EIGHTEEN
ALTHOUGH JAPAN and Nazi Germany never significantly collaborated, the collapse of Hitler’s regime plainly hastened the defeat of Japan, because it enabled the Allies to transfer significant, though not unlimited, resources to completing the destruction of Hirohito’s shrinking empire. In the last weeks of the European war, Japanese emissaries in Berlin pestered leading Nazis in the hope of salvaging something for themselves from the wreckage of Hitler’s arsenal. After considerable difficulties, naval representative Vice-Admiral Katsuo Abe secured an interview with Admiral Karl Dönitz on 15 April 1945, and another with Keitel and Ribbentrop on the seventeenth. He begged that the surviving German fleet, and especially its U-boats, should be sent to Japan. The Germans curtly informed Abe that only three of their submarines had sufficient range to make the voyage. Hitler refused to grant the admiral an audience. Ribbentrop explained to the Japanese that the Führer was “extremely busy797.” Though a handful of U-boats sought refuge in Japan’s East Indies ports, embroiled in their own catastrophe the Germans cared unsurprisingly little about providing assistance to an ally close behind them on the brink of the abyss.
A British WRNS signaller, Peggy Wightman, wrote home from Mountbatten’s headquarters in Ceylon on 19 April, amid reports that the German war was hastening towards its conclusion: “The news is terrific isn’t it?798 I wonder what you are all feeling like. It is all so remote out here that I think we will all be feeling very funny when the day comes for your rejoicings.” Captain Ronnie McAllister, with his Gurkha battalion in Burma, said: “The end of the war in Europe799 was all very nice, but it didn’t mean a lot to us. Our horizon stretched way ahead. We thought we’d have to go into Siam.”
On 8 May, a foolish young officer of the Border Regiment ran out in front of his company waving his hat and crying exultantly: “Men! The war in Europe is over!800” He was crestfallen by the response: “There was a long silence, while we digested this, and looked through the heat haze to the village where Jap might be waiting…then someone laughed, and it ran down the extended line in a great torrent of mirth, punctuated by cries of ‘Git the boogers oot here!” and ‘Ev ye told Tojo, like?’” Yet Nimitz’s Pacific Fleet Strategic Intelligence Section noted with jocular satisfaction on 21 May: “If, as reports have it801, the German announcement of the death of Nazism’s chief protagonist was accompanied by the massive strains of Wagner’s requiem, ‘Twilight of the Gods,’ it is to the less decorous if more modern jangle of ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ that Nippon, now a Lone Ranger astride a white horse, jogs dolefully towards the last round-up.”
At midsummer 1945, major Allied ground operations against the Japanese were in recess. The armies of Slim in Burma, Krueger and Eichelberger in the Philippines, Stilwell—who, to widespread astonishment, was appointed Buckner’s successor—on Okinawa, Blamey’s Australians in Borneo and the south-west Pacific were engaged in mopping up. It was symbolic of the Japanese condition that some of their starving soldiers resorted to cannibalism. There were cases802 in New Guinea and Burma of downed Allied aircrew being eaten. Portions of beheaded U.S. carrier flier Marve Mershon were served to senior Japanese officers on Chichi Jima in February 1945, not because they needed the food, but to promote their own virility. Such gestures were not uncommon.
When driven by hunger to eat their own dead, Japanese soldiers favoured flesh cut from the thighs. An account from Biak Island described “many corpses lying round…with portions removed with a knife.” A Japanese prisoner from the 108th Airfield Construction Unit described seeing three fresh civilian corpses lying in a pool of blood approximately fifteen feet from a jungle path, each with bayonet wounds in the chest, “and flesh was removed from thighs803…There were many occasions when PW encountered Jap troops offering meat in exchange for potatoes.” Even if some such reports were exaggerated, cannibalism was not infrequent among desperate soldiers in far-flung places.
Scattered enemy forces continued doggedly to reject surrender, and Allied soldiers were obliged to risk their lives to deal with them. On the night of 9 June, for instance, four Royal Navy motor launches took part in a characteristic little adventure up a river in southern Burma. Information was received from local people that Japanese were hiding nearby. Accompanied by a police inspector, Lt. Simon Mitchell led his boats up the Pebin until they reached a village named Payabyo. Police inquiries revealed that the Japanese had gone, but the British found a man whose sampan they had used for their escape. He took them to the place where he had deposited the fugitives. The British used loudhailers to summon the Japanese to give themselves up. Rewarded only by silence, the launches804 formed a line ahead and cruised upstream, pouring 15,000 rounds of automatic fire into the area behind the riverbank. Mitchell and his police companion then landed to make a cautious reconnaissance. To their surprise, and no doubt initial alarm, a Japanese officer and forty men emerged—and surrendered. A year earlier, such docility would have been unthinkable.
“From May onwards, prisoners805 in a terrible state came in daily,” recorded a British gunner unit in Burma, “many of them armed with nothing more dangerous than bamboo spears, and trembling with a mixture of malaria and humiliation.” Almost every Japanese soldier, sailor or airman who lived through the war, especially those posted to designated suicide units, afterwards felt obliged to offer elaborate excuses for his own survival. Most such explanations must be deemed fanciful. The truth, surely, was that a substantial number of young men found that the attraction of preserving their own lives overcame the pressures imposed upon them by the demented culture of bushido.
