Hell to Pay

O p e r at i o n D o w n f a l l
a n d t h e I n va s i o n o f J a pa n,
194547

u p d at e d a n d e x pa n d e d

D. M. Giangreco

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

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 This book was made possible through the dedication
of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1945.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402

2009 by D. M. Giangreco
Chapter 11. To Break Japans Spine and Chapter 17. The Hokkaido Myth 2017 by
D. M. Giangreco

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the first edition as follows:

Giangreco, D. M., date
Hell to pay: Operation Downfall and the invasion of Japan, 19451947 / D.M.
Giangreco.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59114-316-1 (alk. paper)
1. Operation Downfall, 19451946. 2. World War, 19391945CampaignsJapan. 3.
United StatesArmed ForcesHistoryWorld War, 19391945. I. Title.
D767.2.G53 2009
940.54252dc22
2009027766

Maps created by Chris Robinson.

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of

Paper).
Printed in the United States of America.

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 987654321
First printing

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 Contents

List of Illustrations v
Foreword to the First Edition: Three Colonels by Stanley Weintraub vii
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
Authors Note to the New Edition xxvii

Chapter 1 The Maximum Bloodletting and Delay 1

Chapter 2 Spinning the Casualties 11
Chapter 3 The First Army and Kwantung Redeployments 24
Chapter 4 The Pacific Buildup and Berlin Decision 38
Chapter 5 Not the Recipe for Victory 51
Chapter 6 The Decision 66
Chapter 7 Japanese Defense Plans 81
Chapter 8 Victory Might Be Salvaged 99
Chapter 9 The Manpower Box 119
Chapter 10 Mistakes and Misperceptions 131
Chapter 11 To Break Japans Spine 145
Chapter 12 What Is Defeat? 161
Chapter 13 The Amphibious Operation 174
Chapter 14 On the Ground 194
Chapter 15 Unexamined Factors 213
Chapter 16 A Target-Rich Environment 228
Chapter 17 The Hokkaido Myth 250
Chapter 18 Half a Million Purple Hearts 266
Chapter 19 Punishment from Heaven 275
Epilogue Extract from a Letter Written by 291
James Michener, October 20, 1995

iii

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iv Contents

Appendix A G-2 Estimate of Enemy Situation on Kyushu, 293

U.S. Sixth Army, August 1, 1945
Appendix B G-2 Analysis of Japanese Plans for the Defense 341
of Kyushu, U.S. Sixth Army, December 31, 1945
Appendix C Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender 377
Issued at Potsdam, July 26, 1945 (Potsdam Declaration)
Appendix D Operation Blacklist, the Occupation of Japan 379

Notes 415
Index 527

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 Illustr ations

images
The RMS Queen Elizabeth arrives at the Port of New York 39
A wing of the Takatsuki Dump near Osaka 87
The king-sized USS Midway 100
Combat experience in the Pacific 132
Russian cavalry pass a line of Lend-Leasesupplied Sherman tanks 152
Soviet rear admiral Boris Popov 159
Japanese nationals praying over the charred remains of their 171
countrymen
Japanese midget submarines at the Kure naval base 181
The Yokosuka Training Seaplane and the Kawanishi Alf 188
Reconnaissance Seaplane
The skeletal remains of an American or Filipino POW 196
Coastal terrain typical of southern Kyushu 197
Japanese illustration of a flanking gun emplacement overlooking 202
Sagami Bay
Highly defensible terraced rice fields 209
Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa 209
Even dry rice paddies present formidable barriers 232
Some rice fields stretched for dozens of miles up Kyushus valleys 232
The schematic layout for the Ironhorse artificial harbor, 240
Operation Coronet
The Mark 97 20-mm rapid-fire antitank rifle 245
A mountain village in central Honshu 246
American ships ride peacefully at anchor below Mount Fuji 247
Troops of the Soviet 88th Rifle Corps 256
The LCI(L) 551 (Soviet DS-48) 257
Soviet lieutenant general Aleksander S. Ksenofontov 264

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vi Illustrations

Lieutenant General Higuchi Kiichiro during an inspection of Shumshu 265

Naval Base Hospital 18 on Guam 278
War Department pamphlet distributed to Army and Army Air Force 282
personnel

Maps
1. The Component Operations of Operation Downfall 54
2. The Disposition of Forces on Kyushu, August 1945 63
3. The Defense Plan of Japans 12th Area Army, August 1945 90
4. The Defense Plan of Japans 16th Area Army, August 1945 96
5. Provisional Landing Force Fighter Defense for Operation Olympic 103
6. East Asia 147
7. The Assault Plan for Operation Olympic 179
8. Japanese Dispositions in Southeast Kyushu and Landing Beaches 200
9. Japanese Dispositions in Southwest Kyushu and Landing Beaches 204
10. The Assault Plan for Operation Coronet 229
11. Effect of Rice Land, Natural, and Artificial Flooding on 233
Cross-Country Movement
12. Hokkaido 254
13. Honshu 263

Figures
1. Cumulative U.S. Army Loss/Casualties Totals in Yank 18
2. Divisional Redeployment for the Invasion of Japan, 1945 41
3. Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet Order of Battle 53

