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Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Roger Morehouse, and talking today to Saul David, long-term host of this show. And we're talking about the Battle of Okinawa. This is the second part. We're looking at the conclusion of Okinawa now today and the run-up to the American decision to use the atomic bombs against Japan. We've heard in that first episode, Saul, about the opening phase of the Battle for Okinawa and
The strategic thinking of the Americans, the strategic thinking of the Japanese, all desperate stuff. And you have the Americans then saying,
realizing that they're in a pretty serious fight in the south of Okinawa, that they've been allowed to land effectively by the Japanese, who then draw them into this protracted, what's almost, I suppose you could almost describe it as urban warfare, but in a sort of natural environment, using the terrain, using the tunnels that they dug and so on to best effect to essentially grind the Americans down.
just before we sort of carry on with sort of wider issues. But, you know, we broke off last time essentially in that sort of first week of May of 1945 where the European war has just ended. Just...
flag up for us how the Battle for Okinawa proceeds as it goes on, because it carries on for the best part of another six weeks after that date, right? Yeah, exactly right. Another seven weeks. I mean, ultimately, it's an 82-day campaign, and they're hoping it's not going to be anything like as long as that. I mean, they're not foolish enough, actually, to make the same kind of predictions that they did before Peleliu, for example, when the
commander involved said this is going to be a two-day campaign, a three-day campaign. It actually took a couple of months. Well, in the case of Okinawa, no one specifies exactly how long they think it'll take, but they certainly hope it'll be over by the end of the month. And we're nowhere near that, of course. We've got another six or seven weeks of really brutal fighting. And in some ways, Roger, the fighting gets even worse because the weather conditions start to deteriorate.
it's been relatively dry up to this point. But by the end of April, early May, the rains begin to come down now. So not only have you got this incredibly difficult battlefield to fight through as far as the Japanese defenses are concerned, and also consider that it's being fought on an island which is mainly coral rock, as I think I mentioned in the last episode. And coral rock is almost impossible to dig into. So, you know, you've really got to
pile up a pile of rocks to get any kind of defensive position at all, it's all blast your way through it. They actually use a lot of TNT to blast holes in the rock. They're almost impossible to dig into. And if a shell or a piece of ordnance actually hit this rock, it sends little shards of it in all directions. Therefore,
making the explosion even more lethal than it would be. So the battle fleet is turning into an increasingly tough place to fight, not just because it's hard to advance through the difficult terrain, the supporting armour couldn't really get up in support of the infantrymen, but also because the wet and the cold are making this slower traditional warfare even more brutal. Think of some of the fighting on the western front of the First World War, or indeed the eastern front between the Russians and the
in the Second World War. You mentioned there that sentiment at Peleliu that, you know, the battle would be over within a couple of days. Was there a tendency in those early sort of months and years in the Pacific War that the Americans actually underestimated the sort of tenacity and determination of the Japanese on the ground? Yeah.
And if so, had that tendency already gone by the time of Okinawa, surely, right? No, I mean, not so much underestimating their tenacity, because I think, you know, as I've already mentioned, the closer they were getting to the Japanese home islands, almost the more ferocious the Japanese were fighting. And they were fighting tenaciously all the way through the Pacific campaign. I think
the Americans were under no illusions that they would be getting more of the same at Okinawa but they felt that their advances that their superiority in firepower I mean pretty much they'd knocked out the whole of the Japanese Navy by this point and therefore they could isolate the island and reduce it with firepower with bombing from the air with big guns from the ships but also with the amount of artillery they were going to
land on the island and Buckner's quite interesting actually um he was a a man who very much believed as did a lot of people who come up through the staff colleges in the 1930s in the United States particularly if they were army that the artillery was king it could do the job it could blast the Japanese out of their positions but you're really reckoning without you know the sophistication of the and the effectiveness of the Japanese defenses on Okinawa in which they had built
as I've already mentioned, these very safe kind of bunkers underneath the ground that weren't really affected by these bombardments from the air. And in many cases, the only way you can actually winkle them out of these positions is by dropping explosives literally into apertures
through which the Japanese would come out of these things and or by sealing them. So this tactic, by the way, came to be known as corkscrew and burn. And it's absolutely horrific when you think about it. I mean, using flamethrowers and explosives to effectively entomb the Japanese in these positions. Quite hideous stuff.
