Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire

by Richard B. Frank

In a riveting narrative that includes information from newly declassified documents, acclaimed historian Richard B. Frank gives a scrupulously detailed explanation of the critical months leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb. Frank explains how American leaders learned in the summer of 1945 that their alternate strategy to end the war by invasion had been shattered by the massive Japanese buildup on Kyushu, and that intercepted diplomatic documents also revealed the dismal prospects of negotiation. Here also, for the first time, is a comprehensive account of how Japan's leaders were willing to risk complete annihilation to preserve the nation's existing order. Frank's comprehensive account demolishes long-standing myths with the stark realities of this great historical controversy.

Genres: History, Japan, Nonfiction, World War II, War, Military History, Military Fiction

484 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Richard B. Frank is an American lawyer and military historian.
Born in Kansas, Frank graduated from the University of Missouri in 1969, after which he served four years in the United States Army. During the Vietnam War, he served a tour of duty as a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division. In 1976, he graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Before the calendar ran out on [1945], fiery devastation was to come to more than sixty other Japanese cities [besides Tokyo]. Those Japanese not killed in air raids would stand on the precipice of extinction through starvation. A great invasion would be planned but not executed. The Soviet Union would unleash a mechanized assault in Manchuria and plan to seize a Home island. Millions were to die, only a minority of them Japanese, and the Imperial Empire was to vanish in two atomic flashes…”
- Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Japanese Empire

The decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in August 1945 was one of the most controversial and consequential in human history. Over a hundred thousand people died. Many more were injured or sickened. When the radioactive dust settled, the “good war” was over, but it had a glowing asterisk next to it.

Beyond the lives lost, the houses destroyed, the nuclear bombings conducted by the United States ushered in a frightening era: the Atomic Age. It can seem quaint now, the way people reacted to this bright dawning: backyard shelters; stores of tinned foods; and Bert the Turtle telling kids to “duck and cover.” But in a very real sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were warnings of near-biblical prophecy.

The choice to let Little Boy and Fat Man fall from the sky will haunt earth right until the moment it happens again.

Needless to say, it has also engendered endless, often passionate debate.

From the moment on August 6, 1945, at 8:16 a.m., when a mass of Uranium-235 went critical 1,900 feet over the Shima Hospital in Hiroshima, President Harry Truman’s go-ahead order has been hotly discussed. The argument has many aspects and angles. It boils down to this: Were the bombs necessary to end the war?

Richard B. Frank’s demi-classic Downfall – originally published in 1999 – provides an answer to this question, if not necessarily the answer.

Downfall is something of a hybrid. Part of it is a straightforward narrative about the endgame in the Pacific Theater, beginning with the infamous Tokyo firebombing in March 9-10, 1945, and ending with the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945.

The highlight of the narrative portions – in literary terms, of course – comes right at the beginning, in the very first chapter. Here, Frank delivers an incredible portrayal of the B-29 fire raid that annihilated Tokyo and killed – conventionally, with explosive force and fire – approximately as many Japanese persons as did the atomic bombs.

The conflagration this night, with potent incendiaries falling “like rain drops,” was more than any city fire department in the world could have handled. There were far too many fires – each Superfortress bomb load covered an area 1,500 to 2,000 feet long and 300 feet wide – and the heat and fleeing crowds made it impossible to get to some places. Once the fires gained hold, the scorching winds projected “great clots of flame” on short trajectories but also launched live sparks on vaulting arcs up into the sky. Then, as they gathered strength, the fires propelled upward burning bits of wood or paper that tumbled across neighborhoods and then whole wards in fiery showers. Distant observers could see “torch clusters” explode and then sink back in “wavy lines across the city,” with individual blasts that looked like “flaming hair.” After only an hour, the fire department conceded total defeat…

Unfortunately, in a way, Downfall is a victim of its own exceptional opening gambit. Like the inimitable war film Saving Private Ryan, Frank puts his best scene first. Everything afterwards, including a rather brief description of the atomic bombings themselves, seems pale by comparison. In terms of dramatic and emotional impact, nothing in Downfall even approaches the first seventeen pages.

Frank, however, has other things on his mind than storytelling. That’s because Downfall is also an argument in support of the atomic bombings. Carefully, methodically, sometimes pedantically, Frank takes you through the laborious decision-making process that ended with the pika don, the flash-boom of atomic explosions.

Overall, I give Frank a lot of credit for making this complex issue digestible. There are a lot of moving pieces to cover, including American intentions, Japanese intentions, and Soviet intentions. Add to this the interservice rivalry amongst the U.S. military branches, with the Army (proposing invasion), Navy (proposing blockade and bombardment), and Army Air Force (seeking independence) all vying to be in on the kill. There is also a slew of decryptions from the U.S. codebreaking efforts known as Ultra and Magic. At the time Downfall was published, a more complete picture of the intelligence situation was just becoming available. As such, Frank spends a great deal of time with U.S. intercepts of Japanese military and diplomatic messages, requiring head-spinning layers of analysis.

The vast amount of material in Downfall is arranged chronologically. On the one hand, this has the advantage of clearly demonstrating the evolution of American thinking. Right up till the end, even after the atomic bombs had fallen, the strategic picture was in flux.

On the other hand, I felt at times that Frank made things unnecessarily confusing by withholding certain key information. For instance, there is an extensive discussion about Operation Olympic, the proposed U.S. invasion of the island of Kyushu. The level of detail here is mind-numbing. Rather than provide an evocative portrait of how an invasion might have unfolded, Frank mostly provides endless orders of battle, describing every Japanese unit and where that unit was positioned. Much of this is just lists, meaningless lists. There were times, I will admit, that my eyes glazed over. Sentences such as “X-Day likely would have dawned with the Japanese 77th, 25th, 57th, and 216th Divisions, as well as the 4th, 5th, and 6th Tank Brigades…marching for Ariake Bay” just don’t do much for me. Furthermore, and here is the real source of my criticism, Frank waits until after you’ve waded through all these numeric identifiers to tell you that the invasion of Kyushu was probably not going to happen anyway, since American intelligence had become aware of a massive defensive buildup.

Downfall is not a huge book. My hardcover has 360 pages of text, not counting two appendices. There are some good maps showing proposed invasion sites. The annotated endnotes attest to a massive amount of research, and contain a lot of amplification. The final two chapters do a good job of summarizing all that came before, and delivering Frank’s conclusions. In all, then, this is a very good work of history.

At times, though, Downfall tends to feel like the written-word version of whack-a-mole. There are a lot of counterarguments to the atomic bombings, and Frank tries to knock them all down. It should not be surprising that he is not entirely successful, even if his confidence and authoritativeness convey an unshakable sense that he is absolutely correct.

I’m not saying Frank is wrong or wright. It’s simply that we are dealing with the notoriously difficult realm of counterfactuals. In that realm, in which we are attempting to prove things that never happened, the evidence provided by Frank is open to different modes of interpretation.

No one – not you, me, or Richard Frank – can honestly answer the question of whether or not the atomic bombs should have been dropped, because no one – not you, me, or Richard Frank – has ever been in the position of having to give the order, and to accept the consequences.

It is easy – to the point of insult – to say, Sure, drop the Bomb, twice, without having to take responsibility for the noncombatant men, women, and children you are flash-frying, some obliterated so completely only their shadows remained. It is also too easy to say, No, of course not, nuclear weapons are immoral, without having to take responsibility for the eighteen year-old U.S. soldier going ashore on the first wave, or the Chinese civilians dying each day under Japanese occupation, or the Korean women forced into Japanese brothels, for whom each day of continued warfare was suffering.

There were alternative ways of ending World War II, whether by bombardment, blockade, or Soviet intervention. That is a given. Everything else is an unknown. It is a certainty, though, that of all the possibilities, none were perfect. There was no way that the bloodiest of all mankind’s innumerable conflicts was going to end without further bloodshed and death. I am certain of this, if nothing else: I’m glad I didn’t have to make that call.

