Authors Note to the

New Edition
This new edition of Hell to Pay expands
on several areas examined in the previous
book and deals with three new topics: U.S.-
Soviet cooperation in the war against
Imperial Japan; U.S., Soviet, and Japanese
plans for the invasion and defense of the
northernmost home island of Hokkaido; and
Operation Blacklist, the three-phase insertion
of American occupation forces into Japan.
It was originally my intent that the
extensive and still largely unknown degree of cooperation between the United
States and Soviet Union as well as the three antagonists Hokkaido plans be
covered as a single chapter in the first edition. The generous assistance offered
by Larry Bland and Jacob B. Kipp briefly encouraged me to think that I might even
be able to get it done in time to meet my deadlines. I was deluding myself. The
matter was far too complex and ultimately dropped with only a brief and totally
inadequate account of the shifting Soviet designs against Hokkaido at the end of
chapter 3. These subjects are now covered individually in chapter 11, To Break
Japans Spine, titled after a quotation of Joseph Stalin, and chapter 17, The
Hokkaido Myth.
There was good reason to finally produce the chapter on U.S.-Soviet
cooperation against Japan. In the years since Hell to Pay first appeared, the

1
notion put forth by Gar Alperovitz in the 1960s that the atomic bomb was used
not to end the war but to intimidate the Soviet Union and prevent Soviet gains in
the Far East was given fresh wind in Tsuyoshi Hasegawas Racing the Enemy:
Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. In fact, however, both the Roosevelt
and Truman administrations believed that Stalins entry into the Pacific war was in
the interest of the United States and went to great lengths to ensure that end
which included both political guarantees and Lend-Lease supplies specifically
tailored to support Soviet military operations. As the American ambassador to
Moscow, Averell Harriman noted at the time, his instructions were not only to
obtain Russian participation but [also] to have them give us the right kind of help
and enough time to prepare to make their help effective. And that is exactly
what the Soviets did, though their efforts took second stage to the stunning
advent of nuclear weapons.
Today, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed
by the immediate surrender of Japan continues to overshadow the Soviet
declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria but does not negate the fact that
the United States fully accepted the political gains in the Far East that Stalin had
sought at Yalta and locked in at Potsdam. After the war, the results of those two
conferences increasingly became a matter of grave concern, and little to no effort
was made by either the armed services or the State Department to publicize the
extent of direct U.S. aid in support of Soviet military operations against their old
Japanese enemy. The Soviet armies in the Far East were at the end of a
vulnerable, continent-long supply line, and without this dramatic increase in Lend-
Lease deliveries, code-named Milepost, the massive, multi-front offensive against
Japans Kwantung Army in Manchuria would not have been possible. It is
noteworthy that Lend-Lease supplies to support the Soviets Manchurian
campaign were actually scheduled to increase after their declaration of war.
A better understanding of U.S.-Soviet cooperation has also been
undermined by the fact that scholars have failed to notice the implications of a
key military accord at Potsdam. The United States agreed to put the lives of its
own sailors and airmen on the line to force supply convoys through the narrow
Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan when the marginally safer supply route
above Hokkaido became closed by winter ice. In the meantime, and while the
conference still had more than a week to go, the U.S. Navy issued orders to send
six escort carriers to the northern Pacific to form the nucleus of Task Force 49. Its
mission: To protect shipping along the northern supply route from Japanese
aircraft and still-potent submarine fleet. An additional battle group of cruisers
and destroyers, Task Force 92, was already clearing the area of enemy shipping
when TF49 received its orders on August 8, 1945, to maintain a line of
2
communications from the Aleutians across the Sea of Okhotsk to the Russian
port of Vladivostok.
If there was a race involving the United States and Soviet Union in the Far
East, it was a race by both allies to get Red armies into the war against Japan as
quickly as possible.
The second major addition to Hell to Pay involves U.S., Soviet, and Japanese
plans for the invasion and, alternately, the defense of Hokkaido. This has become
an area of increasingly odd and uninformed speculation, engendering a host of
nonsensical statements: The U.S. Navy mined the waters off northern Japan to
keep the Russians from invading first, There was nothing to stop the Soviets
from invading before the Americans and seizing all of northern Japan, and Stalin
was prepared to seize the northern end of Honshu. From there his armored
divisions would sweep down the island to Tokyo leaving postwar Japan a divided
nation like Germany.
Much like fantasy football, alternate history can be an enjoyable diversion
from trodding and retrodding the same old ground, and it sometimes provides a
fruitful path to perceiving some new wrinkle in a past war or campaign. What is
interesting about these overheard quotations, though, is that they were all
uttered as statements of fact by educators and historians. And while these and
like ideas have bubbled up for decades, virtually all were made relatively recently
during the countdown to the seventieth anniversary of the wars end in 2015.
Comments of a similar nature can be found coming and going on the Internet
today.
It is clear that both the Soviet armys intent and capabilities are increasingly
being blown way out of proportion by those who have not bothered to closely
study either the works of the U.S. and Russian scholars who have written on this
subject or the belligerents relevant wartime planning documents and operational
summaries. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that the two powers
eyeing northern Japan each conceived and seriously considered a variety of
options that differed in both scale and objectives yet are regularly mashed
together as if they were single proposed operations. In this volume readers will
find a brief overview of the war plans of each nation and see how they fit within
the context of the endgame against Imperial Japan.
Operation Blacklist, the Occupation of Japan, from the Reports of General
MacArthur, volume 1 and the supplement to volume 1, is presented as Appendix
D, replacing James Micheners letter to his friend, Martin Allday, which is now
used as was originally intended as the books epilogue. Military professionals will
be particularly interested in the come-as-you-are nature of the phased insertion
of U.S. occupation forces, the mechanics of their movements to and within Japan,
3
the military-to-military discussions between the Japanese and Americans that
preceded Blacklist, and the reactions of the Japanese themselves to the
unprecedented and previously unthinkable situation.
Gen. Douglas MacArthurs flagrant and repeated disregard of the
commanders intent of his boss, Gen. George C. Marshall, to put George Patton
and his staff in command of an American field army during the invasion of the
Tokyo Plain was outlined in the first edition. Revealed here is that MacArthur had
even devised, and was in the process of implementing, the sidetracking of Gen.
Vinegar Joe Stillwell, who had been picked by Marshall to lead the Tenth Army
when its commander was killed on Okinawa. Additional details are also provided
on the 1945 production of Purple Hearts as well as the decision to halt U.S. forces
on Germanys Elbe River instead of having them become embroiled in a bloody
street fight in Berlin that would disrupt the redeployment of American troops to
the Pacific.
It is my hope that readers will find these to be worthy additions to Hell to
Pay and that they help clarify several controversial issues.