One of the most prominent voices, if you like, of the US Marine Corps in this period is Eugene Sledge. And I know you've used his memoir with the old breed as an important source for you in your book. And it was also an important contribution towards the Pacific series.
which came out a few years ago, covers the same area. So what can you tell us about Sledge and how he remembers it? I'd scribbled down a wonderful line from him that he described Okinawa as Hell's Own Cesspool, which I thought was rather apt.
But what can you tell us about Sledge and his experiences and then how he wrote about it subsequently? Yeah, I mean, we're very fortunate to have Sledge's memoir. And any of the listeners who have read firsthand accounts of war, and I'm sure they'll have read many, you would be wise if you haven't already come across Sledge to get your hands on it. Because
What you've got is a unique perspective of war from the ground up through the eyes of an ordinary U.S. Marine. He's not a U.S. Marine officer. He's someone who came from sort of officer class background. He was educated. He'll go on to become a professor of biology later on. His father was a doctor, very respected doctor in Mobile University.
Alabama. And therefore, he came from a well-to-do background, fascinated with the U.S. Civil War, actually. Two of his ancestors fought in the U.S. Civil War, and he used to wander around the battlefields gathering up mementos and artifacts. But he was a very cultured man, very intelligent man, who actually joined the U.S. Marine Corps as an enlisted man and wrote about it many years later. And so what you get is a very sort of sophisticated thinking perspective, but
through the eyes of a guy who's right on the ground, you know, doing the fighting. And that's what makes it remarkable. It's also a fascinating kind of exploration into the way war corrupts people. And I include on the American side here, because he could see literally in the eyes of his fellow Marines them becoming more savage
So horrific was the nature of the fighting, the fact that the Japanese wouldn't surrender, the fact that the Japanese used to pretend to be wounded and then keep fighting, the fact that they would target a corpsman or a medical aid guys. I mean, all of these things were, as far as the Americans are concerned, completely beyond the pale. And it made them increasingly savage themselves to the extent that you see through...
Sledge's book, the willingness, particularly on Peleliu and Okinawa, to take souvenirs. Literally, they'd cut body parts off their enemies and they would keep them. I mean, one particularly horrific story he tells of a guy showing him a shriveled Japanese ear and saying, you know, look what I got. I'm taking this home to my...
You know, won't they be impressed? And Sledge is like, what are you thinking? You know, this is absolute madness. And they used to take gold teeth out of Japanese mouths. And so many horrific examples like this. And Sledge, through all of this,
never sets himself apart from his fellow soldiers. He just he makes comments like, you know, I could feel myself slipping into this vortex myself, but I just hoped I would retain enough humanity, you know, to be able to come through it. And I hope my fellow colleagues would too. But he could see which way the wind was blowing. And I think the other thing about his memoir with the old breed is there's some wonderful descriptive passages there. And
I spoke about the rain a minute ago, and I'm just going to read you out one very quick passage, really. And this is when he gets to a part of the battlefield relatively shortly after he's arrived. So the 1st and 6th Marine Division, he's in the 1st Marine Division of Come South. He's actually K Company of the 3 5th Marines, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines.
part of the 1st Marine Division. They've come south and they've now been put into a position on the front line. And this is how he describes it. The battlefield was a hellish sight. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed off by the runoff of the rain. There wasn't a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was non-existent.
The scene was nothing but mud, shellfire, flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants, knocked out tanks and Amtrak's and discarded equipment. Utter desolation. This is the series of descriptions he comes up with that he described, as you've already pointed out, Roger, as hell's own cesspool. Great counsel. You alluded to that, the point there about effectively atrocities, war crimes. I mean, there must have been given those sort of
the bitterness of that fighting and the circumstances and how heightened every emotion must have been on both sides, there must have been atrocities committed there. And you've got, of course, in the background of all of this, you've got, what, 100,000 or more Okinawans living in the midst of this ongoing battle. So,
Tell us about that aspect of things.
