Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
In the wake of the nuclear attacks on Japan, the official Allied line was that radiation sickness was not a danger. Yet, as Steve O’Hagan reveals, the first western journalist to witness the effects on the people of Hiroshima told a very different story
At 6am on 2 September 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett boarded a crowded train heading south-west from the wreckage of war-ravaged Tokyo. He was disobeying strict orders that no westerners should venture outside the Japanese capital – and, though he did not yet realise it, he was undertaking the most momentous journey of his life. The Second World War had ended. However, Japan had not formally surrendered, and American occupation was still to come. Japan’s cities lay in ruins, and Burchett couldn’t even be sure that the train line to his destination, over 400 miles away, was intact. He was also alone and in great danger – hence the Colt .45 pistol in his suitcase. Resentment towards the Allies ran high. Crammed around Burchett in his carriage were Japanese Army officers bearing samurai swords. Although he spoke almost no Japanese, Burchett could feel the animosity in the soldiers’ venomous stares. Also among the passengers was an American priest, who nervously warned Burchett that one wrong move could cost them their lives. Should they smile or shake hands, it could be taken by the Japanese officers as a sign of gloating over the Japanese surrender to the Allies that was being formalised later that day. Burchett later recalled glancing nervously at the soldiers: their hands seemed to toy with the hilts of their swords. As the train plunged in and out of long, dark tunnels, he was convinced that he could hear the sound of steel being unsheathed from scabbards. Thankfully, the assault he feared never came. But even as the train reached its destination some 20 hours after setting out, his tension did not abate. He was arriving in Hiroshima – the city that, four weeks earlier, had been nigh obliterated by the world’s first ever nuclear bomb attack. In one of the 20th century’s most remarkable feats of investigative reporting, Burchett was about to become the first western journalist to bear witness to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. A scramble to control the narrative about the reality of the deadly nature of nuclear fallout had begun. Reputational risk Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima presented the US with a public relations dilemma. What story should the country tell the world about unleashing this terrifyingly powerful experimental weapon on a densely populated city? The ‘leaders of the free world’ did not want to be seen as having become monsters while defeating the evils of fascism. As Henry Stimson, US secretary of war between 1940 and 1945, put it, the authorities didn’t want to “get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities”. Read more | How Nazi secrets triggered the ultimate moral dilemma – and led to Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb No one is sure exactly how many were killed in the attack. The city of Hiroshima initially estimated that 42,000 people died, from a population of around 350,000. A year later this number was revised up to 100,000. More recent estimates suggest that, by the end of 1945, up to 140,000 may have died from the immediate and long-term effects of the bomb. The vast majority were civilians. So when President Harry S Truman made radio addresses announcing the dropping of the bomb, he sought to establish the official narrative. First, he referred to Hiroshima not as a city full of civilians but as a “military base”. Second, the weapon was portrayed solely in terms of its explosive potential, with “more power than 20,000 tons of TNT”. Crucially, there was no mention of the potential dangers of radiation, which the Americans expected – or, perhaps more accurately, hoped – would not be an issue. Three days later, a New York Times article quoted Manhattan Project scientist Robert Oppenheimer saying: “There is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground at Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly.” In the weeks that followed the bombing, this was the accepted narrative – until, that is, the previously little-known journalist Wilfred Burchett intervened. Born in 1911, Burchett grew up in the Australian Outback in Victoria, and left school at the age of 15 after his father’s business failed. He spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s as an itinerant labourer. A self-taught linguist with a burning interest in the outside world, he travelled to London in 1937, where he married a Jewish refugee from Germany and worked for a travel agency arranging for German Jews to emigrate to destinations such as Palestine. Front-line reporting Returning to Australia, Burchett forged a career as a journalist. After Japan entered the Second World War in 1941, he filed stories from the Burmese and Chinese fronts. He then joined the US Marines on their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific in 1944, reporting for the UK’s Daily Express. When Japan accepted defeat following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Burchett was due to be part of the official press corps covering the final act of the Second World War: the signing of ceremonial surrender documents aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. However, as some 600 correspondents gathered for the event, Burchett was not among them. Feigning illness to slip away from his US military chaperone, he set out on his illicit and perilous journey to Hiroshima. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/British-Newspaper-Archives-AtomicPlagueDailyExpresswebready-ba8b67e.jpg" width="1500" height="1189" alt="A picture of a newspaper article from the Daily Express newspaper, with the headline THE ATOMIC PLAGUE" title="Burchett’s report on the impacts of radiation sickness in Hiroshima appeared in the Daily Express in 1945. It contradicted the official US narrative about the bomb (Image by British Newspaper Archives)" /> Upon arrival, Burchett was astonished by the sheer physical destruction wreaked upon the city: almost 70 per cent of its buildings had been wrecked. “There was nothing but awful devastation and desolation,” he wrote later, likening what he saw to “some death-stricken other planet”. He was guided by a local journalist to a hospital. “If the evidence of the material destruction of the city had been horrifying,” Burchett wrote, “the effects on humans as I saw them inside the hospital wards was a thousand times more so.” Patients – often whole families – were laid out on filthy tatami mats among the rubble of the damaged facility. Burchett saw how, four weeks after the attack, people were being treated not only for the horrendous effects of the blast but also for something else more mysterious, more sinister. Victims suffered a raft of perplexing symptoms: fever, diarrhoea, hair loss, hideous marks on the skin, bleeding from the mouth and other orifices. We now recognise these as markers of the advanced stages of radiation sickness, but the local doctors at the time had no idea what they were seeing. Many believed that the bomb had released poisonous gases from the ground. Burchett immediately understood that what he was witnessing was not just a visual manifestation of the end of the Second World War but the fate of inhabitants of hundreds of cities worldwide should there be another global conflict. “If that does not make a journalist want to shape history in the right direction, what does?” he wrote. In a state of near shock, Burchett sat on a concrete block among the ruins outside the hospital and tapped out his story on his battered typewriter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-92425109webready-9744727.jpg" width="3888" height="2592" alt="A black and white photograph of lots of people laying on the floor. One man is standing up, watching over the sick people laying down" title="Tens of thousands who survived the blast over Hiroshima suffered symptoms that mystified doctors who’d never seen the effects of radiation (Image by Getty Images)" /> Three days later, on Wednesday 5 September, Britain awoke to an apocalyptic front cover on the Daily Express. “The Atomic Plague” was the main splash, then: “Doctors fall as they work.” (In the haste to get the story published, authorship was wrongly attributed to “Peter” Burchett.) Read more | Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict" Burchett’s searing reportage painted a terrifyingly vivid picture: “Hiroshima… looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence… It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.” The focus of his piece was, though, on the “uncanny after-effects” from which “people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly” weeks after the attack. The words he chose to describe this sinister malaise – “Atomic Plague” – suggested that the bomb dropped by the US was on a par with a chemical or biological weapon, both outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Initiating global opposition Also striking was the polemical strap-line to Burchett’s article: “I write this as a warning to the world.” With these words, he arguably initiated the global opposition to nuclear weapons that persists to this day. His article travelled rapidly around the globe after the Express released the text free to the international press – but this was not the story that the US military wanted the world to read. US authorities immediately moved to shut down Burchett’s narrative. Press conferences were held at which his claims of “atomic plague” were refuted, and military officials accused Burchett of having “fallen victim to Japanese propaganda”. Hiroshima was declared out of bounds to the media, and any reports of radiation sickness were censored. Burchett’s press accreditation was rescinded and he was encouraged to leave Japan. In the American press, stories sympathetic to the official line quoted Manhattan Project officials minimising the reports of radiation sickness. “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” ran one piece in the New York Times on 13 September. General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, testified to the Senate in November 1945 that scientists believed radiation sickness “is a very pleasant way to die”. In this way, Burchett’s warning to the world was to a large extent successfully suppressed in the months following its publication. But nobody could stop the truth radiating out from Ground Zero forever. In the years that followed, more information about the effects of radiation exposure emerged. In August 1946, the New Yorker ran its now famous John Hersey-penned Hiroshima issue (published as a book later that year), which opened millions of eyes to the horrors of what had happened. In 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler were poisoned by radioactivity from a US thermonuclear bomb test, with one man dying. And victims in Hiroshima continued to die young as the years ticked by. Nonetheless, it would take decades for the US to accept the full reality of radiation sickness – even after it afflicted American citizens: it wasn’t until the 1980s that US veterans of atomic tests received any compensation. No such compensation has ever come the way of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wilfred Burchett died in 1983, at the age of 72. By then, his scoop from the ruins of Hiroshima was largely forgotten in the west. But not in the city itself. Over the course of his life, Burchett returned several times to Hiroshima, where he was welcomed and feted by the Hibakusha – the survivors of the world’s first nuclear attacks. For them, there could be no forgetting. Steve O’Hagan is a documentary film and radio producer. His Archive on 4: Exposing Hiroshima programme about Wilfred Burchett’s reporting is available now on BBC Sounds This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?
For years debate has raged over whether the US was right to drop two atomic bombs on Japan during the final weeks of the Second World War. The first bomb, dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, resulted in a total death toll of around 140,000. The second, which hit Nagasaki on 9 August, killed around 50,000 people. But was the US justified? We put the question to a panel of expert historians...