Preface and Acknowledgments

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. Marshall1

In 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
commenced 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.

1 From a Marshall-edited transcript of his June 11, 1945, remarks before the Maryland Historical Society.
It was originally published as Some Lessons of History in the Maryland Historical Magazine 40
(September 1945): 175184. See Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, Papers of George Catlett
Marshall, vol. 5, The Finest Soldier: January 1, 1945January 7, 1947 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003), 220227, esp. 223.

4
 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, December, 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.
Roosevelt to produce a 100,000-men-per-month replacement stream for
Downfalls 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
Offensives), 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
generated 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 acknowledge the basic accuracy of what veterans knew.

5
 Newmans words, however, fell on deaf ears, for while the veterans had
indeed made their presence felt politically, they had no evidence beyond Truman
and Stimsons writings and their own memories of troop briefings conducted 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 worldwide specifically 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 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 Winston 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
ability to island hop and bypass Japanese garrisons steadily decreased. Even
though American assault and amphibious techniques were honed to near
perfection, casualties were nevertheless rising at alarming rates, and losses during
prolonged battles 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 killing Americans, particularly on Okinawa,
demonstrated to Secretary Stimson and many Pentagon planners that the worst
case was a real possibility.
This begged a question. If the situation could already be seen fully half a
year before the initial assault on the southernmost home island of Kyushu to
be moving in the direction of what originally had been projected to be the worst-
case scenario, was there an even worse case that had not been anticipated?
Would the Selective Service draft calls, nearly doubled just a few months before,
6
be adequate for the task ahead? Or would they have to be ramped up again and
deferments further tightened on protected categories such as agricultural
workers? To answer these questions Stimson instituted a multi-study
reexamination of the Armys manpower and training requirements for the
duration of the war as well as the possible casualties the Japanese might be able
to inflict on the invasion force.
The conclusion delivered to the War Department in July 1945, shortly before
Potsdam, was that the United States could squeak by with the current six-figure
level of inductions, but a new worst case had now been created: We shall
probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese [and] this might cost us
between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including 400,000 and 800,000 killed.
The Japanese leadership had come to a similar conclusion. Excluding the
42,000 to perhaps 100,000 civilians who lost their lives during the invasion of
Japans Okinawa prefecture, nearly 178,000 Japanese civilians had lost their lives
in recent months most burned to death or asphyxiated by American incendiary
bombs and 8 million had been made homeless even before the atomic bombs
were dropped. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo made its own clear-eyed
assessments. Based largely on the recent fighting on Okinawa, where up to
130,000 combatants and perhaps as many as a quarter of the islands 400,000
men, women, and children were dead by July, a remarkable 20 million
(representing total casualties in some records and deaths in others) became the
figure discussed in Imperial circles.
Yet even such terrible numbers as these only served to strengthen the
militarists conviction that they could still salvage a victory of sorts over a
decadent America less concerned with winning than with the lives of its sons. For
the militarists, the bloodletting among the Okinawan population was of little
consequence. What they beheld was that a force amounting to the equivalent of
three infantry divisions plus locally raised auxiliaries had held out for one hundred
days against a lavishly equipped American army more than five times as large.
Within Japan, the Okinawa battle was regularly trumpeted as an example of
Imperial troops stretching out a campaign in the face of a vastly superior enemy.
A senior staff officer (and son-in-law to the war minister) later explained to U.S.
interrogators:

We did not believe that the entire people would be completely annihilated
through fighting to the finish. Even if a crucial battle were fought in the
homeland and the Imperial Forces were confined to the mountainous regions,
the number of Japanese killed by enemy forces would be small. Despite the
constant victories of Japanese troops in the China Incident, relatively few
7
 Chinese were killed. Almost all the strategic points in China were occupied,
but the Chungking Government could not be defeated. [But] even if the
whole [Japanese] race were all but wiped out, its determination to preserve
the national polity would be forever recorded in the annals of history.

