Season 15, Episode 20: The Pacific War, Part VI: Surrender
By the summer of 1944, things were going very poorly for the Axis Powers, and a year earlier, they had already lost one of their members to the scourge of peace. Shortly after the invasion of Sicily, ministers serving prime minister Benito Mussolini plotted to have him removed, fearing a devastating full-scale invasion of the peninsula. Earlier that year, the Allies displayed their willingness to engage in such an invasion, subjecting Rome to an aerial bombardment for the first time in the city’s history. In order to remove Mussolini, they enlisted the help of King Victor Emmanuel III, who was the only entity under Italy’s constitution which had the authority to remove prime ministers. In late July, the king summoned his prime minister and officially dismissed him. As a flummoxed Mussolini was leaving the king’s residence, he was accosted by a few hundred riflemen who took him into custody. Worried that the Germans might try to rescue him, they kept his location a secret and constantly moved him between several safehouses as they worked through the summer of 1943 with their Allied counterparts and in September signed the Armistice of Cassibile.
German commandos discovered Mussolini’s whereabouts the day before the treaty was signed and freed him. German forces attacked Italian holdings in the Balkan States and managed to seize control of most of northern Italy, including Rome, installing Benito Mussolini as the head of state for “The Italian Social Republic,” a Nazi puppet state. Although German propaganda attempted to cast these actions as protecting the Italian people from Allied aggression, the ranks of the Italian resistance swelled and partisan sabotage in northern Italy became a real problem for the German occupiers as they faced a new southern front in this war.
Back in Japan, Prime Minister Tojo Hideki hoped that the offensives and battles of the first half of 1944 would convince the US to sue for peace and at least allow the empire of Japan to retain what it had taken thus far. Operation Ichi-go would neutralize China, Operation U-go would neutralize Allied forces in India, and the Battle of the Philippine Sea would knock out US Naval and air power in the Pacific for the foreseeable future. Back in February, the Prime Minister took up the position of Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, dismissing existing chief Marshal Sugiyama Hajime. The emperor supported this rather unorthodox assumption of power, as Prime Minister Tojo had assured him that his plans would lead to an acceptable result of the ongoing war with the United States.
While Tojo’s many plans looked very convincing on paper, their actual results left something to be desired. Operation U-Go, which began in March, had gone just about as poorly as it could, and by July nearly every one of the 150,000 Japanese soldiers who joined in the initial offensive was either dead or wounded. While framed as a liberation of India from the colonial clutches of the UK, the Indian armies who clashed with Japanese forces did not defect as Tojo was hoping they would. Instead, the Imperial Japanese Army was forced to withdraw by early July.
The Battle of the Philippine Sea, meanwhile, had been nothing short of a catastrophic disaster, resulting in the complete collapse of Japanese naval air power in the Pacific and the loss of most of her remaining capable pilots. Only Operation Ichi-go could be called a success, and while it succeeded in its stated aims of seizing the railways throughout eastern China, the nationalist army remained in the field, as well as the communist insurgents. Tojo Hideki’s late-stage gambit had failed. His enemies in the imperial court were quick to spread the word that the Prime Minister no longer enjoyed the support of the emperor. On July 18, 1944, shortly after the island of Saipan was taken by US forces, Prime Minister Tojo Hideki resigned, having no one but himself to blame for the war effort’s ultimate failure.
A campaign by a faction at court supported Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa to replace Tojo Hideki as prime minister, but Admiral Yonai was a well known member of the so-called “peace faction,” who argued against making war against the US and UK prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. While those who supported him at court might have wanted him for the express purpose of making peace, Admiral Yonai himself expressed a very legitimate fear that any prime minister who offered peace at this moment would likely be assassinated by Army officers, who generally counted even considering of a conciliatory peace agreement as tantamount to treason. He counter-recommended General Koiso Kuniaki to serve as premier instead, and was himself appointed as Minister of the Navy under the new government of Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki.
The new prime minister had been involved in the Sakurakai, or “Cherry Blossom Society,” which had attempted a coup back in 1931 known as the “March Incident,” which we discussed in episode 5. However, the other high-ranking army officers who might be preferable were all considered indispensable in their present roles and were thus unable to be recalled from active service at the moment. Admiral Yonai, in addition to his duties as the Minister of the Navy, was also given the task of serving as deputy prime minister in the hopes that he might provide some political counterbalance.
