Hell To Pay is a comprehensive and compelling examination of the myriad complex issues that comprised the strategic plans for the American invasion of Japan.  U.S. planning for the invasion and military occupation of Imperial Japan was begun in 1943, two years before the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In its final form, Operation Downfall called for a massive Allied invasion—on a scale dwarfing "D-Day"—to be carried out in two stages.  In the first stage, Operation Olympic, the U.S. Sixth Army would lead the southern-most assault on the Home Island of Kyushu preceded by the dropping of as many as nine atom bombs behind the landing beaches.  Sixth Army would secure airfields and anchorages needed to launch the second stage, Operation Coronet, 500 miles to the north in 1946.  The decisive Coronet invasion of the industrial heartland of Japan through the Tokyo Plain would be led by the Eighth Army, as well as the First Army, which had previously pummeled its way across France and Germany to defeat the Nazis.

These facts are well known and have been recounted—with varying degrees of accuracy—in a variety of books and articles. A common theme in these works is their reliance on a relatively few declassified high-level planning documents.  An attempt to fully understand how both the U.S. and Japan planned to conduct the massive battles subsequent to the initial landings was not dealt with in these books beyond the skeletal U.S. outlines formulated nine months before the initial land battles were to commence, and more than a year before the anticipated climactic series of battles near Tokyo.  On the Japanese side, plans for Operation Ketsu-go, the "decisive battle" in the Home Islands, have been unexamined below the strategic level and seldom consisted of more than a list of the units involved and a rehash of U.S. intelligence estimates of Kamikaze aircraft available for the defense of Kyushu.

Hell to Pay examines the invasion of Japan in light of the large body of Japanese and American operational and tactical planning documents unearthed by the author in both familiar and obscure archives, as well as postwar interrogations and reports that senior Japanese commanders and their staffs were ordered to produce for General MacArthur's headquarters.  Hell to Pay clarifies the political and military ramifications of the enormous casualties and loss of material projected by both sides in the climatic struggle to bring the Pacific War to a conclusion through a brutal series of battles on Japanese soil.  This groundbreaking history counters the revisionist interpretations questioning the rationale for the use of the atom bomb and shows that President Truman's decision was based on very real estimates of the truly horrific cost of a conventional invasion of Japan.

D. M. Giangreco served for more than twenty years as an editor for Military Review, published by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  He has written and lectured widely on national security matters, and is an award-winning author of numerous articles and eleven books, including Dear Harry...Truman's Mailroom, 1945-1973.

Praise For HELL TO PAY 

"A former editor at Military Review provides us with one of the first books to detail the planned U.S. invasionof the Japanese home islands in October 1945 and the Japanese preparations for that invasion. Drawingon solid research in both countries, Giangreco lays out the U.S. planning and the whole scenarioof whatwould have happened: millions of casualties, prolongation of the Pacific war, possibly past 1947,and manpower shortages and war weariness in the United States, with Japanese militarists—and their no-surrender policy—in control in Japan. The two-pronged invasion would have begun on the island of Kyushu, preceded by no fewer than nine atom-bomb drops behind the landing beaches. Illustrative of just how much the war with Japan was a close-run thing, this is essential reading." —Library Journal (Starred Review)

"Giangreco . . . synthesizes years of research in a definitive analysis of America's motives for using atomic bombs against Japan in 1945." —Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

 "I know of no other book that examines the actual scenarios for the invasion of Japan more fully than this. It strikes me as an important piece of military history. Of course, some will continue to argue that "Japan was ready to surrender"--without ever adequately explaining why, if that was the case, Japan did not surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

—Alonzo L. Hamby, History News Network