I believe you’re thinking of Okinawa. It had a large civilian population. Iwo Jima was a small island. The tiny prewar population had been evacuated.
Yeah, Iwo Jima is a volcanic rock in the middle of the ocean, the name literally means Sulfur Island. Okinawan males were forcibly conscripted by the Japanese during the fighting, and they formed a large percentage of the prisoners taken. Civilians were encouraged - and often forced - to commit suicide, often by giving them grenades, by the Japanese military, a practice that had started at Saipan. Saipan was the first island taken that had a significant population of Japanese civilians. More than 1,000 civilians from a population of 25,000 or so committed suicide on Saipan, many jumping to their deaths at what became known as Suicide Cliff. Youtube video on the topic of civilians at Saipan and Okinawa:
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I wanted to just ETA, but I’m getting the ‘you can’t embed’ error trying to edit my last post, so:
ETA: Oh and there were plans to organize the civilian population to conduct guerilla warfare on the home islands in the Volunteer Fighting Corps , armed mostly with swords or bamboo spears.
One thing that is sometimes not fully appreciated, is the way we look at things in hindsight.
While there is a certain air of inevitability now when we read of historic events or timelines, it sure didn’t look that way at the time. The allies were getting their ass handed to them from 1939 to about mid 1943 - the entire war was at least in some doubt.
The next factor, and this was a big one, was just where all those troops for the invasion of the home islands were going to come from. As it turned out, a lot of them were slated to be redeployed from the European theater, and they were not happy about this, I had a combat veteran Uncle who mentioned this, he said a lot of guys were talking about going AWOL if this happened. They felt they had “done their part” for the last several years and should be able to go home now, not invade Japan. He was also very vocal in his support of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
In Okinawa, there were the 防衛隊, “Defense Corps” boeitai, which actually did work with the IJN, but it didn’t go well.
I’ve read a few accounts of the boeitai personnel, including a couple where the men really tried to help the Japanese army but were treated really badly and not accepted. Japanese society is all about groups, and the army personnel did not like untrained civilians coming into their group.
I agree agree completely with the first sentence, and a lot of the arguments against the bomb come from this view of inevitability.
I can’t agree as much with the dates. For the starting date, yeah, while the Chinese were Allies, the US, British, Australians, Dutch and such didn’t start getting their asses handed to them until the end of ’41.
The high point of the Japanese expansion was in late summer / early fall of ’42 when the US and Australians stopped them at Guadalcanal by the former and on the Kokoda trail.
Of course, the Japanese had the huge setback at Midway, but the many naval battles around Guadalcanal punished the USN as well, but that was winding up by the end of ’42.
My father’s squadron in the navy was slated to be redeployed after VE day. I’m not sure what it would have done because it was a submarine hunter-killer squadron on jeep flattops protecting convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic. I’m not sure how many IJN subs were left by then.
Like your uncle, he was glad the bombs ended the conflict real soon.
In December, 1941, Japan had 63 subs (not counting the midgets), and completed 111 more, for a total of 174, with 128 of them lost and only 46 remaining. Most of the remaining ones were either used for training or just completed and didn’t see combat.
Despite having the best torpedoes in WWII, the subs performed dismally.
Japan had over 100 midget subs, the Koryu, a five-man midget submarine equipped with two torpedo tubes and a diesel generator, and was developed for the final battle for the mainland.
I had a girlfriend whose father was a zero pilot and most likely would have become a kamikaze at some point, so he was equally happy for the war to end.
A point not often considered is that the atomic bombings were an excellent thing from the narrow self-interested perspective of most Japanese people. It totally sucked for those Japanese in the two cities, but an awful lot of other Japanese were grateful to see the war come to an end without an invasion, even if they didn’t necessarily think that on the very day.
My Dad was the right age & SES to have become Japan invasion / occupation fodder had the war lasted until / past '47. Which in Summer '45 it showed every indication of doing.
Yeah, I’ve talked to lots of Japanese who felt that Japan was much better off having lost the war quicker, which historians also agree.
As I write below, the number of civilian casualties would have been
Japan was really a defeated country. The only problem was that the military didn’t know.
