The War That Could Not Be Ended — Why Surrender Came So Late

Just as a war has a beginning, it has an end. Yet when we trace the way the Pacific War ended, one heavy question rises to the surface: why could it not have been ended sooner? By the time 1945 arrived, the war situation was already hopeless. That must have been visible not only to the soldiers at the front, but also to the leadership that knew the state of the war. And yet the decision to surrender came late, and in the interval of that delay, the Battle of Okinawa, the firebombing of the home islands, two atomic bombs, and the Soviet entry into the war — these catastrophes struck Japan one after another. In this installment, we look at the structure in which the war ‘could not be ended.‘

Okinawa — What the ‘Preliminary Battle’ of the Homeland Decisive Battle Took Away

The price of surrender coming late was paid in its most violent form by Okinawa. From March to June 1945, Okinawa became the stage of the only large-scale ground battle within Japan. There is a view that it was positioned as a ‘sacrificial stone’ and a ‘preliminary battle’ to delay the American landing on the home islands, and because of that character, the residents were drawn deeply into the fighting.

The sacrifice was immense. In addition to military personnel and military civilian employees, the sacrifice of the residents — the prefecture’s people — was also extremely large, and together more than 200,000 people are said to have lost their lives. The tragedy of the mobilized girls’ student corps, and the ‘mass suicides’ in which residents, fearing capture by American forces, were driven to take their own lives, are also known to have occurred in various places. Regarding the mass suicides, there is debate over whether the involvement or coercion of the Japanese military lay in their background, and it has become a point on which views differ; but that the residents were driven into extreme circumstances is conveyed by a great many testimonies.

No One Can Decide — The Pathology of Dysfunction

Why, then, was the decision so delayed? Here lies the most deep-rooted problem of this war. It was a structural dysfunction of the leadership — that ‘no one could stop the war.’

Even as the prospect of defeat grew darker, the army’s pro-war faction continued to insist on a decisive battle on the home islands. At the imperial conference of June 1945, the policy of a homeland decisive battle was confirmed, and even the words ‘one hundred million shattered jewels’ were spoken. On the other hand, there were also forces within the government who believed that continuing the war any further was impossible and sought to find a path to peace. The problem was that these two positions remained in equilibrium, and neither could hand down a decisive conclusion. Army and navy, government and high command, the pro-war and the pro-peace factions — each refused to yield to the others, and there existed nowhere a center that could take responsibility and decide to ‘stop.’

This ‘no one can decide’ structure was, in fact, what bound Japan’s decision-making consistently from the entrance of this war to its exit. Just as, at the outset of war, face and atmosphere were given priority over reason, so too in the phase of ending the war the organization had no power to halt itself.

The August in Which Three Shocks Converged

What shattered the deadlocked situation from outside were two — no, three — enormous shocks.

On July 26, 1945, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, urging Japan to surrender. The Japanese government’s response to it was reported in the newspapers and elsewhere as ‘mokusatsu’ — killing with silence. How this ‘mokusatsu’ was received abroad, and how it relates to the decision to drop the atomic bombs, is the subject of various debates, and views remain divided even now. But as a matter of fact, the declaration was not promptly accepted.

And then in August, the catastrophes piled up. On August 6 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and on the 9th on Nagasaki; each city was annihilated in an instant, and within that year, and over long years thereafter, an immense number of people had their lives taken from them. Furthermore, from August 8 to 9, the Soviet Union — which until then had held a neutrality pact — went through with entering the war against Japan and began its invasion of Manchuria. For Japan, which had secretly hoped for Soviet mediation of peace, this meant that a diplomatic lifeline of hope had been severed. Whether the atomic bombs or the Soviet entry was the decisive blow for surrender is a matter on which historians’ views differ, but it is said that the convergence of these two sharply intensified, all at once, the recognition that continuing the war was no longer possible.

The ‘Sacred Decision’ as the Final Exit

Even so, within the government the debate over the conditions of acceptance continued, and it was not easily settled. Amid a situation that would not move, with opinion split clean in two, what finally opened the door to the war’s conclusion is said to have been the emperor’s judgment at the imperial conference — the so-called ‘sacred decision.’ On August 14, acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration was formally resolved.

How to evaluate this ‘sacred decision’ is also something on which views are not uniform. Over the rightness or wrongness of a constitutional monarch handing down a political decision, and over the magnitude of that role, various debates exist. Yet what is certain is the fact that, when the ordinary mechanism of decision-making had completely reached a dead end, there was no way to stop the war other than in such a form. Turned the other way around, this was also proof that Japan’s war leadership had, to the very end, been unable to possess the power to ‘stop ourselves, by our own hand.’

The long war thus at last heads toward its end. Yet its price was far too great. The residents of Okinawa, the people of cities burned in the air raids, the two bombed cities, the people caught in the chaos in Manchuria, and the soldiers who fell to hunger and disease on distant battlefields — when we think of the lives lost in the several months by which surrender was delayed, the weight of the structure of ‘could not be ended’ presses anew upon the heart.

And so, at last, the long war comes to an end. In the next installment, we advance the story toward a departure from the ashes, and the opening curtain of a new age called occupation.