Eighty Years Ago This Week

  In a New Year message to the Japanese people Emperor Hirohito explicitly labelled the conception of his own divinity as false . He had never in fact been openly designated as a god although his claim to be descended from Ameratsu, the sun goddess and senior divinity in Shinto, had lent him at least indirect divine status. By force of uninformed repetition during the war years it had become generally thought that he was truly divine. Hirohito did not disclaim  Ameratsu as an ancestor but, on a more practical level, he also declared that the belief that the Japanese people was superior to all others and fated to rule the world, as false. Demoting Hirohito to human status was part of an American strategy designed, on the one hand, to extirpate any possibility that Japanese militarism would revive but, on the other, positioning him to be accepted as a relatively normal constitutional monarchial figurehead for a democratic Japan fit to become a stable member of the community of n...

  The foreign ministers of the US and Britain travelled to Moscow for a three power conference at the suggestion of US Secretary of State Byrnes. There was no pressing agenda. The conference discussed a number of second-tier questions touching Korea and Iran amongst others and endorsed the Soviet puppet regimes in Bulgaria and Romania. The true purpose of the meeting was to establish the US and the Soviet Union as the arbiters of any residual questions from the war; Britain was included in the hope of creating rifts with the US. The other victor powers, France and China, were entirely excluded. The Soviet Union overplayed its hand by launching claims to massive swathes of Turkish territory, the provinces of Kars and Ardahan. These had been seized from the moribund Ottoman Empire by Russia in 1878 but returned to Turkish rule by the Treaty of Kars in the aftermath of the First World War when the Bolshevik regime was anxious to avoid Turkish participation in the civil war. The inhabi...

  The London County Council discussed the project for a national theatre, which had been kicking around for over a century. The location proposed was on the south bank of the Thames in the heavily bombed area between Waterloo Station and two long established features of the river front, the Shot Tower and the Lion Brewery. The theatre was indeed built on the site but over ten years later.  The  Brewery  (admittedly abandoned since 1930)  was demolished to make way for the Festival of Britain in the late 1940s and the Shot Tower followed it into oblivion as the National Theatre was built.  The brewery's iconic huge Coade stone lions were preserved by the order of King George VI; one stands facing Parliament and the other at Twickenham Stadium. In what was described as a major easing of wartime controls, men aged 31 and over and all women other than nurses and midwives were to be released from the "Control of Engagement Order". In reality 8.75m people were ...

  Britain's Labour government faced a censure motion tabled by the Conservative opposition in a lively debate in Parliament. Oliver Lyttleton led for the motion with a vigorous and telling speech. Given the scale of the challenges that faced the government to bring Britain back to a peacetime footing, he had easy targets. He described the massive residue of wartime controls as a "Whitehall twilight" which was holding industry back and extended the attack on heavy regulation by claiming that  "thou shalt not" was the government's motto. He criticised the shortages still prevalent notably clothing which the government had promised to alleviate and the slow restoration of damage done by German bombs, of the replacement of bombs, "all words, no houses." Stafford Cripps delivered a lacklustre response for the government but its huge majority ensured that the motion was heavily defeated by 381 to 197. Afterwards Aneurin Bevan, responsible for the task as...

  The trial for treason of John Amery took place and lasted a mere eight minutes. He was the son of senior Conservative politician Leo Amery but had gone from being the black sheep of the family to defecting to Nazi Germany where he recruited for the SS British unit and made propaganda broadcasts. He had been arrested in Italy by British troops including Alan Whicker, later famous as a journalist. Attempts to present him as mentally ill and unfit to plead or as a Spanish citizen had failed. Amery pled guilty, which was tantamount to suicide as the only penalty for the offence was death. He was duly sentenced to be hanged. Yugoslavia was declared a republic by the communist dominated Constituent Assembly. The monarchy was abolished permanently. The now ex-king protested feebly but the British government, which had been the chief backer of Tito's partisan movement during the Axis occupation and de facto civil war,   accepted the assembly's decision with only the faintest qualif...

