Was the invasion of Okinawa necessary

We pushed, UPPING the ante, till we found what they WOULDNT allow or give, then BLAMMO. I believe, and many historians, that had we allowed them to fully say uncle, while keeping their honorary emperor, we could have gotten away without losing the assumed many men, and not blowing folks up nukular.

But, we wanted/needed to warn off the Soviet Union.

 

I'm guessing but probably right, neither MacArthur or Nimitz knew anything about the A-bomb.

FDR didn't micromanage the war and allowed the generals and admirals to do their thing which wsa to implement Plan Orange in the Pacific and Plan Rainbow in Europe.

FDR and his military chiefs of staff just set the time lines for both Plan Orange and Rainbow.

Plan Orange called for the invasion of Okinawa, that decision was adopted back in 1924.

Truman came into the White House not even knowing jack **** about the A-bomb. FDR kept Truman completely out of the loop.

 

I wasn't aware of that historical fact and it does shed light on the issue.

 

US cut off the oil and froze the assets of Japan because of its war in China and it seizure of Indochina. Tough.

 

The best source for history on WW ll is what was used to write the history of WW ll, the official records, documents, interviews and after action reports. No opining just the facts. -> http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/

Months of reading and you see a lot that still hasn't made it into the history books yet.
Note: Always follow the links.

Just an excerpt:

 

You keep leaving out the part of Orange that specifically called for NOT invading the Japanese home islands, and instead relying on bombing and a naval blockade to force Japan into eventual surrender. This puts the lie to the “Nuke or invasion! There was no choice! Saved American lives!” mantra.

FDR simply wanted to try out his new toy by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians. He would have his ocean of blood no matter what. When he finally went to hell, Truman did what he was told and carried out his final bloody wish.

 

Countdown to 'Love-Day'

The three-month-long battle of Okinawa covered a 700-mile arc from Formosa to Kyushu and involved a million combatants--Americans, Japanese, British, and native Okinawans. With a magnitude that rivaled the Normandy invasion the previous June, the battle of Okinawa was the biggest and costliest single operation of the Pacific War. For each of its 82 days of combat, the battle would claim an average of 3,000 lives from the antagonists and the unfortunate noncombatants.

Imperial Japan by spring 1945 has been characterized as a wounded wild animal, enraged, cornered, and desperate. Japanese leaders knew fully well that Okinawa in U.S. hands would be transformed into a gigantic staging base--"the England of the Pacific"--for the ultimate invasion of the sacred homeland. They were willing to sacrifice everything to avoid the unspeakable disgrace of unconditional surrender and foreign occupation.

Okinawa would therefore present the U.S. Navy with its greatest operational challenge: protecting an enormous and vulnerable amphibious task force tethered to the beachhead against the ungodliest of furies, the Japanese kamikazes. Equally, Okinawa would test whether U.S. amphibious power projection had truly come of age--whether Americans in the Pacific Theater could plan and execute a massive assault against a large, heavily defended land-mass, integrate the tactical capabilities of all services, fend off every imaginable form of counterattack, and maintain operational momentum ashore. Nor would Operation ICEBERG be conducted in a vacuum. Action preliminary to the invasion would kick-off at the same time that major campaigns in Iwo Jima and the Philippines were still being wrapped up, a reflection of the great expansion of American military power in the Pacific, yet a further strain on Allied resources.

But as expansive and dramatic as the Battle of Okinawa proved to be, both sides clearly saw the contest as a foretaste of even more desperate fighting to come with the inevitable invasion of the Japanese home islands. Okinawa's proximity to Japan--well within medium bomber and fighter escort range--and its militarily useful ports, airfields, anchorages, and training areas--made the skinny island an imperative objective for the Americans, eclipsing their earlier plans for the seizure of Formosa for that purpose.

Okinawa, the largest of the Ryukyuan Islands, sits at the apex of a triangle almost equidistant to strategic areas. Kyushu is 350 miles to the north; Formosa 330 miles to the southwest; Shanghai 450 miles to the west. As so many Pacific battlefields, Okinawa had a peaceful heritage. Although officially one of the administrative prefectures of Japan, and Japanese territory since being forcibly seized in 1879, Okinawa prided itself on its distinctive differences, its long Chinese legacy and Malay influence, and a unique sense of community.

The Japanese Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo did little to fortify or garrison Okinawa in the opening years of the Pacific War. With the American seizure of Saipan in mid-1944, however, IGHQ began dispatching reinforcements and fortification materials to critical areas within the "Inner Strategic Zone," including Iwo Jima, Peleliu, the Philippines, and Okinawa.

On Okinawa, IGHQ established a new field army, the Thirty-second Army, and endeavored to funnel trained components to it from elsewhere along Japan's great armed perimeter in China, Manchuria, or the home islands. But American submarines exacted a deadly toll. On 29 June 1944, the USS Sturgeon torpedoed the transport Toyama Maru and sank her with the loss of 5,600 troops of the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade, bound for Okinawa. It would take the Japanese the balance of the year to find qualified replacements.

By October 1944 the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had recognized the paramount strategic value of the Ryukyus and issued orders to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet/Commander, Pacific Ocean Areas, to seize Okinawa immediately after the Iwo Jima campaign. The JCS directed Nimitz to "seize, occupy, and defend Okinawa"--then transform the captured island into an advance staging base for the invasion of Japan.

