Richard Overy
Subject: Remembering the 80th Anniversary of Japan’s Surrender
Bio: Leading WW2 air force historian, Author of Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Remembering the 80th Anniversary of Japan’s Surrender. Our speaker is Richard Overy who is the leading WW2 air force historian. Richard is the author of a new book entitled Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan. I want to discuss with Richard the moral and military issues related to dropping the nuclear bomb and firebombing Tokyo.
After our conversation with Richard, I am going to release excerpts from two previous podcasts on winning the War in the Pacific. The first excerpt is with Kenneth Pyle who is a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington. Kenneth recently released a new book entitled Hiroshima and the Historians: Debating America’s Most Controversial Decision.
This discussion will focus on FDR’s decision to demand unconditional surrender for each of the Axis Powers and why that may have resulted in more unnecessary death and suffering.
Our second excerpt is with Paul Kennedy who is a Professor of History at Yale and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Paul will examine the American military strategy to beat the Japanese.
Richard, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Richard Overy:
I wrote the book Rain of Ruin, partly as a companion to my study of the bombing war in Europe, which I wrote over 10 years ago. I was going to add the war in Asia to that book, but I thought we've got the 80th anniversary of the three deadliest air raids of the Second World War: the bombing of Tokyo on March 9th, 1945 then the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which between all three resulted in the deaths of more than 300,000 people in three hours of bombing and two nuclear strikes.
When we look at it now 80 years later, we need to ask big questions about where did the Americans get the idea of bombing Japanese citizens, dropping atomic weapons? How was warfare radicalized that it was possible to do that?
You start off with a strategy in which we've got to observe the rules of warfare. They're not going to kill civilians, which both the British and the Americans did at the beginning of the Second World War. And you move on to a point where the British are busy destroying Dresden in February 1945 and the Americans are destroying Tokyo in March.
The general who undertook the firebombing of Tokyo destroyed 60% of Japan’s urban area. From the American point of view, you didn't need to justify atomic bombs separately because you'd already engaged in a campaign which had destroyed Japanese cities and killed more than a quarter of a million people. That's a link which is often missing in discussion.
The third thing I wanted to do in the book was to talk about Japan and unconditional surrender. Now the assumption is unconditional surrender follows the two bombs. The reality is quite different and much of the recent work by Japanese scholars has made that clear. The Japanese leadership was trying from the Spring of 1945, perhaps even earlier, to find a way of terminating the war. It didn't just happen with the two atomic bombs. The difficulty was that the Japanese army wanted to fight a final war of apocalyptic destruction in Japan rather than give in.
By the summer of 1945, even the army realized that Japan was facing crisis. The war economy could only last a bit longer. The food situation was perilous, a great many Japanese working long hours on 1200 calories a day. There was a limit to how long Japan could continue, and Hirohito was very worried about the bombing, the possibility of social unrest, even revolution if conditions got much worse.
The elites’ fear of communism was a critical factor, and it was thrown into relief when the Soviet Union, two days after the bombing of Hiroshima, declared war on Japan and launched an invasion which cut through the Japanese army like a knife. On the ninth, the Supreme War Council and then the cabinet discussed the possibility of accepting the American ultimatum, which had been broadcasted to them from the Potsdam conference.
The Emperor of Japan was asked to decide between the arguing factions. He called a meeting in the early hours of the 10th of August, he said we're going to have to accept it. Another meeting was held with the Emperor on the 14th. The Emperor said, “We now must surrender, and they did the following day.”
The atomic bombs played a quite minor part in all that. Much more important was fear of social unrest, fear of communism, the Soviets invasion and the continued destruction of Japan's smaller towns and cities by LeMay’s firebombing campaign. By the 10th of August when the first decision had been made, they didn't even know yet that it was an atomic bomb. That report arrived only after the Emperor had already made his decision. And so, we need to put the two atomic bombs into perspective. They were not necessarily the critical factor that spurred Japan's surrender.
Larry Bernstein:
My first question is about the morality of war. We had Michael Walzer, a philosopher who wrote a book called Just and Unjust Wars. And he describes what ethical behavior is in war, and one of it is minimizing the loss of civilian life or harming civilians in battle.
He does understand and appreciate that civilians are caught on the battlefield, and particularly as we as citizens live where urban environments play a critical role in supplying the battlefield that they are at risk. That said, firebombing cities doesn't meet the threshold that he's talking about.
Do you agree with Michael Walzer’s philosophical and originally a Catholic theologian argument about what makes a just war? And if so, what happened that both sides in this conflict decided to not pursue unethical behavior in war?
Richard Overy:
In the case of the United States and Britain, the bombing of Germany during the Second War, the deliberate targeting of civilians, which happened in both cases was something not only contrary of course to the prevailing laws of war and agreements but was contrary to what Roosevelt and the British government said at the beginning of the war. In the end, about a million civilians died because of bombing.
Larry Bernstein:
You think it's a tit for tat thing? For example, the Germans bombs London and they said, the Brit said, you want to play that game?
Richard Overy:
The British started bombing German cities first. In fact, Hitler reacted in September finally in anger because there was strong public pressure that the Germans were not bombing British cities in return. And then the Germans did.
Just because your enemy does something doesn't mean that you should then decide to embrace it. You can escalate and escalate and escalate that you lose sight entirely of what retribution you're trying to impose. In the end, the only thing that's going to save civilians is restraint. And that was implicit in the Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Geneva additional protocols in 1977, they're both about protecting civilians and in fact, they had no effect whatsoever on the way war is conducted right through 1945 onwards. Self-restraint is the only way you're going to do that.
Larry Bernstein:
Sometimes two different regimes have different strengths and weaknesses. How do you think about relative battle advantages driving moral decision-making in wartime?
Richard Overy:
If you take these the American bombing of Japanese cities, this was an entirely asymmetric war. Japanese air defenses were weak or non-existent. No bombing raids had been carried out in American cities. And the United States faced no threat from the Japanese so that they could choose what weapons they wanted to deploy because they knew they were not going to suffer the consequences. It's why nuclear powers don't fire nuclear weapons at each other because they have a natural deterrence. The best of Japanese could do is kamikaze strikes on American warships, which showed the desperation of this increasingly asymmetrical war.
