Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [130]
Little discussed is the fact that in June 1943 Hirohito had directed his prime minister to ask the army and navy general staffs where they planned to stop the Americans. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s adviser, General Kenryu Sato, accurately replied, “Neither the Army nor the Navy can possibly draw up a plan to stop them.” Yet Japan persisted more than two years.
Nevertheless, the victims of American bombings also were heard. U.S. Army radio monitors picked up part of a Radio Tokyo broadcast in 1945: “‘Blind’ bombing or ‘indiscriminate’—these expressions have appeared in our official communiqués but are now regarded as a gross misnomer in describing the enemy’s savage attacks.” Fifty years later the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared the atomic bombings to the Holocaust. They found support among those Americans who frame the debate on behalf of Japan, an approach intellectually crippling and objectively flawed. With the war’s instigators receiving a pass from the anti-atomic perspective, Tokyo is cast as victim rather than perpetrator and owner of the nation’s fate.
The pattern is clear: Japan’s warlords remained unconcerned about their people’s suffering. Having deceived the population for years, announcing one triumph after another even as the front lines drew inexorably nearer their own shores, Japan’s leaders displayed stunning indifference toward 70 million industrious, devoted subjects.
Only after the trip-hammer blows of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet declaration of war coming in rapid-fire sequence did the emperor intervene and override his doom-laden cabinet. One has to wonder why he did not do so five months earlier, when he sniffed the ash-strewn wind whipping round the Imperial Palace, bearing the stench of 85,000 charred corpses.
Defenders of the atomic bombings stress the lives saved on both sides in avoiding blockade or invasion. Those spared included hundreds of thousands to millions of Japanese who escaped death by starvation—let alone in an invasion—and tens of thousands of Allied POWs who almost certainly would have been killed. Moreover, those spared included an immense number of Asians—perhaps 100,000 or more per month in China alone—who were dying of disease, famine, and brutality.
Japan’s senior civilian leaders acknowledged the primacy of airpower in forcing capitulation. Prince Konoye said, “Fundamentally the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.” Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki agreed, adding, “On top of the B-29 raids came the atomic bomb, issued after the Potsdam Declaration, which was just one additional reason for giving in . . . and gave us the opportune moment to open negotiations for peace.” His reference to “us” was only partly true since most of the military preferred to continue the war. But it did accurately state the position of the one human whose opinion mattered most—the emperor of Japan.
Epitaph
So the airmen had their victory, but it represented far more than the defeat of Imperial Japan. To Arnold, Spaatz, LeMay, and others, the B-29 had more than justified its $2.5 billion cost because its success set the stage for an independent air arm. Consequently, the end of World War II launched another conflict: postwar arguments about the relative effectiveness of land- and carrier-based airpower with an eye toward the emerging Army-Navy rivalry for postwar funds and missions. Looming hugely was the airmen’s surging confidence that they deserved a separate service, equal to the Army and the Navy. They finally got it in 1947, with the United States Air Force.
The fliers who bombed Japan provided leadership to the Air Force and Navy for the next thirty years. LeMay and Thomas Power led the Strategic Air Command—America’s primary nuclear war-fighting arm—and LeMay commanded the entire Air Force from 1961