Word: kyushu
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...loaded into another of the 509th Group's B-29s at Tinian. The plane and its complement of escorts took off the next morning at 3:47 and headed for Kokura, a city that contained a major weapons arsenal, on the north coast of the island of Kyushu. Finding the target obscured by clouds and facing a fuel shortage on the strike plane, Major Charles W. Sweeney decided to fly over the alternate target on his way to an emergency landing on Okinawa...
Thus did Nagasaki enter history, an afterthought on the day of its ordeal and ever since a footnote: the second city to be hit by an atomic bomb. Fat Man exploded 1650 ft. above the city of some 240,000 people on the western coast of Kyushu at 11:02 on the morning of Aug. 9. In many ways, the event was a carbon copy of the horrors of Hiroshima: flash, heat, blast, radiation; permanent shadows cast by bombshine; thirsty, mortally burned people, emerging from the smoke and dust, trailing strips of their skin behind them. Some in Nagasaki...
...June 22, 1945, the U.S. had conquered Okinawa, just 350 miles from Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. LeMay's bombers set those islands aflame. From March to May, enormous sections of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, Kawasaki and Yokohama were incinerated. The raids on Tokyo had to be called off after May because scarcely any major targets were left. Of the carnage, LeMay said, "No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter." He was after military production. But, he added, "the entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes...
...Chester Nimitz, to lead the invasion of Japan as commander in chief of U.S. Army Forces Pacific. The plan consisted of two parts: first, Operation Olympic, scheduled for Nov. 1, 1945, would land the largest invasion force in history--nearly 340,000 soldiers and Marines--on the island of Kyushu; then, as early as March 1946, Operation Coronet, involving up to 2 million men, would target the island of Honshu and the Kanto plain, on which Tokyo lies...
...Emperor's strategists also prepared for an invasion of Kyushu. Allied intelligence estimates in late April put 84,200 Japanese troops in southern Kyushu. In fact, by late July almost 600,000 Imperial troops were on the island. That balance of Japanese to American fighting men portended a cataclysm. At Okinawa, until then the Pacific's largest land battle, 278,000 U.S. troops fought 83,000 Japanese. The Americans considered a worst-case scenario requiring three attempted landings to achieve victory. Meanwhile, Tokyo had issued orders to its troops--decrypted by U.S. intelligence, which long before had broken the Japanese...