FINAL SURRENDER

THE AIR OFFENSIVE - HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI

Since October 1944, when the B-29 bombers of the US 21st Bomber Command had been moved up to bases in the Marianas from China and India, the bomber fleet had been able, albeit hazardously, to strike at targets in mainland Japan. The first large-scale raid on Tokyo was launched on November 24th 1944, but, because the Japanese were able to put up fighter intercepter forces from their bases on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and because bombers had such a long trip home, losses were high. Moreover, the actual effectiveness of the raids was not great. The B-29s were using the high-level precision daylight bombing techniques that had always been favoured by the American Air Staff, and were doing relatively little damage. This was partly because the combination of high altitude and extreme range rendered the aircraft unable to carry more than a fraction of their maximum bomb load.The final capture of Iwo Jima in March 1945, and the arrival of the innovative and adventurously inclined Major-General Curtis LeMay as commander of the 21st Bomber Command, changed things dramatically. It was clear that the final assault on mainland Japan had to be from the air, and LeMay set about finding ways to maximise the effectiveness of the B-29 raids. Perhaps benefiting (at long last) from the experience of RAF Bomber Command over Germany during the previous two years, LeMay decided to try low-level night bombing with a mixture of incendiary and high explosive bombs. The technique was, if anything, more capable of bringing about destruction on a massive scale in Japan than it had been in Germany, since most Japanese houses were of relatively flimsy timber construction. After small-scale test raids on Nagoya in January and Kobe in February, the first full-scale night raid of the offensive was scheduled for the night of March 9th/10th. The target was Tokyo.To prevent possible mayhem caused by crews unaccustomed to night raids firing at each other in the dark, the B-29s flew without ammunition for their machine-guns. The weight saving made it possible for each aircraft to carry an additional 3,200 pounds of bombs to the target, a significant addition which brought the average load per bomber for the low-level raid to about six tons. Between them that night, the 334 B-29 aircraft delivered about 2,000 tons of bombs from between 4,900 and 9,200 feet. The effect on Tokyo was awful and awe-inspiring. More than a quarter of a million buildings were destroyed; over a million people were made homeless; 83,000 people died; almost 41,000 were injured. Nearly 16 square miles of the city were burnt out in the fire storm that the raid raised, which had been visible to the crews of the returning bombers for more than 150 miles. Many of the crucial industrial plants supplying the Japanese war effort were destroyed beyond repair. Against this raid, the Japanese had been unable to put up fighters, and had found their anti-aircraft fire to be almost totally ineffective. Only 14 American bombers were lost; 42 more were damaged.

It seemed that LeMay had found the answer to crushing Japan. But when this success for the American bomber fleet was followed on March 11th with a similar raid on Nagoya, the centre of Japan's aircraft industry, the results were less devastating by far. Although more bombs were dropped, there was no firestorm, no general devastation, and no total destruction of industrial plants. In part, this was due to the still air of the night, but far more of the credit for saving a large part of the city went to the efficiency of the fire fighters, and the fact that their water supply continued to work through and after the raid. The American bombers all returned, with the exception of one that ditched at take-off.

Two days later, after the American ground-crews had worked ceaselessly to repair the 20 aircraft damaged over Nagoya and the 42 that had limped back from Tokyo, the B-29s struck again, this time against the port and shipbuilding centre of Osaka. A total of 301 B-29s, each with six tons of bombs, left the Marianas; 274 found the target and dropped over 1,700 tons of bombs on it. Once again, they started a firestorm, although, because the Japanese people were far better prepared, many fewer inhabitants of Osaka died than had met their end in the Tokyo raid. Nearly 4,000 civilians were killed, and another 8,400 were injured. Over eight square miles of the city were burnt out, with the loss of 119 major factories and almost 135,000 houses. On March 16th, the bombers hit Kobe, another port, and Japan's sixth largest city, destroying 500 industrial buildings and almost 66,000 houses, disabling Japan's submarine-building yard and killing nearly 3,000 people. Three days later, Nagoya was bombed again, this time with more than 1,800 tons of bombs including a significantly greater proportion of high explosive than had been used in the earlier raid. As a result, the fire-fighting on the ground was less effective, and a firestorm burned out three square miles.

