The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and prevented a planned US attack to capture Tokyo and Yokohama. Records show that Douglas MacArthur was preparing sea landings in Kyushu and in bays around Tokyo. An attack on Japan would have taken months to accomplish because of the country's terrain and the skillfulness of the Japanese in mountain warfare. A description of the events surrounding the Japanese surrender in Aug. 1945 is presented.
The two atom bombs released over Japan in August 1945, fifty years ago, changed the course of history. The catastrophes provided the Japanese with a convenient excuse for 'bearing the unbearable', for breaking off hostilities without too great an agony of self-reproach for doing so.
It is now known that the Emperor, who knew more of the outside world than most of his politicians, had already decided on June 18th, 1945 to make overtures for peace, and to introduce into his Supreme War Council a group of elderly dug-outs who could pursue a peace policy without too much loss of his personal face. They were, however, foolish enough to entrust these overtures to their ambassador in Moscow, where the Russians - can rapid actions ever be expected from them in any matter whatever? - dragged their feet as usual to such effect that they were themselves able to enter the war against Japan for the last week or two, and emerge from it without a struggle and in the position to acquire substantial new territories.
The factors driving the Japanese to make these overtures were their enormous civilian air casualties at home, a critical shortage of aviation fuel, and the knowledge that, owing to American command of the seas, their overseas forces could neither be operated where they were nor be effectively redeployed.
This was the state of the main conduct of the war on which the two atom-bomb attacks were, as it were, superimposed by the accident of the bombs being completed at that particular moment. The development of these bombs had been begun in 1940, and had cost [pounds]500 million, the whole cost being met by the United States; and even this gigantic sum had resulted in the preparation of three bombs only, one of them for test purposes. Of the remaining two, the uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 7th, killing 70,000 people outright, and the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki (a substitute target for Kokura, which was covered in mist at the time) on August 8th, causing considerably fewer casualties since ravines and escarpments in the area absorbed much of the blast. It took the Japanese a week of internal convulsion before they finally capitulated on August 15th, having changed their channel of communication from the Russians to the Swiss. (On August 1st, 1945 the Swiss ambassador in Tokyo, an old gentleman of eighty, was representing the interests of no fewer than twenty-one different powers, Allied and others.)
As a matter of military circumstance, the atom bombs brought the war to a close at the most inconvenient moment possible for General MacArthur. His island-hopping campaign up the Pacific, mounted from Australia in 1942, had by August 1945 reached the Philippines, Okinawa and Iwo Jima, preparatory to the final landings in Japan proper; and the whole of his available fleet of seven hundred landing craft destined for this purpose was at the moment back home in the United States for refit. What form were these final landings due to take? They would have been by far the most ambitious landing operations of the whole war, and certainly extremely hazardous in execution.
General MacArthur's strategic plan, codeword Downfall, had been completed in Manila in May 1945. It included the two operations 'Olympic' and 'Coronet', of which the salient details were:
Olympic
Landing Area: South end of the island of Kyushu.
Object: To acquire and develop airfields for the support of the later operation Coronet.
Forces: One army of four corps and HQ troops.
Date: November 1st, 1945.
Coronet
Landing Areas: (i) Sagami Bay and other points round Tokyo Bay, and (ii) Kujukurihama Beach, sixty miles east of Tokyo.
Object: The capture of Tokyo/Yokohama.
Forces: One army on each landing area, plus marine forces.
Date: March 1st, 1946.
It is not hard with a map to picture the strategy intended. The Tokyo Plain (or Kanto Plain, as the Japanese call it) is the only area in the whole of mainland Japan where overwhelming mechanized land forces can be deployed to advantage, or indeed at all. The rest of Japan, apart from the agricultural island of Hokkaido in the north, is a mass of intersecting mountain ranges and narrow, easily defensible valleys. Tokyo and Yokohama being the objectives, it would have been folly to put a large mechanized force ashore anywhere else and expect it to range across the intervening mountains in the short time at its disposal. This limiting factor was apparent to the Japanese too; equally apparent was the probable date of the first landings, which they knew would have to be deferred till the rains stopped at the end of October.
