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We have witnessed this morning the distant view

of the Seattle Hospital Harbor and a severe

bombing of the hospital harbor by enemy planes,

undoubtedly Japanese.

I was up in the compartment reading a comic book.

That's when I realized we were under attack.

Buddy, this is the real McCoy.

It's the goddamn Japs.

The unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan, a state of war, has existed.

Can you envision a million pounds of TNT blowing up?

I could see the pilot and the co -pilot and they were laughing for all they

were worth.

It was horrifying.

5 a.m., Sunday 7th December 1941.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii lay still and quiet.

The mighty warships of America's Pacific fleet were

anchored in battleship row.

At that time the Navy, the personnel thought

the battleships were the greatest thing going.

Nothing could defeat them.

Oklahoma was outboard, the Tennessee was inboard, the

West Virginia was outboard.

And right behind us was the Arizona and

then right behind the Arizona was the Nevada.

Were two battleships, then two battleships, then two

battleships, all sitting there like sitting ducks.

On air bases, aircraft were tightly grouped to

guard against potential sabotage from Japanese sympathizers on the island.

Unbeknownst to those at Pearl Harbor, 230 miles

to the north, Japanese forces aboard the carrier

Akagi were preparing for an attack.

As dawn approached, the first wave of 180

aircraft took flight.

The fate of Pearl Harbor was sealed.

At 6.30 a.m., Navy sailors aboard

the anchored warships at Pearl Harbor began their

routine, waking up to what seemed like an ordinary Sunday.

Unaware of the catastrophe about to unfold, these

men went about their duties, oblivious that in

mere minutes they would face one of the

most devastating and historic battles in American naval history.

Fifteen minutes later, signs began to emerge that

this would be no ordinary day.

One of the advanced guard Japanese submarines had just been spotted.

The USS Ward had been patrolling outside of

the harbor when it saw a periscope above the water.

The ship attacked the unidentified submarine and sent

back notification of the incident to the mainland.

His message, when I broke it down,

said, sunk enemy submarine one mile south of Pearl Harbor.

Well, our communications officer, when he looked at that, he was aghast.

He was certain they didn't mean sunk a submarine, they meant sighted it.

This vital early warning was neglected.

Had the message been relayed properly, aircraft and

battleships could have been prepared in advance, and

the U.S. Navy could have diverted the catastrophe which would soon unfold.

By 7 a.m., the first wave of

Japanese aircraft was approximately 130 miles away from Pearl Harbor.

The commander of the strike force used music

from an Hawaiian radio station to home in on the target.

However, by this time, American forces on the

ground had spotted the Japanese attackers.

One of the men at an Army radar post noticed some blips on his radar and

alerted military HQ.

This was the Americans' final chance to avert

disaster, but unfortunately, the intelligence was not taken seriously.

At 7.20 a.m., an Army lieutenant

disregarded the radar report, believing that it indicated

a flight of U.S. planes, possibly B

-17 bombers, scheduled to arrive that day.

I told them not to worry about it because it was a flight of B-17s

coming in from California.

Well, when you're approaching Oahu from California, you

don't come from the north, you come from the east.

7.40 a.m., the first wave of Japanese aircraft reaches the island of Oahu.

The quiet morning was shattered by the roar

of planes, and a rush of fear and panic spread across the naval base.

Out of the mystic Pacific skies, like tiny

locusts, they swarmed in from the sea.

Without knowing it, a reluctant U.S. would

soon be plunged into World War II, forever altering the course of history.

Until December 1941, America is adopting this very

kind of tricky policy of staying out of

the war, because domestically, a lot of Americans

don't want to be sucked into a conflict.

They don't think it's got anything to do with them.

And at the same time, the American president,

Roosevelt, is keen to help the Allies fight,

by supplying supplies across the Atlantic, and also supplying battleships.

So there is a very fine line the Americans are having to tread.

If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers

will control the continents of Europe, and Asia,

and Africa, and Australasia, and the high seas.

And they will be in a position to

bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.

Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I

make the direct statement to the American people

that there is far less chance of the

United States getting into war, if we do

all we can now to support the nations

defending themselves against attack by the Axis, than

if we acquiesce in the defeat of those nations.

That is all going to change in December

1941, when suddenly, out of the middle of

nowhere seemingly, the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbour

is suddenly attacked by the Japanese.

