From what I’ve seen just noodling around, the projected timeline for Operation Downfall has generally been placed at 18 months (a few places say 18-24 months.) But I’ve never seen that timeline linked back to an official document. Also, the timeline seems to be only for the logistics of the invasion, and not for pacifying the population and miscellaneous mopup.
And none of the American estimates were made knowing that the Japanese had deduced where the initial invasion would take place, and had already been heavily fortifying Kyushu.
There really weren’t broadly agreed upon projections prior to Normandy, and what projections that were made turned out to be wrong. That the Allied positions at D+90 turned out to be roughly where the projections wanted it to be a at that date was a complete accident. Caen was supposed to be taken on D-Day, June 6th but ended up taking two entire months to capture. The Allies were somewhat incredibly entirely unprepared for the effect that the Norman hedgerows would have on offensive operations; nobody had bothered to study the matter ahead of time. While with the safety of hindsight we can see that there was no way the invasion was going to fail to establish a beachhead, Eisenhower felt it necessary to prepare a communique taking full responsibility for the failure of the invasion had things gone incredibly wrong and the landings been a complete failure.
The airborne divisions were supposed to have been pulled off the line almost immediately after the landing to preserve their specially, time-consumingly trained elite personnel from suffering the effects of constant attrition staying on the line would result in. The effects of the hedgerows, determined German resistance, and the inexperience of most of the Allied troops sent into Normandy resulted in needing to keep them on the line for over a month. For example, in the case of the 82nd Airborne, this resulted in
By the time the division was relieved, in early July, the 82nd had seen 33 days of severe combat and casualties had been heavy. Losses included 5,245 troopers killed, wounded, or missing, for a total of 46% casualties.
While an actual complete failure to secure a lodgment wasn’t a realistic possibility, what was seriously feared once successfully ashore with the grindingly slow and casualty intensive speed of the advance was that the Germans would be successfully able to contain the lodgment in a stalemate similar to what had occurred at Anzio in Italy, with the lodgment too small to break out of for the rest of 1944 but too large to abandon.
Once the German line did eventually break, the rapid pace of the advance brought up its own issues. The Allies had expected a steady pace of advance to support logistically and had hoped to capture the port of Cherbourg relatively intact to push supplies through. In the event, the German demolition of the port facilities of Cherbourg were very thorough and prevented it from being used for a very long time, with it still being unusable and supplies still being delivered over the beach at D+90. The rapid pace of the drive cross France eventually had to slow down due to the inability to properly supply the entire front, leading to the crisis of September where Eisenhower had to decide who was going to be getting enough supplies and who wasn’t.
This outpacing of their ability to push supplies forward, combined with the German ability to scrape together fresh forces resulted in the stalling of the Allied advance on the Seigfried Line around the end of August and beginning of September. Fighting to slowly break through it slogged on until March 1945.
Yes. I recommend meticulous historian Gar Alperowitz’s book. He devotes a whole chapter on how the supposed casualty estimates “grew” — after the war was over — until the “million US soldiers” became the (false) number that forever lodged in the public’s mind.
As others have noted, the actual estimates ranged from about 30,000 to about 180,000.
Unfortunately, Alperrowitz is equally guilty of cherry picking quotes and taking things out of context as well. He’s had an antinuclear agenda which seems to color his research. There are many, many objections to his books.
Here is one, for example.
Here is another critical book review, but unfortunately it is in PDF format.
It’s been a while since I’ve read some of his material, but it didn’t seem convincing.
Also note that even had they succeeded against all odds, all they were hoping was to get the northern chunk of Hokkaido, which is a whole lot of nothing. (With apologies to some Japanese friends who live in Shari, 50 km away from one of the disputed islands.) It’s nothing like the partitioning of Germany or Korea.
In anticipation of the invasion of the home islands the War Department ordered a fresh batch of Purple Hearts be made up. A big batch.
Thankfully they weren’t needed and went into storage. These same Purple Heart medals are still in the inventory, and still being awarded today some 80 years later, they haven’t ran out yet.
