I seem to remember reading somewhere that by August 1st the Allied command was mostly against an invasion. Was it McArthur that was in favor?
Franks made the argument in his 1999 book, but Gianreco refuted it with newer research; basically, Franks misread some telegraph documents. From Chapter 6 of
Hell To Pay:
The president’s meeting with the JCS and service secretaries took place before one of the recipients of Truman’s directive, Stimson, had submitted a written response. It was not until after the meeting and several drafts that Stimson wrote, “The terrain, much of which I have visited several times, has left the impression on my memory of being one which would be susceptible to a last ditch defense such as has been made on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and which of course is very much larger than either of those two areas. . . . We shall in my opinion have to go through a more bitter finish fight than in Germany [and] we shall incur the losses incident to such a war.” 57 At the Monday meeting all the participants agreed that an invasion of the Home Islands would be extremely costly but that it was essential for the defeat of Imperial Japan.
Further:
Continued discussion touched on military considerations and the merits of unconditional surrender, and the president moved to wrap up the meeting: “The President reiterated that his main reason for this conference with the Chiefs of Staff was his desire to know definitely how far we could afford to go in the Japanese campaign. He was clear on the situation now and was quite sure that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should proceed with the Kyushu operation” and expressed the hope that “there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”
All of this from June of 1945. As for the August situation with King and Nimitz:
CINCPAC Command Summary, bk. 7, p. 3510. Even though all of these messages were sent “Eyes Only,” which meant that they, and any copies, were not to be filed with routine message traffic but, instead, were subject to a higher level of security, some later observers have attached additional, and frequently conspiratorial, meaning to the term. For example, Bernstein, not understanding how message traffic was handled and routed, finds significance in King not personally instructing Nimitz to insert the classification into a message, and thinks that King is allowing a series of supposedly back-channel communications to be seen by MacArthur and thus, Bernstein supposes, “produce a near crisis” when MacArthur saw them (see below). In fact, when the initial message in an exchange was tagged “Eyes Only,” all subsequent messages in the exchange simply repeated the classification. Bernstein apparently did not realize, first, that all parties’ headquarters had been receiving the communications from the start (see note 25 above), and, second, that the classification has to do with how the message is handled and filed. As a result Bernstein perceives dark motives behind Admiral King’s request that Nimitz send comments on MacArthur’s reply to both him and MacArthur, mistaking routine message traffic for an attempt by King to goad MacArthur into a confrontation over supposed Navy opposition to invading Japan.
Having Nimitz put MacArthur specifically on an “information line” as was done here ensures that the message was seen by MacArthur personally in case the exchange of messages was only being reviewed by his chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Richard K. Sutherland. (It is noteworthy that intra-Army communications were handled slightly differently and had their own problems in this regard. For example, earlier that summer General Marshall, when soliciting MacArthur’s opinion of possible casualties during Olympic ahead of a hastily called meeting with the president, quickly recognized that his questions had been routed to either Sutherland or MacArthur’s G-3, Gen. Stephen J. Chamberlain. This forced Marshall to shoot back a request for clarification, but this time, instead of from “Washington” to Headquarters AFPAC and signed “Marshall,” it was from “General Marshall” to “General MacArthur (Personal).” See Giangreco, “Casualty Projections,” 545-50.) King did not direct that Nimitz put MacArthur on the addressee line—the “action line” requiring a response— and the search by some for hidden meaning to King’s order requires one to believe that King was engaging in subtleties not characteristic of his well documented dealings with the Navy’s sister service and his subordinates.
Bernstein maintains, however, that “King’s decision not to restrict Nimitz’s reply to an ‘eyes only to King’ message is significant. Sending a copy of Nimitz’s message to MacArthur, if Nimitz’s assessment was negative (as would have seemed likely), could produce a bureaucratic conflict in the Pacific and difficulty in Washington.” Bernstein, after stating that King had “suppressed” Nimitz’s message from several months earlier expressing reservations about Olympic, then proposed that King “seemed to be triggering events that were likely to produce a near crisis” (Bernstein, “Alarming Japanese Buildup,” 587–88). Unfortunately, Frank (Downfall, 276) apparently examined copies of the exchange that did not include the transmissions’ addressee and information lines which led him to similarly miss that all parties were being kept abreast of their exchange, as per interservice protocol, and that King wisely wished to ensure that Nimitz’s response would be read by MacArthur, not just his chief of staff.