[Doubledf99.99 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read about the last 6 months of the War in the Pacific.
Starts off with the fire bombing of Tokyo, LeMay taking charge and going from high altitude bombing to low altitude bombing with the new M-69 incendiaries.
Planing for Operation Olympic, intel from Magic and Ultra chapters are some good reading about Japans defensive scheme for an Armageddon.
Lot of tables and numbers.
My only gripe the two maps that were with the book I just wish they had been a lot more detailed.
It's another one of the books that's good to read every few years.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Richard Frank argues that the decision to use the atomic bomb originated out of military rather than diplomatic necessity. Frank begins his account with an explanation of the Tokyo firebombings and the military thought that lead to the decision to use less discrimination in regards to civilian targets. Much of the book demonstrates Frank’s comprehensive understanding of military strategy as he goes on to describe the strategies used throughout the Pacific and their relative successes. He uses this information to argue that the atomic bombs were not an aberration but a logical next step in a military campaign that accepted tremendous civilian losses while trying to minimize American casualties.

Throughout his analysis Frank puts forth a convincing and thorough military argument, taking issue with historians such as Gar Alperovitz who have vehemently criticized the decision to drop the bomb. The fact that he includes sources from the Japanese lends credibility to his argument as well. However, his final chapter gives the impression that he is seeking “vindication” for the decision-makers during the Pacific War especially in terms of using the atomic bomb. This is where Frank engages in the same moral judgments that he seems to criticize other historians for. Certainly, in light of Frank’s evidence, the atomic bomb seems to have ended the war earlier than the planned invasion of Kyushu with fewer American casualties, but Frank remains narrowly focused on military aspects alone. Although he does grant a chapter to discussing the role diplomacy with the Soviet Union played in the use of the atomic bomb, he maintains the belief that diplomacy only played a secondary role in the decision-making process. Frank asserts in his final chapter that “alternatives to the atomic bombs carried no guarantee that they would end the war or reduce the amount of human death and suffering” (360). In 1945, the atomic bomb, having never played a role in warfare before, made no such guarantee either. Frank offers a comprehensive look at military strategy and thinking during the Pacific War, which adds a valuable component to the history of the atomic bomb. However, his rationale for the use of the atomic bomb must be considered in light of other theories that highlight other lines of reasoning. It is only with an eye for a varied historical account can we begin to offer vindication or villainy. And, due to the fact that many of these historical accounts will never be resolved, perhaps it is fruitless to try to seek that distinction.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Downfall by Richard B. Frank is considered the definitive book on the end of the Pacific War with Japan in World War II. It was one of the sources I used for a history paper I recently wrote for a correspondence course I was taking in Modern American History. It is extensively researched and uses original and secondary sources including recently declassified Japanese governmental documents and sources. He does an excellent job refuting the claims of "Hiroshima revisionists" who argued that the Japanese were willing to give up, that causalities of an invasion wouldn't be as high as some (like Stimson) suggested, and that Nagasaki was not necessary. He shows how all of thee conclusions are inaccurate and gives lots of other factual information about how and why the Japanese waited so long even though their loss was inevitable. Even after the two bombs were dropped some militarists still wanted to force the U.S. to invade so that they could inflict high causalities and use this as leverage to broker a better peace deal they were afraid of losing the imperial government and wanted to save themselves from punishment. Hirohito had to declare surrender since the war council could not or would not give in to surrender. It took two bombs and the declaration of war by the Russians to finally drive Hirohito to do it. It is an extremely informative and important book to remind people of the horrors of the Pacific War: the bloody battles at Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa with harsh tropical conditions, the poor treatment of prisoners of the Japanese, the harsh treatment given to the locals by the occupying Japanese forces, the cruel human experiments carried out by Unit 731, banzai charges and kamikaze attacks-these need to be considered when judging whether the Japanese deserved to be bombed or not. They were given a chance to surrender after the Potsdam Declaration but stubbornly refused to accept.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Frank conclusively shatters a number of myths about the end of the Pacific side of World War II.

First, Japan was NOT ready to accept unconditional surrender, even with the caveat of the preservation of the Japanese throne, until after both bombs were dropped. Frank uses extensive declassified transcripts of Ultra (military) and Magic (diplomatic) U.S. codebreaking to get members of the Japanese war cabinet's own words, or lack thereof, on this issue. Within that is the fact that Japan's attempt to use Russia as an intermediary-ally in negotiations was totally out of tune with reality, so much out of tune that Tokyo actually expected Moscow to honor the full one year's "down time" after abrogating the two countries' neutrality agreement.

Second, the Japanese Army was ramping UP the plans for Keisu-Go, the all-out defense of the Japanese homeland, after the spring firebombings of Tokyo and elsewhere. Top Army brass considered that the U.S. might well try blockade, and thought it had enough kamikazes, midget submarines, etc., to make the U.S pay enough a price for even the blockade that it would settle for a negotiated peace. Again, Frank looks in-depth at Magic and Ultra transcripts to show how much support there was for this.

Third, Frank demonstrates that U.S. casualty fears of an invasion of Kyushu were well-warranted and may even have been understated in some cases.

The determination of the Japanese Empire to resist was well-known by American troops in the Pacific who had seen the Japanese, on average, take 97 percent casualties in many of their defensive actions. A militaristic government was ready to exploit this to the death.

The atomic bomb was therefore used for reasons of the highest seriousness. It was NOT dropped on Hiroshima as a demonstration for Stalin. And, speaking of demonstrations, the fact that it took two atomic bombs on Japan to get it to surrender puts the lie to the idea that a "demonstration" bomb would have been enough to get the Japanese to a non-negotiated surrender with them attempting to hold on to territory.

==

I re-read this 12 years later, and it's as pertinent as ever. Here's additional notes.

Downfall

As for the “let blockade work” folks? Per Chapter 10 (149ff) a formal blockade started in early June, not too long after Okinawa was done. And, we’d been dropping aerial-placed sea mines on Japan’s Inland Sea, and selected spots elsewhere, already in March.

Rather than “unconditional surrender,” the Potsdam Guarantee not only (roundaboutly) guaranteed the Imperial House, it made other Atlantic Charter-based guarantees that were never offered to Germany, enough of them to appal the Aussie prime minister.

But, as of Aug. 9, that wasn’t good enough for many Japanese leaders, who also knew they were running ever lower on military goods and that the morale of many citizens was weakening.

On Aug. 9, in light of Hiroshima and hearing the first word about Soviet war entry, the Imperial War Cabinet met. The Kwantung Army did not know immediately how badly outnumbered it was, especially on armor, but they knew that this part of their self-deception had now vanished. Then, in the middle of the meeting, came first word of Nagasaki.

And YET, half the War Cabinet kept a “four-condition” stance.

The “one condition” stance was surrender based on the Potsdam Declaration, with the assumption its wording meant that, in some way, shape or form, the Emperor stayed.

The “four condition” stance was, well, in light of reality, intransigent. The other three conditions were that Japanese troops would disarm themselves, that Japan would itself oversee any war crimes trials, and that Japan would not be occupied.

(Up to the time of Okinawa, at least, many Japanese military leaders had been “five-condition” persons, though Frank doesn’t talk about this in detail. That fifth condition was that Japan keep at least part of the territory it had gained in the 1895-1914 period. And, Hirohito himself held to this, as well as holding at that time to a refusal to negotiate until Japan won once more. To overview that?

In the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, Japan crushed China. China ceded the Liaotong Peninsula and Taiwan to Japan. But Russia, in part fronting for other European powers, forced Japan to surrender it and the strategic Port Arthur to Russia in exchange for a bigger Chinese indemnity, with Russia also working to supplant Japanese influence in Korea. That set the stage for the Russo-Japanese War. Japan got Korean influence, Port Arthur, and southern half of Sakhalin Island. But Teddy Roosevelt, in reaty negotiations, backed Nicholas II in refusing to pay an indemnity. That was the first incident to raise Japanese suspicions of US plans for Asia.

Japan then, working off its 1902 alliance with Britain, entered World War 1 with the Allies. Its goal, met successfully, was to take German holdings in China and the Pacific. That was the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands, important in World War II. The not quite totally nutters among the Japanese military believed America would be OK with those surrendered to them but Japan keeping everything else up to 1905.

At the end of the book, Frank refutes a number of misconceptions, starting with the “bombs vs invasion” one. Yes, the two bombs did save as many as 500,000 casualties and 100,000 US deaths just for the invasion of Kyushu, and yes, that was mentioned soon after the war, but that wasn’t the primary concern at the time, or at least not the sole primary concern.

Rather, and especially before Trinity and it being known we had a working plutonium bomb, the issue was “blockade and bombardment alone” vs “that plus invasion” on getting Japan to surrender and even more, getting Japan to surrender IN AN ORDERLY FASHION.

