ISBN 0-8131-2248-1
194 pages

Preface; photos; maps; Notes; Bibliography; Index

   Tim Maga opens his slender new book by underscoring the fanatical determination of Japan's leaders—if not the entire populace—to resist American invasion of the homeland to the death, going so far as to prepare "ceramic pipe bombs" by the thousands for small children to deliver in suicidal, one-on-one attacks against individual GIs.
   Given this level of resistance, how did the Allies plan to end the war against Japan? Would a grand invasion be required? Could such an invasion be successful without expending impossibly huge quantities of American blood? What were the key factors involved in ensuring success at the lowest possible cost and with the best long-term results? Maga begins to answer these questions by listing the "Ten Points" of the original political-military-economic blueprint prepared by a team of planners at the Presidio in California. Interestingly, many of these provisions for invasion and occupation echo the exact "lenient and enlightened" terms ultimately implemented by the "far-sighted" General Douglas MacArthur. Maga attributes the key points in this planning document to an obscure agronomist turned lieutenant j.g. named George L. McColm.
   Maga goes on to describe arguments at the Hot Springs conference about implementing the Ten Points, including predictions by some advisors that any invasion would require a full two years of campaigning to defeat the Japanese defenders, and Chiang Kai-Shek's resentment about such lenient treatment as McColm prescribed for Japan. The discussion then turns to a lengthy rehashing of McColm's theories on Japanese agriculture, agrarian reform, and the chances of mass starvation in the wake of an invasion:

   After the Hot Springs arguments concerning grand goals and objectives were over, the planners could return to more specific work. McColm, as the invasion planning team's agricultural expert, was now at the center of the controversy. Although they disagreed on the tactics and strategies to deal with the problem, both Nimitz and MacArthur could agree that the potential for mass starvation in Japan during the time of the invasion was high. When and where the invasion began in this country, still strongly reliant on its rice farming economy, would determine the starvation factor. The food set aside by Japanese communities for anti-invasion guerilla fighters would also lure more men to join that fight. Elsewhere, the threat of a long, ugly death by starvation could prompt the mass suicides that the invaders feared. If the invasion moved quickly and successfully, there would still be the problem of assisting rice farming areas that had been battlefields. The starvation threat would not end when the invasion ended. McColm was expected to resolve all these problems before they happened.

   Many of these pages read like a primer on agriculture, and it's surprising how closely the agricultural issues were related to military matters.

   Recognizing the significance of McColm's invasion date and location recommendations and Hilldring's support of them, the White House agreed that no invasion of Japan would take place while there were crops in the field. McColm's report on food/agriculture-related priorities had been countersigned by over forty of his colleagues, and President Roosevelt had no reason to dispute them. Three points had been argued in defense of this decision, and all of them involved military strategy. First of all, MacArthur advocated landing 1400 tanks in the first wave of the assault. Japan was a rice-growing country with miles of flatland. With the rice crop in the field, water would be a problem both for the tanks and the foot soldiers marching behind them. Only the enemy would benefit from such a situation. Second, a good rice growing period was also associated with heavy rainfall. This only accentuated the water problem, making most of the many irrigation ditches and streams too deep to ford. Third, the air offensive over Japan during the opening hours of the invasion was expected to be quite successful. The significant bridges left undestroyed in previous air raids would not be left standing this time. Wide rivers separated many interior Japanese cities from the rice fields. Without bridges, those cities would become medieval-like fortresses, complete with wide, deep moats, distancing them from a water-logged invading army with their tanks already sinking in the mud. In short, as the exhausted Allied armies sloshed forward, they would be faced with yet another water-related crisis. Even if some of the bridges remained standing, few of them, according to still-existing prewar Japanese construction codes, could handle the weight of several American-made tanks. A dry season attack remained essential to success.
   The American Joint Chiefs of Staff favored an assault where the invading armies could consolidate their strength quickly and only then move forward into the heart of Japan. Rural southern Japan or Kyushu seemed to promise this early success, but it also represented the water-logged nightmare detailed by the Presidio group. On the other hand, if the military judged the proper timing, Kyushu was still a good selection for the first strike. Some of its rice was grown on what farmers call "benches," and thanks to the warmer weather in that part of Japan those same farmers also grew barley in the winter. McColm's team advocated an invasion to be timed with the plowing of the barley. If the Allies invaded too soon, the water problem would still be there. If they invaded to late, they would destroy the barley crop and contribute to the starvation-related problems the Presidio had been tasked to prevent. McColm and his colleagues set October 31 or November 1, 1945, as the best dates for the attack, and the Joint Chiefs accepted the plan by July 4, 1945.

