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Admiral Nimitz has just announced that Japanese suicide planes have heavily damaged an American hospital ship. The mercy ship when attacked was evacuating wounded from bloody Okinawa. 29 men aboard were killed. 33 others were wounded. The American hospital ship was the USS Comfort.

Kirk Saduski

Spring and early summer, 1945. Okinawa is the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater. The scope of loss is staggering. 12,000 Americans and 150,000 civilians are killed. And in Japan, American planes are firebombing Tokyo leaving scores dead. A plan is approved for a two-phase invasion of Japan. Code name, Downfall. President Truman wrote in his diary, I have to decide the Japanese strategy. Shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade? That is my hardest decision to date. Truman did not mention the atomic bomb. Rich Frank joins us today for the entire episode. He's a historian and the author of "Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire" and "Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War." Rich, thank you for joining Don and me.

Richard Frank

Well, thank you for having me.

Kirk Saduski

Okinawa, tell us about Okinawa. It's the largest battle in the Pacific, well least the Pacific War, certainly. But tell us about Okinawa. Who was involved and what was the strategic purpose?

Richard Frank

Well, in the step-by-step advance across the Pacific, the key issue was always finding air bases and making your next target within range of air bases you held, especially within fighter plane range. And when the plans came up for an invasion of Japan, and the first phase was calculated to be going to Kyushu, so the southernmost of the main Japanese home islands, the obvious place that was large enough to sustain a large number of aircraft, a large number of air airfields was Okinawa. It was very obvious. In fact, it was extremely obvious to the Japanese that that was what was going to be the very likely American target. And in early January, 1945, the Japanese already figure that the Americans will come to Okinawa by roughly midyear, turned out to be April to June. And not only that, what the Japanese did was they just got a set of dividers and set 'em for American fighter plane range and just ran an arc from Okinawa. And of course that showed that the places that the Americans could come to after they took Okinawa would be either either Southern Kyushu or Shikoku, the fourth of the main home islands. But it was obvious that Southern Kyushu offered a lot more air base sites than Shikoku and better landing beaches. So the Japanese knew literally from January, 1945, what the Americans most likely are gonna go to Okinawa in midyear. And then on to Kyushu. The other problem with Kyushu was are the Americans gonna put their air bases on mountaintops or flat ground? Well, if they're gonna put them on flat ground, and you look at a topographical map of southern Kyushu, out pops the obvious invasion sites, and of course the Japanese, they massed forces there exactly where we planned to land.

Kirk Saduski

Okinawa was one of the few battles, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, where it was a combined Army-Marine force. Obviously the Navy too, we're gonna get to the Navy, but both the Army and the Marines were key, were essential. Describe that. How did the two services get along and why did it require both Marines and US Army?

Richard Frank

Well, Okinawa was a large enough island. It was gonna require more than one corps. A corps usually is like three divisions or something like that. I think we eventually put seven on the island and we have another divisional reserve, part of which comes in at the very, very end of the campaign, an Army sized unit was gonna be commanded by an Army general. In this case Buckner. And his command was called the 10th Army. And they had both Army divisions and Marine divisions for this operation because it was so huge. I mean, it was the biggest single landing in the Pacific. The actual relations of the Army and the Marine Corps generally, the lower level you got, the better the relations. And in operations, like on Guam, the Army and the Marines were just exemplary in their cooperation. On Saipan, exactly the opposite. On Okinawa, the big issue became when the fighting started, and it turned out the Japanese had abandoned the larger part of the island to dig in on high ground on the southern part of the island to conduct this very, very costly defensive battle of attrition. The Marines wanted to conduct an amphibious landing behind the Japanese lines to break open the operation. And Buckner refused to do so, which led to a lot of friction. And at the same time, of course, the kamikazes were reigning down on the fleet offshore. And that was causing great agitation by Admiral Nimitz, the naval commander in the Pacific, as he was losing so many ships and he wanted the Okinawa operation to move on quickly to conclusion.