  Three officers - a major general and two colonels - who had  defected from the British led Indian army to the Japanese controlled Indian National Army were put on trial by court martial at the Red Fort in Calcutta on charges equivalent to treason. All came from the Punjab but one was Muslim, one Sikh and the third Hindu. They all chose to be defended by the Indian National Congress. The trial provoked extensive protests in which hundreds were injured.   Two police manned coast guard stations in Palestine were blown up  in protest at British measures to halt illegal Jewish immigation causing some injuries. The British responded with an attack on kibbutzim suspected of harbouring the attackers. Some 10,000 soldiers of the 6th Airborne Division conducted the operation in which eight settlers were killed and dozens injured. The settlements were searched and some forty Jews were taken away for interrogation. British led forces including Gurkhas were heavily engag...

  Britain was facing the challenge of its effective bankruptcy. The lead British negotiator Lord Keynes was on the verge of collapse after navigating aggressive American nit-picking and confused views in London; the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton was at sea, barely reading the papers which he might not have understood anyway; the Bank of England showed little signs of awareness that Britain's financial might had dwindled since 1914. Three weeks of gruelling negotiations in Washington yielded a public offer from the US of a loan of £875m at 2% interest and £125m applied against lease-lend debts. The stark truth was that unless Britain were prepared to retreat into complete autarky based on the relics of Empire ("starvation corner") it held no cards. The near-truce between the Labour government and the Conservatives was breaking down. The government had yet to roll out its full detailed five year plan for nationalising industry including utilities, in particular ho...

  A specially modified Gloster Meteor  set a new official world speed record of 606mph. There seemed a fitting symmetry in the maker of the RAF's last biplane fighter scoring this triumph with the RAF's first operational  jet fighter. The achievement appeared to be a continuation of the way progress in aviation had been measured by such records. It seemed to hold promise for the vast aircraft industry which Britain had built during the war. In reality the commercial battle would be won by size of accessible market and of military purchasing power; the US aviation industry was always going to win. Anyway the German rocket powered Me 163 fighter had already flown faster, making the RAF record doubly irrelevant. Tito reaped the rewards of his military success in the fight against German occupation and the virtual civil war to which unwavering British support had made a large contribution. His People's Front won 90% of the vote in Yugoslavia's parliamentary elections. It wa...

  Hugh Trevor-Roper, history don turned wartime intelligence officer, published the results of the investigation that he had undertaken into the fate of Hitler at the behest of the British authorities. The investigation aimed to remove the veil of mystery cast by the Soviets who had occupied Berlin and with it the Fuehrerbunker so were thus far better placed to know the truth.  The Nazis had claimed that Hitler had died fighting . Stalin preferred to hold out the possibility that or, even claim, that Hitler had survived. The democratic states could be accused of harbouring Hitler with the intention of restoring Nazism.  Trevor-Roper had established the truth that Hitler had shot himself after Eva Braun, whom he had just married, died by poison. The Soviets did not respond in any way and it took another five years before they accepted something approaching the truth. In the meanwhile  Trevor-Roper had written a book on Hitler's last days which made h...

  The British blundered ever deeper into the fight for Indonesian independence. In breach of a local agreement, leaflets were dropped on the city of Surabaya demanding that arms be surrendered. Surabya was a stronghold of anti-colonialism, partly inspired by the radio broadcasts of "Surabaya Sue," a Glasgow-born hotelier. The leaflets provoked violence against British troops in the city who were there to repatriate internees rather than to restore Dutch colonial rule. Brigadier Mallaby, their commander, made a fatal error by driving into the centre with no escort and almost unarmed. Outside a bank, where some of his troops were besieged, he was killed in confused circumstances. More in reprisal than anything else, the British unleashed a division strength attack on the Indonesian forces with air and tank support. The city was almost destroyed and 10,000 or more people were killed.  Mallaby's wrecked Lincoln became an image of the fight for independence. The Norwegian Fasc...

  The French (including women for the first time) went to the polls. They voted almost unanimously for a new constitution and by a majority of two-thirds that any new constitution would be put to a popular vote. The second proposal had aroused fears that it would serve to repeat Napoleon III's rule by plebiscite.  De Gaulle  had advocated a yes vote on both so as to avoid the new assembly having sovereign status. Voters also chose the assembly which would deliberate the new constitution. The Communists emerged as the largest party with 26% of the vote and 158 seats followed by the Catholic MRP, 23% and 152 seats . Blocs of smaller parties took 24% but only 97 seats. The Communists had campaigned against a referendum on a new constitution and the MRP offered "fidelity" to de Gaulle. The socialists came third with 22% and 142 seats. The Communists' goal of a coalition between themselves and the socialists had been thwarted by the socialists who saw the danger of domina...

