Original subtitles

Desperate to end the war, the U.S. is planning to invade Japan.

Largest invasion in World War II.

Would have dwarfed D-Day.

Military is talking about the suicide of the 100 million.

A recipe for a mass bloodbath.

But unleashing the elemental power of the atom

offers another way out.

Pro-bomb people say, "Look, this is a weapon like any other.

Let's use it to end the war."

President Truman makes a fateful decision

to deploy the most deadly weapon ever created.

Nothing in the human experience

had prepared anybody for such totalizing damage, so instantaneously.

I knew I was facing death.

The final hours of the Second World War

changed the course of history.

Now, rarely seen archives from around the world,

expertly restored and brought to life in full HD color

tells the story of one of the most destructive events of World War II

as you've never seen it before.

By early 1945, the war in the Pacific

is reaching new levels of savagery.

Fighting is vicious and cruel.

It was a war without mercy.

The war was brutal on both sides.

Prisoners are not taken in many cases.

The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor

dragged the U.S. into the conflict.

Believing the American Navy crippled,

the Japanese embarked on a massive campaign

across Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific.

But the tide turned at the Battle of Midway

and now, the Americans are hitting back with a bloody war of attrition.

Island hopping across the ocean,

the U.S. forces have been capturing occupied territories

and steadily pushing the Japanese back.

In early 1945, the Americans are closing in on Japan itself.

Every time that the Japanese strategic positions were taken away

and the Americans inched closer towards

the Japanese islands, then that they realized

that their days were numbered.

An island with no natural resources,

Japan is totally dependent on imported oil.

By systematically targeting their shipping routes,

the U.S. Navy has virtually cut off the country from vital supplies.

We've choked off their economy,

we've sunk most of their merchant fleet,

we've sunk most of their navy.

They were essentially done.

The blockade has left ordinary Japanese civilians

facing something approaching famine.

The situation in the cities was dire.

The evacuated children were slowly starving to death

and if they had sores, they would suck on their sores

because pus is sweet. It tastes sweet.

But even such hardships are not enough to turn the Japanese

against the war.

That didn't reckon with the peculiar national character of Japan.

People there saw Emperor Hirohito as the son of God,

saw this war as something divinely ordained and sanctioned,

saw their duty as being to die for the emperor.

Most people are willing to put up with what is necessary

for the war to be won.

As a consequence, the final stages of the war

are becoming increasingly frustrating for the Americans.

As the war gets closer to Japan

and as Japan gets closer to defeat,

the Japanese fight with greater intensity and greater bitterness.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines

sees the most extreme measures yet.

A very ominous turn happens in late 1944

when the Japanese go to full suicide.

The infamous Kamikaze strike.

The tactic is an act of desperation.

The best Japanese pilots had long since been killed

and the rest were poorly trained.

If you have a very limited supply of airplanes,

a limited supply of fuel,

and a very limited ability to train pilots,

you can probably train them to crash into a ship.

Portrayed as fearless warriors,

those undertaking these missions were not always willing volunteers.

A lot of the Kamikaze pilots were not allowed enough fuel

to come back.

They were used as human bombs.

With this, the ultimate sacrifice,

the Japanese are determined to send the Americans a message.

What the Japanese were trying to do was to demoralize the Americans,

but also destroy their naval assets.

In total, 34 U.S. ships are sunk

and 10,000 men, casualties of Kamikaze attacks.

It speaks to and it redoubles the idea

of a Japanese fighter as a fanatical fighter,

as one who will never give up.

The U.S. soon gets the opportunity to strike back.

Their capture of the Mariana Islands

means their bombers can now reach Japan itself.

General Curtis LeMay orders low altitude area bombing

using napalm-style incendiaries.

Their first target is Tokyo.

The wooden structures of the city don't stand a chance.

The 314th is airborne.

One-hundred and forty-five planes, one minute apart,

67 tons each.

The Japanese defenses by this point were terribly denuded.

They were out of fuel.

They didn't have enough pilots to defend their cities

and so, the bombers could go in almost with complete impunity.

Eight minutes after midnight on March the 10th,

279 B-29s descend on the sleeping city.

The incendiary bombs ignite fires that are so intense

that buildings and people vanish in a matter of moments.

Flames are leaping from building to building

and because so much of it's wood,

the fire's spreading faster than people can run.

And the winds created by the fire storms are so intense

that children are taken from the grasp of their parents and disappear.

In one night, the U.S. dropped 1,600 tons of bombs.

Kills over 100,000 people

and flattens 16 square miles of city.

It is the single most destructive air attack ever carried out,

and the start of a campaign that destroys 67 cities.