The March raids had proved that strategic night bombing at low altitudes achieved dramatic results with relatively light losses. During April 1945, the wearisome and bloody campaign in Okinawa needed all the support the bombers could give, and the attacks on Japan ceased, giving the devastated cities a breathing space in which to begin the major task of clearing up. The last bodies of people killed in the first Tokyo raid of March 9th/10th were not found and removed until the second week of April, and the immensity of the task of restoring some semblance of civic order was daunting. But the experience of the American Army and Marine Corps in Okinawa was sufficient to convince both Curtis LeMay and his superiors that an amphibious invasion of mainland Japan should be considered only as a last resort. During April, the cities and industrial centres of Japan had been graded as targets according to their strategic significance, and in May the remorseless assault from the air began again with yet another raid on Nagoya, home of the Mitsubishi engineering and aircraft factories. LeMay now had more aircraft at his disposal, and was able to send 472 B-29s to deliver more than 2,500 tons of bombs - but he sent them by day to bomb from a height of between 12,000 and 20,500 feet, carrying an average of 5.3 tons apiece. The force lost ten aircraft, and achieved less damage than had the earlier night raids. Two days later, the 21st Bomber Command attacked by night at low level again, once more against Nagoya. This time the aircraft carried 8 tons each, and finally managed virtually to destroy the Mitsubishi aircraft works, with the loss of only three aircraft, all of which suffered mechanical failure rather than the effects of enemy action.

Through May and June the night attacks continued, raining destruction on the major cities and industrial centres of Japan. On May 25th, only two nights after a further raid on Tokyo had burned out over five square miles, the worst non-nuclear raid of the war on Japan totally destroyed 16.8 square miles of the city. By the end of June, 105.6 square miles of the total 257.2 square miles area of Japan's six largest cities had been burned out. More than half of Tokyo was in total ruins. Even so, in excess of sixty attacks were made between June 17th and August 14th. Yet still the spirit of Japan prevailed. Absolute devotion to the Emperor could only be overcome by the Emperor himself accepting surrender. How, the Allies asked themselves, does one persuade a god to accept defeat?

The Nuclear Holocaust

In the strictest secrecy, the "Manhattan" project had, as the conventional war progressed, created in America the world's first practical nuclear weapons. Two separate lines of weapons research had resulted in the USA having, by the spring of 1945, two entirely different types of atomic bomb. The first, a gun-assembly weapon known as "Little Boy", was an oblong, parallel sided bomb containing, at one end of the casing, a quantity of Uranium 235 fissionable material that was just short of the critical mass, and, at the other, a gun "loaded" with a segment of the same material. When the gun was fired, and the smaller piece of ratio-active uranium was propelled into the larger, the total mass became critical and a massive explosion ensued. This was the bomb that was to create the devastation of Hiroshima.

The other weapon, "Fat Boy", used plutonium as its fissionable material, and relied upon the implosion principle for its detonation. A core made up of several separate units of plutonium was contained within a casing of TNT. When the conventional explosive was detonated, the plutonium was collapsed into one larger critical mass to create the nuclear blast. America's second bomb, dropped over Nagasaki, was of this type.

In June 1945, knowing that "Little Boy" could be ready late in July, and that "Fat Boy" could be operational at about the same time if tests in July proved that it worked, a meeting between President Truman and the US Chiefs of Staff discussed the disturbing question of whether the new weapon should or should not be used. The problem was not quite as straightforward as it has sometimes been made to seem. General George C. Marshall had calculated that, if mainland Japan was to be invaded as the means of ending war, it would have to be tackled in two major campaigns, the first against the island of Kyushu, the second some months later against Honshu. He had worked out from Okinawa experience of the Japanese army's fanatical preparedness to die that the first of these attacks alone would cost the USA as many as 69,000 killed and wounded out of a proposed force of 190,000. What the losses arising from the final attack on Honshu would have been, once the Japanese army had reached the zenith of its suicidal zeal, nobody seems to have dared to calculate. Despite these figures, Marshall favoured holding back the atomic weapons, and the June meeting did in fact agree that the invasion of Kyushu would begin on November 1st 1945, and that the invasion of Honsho would be scheduled for March 1946.

A further school of thought held that there was no need either to use the nuclear weapons or to invade. Since Japan could shortly be totally surrounded and blockaded, it was argued, her own inability to feed her population without imports would ensure her defeat. But this argument did not gain ground, and by the time the Potsdam Conference issued its considered view, on July 26th, that Japan must either surrender unconditionally or accept "prompt and utter destruction", the weapons were ready, and the Allies clearly intended that the Potsdam ultimatum was to be taken seriously. Despite appeals to the military government of Japan by Emperor Hirohito to accept surrender if the terms could be negotiated to include the continued existence of the Imperial Throne, Prime Minister Suzuki declined to consider the acceptance of defeat. The die was cast.