  The British government published the bill to nationalise the Bank of England in line with its manifesto. The discussions between Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Bank Governor, Lord Catto had gone the Bank's way. The normally over-bearing and arrogant Etonian intellectual, raised in exalted Court circles, had been outmanoeuvred by the low profile Scot, who had worked his way up from being a clerk in a shipping office. Shareholders would be fully compensated and control of the Bank would remain with its Court of Directors. It was also given an explicit role in supervising the banking system but Catto evaded Dalton's attempt to force on the Bank the power to dictate to banks the assets they held.   Serious fighting broke out in Indochina, now Vietnam, where the Viet-Minh independence movement under Ho Chi Min had established  an autonomous government. The Viet Minh tried to take control of Saigon airfield and the radio station. This had been been overth...

      France's Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval was tried for collaboration and passing intelligence to the enemy. Unlike the trial of Marshal Petain which had been conducted decorously in light of defendant's reputation and standing the entire court, notably the jurors who hurled abuse at him, showed open hostility. Laval was given little opportunity to speak and made vigorous use of what freedom he was given. In protest at the conduct of the trial he refused to remain in court. He was sentenced to death on all counts. Britain's ports were almost shut down by a series of unofficial strikes. The strikers chiefly aimed at an increase in or simple introduction of a fixed wage; they were mostly employed on a casual basis and paid piecework. The return to their usual ports of men deployed elsewhere during the war also provoked discontent. The general secretary of the TGWU Arthur Deakin which represented dockers was close to Ernie Bevin who had been a key Labour minister in t...

  General George Patton now military governor of Bavaria pursued his gift for public controversy with  an interview in which he said that denazification was wildly overblown and that the political debate over Nazism was equivalent to the that between Democrats and Republicans in the US. He privately admired Germany and saw the nation as the only worthwhile bastion against Soviet domination of Europe. He had also developed a broad dislike of Jews on the basis of what he saw of concentration camp survivors. He was dismissed from his post by Eisenhower. The Potsdam conference had mandated a Council of Foreign Ministers as a regular forum to settle post war issues. In reality it became an arena for Soviet attempts to dominate the process and its first formal meeting provided ample proof. The dispute focused on major questions of procedure. In particular the  Soviets objected to the inclusion of French and Chinese representatives. The meeting broke up with no significant ...

  Maynard Keynes had been sent to Washington to negotiate the future of economic relations between the US and the UK following  the President's abrupt termination of Lend-Lease aid. In military terms Britain had been able to hold on its status as one of the "Big Three" while the war lasted, but now had to face life in peace with an economy geared almost entirely to war production and its finances in ruins. Keynes's opening case was leaked to the press and showed how little negotiating power he held; his case rested on notions of equity only. In proportionate terms Britain had made a vastly greater sacrifice to defeat the Axis than the US; the impact on its economy was "considerable" whilst the US incurred a  "negligible". Perhaps worse, Britain could only claim to have passed very modest assistance through to other allies. During the First World War Britain had passed much US financial aid through to allies notably Russia but was left with no enfor...

    It is uncommon to hear discordant opinions about the RAF's achievement commemorated on Battle of Britain Day but possibly the most strident came from one of the service's highest profile leaders: Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris, AOC-in-C of Bomber Command. His words aimed to put the praise usually given to Fighter Command for victory in the Battle of Britain in a broader context. However they read as astonishingly mean spirited.  They give valuable sidelights on the internal dynamics and mindset of the RAF. He claimed that "[i]t was definitely Bomber Command's wholesale destruction of the invasion barges in the Channel Ports that convinced the Germans of the futility of attempting to cross the Channel", thus claiming final credit for his own arm of the service. He gave no evidence for this view and there was none to give. Perhaps one tenth of the barges were destroyed by bombing. He also plays down the sacrifice of Fighter Command pilots by de...