Kirk Saduski

Okinawa is, as you said, it's the largest Pacific campaign and there's a lot of candidates for this, but maybe just the most horrific in many ways. Don, you've written about, your book "D-Day in the Pacific." Compare Okinawa and how was it different from Tarawa or Saipan or Peleliu?

Donald Miller

Well, usually what made these battles different was the terrain. A coral island that's Tarawa, you know, where it's a forested island like New Guinea or something like that. Okinawa is kinda like Pennsylvania. It's hilly, it's got rocky protuberances, it's got rugged beaches, cliffs, things like that. It's a mixed environment. Controlling high ground on Okinawa is really, really important in this battle. Basically, it's set up in such a way that there's Surrey Castle here, this gigantic fortification, almost medieval like extended from shore to shore with all kinds of underground tunnels, almost in a so-called impregnable position. And they had pretty good artillery. Eugene Sledge does a fantastic job about artillery and the helplessness that the troops feel under artillery. The two sides are very close together. The Marines and the Army both figure out a way to get to these guns. They're almost human suicide missions. To get into the inter stasis between the guns and come up behind them and capture them, it was exceedingly difficult. And the battle swayed back and forth, back and forth. The Marines would take a position, hold it for like 17 hours, and then they get run off and then they go back at it again. When you're teaching or trying to do it in a film or write about it, it can seem very repetitious. It was anything but to these guys. I mean, the strategy becomes bleed them, slow down their advance, but mostly bleed them because you can break their will. The kind of bastardization of the Bushido code that the military put together in the 30s argued that the battle could be won by spirit rather than technology that the Americans were soft and materialistic. Eventually with enough pressure, they'll flinch, they'll crack. That's kind of the idea that the soldiers go, and you gotta take a lot of guys with you. Like in Iwo Jima, the commander said, you know, if you're gonna go, you gotta take about 10 Americans.

Kirk Saduski

The way you're describing Okinawa, you could be describing Verdun.

Donald Miller

It is, you know, incredibly like that. Bill Manchester does a really good job, I think in his book at capturing the sagging morale among the troops with this incessant fighting, you know, every hour. It never stopped. It never stopped. And where do you put your garbage? The sanitation problem was unbelievable. With the enemy so close together, and you're both fighting for national survival, you're fighting an enemy that's not gonna surrender, considers you, and I think the Marines had figured this out by now, that you know, they don't respect their prisoners because it's a sign of weakness to surrender.

Richard Frank

One of the most horrific scenes that Sledge describes is in this inundated area where everything is mud and pools and puddles. If a rain fell down on one of these hillsides and tumbled down, he'd end up with all these rising maggots all over him. It had been crawling around in the shallow graves or even the unburied dead. That scene I think is one of the most searing in a book that has lots of them. But it describes that, the other thing I would add here is that the Japanese very cleverly made their defensive positions interlocking. So to attempt to attack one was made extremely difficult because of crossfire you could get from one or two or three or four others, which made any sort of an attack extraordinarily difficult. And if you're attacking to try to take out a section of the line, if any part of the attack fails, then the rest of it may fail also. And this repetition, which was very unusual in our experience in the Pacific War, of taking high ground and then being kicked off of it and having to re-fight to get up and do it again.

Donald Miller

Once you had it, you had it, you know, a lot of the fighting was done at night too, and that was unnerving to have the Japanese come in behind you just jumping your hole, you're one-on-one, separated maybe by a buddy, six, seven feet away. It's down to that personal level.