Of course, there was also a lot of comments that they couldn’t believe Germans fought as hard as they did. Resistance remained ferocious long after there was no hope for them; consider the truly vicious Battle of the Bulge, or determined resistance in the Netherlands. The Germans held out in Budapest for two months. Those were obviously hopeless, yet the Germans fought hard.
Germany collapsed in large part because they simply had no way to defend themselves; Germany has no natural defensive barrier against invasion from the low countries and northern France, or from the east through Poland, and they were being absolutely pummeled from above, as the Luftwaffe ceased being capable of effective resistance around the 1944-1945 new year. After the catastrophic defeats of summer 1944, they had zero chance of holding out any longer than they did. There wasn’t any WAY they could mount a real defense. Unlike Japan sitting on her islands, German forces were in constant contact with Allied and Soviet attackers, being ground down at all times; it was a mathematical inevitability that the German state would effectively cease to exist at about the time it did.
Troops seem to have been less optimistic than their leaders about when the war in the Pacific would end, as well as what they could expect to come home to.
Fair enough, but this particular fact is true: the planners for the home islands invasion anticipated US casualties on the order of tens of thousands to about one hundred thousand — yet the number most people “remember” since about 1950 is “one million.”
Your argument is that the lower end would have been “tens of thousands”, so let’s use 30k, although 40k wouldn’t be significantly different. Moreover, the plan was to invade Kyushu first, Operation Olympic then Kanto the area, includingTokyo, Operation Coronet.
Just to demonstrate the absurdity of this argument, let’s split the number in half for each campaign, 15,000 and 15,000.
Your assertion is that it’s a fact that the anticipated number of US casualties for the invasions of the Imperial Japanese home islands, for both campaigns(!) would be on the same scale as Iwo Jima, a speck of rock defended by about 21,000 Japanese troops and attacked by 110,000 US. Interesting. The US suffered about 27,000 total casualties, which is close to your lower estimate. Interesting.
Oh, and look at the number of US casualties again against the number of defenders. 21,000 Japanese troops inflicted 27,000 US casualties, which had a casualty rate of about 25%. Compare the number of US casualties to the number of defenders and note that each Japanese caused more than one casualty.
You are telling us that although the invasion of Kyushu by over 580,000 US troops against an estimated 900,000 Japanese soldiers, with over 5,000 planned Kamikazi attacks, the suicide destroyers, suicide boats, suicide mini subs and suicide frogmen, all planning on attacking transports and landing craft, on a terrain that precludes effective naval bombardments, would be significantly easier than Okinawa, with about 50,000 US casualties (a rate of about 30%ish of the 183,000 combat troops) against 76,000 Japanese. Really?
Also look at the number of US casualties again against the number of defenders. 76,000 Japanese troops inflicted 50,000 US casualties, with a rate about 30%ish.
580,000 US troops are going up against 900,000 Japanese ones, who are preparing specifically to inflict absolutely as many casualties as possible and the belief that the US will abandon the invasion of their sacred home island, where they have dug into the walls of the canyons to wait for the invaders, and a mere 15,000 Americans will be killed or injured? Really? A casualty rate 2.6%?
Even your “high end” rate of 50,000 (half of 100,000) would only be a rate of 8.6%. Compare that to the Battle of Peleliu, where 10,900 Japanese inflicted 10,500 US casualties against a force of 47,000 troops for a rate of 22% and again close to 1:1 ratio of US casualties to defenders.
Concerning that battle, which occurred September 15 to November 11, 1944:
Now you are stating that 900,000 Japanese troops on a Japanese home island are going to only cause 50% more casualties than 10,900 defenders of some speck of land in the middle of nowhere?
How are the Japanese going to become so ineffective? Does this make any sense at all?
Note that the beaches on Kyushu quickly lead to steep mountainous terrain, where the Japanese were digging in. They had anticipated our planned invasion sites (which isn’t that difficult, looking at a map shows the only possible areas) and were well prepared with caves and stored ammunition.
In all the battles up through Okinawa, there were either zero or close to no surrenders.
What had changed by for the minds of the American military leaders to believe that this enormous campaign would have a similar number of American deaths and wounded as in Saipan?
