In the Spring of 1945, an embattled Japan was gearing up to shock the USA with a nightmarish
fighting tactic.
In Europe, a desperate Adolf Hitler was going insane in his bunker.
Meanwhile in the USA, the President had a very hard decision to make- does he sign off
on dropping weapons of mass destruction on Japan, weapons which his Chief of Staff said
were so “barbarous” they showed an ethical standard of barbarians from the Dark Ages?
It was not an easy decision to make, which we think you’ll agree with by the time you’ve
got to the end of this show.
That Spring, the Japanese had finally been beaten in Burma, but the country was in no
way done in the Pacific.
Japan would not concede defeat, and never mind what it took, it would fight on to the
bitter end.
As March came to a close, US forces had secured the island of Iwo Jima, but not without considerable
loss of life.
To capture this tiny island, no bigger than a third of Manhattan, 7,184 American soldiers
died, and another 24,000 US soldiers were injured.
The Americans were now entirely superior to the Japanese in almost all military capacities.
As the war historian Max Hastings notes, at this point Japan was suffering “death from
a thousand cuts.”
He also said that while Japan’s defeat was assured, the country’s military leaders
would not accept that.
What Japan’s generals wanted was for the war to end on their terms, which seems ridiculous
given the weak position they were in.
But they had an idea- make sure that for everything gained by the US, there would be massive blood
loss.
Show the Americans that they would have to fight tooth and nail, and if a land invasion
of the Japanese mainland should happen, let the Americans know that it will cost lots
and lots of American lives.
As you’ll see, this very sincere stubbornness led to one of the most controversial military
tactics of all time.
With this plan in mind, Japan struck quickly, mounting a series of devastating air attacks
on the US Navy.
It wouldn’t be enough however, and soon after Major General Curtis LeMay issued the
command to strike Tokyo.
325 bombers flew low over the city dropping so many bombs in such quick succession the
place resembled flaming hell.
Only 12 of those bombers didn’t come back, but that was only because they were caught
in the updrafts from the fires.
Such success was uncommon.
An American soldier said Tokyo looked like “Dante’s Inferno.”
He wrote back home saying, “Fires were everywhere, and the destruction brought this night could
have been nothing less than catastrophic.”
100,000 Japanese residents were killed in the Tokyo bombing and about a million people
lost their homes, with around a million suffering injuries.
Then American B-29 bombers hit other cities, causing mass destruction and death in places
such as Osaka and Kobe.
Japanese planes couldn’t stop the attacks.
It was an absolute massacre.
Then the Japanese used their dark ace in the hole.
They used pilots to fly their planes into American planes or ships.
Yep, you’ve heard of this tactic.
They were called kamikaze pilots, a word which in Japanese means “divine wind.”
That’s what the pilots thought they were doing, acting as divine agents to save their
homeland from the not-so-divine Americans.
Many of those pilots volunteered, but many others were reluctant to fly to their deaths.
Some had barely any flying experience and were just out of high school.
One such young man said, “We have to go to the battlefield to die without being able
to express our opinions, criticize and argue…
To die at the demand of the nation – I have no intention whatsoever to praise it; it is
a great tragedy.”
Japanese cities had already been reduced to ash.
Millions upon millions of people had been injured and displaced.
The air raids may have killed 400,000 but some estimates say 900,000.
As for military deaths, during those bombing campaigns, one American soldier died for every
100 Japanese soldiers.
By May, Hitler had already expired in his bunker, along with his new wife and his beloved
mutt, Blondi.
Germany was done and the Soviets were doing their very worst in those cities to the surviving
civilian population.
But the Japanese would not give up.
Once they started using kamikaze pilots, their success rates improved, despite how awful
this form of fighting was.
When the US invaded Okinawa, the Japanese hit back with these pilots, and suddenly the
US Navy started taking a hammering.
The US public, seeing the war in Europe was over, didn’t like hearing that American
boys were going up in flames.
Those kamikaze pilots were doing so much more damage because they rarely missed their target.
It also helped that because those planes were destined for destruction, they could be stripped
down of parts and not fully filled with precious fuel.
The executive officer of the USS Essex, Fitzhugh Lee, said some of his boys were in a state
of wild panic because of the Japanese one-way missions.
