American History Hit - Operation Downfall: What if the Allies Invaded Japan?

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

How would the Allied forces have forced the surrender of Japan had they not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?Operation Downfall was the planned invasion of Japan. It was expected to be a massive two part operation; bigger than D-Day and enormously costly.To find out more about the proposed invasion, its projected outcomes and why it wasn't implemented, Don spoke to D. M. Giangreco, an award winning author who served as an editor at Military Review, US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, for 20 years. His book on this subject is 'Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's late spring, 1945, we're stationed at Naval Base Manila on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. For months, American forces have been working hard liberating these Japanese occupied islands.

There is still resistance. On May 8, 1945, we saw in the papers and the newsreels the celebrations of VE Day, victory in Europe, the collapse and surrender of German forces. But out here in the Blue Pacific. The war grinds on. The U.S. has slogged its way across half an ocean, from midway to Guadalcanal to Iwojima and Okinawa, eventually landing troops in the Philippines, where we now prepare for the inevitable final conflict,

the invasion of the Japanese home islands. If the Pacific War has been a bloody and hard-won campaign to this point, and it surely has, it has predicted this upcoming operation will be worse, much, much worse. Hello, folks, good to have you. This is American History yet, and I am Don Wildman. Today, we are concerned with grave matters, the end of World War II in the Pacific,

and plans having been made for an allied invasion of Japan, a secret two-phase endeavor called Operation Downfall, scheduled for November 1945 and March 1946. It never happened, thankfully so. But that doesn't minimize the historic and strategic, strategic significance of Operation Downfall in more fully understanding the final phase of the war and the subsequent Japanese surrender and American occupation. It also figures in crucially when considering Truman's fateful decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What we'll discuss today is still a heavy matter of historical discussion and debate, surely regarding the bombs. But one thing is certain. The invasion of the Japanese home Islands would have been a torturous and horrifying campaign lasting months and likely years, pitting overwhelming Allied forces against still formidable numbers of well-supplied Japanese troops, dug in and fiercely fighting to the death, with potentially millions of Japanese civilians engaged in a kind of guerrilla warfare. All in all, it is generally estimated that the cost inhuman lives on both sides of such an invasion would have dwarfed the numbers of those killed and maimed in the bombings of August 6th and 9th, 1945.

Over the last decade or so, Operation Downfall has attracted the close attention of military scholars and analysts, exploring an alternative reality in which the Japanese would have extended the war, compelling the Allies to negotiate an armistice, instead of the unconditional surrender imposed on the Emperor of Japan and agreed to on August 15th. It's all pivotal stuff, and we talked through it today with author D.M. Gianreco, a former editor of Military Review, publication of the U.S. Army Combined Armed Center. Greetings, Dennis. May I call you, Dennis? Oh, sure. Thank you. Your book published in 2009, first edition, Hell to Pay has been proudly on my shelf for years, as I've sought clarity on a topic very

personal to me. My father, at the time, First Lieutenant George Wildman, age 24, was stationed in the Philippines, in Manila, 1945, one of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, trained up and poised to invade. So I am extremely eager to talk this through on behalf of the audience and my whole family. Thank you. Well, you're welcome. One of the things to like bear in mind as we're approaching, and especially as your family, and you and your family are concerned, is that in the previous year, we had had, in June

1944 began what the army post-war referred to as the casualty surge. And that casualty surge really began with, in Europe, you had overlord the invasion of France and, you know, and like ultimately the battles in France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, you know, and so forth. And you had the invasion of the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. So in June of 1914, as when the U.S. began to really suffer casualties, began to first suffer casualties at very much the same pace as the other combatants had been suffering for years. And even then we were on the mild side. But that mild side boiled down to an average, and again an average of 65,000 U.S. Army, and that's Army, not counting Navy and Marines. an average of 65,000 Army casualties, Army Army Air Force, each and every month that the war was going on. It had peaks and it had valleys.