Nimitz turned once again to his most veteran commanders to execute the demanding mission. Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, victor of Midway, the Gilberts, Marshalls, Marianas, and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, would command the U.S. Fifth Fleet, arguably the most powerful armada of warships ever assembled. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, gifted and irascible veteran of the Solomons and Central Pacific landings, would again command all amphibious forces under Spruance. But Turner's military counterpart would no longer be the familiar old war-horse, Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith. Iwo Jima had proven to be Smith's last fight. Now the expeditionary forces had grown to the size of a field army with 182,000 assault troops. Army Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., the son of a Confederate general who fought against U.S. Grant at Fort Donaldson in the American Civil War, would command the newly created U.S. Tenth Army.

General Buckner took pains to ensure that the composition of the Tenth Army staff reflected his command's multiservice composition. Thirty-four Marine officers served on Buckner's staff, for example, including Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith, USMC, as his Marine Deputy Chief of Staff. As Smith later remarked, "the Tenth Army became in effect a joint task force under CINCPOA."

Six veteran divisions--four Army, two Marine--would comprise Buckner's landing force, with a division from each service marked for reserve duty. Here was another indication of the growth of U.S. amphibious power in the Pacific. Earlier, the Americans had forcibly landed one infantry division at Guadalcanal, two each in the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Palaus, and three each at Saipan and Iwo. By spring 1945, Spruance and Buckner could count on eight experienced divisions, above and beyond those still committed at Iwo or Luzon...-> https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-C-Okinawa/index.html

 

Japan's war plan for war in the Pacific against the United States never called for invading Hawaii or invading the CONUS.

Japan's war plan was to invade and occupy the Philippine Islands thinking that the U.S. would send the U.S. Navy with an invasion force of Army and Marines to retake the P.I.'s

That invasion fleet would be intercepted in the Central Pacific (Mandate Islands) and sank by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The mother of all naval battles.

The United States would then sue for peace and leave the Western Pacific and Asia for ever.

But Plan Orange called for allowing Japan to occupy the Philippine Islands. The American army in the P.I.'s were expendable.

That American invasion fleet never materialized the the mother of all naval battle never happened.

If that mother of all naval battles were have happened, on paper it looks like Japan would have sank the U.S. Navy.

 

What FDR wanted (the use of the atomic weapons) does not matter. He was dead, and the decision was Truman's.

What does matter is Truman's want, and his communications with Senator Long clearly reveal that he believed Japan's actions and refusal to surrender put the onus of atomic weapon use on the Japanese leadership.

 

The US military plan did not really expect the US Navy to be in a position at that time to engage the IJN in a decisive battle off the Philippines in early 1942. The American high command did think the islands' defense would last longer than April 1942. But McArthur bungled the operational placing of supplies, the locations of which the invading Japanese rapidly overran. So McArthur got another Medal of Honor to cover the mistakes and was sent to Australia, while the survivors were sent to awful Japanese POW camps.

 

Plan Orange also never envisioned the Japanese over extending itself into Southeast Asia and deep into the Southwester Pacific like the Solomon Islands and Australia.

Plan Orange never called for occupying Guadalcanal.

The thinking back during the 1920's was that Japan would sue for peace before the U.S. was in position of invading Japan.

Should also be remembered that after the "Battle of Gallipoli" during WW l the world believed no military would ever try pulling off an amphibious assault again, never.

The Marine Corps thought differently and so did Imperial Japan.

 

Yes, and? This is common knowledge.

 

No it's not common knowledge.

Most never heard of America's colored war plans.

Most are completely unaware that when the U.S. Army landed on the beaches of North Africa that it was the French army shooting at them not Germans.

The Japanese army didn't disarm the French army in French Indochina until early 1945.

Or that Admiral Halsey's first order when he became the commander of the U.S. Navy's Southwestern Pacific Fleet was to order his personal Marine rifle platoon to go ashore on New Caledonia and disarm the French military and then throw the French Governor out of his mansion and onto the streets.

 

Orange had, from the beginning, envisioned a naval blockade of the home islands INSTEAD of invasion.

It had also foreseen an attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

It is for anyone who bothers to study history. Not classified information. Most people forget what they studied long ago.

 

Whenever a country says something it's not at all what they say; it's what is their relative position of strength when they say it.

 

I agree that Apacherat has the history right concerning the discussion's main points.

 

They stopped teaching history in our schools and colleges.

What history is taught in cultural-marxism revisionist history.

History is no longer required for earning a BA or BS in most degrees.

 

The first generation nuclear weapons were not tactical weapons. There were no targets on Okinawa that an atomic bomb would have been effective on.

 

I've always felt the first bomb should have been dropped on a military target rather than on a civilian population in order to show Japan what we could do to one of their city's. Doing so in Okinawa would of course destroy more jungle than anything but any reasonable government seeing the power we now had would immediately wave " the white flag. History of course proves me wrong in this line of thinking but without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight that would have been the method I would have preferred. I do however have the luxury of formulating this opinion many decades later and may have felt different in 1945.

 

Hiroshima was a military target: site of a major army base and air field, numerous war industries in the city, and a key transportation hub.

 

It was also full of innocent women and children but in retrospect and knowing how even that bombing didn't force immediate surrender it was the right call.

 

Precision weapons didn’t exist in WW2. You couldn’t attack military targets in a city without killing civilians.

 

Holy K-rats, it's a freaking Jap precision weapon !!!



FYI:
Unless a city is declared an "open city" and isn't protected by military forces, it's fair game.

Paris and Dresden were "open cities."
The firebombing of Dresden was a war crime.

open city

noun
a city that, during a war, is officially declared demilitarized and open to occupation, and that will consequently not be defended, in order to spare it, under international law, from bombardment or other military attack.

 

Pray tell, how many times did Japanese Kamakazis attack cities with precision attacks that minimized civilian casualties?

Why do you insist on bringing up wars from a time before the development of modern PGM’s?