Inferno - Max Hastings [409]
Most of the young men bombing Japan had long since acquired a carapace of callousness about their business, matched by that which armoured their commanders. Gen. “Hap” Arnold, the USAAF’s commander, wished to conclude the Superfortress offensive with a “grand finale” by a thousand fire-raising aircraft; Spaatz, now his Pacific C-in-C, preferred the idea of dropping a third atomic bomb on Tokyo. In the event, on 14 August 800 B-29s attacked the Isesaki urban area with incendiaries without losing a single plane, creating a last post-Nagasaki storm of destruction. One of the pilots, Col. Carl Storrie, said next morning of his own role: “We played alarm clock. All the rest of the aircraft carried fire bombs, but we had 4,000-pounders and went in to wake up the population of Kumugaya … We were at 16,000 [feet] and could feel the concussion. It was a dirty trick. We figured the Japs would think it was another atomic bomb.”
Emperor Hirohito summoned a gathering of his country’s military and political leaders and informed them of his determination to end the war, declared to his nation in a radio broadcast a few hours later. Not all his subjects even then accepted his conclusion. A fighter pilot, Cmdr. Haryushi Iki, said: “I never allowed myself to think about the possibility of losing the war. When the Russians invaded Manchuria, I felt terribly depressed—but even then I could not accept that we had lost.” Some senior figures, including the war minister and a number of generals and admirals, committed ritual suicide, an example followed by several hundred humbler folk. “There was a clear division of opinion in the army about whether to end the war,” said a General Staff intelligence officer, Maj. Shoji Takahishi. “Many of our people in China and South-East Asia favoured fighting on. Most of those in Japan accepted that we could not continue. I was sure that, once the Emperor had spoken, we must give up.”
This view prevailed. At 7:00 p.m. on the evening of 14 August Washington time—already the fifteenth in Japan—Harry Truman read the announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender to a dense throng of politicians and journalists at the White House. The president then ordered the cessation of all offensive operations against the enemy. In Tokyo Bay on 1 September, Japanese and Allied representatives headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur signed the surrender document on the deck of the battleship Missouri. The Second World War was officially ended.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
VICTORS AND VANQUISHED
GOETHE WROTE in the early nineteenth century: “Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.” So it almost was in 1945. The war ended abruptly in Europe: sullenly or thankfully, millions of German troops surrendered, tossing away their weapons before joining vast columns of prisoners shuffling towards improvised cages, while only a small number in the east attempted to sustain resistance against the Russians. The vanquished emerged in some unlikely places and guises: a U-boat flying a white flag sailed up New Hampshire’s Piscataqua River, where bewildered state police received its captain and crew. Irish prime minister Éamon de Valera, flaunting to the end his loathing of his British neighbours, paid a formal call to the German embassy in Dublin to express his condolences on the death of the Reich’s head of state.
Many Germans believed themselves as much victims of Hitler as were the foreign nations he had conquered and enslaved. In Hamburg, old Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote brokenheartedly on 1 May: “We … mourn most deeply the fate of our poor Germany. It is as if the final bomb