But if some proved ready to quit, others did not. To the end, most Japanese who lost their ships at sea deliberately evaded Allied rescuers. On the deck of HMS Saumarez, destroyer captain Martin Power was directing rescue operations after sinking a Japanese convoy off the Nicobars, when he suddenly heard a “clang” against the ship. Peering over the side, he saw a bald, heavily built Japanese clinging to a scrambling net with one hand, while hammering the nose of a shell against the hull with the other. Power drew his pistol, leaned over and whacked the man’s head. “I could not think of anything else to do806—I spoke no Japanese. Blood streaming down his face, he looked up at me, the pistol six inches from his eyes, the shell in his hand…I do not know how long I hung in this ridiculous position, eyeball to eyeball with a fanatical enemy, but it seemed too long at the time. At last he dropped the shell into the sea, brought up his feet, pushed off from the ship’s side like an Olympic swimmer, turned on his face and swam away.”
The main business of the Allies, following the conquest of Okinawa, was the maintenance of the blockade of Japan and the air bombardment by LeMay’s B-29s, now joined by carrier aircraft of Third Fleet, together with preparations for Mountbatten’s Operation Zipper, an amphibious landing by British and Indian forces on the coast of Malaya, to be staged in defiance of American disdain; finally, of course, there was Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, Japan’s southern island. This was scheduled for November. Despite rumours that Nimitz or even Marshall himself might direct the operation, MacArthur was appointed. His subordinate commanders immersed themselves in the huge task of planning the assault, together with assessing likely Japanese responses. This would be the largest opposed landing in history, with fourteen divisions afloat and twenty-eight carriers deployed in support. Weighty volumes of documentation were prepared in anticipation. “Mass air attacks807 mixed with frequent small sorties will probably begin as soon as landing is imminent,” stated a characteristic forecast from MacArthur’s staff dated 25 April, entitled “Estimate of the enemy situation with respect to an operation against southern Kyushu in November 1945,” “and continue with great violence until the enemy is convinced his efforts to prevent our landing and consolidation are unlikely to succeed…The enemy fleet…will probably launch a final desperate suicide attack during the approach or soon after landing. Intense submarine attack by both large and midget subs and 1 man suicide torpedoes may be expected.”
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. His relations with Nimitz worsened: there were persistent “turf wars” and arguments about resources. As late as 8 August, Navy Secretary James Forrestal urged that MacArthur should be replaced as Olympic commander, in the interests of inter-service relations and operational effectiveness. But the general’s untiring publicity machine served him better than did his battlefield judgement. His prestige, the American public’s belief that he was the embodiment of national retribution against Japan, rendered him unsackable. Forrestal, King and Nimitz were obliged to put up and shut up. If Olympic took place, however, it would be directed by an officer whose military competence and even mental stability seemed increasingly questionable.
One of the most difficult issues for the Allied high command was that of transferring formations from Europe to the Far East. Many British soldiers and civilians who had begun to keep diaries of the Second World War in September 1939 made their last entries in May 1945, perceiving the conflict as ended once the Germans were beaten. Almost every European veteran felt that he had done his part, and expected to go home. Some 5.2 million Americans were serving overseas, only 1.2 million of them in the Pacific. There was dismay in British and U.S. formations under Eisenhower’s command when some were told that they would be required to invade Malaya or Japan.
Many men had amassed sufficient points to qualify for demobilisation, drastically weakening units’ combat power. Intensive training of replacements was needed before any of Eisenhower’s formations would be fit for their destined role in Operation Coronet, the post-Olympic assault on Honshu. For British soldiers in Burma, “repat”—repatriation—had become an obsession. Slim noted that a man in a foxhole, asked what he was, replied not “A Lancashire Fusilier,” but “I’m four and two,” or “three and ten,” indicating his length of overseas service. The British Army reduced compulsory foreign service from four years to three years and eight months in January 1945, then again in June to three and four. The consequence was that thereafter many units found themselves abruptly stripped of experienced men, who were sent home. Slim saw no purpose in trying to hold back the time-expired: “It would have been not only unfair808 to land such men on Malayan beaches, but unwise.”
Yet there were always some eager warriors, especially in special forces and airborne units. Maj.-Gen. James Gavin and other fiery spirits in the U.S. 82nd Airborne expressed disappointment that, after reaching the Elbe, they were offered no chance to fight the Japanese. Elements of British “private armies”—the Long Range Desert Group, Special Boat Service and suchlike—volunteered for the Asian theatre. A brigadier who signed himself “Crasher” Nicholls, commanding the “Special Allied Airborne Recce Force,” which was being disbanded in Germany, wrote to SEAC on 1 June 1945, appealing for employment: “I am trying very hard809 to get myself included in something going to the Far East as I regard War [sic] as my job, and as long as there is a War on I want to be in it.” By the summer of 1945, however, there were relatively few “Crasher” Nichollses. The higher commanders of the U.S. and British armies were alike dismayed by the prospect of needing to motivate soldiers for further battles when some comrades were already going home, and most were out of harm’s way.
