Surrender of Japan

The surrender of Japan ended World War Two in the Pacific, but getting to that endpoint was no simple process. There were Japanese factions quite prepared to fight to national death, until the unprecedented direct intervention of Emperor Hirohito in the decision process.

Had Japan not surrendered, the U.S. was preparing the Operation DOWNFALL invasions, the Japanese response to which were in the Operation KETSU-GO plans. It remains controversial if Hirohito would have intervened without the nuclear attacks on Japan, or if Japan would have surrendered had strategic bombing and naval blockade had continued.

July 1944

The Battle of Saipan ended on 7 July, bringing the Home Islands into B-29, Hirohito first told the military to recapture it, having said to the Prime Minister of Japan, Hideki Tojo on June 17, "If we ever lose Saipan, repeated air attacks on Tokyo will follow. No matter what it takes, we have to hold there.

Hirohito thought the battle was costly enough that a new Prime Minister might encourage an American peace proposal. He withdrew support from Tojo and replaced him with a covert operations specialist, Koisi Kuniaki.

February 1945

Just before the start of the Battle of Iwo Jima and six weeks before the Battle of Okinawa, Hirohito met with former Lord Privy Seal Nobuaki Makino, and six former prime ministers — Kiichi Hiranuma, Koki Hirota, Reijiro Wakatsuki, Keisuke Okada and Fumimaro Konoe. They recommended continuing the war; Hiranuma and Hirota specifically mentioned fighting to the end while others suggesting finding an opportune moment.

March 1945

James Forrestal, the U.S. Secretary of War, approved a psychological warfare proposal from Captain Ellis Zacharias, U.S. Navy, to encourage a peace faction.

May 1945

On May 8, shortly after President Harry Truman's announcement of the end of the war in Europe, Zacharias, identifying himself as the "official spokesman of the U.S. Government," delivered the first in a series of 18 radio broadcasts to the Japanese leadership explaining the concept of unconditional surrender. Zacharias emphasized that unconditional surrender was a military term signifying "the cessation of resistance and the yielding of arms."

Office of War Information personnel observed that "these messages produced much positive reaction in the general population of Japan and in several instances exhortations warning the Japanese people against the broadcasts have been intercepted by the Federal Communications Commission." A later report stated that Prince Takamatsu, brother of the emperor, and other top Japanese officials believed that the broadcasts "provided the ammunition needed by the peace party to win out against those who wanted to continue the war to the bitter end." Here was evidence that the Zacharias broadcasts were reaching their targets.

June 1945

Hirohito held a June 22 meeting with Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, War Minister Korechika Anami, the Foreign Minister, Navy Minister, and Chiefs of Staff of the Army and the Navy. He asked "Isn't it time for you to consider ways to bring this war to an end?" Prince Konoye, as a result, was sent as an emissary to Joseph Stalin, who, without telling the Japanese, sent the message to the Potsdam Conference, then in session.

July 1945

The Potsdam Declaration of 26 July stated the Allied terms for Japanese surrender, but the document was unclear on what would be the single most important issue to the Japanese: preservation of the Throne as the symbol of kokutai, the national identity.

First response to Potsdam Declaration

Linguistic ambiguity drastically confused the situation. In December 1941, the Japanese government misunderstood a memorandum from U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to be requiring Japanese withdrawal from China and Manchuria, when China alone was meant, and the war was a result. In this case, the Japanese used the word mokusatsu in their broadcast response to the Declaration. This word means "to kill with silence", but an alternate translation is to give deep study to the matter. Tokyo radio used the word, saying the government would mokusatsu the declaration and fight on. According to an authorized biography of Harry S. Truman, "The English translation became "reject," and the president took it as a rebuff. Years later he remembered, 'When we asked them to surrender at Potsdam, they gave us a very snotty answer. That is what I got. . . . They told me to go to hell, words to that effect.'"

Zacharias claims

He wrote that his 21 July broadcast had used the words, "Shokun ga go-zonji no tori, Taiseiyo Seiyaku oyobi Cairo Fukoku wa Bei seisaku no kongen to natte orimas.", or, in the official translation, "As you know, the Atlantic Charter and the Cairo Declaration are the sources of American policy." In the article, he said that these eighteen words "now conceded by the Nipponese to have had a vital perhaps decisive role in ending the war." He explained that he had been influencing a peace faction of "Admiral Suzuki, a confidant of the Emperor; Navy Minister Yonai, representing the whole Navy clique; General Umezu, chief of the Imperial General Staff and leader of the dissidents within the Army; Shigenori Togo, Japan's Foreign Minister at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack; Baron Kiichi Hiranuma, president of the Privy Council, and General Shigeru Hasunuma, chief aide-de-camp to the Emperor. The composition of this group was significant. These men had the support of the throne and also certain foreign contacts which enabled them to put out a series of peace feelers in Bern, Switzerland, and in Rome, Italy."

His claims, in hindsight, were somewhat suspect. Hiranuma and Umezu were not part of the peace faction, only agreeing to it after the Emperor's intervention. It is not known if he had continuing access to MAGIC communications intelligence, but, if he had, it would have been relevant only to diplomatic messages — the decisionmakers in Japan were not communicating by radio.

"By suggesting that the Japanese could obtain surrender terms according to the Atlantic Charter, he had ignored the President's order not to state that the emperor would be retained....Almost immediately, the Navy forbade Zacharias from making any further broadcasts to Japan unless he was detailed to the Office of War Information (OWI), which was done", on the grounds that his mission had become diplomatic rather than military. By July 26, he had been stripped of his "official spokesman" status and reassigned to OWI.