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in August 1945 brought the Second World War to a sudden and devastating close, and sparked a moral and historical debate that has continued since. Well over 100,000 people, most of them civilians, were killed instantly or in the immediate aftermath, with many more suffering from long-term effects of radiation exposure. The decision by US president Truman to authorise the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was unprecedented. It marked the first (and so far only) time that atomic bombs have been used in warfare. The justification offered at the time was that the bombings would force Japan’s surrender and avoid a prolonged and bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. Yet the question remains: was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? Historians continue to debate the military necessity, political motivations and moral implications of the bombings. Was it a strategic decision to end the war quickly and save lives? Or a demonstration of power aimed as much at the Soviet Union as at Japan? Here, a panel of historians offers their perspectives on one of the most controversial chapters of the Second World War, and considers whether the US was right to bomb Japan in 1945. Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? “Yes. Truman had little choice” – Antony Beevor Few actions in war are morally justifiable. All a commander or political leader can hope to assess is whether a particular course of action is likely to reduce the loss of life. Faced with the Japanese refusal to surrender, President Truman had little choice. His decision was mainly based on the estimate of half a million Allied casualties likely to be caused by invading the home islands of Japan. There was also the likely death rate from starvation for Allied PoWs and civilians as the war dragged on well into 1946. Read more | The Manhattan Project: your guide to the building of the first atomic bomb What Truman did not know, and which has only been established quite recently, is that the Imperial Japanese Army could never contemplate surrender, having forced all their men to fight to the death since the start of the war. All civilians were to be mobilised and forced to fight with bamboo spears and satchel charges to act as suicide bombers against Allied tanks. Japanese documents apparently indicate their army was prepared to accept up to 28 million civilian deaths. Antony Beevor is a bestselling military historian, specialising in the Second World War. His most recent book is Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble (Viking, 2015) “No. It was immoral, and unnecessary” – Richard Overy The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was justified at the time as being moral – in order to bring about a more rapid victory and prevent the deaths of more Americans. However, it was clearly not moral to use this weapon knowing that it would kill civilians and destroy the urban milieu. And it wasn’t necessary either. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now Militarily Japan was finished (as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that August showed). Further blockade and urban destruction would have produced a surrender in August or September at the latest, without the need for the costly anticipated invasion or the atomic bomb. As for the second bomb on Nagasaki, that was just as unnecessary as the first one. It was deemed to be needed, partly because it was a different design, and the military (and many civilian scientists) were keen to see if they both worked the same way. There was, in other words, a cynical scientific imperative at work as well. I should also add that there was a fine line between the atomic bomb and conventional bombing – indeed descriptions of Hamburg or Tokyo after conventional bombing echo the aftermath of Hiroshima. To regard Hiroshima as a moral violation is also to condemn the firebombing campaign, which was deliberately aimed at city centres and completely indiscriminate. Of course it is easy to say that if I had been in Truman’s shoes, I would not have ordered the two bombings. But it is possible to imagine greater restraint. The British and Americans had planned in detail the gas-bombing of a list of 17 major German cities, but in the end did not carry it out because the moral case seemed to depend on Germany using gas first. Restraint was possible, and, at the very end of the war, perhaps more politically acceptable. Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of World War Two (OUP, 2015) More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives WW2 the big questions: final stages of the conflict What if...The Enigma code had not been cracked by Alan Turing and Bletchley Park? Oppenheimer | Is Christopher Nolan perpetuating a historical myth? The PoWs who survived Nagasaki "We’ve come to think that peace is normal, but that's not the reality": Margaret MacMillan on humanity's compulsion to go to war Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers “Yes. It was the least bad option” – Robert James Maddox The atomic bombs were horrible, but I agree with US secretary of war Henry L Stimson that using them was the “least abhorrent choice”. A bloody invasion and round-the-clock conventional bombing would have led to a far higher death toll and so the atomic weapons actually saved thousands of American and millions of Japanese lives. The bombs were the best means to bring about unconditional surrender, which is what the US leaders wanted. Only this would enable the Allies to occupy Japan and root out the institutions that led to war in the first place. Timeline | The countdown to the bombing of Hiroshima The experience with Germany after the First World War had persuaded them that a mere armistice would constitute a betrayal of future generations if an even larger war occurred 20 years down the line. It is true that the radiation effects of the atomic bomb provided a grisly dividend, which the US leaders did not anticipate. However, even if they had known, I don’t think it would have changed their decision. Robert James Maddox is author of Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism (University of Missouri Press, 2007) Video: Could the Nazis have built the first atomic bomb? View Green Video on the source website “No. Japan would have surrendered anyway” – Martin J Sherwin I believe that it was a mistake and a tragedy that the atomic bombs were used. Those bombings had little to do with the Japanese decision to surrender. The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept. Of the Japanese leaders, it was the military ones who held out against the civilian leaders who were closest to the emperor, and who wanted to surrender provided the emperor’s safety would be guaranteed. The military’s argument was that Japan could convince the Soviet Union to mediate on its behalf for better surrender terms than unconditional surrender and therefore should continue the war until that was achieved. Read more | How and when did the Second World War end? Once the USSR entered the war, the Japanese military not only had no arguments for continuation left, but it also feared the Soviet Union would occupy significant parts of northern Japan. Truman could have simply waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the occupation of Japan. Another option (which could have ended the war before August) was to clarify that the emperor would not be held accountable for the war under the policy of unconditional surrender. US secretary of war Stimson recommended this, but secretary of state James Byrnes, who was much closer to Truman, vetoed it. By dropping the atomic bombs instead, the United States signalled to the world that it considered nuclear weapons to be legitimate weapons of war. Those bombings precipitated the nuclear arms race and they are the source of all nuclear proliferation. The late Martin J Sherwin was co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer (Atlantic, 2008) Read more | 6 terrible choices people had to make during the Second World War “Yes. It saved millions of lives in Japan and Asia” – Richard Frank Dropping the bombs was morally preferable to any other choices available. One of the biggest problems we have is that we can talk about Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg and we all know what the context is: Nazi Germany and what Nazi Germany did. There’s been a great amnesia in the west with respect to what sort of war Japan conducted across Asia-Pacific. Bear in mind that for every Japanese non-combatant who died during the war, 17 or 18 died across Asia-Pacific. Yet you very seldom find references to this and virtually nothing that vivifies it in the way that the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been. Read more | What was the Truman doctrine? With the original invasion strategy negated by radio intelligence revealing the massive Japanese build-up on the planned Kyushu landing areas, Truman’s alternative was a campaign of blockade and bombardment, which would have killed millions of Japanese, mostly non-combatants. For example, in 1946 the food situation would have become catastrophic and there would have been stupendous civilian deaths. It was only because Japan surrendered when it still had a serviceable administrative system – plus American food aid – that saved the country from famine. Read more | Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine Another thing to bear in mind is that while just over 200,000 people were killed in total by the atomic bombs, it is estimated that 300,000–500,000 Japanese people (many of whom were civilians) died or disappeared in Soviet captivity. Had the war continued, that number would have been much higher. Critics talk about changing the demand for unconditional surrender, but the Japanese government had never put forth a set of terms on which they were prepared to end the war prior to Hiroshima. The inner cabinet ruling the country never devised such terms. When foreign minister Shigenori Togo was told that the best terms Japan could obtain were unconditional surrender with the exception of maintaining the imperial system, Togo flatly rejected them in the name of the cabinet. The fact is that there was no historical record over the past 2,600 years of Japan ever surrendering, nor any examples of a Japanese unit surrendering during the war. This was where the great American fear lay. Richard B Frank is a military historian whose books include Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Random House, 1999) “No. Better options were discarded for political reasons” – Tsuyoshi Hasegawa Once sympathetic to the argument that the atomic bomb was necessary, the more research I do, the more I am convinced it was one of the gravest war crimes the US has ever committed. I’ve been to Japan and discovered what happened on the ground in 1945 and it was really horrifying. The radiation has affected people who survived the blast for many years and still today thousands of people suffer the effects. Read more | “My God, what have we done?” The moral dilemma of Hiroshima There were possible alternatives that might have ended the war. Truman could have invited Stalin to sign the Potsdam declaration [in which the USA, Britain and Nationalist China demanded Japanese surrender in July 1945]. The authors of the draft of the declaration believed that if the Soviets joined the war at this time it might lead to Japanese surrender but Truman consciously avoided that option, because he and some of his advisors were apprehensive about Soviet entry. I don’t agree with revisionists who say Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviet Union but I believe he used it to force Japan to surrender before they were able to enter the war. The second option was to alter the demand for unconditional surrender. Some influential advisors within the Truman administration were in favour of allowing the Japanese to keep the emperor system to induce so-called moderates within the Japanese government to work for the termination of the war. However, Truman was mindful of American public opinion, which wanted unconditional surrender as revenge against Pearl Harbor and the Japanese atrocities. Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice Bearing in mind those atrocities, it’s clear that Japan doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to immoral acts in the war. However, one atrocity does not make another one right. I believe this was the most righteous war the Americans have ever been involved in but you still can’t justify using any means to win a just war. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University, Press 2005) “Yes. The moral failing was Japan’s” – Michael Kort Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was the best choice available under the circumstances and was therefore morally justifiable. It was clear Japan was unwilling to surrender on terms even remotely acceptable to the US and its allies, and the country was preparing a defence far more formidable than the US had anticipated. Read more | Who was Hermann Göring? The truth about Hitler’s drug-fuelled enforcer who met his downfall at Nuremberg The choice was not, as is frequently argued, between using an atomic bomb against Hiroshima and invading Japan. No one on the Allied side could say with confidence what would bring about a Japanese surrender, as Japan’s situation had been hopeless for a long time. It was hoped that the shock provided by the bombs would convince Tokyo to surrender, but how many would be needed was an open question. After Hiroshima, the Japanese government had three days to respond before Nagasaki but did not do so. Hirohito and some of his advisers knew Japan had to surrender but were not in a position to get the government to accept that conclusion. Key military members of the government argued that it was unlikely that the US could have a second bomb and, even if it did, public pressure would prevent its use. The bombing of Nagasaki demolished these arguments and led directly to the imperial conference that produced Japan’s offer to surrender. Read more | The science behind the bombing of Hiroshima The absolutist moral arguments (such as not harming civilians) made against the atomic bombs would have precluded many other actions essential to victory taken by the Allies during the most destructive war in history. There is no doubt that had the bomb been available sooner, it would have been used against Germany. There was, to be sure, a moral failing in August 1945, but it was on the part of the Japanese government when it refused to surrender after its long war of conquest had been lost. Michael Kort is professor of social science at Boston University and author of The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (Columbia Press, 2007) HistoryExtra readers George Evans-Hulme and Roy Ceustermans debate... George Evans-Hulme: Yes, it was justified. The US was, like the rest of the world, soldiering on towards the end of a dark period of human history that had seen the single most costly conflict (in terms of life) in history, and they chose to adopt a stance that seemed to limit the amount of casualties in the war, by significantly shortening it with the use of atomic weapons. It was certainly a reasonable view for the USA to take, since they had suffered the loss of more than 418,000 lives, both military and civilian. To the top rank of the US military the 135,000 death toll was worth it to prevent the “many thousands of American troops [that] would be killed in invading Japan” – a view attributed to the president himself. This was a grave consequence taken seriously by the US. Ordering the deployment of the atomic bombs was an abhorrent act, but one they were certainly justified in doing. Roy Ceustermans: No, the US wasn’t justified. Even secretary of war Henry Lewis Stimson was not sure the bombs were needed to reduce the need of an invasion: “Japan had no allies; its navy was almost destroyed; its islands were under a naval blockade; and its cities were undergoing concentrated air attacks.” The United States still had many industrial resources to use against Japan, and thus it was essentially defeated. Rear Admiral Tocshitane Takata concurred that B-29s “were the greatest single factor in forcing Japan's surrender”, while Prince Konoye already thought Japan was defeated on 14 February 1945 when he met emperor Hirohito. A combination of thoroughly bombing blockading cities that were economically dependent on foreign sources for food and raw materials, and the threat of Soviet entry in the war, would have been enough. The recommendations for the use of the bomb show that the military was more interested in its devastating effect than in preparing the invasion. Therefore the destruction of hospitals and schools etc was acceptable to them. Read more | 7 of the best WW2 films GEH: The USA was more interested in a quick and easy end to the war than causing untold suffering. They had in their hands a weapon that was capable of bringing the war to a swift end, and so they used it. The atom bombs achieved their desired effects by causing maximum devastation. Just six days after the Nagasaki bombing, the Emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō speech was broadcast to the nation, detailing the Japanese surrender. The devastation caused by the bombs sped up the Japanese surrender, which was the best solution for all parties. If the atomic bombs had not had the devastating effect they had, they would have been utterly pointless. They replaced thousands of US bombing missions that would have been required to achieve the same effect of the two bombs that, individually, had the explosive power of the payload of 2,000 B-29s. This freed up resources that could be utilised for the war effort elsewhere. RC: After the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the death toll on both sides was high, and the countries’ negative view of one other became almost unbridgeable, says J Samuel Walker in Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and The Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Therefore, the US created unconditional terms of surrender, knowingly going against the Japanese ethic of honour and against the institute of the emperor, whom most Americans probably wanted dead. Consequently, the use of the atomic bomb became a way to avenge America's fallen soldiers while also keeping the USSR in check in Europe. The Japanese civilian casualties did not matter in this strategy. Also, it did not prevent the Cold War, as the USSR was just a few years behind on a-bomb research. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 At the time, revenge, geopolitics and an expensive project that could not be allowed to simply rust away, meant the atomic bomb had to be hastily deployed “in the field” in order to see its power and aftermath – though little was known about radiation and its effects on humans. GEH: Admittedly, the US did use the atom bomb to keep the USSR in line, and for that it served its purpose. It may not have stopped the Soviets developing their own nuclear device, but that’s not what it was intended for. It was used as a deterrent to keep the (sometimes uneasy) peace between the US and the USSR, and it achieved that. There are no cases of a direct, all-out war between the US and the Soviets that can be attributed to the potentially devastating effects of atomic weaponry. The atomic bombs certainly established US dominance immediately after the Second World War – the destructive power it possessed meant that it remained uncontested as the world’s greatest power until the Soviets developed their own weapon, four years after the deployment at Nagasaki. It is certainly true that Stalin and the Soviets tried to test US dominance, but even into the 1960s the US generally came out on top. RC: The price to keep the USSR in check was steep: the use of a weapon of mass destruction that caused around 200,000 deaths (most of them civilians) and massive suffering through radiation. However, it did not stop the USSR from creating the same weapon within four years. It might be argued that, following the explosions, Japan virtually disappeared from the world stage while the USSR viewed the bombing as an incentive to acquire the same weaponry in order to retaliate in equal force if the atomic bomb was ever used again. Considering the tension between the two countries, a similar attack with tens of thousands of civilian casualties would have created a nuclear apocalypse. If the US had organised a demonstration, as they had briefly considered, the USSR would still have responded in the same manner, while Japan – which had made clear overtures for a (un)conditional surrender – could have been spared. Furthermore, by postponing the use of the bomb, scientists would have had time to understand the test results, meaning further anguish, like the Bikini Atoll [a huge US hydrogen bomb test in 1954 that had major consequences for the geology and natural environment, and on the health of those who were exposed to radiation] could have been avoided. GEH: The large civilian death toll that resulted from the bombings can be seen as a small price to pay by the United States in return for their assertion of dominance on the world stage. The USSR’s development of an atomic weapon had been underway since 1943, and so their quest for nuclear devices cannot be solely attributed to the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It should also be considered that the Soviets’ rapid progress in creating an atom bomb was not exclusively down to their desire to compete with the United States, but from spies passing them US secrets. Postponing the use of the atom bomb would only have prolonged the war and potentially created an even worse fate for the people of Japan, with an estimated five to 10 million Japanese fatalities – a number higher than some estimates for the entire Soviet military in the Second World War. Ultimately, the atomic bombs did what they were designed to do. They created such a high level of devastation that the Japanese felt they had no option but to surrender unconditionally to the United States, hence resulting in US victory and the end of the Second World War. RC: Of course civilian casualties of another nation would have been acceptable to the USA. Japan had made clear overtures to peace, but cultural differences made this nearly impossible (the shame of unconditional surrender goes against their code of honour). The determination to use an expensive bomb instead of letting it rust away; the desire to find out how devastating it was and the opportunity to use the bomb as a strong showcase of US supremacy, made Japan the ideal target. Obviously, the USSR would eventually succeed in creating the a-bomb. Therefore, making Hiroshima & Nagasaki the example of the tremendous power of the bombs would make it clear to the USSR that they too needed such weapons to defend themselves. Moreover, other countries claimed the right of nuclear weapons to defend their citizens. Consequently, the tragic bombings became the example of an arm’s race instead of peace. Furthermore, since Japan was already on the brink of collapse the bombing was unnecessary, and peace talks would have taken place within a decent time frame (even after the cancelled Hawaii summit). The millions of deaths calculated by Operation Downfall [the codename for the Allied plan for the invasion of Japan near the end of the Second World War, which was abandoned when Japan surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] actually show that only desperation and honour stood between Japan and unconditional surrender. George Evans-Hulme has a passion for military and political history, and enjoys visiting historical sites across the UK. Roy Ceustermans has a master's degree in the history of the Catholic Church, an advanced master's degree on the historical expansion, exchange and globalisation of the world, and a master’s degree in management.
Why is a mythical catfish to blame for earthquakes in Japan?
According to Japanese mythology, the thrashing of a giant subterranean catfish causes the earthquakes that wreak havoc on the country. Far from being a feared or hated monster, however, this catfish can also be a force for good
Japan is no stranger to earthquakes. Located on the Ring of Fire, a seismically active area around the edge of the Pacific Basin, the country experiences around 2,000 quakes every year and around 20 per cent of all the world’s seismic events over a magnitude of six on the Richter Scale. Long before scientific explanations, Japanese folk myth came up with its own reasons to explain why the ground could suddenly and violently shake. At first, the blame was placed on dragons or serpents; then in the 17th century, it shifted to a creature called Namazu. Who is Namazu, the Earthshaker? Namazu is a giant catfish believed to live in underground rivers and seas beneath Japan and caused earthquakes by rubbing its body against the rocks or thrashing its mighty tail. In Japanese myth, the thunder god Takemikazuchi did manage to subdue and restrain the creature by pinning the head down with a stone (though in some versions, he thrust a sword through the catfish’s head.) The stone, kaname-ishi, is so large that its uppermost tip can supposedly be seen on the earth’s surface, sticking out of the ground at the Kashima Jingu shrine in Japan’s Kanto region. When Takemikazuchi becomes distracted, however, or is called away to an annual gathering of the gods, Namazu is able to wriggle around. That’s enough to bring about an earthquake. Read more | Dragons: from mythological beasts of history to the fire breathers of fantasy Images of symbolic catfish in Japan date back to the 15th century, and the animal may have been chosen as the mythical harbinger of destruction as the result of a widely held belief among Japanese fishermen. Apparently, they would observe catfish acting strangely right before a seismic event. Today, the catfish is used as the logo for early earthquake warnings sent out by the Japan Meteorological Agency, and also appears on the road signs to let drivers know which highways will be shut in the event of a quake. Which earthquakes have been blamed on Namazu? It was after a series of major earthquakes between 1854 and 1860, the so-called Great Ansei Earthquakes, that the Namazu myth truly became embedded in Japanese popular imagination. In particular, the 1855 quake that hit Edo (Tokyo), which resulted in as many as 10,000 deaths, was blamed firmly on the catfish. In the aftermath, hundreds of woodblock prints, namazu-e, were produced showing the catfish wreaking havoc or being weighed down by the stone-wielding god. Read more | The Great Kantō earthquake: a 1923 disaster that left Tokyo in ruins Namazu was also a force for good Namazu was not depicted solely as a destructive force, but a purifying one. At a time of cosmic imbalance – caused by a corrupt government or social ills, say – Namazu can be a force for good by bringing about yonaoshi (world renewal). Therefore, Namazu equally represented good fortune and the redistribution of wealth. After all, the 1855 quake hit the affluent parts of the city the hardest, as well as the government district, which meant that there was suddenly a lot of work, and money, for poor labourers and builders. In some of the namazu-e prints, the catfish was shown showering gold on the people (in others, rich people are seen firing out coins from their behinds) or, in a half-human form, celebrating with the workers in the entertainment districts of Edo.
History's greatest cities podcast series
Christopher Harding explores the unsettled story of the current capital of Japan, from devastating earthquakes to its prominence under the ruling shoguns
In episode two of our series exploring the great historical cities of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, travel writer Paul Bloomfield is joined by Dr Christopher Harding as they delve into the fascinating, yet often turbulent, story of Tokyo. Together, they’ll visit key sites where major events unfolded – from exploring its medieval origins, and its growth as the base of the ruling shogun, to considering the major social and political upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Along the way, they also meet some of the major figures who played pivotal roles in the development of what's now known as Tokyo.
Who is Yasuke? The true story of the African who became Japan's first black samurai
In a land wracked with conflict, the arrival of an imposing black man caused uproar. Thomas Lockley explores the Japanese sojourn of the first African samurai...
