Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [88]
Truman’s strategists hoped so too. They knew that American ships and planes had made it nearly impossible for the Japanese to move soldiers and supplies between Japan and the Asian mainland. The seas surrounding the home islands had been seeded with mines, complicating transport between the islands and thus overtaxing the Japanese rail system, already strained by bottlenecks and maintenance problems. The American blockade could be tightened over time, starving Japan and finally bringing its surrender. Another possibility was the threat or fact of Soviet entry into the war against Japan. At the Big Three conference at Yalta, held the previous February, Stalin had agreed, after securing from Roosevelt a handful of significant territorial concessions in East Asia, that the Russians would enter the war against Japan within three months of the defeat of Germany. That meant the Soviets would move by early August. Given the pace of Soviet force build-ups in the areas just north of Manchuria, Soviet intervention was a formidable threat to the Japanese, one that, combined with the dissolution of the Pacific empire at the hands of the Americans, offered a possible endgame without the need for a US invasion.17
4. The bombing of Japan
There was another way to go, not in distinction but in addition to a tightened blockade and possible Soviet entry. Since early in the war— indeed, since before the United States went to war and well before the American Air Force began bombing civilians in Germany—American military planners had envisioned attacking the Japanese from the air, without discriminating between soldiers and noncombatants. In mid-November 1941 Army Chief of Staff George Marshall had proposed (secretly) to the American press that, in the event of war, American planes would ‘be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire . . . There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians,’ Marshall asserted. ‘It will be all-out.’ White American racism, and the contempt it fostered for the Japanese, enabled Marshall and others to contemplate attacks on Japanese cities without reservation or fleeting second thoughts; if incinerating Germans troubled them temporarily and slightly, no similar scruples kept them from imagining Japanese cities put to the torch. ‘Perhaps the best way to offset this initial defeat is to burn Tokyo and Osaka,’ mused a military official two days after Pearl Harbor. At that point the United States did not have the capability of attacking Japanese cities—a one-off raid on Tokyo led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle in April
1942 raised American morale but did little damage—but, as US forces pushed toward Japan in early 1945, such attacks became possible. For a time, strategists maintained that the targets of bombing, as in Germany, were military and industrial, and the persistence of this claim allowed for considerable self-delusion along the way. In fact, throughout 1943 air-force analysts built careful models of Japanese (and German) cities in the Utah desert, then experimented with various combinations of incendiaries to determine how best to burn them down. The mock Japanese houses were even stocked with tatami mats taken from Japanese-American homes in Hawaii.18
The attacks on Japan, aided by the availability of new B-29 Superfortress bombers for China and the Marianas, began in earnest in mid-1944, with a raid on a Kyushu coke and steel plant. The attack failed, and heralded a series of failures resulting from Japanese defenses, logistical problems at Chinese airfields, bad weather, and defects in the B-29s, in ascending order of importance. The final two problems also plagued the bomber campaign launched from the Marianas. As American pilots had found in Germany, it was hard to hit a single target, even one as large as a steel or munitions plant. Recognizing this, officials in Washington raised the priority of what they called blandly ‘urban industrial areas’ to second on the targets list, still behind ‘the aircraft industry’ but now ahead