And that, in a nutshell, is why I intensely dislike Gar Alperovitz. Reading him is bad for my blood pressure and the heath of my laptop and the bedroom window.
I appreciate your fighting my ignorance; I indeed was led astray by Alperovitz’ selective inclusion among contemporary estimates.
(Richard Frank is in between the “traditionalists” and the “revisionists,” and he estimated about 140,000 US casualties — of which 35,000 are deaths — for the invasion of Kyushu, plus 200,000/50,000 to complete the task on Homshub— so, 340,000 total).
We’ll never know for sure, but the “about 100,000” that Alperovitz cited from cherry-picked contemporary estimates is surely far too low — but “one million” is just as surely too high, yet that’s the only number many people have heard in the decades since.
(And, some of the figures confuse casualties and deaths).
The study by Stimson’s staff came closest to the six figures you seek — perhaps two million casualties, about 700,000 of these deaths. I’ll accept that now. Like I said, your cites and others I’ve read today (and their specific reasonings - comparisons to Okinawa; likelihood of mass civil defense; etc.) have changed my mind in this.
BUT, the figure that most people have in their minds ever since is “a million US military DEATHS.” Not even Stimson’s report predicted that (but at least it’s not off by an order of magnitude, so I wouldn’t quite call it “absurd,” that’s true).
Maybe this is the nub of it — the public has confounded “casualties” with “deaths.”
Anyway, these are big numbers — horrible numbers — and it has shifted my thinking somewhat regarding Truman’s decision to drop the Hiroshima bomb (not completely, but I understand it better now).
(No such excuse for Nagasaki, certainly not so soon after Hiroshima — but that’s a matter for a different thread.)
Note that there are two separate issues at stake. The first is what was the anticipated number of casualties by US military leaders at that time, given their limited awareness of the situation in Japan and based on necessarily flawed intelligence?
A separate issue would be what do historians believe the number would be, given a much better understanding of the actual situation, including the numbers of Japanese, their state of readiness, their defense plans and preparations, etc. All of this is much easier done in hindsight.
The estimates were all over the place in the summer of 1945, but for the ones who were actually trying hard rather than attempting to minimize the situation, the estimates were increasing as more information became available and as the Japanese continued in pour men into the potential combat zone.
Also note that I’m not taking a position on what the numbers “ought” to be. I’m looking at the narrower question of what did the planners anticipate and, as you noted, there were legitimate concerns that it would be well over a million.
Noted, but that’s a strawman argument. Yes, there are people who are wrong on the internet or in real life, but this comes back to the point of this thread which what did the military planners anticipate.
Now we switch modes and judging the morality of Truman’s decision can be aided by hindsight, although a similar case may be made by looking at what they knew at the time.
The actions and many of the actual thoughts of the Big Six, plus the Emperor, Koichi Kido (Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan and the gatekeeper to the Emperor) and others are known. The note of the meetings are available and we have records of what was said.
Not only did it require the two bombs, the final decision to surrender also required the entry of the Soviets into the war. (OK, this is off into GD territory, so that’s for another thread.)
I anticipate that if you look at the issue as carefully as you have revisited the number of casualties, even though you may not agree with the same conclusions, you could at least appreciate that point of view.
Yes, the number of Japanese troops stationed on Kyushu was seriously underestimated at the time — as I understand it, that was the most important misconception, at least during early planning.
The problem is that all of this was well known, especially after the war, so it’s inexcusable for a historian to ignore this. It’s a dishonest argument and Gar should be ashamed of himself.
I’m not a WWII history buff, but I recall reading about the Iwo Jima invasion - that the Japanese army also coopted the locals into the fight, convincing them that the Americans would torture them to death and rape their women - thus motivating many to use tricks like fake surrenders and suicide grenade attacks.
Also not mentioned in the discussions above, is what happens when the US army takes an area - how do they tell Army people gone guerilla (like Iraq) from local farmers and workers? What was the plan to pacify theoccupied areas? How do you defend against suicidal attacks by the locals, as opposed to confrontations with troops?
I think one of the lessons the brass were contemplating was what occupation would look like against a force that was willing to resort to subterfuge and suicide.