How Could the War Best Be Ended?

May 1945. The war in Europe was over. The members of the coalition were about to enter upon joint occupation and control of Germany. The Charter of the United Nations was being conceived at San Francisco. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin had agreed to confer about the many unsettled European situations.

Japan, all alone, was fighting on. The United States was assembling ever larger forces — army, navy, and air — for the next great actions in the Pacific. The Soviet government was transporting divisions to the Far East for deployment along the Manchurian frontier. The British Commonwealth was planning the expulsion of the Japanese from the south Pacific and southeast Asia. The Chinese were getting ready to start a march toward the coast in the Canton-Hong Kong area, to be their first offensive since their country was invaded.

The structure of Japanese life and production was being smashed and burned. The Japanese Navy and Air Force were but remnants of what they had been. But the spirit of defiance was still alive in the armed services and among the people — unwavering in their acceptance of suffering and the sad stroke of death. In Okinawa over one hundred thousand Japanese, hunted with mortar and fire, shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, were refusing to give up. Japanese suicide planes were flinging themselves in exalted desperation against the off-shore American fleet — with frightening effect. These grim experiences were taken as proof that the ordeal still ahead might be long and agonizing.

How could it be ended surely and quickly? The American managers of the war were giving thought to three sets of measures, all of which were being shaped for use.

The obvious and perhaps most certain way was to beat down the Japanese until they could no longer fight on — by enlarging the assaults on Japan and Japanese armed forces wherever they could be reached, by air and sea and on land, culminating in the invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Another was by inducement. The Japanese might agree to submit before they were utterly crushed if the coalition (including perhaps the Soviet Union, not yet at war with Japan) informed them how they would be regarded in defeat. Might not even this hardy nation, if assured of tolerable treatment after surrender, be brought to give up before it was reduced to the last extreme of misery? Might not the elements who knew the war was lost prevail, if a promise was given the Japanese people that after their means of making war were broken, they would be allowed to re-engage in peaceful pursuits, determine their own political forms and future, and that their fighting men would not be kept in long captivity?

The third, most secret, was by shock. The Japanese might be awed into surrender when they found out that a refusal could lead only to utter destruction — because their enemies had an irresistible new weapon and the Soviet Union was joining them.

Each of these routes could lead to the end of the war j or two or three of them could do so, in combination or in succession. Within the American government each had its own group of activators who nursed their plans and evolved their policies more or less separately from the others. The three were conjoined only in fitful and irregular consultation between the men in the small circle of ultimate decision-makers, and with the President.

The ideas of the heads of the military organization — the Joint Chiefs of Staff and top commanders of our forces — were centered on strategic plans for the advancement of the assaults by sea, land, and air on going lines, and in preparations for the next greater operations. Although not opposed to trying, they thought it unlikely that promises of leniency could induce surrender until the Japanese armed forces were thoroughly subdued. Some officials in the State Department had long been advocating an appeal to the preservative sense of the Japanese people before the struggle reached its portended climax. Secretary of War Stimson joined them in June. However, he conceived the exposition of our intentions as an accompaniment to an ultimate warning of destruction, fused by the atomic bomb. He was Chairman of the small group (known as the Interim Committee) who knew most about the progress and potentialities of this emergent secret weapon, and hoped that its burst would bring the war to an almost instant end.

This narrative will follow each of these three sets of means and measures separately toward their convergence.

By Combined Assault

The end of the war in Europe released American, British, and Russian forces for use in the Pacific. The amplitude of their combat resources enabled the members of the coalition to agree easily upon their respective parts in the assault upon Japan j they were great enough to enable each to engage in those operations upon which it was most intent.

After many months of discussion, several differences of judgment within the American government were still unresolved.

Some senior naval and air force officers, including the Commanding Admiral of the United States Fleet, Admiral King, and the President's representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Leahy, believed that Japan could be forced to accept our terms merely by our suffocating naval blockade and our devastating air assaults. To assure the utmost effect for these measures they favored the acquisition of several more bases nearer to and around Japan. If that were done, they believed that the Japanese would be forced to give up before long, without having to engage in land battles on the Japanese home islands, and even if the Russians should refrain from entering the war.

However, the proponents of this belief did not challenge the opinion prevailing in the Army that it was essential to prepare for, and if need be undertake, the invasion of the home islands. Two reflections made it easier for them to go along with plans for this venture. Enlarging naval and air attacks were to be continued anyway, to break down resistance to the invasion; these might be so damaging that Japan would quit before great scheduled land battles were fought. And, in any case, the losses suffered in...