Here is just some of the evidence that Japan was beaten and prostrate by no later than June 1945:
* By June 1945, we were losing only 0.003 of our bombers in air raids on Japan—in other words, only 3 out of every 1,000 bombers were being shot down (Paul Ham,
Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath, p. 176).
* By June 1945, every major Japanese port was mined by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Indeed, U.S. Navy mines closed the Shimonoseki Straights, which cut off naval activity between the Japanese main islands of Honshu and Kyushu. U.S. Navy mines also shut down 18 of Japan’s 21 naval repair yards on the Inland Sea. Hiroshima’s port was shut down. Nagasaki’s port, formerly a major port, became nearly worthless.
* By June 1945, Japan had a grand total of 9,000 planes of any kind. Most of these were trainers or old planes designed for kamikaze raids, and less than half of them were properly equipped for such raids. Many of those planes could not have been flown anyway due to the lack of fuel.
* By June 1945, the Japanese Navy’s surface fleet had essentially ceased to exist. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) reported,
After the liberation of the Philippines and the capture of Okinawa, oil imports into Japan were completely cut off; fuel oil stocks had been exhausted, and the few remaining Japanese warships, being without fuel, were decommissioned or were covered with camouflage and used only as antiaircraft platforms. Except for its shore-based Kamikaze air force and surface and undersea craft adapted for anti-invasion suicide attack, the Japanese Navy had ceased to exist. (USSBS, p. 11)
* The USSBS also reported the following about our bombing of Japanese cities and about Japan’s condition:
Not only were the Japanese defenses overwhelmed, but Japan's will and capacity for reconstruction, dispersal, and passive defense were less than Germany's. In the aggregate some 40 percent of the built-up area of the 66 cities attacked was destroyed. Approximately 30 percent of the entire urban population of Japan lost their homes and many of their possessions. (USSBS, p. 86)
Even though the urban area attacks and attacks on specific industrial plants contributed a substantial percentage to the overall decline in Japan's economy, in many segments of that economy their effects were duplicative. Most of the oil refineries were out of oil, the alumina plants out of bauxite, the steel mills lacking in ore and coke, and the munitions plants low in steel and aluminum. Japan's economy was in large measure being destroyed twice over, once by cutting off of imports, and secondly by air attack. (USSBS, p. 90)
By 1944, the average per capita caloric intake had declined to approximately 1,900 calories. By the summer of 1945 it was about 1,680 calories per capita. . . .
The average diet suffered even more drastically from reductions in fats, vitamins and minerals required for balance and adversely affected rates of recovery and mortality from disease and bomb injuries.
Undernourishment produced a major increase in the incidence of beriberi and tuberculosis. (USSBS, p. 94)
* By early 1945, the vast majority of Japan’s merchant vessels had been destroyed. According to the USSBS, by the end of the war, we had sunk or disabled about 90% of Japan’s merchant fleet shipping:
Japan entered the war with some 6,000,000 tons of merchant shipping of over 500 tons gross weight. During the war an additional 4,100,000 tons were constructed, captured or requisitioned. . . .
Eight million nine hundred thousand (8,900,000) tons of this shipping were sunk or so seriously damaged as to be out of action at the end of the war. Fifty-four and seven-tenths (54.7) percent of this total was attributable to submarines, 16.3 percent to carrier-based planes, 10.2 percent to Army land-based planes and 4.3 percent to Navy and Marine land-based planes, 9.3 percent to mines (largely dropped by B-29s). . . .
Due to their ability to penetrate deeply into enemy-controlled waters, [U.S. Navy] submarines accounted for approximately 60 percent of sinkings up until the final months of the war.
During 1944, carrier task forces made deep sweeps which accounted for large numbers of ships. After April, 1945, when Japanese shipping was restricted to the Korean and Manchurian runs and to shallow inland waters, mines dropped by B-29s in Japanese harbors and inland waterways accounted for 50 percent of all ships sunk or damaged. In isolating areas of combat from ship-borne reinforcements land-based aircraft also sank large numbers of barges and vessels smaller than 500 tons gross weight, not included in the tabulation prepared by the Survey. . . .
