More than 60 Japanese cities were hit by firebombing attacks, including a massive March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo that easily outstripped Hiroshima or Nagasaki for death toll, destruction and general horror. military had gradually become numb to the task of wiping Japanese cities off the map. Had the United States possessed an atomic bomb in 1941, it’s inconceivable that they would have responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor by vaporizing a city. The United States had been destroying Japanese cities for months 6 detonation of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima, western Japan. 8, 1945 file photo, two people walk on a cleared path through the destruction resulting from the Aug. “A runner comes in and says ‘Sir, we’ve lost Nagasaki, it’s been destroyed by a new ‘special’ bomb’ … and the sort of six Samurai sort of said, ‘thank you, and run along,’ ” Ham told an interviewer in 2011.Īrticle content In this Sept. Engrossed in discussions about the Soviet invasion, the assembled men did not seem to care. 9, Japan’s six-member supreme war council was meeting in a bunker under Tokyo when word was first received that Nagasaki had been destroyed. The minutes to Japanese war meetings barely mention the bombingsįor his 2011 book Hiroshima Nagasaki, Australian historian Paul Ham pored over the minutes of high-level Japanese meetings and discovered that the country’s ruling military elite had a shocking indifference toward the atomic bombings. Air Force planes participated in the Nagasaki mission, one to carry the bomb and the other to act as escort. ![]() The wing of the airplane is visible at right. Smoke billows over Nagasaki, Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city Aug. When Imperial Japan came to the United States to talk surrender, they weren’t just facing nuclear bombs, they were staring down an unstoppable communist juggernaut that was just as ambivalent about death as they were. ![]() Across a 4,400-km front, the war-hardened Red Army utterly steamrolled through Japanese defences - and within two weeks Soviet landing craft had begun hitting islands off the Japanese coast. For comparison, D-Day involved 150,000 troops. 9, just three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, as many as 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on Japanese positions in Manchuria. The bombings coincided with one of the largest invasions in history Below, some things you may not have known about the momentous events of August 1945.
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