The War that Never Was: Operation Downfall:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/MacArthur%20Reports/MacArthur%20V1/ch13.htm

One of the most fascinating and horrifying parts of WWII is the War that Never Was. This was the plan for the invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall, averted by the combination of Marshal Meretskov and Fat Man and Little Boy. If Downfall had been launched, it would have been required to strike in areas where the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy knew it could do so, always the most lethal of potential moves in warfare. Downfall would have been a horrific bloodbath, the Japanese were planning large-scale employment of the Kamikaze suicide planes and self-guided suicide gliders, they were going to mass teenage girls with broomsticks on the shores of the Kanto Plain and in Kyushu to resist the US invasion.

The most brutal statistic of Downfall is that the supply of Purple Hearts readied for it in the 2010s has still not yet been exhausted, even counting Korea, and even counting Vietnam. Japan's defeat was foredoomed before the invasion would have been launched, and the prospect of a bloodbath akin to Aachen, Konigsberg, Berlin, Danzig, Nuremberg, would have become reality again in Asia, as it had been in Manila. There is no question that the atomic bombs were an utter evil, in concept, and an utter evil in execution. The question posed, given that both the USA and Japan were in earnest planning this apocalypse, is what happens if the USA did go along with the invasion?

In reality of course Downfall never happened, but if it had happened, I think that the result would have been more horrific than the Bomb was for Japan. Given the Imperial Army almost deposed the Emperor and went through with extending the war anyway, this was a very near-missed apocalypse. Does this justify the atomic bomb? In reality it's never easy to use a hypothetical to justify a reality, though I think that given how in earnest those two states were that it's hard to argue that the one was the lesser evil to the other, though both were alike evils.

And this is without considering the prospects of Unit 731's bubonic plague bombs or the USA's plan to nuke areas *before sending its own soldiers right through multiple ground zeroes* for further fodder for the earlier paragraphs.....

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's nice.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's nice.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

They made the decision that was in their own best interests, and incidentally the best interests of all the servicemen who might have been involved.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

On both sides. I can't say that Imperial Japan's suicide stand would have done anything more than bloat the death toll of WWII (along with all those Allied POWs who would have in all probability have all been executed around the time that Downfall began).

[dwer.livejournal.com]

While both sides probably benefited in sheer number of deaths, I don't know how much Japan's projected losses factored into the decision.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In the sense of more fanatical resistance ala Okinawa and Iwo Jima? Probably quite a bit. Given that at Okinawa and Iwo Jima Japan was finally starting to *win* the battles of attrition.....

[dwer.livejournal.com]

sorry, that's not what I mean. I mean that I don't know if the US cared much about how many japanese people would die; they were focused on reducing american losses.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True, and that I'd agree with. If the USA *had* cared about that then the firebombings would never have happened to start with. Given that they first happened in Germany, they were used in Japan *precisely* because they were known to be very, very lethal.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

I blogged (http://miniver.blogspot.com/2005/08/hiroshima.html) about many of the same things a while back on the 60^th anniversary of Hiroshima. I remember when I first heard the thing about the Purple Heart Warehouse and how much it affected me; when I tell people they generally boggle.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

A surrender was in the works when the nukes were dropped. Operation Downfall would only have been carried out as long as the negotiations lasted. The nukes were more important in impressing the Soviets than they were in ending the war.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's not quite what was happening. Rather the Japanese realized the pipe dream that the USSR was going to let them off scott free had failed. That coup was very narrowly avoided, and I rather doubt the nukes impressed the Soviets given Stalin knew more about the US nuclear program than Truman did.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The impression was in the willingness to use them the way that they were used.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

The nukes may not have impressed the Soviets but our demonstrated willingness to use them sure did.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

I think it's a damn shame that no matter what option is given it all ends with a ton of dead Japanese civilians.

And yes, yes one option saved a ton of American lives. But then that's kind of one of the more perverse things about war, the only lives that matter are the lives that are on our side.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

But there's the rub, who becomes "the enemy" when we declare war and who becomes the collateral? From the looks of things it seems like we declared the population of two entire cities "the enemy". You know, just ordinary civilians like women, children, elderly, pets and the like. It's a good thing we took care of them before they had the chance to strike huh?