The firebombings of the major, medium and even some smaller cities had displaced a huge number of people. The workforce was spent, with astronomical absentee rates from workers getting sick from overwork and malnutrition.
The majority of Japan’s sugar came from Okinawa and Taiwan, and once Okinawa fell and they were no longer able to import much food from Taiwan and other Asian countries, the number of calories available was plummeting.
The noose around Japan was getting tighter and tighter. Unique among the major combatants, Japan was dependent on ocean freight for domestic transportation. Kyushu and Hokkaido were important sources of rice and coal, for example, and America was getting progressively better at disrupting the transportation of these vital commodities.
Everything was down. The production of coal in Japan had plateaued early in the war and maintained that level until 1945 when it dropped to less than half the previous year.
After Germany surrendered, teams of US military went in and made various surveys. One of which was strategic bombing, and they found more effective ways of disrupting transportation systems, which they were just starting to implement in Japan. That would leave Japan even less able to move people, commodities, materiel and food.
Operation Starvation had begun in April, 1945 and had been wildly successful, sinking 1.25 million tons of shipping against the loss of 15 B-29s.
This is an interesting paper on the food situation in Japan during the war, about 30 pages so longer than what most people want to read, but the author quotes estimates that if the war went on for another year, some 7 million Japanese civilians would have died to starvation and disease, not counting people in other countries.
my bolding
Here is the conclusion.
My bolding.
The whole question of if and when the Japanese would surrender is a very complex subject, with the traditional belief by Americans that it was the atomic bombing that caused it. Other historians then argued that it was the Soviet entry into the war which led to the surrender. Others, like this author have argued it was the starvation.
In my amateur opinion, it was all of these things.
Regarding the decision to use nukes, we really have to consider the reality of total war.
Most people probably think the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing were the most destructive bombing missions of the war. Nope. WWII was the war in which we decided that it was okay to destroy entire cities and the people in them. We tried many, many times.
The Germans killed about 25,000 people in the bombing of Warsaw.
45,000 people died in the firebombing of Hamburg.
10,000 died in the bombing of Kassel,
12,500 died in the bombing of Drumstadt.
17,000 died in the bombing of Belgrade
21,000 died in the firebombing of Pforzheim.
23,000 died in the bombing of Swinemuende, and 25,000 at Dresden.
In March 1945 1100 aircraft bombed Dortmund, destroying 98% of all buildings in the city. I couldn’t find the casualty figures.
In total, about 500,000 German civilians died in strategic bombing raids.
Also in March 1945 Tokyo was firebombed, and the fires killed over 100,000 people and made 2.5 million homeless. This was the most destructive raid of the war, nuclear or not.
This is a very partial list. For example, 32 cities in Japan were more than 50% destroyed by bombing raids. 17 cities in Germany suffered the same fate.
As for thr nuclear raids, Approx. 66,000 were killed at Hiroshima, and about 39,000 at Nagasaki. Those are numbers in line with firebombings of major belligerant cities around the world.
The horror of the nukes wasn’t their destruction, but that the destruction could be done with a single bomb dropped from a single plane. That shocked everyone, because it implied that such attacks could not really be stopped. In comparison, it took hundreds or thousands of aircraft to inflict similar damage on other cities.
But the decision to destroy entire cities and their civilian populations had been made long before. I can’t imagine the same people who sent 400 B-29’s over Tokyo with inciendiaries to burn the city were too worried about the casualties from a single B-29 dropping a nuke on a much smaller city.
Oh, and the Japanese also firebombed and terror bombed cities in China, so they weren’t innocent to this kind of thing.
Some knew it, but didn’t care. The idea of defeat was so appalling that they were content to contemplate the glorious extinction of the entire Japanese population.
Those numbers only reflect immediate casualties. Add in delayed effects i.e. deaths from radiation, and the total number of dead is close to 140,000 for Hiroshima and 74,000 at Nagasaki.
It’s hard to dispute the idea that by shortening the war the nuclear bombings saved lives, including the thousands of prisoners and civilians who were dying every day and the people of Japan who would’ve perished in further conventional bombings and during the planned invasion of the Japanese islands.