But for example, when you look at November, December, and January, running from 1944 to 1945, for example, the Army alone had 72,000, 88,000, 79,000 casualties. during that one three-month period. Now, let me backtrack a bit. The Army ended up basically counting all casualties, and that included from disease, injuries and so forth, about a million and a half during that casualty surge. And essentially, we looked at the war at that time

as not running down to the end, but that with the defeat of Germany, we were actually in the middle of the war. Now, as early as January, and this was all very public, and it was announced in the New York Times and Time magazine and so forth, we were ramping up selective service inductions. What had been 60,000 a month, was brought up to 80,000. Then I think it was in March, where it went up to 100,000 inductions for the Army.

me alone for casualty replacement. And again, this was publicly announced literally in publications of the time. When you added in the Marine and Navy Inductions, the target was for 140,000 men per month. Now, mind you, these guys have all got to be trained. They're moving into the system for what will be in just a couple months, a one front war, no more, two-front. Now it's a one-front war against the Japanese. It was realized it was going to be a very, very bloody fight and go on potentially through at least, at least the end of 1946. In the campaign across the Pacific, was it always seen as inevitable that we'd end up attacking Japan itself? Was that always part of the thinking? Yes. The United States at that time was still very much

although you didn't see it in papers as much by 1945, but that whole idea as the Versailles Treaty as being essentially a failure was very much ingrained into the public. There was not an end to war, there was basically just an interlude to war. Germany had not been occupied and was allowed to rebuild, rearm and so forth, once they had, you know, Adolf Hitler in there with a solid mind to do such a thing. And the thinking was, is if the war was not brought to a full conclusion against both of the major enemies with unconditional surrender, complete and unconditional surrender,

that really all you would be doing is like setting up potentially for another war, say maybe a couple decades later. Let's talk about the Battle of Okinawa. April to June 1945, the last island taken in what was a three and a half long slog across the Pacific. Okinawa was brutal. 12,500 U.S. soldiers killed, 50,000 casualties and all. On the Japanese side, 77,000 killed. Rough numbers, of course, but this is what you read. And huge numbers of civilians as the war is the fighting rolled over them. Probably more than 100,000 civilians killed. Could be. Okinaw was a legit nightmare and widely seen as a sign of things to come, correct?

Yes. And interestingly enough, while many in the United States trumpeted it as a victory, and of course it was because Okinau was key to the movement towards Japan, the interesting thing about it was, is the Japanese also saw it as a victory. From their standpoint, they had, you know, a couple combat divisions and locally raised. levies succeeded in holding off the United States' 10th Army, a multiple core formation, for the better part of, say, three months. And from their standpoint, both sides looked at it as a victory because both sides were aiming for different things. Interesting. Which speaks to the different standards of victory that you're dealing with here and a different outlook on war, for that matter. It's interesting to me because the Japanese would have perceived things so differently. Our march across the Pacific was part of their strategy, of course, in attacking Pearl Harbor. They never saw the America, saw United States as having the appetite to make that kind of multi-year march across the Pacific that would have taken so many lives and resources. At any given time, we could have said, okay, enough, let's negotiate a surrender here. And they would have held on to so many of their holdings. It was really, this point that they never expected to get to. Is that fair to say? Yes, actually, it is. They really

thought that the war would be wrapped up much earlier and that they would be able to solidify their gains. Curiously enough, the architect behind the Pearl Harbor attack Yamamoto had stated that he could run wild for six months, but he really couldn't guarantee it after that. He had lived in the United States much earlier in his life, what they perceived in Japan as a decadent, soft lifestyle, a freedom of the press where there was this constant criticism from what the Japanese saw as a very chaotic society. He looked at these things after having lived here for some time and also dealt with the, you know, U.S. military as, really, he understood it as signs of inner strength that, for example, you could have a press like we have in the United States and not devolve into chaos.

Yeah, right. He viewed it very differently. He tried to warn them. And, of course, like about maybe eight months or so into the war, he himself ends up becoming the victim to a long-range fighter aircraft and U.S. intelligence figuring out where he was going to be at a certain time. and he was shot down. It's not like they were not warned by a very, very senior guy. Yeah. When did the planning take place for Operation Downfall? In what conferences are we talking about?

I mean, there's a whole string of conferences, you know, under the end of FDRs into Truman, Yalta, etc., etc. When did they really nail down Operation Downfall? After you had the agreements with the British and the combined chiefs of staff and, of course, Roosevelt and Churchill on the direct. direction that the war was to take, get Germany, basically fight and holding action in the Pacific, which ended up, by the way, being more than a holding action. We were moving across the Pacific, but that's another story. But essentially it was to be a holding action in the

Pacific and go after and defeat the Germans first. But even though the focus was on defeating the Germans first, a very considerable amount of planning really started to be undertaken as early as the spring of 1944 before overlord, the invasion of France even occurred, one of the key things was taking possession of the Mariana Islands from which put the Japanese within bombing range. So a lot of the early planning began years earlier, and as things progressed, you know, more it was fleshed out considerably, different things that were being proposed. or put aside for one reason or another. An example of that would be that in terms of raw miles,

it looked like approaching Japan via, say, the Aleutian Islands. To deskbound planners in the Pentagon, that looked like a great way to go. But in the Pacific, you had MacArthur and Nimitz saying, no. I mean, it may look great on a map, but the weather is atrocious. You have very narrow timeframes in which you can be doing things. Your buildup would be over a narrow island chain

instead of over a very wide swath of islands. It also ignored retaking the Philippines, which was a political objective and also military objective from the standpoint that you could cut off Japanese resupply from really one of their biggest sources of raw materials and oil and so forth, which was in the south.

