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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 9, 1985
for the atomic bomb."
"One is aghast," wrote a reviewer of
"Goodbye, Darkness" in 1979. But Mr. Manchester repeats the her
esy today: "Thank God for the atomic bomb."
He is 63 now•••• Today Mr. Manchester is an adjunct professor of
history at Middletown's Wesleyan University and the celebrated
biographer of H.L. Mencken, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Rocke
fellers and the family Krupp, arms makers to the Third Reich••••
The latest Manchester work [is] his biography of Winston
Churchill, "The Last Lion."•••
Mr. Manchester was in a receiving hospital in San Francisco when
he heard the news of Hiroshima•••• He thinks the bomb spared his
life. At the time, 650,000 U.S. ground troops were massing to
land on Kyushu in November 1945, in the first of two invasions of
Japan.
Several Marine divisions were to land abreast in the
first wave, Mr. Manchester says, and they were looking for a few
good veterans.
"Most civilians don't realize the difference between green troops
and veterans," he says with the swagger of a man who has seen com
bat. Green troops take enormous casualties, he says; they simply
don't know what to look for. "It takes about 72 hours of action
before a man begins to sort out the sound of shells overhead, for
example. So a veteran is worth a great deal, whether he's crip
pled or not•••• As they patched me together they would have sent
me back, because I was a veteran."•••
"It may seem that my views are self-serving•••but the fact is
that every scholar,� the Japanese scholars, say the Japanese
would never have surrendered without the bomb."•••
The background may be even more startling. In anticipation of an
American invasion, the Japanese had hidden 5,000 kamikaze (sui
cide) planes in underground hangars on the home islands. The
human bombs, whose slogan was "one plane, one warship," had
accounted for 400 ships and 9,724 U.S. sailors since the battle
for Leyte Gulf.
Two million Japanese troops� stationed around the islands,
with tons of ammunition stowed in underground caves; another
l
million were being called back from China for a last-ditch
defense. The soldiers themselves w�to carry explosive charges
strapped to their backs. Every .Q.illl of Japan's 10 million able
bodied civilian men and women was asked to sacrifice his or her
life in suicide attacks. On Kyushu alone-:- 14 Japanese divTsions
and five independent brigades, almost the equal of the entire
American invasion force, lay waiting to fight ·to the last man
from fortified caves and tunnels--the type of combat the Japanese
had made into an art form on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
And this force was what the Japanese military leadership had in
mind on Aug. 9.
Fully aware of the second atomic attack £!!
Nagasaki, thex petitioned the Emperor Hirohito to allow them to
lure the Americans ashore and annihilate them. National honor,
they said, required one last battle on Japanese soil.