Richard Frank

The other thing about Okinawa, which is so grim and so incredibly tragic, is that the Okinawan people are ethnically different from the Japanese people. And given the general attitudes of the Japanese towards all other people, the Okinawans were looked down upon and were quite aware of that fact. The Japanese had instilled in the population the notion that if the Americans were to come, that a feature of the American offensive attack on Okinawa would be to slaughter the civilians without mercy. And so they believe that falling into the hands of the Americans would be equivalent to committing suicide. And the Okinawans to this day blame the Japanese for the fact that because so many of those Okinawans were indoctrinated that way, they committed suicide. Large numbers of 'em attempted to retreat with the Japanese forces, which then left them in the area where American artillery was falling or other fire. And so something on the order of 150,000 Okinawan civilians were killed in the battle on Okinawa. And in some ways, the Japanese were also on Okinawa, were partially trying out what they were going to implement for the invasion of the home islands. They had mobilized, particularly younger Okinawans, boys and girls into what we would call combat support units and then eventually combat units to fight the Americans. The whole thing, the horror of the whole thing, both in terms of all the military dimensions, but even more so, the notion that you'll be fighting amid this hostile population seemed like, and the Japanese intended to seem like this incredibly nightmarish depiction of what getting into the home islands was going to be like.

Kirk Saduski

Let's stay with that for a minute. Did it have that kind of an impact on the American Military Chiefs, Secretary Stimson? What impact, did it have the desired impact, I should say, strategically?

Richard Frank

Right. It did, probably the single most significant impact in terms of the higher level command was on Admiral Nimitz, who was commander in chief for the Pacific. He was the senior naval officer in the Pacific at this time. Douglas MacArthur was the senior Army officer in the Pacific. And they had tentatively authorized in April this plan for what we call Operation Olympic to go into Kyushu on the target date, the 1st of November, 1945. And Nimitz initially in the beginning months of '45, had agreed that he would support going into Kyushu. Of course, from his perspective, the Army wanted to do a two-phase invasion, go to Kyushu to get air bases there, then to support a landing around the Kanto Plain, the Tokyo region. And Nimitz had signed on at least initially to go into Kyushu. He was thinking about tightening the blockade and bombardment strategy, not the two phase invasion. But after two months of Okinawa, he sends what we call a back channel message to Admiral King, who's the senior naval officer in Washington. And Nimitz says, I can no longer support any invasion of the Japanese home islands. He's looking at both what's going on in the ground and also with the kamikaze effort. So King, who I think we know now and can say with great confidence, had been adamant from the very beginning when they were contemplating the end game against Japan, that there absolutely positively should be no invasion of the Japanese home islands. Because the Navy had studied war with Japan, particularly from 1906, and particularly between the wars. And one of the most bedrock convictions that the Navy had hit upon that they taught at the Naval War College was that it was absolute folly to attempt an American invasion of Japanese homeland because it produced politically unacceptable casualties. But the Army was still hell bent on the invasion strategy. So Admiral King, I think very clearly was always maneuvering in 1945 to kill any invasion of the Japanese home islands. And Okinawa was by converting Nimitz, then gave him an additional card.

Kirk Saduski

One of the tactics that the Japanese used was the so-called kamikaze flights. They had initially, they had introduced that tactic back in 1944 in at Leyte Gulf and I think Luzon, they really use it here. And I'll ask both you guys to describe, there's a lot to talk about. It's obviously these are suicide bombers, but how were they used strategically, tactically, how were they used? But also talk about, I'll say the philosophy behind kamikaze, if I can term it that.

Donald Miller

Terror in all its manifestations, fear, anxiety. I mean, guys just went crazy on the destroyer pickets. I mean, imagine, you know, manning a gun and a plane's coming at you, it's 200 yards away and it's not gonna stop. He's gonna kill himself. He's gonna kill you. I mean, these are guided missiles, better than guided missiles. You can maneuver around guns, change course hit the best part of the aircraft carrier, whatever you're going after 'til the very last minute unless you're hit. So they have that kind of lethality, they try to drill into these kids a deeply fanatical point of view that, you know, it was okay to die because you're dying for the emperor. This had never happened in typical samurai culture. You served your futile Lord, not the emperor who was this femoral figure off in the distance. But they rewrote the military manuals in the late 20s and 30s, distressed the idea of emperor worship and dying for the emperor, that had never been part of Japanese culture.

Kirk Saduski

Rich, very briefly help us understand the evolution of the kamikaze attacks as a tactic, as a strategic weapon of war. What was behind it? Who thought of it? When did it come online?

