The next day, Soviet forces attacked in Manchuria, rapidly overwhelming Japanese positions there, and a second U.S. On August 8, Japan’s desperate situation took another turn for the worse when the USSR declared war against Japan. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 80,000 people and fatally wounding thousands more.Īfter the Hiroshima attack, a faction of Japan’s supreme war council favored acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, but the majority resisted unconditional surrender. Truman ordered the devastation to proceed, and on August 6, the U.S. Ten days later, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding the “unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces.” Failure to comply would mean “the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitable the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.” On July 28, Japanese Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki responded by telling the press that his government was “paying no attention” to the Allied ultimatum. On July 16, a new option became available when the United States secretly detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. The invasion of Japan promised to be the bloodiest seaborne attack of all time, conceivably 10 times as costly as the Normandy invasion in terms of Allied casualties. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge of the invasion, which was code-named “Operation Olympic” and set for November 1945. At the end of June, the Americans captured Okinawa, a Japanese island from which the Allies could launch an invasion of the main Japanese home islands. The Allied naval blockade of Japan and intensive bombing of Japanese cities had left the country and its economy devastated.
The Japanese navy and air force were destroyed. Aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan formally surrenders to the Allies, bringing an end to World War II.īy the summer of 1945, the defeat of Japan was a foregone conclusion.
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