Caps-lock is needed on this.

Even after the two bombs AND Hirohito’s rescript, Truman and the brass weren’t 100 percent sure all Japanese troops in Japan would surrender in an orderly fashion and they were VERY unsure about troops in outlying areas of Japanese occupation. In fact, Japanese military leaders were also unsure.

Now, those casualties.

There was no final, formal assessment by US planners after the war was done about what Olympic would have cost. But we know that casualty estimates were going up and Nimitz had already soured on it because of this. The numbers above are reasonable estimates.

And, that’s just US military casualities.

From the start of the war in non-Manchuria parts of China in the last 1930s, Frank shows that Japanese occupation had been killing a million Chinese a year. From 1941 on, it had been killing half a million residents in other occupied countries.

So, every month the war continued was a month, even with the loss of parts of the Empire, for 100,000 or more civilians to die.

Then there is the issue of how many more Japanese would have died.

Frank does a good job of showing how, if we had continued the full blockade, and then intensified disruption of Japanese transportation as planned, a million or more Japanese might have died of malnutrition and starvation.

And, for moralizers? He points out that blockades are wars against civilians, women and children just like either atomic bombs or napalm incendiaries. Period.

Related to that, he notes that within early military moralizers, many, like Ike, have faulty memories. In other cases, like Leahy, their memories might not be faulty, but they might have been guilty of turf wars. Plenty of Army and Navy people “found” a conscience. Army Air Force / Air Force brass, not so much; per Bomber Harris, after all, the ultimate bomb had gotten through.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a 5 Star book for any who believe the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were not needed. It is also for those who wonder why the decision to drop the Bomb was made—or maybe a better way to state it is: why didn’t the leaders stop the process that would result in dropping the bomb. Once you read this book, you will understand.

Some takeaways:

Ketsu-go was designed to kill as many US troops as possible in order to get a negotiated surrender in place of unconditional surrender. It did not matter how many Japanese died in the effort. The military was not going to give up. Ever.

There are many tragic stories of men, women, children killed in the two blasts, as well as the many killed in the fire-bombing of the Japanese cities, AKA the “burn jobs”. What makes them more tragic than the more than 16 million killed and starved in China and elsewhere by the Japanese military? Many millions more would have died if the surrender was not forced. All the Allied POWs would have been killed long before the Japanese military gave up. Sorry, not sorry for dropping the bomb.

After Saipan, Iwo and Okinawa battles showed the willingness to fight on long after defeat was inevitable, the US and Allies did not want to have to fight the same scale of battles in every stronghold of the Japanese Army. Unless the emperor called for surrender, the Japanese forces would have fought to the death.

Truman and the military commanders (except MacArthur) did not want to send our troops into battle with estimates of a million casualties for Operation Olympic and Coronet. Amazing to know that all the Purple Hearts handed out to all our forces since WWII were made in preparation for the Japan invasion.

Frank covers the run up to the bomb in real time, showing what the US commanders knew at any one time. Also what the Japanese were saying and doing. The entry of the Russians was not significant in the surrender because the Japanese leadership had little idea how bad the battle was going as communications, already poor, broke down even as the Soviets made gains.

The moral resistance to killing civilians was worn down and discarded in the European theater. By the end of the war, we used the sledgehammer of airpower at will, with little restraint:

…it is believed that as many as sixty thousand people died (in Dresden), almost all civilians. Two successive American attacks on Dresden’s railway yard followed in which a total of 521 bombers released 1,232 tons of explosives. Their fighter escorts swooped down to strafe roads, packed with civilian refugees, so as to “add to the chaos.” The U.S. raids swelled the toll, but unquestionably the firestorm inflicted by far the greatest slaughter.

On the night after the official end of Clarion, February 23-24, Bomber Command mounted its sole raid of the war on Pforzheim. Coming in low at eight thousand feet, 380 aircraft released 1,825 tons in 22 minutes, leveling 83 percent of the city, a single-raid proportion exceeded only by the Japanese city of Toyama. In the fire and explosions, at least seventeen thousand Germans perished, the third-highest single-raid total for the war in Europe.

Allied bombing killed at least 300,000, and perhaps as many as 593,000, German civilians. Thus, wrote historian Richard Overy, “the most striking moral paradox of the war years was the willingness of ostensibly liberal states to engage in the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians from the air.”

As Max Hastings, a student of Bomber Command, wrote, “At no time after the fall of France did the Allied warlords consider restricting the bomber offensive for moral reasons.” That American civilian leaders—as well as Arnold, Marshall, and Eisenhower—supported or certainly did not intervene to halt the movement to less discriminate attacks is clear, but they did so because of a shared perspective that ultimate Allied security rested not simply on driving the aggressors back behind their borders but on reordering their societies. The completeness of a victory of unconditional surrender comported with the application of unlimited power. Western leaders also made a deliberate choice to exploit advanced technology to preserve the lives of their servicemen. By this decision they did not simply honor ideas, they also aimed to maintain morale to see the war to a decisive finish. The creation of vast air fleets generated tremendous inertial forces mandating that the investment pay off.

In light of all the events that were to follow during the summer of 1945, including the use of atomic bombs, the most fundamental point about the history of bombing in Europe is that it had trampled down every moral barrier to the use of massive aerial firepower (though not poison gas) against legitimate targets, even when it was clear that the destruction of the target would entail death for large numbers of noncombatants.

We knew before the war that Japan’s cities would burn easily and Hamburg and Dresden showed what a firestorm could do:

Army Air Forces officers used European lessons as a catechism for planning raids on Japan, but Japan’s peculiar vulnerability to fire had long been a topic of discussion. General William Mitchell commented publicly in the 1920s that Japan’s teeming cities erected of “paper and wood and other inflammable structures” comprised “the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen... . Incendiary projectiles would burn the cities to the ground in short order.”

Visions became plans in the fall of 1941. As Boeing Flying Fortresses rushed to the Philippines to deter Japanese aggression, General Marshall, in a secret press briefing on November 15, pronounced forthrightly that if war came, “we'll fight mercilessly. Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire.”

Thus, any notion that these policy makers agonized over the question of use or that Truman made a personal and lonely decision to use the bomb misconstrues the decision process. Later, Groves stated that Truman’s “decision was one of noninterference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.” But Truman’s noninterference transpired in the context of a policy that arrived before him carrying the unanimous sanction of his principal advisers on the issue, all of whom save Byrnes had similarly served Roosevelt.

The author relates how the “forces” slated to move from Europe to the Pacific were not going to be ready soon. And all the close coordination and experience would be lost as the men with the highest point total would be released from service:

The most egregious case was the 45th Infantry Division. This veteran and respected National Guard division, having battled since the Sicily landings in July 1943, reported in July that eleven thousand of its enlisted men and six hundred of its officers qualified for separation—83 percent of the division. In the division artillery staff, only one officer would be left: the commander himself.

Readjustment completely fractured the accumulations of well-honed skills, teamwork, cohesion, and esprit that made units effective. The experienced and decorated infantrymen that Marshall called “the first team” departed, as did the seasoned sergeants and corporals that “made a unit dependable in battle.” In short order, the formidable combat efficiency of veteran units, earned at such blood cost, evaporated. General Dwight D. Eisenhower estimated it would take at least six months of further training to restore the redeployed European units to combat readiness.

The war in the Pacific would be completely different from the war in Europe, in the minds of the commanders”

The profoundly different character of fighting in the Pacific also mandated retraining of redeployed units. American soldiers viscerally recognized a difference in their opponents. As one publication, “Battle Experience Against the Japanese,’ noted, if the German was the professional heavy weight prizefighter—fighting was his business and he WAS good at it... the Jap is definitely a lightweight—not a professional but an alley fighter who is not above a thumb in the eye, a knee in the crotch when you’re not looking. Furthermore, he’s a left hander so it’s a style that’s hard to solve until you get on to it.

Army Ground Forces had crafted a training program that was a minimum of eight weeks long and emphasized features that would be peculiar to fighting the Japanese in their Homeland, not least attacks against positions fortified with earth and logs, using flamethrowers and bulldozers and fighting in Japanese villages.

Halsey Hits Japan

Boiling out of Leyte on July 1 came the most potent element of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, designated Task Force 38, unchained from an Okinawa support role and bending knots northward to satisfy Admiral William Halsey’s itch to smite the enemy in his Homeland. Halsey’s armada comprised eight of the big Essex-class carriers and six of the low-slung Independence-class light carriers, altogether embarking almost one thousand planes.

