submission. This is probably true, but can never be proved. At best such a policy would indubitably have saved many American lives, even though it would almost certainly have caused horrible and unimaginable suffering in Japan. Because it would have taken so much longer, it would have given the insatiably land-hungry Stalin the opportunity to enter the war for a much longer period than his actual six-day contribution, and thus cloak him in the customary mane of the lion roaring for his “rightful” share of the spoils. Hiroshima, then, did save Japan from the brutal and selfish policies of her War Lords determined that the nation must die like a dutiful
From all this speculation only two probabilities seem to emerge: one, that Japan was already beaten and would have surrendered before the monster Operation Olympic invasion began three months later; two, that Harry Truman dropped both bombs as much to frighten Stalin as to finish off Japan.
Where, then, does this leave Okinawa?
A corollary of the myth of the atomic bombs is the other though less widespread misconception of Okinawa as an unnecessary battle. Here is one more instance of that cart-before-the-horse thinking common to those facile minds so well described by Aristotle: “Contemplating little, they have no difficulty deciding.” The Battle for Okinawa was begun on April 1, 1945, more than 4 months before the bombing of Hiroshima and 3? months before the first bomb was exploded at Alamogordo. The Americans wanted Okinawa for a staging area only 375 miles from Kyushu, the Japanese hoped through its
Because Imperial General Headquarters had not the slightest suspicion that the Americans were close to producing an atomic bomb, General Ushijima and his Thirty-second Army expected to defend Okinawa with conventional weapons, while General Buckner intended to seize the Great Loo Choo with the same instruments of war. Not until just before Hiroshima were Fleet Admiral Nimitz and General of the Armies MacArthur—the officers who would command the invasion of Japan—informed that their country now possessed atomic weapons. By then, of course, Okinawa had fallen—and when it did, it so shocked Emperor Hirohito that he could echo what Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, his personal naval advisor, had cried when he learned of the loss of Saipan: “Hell is on us!”
Until Okinawa, Hirohito had been an accomplice of the War Lords; if not a willing one, then, in the words of MacArthur, who came to know him better than any other Westerner: “a figurehead, but not quite a stooge.” After its fall, he was ready to challenge them, and the atomic bombs gave him that opportunity.
So Okinawa was indeed decisive, for if the Japanese had won in this biggest battle of the Pacific War, the hold of the War Lords upon the nation of Nippon would have been so strengthened that even the influence of Hirohito could not have persuaded the Imperial Conference to accept the Allied surrender offer. Thus, the war would have been prolonged—hopelessly for Japan, of course—and only the production and use of more atomic bombs would have avoided that titanic clash of arms upon the Tokyo Plain.
Index
Ainu
Amamiya, Tatsumi
ambush tactics
ammunition, supplying of
Anderson, Beauford “Snuffy”
Ara Point
Archer, Robert
Ariga, Kosaku
Arima, Masafumi
Aristotle
Army Air Forces (POA)
Army Ground Forces (POA)
Arnold, Archibald
Arnold, H. H. “Hap”
Asa River
Asato River
atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Australia
Axtell, George
B-29 bombers (Superfortresses)
Badoglio, Pietro
Banzai charges
Beary, D. G.
Belman, Dave
Biak
Biscansin, Al
Blakelock, David
Bonin Islands
Borneo
Bourne, R. F.
Bradford, William
Bradford Force
Bradley, James
Bradley, Omar
Brocade Banner affair
Bruce, Andrew
Buckner, Simon Bolivar, Jr.
death of
Minatoga landing rejected by
surrender appeal of
Tenth Army and
