Gather Hell To Pay: Operation DOWNFALL And The Invasion Of Japan, 1945-1947 Conveyed By D.M. Giangreco Readable In Version

always wondered about the allied plan to invade Japan in WWII, Most accounts of WWII leading up to the ABomb droppings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but do not get into the detail of what would have happened IF we had to really invade Japan and take it by force.
In years passed, there have been some loud voices against the dropping of these ABombs on Japan saying we could have taken Japan conventionally.
This book is all about FACTS, I don't know another book that I have ever read about WWII in the Pacific that is so well thoroughly documented, so filled with data and information, so thoroughly vetted as this book is.
Not only does this book contain the allied plan called Operation Downfall, consisting of Olympic and Coronet, that is, the successive allied plans to invade first Kyushu but also Honshu main Island with Tokyo.
Also included are the details which the Japanese Imperial Military were preparing for this invasion: their plans, This serious, thorough and highly detailed study revealed that the Japanese has us "figured out, " They knew where we were going to land and what we probably would do afterwards, . they had figured this out in minute detail and were prepared to counter us, The Japanese were committed to sacrificingmillion Japanese lives or more in order to prevent the invasion, . . and the fact is that the Japanese had been working on defenses starting in, As the allies progressed across the Central Pacific and into Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Japanese learned a great deal about allied tactics.
The book discusses more than once, the fact that prior allied losses earlier in the war had been a ratio ofallied toJapanese.
By the time Okinawa happened, this ratio had been reduced toallied to,Japanese. The Japanese held out fordays on Okinawa against overwhelmingly superior allied forces, The book reveals, that in Kamakazi attacks, three wooden Kamakazi planes managed to destroy THREEU, S. Navy destroyers! The Japanese were prepared to defend "indepth," while pursuing a murderous Kamakazi policy, The allies figured the Japanese had only about,planes, when in fact they had,hidden on the Japanese islands, The allies figured that the Japanese had just about run out of pilots to fly them, but the fact was that there were about,pilots that were available, meaning that IF we had attacked in a conventional manner, the Japanese would have used up to,aircraft in a Kamakazi fashion thinking about thosedestroyers sunk to three puny wooden Kamikaze planes.
The Japanese were prepared to fling their entire air capability at the allies, And in fact, the wooden structure of the airplanes was impervious to radar detection, As far as "indepth" is concerned, this means multiple rings of successive heavily fortified defense points, The Japanese had stockpiled aviation gas, ammunition, weapons, medical supplies and food all over the Japanese Islands in hidden bunkers, tunnels and caves.
What this all comes down to is that the,to,,allied DEATHS projected to occur would also result in at least a multiple of this in injuries probably on the order oftimes as many allied injured as killed or roughly.
MILLION or greater. This book is more than just convincing proof that President Truman made the right decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan to force an end to the conflict.
The allies were figuring a minimum force ofmillion allied required, The fact is, however, we did not know whether even dropping the ABombs on Japan would be enough to convince the fanatical Japanese militarists to finally give up.
. . it was a gamble. I did learn in this book that we were actually contemplating dropping NINEABombs on the island of Kyushu alone in a Vshape.
. . this was something I had never read before, There is so much historical fact and detail in this book, you have to read it for yourself, if you really want to know for SURE why what we did was the right thing to do! Yes,,Japanese died as a result of dropping the atomic bomb on them BUT, it saved,,projected Japanese lives, up to or more,,,American lives and up to.
or more million injured American combatants, . . and this does not even take into account the expenditures in warships, planes, tanks, ammunition and other weapons and materials needed to conquer Japan by conventional force.
If anyone leaves this book still convinced we should not have used nuclear weapons on Japan, then they didn't learn a thing from reading the book.
This is one OUTSTANDING BOOK! Exhaustive, totally vetted, thoroughly and compelling professional in its details an absolute "must read" for any military historian.
An exhaustive analysis of the plans for Operation Downfall, Those who question what an invasion of the home islands of Japan would have cost in carnage of American lives should read this book.
Maybe the most sobering of chapters was "Half a million Purple Hearts" in which was detailed the grim ordering and production of massive numbers of the medal in anticipation of invasion.
The navy alone had an initial order of,of the medal, Quite a lesson in the enormous killing fields it would have wrought, I put this one down half way through, Something I rarely do.
I am very interested in almost all things WW, In this case, I was looking forward to hearing the different perspectives on the later stages of war between Japan and the US.

This book, however, left much to be desired for me, It reads like an instruction manual or academic textbook, It is extremely dry and arduous, I don't do well with books written in this fashion,
The intro and first portion of the book were very wellwritten, It is actually a summary of the thesis of the entire book,
The thesis of the book, one which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that dropping the two atomic bombs on Japan inwas the best course of action not only for ensuring a speedy US victory, but also in preventing many hundreds of thousands, if

not millions of Japanese lives lost.
The author lays out a very convincing case for these assertions,
I soon realized that each subsequent chapter was the author expanding these points longform, and heavily supported by large datasets,

If you are a meticulous datacollector, who appreciates notations on every person who was recruited, moved, fought, and possibly died then this is the book for you.
The book is a virtual barrage of numerical factoids,
If you are interested in a good story of the opposing sides near the end of the war, then give this one a pass.

