MY SAY: AUGUST 1945 HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki . General Douglas MacArthur had expected to continue conventional bombing of Japan followed by a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” President Harry Truman was told that such an invasion could cost one million American casualties.He decided–against the advice of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb.
Emperor Hirohito announced Japans’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.” The formal surrender agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.
And that was the end of World War 2- the last war fought with the goal of total victory and unconditional surrender.
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