“Those minutes would seem like years,” he said, about seeing a blip in the sky coming
towards the ship.
“We had a few who lost control of themselves and started weeping, crying, praying,” Lee
said.
All of this is very important when you try to understand why the US dropped those two
atomic bombs on Japan.
One Japanese kamikaze pilot wrote to his mom, proud of what he was going to do.
He said, “I will do a splendid job sinking an enemy aircraft carrier.
Do brag about me.”
His name was Hayashi Ichizo and indeed that was his last letter.
He died off Okinawa, at just 23 years old.
Other such pilots stated in letters that they would defeat the Americans and the British
and they would die with pride doing it.
How do you beat such a force of will?
27 American ships were sunk during this time, which was devastating for the US.
If a Japanese pilot set off on a mission, he had a 20 percent chance of hitting his
target and causing massive damage to man and machine.
This tactic was ten times more destructive than regular attacks.
On June 22, the Americans reported over 7,000 army and marines dead plus another 5,000 navy
personnel dead.
Over 50,000 soldiers were injured, some very seriously.
Japan was having success and so the generals still believed this could force the US to
bring agreeable terms to the table.
Little did those generals know what was in store for them.
As they made plans to send more men to their certain deaths, British scientists, who’d
been ahead in the atomic bomb-making department, had already joined the Manhattan Project in
America.
The atomic bomb was ready to go, but oh God, dropping that thing was an ethical conundrum.
One of those scientists, Edward Teller, wrote to a colleague, saying, “I have no hope
of clearing my conscience.
The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with
politics will save our souls.”
But US planes had pretty much crippled Japanese industry.
There were hardly any more industrial targets to destroy.
Now it was just about killing civilians, women, children, old folks.
Some people who didn’t agree with war, who hated war.
But if you think for a minute that even with that kind of carnage, Japan was going to back
down, you’d be very wrong.
During all this chaos, all this loss of life and industry, here’s what chief of general
staff Yoshijiro Umeza said in a newspaper story in May:
“The sure path to victory in a decisive battle lies in uniting the resources of the
Empire and getting behind the war effort; and in mobilizing the full strength of the
nation, both physical and spiritual, to annihilate the American invaders.”
No doubt many people in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki read that, and likely many of
them read those words with a sense of pride, determination, and hope.
They could have no idea what was coming to them, murderous weapons cynically named “Fat
Man” and “Little Boy”, weapons that would cause more destruction than they thought
possible in their wildest nightmares.
Still, many of them must have picked up one of the 63 million leaflets that the Americans
dropped over Japan, saying things like, “We cannot promise that only these cities will
be among those attacked.”
They just didn’t know how they were going to be attacked.
Not many people knew just how destructive those bombs were.
A British commander of the Sefton, named Michael Blois-Brooke, wrote just after the bombing,
“We heard about some wonder bomb that had been dropped on Japan which was going to stop
the war.
We really took no notice, thinking that one single bomb wasn’t going to alter the course
of history.”
That’s the thing, not many people knew how deadly those things were.
The Japanese certainly didn’t know what was around the corner.
In terms of the ethics of dropping the bombs, many people now ask why at least didn’t
the Americans send an explicit threat.
Still, would those Japanese generals have backed down?
You already now know just how intransigent they were.
To them, many Japanese soldiers and to many people in Japan, they were fighting that divine
war.
It’s likely they’d have ensured that war went on and on, in spite of the massive loss
of Japanese life.
If that had happened, back home in America report after report would have detailed depressing
statistics about loss of American lives.
In early August, a 19-year old American gunner named Joseph Majeski was on the Pacific island
of Tinian when he saw the delivery of a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay.
He noticed that it had been modified, so he asked what the purpose of it was and why it
was in Tiinian.
A crew member looked him in the eye and said matter-of-factly, “We’re here to win the
war.”
The first bomb, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Fat Man hit Nagasaki
three days later.
Had the Japanese not surrendered on August 15, a third bomb would likely have been dropped
on Tokyo.
But the devastation caused to Japan was so great that even those incorrigible generals
had to accept defeat.
Some Japanese soldiers remarked that they could never imagine such a thing, but those
bombs were also something they could have never imagined.
Somewhere between 129,000 and 226,000 died in both cities, with as many as 240,000 people
dying later from the effects of the bombs.