At 7.49am, the First Waves commander ordered

the attack on Pearl Harbour to proceed.

I was in bed with a beautiful blonde, my wife.

That's what I was doing on December the 7th.

All of a sudden, I heard a commotion.

By now, my gut had just turned up to a little ball of lead.

Six minutes later, the coordinated attack on Pearl Harbour began.

The Japanese dropped bombs, torpedoes and fired mercilessly

at the Pacific fleet and aircraft bases.

About that time, I began to hear our guns firing.

I mean, they would really fire fast.

They had a lot of guns and more

ammunition, they could have shot in a thousand years.

Dive bombers attacked American air bases across Oahu,

starting with Hickam Field, the largest, and Wheeler

Field, the main United States Army Air Force's fighter base.

The men on the air bases tried desperately

to fight back, but the close grouping of

the planes made them easy targets for the Japanese bombers.

Over at Pearl Harbour, around 15 miles away

to the west, the Japanese aircraft had America's

Pacific fleet in their sights.

On the morning of the 7th, that was my third anniversary in the Navy, and I

was sitting in my bunk, reading the paper

when they sounded general quarters.

The thoughts went through people's heads.

What in the world is going on now?

Why are they doing a drill on a Sunday morning?

And they said it in a different manner,

you know, they got a little hot-tempered.

When it all started, we kept hearing some

thud noises and explosions, but they were deep sounding, they got louder.

And I got up, I told my buddy, I said, let's go out there and see

what's going on.

I said, that sounded big.

And looked up there and saw those planes

screaming around, and we saw the big red dot.

Well, that's when we realized it was Japanese.

An emergency message was flashed out.

Air Raid Pearl Harbour, this is not a drill.

Unprepared for the attack, the warships had only a minimal power supply.

Ammunition from the stores had to be brought up manually by crew.

The odds were not in the U.S.'s

favour, and the Japanese had total domination of the sky.

As I was going up the ladder, a plane came flying right down the port side

of the ship, and I could see the pilot and the co-pilot, and they were

laughing for all they were worth.

The Americans believed that the water was too

shallow for a torpedo attack, but the Japanese

had created a brand new kind of torpedo,

specifically designed for the waters of Pearl Harbour,

and it had a devastating effect.

By 8 a.m., the USS West Virginia had been hit.

The West Virginia was torn apart by six torpedoes and two bombs.

Chaos and confusion soon ensued.

The attack on Battleship Row moved at a sudden pace.

Within the first five minutes of the attack,

four battleships were hit, including the USS Oklahoma and the USS Arizona.

Minutes later, the Arizona exploded after a bomb hit its gunpowder stores.

The ship was sunk, and it took the lives of 1,177.

It was horrifying, because as the bomb hit

the starboard side of the Vauxhall deck, it was just a gigantic explosion.

Can you envision a million pounds of TNT blowing up?

You had burning oil all over the top of the water, and you had black smoke,

and then you had fire in the ship.

And so those young kids were trying to

jump into the burning water from the mast.

Some of them made it, some of them didn't.

By 8, 10 a.m., the USS Arizona was in bits.

The Japanese had swiftly pulverized Battleship Row.

The USS Oklahoma, containing 1,000 men, was experiencing a horrifying fate.

The Japanese had fired three torpedoes, causing the ship to turn over.

Water started to spill through into the interior.

And I looked around, and there was a big whale.

I said, what on earth is that?

That's the Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma had capsized, and we didn't even know it.

And it was right so close I could have hit it with a ball.

I felt like somebody kicked me in the

stomach with a boot or something, because that's

the worst I ever felt in the whole war, to see the Oklahoma.

You just don't kill a battleship.

They're impregnable.

Tough!

The Oklahoma's hull had been torn apart, and

the crew desperately tried to stop the water pouring in.

We took these soles and the blankets and

stuffed them in the vent system to try to stop the water from coming in.

Well, we'd plug it up in one place in the vent, then it'd start coming in

somewhere else.

More than 30 soldiers were trapped inside the

battleship, fighting for their lives.

Meanwhile, Kanyohi Naval Air Station was also in flames.

But the sailors stationed there attempted to fight

back against the Japanese bombardment.

I was angry, so damn mad, that I didn't have a sense enough to be afraid.

Of course, during this time, I was being

wounded, because the Japs, they ain't joking, they were there to kill us.

The first wave of attacks was ending.

However, one Japanese pilot made a final daring run on the base.