The 509th Composite Group of the USAAF, which had been based at North Field on Tinian Island in the Marianas since May, was put on readiness to deliver the new secret weapon on or after August 3rd. The uranium 235 necessary for the "Little Boy" bomb had arrived on Tinian on July 26th. The crews of the 509th had been training for months, dropping large high explosive bombs with similar characteristics to the atomic weapons in raids over Japan. Now they waited for the clear weather that was obligatory for the dropping of the most terrible weapon man had yet devised.

On August 6th, the weather cleared, and Colonel Paul Tibbets, commander of the 509th Group, rostered himself to fly the "Enola Gay", the long-range B-29 that he had named after his mother. Two other B-29 aircraft flew with him as observers. The target was Hiroshima. The "Little Boy" bomb, armed during the flight to avoid dangers to Tinian Island should an accident occur at take-off, weighed 9,000 lbs, and the "Enola Gay" was, at 65 tons take-off weight, fully eight tons over the normal operational bombing weight for a B-29. Despite this, the take-off was uneventful, the flight to the Japanese mainland passed without incident, and when the lone B-29 whose task it was to check on weather conditions over the target signalled at 7.15am that it was clear, the three aircraft bringing the bomb began their approach to the target. By the time they arrived over the city at 8.06am, the earlier air raid warning triggered by the weather aircraft had been cancelled. People were on the streets, and the city continued to go about its business, undeterred by the three aircraft far above at over 31,000 feet. Survivors reported noticing that the two aircraft either side of the leading B-29 turned away unusually tightly and made off at speed after an object on a parachute was dropped.

Just 17 seconds after 8.15am, a mighty flash, followed by searing heat and an explosion like a hundred claps of thunder rolled together, followed by blast that lifted and disintegrated buildings, tramcars, people, virtually everything in its path, burst open the stricken city, as "Little Boy" detonated about 2,000 ft above a bridge that was the target marker. A huge mushroom cloud of debris and dust rose boiling into the atmosphere, higher than the aircraft that had brought the devastation. A blast equal to 170,000 tons of TNT and the firestorm that it raised completely flattened almost everything for 4.7 miles around the point directly below the explosion. Two thirds - 60,000 out of 90,000 - of the buildings within 9.5 square miles were either destroyed or seriously damaged. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people died, either immediately or in the weeks immediately following the bomb being dropped. Another 70,000 suffered terrible injuries. Over 20,000 children died in the blast.

On August 9th, another group of three B-29 bombers carried "Fat Boy" to Nagasaki. Although this attack was a chapter of minor difficulties, and the aircraft delivering the bomb had subsequently to make an emergency landing on Okinawa with almost empty fuel tanks, the raid itself achieved its objective. The blast from the plutonium bomb was greater than that of the uranium bomb dropped at Hiroshima, but its equivalent explosive force to 20,000 tons of TNT in fact did rather less damage, mainly because of the more hilly topography of Nagasaki. Some 35,000 people were killed or injured in the attack and its immediate aftermath, but it should not be forgotten that the real total of killed and injured for both nuclear attacks was very much higher than the figures for immediate casualties suggest. The subsequent radiation sickness, and high incidence of cancers, congenitally abnormal births, cataract, spontaneous abortion and other conditions greatly increased the total casualties over a period of twenty and thirty years, and even as this book is written, the final genetic effects cannot be fully known. Not for nothing has the attack on Hiroshima become a symbol of the nuclear age.

Russia Claims the Pickings - and Japan Surrenders

On August 8th, after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and before the second bomb fell on Nagasaki, Russia honoured her undertaking to enter the war against Japan once the war in Europe had been won. At midnight on the 8th, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow received the Soviet declaration of war. Ten minutes later, 1,500,000 Russian troops, 5,500 armoured vehicles and almost 4,000 aircraft embarked on a high-speed campaign against the 1,040,000-strong Japanese army in Manchuria. This was to be the last offensive of the Second World War, and it demonstrated to a watching world just how effective the Soviet war machine had become since 1941. Until the August 1945 offensive, both Japan and Russia had observed carefully, even stringently, the Neutrality Pact of April 1941. Now, after three and a half months of transporting the Russian army across a continent - 750,000 were moved on the Trans-Siberian railway alone, and 136,000 truckloads of equipment were driven to the Easternmost extremity of the USSR - the Soviet army was ready. The principal push into Manchuria was to come from Marshal Malinovsky's Transbaikal Front, made up of five armies plus the 12th Air Army, which would enter Manchuria from the West and thrust Eastwards to Mukden and Chang-chun. Far to the East, in the Maritime province North of Vladivostock, where the Japanese expected the offensive, the 1st Far Eastern Front under Marshal Meretskov, made up of the 1st, 5th, 25th, and 35th Armies faced formidable fortifications built by the Japanese against this day.

