Nuclear Counterfactuals: Part II
Japanese soldier throwing grenade at Battle of Okinawa
This article is the second of a two-part series. For the first article, see “Hiroshima and Nuclear Counterfactuals.”
Virtual History #2: Non-Use and Costly Invasion
In February 1945, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted an advisory document to President Truman stating that, in their considered opinion, the use of the “special weapons” that would become available beginning in August was not necessary to bring the war to a speedy end. They advised the president that the Japanese military was finished as a fighting force, that strategic bombing and blockade had destroyed Japan’s industrial base, and that the Japanese people’s will to fight was close to the breaking point. They further advised that the US military was at peak readiness for an invasion of the Japanese home islands. They concluded that US land, naval, and air forces were well equipped, experienced, and highly motivated. In short, the chiefs told the president that he had at his disposal the best fighting force ever assembled by the United States. The Japanese, they informed the president, even though fighting in defense of their homes, simply could not withstand an assault by such a force—especially as battle-hardened and very capable Allied forces would supplement it. While there would be casualties, they advised, these were not likely be excessive.
Based on this advice, and taking into account the broader geopolitical situation, President Truman ordered his Secretary of War to implement Operation Downfall, the long-planned Allied invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Operation Downfall comprised two constituent campaigns: Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet. The first, Operation Olympic, had as its objective the capture of the southernmost main Japanese island, Kyūshū, which was subsequently to be used as a staging area for an invasion of the main Japanese island of Honshu and to provide bases for land-based airpower to support that invasion.
Initially planned to begin in November 1945, President Truman ordered the operation to be moved up three months in order to forestall any Soviet effort to enter the war and seize Japanese territory. The second operation, Coronet, was initially planned for March 1946 but was also moved up by three months. Operation Coronet’s objective was to take the Kantō Plain on the Japanese island of Honshu, then move directly against Tokyo. A joint Allied endeavor, Operation Downfall saw US Army and Marine Corps forces joined by a British Empire Corps, made up of infantry divisions from the Australian, British, Canadian, and Indian armies. Downfall was the largest amphibious operation in human history, dwarfing even Operation Overlord in Normandy the previous year.
Almost from the beginning, things went badly for the Allied side. Through April, May, and June, Allied intelligence followed the buildup of Japanese ground forces in Kyūshū, projecting that at the time of the planned invasion the total number of Japanese military forces on the island would be on the order of 350,000 troops. That changed in July, with the discovery of four new divisions on the island. By the beginning of August, the intelligence estimate was up to 600,000 troops, twice the number expected and still a substantial underestimate of the actual Japanese strength.
The intelligence revelations about Japanese preparations on Kyūshū emerging in mid-July sent powerful shock waves both in the Pacific Theater and in Washington. Various officials advised the Secretary of War and the president to alter the invasion plan or at least delay the invasion until the Japanese forces had been adequately “softened up” by additional conventional aerial bombardment. But considerations of weather, concerns about Soviet intentions, high-level skepticism about the intelligence findings, inter-service politics, and simple inertia combined to keep the invasion on schedule. As we now know, the Allied invasion forces were not met by the initial estimate of 300,000 enemy troops, nor even by the revised estimate of 600,000. Instead, they faced an approximately 917,000-strong Japanese garrison. The commander of this garrison, having learned well the lessons of Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, had deployed his forces wisely: far enough inland from the beaches that he was able to minimize exposure to naval bombardment, while close enough to the beaches that he could engage the US and British Empire forces before they could establish a secure foothold. The Japanese commander also maintained a mobile counteroffensive force even farther back from the invasion beaches, a force that would prove instrumental in nearly driving the Allied invasion forces back into the sea in the days following the X-Day landings.
Once the invasion got underway, things went even worse than the most pessimistic pessimists had imagined. Under the command of Admiral Matome Ugaki, the Japanese Fifth Air Fleet, comprising more than 10,000 kamikaze aircraft and supplemented by hundreds of small suicide boats, relentlessly attacked the Allied invasion forces as they approached the shores of Kyūshū. Eventually, Ugaki’s kamikaze force would sink more than 400 ships, nearly one-third of the Allied invasion armada, the largest proportion of which were transports rather than carriers or other surface combatants. Large numbers of Allied troops never made it to the beaches. Those who did make it faced stiff resistance.