  William Joyce (" Lord Haw Haw")  the Fascist leader,  who had fled to Germany on the outbreak of war and broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain, was sentenced to death for treason after a trial which lasted a couple of days; the jury deliberated for only twenty three minutes. He pled not guilty and there was no argument about the facts; the case turned entirely on a legal point. Joyce had been born in the USA to an Irish father who was a naturalized American. Joyce was never legally a British citizen although he had lived in the country since childhood. He had obtained  a British passport   by making a false declaration and this - together with a false claim to being British when he was joining his university OTC - was held to show that he "owed allegiance to the King" and could thus commit treason. Prime minister Attlee and Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India who had returned there after discussions with the government in London, each made broadcasts about the fu...

  The reappearance of this photograph on Twitter, questionably captioned as showing Stalin on learning of Barbarossa, provides nonetheless a reminder that Stalin was blind sided by the German attack despite almost unanimous and extensive evidence that it was coming.  Stalin was terrified that Hitler would attack and had striven to avoid anything that might have provoked him; he was a committed appeaser. Hitler was too good an actor. Both Stalin and Neville Chamberlain saw him as a dangerously volatile and touchy leader. They did not spot that his outbursts were calculated pieces of theatre. Sir Horace Wilson,  Chamberlain's right hand man, was obsessively risk-averse and fed the prime minister's fear that Hitler would go to war if pushed; they shared the delusion that Hitler shared a normal human being's dislike of war. In reality Hitler revelled in the prospect of war.

    Japan's wartime leader General Tojo attempted to kill himself when US troops came to arrest him for his war crimes. He had no time to perform seppuku as would have been traditional and shot himself in the chest, but missed the heart. He survived and did not cheat the hangman. The Academie Francaise took steps against four members who had been convicted of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers but there was a curious imbalance in how they were treated. The two most prominent, Marshal Petain and Charles Maurras, were struck off but their seats would remain vacant whilst they were still alive; they remained half immortal. Abel Hermant and Abel Bonnard were fully expelled and new occupants sought for their seats. For the first time since the early days of the war the Brigade of Guards mounted the "Bank Picket" when a detachment of troops marched from Wellington Barracks to the Bank of England to protect it from a repetition of the attack during the Gordon Riots. In a conc...

  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...

   The trial of Marshal Petain on charges of treason opened in Paris. He had bowed to the advice of his de fence lawyers and wore the uniform of a Marshal of France, adorned only with the Medaille Militaire (a decoration only available to the most junior and most senior soldiers). He declined to carry his Marshal's baton.   Petain affected to be too deaf to follow what was said but he had been observed listening attentively to significant points in the opening proceedings. The first witness was Paul Reynaud, who as prime minister had brought Petain into the government. Reynauld was attempting to justify his own conduct as much as anything and his testimony was hostile.  The Belgian monarchial crisis continued as parliament voted on an extension of the regency. The prime minister Achille van Acker declared that the king was incapable of reigning following his actions during the war, in practice calling for his abdication. He also accused the king of failing to pu...

    The leaders of the "Big Three" nations - Britain, the Soviet Union and the USA  met for their final summit conference. It was visibly the end of an era. There was a new US president and Churchill's future was in the balance pending the count for the general election which had just taken place. As Churchill had invited the Labour leader Clem Attlee to attend, it was certain that  the prime minister who would be responsible to enacting the conference's decisions would be there, but a question mark hung over who it would be. The previous summits had debated the conduct of the war but now the agenda covered largely the future of defeated Germany. A further element of unreality was also present at Potsdam. The first test of a nuclear weapon was due to take place; by some accounts President Truman had tried to delay the conference so as to know the result of the  Trinity (as the test was codenamed)  with the attendant implications for the balance of power. Tr...

    With a large increase in the number of voters since the last general election in 1935 it was especially hard to call the result of the 1945 vote. To give time for the votes of electors serving overseas to be counted, it would be another three weeks before the result was published.  Labour was in confident mood after polling day on the basis of detailed canvasses although the Conservatives were still on a formidable majority of seats won in 1935. Labour leadership talked in terms of winning 100 seats and many of the 25 new constituencies. This would put them within striking distance of enough MPs to form the government. The Conservatives were nervous that a vigorous campaign by the Liberals had translated to proper three-way fights in constituencies which would work to the government's disadvantage. Political debate in France was dominated by the question of the consitution. De Gaulle preferred a simple reversion to the 1875 constitution of the Third Republic but ...