Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
On the night of 9-10 March 1945, 279 giant US B-29 Superfortress bombers launched a new type of raid on the Japanese capital Tokyo. They dropped 496,000 small six-pound M-69 incendiaries which, unlike those used in Europe, each contained a small amount of a highly flammable jelly known as ‘napalm’ that had been developed earlier in the war by a Harvard scientist, Louis Fieser.
Tokyo’s Air Raid Precautions were very poor. There were few shelters and limited anti-aircraft batteries. Thousands of fires were started in some of the most densely populated areas of the city. The small wooden houses were soon engulfed in a major firestorm that spread rapidly from roof to roof and building to building in the strong winds that blew that night. Sparks in the hot air quickly ignited clothing as people rushed to escape the conflagration and one witness described bodies as being turned into ‘blackened lumps of charcoal’. In places where there were solid brick buildings people gathered to try to avoid the flames. But there was no escape from the fires, and on the next day bodies could not be identified in the piles of ash that were all that remained.
It was estimated that more than a quarter of a million homes, offices, and factories were destroyed that night and 16 square miles of the city were burnt to the ground. One million people were left homeless and Tokyo police reported that 83,000 had died. The real number was without doubt much higher.
The bombing marked a new strategy in the Pacific War. With the capture of the Mariana Islands – Guam, Saipan, and Tinian – the newly arrived B-29 bombers with their massive range could at last fly to and from the Japanese mainland. The commander of the XXI Bomber Group Haywood Hansell planned to bomb by day from high altitude but was unhappy about bombing civilians. The USAAF in Europe had opposed the RAF policy of carpet-bombing civilian centres at night, preferring instead precision raids by day. But Hansell was dismissed from his command as being ‘too civilised’, and was replaced in early 1945 by Curtis LeMay, who had no such scruples. In March, LeMay therefore began a strategy of bombing by night with incendiaries from about 5,000-7,000 feet.
Over the next couple of months, there would be 66 further raids on civilian, military, and industrial targets across Japan. Another 162 square miles of urban landscape was destroyed and more than a quarter of a million Japanese were killed. But it was the Tokyo fire raid on 9-10 March that represents the largest loss of civilians in any single bombing raid – and roughly double the total number of deaths in the nine-month Blitz of Britain in the winter of 1940-1941. Coming towards the end of a war in which the Japanese had demonstrated barbarous behaviour towards enemy troops and occupied nations, LeMay showed no regrets at the massive civilian loss. ‘It was something they asked for and something they got,’ he was reported as saying. The air commanders began to argue that maybe bombing alone could bring an end to the war – and that the huge losses expected in the planned invasion of Japan, Operations Olympic and Coronet (see feature here), could be avoided.
A bolt of lightning
Back in Europe, during the month following the Tokyo raid, the Anglo-American armies successfully crossed the Rhine and surrounded a massive German army in the Ruhr pocket that was forced to capitulate (see MHM 145, April/May 2025). The European war was nearing its end. But President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill disagreed on future strategy. Churchill was fearful of the Soviet threat as the war came to its conclusion and protested to the President about the policies pursued by Moscow. On the morning of 12 April 1945, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill that he would ‘minimise the general Soviet problem’, certain that his relationship with Stalin would ensure post-war harmony. But, while posing for a portrait that afternoon, the 63-year-old President collapsed. He never regained consciousness and died a couple of hours later of a brain haemorrhage. According to the constitution, Vice President Harry Truman immediately succeeded to the Presidency. He was sworn in later that day.
Truman had been kept woefully ignorant of key military and foreign policy developments in the war. For instance, he knew nothing of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret programme to develop an atomic bomb which involved up to 200,000 scientists in a variety of locations across the United States. ‘I feel like I’ve been struck by a bolt of lightning,’ he told a colleague on being sworn in. Truman liked to see things in simple black-and-white terms. He did not have the patience to weigh up subtleties and freely admitted he was ‘not up on all details’. He immediately took against the Soviet Union and what he regarded as its bully-boy tactics in Eastern Europe in breach of the agreements reached at the Yalta Conference earlier that year. Only two weeks into his Presidency, he had a meeting in the White House with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Truman gave him a full-on dressing down over Soviet policy. ‘I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life,’ Molotov complained. ‘Carry out your agreements,’ Truman replied, ‘and you won’t get talked to like that again.’ The era of wartime collaboration was coming to an end.