I'm sure that there are many people who will appreciate the author's extreme attention to specific numbers, which are all annotated, but I am not one of those, unfortunately.
. .
There is a great story to be told here, but you won't find it in the pages of this one,
stars. TLDR: The Enola Gay revisionists were wrong: invasions of Kyushu and Honshu would have been bloodbaths on both sides, yet necessary,

Welldocumented and wellargued book on the necessity of invading Japan and the subsequent cost of ending WWif the atomic bombs were not used.
Some of the writing is redundant from chapter to chapter, and some of the discussion is literally in the weeds, but overall a useful counter to arguments made against use of the atomic weapons.
This is a data rich account of the plans, resources, strategies and preparations on both Japanese and US sides for the inevitable, unavoidable invasions of Japan Kyushu followed by the final invasion of the Tokyo plains on Honshu.
Truman's decision to nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war unexpectedly, There is a lot of revisionist history critical of Truman's decision, and arguing that it was not necessary revisionist and wrong, Monthly casualties in Japanese held territories alone were over,per month, The US expected to war to last throughout, perhaps into, The US suffered almost.million casualties in WWII over one million of them between Juneand August, Yet a partial demobilization was politically forced upon the US following the German surrender that reduced US troop strengths by nearlyeven as troop requirements were increasing in the Pacific.


Based on intelligence estimates of Japanese resources and preparations on Kyushu it was estimated that US casualties would be on the order of,in the firstdays.
. . but that intelligence was wrong, Japan had two to three times the numbers of troops, suicide planes and boats, ammunition, fuel and defensive fortification they intended to replay Okinawa on a grand scale, including millions of civilian suicide attackers.
The Japanese had learned a great deal about American war doctrine and practice and they prepared accordingly, The Honshu invasion was even bigger, more fully resourced more desperately defended, Read this book and "Downfall" by Richard Franks Truman's decision brought the war to an early, unexpected conclusion and saved millions of lives in the process.
These two books make that simple fact unmistakably clear, This is a detailed examination of the Japanese and American planning for the Invasion of Japan, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the global challenges faced by the US Army in World War II, the decision to drop the Atomic Bombs or anyone who has read historical accounts of the last year of the War in the Pacific and desires more detail on the invasion plans.
However, it is not wellwritten or well organized and therefore I would recommend Richard Frank's "Downfall" which is exceptionally wellwritten and more comprehensive.
The value in this account lies in the details how, for instance, did the US Army plan to sustain the flow of whole blood to the theater how did the various air forces plan on countering the kamikaze threat what manpower challenges confronted the Army as the war extended into.
Many of these issues figure in other accounts but rarely are they discussed in the detail you see here, Additionally, Giangreco offers analysis on the Japanese perspective their adaptations, anticipation of the Allies plan and their strategy to attrit Allied forces in Kyushu they correctly anticipated the initial allied landings here and force a negotiated end to hostilities.
In some accounts, these aren't given much credence here, details on mobilization, troop deployments, tactics, terrain and geography are woven together to present a Japanese plan that may have had a much greater chance of success than generally admitted and provide another reason for continued intransigence after dropping of the first atomic weapon, in particular.
A very interesting book. The Last Word

This book is the last word on Operation Downfall and the decision to try the atomic bomb beforehand as a means of shocking the Japanese leadership into surrender.
Had Japan's militarists continued to hold sway after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the invasion of Japan would have begun, with devastating losses suffered by both sides.


Giangreco exposes many misconceptions about the state of Japan by the summer of, He reveals that far from being out of aviation fuel for their fleets of kamikaze suicide attack squadrons, the Japanese had ample stocks of fuel stored away in preparation for use during the invasion.
Giangreco also reveals that the apparent lack of Japanese air activity during this time was due to a deliberate husbanding of kamikzaes in preparation for attacks on the invasion fleets.
Giangreco also reveals the difficult defenses and terrain features the two Allied landingsOperation Olympic, on Kyushu, and Operation Coronet, on Honshuwould have faced, plus the inevitable delays typhoons would have caused for the launching of Olympic and Coronet.


Giangreco derails the revisionist argument that predicted invasion casualties were postwar fabrications designed to justify use of the atomic bomb.
He reveals that many casualty estimates generated during the buildup to the invasion were indeed in the,range, with some predicting even more losses.
Only a scattered few projections over optimistically predicted lesser losses,

The Hell to Pay's only flaws were a scattering of typos and how some illustrations and their captions were not placed in the vicinity of the relevant parts of the chapters they appeared in.
These are minor flaws, however, and do not detract from this tour de force of research and scholarship on WWII's biggest "what if"

After I read Eugene Sledge's searing memoir "With The Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa," I shared Sledge's relief that no invasion of Japan proper ever happened.
After reading "Hell to Pay," I am even more grateful the bloodbath to be that was Operation Downfall never had to be executed.
.