A Patriot's History of the Modern World (73 page)

Tragic as the physical loss was, the division of Europe, which came at the Yalta Conference in February of 1945 between FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, and cemented the principles discussed at Tehran, proved nearly as destructive to the human soul over the next forty years. As always, the Soviets would fail to meet their obligations under the agreement or keep their promises, especially free elections in Poland. This was true for both the public components and their private pledges, withheld from the British and American public until the 1950s for political reasons. Potentially the provisions of Yalta were worse than those of Versailles in that Europe was left in two armed camps, one of which, the Soviet Union, had dedicated itself to the destruction of the other. Versailles, at least, left the European countries more or less disarmed with no dominant continental power.

Divine Wind and Atomic Fury

Japan, though badly mauled and incapable of further offensive operations, nevertheless remained unbowed and unrepentant in the Pacific. On February 19, 1945, Marines assaulted Iwo Jima in what became the bloodiest engagement in Corps history. Dug-in Japanese pummeled Leathernecks on the beaches and shelled them from the 546-foot-tall Mount Suribachi, which seemed impervious to naval gunfire or bombing by air. Nearly every inch of the island had to be taken by hand-to-hand combat: flamethrowers and grenades were commonly used to eliminate Japanese pillboxes and tunnels, and the enemy refused to surrender. Out of the 20,000 Japanese troops who held Iwo Jima, scarcely 1,000 gave up. Perhaps the greatest image of victory in World War II came when Marines and a Navy corpsman raised Old Glory on top of Suribachi. The famous scene, of course, was the second such flag-raising: the first flag had been requested as a souvenir—a request that outraged the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, who said it belonged to the unit. Thereupon, Johnson ordered Lieutenant Ted Tuttle to find a replacement, shouting as Tuttle hustled off, “And make it a bigger one.”
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Tuttle returned with the flag from a tank landing ship and got it to the command post, where Johnson gave it to Rene Gagnon (one of the six men who raised the flag). Gagnon and forty other Marines headed back to the summit, where Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for the Associated Press, had replaced the man who photographed the first flag, Staff Sergeant Louis Lowery. Rosenthal, who put down his camera to help pile rocks, nearly missed the shot, but as the Marines lifted Old Glory, he snapped the photo. Three of the Marines were killed within days (Michael Strank, Franklin Sousley, and Harlon Block), and for years Block was misidentified as Sergeant Hank Hansen (who had raised the first flag). Gagnon and Ira Hayes drifted into alcoholism and “survivor's guilt,” with Hayes—a Pima Indian—dying of alcohol poisoning in 1955. John Bradley, who died in 1994, never spoke of his experience, and it was only through the efforts of his son, James, that the details were uncovered and published as
Flags of Our Fathers
(2000). Rosenthal's photo won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1954 Navy petty officer Felix de Weldon completed the sculpture of the event that stands as the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington Cemetery.

As the final step before assaulting the home islands, Okinawa was attacked in April. By then, the U.S. ground forces totaled 548,000 men, the
largest amphibious operation carried out in the Pacific. Okinawa proved a tough nut to crack as the Japanese employed suicidal kamikaze attacks on American ships with the objective being to exchange a single Japanese pilot for 1,500 American sailors. As on Pelelieu and Iwo Jima, the Japanese forces made the Americans pay for every inch they gained in the hope of raising the U.S. casualty level to beyond what the American public would accept. As General Mitsuru Ushijima wrote to his troops, “One Plane for One Warship.”
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In fact, the suicide attacks convinced the Americans more than ever that they needed to employ firepower first and advance with human forces later. A member of the 1st Marine Division, E. B. Sledge, recalled, “The mud was knee-deep in some places…. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck…There wasn't a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent.”
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Japanese generals committed suicide rather than suffer capture.

The Japanese suicide attacks sealed the fate of Japan itself by ensuring that if the opportunity arose, the United States would use any means other than human assault to take the home islands, including—once the new secret weapon became available—the atomic bomb.