As Truman learned more about the development of the atom bomb, he came to the view that there was no question that it should be used. He asked why would so much effort and the expenditure of billions of dollars (probably equivalent to more than $30 billion in today’s money) be invested if it was not going to be used? And potentially it could save hundreds of thousands of American lives in the invasion of Japan. The atomic bomb had been developed by American scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer at great speed, fearing that Germany would develop a nuclear device first. But no one knew if the science would work or when the bomb would be available. As it happened, the war in Europe was won before the bomb was ready.
Two months after the end of hostilities, the wartime victors met at the Cecilienhof Palace, Potsdam, in the suburbs of bombed and ruined Berlin. The leaders all had slightly different agendas. For Truman – accompanied by his new Secretary of State, James Byrnes, who had been sworn in only three days before departing for Potsdam – a key objective was to get the Soviets to confirm their earlier promise given at Yalta to enter the war against Japan. On the first day of the conference, Stalin reiterated his pledge. ‘Could go home now,’ Truman whispered to Byrnes.
But there was a lot more to do at Potsdam. And in the middle of the first stage of negotiations, on 16 July, Oppenheimer’s team nervously carried out the first test of their new bomb at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert, codenamed Operation Trinity. The explosion was reported to be ‘brighter than a thousand suns’. It was a complete success, exceeding the expectations of the scientists, and totally vapourised the steel tower on which the bomb was launched, sending a giant mushroom cloud of sand and dust into the air. When Truman was told in Potsdam of the success, he was delighted. ‘He was a changed man,’ Churchill noted.
A few days later, Truman and Byrnes went across the floor to Stalin and told him that the United States now had a big new weapon. ‘Good,’ the Soviet leader said to the US President. ‘I hope the US will use it.’ They thought he had not understood. But Stalin knew all about the development of the atom bomb through his spies in the Manhattan Project. He immediately ordered the speeding up of the programme to develop a Soviet atom bomb.
On 26 July, the US, Britain, and China issued the Potsdam Declaration (the Soviet Union was still not at war with Japan). In effect, this was an ultimatum. Japan had to agree to an unconditional surrender or they would suffer ‘prompt and utter destruction’. What was not made clear was exactly what was meant by ‘unconditional surrender’. It would certainly involve withdrawing from occupied territories, disarmament, and occupation. But it was unclear, for instance, whether Japan could keep its Emperor. Two days later, the Japanese press reported that the country’s government would not accept the ultimatum. From this point, there was no question that the atom bomb would be used. The President was not involved in the final decision to deploy the bomb. He had already authorised its use. The final decision about when and where to drop the bomb was left entirely to the military.
A sacred decision
The question remained, would the Japanese surrender in the face of the massive aerial bombing that was already taking place on their home islands? The Japanese warrior code did not allow for the concept of surrender. Everything had to be done to protect the Empire and soldiers would fight to the death for the Emperor, committing suicide rather than admit defeat. Emperor Hirohito was a combination of supreme commander, national father figure, and divine god. However, under the Japanese constitution, the Emperor could issue a ‘sacred decision’ known as a seidan, but this was extremely rare and it was not clear exactly how this could be done as no ‘sacred decision’ to surrender had ever been made.
Within a few hours, about 70,000 people were dead.
By the summer of 1945, there were two factions in Tokyo. The army led the faction that argued it was the duty of all Japanese, soldiers and civilians, to fight to the death for the Emperor. This meant that the civilian population would be called on to resist an invasion of the home islands. If this effectively meant national suicide, they argued this was better than the ultimate humiliation of defeat and dishonour.
However, there was also a peace faction, centred around Japan’s Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Koichi Kido, and the foreign minister, Shigemitsu Mamoru. They realised that the war was lost, that the naval barricade of Japan would mean people would soon be starving with the lack of food imports, and that the devastation from the skies would completely destroy the country’s manufacturing industry and economic wealth. Hirohito himself sided with this group. He had inspected the damage after the fire bombing of Tokyo and had been shocked at the scale of the destruction. This peace faction still did not speak of surrender but called for a ‘termination’ of the war. Feelers were put out to Moscow to see if the Soviets would act as intermediaries to negotiate terms to end the war with America.
