BELFAST RB BOOKLET 2020 - Flipbook - Page 111
Ci t y of Belf ast Grand Bl ack Chapt er - Dem onst rat i on Bookl et 2020
JAPAN SURRENDERS, BRINGING AN END TO WWII IN ASIA
Whilst it is accepted that
following
the
German
surrender in May 1945, the
war in Europe was over,
however hostilities still
carried on elsewhere in
parts of Asia with sections
of the Japanese military still continuing to carry out ketsu-go .. 'the strategy of
fighting one last decisive battle intended to inflict so many casualties' ... on a
war-weary America that would force the US to reduce its demand for an
unconditional surrender and negotiate a peace. This would, at a minimum,
safeguard the Emperor and potentially preserve the armed forces, shielding them
from any prosecution for war crimes. Indeed decades after they were discovered
hiding in several isolated offshore Malaysian islands, many now elderly
Gambaros still remained convinced that the war was still ongoing!!
However by the summer of 1945, the defeat
of Japan was a mere foregone conclusion with
what was left of its navy and air force having
been practically destroyed, and with the Allied
naval blockade and intensive bombing on its
cities, the country had been economically
devastated.
By the end of June, American troops had
captured Okinawa, from which the Allies
could then launch an invasion against the
main Japanese home islands.
American General Douglas MacArthur had
been placed in charge of the invasion, codenamed Operation Olympic and set for
November 1945, thereby promising the
bloodiest seaborne attack of all time, indeed it
was reckoned to be ten times as costly in
terms of the Allied casualty list during the
Normandy invasion.
However on July 16th and still angered by
the previous Sunday morning attack on Pearl
Harbour, during December 1941, a new option
became available when in the New Mexico
desert, the United States secretly test
detonated the world’s first atomic bomb.
Ten days later, at a conference held in
Potsdam, Germany the Allies issued their
ultimatum in an Official Declaration
demanding the unconditional surrender of
all Japanese armed forces; adding that
failure to comply would mean the inevitable
and complete destruction of Japan's armed
forces, and just as inevitable, the utter
devastation of the Japanese homeland.
On July 28th, two days after the
ultimatum had been issued, Japanese
Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki openly
responded in the local media that he
would ignore the Allies demands
thereby prompting US President Harry
Truman to order the devastation to
proceed and on August 6th, the B-29
aircraft Enola Gay dropped an atomic
bomb on the City of Hiroshima, killing
an estimated eighty thousand people
and fatally wounding thousands more.
After the Hiroshima attack, a faction of
Japan’s supreme war council voted to
accept the previous Potsdam Declaration,
however a majority still held out, resisting
any issue of an unconditional surrender.
On August 8th, Japan’s desperate situation
took another turn for the worse when the
USSR declared war against it, with the Soviet
forces attacking Manchuria the following day,
rapidly overwhelming the enemy positions
IN MEMORY OF THE FALLEN - 109 - AND THE FUTURE OF THE LIVING