The other was in China and Manchuria. And so, you know, there would be people who would be or staffs that would be proposing different things, but those were all put aside for what you see now, which is the twin drive across the Pacific, MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, and then Nimitz across the Central Pacific, essentially merging into the,

fighting that you would see towards the end in the Philippines and Okinawa, from which really the main, your father, of course, Philippines being the major staging point for the troops themselves and Okinawa for a certain amount of the bombing. Let's define what the operation is we're talking about. This is a two-part strategy. First of all, let's just orient ourselves geographically. Okinawa is to the south, part of the Rishu Islands, to the south. to the south of Japan. Japan itself is a series of islands, and the southernmost is called Kyushu.

So Okinawa was really, you know, after it had finally been won, becomes in effect the staging ground for the attack on Kyushu in November 1945, in the fall of 1945. Again, this has only is going to happen if the atom bomb is not effective or was never created. November is part one. That's the attack on Kyushu, which has to happen in order to then make an effective, attack on Hanshu, which is where Tokyo is on the Kanto plain. So it's a two-part thing. Second part happens in March of 1946. This is going to be bigger than D-Day, right? This is a massive, massive attack. Yeah, for example, for the assault onto Kyushu, you have the U.S. Sixth Army, which is an army that was formed in the Pacific and had been fighting for some time.

and they would be the assault force that would invade Kyushu and no intent to take the entire island. The manpower and the reasoning did not exist to do that. We were going to do essentially what we'd done before in a number of occasions, such as like at Bougainville. We were going to, in this case, we were going to take about the bottom third of the island, get this one large staging area that included a Great Bay for naval forces, get the Japanese pushed up into the mountains away from the staging area and have those staging areas out of artillery range, so to speak. And then from there, there would be the invasion of the Canto Plain, the Tokyo area.

And that would be done by the 8th Army, which was another Pacific, army and, interestingly enough, the first army, which was being shipped completely across the globe from Europe after having defeated the Nazis. Also, coming across and being part of this would be the 8th Air Force. Everyone thinks of the 8th Air Force in terms of, you know, the bombing of the aerial assault against Germany. Well, interestingly, enough, they were being transferred to the Pacific as well. Retraining, mostly in the

southwest United States, on B-29s, but the 8th Air Force was coming over as well. There was not enough troops to just have independent forces bringing these various foes to destruction. We were actually going to be having to use a lot of, use a lot of

the same forces that had fought in Europe, which gets into a whole other subject as well. I do have to go back on one thing, though, that you'd mentioned. And that was kind of that idea of invasion or bomb. And actually, that was not the way it was looked at at the time. It was thought quite rightly that even assuming the atomic bombs worked, the Japanese might not surrender. Yeah, there you go. And there was a target set of four cities.

At different times, the Air Force tried to put a fifth city on, and Stimson kept taking it off. But there was a strategic target set of four cities. And it was thought that if these cities that had been were purposely kept away from the bombing campaign that had destroyed all of the major, cities or laid waste to all of the major cities in Japan, that these cities would not be part of that so that the Japanese could behold clearly the destructive power of an atomic bomb. And it was thought that if we destroyed each, if we dropped an atomic bomb on each of these four cities in relatively quick succession, essentially as the bombs became ready, that we could hope, shock them, kind of stampede the government into surrender. But there was no guarantee that that would

happen. And in fact, without going into all the details, when the Japanese kind of stopped talking to us after the destruction of Nagasaki, General Marshall started the process for looking into if the basic plan of four cities should be pulled back from and that we should start to. instead stockpiling atomic bombs for tactical rather than strategic use and also introducing poison gas. Today you'd call these WMDs weapons of mass destruction, but at the tail end of the war, that's actually what was the proposal that was in the beginning stages of being developed. and really the Japanese were not being stampeded. And it took finally the direct input and orders from the emperor

to get the army to agree to surrender because they wanted to continue fighting on. It actually took the direct intervention of the emperor to get them to call it quits. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Let me circle back for a moment, Dennis. I should have identified this as part one and part two.