Suicide tactics caused a great deal of concern to Army and Navy planners working on the invasion of Japan. After witnessing similar tactics at Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf, American officers anticipated extensive use of kamikazes and human bombs of all types when they invaded Kyushu and Honsu. In 1941, General Hideki Tojo had issued a military order—“Do not stay alive in dishonor”—instituting a principle similar to the one that would send generations of Islamic suicide bombers to their graves over ensuing decades. Against the United States in World War II, this dictum resulted in a mere 7 percent of all Japanese soldiers surrendering. (After Okinawa was “taken,” American teams spread out back over the previously “conquered” territory killing nearly 9,000
more
snipers and holdouts!) Based entirely on what the Japanese saw as American weakness in its affinity for life, the Empire successfully struck at American morale on June 5, 1945, with large-scale attacks on the battleship
Mississippi
and the cruiser
Louisville
. Overall, the Okinawa kamikaze campaign sank twelve major ships and damaged four fleet carriers, three light carriers, ten battleships, five cruisers, and more than sixty destroyers, making it the most deadly campaign in the history of the U.S. Navy. Worse, the Japanese high command exaggerated the losses, reinforcing its view that the war could indeed turn on suicide bombing.
To a large degree, the safety of the American naval presence in Japanese waters depended on neutralizing this tactic, and planners hoped that few aircraft remained in Japan's arsenal for homeland defense. Indeed, as military historian Victor Davis Hanson has argued, the Okinawa invasion made the use of the atomic bombs all the more certain, as the United States would seek to avoid a repetition of Okinawa's fanatical defense writ large all over the Japanese home islands. Kamikazes, paradoxically, provoked the loosening of America's self-imposed restraint. In subsequent conflicts in the Middle East, jihadists would attempt (unsuccessfully) to use this very tactic to perpetuate a religious war between the West and all Muslims. Most, fortunately, would not buy into the propaganda as far as the Japanese had in 1945.

Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt's successor, seemed utterly determined to see the war through to unconditional surrender. Reports of the kamikaze attacks and the horrible toll of taking Okinawa that summer had convinced Truman that nothing less than victory over Japan was acceptable. He was prepared to order the full invasion of the Japanese home islands, even after numerous briefings indicating that the casualties would be high. Public pressure was already beginning to chafe at the terrible losses in the Pacific, and troops who had fought for three hard years in Europe balked at being sent to the Far East. If anything, American intelligence consistently underestimated the cost of taking the Japanese islands had an invasion been required. After the war it was found that Japan had mobilized more than 17 million men, women, and children to repel an invasion, and more than seven thousand planes had been held back for use against the invading fleet. Although the military had estimated upward of a million casualties, the actuality of Japanese preparations probably meant this estimate was low by as much as a factor of five. The so-called casualty myth would be raised by postwar leftist historians to claim that the atomic bombs were employed only to cow the Soviets through “atomic diplomacy.” But even Japanese historians, such as Sadao Asada, and American scholars, such as Richard Frank, have concluded that an invasion would have been horrifically bloody and that if anything, the Americans had seriously underestimated the costs—both to their own forces and to Japanese civilians.
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Three events, taken together, rendered all invasion planning unnecessary. First, the United States had developed the atomic bomb, tested it in July, and Truman gave approval for the Army Air Corps to drop the only two in existence on Japanese cities of strategic importance. On August 6,
the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, flattening the city and causing 66,000 to 87,000 deaths. With the military in firm control of the Japanese government, the use of the bomb and the heavy casualties incurred did not seem to alter the government's steadfast refusal to consider surrender. Indeed, the Japanese war leadership summoned its top nuclear scientist to determine if developing their own bomb was possible. At the same time, Japan protested the weapon (through the Swiss embassy) to the international community as a “disregard of international law by the American government,” and referred to the “new land-mine used against Hiroshima.”
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Second, on August 8, the USSR declared war on Japan, and immediately broke through the Kwantung Army's defenses. According to many recent revisionist historians, the Soviet declaration of war constituted a blow every bit as staggering as the first atomic bomb. Yet still Japan did not surrender.

