. Such an assertion does not immediately render the detonations of the atomic bombs acceptable acts. It merely emphasises the fact that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by no means represented the worst outcome of the war for the Japanese people, far less for the world.

a critical, if unacknowledged, element in Japanese thinking was awareness that they had lost the chance of a “decisive battle for the homeland.” The hopes of the military were pinned upon exploiting an opportunity to defeat a U.S. amphibious assault. Now Japan faced devastation, starvation and probable Soviet invasion, without the need for America to expose its soldiers to the desperate defenders of Kyushu.

The emperor himself will never cut a sympathetic figure in Western eyes. Hirohito presided over a society which had brought misery upon many nations. If he was not a prime mover, throughout the war his preoccupation with the preservation of the imperial house caused him to treat Japan’s militarists as honourable men and legitimate arbiters of power, to applaud their successes and acquiesce in their excesses. Yet there was a redemptive quality about his conduct in those last days. Albeit belatedly, he displayed a courage and conviction which saved hundreds of thousands of lives. To a man of such instinctive diffidence, his role was entirely unwelcome, but he fulfilled it in a fashion which commands some respect.

Nothing so became MacArthur’s tenure of combat command as the manner in which he ended it. The general departed ashore, to begin at the age of sixty-five the most impressive phase of his life, as architect of Japan’s resurrection and redemption—also, indeed, of his own.

THE MOST CREDIBLE statistics suggest that 185,647 Japanese were killed in China between 1937 and 1941. The Imperial Army lost a further 1,140,429 dead between Pearl Harbor and August 1945, while the navy lost 414,879. At least 97,031 civilian dead were listed in Tokyo and a further 86,336 in other cities, but many more bombing casualties were unrecorded. Over 100,000 died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some 150,000 civilians are alleged to have perished on Okinawa, 10,000 on Saipan, though these latter figures are thought by modern Western scholars to have been exaggerated, perhaps as much as tenfold. Anything up to 250,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians died in Manchuria during the icy winter of 1945, after the war ended, along with many more who served as slave labourers for the Soviets in Siberia through the succeeding decade. Japan’s total war dead are estimated at 2.69 million, against 6 million Germans.

The U.S. Army, meanwhile, lost some 55,145 killed in the Pacific conflict, including 3,650 in South-East Asia, compared with around 143,000 in Europe and North Africa. The U.S. Navy lost 29,263 dead in the east, the Marines 19,163. About 30,000 British servicemen perished in the war against the Japanese,

The outcome of the Pacific conflict persuaded some Americans that they could win wars at relatively small human cost, by the application of their country’s boundless technological ingenuity and industrial resources. The lesson appeared to be that, if the U.S. possessed bases from which its warships and aircraft could strike at the land of an enemy, victories could be gained by the expenditure of mere treasure, and relatively little blood. Only in the course of succeeding decades did it become plain that Japan was a foe uniquely vulnerable to American naval and air power projection. Some modern U.S. historians assert that the pursuit of decisive victory is central to the American way of war. If true, this renders their country chronically vulnerable to disappointment. The 1950–53 Korean conflict proved only the first of many demonstrations that the comprehensive triumph achieved by the U.S. in the Second World War was a freak of history, representing no norm. Modern experience suggests that never again will overwhelming military, naval and air power suffice to fulfil American purposes abroad as effectively as it did in the Pacific war. Limited wars offer notable opportunities to belligerents of limited means. Only total war enabled a liberal democracy to exploit weapons of mass destruction. Even granted such circumstances, posterity has shown itself profoundly equivocal about America’s 1945 bombardment of Japan.

can be suggested that Japan would have surrendered not one day later had U.S. ground forces never advanced beyond their capture of the Marianas in the summer of 1944. It is superficially arguable, therefore, that Iwo Jima, Okinawa and MacArthur’s Philippines campaign contributed no more than did Slim’s victory in Burma to the final outcome.

It would have been politically as well as militarily unthinkable for large American and British forces to stand idle in the Pacific and South-East Asia, waiting upon the impact of hypothetical scientific, strategic and economic developments.

If the effects of nuclear attack had not been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is overwhelmingly likely that in the Cold War era, an American or Russian leader would have convinced himself that the use of atomic weapons could be justified. Korea in 1950 offers an obvious example, when some U.S. generals, above all MacArthur, favoured exploiting against China the advantages supposedly conferred by America’s nuclear arsenal. Such a point is irrelevant to the debate about whether the original decision in 1945 was valid, but is surely worthy of consideration more than six decades later.

Slim’s 1945 reconquest was among the most successful British campaigns of the war, reflecting the highest credit on its commander and his soldiers. But it represented a last convulsion of empire, rather than a convincing contribution to the defeat of Japan.

And so to MacArthur. Few today suppose that he ranks among the great commanders of history. Yet so prodigious were his theatrical powers, so remarkable was the achievement of his wartime publicity machine, that he remains the most famous figure of the Pacific war. More than forty years after the general accepted the Japanese surrender, Ronald Spector wrote of him: “Despite his undoubted qualities of leadership, he was unsuited by temperament, character, and judgment for the positions of high command which he occupied throughout the war.” MacArthur’s megalomania, disloyalty to his own national leadership, pettiness, contempt for intelligence, poor selection of staff and subordinates, refusal to acknowledge error and determination to shape national strategy to conform with his personal ambitions suggest that this verdict errs on the side of generosity. Nonetheless, it is essential also to recognise the charisma, intellect and self-conscious aspiration to nobility which enabled MacArthur at times to scale heights no ordinary commander could achieve, as he did at the Japanese surrender. As post-war ruler of Japan, he displayed a wisdom and magnanimity conspicuously absent from his tenure as supreme commander in the south-west Pacific.