Operation Zipper, Sept 9, 1945 — The Other “Invasion That Never Was”

12 thoughts on “Operation Zipper, Sept 9, 1945 — The Other “Invasion That Never Was””

1. Early in my career I worked for a gentleman who entered the war as a US soldier just after the fall of Okinawa. His first combat was to be the invasion of Japan.

   When he and his fellow soldiers first heard the news of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they wept in joy with the feelings that their lives had been saved.

2. The contemplated land offensives in China would have consumed countless lives, as well.

   You have written about the contemplated invasion of Java.

   There was fighting going on in the Phillipines until the end of the war.

   Every day that went by with the war dragging on cost thousands of lives.

3. I had read of the experiences of British and American civilians interned in the PI, Malaysia and Sumatra, that they figured they were about two weeks from starving to death when they were liberated. And the Japanese plans to exterminate all POWs anyway were already well underway.

4. With the numerous books I have read about the Japanese policy on POWS it is a consensus that even at the very top the policy was to execute all POWs before the end of the war.

   if you want to read a couple of chilling accounts of POW life I can’t recommend Unbroken, the true story of Louis Zamperoni – highly enough.

   And the book Ghost Soldiers about the Army Ranger raid on a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines, is chilling. Of the 100,000 or so American POWs on the island at the start of he war (and the fall of Bataan), about 6,000 starving an disease-ridden POWs were left just 3 years later.

   Numerous Japanese commanders around the Pacific had their own policy of executing prisoners.

   Read James Bradley’s followup to Flags of Our Fathers , a book about the fate of 6 American flyers on Chi Chi Jima, a small island 150 miles from Iwo. At the time, it was where all Japanese military communication emanated from the Pacific and the commanders were sure there’d be an invasion like Iwo. (That’s where G.W. Bush Sr was shot down for those interested).

   Rather chilling and inhumane account of the fate of those captured flyers.

5. I will second the recommendation on Ghost Soldiers. The Japs (as my hero Adm. Halsey called them) were animals.
   http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/g250000/g259446a.jpg

   “The word of that atrocity would have prevented a later Japanese surrender as the British and American public’s rage would have left the American President and British Prime Minister no other options.” I agree with this completely and it would have caused the elimination of a full generation of Japanese.

6. Dan – I used to have a neighbor – an old Marine who had seen Tarawa, Saipan (and recalled to Korea) the Chosin Reservoir. I told him he was a fugitive from the law of averages ;-)

   He said that the Japanese were worse than the Nazis and never really held accountable. The top ones yes but that was it – MacArthur needed the co-operation of the Emperor to keep the Japanese in line.

   On the book Ghost Soldiers they made a movie on it ( The Great Raid ) and the opening scene – taken from the book – shows a Japanese unit forcing American POWs – about 100 – into a trench where they then poured gasoline and lit it –

   It was an unforgettable scene.

7. I think — and that is my purely off-the-cuff feeling, from having read so many accounts of what happened to POWs and civilian internees — is that there were just so many instances of brutality and brutal abuse of POWs and civilian internees alike, that after the war, the Allies only had energy sufficient to go after the worst offenders. The very most brutal, the worst of the worst – was about enough that they had the energy to go after. The minor-league brutes – of whom there were many – small potatoes, relatively speaking. Such is life.
   Although, I do hope that certain Japanese and Japanese-Korean prison-camp guards have never spent a sound night of sleep in the years since. I hope that they have spent every night of every year since, fearing that nemesis will blow open their front door and come barreling in.

8. Sgt Mom – an interesting facet of the book Unbreakable was that it brought back for me a memory from the Tokyo Summer Olympics – in the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics – during Zamperini’s Japanese Confinement a lot of the book dealt with this sadist nicknamed “The Bird”

   Right after war he disappeared with a death penalty hanging over his head.

   Long story short after decades the death penalty was rescinded and he came out of hiding.

   So I remember his being interviewed during the 1998 games and he was completely unrepentant. He died a few years ago – of natural causes.

9. I think — and that is my purely off-the-cuff feeling, from having read so many accounts of what happened to POWs and civilian internees — is that there were just so many instances of brutality and brutal abuse of POWs and civilian internees alike, that after the war, the Allies only had energy sufficient to go after the worst offenders

   The first act by the American government in the Cold War was to cover up the crimes of Emperor Hirohito. Specifically his involvement with chemical and biological weapons development and use in China. This decision was made in October of 1945 when the Truman Administration had General MacArthur shut down prosecutions against Hirohito.

   Maintaining a compliant occupation government in Japan while we reformed that nation was more important than justice for our dead.

   Once that happened, all the Allies started using the various surrendered Japanese military units and leaders to maximum advantage.

   Field Marshal Count Terauchi for one should have been put up against the wall and shot for his involvement with the use of Allied POW labor to build railroads in Thailand. Instead Admiral Lord Mountbatten used him to run Japanese forces for the British in what is now modern day Vietnam.

   Still and all, much as I dislike to admit it, the results with regard to modern Japan speak for themselves.

   The militarist death cult leadership of Japan is gone and the nation is not a military threat to American or West Asian interests.

   Maintaining the institution of the Japanese Emperor was vital to that outcome.

10. So I remember his being interviewed during the 1998 games and he was completely unrepentant. He died a few years ago – of natural causes.

    Thanks for reminding me why it’s okay to believe in hell.

11. Another great post on what the war going past August 1945 meant for everyone.

    The Battle of Manila (3 Feb – 3 Mar 1945) is instructive to what would have faced Singapore when ZIPPER was *ahem* unzipped.

    Out of a population of 1 million, about 100,000~ died; or 10%. In addition, the city was pretty much destroyed.