I saw a speck way up there.

Boy, he was coming like hell.

Then he came boiling out of that smoke.

I didn't have to move that gun, I just swung it around and I let him

have it.

The air station lay in complete devastation.

Charred wreckage of airplanes and shattered propellers were

strewn across the landscape, mingled with lifeless bodies.

The American troops felt a crushing sense of defeat.

I know some of them cried.

Some of them were angry.

Some of them just couldn't understand.

None of us really understood why we were hit at that time.

The surprise attack had taken a massive toll.

At 8.54am, the second wave of 170

aircraft began their attack.

They were separated into three groups, focusing in

on mostly the same targets.

But with the base now on high alert, their plan was less successful.

At the airbase and the ships, the Japanese faced a barrage of fire.

Resistance was better coordinated.

The sky was very full of planes, plus exploding shells.

At times, it was just like a flock of birds.

Having devastated battleship Roe over the last hour,

Japanese pilots set their sights on the warships moored in the dockyards.

There were three airplanes coming down, and dive bombers.

And these three planes dropped their bombs, and

I saw them coming, and I started screaming

and screaming, and I said, they're going to

get us, they're going to get us this time.

The USS Cassin and USS Downs, both destroyers,

were heavily damaged during the second attack.

Stationed in dry dock number one, alongside the

battleship USS Pennsylvania, they were hit by bombs

and engulfed in fires from ruptured fuel tanks.

At 9.30am, the Japanese also set their

sights on the USS Shore, dropping several bombs on the ship.

The spectacular explosion of her forward magazine provided

one of the most iconic photographs of the attack.

While the shore burned, another warship, the Nevada,

made a break for open water.

As we moved down the channel, the second

wave of planes came over, and we were hit by five to seven bombs, and many,

many near misses.

The explosions, we could feel them, and we

just were holding our breath, hoping that all went well up there.

Bombs hit the forward and mid-section of the ship.

If the crippled Nevada sank, it would block the escape route to the sea.

The rest of the ships in Pearl Harbor would be like sitting ducks.

The Nevada eventually beached on Hospital Point, escaping

the inferno and keeping the vital channel clear.

At 10am on the 7th of December, 1941,

the Japanese strike force decided to withdraw, leaving

behind a devastated Pearl Harbor.

Concerned about potential American counterattacks and the risk

of exposing their fleet to greater danger, Admiral

Nagumo ordered the retreat.

Although the attack was highly successful, key targets

like oil storage facilities and shipyards remained intact,

which later proved crucial to the U.S.

recovery.

Within two hours, 21 American warships had been

sunk or damaged, 188 aircraft destroyed, and 2

,403 U.S. servicemen and women killed.

Many of the ships were repaired and fought in later battles.

And crucially, from the point of view of

the United States, all three of the Pacific

Fleet's aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor

at the time, and so they escaped damage.

And this was to prove vital during the later stages of the Pacific War.

The reason why it was so symbolic and

so successful was that America had never been

attacked like that on their home shores, especially in the modern era.

And it was proof that the Japanese were

this highly mechanized force, utterly ruthless, who would

commit an act like this, I mean, you

could almost call it terror, of absolute audacity

and absolute violence, which had both a very

strong military and naval purpose, but also, of

course, it basically saw the Americans who had

spent the last couple of years being relatively

complacent about the war, about a lot of

people thinking, this doesn't bother us, this isn't

something that's going to impinge on our backyard,

to realizing that the war was at hand whether they liked it or not.

During the attack on Pearl Harbor, 68 civilians

tragically lost their lives, with the bulk of

the casualties being military personnel.

A total of 2,335 service members were

killed, bringing the overall death toll to 2

,403.

Many civilian deaths were caused by stray anti

-aircraft shells that fell on Honolulu as defenders

desperately fired at the incoming Japanese planes.

Millions of Americans awoke on the morning of

the 7th of December, 1941, to the horrifying

news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The devastating aftermath of the damage sent shockwaves across the country.

Hello NBC, hello NBC, this is KGU in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I am speaking from the roof of the Advertiser Publishing Company building.

We have witnessed this morning, the distant view,

of a brief full battle of Pearl Harbor,

and the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy

planes, undoubtedly Japanese.

The city of Honolulu has also been attacked,

and considerable damage done.

This battle has been going on for nearly three hours.

It is no joke, it is a real war.