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 Preface and Acknowled gments

The full impact of the war comes more to me, I think in some
respects, than it does to anyone in this country. The daily casualty
lists are mine. They arrive in a constant stream, a swelling stream,
and I cant get away from them.
Gen. George C. Marshall, June 11, 1945,
speech at the Maryland Historical Society

I n the spring and summer of 1945, the United States and Imperial Japan were
rushing pell-mell toward a confrontation of catastrophic proportions. World
War IIs sudden and unexpected conclusion after atom bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki masked the fact that the United States had already com-
menced the opening stages of Operation Downfall, a series of land invasions on
the Japanese Home Islands that U.S. Army planners and senior leaders calculated
would cost anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million American casualties during just the
initial fighting.
The United States had entered the war late, and because of its sheer distance
from Europe and the Western Pacific, it did not begin to experience casualties
comparable to those of the other belligerents until the conflicts final year. By then
the U.S. Army alone was losing soldiers at a rate that Americans today would find
astounding, suffering an average of 65,000 killed, wounded, and missing each and
every month during the casualty surge of 194445, with the November, Decem-
ber, and January figures standing at 72,000, 88,000, and 79,000, respectively in
postwar tabulations.
Most of these young men were lost battling the Nazis, but Secretary of War
Henry Stimson warned the newly sworn-in president, Harry S. Truman, that
because of the nature of the Japanese soldier and the terrain in the Home Islands,
Americans would have to go through a more bitter finish fight than in Germany.
Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, agreed and told Truman, It is
a grim fact that there is not an easy, bloodless way to victory. By the time these
words were spoken in June 1945, the United States was already several months
into the steep increase in draft calls implemented under President Franklin D.
xi

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xii Preface and Acknowledgments

Roosevelt to produce a 100,000-men-per-month replacement stream for Down-

falls casualties.
Although details of the operation had been a closely guarded secret, the near
doubling of Selective Service inductions was hardly something that could escape
the notice of a war-weary citizenry and their representatives in Washington. In
mid-January 1945, as part of the Roosevelt administrations effort to prepare the
public for the ratcheting up of the draft that year, Marshall and Adm. Ernest J. King,
the chief of naval operations, spelled out in a joint letter to Congress what must be
done to meet the needs for what was now a one-front war against Imperial Japan:
The Army must provide 600,000 replacements for overseas theaters by June 30,
and, together with the Navy, will require a total of 900,000 inductions.
Despite its publication in many newspapers, including a page-one article in the
January 18 New York Times (Roosevelt Urges Work-or-Fight Bill to Back Offen-
sives) and a related piece in Time magazine (Manpower: If the Nation Calls),
the Marshall-King letter remained completely invisible decades later during the
controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institutions National
Air and Space Museum (NASM). Not so the World War II veterans, who gener-
ated plenty of visibility when they firmly maintained that they had been told to
expect half a million casualties. Said Robert P. Newman, one of the few academics
to defend veterans claims publicly, Any account of this argument should acknowl-
edge the basic accuracy of what veterans knew.
Newmans words, however, fell on deaf ears, for while the veterans had
indeed made their presence felt politically, they had no evidence beyond Tru-
man and Stimsons writings and their own memories of troop briefings con-
ducted for the men during the partial demobilization that occurred after the
victory over Nazi Germany. Displaying a marked inconsideration for the busy
schedules of future historians, some yet to be born, the young soldiers of 1945
inexplicably failed to take detailed notes for the benefit of those scholars. The
briefings, carried out worldwidespecifically at such diverse locations as the
Pacific-bound U.S. First Army Headquarters in Weimar, Germany, the B-29
training bases in the southwestern United States, and the Pentagon itself
all utilized a uniform figure of 500,000 for expected casualties, somewhat lower
than the figure that had been released to the press.
But while this low figure originated as purely an Army public information
tool divorced from actual military planning, it nevertheless was widely disseminated
to the troops themselves, and as anyone who followed the Enola Gay controversy

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 Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

can attest, its effect was pronounced and long term. readers of this volume will gain
an appreciation of how the casualty projections, created by a variety of different
army and war Department staffs for their own purposes and chains of command,
were formed, connected, and used. They will see the scale of the estimates and what
was briefed to the president before his meetings with British prime minister win-
ston Churchill and soviet premier Joseph stalin at the potsdam Conference. and
yet, while these numbers were indeed huge, they were not the end of the story.
as the war drew closer and closer to the home islands, the U.s. militarys abil-
ity to island hop and bypass Japanese garrisons steadily decreased. even though
american assault and amphibious techniques were honed to near perfection, casu-
alties were nevertheless rising at alarming rates, and losses during prolonged bat-
tles at Okinawa and iwo Jima far exceeded earlier estimates. it was clear that the
Japanese were riding their own learning curve. as early as the summer of 1944,
pentagon planners had produced a worst-case scenario of half a million american
lives and many times that number wounded, and the imperial armys increased
efficiency at ki lling americans, particularly on Okinawa, demonstrated to secre-
tary stimson and many pentagon planners that the worst case was a real
possibility.

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