Unlike in Normandy the previous June, resistance at all of the thirty-five Allied landing beaches—named for automobiles, Austin, Buick, Cadillac, and so on through to Stutz, Winton, and Zephyr—was fierce and determined. Several beachheads were wiped out within the first several days after the landings, and at least five more were in danger of a similar fate. In desperation, the US put into effect existing plans to use the massive arsenal of chemical weapons it had stockpiled in the Mariana Islands against the Japanese military. This resulted in massive numbers of Japanese military deaths, as well as vast numbers of civilian casualties. Large numbers of Allied forces were also killed as a result of shifting winds that blew US chemical agents back toward Allied lines and Japanese retaliation-in-kind.
Despite the widespread use of these weapons, the military situation continued to worsen. By X +15, more than two weeks after the initial landings, it seemed that the entire invasion was on the verge of catastrophic failure. This, combined with a Soviet invasion of both Japanese occupied China and the northern island of Hokkaido, led to the fateful decision on August 20 to deploy nuclear weapons against the Japanese Kyūshū garrison. The use of these “special weapons” quickly changed the military balance on the island, allowing Allied forces to advance rapidly against a Japanese defender crippled by both chemical and nuclear attacks. When the Emperor still refused to surrender to the Allies, President Truman authorized the use of nuclear weapons against two Japanese cities that had thus far been spared the horrors of firebombing—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three days later, Emperor Hirohito accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and called on the Japanese people and armed forces to lay down their arms and cease all resistance to the US-led forces in the south and the Soviet forces in the North.
In January 1946, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff reported the Allied casualties incurred during Operation Olympic. Between X-Day and X +90, the Allied forces suffered 514,072 casualties (including 134,556 dead and missing). This assessment included neither casualties suffered by British Empire forces nor personnel losses at sea from Japanese kamikaze attacks. Nearly 400,000 Purple Heart medals (awarded for combat wounds) were awarded to US service members. Japanese casualties totaled an astonishing 800,000 dead or missing. Soviet casualties remain unknown but are widely believed to be substantial.
What should we make of the two counterfactual scenarios I have described? One important conclusion, I think, is that there were simply no easy options on the table for US military commander and political leaders in the summer of 1945. No matter what path the responsible American officials chose, there were going to be humanitarian and/or strategic costs and benefits. When it came to ending the war with Imperial Japan, the US was confronted with the very definition of a “wicked problem,” that is, a problem that had innumerable dimensions, was difficult to analyze, and that simply didn’t have a right answer that would satisfy all constituencies.
Despite having cracked the Japanese codes, the US decision-makers were also partly blinded by the “fog of war.” They simply did not know everything they needed to know to make the best possible decision, whatever goal that decision was meant to advance. This was not a simple binary choice between evil bombing and virtuous not bombing, or vice versa. Playing the ever-so-strategically hard-nosed or morally virtuous arm-chair general three-quarters of a century later is easy. Being the person behind the desk who has to make the difficult choice between bad, really bad, and truly awful options (and not knowing which is which) is not.
More broadly, though, I think the most salutary effect of this thought experiment is that it forces us to concede that Truman’s decision was the product of neither malice nor stupidity. Rather it was the outcome of his inevitably flawed human attempt to come to grips with a wicked problem, in the absence of perfect knowledge and in the full knowledge that the stakes were world-historical in significance. He was always going to get it partly wrong—maybe even entirely wrong, if “wrong” is defined retroactively and out of context.
Nagasaki a day after the atom bomb was dropped
Two final thought experiments might drive home this point. Imagine, in the first, a situation in which every 8th of May we ritually condemned Winston Churchill for ordering the Royal Air Force to drop Britain’s first atomic bomb on Berlin in 1940, thus ending the war quickly and sparing the lives of most of the 70-85 million people who eventually died in that war. Now imagine, in the second, that President Truman had not ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Would we be condemning him now for not ending the war as quickly as possible, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives lost during the extended war that ensued, and that millions more lost to the North Korean-style Marxist necrocracy installed by the Soviets in North Japan?
Andrew Latham is a professor of Political Science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He regularly teaches courses on Conservative Political Thought, Medieval Political Thought, and International Security.