The idea that the 10 to 25 million Chinese who had died since the Marco Polo
Bridge incident was seen as relatively few, and that just tens of millions of dead
Japanese would still offer the bright side that the entire people [had not been]
completely annihilated, is so alien to Americans, then and now, as to practically
defy comprehension. Shortly before the radically increased Selective Service calls
were announced to the public, Stimson told President Roosevelt in January 1945
that a so-called negotiated peace was impossible in this kind of war where one
side was fighting for civilization and the other side represented barbarism; there
was no common meeting ground and there therefore necessarily had to be a fight
to the finish; that a fight to the finish meant a long horrible contest where we
needed all the manpower that we could summon.
The Treaty of Versailles, the resurgence of Germany after the War to End All
Wars, the weak-kneed response by the League of Nations to growing aggression,
France and Britains appeasement of Nazi Germany, and the subsequent plunge
into an even bloodier conflagration than the previous war these matters were
so deeply imbedded in the American psyche that they were seldom directly
mentioned in the press by the later war years, but all hung like a cloud over the
American consciousness as the fighting in the Pacific reached its climax.
The result of the countrys consensus on the events of the previous thirty
years girded a grim determination, both inside and outside of Washington, to see
the war through to the bitter end of unconditional surrender, lest an
inconclusive finish, such as in World War I, lead the next generation into an even
bigger, bloodier conflict twenty years hence (with, unlike in Vietnam, no college
deferments for that one). Despite a growing war weariness and worry among
some that stiff terms might prolong the fighting, the understanding that the war
must be prosecuted until Japan either gave up or was pummeled into submission
was so fundamental that it did not warrant much discussion beyond the sticky
matter of how to accomplish victory and bring the boys home at the earliest
possible date.
Some civilian elements within Japans ruling circle were determined to try to
find a way to end the war before the U.S. invasion was launched. Unfortunately,
the militarists were in firm control of the government, and Japanese moderates
had to tread gingerly for fear of arrest or assassination. In the summer of 1945,
Emperor Hirohito requested that the Soviets accept Prince Konoye as a special
8
envoy to discuss ways in which the war might be quickly terminated. But far
from a coherent plea to the Soviets to help negotiate a surrender, the proposals
were hopelessly vague and viewed by both Washington and Moscow as little
more than a stalling tactic ahead of the Potsdam Conference to prevent Soviet
military intervention, an intervention that Japanese leaders had known was
coming ever since the Soviets recent cancellation of their Neutrality Pact with
Japan.
The subsequent exchange of diplomatic communications between Japans
foreign minister and its ambassador to the Soviet Union has been characterized
by some as evidence that the country was on the brink of calling it quits.
American officials reading the secretly intercepted messages between Moscow
and Tokyo, however, could clearly see that the defeatist ideas of the
ambassador received nothing more than stinging rebukes from his superiors. The
fanatical Japanese militarists retained their grip on the decision-making process
until the simultaneous shocks of the atom bombs and Soviet entry into the war in
August 1945 stampeded Japans leaders into an early capitulation.
Today the Japanese militarys own estimates of casualties from starvation,
disease, and battle are just as invisible on the other side of the Pacific as Marshall
and Kings warning in the New York Times. This is hardly a new phenomenon. As
early as 1981, Pacific veteran Paul Fussell wrote in the New Republic that the
degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the
Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the war.
Nearly three decades after Fussells comments, World War II is not even a dim
memory for most Americans, and the numbers killed versus the numbers saved
are just abstract figures with long strings of zeroes. But the fact remains, albeit
uncomfortable or inconvenient for some, that President Harry S. Trumans much-
derided accounts of massive casualties projected for the two-phase invasion of
Japan is richly supported by U.S. Army, White House, Selective Service, and War
Department documents produced prior to the use of nuclear weapons against
Japan and stretching all the way back through the last nine months of the
Roosevelt administration.
Some scholars have for years indeed, decades picked over the bones of
every decision relating to the use of nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan.
Every nuance of Trumans most casual asides has been examined, parsed, and
psychoanalyzed as critics of the decision have tried to prove that the president
lied when he stated that the atom bombs were dropped in the hope that they
would induce a defeated Japan to surrender before U.S. forces being gathered
in the Pacific from as far away as the battlefields of Germany were forced into
a prolonged, bloody ground invasion.
9
 In 1945, however, Truman and his senior military and civilian advisors had no
such luxury. The clock was ticking on the invasion countdown, and George M.
Elsey, who worked closely with Truman throughout his presidency, later
remarked, You dont sit down and take time to think through and debate ad
nauseam all the points. You dont have time. Later somebody can sit around for
days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This
is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.
The later examination of Trumans decisions was further complicated
because his critics had little knowledge of military historiography and even less of
the language and assumptions that are standard features of what is produced by
planning staffs. For example, some have promoted the idea that General
Marshalls staff believed an invasion of Japan essentially would have been a walk-
over. To bolster their argument, they point to highly qualified and limited
casualty projections in a variety of briefing documents produced in May and June
1945, roughly half a year before Downfalls initial invasion operation, Olympic,
was to commence. The numbers in these documents, however, were not
recognized for what they are: estimates of only the first thirty days of fighting.
Consequently, they were grossly misrepresented by individuals with little
understanding of how the estimates were made and exactly what they
represented.
In effect, it is as if someone during World War II had come across casualty
estimates for the invasion of Sicily and then declared that the numbers would
represent losses from the entire Italian campaign and then, having gone that
far, announced with complete certitude that the numbers actually would
represent likely casualties for the balance of the war with Germany. Of course,
back then such a notion would be dismissed as laughably absurd, and the flow of
battle would speedily move beyond the single event the original estimates be
they good or bad were for. That, however, was more than six decades ago.
Today, historians doing much the same thing have won the plaudits of their peers,
received copious grants, affected the decisions of major institutions, and misled a
young man who would become president.

