Eighty years ago this past week, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing nearly 200,000 people. Months before, U.S. bombers obliterated much of Tokyo, killing more than 100,000 people. Those were only three of more than 60 Japanese cities that were targeted in the campaign of strategic bombing that ultimately ended the Second World War.
And even after Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9, 1945, elements of the Japanese military and some members of Japan’s war cabinet wanted to fight on. It was only the intervention by Emperor Hirohito that enabled Japanese leaders to agree to the surrender, which formally took place on September 2, 1945, on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The American who was most responsible for ending the war was Gen. Curtis LeMay.
LeMay, who was treated as a hero immediately after the war, since then has since been demonized by Americans and other moralists who like to beat their breasts and apologize for America’s “sins.” One of those sins, apparently, was ending the most destructive war in history. Another of those sins, apparently, was saving both American and Japanese lives — lives that would have been lost if American forces invaded the main Japanese islands. (RELATED: America Must Never Apologize for Dropping the Bombs on Japan)
The moralists who arrogantly condemn LeMay and the United States for the strategic bombing campaign that ended the war frequently avoid discussing it within the context of Japan’s war of aggression that began in 1931, with the invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of a puppet regime in what was subsequently called “Manchukuo.”
Japan’s war against China caused more than three million Chinese military deaths and about 20 million Chinese civilian deaths, greatly exceeding the deaths caused by LeMay’s strategic bombing campaign. Japanese soldiers carried out unspeakable atrocities against civilians at Nanjing, Manila, and elsewhere, against captured soldiers in Bataan and elsewhere, including the infamous Unit 731’s experiments on captives.
The moralists also downplay the anticipated American and Japanese casualties.
The moralists also downplay the anticipated American and Japanese casualties that likely would have resulted if U.S. armed forces had invaded Japan’s main islands of Kyushu and Honshu. Codenamed Operation Downfall, and subdivided between Operations Olympic (Kyushu) and Chromite (Honshu), more than 750,000 Allied, mostly American, forces under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur would land on Kyushu on November 1, 1945, where they would have faced approximately 784,000 Japanese troops plus 575,000 home-defense forces.
Japan’s military leaders issued a directive in April urging every soldier and every citizen (“man, woman, and child”) to “fight to the last person.” Japan had more than 10,000 planes and planned to use them in kamikaze attacks on Allied ships and troop transports.
On Iwo Jima, some 22,000 Japanese soldiers were killed and over 6,100 Americans. On Okinawa, Japan lost 110,000 combatants, while American forces suffered more than 12,500 dead. The casualty numbers for Operation Downfall would have dwarfed those numbers on both sides. Predictions of allied deaths ranged between 400,000 and 800,000, with total Allied casualties possibly reaching up to four million. If the casualty ratios from Iwo Jima and Okinawa were repeated, the number of Japanese dead could have exceeded four million, with total casualties possibly exceeding 12 million.
Writing in Commentary on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs, historian Donald Kagan concluded that the evidence shows that Japan would not have surrendered absent an invasion of the main islands had we not concluded our strategic bombing campaign with atomic warfare. Thirty years later, that conclusion remains true.
As military historian D.M. Giangreco wrote in Hell to Pay, “Lives in untold numbers were spared by the Japanese capitulation” following the Nagasaki bomb. “[B]oth sides,” he explained, “were rushing headlong toward a disastrous confrontation in the Home Islands.” That disastrous confrontation was avoided thanks to Curtis LeMay and his strategic bombing campaign, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower once remarked that Andrew Higgins — who built the “Higgins Boats” that transported American troops to invasion beaches in Europe and Asia — was “the man who won the war.” Gen. Curtis LeMay was the man who ended the war.
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