Unwilling to surrender

The words of Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman occurred to best-selling author Donald Miller Friday during presentations at the International World War II Conference in New Orleans that explored the gruesome battles and strategies that led to the end of fighting in Europe and the Pacific 70 years ago:

“Wars don’t wind down,” Miller quoted Sherman. “They get worse at the end.”

That quotation aptly framed Friday’s session of the annual conference produced by the National WWII Museum. Titled “1945: To the Bitter End,” the event examined from multiple perspectives the measures Axis powers took to resist inevitable defeat in the final year of World War II.

One of those degrees has connection with today’s war against terrorism. “We, as Americans, have become more familiar with suicide weapons than we care to,” said historian Jonathan Parshall, who spoke of the Japanese kamikaze attacks on U.S. warships that started in October 1944 and continued through the end of the fighting in August 1945. “A lot of Americans looked at the kamikazes as crazy.” However, he said, there was a logic to it, and an effectiveness.

As Allied forces fought their way toward the main islands of Japan, the death-before-defeat philosophy of aerial combat sank 28 U.S. Navy ships, damaged 368 others, killed 5,000 Americans and wounded another 5,000 in the Okinawa battle alone in the spring of 1945, Parshall explained. The Japanese lost 7,830 aircraft in the fight. It was obvious by that time that the enemy was not going to submit, even after American forces were clear of Europe and could focus solely on the Pacific Theater.

“How do you bring to the bargaining table an enemy that cannot, or will not, admit they are defeated?” Parshall asked.

“It’s like fighting ISIS,” Miller later said. “There is no surrender.”

The fighting in Europe was equally bloody to that in the Pacific during the final stages of the Allied march toward Berlin and the May 1945 defeat of the Third Reich. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson explained that April 1945 was one of the deadliest months of the war for the Americans in Europe, who lost more than 10,000 troops battling their way across Germany. “The war is awful, virtually until the last gunshot,” he said.

Speaking from the audience floor of the conference were two veterans who could personally attest to the way it all ended on both fronts – Japan prisoner of war Fiske Hanley, a U.S. B29 flight engineer, and B17 tail gunner John Wheatley, who battled in the skies of western Europe. Their accounts of the war, Wheatley speaking about U.S. targets hit from the air in the fall of 1944, and Hanley about the intentions of the Japanese in the event of a U.S. invasion, brought conference attendees to their feet.

“We were looking for ways to help the troops on the ground,” Wheatley told the crowd. “We were looking to get to their oil and where they were building tanks.” While the bombs may have been imprecise, leading to numerous civilian casualties, no U.S. planes were intentionally looking to hit churches, children or other non-combatants, he said.

Hanley, who was taken prisoner after his B29 was shot down and he was forced to parachute out, told the crowd that it was made clear to he and other POWs that they would all be executed if the Americans took the war onto the main islands of Japan. “I’m glad we didn’t invade,” said Hanley, 97.

In both theaters, as the war was ending and the results were apparent, American planes dropped leaflets to warn civilians to leave immediately because their cities and towns were soon to be destroyed. Hundreds of thousands did leave before the bombings, but in Japan, nearly all adult men and women were also ordered into military service around that time, sending a message that the defense would come down to the last drop of blood.

Dr. Haruo Tohmatsu, professor of diplomatic and war history at the National Defense Academy of Japan, said the futile and often suicidal resistance late in the war was driven by five key motivations: imminent defense against an Allied invasion on the main islands; a sense of civic duty; patriotic zeal; military professionalism; and a belief in the national mission.

“Even some people of my generation don’t understand why the Japanese fought to the end,” he said. “The war ended in total defeat, pain and misery.”

Tohmatsu said one of the greatest battles of the war – Iwo Jima – is “not widely known or told in detail” in his country today even though it has been interpreted in history as a pivotal moment, with mutual respect on both sides. “It is a clean story, meaning no civilian victims – military force against military force,” Tohmatsu said, adding that National Defense Academy of Japan students annually visit Iwo Jima – called “Iwoto” by the Japanese – to walk the battle zone and learn from it. “They go around the island and try to re-experience what the veterans had gone through.”