THE DUTCH, French and British owners of the old Eastern empires were increasingly preoccupied with regaining their lost territories—and conscious that they could expect scant help from the Americans to achieve this. “We must naturally be prepared810 for criticism from some quarters whatever we do,” the British embassy in Washington observed to the Foreign Office on 13 May. “If we prosecute Eastern War with might and main, we shall be told by some people that we are really fighting for our colonial possessions the better to exploit them and that American blood is being shed to no better purpose than to help ourselves and Dutch and French to perpetuate our degenerate colonial Empires; while if we are judged not to have gone all out, that is because we are letting America fight her own war with little aid, after having let her pull our chestnuts out of the European fire.” The U.S. Navy, said the embassy with a sigh, was prone to think both these things simultaneously.
Not only Japan’s Asian possessions, but those of the European powers, were perceived to be “in play.” Tensions between Britain and the U.S. grew, rather than diminished, as the war entered its final stage. MacArthur made plain that he had no desire for British participation in Olympic. A Foreign Office official minuted bitterly: “The Americans are virtually conducting811 political warfare against us in the Far East and are seeking not only to belittle the efforts which we have hitherto made in that theatre of war, but also to keep us in a humiliating and subsidiary role in the future.” Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s most intimate counsellor in Washington, did not dissent from such a view: “To hear some people talk812…you would think the British were our potential enemies.”
If the Americans were unenthusiastic about the resumption of British hegemony over Burma and Malaya, they were implacably hostile to French retention of Indochina. In 1945 the Japanese achieved a victory there which did nothing to improve their own strategic fortunes, but significantly influenced the future of South-East Asia. They had entered northern Indochina in 1940, to halt the flow of supplies to Nationalist China from the Vietnamese port of Haiphong. In 1941 they introduced 35,000 troops to secure for themselves the colony’s rich resources of rice, rubber and tin. The Vichy French administration was permitted to continue in office; the French garrison kept its arms under Tokyo’s orders; the hapless Vietnamese people were allowed to starve so that Japanese people might eat.
Early in 1945, however, de Gaulle’s government in Paris demanded that the governor, Vice-Admiral Jean Catoux, should adopt a far more aggressive policy. As the local nationalist Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh spread their influence ever more widely, de Gaulle decided that France would only regain possession of Indochina by being seen to contribute to its liberation. The outcome was a disaster. On 9 March the Japanese staged a pre-emptive coup against the Saigon administration, seizing or massacring ill-equipped French troops who sought to resist. By 13 March, the Japanese claimed to have captured 8,500 POWs and killed a further thousand Frenchmen. Saigon Opera House became the Japanese interrogation and torture centre. With wildly confused loyalties, some French colonials found themselves held captive in prisons manned by French guards. Straggling columns of French fugitive soldiers sought to cut a path across country from Tonkin to the Chinese border, beset by both Japanese and Vietminh.
The British were eager to assist these survivors, on both humanitarian and political grounds. If Indochina fell into local nationalist hands, this would represent a disastrous precedent for Burma and Malaya. Yet the Americans, with bases and aircraft in neighbouring China, declined to lift a finger. This provoked one of the most bitter Anglo-American rows of the Japan war. Esler Dening, chief political adviser to Mountbatten, once observed acidly: “I often think that we might813 on important occasions remind ourselves that we are not yet the 49th of the United States.” In Paris, the enraged de Gaulle complained to U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery about the refusal of the U.S. air force in China to fly support missions to his people in Vietnam. He said that he found American policy incomprehensible: “What are you driving at? Do you want us to become, for example, one of the federated states under the Russian aegis?” In Washington, a State Department official minuted contemptuously: “I personally think that the French are making a great fuss over the IndoChina resistance for political reasons only in an effort to smoke out our policy.”
Churchill cabled Washington on 19 March: “It will look very bad in history814 if we were to let the French force in Indochina be cut to pieces by the Japanese through shortage of ammunition, if there is anything we can do to save them.” Marshall, however, delegated operational decisions to Wedemeyer in Chongqing, who pleaded logistical difficulties to justify American passivity. Such arguments seemed unconvincing. On 29 March, for instance, two C-47s of Tenth Air Force were dispatched from China to Tonkin to evacuate OSS personnel and six downed American airmen. Frenchmen at the strip where they landed were enraged when the planes arrived empty, without even cigarettes for the destitute colonists. An officer of the British Force 136 signalled: “American name is mud, repeat mud, with French and British alike in this whole episode.”
The anti-colonialist policy of the Roosevelt administration in Washington was executed with utmost fervour by OSS teams operating in support of the Vietminh nationalists. American special forces’ definition of Vietnamese liberation addressed French rather than Japanese occupation. Sebastian Patti of OSS explicitly told the Vietminh that they enjoyed the wholehearted support of the United States. Another OSS man described Ho Chi Minh as “an awfully sweet guy815…If I had to pick out one quality about that little old man sitting on his hill in the jungle, it was his gentleness.” Washington refused to allow troops of de Gaulle’s Corps Leger to be deployed in Asia. French agents parachuted into Tonkin Province by British and Australian aircraft were killed by the Vietminh. After dreadful sufferings as they struggled through the jungles and mountains of northern Vietnam, some 5,000 French fugitives eventually reached China. They were greeted without enthusiasm by U.S. ambassador Patrick Hurley. Urging that they should quickly be removed elsewhere, he described them as “undisciplined, unequipped and destitute816 refugees and almost useless.”
