The World War II Chronicles Page 12

  Rescue workers going past them toward the valley sobbed as they watched the hellish procession move along under the specter of the mushroom still lingering above. When American reconnaissance planes flew over to try to ascertain the damage, they were scarcely noticed.

  Later in the afternoon, Tatsuya Koga sat on the hillside behind the Medical School. Around him the remnants of the hospital staff tended to the dying. Below, the west wing of the college was still burning and patients trapped by the fire had ceased to scream. Across the valley, antlike columns of Japanese men and women still struggled up the slopes of the hill leading to Nishiyama. Children rode the backs of the less seriously injured.

  Koga felt a wave of nausea and vomited into the grass three times. He continued to retch bile as the effects of radiation gripped his body. He put his head down and fell into a fitful sleep.

  By four o’clock rescue workers had cleared a stretch of the railroad leading to the shattered Urakami station. The first trainload of wounded was shepherded out of the area and on to the Omura naval hospital twenty-eight miles north of the city.

  Governor Nagano acted quickly to head off another calamity. Aware that the summer heat would accelerate decomposition of the thousands of cadavers lining the streets, he ordered mass cremations begun as soon as possible.

  Twilight came early that afternoon to the Urakami Valley. Smoke hung over the land. A sea of fire had spread across the entire valley. The living clung to the slopes and watched their homes burn to the ground. From the edges of the fire people ran haltingly, blindly toward the highlands. Some had skin hanging in huge folds from their arms and legs, and cried when they brushed against anything in their path. As darkness fell, volunteers began to collect the corpses by the light of the burning trees and buildings. Row after row of blackened and blistered bodies were formed into mounds. Torches were applied to wood underneath the piles. Human forms lay stiff and naked in a welter of meat soon to be reduced to ashes and remnants of bone.

  Many families buried or burned their own dead rather than have them collected and thrown on the mountain of flesh. Many others did not need to.

  Kikuo Fukahori arrived back from his job several miles away to find his home completely destroyed. He went to a nearby cave to look for his family. In the dusk he could see nothing inside and went away. His family was beyond help. His five children had been pinned under the roof of their home and died in an inferno of fire. His wife was inside the cave, her tongue protruding from a swollen and blistered face.

  In the darkness, small fires dotted the landscape as other survivors returned to the ruins and put their relatives to rest. There was little else they could do that awful night in the sorrowing land around the Urakami River.

  The crew of Bock’s Car spent less than two hours at Okinawa. Within a few minutes after its nearly disastrous landing, it was joined by Fred Bock’s The Great Artiste. Nearly an hour later the missing camera plane finally made its rendezvous with its companions. Its crew received some sarcasm from disgusted fliers in the other ships. Meanwhile, Sweeney and Ashworth had reported their mission to General Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Eighth Air Force based on the island. When they departed for Tinian, only he, of all the men on Okinawa, knew what Bock’s Car had accomplished that day.

  En route to the Marianas nearly all the men aboard the plane slept. At 10:25 P.M. they touched down on Tinian—nearly twenty hours after the mission had begun.

  There was a briefing attended by Purnell, Farrell, Ramsey, Tibbets and others. Then the crews of the three planes were dismissed. Time reporter Bill Laurence sat down to write the story of the raid. It would win him the Pulitzer Prize. Bombardier Kermit Beahan went to bed, exhausted. It was his twenty-seventh birthday. Some of the others were too tense to rest. Two officers of the 509th stood at the bar of the officers’ club and drank until 5:00 A.M. Then they stole a general’s jeep and tried to drive it through the hut where Kermit Beahan and Don Albury were sleeping. Some of the men on Tinian had trouble settling down that night.

