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By May of 1945 an exhausted and overrun Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over. The United States, aided by Great Britain, moved closer and closer to Japan. Massive suicide attacks by the Japanese caused great losses to the Pacific Fleet, but did not deter its drive. Japan, thinking the Soviet Union was a friendly neutral in the war in the Pacific, submitted unofficial peace feelers to the United States through them. The Soviet Union, secretly wanting to join the war against Japan, suppressed the feelers. Ironically, the Japanese military made it impossible to pursue peace directly, as...

Saturday marks the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima – devastating acts that helped bring World War Two to a close. (Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was similarly battered). The attacks – the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in world history to date – killed tens of thousands of people and shocked the planet with the scale of their destruction. There has been much controversy over the decision to bomb Japan and some speculation that it might have been racially motivated (given that the U.S. military did not drop such weapons on European civilian targets)....

Today marks one of the United States’ most important – but least celebrated – anniversaries. It is remarkable not only for what happened on this date in 1945 but for what did not happen subsequently. What did happen was that the “Enola Gay,” an American B-29 bomber from the intentionally obscure 509th Composite Group (a U.S. Army Air Force unit tasked with deploying nuclear weapons), dropped “Little Boy,” a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That dramatic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week after the August 9 detonation of “Fat...

There's a museum in Tokyo dedicated to Japan's ample history of warfare. But if you visit the plainly named Military Museum, you'll find no reference to the grotesque medical experiments the Japanese army conducted in World War II or the sex slaves it kidnapped.

into the Bockscar plane on the island of Tinian, August 9th, 1945 Posted February 7th, 2014 by Alex Wellerstein Teaching and other work has bogged me down, as it sometimes does, but I’m working on a pretty fun post for next week. In the meantime, here is something I put together yesterday. This is unedited (in the sense that I didn’t edit it), “raw” footage of the loading of the Fat Man bomb into the Bockscar plane on the island of Tinian, August 9th, 1945. It also features footage of the bombing of Nagasaki itself. I got this from Los...

The sinister surprise attack against the naval base at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Imperial Military is recognized by historians as one of the most successful sneak attacks in military history. While many Americans initially thought the Empire of Japan intended to attack the United States mainland – Californians along the coastal areas felt especially vulnerable – the real targets were in Southeast Asia: Hong Kong, Siam, Malaya, Thailand, and the Philippines, as the first of many. The attack upon the naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, shocked America and the world. While Americans were still reeling,...

JERUSALEM – A senior Israeli government official has posted online comments on Facebook saying he is “sick” of commemorations for the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, a local newspaper reported. “I am sick of the Japanese, ‘Human rights’ and ‘Peace’ groups” over holding their “annual self-righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims,” the Haaretz daily quoted Daniel Seaman, a deputy director general at the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, as writing in his Facebook post. Seaman, a key Israeli online public relations official, also wrote on the social networking site: “(The bombings of) Hiroshima...

Monday, August 12, 2013 Hiroshima's Lessons for the War on Terror Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In the summer of '45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima, with a bang. On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki's turn. Six days later, Japan, which had been preparing to fight to the last man, surrendered. For generations of liberals, those two names would come to represent the horror of America's war machine, when...

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.That was a conclusion of the 1946 U.S. Bombing Survey ordered by President Harry Truman in the wake of World War II.Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963, “the Japanese were...

August 6, 2013 marks the 68th anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb, and August 9th the last. Japan did not surrender for five days after Nagasaki was bombed, during which time the Soviet Union declared war and the Americans conducted additional, conventional firebombing raids on a Japanese city. Emperor Hirohito was asked to break a deadlock in the imperial cabinet that had blocked an unconditional surrender up to that point. To this day, Harry Truman is viewed by ardent critics as a war criminal and the United States is deemed as being stained by a sin as...

