On August 6th, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. The city was Hiroshima and the next target had been planned as Kyoto. The original intent, and the threat, was that America would drop a bomb on one city every other day, but that ended up being impossible – only two were ready for deployment. Other cities on the original short list were Kokura and Nigata.
The United States had successfully detonated the first atomic bomb in a July test, followed by the Potsdam Declaration, an ultimatum for Japan to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.”
In discussions prior to the launch, Secretary of War Henry Stimson persuaded President Truman to substitute Nagasaki for the shrine city of Kyoto. General Carl Spaatz, head of strategic air forces in the Pacific, selected Hiroshima and Kokura to be the targets for the first and second atomic bombs – cloud cover the day of the second mission caused them to switch the target to Nagasaki.
The USSR, their neighbor, declared war on Japan the same day as the bombing of Nagasaki. On August 14th, the Japanese accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered.
Leaflets dropped on major industrial cities after the first bomb in Hiroshima read
We urge that you accept these consequences and begin the work of building a new, better and peace-loving Japan.
And they did. The Emperor stepped down and America occupied it while a democracy took hold. Meanwhile, America began a Cold War with the USSR. As we joked about when I was in the military, ‘the US and Russia had a Cold War and Japan won’.
General Matt Ridgway, who became Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific after MacArthur, received a nice hand-written, velvet-covered ‘thank you’ from the Japanese press association the day the San Francisco Peace Treaty went into effect in 1952 and Japan was once again independent. When Ridgway’s widow died, I acquired it in the estate auction. It’s a nice commemorative outlining the awesome responsibility and power that a free press has.
Wow. What an incredible piece of history!
I visited Hiroshima for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. Need to get a blog post together on the topic…. Having visited Pearl Harbor last year it seems all jumbled in my mind — having family in both countries leads me to say there is way too much suffering.
And in so many of the photos around Japan, we “posed” with friends, meaning we waved the peace sign.
Yes, I got that and a footlocker of his at the estate auction. A lot of the other stuff was really, really expensive (museums have a lot more money than they claim) due to him being the guy who basically created the 82nd Airborne in WW2. But after that (when MacArthur imploded his career by telling the president what to do) he got the coolest title in the world: Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.
When people talk about Iraq and Afghanistan they forget we still ‘occupy’ both Germany and Japan. And in the case of Europe it’s resulted in the longest period of peace in their history.