Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [196]
The Japanese willingness to kill prisoners was exhibited any number of times, perhaps most powerfully on December 14, 1944, when 150 U.S. POWs held on Palawan in the Philippines were ushered into an air raid tunnel and burned alive. Several of the doomed prisoners begged their captors to shoot them in the head, but the guards laughingly shot or bayoneted them in the stomach instead.
As fissures spread in the very core of Japan’s great Pacific empire, the fate of prisoner and emperor alike lay shrouded in doubt. The atomic bombings reverberated within the halls of the imperial command long after their thermo-atmospheric effects had drifted southwest and bruised the skies over Thailand. According to an observer, a mood of “impatience, frenzy and bewilderment” gripped the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War when it convened on the morning of August 9. A rumor arose that Tokyo would be the target of the next atomic strike. This rumor, it appears, was the product of the desperate imagination and audacity of an American fighter pilot shot down over Osaka on August 8. Captured and tortured by a Japanese officer who demanded details about the new U.S. weapons program, the pilot said that the United States had a hundred more such bombs and that Kyoto and Tokyo would be struck within days. The short period between the two atomic attacks already carried out suggested all too powerfully that America might indeed have been able to continue them at will.
Yet as intercepts of Japanese military traffic revealed, a stubborn faith in Nippon’s invincibility ruled the thinking of three of the six men who held the nation’s fate in their hands. Army Minister Gen. Korechika Anami, Chief of the Army General Staff Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, and Chief of the Naval General Staff Adm. Soemu Toyoda insisted that any terms of surrender carry four conditions: preservation of the sovereignty of the imperial throne, self-disarmament, Japanese control of war crimes proceedings, and no Allied occupation of the home islands. The conditions, if granted, would have given cover to Japan’s militarists, who wanted to deny that they were ever actually defeated. Cooler heads feared that the aggressive demands would be seen as defiance and lead to further atomic bombings and fire raids. What conditions should be attached to the surrender papers was the subject of a clean deadlock, with three members of the War Direction Council supporting acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration with all four conditions, and three, led by Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, favoring surrender with the sole assurance that the imperial system would be retained. The verdict breaking the impasse would be formally and finally given that night by Emperor Hirohito himself.
Japan’s diplomats had tried to divide the nascent superpowers, confronting them by brokering a separate peace with Moscow. In the middle of July, Japan’s ambassador to Russia had been informed that since Stalin and his deputies were away at Potsdam, the answer would follow on their return. On August 8, the Soviets had delivered that answer by breaking off diplomatic relations with Japan and sending their mechanized forces into Manchuria. Shortly before midnight on August 9, Emperor Hirohito joined his advisors in the air raid shelter in the basement of the imperial library. Noting the poor state of readiness of his defensive forces and the grotesque effects of the atomic blasts, he asked, “Since this is the shape of things, how can we repel the invaders? It goes without saying that it is unbearable for me to see the brave and loyal fighting men of Japan disarmed. It is equally unbearable that others who have rendered me devoted service should now be punished as instigators of war. Nevertheless, the time has come when we must bear the unbearable.”
But as the intercepts revealed, the army remained unbroken in its defiance. On August 11, Field Marshal Terauchi,