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of Malaya. There were many sour jokes among men fighting in the east on hearing news of VE-Day. A dispatch rider handed a signal bearing the news to the senior staff officer of a division in Burma. This dignitary called to his sergeant, ‘I’ve got a message here: the war in Europe is over.’ The NCO turned to his men and said, ‘The war in Europe is over. Five-minute break.’ Major John Randle, who had been fighting on the Burma front since April 1942, said of the mood in the summer of 1945, ‘We thought we would go on and on. We were wearing a bit thin by then. If my CO had said, “You have earned a rest,” even before we went back [into Burma] in early ’45, I would have taken it. But I would never have asked for it; you couldn’t put your hand up and say “I’ve had enough.”’

To the dismay of many senior Americans, MacArthur was designated supreme commander for Olympic, the invasion of Japan scheduled to commence in November with a landing on Kyushu. Meanwhile, LeMay’s bombers continued to incinerate the enemy’s cities, and Japanese industrial production approached collapse. On 10 July 1945, the US Third Fleet under Halsey closed in on Japan and began its own intensive programme of carrier air strikes against the mainland, inflicting carnage and destruction upon areas that had escaped the attentions of Twentieth Air Force. ‘In the forefront of the invader, his great carrier task force rampaged about … like a mighty typhoon,’ wrote naval officer Yoshida Mitsuru in awed frustration.

Stalin had promised to join the eastern war and launch a great Manchurian offensive in August. Against Japan as against Germany, there seemed every prospect that American lives could be saved by allowing the Russians to do some of the bloodiest business of smashing the enemy. Washington was remarkably naïve in failing to recognise that Stalin intended to engage the Japanese not to oblige the United States, but because he was determined to secure his own territorial prizes. Far from requiring inducements to commit his soldiers, the Soviet warlord could not have been deflected from doing so. Of all the belligerents, Stalin sustained the most clear-sighted vision of his own purposes. Through June and July 1945, thousands of Soviet troop trains shuttled eastwards across Asia, carrying armies which had defeated Germany to complete the destruction of Japan.

Meanwhile at a score of massive, closely wired installations across the United States, 125,000 scientists, engineers and support staff laboured to bring to fruition the Manhattan Project, greatest and most terrible scientific enterprise of the war. Laura Fermi, wife of Enrico, one of the brilliant principals at the Los Alamos research site, wrote later that she pitied the army doctors charged with the welfare of the scientists: ‘They had prepared for the emergencies of the battlefields, and they were faced instead with a high-strung bunch of men, women and children. High-strung, because altitude affected us, because our men worked long hours under unrelenting pressure; high-strung because we were too many of a kind, too close to one another, too unavoidable even during relaxation hours, and we were all crackpots; high-strung because we felt powerless under strange circumstances.’

In 1942 the British had made significant progress with research on an atomic bomb; their theoretical knowledge, indeed, was then greater than that of America’s scientists. But, with their own island embattled, they recognised that they lacked resources to build a weapon quickly. An agreement was reached whereby British and European émigré scientists crossed the Atlantic to work with the Americans. Thereafter, Britain’s contribution was quickly forgotten in Washington: the United States became brutally proprietorial about its ownership of the Bomb.

Technological determinism is a prominent feature of modern warfare, and this was never more vividly manifested than in exploitation of the power of atomic destruction. Just as it was almost inevitable that once an armada of B-29s had been constructed to attack Japan, they would be