Relations worsened steadily between Wedemeyer in Chongqing and Mountbatten’s headquarters at Kandy. On 30 May, the American general asked Washington to suspend lend-lease aid to British clandestine organisations in South-East Asia. He was chagrined to learn that this was impracticable, since in the China-Burma-India theatre U.S. forces were getting “considerable assistance from [the] British817 through reverse lend-lease.” The “turf” dispute about Indochina was settled at Potsdam in July, when the combined chiefs of staff agreed to assign southern Indochina to SEAC, the north to China, at the Japanese surrender. Esler Dening wrote from Mountbatten’s headquarters, however: “The division of French Indochina818 by the parallel of 16 degrees north…is going to cause a lot of trouble…The division is purely arbitrary and divides people of the same race, while raising new and unnecessary problems to divide French civil administration between here and [Chongqing].”
The consequence, of course, was that when the French returned, the Vietminh had gained a momentum which was to prove irreversible. The West had the worst of all possible worlds. The British showed poor judgement in supposing that the French status quo ante might be restored. The Americans allowed Ho Chi Minh to exploit U.S. support for his own political purposes, rather than in pursuit of the struggle against Japan. The cynicism of Wedemeyer and the OSS in denying even humanitarian aid to French troops after 9 March—when they were, after all, fighting the Japanese—invited dismay. The U.S. subsequently forfeited Indochinese goodwill by withdrawing its support from the Vietminh. Here was an ugly subplot to the war which did credit to no one.
A directive from the Political Warfare Executive in London to Mountbatten’s command highlighted the political and cultural complexities besetting the theatre: “Keep off Russo-Japanese819, Russo-Chinese and Sino-Japanese relations except for official statements. Do not comment on [Chongqing-Yan’an] relations…Continue to show that if Germany had prolonged her resistance the devastation would have been yet more terrible. Show that a worse fate awaits Japan if her militarists force her to fight on…Continue to avoid the alleged Japanese peace feelers.” At Britain’s Military Administration School in Wimbledon, and at the Malaya Planning Unit in London’s Hyde Park Gate, intensive planning had been taking place for years, in anticipation of the restoration of imperial rule in the east. Many of those involved, however, especially younger officers and civil servants, perceived that they were crafting a hollow crown.
BRITAIN’S Royal Navy was embarrassed by its difficulties in sustaining a small fleet alongside the great American armada off Okinawa. In the spring of 1945, however, it conducted a series of little actions which helped to revive its battered self-esteem. First, on 15–16 May, a destroyer flotilla fought what proved to be the last significant battle between surface ships in the Second World War. Signals intelligence revealed that the 13,380-ton heavy cruiser Haguro, with the escorting destroyer Kamikaze, was sailing to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean to deliver supplies and evacuate troops. After evading British submarines, Haguro was a hundred miles south-west of Phuket when spotted by a Fleet Air Arm Avenger shortly after noon on 15 May. Saumarez’s Captain Martin Power, leading five destroyers of “Force 61,” headed to attack the Japanese at twenty-seven knots. Given the overwhelmingly superior firepower of Haguro’s eight-inch guns, Power hoped to delay an engagement until nightfall, then close with torpedoes. Lest he be in any doubt as to his duty, he received a terse signal from his admiral: “You should sink enemy ships before returning.”
The British were relieved when dusk fell without a sighting. Thereafter, despite heavy rain which limited visibility, they were confident of defeating the Japanese when they found them. The destroyers steamed in line abreast, four miles apart, probing for electronic contact. At 2245, at an amazing range of 68,000 yards, Venus’s radar picked up the Japanese. An hour after midnight, the five British ships closed in a crescent on the enemy cruiser. Haguro, perceiving her danger, began to twist and turn, finally fleeing from the British at her full thirty-three knots. Venus missed a perfect chance to attack at almost point-blank range when her torpedo officer misjudged his settings. The British lit the sky with star shell, and began exchanging gunfire with Haguro. Splashes from Japanese near misses drenched the British bridge crews. Power said laconically: “If you’re only getting wet, there’s nothing to worry about.” A few seconds later, however, a direct hit wrecked one of Saumarez’s boilers. The ship rapidly lost way. Power had one brief chance: he swung the destroyer violently to port and fired eight torpedoes at 2,000 yards. A minute later, Verulam dispatched her own salvo.
Three of these sixteen torpedoes achieved hits, throwing up water-spouts beside Haguro’s hull “like a Prince of Wales’s feathers, more than twice as high as her bridge.” Saumarez was now hit again, however. Scalding steam burst through the boiler room, killing several men in the most horrible fashion. A terrified bridge lookout abandoned his post and fled below, which caused him later to be court-martialled, dismissed the service and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for cowardice in the face of the enemy. The captain’s secretary, supposing from the ship’s violent manoeuvres that the helmsman was disabled, engaged the emergency steering aft the funnel. In a spirit which might have won Japanese admiration, an excited petty officer urged the secretary to ram the enemy. Power quickly resumed control, however, and watched Venus put another “fish” into the stricken cruiser, whose decks were now awash.
