A Victory in Perspective: Behind the End of the Pacific War and the Manhattan Project

By Geraldine Genzardi

The story often told of the final defeat of Japan overlooks vital pieces that bring together the events that took place at the end of World War II. For instance, today many people have never heard of the Manhattan Project, learned about the tremendous casualties both sides experienced during the bloody Pacific campaign, or grasped the decision President Truman was forced to make regarding the atomic bomb. Each of these events are related to one another, and must be understood to have a firm sense of the actions taken by both the Japanese and the Americans at end of World War II. The final defeat of Japan in 1945 was the result of persistence by the American forces in the Pacific campaign, strategic planning for the invasion of Japan, and undertaking the Manhattan Project and the dawn of the nuclear age.

To many veterans, the Japanese today are very different from the Japanese of World War II. Japanese soldiers committed an overwhelming number of atrocities that many still deny. The 1937 conquest of Nanking, China, is commonly referred to as the “Forgotten Holocaust” and “The Rape of Nanking.” Much of the city was burned to the ground. The Japanese raped and murdered Chinese citizens on a massive scale. The blades of Japanese soldiers’ swords were often ruined, as one of their favorite methods of execution was to cut Chinese soldiers in half, helmet and all. Another method of killing Chinese prisoners at Nanking was to bury them, leaving only their head above the ground, then crushing them by riding over on horses or in tanks, or by gouging them with bayonets. Others were used as guinea pigs in testing new anesthetics before being killed. Some were shot in an effort to teach Japanese surgeons how to remove bullets. 

In April 1943, the first reports of the torture and murder of American prisoners surfaced following the infamous Bataan Death March. Soldiers were outraged when they heard of the treatment of POWs. Army Psychologists asked GIs if they agreed with the following statement: “I would really like to kill a Japanese soldier.” Thirty-eight to 48 percent agreed, while in comparison, to the question of killing a German soldier only five to nine percent agreed. With no Hitler to focus their aggression on in the Pacific war, soldiers lumped all the Japanese together into one loathed killing machine. Meanwhile, a Japanese soldier’s purpose was to live so he could die in battle. The Japanese frowned upon the American soldiers that surrendered and considered them cowards. A Japanese soldier’s acceptance of death was morbid, frightening and shocking to most American troops.

Relations with Japan had been strained long before the United States entered into World War II, and military leaders believed that war was inevitable. The American military had been preparing a plan for any conflict with the Japanese for four decades prior to World War II, entitled “War Plan Orange.” The strategy of War Plan Orange was to mobilize the United States’ Naval Fleet and protect the outlying Pacific islands from capture. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States immediately realized attention must be turned to the dominance of aircraft in naval warfare and the outline of War Plan Orange changed.

Twelve years prior to the initial detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945, premier Jewish scientists, including Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, were fleeing Europe to escape the growing threat of fascism and racial hatred. In 1938, German scientists Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann succeeded in splitting a uranium atom, discovering fission. For the scientists that had fled Europe, the implications of this event were overwhelming. The Nazis could now pursue the development of an atomic bomb. Szilard felt that President Roosevelt should be informed about this possible threat. He knew that he would likely not be taken seriously, as a foreign man telling the president that the Germans could make a bomb that would destroy a whole city. Considering this, Szilard convinced Einstein, already a prominent figure, to write a letter to Roosevelt explaining the dangers nuclear fission posed in the hands of the Germans. Upon reading this letter, Roosevelt formed the Advisory Committee on Uranium on October 11, 1939. The development of the atomic bomb would become a race pitting the United States against Hitler’s Germany.           
           
With the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States officially entered World War II and found itself countering a Japanese offensive in the Pacific. The first move would be to dispatch troops from Washington and Alaska to defend the islands of Samoa, Guam, Johnston, Midway and Palmyra. However, from a political standpoint the Pacific Campaign was second to the defeat of Germany.