Part one, Operation Olympia, November 1945, followed by Operation Coronet, March 1946. This initial impact, I just want to get the statistics because it's kind of breathtaking. 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, 400 destroyer escorts, an enormous naval force

carrying a huge infantry of 15 divisions, which is like 675,000 troops. And this was just part one. I mean, it's unbelievable how big this invasion was. What's so surprising is that it was required. I think most people do not understand that the Japanese had really prepared for this. They had brought troops down from Manchuria, from Korea. They had really consolidated the troops, knowing in the time that they were fighting in Okinawa that this was the next step they needed to.

be prepared for. Well, you know, the Japanese people can read a map and they understand logistical tables and they can read that, they can read a map. And the United States had a very formulistic structure for conducting invasion operations. For example, every invasion operation was conducted within the range of air power that was going to be launched from the previous base that was established after an island, say, you know, had been captured. So everything had to be within range of ground-based air power, simply because even with that massive carrier force that you're describing. 42 carriers, unbelievable.

But here's the rub. When you start breaking it down as far as carriers needed, say the smaller carriers being needed for convoy escorts. and for feints and for suppressing aircraft, say, maybe coming over being staged through Formosa from China, you know, to attack, say, you know, U.S. convoys coming out of the Philippines and so forth, when you start carving out all the needs that the carriers of all sizes are going to be responsible for, You only have roughly about 2,000 aircraft from those carriers, and they're not just going to be fighting in that area.

They're going to be ranging far up north to suppress Japanese reinforcements and so forth. So while it is a massive number of carriers and carrier aircraft, it's not enough to support a land invasion and a full field. army, not just a division or two divisions, but a full field army. So you had to have, for example, the bases in Okinawa and the Philippines to support that. The task is so huge. It takes a massive amount of infrastructure to be built and all of this moved forward. So yes, you're looking at huge numbers, numbers that today people would find astounding. I once did a TV show on Okinawa about that battle, and there was a survivor there who told me about the day, a civilian, who told me about the day they woke up and saw the military,

the American Navy offshore. And they basically said from the shoreline, from the waves, all the way to the horizon, they saw metal. That's all they saw. It was just one ship after another all the way. out to the horizon. It was just amazing. I don't know if it was true or not, but what an amazing illustration. Well, from the standpoint of someone on the land, it's just unreal. You've never seen anything like that before. But again, it also had its limitations. The Japanese

knew, the Japanese military knew what it took to create that and support it. So they were able, and this is getting back to an earlier question of years, they were able, knowing what they knew that if the United States is going in this direction and they've attacked here, here and here, then their next and most obvious point of assault is going to be here. And again, the funny thing is, is you had Japanese saying, well, what if they decide to do an end run and come straight at Tokyo? And we had people within our own staffs who were saying, well, why don't we do that end run? And so the Japanese were looking at a possible end run.

We were looking at a possible end run. But then the Japanese, just like us, said, no, they're not really going to have the infrastructure to carry it out. And on our side of the Pacific, we're saying the same thing. No, we don't have the infrastructure to carry it out. So both sides really had, were operating in such a way that there was a strong ability to figure out what the other side was going to do but you're locked in.

I referred to it as kind of a mutual suicide backed. Terrible. What were the estimates on casualties? What are we talking about? The working figure for the Pacific campaign was 720,000 dead and evacuated, wounded through March of 1946, 720,000 dead and evacuated wounded through March of 1946, 720,000 dead and evacuated, wounded. Now that only takes it. Now, yeah, U.S. Now that only takes in, and that's also only

army. Now that also does not take in continued fighting in either Kyushu or now the much bigger battle on Honshu. That takes up the

Kyushu fighting so far and say about the first month or so on Honshu. Now that was the actual figure worked out for planning purposes being used, say, by medical planners, transport and evacuation and so forth. See, there were several stratas of planning. This is the more tactical, technical side of it. There was other strategic analysis done, and that was in the summer, spring and summer of 1940.

where we're having to do almost kind of a crystal ball, look at it. And that was coming up with that the United States could have somewhere in the vicinity of, ultimately, of about a million, million, 200,000 plus dead, and that we would have to kill five to ten million Japanese. Now, the Japanese were working their own figures. and their figures for, while we're figuring that we may have to kill five to ten million Japanese, they are working and being briefed at the imperial level, at the highest levels, that Japanese, and in some post-war interrogations in the Tokyo war crimes trials,

they sometimes mix words. Sometimes it's translated as dead. Sometimes it's translated as just casualties. but they were looking at a figure of 20 million or approximately one quarter of every Japanese on the island of Hanshu in order to achieve victory. So again, how do you wrap your head around figures like this?

