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The Smithsonian and the Enola Gay:
The Mission
War in the Pacific
By July 1945, it was clear that Japan had lost. However, Japan had not
accepted defeat and was not ready to end a war in which 17 million people had
already died at the hands of the Japanese empire since 1931.
The eventual military outcome of the war had been sealed since the US captured
the Mariana Islands in 1944. B-29 bombers from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian were
systematically destroying the industrial cities of Japan. The US Navy and the
Army Air Forces had cut off Japan’s supply lines.
Nevertheless, the war dragged on, and casualties were rising. More
than 26,000
Americans had been killed or wounded on Iwo Jima in February and March 1945.
US casualties from April to June on Okinawa were 48,000.
As Japan’s desperation worsened, the ferocity of the fighting continued. Surrender
was regarded as dishonorable. Japanese fighting men preferred to take their own lives or
die in kamikaze suicide attacks. Americans who surrendered to Japanese forces were
treated with contempt, often tortured or summarily executed.
For the past year, Japan had been drawing units back to the home islands in
anticipation of a final stand there.
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| The Decision Return To Top In April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman became president of
the United States. He had not known before that the United States had been
working on an atomic bomb. After successful testing of the bomb at the Trinity
site in New Mexico in July 1945, Truman and the armed forces had three
strategic options for inducing a Japanese surrender.
- Continue the bombing and the blockade. Some military leaders, including
Gen. H. H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, believed that bombing
would soon bring an end to the war.
- Invasion of Japan. Neither Truman nor Gen. George Marshall, the Army
Chief of Staff, believed that the B-29 bombing campaign would force a prompt
surrender. In their view, the only conventional alternative was invasion.
- Use the atomic bomb.
There were differences of opinion about the best strategy among Truman’s
military and civilian advisors. However, when a warning of “utter devastation
of the Japanese homeland” went unheeded, the decision was
made to use the atomic
bomb.
In his radio address to the nation, Truman gave his reasons: “We have used
it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands
and thousands of young Americans,” he said.
Click here for
“The Decision That Launched the Enola Gay,” Air Force Association, March 1994
www.afa.org/media/enolagay/03-001.asp
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| Hiroshima and Nagasaki Return To Top
In the early morning hours of Aug. 6, the Enola Gay took off from Tinian.
The primary target was Hiroshima, the seventh largest city in Japan, an
industrial and military shipping center on the Inland seacoast of Honshu.
At precisely 8:16 a.m., the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. More than
half of the city was destroyed in a flash, and about 80,000 Japanese were killed.
Reaction of the Japanese cabinet was polarized, split evenly between the war
faction and the peace faction. The Japanese were not quite ready to surrender.
The second atomic bomb was dropped by the B-29 Bockscar
on Aug. 9. The primary
target, Kokura, was obscured by smoke drifting from a nearby city that had
been bombed two days before, so Bockscar diverted to Nagasaki, a military
industrial center on the western coast of Kyushu. The bomb fell on Nagasaki
at 11:02 a.m., killing 40,000.
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| End of the War Return To Top
The war faction in Japan was still not ready to quit, but Emperor Hirohito
asked the Cabinet to prepare an Imperial Rescript of Surrender. A few hours
before the Emperor’s message was broadcast on Aug. 15, the war minister, Korechika
Anami, committed suicide.
In the radio broadcast, the Emperor said that “the enemy has begun to employ a
new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed, incalculable,
taking the toll of many innocent lives.”
The formal surrender took place aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay
on Sept. 2.
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| The Invasion That Didn't Happen Return To Top
The prevailing opinion in 1945 was that, without the atomic bombs, an invasion
of the Japanese home islands would have been necessary to force Japan to
surrender. The invasion plan, Operation Downfall, had two parts:
- Operation Olympic, projected for Nov. 1, 1945, sending 766,700 US ground
troops and a massive aerial bombardment against the southern Japanese island
of Kyushu.
- Operation Coronet, beginning March 1, 1946, directed at the main Japanese
island, Honshu. The US invasion force was to consist of 1,026,000 ground troops
and an enormous number of aircraft.
The Japanese force awaiting in the home islands to throw back an invasion consisted
or 2.3 million military troops and four million Army and Navy civilian employees who
could be called upon for combat duty. About 7,700 combat aircraft were available, many
of them kamikaze suicide planes. Millions of women, old men, and boys had been trained
to resist by such means as strapping explosives to their bodies and throwing themselves
under advancing tanks.
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| Casualties: Lives Lost and Saved Return To Top
Casualty estimates for an invasion of Japan are mostly guesswork. Truman’s critics
sneer at the idea that the invasion might have cost half a million American lives
and say that US dead would not have exceeded “tens of thousands.” The debate of the
casualty question is open-ended. However, the record of casualties up to the summer
of 1945, when Truman made his decision, is instructive.
- In April 1945, an Operation Downfall planning document prepared for the Joint
Chiefs of Staff took US casualty rates from seven previous amphibious campaigns
in the Pacific War and applied them to the force numbers to be employed in Olympic
and Coronet. It pointed to 1,202,005 US casualties, including 314,619 Americans
killed.
- The most destructive bombing attack on Japan was not the atomic weapons at
Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo the night of March
9–10, 1945, killing 83,793. Continuation of the conventional bombing would not
necessarily have meant fewer casualties.
- On Okinawa US casualties were almost 50,000 (12,520 killed or missing, 36,613
wounded). Japanese casualties were far worse: some 90,000 soldiers and 60,000
civilians dead. An invasion of Japan, with many times the numbers of forces that
were engaged on Okinawa, would have led to vastly higher casualties on both sides.
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| Further Reading Return To Top
DREA, Edward J., “Previews of Hell,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History,
Spring 1995.
FRANK, Richard B. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.
Random House, 1999.
GUDMUNDSSON, Bruce I., “Okinawa,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of
Military History, Spring 1955.
MADDOX, Robert James. Weapons of Victory: The Hiroshima Decision,
Fifty Years Later. University of Missouri Press, 1995.
NEWMAN, Robert P. Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. Michigan State University
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War in the Pacific