The Americans, interestingly enough, knew about this. They had their studies of the island, what its topography was like, but also what its population was. And they knew that there was going to be a potential humanitarian crisis, as we would call it today. So they set up these kind of civilian teams whose job was to basically create these internment centers where they would process people.
treat if they needed medical attention, but also importantly, feed and water the civilian population. But all of this depended on the civilian population cooperating and the Japanese, that is the Japanese military and also Japanese civilian authorities. And I should at this point, you know, make the distinction between the Japanese and the Okinawans, because although they were part of the Japanese political structure, as I mentioned in episode one, they were from a different ethnic background. They were, you know,
Okinawa had been a kingdom in the 19th century before it was conquered by the Japanese. So they are ethnically very different. They had a little bit of Japanese ethnic blood, a little bit of Chinese and also their own indigenous Okinawan blood. And they were very much treated by the Japanese as second class citizens. And so the Japanese military and civilian authorities on the island had told the islanders, this sort of campaign of propaganda, that if and when the Americans get here,
They will rape and kill everyone. And therefore, you're better off committing suicide and or fighting them. But really, the idea that they needed to commit suicide rather than handing themselves over to the Americans was uppermost in the minds of a lot of Okinawan civilians. And that's exactly what happens. You see this even before the battle starts.
in some of the outlying islands where the first examples of mass suicide by the local population take place. But it also really begins to ramp up on Okinawa proper. Meanwhile, the Japanese are determined not to allow any of the Okinawans who don't want to kill themselves to actually hand themselves over to
to the Americans. A lot of them are captured by the Americans, of course, particularly in the north of the island, and they are treated relatively well. Well, they're treated very well, comparatively speaking, in the sense that they are given medical treatment, as I mentioned, and fed and watered. But those people in the south, where the majority of the population were, were the ones really in trouble. So not only are they in danger of crossfire, they're in danger of the Japanese themselves either forcing them to commit suicide or
herding them into an area where they are more likely to be killed by American shells and American bullets. Wow, brutal. Okay, it's now time to have a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. Thank you. We also have, you know, the end of that campaign on Okinawa sees the death of both...
commanders on both sides, American and Japanese. Buckner is killed the third week of June, I believe, and General Ushijima commits suicide somewhere close to that time as well. That presumably brings an end. Is that a sort of a neat bookend in a way to events on Okinawa? Yeah, I mean, Ushijima's death is a sign that things have gone horribly wrong, as was the tradition among Japanese field commanders.
who've lost a battle they would tend to commit a ritual suicide or seppuku as it was known and it's interesting i mean i describe in great detail um for some of the more squeamish listeners they might want to turn off now or turn the sound down now but the method of doing it and and it wasn't just ushijima who carried out this ritual killing it was also his deputy his chief of staff a man called cho and the idea is you stab yourself in the belly first of all with a short sword
And then if you're left long enough, it's going to kill you anyway. But to save yourself unnecessary suffering, you've got a guy standing by with a samurai sword just behind you and he'll cut your head off. So that's exactly what happens to those two commanders. And as you say, Roger, it very much bookends the campaign. But just to fill in a bit of the detail in between,
I mean, by the beginning of May, you've got the Marine divisions coming into play. They then have this grinding advance through this incredibly effective defensive line, the Shuri line. They're making 100 yards a day, 200 yards a day. They're taking increasing number of casualties. You've got something like six divisions now, six US divisions fighting, not all at the same time. They're rotating them in and out of the line. And as they're finally cracking their way through the Shuri line, the Japanese high command decide to...
withdraw to the bottom of the island, right to the southern tip, the Kian Peninsula, as it's known, where they're going to set up a last redoubt. And that's exactly what they do. And again, Buckner is slightly culpable here because he gets given early intelligence that this is about to take place. And really, he should have made every effort to stop it, to interdict it, certainly by the use of air power. But they don't.
do not react effectively. The Japanese leave a kind of thin crust to defend the positions and then withdraw most of their best troops. I mean, admittedly, they've lost a good half of their forces now. They're probably down to about 40% of their original force. And they withdraw all the way down to the Cayenne Peninsula. And it's in that final battle for the Cayenne Peninsula that Buckner gets a little bit
too close to one of his attacking regiments. And this is a regiment of the 2nd Marine Division, the 8th Marines. He goes forward to an observation post and there's an extraordinary sequence of events actually that leads to his death because prior to the campaign he's been told...