The Navy conducted a series of ship bombardments of shore targets during what proved to be the closing weeks of the war. On July 14, the battleships South Dakota, Indiana, and Massachusetts dumped 802 sixteen-inch shells on Kamaishi. The next day, 860 shells of similar caliber from the Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin rained on Muroran. On July 18, the lowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin, plus the North Carolina and Alabama, loosed 1,207 sixteen-inch shells on Hitachi while the newly arrived British battleship King George V struck a nearby target. This same day, despite threatening weather, carrier planes raided Yokosuka, where the main target was the battleship Nagato. It survived in an unserviceable state to become a postwar target in the atomic-bomb test at Bikini.

According to at least one distinguished American scholar who participated in the occupation, foreign nationals reported that the Japanese finally realized the war was lost upon the visible appearance of Allied warships just off Japan’s shores.


What makes the death of many under the bomb notable when this was going on?

but the Japanese vented the greatest wrath on Superfortress crews. Captured B-29 airmen were shot, bayoneted, decapitated, burned alive, or killed as boiling water was poured over them. Other aircrew members were beaten to death by civilians and shot with bows and arrows and then decapitated. The grisliest episode, however, came when the Western Japan military command gave some medical professors at Kyushu Imperial University eight B-29 crewmen. The professors cut them up alive, in a dirty room with a tin table where students dissected corpses. They drained blood and replaced it with sea water. They cut out lungs, livers, and stomachs. They stopped blood flow in an artery near the heart, to see how long death took. They dug holes in a skull and stuck in a knife into the living brains to see what would happen.

Vastly more numerous than the POWs and the romusha but kindred in suffering were the hundreds of millions of Asians trapped in the effects of Japan’s aggression. While most Americans and Westerners in general carry at least some knowledge of Hitler’s Holocaust—with its mechanical, bureaucratized extermination of six million (of a planned toll of eleven million) Jews—and perhaps an understanding that millions of other Europeans died of systemized neglect or slavery, few recall the costs of the Japanese march of conquest in the 1930s and 1940s. “Asia under the Japanese,” charged Daws, “was a charnel house of atrocities.”

The devastating effects of the Japanese blockade and its disruptions continued to produce what a United Nations report termed “an enormous number” of deaths in China by starvation into 1946, well after hostilities had officially ceased.

The announcement by the emperor finally made it all stop:

The Emperor’s broadcast was followed by an announcement advising the Japanese people that the atomic bomb was the greatest reason for the surrender. In the Hiroshima hospital, now overflowing with hideously afflicted victims of that bomb, Dr. Hachiya stood stunned.
Like others in the room, I had come to attention at the mention of the Emperor’s voice, and for a while we all remained silent and at attention. Darkness clouded my eyes, my teeth chattered, and I felt cold sweat running down my back. ... By degrees people began to whisper and then to talk in low voices until, out of the blue sky, someone shouted: “How can we lose the war!”

Following this outburst, expressions of anger were unleashed.

“Only a coward would back out now!”

“There is a limit to deceiving us!”

“I would rather die than be defeated!”

“What have we been suffering for?”

“Those who died can’t go to heaven in peace now!”

The hospital suddenly turned into an uproar, and there was nothing one could do. Many who had been strong advocates of peace and others who had lost their taste for war following the pika were now shouting for the war to continue. ...

The one word—surrender—had produced a greater shock than the bombing of our city.

[Vheissu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am very impressed by Mr. Frank's research. I will refrain from expressing an opinion about his work until I have finished reading it. In a footnote on page 248, he comments on an alternative theory about the end of the Pacific War and the use of nuclear weapons on Japan, viz.

These memoirs [by Joseph Grew and Henry Stimson] form the foundation for an augment alleging that use of atomic bombs actually delayed the surrender [of Japan] because the U.S. government chose to wait to use them rather than issue such a guarantee [regarding the future of the Imperial dynasty], coupled perhaps with other modifications of unconditional surrender, at some point between around June and August 1945

This happens to be a theory that reflects my own personal views; I will see if Mr. Frank is able to refute it.

I am eager to read this book, but frankly, I find Frank's thesis--at least as summarized by readers here--to be suspect. There is little if any evidence to suggest that nuclear weapons were ever intended by AAF officials to end the War in the Pacific or that the bombings did, in fact, result in the end of the war.

Michael S. Sherry argues persuasively in The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon that the air campaign against Japan was never intended to accomplish anything other than "softening up" the Japanese before a land invasion (p. 236) and that the AAF had no way to know the effectiveness of their bombings relative to that mission. Sherry quotes Lauris Norstad, chief of staff of the 20th Air Force, as stating on September 27, 1944, "Whether or not air bombardment alone can defeat a power like Japan is no concern of ours" (p. 237), as well as a civilian analyst who wrote on June 6, 1945, that "there has been to date no careful study of bombing accuracy from B-29s" (p. 235).

The atomic bombings and the claims that they ended the war were more likely the result of efforts by AAF commanders to rationalize the enormous amounts of money devoted to the bombing (development of the B-29 cost more than the Manhattan Project itself) and to demonstrate the necessity for a large and independent Air Force after the war was over. The notion that the bombings accomplished the surrender of Japan was consistent with the Air Force's self-mythological public relations campaign, not to mention a way for self-righteous Americans to ignore the devastating human toll that area bombing produced. In the end, as John W. Dower (Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan) argue, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Moscow's declaration of war against Japan were the final straws that broke the will of the emperor and Japanese military.

One rationalization for the fire bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 was, as Frank repeats:

The intermixture of modest and medium-sized enterprises with private dwellings [that] played an important role in armament production. The output of a major factory, and there were a great many in Tokyo, depended typically upon a flow of component parts from feeder firms across the city. (p.7)

Sherry offers this:

The feeder system was indeed extensive and commented upon by Japanese as a target whose destruction did serious damage to Japan's war economy and thereby was implicitly justified. But its importance in 1945 was another matter altogether. Japan's industrial economy, like that of every combatant, had undergone a concentration into larger enterprises to achieve economies of scale and reflect accompanying shifts in the location of economic power. Large numbers of men (by conscription) and women (by economic necessity) had been drawn into the factory system, and the 'drift toward oligopoly,' Thomas Havens notes, saw '11,000 small shops forced to close in Tokyo alone by mid-1943.' Doubtless, many of those were in the rapidly collapsing consumer sector, but as the Strategic Bombing Survey later concluded: 'By 1944 the Japanese had almost eliminated home industry in their war economy.' Factories with fewer than 250 workers still played a vital role, but these were hardly backyard drill presses. Simply the well-known dispersal of war industry out of the cities made the cottage industries a less practical source of supply." pp. 285-6)

In any case, Sherry adds, bombing damage to Japan's heavy industry plus the U.S. Navy's stranglehold on imports of raw materials gave both factory and cottage industries few materials for any type of fabrication. (p.286)

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Original September 2015 Review:

Very clear and convincing picture of what happened at the end of WWII in the Pacific Theater. The author gives a very even-handed analysis, taking into account what contemporary evidence at the time would have led leaders of both sides to believe. This would be excellent reading for any one with an interest in WWII. For those interested in the question of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the book offers an excellent analysis while never downplaying the horrors of the atomic bombings (or for that matter the horrors of the blockade and conventional/incendiary bombing).

Updated, September 2018 Review

Apparently three years have passed since I first read this book. My regard for it remains very high.

I will append to my review that I find Frank more persuasive overall than Hasegawa (Racing the Enemy) on the analysis of how important atomic bombs, Soviet entry, and bombing and blockade were on the Japanese decision to surrender. Hasegawa does a great job of fleshing out the Soviet viewpoint, but I believe Frank explains how the interaction of all of them was necessary for an early surrender. I also think Frank takes on alternative history scenarios extremely well, pointing out that these scenarios would most likely included either Soviet occupation of Hokkaido or mass starvation in Japan and among its Asian conquests. The loss of life from these would likely have exceeded the death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It should also be pointed out that many of the lives lost in the alternative scenarios would have been noncombatants outside of Japan.

[Simon Mee · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is good that we confront the decisions of the past, it is good that we account for voices of dissent. However we cannot strip decisions and the dissents from the context they inhabited.

