Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [302]
The critical question, of course, was whether these forces represented anything like as grave a threat to an American landing as their raw numbers might suggest. Most of the available planes were trainers or obsolete types, though as kamikazes even these could be deadly. The kaiten and fukuryu units could be dismissed, likewise Japan’s surviving surface ships. Ground formations were as short of firepower and training as all Japanese forces at this stage, although experience in the Philippines and on Okinawa had shown that even raw Japanese units could achieve remarkable results, if their men were committed to death and entrenched in fixed positions. Yet by November 1945, after months of LeMay’s planned bombardment of Japanese transport links, food for the military as well as civilian population would be desperately short. As we shall see, the Soviets rolled up Japan’s armies in Manchuria with relative ease.
Japanese combat effectiveness in the face of Olympic will never be susceptible of proof. It can only be said that it seems mistaken to judge the fitness of Hirohito’s armies to mount “Ketsu”—the operation to defend Kyushu—merely in terms of troop and aircraft numbers. It is possible to speculate that the defences would have crumbled relatively quickly. But no responsible American commander could make such an assumption at the time. The only one who did so, MacArthur, merely emphasised his own hubris when he dismissed overwhelming evidence of the enemy’s build-up on Kyushu in a signal to Marshall on 9 August: “Throughout the southwest Pacific Area campaigns,” said the supreme commander, “as we have neared an operation intelligence has invariably pointed to greatly increased enemy forces. Without exception, this build-up has been found to be erroneous.”
This observation represented the reverse of the truth, of course. Again and again in the Pacific, MacArthur had chosen wilfully to underestimate enemy strength, to follow his own hunches rather than to heed signals intelligence. Now, fantastically, he suggested that the enemy was deliberately generating exaggerated information about its own strength, to deceive U.S. intelligence. Richard Frank has written: “It is almost impossible not to believe828 that MacArthur’s resort to falsehood was motivated in large measure by his personal interest in commanding the greatest amphibious assault in history.”
Until the last day of the war, MacArthur and his staff continued to plan for Olympic. Yet nobody, with the possible exception of the general, wanted to launch the operation. A British infantryman, gazing at bloated corpses on a Burman battlefield, vented the anger and frustration common to almost every Allied soldier in those days, about the enemy’s rejection of reason: “Ye stupid sods!829 Ye stupid Japanni sods! Look at the fookin’ state of ye! Ye wadn’t listen—an’ yer all fookin’ dead! Tojo’s way! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin’ chah an’ screwin’ geeshas in yer fookin’ lal paper “’ooses—an’ look at ye! Ah doan’t knaw.” However the statistics of the Japanese build-up on Kyushu were interpreted, they promised heavy American casualties—of an order of magnitude of at least 100,000.
In an “eyes only” signal to King on 25 May, Nimitz wrote: “Unless [Olympic] is considered so important that we are willing to accept less than best preparation and more than minimum casualties, I believe that the long-range interests of the U.S. will be better served if we continue to isolate Japan and to destroy Japanese forces and resources by naval and air attack.” The Pacific C-in-C’s resistance to an invasion did not diminish in the months that followed. With the ending of the war in Europe, millions of Allied soldiers had been liberated from the risk of