No one in the field should be wearing silver stars on their helmets. He was a lieutenant general, so he would have three silver stars on their helmets. They're all supposed to wear covers on the helmet which cover up the stars. And he's like, he's so proud of his first time in action. He's saying, I'm absolutely not going to pay any attention to that. Anyway, while he's watching the battle from this observation post, a Marine officer who's further forward, who's part of the attack, can see that.
the three stars glinting on his helmet. And he radios back and says, General, I think, you know, the Japanese are going to be able to see you. I would take off that helmet. Well, eventually he takes it off, leans it on the rock next to him, puts on a separate helmet, and he's still...
observing the battle through binoculars when the Japanese who probably already seen the three stars fire an artillery piece a shell lands in between the two big coral boulders directly ahead of him and it's a combination of shrapnel from the shell and also bits of the boulder that go into his chest and mortally wound him but you know frankly it's a self-inflicted wound for two reasons Roger
One, for wearing that helmet and two, for being so close up to his frontline troops where you could say, well, you know, good on him. You know, he was showing his face, but it was slightly unnecessary right at the latter stage of the battle. And the only battle in my knowledge, and it'll be interesting if listeners have got an alternative to this, in which both senior commanders of three star or above are actually killed.
And he's one of the most senior US officers to be killed in World War II, right? Yeah, in action. Equal, there was another man called McNair, who's killed in an infamous friendly fire incident during the Normandy campaign when they were advancing south of St. Lowe. And there's a huge aerial bombardment, which actually falls short, and it kills McNair and about 400 other American servicemen. Now, you've mentioned that Buckner was sort of untried in combat and so on in that sense, in that context.
role of command. And he obviously made a few errors on Okinawa. To what extent can we sort of, you know, label him in that sense as, you know, part of the problem, shall we say? We're 80 years on now, we can talk about these things with a degree of
objectivity. So was he part of the problem for the Americans on Okinawa? Yeah, I think he was. I mean, it was always going to be a tough nut to crack, but a more able general and certainly one with more experience of Pacific War fighting, like Holland Smith, who was the Marine General who had fought in most campaigns prior to this, or indeed even one of the more experienced army commanders like Eichelberger, who was part of MacArthur's force
should really have been given the job, but it was given to him. And as I mentioned, it's safety first with him. His attempt is to use artillery to blast the Japanese from their position, where slightly more sophisticated use of getting around the problem would have worked much more effectively. And we know, albeit in retrospect, that the Japanese had moved a lot of their troops from
from guarding the south of the island. And an amphibious landing there would have worked very well, actually. So I think it was a poor choice. Using inexperienced commanders for a battle of this size rarely goes down well, I'm afraid. So unfortunate. So it's an 83-day campaign on Okinawa. It ends formally on the 22nd of June, 1945.
Tell us about the sort of the casualties on all sides of both Japanese and American, obviously, but also among Okinawans themselves. Yeah, I mean, that's the real tragedy. Well, all those deaths are tragic. The servicemen, of course, you expect fatalities. The Japanese absolutely dug in as is their want.