The act dwarfs any aggression seen in the European theater.

It just seems to be that the Americans would consider

doing things against the Japanese they wouldn't do against the Germans.

From the start, the war in the Pacific

has a pronounced racist element.

Anti-Japanese feeling had been high in the U.S.

for decades before the conflict.

The language used by the U.S. and its allies

in describing Japan was highly racialized.

They're characterized as vermin.

Apes, monkeys… It's just a representation

that devalues and dehumanizes the individual,

and in turn, reinforces this idea that you can be more brutal to them.

For the Japanese, too, race is all-important.

The Japanese saw themselves as superior,

as pure, aesthetically refined.

They regarded the Americans as being decadent, pleasure-loving

and simply unable to bear up under the harsh demands of combat.

This entrenched racism leads both sides

to treat human life with disdain.

The war in the Pacific is just seen as more exterminatory.

This goes back to Pearl Harbor.

Japan is a duplicitous, evil, alien, Asiatic people.

You, therefore, can fight them more dirtily, more aggressively.

The rules of war have somehow been suspended.

The Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners of war is also brutal.

They face starvation and disease,

forced labor, beatings, and beheadings.

In Manchuria, civilians are subject to horrific medical experiments,

as the Japanese seed entire villages

with bubonic plague and cholera.

But the Allies also commit atrocities.

U.S. troops collect Japanese body parts as war souvenirs,

boiling the flesh off skulls before sending them home.

In some parts of the Pacific, surrendering soldiers

are even executed in vengeance.

From the American standpoint, Japan had fractured all prior restraints

on the use of firepower and terror against civilians.

And therefore, what the Japanese were now receiving

was simply the whirlwind they had reaped.

With some three and a half million men committed,

U.S. forces are carrying the burden of the fight in the Pacific.

The human cost is proving high.

The Soviet Union, a key ally in the European theater,

is not at war with Japan

but President Roosevelt is determined to get their help.

It's Roosevelt who raises the issue

with Stalin and he says,

"I need Russian help in the Pacific.

Can you take on the last largest remaining Japanese force in the far east,

that's the Kwantung army in Manchuria?"

But Stalin's armies are still battling the Germans,

and Roosevelt finds the Soviet leader difficult to pin down.

Re-elected in late '44 as president for an unprecedented fourth term,

Roosevelt is seen as indispensable to U.S. war strategy,

but few know how much authority the president is now delegating

to his close friend, Chief of Staff, Fleet Admiral William Leahy.

He very much likes to serve Franklin Roosevelt, his friend,

and he likes to exercise power,

though he doesn't need people to know he's exercising power.

That's one of the reasons Roosevelt trusts him.

Roosevelt trusts nobody.

What only a handful of people know

is that the president is dying.

He has to take weeks off.

At one point he has to take an entire month away from the office

because he's simply too weak to work.

Roosevelt, though, is determined

to see the war through to its bitter conclusion.

In the Pacific, we are pushing the Japs around.

We shall not settle for less than total victory.

The question now is how to end the conflict.

Opinions within the U.S. leadership are strongly divided.

Leahy and the navy favor continuing the current tactic

of bombardment and blockade.

William Leahy says, "Look, we've cut Japan off from the world.

Japanese economy has collapsed.

They won't be able to fight this war in any way.

We just need to do what we're doing.

The Japanese will realize they've lost eventually.

It might take longer, but the war will end."

This strategy will sacrifice the least number of American lives,

but many don't believe it will force the Japanese to surrender.

As far as the Japanese are concerned,

if the Americans want to win this war,

they need to come outside the Imperial Palace and knock at the door

And we'll make that job impossible to achieve.

The army, led by General Marshall,

insists the only way to force capitulation

is a full-scale invasion of Japan itself.

Code-named "Operation Downfall,"

the proposed invasion has already been months in the planning.

We're going to invade Japan itself,

starting with the large southern island of Kyushu.

And we will have the largest invasion in World War II.

Something that would have dwarfed D-Day.

Cautious of committing so many men,

Roosevelt has yet to authorize the massive assault.

In the quiet of the New Mexico desert,

the president funds the Manhattan Project:

A top-secret weapon,

one he believes could bring any country to its knees.

Physicists are working to release the incredible forces within atoms.

If a nuclear chain reaction can be harnessed to weapons,

this could become a weapon of incalculable power.

But the intended target is not Japan.

In response to reports that Germany had started an atomic weapons program,

Einstein and fellow scientists urged Roosevelt to respond.

And they say, "Hey look, you know, the Germans have a nuclear program.

This has military uses.

