Eighty Years Ago This Week

  When Emperor Hirohito had announced Japan's surrender, the nation was in a quite different situation to Germany. The vast bulk of its core territory - above all the home islands - were unoccupied. Its government was intact. Substantial Japanese forces were still in control of large areas which had been conquered mostly during the war. The practicalities of ending the war and enforcing Allied will on the country would be quite different. Unlike in Europe the USA was by far the dominant power militarily in the region. The British army which had just driven the Japanese from Burma was too far away to weigh heavily in the balance of power. Moreover, Britain had an interest in reaffirming its role in the imperial possessions lost to Japan in 1941 and 1942; British forces reoccupied Hong Kong and Singapore. Apart from seizing desirable territory the Soviet Union had no particular goals. It would have been only a junior partner in the occupation of Japan.  The fate of Japan lay not...

  The new Labour government was confronted with an immense economic challenge. Without prior warning or discussion the US stopped Lend-Lease aid with immediate effect. Maynard Keynes had just circulated a paper warning the government that Britain faced "financial Dunkirk" because its economy was now entirely dependent on US assistance and was geared overwhelmingly to fighting a war which had just ended far sooner than anticipated. Britain was in the wholly anomalous position of being one of the "big three" world powers with attendant military and diplomatic commitments but financially bankrupt. Keynes calculated that Britain would need $5bn from the US to avoid "Queer Street" and "a sudden and humiliating withdrawal from our onerous responsibilities with great loss of prestige and an acceptance for the time being of the position of a second-class Power, rather like the present position of France." The government hoped to avoid having to take this...

    The US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. It is estimated to have killed one fifth of the population of 195,000, a smaller percentage than the bomb on Hiroshima.   Nagasaki's topography with lines of terrain relief dispersed the blast and the bomb fell in the outskirts and not plumb centre as at Hiroshima. The Soviet Union launched an attack on Japanese occupied territory, just meeting the commitment made at Yalta to begin war on Japan within three months of Germany's surrender. The Soviet Union was able to reverse Japanese gains made in the war of 1905 and retook South Sakhalin and the Kuril islands. It also seized Korea north of the 38th parallel. These have remained in Russian or communist hands since.  Port Arthur became a Soviet navy base albeit under notional Chinese sovereignty. Japan bowed to allied demands and surrendered  unconditionally, albeit with a rider that the position of the emperor should remain sacrosanct. When Hirohito ...

  Japan's failure to respond to the invitation to surrender in the Potsdam declaration prompted President Truman to order the use of the atomic bomb in anger. One was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing about half of its population of 343,000; half of these died immediately and the others from their wounds or radiation poisoning in the following months. People were simply vaporized leaving no more than a shadow on the ground. Any hopes that Stalin might have entertained that the new Labour government of Britain might have been more pliable at the Potsdam conference were disappointed when the British continued to oppose his urging to act against Franco's Spain. The three powers compromised to announce that Spain would not be allowed into the United Nations organization under his regime as it had been established with the assistance of the Fascist powers. Attlee included two notable leftwing former rebels in his government. Aneurin Bevan was made minister of health although...

The Japanese navy enjoyed its last significant success of the war when one of its submarines sank the cruiser USS Indianapolis on passage from Tinian to which she had delivered key components for the first atomic bombs. Of her complement of 1,100 some 900 survived the sinking but through a series of oversights her loss was not apparent to the authorities for over three days. When a rescue mission was finally mounted there were only 315 survivors left. It was the USN's greatest loss of life at sea. The episode features in the movie Jaws as a mass shark attack, but most of the men died from exposure and thirst. To draw attention from its errors the USN successfully court-martialled her captain. The result of the UK general election was announced. Labour won by a landslide, taking twice the number of seats as the Conservatives on a turnout of 72%. The scale of the victory came as a surprise although the result had been uncertain. There appears to have been no systematic attempt to as...