and pretty much the whole of their 110,000 garrison perishes. I mean, it's really hard to get your head around that, isn't it, Roger? More than 100,000 fatalities on the Japanese side. About 7,000 of them are taken prisoner, and that's quite a high number as far as the Pacific War is concerned. But most of those people taken prisoner, in fact, 99% of them would have died
been from the poorer grade auxiliary fighting force, many of whom were Okinawans themselves. So we're not talking about frontline Japanese soldiers. Very few of those surrendered. On the American side, it was the heaviest casualties of the Pacific War. 12,500 were killed, including 5,000 Navy. So we mentioned before the Japanese attempt to knock out the Navy. And I
kind of maybe underplayed the effect of what they did a little bit. I mean, they sunk 36 US ships, including a number of destroyers, and damaged another 368, which were the heaviest US naval losses of the war. And the total casualties were about 5,000 killed on the US Navy side. The US Army and the US Marines lost another 7,500. So you've got 12,500 dead. You've got about another 3,000
37,000 wounded. That brings the total casualties up to 50,000. But you've also got another 25,000 or so who've come out of the line suffering from either illness or combat exhaustion. And that will also give you an idea of the kind of ferocity of the fighting that so many people were actually brought out of the line, you know, literally, unharmed.
unable to take any more shell shock, as we would have called it in the First World War. I mean, those are huge figures, really. And the most tragic of all, of course, were the civilians. I mentioned before the Japanese insistence that the Americans were never going to take them prisoner. That wasn't true. And therefore, they might as well commit suicide. Well, the end result of all of this and a large number being caught in the crossfire was that 125,000 civilians will never know the exact
figure were killed in this campaign. And I think it's that final figure of the number of civilian deaths that really shook the American leadership and played into the determination to use nuclear weapons. Yeah, so that leads us into that whole question. I mean, you can see from Okinawa, as you can see on Iwo Jima as well, the costs to the Americans. Now, that's
I suppose the primary concern for American planners at this point is to try as best they can to, you know, win the war, of course, but whilst as far as possible, you know, preserve American lives, um,
But they must have looked at those two battles and particularly Okinawa and said that, you know, we must have an alternative strategy here because this is going to be extremely bloody. That's exactly right. And so you get this extraordinary meeting on the 18th of June in Washington, D.C. Now, 18th of June is the day Buckner
A couple of days later, Ishijima commits suicide. But it's the effective end. I mean, it's not, you know, not all the fighting's over. It's the effective end of the campaign. They know in Washington, D.C., that it's almost a done deal on Okinawa, but they're also getting the casualty figures through. And it's at that meeting, which has really been set up to discuss what happens next.
The end result of the meeting is that Truman gives the go-ahead to the U.S. Army, well, in fact, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but in particular, Marshall's determination to launch this twin invasion of Japan. He gives the go-ahead, OK, the plans are in place. That's actually going to take place. The initial invasion of Kyushu will start on the 1st of November. But he's also made it clear at that meeting that he doesn't want another operation
Okinawa from one end of Japan to another. And therefore, he's effectively asked them, what are the alternatives? Well, they're not discussing specifically at that meeting the atomic weapons, not least because they haven't been tested. But it's very much an unsaid kind of thought that if those atomic weapons do work, they are the solution to the problem. In other words, they will be such a shock, or at least they believe they will be such a shock,
that this will encourage the Japanese not to attempt to defend the Japanese home islands. I think the estimate was made at the time of these discussions that if they were to fight on in a conventional campaign into the home islands, they were reckoning with
about the loss of a further million US lives. Is that part of those deliberations as well? Yeah, they're not specific, again, on that 18th of June meeting, but a number of people who were there, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson, expected casualties, as he wrote.