I just listened to yet another disturbing piece of propaganda by Oliver Stone, the Untold History of the United States. It is about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As can be expected in a good leftist piece of propaganda, the point made is that the US was the bad guy (including Truman) , who bamboozled poor Japan and Poor USSR during that time. The horrible US dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, knowing that Japan was going to surrender without its use within a couple of weeks anyway. Then the laughably improbably logical gymnastics come...

TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese government-backed researcher said Friday no health effects from radiation released by the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant have been seen in people living nearby. The pronouncement by Kazuo Sakai of Japan's National Institute of Radiological Sciences is the latest by authorities seeking to quell fears over the long-term effects of the disaster. But it was dismissed by campaign group Greenpeace who said the government should not seek to play down health worries. "Since the accident in Fukushima, no health effects from radiation have been observed, although we have heard reports some people fell ill due to...

Aug 20 (Reuters) - People who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as children continue to have a higher-than-normal risk of thyroid cancer more than 50 years after radiation exposure, according to a U.S. study. Thyroid cells are particularly vulnerable to ionizing radiation, the kind produced by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown or the atomic bombings in Japan. The study published in the International Journal of Cancer tracked new cancer diagnoses in people who were in Japan during the bombings in 1945 and those who were not. In total, there were 371 thyroid cancers diagnosed between 1958 and 2005...

We have readers all over the globe and some of them are from the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’. I heard from one of them today, reminding me of the 67th ‘anniversary’ of the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I have been reading a book called ‘The Fall of Japan’. It brings out a considerable amount of evidence indicating that most of the Japanese government officials, diplomats and many of the top officers in the Imperial Navy were trying to influence their government toward suing for peace with the Americans, but the very top dogs in the military...

Clifton Truman Daniel will visit Japan from August 2, and attend ceremonies in Hiroshima August 6, and Nagasaki on August 9, according to Kyodo News as reported in the Nihon Keizai Shinbun. It is the first time a member of the late president’s family will attend the ceremonies, and will holds a deep symbolic meaning for the Japanese. Public papers from his time in office reveal a man with no regrets about using the A-bomb, but his grandson told Kyodo News that the late-president was horrified by the destructive power of the Bomb.

Leadership: Leaked cables show Japan nixed a presidential apology to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for using nukes to end the overseas contingency operation known as World War II. Will the next president apologize for the current one? The obsessive need of this president to apologize for American exceptionalism and our defense of freedom continued recently when Barack Obama's State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) contacted the family of al-Qaida propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to "express its condolences" to his family. Khan, a right-hand man to Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed along with Awlaki in an airstrike in Yemen on Sept. 30....

Sources within the Obama Administration as well as with the ruling Japan Democratic Party here have leaked and confirmed that Obama (and Japan side) have come to the conclusion to make the decision to cancel any side trip to Hiroshima, Japan in November as part of O's ongoing worldwide apology tour.

This week marks 65 years since the United States dropped the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, President Harry Truman delivered a “rain of ruin” upon Hiroshima, Japan, with Nagasaki hit three days later, killing 100,000 to 200,000. Truman’s objective was to compel surrender from an intransigent enemy that refused to halt its naked aggression. The barbarous mentality of 1940s Japan was beyond belief. An entire nation lost its mind, consumed by a ferocious militarism and hell-bent on suicide. Facing such fanaticism, Truman felt no alternative but to use the bomb. As George C. Marshall put it, the Allies needed...

Theodore Van Kirk is sitting at his desk in a detached bungalow in the gated community outside Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives. The room is cluttered with boxes, trinkets, shelves full of books on wartime history and photographs of planes on the walls...

Archbishop Joseph Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki, Japan. (CNS/Paul Haring)While another in a series of important events aimed at making the world safer from nuclear weapons occurs this week with the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, plans are under way to bring a statue of Mary that survived the 1945 nuclear blast in Nagasaki, Japan, to the United States for first time.Actually, only the head of Mary will be displayed at a May 2 Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, reported Ecumenical News International. It’s the only part of the wooden statue that survived the powerful explosion.The Mass will...