Downfall was explicitly written as a counter the “revisionist” view that the bombing of Japan was militarily unnecessarily and perhaps even a war crime. I’m not going to make a call on that, but there has been a preponderance towards the revisionist view in articles.

There are major discussion points around whether the Japanese were willing to surrender from June 1945 (Frank says they weren’t and were pretty keen on decisive battle) and that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria would have been sufficient (Frank says that’s overstated and would you have liked the Soviets in Hokkaido, knowing that 300,000 Japanese died as prisoners of the Soviet Union?). Despite this, I will focus on the war crime part.

Agents of Mass Death

When you open a book on atomic weapons with the conventional fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, perhaps the most single devastating event of the war, it’s clear you want to make a point:

…central to understanding this period is the basic fact that atomic bombs were not the sole agents of mass death.

In World War Two, the Western Allies propped up the Soviets (morally troubling to Frank) and launched bombing raids over Axis cities:

If Bomber Command could not hit what it would, it would hit what it could. That meant an “exterminating” rain of high explosives and incendiaries on urban centres to destroy civilian “morale” – “a cosmetic word for massacre,” observed John Terraine.

Frank notes that the British, with some squeamishness from the Americans, intended to bomb the civilian areas of Germany to force surrender, i.e. terrorism. The point I take from Frank is that the atomic bombing was not a tremendous leap morally from what the Allied powers had committed themselves to doing anyway.

There has been commentary that 7 of the 8 five-star generals opposed the atomic bombings. That is not covered directly, but Frank pushes back on the contemporaneousness of Eisenhower’s comments. Further, MacArthur was slated to lead the most brutal invasion of the war, knowing from Saipan, Luzon and Okinawa that civilians would be involved as combatants or victims.

A Plethora of Unattractive Options

“I don’t get the problem,” you say. “They are all war crimes.”

…and look, yeah, probably… Frank points out the Allied populations imbibed those beliefs in mass bombardment, but it kind of helps they were on the winning side. Germans imbibed Anti-Semitism in one form or another, and it hardly stands as a criminal defence. At best it is evidence of political will.

Frank alludes to the escalation by the Axis powers at Guernica, Chungking, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry. However, he does ignore the British bombing of villages during the 1920s revolt in Iraq, a pretty notable precursor. As Frank himself acknowledges, Allied leaders often placed a patina of legality over the mass bombardments, suggesting an underlying admission of the wrongness of their actions.

His better point, and the one he emphasises, is that there was a race against time. Death rates among European and Asian (particularly Asian) prisoners and slave labourers were astoundingly high, estimated by Frank as 100,000-250,000 a month:

Any moral assessment of how the Pacific war did or could have ended must consider the fate of these Asian noncombatants and the POWs.

Frank states was fundamental for political purposes to maintain political support and this was enshrined in the goal to end the war against Japan within a year of Germany’s surrender. The prospect of massive casualties on both sides by way of invasion, or starvation of millions via blockade hardly appears more attractive than going to the atomic bomb.

Bombs Away?

I feel Frank:

(a) makes a good point in making the atomic bombings a lot less exceptional from a war crime perspective in the context of the war; but

(b) doesn’t undermine the basic contention that it was a particularly war crimey time, going instead with the position that were clear trade-offs.

The book never really tries with the second point from a legal perspective, and that does hurt it. The trade-offs come down to which number is bigger, and Frank places the blame on Japan’s refusal to surrender being the prime cause of those numbers:

It might appear obvious in hindsight that Japan's leaders should have recognized the impossibility of continuing a modern war of attrition and the clear course was to surrender. The reality, however, is that they chose a different path.

Despite weaknesses, that Frank works within the context of the time, even if imperfectly, should be acknowledged. Atomic bombing another country is never a great choice. The issue is, were there any better ones?

[Jim Pomeroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastically argued and well written. Would wholly recommend this book as part of the large bibliography surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Michael Gerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This exhaustively researched book is arguably the most authoritative popular reference for the subject of the last months of the Second World War against Imperial Japan. Due to its academic hue, it is only recommended read for the most serious student of the subject. I am impressed with the author's presentation of the facts as gleaned from meticulous American code-breaking of the Japanese diplomatic and military codes and the now-accepted thesis that Japan stubbornly refused to end its savagery and surrender until their war leaders, led by the Emperor, were forced to acknowledge the reality of their defeat by the entry of the Soviet Union into the war and the US' use of the atomic bombs.

This book is one of the last nails to the coffin of the myth still being propagated by some Japanese to portray themselves as the victims of the Second World War.

For the record: The Japanese militarists and imperialists were not the victims; they were the AGGRESSORS. They reaped what they sowed.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written and throughly researched account of the end of the war in the Pacific. Much more balanced and convincing than most in this genre.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll start off by saying I am in the "Soviet Invasion Camp" did more to bring Japan to surrender than the atomic bombs did. That being said, Richard B. Frank has written a well researched and convincing argument for why the use of the atomic bombs were not only necessary, but ultimately saved lives. Frank focuses on American intelligence sources (MAGIC and ULTRA intercepts) and goes through how the air campaign against the Japanese mainland progressed in late 1944 until the war ended in August 1945. He also goes in depth on the different US invasion plans for the Japanese home islands and the casualty projections.
Two things that Frank focused on that I thought particularity interesting were that the American incendiary attacks were focused on industry, not civilians; and the possibility of saving not only American lives, but Japanese, Chinese, and Korean lives by ending the war as quickly as possible. I was under the impression that the incendiary attacks against large cities like Tokyo and Yokohama were focused on destruction of civilian homes and lives. Frank goes into the American planning of bombing and how the war industry of Japan was largely spread out in small workshops, rather than being concentrated in large central factories. Incendiary bombing was seen as a way to improve bombing results, with the civilians living around these workshops being collateral damage, not the targets.
Frank also takes time to describe how starvation threatened the Japanese home islands if the US had continued to focus attacking transportation infrastructure. Frank looks briefly at Japanese contingency plans to take more food from conquered areas of China and Korea, leading those people to also face the threat of starvation. Even after the US occupation, General MacArthur had to bring in tons of supplies to prevent widespread starvation in several areas of Japan.
While I feel that Frank may have put more attention and weight to American sources than Japanese sources, I think he brings a convincing counterpoint to many of the cases against dropping the atomic bombs. Definitely worth reading if you've ever been frustrated by the seemingly simple arguments about the use of the atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

[Ooi · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much has been written about the two atomic bombs that were dropped in Japan that one has to wonder if there is anything new that can be added to the narrative. Apparently there is. Richard Frank’s Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire utilizes newly declassified military papers and years of research to disclose the events leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and provoke us to rethink the delicate trichotomy of dropping the bombs, invading the Home Islands and forcing the Japanese to surrender through blockade and diplomatic channels.

The book opens up with a gruelling account of the Tokyo bombing on March 9 and 10. The raid resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths and many others wounded. Frank, who previously wrote another non-fiction Guadalcanal, intentionally started the book by demonstrating the horrible effects of bombing raids and perhaps by doing so, illustrated further destruction in the event of a prolonged campaign even without the use of atomic bombs. As indicated in the introduction, Frank proposes to emphasize the historical context and alternatives at that period to both the American and Japanese sides instead of merely condoning or condemning the employment of Fat Man and Little Boy.

The book then chronologizes the change in command to General Curtis LeMay, the invasion plans of the Home Islands known as Operations Downfall and Olympic, and secret Japanese messages that the American forces managed to intercept through Magic, the cryptanalysis project designed to break enemy’s code. After learning of the massive Japanese build-up in Kyushu and the devastating kamikazes and fierce resistance of the Japanese however, Operation Olympic was thrown in doubt. The plan for land invasion was further reconsidered after President Truman and the top military command learned of the Manhattan Project. Truman did not object that the bombs be used when they are ready, as his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt had decided earlier. The book also provided the basis for selecting Hiroshima as the first target. The city has yet to be bombed previously and given the concentrated population and geography, a more accurate assessment on the effects of the bomb can be done.