A world destroyed
While the debate about ending the war was going on in Tokyo, all the elements of the atom bomb were gathered at Tinian, where it was assembled by engineers in early August. When the weather cleared on 6 August, a B-29 named Enola Gay captained by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the first ever nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. The bomb exploded at 8.15 that morning. Within a few hours, about 70,000 people were dead. By the end of the year, another 70,000 had died from radiation sickness.
Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. In a Soviet Blitzkrieg, the Red Army surged forward and made dramatic advances into Japanese-occupied territory. The invasion continued until early September, and the Soviets advanced into Korea and occupied the country down to the 38th Parallel. Stalin was keen to seize a piece of east Asian territory before Japan surrendered, hoping to be a party to the Japanese peace negotiations, as they were already a major player in the division of Germany.
In Tokyo, there was still debate about whether or not to end the war. Initially, the government saw the dropping of the atom bomb as merely an extension of the massive aerial bombardment of the country that had been going on since March. They were sceptical that the bomb used on Hiroshima was a new form of atomic device as claimed by Truman. Japanese scientists did not believe the Americans had enough uranium to make a bomb. But the Americans were now in a hurry. Frustrated by the lack of an instant surrender, a second bomb, a plutonium bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki on the day after the Soviet invasion, on 9 August. The death toll was lower than in Hiroshima because of the local topography. But it was estimated that 40,000 died within hours of the dropping of this second bomb.
On 13 August, President Truman threatened the Japanese with a third bomb, this time on Tokyo. In fact, there was no third bomb available. The construction of a third bomb would not be possible for some months. But the threat seems to have accelerated developments in Tokyo.
On 14 August, Emperor Hirohito attended an emergency session of the Supreme War Council in an underground air-raid shelter in the Imperial Palace. In a scene of high drama, Hirohito announced a ‘sacred decision’, a seidan, to end the war. He still did not speak of surrender but spoke of conditions in Japan making it impossible to continue the war. He said he wanted to avoid reducing the whole country to ashes. There was no expression of regret for the suffering caused by Japan’s expansionist policies or of the devastation in south-east Asia and the Pacific. With tears in his eyes, Hirohito spoke of the need to terminate the war immediately. A recording of his speech was made later.
Despite a last-minute coup attempt by army officers opposed to the capitulation, at midday on 15 August the Emperor’s message was broadcast and relayed on loudspeakers throughout Japan. For most Japanese, it was the first time they had heard the voice of their sacred Emperor. Many found it difficult to understand what he was saying, as his language was so archaic. Nevertheless, the military laid down their swords and accepted defeat. A formal signing of the Instrument of Surrender by foreign minister Shigemitsu took place on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. The war in the Pacific was over.
Final analysis
The debate has raged ever since as to whether the US needed to drop the atom bombs on Japan. Or would the country have eventually surrendered under the pressure of the aerial bombing campaign that had begun against Tokyo in March? And did the Soviet invasion of August make a final capitulation inevitable?
It seems to me that, having developed the atom bomb at great expense and with scientific genius, it is barely credible that it would not be used. The prospect of the massive loss of American lives in an invasion of Japan unquestionably strengthened the argument for its use. This was Truman’s view all along, and it has been the standard justification for dropping the bomb ever since. In one sense, it was just an extension of the aerial bombing taken to a newly terrifying level. However, the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems totally unnecessary. The Tokyo leadership, with its arcane forms of coming to a sacred decision, was always going to need time to formulate a response. Was the dropping of the second bomb, of a different type to the first, a gesture to intimidate the Soviet Union, showing that America was now all-powerful and could dominate the post-war world? Maybe the dropping of this bomb was not intended to end the World War, but was a first gesture in the coming Cold War.
Taylor Downing’s latest book The Army that Never Was: D-Day and the Great Deception is out now in paperback (Icon Books, £10.99).
Operation Downfall: See here for David Porter’s analysis of the Allied plan to invade the Japanese homeland.
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
You must be logged in to post a comment.