We're looking at 5 to 10 million. They're looking at up to 20 million at the time with starvation, exposure, the war itself, you're in the final months of the war from that great arc running from, say, New Guinea, Indonesia,

what's today called Indonesia, up through China and north and into Manchuria, the UN figures came out to ultimately about 400,000 dead per month that the war was going on. How do you wrap your head around

figures like that? I mean, it's just incredible. One thing that's very important for listeners to understand and to grapple with is that we are often tempted to compare this to D-Day. D-Day is a much smaller campaign. It's also a campaign into a country that is friendly. You know, you don't have a hostile population welcoming you into that nation. This is going to be the opposite. This is going to be fighting onto these lands that are already very well defended and dug in for months, knowing where they're going to come, where those troops are going to come.

The very beaches have been targeted. and then you have a civilian population that's been somewhat trained up, or at least instructed and requested to fight back. And boy, this turns into a real slog. Yeah, the Japanese were very happy to be documenting this, both for their own population and for propaganda use as well. And this was not just propaganda photos, you know, these, and they were getting systematic training in things like bamboo spears,

like the whole works. Real basics. It's just incredible. They weren't just propaganda photos. Add to this, the factor that had been proven by Okinawa, which is Japanese kamikaze, had been a major factor in that battle. This was going to be an even bigger factor against the Navy and the attack force during downfall. Yes. And the Japanese, when we invaded the Philippines, they knew that their oil supplies were going to be cut off.

and they did a last major run of tankers, many of which were sunk, but a last major run of tankers up from the Indonesia area, which is where their principal oil supplies were coming from. And they had, and we did, by the way, did not realize this until after the war was over. We thought they were pretty much, you might say, out of gas. but they had refined fuel. They had it stockpiled, and this is outlined in detail in Hell to Pay. They had refined fuel that had been hidden and stockpiled in immense amounts

and were their aircraft that would be used as kamikazis, which is they were converting training outfits for training pilots were brought into combat use with their antiquated aircraft. an older obsolescent aircraft. Those were brought in to be used as kamikazis, while their more modern aircraft would be functionally serving as fighter cover. But they had the gas. They had the gas.

And we did not actually know that at the time. It sounds like madness. But in terms of the Japanese motivations, there is a method to this, which is we can make this so miserable for you that it will not be worth the effort, the cost in lives and treasure. And so you will negotiate an ending to this.

They were still playing that card at the end. Oh, yeah. Literally right up until the emperor said, cease and desist. Yeah. It was literally, and you had literally had a situation where two cities had been obliterated by atomic bombs. The Russians who we had made agreements with, certain agreements with, had come into the war as well. and the military was still firmly advocating that the war be continued. The emperor was the one person who actually had the authority to call it quits.

And even then, at the last minute before the surrender broadcast could be made, there was a coup by mid-level officers, and the most senior military officers, there was a number of them who were assassinated as part of this. But the most senior military officers, and this one, their chief of General Staffanami, basically just kind of sat back a little bit to see how things were going. And the coup was put down. He helped put it down ultimately. But it was a very close run thing.

You've brought up the next discussion of Operation Downfall. And this is a huge part of this conversation, sort of two part. First of all, the Soviet role in all of this is often debated. as to whether or not there was some geopolitical reason for Truman's motivations to drop the bomb, as to how the USSR was or was not going to get involved in the ground battle in Japan. Where do you come down on that whole issue? Well, after the war, neither the Soviets nor the United States, as the Cold War began to develop fairly quickly, neither government really wanted to talk about this.

But throughout the Roosevelt administration and then into the Truman administration, there were great efforts to get the Soviets involved or to commit to being involved as soon as they got the war with Germany over with. As early as the Tehran conference, Stalin said two to three months after Germany is defeated, we will come in. but they had a neutrality pact with Japan. Moreover, not only did they have that neutrality pact with Japan, but their far eastern provinces, they call them the maritime provinces, the Port of Vladivostok and so forth, were all extremely vulnerable to Japanese assault or attack. Right. You and I had a conversation about this before, and I just want to let the audience know. I was misinformed, and you let me know this before. My impression was that, which is largely a conspiracy theory,

which is that the dropping of the atomic bomb would have had as much to do with keeping Russia out of the Japanese islands as it did about, you know, ending the war itself. Like that was part of the idea behind Truman. You came hard down on me, and I appreciate that because I read a lot about it since then, and I understand how that's been created, that idea. Very little to substantiate that theory, right? Oh, yeah. And it's all been agreed to in Moscow in 1944. The framework for what the Russians would get out of it was agreed to before Yalta.

