The Pacific typhoon season in 1945 was very active with 26 named storms, lasting from April into November. Ironically, had Operation Olympic gone forward with X-day on 1 November 1945, it too would have been severely impacted by a typhoon. Some accounts claim Mongol losses at over 100,000 men. The Japanese executed any Mongols (and Koreans and Northern Chinese) who made it ashore, sparing only Southern Chinese, who the Japanese believed had been coerced by the Mongols the Japanese made them slaves. By 1281, the Japanese had made extensive defensive preparations and the Mongol fleet sailed around for months trying to find a place to get ashore before the great typhoon finally wiped out most of the fleet. The 1281 invasion attempt went even worse for Kublai Khan’s Mongol invasion force (reputed to be over 4,400 ships and 142,000 men─probably greatly exaggerated but still a massive force for the time). In the 1274 invasion attempt, the Mongols were actually withdrawing when the storm hit, destroying some 200 out of 500−900 ships and killing as many as 13,000 of 30,000 men. Although the story of the “Divine Wind (Kamikaze)” is what is most remembered, in each case the Japanese put up ferocious resistance ashore. The most serious previous threat came from two Mongol invasion attempts in 12, both of which were thwarted by typhoons that caused massive ship and manpower losses. Nevertheless, in over two thousand years, Japan had never been successfully invaded. Navy, especially submarines) and unavailable for the defense of the Japanese Home Islands. Although Japan still had 4 million men under arms, well over half were essentially trapped in China and Manchuria (thanks to the U.S. Sailors (Fleet Admiral Nimitz’s estimate) since neither Olympic or Coronet, nor the Japanese defensive plan, Ketsugo, were executed. Fortunately, 100 Million Japanese didn’t have to die a “glorious death,” nor tens of thousands of Americans, nor 5,000 U.S. An even bigger operation, Coronet, was planned for March 1946, an invasion of the Kanto plain area near Tokyo.
invasion force, with British participation, for Olympic would have significantly exceeded that of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
naval history had the first phase of Operation Downfall (the invasion of Japan) been executed as planned on X-day (1 November 1945) in Operation Olympic (the invasion of the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu). Were it not for the end of the war in August 1945, the alternative would have been the bloodiest battle in U.S. servicemen were returned in that month to the United States from the Pacific aboard several hundred U.S. “The sooner the Americans come, the better… One hundred million die proudly” – Japanese propaganda slogan, summer 1945.įortunately, at Christmas 1945, Operation Magic Carpet was in full swing, with December the peak month as over 700,000 U.S.
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