  In the communications center, General Tom Farrell sent a coded message to his superior in Washington:

  TO GROVES PERSONAL FROM FARREIX APCOM 5479

  TOPSECRET

  Strike and accompanying planes have returned to Tinian. Ashworth’s message from Okinawa nr 44 is confirmed by all observers. Cloud cover was bad at strike and it will be necessary to await photographs to give exact point of strike and damage.…

  After listening to accounts, one gets the impression of a supremely tough job carried out with determination, sound judgment and great skill. It is fortunate for the success of the mission that its leaders, Ashworth and the pilot Sweeney, were men of stamina and stout heart. Weaker men could not have done this job.…

  Fifteen hundred miles to the north, the enemy could not sleep either. While the interrogations droned on at North Field, nervous men sat around an air-raid shelter in Tokyo and waited for the Emperor of Japan to appear. The past day had been calamitous. Russia had invaded Manchuria, and a second atomic bomb had killed thousands. The men in the shelter had come to discuss the dread word surrender and the Emperor was on his way to listen to their arguments. He wanted a decision that night.

  Thirteen hours after Bock’s Car dropped the Fat Man over Nagasaki, the officials sat tensely, waiting for their Ruler to enter the room and listen to them debate ending the war. As Captain Ellis Zacharias’ Plan I-45 predicted months before, they were divided by doubt, debate, difference of opinion, and the fear of being held responsible for such an awful decision.

  SEVEN

  The Air-Raid Shelter

  Eleven men sat in extraordinary session around the long, cloth-covered table. The room they had gathered in was small, only 18 by 30 feet. Its ceiling was steel-beamed, its walls paneled in a dark wood. Its most striking characteristic that particular evening, however, was a complete lack of ventilation. In the August humidity, the assembled conferees, all dressed formally in morning attire or high-collared uniforms, perspired heavily as they talked.

  Four of the men were aides or secretaries. One man was a guest. The others were the Big Six, Japan’s “inner cabinet,” formally named the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War. To these six men—four cabinet ministers and two military chiefs of staff—was entrusted the formulation of policies, subject to full cabinet approval, which influenced the destinies of eighty million citizens of the Japanese Empire.

  The “inner cabinet” operated very cautiously because, in the summer of 1945, real power in Japan was vested in the Army and Navy General Staffs. The Diet, similar in makeup to the United States Congress, was now a rubber-stamp assembly. The Privy Council, once a powerful group advising the Throne, was now consulted after the fact. The jushin, ex-Premiers, held no official authority, but managed to exert some pressures on events as they had in forcing General Tojo’s downfall in 1944. The cabinet, modeled like those in America and England, nevertheless had little mind or authority of its own; the military dictated its actions.

  Above all these governmental branches sat the Emperor of Japan, who could express his opinions, show his feelings, but who by tradition did not order his own subjects to do his bidding. He had no veto power. On this night, for instance, he could only suggest courses of action to the men in the shelter.

  The titular leader of the Big Six was Premier Kantaro Suzuki, a venerated hero of the long-ago Russo-Japanese War. Then, as a young officer, he had led a suicidal charge against the Czarist fleet off Tsushima. By that exploit, he had earned lifelong prominence in Japan. Now in his eighty-first year, the aged admiral held the highest office his nation could offer a commoner. Revered by most, he puzzled some by his contradictory statements on the conduct of the war. One day, he would tell everyone he would prosecute it to the bitter end. The next day, he would reassure the peace party that he was in favor of immediate moves to terminate hostilities.

  The Japanese people delight in oblique tactics, but Suzuki’s actions confused even his closes
t confidants. Some whispered that his apparent indecisiveness could be traced to his advanced age. Deaf in one ear, Suzuki dozed frequently at conferences, missed points in debates, and generally let others hold the spotlight while he sat in the twilight of his career. Though he had been an inveterate cigar smoker in the past, he puffed only two a day by 1945. He loved to sit and play solitaire or read books on Taoism, while sipping part of his quota of five cups of sake a day. His wrinkled, moustached face, framed by enormous ears, smiled often as he went about among his peers. Even those violently opposed to his policies liked and admired him. Premier Suzuki was one of the few men in government without personal enemies.