----------

Operation Downfall, the onrushing event driving both American and

Japanese decision making, has received far less examination than the political side
of the process, which was utterly subordinate to it in 1945. With some notable,
fine exceptions, the tendency has been for historians to regurgitate the same
limited selection of planning and briefing documents or go to the other extreme
10
and print everything that one can get his hands on while displaying little ability to
separate the wheat from the chaff. This is also true for Olympic, while of the
second invasion operation, Coronet, against the Tokyo area in 1946, the lack of
examination is explained away by the supposed lack of documentation.
Readers of this volume will find that misconceptions abound as to the state
of Japanese readiness to meet the invasion. This principally is due to the
uncritical acceptance of assumptions and incomplete intelligence in the relatively
few presurrender documents that have formed the core of many scholars
opinions. The state of Japanese air power is an excellent case in point. The often-
repeated common wisdom holds that there were only 5,500 or, at most 7,000,
aircraft available and that all of Japans best pilots had been killed in earlier
battles. What the U.S. occupation forces found after the war, however, was that
the number of aircraft exceeded 12,700, and thanks to the wholesale conversion
of training units into kamikaze formations, there were some 18,600 pilots
available. Most were admittedly poor flyers, but due to the massive influx of
instructors into combat units, more than 4,200 were rated high enough for either
twilight or night missions. A deadly turn of events.
Based on intelligence reports during the summer of 1945, U.S. commanders
also believed that the Imperial air forces were out of gas both figuratively and
literally. But although it was true that fuel for training units was being severely
rationed both before and after the units were given combat status, it did not
become clear until after the war that the Japanese had succeeded in building up a
large strategic reserve of aviation fuel separate and distinct from stocks used for
training and day-to-day activities, reserves which would only be tapped for the
final battles in the Home Islands. The idea that there was a dearth of fuel was
further reinforced in American eyes by the manifestly weak reaction of the
Imperial air forces to the B-29 raids against Japanese cities and virtually no
response at all to a series of shore bombardments by American and British
battleships that it was hoped would lure large numbers of aircraft to their
destruction by waiting carrier aircraft. Despite the best efforts of the U.S. Navy
and Army Air Force, the Japanese displayed a fanatical adherence to their plan to
not launch air attacks until it was confirmed that the invasion was actually taking
place.
One matter that set off urgent alarm bells within the U.S. Navy in the wars
very last days was that the Japanese had begun to launch kamikaze attacks of a
type for which there was no effective defense. Japans naval air arm had
inadvertently stumbled upon the fact that the thousands of largely wooden
trainers that they had redesignated as combat aircraft were functionally invisible
to radar, and now that they had the night-qualified pilots to fly them, the
11
Japanese had the ability to stealthily attack U.S. warships before few, if any, guns
could be brought to bear on the aircraft. Moreover, the normally deadly
proximity fuze fired by the U.S. Navys antiaircraft guns had to pass extremely
close to a wooden aircraft before it would be influenced by its presence and
explode. That the antiquated sticks n string kamikazes went three for three in
attacks against U.S. destroyers immediately before Japan surrendered has rarely
been mentioned beyond a brief reference in the official Navy history of the Pacific
war, or been examined outside of long-declassified documents, in spite of the
intolerable situation they foreshadowed if the war had continued.
As for operations on land, the perception has grown that the Imperial Army
intended to expend itself in division-sized banzai charges into the face of
American artillery and naval guns. In this respect, some modern historians have
fallen just as prey to the militarists call for a decisive battle on Kyushu as the
targets of their exhortations in 1945, the Imperial foot soldiers and civilian levies.
The plentiful, and dead earnest, propaganda to relentlessly storm the beachheads
has tended to obscure the fact that the highly choreographed attacks against the
correctly determined American beachheads were anything but mindless mass
charges in which Imperial infantry would offer themselves up for annihilation.
Likewise, the coastal defense divisions tasked with delaying the establishment
of American lodgments and movement inland only placed one-fifth to one-third
of their men (depending on the nature of the terrain) in the well-sheltered
positions along the beaches with the balance ensconced in all-around battalion
and company positions in the craggy hills to their rear. Indeed, the bulk of
Japanese positions, as at Okinawa, were well away from the targeted beachheads.
The tactical and operational details of Imperial Japans counterpart to
Downfall, Ketsu-Go, generally have seen far less misrepresentation and
misinformation than other aspects of this subject for the simple reason that
Ketsu-Go generally has been ignored. Beyond the goundbreaking studies by
Edward J. Drea and the late Alvin D. Coox, tactical and operational matters have