Larry Bernstein:
In 1998, I was transferred to Tokyo where I ran fixed income and equity arbitrage trading at Salomon Brothers. And each weekend I would go visit a different city in Japan and I would call a meeting of my peers to get suggestions on how to spend my time in those cities. One weekend I was going to Hiroshima, and I asked this group of 20 about what to do in Hiroshima. It turned out that no one had visited Hiroshima. And I asked if any of them had ever been to Las Vegas, and all 20 of them had been to Las Vegas. And so, I asked them, “Why do you guys never go to Hiroshima?” And they said, “there's nothing really to see there. It's not an important cultural city.” But I said, “I'm not going for the culture. I'm going to engage with the decision about whether dropping a bomb is an appropriate decision.”
I said, “how angry are you at the Americans for behaving this way?” And to a man, they said, we started it. We blindsided you at Pearl Harbor.
Richard Overy:
Japanese public opinion has been divided ever since 1945, but for a long time there was a strong amnesia, forget not only about what happened to the Japanese, but what the Japanese did to other people. And over the years there has been a growing movement hostile to the dropping of atomic bombs. But there's also a strong strand in Japan wanting to forget about the war, engage with America as an important security and economic partner and to move forward.
The alternative is the peace movement of Japan, which is very broad and has influenced the peace movement across the world. The anti-nuclear campaign mounted from Japan clearly reflects a rejection of the dropping of the two atomic bombs.
In Japan, it depends on who you're talking to. There's a faction that wants to accept the post-war order and friendship in America and not to rock the boat. And there are those who think that United States did commit serious war crimes.
Larry Bernstein:
In Curtis LeMay’s autobiography, he talks about that the original bombing campaigns were unsuccessful. That jet stream blowing these planes all over the place. LeMay came up with this idea about coming in low and dropping incendiary bombs to cause a firestorm. Can you go through LeMay’s process and touch on the morality distinction between his original and the new incendiary strategy that he later employed?
Richard Overy:
One of the important points was the pressure from General Arnold in Washington to show results which could be put on the front page of American newspapers. LeMay was aware that trying to hit industrial targets had been useless. So, to get results, he immediately thought back to the incendiary option, which he justified by saying that the committee of target analysts had said that in Japan if you burnt down a residential area, you were also burning down lots of small workshops producing components. With that in mind, he sent in the aircraft, very low, packed with incendiaries, following exactly the pattern of incendiary tactics used by the British in Europe and burnt down 16 square miles of Tokyo and killed 50,000 people in three hours of bombing.
In his memoir he said the morality of what we were doing was nuts. The critical thing was saving American lives to him. This shortened the war.
Larry Bernstein:
Robert McNamara, in the Errol Morris movie The Fog of War, spoke about his role of incendiary bombing. He was doing statistical analysis for Curtis LeMay and evaluating the efficacy of the incendiary bombings ability to destroy large portions of these Japanese cities. And so, it wasn't like the Americans could later argue, we didn't know what we were doing. Not only was it a plan, but we had a quantitative approach to how we chose targets and implemented them.
Richard Overy:
You had no idea what was happening on the ground. And so, the best way you could judge what impact you were having, but several square miles of urban area you were destroying, and you must be undermining the capacity of Japanese to make war. Just as Bomber Harris thought, if you destroyed enough square miles of German cities, they were bound to give up. A view he took all the way through to 1945 when there was almost no evidence that would be the case.
Larry Bernstein:
Bomber Harris was famously quoted that if we lose this thing, there's no doubt I'll be charged as a war criminal.
Richard Overy:
It does reflect the fact that Harris knew that much of what he was doing didn't fit with the conventional ethics of warfare. In the trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg and then later in Tokyo, they did not include the bombing of civilians as one of the charges they wanted to initially, but the British foreign office said, don’t.
Larry Bernstein:
Last week's podcast was a Tom Cruise retrospective (here is a link) and one of the movies we reviewed was A Few Good Men, and there's a role played by Jack Nicholson who plays Colonel Jessup, who oversees Guantanamo, and he says that You need me on that wall. You want me on that wall? In times of war, you need a man with a gun to protect you. When you're at war, you have a certain moral ethical behavior, and then as soon as the war ends, you adopt different moral ethics, and you challenge the actors involved in those military decisions.
Normally we'd expect that we would throw Curtis LeMay under the bus and say that this man is a demon. But that doesn't happen to Curtis LeMay. Curtis LeMay is promoted. He becomes head of Strategic Air Command. He becomes a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then later George Wallace nominates him as his vice-presidential candidate. He's considered a great hero. Why do you think Curtis LeMay isn't tossed to the side? Why is Curtis LeMay viewed as a hero despite this post-war analysis that we went too far?
Richard Overy:
There's always been more debate in Britain than there was in the United States about the ethics also about the effectiveness of the British bombing campaign than in the United States.
There was never a moment where the American public stopped and said, hang on a minute, you don't think that was a very good thing to do? In the 1960s, 80% of people being polled thought that dropping the two atomic bombs was justified.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to get to the ethical decision making of dropping the nuclear bomb. We had a podcast on the movie Oppenheimer called Babes, Bombs, and Beer, and in it we focused on this scene where Oppenheimer meets with President Truman to discuss his moral responsibility associated with dropping the bomb. And in that scene of the film, Truman concludes by saying, “I never want to see that man again. How dare he come here and tell me that I made an ethically poor decision. I did what was right. We built this weapon for a purpose, and we used it like any of the other weapons used in the war.”
Previously, I had a book club with Reverend Wilson Miscamble, who is a Professor of History at Notre Dame, and he emphasized that the utilitarian moral calculus used by the Americans ex ante was that this bomb could potentially save a million American soldiers lives, and this was a consequence. Therefore, you have the moral compass to potentially kill a hundred thousand Japanese civilians. As part of that decision making, how do you feel about the moral and ethical decision to build this bomb and then to use it?
