HEADLINE: THE LONGEST DAY - 'We could be digging a hole for ourselves. It's always possible to create a disaster'
SOURCE: MATP
BYLINE: Tony Maniaty
As US forces mass against Iraq, Tony Maniaty considers the lessons of the biggest invasion ever planned
UNPREDICTABLE weather. The risk of chemical and biological warfare. A fanatical and potentially suicidal enemy. A harsh, unfriendly landscape. Tens of thousands of US troops massing, preparing to topple an evil regime. A confusing array of military options. Competing strategic and political interests. No guarantee of immediate victory.
Iraq in 2003? Not remotely close. Japan, 1945. "You have to look back to Operation Downfall to find something that's potentially this big," says historian Thomas B. Allen, referring to the planned US invasion of the Japanese mainland in late 1945 and early 1946.
Washington-based Allen, co-author of Codename Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan, argues that hopes of a quick victory in Iraq may be as misplaced as they would have been in Japan.
"Perhaps the evolution of hi-tech weapons changes the equation somewhat," he says, "but fundamentally the issue is the same: to invade, you need overwhelming force and a determination to deal with people defending their land.
"The [US] media is calling this Gulf War II, forgetting that there's no comparison between pushing Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and actually invading Iraq."
As the US braces itself for another war, gathering up to 250,000 troops in the Gulf region, military strategists and historians still can't decide whether the even bigger force of Downfall -- billed as the largest invasion ever -- would have ended World War II decisively, or become, in the words of one Marine Corps researcher, "the biggest bloodbath in American history".
Some also wonder if the Pentagon, in its eagerness to topple Saddam Hussein, is paying attention to its own history. On one point, virtually all agree: in the yellowing, once-classified but never-used plans for Operation Downfall, even the lowest projections of US combat deaths are enough to scare the camouflaged pants off today's toughest hawks.
"To military people these days," says historian Dennis Giangreco, "the numbers are absolutely mind-boggling."
THE invasion was to begin on November 1, 1945. It would involve 5 million men -- almost half the entire American military, plus a British Commonwealth infantry force including one battle-hardened division of Australians.
The US demanded Japan's total defeat; the war had been too long and painful to risk Japanese revival.
The first assault, Operation Olympic, would require 14 divisions of US soldiers and marines go ashore on heavily fortified Kyushu, southernmost of Japan's home islands. This would be followed -- in the event Japan didn't succumb -- by Operation Coronet, a spring invasion of the vast Kanto Plain stretching to Tokyo and Yokohama, home to one-sixth of Japan's population.
Eager for victory, president Harry Truman had approved the B-29 Superfortress incendiary bombing of Tokyo. Faced with 94,000 deaths in a single night, major-general Curtis LeMay answered his critics: "We're at war with Japan. Would you rather have Americans killed?"
There were plans for heavier bombing to force a Japanese surrender.
"The airpower boys all say, 'Don't worry, we can pulverise Baghdad'," Allen says. "Well, in Japan, we'd already devastated Tokyo from the air and there was no indication of surrender.
"And look at the British in the Blitz. And Dresden."
Blanket bombing hadn't worked in European theatres, just as it would not work three decades later in Vietnam.
Careful analogy over long timeframes is a powerful tool for military historians, revealing both patterns and lessons. The war rhetoric on Japan in 1945, for example, sounds eerily similar to the media spin presently emanating from Washington and Baghdad.
Operation Downfall was meant to strike "the final blow" against what the US called "an evil regime", to end what Emperor Hirohito and the ruling military elite described, in Japanese parlance, as a "holy war". As Japan embraced a suicidal policy of denial, a People's Volunteer Army wielded bamboo spears, pitchforks and axes to fight off the Allied invaders. The propaganda too has a familiar ring. "The barbaric tribe of Americans," wrote a Tokyo magazine, "are devils in human skin."
As with Iraq now, the issue for Washington in 1945 was not whether to crush the regime in Japan, but how. Nobody could envisage a clean end.
Japan still had 3 million soldiers. Its plan to repel the Allied invaders -- Ketsu-Go, Operation Decision -- also called for the sacrifice of up to 25million civilian defenders.
"Please do not grieve for me, mother," one flier wrote, "it will be glorious to die in action."
Kamikaze suicide pilots would slam into US warships and troop carriers.
"The great debate was whether to go in, or stand off and bomb Japan to death," says historian John Ray Skates, a former US Army Reserve colonel and author of The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb.