Errant torpedoes swerved in all directions, narrowly missing British ships. The engineer officer of Saumarez ordered every other man out of the boiler room before manhandling an unexploded Japanese eight-inch shell up to the deck, aided by a petty officer. He then had his little joke, reporting the lethal projectile’s presence to the bridge before adding: “But don’t worry, I’ve thrown it over the side.” The flotilla crowded the Japanese cruiser, “snarling round the carcass like a lot of starving wolves round a dying bull.” At 0206, Venus reported Haguro sunk. The British used searchlights to conduct a perfunctory scan of her resting place without finding any survivors, then hastened away to open the distance between themselves and Japanese airfields before dawn. The slightly damaged Kamikaze later recovered some of the cruiser’s crew.
British submarines operated with increasing energy against Japanese shipping off Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, but the most spectacular exploit was performed by midgets. It was a fantastically dangerous business, conning tiny underwater vessels into enemy harbours. Italians pioneered such techniques, the Japanese used them unsuccessfully, the British refined them. In 1944, Royal Navy “X-Craft” seriously damaged the battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord. When the first “XE-Craft” reached Brisbane in April, the British were crestfallen to discover that the Americans had no interest in promoting their operations. It might be politically necessary for the U.S. Navy to endure a token British presence in the Pacific, but King and his subordinates had no intention of providing opportunities for piratical British adventures—or, as the Royal Navy believed, for the publicity that might accompany successes.
Only in July did the little XE-Craft flotilla get its chance, after a spell of training in which two divers died of oxygen poisoning. Towed by conventional submarines with passage crews, five midgets were dispatched to cut telegraph cables off Hong Kong and Saigon—and, most spectacularly, to attack the heavy cruisers Myoko and Takao at Singapore. Early on the morning of 31 July, having slipped the tows from their parent ships, Lts. Ian Fraser and John Smart steered two three-man boats up the Johore Strait. That afternoon, Fraser took XE-3 under Takao’s hull. His crewman, Jim Magennis, then emerged from a hatch in frogman kit, to dump the boat’s two big mines under the Japanese cruiser.
It was a hair-raising business. First, one charge refused to unlock from XE-3’s hull. Then, when Magennis re-entered the boat, for several minutes it appeared that a falling tide had trapped the submarine beneath Takao’s bottom. XE-1, delayed by encounters with Japanese patrol craft, laid its own mines under the same cruiser. The two little boats made good their escape. That night the charges exploded, severely damaging the cruiser and winning Victoria Crosses for Fraser and Magennis. Strategically, in those last weeks of war their feat was irrelevant. But such small triumphs delighted the Royal Navy, so eager to be seen to contribute to the defeat of Japan.
ONCE OKINAWA was secured and American ground-based aircraft deployed there, the U.S. Navy was at last free to launch an air offensive against the Japanese home islands, which began on 10 July 1945. The first raids were exploratory, probing resistance as American planes struck at strips in the Tokyo plain. Thereafter they attacked with increasing confidence, against ineffectual Japanese defences. The most devastating missions were launched on 14–15 July, against the sea links between Honshu and Hokkaido islands. Of twelve rail ferries, eight were sunk outright and the remainder badly damaged. Shipments to Honshu of coal, lifeblood of Japanese industry, were more than halved overnight. The Japanese had no means of replacing the ferries.
Between air strikes American battleships, joined by the Royal Navy’s King George V, bombarded coastal industrial installations. Flat-trajectory naval gunfire was much less effective than incendiary attack by B-29s, but drove home to the Japanese that they could now be struck with impunity from the sea as well as the air. Hundreds of planes were destroyed on the ground by carrier strikes, though many more remained camouflaged and dispersed miles from any airfield, awaiting MacArthur’s invasion. Inshore shipping was ravaged at will. American aircraft mounted an average of two sorties a day apiece, for a cumulative daily total of more than 2,000. Weather was the chief impediment to Halsey’s operations, with thick fogs and heavy seas often frustrating ships’ refuelling as well as flying. Isolated kamikaze attacks on the fleet were intercepted and broken up, while the Americans maintained standing fighter patrols—“the big blue blanket”—over mainland airfields, to frustrate enemy take-offs. When the Japanese mounted night counter-attacks, Halsey withdrew his ships further offshore, not from fear that they might be sunk, but because his pilots needed their sleep.
Beyond destruction of the Hokkaido ferries, a critical contribution to the paralysis of Japanese industry, substantive damage inflicted by the carrier planes—“the little ones,” as civilians called them—was limited. But the spectacle of Halsey’s airborne host overhead, often flying so low that civilians could see pilots’ faces, made a deep impression on morale. Hunger and despair were eroding the spirit of the Japanese people, however strong the residual commitment of their soldiers. At Osaka University, students routinely ate locusts boiled in soy sauce and sake. Lunch might consist of twenty or thirty insects, half a potato and a salted plum. Yoshiko Hashimoto, who had survived the March Tokyo air raid in which her parents died and her sister Etsuko was terribly burned, said of this time: “In the last months, the food situation became worse and worse. The black market became an open, public institution.” Yoshiko had to feed two sisters, of whom one was desperately injured. She struggled to get medicines for Etsuko, until such things could no longer be bought for any money. All the girl’s burns eventually healed except those on her hands, which never received the treatment that might have restored them. To the end of her life, in company Etsuko concealed her hands behind her back.