Up to the end of 1942, ship sinkings exceeded new acquisitions by a small margin. Thereafter, the aggregate tonnage sunk increased far more rapidly than could be matched by the expansion of the Japanese shipbuilding program. The size of the usable fleet thus declined continuously and at the end of the war amounted to little more than 10 percent of its original tonnage. (USSBS, pp. 72-74).
* In July 1945 the Japanese government was forced to impose yet another cut in staple food rations: a cut of 10%, in fact. As a result, the food ration per person fell below 1700 calories, well below the minimum needed to maintain basic health.
-- Cases of night blindness due to malnutrition became common.
-- Japan was even running so low on rice that the government announced a program to process acorns as a substitute for rice.
-- The food shortage became so bad that the government actually published articles and booklets on how to eat food no one would usually eat, such as “Food Substitution: How to Eat Things People Normally Wouldn’t Eat.” One government booklet advised citizens to eat locusts and insect pupas.
* Japan was running so low on fuel that the government began exploring pine-root oil as a fuel substitute for aircraft.
* By October 1944, many new fighter pilots were being trained with films instead of live flight training in order to save fuel:
The Toho Motion Picture Company constructed a lake in Setagaya and filled it with six-foot models of U.S. warships. Atop a tower a movie camera on a boom took pictures of the vessels from various angles, simulating different speeds of approach. These films were shown as a substitute for flight training in order to save fuel. (John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945, New York: Random House, 2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition, p. 536)
* Japan was running so low on metal that its military aircraft were increasingly made with larger amounts of wood. In fact, in July the government announced it had established a department to make planes out of wood.
* Starting in early 1944 the lack of metals became so severe, due to the U.S. naval blockade, that the Japanese government was forced to start confiscating and melting bridge railings, metal fences, metal statues (even those in Buddhist temples), gate posts, notice boards, and even household items.
* Although Japan built underground aircraft factories, raw materials were in such short supply that only 10—yes, just 10—aircraft were manufactured in those factories.
* In March 1945, imports of crude oil, rubber, coal, and iron ore
ceased—that’s right, they
ceased, stopped, ended. Why? Because of the U.S. Navy’s naval blockade.
* By early 1945, few Japanese stores remained open because there were so few commercial goods being produced or imported.
* As mentioned earlier, Japan was virtually defenseless against air attacks. By June 1945, the odds of a U.S. bomber being shot down in a bombing raid over Japan were 3 out of 1,000—not 3 out of 100 but 3 out of 1,000. The pitiful state of Japan’s air defenses persuaded General Curtis LeMay that he could safely remove machine guns and gunners from his bombers. Gene Santoro:
To up the B-29’s bomb capacity, as Arnold kept demanding, LeMay again boldly flaunted conventional wisdom. His analysis told him there was little low-altitude flak over Japan, and that the enemy’s night fighters were negligible risks. He stripped 325 B-29s of defensive guns and gunners to lessen their weight, allowing an increase in bomb and fuel loads; then he filled them with incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus bombs, and a new product called napalm, and ordered them to fly over Japan at night at 5,000 to 7,000 feet instead of 30,000, which had his crews gnashing their teeth. . . .
The night of March 9, 1945, LeMay’s reconfigured B-29s took off. In three hours, they dumped tons of incendiaries on Tokyo, killing some 80,000 civilians and destroying the homes of a million others. The crews in the last aircraft reported being assaulted by the stench of burning flesh. Unlike in Europe, LeMay waited behind at HQ, grounded because he was one of the few to know about the atomic bomb and couldn’t risk capture and interrogation.
When the planes taxied in, only 14 were lost. “Eighty-six percent of them attacked the primary target,” LeMay later wrote. “We lost just four-and-three-tenths per cent…. Sixteen hundred and sixty-five tons of incendiary bombs went hissing down upon that city, and hot drafts from the resulting furnace tossed some of our aircraft two thousand feet above their original altitude. We burned up nearly sixteen square miles of Tokyo.” (“Outkilling the Enemy,” HistoryNet,
Outkilling the Enemy)
* By June 1945, Japan posed no threat to us. The Japanese were purely on the defensive and their situation was only getting worse by the day because of our virtually total naval embargo and total control of the air. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the USSBS concluded that “in all probability”
Japan would have surrendered before 1 November 1945 even if we had not dropped nukes and even if the Soviets had not invaded:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. (USSBS, p. 26)
