Eighty years ago this week the US Navy suffers a final calamity

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 assess the intentions of the millions serving overseas, which may have been the wild card. General Slim commanding the army in Burma had told Churchill emphatically that his men would not be voting Conservative which may give some indication. The poll gave Clem Attlee's incoming government a madate for a radical programme. 

At the end of the Potsdam conference the allies issued a declaration to Japan. It called for unconditional surrender but only at the end of the text. Similarly it demanded the permanent removal from power "those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest" without explicitly mentioning the Emperor. But all told the declaration was substantially more constructive than the flat demand for Germany's unconditional surrender and gave some arguments to those advising against total resistance. It included a positive promise of measures to foster democratic government; Japan would not be eliminated as a nation and would be permitted to retain industrial infrastructure to sustain the economy.