Yasuke was a man of African origin who arrived in Japan in the late 16th century, and is widely held to have been the first and only black samurai (though not the only foreign samurai, lest we forget William Adams, the inspiration for Shōgun's John Blackthorne). Now Yasuke is set to be one of the playable characters of Assassin's Creed: Shadows, with the upcoming installment of the time-hopping series taking us to feudal Japan. Unlike most Assassin's Creed protagonists, Yasuke is a real historical figure. Here, historian Thomas Lockley explores the African samurai's life. View oEmbed on the source website Who was Yasuke? This man known to history as Yasuke (possibly a Japanese corruption of Isaac) was most likely a member of the Jaang (Dinka) people, of what’s now South Sudan, who had been trafficked to India as a boy. There he entered the service of the chief Jesuit in Asia, Alessandro Valignano, who was on an inspection tour of the Indies. Valignano’s ultimate destination was Japan, home of the most successful mission in Asia, where he arrived in 1579 with his bodyguard and valet, Yasuke. The first record of Yasuke in Japan describes a 1581 visit to Kyoto, then the country’s capital. En route the Jesuit’s party passed the port city of Sakai, where huge crowds clamoured for a glimpse of the African; buildings collapsed under the weight of spectators, and the Jesuit procession was severely disrupted. In order to escape, Yasuke had to ride a horse through the throng of enthralled locals. He was not only the first African they had seen but was, by Japanese measures, a ‘giant’ – 188cm tall – good looking, intelligent and entertaining, with the strength of 10 men. And, because the Buddha was often portrayed with black skin, many saw him as a divine visitor. That raucous reception was repeated in Kyoto, where thousands turned out to witness his arrival. He took refuge in the Jesuit church but the mob broke down the doors, demanding to see him; some spectators were even crushed to death. How did Yasuke become Oda Nobunaga's samurai? The most powerful warlord in Japan, Oda Nobunaga, was holding court in the Honno-ji temple nearby. He demanded to know who was disturbing his peace and, when he heard about Yasuke, ordered an immediate audience. By that time Yasuke had learned quite a lot of Japanese, so was able to engage in conversation. The fascinated warlord had the African strip from the waist up, and scrubbed his skin to see if the dark hue was real. Finding it was, the delighted warlord threw a party for this astounding guest, and bestowed on Yasuke a large gift of cash, making him instantly rich. A few days later, Nobunaga asked Valignano if he could take Yasuke into his service; Yasuke became Nobunaga’s weapon bearer – a position of great honour – and confidant about overseas matters. Within months he received a stipend, a residence in Azuchi Castle, north-east of Kyoto, servants and a katana sword. The katana is the symbol of a samurai warrior, so it is traditionally understood in Japan that Yasuke was the first documented non-Japanese samurai. Read more | In Japanese history, what was a Shōgunate? Did Yasuke fight for Oda Nobunaga? Over the course of the next year, Yasuke accompanied Nobunaga in battle at least once. They were conquering the territories just north of Mount Fuji, long held by the Takeda clan, the Oda’s mortal enemies. Yasuke was observed by a Japanese diarist just south of the holy mountain on the journey back to Azuchi. In June 1582, Nobunaga launched a major campaign against his long-time enemies to the west, the Mori clan. A large army was already in the field, and he set out for the front with around 30 men, Yasuke among them. In Kyoto they slept in Honno-ji, the temple where Yasuke had met Nobunaga 15 months earlier. In the hour before dawn on 21 June they were attacked by the 13,000-strong army of Akechi Mitsuhide, formerly one of Nobunaga’s most trusted generals, who stormed the compound. Most of the defenders were dispatched with gunfire, the survivors finished off by hand. During the fighting, the temple caught fire. As flames swept through the temple, Nobunaga performed seppuku (ritual suicide). According to legend, his last order was issued to Yasuke, telling the African to keep his head from falling into enemy hands. Read more | A brief history of samurai warfare What happened to Yasuke after Nobunaga's death? Yasuke fled to the new head of the clan, Nobunaga’s son and heir, Oda Nobutada; however, he commanded only about 200 men, who were swiftly dispatched by the rebels, and he, too, was forced to take his own life. Yasuke was brought before Akechi, who ordered him to be returned to the Jesuits. That is the last definitive historical mention of Yasuke. Records include sightings of similar men in Japan, but it is impossible to be sure whether or not they were Yasuke. There is evidence to suggest that he was remembered in Japan for another century before his story was forgotten. Today, the African samurai has been reborn as a character in computer games, anime, manga comics, films, books and theatre. Read more | The lion and the rising sun: Britain and Japan's 400-year relationship Thomas Lockley is associate professor at Nihon University College of Law, Tokyo, and co-author with Geoffrey Girard of African Samurai (2019, Hanover Square; published in the UK by Sphere as Yasuke) This content first appeared in the October/November 2019 issue of BBC World Histories Magazine
Christopher Harding revisits the catastrophic earthquake that levelled much of Tokyo more than 100 years ago
On 1 September 1923, the streets of Tokyo began to shudder. It was the first warning sign that something terrible was coming – a devastating earthquake that would level much of the city. But, as historian Dr Christopher Harding tells Ellie Cawthorne, the Great Kantō earthquake wasn’t just a natural disaster – it also exposed deep lying social and political divides. Read more from Chris Harding: The Great Kantō earthquake: a 1923 disaster that left Tokyo in ruins View Green Video on the source website
The real John Blackthorne in Shōgun: the true story of samurai William Adams, the first Englishman in Japan
If you look at the life of Western samurai William Adams, you’ll realise that the character of John Blackthorne in feudal Japanese drama Shōgun is not entirely a work of fiction
Samurai and skulduggery abound in FX’s showpiece period drama Shōgun, which transports viewers to the treacherous world of feudal Japan at the dawn of the 17th century. The series, streaming on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK, is based on James Clavell’s 1975 historical-fiction novel of the same name. Much of the story is told from the view of John Blackthorne (played by Cosmo Jarvis), an English navigator who washes up on the shores of Japan in 1600 and finds himself in a land on the brink of civil war. But though the plot particulars of Shōgun are a work of imagination, did you know that John Blackthorne is based on a real person? Who is the real John Blackthorne? The character of John Blackthorne in Shōgun is loosely inspired by William Adams. He is the first Englishman believed to have set foot in Japan, and considered one of the few Western samurai. Just as Blackthorne makes an ally of the warlord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) in the drama, Adams became a trusted advisor to the real figure who inspired the character of Toranaga, a warlord named Tokugawa Ieyasu. Iesyau would come to rely on Adams as a trade and diplomatic advisor after becoming shōgun, granting him land, the revered title of hatamoto, and a pair of swords to indicate his status as a samurai – though he was not a warrior. Who was William Adams? William Adams was born in September 1564 in Gillingham, Kent. Little is known of his youth, but much of what we do know comes from Adams’ own hand, in the form of a letter addressed to ‘Unknown friends and countrymen’ that he wrote in the Japanese port of Hirado in 1611. We know that, aged 12, he was apprenticed to a Nicholas Diggins in Limehouse, London, where he learned nautical navigation, astronomy and shipbuilding. He remained there until he was 24 – the year of the Spanish Armada. That was 1588. Adams signed up to Francis Drake’s navy, with Adams listed aboard the supply ship Richard Duffylde; whether he actually fought in the battle is unclear. When the Queen’s fleet was disbanded after England’s victory, he found himself unemployed. After a decade with the merchants of the Barbary Company, Adams turned to the Dutch fleets bound for Asia. It was through the Dutch he would eventually reach Japan. The Dutch had been at war with the Spanish for some 13 years when, in 1581, King Philip II of Spain also inherited the throne of Portugal. Dutch merchants, who had sourced all their Asian wares through Lisbon, suddenly found her harbours closed to them. If they wanted to keep selling Asian goods, they were going to have to go to Asia to get them. War with Spain made easy allies of Dutch and English sailors, and in 1598 William Adams found himself as a pilot – a pilot being a navigator – within a fleet of Dutch ships bound for the East Indies. How did William Adams reach Japan? Five ships set out from Rotterdam in the Dutch Republic in 1598. Just one of these made it to Japan in 1600, with only a score men aboard out of a crew on that single ship of more than a hundred, all malnourished and many wracked by disease. William Adams was one of these lucky few. It had been a long and perilous journey. The plan had been to sail through the Strait of Magellan, plunder Spanish ships and settlements in South America, and then sell those spoils in Asia, bringing the purchased goods back to Europe via the same route. “That was the plan, and it didn’t work out how they wanted it to,” says Frederik Cryns, an expert on the life of William Adams and the historical consultant for FX’s Shōgun TV series. He was speaking to us on a soon-to-be-released episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “They had a lot of problem with first the winds, so they couldn't proceed on schedule. They didn't have enough food, so a lot of the sailors starved. They had diseases and they had to fight the Portuguese, then they had to fight the Spanish. And when they came into South America, they were attacked by the native peoples living there.” One of the casualties in those attacks in South America was Adams’ brother, Thomas. “Of the five ships, one went back to Holland, one was captured by the Spanish, one was captured by the Portuguese, one was lost in a storm, and eventually there was only one ship left,” says Cryns. “That was the Liefde, which arrived in Japan in April 1600, two years after they departed.” The crew were met by wary Japanese locals and agog Portuguese Jesuits – until then, the Portuguese had been the only Europeans in Japan, and they’d hoped to keep it that way. They did their very best to convince the Japanese that the crew of Liefde were pirates, which would have condemned them to death. Instead, the sailors came to the attention of Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of Japan’s most powerful daimyo (large landowners) and one of the five regents who ruled the country in place of the underaged heir Toyotomi Hideyori. Ieyasu would take a different view. Did William Adams help Tokugawa Ieyasu become shōgun? FX’s Shōgun TV series, much like the 1975 novel that inspired it, depicts John Blackthorne as being pivotal to Lord Toranaga becoming Japan’s pre-eminent warlord. In the novel, Blackthorne’s insights and ‘barbarian’ way of thinking proves instrumental to Toranaga besting his chief rival Lord Ishido, which culminates in the October 1600 battle of Sekigahara. On more than one occasion, Blackthorne directly saves Toranaga from death or capture. None of this is true for William Adams, who was elsewhere during Ieyasu’s rivalry with Ishido’s real-life equivalent, Ishida Matsunari. Read more | What is a shōgun in Japanese history? Cryns’ book on the life of William Adams, titled In the Service of the Shōgun, covers the entire period in which the show is based in two pages. That is how little Adams has to do with it. After being brought before Ieyasu in Osaka, thrown into prison, and intermittently questioned, Adams was released and sent to Uraga, a harbour near Edo (now Tokyo) where his ship and remaining crew had also been moved to. He was denied permission to repair the Liefde and leave Japan, but was otherwise left to his own devices. “He's just sitting idle while Ieyasu fights his final battle against Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigahara,” says Cryns. “It's only after Ieyasu establishes his rule and everything stabilises that Adams is asked to join him.” This is the point that Adams becomes a tutor to Ieyasu on the wider world. The relationship between the real Blackthorne and real Toranaga Though William Adams did not help Ieyasu become shōgun – nor, as the book would have it, teach him how to dive – the pilot would become one of his most trusted advisors, and in the process shape Japan’s relationship with the European powers. Iesayu still had domestic concerns – it was not until the summer of 1615, 15 years after Sekigahara, that he finally quelled all opposition and became the unchallenged ruler of Japan. Read more | A brief history of samurai warfare But his other difficulty was the Portuguese, who held a monopoly on foreign trade, particularly Chinese silks, a mainstay of Japanese clothing, as well as lead for weapons. By 1603, Adams had moved from Uraga to Edo, where he was frequently called upon by Ieyasu. On one of these visits, Ieyasu asked Adams to build him a Western style