I like to be the last person on the planet to read any given bestseller. I finally got around to reading Unbroken, about Louis Zamperini, a U.S. Olympic athlete-turned-World War II bombardier. He survives 47 days in an inflatable raft and then just barely survives being a prisoner of war in Japanese custody.
Japan had signed the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of prisoners, but hadn’t ratified it. Thus prisoners were beaten and starved and scheduled to be killed as whatever island they were held on was overrun by American forces. According to Unbroken, there were in fact mass executions of prisoners held on islands beyond the Japanese core islands.
What could have saved prisoners? A quick and Big Bang-ish end to the war. Something that wouldn’t give the Japanese sufficient time to carry out their execution plans.
The modern fashion among historians, including in the biography of Eisenhower that I finished recently, is to treat the atomic bombing of Japan as an unnecessary act shading into war crime territory. At best it is something to be regretted. Invading Japan wouldn’t have been that costly or have taken that long.
Unbroken is a good reminder that not everyone would regret the A-bombs dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945. Zamperini was within weeks of dying from malnutrition, dysentery, and beatings even if the Japanese had not planned an August 15, 1945 execution date. He ultimately lived through 2014 (aged 97).
The book is also a good reminder of how much more dangerous accidents were than combat during World War II. Zamperini’s plane went down due to the crew feathering a good engine after one quit (so they could have had three out of four running engines and a dead one with a feathered prop; instead they ended up with two running engines, both on the same wing, and a dead engine with a stopped prop generating a huge amount of drag; this is a classic problem when learning to fly multi-engine piston aircraft and has been mostly addressed by auto-feather props and/or turbojets that don’t need to be feathered after quitting (and they hardly ever quit). Despite auto-feather, TransAsia 235 came to grief in a similar fashion in 2015. A crew of five USAF pilots wrecked a C-5 cargo plane in Dover, Delaware via a similar mistake in 2006. Machines get better, but apparently humans do not.
Lauren Hillenbrand does a better job than 99 percent of America’s journalists and authors in explaining aviation concepts. She thanks her brother, a Private certificate holder, in the acknowledgments.
Some statistics:
Pilot and navigator error, mechanical failure, and bad luck were killing trainees at a stunning rate. In the Army Air Forces, or AAF,* there were 52,651 stateside aircraft accidents over the course of the war, killing 14,903 personnel. Though some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, killed without ever seeing a combat theater. In the three months in which Phil’s men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per day—met with accidents stateside, killing 9 men per day. In subsequent months, death tallies exceeding 500 were common. In August 1943, 590 airmen would die stateside, 19 per day.
These losses, only one due to enemy action, were hardly anomalous. In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.
As planes went, so went men. In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.*1 Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.
The book is also a good reminder of how enthusiastic the U.S. has become regarding imprisoning people. Although some Japanese war criminals were executed, hardly any were imprisoned longer than the Green Card holding woman who tried to vote in Texas. The worst criminal described in the book escapes punishment altogether. He went into hiding after the war and came out after an amnesty was declared.
Then, one day in March 1952, as he read a newspaper, his eyes had paused over a story. The arrest order for suspected war criminals had been lifted. There on the page was his name. The lifting of the apprehension order was the result of an unlikely turn in history. Immediately after the war, there was a worldwide outcry for punishment of the Japanese who had abused POWs, and the war-crimes trials began. But new political realities soon emerged. As American occupiers worked to help Japan transition to democracy and independence, the Cold War was beginning. With communism wicking across the Far East, America’s leaders began to see a future alliance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America’s security goals, something had to give. On December 24, 1948, as the occupation began to wind down, General MacArthur declared a “Christmas amnesty” for the last seventeen men awaiting trial for Class A war crimes, the designation for those who had guided the war. The defendants were released, and some would go on to great success; onetime defendant Nobusuke Kishi, said to be responsible for forcibly conscribing hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans as laborers, would become prime minister in 1957.
Mutsuhiro Watanabe’s flight was over. In his absence, many of his fellow camp guards and officials had been convicted of war crimes. Some had been executed. The others wouldn’t be in prison for long. In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory. Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on “sinful, absurd, insane war.” He saw himself as a victim.
Watanabe married and had two children. He opened an insurance agency in Tokyo, and it reportedly became highly profitable. He lived in a luxury apartment worth a reported $1.5 million and kept a vacation home on Australia’s Gold Coast. Almost everyone who knew of his crimes believed he was dead.
Watanabe died in April 2003.
More: read Unbroken.
The late ’50s were a popular time for letting war criminals go. I suppose the Cold War was a contributing factor. The Lagerführer of my father’s camp got 20 years hard labor but they let him out in ’57 after serving only 10. This guy was less evil than the average Lagerführer so he only got 20 years instead of death like most Lagerführers. The ones that they hung could not be revived when the Cold War heated up. But I suppose my father was lucky – part of the reason that he survived is that this guy was only a 2nd rate war criminal and not a 1st rate sadist.
For the most part, people in the ’50s wanted to forget WWII and all the atrocities. Interest in the Holocaust only got going after Eichmann was captured and even then it was not a big deal until the ’70s.
None of the historians (or, in general, people) decrying the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki descend from people serving on the pacific. The day before (and possibly, on the day!) armistice someone always gets killed. Any delay in reaching an armistice means more or your own folks die, right? Clearly nobody is able to think, had grandpa died had to fight three more months he might have died, and I would not be here pontificating. In addition, the US had to bomb Hiroshima AND Nagasaki. Had Japan been on the verge of surrender, why was the bombing of Nagasaki needed?