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

I dunno, where are those WMD's? :p

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

I wasn't saying that I was just acknowledging what you might have been talking about that's all.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

We were talking about Imperial Japan though, I don't see how women would've have had a chance to be fighting in their military.

I'm not saying women are weak or can't fight in wars, but the ones that are not in active combat - along with any men that aren't - certainly shouldn't be targeted.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Of course with the bomb, the shipyard becomes an entire city, with no chance for anything inside it to escape. And later then the amount of blast radius we can destroy just gets larger from there. With that much destructive power the line between civilian targets and military ones just get blurred.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

The trouble with that is we don't have many western style battlefields anymore.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Wait, what do you mean by western style fighting anyways? You mean do all the fighting out in a field of somekind?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The concept of combined arms warfare employing air, sea, land (in the form of infantry, artillery, and armor) forces together for one common purpose with two such forces clashing. It's worth noting the longest such war in the 20th Century was between Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, neither of whom are quite in the usual view of "Western."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually they really were intended to be used on the front lines. Photographs like this one are a rather chilling testament to that:



And plenty of women served in combat in WWII on the Eastern Front, including one of the last Nazi aces who was a fanatic who volunteered to be a suicide bomber.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The Soviets used women with good effect in their own war, and Japan was desperate for any kind of manpower at all. Throw untrained women at Allied time on target artillery and the result is a very lopsided bloodbath in the Omdurman fashion. It's the horror of the thing.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Right, I thought of the Soviets and their use of women in the military, but unfortunately don't have much knowledge on Japan's stance on that and can only speculate.

I just remember reading or hearing about old Japan having some of the same kind of prejudices against women as the west at times.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They did. But if it comes to Downfall desperation and its magical power to shatter prejudices was going to lead to them doing what I'm referring to. Just like the UK's intentions to bring gas into the war had Germany launched Sealion (not that that was ever going to do anything other than go horribly wrong, albeit).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually the third option is the one with the most civilian deaths: Operation Starvation, which was a succint and brutally accurate description of what the concept was: blockade Japan. bomb it, shell it, and let the accumulated privations of four years of an unwinnable war do their thing until either Japan surrenders or it collapses. At least the invasion would have been a quick, brutal thing by comparison.

But yes, this is pretty much a horrifying Hobson's Choice up to 11.

[gillianinoz.livejournal.com]

Does this justify the atomic bomb?

No. Nothing ever could.

In April and May 1945, Japan made three attempts through neutral Sweden and Portugal to bring the war to a peaceful end. On April 7, acting Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu met with Swedish ambassador Widon Bagge in Tokyo, asking him "to ascertain what peace terms the United States and Britain had in mind".

Bagge relayed the message to the United States, but Secretary of State Stettinius told the US Ambassador in Sweden to "show no interest or take any initiative in pursuit of the matter."

Further messages of surrender were intercepted through June and July.

In fact according to a memo that was released after the war and has never been disputed by the White House, the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. 

When the US and Great Britain made the Potsdam Declaration they stated they would only accept "Unconditional Surrender" - and they didn't mention the Emporer at all.

If they had made clear that the Emporer would remain in place - likely the Japanese would have surrendered immediately, saving thousands of lives.

Ironocally they kept him as a symbol of authority anyway, realising that he made a useful figurehead to ease their occupation of the defeated country.

There was no military or moral justification for dropping two bombs on cities full of civillians. If the US wanted to impress the world with their bombs they cold have dropped them on an isolated militray base.

A leading voice of American Protestantism, Christian Century, strongly condemned the bombings. An editorial entitled "America's Atomic Atrocity" in the issue of August 29, 1945, told readers:

The atomic bomb was used at a time when Japan's navy was sunk, her air force virtually destroyed, her homeland surrounded, her supplies cut off, and our forces poised for the final stroke ... Our leaders seem not to have weighed the moral considerations involved. No sooner was the bomb ready than it was rushed to the front and dropped on two helpless cities ... The atomic bomb can fairly be said to have struck Christianity itself ... The churches of America must dissociate themselves and their faith from this inhuman and reckless act of the American Government.

