Article written and provided by Dan McEwen
["I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.” - from The Loneliness of the Military Historian by Margaret Attwood]
Between 1937 and 1941, a cabal of gold-braided generals and admirals dedicated to making Japan great again, led their tiny island nation into wars they thought they could win with China, the most populated country in the world; Great Britain, overlord of the planet’s largest empire; and United States, the most industrially, technologically and financially powerful nation in history. It proved an apocalyptic miscalculation.
By the summer of 1945, Japan was a dead country walking. Its battleships and aircraft carriers had all been sunk, its warplanes had all been shot out of the sky, its sick and starving armies had all been beaten back, island chain by island chain to Okinawa, the last outpost before the Home Islands. Overhead, an endless stream of shiny B-29 bombers was turning the paper and wood cities on those islands into crematoriums for hundreds of thousands, leaving millions more shivering, homeless and facing starvation brought on by the U.S. navy’s blockade of the rice-growing northern islands. The coming American invasion meant that for the first time in the country’s 2,500-year history, a hostile foreign power was about to put boots on Japanese ground!
Undeterred by the prospect of impending Armageddon, the Supreme Council, Japan’s war cabinet, kept calm and carried on. Abandoning all hope of military victory, its warlords instead sought a draw. Called Operation Ketsu-go, their nightmarish plan envisioned sending waves of women and children armed with handguns and sharpened sticks against G.I.’s armed with machine guns and flame-throwers until, in the Council’s own words, “The Americans become so sickened and ashamed they’ll quit first.” However, the Americans had a plan of their own.
The “Arsenal of Democracy” had financed, designed and produced the world’s first nuclear bombs. In July, U.S. president Harry Truman publicly threatened Japan’s leaders with; “A rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” if they did not surrender unconditionally as their Nazi allies had three months earlier. The Council’s reaction was stone-faced indifference. The B-29s had already reduced most Japanese cities to smoking rubble. How much worse could it get? They got their answer at 8:30 on the morning of August 6th.
Reports from the city of Hiroshima left the Council shaken, not stirred. The fire-bombing of Tokyo had killed far more and the warlords hadn’t blinked. They insisted that this newfangled super-bomb was so complex the U.S. couldn’t possibly have built more than one. On August 9th, Nagasaki was sacrificed to their skepticism. Tokyo’s reaction? Letters and diaries of the survivors in both cities recall that armed troops were dispatched to force the dazed and ragged survivors at gunpoint to clear the bomb’s rubble from the streets. But behind closed doors, Nagasaki was a bomb too far.
Radiation terrified the Council in a way TNT and napalm never had. Its most senior members, including three admirals, one of whom also served as Prime Minister, two army generals and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, were deadlocked between surrendering and waiting for Ketsu-go to do its worst. Only divine intervention could stop the bloodletting. So, was it merely a coincidence that the Japanese just happened to be the only modern society to believe it was ruled by living gods?
The 124th incarnation of this god, Emperor Hirohito, was a slight, nearsighted man who wore wire-rimmed glasses, white gloves and top hats. Although he had originally supported the warlord’s imperialist ambitions, he was aghast at the horrific destruction wrought by the A-bombs and now urged them to stop the insanity. Urge was all he could do as the title of emperor carried no formal authority to command a surrender. But to his subjects, Hirohito was their god and who says no to god, especially when he’s sitting right across the table?
The Council grudgingly agreed with his plan to record a surrender statement admitting only to the “futility of further resistance”, to be broadcast before the more fanatical field commanders could object. Still, some of those officers staged an 11th hour coup to prevent the broadcast. They failed and on August 15th, Hirohito’s royal voice was heard by his subjects for the first time. They rejoiced upon hearing it. The deadliest six years in history were over! - Dan McEwen