been of little interest to Eurocentric historians who, at most, take whatever
fragments of Coox and Dreas work that best suits them. Not so in this volume.
Moving further down into the weeds, Ketsu-Go No. 6 and Ketsu-Go No. 3, the
Japanese counterparts, respectively, for Olympic and Coronet, are examined in
detail. From the weeds, we burrow into the mud, covering the Mutsu Operation
No. 1, the defense plan for southern Kyushu, as well as its three defense zones in
the very areas of Kyushu where U.S. forces planned to come ashore. This material
was garnered from postwar interrogations and reports produced by the relevant
Japanese staffs from field units on Kyushu through Imperial General Headquarters
in Tokyo, and readers will find that there is no basis for the often-repeated notion
12
that Japans military lacked the capacity to effectively resist an invasion.
Juxtaposed against Japanese efforts are the tactical intelligence analyses
produced by the U.S. Sixth Army targeting Kyushu both immediately before the
dropping of the atom bombs and a month later during Operation Blacklist, when,
with American boots on the ground, direct examination was possible of
Japanese defense preparations. U.S. personnel were stunned at the scale and
depth of the defenses. The Japanese had, to put it bluntly, figured us out, said
one officer. Chillingly, a highly placed member of the Imperial Army staff not only
told the Sixth Armys Intelligence chief that they expected the initial invasion to
be launched on Kyushu in October 1945 but also demonstrated that they knew
the precise locations of the landings.
Instead of a grinding war of attrition, the U.S. military had hoped for a less
costly battle of maneuver, but both the interrogations and the layout of the
Japanese defenses indicated that this had not been in the cards. Moreover, the
Japanese had expanded their forces on Kyushu far beyond anything imagined by
U.S. planners. While neither the highly perceptive positioning of the Japanese
defenses nor the increase in forces were apparent before Truman, Stimson, and
Marshall left for the Potsdam Conference, by the third week in July it finally
became alarmingly clear that a Japanese buildup of stunning proportions had
been accomplished right under the noses of U.S. intelligence and was continuing
at a rapid pace with the end not in sight. Meanwhile, American preparations
for use of atom bombs against four specially chosen cities continued apace, and
the Japanese leadership chose to ignore warnings issued by the Allies at the
conclusion of the conference.
General Marshall, who by now had returned to Washington and been made
fully aware of activities on Kyushu, could not assume that the fanatical Japanese
would surrender even when atom bombs were raining down on their cities and
the Soviet entry into the war dashed their hopes of a negotiated settlement. An
examination of alternative invasion sites for Kyushu had been launched when the
scale of the Japanese troop buildup had become evident, but both the chief of
staff and his commander in the Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, agreed that
none of the sites were adequate substitutes. U.S. leaders were encouraged by
the official Japanese government inquiries initiated after the dropping of the first
two bombs and Soviet invasion of Manchuria, but optimism that the war might
soon be over vanished. Communications had suddenly stopped, and it appeared
that Japanese intransigence or indecision was about to scuttle peace efforts.
After a tense weekend with no word from Tokyo, Marshall informed his
Pacific commanders, The President directs that we go ahead with everything
weve got. Conventional air strikes were resumed and components for the third
13
atom bomb were released for use. But the Army chief and his senior staff had
something else in mind now that it was beginning to look like the shock of atom
bombs had failed in its strategic purpose of loosening the iron grip the countrys
militarists had on Japanese decision making.
Marshall had long been a proponent of the tactical use of the developing
atomic arsenal and poison gas in support of ground operations. Strategic use of
atom bombs against cities had certainly been worth a try, but the militarists
appeared to be completely unmoved, and to Marshall, atom bombs were too
precious an asset to waste in an apparently futile strategic campaign. With the
invasion still very much on and forces gathering for it from as far afield as
Europe, he now threw his staff into planning for the use of the full range of
weapons in the United States arsenal, today referred to as weapons of mass
destruction, to trump the human tide welling up on Kyushu. Marshalls plans
called for most and if he could convince Stimson and Truman, all of the
bomb production through December 1945 to be dropped on Japanese defense
concentrations along or near the beaches.
A more complete appreciation of the dangers posed by nuclear radiation was
still in the future, and millions of Japanese, and Americans, on Kyushu and close
by at sea would have been affected by the tightly packed set of perhaps nine
detonations in a triangle-shaped zone roughly analogous to the area bounded by
Newport, Rhode Island, Worcester, Massachusetts, and Boston. The emperors
surrender, broadcast on August 15, 1945, effectively ended any need for Marshall
and his staff to pursue the initiative, and like so many aspects of Downfall, the
hideous consequences of the imminent switch from strategic to tactical use of
nuclear weapons if the Japanese had not surrendered has not been closely
examined before.