Prime Minister Koiso’s primary objective upon taking office was ending the rivalry that had arisen between the Imperial Army and Imperial Navy. He created the Supreme War Guidance Council, composed of high officers of both branches, in hopes of creating the unity which would lead to a more effective response to US gains in the Pacific. However, his fellow council members frequently contradicted him to his face at these meetings and generally did not respect any of his ideas. In the midst of this infighting, which lasted through the summer, US troops finalized their seizure of the Mariana Islands, including Saipan and Guam. The landing strips on these islands allowed B-29 bombers to launch missions there which were capable of reaching Japan’s home islands.
As summer progressed, the Allies likewise made plans for their next steps. Admiral Chester Nimitz advocated for an invasion of Taiwan while General Douglas MacArthur argued that US efforts would be better spent if they focused on retaking the Philippines. In mid-August, president Roosevelt made his decision: MacArthur’s plan to liberate the Philippines was chosen. It would be some months, however, before this new offensive would be ready to launch, months which US engineers spent revamping airfields on the Mariana Islands in preparation for further incursions against Japanese territory. As early as June 1944, Allied strategic air raids on Japanese soil became a regular occurrence, devastating not only the national warmaking capacity but also killing hundreds of thousands of people before the war’s end.
The summer of 1944 was also a very bad time for Nazi Germany. The reversal of fortune on the eastern front that began with the Battle of Kursk continued apace and German armies were repeatedly forced to retreat when faced with renewed Soviet aggression. The newly-established western front likewise made serious incursions into German-occupied France, resulting in the liberation of Paris on August 25, followed shortly thereafter by further Allied victories in Marseilles and Toulon.
Throughout the fall of 1944, US forces were preparing to return, at long last, to the Philippine archipelago. When choosing a specific target for their initial incursion, which would serve as a foothold from where the rest of the archipelago could be taken, the island of Leyte was selected. Located on the eastern side of the Philippines and nearly dead center between the archipelago’s north and south, US high command hoped that taking Leyte would help them cut the empire of Japan’s supply lines which extended to Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Malay Peninsula to the south. For General Douglas MacArthur, the Philippines campaign which began in the fall of 1944 was more than just another battle which needed fighting; it was the fulfillment of the promise he had made to return to the islands after he had been compelled to flee from the Japanese invasion in 1942.
Japanese high command was well aware of how critical control of the Philippines was to maintaining their increasingly-tenuous supply lines and the leadership of the Imperial Japanese Navy was determined to defend the islands using every means at their disposal. The Allied Philippines campaign began on October 20 with the amphibious landing of the US Sixth Army on the eastern side of Leyte island. The Imperial Japanese Navy responded by attempting to interdict support ships and other Allied craft, which led to the three-day Battle of Leyte Gulf. The ensuing naval engagement witnessed the final crippling of the Imperial Japanese Pacific Fleet.
At first, the Imperial Japanese Navy misjudged the size and strength of their opponents, sending an insufficient quantity of their own ships in response and then later trying to make up for this shortfall through trickery. They sent some of their only remaining aircraft carriers to the north of the US Pacific Fleet in hopes of drawing some US ships, preferably carriers, into a trap. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, which we discussed in the previous episode, had already sapped the Imperial Japanese Navy of most of its remaining veteran pilots, and Japanese high command pursued an unorthodox military doctrine in hopes of making up for the inferiority of their air power. In the early summer of 1944, there were rumors that a new air tactic was being considered by Japanese high command which would transform their fighter planes from being weapons platforms into being weapons themselves.
There had been some precedent to the creation of so-called Kamikaze pilots: many Japanese pilots had, when their craft had been damaged beyond repair or when they themselves had been grievously wounded, intentionally crashed their planes into enemy vessels in a final act of suicidal defiance. Training pilots specifically to crash their vehicles into Allied craft, however, was a new development. Though it seems like several lifetimes ago when last I used the word “Kamikaze,” it has its origins in the late Kamakura Period, which we discussed in season seven. When Kublai Khan sent a great fleet to invade Japan in 1274, a typhoon destroyed many of the ships which were meant to support the invasion, which subsequently failed. These typhoons were dubbed “kamikaze,” or “divine wind” by those who believed that the storms were instruments of divine intervention by the gods of Japan to protect their people.