Third, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. In truth, the United States had a limited number of bombs—two more were scheduled to be dropped on August 13 and 16, and only two more would be ready by December, then there would be a long lull before any more radioactive material could be extracted. Aware of this, Truman sought to make it appear that the United States made the terrible new weapons as easily as it had turned out Liberty Ships or Sherman tanks, and he alluded to exterminating the Japanese people if surrender was not forthcoming. The conventional B-29 raids also continued, with Tokyo experiencing a full day's worth of bombing on August 13.

Even after these three events, the following day the Japanese government announced it would only accept surrender terms with the understanding that they did not contain any demand that would lessen the prerogatives of the emperor. Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, then prime minister, had to plead with the emperor, contrary to tradition, to intervene directly, which he did (“I was given the opportunity to express my own free will for the first time without violating anyone else's authority,” he recalled).
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A revolt broke out by diehards unwilling to admit defeat, but they failed to prevent the emperor's speech on August 15 calling on the Japanese people to “endure the unendurable” being broadcast over the radio.
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After that speech reached the public, many of the military leadership committed suicide, including the war minister. Surviving Japanese officials flew to Manila on August 19 to meet with MacArthur to arrange details. American occupation forces
began to land on August 28, and MacArthur arrived two days later. On September 2, at the formal surrender ceremony aboard the battleship
Missouri
, the Americans put every ship possible in view and flew seemingly endless flights of aircraft overhead. “We wanted them to know who won the war,” said one participant. MacArthur reinforced the point on September 27 when he met Emperor Hirohito—a man he wanted on his side—and yet wore only khakis instead of his ceremonial dress uniform.

Horror at the use of atomic bombs had tarnished the image of the United States in the minds of some, and even British historian Paul Johnson, who otherwise heaped praise on the Americans, likened the bombing (all civilian bombing, not just the use of atomic weapons) as the equivalent of terror. In fact, bombing of cities constituted a continuation of Clausewitz's “total war” doctrine in place in every advanced nation since Napoléon's time, and in the modern world, where civilians mass-produced weapons and the military used roads and railroads to move the machinery of war, it was not only inconceivable but impossible not to view civilians as part of the total war effort. Although British “area bombing” failed to achieve its reductions in industrial output, prior to 1942 all indicators pointed to it as effective in reducing the enemy's ability to fight, if only by siphoning military resources from the Eastern Front. Atomic bombs were orders of magnitude bigger, but only in effect, not in concept. History had seen countless states and empires entirely eradicate enemies, to the point of leveling the cities that once existed.

Nor did America or the West engage in the kinds of genocide or human rights abuses as a matter of policy that were characteristic of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or Communist Russia. Nowhere in the Western powers' areas of occupation did concentration camps exist for the purpose of exterminating the enemy. Leftist historians point to the American internment camps for Japanese as similar. In fact, they were different in intent, operation, and, of course, result. Japanese-Americans' life in the camps was no picnic. They lost property in the relocation. But they were not put into forced labor as were Stalin's victims (even average Russians who merely disagreed with him), deliberately starved like the subjects in the Nazi camps, or experimented upon, as were the hapless Chinese tortured by the Japanese. Nowhere in the West did democratic institutions cease to function, even under the more repressive of FDR's war orders; nowhere did free elections stop. Attempts to compare wartime actions in free societies to those of Communists and Nazis constitute nothing more than moral relativism
at its worst, usually undertaken with the intent of minimizing or ridiculing American exceptionalism.

Nor did America severely restrict American liberty at home under the guise of expediency or necessity to achieve wartime efficiency. Libertarians point to conscription, but the Selective Service Act was voted in by a representative democratic assembly of two houses of lawmakers. There was also rationing, but the government attempted to minimize its impact on the civilian population as much as possible by limiting the number of goods rationed to only the most critical for the war. As a result, the average daily caloric intake in the United States did not decline under rationing, and no one starved.