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man answered flippantly, ‘We’re here to win the war,’ and of course the young airman did not believe him. A few days later, on 6 August 1945, the plane dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. Its detonation generated the power of 12,500 tons of conventional explosive, created injuries of a kind never before experienced by humankind, and killed at least 70,000 people. Around the world, many people at first found the notion of what had taken place beyond the compass of their imaginations. Lt. Cmdr. Michael Blois-Brooke of the British assault ship Sefton, preparing to invade Malaya, said: ‘We heard about some wonder bomb that had been dropped on Japan and which was going to stop the war. We really took no notice, thinking that one single bomb wasn’t going to alter the course of history.’

Three days later ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki, matching the explosive power of 22,000 tons of TNT, and killing at least 30,000 people. In the early hours of that day, the first of 1.5 million Soviet troops crossed the border into Manchuria, supported by 5,500 tanks and self-propelled guns. They swept across the region, overwhelming the hopelessly outgunned Japanese. In some places the defenders fought to the last, sustaining resistance for ten days after the war officially ended. But by 20 August the Russians had secured most of Manchuria and northern Korea. The brief campaign cost them 12,000 dead, more than the British Army lost in France in 1940, while something close to 80,000 Japanese soldiers perished.

Most of the young men bombing Japan had long since acquired a carapace of callousness about their business, matched by that which armoured their commanders. Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold, the USAAF’s commander, wished to conclude the Superfortress offensive with a ‘grand finale’ by a thousand fire-raising aircraft; Spaatz, now his Pacific C-in-C, preferred the idea of dropping a third atomic bomb on Tokyo. In the event, on 14 August eight hundred B-29s attacked Isesaki urban area with incendiaries without losing a single plane, creating a last post-Nagasaki storm of destruction. One of the pilots, Col. Carl Storrie, said next morning of his own role: ‘We played alarm clock. All the rest of the aircraft carried fire bombs, but we had 4,000-pounders and went in to wake up the population of Kumugaya … We were at 16,000 [feet] and could feel the concussion. It was a dirty trick. We figured the Japs would think it was another atomic bomb.’

The Emperor Hirohito summoned a gathering of his country’s military and political leaders and informed them of his determination to end the war, declared to his nation in a radio broadcast a few hours later. Not all his subjects even then accepted his conclusion. Fighter pilot Cmdr. Haryushi Iki said: ‘I never allowed myself to think about the possibility of losing the war. When the Russians invaded Manchuria, I felt terribly depressed – but even then I could not accept that we had lost.’ Some senior figures, including the war minister and a number of generals and admirals, committed ritual suicide, an example followed by several hundred humbler folk. ‘There was a clear division of opinion in the army about whether to end the war,’ said General Staff intelligence officer Major Shoji Takahashi. ‘Many of our people in China and South-East Asia favoured fighting on. Most of those in Japan accepted that we could not continue. I was sure that, once the Emperor had spoken, we must give up.’

This view prevailed. At 1900 on the evening of 14 August Washington time – already the 15th in Japan – Harry Truman read the announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender to a dense throng of politicians and journalists at the White House. The president then ordered the cessation of all offensive operations against the enemy. In Tokyo Bay on 1 September, Japanese and Allied representatives headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur signed the surrender document on the deck of the battleship Missouri. The Second World War was officially ended.

Victors and Vanquished

Goethe wrote in the early nineteenth century: ‘Our modern wars make