The new kamikaze were expected to similarly turn the tide against a supposedly rapacious, murderous invader, destroying their naval power to protect the precious homeland. While there are rumors of attempted suicide flights before the Philippines campaign of 1944, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was the first engagement in which such attacks were confirmed. While these attacks, when successful, usually took the lives of at least a dozen enemy combatants, their propaganda value was always higher than their potential as a destructive weapon. Many would-be kamikaze pilots were killed before they could make their fatal attack, being barely-trained by the air corps who rushed them onto the field to give their lives in service to the emperor.
By the end of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the four carriers which Japanese Naval command had attempted to use as bait were sunk, along with twenty-two other ships and the loss of over twelve thousand personnel. On the US side, three thousand had been killed and eleven ships sunk. Though this was a costly victory for the US Pacific Fleet, it was indeed a victory. For the Imperial Japanese Army, it was the most devastating defeat which they would suffer in the Pacific War. Many of the surviving Japanese vessels anchored in various ports throughout southeast Asia under Japanese control and awaited repair, only to be destroyed in the Allied bombing raids that followed.
The loss of the northern Mariana Islands of Guam and Saipan earlier that year was a terrible blow to the Japanese war effort; the failure to prevent an Allied landing on the Philippines was equally demoralizing. Seaborne supply lanes traveling between Japanese-occupied southeast Asia and mainland China were now subject to embargo from US forces in the area. The empire of Japan had been using those sea lanes to transport oil extracted from southeast Asia and now would have to make do without. It was not lost on Japanese high command, either, that Allied forces stationed on the Philippines could be redeployed for an invasion of Okinawa prefecture, which was now within easy striking distance.
As for the landborne invasion of Leyte island, the years spent coordinating with Filipino resistance groups now came to fruition for US forces. In addition to performing acts of sabotage behind enemy lines, these groups also acted as community organizers, helping to evacuate residents in the path of oncoming troops and keeping the roads clear so that they could be used by US armored divisions. Fighting on the island of Leyte raged for two months but by the end of December it was comfortably in US hands in spite of stiff resistance from Japanese troops. In mid-December, while Leyte was still being pacified, US naval command launched a concurrent invasion of the nearby island of Mindoro, which lies just south of the main island of Luzon. Mindoro would fall even faster than Leyte and was taken in a matter of days. Several other surrounding islands experienced their own amphibious landings and seizure and on January 9, 1945, the invasion of Luzon began.
Resistance on Luzon was considerable, as Japanese defenders possessed a large contingent of heavy armor to aid their defense. American armor frequently became bogged down while engaging with their Japanese counterparts and while Allied forces generally came out ahead in such engagements, the casualties inflicted were still horrific. By March of 1945, Allied forces controlled all of the important economic and strategic areas of Luzon but Japanese holdouts took to the densely-jungled mountains and continued a guerrilla resistance until the end of the war.
Meanwhile, political conditions throughout the empire of Japan continued to deteriorate. On November 10, 1944, Wang Jingwei died of pneumonia, leaving the Reorganized National Government of China in Nanjing, the empire’s puppet Chinese government, in the hands of Chen Gongbo, who proved even less capable than his predecessor. Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki grew desperate to discover some peace solution which would satisfy both the Allied enemies as well as the officer corps of the Imperial Japanese Army but was unable to find this elusive, likely-nonexistent compromise. As the Imperial Japanese Navy continued to lose ground throughout the spring of 1945, the emperor’s support of his premiership continued to erode.
On February 19, Allied forces began a five-week assault against Japanese forces ensconced on the island of Iwo Jima. Composed of volcanic rock, this island held many natural defenses for the garrison it hosted, who were able to hide safely underground in vast tunnel networks during air raids. Unlike the colonial holdings which the Allies had been taking previously, Iwo Jima was legitimately part of Japan, specifically part of the Ryukyu island chain which was now called Okinawa Prefecture. The island did host two air bases which was the reason why Allied command committed to taking it, but some within Allied high command objected, noting that these air bases weren’t strictly necessary for the purpose of launching an air campaign against the Japanese home islands. Nevertheless, the decision was made: Iwo Jima must fall.