Richard Frank

Essentially, I mean, if you're just applying brute logic, putting aside any indication of humanity or anything else. In 1944, the Japanese had reached a state in which the aircrew training and capabilities of their aviators had reached an adir. And the aviators that would go out had extremely limited probability of inflicting any damage on the Americans with any sort of conventional attack. And from that, they reasoned that first of all, their aviators were gonna die. And secondly, if they were going to die, can we give them some genuine purpose, some accomplishment that would go with their death? And that's what led to the concept that, well, since they're all going to die anyway, whether it's one mission or two or three, they might as well embark on a type of mission that would give them some probability of actually inflicting damage. Whereas if you just continue the conventional attacks they've been executing, there was extremely low probability of them inflicting, they were gonna die, but not inflict any damage on the enemy. That was the rationale behind it. When they first implement it in October, 1944, as you pointed out, it was a small select group. They actually, one of the really difficult to imagine being the shoes of one of these pilots was frequently kamikaze pilots would take off based on a report of where American ships were, what they were supposed to locate and then attack. And more than a random set of times they'd fly out and not find anything to hit. And you go back and land, imagine getting yourself geared up to take off on what's supposed to be a certain death mission. You can't find a target, you go back and then you have to land and gear up to do it again. As they went through their cadre of pilots, however, the skill level of the pilots was going down very dramatically. And after using them in the Philippines, and particularly around Leyte and then around Luzon, they saved up a bunch for what proved to be the Okinawa operation. And during that, they sent thousands of these kamikazes down. The US Navy had the highest fatality rate total for one campaign of the war at Okinawa, about 4,900 shipboard personnel were killed. Almost all of them were killed by kamikazes. There were a handful of other incidents, but overwhelmingly it was by air attack, by kamikaze attacks.

Donald Miller

Yeah, and you had the, it's almost like Rich says no training. They arrive with no navigational skills. They take off and there'd be two escorts with him. The escort planes were not to dive on the fleet, they were to get you to the target and make sure you stayed in formation because these kids couldn't fly very well in formation. So they try to keep 'em together as a cadre and then go in as low as possible. But then you had to gain height because you had to do a vertical dive. And when you do a vertical dive at a certain height, you try to get to a height where you can ramp up to about 550 miles per hour, almost the speed of sound. And then it was just a question of deciding beforehand what you're gonna go for the hangar, you know, what part of the carrier you're gonna try to hit. And that was all determined by the amount of resistance that you encountered. Or maybe somebody just flies into the sea, you know, and decides maybe he's not gonna be a hero god today, because a lot of these kids in the beginning, so Japanese scholars were arguing now were not told initially that they were gonna die. They were just told they were gonna be exceedingly dangerous missions. And when they were told, they weren't happy about it, a lot of them weren't happy about it. They didn't see the point of it. Initially, the Navy was very much against it because they thought it was a dishonorable way to fight. Not part of the Navy tradition, the Navy code. They didn't think it was gonna be that useful. They thought it was a waste of human life. But they were overwhelmed by the arguments that Rich raises, they just had reached a point where their air force had been attrited so severely in the battles of the Philippines. Those were incredible sky fights over Luzon during the landing and before down at Leyte, incredible, we lost a lot of planes to the kamikazes. I mean, they struck fear.

Richard Frank

Psychologically, one facet of the kamikazes effort was ideally the kamikazes were supposed to attack high value targets like aircraft carriers. Off Okinawa, they had to fly down. Typically they flew down from like Kyushu or they flew in from the west. And I think if you study this, you think put yourself in the shoes of these pilots, they're all keyed up to, I mean this is, I'm gonna die. And what frequently happened was they, they would attack the first target they saw, they wouldn't fly on to the high value targets, the carriers or the troop transports, and particularly these radar picket stations that were set up around Okinawa to give early warning of Japanese aircraft attacks. So they were attacking these radar picket stations very heavily. And those picket stations, some of them in particular became like, you know, being assigned there was like knowing your ship was gonna be sunk, destroyers and a few support ships. And you know, they couldn't handle more than a couple targets. So their principle defense was both what they could do with their gunnery, but also just maneuvering and trying, sometimes trying to exploit the fact that if a Japanese pilot put his plane into a steep enough dive, he'd pick up so much air speed that his controls mushed up and had difficulty trying to control the terminal aspect of the dive into the ship.