   Of course, all these debates, compromises, and plans, especially regarding invasion as opposed to occupation issues, were mostly made moot by the atomic bomb.
   But before the bomb there were many peace-feelers to and from both sides, particularly probing the true meaning of "unconditional surrender." In addition to Japanese peace-feelers, Maga reviews many dissenting views among leaders in the United States on alternatives to unconditional surrender. In practice, these meant little to the conduct of the war, but in sum they pointed out that a wide spectrum of opinion was concerned about above all else minimizing American casualties.
   The fourth chapter of the book uses former President Herbert Hoover's report to President Harry Truman as the starting point for exploring Truman's views on unconditional surrender and the end of the war with Japan. Truman's views were at times hard to pin down, and much of the exposition concerns the various plans, opinions, and theories put to him by assorted advisors. This includes, predictably, some of the well-known disagreements and squabbling about likely American casualties in the event of an invasion. As to just exactly how many casualties his top military advisors told him to expect, and just exactly how many casualties Truman was willing to accept, both remain ambiguous.
   Maga also looks at the situation in mid-1945 from the Japanese perspective, discussing the failed mission of the German submarine U-234 (but without using the latest research from Joseph Scalia's recent Germany's Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234). There are also odd bits, such as the bizarre Japanese decision for Radio Tokyo to play the American pop song "Don't Fence Me In" following the official announcement of Adolf Hitler's death, ostensibly to signal to the Allies Japan's willingness to fight on. Maga also devotes considerable space to Japanese-Portuguese and Japanese-Irish relations in the waning months of the war. Difficulties in those countries, according to Tokyo, were caused by the Soviets, and of course the heart of the whole matter was actually Soviet-Japanese relations. This proves to be a rather cursory survey of an important and complicated component of Japan's eventual surrender, and Maga relies on a dearth of sources while mostly skimming over this part of the story.
   For its penultimate chapter, America Attacks Japan for the first time moves deeply into territory closely related to the title of the book; that is, the actual military planning for the assault on Japan. To begin with, Maga surveys the kamikaze phenomenon. Much of this material comes from General MacArthur's "Investigation Task Force #15." This segues into Japanese defensive planning, the continued split between the Japanese Army and Navy, and civilian relations.

   Years after World War II, Fukushiro Nukaga, mayor of tiny Kajiki in Kyushu, remembered shouting at the top of his lungs at KETSU-GO planner Admiral Toyoda Soemu. Soemu expected the regional political community to follow his orders and selflessly support whatever he demanded of them and their electorate. But Nukaga had heard similar demands from another KETSU-GO planner, General Kawabe Mazakazu, who implied that Army requests came first in all matters of home defense. Caught in the middle, Nukaga balked at Admiral Soemu's suggestion that he would be shot for treason if he ignored Navy requests for civilian assistance in favor of the Army. Both the general and the admiral, Nukaga claimed, "talked down to him." In the view of these two northerners, Nukaga was a foolish country bumpkin anyway. But if civilian assistance was to play an equal share in the defense, Nukaga wanted to be considered as important to the cause as any admiral or general. The military, of course, disagreed.
   Many rumors abounded in Kyushu that certain government officials in Tokyo were already talking to the Allies about a peace deal. Would the destruction of towns like Kajiki be for nothing, especially if the peace faction was suddenly to prevail? Selfless obedience was becoming a bit too much to ask under these circumstances, or so Nukaga remembered. He received no confirmation or denials from Tokyo about the peace deal rumors. Despite the image and rhetoric of a united Japan, old political rivalries died hard. Nukaga would be amazed that the image of 1945 Japan, a nation standing in unswerving solidarity, would survive long after the war. He remembered a different KETSU-GO, and his point of view was shared by many who lived through the defense preparation process in southern Japan.

