America at War: The War Ends in the Pacific

AMERICA AT WAR: THE WAR ENDS IN THE PACIFIC

Bombing Japan

Shortly after the success of American troops in Normandy, U.S. long-range bombers began to pummel the Japanese mainland. In October MacArthur returned to the Philippines as he had promised, and in March U.S. Marines completed the capture of Iwo Jima in the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific up to that time. The raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi after the Iwo Jima campaign became the symbol of American triumph. Yet even worse fighting took place in June on Okinawa, the gateway to the Japanese home islands, where some 13,000 Americans and 100,000 Japanese lost their lives. So savage was the fighting in the last months of the Pacific War that troops in the field came to fear that a presumed invasion of Japan proper would cost the United States a million casualties, dwarfing the losses at Normandy the year before. The need to avoid such shocking losses became the overriding concern in the official rationale for what happened next.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On 16 July 1945 the United States detonated the world's first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. On 6 August a single American bomber flying over Hiroshima, the eighth largest city in Japan, dropped one bomb, code-named "Little Boy." The resulting explosion, astounding even the scientists who created it, leveled more than four square miles of the city, instantly killing more than 50,000 people. As Stalin had agreed, Soviet troops entered the war in Asia on 8 August, as American demands for the unconditional surrender of Japan went unanswered. The Japanese government was confused at first, unable to verify the dimensions of the damage in Hiroshima because of destroyed communications lines. By the time Tokyo realized the catastrophic power of the Americans' unprecedented new weapon, the deadline for surrender had passed. Thus, on 9 August a second bomb, "Fat Man," was dropped on Nagasaki, essentially destroying that city as well. The next day the Japanese Supreme Council voted to surrender unconditionally. On the fifteenth, V-J Day, the Allies accepted it. The most horrific war in human history had finally ended. The victors' effort to pick up the pieces would soon lead to new strife and a bipolar world tense with the possibility of nuclear war.

Sources:

Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969);

Robert A. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);

Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969);

Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger (New York: Harper & Row, 1972);

C. L. Sulzberger, The American Heritage Picture History of World War II (New York: American Heritage Publishing House, 1966).