• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1242 0

in February and March 1945, sacrificing his entire force of 20,000 while inflicting heavy casualties (7,000 dead, up to 19,000 wounded) on the Americans. Okinawa came next. Kikako Miyagi was a 16-year-old schoolgirl when the land assault began on 1 April. Mobilized into the Himeyuri Student Corps (boys the same age entered the Blood and Iron Student Corps), Miyagi was pressed into service as a nurse in a cave at the south end of the island. The wounded started coming, ‘thousands of them’, she remembered, men a little older than herself with toes, arms, even faces missing. The older girls had the task of restraining men whose limbs were being amputated. The relative respite at night gave the girls a chance to carry corpses outside, where they threw them into shell craters. At the end of May they withdrew; the wounded were given cyanide, told to die gloriously, and left where they lay. Miyagi walked, staggered, crawled, trying to stay alive and avoid capture by the advancing American ‘demons’, whom she was sure would defile and kill her. Finally, on the first day of summer, she was captured, still gripping a grenade but too exhausted and frightened to pull the pin. She was well treated and later reunited with her parents.4

Those few who survived these terrible battles, including Ogawa, Yamauchi, and Miyagi, could not have been optimistic that Japan would hold out, and had seen enough of war to turn away from it in revulsion. Had they known the state of the Japanese atomic-bomb projects, NI and F, they would have been even more certain that the game was up. As noted in Chapter Three, the Japanese program had never flourished, despite the ingenuity of its leading scientist Yoshio Nishina, the respected ‘Old Man’ of Japanese physics. Short of money, short of uranium ore and the equipment needed to separate from it fissionable U-235, short of electricity and basic lab equipment, and short especially of confidence that a bomb was worth pursuing, scientists had let the two parallel projects languish. By the time the Americans had laid siege to Okinawa, Nishina’s Riken Institute, in the Koishiwa District of Tokyo, had produced but a fleck of U-235. Then, on the night of 13 April, Curtis LeMay’s bombers attacked. Nishina, along with over 600,000 others, were burned out of their homes. Much of the Riken was destroyed. At the end of the month, Nishina summoned to his office Masashi Takeuchi, who had been in charge of uranium separation despite being out of his depth. Takeuchi, said Nishina, had failed. He must now resign. He did so the next day, and transferred to the Navy, where he worked to improve radio communications. Nishina moved his family to a Riken building the fires had spared and resumed desultory work on fission. (When the Los Alamos theoretician Robert Serber visited Nishina at the Riken several weeks after war had ended, he found that the remaining scientists were growing vegetables on the grounds. ‘They were just trying to live,’ Serber explained.)5

But the suffering of Japanese soldiers and civilians and the absence of an atomic bomb were not enough, in the spring of 1945, to shake the cabinet’s resolve to fight on, if the alternative was unconditional surrender. That is not to say that the Japanese leadership remained altogether insensitive to the nation’s declining military fortunes, nor that there was unanimity among policymakers concerning the response to the decline. On 5 April, just days after the Americans had landed on Okinawa, the cabinet of Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso fell, in part because of its inability to devise a plan to take the country out of war. Koiso was replaced by Kantaro Suzuki, an aging admiral whose wife had been the boy Hirohito’s most influential nurse, and with a reputation for loyalty to the emperor and battlefield bravery. Suzuki was not himself committed to an early peace—indeed, he told associates that he thought the war should continue for two or three more years—though he was willing, or in any case found it necessary, to place in his cabinet two men known to favor a settlement: as