in his memoirs of over a million. They're very cagey about numbers. They talk about, you know, they very much talk about the casualties in all the previous campaigns. That is discussed at that meeting. And it's pretty clear to Truman that the butcher's bill is getting higher and higher the closer they get to the home island. So the minimum estimates are about a half a million, maximum a million. You know, in reality, Roger, if
Five million Allied servicemen had landed on the Japanese home islands, albeit over the course of these two campaigns in the autumn of 1945 and the spring of 1946. I think the casualties would have been higher than a million. And of course, not only would almost all the Japanese servicemen on those islands have
have died in defense of their country, but so would millions of Japanese civilians. So looking back and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me completely logical that when they realized that atomic weapons would work, and of course, the crucial test takes place in the New Mexico desert on the 15th of July, by which time Truman is now in Berlin for the Potsdam conference meeting
Stalin and Churchill, it's pretty clear that he's going to take the decision to use it, not least because all his chief advisors, both military and scientific. This is the other interesting thing. There's a lot of people say, well, surely the scientists didn't want to use nuclear weapons that they created, but they didn't want to use it because they knew what they had created. Well, there were some people in the scientific community who didn't want to
want to. But all the key people, particularly those who are in Los Alamos, which was, of course, where they were actually, you know, putting the final pieces into place and where they test the weapon, led by Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer, they were all absolutely determined that not only should they use it to demonstrate its awesome power, they should use it on an actual live target. There were some people suggesting, including in the American administration, well, let's just have a demonstration somewhere on some deserted island. But
No, the scientific community were pretty much united. It needs to be used against what they termed a military target, which is a bit of a euphemism, to be honest, Roger, because at that point in Japan, pretty much every city had some kind of military capacity. But of course, the majority of people living there would have been civilians. And of course, I mean, you mentioned earlier on the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945, like conventional firebombing of Tokyo.
the death toll of which is in every way comparable to either one of the atomic bombs. So, I mean, you know, they were quite capable of wreaking, you know, huge amounts of damage and chaos on the ground and deaths on the ground.
even without using these weapons. So, you know, to some extent, I suppose, could you almost say that this was a bit of a red herring to sort of jump to the use of the atomic weapon? Because they could have carried on in the same way, that idea of using the Air Force to its best effect. And they would have had, you know, as in Okinawa, they would have had various other places from which
they could have really effectively done that. That's right. And recent scholarship, and in particular, Richard Overy's book published this year, Reign of Ruin, makes the explicit connection actually between the two, between the firebombing and the use of the atomic weapons,
And in Overy's words, this is logical extinction. And he also makes the point, Roger, which you made now, that the number of deaths caused by the firebombing, that is, in effect, the area bombing of Japanese cities, which were particularly vulnerable, of course, to incendiary bombs because they're
mainly made of wooden paper, was absolutely horrific up to this point. Deaths caused by firebombing, including Tokyo, far more than were lost, actually, as a result of the two atomic weapons. So, you know, a lot of concentration, particularly in a moral sense, gets put on the use of the atomic weapons. But actually, they were slowly but surely destroying the urban centers of Japan, even without the atomic weapons. So I suppose a really interesting question that comes up
in people's minds now, Roger, is that whether or not Japan would have submitted without the use of the atomic weapons. That is an interesting question because definitely the net was tightening. They were almost running out of munitions. The emperor, as Richard Overy shows in his book, was very much on the side of the
peace party by the summer, by June 1945. But he had to get the military guys on side and the military were all for right up to the end, fighting to the finish. There was a very delicate balance as to whether you actually agree to the
ultimatum, which was issued at Potsdam by the Americans, you know, we're going to cause fire and we're going to destroy Japan from one end to another if you don't surrender unconditionally. But of course, what does that actually mean? They're already bombarding us with conventional bombs. They didn't realize they had the capacity to use atomic weapons. My personal view is it probably tipped the balance, but there were multiple other factors that meant that by August 1945, Japan was pretty much on its knees.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that, you know, as you say, you mentioned Overy's book. You know, it's clear from what we've been discussing about Okinawa, for example, that those battles, Okinawa, Iwo Jima and others, were central in American decision making towards, you know, the use of the atomic bomb. But the wider question, which is what Overy brings into question,
of whether the bombing itself was instrumental in their surrender is still open to some extent. As you say, there are lots of other factors, not least the one that struck me from reading that book most blindingly was that they didn't even fully appreciate the first one and Hiroshima had actually been dropped. They didn't understand what it was.
So by the time they were making those decisions, obviously they knew they'd been heavily bombed and there was a heavy death toll, but they didn't even appreciate that this was an atomic weapon. It wasn't really publicized to them. So as he rightly says, and you've just alluded to, there are lots of other factors, not least the prospect of widespread civil unrest, which to that Japanese government was potentially fatal. So there's a lot more
Or that whole decision-making process on the Japanese side is much more complex, even if the American decision-making is relatively straightforward. And that's where, as you say, Okinawa fits in that really well. I mean, what I was pleased to see in Overy's book is a foremost scholar, one of the foremost scholars of the Second World War, confirming my view that Okinawa was a major factor in the American decision to use the atomic weapons.