The scale of the tragedy began to unravel, and President Franklin D.

Roosevelt took swift and decisive action.

On 8th December, 1941, the very next day,

he addressed a joint session of Congress, delivering

his famous Day of Infamy speech, a show

of strength which would go down in American history.

Yesterday,

December 7th,

1941,

a date which will live in infamy.

The United States of America was suddenly and

deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation,

and at the solicitation of Japan, was

still in conversation with its government and its

emperor, looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

The facts of yesterday and today

speak for themselves, with confidence in our armed forces,

with the unbounding determination of our people.

I ask that the Congress declare that since

the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on

Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war

has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Pearl Harbor at Hickam Field in the bomb

-popped streets of Honolulu ever is written history,

history with a tragic, treacherous pen, history that

130 million Americans will never forget, and in

days to come, the Japs, too, will remember Pearl Harbor.

Here is a tragic, unforgettable page in the annals of America.

Here, the cunning deceit of the Japs will never be forgotten.

Here, they hoped to score a knockout before the war began.

The Arizona's gun crews battered and broke and fired to the last.

Their guns pointed skyward from whence the enemy appeared.

Pearl Harbor was the worst defeat the United

States had ever had, and that dug right deep into every one of them.

This cannot happen.

Why did it happen?

And they all responded in such a strong way.

I guess I really did know that we

would win, because when you attack a bunch

of Marines and sailors, you're in trouble.

We may lose the battle, but we're going to win the war.

The attack on Pearl Harbor had shattered the

peace, igniting a fiery resolve across the nation.

As smoke still billowed over the wreckage, the

U.S. transformed overnight, gearing up for war on an unprecedented scale.

Factories roared to life, soldiers rallied, and the

country united under a singular purpose, to strike

back with relentless force.

We are going to win this war, and we are going to win the peace that

follows.

I repeat that the United States can accept

no result, save victory, final and complete.

Franklin D.

Roosevelt led the United States into war in

the Pacific, with strong backing from both the Soviet Union and Britain.

We cannot tell what the course of this stell war will be.

And it spreads remorseless to ever wider regions.

Though the Soviet Union was primarily focused on

the European front against Nazi Germany, Stalin supported

U.S. efforts against Japan, particularly after the U.S. joined the Allies.

Winston Churchill and Britain, already deeply involved in

the war, were key partners.

With both nations coordinating strategies for a two-front war,

in response to the surprise attack, FDR swiftly mobilized

the military, air force, and navy, with the

first waves of American forces being deployed to

key Pacific locations, such as Hawaii, the Philippines,

and other islands soon after.

The Japanese military fortified its positions across island

strongholds by reinforcing defenses and stockpiling resources, fully

aware of the impending clash with the U.S.

Elsewhere, in the West, most of Europe was under Axis control.

Adolf Hitler had launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union,

but the spread of his forces did not deter

him from also declaring war on the United States on 11 December 1941.

It's one of Hitler's most perplexing decisions as

to why he decided to declare war on the United States.

Actually, his reason for doing it is because

he thinks, finally, this is an opportunity to

show that he really wants to rid the world of what he sees as being the

evils of international finance and Jewish control of economies.

Of course, he's dead wrong about that.

He's also in a pact with Japan, so he feels that Japan's a natural ally.

And so this is why, you know, war breaks out.

It's Hitler saber-rattling.

He doesn't know what it's going to lead to.

With Hitler's declaration, the U.S. found itself

engaged in a two-front war.

The attack on Pearl Harbor had thrust millions

of American citizens directly into the heart of the conflict.

It's one thing just to say we're declaring

war, but also, logistically, this is a really

tricky ask for the Americans, if you like.

They've got to fight a war in Europe,

and they've also got to fight a war

around the other side of the planet, all over the Pacific.

This is going to require all of America's

industrial might and know-how if they can

fight a war both in Europe and the Pacific.

Never in the history or the memory of man has there been a war in which

the courage, the endurance, and the loyalty of

civilians played so vital a part.

Many thousands of civilians all over the world

have been and are being killed or maimed by enemy action.

Our soldiers and sailors and Marines are fighting

with great bravery and great skill on far

distant fronts to make sure that we shall remain safe.

As we here at home contemplate our own

duties, our own responsibilities, let us think and

think hard of the example which is being

set for us by our own fighting men.

The Pacific War turned out to be a

brutal and drawn-out conflict marked by relentless

battles across land, sea, and air.