Col. Saburo Hayashi acknowledged the growing unpopularity of the military, still privileged people among the civilian population: “There was disorderly behaviour820 by officers and men occupying billets in towns and villages; the military were especially selfish in their attitude to food. Their actions, which provoked intense public hostility, can be attributed to the poor quality of manpower now reaching the armed forces because of the scale of national mobilisation.” So desperate was Japan’s lack of fuel that millions of civilians, including many children, were committed to digging out pine roots, from which oil might be extracted. Some 37,000 local distillation units produced 70,000 barrels, yielding just 3,000 barrels of aviation spirit.
Each night when Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa finished duty at Yokosuka naval base, he walked home to a doctor’s house in town, where he shared a billet with his wife, Fumiyo. After years at sea, he was grateful for a shore posting which spared him from the fate of his brother, lost aboard a transport in the Pacific. At Yokosuka, naval rations provided the Ebisawas with enough to eat, but even at the base shortages were endemic. In the absence of fuel, sailors provided traction when trucks were used to move equipment.
The Ebisawas’ landlord was the matchmaker who had introduced the couple. Fumiyo was a teacher, now a heavily pregnant one, who possessed much of the legendary toughness of Yokosuka people. “I always felt that if anything should happen to me, she would be able to look after herself and the baby,” said Ebisawa. They talked between themselves about the future, after Japan’s inevitable defeat. Before Ebisawa was called up he had worked for Mitsukoshi, the famous Tokyo department store. He reckoned the firm would take him back, but did not expect to live to apply.
Zero engineer Jiro Horikoshi went to Nagoya station to bid farewell to his wife as he dispatched her to the safety of the countryside. On the platform, contemplating his country’s predicament, he burst into tears: “Those of us who knew821 the awesome industrial strength of the U.S. never really believed that Japan would win this war. We were convinced that our government must intend some diplomatic initiative which would save the situation before it became catastrophic. But now, bereft of any convincing government initiative to enable us to escape, we are being driven to our doom.”
Hirohito’s people could see for themselves that their defenders had lost control of Japan’s airspace. Bombers from the Philippines attacked targets around Formosa and off Korea. LeMay’s Superfortresses, in formations up to a thousand strong, broadcast fire by day and night. The Americans dominated sea and sky. Japan’s home air bases descended into a routine of alarms and damage control. At Hyakuri, for instance, Petty Officer Hachiro Miyashita gave up trying to reach a slit trench when he glimpsed American fighters—they approached so low that shelter was unattainable. He simply threw himself on the ground as shrapnel rattled down like hail after each bomb explosion. The crews enlisted the aid of soldiers from a neighbouring recruit camp to push aircraft deep into woodland, where they were concealed until immediately before take-off.
USAAF captain Jack Lee DeTour’s group commander was obsessed with a desire to sink an aircraft carrier before the end of the war, and was killed making the attempt off Kyushu. DeTour’s unit spent the spring flying B-25s out of the Philippines against ships, railyards and fuel-alcohol plants on Formosa. They attacked from heights between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, using a mix of bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire. Shipping strikes were by far the most dangerous, requiring lower-altitude attacks, with a five-second delay on bomb fuses to enable planes to jink clear after attacking. DeTour, a garage owner’s son from a small town in Nebraska, was twenty-two, and had been in the war a long time. Frustrated in his ambition to become a fighter pilot, he flew nine hundred hours before entering combat in New Guinea. He spent the summer of 1945 attacking Japanese convoys from a strip on Okinawa. The American pilots fell upon one cluster of enemy shipping, two squadrons strong, off the Korean coast. DeTour was dismayed to see one of his former flight students going down, hit by flak. The bombers hit a destroyer and a merchantman. He was awed by the sight of the stricken ships’ disappearance: “It seemed unbelievable822 that something that big went down so fast.”
Admiral “Jocko” Clark of Halsey’s Task Force 38 was disgusted to discover that one of his Helldiver commanders, finding a target fogged in, had jettisoned bombs in the sea rather than drop them randomly on Japan: “When I took him to task823 he said he did not want to kill innocent civilians…But any damage to the enemy in war contributed to destroying his willingness to fight. I told this strike leader that he should have dropped his bombs on Mount Fuji, rather than waste them.”
If American losses were relatively small, the price of being shot down and captured was always high, not infrequently fatal. On 25 July, Ensign Herb Law flew from the carrier Belleau Wood to attack Yokkaichi-shi airfield on Honshu. “We had the usual fun824 strafing and rocket-firing…I was saving my bomb for a juicy target. Just as we were pulling out at low altitude bullets began hitting my plane. My first thought was that it was AA. Much to my surprise, there was a Jap plane directly behind me…Where the hell he came from I’ll never know. My engine cut out completely, and he got in some more gunnery practice while I looked for a place to land.” Law was too low to parachute, and crashed in a field, where he sat on a wing examining a wound in his leg. He enjoyed his first glimpse of the enemy when a Japanese woman approached, and emptied a pistol towards him without effect. Ten minutes later he was encircled by a fiercely hostile crowd, who stripped him naked. He was eventually taken to Osaka: “I had no food or water for three days. I was beaten with clubs, fists, leather straps every day and night. I had lighted cigarettes put to my lips. It is surprising what a man can take and still live.”