  Yet the Premier was beset by fear of assassination. He knew first-hand the force of military fanaticism. Nine years earlier, on February 26, 1936, hundreds of Army officers and men had gone wild in an orgy of killing. Shot three times, Suzuki had narrowly escaped death. His mind as well as his body still retained those scars of violence. In the summer of 1945, as he surveyed the ruins of his beloved Empire and tried to carry out the Emperor’s mandate to end the war, the Premier could not perform effectively. During the intensive series of high-level discussions, he vacillated, contradicted himself, trod carefully through the camp of the enemy, the military. He wanted to surrender, but he knew, as did others in Tokyo, that a premature declaration of intent would probably mean his death. His realization of the futility of continued war did not need to be confirmed by the bombing of Nagasaki. When the first Soviet troops broke across the Manchurian border that morning, Suzuki had cried, “The game is up.” Now, hours later, as he sat with his colleagues, he was at last prepared to show his hand and take his country out of the “game.”

  Beside Suzuki in the Emperor’s shelter sat Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, sixty-three years old and a strong supporter of surrender. Though later the Allies would brand him as a war criminal for his actions as Foreign Minister at the time of Pearl Harbor, Togo had assumed a dominant role in the summer’s efforts to take his nation out of the war. A brilliant intellectual, he had little use for sensitivities in his daily contacts. He was a dogmatic man, scornful of opinions contrary to his own, and given to venomous eloquence in frequent temper outbursts. A mild-looking, bespectacled face masked an aloof, acerbic personality which caused his friends much embarrassment and his enemies much pain.

  From 1942, when he had been deposed owing to a dispute with the military, until 1945, when Suzuki became Premier, Togo had lived in retirement. At the urging of the jushin he then again took charge of the Foreign Office. He agreed to do so only after he was assured that Suzuki intended to end the war as soon as possible. Like Suzuki, however, Togo was forced to proceed carefully to forestall a coup by military fanatics. He too feared for his life in the long summer of 1945.

  The third member of the peace faction was a military man, Navy Minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, whose weather-beaten face had been a familiar sight among top circles in the Government for nearly twenty years. At sixty-five, the Navy Minister sat once more with old friends and rivals and championed the cause of peace. His features betrayed an enthusiasm for good whiskey. Once handsome, his facial muscles now sagged, huge pouches hung under his eyes, deep lines creased his cheeks, and veins stood out on his nose. Yet a warm smile constantly wiped away these signs of debilitation and attracted people to his side.

  Yonai had many enemies among the military, who resented his “pacifist” attitude. When he had been Premier in 1940, he ran afoul of the generals because he opposed any alliance with Germany and Italy. For that the Army forced his resignation.

  He was an ardent critic of war with the United States and was subjected to much harassment when the Japanese marched south in 1941. Called pro-American, he was sent into retirement. For nearly three years, Yonai languished in relative obscurity while the United States armed forces battered their way to the Marianas. When Tojo fell in July of 1944, he was catapulted back into service as Navy Minister under Koiso. Actually he was more than that. Because the jushin had forced the Army’s hand, Yonai was in effect assistant Premier, standing in Koiso’s shadow, subtly trying to influence the course of events. When Suzuki took over, Yonai continued as Navy Minister.

  As noted in the Fujimura affair, he walked carefully to avoid extremists. He had the same fears, the same memories as did Suzuki and Togo. Death lurked in the barracks, in the officers’ clubs, in the hearts of young men unable to comprehend defeat. Yonai had to wait for the right opportunity, the moment when the scales would be heavily weighted in his favor. Tonight he sat near his inseparable companion, Kantaro Suzuki, and prepared to strike. The events of the past few days—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Russian invasion of Manchuria—had unbalanced the scales.

  Ranged against Togo, Yonai and Suzuki were the other members of the Big Six. Their leader was General Korechika Anami, War Minister, spokesman for the Army and the most powerful man in Japan.

  Only four months before, Anami had arrived at the summit of his military career. The fifty-seven-year-old general had been given the War Ministry post when Suzuki formed his new cabinet. His new power, however, offered him little satisfaction. Beneath him lay the ruins of an empire. His Army numbered in the millions, but it was doomed to defeat. Supplies for the war machine had begun to dwindle and disappear. Though tactically the Imperial Japanese Army could still inflict cruel punishment on the enemy, strategically it had lost the war.

  But Anami had one hope left. His forces might bleed the Americans so badly on the beaches of Kyushu and Honshu that Japan could extract better peace terms from the conquerors.

