What averted that catastrophic slaughter was the Enola Gay, the B-29 that delivered the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima on Aug. Upwards of 500,000 Americans, perhaps 2 million Japanese, would lose their lives. The resistance would be so savage that it would probably take until the end of 1946 to subdue the enemy. "Operation Coronet" would send a million and a half US troops onto the beaches near Tokyo. If the invasion of Kyushu didn't end the war, a second landing would start in March 1946. Yet compared with the losses Americans would suffer when they invaded Japan itself, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were just warm-ups. With 12,500 Americans dead, and another 36,500 wounded, it had been the bloodiest battle in US naval history. The Japanese had fought with suicidal fanaticism. In Okinawa a few weeks later, the butchery had been even more hellish. Nearly every one of the Japanese, some 21,000, had died fighting.
In a futile effort to defend a little island in the Bonins eight months earlier, a speck called Iwo Jima, the Japanese had killed close to 7,000 American Marines and wounded 20,000 more. All anyone knew for certain was that horrific numbers of young men would die.Īlready the carnage in the Pacific beggared comprehension.
They would try to occupy half the island - enough, it was hoped, to force the Japanese to surrender.
1, 1945, 770,000 American troops - more than five times the number of soldiers who fought at Normandy on D-Day - would land on Japan's southern island, Kyushu.