Kirk Saduski

Don, I wanna go back to something you said earlier because it's not an aspect of the war we talk about too often. You were saying how the Japanese Navy objected to the idea of kamikaze.

Donald Miller

Initially. They all came around. Navy, one thing to emphasize on the kamikazes, to get away from the idea that they're just a bunch of fanatics. That this is a Japanese elite. Most of them were college grads. These would be kids from Princeton and Harvard, the best there was in Japan. That's why some of the Navy felt why, why these are the only, we have so many untrained pilots here and some of these guys can be trained very fast. They're very bright and we're sending them to a certain death. And this whole suicide culture, I kept thinking about a friend that I worked with on a film named Mort Zimmerman. And he was a sailor on a destroyer at Okinawa during the kamikaze raids. And his job was to patrol the boat with an old fashioned, what they called street sweeper, you know, a tommy gun to gun down suicide swimmers. Japan had created cadres of suicide swimmers who carried charges with him, attached him to the boats, and then swam away or went up with the boat. They had vests that blew up. This is long before Al-Qaeda. And they were making them by the thousands. They had suicide speedboats, and they had a small island off the, we eventually bombed it off the coast of Okinawa where they parked all these suicide, these motorboats that were just loaded. You could only get one human being in there. And then you just loaded it with ammo and dynamite and crash into the ships, would've created a gigantic hole in a destroyer. They had a thing called an oka bomb, where a guy jumps into a missile, it's attached to the underside of the plane and it's released and it has a small motor, but he can guide it like a kamikaze right to the target. We lost about 36 ships and 36 that were really heavily damaged. But what it expresses, even though it's not all that effective, is the ardency that they're gonna face. How do you get a people like that? Forget the diplomats. How are you gonna get a people like that to surrender?

Kirk Saduski

American forces would soon overwhelm Okinawa, but rather than surrender, Japanese forces chose to commit suicide in the name of the emperor. Don, help us understand here, because now we're dealing with essentially timeframe of April '45, which we've discussed at length and in detail and what was happening in Europe into the summer of '45. The American armed forces have to shift, even though they've been paying attention to the Pacific, main emphasis has been on the European theater and defeating Nazi Germany. Now there has to be a big psychological and physical shift. Help us understand what a challenge that was.

Donald Miller

Well, first of all, you have to convince the American public, which is sick of war, they want their boys home. That was really important. That was the importance of symbolic events like the raising the flag on Iwo Jima, also reports were starting to filter in. A few guys are escaping Japanese imprisonment and getting back to the American forces. And stories are being written about treatment and especially in papers like the Chicago Tribune, which was a kind of Douglas MacArthur sheet describing the horrific treatment and the high death rates inside the camp. They were actually on the order of 33, 34%. Whereas German camps they were 4%. But in any event, you've got to completely gear the psychology of the American people. Remember this war costs money, you're raising bonds and these bond drives go on incessantly throughout the war. And these guys need moral support from the home front. And they need to believe that this is worth fighting for. MacArthur actually was very good at playing on this, getting permission to go back and liberate the Philippines when they're trying to push him into Formosa and the moral pledge. And, you know, I'm coming back and liberating. To a lot of Americans looking at the whole war from an American perspective, they couldn't understand why. It sounds like it's off the topic, but it's right on it. They couldn't understand why we didn't go in right from the beginning. Why do you have something like the Bataan Death March? Why are Americans put in Camp O'Donnell a horrible prison camp, why aren't there liberation movements? We're the United States of America, you know, this is this Alamo idea and that MacArthur tried to play on, but that exposed American weakness. And people remember that. People remember that the Japanese had humiliated us.

