Hell to Pay

There is controversy over whether or not the United States should have dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some say it was a horrible thing to do and others say that it was a military necessary since an American invasion of Japan proper would have resulted in huge American casualties.

This book proves beyond any doubt that the second assumption is the correct one. The book has the facts, the figures, the plans and the problems all fully discussed. An extremely strong case is presented to show that the U.S. might have had half a million dead soldiers, maybe even more, in any such attack on the Japanese mainland.

One of the first things the book points out is that some 13,000 American soldiers died in the battle for Okinawa. The battle for Japan itself would have been covering a much larger area. Not only that, but the terrain was very different and would have made it extremely hard for American tanks and soldiers to move through areas like rice paddies.

The Japanese also had plenty of time to build underground fortifications such as they did on Iwo Jima. They knew the beaches that the U.S. planned to land on and they had their artillery centered on those beaches. They also had hundreds upon hundreds of various forms of kamikaze ready to attack American ships and landing craft.

The book shows that the U.S. government vastly underestimated the strength that the Japanese had developed on Kyushu. (This was Operation Olympic.) They also had time to prepare defenses for Operation Coronet which was planned to land on the Tokyo plain.

Another problem was in the U.S. itself where they draft calls had to be increased in order to make up for the soldiers that had been killed and or wounded and could no longer fight. Such an increase in draft calls could have ended up causing the American public to question the necessity for continuing the war.

More things. The island hopping procedure that allowed the U.S. to isolate many Japanese bases and their soldiers would not work on Japan itself. Further, even though Japan had limited fuel for their planes they would have had enough since the American ships would have been very, very close to Japan and made the distances the kamikaze had to travel much, much shorter than earlier in the war.

The book even goes into the types of weather that occurred at various times of the year and how this could have caused major problems for American invasion forces.

The book also shows that there is no doubt that many of the Japanese civilians would have used whatever weapons they could find, including bamboo spears, to attack American soldiers.

There was consideration being given by the U.S. military to the use of poison gas against the Japanese. There's also a part in the book that goes into how there were plans to use eight or more atomic bombs on Kyushu as part of the invasion procedure.

The number of Japanese that the Americans would have had to kill during the invasion ranged from 5 million to 20 million.

If you read about the latter battles in the Pacific Theater you will see just how bloody they had become with the intensity of the fighting and the hatred on both sides increasing all the time. The Japanese were also learning from their mistakes, the book points out, and the near mindless massive banzai charges would have been ended. The mountains in Japan would have required the type of cave-by-cave fighting that the Marines had to do on Iwo Jima.

All this would have extended the length of the war by a couple of years or so and this brings up the question of whether or not the American public would have accepted the increasing deaths and casualties in such a protracted war or whether they would have voted in politicians who would have found a way to end the war without requiring unconditional surrender on the part of the Japanese government. The book points out, though, that if no definitive conclusion to the war was obtained then there existed the possibility that yet another war against Japan would have taken place some years later.

There is no doubt that this is the single best book I have read on the subject.

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