Just before midnight on August 9, Japanese Emperor Hirohito convened the supreme war council. READ MORE: Hiroshima, Then Nagasaki: Why the US Deployed the Second A-Bomb atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese coastal city of Nagasaki. The next day, Soviet forces attacked in Manchuria, rapidly overwhelming Japanese positions there, and a second U.S. On August 8, Japan’s desperate situation took another turn for the worse when the USSR declared war against Japan. 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.Īfter the Hiroshima attack, a faction of Japan’s supreme war council favored acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, but the majority resisted unconditional surrender. Truman ordered the devastation to proceed, and on August 6, the U.S. 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.
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. 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.
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