Kirk Saduski

What you were mentioning, well, we were talking about how America has to now focus on the Pacific after putting primary focus on defeating Nazi Germany. That's the home front, that's the folks at home and the government and the military. How did the guys feel just to set the stage? I mean, theoretically, I know when we did Masters of the Air, Robert Rosenthal, who had flown 52 missions, he came back to the States and was training on B29s to go to Japan. And he obviously was not unique that most guys had that in the back of their mind. That okay, I was at Bastogne, I jumped into D-Day, I may have been at Anzio, et cetera, now I have to go to Guadalcanal or some, the new version of Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima?

Richard Frank

Well, this takes us into a part of the story that connects not only Europe and the Pacific, but also connects us to President Truman's issues that he's dealing with. A part of the story that's been largely lost in the retelling, the American people reasoned that we had had about 12 million men and some women under arms conducting a war in both the European Theater and the Asia Pacific Theater. The Germans surrendered and General Marshall had, and the Army had properly calculated that the American people would reason that if we had 12 million people under arms to do both Europe and the Pacific, and now we're only doing the Pacific, there would be a drawdown of the American armed forces. That part of the logic was pretty obvious and clear. So what happens, well what the army decided to do was how do you fairly determine who is gonna do what in this final phase of the war, to end the war with Japan? And you've got people who are going to have to occupy Germany and being in Europe, you've got people who are gonna have to carry on the campaigns against Japan and the Pacific. And then you're gonna have some folks that theoretically at least you can demobilize and send home. And how do you calculate that? Well, they came up with a points system and the army went through great lengths to, as we would now call it focus group it, but through not only what the ideas of what officers would have about what a point system should look like, but what GIs thought would be a fair system. And they came up with this system. I won't go through the whole thing, but I mean, you got one point for every month you've been in service. Another point for being overseas. And so they came up with this system where the magic number was 85. And on May 25th, 1945, an Army and Army Air Force serviceman got to calculate their adjusted service rating, which was their score. So if you had 85 points, you were entitled to be discharged, not to go home immediately, because we were gonna use the shipping to move guys to the Pacific, but you were gonna go home. The Navy Department had fallaciously believed that they somehow would be exempt from this. The Army Air Force has thought for a while that they would be exempt from this. Back in the States, and this is where Truman comes in, as soon as this took place, there was a great hullabaloo about no, the points system is not right. What we need to do is, well, let's bring home all the railway workers first so we can get, you know, folks from the East Coast to the West Coast. Oh, no, no, we need to bring the coal miners back first so we can have coal and went on and on on. And what's been lost in the history is that Truman, this was a huge, huge problem with Truman, you know, a political problem in domestic front because behind everything else was this notion that the fear that the economy was going to either stagnate or basically go into a depression. And the first guys who got home were gonna get the available jobs and they were going to have a reasonable life. And the people who didn't get home quickly, well they were gonna be in very dire straits. You can imagine the visceral element that surrounded this element, and this is going on while they're arguing about diplomacy with the Soviets, they're arguing about the invasion of Japan. This whole area here about what is going on domestically is a huge part of the story.

Donald Miller

I had a friend that worked in the mail room at the White House. He did some work on the history of the mail room. And he said, except for the first years of the Great Depression, when Roosevelt took over, they've never gotten the deluge of mail they got in '45 and early '46 about the points system. My kid has so many points and everybody knew what they had.

Kirk Saduski

Bring the boys home. Perhaps the most closely held secret of the entire war was the Manhattan Project, an attempt to develop an atomic bomb. In the spring of 1945, a testing point was near. Rich, where's the Manhattan Project?