At the Yalta conference was the secret agreement on how things were going to be sort of divided up in the post-war world, at least to the extent of the occupation and who was targeting what and what the Russians were going to get out of it, essentially what was agreed to in Moscow then ratified at the Yalta Conference was that we were going to attack the head. We were going to attack the eastern portion of the Japanese Empire. The Russians were going to attack the western,

portion. So it's really a kind of a division of labor. There was never any plans by the Russians to do any kind of invasion of Japan proper. Although when things were moving quickly at the end, they kind of looked at maybe doing something in the northernmost island and the top people and the Russian general staff just said, hey, we don't have the ability to do this. Yeah. It's the complexity of this operation that really blows your mind and the scale of it, of course, never mind the casualties that are going to result from it. One aspect of this that's really interesting, and I want to kind of close on this idea, is that Truman, this was very surprising to me. You wrote a book called Soldier from Independence about Harry Truman's wartime experience

in World War I. He was quite aware of how difficult it was to be in combat and what the soldier's experience would have been. Oh, yeah. The experience that my father would have gone through. and he told me quite poignantly when I was a child, you wouldn't be here, but for the A-bomb. He had often said that to me and my sisters. Harry Truman felt for the soldiers. He knew what was going to happen. That would have weighed heavily on him in his decision-making.

Oh, yeah. He is commonly thought that Truman was just essentially kind of there for the ride, that he's often referred to as the accidental president, although it was known at the time that he was going to be becoming president because of Roosevelt's health, but it was thought that Roosevelt would hang on a little bit longer than he did. But Truman, he was often characterized

in later times as not really knowing much of anything, about anything. Often people would refer to him running a canteen during the war, which is true. And it's at the early stages in the United States. And that, oh, well, he was just a battery captain. Well, that's true.

But it's also true only if you just kind of focus in on that one thing and not what came later. Like Truman was a battery captain, but he was a battery captain who saw a very extensive amount of combat. And his battery was during the opening phases, the Mews-Argonne offensive, was situated in what one member of the division, his combat division, the 35th, referred to as a cemetery of unbeautiful. was situated in what one member of the division, his combat division, the 35th referred to as a cemetery of unburied dead. And he operated from that, saw extensive combat where he risked his own career firing into German artillery elements that were being set up on the flank of his division. but in the zone of the division on his flank. Later on, after the war, while everyone else was being reverted, he was actually brought in at a promotion to major.

He eventually rose through the ranks to become a full colonel in the commanding a National Guard, a very highly trained and well-respected because of its level of training, artillery regiment as a full colonel before he was even a senator. He knew everybody. You sent me to, I want to close with this, you sent me to a letter written by James Michner, close to my experience of life because he was a Quaker, and so was I raised one, who wrote as late as 1995 a letter to his friend about his feelings about being over there and what would have occurred versus the dropping of the bombs. It's a long letter. I'm not

going to go through the whole thing, but I will note this one sentence here. Let's put it simply, he is saying to his friend, never once in those first days nor during the long reconsiderations later, could I have possibly criticized Truman for having dropped that first bomb? True, I now see that the second bomb on Nagasaki might have been redundant. He's basically just rationalizing out the decision to drop the bomb, but it's in the context of a letter in which he explains how horrific the circumstances would have been both for the Americans and for Japanese in this circumstance of our invasion. I think that's really important for people to understand. You have steered me correctly, Dennis, and I'm really grateful, and I invite listeners to look up this book, Hell to Pay.

There's been a second edition since then, but it was first published in 2009. It's subtitled Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945 to 1947 by DM Gian Greco, the man you have been meeting this hour of conversation. It's often said that Okinawa was the end of the war, and then the bombs, of course. But really, for me, the end of the war was really the decision not to invade because the fateful circumstances, what would have unfolded, were just untenable. Thank you so much for joining us, Dennis. I really appreciate it. This is a huge subject matter to get through in less than an hour. So I thank you for your patience.

Well, I was glad to be here. And yeah, you're right. At the time, we thought we were in the middle of the war, not the end. Exactly. Well, there's much work to be done here. Many more pages to read for me. of DMG and Greco's work. Take care, sir.

Well, thank you. Bye-bye. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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