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Although I didnt know it at the time, work on Hell to Pay began when I was
engaged in military government studies at the Harry S. Truman Library and
Museum in Independence, Missouri, in the early 1980s. Many years later,
Military Review editor in chief Lt. Col. George L. Humphries and Dr. Michael E.
DeBakey, colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), encouraged me to write a book on the
invasion planning, but it wasnt until my back-to-back publication on matters
relating to the U.S. Armys casualty projections for Downfall in the June 1997
Journal of American History and the following month in the Journal of Military
History that Larry Bland, coeditor of The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, said
that I must finally get down to work. I saluted and said, Yes, sir!
14
 Larry was particularly interested that I should document such things as the
massive production of Purple Hearts in anticipation of the invasion, and the
relationship of the Pacific-bound redeployment of forces from Europe to General
Marshalls firm determination to not allow the Army to get bogged down in a
prolonged battle for Berlin. These and other matters in which we shared a deep
interest were beyond the scope of his then-current project, volume 5 of the
Papers, spanning 1945 and 1946, and both are covered in this book. Friends and
colleagues of Larry will recognize his hand throughout Hell to Pay.
Both Michael DeBakey and John Correll, during their tenures, respectively, at
the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and the Air Force Association in
Arlington, Virginia, were of great assistance personally, and DeBakey also
assigned students to help locate certain documents produced during his time with
the Armys Surgical Consultants Division in 194446. Similarly, Correll arranged
for the associations Juliette Kelsey to twice do important preliminary work at the
National Archives before my research there on Purple Heart production. George
Elsey made later work at the archives much less of a financial strain by graciously
putting me up at his club, and he provided valuable insights into President
Trumans thinking and the flow of intelligence information to Truman and his
senior advisors. His friend, Maj. Gen. Donald S. Dawson, USAF (Ret.), also from
Trumans staff, made similar beneficial arrangements during yet another research
siege.
Throughout this project, my lovely wife (and frequent coauthor) Kathryn
Moore pitched in at the drop of a hat, as did my daughter Andrea Giangreco
during the indexing and document transcriptions. Three individuals of
inestimable help with this book were Alvin D. Coox and Edward J. Drea on all
matters relating to the Japanese military and Sadao Asada on the decisions of the
Japanese cabinet. (Asada also shared his experiences as a young boy during the
late war years and U.S. occupation.) These scholars answered my questions
promptly, fully, and with far more patience than I deserved. The U.S. Naval
Institute Press crew, particularly Karin Kaufman and Elizabeth Bauman, were a
delight to work with, and the Press cartographer, Christopher Robinson, spent
nearly fifty hours producing the superb set of maps on these pages. Edward S.
Miller provided varied and valuable contributions, and Richard Russell on the
business end of the Press also found himself doing a little double duty on this
book since, having written extensively on U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the Pacific,
he was a ready and willing resource.
The list is long of others who generously lent their time, knowledge, and
encouragement to this project and includes George McColm; Lefteris Lefty
Lavrakas; Tim McGarey; Werner Gruhl; Eric Berguid; Stephen J. Waszak; Terry
15
Griswold; Gary R. Hovatter; Thomas E. Conrad; Von Hardesty; Dean Allard; Robert
Aquilina; Bill Maulden; Maurice Matloff; Andrew J. Goodpaster; Robert W.
Coakley; Stanley L. Falk; Shelby L. Stanton; Roger Pineau; Norman Polmar; Thomas
B. Allen; Ken Werrell; Denis Warner; Trevor N. Dupuy; Elliot Richardson; Ike
Skelton; John Lehman; Clarence M. Kelley; Vince Shartino; Morey Amsterdam;
William F. Buckley Jr.; Selwyn Pepper; Alexander Herd; Richard B. Frank; William
G. P. Rawling; Jon Parshall; Joao Paulo Matsuura; Sarandis Randy Papadopoulos;
Jeffrey Barlow; Fred L. Schultz; Wade G. Dudley; Michael D. Pearlman; Geoff
Babb; Graham Turbiville; Jacob Kipp; Les Grau; Dave Glantz; Samuel Loring
Morison; Arthur G. Volz; Michael Kort; Father Wilson D. Bill Miscamble; Josh
Reynolds; Kevin Ullrich; Martin Allday; Andrew A. Andy Rooney; William A. Bill
Rooney; Ben Nicks; Paul Tibbets, James Pattillo; Burr Bennett; Jack Moore; Samuel
J. Giangreco; Phil Nonnemaker; John J. Maginnis; John E. Greenwood; Victor H.
Krulak; Edwin Simmons; Bernard J. Humes; Strom Thurman; David L. Riley; Victor
Fic; Robert A. Silano; Marc Gallicchio; Jeffery J. Roberts; Richard F. Snow; Oliver
Kamm, Rick Shenkman,, Delia Rioa, Frederick E. Allen; Fritz Heinzen; George F.
Kennan; Stanley Weintraub; John Bonnett; Hal Wert; Ian V. Hogg; Earl F. Ziemke;
Mackenzie Gregory; Sadao Asada; The Three Bobs: Robert P. Newman, Robert
H. Ferrell, and Robert James Maddox; Dwight M. Miller, Erwin Mueller; Dennis
Bilger; Samuel Rushay, Patrick Connelly; Pauline Testerman; Liz Safly; Randy
Sowell; JoAnne Knight; and, finally, Barton J. Bernstein, whose phone calls and