And that was written in 1945! 

I guess most people needed to believe the lies and propaganda. After a long and brutal war they just wanted an end to it. 

In a 1986 study, historian and journalist Edwin P. Hoyt nailed the "great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world," that "the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan." In Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict (p. 420), he explained:

The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.

I'll finish with the words of General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff). He put it most succinctly: 

"The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war."


My most immediate resource for the facts, figures and quotes here are from the Institute for Historical Review, an article by Mike Weber

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

I lifted a lot from there as I just got home from my first shift of the day and I'm too tired to think clearly.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

All of this would be more convincing if it weren't for the reality that the USA and UK had demanded an unconditional surrender from Italy and Germany and proven very willing to fight from one end of them to the other (and the USSR also in Germany), while their yielding a conditional surrender to Japan if anything expresses more fear of the USSR than actual willingness to kill Japanese. The USA and UK were willing to march from one end of Italy and Germany to the other and leave nothing alive if it made one shot at them, the USSR still moreso.

The blunt statement, thus, is that an unconditional surrender only with Emperor intact is no unconditional surrender at all.

[gillianinoz.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I get your point here. The question was - did avoiding conflict on mainland Japan justify using atomic bombs on highly populated cities?

The answer is no, not when there was another option. Clearly there was another option.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Historically speaking no, there really wasnt, and the "it was racism" argument doesn't cut it when you consider that the Germans actually got the nastier treatment in being mandated to surrender totally, no conditions, no little end-runs, just give everything over to the UK, France, USA, and USSR.

[gillianinoz.livejournal.com]

I suppose you mean the Germans got the nastier treatment when it came to terms of surrender, which may well be. Still not talking about them, or racism.

Talking about atomic bombs used on civillians. Could the US have ended the war another way, one that didn't involve a warehouse full of purple hearts or atomic bombs?

The answer is YES.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that even with all the people killed decades later, the use of firebombings by fleets of regular bombers have still killed more Japanese civilians. If the principle is mass killing of civilians by bombs dropped by airplanes is evil, there's no moral difference between atomic bombs and the mass bombings of 1944-5.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

The atomic bombs were terrible. Firebombing is terrible. Guns, swords and knives are terrible. War is terrible. My uncle had endured the Normandy invasion and months of fighting across Europe; he was going to be transferred to the Pacific after the Nazis were defeated. I doubt he would have survived the invasion of Japan. Whether the atom bombs actually brought the end of the war or not, it was a foregone conclusion that they would be used before Operation Downfall happened. It was a calculated risk which was meant to save the lives of millions of Japanese and Allied troops. Can anyone actually believe the U.S. would spend that much money and time developing a weapon - and then have a President refuse to use it to avoid an invasion? Truman would have been impeached in a New York minute.

This is an interesting exercise for young people who are distanced by multiple generations from WWII. I'm glad my uncle had ten more years of life at home before he died from the physical and mental damage caused by the war.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

My grandfather would likely have died from the hand-guided suicide bombs, meaning my aunt and mom would be alive but not my father or I. So this topic is very personal to me for exactly that reason.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

What would have happened if we didn't invade Japan?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

General Starvation engages in a murderous culling (and that word is very deliberately chosen) that would be one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of human history and the Japanese state in all probability completely disintegrates into anarchy in the process.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Soviet occupation of at least Hokaido and probably most of Honshu.

20-20 hindsight arguments against the bombings always seem to forget that part.

[terminator44.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the U.S. didn't know that was going on until Japan had already surrendered. The invasion began at the same time the atomic bombs were dropped.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Likewise critiques of the Bombings also forget that the original Allied strategy for WWII was that the Germans are crushed first, then the Soviets joined the Allies in crushing Japan (which the Soviets were always going to want to do regardless). This in fact was a major reason for US behavior at Yalta and Potsdam as far as the nature of Soviet occupation of Central Europe was concerned.