Richard Overy:
Truman didn't really make that decision. It was already made by various committees that the best target would be a city center, perhaps with a big factory, and then see what the consequences were. But whether it would end the war, there was a great deal of skepticism. The army itself continued to plan for the invasion of the home islands.
The bomb was dropped because they wanted to see in the end what science would do. They'd spent all that time producing the first atomic bomb, and there was a strong sense that they had to use it to show exactly what an atomic bomb would do.
There were plenty of other factors that affected the Japanese decision to terminate the war, which was already well established even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That the idea that somehow it ended the war is an illusion. It contributed but there were many other factors that brought the Japanese to accept the Potsdam ultimatum. The idea that it saved a million American lives doesn't hold water.
Larry Bernstein:
There's a difference between ex ante and ex post analysis. We live with uncertainty. We don't understand how decisions are made by a foreign power. The Japanese government decision-making process is a black box.
Richard Overy:
Indeed. Americans had very poor intelligence on what was happening in Japan, and the temptation must be to think the Japanese would be fanatically united and carry on to the very end. So yes, dropping atomic bombs was clearly in their view related to the effort to end the war. It's not just us doing it as historians. At the time, there was a great deal of uncertainty about what would be achieved. The remarkable thing is that both bombs worked perfectly. A lot could have gone wrong. This was a very immature technology. There is a good deal of anxiety on the part of the scientists about whether they got it right, whether it would work, and for the poor Japanese who became the victims of it, both bombs worked perfectly.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the moral questions that you ask in your book is to distinguish the incendiary firebombing with the atomic bomb. Today, we would view escalation in the use of a nuclear weapon on the battlefield in any war as a moral abomination. One of the things that is at the core of your book is that these incendiary devices were quite catastrophic, immoral in their use, and caused an enormous amount of pain and destruction to a civilian population as much or worse than in total numbers than the nuclear weapons themselves. Tell us about morality and use of incendiaries versus nukes.
Richard Overy:
There isn't a difference if you burn down the city center and kill 10,000, 20,000 people burn to death indiscriminately. There's a difference of degree, perhaps of the dropping of atomic bombs. There's not a great deal of difference in intention and results.
Larry Bernstein:
I had Kenneth Pyle on our program before discussing the FDR decision to demand unconditional surrender. FDR is dead of natural causes in 1944, Truman comes in, he goes to Congress and reiterates in a Joint Session of Congress that we're going to continue to fight for unconditional surrender. And the Congress is ecstatic. On reflection, was that a mistake? Should the United States have been more proactive on negotiation of a conditional surrender, is this a policy that parties in war should not accept again? What caused this unconditional surrender demand and what were the negative consequences?
Richard Overy:
Well, it hasn't been used since. What conditions can you accept? In the German case, you can't accept any conditions in Hitler. In the Japanese case, what conditions can you accept? The one condition you will accept perhaps is the emperor can stay on the throne. And the State Department in Washington was deeply divided. You couldn't say to the Japanese military, there'll be some conditions, you can maybe keep a bit of your empire, and we won't occupy you. We won't end your military project.
But you're not going to find anybody in 1945 who's going to accept that kind of argument. There isn't in the end much an alternative to people who won't surrender. Germany and Japan, the determination to hang on at all costs to that shrinking area in which they had control. Though it seems difficult to explain today, it seemed perfectly rational to Hitler or to the Japanese military at the time. So, the only alternative in fact is to insist on unconditional surrender.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to the use of air power to win wars?
Richard Overy:
We need to recognize the limitations of air power. Aircraft can't occupy anywhere. If you want to occupy territory, you must use the army and the air will support that, but it won't necessarily win a war on its own. It's taken a long time for that reality to be accepted. Airpower has a very important role to play, but it needs to be put into context with the other services as well.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Richard, I’m now going to move onto our second speaker. This is an excerpt from a previous podcast with Kenneth Pyle, who is Professor Emeritus of History at The University of Washington. Kenneth recently released a new book titled, Hiroshima and the Historians.
Ken Pyle:
My book is about the impact that we Americans have had on Japan. In my judgment, no country has been more impacted by America's rise to world power than Japan. So, I would like to highlight three controversial points about the war in the Pacific.
First, the main reason for the huge impact we had on Japan is the way we mistakenly chose to fight the war in the Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt declared that the war against the fascists, Germany, Italy, and Japan, would be fought to unconditional surrender. It's the only war in American history fought to unconditional surrender. Al other wars, we've had a lot of them, were fought to a negotiated peace. Our diplomats were told not to negotiate, not to discuss conditions for ending the conflict, so compromise and diplomacy were ruled out from the beginning.
Instead, Roosevelt announced that our war goals were to demand from Japan surrender of its sovereignty; to occupy Japan; dissolve its empire; permanently disarm it; carry out war crimes trials; democratize its political, economic, and social institutions; and reeducate its people. Well not surprisingly, such sweeping goals did not result in unconditional surrender on the part of the Japanese who feared the execution of their emperor, the abolition of the Imperial institution, and the end of their way of life.
The mistake in my judgment was to rule out diplomacy. The possibility of a negotiated peace with Japan existed, which might well have avoided the protracted war and also Stalin's last-minute entry into the war, which gave Russia a foothold in the Far East. Hitler and Nazism defied compromise solutions, but with Japan compromises were possible. We know that because once the war was over and we occupied Japan, we began to make a succession of major compromises right away with our wartime goals. It was ironic that after insisting on unconditional surrender, the Americans decided to keep the emperor, keep the conservative bureaucracy, leave high levels of concentration of capital, that is zaibatsu, and restore the pre-war conservative elite, and then most ironic of all, prod the Japanese to rearm.
Second key point in the book is that this totally unprecedented unconditional surrender policy made the use of the atomic bomb almost inevitable. Since we wouldn't negotiate, that meant our military was given charge of war strategy, and American strategy became maximum force with maximum speed. When the B-29s came within range of Japan in 1944, we then fire bombed 60 Japanese cities, deliberately targeting civilians to break Japanese morale. There were upwards of half-a-million civilian casualties. Just in one night bombing Tokyo, 100,000 people died. In his memoir, General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the bombing campaigns summed up the strategy in stark terms, "Bomb and burn them until they quit.” Japan refused to surrender, mobilized the entire nation for a last stand, which meant invasion of Japan would be necessary at a huge cost of casualties to us. When the atomic bomb became available, there was no doubt that we would use it. Unconditional surrender policy had made the use of the atomic bomb almost inevitable.