Richard Frank

Well, basically what you have to understand, there were essentially two components to the thing. There was the scientific end, which was the theory about how you were going to make a nuclear device and the practicalities of how exactly you construct a nuclear weapon. The other part of the Manhattan Project was to create fissionable material, which was the stuff that made an atomic bomb an atomic bomb. And that in many ways was the bigger problem because it was very costly, very time consuming, very difficult. But you had to have both of them together to have a bomb. And it was a long time until it was clear we were going to have a workable weapon, well into 1945. Other thing about that's interesting about this is we now, in the history particularly, you know, we talk about this galaxy of fantastic scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer. One of my colleagues once described the great book about this by Richard Rose. You know, it's like the Knights of the Round Table, you know that's the scientists. But then you say, well what, what's this Army General Groves doing in charge of the thing? Well, you needed fissionable material, which is an engineering task of the first order. And that's why Leslie Groves is actually head of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer reports to him.

Kirk Saduski

Who was General Leslie Groves?

Richard Frank

A career Army officer who worked in the Corps of Engineers. He'd done a number of very important projects prior to being appointed to the Manhattan Project, the most conspicuous of which was the creation of the Pentagon. And he replaced an officer who did not seem to have the proper sense of urgency about it. And famously in the interview in which they brought him in and said, we'd like you to take charge of this. And they explained urgency is of the utmost importance. And pretty soon he's looking at his watch and says, I've gotta go. I've gotta get to work.

Kirk Saduski

Well and let's get to the heart of the matter here, because now everything we've been talking about, we're in June, 1945, late June, Okinawa has been secured. But we don't know, the Truman administration does not know whether the atomic bomb is going to be usable or not. Yet Trinity has not, we haven't gotten to Trinity yet. Give us the scenarios. What were we looking at in terms of how were we gonna beat Japan? Japan was not surrendering.

Richard Frank

In late June, 1945, and into July, we start getting these very disturbing inklings that the Japanese forces on southern Kyushu where the original invasion site is planned, are much greater than we thought. And this has become an extremely important factor in what happens over the next six weeks leading up to the dropping of the bomb.

Kirk Saduski

You're saying it's become an extremely important, elaborate on that.

Richard Frank

Right. The whole plan for the initial invasion of Japan, when that plan was laid out, it was assumed that the Japanese would only have three field divisions and some other forces, maybe about 60,000 men there. And we're going in with a landing force that is over 700,000 men. And then we start identifying additional Japanese combat units in southern Kyushu. And this begins a process by which the codebreakers begin to tease out that the Japanese have built up a lot more forces on Kyushu than we expected, making the whole issue of the invasion, much iffier than when Truman was briefed for it on June 18th, 1945 in Washington.

Kirk Saduski

And for both you guys, so kind of help us understand the mindset, both within the administration, but also at the Pentagon and out in the Pacific, what they might be looking at and put it in context of what had just happened at Okinawa.

Richard Frank

As you go into 1945, you have to bear in mind first of all, that total American battle deaths during World War II occur about 2/3, 64% between the 1st of June, 1944, and the end of May, 1945, then trickling out into Okinawa. So basically we've had the largest, by far number of war deaths during the war during that one year period, which was a very sobering thing. It strained us also in terms of replacements for our infantrymen and things like that. And then you get to the fact that there was a crescendo of casualties in the Pacific, also first in the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. Okinawa particularly was disturbing. We expected to be able to get in there and do that without excessive cost. And it turned out to be a three month struggle with horrendous losses. And there was a specific reference by one of the staff officers in the White House that Mr. Truman was, as he put it, perturbed by the casualties on Okinawa. And he was very much perturbed by what the losses and what it seemed to imply might be the cost of going into Japan.

Kirk Saduski

And Don we were continuing our bombing of Japan, particularly Tokyo. Is that correct?

Donald Miller

Right to the end, absolutely. We're not gonna call off the Air War, LeMay thinks he can still win it. He's making these arguments to Washington that's saying, I'm doing the job. I knocked out 60 cities. I have 60 more on my kill chart. He was just worried about did he have enough bombs? And initially, that's why he stopped bombing late in the spring and he's putting the pressure, not atomic bombs. He wants conventional bombs.

Kirk Saduski

One of the most respected journalists of the war was Ernie Pyle. During World War II, he was the voice of the American soldier. After reporting from the European Theater for years, he felt compelled to tell the story of the war in the Pacific as well. And on April 17th, 1945, Ernie Pyle arrived to cover the Battle of Okinawa.

