The Fall of Japan

Again, as with other books of this type, I will just comment on some of the most interesting things that I found.

Admiral Takijiro Onishi was the one who helped Yamamoto draw up the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

By 1944 the situation had changed for the Japanese. Onishi was on Luzon and said that the Japanese forces had to neutralize the US carrier strength for at least a week. He then added: “In my opinion, there is only one way of assuring that our meager strength will be effective to a maximum degree. That is to organize suicide attack units composed of Zero fighters armed with 250-kilogram bombs, with each plane to crash-dive into an American carrier.”

On April 6, kamikaze attacks sunk or damaged 24 US ships in the seas off Okinawa.

By the end of the fight for Okinawa, over 12,000 Americans were dead, and over 100,000 Japanese were dead.

On March 9, B-29s took off for their firebombing attack on Tokyo. As a result of that attack, over 100,000 people died. Bodies were stacked eight feet high in the Meija-za theater. Bodies were everywhere, bridges were deathtraps, people drowned in rivers, and the smell of the burning bodies was actually noticeable to the B-29 pilots flying thousands of feet overhead. Flames reached 2000 degrees.

The Japanese plan to defend their homeland was called Ketsu-Go. 5225 planes were to be used as suicide craft. They had enough gas for a one-way mission. They would concentrate on the transport and landing barges. The idea was to kill as many soldiers as possible and maybe break US morale that way.

The book has a lot of material on the atomic bomb, of course.

The plane that dropped the second atomic bomb had serious trouble, was in danger of running out of fuel, and could have ended up in the ocean with the bomb still in the plane.

More is included on the effects of the bomb on Nagasaki than is usually included in a book dealing with the subject. For example, 2400 feet north of the bomb's explosion a roof of a Catholic cathedral caved ink killing everyone. At the Nagasaki Branch Prison, 118 guards and convicts died. An approaching train had stopped and many people were killed by glass exploding inward. A boat two and a half miles away was engulfed in flames. A wooden barracks four and a half miles away collapsed. Half the medical personnel in the city died within the first few minutes. In a village seven miles away one of every ten windows was blown out. 18 schools were destroyed.

The book also has some material on things that happened even after the surrender. Apparently not all groups in the military were willing to surrender. Atsugi Airbase was a source of rebellion, leaflets were dropped on Tokyo saying the armed forces would not surrender, and various other bases had kamikaze pilots who were not willing to surrender.

A group of students on Atago Hill were resisting the surrender. One guy made an incredibly valiant effort to negotiate with them but pistol fire erupted from the soldiers surrounding where the students were, and the students blew themselves up with grenades.

Later at Atsugi a fight took place between Navy and Army personnel, including the use of firearms. The soldiers sent from Tokyo were to dismantle the kamikaze planes so none of the remaining hotheads could use them, and they were met with fierce resistance.

There were also examples of the effects of propaganda on the Japanese civilians, in relation to how they thought American soldiers would act. In Gifu City, the mayor ordered all girls from 15 to 25 to go into the mountains. Women workers at Nakajima Aircraft Company asked their employers for poison to swallow in case the US soldiers tried anything. In Tokyo, papers told women to wear loose-fitting clothing so they would be less attractive.

There were some instances of rape by US soldiers, but after MacArthur said anyone doing that would get the death penalty the problems pretty much stopped.

(The importance of this civilian reaction to the soldiers is part of the whole propaganda thing that the Japanese military had subjected the civilians to for years. It does tend to support the idea that some people have that, should the US have actually invaded the homeland, civilians in large numbers would have attacked with anything they could. This would have resulted in some American deaths and countless thousands of Japanese civilians being killed, and it would have very probably had a negative influence in world opinion about the US and how it was conducting the war, although that's assuming such civilian casualties would have been made public news back in the US. War censorship was pretty effective.)

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