102 letters were instructive in many unexpected ways.
I have been playfully teased by former and forthcoming coauthors of mine,
John T. Kuehn, commander, USN (Ret.), and Donald L. Gilmore, colleagues from
my years at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, over how I have approached American and
Japanese planning for the invasion. Both have remarked that, unlike in previous
works, Olympic and Ketsu-Go are given the somewhat dense Staff College
treatment in Hell to Pay. I can only plead guilty. This level of examination had to
be done, however, because there are so many deep-rooted misconceptions
attached to this subject, particularly regarding the true state of the Imperial Army
and Navy, as well as their air elements, and the basic realities on the ground in
the Olympic and Coronet invasion areas.
Larry Bland, seconded by others, also cautioned, You are dumping so much
genuinely new material on people that you should consider recapping some of
the key points somewhere in the middle, and he suggested that readers be
allowed to take a breath before going on. Wise advice, and I have followed it in
the first half of chapter 9. As for the matter of expected casualties, Japanese as
well as American, DeBakey got right to the heart of the matter. After fretting over
the deterioration in Americas institutional knowledge of the environment in
16
which all life-and-death decisions had to be made in 1945, he stated that having
to demonstrate that the invasion of Japan would produce catastrophic
casualties was ridiculous. Said DeBakey, Its like having to prove that slamming
someones head with a meat ax will kill him.
Larry Bland and Michael DeBakey both passed away as this book was
entering its final stages, and it is a sad fact of life that many of the gentlemen in
these acknowledgments are no longer with us. From Newt Tritico to Paul Tibbits,
it was an honor to have met them, and to still learn from the old soldiers, sailors,
airmen, and Marines who, as one of their number put it, are still alive and
kickin. With the sole exception of former attorney general Elliot Richardson,
who said that he was looking forward to the invasion, the veterans to a man
stated that they dreaded what was to come. And even Richardson, then a
decorated and twice-wounded medic with the 4th Infantry Division, admitted that
his outlook in 1945 was out of the ordinary, explaining to me that he was young,
gung-ho, and foolish.
During the Enola Gay affair at NASM, Veterans groups were frequently
dismissed as being overly sensitive to supposedly inconsequential points in the
exhibit that focused almost entirely on Japanese civilian casualties in the closing
days of the war. Yet its like Kissinger used to say, Even paranoids have real
enemies. Martin Allday, wounded on Okinawa and headed for Tokyo in
Operation Coronet, related how his persistent efforts to get friend and fellow
veteran, author James Michener to weigh in publicly with his knowledge of what
the men faced was one battle that he could not win. Although Michener would
take part in several local events in Texas, his well-founded fear of the reaction
from the literary and Hollywood circles he moved in was so strong that he made
Allday promise not to release one eloquent letter hed written until after his
death. An excerpt from Micheners letter is reproduced in the epilogue to this
volume.
That Michener preferred to keep his opinions to himself, though
disappointing, is not particularly surprising when one remembers the derision
heaped upon veterans at the time from some historians and major institutions.
NASM director Martin Harwit wrote after his dismissal that the Enola Gay
controversy was a battle between a largely fictitious, comforting story
presented by the veterans and the event [Hiroshima] as revealed in trustworthy
documents now at hand in the nations archives, which the veterans feared
could cast into doubt a hallowed, patriotic story. Many in the academy support
this contention. Laura Hein, for example, praised the contemporary historical
scholarship displayed in the original, disputed exhibit script and maintained that
a great many U.S. soldiers in the Pacific in 1945 believed the bombs brought the
17
war to a speedy end, but they were not in a position to know. This presumed,
however, that assumptions based on these trustworthy documents were
themselves correct and derived from a comprehensive understanding of the
material. They werent.
The type of characterization made by Truman critics that the exhibit might
be interpreted as celebrating the deaths of 150,000 to 200,000 Japanese civilians,
mostly old men, women and children, only served to confirm the veterans
suspicions that scholarly discussion of this subject is dominated by those who, for
whatever reason, do not acknowledge that even excluding mounting deaths along
the Asian littoral and according to the Japanese governments own estimates
anywhere from 50 to nearly 125 times the number of Japanese who died at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be killed during the invasion, taking a significant
number of Americans with them. For veterans, the celebration was not in the
deaths of innocents, but that their own lives, and those of their buddies, were
spared.
Hopefully this book will allow Americans to get a glimpse of what many of
these men would have confronted during Operation Downfall.