This is a real threat. A kind of super weapon

that could turn, you know, all the military calculations

on their head."

With 125,000 staff working across three secret cities,

the new weapon is one of the most expensive projects of the war.

Leahy has grave concerns about the ethics of a potential bomb

which he shares with Roosevelt.

He just hates everything about the bomb.

He hates the cost, he hates the science,

but most of all, he hates what it means.

He hates it as a weapon.

The president listens, but is silent on the topic.

He obviously finds the atom bomb something difficult,

that he's wrestling with.

I think that's partly because the man he trusts

more than anyone else in the world in late 1944

is relentlessly negative about the bomb.

To the physicists involved, this is primarily a great scientific,

not moral, challenge.

They didn't know how to create these nuclear chain reactions.

They didn't know how to build the actual device.

They didn't know how to then weaponize it in a way that it could be delivered

to a target, exploded to inflict its damage.

So all of this was probably the supreme scientific challenge

of all of their lives.

But so far, the weapon is still theoretical.

Nothing is ready.

No one was confident that a usable bomb would be created

before the end of the war.

As the fighting inches closer to Japan,

and the U.S. grows stronger, invasion looks inevitable.

The first stage, Operation Olympic,

would see 650,000 troops storm Japan's southern island.

Six months later, another amphibious invasion

involving over a million men

would take Honshu, the main island.

But the Americans worry about fanatical Japanese resistance.

Following economic and political upheaval in the 1920s,

a rise in right-wing patriotism

saw the country turn into a fascist state.

Between the middle 1930s and 1945,

there were 63 separate episodes of political violence

ending in assassination of people who opposed the policies

of the Japanese military.

Everyone was conscious of the fact that if you spoke up,

your next meeting could be with an assassin.

Though Emperor Hirohito is head of state,

the military effectively rule the country.

Through fear, censorship and fierce indoctrination.

The wartime Japanese society was organized by units

called Tonarigumi, that's Neighborhood Associations.

That unit really controlled every aspect of civilian life

during the wartime.

Neighborhood Associations became a way

to monitor support for the war in local communities.

So if you said something against the war,

the head of the Tonarigumi would report disloyal citizens

to the special police.

So there was this snitching and mutual surveillance basically,

in place down to the level of the neighborhoods.

The authorities demand unswerving loyalty to the emperor

as a pure being and a living god.

You were not to look upon the emperor.

When the emperor's carriage moved about the city,

people would line up, but they would avert their eyes.

But the concept of emperor as a divine being is a manufactured myth.

That kind of deification of the emperor was, surprisingly,

a recent invention. And that kind of public ritual

of really treating him as this sacred being

actually began in the 1930s.

The military also hijack

the Bushido Warrior tradition of the samurai,

and use it to manipulate the ordinary soldier.

That code of the warrior was adopted and re-purposed

for the modern military.

It was a bastardized version, to be sure.

Sacrifice and fighting to the death are glorified.

The process is very much a way to romanticize

and highlight a sense of commitment.

And a sense of purpose related to serving a master,

serving the emperor.

And if that means that you're going on a suicide mission,

that's because the emperor is asking of you,

and that's because that's what's required of you.

The authorities do everything they can to cement this sense of devotion.

The Japanese government had been creating these

moments of silence…

where the entire country would face the imperial palace,

and observe a minute of silence and bow.

The Japanese are so primed to defend

that the Americans fear the invasion will turn into

a Pacific version of Stalingrad.

Resistance so bitter, the battle will be fought street by street.

The worry seemed more than justified.

The Japanese authorities have devised an all-encompassing defense strategy

entitled, Ketsugo,

Operation Decisive, to fend off invaders.

The Japanese believed that if they could inflict

huge casualties, American will would shatter.

They are convinced a final bloody battle

would turn American public opinion against the war.

They're banking on Ketsugo

as putting them in a negotiating position to end the war on terms

they find acceptable.

Even more ominously, Japanese strategists

predict the exact locations US forces will land.

They identified Okinawa as being the likely American base,

and they simply put their dividers in a map and did an arc,

and that told them that the most likely place

for the American landing was southern Kyushu.

That was exactly where the invasion was planned.

Hundreds of thousands of troops gather in readiness.

They'd been evacuating material from China

to fortify the islands for a last hold-out.

They'd been mobilizing everybody in Japan to fight.

Ketsugo called for every man, woman and child to resist the Americans.

The military is talking about the suicide of 100 million.

And encouraging all Japanese to embrace what was called

the "special attack spirit",

kamikaze spirit.

Even children had been taught how to fight,

how to throw a hand grenade.