Halsey deliberately excluded British aircraft from Third Fleet’s last strikes against the Japanese navy, claiming to have fallen in with his chief of staff’s views: “At Mick Carney’s insistence825 I assigned the British an alternative target. Mick’s argument was that although this division of force violated the principle of concentration, it was imperative that we forestall a possible post-war claim by the British that [they] had delivered even a part of the final blow that demolished the Japanese fleet.”
TWO FUNDAMENTAL propositions still underpinned Japanese strategic reasoning: first, that the Americans must invade their home islands in order to claim victory; second, that in such an eventuality, they could be repelled. All the elements used to such effect on Okinawa would be deployed manifold on Kyushu: fixed defences, kamikaze aircraft, suicide boats, “oka” rocket-propelled suicide bombs, suicide anti-tank units. The Japanese army’s newly issued Field Manual for the Decisive Battle in the Homeland called for absolute ruthlessness in slaughtering any Japanese, old or young, male or female, who impeded the defence or was used as a shield by the invaders. There would be no retreats. Casualties were to be abandoned. Those whose weapons and ammunition were spent should fight with bare hands. Here was a commitment to create not merely an army of suicidalists, but an entire nation.
At Yokosuka naval base, Kisao Ebisawa was instructing a new unit of “fukuryu”—“dragon divers”—destined for suicide missions against American landing craft. Many of the 4,000 pupils were teenagers, some as young as fourteen or fifteen. Their only asset was a sacrificial commitment, matching that of the Hitler Youth in Europe. Ebisawa and his fellow petty officers, recognising that the war was lost, recoiled from the enterprise to which these children were committed. “Whoever dreamed it up knew nothing about diving,” said the sailor. “First, anyone who had seen the Americans in the Pacific knew that they bombed and shelled everything in sight before making a landing. Shock-waves would kill any diver in the water for miles. Fukuryu were supposed to attack in groups, each one carrying a pole charge. It needed only one charge to detonate, for the whole group to go up in smoke. It would have made more sense to pack all those kids off to the mountains to wait for the Americans with grenades.” Some instructors were rash enough to make representations to their superiors along these lines, causing them to be posted out of the unit. Thereafter, Ebisawa and his colleagues kept their mouths shut, though they were painfully conscious of the chasm between the enthusiasm of their young students and the cynicism of their commanders.
At his airfield outside Singapore, Lt. Masaichi Kikuchi was deeply unwilling to become a human sacrifice, but gyokusai, duty to fight to the last, was deeply instilled in his generation. “It was all a matter of upbringing826 and education. This was what we had been taught was required of us.” Month after month Kikuchi and his unit supervised working parties of Allied prisoners, digging a maze of tunnels, trenches and bunkers for the great defensive battle against a British landing which their commanders were sure would come. Officers made black jokes to each other: “These holes are going to be our graves. We’d better dig them good.”
Toshiharu Konada and his fellow midshipmen on the heavy cruiser Ashigara volunteered for submarine service when it became plain that Japan’s remaining big ships were going nowhere useful. Konada, by then a lieutenant, spent a fortnight at the submarine school at Otake before he and thirteen others in his draft were abruptly informed that they were being transferred to man new weapons named kaiten—“heaven-shakers.” They had no notion what kaiten were, until they reached a training base on the island of Ohtsu. There, at last, they were admitted to the secret. Their craft were human torpedoes, piloted by frogmen sitting astride them. Their commanders claimed that these would transform Japan’s fortunes, destroying the enemy’s ships as they approached the home islands.
Konada’s group were thrilled. “This was a role which made us really happy and excited,” he said. Class photographs of himself and his beaming young comrades support this claim. They were all twenty-one-year-olds: “We felt that kaiten offered us an opportunity to make a personal difference to the course of the war, to save our country, even.” Some 1,375 pilots entered training, but only 150 completed the course before the war’s end, because of a shortage of torpedoes. A further fifteen died in training, for kaiten were immensely dangerous to their operators. Some pilots suffered respiratory failures, others steered their craft into rocks or were lost in rough seas.
Konada found the atmosphere on his course “very tense and serious; but it was also a very exciting experience.” When his detail graduated in December 1944, he himself was retained at Ohtsu for four months to help train the next intake. He found this frustrating, “because I wanted to get on with the job.” It became more so as he heard the fate of comrades of his own course, already dispatched against the enemy. There was his roommate Kentaro Yoshimoto, “a very jolly fellow, though not very bright. We used to talk for hours about everything—except the war or death.” Yoshimoto and his torpedo were launched on a mission in the Carolines on 20 December, which ended in an anticlimactic technical failure. He set forth on a second operation on 12 January 1945, and was never heard of again.