Frank examined the traditional and revisionist accounts of the decision to drop the A-bombs. Traditionalists held that the atomic bombs were necessary to end the war while revisionists argue that Japan was already seeking to end the war before the bombs were dropped and hence the United States used the nuclear weapon for political reasons directed at the Soviet Union rather than for military and peaceful purposes. Frank was critical of the latter as he claimed that the existing evidence did not indicate that the Japanese was willing to submit to unconditional surrender prior to the A-bombs. He showed that even though the Foreign Minister and ambassador were seeking a quick end to the war, the Big Six cannot agree. Meanwhile Japanese militants were drawing up plans to engage the Allies in a final encounter, most probably upon their landing at Kyushu. If they fail to dislodge the Allies at the beach, they will resist and attempt to push them back till the last man. Given their encounters with the Japanese armed forces and civilians in Iwo Jima, Okinawa and others, the Allies predicted very high casualties if the battle materializes.

That is not to say Frank is totally supportive of the A-bombs. He was sceptical of the false dichotomy between dropping the atomic bombs and invading Japan. He raised the possibilities that if the Allies had prolong the blockade and bomb railway network, they might be able to force the collapse of the Japanese economy. Then, starvation and unrest could subdue the political will of the Japanese leaders to accept surrender terms. He also hinted that if the Americans had battle the Japanese in Kyushu, high casualty might be able to push the president and military leaders to modify their surrender term. Indeed, a central controversy revolves around whether or not Americans’ refusal to modify unconditional surrender actually prolong the war and make the Japanese unable to accept their proposal. Again, the revisionists claim that if Americans were to modify the surrender term, the Japanese would be able to agree on peace. The book disclosed the Allies’ rationale : Unconditional surrender is not negotiable. It is vital for them to prevent the militants to ever grasp power and start another war. Hence occupation to oversee postwar development would be necessary for them – something the Japanese army cannot agree to. Again, Frank showed that deadlocks such as this impasse render the revisionists’ simplistic calculation less credible. The last few chapters of the book recount the steps leading to the Japanese surrender and the decisive intervention by Emperor Hirohito and assessment of the reality and its alternatives.

Overall this book with its nearly a hundred pages of citations and references is a detailed study on the subject. This book will not convert those who opposed the decision to drop the atomic bombs, which is understandable given the terrible destruction. But at the very least, Frank reminded the readers that the alternatives to the atomic bombs are probably just as ugly, if not more.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

My comments here do not represent a review. I have only read two other books on the subject of WWII in the Pacific, wonderful books by John Dower, and so I am entirely ill equipped to comment on its merit as an account of past events. But I can comment on my sense of the writer's methods, which evokes in me a sense that he has been altogether successful in accomplishing his purpose. Whether his book has withstood critical examination - I can't say.

And what purpose is that? Frank's purpose in writing this account appears to be a conviction that historians/writers who, out of moral convictions, reject or even so much as quibble with Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons to end the war in the Pacific. He attacks these positions in every chapter, and his approach is to examine and evaluate (1) the scope and depth of critics' research into documentary sources, (2) their complete disregard of accepted evidentiary standards and rules of evidence, and (3) the rather narrow-minded evaluations that ignore the scope of an extremely complex set of considerations and uncertainties that confronted decision makers both in Japan and the USA in 1945. As far as I can tell, and I don't intend to sample that vast body of work any more extensively than I already have, Frank demolishes completely the arguments of his opponents in lawyerly fashion - and Frank is a lawyer - as the product of slipshod research and extraordinarily faulty interpretations of the bits and pieces of evidence they adduce.

It's quite refreshing (for me) to read a work of history that derives from technically excellent research. He states and applies his evidentiary standards, explains his acceptance of certain sources and rejection of others, assesses gaps in the historical record, identifies the unknowns that will remain forever unknown, the uncertainties that will likely remain uncertainties throughout all time, and then marshals the evidence he finds credible, even clear and convincing, in an extraordinarily economical manner to render his opponents' assertions laughable, even pitiable, the products of incomplete, selective and uncritical research and sloppy thinking, which don't represent credible facts but rather expressions of moral outrage that attempts to pass as "history" - whatever that may be.

Frank's own variety of moral outrage is quite palpable. It expresses itself in his relentless and unremitting presentation from first page to last of distilled oceans of documentary evidence in the most dispassionate and economical manner that I've encountered since I last watched an episode of "Perry Mason" decades ago.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the 1970s I took a college class on the development and use of the atomic bomb. Part of the subject dealt with the morality of using the bomb on Japan, and what the likely outcomes would have been if we didn't.

That was only 30 years after the end of the war, and since then many documents have been made available, including personal diaries from both the Japanese and U.S. side, and the Emperor's written account, released after his death in 1989.

I was curious what was the result of revisiting the issue. This book deals with the ongoing perception of the war from both sides, and goes into extensive detail on the preparations on both sides for an invasion of Kyushu, scheduled for Nov. 1, 1945. The ending of the war on Aug. 15 precluded that.

It's fascinating to see how the Japanese military accurately forecast the likely landing sites and extensively built up the defenses, including massive numbers of suicide attackers. The U.S. became aware of this build-up because we had broken their codes. As the Japanese poured forces into Kyushu, the enthusiasm for an invasion by the U.S. commanders waned, especially the leaders of the Navy. An Army/Navy clash over the topic in August was only avoided by the bomb and subsequent end of the war.

The Japanese military hungered for a battle on their home territory, reasoning that based on American casualties sustained on Okinawa (70,000 casualties, over 12,000 dead), the Americans would lose their stomach for the fight after the initial battle and seek a negotiated settlement rather than unconditional surrender. It's intriguing to realize that the Japanese leaders might have been correct; forecasts of casualties are notoriously difficult, but based on Okinawa, America may have sustained as many casualties as they had taken in the entire war up to that point. Would the American people have had the stomach for that kind of loss to achieve unconditional surrender? It's an open question.

Anyhow, a fascinating and well-researched revisit of that critical period of time. As a history it reads a little dry because of so much numerical information and textual citations, but for those interested in the end of WWII, it's a compelling read.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Frank has written a totally engaging book on the last six months of WWII in the Pacific; and more specifically, why Japan was NOT getting ready to surrender immediately prior to the atomic bombs being dropped.

Revolving around the entire book are the worries US officials had about the upcoming invasion of the Japanese homeland, Operations Olympic and Coronet. The US correctly surmised that the Japanese military and population would no doubt fight to the death making the approaching invasion an extremely worrisome affair.

Recent history has taken Truman, et.al. to task for dropping the two A-bombs on a country just about to surrender. Frank makes, and proves, the argument that the Japanese were NOT about to surrender. The more militant members of their high command wanted no part of "unconditional surrender," and were hence planning the Ketsu-go (decisive blow) operation prior to the US invasion.

It was only after both A-bombs were dropped that the Emperor realized the futility of continued resistance. Not only that, he, more than his military leaders, considered the millions of Japanese war dead that would occur should the US invade and/or continue their A-bomb attacks.

It's fashionable nowadays to accuse the US of racism in it's decision to use the A-bombs. It should be noted that previous fire bombings of major Japanese cities did far more damage, and killed more civilians than the two A-bombs did. Also, one only needs to look at the tonnage and complete destruction of Dresden, Germany, among other places, the US wrought upon the caucasian Germans. People should note that throughout WWII, over 75 percent of US war material was being directed toward the European theater, while the Pacific front was secondary to defeating Germany.

In the end, many thousands died in the Pacific theater (the Japanese alone killed over 18 million other Asian peoples...don't hear that often, do you?) The two atomic bombs, without a doubt, shortened the war and perversely saved over one million Japanese, and close to one million US servicemen.

[J.S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the subtitle of this book says, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire is about the end of WWII and the Japanese empire, which covers events from (roughly) the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 through the weeks following the dropping of atomic bombs in August. It is NOT a simple history of the events, however, but a detailed examination of results of the events with the ultimate aim of justifying the use of atomic bombs. As such, Frank goes into detail about Japanese plans to defend the Homeland, how they anticipated the American invasion would be on the island of Kyushu, and the extensive preparations to defend it. Their purpose, he shows, was to extract such an enormous price from the Americans that they would sue for peace on terms modified from the “unconditional surrender” demanded by the Allies. He also examines Operation Olympic, the US plan to invade Kyushu with extensive figures on troop strength as well as estimates (from the time and later) on casualties.

Like I said, this is a very detailed book. Frank leans heavily upon evidence from the period (instead of recollections months or years after the fact) to make his point. But do not assume Frank is callous or unfeeling in any way toward the Japanese; his descriptions of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was horrific and sobering. He convincingly disputes myths that the Japanese would have surrendered if only the “unconditional surrender” demand had been modified as well as the idea that the Soviet entry into the war was actually responsible. He also runs through the numbers that suggest other ways might have been more humane (they’re not - by a wide margin!).