The fighting that ensued was brutal, nasty, and extremely costly for both sides of the engagement. This was home turf for the Japanese defenders and they excelled at laying traps for the invading Allied troops, who experienced higher total casualties than their Japanese counterparts. To be clear, the term “total casualties” includes wounded, but it had still generally been the case throughout the Pacific War that the Japanese saw the worst of the fighting in terms of overall casualties. However, while the casualties suffered by the 21,000 Japanese defenders were usually deaths, the vast majority of Allied casualties were wounded. Nevertheless, nearly 7,000 Allied lay dead on the sands of Iwo Jima by the time the battle came to a close in late March, a devastating total that touched many lives back home.
While the Battle of Iwo Jima itself threatened to become another political liability like the Battle of Tarawa, it also provided the US with an enduring piece of photographic propaganda. The famous photo of the six marines raising the US Flag was taken during the Battle of Iwo Jima, and was the subject of a 2006 film called “Flags of Our Fathers,” which, in spite of its cold, cynical undertone, serves as a decent depiction of the Battle of Iwo Jima itself in all its horror. As shown in the film, the photograph appeared on the front page of many newspapers across the nation and became an enduring symbol of US determination in the face of a challenging foe, giving the US government some political breathing room as they continued preparing for the next phase in the Pacific War.
That phase was called “Operation Downfall” and it described an invasion of the Japanese home islands, starting with Kyushu but then striking at Tokyo directly, a relatively easy task on paper since Tokyo is near the ocean. US high command wanted nothing less than an unconditional surrender from their Japanese counterparts and given the determined resistance they had so far faced when engaging Japanese troops, they believed that nothing short of brutal national pacification would earn them the surrender they sought.
In late March, a naval air campaign dubbed “Operation Starvation” was initiated. It involved high-altitude bombers dropping parachute-slowed sea mines in the major shipping harbors across Japan and throughout the Seto inland sea for the purpose of a soft blockade. Many tons of goods were destroyed by these mines in the months that followed and, true to its name, Operation Starvation did manage to inflict a food shortage upon the citizens of the empire of Japan.
At the beginning of April, Allied forces in the Pacific launched another offensive against a Japanese island, this time against the island of Okinawa, the main island in the Ryukyu archipelago and the primary island of the prefecture bearing its name. The Battle of Okinawa would continue for nearly three months and while it was still underway there arose several important developments. The Imperial Japanese Navy, though at this point it is more accurate to think of them as the remnant of the Imperial Japanese Navy, decided to launch a last-ditch attack against US naval forces which were supporting the troops engaged in the Battle of Okinawa.
Ten-go Sakusen, or “Operation Heaven,” involved nine Japanese battleships, notably the extremely large and well-armed battleship Yamato, the flagship of the combined fleet. Japanese high command had no illusions about winning the naval battle, but ordered the Yamato to make straight for Okinawa island and beach herself, then act as fixed artillery to support counterattacks by Japanese defenders on the island. This rather unorthodox method of ad-hoc defense fortification threatened to increase casualties, both among Allied troops, who would be killed by the Yamato’s artillery support, but also among Japanese troops and civilians, who would be killed by the air raids which would become necessary to neutralize the beached Yamato.
The ensuing battle that resulted from Operation Ten-go was a much simpler affair than the Battle of the Philippine Sea because there were almost no Japanese aircraft escorting the Yamato’s battleship group, which allowed US fighters and bombers to assault the formation with only the shipbound anti-aircraft fire to contend with. This is not to say that there were no Japanese aircraft available; in fact there were over a hundred planes in the air courtesy of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Group. Most of these were kamikaze, however, which assaulted Allied vessels when they managed to survive the defensive fire and escort planes. Though the Yamato was sunk en route to its new assignment on April 7 and fewer than one hundred US personnel killed in action during Operation Ten-go, members of the Allied naval service were awestruck at the willingness of Japanese pilots to engage in suicide attacks against their ships.
Five days after the Yamato was sunk, with the Battle of Okinawa fully underway, President Roosevelt died. The president’s health, never his strong suit, had been deteriorating considerably throughout the last year of his life and even though his declining health had been kept strictly secret, the public was already beginning to suspect that all was not well with the commander-in-chief. Although he had handily won re-election in 1944, he had been heard to remark in confidence that he planned to resign as soon as the war ended. He was 63 years old.