The third and final key point that I want to make about the book is that we have mistakenly convinced ourselves that the occupation of Japan under General MacArthur was such a great success, that it became the model for subsequent interventions in other countries and nation- building. The seven-year occupation of Japan turned out to be the most extensive reconstruction of a nation in modern history. The problem is that we denied the Japanese the right to reform themselves according to their own culture, traditions and history. Instead, we imposed our institutions and values on Japanese politics, education, economics, and society. We wrote their constitution and imposed it, along with our education system, along with equal rights for women.
If democracy is to work, it must be in the lifeblood, the experience, the history of a people, but we believed our institutions and values were universal, good for every people, regardless of their history and culture. Our occupation of Japan, unfortunately, became the model and inspiration for all subsequent American interventions and nation-building efforts. For example,
President George W. Bush often cited success in democratizing Japan as demonstrating our ability to do the same when we invaded Iraq. He said that many, many times.
By some estimates, we have conducted as many as 30 major interventions. In the last century, we believed we could nation-build. Our values were universal. Never mind the history and culture of other countries, we could remake them.
In the wake of the unhappy outcomes of recent quixotic interventions, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Americans are disillusioned with such nation-building and efforts to remake other countries in our own image.
Larry Bernstein:
What were the Japanese thinking when they attacked Pearl Harbor? Was this instigated by Roosevelt's policies, specifically, the embargo on oil and other critical commodities? What provoked the Japanese attack?
Ken Pyle:
Well, we had been in negotiation with the Japanese for about half-a-year before Pearl Harbor, and, what we were trying to achieve was a Japanese withdrawal from the continent. And in the last phase of the negotiations, Secretary of State Hull sent a message, we won't end the embargo on all these critical materials, including oil, unless you withdraw from China. Tojo who had become Prime Minister turned to Admiral Yamamoto, who had this scheme of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. One interesting development that's become clear recently is that Harry Dexter White, who was undersecretary of Treasury and a Soviet sympathizer and spy, actually, had written an early draft of what became the Hull note. And there was a basic miscalculation by both the Japanese and the Americans, and that led to the war.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you explain the Japanese behavior of fighting to the last man in its battles with the Americans and the decision to use suicidal kamikaze pilots to destroy American warships?
Ken Pyle:
From way back in the Meiji period in the late 19th century, the Japanese military had been taught that that surrender was a lack of loyalty to the emperor. And then during the war, Japan was faced with fighting against a country that was 10 times its power. And they always believed that what their last card was Japanese spirit, as opposed to the Yankee's technology. Japanese spirit would overcome the invader.
Larry Bernstein:
After the bombings of Tokyo and Hiroshima, was the Japanese public enraged, and did they think that the Americans had gone too far with their incendiary and atomic bombings of civilians? Did the Japanese view these bombings as an illegitimate form of warfare? Or, did the Japanese consider the fact that they drew first blood at Pearl Harbor as an appropriate justification for the American response?
Ken Pyle:
The Japanese were outraged, but a lot of the details of the atomic bomb were kept from the Japanese population by the occupation. It did not really demonize the Americans for the use of the atomic bomb, but they became convinced that they had been unique victims of a new weapon. But the American occupation and the new relationship with Americans after surrender helped to diffuse some of the hatred that people felt for the use of the bomb.
Larry Bernstein:
I did a book club with Reverend Wilson Miscamble of Notre Dame; he wrote a book defending the American decision to drop the bomb at Hiroshima. Miscamble reviewed Truman's decision- making process. No one in Truman's circle thought that we shouldn't drop the bomb, and there was a strong belief that a million American soldiers would likely die to invade the Japanese Islands. Do you agree with Reverend Miscamble's historical interpretation?
Ken Pyle:
I know the book well, and that's the common view of Americans that defend the atomic bomb decision, that it saved a million American lives. Historians that have studied this carefully can find no confirmation of how that number makes any sense. The truth is we don't know how many casualties, because we don't know how long the war would have gone on. In my opinion, the unconditional surrender policy of Roosevelt created the conditions in which when we were faced with a massive buildup for the invasion, and the Japanese sent 3 million men in the army down to Kyushu to handle the invasion. Truman, as a result of unconditional surrender, was faced with a terrible dilemma. And just at that point, the Manhattan Project came to a conclusion.
We had an atomic bomb, and so we used it. But in my judgment, we could have undertaken diplomacy to negotiate a peaceful end to the war. How that would have worked out we can't be sure, because it's a counterfactual. But in my judgment, it was the unconditional surrender policy which made that decision inevitable.
Larry Bernstein:
Core to your thesis was the foolishness of the unconditional surrender proclamation by FDR. I want to ask questions first on the US side, and then on the Japanese. In America we have a Congress, there's a state department, and public intellectuals who could have said the unconditional surrender demand was a bad idea. Why didn't these people come to the fore?
Roosevelt died in 1944. Why doesn't Truman, and other members of the US State Department or other foreign policy experts challenge the unconditional surrender proclamation?
Why didn't Japan publicly announce a willingness to negotiate? This would have reopened the issue for Allied public debate?
How do you explain both the American and Japanese policies relating to this bungled unconditional demand for surrender?
Ken Pyle:
The State Department was exceedingly weak during the Second World War. Roosevelt neglected them, often didn't even bring them along to major conferences. And then Truman came in, weak and inexperienced, and with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and pledged to follow Roosevelt's legacy. And in his first speech to Congress, he announced right away, "Our policy will continue to be unconditional surrender," and at that, the entire chamber, joint meeting of Congress, they all rose to their feet. So public opinion by the time of Truman was overwhelmingly in favor of unconditional surrender. A Gallup poll in the early summer of
1945 found 9 to 1 in favor of unconditional surrender, even if it meant an invasion.