Foreword:
Three Colonels by Stanley Weintraub
From what we learned in the last days and the aftermath of the two-
hemisphere world war that closed with the collapse of Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan, we know what the world would have been like had we been unwilling to
pay the price to defeat them. Yet as the war dragged on beyond Europe and the
casualties escalated, and as some combat veterans began returning while others
now never would, the home front was becoming less willing. The public began to
lean toward militarily unthinkable negotiations while encouraging Japans
submission by air and sea power, thus avoiding the heavy costs of invasion.
In 1945, during the intense final months of World War II, the price of victory
was being calculated and its extent determined by three men who, in 1918, had
been in uniform in France. One was a Missouri National Guard captain whose
35th Division, in the six days of the culminating Meuse-Argonne offensive, had
suffered nearly 7,300 casualties, half its front-line strength. In the interwar years,
even before he went to Washington as a senator, Harry Truman rose to Reserve
colonel. In wartime he made a sterling reputation heading the U.S. Senate
investigating committee on military spending effectiveness. Truman was now
president, succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died suddenly in mid-April.
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 Another in the leadership trio who once bore the bird on his shoulders was
the now-elderly Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who was once an artillery officer
and twice a Cabinet member with War and State Department portfolios under
earlier, Republican administrations and who still preferred being called Colonel.
The third had been a colonel and on the General Staff of the American
Expeditionary Forces during World War I. On his return to the States after the
war, he was meanly reduced to his prewar permanent rank of captain. On
September 1, 1939, as war again broke out in Europe, George Marshall moved up,
as Roosevelts appointee, from the one star he had finally earned, seventeen
frustrating years after the army was drastically downsized, to an instant four stars
as Army chief of staff.
Some of the major decisions closing the war with Germany and accelerating
the downfall of Imperial Japan were inherited by Truman. The feisty accidental
president, who took pride in his Oval Office motto, The buck stops here, had to
make sweeping decisions advised and backed by Marshall and Stimson. Ironically,
the civilian-suited war secretary was more militarily tough-minded than his
seemingly austere top general, who now wore his congressionally mandated
super rank of five stars, but always, realistically, kept in mind public attitudes,
industrial capacity, and logistical limitations. Winston Churchill, who called
George Marshall the architect of victory, was not being overly theatrical when
he recalled that the British government, its fading imperial sway at stake, was
pragmatically resolved to share the agony . . . [of ] the final and perhaps
protracted slaughter.
D. M. Giangrecos striking title, Hell to Pay, represents the closing wartime
dilemmas and the likely repercussions to their solutions. After ten years of
violent aggrandizing in China, Japan had, in 1941, simultaneously and shockingly,
attacked four nations over a seventh of the earths surface. Defeating the
sprawling Japanese Empire had required fiscal fortitude, technological
breakthroughs, immense transfers of men and materiel across two oceans, and
continuing evaluation of the terrible human cost of the two-stage invasion of
Japan building up on the Pacific Rim Operation Downfall. To pacify a fickle
electorate believing that a war half-won only required half-mobilization the rest
of the way, the American military establishment, at odds with its needs, began
sending some seasoned veterans home even as Nazi Germany imploded into
chaos.
The complex conditions perceived by both Japanese and American decision
makers, and the difficult assessments made at the time, require, in Hell to Pay,
the portrayal of vast arrays of numbers. In few books about any subject other
than astrophysics are figures more provocative and more persuasive.
19
Giangreco turns number crunching into high drama. The clouds of supporting
aircraft assembled, from the Marianas and the Philippines to Iwo Jima, Okinawa,
and dozens of fleet carriers, ran into five figures, so many that they hazarded
getting in each others flight paths. The assault shipping (four thousand
oceangoing vessels alone) being gathered, and troops committed for the Kyushu
landings planned for late October 1945, far exceeded D-Day in Normandy (to face
a Japanese buildup that by the time of their surrender totaled nearly 917,000
troops on the island). The coordination of landings in predawn darkness and in
the fog of smoke screens risked a nightmare of swampings, collisions, objectives
gone awry, and deadly friendly fire. The Japanese intended conceding
extraordinary losses to inflict 20 percent casualties before any GI set foot on
the beaches and further carnage thereafter during the inexorable grind of daily
close-in battle conducted at the distance that a man can throw a grenade.
The long-lived and much-quoted canard that estimates of horrific casualties
during an invasion of Japan were postwar apologetics for the atomic bomb is set
aside here by Giangreco, an indefatigable and precise military historian, in clubs,
diamonds, hearts, and spades. The frightful dimensions of putting Allied boots
on the ground on Kyushu and Honshu are spelled out from both Japanese and
American planning documents and the recollections of participants on both sides.
The consequences could be projected. On and adjacent to Okinawa, an island
only sixty miles long and a third as wide, 13,000 Americans died and 37,000 were
wounded. Japanese deaths, including hapless Okinawan civilians, exceeded
142,000. The seas were crimson with corpses. Harry Truman told his assembled
planners in a momentous White House conference, as the enormous casualty
figures were still coming in, that he hoped to avoid the intolerable cost of another
Okinawa, grotesquely magnified, from one end of Japan to the other.
The Japanese military culture had, historically, long rejected surrender.
Okinawa was not a worst-case scenario, it was a reality. The far more extensive
killing ground of Japan was waiting to happen.
Although Japans colonial empire was shrinking and its internal resources
were dwindling, so was the American war enthusiasm generated by Pearl Harbor.
A negotiated peace rather than overwhelming victory might, however, merely
postpone, rather than preclude, another and more horrible war. The three
former colonels all understood that likelihood from their experience in France in
1918 and beyond. That war had been won; only the peace was lost. Not an inch
of German soil had been occupied when the Armistice was concluded, and the
German flag continued to fly over an unoccupied Berlin. That anomaly had not
happened again in Germany in May 1945 and could not be permitted by default in
Japan.
20
 But lengthy attrition was not in the American playbook. What Operation
Downfall would cost was projected in the planning documents but only became
concrete after the surrender. Here Giangreco lays it out by the numbers. After
the war, for example, the Japanese in the home islands surrendered 28,428 knee
mortar grenade launchers along with millions of their ballistic grenades. And
contrary to popular belief, they had aviation fuel stockpiled for thousands of
suicide planes and thousands of manned torpedoes and suicide craft in hiding.
The Japanese could persevere under harsh conditions alien to Americans, as
troops had already discovered in New Guinea and on Iwo Jima. The Japanese
even counted on, as in their past history, punishing typhoons (or kamikaze,
literally divine wind) and torrential rain to disrupt and scatter the enemy, as
actually would occur off Okinawa in early September, the first full month of
peace.
Throughout East Asia and the Western Pacific, roughly 400,000 people,
civilian and soldier, from their conquered territories in the Dutch East Indies to
China and Manchuria and the home islands, died in each of the last months of the
war, several times the terrible human cost of the two atomic strikes that shocked
Emperor Hirohito into warning of the imminent nuclear destruction of the
Japanese people. Nearly every Japanese city of more than 40,000 in population
had already been laid waste by conventional bombing alone. Scorning Hirohitos
unwillingness to intervene until catastrophe had come, one of his formerly
respectful subjects composed a bitter tanka While I read the Emperors rescript
that came too late, Atomic bomb victims writhe on the scorched ground.
The Japanese already knew about hell to pay, and relentlessly prepared to
pay it, but the concept of surrender was new, and nuclear. And now
overwhelming.

Stanley Weintraub is author of Long Days Journey into War: Pearl Harbor and a
World at War, The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, and 15 Stars:
Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall: Three Generals Who Saved the American
Century.
Hell to Pay
Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947
By D.M. Giangreco
ISBN: 9781682471654 | 584 Pages | 6.1 x 9.3 in
Special Holiday Price: $17.50
https://www.usni.org/store/books/holiday-catalog-2017/hell-pay
Naval Institute Press

Interviews available with Missouri based D.M. Giangreco. Please contact Jacqline Barnes for
all media inquiries. [email protected]; 410-295-1028.
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