Taking Roosevelt’s place as the new president was his vice president Harry Truman. However, Truman had only become the vice president at the start of Roosevelt’s latest term in January of 1945, having replaced previous vice president Henry Wallace after some political maneuvering at the party convention during the 1944 campaign. Truman did not enjoy the same level of support as his predecessor and, in his defense, had not been well-prepared to take over for the president. He replaced many of Roosevelt’s staff appointees with his own partisans, but this reduced the White House Staff drastically and made work for those who remained very burdensome. Truman’s takeover created more than a little friction throughout the US political establishment, which included the Army, Navy, and Marines.
A little over a week after Roosevelt’s death, Adolf Hitler ended his own life. The misfortunes suffered by Nazi Germany which began around the time of the fateful Battle of Kursk in 1943 had only gotten worse since. France was quickly retaken and Germany soon found itself under active invasion from both the west and east. Huddled in an underground bunker in Berlin, on April 20, 1945, he killed himself. His wife Eva Braun likewise took her own life. A few weeks later, on May 8, 1945, the remaining representatives of Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally. The empire of Japan was now the only Axis power left who was still fighting the second world war.
When the Battle of Okinawa finally came to a close in late June, its ultimate casualty count was staggering. After 82 days of brutal fighting, Allied casualties were in the 70,000 range, of which over twelve thousand were dead. Casualties among Imperial forces were far worse, being around 94,000 dead and over 7,000 taken prisoner. The civilian population of Okinawa is believed to have suffered between forty and one hundred fifty thousand dead. Many of these civilians had committed suicide en masse, often at gunpoint from members of the Imperial Japanese Army, who warned them that they would be tortured by the Allies after the battle ended.
The horrific scale of the Battle of Okinawa underscored, for Allied high command, the horrors that awaited during “Operation Downfall,” the coming land invasion of Japan’s home islands. Nevertheless, for the moment the plan was to prepare for invasion, starting with the southwestern island of Kyushu and then, in 1946, mounting a full amphibious landing bent on seizing Tokyo and most of the Kanto Plain.
Meanwhile, in the halls of power in Tokyo, prime minister Koiso Kuniaki had resigned on April 7, after the sinking of the Yamato. For his replacement, the emperor made a rather unorthodox choice which some among the Allies hoped signalled a new openness to resolving the Pacific War. To replace Koiso Kuniaki, emperor Hirohito chose the seventy-seven year-old Suzuki Kantaro, a decorated veteran of both the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. He had served as Vice Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the first world war and had been vice president of the Privy Council since 1940. He had been among those targeted for death by the assassins who carried out the February 26 Incident in 1936 but had survived the attempt and still carried the would-be killer’s bullet in his body. In spite of his decorated service, Suzuki Kantaro was an unpopular choice for premier among the military factions because he had openly opposed war with the United States for many years.
In truth, the empire of Japan was already living on borrowed time. At the Yalta Conference in February of 1945, Secretary Stalin committed the Soviet Union to join the Allies in making war against Japan no more than three months after the conclusion of the war in Europe. The Soviet Union and Japan had maintained an uneasy peace since the rather impolite dust-up known as the Battles of Khalkin Gol, but Stalin was determined to defeat Nazi Germany before opening up a second front on Russia’s east with the empire of Japan. Rail transport to Russia’s east had improved little since the days of the Russo-Japanese War, so massing Soviet troops in the east would take no small amount of effort, money, and materiel. Still, war would not be declared by the Soviet Union until after the Potsdam Conference which stretched from mid-July to early August.
At the Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and President Chiang Kai-shek, issued a document known to history as the Potsdam Declaration on July 26. The purpose of this document was to state, in clear terms, the demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender and the intentions of the Allies during the postwar period, as well as assurances against reprisals. One of the provisions conveyed that the Allies had no interest in enslaving the Japanese or destroying their nation but also promised stern justice for any Japanese war criminals, especially those who had mistreated Allied prisoners. The end of the declaration reads, (quote)
"We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction." (end quote)
Some believe that the promise of so-called prompt and utter destruction was a direct reference to a new, terrible weapon which the United States had just developed and which it planned to use against the empire of Japan in hopes of forcing a surrender.
In 1939, before the Germans invaded Poland and initiated what would become the Second World War in Europe, a group of leading scientists including Albert Einstein penned a letter to then-president Roosevelt urging him to initiate and fund research into weaponizing nuclear fission so that such a weapon could be used against Nazi Germany if the need arose. It was believed that Germany was already funding research in that direction and these scientists hoped that the US could beat them to it. In early 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent entry of the US into the second world war, President Roosevelt formally authorized a government project to weaponize nuclear fission.