  The general was a stubborn man, whose career reflected a tenacious determination to succeed. As a youth, he took and failed the entrance exams for the Military Academy four times before passing. After graduating from school, he served a typical apprenticeship in the Japanese Army in the period during and after World War I. In 1926, he was placed in the much sought-after position of aide to Hirohito. As such, Anami became friendly with Marquis Kido, also an Imperial aide, who later became Hirohito’s most influential counselor.

  Anami was not one of the original fanatics who usurped power in Manchuria. Not a firebrand, he chose a middle path between the disputing factions of the Imperial Army, thus avoiding the bitter factional warfare that erupted in the turbulent thirties. After Pearl Harbor, the rapidly rising officer commanded Japanese armies in the Dutch East Indies. From there his path led back to the intrigues of Tokyo. When Koiso fell, he was acceptable to both peace and war advocates as War Minister.

  Anami possessed a relatively colorless personality. Compared to predecessors like Tojo, he seemed almost a shadow figure in the military hierarchy. Grandfatherly in appearance, Anami’s only affectation was a neatly trimmed moustache. His face was full, his figure ample but not portly. The general kept in excellent condition through his favorite pastimes, archery and kendo (Japanese fencing). Every morning he tried to spend a few minutes shooting a bow and arrow because he felt that it helped discipline his mind.

  To the young officers under him, Anami was always calm and almost paternal. To the men who argued for peace in the cabinet meetings, he was infuriatingly obstinate. Frequently, the general would agree to a main point of discussion, then spar over side issues interminably. Such a man now grasped the leadership of the most dominant force in Japan, the Army. He must either disarm it forever or see it overwhelmed on the beaches. Thus far no one had been able to convince him not to fight. He had insisted on one last battle.

  His Chief of Staff sat next to him. General Yoshijiro Umezu, who looked like an oriental version of Benito Mussolini, also managed to typify the American image of a Japanese warlord. His head was shaven, his eyes were narrowed slits, hooded and menacing. His thick lips were constantly pursed, lending a perpetual scowl to his face.

  Umezu was a rigid, gruff martinet, a product of the fanatical Kwantung Army. Like Tojo, he had been in the center of the drive into Manchuria and China from 1931 to 1940. As one of the small nucleus th
at guided Japan’s destinies overseas, he was partially responsible for the disaster that engulfed his nation. But Umezu was not blind to the truth of impending defeat. He merely wanted better terms than those offered so far by the Potsdam Declaration. From the tip of his visored cap to the spurs on his shiny boots, the Army Chief of Staff epitomized the dilemma facing Japan. The Army must have peace with honor or it would fight on without quarter to the enemy.

  The sixth member of the council was Admiral Soemu Toyoda, a beefy man with a pockmarked face, who was Navy Chief of Staff. As such, he was the most recent addition to the select group and had been appointed by Navy Minister Yonai both for his competence and for a less apparent reason. Toyoda came from the same clan and region as General Umezu. Assuming that Toyoda leaned toward immediate peace, Yonai felt that the admiral would be a positive influence on Umezu in the final weeks of discussion. He guessed wrong.

  In these discussions, Toyoda vigorously defended the Army’s position. With his Navy lying on the floor of the Pacific, the Admiral lent full moral support to his fellow officers. Probably the most astute of the three, he dissected arguments brilliantly and found flaws in every position held by the opposition. His speeches were eloquent and reasoned. The sixty-year-old Toyoda was known as extremely nationalistic, and his hatred of foreigners was intense. Instead of being a subversive force against the generals, he had proven a worthy compatriot to the military clique in the last days.

  The guest, Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma, had no legal right to be there. As President of the Privy Council, an advisory body to the Emperor, he approved decisions already laid down by the full cabinet. Hiranuma had been invited merely to observe and report back to his own group on this meeting, thereby speeding up the decision-making process within the Government. However, the bespectacled, long-faced old politician intended to do more than just listen to the dialogue. Hiranuma had decided to become a devil’s advocate, soliciting facts, seeking out loopholes in arguments, generally pressing the participants closely in order to help them break through to a conclusion.