These are the distances by sea from Tokyo to the only mounting bases available to the Americans: 1,000 miles to Okinawa (the nearest base); 1,600 to the Marianas; 1,800 to Leyte and Luzon in the Philippines; 1,800 to Ulithi Atoll; 2,400 to the Admiralty Islands; and 3,400 to Hawaii. Most of these bases were of limited capacity, and the timing of the assaults to converge on Japan from so many different and distant starting points was bound to be the source of many headaches.
The preliminary 'Olympic' assault was to have been on three different beaches - more than a dozen divisions in all, with a vast quantity of stores and airfield construction material to bring ashore with them; Japanese runways were of concrete only four inches thick, and the American four-engined Curtisses and Douglases required a minimum of eighteen inches. Against these forces, according to the August 1945 dispositions produced by the Japanese and checked by US Intelligence, the Japanese opposed nine divisions, two brigades and two tank brigades - a formidable force having regard to the fact that the Japanese were excellent mountain fighters, able to retire into deep caves and sit out the heavy bombardments with which the Americans habitually preceded their assaults.
A secondary, unforeseeable misfortune which would certainly have set back the preparations for 'Olympic' was the typhoon which swept southern Japan and Okinawa during September 1945. Among the destruction wrought by this typhoon would most probably have been the RAF Lancaster squadrons which were to be based on Okinawa as the British contribution to 'Olympic' and to the strategic bombing of Japan.
Assuming, however, that all went well and that in the four winter months available the Americans had established themselves and their aircraft on Kyushu, the main Tokyo Plain assaults would have gone in on the two areas mentioned in the spring of 1946. A date was chosen which would have been the latest to give a reasonable chance of reaching Tokyo itself before melting snows flooded the intervening rivers and turned them into impassable, swirling torrents. Once more the same calculations had been made by the Japanese themselves. In the hills behind the chosen landing beach in Sagami Wan, US Intelligence officers were shown, when hostilities ceased, preliminary clearings for launching a new type of catapulted suicide glider-bomb, to be guided by a human pilot so as to explode both himself and the bomb against the supplies accumulating on the American beach-head ten miles away. These glider-bombs were the army equivalent of the naval Kamikaze suicide-units already seen in operation against US forces in Okinawa. It is difficult for any Westerner to conceive the extent to which a Japanese orders his life as if playing to a critical gallery of his ancestors, and the importance attached, as a climax to the whole affair, to meeting his death in a worthy and picturesque manner. There would have been no shortage of pilots for these glider-bombs operating in defence of the homeland; and their launching ramps, though unfinished in August 1945, were unerringly aligned towards the Americans' chosen landing areas.
The morning of March 1st, 1946, the intended D-Day of 'Coronet', I spent with some American officers on the long Kujukurihama Beach chosen for the first landings east of Tokyo. It was a most unpleasant day, with a 40 mph north wind blowing icily down the beach, occasional sleet, and long rolling breakers with plenty of surf. Whatever tactical surprise the landing might have achieved, sixty miles away in Tokyo it snowed continuously for several days thereafter, and the first few hours and days of getting ashore and deploying mechanized vehicles across the sodden paddy fields would have been a most uncomfortable business.
At the north end of this beach, at a tiny fishing village called Iioka, the Americans had proposed to site the biggest artificial harbour yet used anywhere in the war - a $50 million affair to be built in San Francisco and towed out in sections to the spot, a distance of some 4,700 miles. The site, however, was commanded by a long range of 250 foot hills, honeycombed here, as all round the Tokyo Plain, with caves, underground store rooms, concealed gun emplacements and so on. No doubt flame-throwers - sardonically nicknamed 'Zippos' after a popular cigarette-lighter - could have been used effectively against such enemy positions, as they already had been in Okinawa; these dreadful engines were capable of hurling a blazing mixture of napalm and petrol up to a hundred yards. American officers believed too - I think without any justification - that by March 1946 some kind of 'mini' atom bomb would have been freely available for tactical use in obliterating all resistance, and everything else, along a broad path down to Tokyo, as soon as it appeared that the target date of Tokyo by April 15th might not be kept.
I suggested to one of the American officers he should collect a few sea shells off this fateful beach and send them to General MacArthur - who replied the next day with a scribbled note: 'Thank heavens these are our only souvenirs of yesterday'.
