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Saturday, Nov. 28, 2009

Sites of Tokyo: The invasion of Japan that never happened

TOKYO -- There is no massive statue at Sagami Bay of an angel with a sword and a coronet. No rows of white crosses above "99 Beach."

Narita is just an international airport. Yokohama, a seaside metropolis. The Great Buddha sits peacefully among the trees of Kamakura.

That the region around Tokyo isn't dotted with American war memorials is a matter of science, luck, politics -- and endless controversy. These were all objectives in Operation Coronet, the planned seaborne attack on Tokyo in World War II. The greatest battle that never was.

Guadalcanal, North Africa, Italy, Tarawa, Saipan, D-Day, Iwo Jima, Okinawa -- even the planned invasion of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu -- were all prelude. Each a step toward victory, with more steps to get to the end.

Coronet was to be the end.

None of it happened because of two shattering flashes of light and heat: the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. Japan capitulated. The final surrender was signed Sept. 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Why travel across the Pacific to visit beachheads that ended up as nothing more than a file in a Pentagon drawer?

For me, the answer is simple mathematics. While the average age of a combat soldier in World War II was 26, the invasion of Japan would have required a massive infusion of fresh troops. Volunteers had to be 17. At 18, they could be drafted. High school kids like my father. Maybe he never would have gone to war. Maybe he would have fought and come home to march in those Veterans Day parades.

Or maybe he would have been one of those white crosses above a beach in Japan. He'd never meet mom. So, no me. Or my children.

Instead, he and the rest of the Class of 1946 were the first in several years to graduate into a world at relative peace. There are tens of millions of Americans and Japanese who exist today because the invasion of Japan didn't lop off their family tree.

A "what if" tour of the final invasion is frustrating, yet easy. Frustrating in that there are no markers for a battle that never occurred, and maps are in just a few specialty books on the subject. Easy in that most of the Coronet sites are an easy day trip from Tokyo.

A quarter million American troops supported by a deadly canopy of bombers would have smashed their way past a half million Japanese troops on the beaches. Fighting their way through smoldering ruins, the troops could come up against the most fanatical citizens who would heed the generals' call to be "100 million shields of the Emperor" and die fighting or by suicide.

The 1st Army would have landed at Kujukuri Beach on the Boso Peninsula, the stretch of cliff-backed sand just 40 miles from Tokyo. Known popularly as 99 Beach after an old Japanese measure of its distance, the 50-mile long beach is a place where urbanites go to beat the sweltering heat of summer. Surfers ride waves where, in 1945, landing craft with soldiers and Marines would have hit the beach, attacked by fukuryu, submerged suicide divers who would swim toward landing craft to detonate mines they carried on their backs. The Japanese planned massive human wave attacks, in part to blur the line of combat so that U.S. warplanes couldn't strafe the beach without killing their own troops.

One of the three American spearheads was assigned to fight west and take a minor airfield where kamikaze aircraft, including jet-powered manned flying bombs called ohka, could be launched. It's now Narita International Airport, the main gateway to Japan. The eastern approaches to the city, where Japanese troops would have put up a last-ditch fight to stop troops from reaching the Imperial Palace, lead right past Tokyo Disneyland.