This is an excellent book for anyone interested in the debate about the morality of the use of atomic weapons to end the war, and he’s convinced me. In spite of the numbers becoming a bit tedious sometimes, this is probably the most detailed look at what happened and the possible alternatives.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tremendous and well-argued study of the core dynamics of the end of World War II. RF uses a wide variety of sources to assess what US and Japanese leaders knew, perceived, believed, and planned for in the last year of the war. He focuses like a laser on these questions; if you want to read about Okinawa and Iwo Jima you'll have to go elsewhere.

Frank convincingly demonstrates several key points in this book. First, there was no evidence the Japanese leadership (an inner council made up of largely military figures) was ready to surrender in the short or medium term in the summer of 1945, before both the atomic bombings and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Instead, teh Japanese leadership was planning for Ketsu-Go, or a stalwart defense of the southernmost home island of Kyushu. They heavily reinforced this island in order to make it into a giant version of Okinawa: an absolute meat-grinder that would erode US willpower and compel the US to negotiate an end to he war that would prevent an occupation, keep the military clique in power, and let Japan self-disarm (among other concessions).

This was the position of the majority of the Japanese leadership, including the Emperor, until August. There were cracks in this facade, especially some of the civilian leadership who were growing increasingly concerned that the . Some Japanese diplomats made overtures to the SOviet Union and other states to broker a deal that would be something less than unconditional surrender. But these were little more than feelers, and Prime Minister Suzuki explicitly rejected making an offer of unconditional surrender with an exemption for the imperialist institution. Many revisionist historians have argued that this was the deal the US could have reached without having to use the bomb, but by using Magic intelligence intercepts from the time itself, Frank shows this was not the case.

Frank also examines US planning for the invasion of Kyushu and eventually Honshu (Operations Olympic and Coronet) while also covering the strategic bombing campaign and the blockade. He shows that while the United States was rapidly crushing the Japanese economy and killing hundreds of thousands of people in air raids. The US movement toward Operation Olympic was stymied through Magic intercepts in June 1945 that dramatically revised upward the number of Japanese soldiers on Kyushu (nearly a 1-1 ratio with US invading forces) and the likelihood of immense US casualties.

One has to remember that Japan was the secondary theater in WWII. The US people supported unconditional surrender, but they were also growing war-weary, and the US military was heading into a partial demobilization. It did not have unlimited resources to throw at Japan, nor did it have unlimited time. So the combination of these factors made the US leadership become much more skittish about a full-on invasion, which only added to the logic of the bombs. Moreover, US intelligence could see that while Japan had been devastated, it still retained enormous military capacity.

Frank also goes in depth on the Japanese leadership's factions and deliberations to show that the atomic bombings were in fact decisive in prompting them to surrender, and that both bombings were needed (Nagasaki reinforced the point that the US would keep dropping bombs until Japan gave in). The Japanese Supreme Council was internally divided, with some military leaders advocating further resistance through Ketsu-Go and others advocating surrender. The US Secretary of State made an offer of unconditional surrender with a vague promise of maintaining the imperial institution, which left the door open to Japan giving up. Ultimately, the Emperor made his intentions known to the Cabinet that he wanted to take this offer (until then he had been a de facto hardliner). This was decisive in getting the militarists to give in (although not without some coup plotting!), and the Emperor's public message of surrender critically helped get all the far-flung forces of the Japanese Imperial military to give up as well, obviating the possibility of holdout insurgencies across the Pacific.

Frank understands that there are no easy answer in the atomic bomb debate. The urge of the revisionists to reconsider the bombing is understandable, but they stretch the evidence about why the bomb was dropped and why it was probably necessary to do so to end the war, at least in the short term. The evidence from the time period that the bombing was about intimidating Russia is thin; that's largely reading the Cold War back into WWII. The truths about the A-bombs are that A. they were less a decision, thoroughly debated by Truman's Cabinet, and more the end point of a strategy of total pressure against Japan and B. They were dropped for the reason US leaders said they were dropped: to end the war as fast and decisively as possible and C. They actually had that effect, although not in isolation from Soviet intervention, blockade, strategic bombing, etc.

The moral truth of the atomic bombings is that they were a means that justified the ends, especially in hindsight. Unconditional surrender was the correct policy, and it enabled the US to root out Japanese militarism and put the . There was not going to be a clean end to this war; hundreds of thousands were going to suffer whether the war ended through blockade, domestic uprising, continued strategic bombing, invasion, etc, or some combination of these things. Frank notes that every day the war went on, thousands of innocent people (including US POWs) in the Japanese empire were dying. Furthermore, the US still had not thoroughly bombed the railway system in Japan; that was their next step for late 1946, and it would have caused a terrible famine in Japan.

In short, this book strengthened my impression that there was no real alternative, no clever way out of this war, besides the dropping of the atomic bombs, however horrific these acts were. The book is also a shocking testament to the horrors of total war between modern industrial powers.

[Al Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meticulously researched book on the end of Japan and the use of the atomic bomb, Sheds a lot of light on a much debated topic, with as much information as currently available, (records of the Kwantung Army, while seized by the Soviets, at the date of writing had still not been released)

Author draws the conclusion that use of both atomic bombs were justified, though all the evidence leads to the opposite conclusion.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

I realized through reading this book how little I really knew about the War in the Pacific during WWII. The book focuses on what brought the war with Japan to an end and does ultimately defend the use of the atomic bombs as convincing the Japanese to end the war. Until the very end, the Japanese leadership was very hawkish and wanted to continue the war. Even as they faced the homeland being invaded by the Americans, the leadership was largely convinced they would repulse the invasion and make the Americans pay dearly for the attempt - which would lead to the Americans to beg to end the war. The leadership really embraced an idea that every Japanese man, woman and child should be willing to kill and die for the homeland. They were preparing for the invasion by trying to convince all citizens that suicide attacks would be honorable but surrender never would be. The book attempts to go back in time to talk about what the various leaders (American and Japanese) knew and when they knew it. Frank dismisses many of the later evaluations of the war which criticize the decisions the American leadership made. He presents a case that there were many things they didn't know, but they were intercepting many diplomatic and military communications and so knew a great deal about the Japanese commitment to continue fighting as long as it took. They had almost no evidence that any in the Japanese leadership were interested in negotiation or surrender. And they certainly knew what price they had already paid to bring the war to Japan's shores and could see an invasion of the homeland would be even more costly. So the use of atomic weapons, as horrible as they were, still probably saved lives compared to the fighting that would have occurred, the death of allied POWs which probably would have happened, the continued death of civilians through aerial bombardment, the continued deaths of other Asians in Japanese captivity, and the real threat of famine which might have occurred.

[Andrew Tollemache · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oustanding book that when coupled with "Racing the Enemy" and Max Hasting's "Retribution" gives one the most comprehensive understanding of how in the summer of 1945 both the US and Japanese governments were on a course that made the dropping of the two atomic bombs almost inevitable. As a friend of mine put it, this book reads most like a mystery novel where the author explores the motivations, actions and timelines of the key protagonists on an almost day by day basis.
Frank's book does a masterful job demolishing some widely held beliefs about the end of the War in the Pacific particularly the notions that sprung up decades after the war that Japan was actively seeking to end the war and accede to the Allies demands and that the bombs were not needed (and were probable war crimes. Frank also details how not even the entry of the Soviets into the war against Japan which ended any Japanes hope for using Stalin as a honest broker in negotiations with the US and UK was enough to break the hold of the Big 6 military/political leaders who got Japan into the war and held power in the summer of 1945.
While on paper the Japanese were thoroughly defeated to the point US planners worried that if the Japanese held out too long it would be impossible to feed the Japanese in any potential occupation. Every month the war continued meant an average of 200K people, mostly civilians, would die in China and Japan. Even with all thaat and the addition of the Red Army plowing through the Japanese army in China, the Big 6 thought by sacrificing the southern home island of Hyushu they would bleed the US enough to force a tolerable peace.