Spanning thousands of miles of treacherous terrain, it

saw ferocious island-hopping campaigns, massive naval engagements,

and devastating air assaults as both sides fought

fiercely for dominance in the Pacific.

Seven hours on one engine, extra belly tanks,

extra nerve and stamina in the cockpit.

When Japan and the United States are fighting

this war in the Pacific, what they're doing

is fighting for island strongholds.

You've got to think of the war as like a kind of to-and-fro-ing

of trying to grab stepping stones on a big pond, if you like.

And so the more stepping stones you control,

the more of the ponds you control.

And so you have huge battles on islands

like Iwo Jima, Peleniu, which are very bloody,

very attritional fights in which the Japanese are

often dug in and fight to the last man.

And it costs an enormous amount of lives.

So it's a very bloody, very vicious, very drawn-out combat.

And of course, as well as these battles

on these small islands, you also have these

huge naval engagements as well, like the Battle

of Midway, which again are very costly in men and material.

The Battle of Midway in June 1942 proved

to be a decisive naval battle for the US.

Within the first five minutes, the American Air

Force had hit three Japanese aircraft carriers, with

a fourth being destroyed by the end of the battle.

Midway marked the beginning of a more aggressive

American military presence in the region.

Japan employed violent and desperate tactics during the

Pacific War, including the infamous Kamikaze suicide attacks,

where pilots deliberately crashed their planes into Allied

ships in a final deadly bid to halt the advancing forces.

By 1944, the Japanese were using Kamikaze pilots

regularly in an attempt to turn the tide of the war.

These suicide missions, launched primarily against Allied naval

vessels, caused significant damage and sank or damaged

hundreds of ships, killing thousands of sailors.

While terrifying and disruptive, many Kamikaze attacks were

intercepted by Allied anti-aircraft defences, and the

loss of skilled pilots and planes strained Japan's

already dwindling resources.

In late 1944, the bloodiest battle of the

Pacific campaign took place on the island of Peleliu.

The US 1st Marine Division landed on the island expecting a swift victory.

However, the Japanese had changed their defensive strategy.

Instead of defending the beaches, they dug into

the island's rocky ridges and caves, creating a

complex network of fortified positions.

The temperature was around 115 degrees.

Now 115 degrees with high humidity is insufferable

to even sit and rest, but to be

running around out there in the scorching sun

carrying your load of ammunition and your weapon,

trying to help carry a wounded out, was just absolutely exhausting.

You could see Bloody Nose Ridge on the

other side, that's where we were going.

Places as many as 200 feet high, the Japs

had complete clear vision of everything we did.

The Marines faced heavy resistance right from the

start, with intense machine gun and artillery fire

from hidden Japanese positions.

They had heavy artillery up there.

The concussion from the Jap artillery shells was

so loud and so constant that it was

like as though the ground was swaying back and forth.

And here you were up running through this.

You could see guys just falling all around us.

That was one of the strangest ways to me that men fell when they were hit.

I suppose it depended on what type of

projectile or fragment hit them, but some of

them just sagged down to the ground.

It was almost pitiful, like they were just real tired, and they were dead.

And other guys threw their arms out and

fell over backwards, and some guys pitched forward,

and some let out god-awful screams.

To me, that was the worst part of all of seeing guys get hit.

It maybe didn't bother some people as bad as it did me, but every one of

those guys was a damn good Marine and a buddy and some other son.

The island was declared secure after nearly two

and a half months of intense fighting, though

scattered resistance continued for weeks.

However, fighting in the Pacific would continue late

into 1945, with countless more American lives lost.

The Allied powers secured victory in Europe in May 1945.

The Nazi Empire finally fell after six long

years, and Hitler escaped to his bunker prepared to die by cyanide.

However, for the United States, the war was not over yet.

Trouble still brewed in the Pacific, and American blood continued to spill.

After V-Day was declared in Europe, there

was a real problem, but America and the

rest of the Allied powers were still at war with Japan.

And Japan showed absolutely no signs of surrendering.

The difference between Germany and Japan was that

Germany, especially after Hitler died, knew they were

beaten, knew there was nowhere else to go,

they just basically had to settle for a

humiliating peace, the best possible terms they could get.

The thing about Japan is that there is

no concept of surrender in their national identity,

but the whole idea was that they would literally fight until the last man.