The ensuing years were full of advances, recalculations, setbacks and further recalculations until finally, on July 16, 1945, the United States Army detonated the first nuclear weapon in world history on the sands of New Mexico. The recent film “Oppenheimer” does a fair job depicting the Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test, though just as a disclaimer always make sure you learn history from trustworthy sources and not just from popular films.
Throughout much of the summer of 1945, the Allies had been subjecting the home islands of Japan to massive aerial bombardment. No amount of government propaganda could now hide the fact that the empire of Japan was losing this war. The rhetoric that this was a race-based war and that the Allies were bent on exterminating the Japanese people led directly to the government ordering the tonarigumi, or neighborhood associations, to receive training to act as a militia to defend Japan with guerrilla warfare when the Allies invaded.
Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro, meanwhile, found the Potsdam Declaration compelling and strongly recommended that the emperor offer unconditional surrender. In spite of the massive destruction of Japanese cities nationwide, which were now subjected to destructive firebombing, the emperor refused, for the moment, to consider surrender.
On August 6, 1945, a plane carrying a top secret payload set a course for the city of Hiroshima, which is located on the southern edge of western Honshu. Acting on orders, the crew of the plane deployed their top secret payload, an atomic bomb, onto the city below. The destruction and death caused by this single bomb was nothing short of devastating.
It is estimated that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused the instant deaths of around 70,000 people, nearly all of them civilians. When accounting for both those killed in the immediate flash of nuclear fire and those who died of radiation sickness or other related complications during the ensuing months, it reaches around 140,000. Hiroshima was targeted because it acted as a supply base for the Imperial Japanese military, though it was also a thriving civilian metropolis with a population of over three hundred thousand. Allied high command hoped that the massive death toll incurred would convince the empire of Japan to move forward with an unconditional surrender. Instead, the government did nothing, much to the chagrin of prime minister Suzuki Kantaro, who continued to lobby for surrender.
One minute past midnight on August 9, three days after the deployment of the first nuclear weapon in the history of warfare on Earth, the Soviet Union issued its official declaration of war against the empire of Japan. About one hour later, they initiated large-scale offensives against Manchukuo, breaching the border of Japan’s puppet state along the north, east, and even western side as they marched troops and launched air attacks from Mongolia. A little after eleven o’clock that morning, the US dropped another atomic bomb, this time on the city of Nagasaki on northern Kyushu.
While Nagasaki had previously served as the only acceptable port city where Japan would receive international trade, it had grown into a naval base and industrial center. The casualties from this bombing were far lower than the toll which would eventually be reached in Hiroshima because people began evacuating such large cities out of fear that they would be subjected to atomic attack. Around forty thousand lost their lives at the moment of impact, and a total of between sixty and eighty thousand is the usually accepted number of deaths when accounting for the radioactive aftermath, including a little over a dozen Allied prisoners of war in the vicinity.
As the Japanese government continued debating over surrender, the Red Army made rapid progress in Manchukuo, leaving the Kwantung Army to resort to suicide attacks and other desperate but ultimatey ineffective measures. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined with the threat of an Allied invasion which would include the Soviet Union convinced the emperor that it was time to give up. On August 10, at a session of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, which had to be convened in an air-raid shelter, emperor Hirohito agreed to surrender unconditionally.
A few days later, after the necessary back-channeling to the Allies through diplomatic means, the emperor recorded his declaration of unconditional surrender which was intended for general broadcast throughout the nation on August 15. On the evening of August 14, a group of Army officers, intent on preventing this surrender, attempted to stage a coup with the express goal of finding and destroying the recording as well as gaining access to the emperor and forcing him to undo this action. However, in spite of some early successes at seizing some key buildings, the officers failed to locate the recording and the leaders committed suicide while the soldiers they had ordered to help them returned to their barracks. One last fascist coup attempt, for old time’s sake.
In spite of their efforts to prevent it, on August 15, 1945, emperor Hirohito officially surrendered unconditionally to the Allied powers and the broadcast of his surrender played throughout the nation and, soon, throughout the world. The second world war was over, at long last.
This is the final regular episode of Season 15, in which we discussed the events of the early Showa Period. Next time, in a special bonus episode, we will take a closer look at the resistance movements and peace movements which were active in various nations throughout the second world war.