There were realists within Truman's advisors who said, "We're going to be crazy to invade Japan. We should try to negotiate." But the new Secretary of State James Byrnes, persuaded Truman that changing unconditional surrender, he would be politically crucified if he did that.
And Byrnes had great influence over the president.
On the Japanese side, why didn't the Japanese just come out and say, "Let's negotiate?" Well, that was their strategy from early in the war, was if we can win one big battle, make it so bloody and costly to the Americans, we can bring them to negotiate. And they had the precedent in their most previous war, which was the Russo-Japanese war, of winning a great sea battle in the Japan Sea against the Russian fleet, and that had led the Russians then to negotiate.
They were taken back when Roosevelt's sweeping war goals were made to them, and fearful that their whole way of life was going to be changed by surrender. And in the last year of the war with the Emperor's approval, they set out to have one great decisive battle. And they believed that that would force the Americans to negotiate. And in the pre-atomic era, that strategy might well have worked, because Truman was faced with this terrible dilemma of the casualties that an invasion would cost, and whether the American people would be willing to continue a protracted war.
Larry Bernstein:
In your opening remarks, you highlighted that force feeding a constitution to a people is not the way to create institutions or democracy. Yet, the Japanese seem to have adopted and willingly accepted these institutions. Why do you believe that the American methods for creating democracy in Japan was flawed?
Ken Pyle:
Democracy is something that has to be achieved. Democracy has to be in the lifeblood of people, on its history. And we have polls now that show that while MacArthur was having the Americans draft a constitution in the space of six days, there were polls taken that show that Japanese people wanted to have a constitutional convention. They wanted to revise the Meiji Constitution of 1889. And we took that opportunity for the Japanese to reform themselves away from them.
Why did Japan succeed? Well, Japan became a democracy, in my judgment, not because MacArthur imposed it, but over the next decades, Japanese people, through civic activism, held the conservative elite, which we put back in power, to accountability in all kinds of ways. There were massive demonstrations in the 1950s against the Alliance and American bases. In the 1970s, when I first went to Japan, there were massive public demonstrations and civic activism against pollution that the high growth was causing, and the health problems. In the 1990s, there was civic activism that held the Japanese government for its failure to deal with the Kobe earthquake, and then most dramatically, the triple disaster of the earthquake, the tsunami, and the explosion of the nuclear reactor has led to another massive civic activist pushback against the conservative elite.
Over the period of decades, Japan has forced the conservative elite, the ruling liberal democratic party, to accountability. And they have become very sensitive to public opinion.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's talk about Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution. Why have the Japanese people embraced Article Nine?
Ken Pyle:
Article Nine says that the Japanese people renounce war as a sovereign right, and that they will not have land, sea, and air forces. And that was MacArthur's instruction to the Americans who drafted the constitution, but it can also be traced back to Franklin Roosevelt's policy of disarming Japan.
The Japanese people love Article Nine. Particularly in the 1950s, it gave them a reason not to have to participate in the Cold War. Vice President Nixon said, "We made a big mistake with Article Nine. Now we want you to rearm and be our ally in the Cold War." The Japanese very cleverly and cynically used Article Nine to say, "I'm sorry. We have this article in our constitution. And, you Americans wrote it for us. And we can't rearm. We have this constitution, which doesn't allow us to do that.”
With the rise of China, Japan has begun belatedly to take greater responsibility for its own security. But the unconditional surrender policy, so weakened Japan that the remnants of that policy are with us today.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each session with a note of optimism, what are you optimistic about as it relates to US-Japanese relations?
Ken Pyle:
I'm cautiously optimistic that after our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we may finally have learned the lesson that history and culture count. Japan, the occupation mistakenly came to be a model for interventions in other countries, but I'm cautiously optimistic now that we've learned our lesson. And I like to quote an address that John Quincy Adams gave an Independence Day address in 1821. And he said that, "America has abstained from interference and the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings." And then the famous phrase of his, "She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." In other words, the US would not use military force to intervene abroad.
In the 19th century, we believed that we should be a model. We were going to be as the Puritan ideal, the city on a hill. I'm cautiously optimistic that we will make our nation a model for the world and encourage other nations to follow us, but not intervene militarily as we have done so often in the past century.
I think we need to focus on nation building here at home.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Kenneth. Our next speaker is Paul Kennedy, who is professor of History at Yale and the author of The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers.
Today, let’s discuss the battles of 1944 and what actions led to the ultimate Allied victories. Please set the stage for what the war looked like at the beginning of 1944.
Paul Kennedy:
1944 was when the three great allied movements against the axis all took place. On the Eastern front, there was the largest ever Red Army offensive called Operation Bagration, which buckled the Nazi held front in Eastern Europe. In 1944, the allied navies had chiefly pulled out of the Mediterranean, apart from bombarding around the Angio landings, because they were preparing to put all of their amphibious assets into the D-Day operation in Normandy in June 1944. In the Pacific under Nimitz, moving towards a big showdown with the Japanese Navy at the great Battle of the Philippines Sea, which we sometimes call the great Mariana's Turkey shoot because of the losses there.
Larry Bernstein:
In your book, Victory at Sea, you highlight that the Americans had just shot down and killed Admiral Yamamoto and afterwards the Japanese Navy seemed leaderless. What was the Japanese military strategy after Pearl Harbor?
Paul Kennedy:
Larry, the Imperial headquarters overall strategy is not a maritime one at all. Generals have the upper hand. The great campaigns in China involving well over a million Japanese troops are the core. What those Japanese generals wanted was to have some solid defensive line established by the Navy so that you could keep the Americans out. But the Pacific contest was secondary to the large Asian-China contest. The Japanese Navy might have been better able to articulate its own core strategy had the United States not shot down Yamamoto, and had the Japanese carrier forces not suffered the loss of so many of their pilots both at the Midway in June 1942 but also in shootouts around the great island base of Rabaul in late 1943. So, the loss of pilots, the loss of dynamic Naval leadership, the twisted landward strategy rather than the seaward strategy meant that this Imperial Japanese Navy seemed unable to do very much just as the Americans were consolidating this enormous new fleet of new fast carriers, new fast battleships, hundreds and hundreds of destroyers, landing craft to launch these bigger assaults from the beginning of 1944 onwards.