The vast majority of casualties were of course civilians.
As awful as that was, when the US estimated what damage would be caused if it attempted
a land invasion, it was said 400,000 and 800,000 Allied soldiers, American and British, would
likely die.
They also believed that such an invasion would cost the lives of 5 to 10 million Japanese.
Now we need to talk about a man named Joseph Stalin, the well-read murderous maniac that
ruled the Soviet Union.
He was actually one of Time magazine’s men of the year long before he became an enemy
of the USA.
Good old Stalin, fighting the Germans.
But if you read any biography about Stalin, you can see that he had hopes of communism
spreading all over the world with Russia at the head of things.
In fact, he had hoped at the start of the war that powerful nations would be weakened
by the fighting and he would clean up later.
As you know, that didn’t happen, because Adolf Hitler had his own ideas about world
domination, and those jet black precious thoughts of his included getting rid of the darn commies.
Stalin’s Red Army invaded Japanese-controlled Manchuria on August 9, the same day as second
atomic bomb dropped.
Japan had in the past hoped Stalin would not turn against it.
The two countries had signed a pact in 1941, but after the Yalta and Tehran conferences,
Stalin promised the Brits and the Americans that once Germany was felled, he’d help
beat Japan.
This apparently came as a bit of shock to the Japanese generals, who had hoped in 1945
that the Soviets would help broker peace with reasonable terms with the Allies.
So, even if Japan had carried on fighting with the Americans and then the British, and
pretty much been devastated, there would also have been the Soviets to deal with.
Japan would have been fighting on so many fronts and things would have gone really badly
for the country.
So, had those bombs not have dropped, you could have expected extreme loss of life.
The Americans would have lost many more men, too.
We don’t want to sound in support of the use of nuclear weapons.
Those things being used on Japan was a sad indictment of the human race, but when the
Japanese generals said they would fight to the death, we think they weren’t blowing
hot air.
On the very day that the bomb hit Nagasaki, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Imperial Japanese
Army, Torashirō Kawabe, wrote:
“To continue fighting will mean death, but to make peace with the enemy will mean ruin.
But we have no choice but to seek life in death with the determination to have the entire
Japanese people perish with the homeland as their deathbed pillow by continuing to fight.”
We think there’s no doubt then, that the Americans and Brits would have gone through
with the land invasion, called “Operation Downfall.”
And a downfall it would have been for Japan, as you already know, but with considerable
loss of life for the Allies, too.
The US knew only too well from experience that Japanese fighters were willing to walk
into certain death, and that the country had “a fanatically hostile population.”
Meanwhile, Stalin’s army might have marched farther, and possibly have taken the entire
peninsula of Korea.
Some historians think the entirety of Korea would have ended up communist and possibly
also a bit of Japan.
The Americans and the British, knowing the consequences, wouldn’t have started beef
with Stalin.
So, the world would have looked like a different place.
You also have to realize that the USA would have still had those bombs, and later, the
Soviets and then the British.
There wouldn’t be a taboo about them, no horrid photos of their destruction, so you
have to ask if they’d have been used later?
Maybe in Vietnam, maybe as a result of the Cold War?
It doesn’t bear thinking about what would have happened if they’d have been used during
those panic-stricken and paranoid years of the Cold War.
As we said, it was a sad and shameful thing that happened in Japan, but what could have
happened later might have been worse in terms of loss of life.
And anyway, as we have shown you, the land invasion of Japan would have been its own
kind of horror.
It’s a controversial thing to say, but perhaps it was the right thing to do, especially looking
in hindsight.
But obviously, the best thing that could have happened is that Japan had surrendered earlier,
possibly after Truman had done the right thing and fully explained what was coming.
Sure, leaflets said “prompt and utter destruction” was on the way, but Japan just thought that
was already on the cards with all the normal bombs.
We’ll leave the last words to the historian Max Hastings, whose brilliant research helped
us write this show.
“Almost all of those who participated, nations and individuals alike, made moral compromises.
It is impossible to dignify the struggle as an unalloyed contest between good and evil,
or rationally celebrate an experience, and even an outcome, which imposed so much misery
on so many.”
Amen.
Now you need to watch “What If World War 1 Never Happened?”
Or, visit the fictional future in “Why It Would Suck To Live Through The End Of The
Universe.”