What I still have trouble understanding is why no warnings were given before the nuclear bombs were dropped. There were massive leaflet drops on other Japanese cities several days before conventional bombings. Reasons for those warnings were partly self-serving (creating havoc through mass evacuations and getting workers to leave their military industry jobs ahead of time, plus demonstrating the helplessness of the Japanese military). But many lives were undoubtedly saved.
I suspect we wanted a clean test case. Warning the populace would add uncontrolled variables to the modeling.
The other thing, as alluded upthread was the force economy of one bomb, one bomber, one city. If we send 300 bombers and they manage to shoot down a few because they knew we were coming, well, that’s war. Safety in numbers only goes so far.
If they know we are coming tomorrow at 10am and we send two bombers, one to drop & one to film, the enemy has a much greater opportunity to shoot them down. Which would be an ignominious end to a very expensive development effort.
There were warning pamphlet drops. They were obviously not very effective, but not for the lack of trying.
The text of the cite says the warning leaflets dropped on many cities were not about the atomic bomb at all, just about bombing.
The leaflets listed a few cities and said those are potential targets but we might not get all of them, nor are we restricted to bombing only those. So every city is a potential target every week. Which diluted message serves to be no message at all, just a fig leaf. At least as to causing a quickie “humanitarian” evacuation of a specific target on a specific date.
As to general PsyOps in a general war, they served their purpose carrying this message:
We hate your government, not you. You should hate your government too. We’ll stop as soon as they ask us to. So you should tell them to ask us to stop. You’ll live longer & better that way.
The article says these generic leaflets may or many not have been delivered to Hiroshima at all in the week(s) leading up to the atomic attack.
It goes on to say a revised warning leaflet was prepared after Hiroshima explicitly referencing the Hiroshima attack and the consequences. With a picture. It also says it’s unclear whether these leaflets in fact made it to Nagasaki before the second atomic attack took place. Once again, the leaflets did not contain any actionable date and time, unless one would expect masses of people to simply flee to the hills indefinitely.
The “one bomb one aircraft” was evident after Hiroshima but still didn’t stop Nagasaki. As I undertood, the Hiroshima bombing, the solitary aircraft were ignored by the Japanese thinking they were survey or photograph reconaissance. Presumably enough of this happened that it wasn’t worth the effort to try to get them every time.
I agree the realists in the Japanese government saw the writing on the wall - no matter what they did, the Allies were relentlessly throwing the industrial might of an undamaged continent at them, no matter how much it took for each square mile. The atomic bomb was just a convenient excuse - “things are so different now, that we can no longer fight as we have been, we cannot hope to win”.
Actually, it was the official policy accepted by the Big Six, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (最高戦争指導会議 Saikō sensō shidō kaigi) which was the unofficial government body with the real decision making power.
However, despite it being the “official policy” voted on and accepted by the Six, there are real questions about how much it really meant in terms of what they actually felt and how would they have really implemented it.
The entire road to war was littered with these type of rash policy decisions which no one had the guts to oppose, but few actually supported.
While there must have been those who were as you describe, they were vastly outnumbered by the fanatics who believed that if they just fought hard enough and caused enough casualties to the Americans, they could end the war on more favorable terms.
Obviously, I was generalizing my statement when I said “Japan was really a defeated country. The only problem was that the military didn’t know” but in this was general attitude.
Hirohito himself fell into the trap of knowing that they had lost, but believed they should try for one more victory to negotiate from a “better” position.
Pretty much everyone was operating under the irrational impression that they could negotiate a relatively painless armistice rather than a complete surrender.
Another large factor was the knowledge of the fanaticism of the lower ranks – the colonels, majors and captains. Very few people wanted to be targeted for assassination, something which had characterized the 30s.
That was also the trump card of the hardliners in the Big Six. They would say they couldn’t back down because of the fanatics. The Emperor himself was afraid of a coup and had resisted moving to the secure shelter in Nagano, where he thought he would be kept as a bird in a gilded cage or simply deposed for one of his more hawkish relatives.