Larry Bernstein:
At Pearl Harbor, Japan had a massive air power advantage. The Americans had few planes and trained pilots. But by 1944, the US had air supremacy. How did that happen?
Paul Kennedy:
Aviation develops in all of the armed services of the advanced countries from the 1920s to 1930s. The defense ministries have to decide whether they're going to have an independent air force as the British have in the Royal Air Force, or they're going to have separate army air forces and separate Navy air forces. The Japanese Navy carrier air force of the late 1930s has a remarkably well-trained cadre of pilots including high level bomber pilots, dive bomber pilots, torpedo bomber pilots.
The numbers are comparatively limited, and they're not going to recruit much from elsewhere as the war gets underway, so the pilots they lose are valuable assets. They're losing gold dust. They don't lose many at first, because of the decisive victory they have at Pearl Harbor, where their casualties are minimal. They're still in a very strong position as they come to exchange blows with the US Navy at the Battle of the Coral Sea, but one carrier down here, one carrier down there. Most of the aircraft are sunk on the four carriers, which are destroyed at the Battle of Midway. There's still a significant bunch of carrier pilots in the Japanese Naval Air Force, but over time as 1943 grinds on, they start losing steadily trained pilots. And by the end of 1943, the US both in this training operation, caught up and then overtaken the number of trained aviators who are getting many more hours of experience before they even go to fight in the Western Pacific. From that time onwards, not only does the US begin to have better aircraft, but it has better pilots. And that's really turning the battle by 1944.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that the Japanese had over a million men fighting in China after Pearl Harbor. What was the Japanese strategy on the Asian mainland?
Paul Kennedy:
The Japanese army officer culture was very much Asia centered. They defeat China 1894-95, their staggering defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, their takeover of Manchuria in 1931 to 33. And their whole culture was to be a land army. And this is the key charge against them. Surely, Larry, you might say that it's okay to do that immediately after Pearl Harbor, because you think you've knocked those Americans on the head and you've pushed the British out, but by 1943 to 44, the danger is you are concentrating most of your military resources on a land war in Asia, it doesn't make any sense at all. When Japan surrenders in August 1945, there is a very large Japanese army marooned on the continent of Asia because the US submarines are not allowing troop ships back to the home islands. It is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Larry Bernstein:
The greatest naval battle in history occurs at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Over 200,000 naval personnel are involved in the fighting in the waters near the Philippines Islands of Leyte, Samar and Luzon between the American-led allied forces and the Japanese. Many of our listeners are unfamiliar with this great naval battle, what happened?
Paul Kennedy:
The Battle of Leyte Gulf between the Japanese Navy and the advancing American invasion forces were going to have an amphibious landing on the Eastern shores of the Philippine islands around a place called Leyte Gulf.
Larry Bernstein:
The Japanese decide to split their fleet instead of concentrating their forces. They also used part of their fleet as a decoy to hide the main thrust of their attack against the American invading amphibious forces. Why did the Japanese scatter their naval forces?
Paul Kennedy:
The Japanese Navy had specialized in -- we sent part of a fleet here while another part of a fleet will be there, while the main fleet will be coming up in this direction. And a decoy fleet there. And they did not understand, US decryption intelligence was sophisticated and that this wasn't a good way to fight the larger American forces, which are driving in a more central way. Leyte Gulf is where Japanese sent a force from the North to try to decoy American carriers away with them while they push a battleship fleet through the inward islands of the Philippines to come out and give the amphibious landing forces a surprise, while down at the South, they try to bring the giant Japanese battleships to meet with the American battleships.
Every part of the Japanese four-part strategy goes astray. A battleship fleet finds itself blocked at the exit by a long array of American battleships, including older battleships from Pearl Harbor, which blow them to pieces.
The decoy doesn't work very well apart from taking Admiral Halsey away to the North. It leads to the destruction by US carrier aircraft of the remaining Japanese carriers and the drive in the South is also blunted. So, at the end of the day, when you count the overall losses for the Battle of Leyte Gulf of the US Navy, they are not very large at all. In the case of a Japanese Navy, it is carriers. It is a giant battleship Musashi, which is torn apart by carrier air attacks in the middle of the conflict. Heavy cruisers destroyed by US submarines. There's not much left of a Japanese Navy after Leyte Gulf. It's pretty much over.
Larry Bernstein:
Why was the battle there? Why did it come to pass that this was the spot?
Paul Kennedy:
As the US’s driving its twin drives across the Central Pacific coming westwards from Hawaii, the Southwest Pacific drive coming from Australia around the great hump of Papua New Guinea towards the Philippines. This arouses a very significant debate by the American planners, where the heck are we going here on route to invading Japan itself? We're south of the Philippines, we are 2000 miles away from Japan. There was quite a large strategic lobby, which said that you should first go as far west to take a chunk of the Chinese coast, not only to help our Chinese allies and deal a blow at the Japanese military operations, but from that part of the Chinese coast, you could put a very, very large strategic bombing force there to attack and hurt the Japanese home islands.
There was another group, especially around MacArthur who said, no. I told the people of the Philippines when I left there in 1942 that I shall return. So, we have to return to the Philippines first. There were other strategists who said, we are now in the era of long range, amphibious warfare. Amphibious fleets can be covered by these fast-moving carrier forces. We should just strike across, knock out as many of the Japanese ships as possible, and then turn around and go via the small islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa directly to take the home islands, not even bother with China, which eventually is dropped, not even bother with the Philippines. But MacArthur and the army were insistent that you had to go to the Philippines first. And since you were coming from the Pearl Harbor direction, you were going to come in and land on the Eastern shores of the Philippines.
And Leyte Gulf was as about as good a landing area as possible. It was a fair distance from the capital Manila further east. But if you established beachheads there and aerial bases, you could defend yourself and you could move on steadily to do what MacArthur wanted. The total reconquest of the Philippines. Boy, there were a lot of powerful egos in this Pacific history story, Larry. There were great contested battles there between army and navy.
