V-J Day

Today, August 14, 2016, will be the seventy-first anniversary of V-J Day, the day in 1945 when the USA’s war against the Empire of Japan, which Japan started with its attack on Pearl Harbor, three years and eight months prior (December 7, 1941), was finally over.  Eight days before V-J Day, on August 6, 1945, the U. S. military dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  Receiving no response from the Japanese government after the resulting devastation (an estimated 66,000 people were killed), the U. S. military dropped the second and last of its then inventory of such bombs on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 (an estimated 39,000 people were killed).

Five days later, on August 14, 1945 (in the USA), Japanese Emperor Hirohito urged his people, in a radio address, to accept a surrender to the Americans.  He blamed the use of a “new and cruel bomb” by the USA for this necessity.  U. S. President Harry S. Truman announced Japan’s surrender at a news conference at the White House.  The American people were jubilant.  In an iconic photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt that reflected their exhilaration, an American sailor kissed a nurse unknown to him in New York City’s crowded Times Square (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-J_day_in_Times_Square).  The Second World War was finally over.  Germany had surrendered three months earlier on May 8, 1945.

Over the years, there has been some debate about the decision, made by President Truman, to drop those atomic bombs on Japan.  Truman, himself once said that after making a decision, he “never looked back.”  As such, he had no regrets about dropping those bombs.  I agree.

Without those bombs, the USA and its allies would have had to invade the homeland of Japan, just as they had done regarding Germany, in order to secure an unconditional surrender.  The planned invasion was code-named Operation Downfall.  It was to begin in October 1945 with an assault intended to capture the southern third of the main Japanese island of Kyushu.  Then, in the spring of 1946, the USA and its allies would have invaded the Kanto Plain, near the capital of Tokyo on the Japanese island of Honshu.  Operation Downfall would have been the largest amphibious operation in history, greater than the D Day invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944.

On the other side, the Japanese military was preparing for the U. S.-led invasion with its own Operation Ketsugo.  Logically, they knew where the attack would begin and planned for an all-out defense of Kyushu, with nothing left in reserve. 

U. S. military planners assumed “that operations in this area will be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire, but also by a fanatically hostile population.”  As such, estimates were made by various groups and individuals in and out of the U. S. government as to the number of American casualties (killed and wounded) that would be suffered by the U. S. during Operation Downfall.  Thankfully, we will never know the true number, but based upon previous experiences during WWII, it would have been mammoth (substantially more than the number killed by the atomic bombs).  And the number suffered by the Japanese would have been huge as well.  It is safe to say, in my opinion, that the estimated 105,000 Japanese who died as a direct result of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was less than those who would have died (Americans, allies and Japanese) during the planned invasion of Japan.  Thus, the atomic bombs saved lives.