Germany surrendered on May the 8th, and we

got the news on a tank radio because we were preparing on Okinawa for a big

push on May the 9th, and granted that we were all glad for the troops in

Europe and glad for the civilians who had

suffered so much, but as far as we

were concerned, the general remark that I heard

was, so what, because the next day we had to make this push and my company

got all shot up.

So, you know, Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon as far as

we were concerned because we had our hands

full of all kinds of trouble where we were.

The Battle of Okinawa took place on May the 5th.

It was the final desperate push in the

Pacific theater, bringing the war closer to Japan's home islands.

As the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific

War, Okinawa was seen as the last major

stepping stone for the Allies before a potential

invasion of mainland Japan.

This brutal campaign, codenamed Operation Iceberg, was marked

by fierce ground combat, kamikaze attacks, and heavy civilian casualties,

Japanese forces entrenched in

fortified positions fought tenaciously, leading to a high

death toll on both sides.

Over 12,000 U.S. soldiers and an

estimated 100,000 Japanese soldiers were killed.

Thousands of Okinawan civilians also perished, many through

forced suicides.

The combat at Okinawa was in a sense

worse than Peleliu because it went on for

three months and when it was over, we were just so utterly exhausted.

It was indescribable.

I was convinced that if I had had

to invade Japan, I would never survive because my luck had run out.

The battle marked the climax of the

island-hopping campaign and set the stage for the

war's end.

The catastrophic losses at the Battle of Okinawa

convinced U.S. leaders that an invasion of

Japan's mainland would be devastating.

With Truman now as president, he weighed up

the decision to use atomic bombs to force

Japan’s surrender, and avoid further bloodshed.

At 8.15 a.m. on the 6th of August, 1945, the lead plane, Enola Gay,

released the Little Boy bomb over Hiroshima.

Residents awoke to the most almighty sight in human history.

Little Boy fell almost six miles in 43

seconds before detonating at an altitude of 2

,000 feet.

80,000 people died instantly, some even evaporating on the spot.

A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima

and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

You can imagine that if you are in

Hiroshima and you're going about your daily business,

there's just this flash of blinding white light

and then all of a sudden everything around you is destroyed.

And it is something biblical.

I mean, you would have genuinely imagined if

you'd seen it that this was the end of days.

Japan at this point was faced with the

fact that one of their major industrial and

military bases no longer existed.

I mean a huge number of civilians had been killed.

It was an act completely without parallel in modern warfare.

It was literally the first atomic bomb.

You would have expected that they would have

thought we can't carry on, but this is

Japan we're talking about, this isn't any other country.

And so they refused to surrender on the

grounds that they asked us, well, you can keep bombing us.

We don't care, we are not going to surrender to you.

But of course the problem is they didn't

really understand what they were up against.

The bomb obliterated Hiroshima and its people,

and yet the Japanese government still refused to surrender.

Three days later, a second bomb landed on Nagasaki.

The devastation at Nagasaki is, make no mistake,

it's huge, but because Nagasaki is built in

sort of valleys and it's got cliffs and

things like that, the explosion was much more

contained so relatively less, fewer parts of the

city but it is still devastating and it

is far greater than any other single bomb can possibly produce.

Emperor Hirohito broke the government's deadlock, expressing that

the Japanese race will be destroyed if the war continues.

And so on the 15th of August, Hirohito

announced the end to Japan's suffering over radio broadcast.

I have received this afternoon a message from

the Japanese government following that government by the

Secretary of State on August 11th.

I deem this reply a full acceptance of

the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender

of Japan.

In the reply, there is no qualification.

Reporters rush out to relay the news to

an anxious world and touch off celebrations throughout the country.

A new wave of cruelty Japan officially signed the Surrender Act soon after.

Four years after the devastation at Pearl Harbour,

the biggest conflict in history had finally come to an end.

In Chicago, tears of joy mingled with cheers

as a million people sang and danced in the streets.

The surprise attack by Japan on the 7th

of December, 1941 led to death and destruction

on a scale never before seen in human history.

The relentless fighting in the Pacific.

From the beaches of Iwo Jima to the

blood-soaked hills of Okinawa had pushed both sides to the brink.

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki brought the war to a dramatic and

tragic end, sparing the world from further destruction.

What began with an unprovoked assault closed with

a transformed world as the hard-fought peace

reshaped nations and laid the foundation for a new global order.