Likewise Seizo Ishikawa, who had served with Konada in the gunroom of Ashigara, “a bold character of passionate loyalties, with a very sharp tongue.” Ishikawa’s torpedo was launched from the submarine I-58 off Guam on 12 January. Pilots at the home bases never learned the fates of these men and scores of others, though American records show that they achieved little. By the summer of 1945, to Konada’s embarrassment, he found himself the only survivor of the fourteen men in his training detail designated to wear the suicides’ white headband. However, his turn seemed sure to come soon enough. In May he was dispatched to command a unit of eight kaiten on the island of Hachijo, in the Pacific 140 miles south of Tokyo. The Americans were expected to land on Hachijo before they assaulted the mainland. The kaiten crews practiced launches in all manner of tactical circumstances, and worked incessantly on maintaining their frail craft. Konada said proudly: “It was the most rewarding time of my life.”
All through the summer of 1945, Japan poured men onto Kyushu, to confront the expected American landings. In January, there had been only one garrison division on the island. Thereafter, the build-up was relentless. American historians Edward Drea and Richard Frank have made important contributions to the study of this period, by highlighting the scale of Japanese reinforcement in the first seven months of the year—almost all revealed to the Americans through signal decrypts. By the end of July, thirteen field divisions were deployed on Kyushu, 450,000 Japanese servicemen, all digging hard. At least 10,000 aircraft would be available to support the defence.
The critical question, of course, was whether these forces represented anything like as grave a threat to an American landing as their raw numbers might suggest. Most of the available planes were trainers or obsolete types, though as kamikazes even these could be deadly. The kaiten and fukuryu units could be dismissed, likewise Japan’s surviving surface ships. Ground formations were as short of firepower and training as all Japanese forces at this stage, although experience in the Philippines and on Okinawa had shown that even raw Japanese units could achieve remarkable results, if their men were committed to death and entrenched in fixed positions. Yet by November 1945, after months of LeMay’s planned bombardment of Japanese transport links, food for the military as well as civilian population would be desperately short. As we shall see, the Soviets rolled up Japan’s armies in Manchuria with relative ease.
Japanese combat effectiveness in the face of Olympic will never be susceptible of proof. It can only be said that it seems mistaken to judge the fitness of Hirohito’s armies to mount “Ketsu”—the operation to defend Kyushu—merely in terms of troop and aircraft numbers. It is possible to speculate that the defences would have crumbled relatively quickly. But no responsible American commander could make such an assumption at the time. The only one who did so, MacArthur, merely emphasised his own hubris when he dismissed overwhelming evidence of the enemy’s build-up on Kyushu in a signal to Marshall on 9 August: “Throughout the southwest Pacific Area campaigns,” said the supreme commander, “as we have neared an operation intelligence has invariably pointed to greatly increased enemy forces. Without exception, this build-up has been found to be erroneous.”
This observation represented the reverse of the truth, of course. Again and again in the Pacific, MacArthur had chosen wilfully to underestimate enemy strength, to follow his own hunches rather than to heed signals intelligence. Now, fantastically, he suggested that the enemy was deliberately generating exaggerated information about its own strength, to deceive U.S. intelligence. Richard Frank has written: “It is almost impossible not to believe828 that MacArthur’s resort to falsehood was motivated in large measure by his personal interest in commanding the greatest amphibious assault in history.”
Until the last day of the war, MacArthur and his staff continued to plan for Olympic. Yet nobody, with the possible exception of the general, wanted to launch the operation. A British infantryman, gazing at bloated corpses on a Burman battlefield, vented the anger and frustration common to almost every Allied soldier in those days, about the enemy’s rejection of reason: “Ye stupid sods!829 Ye stupid Japanni sods! Look at the fookin’ state of ye! Ye wadn’t listen—an’ yer all fookin’ dead! Tojo’s way! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin’ chah an’ screwin’ geeshas in yer fookin’ lal paper “’ooses—an’ look at ye! Ah doan’t knaw.” However the statistics of the Japanese build-up on Kyushu were interpreted, they promised heavy American casualties—of an order of magnitude of at least 100,000.
In an “eyes only” signal to King on 25 May, Nimitz wrote: “Unless [Olympic] is considered so important that we are willing to accept less than best preparation and more than minimum casualties, I believe that the long-range interests of the U.S. will be better served if we continue to isolate Japan and to destroy Japanese forces and resources by naval and air attack.” The Pacific C-in-C’s resistance to an invasion did not diminish in the months that followed. With the ending of the war in Europe, millions of Allied soldiers had been liberated from the risk of death, and were beginning to go home. In such circumstances, it seemed deeply repugnant that a hapless minority of Americans should again be exposed to mortal peril. Japan’s military leaders remained committed to a “decisive battle” for the homeland. The United States, however, was most unwilling to accommodate them.
An age before, in 1942, on Joseph Grew’s return from service as U.S. ambassador in Japan, he was dismayed by the American people’s abysmal ignorance of their enemy. He delivered lectures around the country, in an attempt to increase understanding of the magnitude of the task which the U.S. faced in overcoming this formidable foe. Grew described his shock on hearing an intelligent American assert blithely: “Of course there must be ups and downs in this war…but it’s now a question of time before Hitler will go down to defeat—and then we’ll mop up the Japs.” The events of August 1945 would display, in the most awesome and terrible fashion, the culmination of the process once so insouciantly described as “mopping up the Japs.”