In all, the two 'Coronet' landings and their follow-ups were to involve over a million men, nearly 200,000 vehicles and 700 landing craft. Fortunately we shall never know how this grandiose scheme would have turned out. After the Japanese had thrown in the towel on August 15th, General MacArthur, with all his landing craft away in the USA, had to change his ideas overnight from a sea landing to an airborne one. Within a week he managed to assemble on Okinawa and in the Philippines every available aircraft on the strength of US Air Transport Command in both the Pacific and Europe. On August 27th the first Allied troops to reach Japan, 200 men of the US 11th Airborne Division, were parachuted onto Atsugi airfield, near Tokyo, followed by the rest of their division air-landed the next day.
The first paratroops were greeted by the Japanese Area Commander with smiles, bows, and those little hisses of welcome in which the Japanese specialise. They were led to trestle tables bearing 200 glasses of lemonade which they were pressed to drink in a ceremonial manner, and were then shown to their billets where the sheets on their bunks were turned down ready for them. A fleet of ramshackle black taxis was all that could be assembled by way of transport, and in this seedy cortege the first staff officers were driven off down the narrow pot-holed road into Yokohama. As they jerked along, the Americans were puzzled to find, every hundred yards or so, a Japanese policeman with arms folded, standing back to the road looking out across the surrounding fields. This, they at first thought, is meant to show studied contempt for the new conquerors; it was only later they learned that it was the official security drill to clear the countryside for the Emperor himself when he drove out.
In Yokohama the Grand Hotel, a solid concrete building of monumental ugliness, had survived the fire raids and took its place in history as the US Headquarters for the first few weeks of the occupation. A little way out of the town the British Consulate was similarly intact; and here we were able to instal the oddly assorted handful of Britishers that tends to be thrown up on such occasions: a Foreign Office official observing the spirit of the US uniform regulations by sporting a most dubious kind of yachting cap, a Royal Naval signals lieutenant, a language officer or two, an army sergeant clutching our cipher pad, a mysterious Australian corporal who must have walked in straight out of the sea, and myself. It was from this overcrowded, almost unfurnished refuge that our little band sallied forth, most days in pouring rain, on the many varied and unexpected tasks that the process of occupation presented to us.
Those 200 glasses of lemonade symbolized the whole spirit of the occupation in its early days; most of the anti-occupation incidents were mere bad temper on the part of Koreans or Chinese who considered they were not being repatriated quickly enough. As the purposeful procession of heavy four-engined US aircraft continued flying in to Atsugi, crunching up the runway in a few hours to the consistency of a badly maintained gravel drive, the Japanese (who had developed no four-engined aircraft of their own apart from a few navy flying boats) really began to apprehend what had hit them. When many of these aircraft started to disgorge huge yellow bulldozers and other earth-shifting equipment, driven slap-happily down the aircraft ramps by giant grinning coloured GIs, it was science fiction come true for the local civilians, who acted promptly as their instincts dictated - they turned and fled.
As to democracy and all that, it was a long time, as one GI put it to me, before 'they discovered whether you rub it into your scalp or spread it on a biscuit'. More awkwardly some Japanese women were heard to ask, 'We are told democracy means washing machines - well, where are they?' Materialist, serious-minded, restless, adaptable, susceptible to any demonstration that they might be barking up the wrong tree, the Japanese are capable of fantastic right-about-turns in search of that worldly success and popularity they so deeply crave. Such a right-about-turn, after 15 years' flirtation with the great 1930s successes, Germany and Italy, made them in 1945 passionately keen to learn from their recent enemies all the latest current technologies; this included the atom bomb itself, a device about which they felt not so much a sense of injury because they had been the victims, as one of shame because they had not got there first.
The world is now a more tightly knit, homogeneous place; but in all the multifarious confrontations in those early months of occupation, I doubt if I saw anything which dented at all seriously for me Kipling's famous observation about East and West.
[Lord Horder was ashore in Japan two days after the signing of the Armistice in Tokyo Bay at the end of August 1945, and served with the United Kingdom Liaison Mission there for the first six months of the occupation.]