ship, which he did with help from the Japanese, teaching them Western shipbuilding techniques in the process. Ieyasu was desperate for ships like this to launch his own Asian trading expeditions, and he was so impressed with Adam’s 80-tonne vessel that he brought him into his inner circle. Adams became a tutor to Ieyasu of sorts, explaining what he knew of mathematics, geometry and astronomy, not to mention global politics. When Adams built a second ship, this one of 120 tonnes, the delighted Ieyasu rewarded him with an estate on the Miura peninsula, and named him hatamoto, making him a direct retainer. These came with an increased income and scores of households to serve him, He was now, essentially, a minor lord. In the midst of this, Adams had been advocating to Ieyasu to reach out to Dutch and English traders. Though prohibited from leaving Japan himself, he convinced Ieyasu to allow two of his compatriots to do – and so in 1609 the first Dutch vessel since his own arrived in Japan. Various letters given to outbound traders eventually brought the English to Japan in 1613 too, and Adams – by now Ieyasu’s official interpreter – was central to the establishment of an English trading factory. But his most influential moment may have been in 1611, with the arrival of the Spanish who offered trade, on the condition Ieyasu break ties with the Dutch. “That of course Ieyasu cannot allow. It’s totally contrary to his own policy,” says Cryns. “But he allows the Spanish to trade and to send missionaries to Japan.” He also allowed the Spanish to survey Edo Bay, ostensibly as an anchorage for trading ships. When Adam hears this, he cautions Ieyasu against that in the strongest possible terms – he is convinced the survey is a precursor to an invasion. Cryns explains that Ieyasu believed he could deal with an invasion given the size of his army. “But then, Adams says, you have to be aware because they send missionaries, they will make a lot of Christians in Japan, and then together they cooperate with those Christians to overthrow your government.” The impact of the dawning realisation that comes to Ieyasu can’t be overstated, says Cryns. “That's really the beginning of the suppression of the Christians in Japan. And that will culminate afterwards into the closing of Japan for all the Christians, and the Portuguese and the Dutch being transferred to Nagasaki, where they will stay on an artificial island and not allowed to come on Japanese soil. “This evolution was really started by Adam's advice to Ieyasu. He had an enormous impact on the future of Japan's diplomatic relationships.” Why was the real Blackthorne called Anjin? John Blackthorne is referred to as ‘Anjin’ in FX’s Shōgun and Clavell’s novel, ostensibly because the Japanese can’t pronounce his name. ‘Anjin’ is the Japanese word for pilot, or navigator. William Adams had a similar name. After being granted his estate on the Muira peninsula, he became known as ‘Miura Anjin’, the ‘pilot from Miura’. When did William Adams die? William Adams died four years after Ieyasu, on 16 May 1620. He left behind a wife in England, Mary Hyn, as well as a son and a daughter who was born after he left Rotterdam in 1598. He had also married a woman in Japan, and is believed to have had two children with her also. Did the real John Blackthorne ever leave Japan? The novel Shōgun ends with Toranaga narrating that it was Blackthorne’s karma to never leave Japan. His real-life inspiration, William Adams, never made it back to England either. But Adams was not kept there against his will, at least not at the end – in 1613, Ieyasu gave him permission to leave forever. When he was offered the chance of a berth on an English ship heading home, however, Adams refused. Instead, he took employment with the British East India Company, navigating expeditions to Siam (now Thailand) and later, on his own account, to Vietnam. “I think that there were a lot of aspects which kept him in Japan,” says Cryns. “In Japan he was a small lord. He had a fief allotted to him by Ieyasu. He had households serving him. “He was a man of influence in Japan. But if he went back to England, he was just another sailor.” Shōgun is available to stream on Disney+. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week Frederik Cryns is Professor of Japanese History at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. His book about the real John Blackthorne, In the Service of the Shogun: The Real Story of William Adams, is published by Reaktion Books and will be released in May 2024
The Great Kantō earthquake: a 1923 disaster that left Tokyo in ruins
In 1923, at a time when a reinvented Japan had bloomed as a global power, a violent earthquake razed the country's bustling imperial capital and killed more than 100,000 people. Christopher Harding explores the events and aftermath of the disaster – and its pivotal cultural and physical legacy
Shortly before noon on 1 September 1923, people in Tokyo and the nearby port city of Yokohama felt the ground beneath them shake. It was not especially unnerving: this region of Japan, the Kantō Plain, stood at the meeting point of four tectonic plates. Tremors were common, and usually passed after a few seconds. On this occasion, though, they continued – for five seconds, then 10 – and were so powerful that people were forced to reach out to steady themselves and catch possessions as they fell. After around 15 seconds, side to-side movement suddenly gave way to something much worse: violent vertical convulsions of such devastating power that they could be felt as far away as Spain in one direction and California in the other. In past centuries, some in Japan had associated earthquakes with the restive movements of a giant catfish living deep within the Earth. People in Tokyo and Yokohama now gained a visceral, terrifying sense of why that belief might have taken root. The shockwaves caused the ground beneath their feet to undulate. Objects did not just fall – they jumped off the floor, accompanied by an angry, ominous rumble that was soon drowned out by the noise of brick and concrete buildings collapsing, tiles crashing from roofs and people shouting and screaming. The cacophony briefly gave way to an eerie quiet as people took in what had happened. Stepping out of homes or shops to survey the landscape around them, they began to think of relatives and friends – and the need to escape. As the first of many hundreds of aftershocks arrived, the streets of Tokyo filled with people trying to flee to the countryside. The prospect of further tremors to come was worrying enough; far worse was the peril that some could already smell on the air: fire. Tokyo: centre of a revitalised nation In 1923, Tokyo was a city in transition. Barely half a century before, in 1868, a cadre of ambitious young samurai had led an armed revolt, overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate. Their vision, fulfilled with extraordinary speed in the decades that followed, had been to build up Japan’s economy, industry and military might. Victorious in war against first China in 1895 then Russia 10 years later, Japan was now one of the world’s great powers. Its international standing had been confirmed in 1922 with the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty, intended to balance naval construction by major maritime players: the US, the UK, France, Italy and Japan. Tokyo stood at the centre of this revitalised nation. It was the seat of a fledgling democracy and the home of the emperor, in whom ultimate authority rested. Industrial magnates such as Shibusawa Eiichi – the ‘father of Japanese capitalism’ – had homes, offices and factories in Tokyo. The capital had been expanding rapidly in recent years, with new railway lines spreading like tentacles into the surrounding countryside and new neighbourhoods growing up around them. Large-scale migration from rural areas saw Tokyo’s population boom from around 1 million in the Tokugawa era (when the city was known as Edo) to 4 million by 1923. Read more | From Meiji to modernity: how Japan reinvented itself through the 20th century The hustle and bustle of the capital was celebrated in literature, art and popular song, but not even the most loyal of Tokyoites would claim that its swift growth seemed planned or pretty. The streets were narrow, the buildings tightly packed, and telegraph and telephone wires hung lattice like over a constant stream of traffic – pedestrians, rickshaws and trams. Most ominously, Tokyo combined several major risk factors: residential buildings constructed with wood and paper; a network of gas pipes; and the widespread use of charcoal fires for cooking. The earthquake struck just as people were preparing lunch. Cooking fires were overturned by the shocks, and blazes flared across the city. Sparks flew, hot air was channelled down narrow streets, and whirling firestorms engulfed entire neighbourhoods. Many of those who tried to escape did so with little thought of returning. Far from fleeing with just the clothes on their backs, one observer saw a man struggling under the weight of an entire chest of drawers. This helped to turn the city’s many river and canal bridges into bottlenecks, leaving people unable to move as the smoke thickened around them and sparks rained down – starting more and more fires. As day turned to night, food, water and reliable news became in desperately short supply. Some expected a tsunami to hit Tokyo, or feared a second earthquake. Still others heard that Mount Fuji was about to erupt. Anti-Korean violence Alongside rumours of impending natural catastrophe, claims spread that the city’s Korean population was rising up – looting, killing, poisoning wells and setting new fires. Tokyo was an imperial capital not just in the sense that it hosted an emperor. An important dimension of Japan’s rise to great power status was its growing colonial empire in Asia. By 1923, its imperial territories encompassed Taiwan, the Liaotung peninsula – a small but strategically valuable portion of Manchuria – and Korea, which had been annexed in 1910 at the cost of nearly 12,000 Korean lives. Anti-colonial feeling in Korea remained fierce, and people in Japan knew it – though they were encouraged by schools and newspapers to imagine themselves as a civilising force in Asia, in much the same way as the British and French populations were taught to feel about their own empires. This view, combined with a low opinion of Koreans shaped by the political rhetoric and racial pseudoscience of the era, made it seem plausible to some Tokyoites that their city’s Korean population might use the unfolding disaster to seek revenge. Some citizens appear to have been simply thugs and opportunists, robbing and killing Koreans under the guise of maintaining law and order. They did so with the support of police officers and soldiers, some of whom had served on the Korean peninsula and were only too happy to fan the flames of anti-Korean sentiment. As many as 6,000 Koreans may have been killed – and it might have been many more had not some Japanese taken it upon themselves to hide and protect their Korean neighbours. Thousands more Koreans were taken into protective custody. Smoky hellscape It took around a week for some semblance of order to be restored in Tokyo. Survivors who made their way back into the city at this point, in search of relatives and whatever might be left of their homes, resorted to the language of religion and myth to relay what they encountered there. The scene that greeted them resembled something out of a Buddhist morality tale: a hellscape through the smoke and stench of which people were compelled to trudge, turning over charred corpses in search of loved ones. Martial law was declared in Tokyo on 2 September, and remained in force throughout the autumn as the authorities rushed to get water, food and medical aid into the capital. Tens of thousands of people had sought refuge in open spaces, including around the imperial palace where some could be found washing the soot from their bodies in the moat. Supplies began to flow in from across Japan, and later from around the world – the American Red Cross alone raised $12m. Roads and railways were steadily cleared or repaired in order to bring in supplies over land, while warships and merchant vessels brought rice and other goods by sea. For a few agonising days, starving residents watched the ships waiting, fully laden, at anchor while Tokyo’s docks were repaired and their cargoes could be unloaded onto shore. Returning to his neighbourhood six days after the fires began at last to die down, the writer Tanaka Kōtarō recalled crossing over a river full of bodies “swollen like sumo wrestlers” and floating alongside abandoned possessions. Other bodies were stacked “like charred, dried sardines”, awaiting cremation. An unforgettable “fatty stench” accompanied those cremations, wafting on the air along with the faint sound of Buddhist sutras being recited for the souls of the departed. By this time, more than 100,000 people were dead, and over half of Tokyo’s population had been left homeless. Few Japanese believed that a giant catfish was responsible for all this destruction. Yet, over the weeks and months that followed, the temptation was strong to believe that the earthquake had meaning – or that it should be given meaning. In the short term, critics focused on the unpreparedness of the municipal authorities. The risk of earthquakes, compounded by fire, was well known. Why didn’t Tokyo have a plan? After restrictions on reporting were lifted in October, and the murder of Koreans became national news, people began to ask what this extraordinary brutality said about a supposedly civilised