The tenacious defense of Iwo Jima, Manila and Okinawa stood as clear examples of Japan’s unwillingness to give up, even though food supplies were shriveling, cities were in ruins and incendiary bombs were proving their ability to kill tens of thousands by fire. “The smell of burning flesh was so extreme, they had to fumigate the planes,” said Dr. Conrad Crane, director of historical services at the Army Heritage and Education Center.

Parshall explained that the United States had increased its “throw weight” or firepower in the Pacific by “18,000 percent” between 1944 and 1945. “By the end of 1944, coming anywhere near a U.S. carrier force was tantamount to suicide,” he said. Still, Japanese authorities continued to send planes and order kamikaze attacks, arguing that “it is better for all concerned to continue the suicide missions,” Parshall said.

“It was a way to show the public that the military was willing to fight to the very end,” Tohmatsu said. “This was very self-destructive.”

Meanwhile on the European front, from the Battle of the Bulge to the crossing of the Rhine River, the march to end Nazi occupation took U.S. troops and aviators into one of the coldest winters on record to fight nearly all of Hitler’s remaining western forces. “The conditions in which men fought were worse than harsh,” explained Anthony Beevor, author of “Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge.” Cold, wet, hungry and miserable, the Americans, British, Canadians and French confronted an enemy force of 30 divisions. However, conditions were just as bad for the Germans who were running out of fuel, ammunition and food.

The wounded that winter stood little chance. “Badly wounded men left in the snow were unlikely to survive long,” Beevor said, adding that at times Allied units used German corpses as sandbags to protect themselves, and POWs were killed in the field (on both sides).

With more than 600,000 U.S. troops involved, the Battle of the Bulge was the largest American ground operation in history. “Hitler’s last great gamble failed because he underestimated the Americans,” Beevor said.

Dr. Harold Winton, a 25-year U.S. Army veteran and noted military historian, said the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge was “largely more significant than Normandy. The story of the Bulge is a great epic… an inexhaustible source of fascination. The stakes were enormous.”

Winton said the battle, after months of fighting across Europe following D-Day, was when the U.S. Army “came of age.” By strategically cutting off enemy rail and supply lines, destroying oil refineries, and building bridges in a matter of hours to cross the Rhine River, the Army systematically pressed through a weakened Germany toward Berlin where the western Allies and the Soviet Union would soon encircle Hitler.

In the Pacific, the Japanese would not relent, expanding their self-destructive tactics to include suicide boats, manned torpedoes and frogmen who were ordered to swim under landing crafts and blow them up “and yourself in the process,” Parshall said.

Hanley, who was tortured for months before his August 1945 liberation, said he and other prisoners had been told by their captors that all of Japan was ready to line up on the beach to fight a U.S. invasion.

Tohmatsu said even his mother, a teen-aged girl at the time, had been trained to fight, even though the population was starving. “Japanese strength and resources were over-estimated in 1945,” Tohmatsu said. “You cannot fight without food. You cannot fight without confidence.”

Historian Richard Frank described two operations that never happened: Olympic and Coronet. They were destined to be the lynchpin assaults of what was code-named “Downfall,” the U.S. invasion of the main islands of Japan. The action would have blockaded all food supplies from the Japanese people. It would have also greatly tested combat-weary forces transferred from Europe and, with demobilizations underway for those who had enough points, would have relied heavily on replacements. The invasion would have been executed against a Japanese approach of “suicide gone mainstream,” Frank said.

At that point, with a new president in office after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was time to make a big decision, Frank explained. “You’d have to ask yourself, if you were president, what would you do?”

That is one topic to be explored in Saturday’s final set of presentations, which are streamed live online at www.ww2conference.com.