    Singapore’s population in 1947 was given as 938,144~; but I don’t know how much was growth after WWII ended several years prior; nor do I have any statistics on the sizes of the two cities in 1945, but there’s a very good case to be made for Singapore becoming Manila II when ZIPPER is initated.

    As for specific numbers of POWs who were alive in 1945; Wikipedia cites Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan with the following numbers:

    37,583 Commonwealth/UK
    28,500 Dutch
    14,473 USA
    56 Chinese

    The list is likely incomplete; but it gives you a scope of the scale of mass murder that would have been unleashed if we had invaded Japan.

12. Ryan,

    Singapore would have been much worse than Manila. Singapore was different because there was no way civilians could run away from their murderers — it’s an island, remember — and the Japanese military controlled the entrance and exits. It would have had far more time to do its killing _unopposed_.

    The Japanese did not start killing Filipino civilians in Manila until the 1st Cavalry Division was in the northern part of the city. Of the 100,000 civilians that were killed in Manila, the “general accepted estimate” was 60,000 were murdered by the Japanese and 40,000 more were killed by either American artillery or cross-fire between the Japanese and American troops.

    MacArthur didn’t allow any air strikes at Manila at all nor artillery for the early part of the battle and American troops did their best not to fire on civilians and protect them when they could.

    The surviving Filipinos surprisingly did not begrudge Americans the use of artillery afterward, because it kept the Japanese from killing even more civilians!

    In Singapore, the Japanese had an island shaped killing jar they controlled the access too, and would have had weeks of time.

    That puts Singapore in the high end death range for the “Rape of Nanking,” not Manila.

    See:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_(book)

    Death toll

    Chang wrote of the death toll estimates given by different sources; Chinese military specialist Liu Fang-chu proposed a figure of 430,000, officials at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and the procurator of the District Court of Nanjing in 1946 stated at least 300,000 were killed, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) judges concluded that more than 260,000 people were killed, Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira approximated 200,000, John Rabe, who “never conducted a systematic count and left Nanking in February”, estimated only 50,000 to 60,000, and Japanese author Ikuhiko Hata argued the number killed was between 38,000 and 42,000.[28]

    The book discussed the research of historian Sun Zhaiwei of the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences. In a 1990 paper entitled The Nanking Massacre and the Nanking Population, Sun estimated the total number of people killed at 377,400. Using Chinese burial records, he calculated that the number dead exceeded the figure of 227,400. He then added estimates totaling 150,000 given by Japanese imperial army major Ohta Hisao in a confessional report about the Japanese army’s disposal efforts of dead bodies, arriving at the sum of 377,400 dead.[29]

    Chang wrote that there is “compelling evidence” that the Japanese themselves, at the time, believed that the death toll may have been as high as 300,000. She cited a message that Japan’s foreign minister Kōki Hirota relayed to his contacts in Washington, DC in the first month of the massacre on January 17, 1938. The message acknowledged that “not less than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians [were] slaughtered, many cases in cold blood.”[30]

    Nor would mass killings have been limited to Singapore. When Operation Zipper went in, the Japanese in SE Asia would start their mass killings across the theater.

    The mass murder of Dutch internees and Allied POWs in Batavia, Java (Modern day Jakarta, Indonesia) was going to put Japan’s Javanese puppet state army in a very tight spot as they either would be ordered to assist with killing of the interned Dutch and Allied POWs (as well as any fellow “rebel” Javanese civilians) or they would have been forcibly disarmed and killed themselves.

    Knowing the Japanese, they would have acted to disarm their puppets first, after the way the Indian National Army disintegrated in Burma. That disarmament would have gone down ugly, brutal and very uncoordinated with some units of the puppet armed forces scattering, armed, to the countryside to join the other “pro-allied” rebels in the hills. After that, the Japanese would have started killing there…and Java is a small densely populated island too.

    Mac Arthur was highly sensitive to the fate of civilian detainees and allied POWs, given what the Japanese did in Manila in March 1945. General Eichelberger, Mac Arthur’s 8th Army CO, was alerted in April 1945 to prepare a contingency plan to invade Java if the Navy and Army Air Corps won the argument of “Invasion of Japan” versus blockade/bombardment in June 1945.

    Ultra would have told MacArthur all of the goings on in Java and he would have acted — to hell with the Joint Chiefs — and the photos of the dead, white, Dutch civilians in Batavia would have given him political cart blanch after the fact.

    As for with what, General Eichelberger had available in late August 1945 the amphibious shipping and logistics in the Southern Philippines to deploy two regimental combat teams — call it 10,000 men — with a couple of weeks of logistical support, with about five days warning.

    This shipping was a combination of amphibious ships training with Operation Olympic divisions, Adm Barbey’s 7th Fleet transports (primarily LST and LSM landing ships) that were “rolling up” equipment and service troops from New Guinea to the Philippines, and US Army Transportation coastal shipping, including US Army flagged and civilian operated LCT’s convoying with Barbey’s transports.

    The Aussies had about one infantry regiment/brigade’s worth of amphibious in Borneo as well under MacArthur’s command.

    MacArthur also had the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regimental Combat Team sitting in the Central Philippines as a part of his AFPAC reserve deciding what he was going to do with it — as the 11th Airborne Division was already committed to Operation Olympic and at the time (6 Aug – 2 Sept 1945) was being staged to Okinawa in preparation to air-landing in Japan as a part of the OPERATION BLACKLIST surrender/disarmament.

    The 93rd Infantry Division (colored) was not a part of Operation Downfall, but was a part of the 8th Army in the Southern Philippines and was used to accept Japanese surrender in the Celebes east of Borneo.

    Ugly and confused doesn’t begin to cover what this operation — with the 503rd RCT dropping into/near Batavia — would have looked like.

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