Larry Bernstein:
What I don't understand is why does MacArthur's personal strategic plan given so much weight?
Paul Kennedy:
MacArthur is a bruising arrogant person. William Manchester’s biography of him is called American Caesar. He's a four-star general and was one of the few to become a five-star general. Since he'd been pushed out the Philippines rather ignominiously in 1942, he was determined that the US strategy was to get back there. Think of it like this, the alternative theater of war large enough for a four-star general, other than fighting in the Southwest Pacific could only be in the Mediterranean with the British, with Montgomery or it could be in Western France in the Normandy landings, and nobody wanted MacArthur meddling around in the Normandy landings.
Larry Bernstein:
In retrospect, was the recapture of the Philippines a smart strategic move or was it a waste of time, money and lives?
Paul Kennedy:
It's a hard call. The US gains more amphibious landing experiences. They encounter the Japanese Kamikaze for the first time. You get another half year of development of the recruiting of your own armed forces. Remember the ultimate plan is the largest ever amphibious operation, which would be the invasion of Japan proper in and around November 1945. This would be so large. It would make D-Day seem small by comparison. So, it wasn't a bad idea to get as many American armed forces control of beaches experience, because my word, when you wanted to move for Operation Typhoon on the Japanese mainland. It was a good exercise.
And it was good publicity to say, we have come back and recovered the Philippines, and MacArthur had very significant political support back home among Republican parts of the country. There was a drumbeat for MacArthur to be president. So, you don't want him nearby.
Larry Bernstein:
Can you explain MacArthur’s strategy for winning the war in the Pacific?
Paul Kennedy:
The million plus Japanese soldiers are in China that's the core of the Japanese military. MacArthur, he believes that his Southwest Pacific army command needs to move from New Guinea across the Philippines, and then the Navy supporting the army all the way to the invasion of Japan.
What you can see by looking at a map of the Western Pacific is that going to the Philippines or going to the Chinese mainland are a long, long diversion to get at Japan proper. Now you cannot come across 3000 miles of ocean from Pearl Harbor without some individual bases, hence Okinawa hence Iwo Jima, but you didn't need much more than that. And the Navy planners felt confident that given the sufficient amphibious landing forces, they had by this stage, 16 aircraft carriers with about 1,500 Navy aircraft, they felt they were an independent transoceanic amphibious force with carrier protection and punch. So why bother unless you had a political reason just to keep MacArthur down there by 1944. It was judged that there were sufficient resources to send a large amount of army divisions to be under MacArthur, while all of the Marine divisions, we're going to be ready for the invasion of Japan proper. Nobody, at that time, knew anything about the atomic bomb.
Nobody thinks that the invasion of Japan, when it comes in late 1945 or 1946 is going to be anything other than gigantic. And you're going to need all the resources possible, including the vast numbers of American GIs, who are just finishing the war in Europe and are going to be sent on to the Pacific.
Larry Bernstein:
Next topic is Iwo Jima. Here is a tiny 8 square mile volcanic island that is 750 miles away from Tokyo. The Japanese knew we were going to invade it, so the island was heavily fortified with soldiers hiding in tunnels and bunkers. Virtually all the 21,000 Japanese soldiers stationed there are killed. Some chose suicide instead of becoming a prisoner of war. This fight to the death mentality was a Japanese concept that seemed to have been out of control. In ancient times, I can understand fighting to the death if the alternative is certain death, rape of the women, and enslavement of the children. But here, we have an uninhabited island with soldiers. Why did the Japanese fight to the death?
Paul Kennedy:
The idea of surrender is a contemptible act of cowardice, which is one reason why the Japanese armies treat the captured British, American, Dutch and Australian soldiers so harshly when they have surrendered to them in 1942. This cult of the Bushido, the cult of the Japanese samurai warrior that is better to commit suicide than to have any form of humiliation, that to fight to the end is a glorious thing. This isn't shared by the average Japanese family, and it isn't shared by their moms or their grandmoms. It is very much a masculine ethos. And in the officer corps, it is drummed into them that if something goes wrong, you are going to fall on your sword.
They're going to fight to the very end and they're going to fight hiding in their bunkers. So, the Americans have got to come and find them. Why? Because if they go on to the surface, they get blown to pieces by superior American firepower. If you can cause so many casualties among the American military that Roosevelt and the others are going to say, let's see if we can get a compromise peace, maybe even a peace with honor. So, keep fighting on and don't try to scuttle away because that would be a disgrace.
Larry Bernstein:
Next topic is the use of the Kamikaze air attacks. I am baffled that using a plane as a human missile in a suicide attack would be a logical and important part of a major power during wartime. Why did the Japanese consider using their young pilots as suicide bombers?
The American military creed is to leave no man left behind, and here the Japanese are saying that nothing is more noble than committing suicide to kill more enemy soldiers?
Paul Kennedy:
It's the idea of this disproportionate cost to the enemy, which is maybe the most logical part of the Kamikaze strategy.
By this time when the Americans take the Philippines and advance on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, this is an awful word to use, but we get more bang for the buck. If these aircraft are only flying in one direction, they have doubled the range of the possibility of attacking, finding, and attacking American carrier groups. If range is sufficient, they arrive over the landing areas of Iwo Jima and then dive bomb the amphibious American infantryman in the landing craft coming ashore. Again, you might have disproportionate losses supposing you kill 10 Americans for every one of the Kamikaze pilots who's gone to his death.
Let the Americans know you have to negotiate to come to a compromise peace because you can see, we are willing to fight to the end. And it really worried American planners that the Japanese were going to fight to the end, including all of the women and children on the Japanese islands. Now we know that those fanatical early flyers of the Kamikaze units did not represent the spirit of so many of the relatively young teenage boys who were trained to fly minimally and then were recruited for Kamikaze operations. There have been interviews done by some of these reluctantly trained Kamikaze pilots. They talk about their horror at this. They're not feeling like heroes at all.
