Japan surrenders- bringing an end to WWII, this day in 1945 – IOTW Report

Japan surrenders- bringing an end to WWII, this day in 1945

History.com:

Aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan formally surrenders to the Allies, bringing an end to World War II.

By the summer of 1945, the defeat of Japan was a foregone conclusion. The Japanese navy and air force were destroyed. The Allied naval blockade of Japan and intensive bombing of Japanese cities had left the country and its economy devastated. At the end of June, the Americans captured Okinawa, a Japanese island from which the Allies could launch an invasion of the main Japanese home islands. U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge of the invasion, which was code-named “Operation Olympic” and set for November 1945.

The invasion of Japan promised to be the bloodiest seaborne attack of all time, conceivably 10 times as costly as the Normandy invasion in terms of Allied casualties. On July 16, a new option became available when the United States secretly detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. Ten days later, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding the “unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces.” Failure to comply would mean “the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitable the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.” On July 28, Japanese Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki responded by telling the press that his government was “paying no attention” to the Allied ultimatum. U.S. President Harry S. Truman ordered the devastation to proceed, and on August 6, the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 80,000 people and fatally wounding thousands more. more here

23 Comments on Japan surrenders- bringing an end to WWII, this day in 1945

  1. hey! let’s re-enact the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki …

    suggestions:
    San Franshithole
    Porthole
    Shitcago
    NYC (New York Collective)
    Newjerk, New Jerky
    Minnicrapolis
    Seasshole

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  2. “Seventy-five years after the formal surrender of Japan on the USS Missouri, it is a little difficult to get one’s arms around how much has changed since then. In the 75 years from V-J Day to today, America has changed, from united as we have ever been to disunited as we have ever been.

    In 1945, enemy cities were firebombed; in 2020, American cities are firebombed…. it seems that after Kent State, the fomenters of the “antiwar” violence made a tactical retreat — replacing confrontation with infiltration (of institutions) — while keeping to their strategic goal of imposing on America their own ideas of a radical paradise….”

    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/from_world_war_to_civil_war.html .

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  3. The KGB controlledNYT had a # of “brilliant” SNARK articles in ’44 + ’45 bout how the Japs were being pressed by xenophobic, racist Americans.
    My Dad and 3 Uncles were some of those xenophobes! 1 Uncle absolutely forbid the nYT on his property. I thought he was extreme – until ’59 when I got some micro film of NYT ’44 + ’45. The NYt has hated Americans for 90 years. Very much so in ‘4 + ’45. Uncle _ was right!

    When JFK was attacking his predessor HST the 4 men who actually shed Jap blood told me (hard to believe; but i was a kid once!) that Harry not only saved 10,000,000 American lives BUT LIKELY 20,000,000 JAP LIVES.
    Jarheads say “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR”, but some do not do it. Almost all Japs fought to the end! Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Guadal Canal, Palau…. If you need more ask. I a proud of my family! And America which they all loved, and I still do!

    harry saved many millions of lives of all countries!

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  4. @Hambone – I agree and can sympathize. My uncle was a marine on Iwo. He rarely talked about it because that generation didn’t aggrandize themselves, but I cannot even fathom what they had to live with.

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  5. Anyone interested in learning more about this incredibly horrific war should read “A Doctor’s Sword” by Bob Jackson. It’s the biography of an Irish Doctor in the British Air Force who was captured by the Japanese on Sumatra and survived more than three years as a prisoner of war. Dr. Aidan MacCarthy survived being shipped to Japan on a Hell Ship that was sunk by the USS Tang in the South China Sea. Picked up by a Japanese ship, MacCarthy ended up in a POW camp located in Nagasaki. The Japanese were planning on executing all of the Allied POWs if the Americans invaded their homeland, and had them dig trenches where they were going to killed. Most of the prisoners survived the second Atomic Bomb that exploded very near their prison camp, because they were forced into the trenches by their captors. Dr. MacCarthy spent many days treating injured and dying Japanese after the attack. Aiden MacCarthy prevented his fellow prisoners from hanging the camp commander after the surrender, and was given the samurai sword referred to in this book’s title in gratitude by the Japanese commandant. Aiden MacCarthy lived to the age of eighty-two and was revered by everyone who every knew him. The samurai sword now hangs in the MacCarthy family’s pub in County Cork. This is a great book.

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  6. I must follow up my previous comment. I do miss my uncle. That does not take away from what my father did during Korea and his role in the Coast Guard. Are they the same? No, but they both served and I do not have the words to thank both of them for their service.
    I do not have the words to adequately express my thanks to all who have put their lives on the line and have volunteered to protect me. Thank You

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  7. @Billy

    I took the Missouri tour a few years ago. It was a great experience to go from the bottom to the top – 9 decks I think. And those huge 16″ guns – awesome.

    The area where the surrender was signed seemed a lot smaller than it looks in the pictures. It’s amazing that all those men fit into that small space.

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  8. Harry S Truman was a democrat and had a lot of the usual democrat bad ideas – but he had guts in authorizing the a-bomb attacks on Japan to end the world’s most destructive war…so far.

    I feel we may be headed for something even worse.

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  9. @ Hambone
    – Four of my uncles were in WW2. The oldest of the four was part of the D-Day landing. Survived to war’s end in Europe. After VE Day he as sent west for the invasion of Japan, and was in Hawaii when the bombs ended the war with Japan. The youngest of the four brothers was only in the Pacific, I think in the Philippines when the war ended. Both probably lived due to the bomb.

    @Marco

    – Thanks so much for the recommendation of the book, “A Doctor’s Sword”. I enjoy reading those types of books. And I had not heard of this one before. It looks like an incredible story/life.

    The following is in the wikipedia entry for Dr Aidan MacCarthy:

    “In 1940, he was posted to France and was evacuated from Dunkirk where he attended wounded Allied soldiers while under fire from German aircraft……

    To the Japanese ear ‘MacCarthy’ and ‘MacArthur’ were indistinguishable. The Japanese assumed that MacCarthy must be a close blood relative of the American commander. Therefore, whenever MacCarthy answered his name, he was struck on the forehead. This may have contributed to his developing a brain clot in later life.

    He was in charge of a working party in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city on 9 August 1945. The prisoners had previously been warned, by secret radio, to take cover at a particular time of day without being given any further details. When the war ended, when some Australian ex-prisoners were attempting to lynch their Japanese captors, MacCarthy locked the Japanese guards in a cell and threw the key into the sea.

    MacCarthy was the senior Allied serviceman in Japan at the Japanese surrender…”

    I also see a DVD was released in 2015, with the same title.
    Here’s the ~ 90 second trailer for the DVD.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-R2IM8oIE0 .

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  10. Blink: Thanks for adding to my summary of the book about Dr. Aidan MacCarthy. He wrote an autobiography entitled “A Doctor’s War” about his incredible wartime experiences. When he was first fished out of the water after his Hell Ship was sunk by the American submarine USS Tang, the Japanese were beating the survivors up and tossing them overboard where they were cut to pieces by the destroyer’s propellers. Seeing this, MacCarthy and several other prisoners jumped back into the ocean. They then started swimming away from Japan and were picked up by some Japanese whalers. Only eighty-two men survived out of over one thousand who had set sail from Singapore. Aidan MacCarthy was definitely a survivor.

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