Downfall POTUS
By John Batchelor on November 17, 2009 at 8:30 PM in Current Affairs
The answer is less significant to me than the speculation that the POTUS conduct may be connected to an apology or an expression of remorse with regard the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
No Doubts.
The documented facts re the decision to use the first available atomic weapons on strategic targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” supports a general statement that Harry Truman and his military and civilian advisers, including Marshall, Leahy, Turner, King, Arnold, Hull, Grew and more, examined very closely the real-time estimates of what casualties the US would suffer in the event of an amphibious invasion of the home islands. They also looked at estimated Japanese casualties, military and civilian.
The planning for DOWNFALL started in the summer 1944 and was continually updated into the Spring 1945. The Japanese suicidal resistance on Okinawa kept readjusting the ratios. The first two weeks of April 1945, US casualties were 7 thousand per week, and then continued at 35oo per week through April, May and into June.
The actual number of US casualties was not the 35 thousand by June 1 but actually double that, in the 65-70 thousand range, including battle fatigue and exhaustion. All this changed the estimates on DOWNFALL. I was shocked, and you will be, too. Herbert Hoover, the ageless and timeless public servant, who was assisting the FDR and now the Truman administrations (Truman assumed POTUS mid-April at FDR’s death), got involved in numbers crunching in late May. Truman personally invited Hoover to the White House, and Hoover traveled from the New York Waldorf (where he lived in the penthouse) to the White House on May 28.
When Hoover returned to New York, he drafted a memo that went to POTUS and presented the bald fact that a minimum casualty number was 500 thousand and that 1 million casualties was possible. Did Truman believe it? Yes. It was based upon Hoover’s good, sound, field tested information from Iwo Jima and Okinawa battlefields. The draft had already started looking for 600 thousand new soldiers as replacements for the estimated casualties.
The Truman administration was in preparation for a living nightmare, hence “Hell to Pay.” They gave orders to prepare 500 thousand Purple Hearts. They gave orders to prepare 700 thousand hospital beds stateside to receive the wounded. The estimates of casualties kept climbing. By June 1947 the official estimate was still based upon the low number of one US combat casualty for every seven Japanese combat casualties.
Using the baseline of 3.5 million combat personnel available for the defense of the homeland, that meant the half million. However by Summer 1945, the DoD believed that the Japanese were capable of fielding 5 million or more men with weapons in defense of the homeland, which would raise the estimates to three quarters of a million at best. And climbing.
The Japanese battle plan, Ketsu-Go, assigned 13 Divisions to southern most in the homeland chain Kyushu Island, which they anticipated would be the first target. They were correct. Operation DOWNFALL was to go in two phases, and the first was Operation OLYMPIC, with X-Day on November 1, 1945. The Japanese divisions dug in well back from the landing zones which they anticipated, and they were exactly correct in their choices. Also, Kyushu had a civilian population of ten million people, who remained in place.
The US was going to launch 14 divisions against 13 Japanese divisions, a formula for disaster. The second phase of DOWNFALL was Operation Coronet, and it was to launch on Y-Day, March 1, 1946, when 40 Allied divisions were to assault the main island of Honshu. Again, Ketsu-Go anticipated correctly, and the Japanese planned to have a comparable force that was well dug in, again to fight to the death.
Add to this misery that fact that the Japanese Air Force was much larger than the US figured because it had been reconfigured with wooden built Kamikazes. The Kamikaze was the single most effective weapon the Japanese ever employed, and the US suppressed the facts of how devastating the attacks had been at Okinawa.
Adding all this preparation, most of it unknown to the US command, the Japanese warlords were prepared to lose 20 million people of all types in order to drain and neutralize the Allied invasions. The Japanese warlord aim, supported by the Emperor Hirohito, was to make the invasion so costly that the US would offer a ceasefire, thereby preserving the Japanese empire for a negotiated withdrawal of all forces from the homeland.
The situation would likely have been much worse.
After the first atomic strike on Hiroshima, August 6, the warlords sent out what was interpreted as surrender messages; but after the second strike on Nagasaki, August 9, the warlords fell silent. Marshall accepted the fact that the warlords would not surrender, and he argued that the next two bombs be kept back for use later in the invasion. Marshall wanted the first seven to nine bombs dropped on Kyushu Island just before November 1. Then Marshall wanted the invasion troops to wait forty-eight hours and attack through the debris.
Marshall knew what the bombs would do; he had gone to New Mexico. But no one knew what radiation would do over time. Ten million Japanese civilians on Kyushu, plus 13 Japanese divisions and 14 Allied divisions, plus the American fleet of battleships, carriers, destroyers, troop transports, all of it, under a rain of fallout. This was the eve of the horror. It didn’t come, because on August 14 the warlords surrendered, to the great surprise and prayerful relief of Truman, Marshall and the admirals.
Aware that the progressives were already campaigning against Truman for his decision to use the bombs, Michener asked that the letter not be made public until after his death: “How did we react? With a gigantic sigh of relief, not exultation because of our victory, but a deep gut-wrenching sigh of deliverance. We had stared into the mouth of Armageddon and suddenly the confrontation was no longer necessary. We had escaped those deadly beaches of Kyushu.”
Does America now indulge in revisionism and fault Truman and Marshall and their cadre for choosing between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and one hundred times those losses?
The whole of the Pacific and Asia was losing 400 thousand casualties a month as long as the Japanese continued to resist. Europe was starving and in ruins. Southeast Asia, Korea, the Philippines, all the islands, were desperate and in need. Wait for blockade? Wait for negotiation? Wait for what? The decision was made to bomb. And when that didn’t work as of August 9, the decision was made to invade. Truman crossed the line. He accepted both scenarios, August 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not enough. Suddenly Truman had to live with his decision to launch fifty-four divisions into Hell.
Apologize? Remorse? Bows? I await more information, but for now I am puzzled. Does the Obama administration have the facts of why Truman gave the order to use the bombs?
………..
Reprinted from the blog for my syndicated radio show.
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