Larry Bernstein:
Next topic is the strategic importance of taking the Japanese atolls. These volcanic islands provided bases for the US bombing of mainland Japan. What did the bombers target and was it successful in destroying the Japanese industrial base?
Paul Kennedy:
The long range, high level, strategic bombing campaign of the enemy's resources, his factories, his infrastructure, his power stations was a central part of US Army air force doctrine from the 1920s all through the 1930s, and as carried out in a parallel campaign against Nazi Germany and Italy in the European theater. This meant that there was a completely independent strategic force.
By 1944, they were expensive, something which only the richest nations who have enormous productive resources can do it. Even Hitler’s Germany does not have a strategic bombing command. The Japanese have nothing like that. This philosophy of long range, independent strategic bombing, could bring this huge enemy to its knees.
We could make it buckle because we are the only force which could reach out from the captured Mariana islands from those giant bases on the islands of Tinian and send long range forces for 1700 miles to drop bombs on industrial infrastructure targets. And then later on, when it seemed the bombing from high level, wasn't actually as effectual as the advocates of strategic bombing suggested, and there was no home defense air force left over Japan. Why not take all of the armor equipment away from those heavy bombers, even take away some of their defensive guns and use all of that weight gained space to do low level bombing of the Japanese cities and industries, but instead of having large high explosive bombs, drop incendiary bombs on what were essentially wooden frame structures, wasn't this going to turn the Japanese war machine to ashes.
Larry Bernstein:
The firebombing of Tokyo and the other industrial cities of Japan was a major decision. These bombings will kill hundreds of thousands of civilians along with their industrial capacity. How did the Americans make these moral and ethical decisions?
Paul Kennedy:
First, keep the atomic bomb to the side for the moment. Nobody knew that was happening. You started it because you were scared stiff that Hitler's Germany would get the atomic bomb. This was a driver from 1942 onwards. And what's more your manufacturing capacity, you'll only have two of them ready by August 1945.
The firebombing of the Japanese cities was the consequence of that decision to do low level incendiary bomb attacks upon Japanese small industry. That is true that industry and the workers who are employed in those factories are so intensely interconnected. It’ll be hard to see how bombing could be pinpoint bombing. It hadn’t worked out in practice, almost always cloud cover. If you were going in low level with incendiary bombs, and even if your intention was to try to destroy ancillary production of military uniforms, of small arms factories, of steel sheet works, that itself could not be done without severe destruction of the workers’ residential row houses next to the small factories themselves.
But there was another evil argument behind this strategic bombing. And it is employed both on the German and the allied side in Europe, you want to inflict sufficient destruction that the population will cause their own governments to surrender. This never had a chance in the democratic governments. The bombing of London made people more, not less determined. And what German Democrats were allowed to argue the case for a negotiated peace? The biggest bombing rate of all of is in March 1945 on the central districts of Tokyo and it became a super fire.
It arose to a very, very great height. They could smell burned flesh coming up into the sky. Many of the bombing crews could see what they were doing. Many of them had doubts about what they were doing. Curtis LeMay continues bombing Japanese medium sized cities after the two atomic bombs have been dropped. The atomic bomb program is not so much to inflict ghastly civilian casualties.
It's a shock effect. You are going to lose hundreds of thousands of your civilians. To persuade people to go to the Japanese emperor and tell him to stop the war. And if there is a justification for the dropping of the atomic bombs, Larry, and I know it's a hugely controversial issue and it brings the fighting in the Pacific to an end within another couple of days of a dropping of a second bomb.
What were you going to do? Not drop the A-bombs? Just have a continued starvation policies of the Japanese of a US submarine blockade of a Japanese Homeland. So, no convoys with food or supplies could get through. Were you going to continue with the aerial bombing of Curtis LeMay?
Larry Bernstein:
Kenneth Pyle spoke that it was a tragic error on our part to demand unconditional surrender of the Japanese, do you agree?
Paul Kennedy:
The idea of having a policy of unconditional surrender was particular to Roosevelt and it was not shared by Churchill. It was part of the propaganda for the total defeat of your enemy when Roosevelt announces it at the Casablanca conference in North Africa in late 42, the British are taken by surprise because they are trying to persuade the Italians to surrender, cut a secret deal diplomatically with the Italian military and the Italian Monarch and get them out of a war.
Wouldn't that be a nifty thing, undercut what Hitler’s planning to do in the Mediterranean. Don't be so stupid as to ask for unconditional surrender. And if you are trying to persuade the Japanese, if there's any Japanese around who want to have a negotiated peace provided that the position of the emperor is not destroyed. I agree that it was good propaganda. There may have been very good practical politics.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned earlier that the Kamikaze strategy and the purpose of the mantra to fight to the last man at Iwo Jima was to force the Americans to the negotiating table, yet the Japanese do not attempt peace talks until after the atomic bombs are dropped and it is too late. And they choose Stalin as an intermediary who will attack them the next day. How do you explain the Japanese lack of preparation in working on a negotiated peace process during 1944 and 1945?
Paul Kennedy:
When you use the word the Japanese, there's a whole variety of factions, army factions, young army factions, more conservative members of the diplomatic core, members of a Royal household, very senior Genro or senior aristocrats, the Navy with its own agenda. And that for many of them, getting to Tokyo and seeing the ferocity of the Japanese army demands, Tojo’s position there made them worry that they would be either put in prison or something even more serious. They tended to believe the military saying that they were going to win. It's only late in the war that you begin negotiations, asking Uncle Joe Stalin, which is neutral in the Far East war, if they can begin to be the intermediator for negotiated peace.
If only there can be certain pre-conditions, we insist upon preservation of the special role of the emperor and Japanese society in politics. And if the Americans are saying unconditional surrender that means you are forcing us to fight on. We cannot surrender if that means giving over the emperor and maybe having the emperor's position abolished by the victorious allies. We have no choice. Hence the negotiations don't really get very far because each side is different. The Americans are saying, first, surrender, and then we will consider what to do. And the Japanese saying, we're not going to surrender unless you guarantee the position of the emperor.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Richard for joining us.
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