Gary Sinise

Dead men by mass production. In one country after another, month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer, dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand.

Kirk Saduski

Perhaps the most well known, the most popular American correspondent of World War II was Ernie Pyle. He reported from both the European and Pacific Theaters. You guys tell us a little bit about Ernie Pyle and why he was so popular and why he struck such a deep chord at home, but also with the men.

Donald Miller

Well, he wrote for the common man, the ordinary guy. He didn't use jargon, military terminology, simple things. You know, you could understand, you could really understand them. He wouldn't use overinflated language, you know, like we're at a crossroads and things like that. He just said, we're jumping into this thing late. The Germans have been at war for a long time. The Brits have been at war for a long time. He humanized the war. He made you feel what it was like for the kids who were fighting it. He talked about guys being scared and he always identified the home. A lot of people thought when they were first censoring his dispatches, Ernie, why do you have to mention Steubenville here, that this guy's from Steubenville or he played baseball there? He said, that's so important, you know. That these ordinary kids in this thing, you know,

Kirk Saduski

You individuate them by that.

Donald Miller

And the guys love that, you know, to be mentioned in an Ernie Pyle dispatch and things like that.

Kirk Saduski

And he served, he was, again, I'm saying served and I guess he did in a way, but he reported from North Africa, from Italy, from Northwest Europe, in France. He was everywhere.

Richard Frank

When you say he reported from, I think that's another absolutely critical element about Ernie Pyle. He was up in the front lines. He was not back at battalion or regimental or division headquarters reporting. He was up with the guys and he had a view of the war that was very much from the point, from the sharp end. The thing about it also was that when you read collectively, you read the dispatches and then you read the biography, you can see the toll this is taking on Pyle. I mean, he's gotten some of the, you know, he writes all these poignant things and you can just feel the anguish that he's going through 'cause he's seeing the dead and the dead and the dead and the guys he was talking to at noon are dead at 5:00 PM and he conveys that very accurately. One thing I found interesting though is that when he got out to the Pacific, you know, he's on that light carrier for a while. And he notices that, you know, there's a distinct difference between the soldiers, the weary soldiers he was seeing in Europe. And when he gets out to the Pacific is that, and the Pacific that the servicemen were much more seemingly anxious to get to grapple with the Japanese. There was much more of this, you know, let's take it to them rather than let's do the job.

Kirk Saduski

Differentiate for that. Explain the difference to us. In other words, between the attitude of the soldiers in the ETO and the soldiers in the Pacific.

Richard Frank

He spent so much time in the front lines in Europe and he was with the soldiers who'd been through the wars and seen plenty and seen them beaten down. And he got beaten down also. And he was channeling that, he came back, he had a brief leave before he went out to the Pacific. And of course the naval war is very different. It's very distant. It's not eyeball to eyeball and it's not basically seeing a lot of dead enemy guys. You can see a number of your dead guys. It's just the qualitatively different and the GIs had this notion, and there was this whole overall issue about, you know, the Japanese, you know, they'd attacked, they'd attacked us more directly at Pearl Harbor than the Germans ever did. And that issue lingered through the war.

Donald Miller

Everybody who knew Ernie Pyle, and there are a number of recent biographies said he was used up.

Kirk Saduski

So why did he go to the Pacific? He didn't have to do it.

Donald Miller

He felt he had to do it. He had to see it, he had to report it. He wanted to see the end. He'd seen so much and he'd seen progress and he wanted to see the end. But he does say in his dispatches, he does say that there's a certain kind of feeling among these guys that the end of the war is not the end of the war. In his mind what was so despairing was his realization very early on that the Japanese weren't gonna surrender. And he wondered if they ever would.

Kirk Saduski

On April 18th, one day after arriving at Okinawa, Ernie Pyle was struck and killed by a Japanese machine gunner. He was 44 years old. Join us next time as we turn back to Europe. And after six years of war, the world finally gets some good news.

Archival

This is a solemn but a glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day.