The criticism about the atomic bombings is usually more along the lines that the Japanese were in fact trying to negotiate terms of surrender well earlier. But the US insisted on a complete unconditional surrender, thus prolonging the war even longer, a-bomb or no. I don’t know the truth of the matter.
bobbybobbob #3, I believe thinking at that time was that after WWI conditional surrender of Germany was a failure that lead Nazis rise to power and to WWII. It seems that the thinking itself was correct. However USA had another scare tactic, to threaten Japanese islands occupation by USSR that in August of 1945 defeated Japan continental forces in few weeks of fighting. Not sure whether USSR occupation threat was used or not.
The audio book was quite good but took longer for us 4 hour/day commuters to listen to than a retired & fast reader reading print. There is ongoing debate on the factuality of the book. It’s most likely that the largest prison camps were killing prisoners while smaller ones were treating them humanely.
Worth reading on the subject of Japanese atrocities in WW2 is Richard Flannagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North about Aussie POWs used as slave labor to build the Burma RR.
Watanabe also shows up in Pappy Boyington’s memoirs in at least one of the same prison camps. His autobiography is pretty graphic about it, and a bio I read recently was a bit more sedate but still makes it clear that, pretty objectively, bad stuff happened to American POW’s.
I’ve also been surprised to read (“Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45”, Max Hastings) that some 10,000 US POW’s were killed by the US Navy as the ships they were being transported on were sunk.
My father was a combat veteran of WWI – Saipan and Tinian. He was stationed on Tinian in 1945 and reportedly saw Bockscar take off.
The Battle of Saipan ended unexpectedly with mass civilian suicides, despite the efforts of the Americans to dissuade them. My father recalls being chased up the road to Marpi’s point by the Japanese (not the Americans chasing the Japanese). When they got to the top of the cliff, the Japanese, soused on Sake, yelled Banzai and jumped off.The Battle of Tinian ended with another mass suicide of Japanese soldiers, Okinawan workers and families and Korean comfort women, as did the Battles on Okinawa.
The plan was to storm the beaches of Japan, as my then 18 year old father had landed with the marines on the beaches of Saipan and Tinian, as the Americans had landed on D-Day. The expectation of a Japanese version of D-Day was for one million American casualties and even more Japanese casualties.
The Japanese did not immediately surrender after both bombs. The Russians invaded from the North – and then, did Japan agree to unconditional surrender to the Americans.
My father and his fellow soldiers were absolutely delighted when the war ended. There is a photo of the soldiers looking ecstatic that the war was over and that they wouldn’t have to land on the shores of Japan and invade. They had all been told that they would not be expected to survive the assault.
The bombs killed far fewer civilians than would likely have occurred had the Americans landed in Japan.
“The modern fashion among historians, including in the biography of Eisenhower that I finished recently, is to treat the atomic bombing of Japan as an unnecessary act shading into war crime territory. At best it is something to be regretted. Invading Japan wouldn’t have been that costly or have taken that long.”
Can’t comment on the Eisenhower biography, but Eric Rauchway provides some evidence that most historians believe the bombings were justified (with some loud dissenters). He summarizes:
Joseph Alsop provides a detailed and fascinating description of the Japanese decision to surrender in a letter to the New York Review of Books, October 23, 1980. Even after Hiroshima, the military leaders didn’t want to surrender. Even after the Emperor intervened, a group of army officers tried to stage a coup to prevent his decision from being broadcast.
If you haven’t read Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, I’d highly recommend it. It was basically a wartime effort on the part of the US to understand Japanese culture and in particular Japanese militarism. With respect to treatment of prisoners, Benedict notes that there was no tradition of honorable surrender: a Western military unit would surrender once they had something like 1/3 killed or wounded, while a Japanese military unit would fight to the death.
According to a book I read, our 41st President narrowly avoided being eaten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident
My father joined the Navy in World War II, when he was 17. He was training as a radar technician, but his training got delayed by him getting scarlet fever. He recovered, and was due to ship out to the Pacific within a few weeks, when the bombs were dropped and the war ended.
He told me a couple of things about how people felt about it at the time. First, many people thought after the announcement of the first Hiroshima bomb, that it was some sort of trick to scare the Japanese into thinking we had a working super weapon; a barge could have been secretly towed into the harbor , filled with TNT, and detonated, producing similar destruction.
The idea that a working atomic bomb had been developed was something that took people by surprise, and with a good deal of skepticism, especially as the German experts had mistakenly concluded it was impractical due to a miscalculation of the amount of fissile material needed to sustain a chain reaction.
The other thing was that even if the Japanese were convinced that the Hiroshima explosion was from an atomic bomb, it was quite likely that the US only had the capacity to build one of them. Hence the Nagasaki bombing produced a convincing illusion that the US had a large supply of A-bombs (though we didn’t).
It was also taken as a matter of common knowledge that the ground invasion would cause huge casualties of US soldiers and Japanese civilians. The experience with fanatical resistance on the outlying Pacific islands was taken as an indication of what fighting on the home islands would be like.
For anyone interested in this topic, I can not recommend the late Paul Fussell’s short book “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” highly enough. He was wounded in combat in World War II, and after the war became a professor literature at the University of Pennsylvania. His analysis of the bombings, which affected him directly, is at once blunt and subtle. He’s clear what his position is, but he acknowledges the complexity of it.
P.O.E.
> not everyone would regret the A-bombs
The author George MacDonald Fraser made an interesting argument to a Bomb-objector. In ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’, he made the obvious point that many allied servicemen would have died without the Bomb.
But he made the point more vivid by asking his interlocutor this question: if you could, here and now, give your own life in order to save one of the civilians killed by the Bomb, would you do it? In Fraser’s telling, the objector prevaricated and on being pressed admitted that he wouldn’t.