He does confirm that. But he also makes the point that there were, as you say, Roger, these multiple other factors, one of which, which we haven't alluded to yet, which was absolutely crucial, was the Soviet Union's decision to enter the war against Japan. And the date's important because it happens on the 8th of August. So the first bomb has been dropped in on Hiroshima on the 6th.
And the second one's going to be dropped on the 9th. But the declaration of war, the opening of the lightning campaign against the Japanese in Manchuria has begun on the 8th. And this information arrives at Tokyo in the morning of the 9th. And that's before they get news of the second bombing.
And already the emperor has effectively said to his cabinet or his war council, OK, now we need to accept the ultimatum. It's just a question of our terms, which they go back and forward to about and eventually come to the conclusion, well, as long as the Americans agree to let me stay as emperor, then yes, unconditional surrender is now on the table. There were, crucially, I think as well, I mean, there were a few regrets expressed on the American side.
about the decision to bomb Japan, right? Yeah, and I think there are multiple factors there. It's a different type of war to the war fought against Germany. You had some, of course, but you don't have many Americans who are of Japanese ethnic origin. There were many who were of German ethnic origin. There's an element of racism involved
There's an element of revenge, of course, revenge for Pearl Harbor. The Americans have not been attacked by Germany, albeit Hitler rather foolishly declares war on them in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. But they don't really have the same beef against the Germans and they see themselves ethnically more similar to the Germans. So there's definitely a kind of a racist element to all of this, which I think Overy brings out in his book. And it's
pretty clear to everyone. And you see it in the language of the way the soldiers are fighting. I mean, I don't sanitize direct quotes that I use in my book, you know, because historians don't tend to do that, Roger. But, you know, when I'm talking about it in prose, you know, the way they defined the Japanese was usually in pejorative terms that were, you know...
a sense of racial superiority. Having said all of that, going all the way back to the first campaign that the Americans fought against the Japanese in 1942 in Guadalcanal, you also get the sense that they're really nervous of taking on the Japanese. The Japanese have had this unbroken run of success in Southeast Asia, and they're thinking, can we actually match up to them, even though they are people we would formerly have assumed were our racial inferiors?
So there's that kind of unknown quantity about taking on the Japanese. And they certainly did deserve the sort of accolade of formidable opponents, albeit an incredibly brutal one too. Yeah. And just to bring that back, to round things off as it were, but to bring it back to Okinawa, the sheer bitterness of that
of that conflict, you know, the no quarter given and no quarter expected that you saw on the island of Okinawa. Again, that feeds into that American attitude that, you know, to a large extent, they just thought, you know, the Japanese deserved everything they got because of the way they'd fought the war.
Yeah, and that's right. And you've got a number of servicemen on the island, of course, who heard about the bombs. So these are people who'd fought the Okinawan campaign. They are now slated to take part in the invasion of the home islands. And they know there's a very good chance they're not going to be coming back from that. And so when they actually hear that the bombs have been dropped, are they concerned about the future?
fate of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians? No, they are not. The first thing in their minds is there's a good chance now we can go home. There's one quote I use in my book from a rather wonderful source I found, actually, a Marine officer called Bruce Watkins, and he writes about this news of the surrender and the use of the atomic weapons. Our hopes have been dashed so often that it took several days to absorb the impact of this event. That, of course, is the surrender.
relief flooded slowly into our veins. We began to dare to think of going home. Wonderful. Saul, thank you. That was fascinating stuff. Of course, for our listeners, if you want to read more on this, Saul's Crucible of Hell, absolutely searing stuff, brilliant book. And, you know, do avail yourselves of that wonderful book. Fascinating subject. Thank you, Saul, very much. That's Battleground 45 for another week. And we'll see you again very soon. Thank you.