   But the bulk of the chapter reviews American invasion plans. Besides enumerating dates, beaches, and assault divisions, Maga returns to the question of likely casualties. In the end, the author can only conclude "But no one knows who said what and when, if ever. The matter remains one of history's mysteries."
   The final chapter of the book covers the unleashing of the ultimate weapon of World War II. One of the most interesting aspects of the chapter is Maga's story of Sumiteru Taniguchi, a Nagasaki survivor, who in 2000 "...founded a compensation movement for Nagasaki survivors, expanded it to include Hiroshima victims the following year, and made headlines in Japan for not demanding money from the Americans. Instead, he blamed Japanese authorities for his misery...[a]rguing that the wartime government had by its own horrific actions pressured the Americans to use the atomic bomb...."
   Most of the last chapter plows familiar ground regarding debates about the racial nature of the war in the Pacific, whether or not Japan could have been compelled to surrender without invasion and without atomic weapons, and to what extent the bombs were dropped as warnings to Stalin. Maga adds some interesting details to the story of the end of the war (such as the American celebrations on Okinawa with so much live fire that six servicemen were killed and another fifty wounded), but in the end he can offer no more of a final verdict on these issues than he could in the question of potential invasion casualties.
   The book's epilogue examines the semi-historical Japanese film "Pride: The Fateful Moment," pointing out how much popular opinion seemed to agree with the fictionalized account of Japan's "anti-imperialist" war and Hideki Tojo's "self-sacrificing efforts" to defend the empire and ensure the Emperor retained his throne by defeating any American invasion (although in reality, by this point Tojo was no longer Prime Minister and "he did not, as this film implies, enjoy national recognition as the dedicated symbol of resistance to the American attackers"). The film, exceedingly well-received by Japanese movie-goers, predicted that any invasion would have been defeated. Maga contradicts this cinematic falsification of history when he sums up the end of the war against Japan:

   Indeed, the facts are not as glamorous as Shunya Ito's film. War weary or not, the Truman administration planned an invasion of Japan and intended to win. Japan planned to defend itself, hoped for miracles, but had no illusions over its fate. The A-bomb hastened the surrender, and the defeated government paid the price for its wartime decisions in the follow-up war crimes trials. America went on to wage the Cold War against its World War II ally, the Soviet Union, and Japan rebuilt itself into a world economic power driven by exports of consumer goods to its former enemies.
   While Japan rushed forward with its postwar Bubble Economy, studying World War II history was a luxury. Or so it was said. At the same time, in the United States, the historical profession took a dim view of writers who stressed "what if" stories, such as what if America had invaded Japan. Given the very real drama of the A-bomb decision and later Cold War struggles, examining the planned invasion of Japan was, for priority reasons, never a vital research issue to American historians. Today, as the "greatest generation" passes on, examining how hundreds of thousands of them might have died much earlier during OLYMPIC or CORONET takes on new meaning and significance. And in Japan, there is a new hunger for the truth and the rest of the story. The invasion tale has never deserved to be ignored, and this book must never be the final word.

   The author presents some entirely fresh facts and opinions in America Attacks Japan, from the ceramic bombs to George McColm's agri-centric planning to a Brian Williams news report on NBC television to the V-J celebrations in the Philippines and Okinawa. In sum, however, this is only a brief outline that does not dig as deeply into the subject matter as some closely related works. For example, in Downfall Richard Frank offers the best overall view of the complexities behind military planning, the atomic bomb, and the end of the war (although it's certainly true that Frank omits ceramic bombs, George McColm, and many of Maga's other interesting flourishes). Similarly, in The Invasion of Japan, John Skates delves far more deeply than Maga into US and Japanese planning and preparations for the battle of the Home islands.
   Maga's book is a thoughtful and enlightening perspective on the end of the war. As a full and comprehensive analysis, it doesn't serve as well as Richard Frank's much thicker book. However, it's indisputably a significant addition to the study of this subject, and it should be read by anyone interested in the events leading up to the surrender of Japan.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from University Press of Kentucky.
   Thanks to UP Kentucky for providing this review copy.