Downfall

As I alluded to in comments a few days back, I have gone back and forth quite a lot over the past two decades on the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945. My latest thinking is that it was worth almost anything to avoid Operation Downfall, the proposed invasion of Japan scheduled to begin in November 1945…

Japanese intelligence guessed accurately at the key elements of the Allied plan.

Although Japan lacked resources (especially energy), it had a considerable number of soldiers, a potentially fanatical civilian population, and bitter experience from defending a host of Pacific islands. Japanese planning envisioned a defense in depth supported by suicide attacks on the ground, in the air, and at sea.

While these preparations probably could not have prevented an Allied victory, they could have made it enormously costly. Indeed, Japanese preparations were made primarily for deterrence purposes, in the hopes that the Allies could be persuaded to accept an armistice in lieu of the invasion.

Casualty estimates for the invasion became suspect almost immediately because of political and organizational needs to justify particular policy decisions, especially the use of the atomic bombs.

Forecasts during the war ran from a hundred thousand US dead to over a million.

Japanese losses would simply have been unimaginable, as would damage to the home islands. Indeed, as additional atomic bombs became available, they would have been used against Japanese civilian and military targets, adding to the destruction.

I have sort of come around to the idea that the best policy, the one that I would recommend to Harry Truman if I could be shuttled back to July of 1945, would be to use the first bomb against a military target with minimal civilian damage, stagger the second bomb back a bit, and be a touch more flexible with diplomacy. But while that sounds great, in practice it might just strengthen the hand of the factions in Tokyo that wanted to continue fighting; there’s very good evidence that the simultaneous hammer blow of Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion of Machukuo broke the ice and enabled a political settlement by August 15. I think it’s also worth noting that despite real and meaningful concerns about the insufficient scourging of the Japanese political elite after 1945, the core job was done and done correctly; Japanese militarism was strangled for at least eighty years. Any flexibility on diplomacy prior to August runs the risk of failing to cut enough of the militarism out.

I think it’s also worth emphasizing that there was not a “either the bomb or invade” binary choice for US policymakers. For one, the Navy and the Army Air Force preferred a strangle-and-bomb option that very possibly could have been worse than Downfall and that would have left the war hot in the rest of Asia; Japanese forces would have continued fighting in China and Southeast Asia until an actual surrender from Tokyo. Worse, the possibility that Japan would continue to fight *despite* the dropping of the bombs was very real, which would have combined the horrors of Operation Downfall with a nuclear campaign against Japan’s remaining urban centers, as well as any convenient military targets. Even thinking about how this would affect Japan’s future is daunting.

It was a mess of bad options. In younger days I could get strident on arguments about the Bomb, but no more; it was a rough decision no matter what. If we want to talk about agency, the band of gangsters who ran the Japanese war machine into the ground should have thrown in the towel no later than April 1945, and much of the responsibility for what happened later belongs to them.