[Paul Kuhn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every August the world commemorates the Atomic bomb droppings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and just about as often we are treated to disagreements over whether the Atomic bomb droppings were justified . Most critiques center on the belief that the Japanese were willing to surrender and were even making an attempt to surrender . Other makes the claim that the claim of American losses were highly exaggerated. Still another group likes to claim that it was the Soviet Unions entering of the war that caused the Japanese to surrender and not the Atomic Bomb droppings .

First the diplomatic overtures Japan made weren't very serious. There would be no surrender but an Armistice. Japan would not be occupied. no war crimes. The Japanese military would not be touched. Even their occupation forces could stay until they were de-colonized. Other diplomats tried but weren't officially recognized . They were freelancers with no official government recognition.

Also it's important to understand that the Japanese decision makers were six men almost all had a military background and were loathe to surrender.

Where this book makes its strongest case for the necessity of the Atomic bomb droppings was an analysis of the Japanese Army as it prepared to fight the Americans . While the Japanese Army lacked many resources it certainly had the ability to fight a defensive battle. It had well trained and disciplined men. They were fighting on their home turf. They were fanatical in their devotion. Seeing the number of men. The equipment they possessed the number of Kamikaze aircraft and boats. It's obvious that the American military would have suffered losses in the tens of Thousands .

I don't think you cannot read this and not come to the conclusion that dropping of the Atomic bombs was justified.

[Alan Kaplan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the defeat of Imperial Japan in WW II, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb.
Over the years, revisionist historians have tried to state that we never should have dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. They state that Japan was already defeated, and would have surrendered anyway. Some historians state that the only reason to drop the bomb was to demonstrate its capability to the Russians at the beginning of the Cold War. Frank's debunks these theories. Japan was not defeated. They were building an armada of suicide bombers and boats. They had huge armies in China and Southeast Asia who were not defeated. The Japanese Imperial Army and Navy wished to fight to the last man. They had enlisted the entire civilian population to fight an expected American invasion. Casualties on both sides would have been huge. Also due to intensive American bombing and a naval blockade, the Japaneses infrastructure was in tatters. Without the atomic bomb, hundreds of thousands Japanese would have died of starvation. The death toll at Hiroshima was 100,000 and the death toll of Nagasaki was 25,000. 125,000 Japanese were killed so that millions would be saved. Even with those number, Emperor Hirohito had to push hard for surrender.
On a side note, the fire bombing by America on Tokyo killed 100,000 in one night of terror. Tokyo was built of wood and paper and when napalm was dropped, an inferno was begun. As William T. Sherman said, "War is Hell."

[Maduck831 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense, well researched, a book to reference and come back to. I'm curious about counter points to this book and his conclusions, etc.

A rough rule of thumb is that to ensure success at a reasonable cost the attacker should outnumber the defender three to one. (135)

This sortie and another that followed it forced the Japanese to reroute ships, initiate convoying, and abandon the practice of anchoring outside ports. (155)

Two factors channeled their deliberations: There would be few bombs and thus few targets deemed worthy of such weapons. (254)

Two words became fixed to the event: pika and don - pika meaning a glitter, sparkle, or bright flash of light; don meaning a boom or loud sound. (264)

The awed Soviets called such suicide attackers smertniks. (322)

MacArthur, in one of his finest hours, silenced them by observing that the Allies had just tried and executed Imperial Army commanders of their responsibilities in "ill treatment, including starvation" of American prisoners of war; with the situation reversed, America had to do better. (352)

Those Japanese noncombatants, however, held no stronger right not to be slaughtered than did the vast numbers of Chinese and other Asian noncombatants, the Japanese noncombatants in Soviet captivity in Asia, or the Japanese noncombatants (not to mention Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees) who would have perished of starvation and disease in final agony of the blockade. (360)

[Varun Jha · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Covers the Pacific Theatre at the end of WW2.

In part it's a book by a historian for other historians. There's a lot of detail that I doubt a layman could make sense of. On the other hand, I hadn't read any WW2 history prior to this, and despite picking up at basically the final chapter of WW2, I didn't feel lost, and honestly I find that quite impressive.


From what the US Policy makers actually thought about Pacific, to how those thoughts changed during the war, which events caused which changes, the narrative is very well established. There is perspective from the US Military, Japanese Military, Japanese and US leadership, and Diplomacy.

I think everyone should read at least the first chapter of the book. It's a detailed and a gruesome description of the night of March 9, 1945 when the Tokyo Firebombing raid happened. I think it works wonderfully to dispel the illusion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the worst atrocities of the war.

It sets a wrong precedent, the rest of the book is nothing like the 1st chapter, so if you like the first chapter, it doesn't mean that you want to read the entire book. But the book is not trying to be a picture of trauma that people faced at the end of WW2. It simply tried to show how the Imperial Japanese Empire fell at the end of WW2.

But the picture those first 17 pages paint, I believe there are entire books out there that do not come close to the weight of those pages.

[Evan Þ. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frank juxtaposes American planning for the invasion of Japan with Japanese defense plans and diplomatic moves, showing how things kept building upon themselves until the atomic bomb changed the situation. And then, he tells the diplomatic moves between the bombing and the surrender being made effective. It's a strong history, eye-opening on several points.

Several details were new to me - such as how kamikazis were plausibly the best-available tactical move for Japan (though horrifying), and how many Japanese officers remained so unreconciled to the surrender that they planned to kamikazi the American fleet when they sailed into Tokyo Bay to formally accept the surrender (before being foiled by other officers who immobilized their planes).

But Frank's biggest argument is that, without the atomic bomb, Japan might really have forced America to more lenient terms out of fear an invasion would cause politically-unsustainable casualties. He's convinced me such high casualties were very possible, and were convincing Admiral Nimitz and other high military officers to oppose an invasion. What would that have led to? Frank's conclusion doesn't convince me - but I can't exclude it.

So, all in all, I consider this one of the best sort of histories: it's both given me new details and opened my mind to a new perspective.

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving this book 5 stars, not because it's edge-of-your-seat thrilling, but based on what it's supposed to be.

Downfall is the historically-accurate, highly-detailed nonfiction story of the last months of the Japanese Empire during WWII. The author goes into meticulous detail of the XXI Bomber Command's air offensive, the American invasion plans and Japanese defense plans for the home islands. It details the specifics of the diplomatic front, who sent what telegram to whom, containing which details, and why they matter.

This is not an easy read. It's not for even most history buffs. It's for those studying specifically the events of WWII in the Pacific theater from roughly February - September, 1945. It's not supposed to be exciting or a page-turner. The real underlying message from the book is the complete, irrefutable fact the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fundamentally necessary in order to end WWII as quickly as possible, with ironically, as few casualties as possible. Because as the author demonstrates though facts, not opinions, the Japanese were ready if not eager to meet the Americans on the invasion beaches of the home islands for one climatic, bloody battle that thankfully never happened.

[Chris S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew - that took nearly 2 months but I'm finally done! An extremely comprehensive treatment of the surrender of Japan, approaching the issue from directions I never would've conceived of beforehand. The arguments Frank deploys are well-supported and drawn from a broad swath of evidence - I must admit they've overturned my previous ideas regarding the likelihood of Japanese surrender pre-atomic bombing.

The book is very detailed, and it takes a degree of patience (I felt myself getting bogged down at many instances) to go through all the statistics and seemingly inconsequential points (e.g. the exact distribution of Japanese divisions on Kyushu in preparation for the US invasion). Having gone through them, however, one is rewarded with a greater intuition for how military planners might have dealt with these issues in the moment.

If one is looking for definite answers regarding what could have occurred at the end of the Pacific War, they will not find them here - one instead finds a set of measured, supported conclusions that do not step off into the realm of over-speculation.

[George Kasnic · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book makes cogent arguments concerning the use of the atomic bombs at the end of WWII. The author goes to great pains to frame his analysis in the perspective of the decision makers of the time, which is often lost to poor historians who attempt to overlay current contemporary thought/morals on the reasoning (separate from the actions) of decision-makers.

I was disappointed because I expected this book to focus on operations Olympic and Coronet, the components of Operation Downfall, rather than the atomic bomb decision. This was not the case. The possible outcomes and costs of Olympic and Coronet, especially Olympic are addressed in support of the analysis of the reasoning of both allied (US, mainly) and Japanese decision makers, but there is no real gritty level of detail on this, and that is the book I wanted to read. That is not this book.

If you want an analysis of the a-bomb decision and supporting factors, this is your read; if you are looking for detailed insight into Operations Olympic and Coronet, this is not the book