On Marshal Malinovsky's front, the 6th Guards Tank Army, despite problems of supply of

fuel and water, attacked the Japanese across what most regarded as an impossible barrier

- the Gobi Desert in August; hot, arid and inhospitable. For four days, the Russians advanced without opposition, for no attack had been expected on that front. As fuel and water were dropped from the air in a spectacular airlift operation, the advancing Russian Tank Army overcame the Japanese 80th Brigade, then the 107th Division, who fought on oblivious to Japan's total surrender on August 15th. The Russian 17th Army made similar progress, and by August 20th was over the Chinese border. All along the front, the armies of Soviet Russia rushed forward, overcoming all in their path. After 15th August, news of Japan's surrender gradually reached the Japanese armies in the field, many units of which simply failed to believe what they heard and fought on. But the progressive surrender of Japanese units speeded the Russian advance all along the Transbaikal Front, and by the 24th August, the Russian forces were in Mukden, Dairen and Port Arthur, and had avenged Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905. More to the point, Stalin had successfully grabbed some more territory before the war finally ended.

On the Far Eastern Front, the Japanese armies were better defended and more concentrated, and fought fiercely. Only the final surrender of Japan saved theSoviet troops from a protracted and bloody campaign of the sort the Americans had suffered throughout the long haul back across the Pacific. This was particularly true of the Russian landing on Sakhalin and in the Kurile Islands. Now Russia was able to support with arms captured from the Japanese the Communist forces fighting the civil war in China against the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek. Faced with this new peril, Chiang's future was bleak.

The Final Surrender

The devastation of the two atomic bombs, and the Russian declaration of war and offensive against Manchuria, convinced Emperor Hirohito of Japan that the time had come for a little rational Western thinking, and for his nation to surrender. For almost ten years, he had been effectively a puppet Emperor, unable to do more than accept the dictates of his "advisers" and acquiesce in the rule of the military government. Now, when the military dictatorship had demonstrably failed, and Japan had been brought to her knees, he convened a meeting in the air-raid shelter of the Imperial Palace at midnight on August 9th 1945. There was a heated discussion. All agreed that any surrender must permit the Emperor to retain his throne and his sovereignty, but the military members of the government wanted also to ensure that there was no Allied occupation, and that Japanese war criminals would be tried by Japanese in Japan. When everyone had had their say, Hirohito, for the first time since the Thirties, took a decision. Japan would offer surrender on only the one condition - that the sovereign power of the Emperor would be retained.

The decision was cabled to the Allies. The US Secretary of State, James Byrnes, responded swiftly - only unconditional surrender was acceptable, and the Emperor was to be "subject to" the Supreme Allied Commander. More heated discussion ensued in the Japanese Cabinet, and on August 14th a further meeting with the Emperor again elicited a decision made by him alone without deference to his government. Japan would accept the Allied conditions. Radio messages were sent forthwith to all Japanese armies and troops in the field telling them of the surrender and instructing them to lay down their arms. Most did. Some fought on. Many officers committed ritual Hara kiri rather than dishonour themselves by surrender.

To convince the Japanese population that the unthinkable had happened, Emperor Hirohito, for the first time in a reign spanning (since 1926) almost two decades, recorded a radio broadcast, and at noon on August 15th the Japanese population heard the voice of their Emperor, still officially a god, telling them that the war was at an end and that Japan was to be occupied.

On August 30th, the first of the occupation forces, a contingent of American and British troops, landed at Yokosuka. Three days later, on September 2nd, just one day and three hours short of six years after the first Allied declaration of war against Hitler by Britain in 1939, the Second World War came officially to an end when the formal surrender was signed aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo harbour. The newly appointed Foreign Minister of Japan, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and representatives of the Japanese armed services signed on behalf of their country. General Douglas MacArthur, and generals and admirals of the USA, Great Britain, China, Russia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, France and Australia signed on behalf of the Allies. There remained now only the rebuilding of a peacetime world.