(Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson playing “Going Home” as FDR’s body leaves the Warm Springs Institute for the train station.)

The Willow bar was bustling. There were some very attractive ladies at the bar, and some very self-important young men attempting to chat them up. Sara the lovely Lebanese waitress was smiling her perfect smile under her delicately curved eyebrows, raven hair shining. Andre-the-waiter circled solicitously. Peter managed the demands of the long bar with aplomb.

Everyone in the bar was thoroughly in the moment, just as thoroughly as Mac and I were in another. We were in a humid place with still sultry air and shadows sixty-five years long, almost to the day.

I was warming to the topic. “I would like to hear some more about that,” I said. “The whole estimates process. I mean, the decision to drop the Bomb on Japan was a result of Harry Truman making the business case about the cost-benefit in American lives, right?”

The Admiral pursed his lips and took a sip of his Virgin Mary. “I was just a junior officer, but I had unique access at the time and have done a lot of research since. I have a monograph about the end of the war that the CIA did. It is unclassified now, but it never published for public use. It is only about thirty page long, but the attachments are more than a hundred. I looked at it the other day, and read the minutes of the meeting at the White House that talked about options. Truman was there- he became President when FDR passed away in April. Not YN1 Harry Truman.”

“I got that, Sir.”

Mac smiled and counted the olives left in his glass. “Well, after Graham Jackson played “Nearer my God to Thee” on the accordion at Warm Springs and Harry S was sworn in- no period after the S- there was a lot for him to learn. He had never been in the loop for decisions like Vice Presidents are these days. In fact, he had only been in office for eighty days or so, and FDR didn’t talk to him about squat.”

“So, the Spooks come to him after he is sworn in and tell him about the Doomsday secret? Didn’t that mean Stalin knew more about the Bomb than the President did?”

“That is what I understand, based on the subsequent revelations of the Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project. We kept our heads down and prepared for Operation Olympic, the land invasion of Japan.”

“But you mentioned the estimates process. Didn’t that shape what Truman eventually decided to do?”

“Oh yes. We worked with the plans division of CINCPAC forward under Admiral Forrest Sherman. Admiral Nimitz had two hats to wear. For the Navy, he was CINCPAC. For the joint forces he was Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Area- CINCPOA. But of course he had to deal with MacArthur, the Army Commander, whose HQ was in Manila. Sherman’s guys had to go and coordinate with them as the air campaign ground on.”

“So what did you do? What was your average day like?”

“We supported the estimates process and the planners. First, Okinawa had to fall. Most of that had been done before we got to Guam, and we couldn’t bypass it.”

“I remember being in the planning process, Admiral. Sometimes the day of the big exercise would arrive and you realized something really important had to have been done ninety days ago and you were totally screwed.”

Mac laughed. “My roommate in the two-story Quonset hut on CINCPAC Hill was an army Captain named Hal Leathers. He did our ground estimates, and he thought there were 100,000 Jap troops waiting for us, and 2000 kamikaze aircraft ready to strike the Fleet. According to the traffic we decrypted, the biggest battleship in the world, IJN Yamato, was getting ready for a one-way mission to beach itself on the island and use its 18-inch guns as static artillery.”

“The Japanese were determined to make this so costly for us that we would seek options other than complete victory, right?”

“You have no idea. The civilians on Okinawa, like on Saipan, were indoctrinated to believe that the Americans would kill everyone on the island. Admiral Nimitz sent 1,500 ships, including some Brit fast carriers and a half million men.”

I pursed my lips. “Let me get the timing straight. The invasion started in April, didn’t it?”

(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 gun-fight 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. 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 and proved it worked.”

“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 2017 Vic Socotra
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