The chief realist in this case was the sole nonmilitary member of the Big Six, the Minister of Foreign Affairs: Shigenori Tōgō, who led the “peace faction” while the “never say surrender” group was headed by Minister of War (Army): General Korechika Anami.
And as noted in one of my earlier posts, the entry of the Soviets into the war was also a huge factor. Some say more so, although I think they can’t be separated.
(My bolding)
No, they were completely self-serving. The leaflets were part of the PsyOps program and done to create havoc, etc., as you posted.
IFAIK, they never dropped leaflets specifically on targets in the days before a bombing. They would say they are targeting a number of cities, including yours so leave now.
WWII cannot be judged by modern conflicts where the US and Allies (usually) try, (sometimes) very hard, to avoid excess civilian casualties.
The mass bombing campaigns were designed to destroy the enemy’ ability to wage war, and the leaders in charge decided to target civilian areas for “dehousing.” They didn’t like to talk about civilian casualties, but they knew it was happening.
While the A-bomb and Russian invasion angle gets most of the press, this starvation angle highlighted by TokyoBayer played a really significant role in the final decision to surrender. Prominent people were warning that they would soon be facing an uprising due to the lack of food.
To significantly fight off a US or USSR invasion of the home islands, even more food would have to have been diverted from the civilian populace to the military, worsening the domestic stability situation.
The first landing OP by the US and friends would have done well enough in the initial phase that things would have rapidly gone downhill in Tokyo. (It’s the widening of the landing zone to areas where the enemy was well dug in that would have been quite nasty.)
I also think the USSR would have done well in invading Hokkaido. They didn’t have the landing ships the US had, but they did have a lot of experienced troops who just didn’t care. Once they had a port, the rest of the island would fall in a few months at most.
Another anecdote - my dad was in Underwater Demolition Team 11 in the Pacific during the war. Here’s an excerpt from the official team history:
The team disembarked at Oceanside 6 August 1945 and reported for further training >in preparation for the final assault on Japan.
The advent of the Atomic bomb and Japan’s surrender obviated the training program and the team reembarked aboard the U.S.S. KLINE at San Diego, Calif. on the 17th August 1945.
On the 19th August we sailed for Pearl Harbor arriving 25 August. Six
days were spent loading supplies and explosives and on the 1 September we sailed
for Saipan arriving there 13 September to begin a miserable two day stay in the
open road. Huge ground swells rolled the ship from beam to beam constantly,
making eating difficult and sleeping impossible.On the 20 September 1945 the team arrived at Sasebo and the following
day made a reconnaissance of harbor and beaching facilities. During this reconnaissance
one of our rubber boats lead an LST to the beach.The same night we sailed for Nagasaki, and arrived there in three
hours. We tied up to a dock and were taken by surprise when several men suddenly
were taken sick due to the terrific stench there. Reconnaissance was conducted
in the harbor the following day.The officers and men of this team were fortunate enough to visit the
scene of the Atomic bomb damage and the complete and utter destruction it wrought
will never be forgotten. It is difficult to attempt to describe the damage caused
by this one bomb.
In a very limited way it worked. IIRC they got a special condition that the emperor wouldn’t be touched, despite the demand for unconditional surrender.
Without precision munitions, carpet-bombing was the process to disable the industries that supplied the war. Often, this still had limited effect on production of war materials, since some those facilities were the first to be hidden or relocated. But it did affect the workforce. Is the person who packs rations or sews uniforms any less a target than the soldier? Certainly the shipyards and munitions fatories were fair game.
However, the deliberate firebombing of residential areas seems to have crossed the line. I guess the atomic bomb is the culmination of this - “if it’s in the city, it’s a target”.
Indeed, Akio Morita (co-founder of Sony) mentions in his autobiography that for several years after the war, people in Japan were virtually starving.
One thing that was different about Japan from other countries at the time was that a lot of industry was scattered throughout residential areas. There were countless small shops making machines and parts for the war industry. If you were going to put a dent into that you had to bomb those areas. They just didn’t embrace the idea of industrial areas like other countries.