"Truman was queasy about the invasion."
It's not hard to see why. The army chief-of-staff, general George Marshall, had informed him it would cost at least 250,000 American lives "as well as an equal number of the enemy". In Japan's teeming cities, territory would be gained street by street, from one doorway to the next.
WHAT many historians find disturbing about the Iraq invasion is how little weight is given to potential US casualties.
"The failure to discuss casualties is dominating this scenario, whereas it's all that was ever discussed about going into Japan," Allen says. "Right now I don't think there's an official piece of paper anywhere in Washington that's got a figure on it."
Strategy experts such as Michael O'Hanlon of the Washington-based Brookings Institution provide their own calculations.
"Only the Iraqi Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard can be expected to fight hard -- and they might, based on their Gulf War record," he says. "They number around 100,000 troops."
O'Hanlon told a recent congressional committee the fighting could get "rather lethal" and US combat losses could exceed 1000 and "perhaps even approach 5000", in contrast to the 300 who died during the 1991 Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm.
Iraqi troop losses could reach 50,000, O'Hanlon says. Even so, he argues: "This would not be another Korea or Vietnam."
Back in 1945, the casualty projections for Operation Downfall varied enormously, from as low as 30,000 US combat deaths to as high as 1,000,000. (By comparison, 58,000 US troops died in Vietnam.)
In 1945, to ensure the go-ahead from Washington, US Pacific forces commander General Douglas MacArthur played down the risks; in military history circles, the potential toll is still hotly debated. Using data from earlier Pacific battles, Allen and co-writer Norman Polmar settle on 147,500 Americans killed and 343,000 wounded. Kyushu, they declare, would have been the bloodiest battle in history.
In Japanese warfare, the traditional concept of bushido required warriors to die in battle rather than face the shame of surrender -- as incomprehensible to US troops in 1945 as suicidal terrorism is to most Westerners today.
Given the Islamic fanaticism that produced the horrors of September 11, could the same values apply in Iraq? The mind-set of Iraqi soldiers and civilians remains a big unknown.
"You could easily get the same situation we had in the invasion of Europe, where you had extremely bloody conflict [with the Germans] going on in one area and not far away, mass surrenders taking place," says Dennis Giangreco, co-author of Delta: America's Elite Counterterrorist Force. "This is the most likely scenario in Iraq, whereas in Japan there was a determination in the armed forces to go all the way."
Richard Frank, author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, agrees. "As in Japan," he says, "the nightmare scenario is that there's no organised capitulation."
But he doubts if many Iraqis will lay down their lives for Hussein. "His regime hasn't instilled the fanaticism in the population that, say, North Korea has."
Gregory Urwin, military history professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, remains cautious of the US intelligence view that Hussein is widely unpopular in Iraq, and that the Iraqi population will happily rise against him.
"A lot of our intelligence comes from refugees from his regime," he says. "It's like the negative views we got on Castro from Cuban exiles, and on that basis we launched into the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
"We could be digging a hole for ourselves. It's always possible to create a disaster."
IN the event, Operation Downfall -- enormous in scale and risks -- was overtaken by a more abrupt and shocking endgame. On August 6, 1945, 11 weeks before General MacArthur's planned X-Day, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing about 140,000 people.
Truman warned: "If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on earth."
Tokyo refused to give in. Another bomb hit Nagasaki. In a scratchy radio broadcast, the Emperor finally bowed to US supremacy, noting the "trends of the world were not advantageous to us". It was the first time most Japanese had ever heard his voice.
"There's the parallel with Japan of absolute cultural chasm," Allen says. "With the European enemies our connection was total. We had a common heritage. With Japan, we discovered the protocol of surrender was, simply, that there wasn't one.
"What the protocols of surrender for Iraq are, we don't know."
Tony Maniaty is a regular contributor to The Australian.
Heap of hearts
WITH Japan's surrender, notes historian Dennis Giangreco, the US military was left with "the most wonderful of all its surpluses": 495,000 unused Purple Hearts, the medal awarded for "wounds received as a result of enemy action".
The medals had been hurriedly produced by a Philadelphia mint for the horrendous casualties expected in Operation Downfall.
US engagements in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere has reduced the decades-old inventory substantially, but according to Giangreco, most US troops wounded in any Iraq conflict will still receive their Purple Heart from the stocks originally minted for the invasion of Japan.
by Editor on February 25, 2003 at 2:48 PM