Saved by the Bomb

Did the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945 actually save lives? I can attest to at least one. They saved the life of my Uncle Leonard.

Uncle Leonard was 20 years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and his mother refused to sign for him to join up, so he continued in his carpentry work until he turned 21 in July of 1942.

He was assigned to the Amphibious Combat Engineers and had emblems of both the 1^st and 2^nd Engineer Brigades; presumably he spent time in each unit. The 2^nd Brigade emblem featured a seahorse – very cool! Engineering organizations often feature horses in their emblems, but usually the four-legged kind. Surprisingly, these were not Navy units like the Seabees, but instead belonged to the Army.

He joined the forces fighting in New Guinea. Except for a detour to a hospital in Australia to fight malaria, he was with the advance all the way to Japan. In hospital they were made to lie on rubber sheets to avoid ruining their mattresses with perspiration. In a time before air conditioning, reflected heat from the rubber made lying down extremely uncomfortable. They would rearrange their bedding, and the nurses would force them back onto the rubber sheets.

Uncle Leonard said he spent most of the war in bathing trunks building bridges, but his unit moved in immediately after a landing battle, then cleared and built what was necessary for the next landing – hardly far from danger. He spent considerable time on Cebu in the Philippines. There the Army had its own timber-cutting crew and milling apparatus, which they named the Thick and Thin Lumber Company. That pretty much tells everything about what they had to work with.

One of the stories he told often was about how they moved from island to island in the advance. In preparation to leave a place after they completed operations, they loaded all their gear on boats with a bank of outhouses going on last and coming off first at the new location. On one occasion, Pathe News was filming their arrival, but didn’t want footage of a row of outhouses being unloaded immediately after anchoring. To accommodate, they were forced to sail back out and return without outhouses for the cameras.

Uncle Leonard was one of those veterans who didn’t talk about the combat he had seen, but a few things slipped out. One daughter heard him say that you never know how far you can swim underwater holding your breath until someone is shooting at you.

He once told my Father how the amphibious engineers erected tents on a newly captured beach. In the Army, everything had to be straight, so they were using a surveyor's transit to align the tents – while taking sniper fire from the jungle.

As the invasion approached, the situation for Uncle Leonard and his comrades looked grim. The official national defense policy of Japan was named Ketsu-Go, or “Decisive Operation.” The closer US troops approached the homeland, the stronger Japanese resistance became. Deaths on both sides of the Okinawa invasion numbered in excess of 230,000.

According to Wikipedia.com:

The Japanese planned to commit the entire population to resisting the invasion, and from June 1945 onward, a propaganda campaign calling for "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" commenced. The main message of "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign was that it was "glorious to die for the holy emperor of Japan, and every Japanese man, woman, and child should die for the Emperor when the Allies arrived".

Admiral Takijiro Onishi, in charge of kamikaze operations, declared “If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives, victory will be ours!”

On Kwajalein, the fatality rate for the Japanese force was 98.4 percent. On Saipan, almost 30,000—97 percent of the garrison—fought to the death. Of 23,000 Japanese troops on Iwo Jima, only 216 surrendered. On Okinawa, 92,0000—80 percent of the total Japanese force—was killed in action. During the entire Pacific War, only one organized Japanese unit ever surrendered: a 23-man “independent mixed battalion” in New Guinea in May 1945.

In June 1945, Japan established the “National Volunteer Combat Force,” a civilian paramilitary corps. All males age 15-60 and females 17-40 were required to join. They received training from the army on whatever weapons were available, notably bamboo spears and hand grenades. They were expected to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing U.S. tanks. About 28 million Japanese were subject to conscription under this program.

Uncle Leonard recalled that he was on one of the first boats to sail up the estuary in what was to have been the initial landing on mainland Japan. They were expecting to meet fierce resistance. He had been told that they should expect a 90 percent loss on the first wave – which included him – but that US forces could take it on the second wave. His personal assessment of the situation was that there would have been a 100 percent loss on the first wave, a 90 percent loss on the second wave, and that maybe they could take it the third. Every person on shore, young and old, was in position and heavily armed.

And then the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6th and 9th respectively, ended the war. Japanese lives lost to the atomic bombs were about 210,000, roughly ONE PERCENT of the 20 million casualties Admiral Onishi deemed acceptable.

Uncle Leonard got to come home. Because he had been in the field since late 1942, he was among the earlier soldiers to return. He married, raised a family, and taught his nephew to play cribbage. The bombs undoubtedly saved his life and innumerable others, both American and Japanese.