country. Could it all be blamed on criminals, opportunists and corrupt police – a combination that one might find anywhere in the world – or was there cause here for serious soul-searching? Many answers were offered, but a general view was that one contributing factor was the country’s direction of travel in recent years. Some living in the countryside observed that rural Japan had been sacrificed in the interests of its towns and cities. With so much of the country’s political, economic and cultural life concentrated in urban centres such as Tokyo, farmers worried that they were not so much citizens or valued imperial subjects as simply the means by which rice travelled from the earth into urbanites’ bellies. For one farmer in Ibaraki prefecture, the earthquake was a cosmic judgment against the creators and sustainers of this system. “With their elegant clothes and their gold teeth, gold rings and gold watch chains, they flitted from one lavish social affair to another,” he wrote. “But now all that has vanished as if in a dream, consumed by fire, and suddenly they find themselves reduced to misery. It seems that heaven found it necessary to chastise them with a natural disaster in order to protect the nation.” Other commentators, working within a long-established tradition of vexed introspection about the state of the country, took a broader historical view. They noted souring industrial relations of late, alongside a disastrous leftward turn in politics, a shallow consumer culture shaped by western ideas and fashions, and withering national resolve. Japan had passed through a time of heroes, they claimed, beginning with the overthrow of the faltering Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and ending with the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. A modern nation had been built through a combination of far-sightedness, hard work and national spirit. That era had since given way to softness, confusion of purpose and self-seeking among the young. Back in 1898, a statue had been erected in Tokyo’s Ueno Park of one of the great men of that earlier era, Saigō Takamori. All that could now be seen from his vantage point was a ruined, smoking city: evidence if not of divine judgment then of administrative failure and people’s willingness to turn on one another in time of disaster. The more hawkish of commentators spied strategic peril. They regarded the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 not as a welcome sign of Japan’s high status but rather as a betrayal by spineless Japanese diplomats: too much had been conceded to rivals with whom they might well one day end up at war. If the will of the Japanese people could be broken so easily, what hope was there should Japan’s cities, towns and villages become the home front in some future conflict – one that would surely involve the deployment of air power against urban infrastructure? Tokyo had to be rebuilt – but so, too, must the national character. Japan’s prime minister and his cabinet duly began to look at ways in which moral education in schools could be improved. Boy Scouts were sent into what remained of Tokyo and Yokohama to collect stories of heroism and self-sacrifice. At the same time, politicians and planners who had long recognised the downsides of Tokyo’s rapid modern expansion – from overcrowding to poor sanitation – set to work reimagining the capital. Japan’s home minister, Gotō Shinpei, aimed to rebuild Tokyo with open spaces, firebreaks, buildings of limited height (to minimise future earthquake casualties), and an efficient road and transport network. Heavy industry should, meanwhile, be moved out of the city, and measures taken to avoid the return of slums. On the podcast | The big questions about the history of Japan Dreams soon bumped up against the reality of limited funds, political rivalries and the endless legal headaches of re-planning a city where buildings had been destroyed but land rights remained intact. The results that had been achieved by 1930 fell some way short of the utopian hopes expressed in the after math of the disaster. Tokyo did, though, get wider paved roads, new and upgraded bridges, modern water and sewage systems, and major new parks complete with playgrounds and baseball diamonds. For Tokyoites living near the poverty line, the authorities built public dining halls and baths, cheap lodging houses and pawnshops: better to part with one’s belongings than fall prey to moneylenders. The new Tokyo: ripe for destruction? Watching all this with keen interest were American military planners. Charged with war-gaming a future conflict with Japan, they noted which parts of the city had burned best in 1923. They noted, too, the compromises that were made in its reconstruction, not least the failure to invest in fireproof materials for new buildings. Their homework paid off. The Japanese authorities looked forward to welcoming the world to a rebuilt Tokyo in 1940, when Japan was to hold the Olympic Games – the first Asian nation to do so. But the 1930s did not pan out as hoped. Rogue elements in the armed forces, emboldened by the calls for unity, strength and the preservation of Japanese culture that followed the earthquake, launched Japan on a path to war with China and, ultimately, the UK and the US. In 1923, pictures of what became known as the Great Kantō Earthquake appeared in the US press, accompanied by sympathy and calls for charity. Two decades later, they appeared in US propaganda, captioned with derisive talk of “the house the Jap built” – frail, vulnerable and ripe for destruction by “American guns and bombs”. So it proved when devastating air raids were launched on Tokyo and other Japanese cities in the spring of 1945. As the Shōwa Emperor himself admitted long after the end of the Second World War, had Tokyo been rebuilt in the way that those such as Gotō Shinpei had called for, it might have better survived the firebombings of March 1945. As it was, another 100,000 lives were lost, and a quarter of the Japanese capital was again destroyed. Tokyoites had to wait until 1964 to have their glorious Olympic Games, showcasing a city – and a nation – risen, at last, from the ashes. Christopher Harding’s BBC Radio 3 series The Essay: Japan in Five Lives is available on BBC Sounds This article was first published in the September 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
What happened to Hiroshima after it was bombed in 1945? How many people died?
Some 78,000 people were killed instantly when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan on 6 August 1945. Those who survived suffered radiation sickness and severe burns – and the city was utterly destroyed. Jason Goodyer of BBC Science Focus reveals the devastating aftermath of bombing and explains the science behind it...
The US produced the first nuclear weapons during the Second World War following extensive scientific research dubbed the Manhattan Project, led by J Robert Oppenheimer. When they dropped two bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the world had never experienced anything like it before. The dropping of the device – codenamed 'Little Boy' – on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, claimed the lives of an estimated 140,000 people. What happened when the bomb struck Hiroshima? One second after the bomb struck on the city of Hiroshima, a huge fireball 280m in diameter erupted with a core temperature of more than 1,000,000 degrees Celsius. Heat rays from the explosion raised surface temperatures of everything in their path to more than 3,000 degrees Celsius – more than twice the melting point of iron. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 This sudden and extreme rise in temperature rapidly expanded the air around it, generating a blast that travelled faster than the speed of sound. Then, a drop in air pressure in the space behind the blast caused a backdraft powerful enough to burst the eyeballs and internal organs of anyone in its path. Almost everyone within one kilometre of the hypocenter was killed instantly. Those further out were pelted with bits of the city’s buildings, and badly burnt by the extreme heat, giving rise to the characteristic keloid scars – large overgrown tissue produced when the body creates too much collagen. The scar becomes larger than the initial wound. Read more | The countdown to Hiroshima: the 24 hours before the world changed Most of the radiation generated by the blast took the form of gamma rays, but 10 per cent was made up of neutron waves. Both are types of ionizing radiation that are capable of causing alterations to DNA, though neutrons are much more dangerous. Around 10 per cent of Little Boy’s 64kg of uranium was eaten up by the initial fission reaction, leaving the remaining 90 per cent of the radioactive material to be strewn all over the city by the blast. As a result, many of the survivors suffered the symptoms of radiation sickness, which include vomiting, fever, fatigue, bleeding from the gums, thinning hair, diarrhea and, in the worst cases, death. Those that did survive had an increased risk of cancer, though there has been no evidence of abnormalities in their offspring. Read more | Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? Two days after the bombing, Harold Jacobsen, the Manhattan Project physician, stated that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 70 years. However, just one month later, red canna flowers began to sprout less than 1km from the hypocentre. Then, on 17 September, the Makurazki typhoon hit, claiming more than 2,000 lives and flooding great swathes of the city. It did, however, bring in a layer of fresh, radiation-free topsoil that would help the city’s flora to return. The following spring, the city’s iconic cherry trees were blooming. Through further years of slow rebuilding, residents began to grow fruit and vegetables and were gradually able to return to some form of normalcy. Read next | How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? Jason Goodyer is commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus magazine This article was first published on HistoryExtra in 2016
WW2 timeline: 20 important dates and milestones you need to know
Lasting six years and one day, the Second World War started on 1 September 1939 with Hitler's invasion of Poland and ended with the Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945. Here, we trace the timeline of a conflict that engulfed the world, with expert insight from Professor Jeremy Black and the late Terry Charman on 20 key milestones…
The Second World War was the deadliest and most destructive global conflict in history, claiming the lives of more than 50 million people. Adolf Hitler started the war in 1939 when his German forces invaded Poland. When did WW2 start? 1 September 1939 When did WW2 end? 2 September 1945 | Read more about the end of WW2 Which countries were involved? WW2 involved almost every part of the world. But the key players were the Axis powers on one side (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and on the other side the Allies (France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China) How many people died? It has been estimated that 50 million soldiers and civilians died in WW2 Why did WW2 happen? We can now say without equivocation that this was Hitler’s war, say expert historians including Professor Richard Evans, Sir Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees | Read more about why WW2 happened Read on for a timeline for a list of the most important dates and milestones of WW2… Clash near the Marco Polo Bridge, close to Beijing, 7 July 1937 The triggering of the full-scale war with China that lasted until 1945 began with an obscure clash involving a Japanese unit on night manoeuvres near the Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Beijing on the night of 7–8 July 1937. The Japanese felt the nation’s honour had been challenged and sent fresh forces to the region. Hardliners in the Japanese army used the incident to press for a settlement of China on their terms, while the Chinese nationalist leader, Jiang Jieshi, was unwilling to propriate Japan. As a result, an intractable struggle began that greatly weakened both sides. Large-scale conflict broke out toward the end of July, and Beijing was occupied on 29 July. By Professor Jeremy Black WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now The German invasion of Poland, 1 September 1939 The Second World War began at dawn on Friday 1 September 1939, when Adolf Hitler launched his invasion of Poland. The Poles fought bravely, but they were heavily outnumbered in both men and machines, and especially in the air. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, but gave no real assistance to Poland. Two weeks later, Stalin invaded eastern Poland, and on 27 September Warsaw surrendered. Organised Polish resistance ceased after another week’s fighting. Poland was divided up between Hitler and Stalin. Read more about the 1939 invasion of Poland In Poland the Nazis unleashed a reign of terror that was eventually to claim six million victims, half of whom were Polish Jews murdered in extermination camps. The Soviet regime was no less harsh. In March and April 1940, Stalin ordered the murder of over 20,000 Polish officers and others who had been captured in September 1939. Tens of thousands of Poles were also forcibly deported to Siberia. By May 1945, and despite his promises to Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin had installed a subservient communist regime in Poland. Back in 1939, Poland’s then-leader Marshal Eduard Smigly-Rydz had warned, “With the Germans we risk losing our liberty, but with the Russians we lose our soul.” By Terry Charman Read more | Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three’s war of words Germans launch offensive in the West, 10 May 1940 The German unwillingness to limit their war to the conquest of Poland and to launch meaningful peace talks meant that the Second World War broadened out. Hitler was eager to profit from the ability Poland’s defeat offered for Germany to fight on only one front and argued that Germany enjoyed a window of opportunity thanks to being more prepared for war than Britain or France. Bad weather in the severe winter of 1939–40, caution on the part of the German High Command, and the need for preparations, delayed the attack until May 1940. On 10 May, the Germans attacked Belgium and the Netherlands, both hitherto neutral, and invaded France. They successfully gained and used the initiative, while the French and British suffered from a failure to prepare for fluid defence in depth. Read more | Monarchy timeline: from Hastings to the Windsors in 122 moments Germany’s success in its subsequent seven-week campaign transformed the strategic situation in Europe. Victory led Hitler to a conviction of his own ineluctable success, and that of the Wehrmacht under his leadership. Thanks to this victory, the Germans would clearly be able to fight on, and any successful challenge to them would now have to overcome German dominance of Western Europe. By Professor Jeremy Black The Battle of Britain, 25 July, 1940 After France’s surrender in June 1940, Churchill told the British people, “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war”. To mount a successful invasion, the Germans had to gain air superiority. The first phase of the battle began on 10 July with Luftwaffe attacks on shipping in the Channel. Your guide to the Battle of Britain The following month, RAF Fighter Command airfields and aircraft factories came under attack. Under the dynamic direction of Lord Beaverbrook, production of Spitfire and Hurricane fighters increased, and despite its losses in pilots and planes, the RAF was never as seriously weakened as the Germans supposed. Read more | 6 Battle of Britain myths The British also had the advantage that the battle was fought over home ground; pilots who survived their planes being shot down were soon back in action, while German aircrew went into ‘the bag’ as prisoners of war. The battle continued until the end of October, but essentially it had been won in early September when the Germans diverted their resources to night bombing. Radar, ground crews, aircraft factory workers all contributed to the victory, but it was of the young pilots from Britain, the Commonwealth and Nazi-occupied Europe of whom Churchill spoke when he said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”. By Terry Charman More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives The Battle of Britain: everything you wanted to know Resistance in the Second World War Nazi Germany: everything you wanted to know Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers The Blitz, 29 December 1940 The Blitz – an abbreviation of the word Blitzkrieg (lightning war) – was the name given to the German air attacks on Britain between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941. London was bombed by accident on the night of 24 August 1940, and the following night Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. This prompted the Germans to shift their main effort from attacking RAF airfields to bombing Britain’s towns and cities. 7 September 1940, ‘Black Saturday’, saw the beginning of the first major attacks on London. The capital was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, when more than 13,650 tons of high explosive and 12,586 incendiary canisters were dropped by the Luftwaffe. Read more | Lucy Worsley on Blitz Spirit: the courageous stories of six Londoners Beginning with Coventry on 14 November 1940, the Germans also began bombing other cities and towns while still keeping up attacks on London. More than 43,000 civilians were killed in the Blitz and much material damage was done, but British morale remained unbroken and Britain’s capacity to wage war was unimpaired. In Winston Churchill’s words, Hitler had tried and failed “To break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction”. By Terry Charman Operation Barbarossa: the German invasion of Russia, June 1941 Since the 1920s, Hitler had seen Russia, with its immense natural resources, as the principal target for conquest and expansion. It would provide, he believed, the necessary ‘Lebensraum’, or living space, for the German people. And by conquering Russia, Hitler would also destroy the “Jewish pestilential creed of Bolshevism”. His non-aggression pact with Stalin in August 1939 he regarded as a mere temporary expedient. Barely a month after the fall of France, and while the Battle of Britain was being fought, Hitler started planning for the Blitzkrieg campaign against Russia, which began on 22 June 1941. Despite repeated warnings, Stalin was taken by surprise, and for the first few months the Germans achieved spectacular victories, capturing huge swathes of land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. But they failed to take Moscow or Leningrad before winter set in. On 5/6 December, the Red Army launched a counter-offensive which removed the immediate threat to the Soviet capital. It also brought the German high command to the brink of a catastrophic military crisis. Hitler stepped in and took personal command. His intervention was decisive and he later boasted, “That we overcame this winter and are today in a position again to proceed victoriously… is solely attributable to the bravery of the soldiers at the front and my firm will to hold out…” By Terry Charman Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941 After Japan’s occupation of French Indo-China in July 1941, US President Franklin D Roosevelt, followed by Britain and the Netherlands, ordered the freezing of Japanese assets. Many Japanese now believed that there was no alternative between economic ruin and going to war with the United States and the European colonial powers. In October 1941, a hardline government under General Hideki Tojo came to power, and preparations were made to deliver a devastating blow against the Americans. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/08/GettyImages-50698634-d2fc755-e1638549006167.jpg" width="2582" height="1652" alt="Destroyer USS Shaw exploding during early morning air attack by Japanese on Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, near Honolulu. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/US Navy/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)" title="Destroyer USS Shaw exploding during earl" /> On 7 December 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” Japanese carrier-borne aircraft attacked the US Pacific fleet at its base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Despite warnings, the Americans were caught completely by surprise. Eight battleships were put out of action, and seven other warships damaged or lost. More than 2,500 Americans were killed, while the Japanese lost only 29 planes. Crucially, the American carriers were at sea and so escaped, and the base itself was not put out of action. The following day Congress declared war on Japan, which had also attacked British and Dutch colonial possessions. Read more | America and WW2: why didn’t the US enter the war sooner? On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States, and the war was now truly a global conflict. The Japanese were initially victorious everywhere, but Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned: “We can run wild for six months or a year, but after that I have utterly no confidence”. By Terry Charman Pearl Harbor podcast series Member exclusive | Browse and listen to all episodes in our podcast series on the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor Listen to all episodes now The fall of Singapore, 15 February 1942 The Japanese began their invasion of Malaya on 8 December 1941, and very soon the British and empire defenders were in full retreat. Told previously that the Japanese were no match for European troops, morale among the defending forces slumped as General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces moved swiftly southwards towards Singapore. The sinking of the British capital ships HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse by Japanese aircraft also contributed to the decline in morale, and panic began to set in among the civil population and the fighting troops. British commander Lieutenant General Arthur Percival had hoped to make a stand at Johore, but was forced to withdraw to Singapore Island. The Japanese landed there on 8/9 February, and before long the defence collapsed. To avoid further bloodshed, and with his water supply gone, Percival surrendered on 15 February. Churchill described the surrender as, “the worst disaster… in British military history”. More than 130,000 British and empire troops surrendered to a much smaller Japanese force, which only suffered 9,824 battle casualties during the 70-day campaign. Singapore was not only a humiliating military defeat, but also a tremendous blow to the prestige of the ‘white man’ throughout Asia. By Terry Charman Midway, 4 June 1942 For six months after Pearl Harbor, just as Admiral Yamamoto predicted, Japanese forces carried all before them, capturing Hong Kong, Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. In May 1942, in an attempt to consolidate their grip on their new conquests, the Japanese sought to eliminate the United States as a strategic Pacific power. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/12/GettyImages-50659712-9d71328-e1638548987425.jpg" width="2551" height="1709" alt="Smoking hulk of the Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma, which was destroyed during the battle of Midway. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/US Navy/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" title="Smoking hulk of the Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma, which was destroyed during the battle of Midway. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/US Navy/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" /> This would be done by luring into a trap the US navy carriers that had escaped Pearl Harbor, while at the same time the Japanese would occupy the Midway atoll in preparation for further attacks. The loss of the carriers would, the Japanese hoped, force the Americans to the negotiating table. In the event, it was the Americans who inflicted a crushing defeat on the Japanese. Their codebreakers were able to determine the location and date of the Japanese attack. This enabled US admiral Chester Nimitz to organise a trap of his own. Read more about the battle of Midway During the ensuing battle the Japanese suffered the loss of four carriers, one heavy cruiser and 248 aircraft, while American losses totalled one carrier, one destroyer and 98 planes. By their victory at Midway, the turning point of the Pacific war, the Americans were able to seize the strategic initiative from the Japanese, who had suffered irreplaceable losses. Admiral Nimitz described the battle’s success as “Essentially a victory of intelligence”, while President Roosevelt called it “Our most important victory in 1942… there we stopped the Japanese offensive.” By Terry Charman Alamein, 25 October 1942 The North African campaign began in September 1940, and for the next two years the fighting was marked by a succession of Allied and Axis advances and retreats. In the summer of 1942, the Axis forces under ‘Desert Fox’ field marshal, Erwin Rommel, looked poised to take Cairo and advance on the Suez Canal. The British Middle East commander General Claude Auchinleck took personal command of the defending Eighth Army and halted the retreat at the strong defensive line at El Alamein. But Churchill, dissatisfied with Auchinleck, replaced him in August with General Harold Alexander, while Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery took over command of the Eighth Army. Montgomery immediately began to build up an enormous superiority in men and equipment, finally launching his offensive at Alamein on 23 October 1942. By the beginning of November, the Axis forces were in full retreat, although final victory in North Africa was not achieved until May 1943. Although Montgomery has been criticised for being too cautious in exploiting his success at Alamein, it made him a household name and he became Britain’s most popular general of the war. Churchill hailed Alamein as a “Glorious and decisive victory… the bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts”. By Terry Charman Read more | El Alamein: The British empire’s last hurrah Stalingrad, February 1943 The battle for Stalingrad began in late August 1942, and by 12 September, German troops of the Sixth and Fourth Panzer Armies had reached the city’s suburbs. Bearing the name of Russia’s leader, Stalingrad had a symbolic significance as well as a strategic one. Throughout September and October, under General Vassili Chuikov, the city’s defenders contested every yard of ground of the devastated city. The Red Army’s stubborn defence allowed General Georgi Zhukov time to prepare a counterattack that was launched on 19 November 1942, and which soon trapped the Sixth Army commanded by General Friederich Paulus. Hitler, wrongly assured by Göring that the Luftwaffe could supply Stalingrad by air, ordered Paulus to hold out. He also ordered Field Marshal Erich Manstein to break through and relieve the beleaguered Sixth Army. Manstein