(IJN Yamato, dead in the water and damaged. USN Photo)
 
“April Fools Day. We found Yamato on the sixth, and sank her the next day. The Japs lost over 107,000 military and civilian on land and 4,000 sailors at sea. It cost us almost seven thousand soldiers and another five thousand sailors to the kamikazes. It was something entirely new in battle, and it was a real problem. The running battle went on almost to the 4th of July, but once we had a decent foothold we had a place for tactical aviation to stage from, and the skies belonged to us.”
 
The Admiral reached in the pocket of his tan suit and pulled out a list. This is what we worked out with Iron Pants to hit the targets we thought were important.
 
I looked at the list, which seemed to be compiled from a Far East Air Force chronology. I studied some of the entries:
 
“July 10: 83 Very Heavy Bombers bomb oil facilities at Amagasaki.
 
July 13/14: 30 B-29’s mine Shimonoseki Strait and waters at Fukuoka, ports at Seishin, Masan, and Reisui.
 
July15/16: 26 B-29’s mine waters at Naoetsu, Niigata, Najin, Pusan, and Wonsan. 59 other B- 29’s bomb Nippon Oil Company at Kudamatsu.
 
July 15/16: 26 B-29’s mine waters at Naoetsu, Niigata, Najin, Pusan, and Wonsan. 59 other B- 29’s bomb Nippon Oil Company at Kudamatsu.”

The Admiral smiled. “Local Targeting. You have to break out our target list from the master activity chronology to understand what was happening. There was an awful lot of activity and our campaign gets lost in the static. The Air Force and the Joint Target Board prefer it that way, and the story of those brave aircrew that carried out the POL and mining campaigns.”
 
“So, tell me: how did you work with the Air Corps planners?”
 
“We didn’t, at least not directly. That wasn’t our job. We provided target nominations and let them do their work. We were concentrating on estimates and supporting the planning process. That is why Captain Layton took us forward. The main event after Okinawa was Olympic, the assault on Kyushu, and we were battling the Army staff in Manila about what it was going to cost.”
 
“You said Hal came up with 2.5 million American casualties for the invasion?”
 
Mac nodded grimly. “MacArthur’s people said 250,000. There was a lot of back-and-forth and that is how we settled on a round one million. It put things off to November, but we were gearing up for it. There was no alternative except a negotiated peace that would have left the militarists in charge. No one knew about the Bomb except Admiral Nimitz, the Chief of Staff and maybe a couple others.”
 
“They didn’t even know the thing would work. What did they call it?” I searched my brain without any luck.

(Trinity Test, Alamagordo, New Mexico. Photo DOE)
 
“The Gadget. No, they were pretty confident, but it wasn’t proved until the day of the strikes at Kudamatsu. On the sixteenth of July they blew up the gadget up at Trinity Flats in New Mexico.”
 
“With the estimates of causalities I imagine there really wasn’t much choice about it.”
 
“Hal Leathers used to rave about the disparity in the numbers between us and manila. The Army actually started breaking some of the Imperial ground codes toward the end, and Hal was charting the units that were moving into Kyushu, which was the obvious next target. He had the real numbers of the real units, and that is why our assessment was so dire. There was one unit that he knew was present, but could not identify by number. He named it the “Leathers Unit.” I have never seen that in the history books. Hal was my best man after the war. He is dead now.”
 
I tried to remember what they taught us about amphibious warfare. “Aren’t you supposed to have a three-to-one superiority on an assault?” I asked.
 
“Four-to-one if you are General Montgomery,” laughed Mac. “We could never get the numbers to work at more than 1.5-to-one. We would have been slaughtered.”
 
He leaned forward. “We had a translator from FRUPAC named John some-thing-or-other. I’ll think of his last name. He was slated to be in the first wave of the landings on Kyushu. He had a chance to actually visit the beach that his unit was going to hit. He looked at the caves and fortifications and realized that if Truman had not authorized the use of the Bomb, that is the very piece of sand where he would have died.”
 
“Amazing what changed in just a few weeks,” I said.
 
“You don’t know the half of it,” chuckled Mac.
 

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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