was unsuccessful, and on 31 January 1943 Paulus capitulated. Of the 91,000 German troops who went into captivity, less than 6,000 returned home after the war. Stalingrad was one of Germany’s greatest defeats, and it effectively marked the end of Hitler’s dreams of an empire in the east. By Terry Charman Read more on the top 10 military blunders in history Germans launch the battle of Kursk The last major German offensive on the Eastern Front sought to exploit the opportunities provided by a major German salient. They sought to break through the flanks of the salient and to achieve an encirclement triumph to match the Soviet success at Stalingrad the previous winter. Still engaging in strategic wishful thinking, Hitler saw this as a battle of annihilation in which superior will would prevail. He hoped that victory would undermine the Allied coalition, by lessening western confidence in the likelihood of Soviet victory and increasing Soviet demands for a second front in France. The Germans were outnumbered by the Soviets who had prepared a defence system that thwarted the German tank offensive. After heavy losses and only modest gains, Hitler cancelled the operation that had cost him much strength. Having stopped the Germans, the Soviets were now in a position to counterattack. The Germans were now to be driven back in a near-continuous process. By Professor Jeremy Black Read more | 7 must-see WW2 films, from Schindler’s List to Letters from Iwo Jima D-Day, Operation Overlord, 6 June 1944 Operation Overlord, the invasion and liberation of north-west Europe, began on D-Day, 6 June 1944. That day, under the overall command of US General Dwight Eisenhower, British, Canadian and American troops, supported by the Allied navies and air forces, came ashore on the coast of Normandy. By the end of the day, 158,000 men, including airborne troops, had landed. Initially, except on the American Omaha beach, German resistance was unexpectedly light. But it soon stiffened and the Allied breakout from the beachhead area was painfully slow. The fierceness of the fighting can be gauged by the fact that in Normandy British infantry battalions were suffering the same percentage casualty rates as they had on the Western Front in 1914–1918. Eventually the breakout was achieved, and on 25 August, Paris was liberated. Brussels followed on 3 September. Hopes that the war might be won in 1944 were dashed by the Allied failure at Arnhem and the unexpected German offensive in the Ardennes in December. It was not until 4 May 1945 that the German forces in north-west Europe surrendered to Montgomery at his HQ on Lüneburg Heath. By Terry Charman Read more about the events and impact of D-Day: D-Day: the WW2 battle through the eyes of the men who were there Why the training for D-Day was deadlier than the assault D-Day in numbers: 5 infographics that show the big picture 23–26 October 1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf The Americans used their naval and air superiority, already strong and rapidly growing, to mount a reconquest of the Philippines from October 1944. That operation helped ensure a naval battle: that of Leyte Gulf of 23–26 October, the largest naval battle of the war and one (or rather a series of engagements) that secured American maritime superiority in the western Pacific. The availability of oil helped determine Japanese naval dispositions and, with carrier formations based in home waters and the battle force based just south of Singapore, any American movement against the Philippines presented a very serious problem for Japan. There was growing pessimism in Japan and losing honourably became a goal for at least some Japanese naval leaders. The head of the Naval Operations Section asked on 18 October 1944 that the fleet be afforded “a fitting place to die” and “the chance to bloom as flowers of death”. With Operation Sho-Go (Victory Operation) the Japanese sought to intervene by luring the American carrier fleet away, employing their own carriers as bait, and then using two naval striking forces (under Vice-Admirals Kurita and Kiyohide respectively) to attack the vulnerable American landing fleet. This overly complex scheme posed serious problems for the ability of American admirals to read the battle and control the tempo of the battle, and, as at Midway, for their Japanese counterparts in following the plan. In a crisis for the American operation, one of the strike forces was able to approach the landing area and was superior to the American warships. However, instead of persisting, the strike force retired; its exhausted commander, Kurita, lacking knowledge of the local situation, not least due to the difficulties of identifying enemy surface ships. The net effect of the battle was the loss of four Japanese carriers, three battleships including the Musashi, 10 cruisers, other warships and many aircraft. By Professor Jeremy Black Yalta: The Big Three, February 1945 Between June 1940 and June 1941, Britain stood alone against Hitler. But then, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she gained two powerful allies. For the next four years Churchill did his utmost to foster ‘The Grand Alliance’ against the Nazis. He even earned the grudging admiration of Nazi propaganda chief Dr Goebbels who said, “…I can feel only respect for this man, for whom no humiliation is too base and no trouble too great when the victory of the Allies is at stake”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/07/GettyImages-103372360-1e4684d-e1638547611167.jpg" width="1024" height="704" alt="The original ‘Big Three’ at Livadia Palace in Yalta: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. None of them came away from the summit with everything they had hoped for. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)" title="The original ‘Big Three’ at Livadia Palace in Yalta: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. None of them came away from the summit with everything they had hoped for. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)" /> Churchill conferred with both Roosevelt and Stalin to hammer out strategy and to discuss postwar arrangements. The three men congregated for the first time at Tehran in November 1943. There, and again at their last meeting at Yalta, Churchill was conscious of the fact that Britain, exhausted by her war effort, was now very much the junior partner of the two emerging superpowers. Opinion | Did Britain really stand alone in WW2? At Yalta, the postwar division of Germany was agreed upon as was the decision to bring war criminals to trial. The future constitution of the United Nations was discussed, and Stalin undertook to enter the war against Japan after Germany had been defeated. But the future of eastern Europe remained a stumbling block. With the Red Army in occupation, the Soviet dictator was disinclined to listen to the views of his two allies. By Terry Charman The bombing of Dresden, 13/14 February 1945 At Yalta, an Allied plan to bomb the hitherto untouched city of Dresden was discussed. The reason for attacking the city was due principally to its strategic importance as a communications centre in the rear of the German retreat that followed the Soviet winter offensive of January 1945. It was also believed that Dresden might be used as an alternative to Berlin as the Reich capital. The attack was part of a plan codenamed ‘Thunderclap’, designed to convince the Germans that the war was lost. It was drawn up in January 1945, when Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, V2 rocket attacks on Britain and the deployment of snorkel-equipped U-boats clearly demonstrated that Germany was still capable of offering stubborn resistance. Strategic bombing attacks had previously failed to break Germany, although they had proved valuable in reducing its capacity to wage war. Now, on the night of 13/14 February 1945, Dresden was attacked by 800 RAF bombers, followed by 400 bombers of the United States Army Air Force. The bombing created a firestorm that destroyed 1,600 acres of Dresden. Even today it is still uncertain as to how many died, and estimates have ranged from 25,000 to 135,000. Most authorities now put the death toll at around 35,000. The scale of destruction, the enormous death toll, and its timing at such a late stage in the war, have all ensured that the bombing of Dresden still remains highly controversial. By Terry Charman The liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 17 April 1945 Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by the British Army on 15 April 1945. The photographs, newsreel films and Richard Dimbleby’s moving BBC broadcast from the camp sent a shockwave of horror and revulsion through Britain. Stories about concentration camps and the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews had been circulating since 1933, but this was the first time that the British public were faced with the reality of Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question – the Holocaust. Even today it is not known for certain when the order to set about systematic extermination of European Jewry was given. But by December 1941, the first extermination camp at Chelmno in German-occupied Poland was in operation, while mass shootings of Soviet Jews had begun in June. On 20 January 1942, a meeting of Nazi bureaucrats took place at Wannsee, near Berlin, to discuss the technicalities of the Final Solution. It is estimated that nearly six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, more than 1.1 million in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the largest extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. During the Second World War, Hitler’s racial policies also claimed many millions of non-Jewish victims, including Soviet prisoners of war, those with mental and physical disabilities, gypsies (Roma and Sinti), homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The future Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie saw Belsen just after it was liberated. Years later he said,“ A war that closed down Belsen was a war worth fighting”. By Terry Charman Learn more about the horrors of the Holocaust and those responsible: 12 things you need to know about Anne Frank and her diary Forgotten trials: the other side of Nuremberg Experiments in evil: the shocking efforts to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do” VE Day, 8 May 1945 On the afternoon of 8 May 1945, the British prime minister Winston Churchill made the radio announcement that the world had long been waiting for. “Yesterday morning,” he declared, “at 2.41 a.m., at General Eisenhower’s headquarters, General Jodl, the representative of the German High Command, and Grand Admiral Dönitz, the designated head of the German State, signed the act of unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces in Europe.” After nearly six years, the war in Europe was finally over. But while VE Day marked the end of the Second World War in Europe, fighting in the far east would continue for another three-and-a-half months. As a consequence, there was always a slightly solemn undercurrent to the celebrations of VE Day. Read more | What events led to VE Day? Japan was not finally defeated until after the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945... By Terry Charman Nagasaki, 9 August 1945 On 2 August 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to the military potential of splitting the atom. Fears that German scientists might be working on an atomic bomb, prompted the Americans and British to set up the Manhattan Project to develop their own atomic weapon. It was successfully tested in the desert near Alamogordo in New Mexico on 16 July 1945 and the news was flashed to Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman, who was meeting Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam. Although the bomb had been conceived with Germany as the target, it was now seen as both a way of quickly ending the war with Japan, and as a lever to apply political pressure on the Russians. Although the Japanese were warned that if they carried on fighting their homeland would face “utter devastation”, they continued to resist with their usual fanaticism. Thus, the first atomic bomb to be used militarily, codenamed Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. An estimated 78,000 people died and 90,000 others were seriously injured. Three days later a second bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki causing a similar loss of life. By Terry Charman Japan surrenders, 2 September 1945 The dropping of the atomic bombs brought about the quick acceptance of Allied terms and Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945. Japan publicly announced its surrender on 15 August 1945. This day has since been commemorated as Victory over Japan – or ‘VJ’ – Day. But the official surrender documents were not signed until 2 September, which is considered VJ Day in the USA. The formal surrender took place on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, six years and one day after the Germans invaded Poland. The Second World War was officially over. By Terry Charman Jeremy Black is a professor of history at the University of Exeter who specialises in British and continental European history. His publications include The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 (Praeger Publishers Inc, 2006) and World War Two: A Military History (Routledge, 2003) The late Terry Charman was a senior historian at the Imperial War Museum London and the author of Outbreak 1939: The World Goes to War (Virgin, 2009) These WW2 dates first appeared in BBC History Magazine's Collectors' Edition 'The Second World War Story'