Teenage boys are taught to attach an explosive to their chests

and to run out onto the beach.

And to fall on their backs and to wait for tanks to come over them

to ignite the explosive.

Even children, like my own parents, they were training

with a bamboo stick to spear the American soldiers if they came.

Though tired and hungry, the people obeyed.

I think all or most Japanese were prepared to die.

By April 1945, the US have a foothold

on Okinawa,

less than 400 miles from Japan.

Taking the island is critical. As the Japanese rightly predicted,

the Americans need it as a staging post to launch their massive invasion.

In the midst of the battle, America receives unsettling news.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, their guiding leader through the conflict,

is dead.

The task of commander-in-chief now falls to Vice President Harry Truman.

Inexperienced in foreign affairs,

Truman has been excluded from decision making.

Roosevelt hadn't confided with him.

On the most fundamental level, he hadn't shared secrets with him.

Most famously, he had not said a word to Truman about the bomb.

The Vice President of the United States had no idea

the United States was building the atom bomb.

The son of a farming family from the Midwest,

Truman suddenly finds himself responsible

for directing a global conflict.

When he takes office, he has no staff, no one around him,

no cabinet members who are his picks.

He is entirely on his own.

Struggling to familiarize himself with the situation,

Truman looks for guidance.

So right away, Truman broadens the circle

of people to whom he listens.

In particular, Truman really starts giving a lot of credence to a man

called Jimmy Byrnes, James Byrnes.

James F. Byrnes is sworn in

as United States Secretary of State before…

Director of the Office for War Mobilization,

Byrnes is a seasoned politician,

but his influence has, until now, been minor.

He takes a tougher line on foreign policy than Leahy and distrusts Stalin.

With Roosevelt gone, Leahy loses his coveted influence.

Truman views Leahy as simply one voice of many

that he needs to listen to in the American government.

And in many ways, Leahy's the strangest voice

because Leahy has these point of weird positions.

He's against the bomb, he's against the invasion.

The new president is immediately faced

with the stark reality of the war.

The fighting on Okinawa is proving some of the fiercest.

The losses on both sides are appalling.

That is an intensely bloody battle,

and the Japanese just make the Americans come

and dig them out of every hole.

And in doing so, they extract a horrible cost.

Some 100,000 American casualties,

over 100,000 Japanese dead,

150,000 civilians.

Does this foreshadow what the invasion will look like?

On the 18th of June, Truman calls a meeting to decide

if Operation Downfall should go ahead.

Everyone in that room, except for Leahy,

is in favor of the invasion at Kyushu.

And he's hearing George Marshall say,

"We can do it on the whole."

Saying, "The casualties won't be that bad."

That's what the army is saying at that meeting.

Determined to press ahead, General Marshall underplays

the estimated US losses.

If you look at Marshall's projection, you're talking 30 to 50,000

American casualties, which seems very low.

But even these figures worry Truman.

He reluctantly gives the go ahead for the first stage,

Operation Olympic.

Truman comes out of that meeting actually rather depressed.

And what they hear afterwards is, oh, the rosy optimism

of George Marshall at that meeting is shown to be wrong.

By July, Truman's anxiety grows.

Troop buildup on Kyushu is far in excess

of the Allies worst projections.

The Japanese have amassed over double the American estimates,

and are increasing them daily.

So, the Americans are gonna take

hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of casualties

trying to arrest these islands from Japan.

Furthermore, after years of war,

the appalling loss of life is taking its toll.

And Japanese public morale is showing signs of crumbling.

Leahy's bomb and blockade approach might just work.

The major cities were basically gutted

by the American fire bombing.

And then, that had a devastating effect

on the general morale of the Japanese people.

Even the vaunted Japanese armies

are beginning to show signs of fatigue.

They realize that the war is not going well.

The rate of desertion was quite high.

They did not wanna fight till the bitter end.

The infamous Kamikaze pilots are not as fanatical as feared.

Actually, they did not wanna die.

A lot of them, the night before their mission,

they would cry, they would write some letters.

And also suicide notes, saying things like, "I don't wanna die."

"I wanna go back to my girlfriend."

The military leadership is convinced

Japan can resist, but civilian politicians now worry they're losing support

of the populous.

The fear is that the Japanese people

are so exhausted

they will collapse and revolt against their political and military authorities.

Even the emperor is nervous, fearing for his position on the throne.

Bypassing the right-wing factions, he requests Stalin to be approached

to negotiate with the Americans.

What Japan's great hope in the summer of 1945,

is using their friendly relations with the Soviet Union,

they can find a way out of the war.

The Soviet Union and Japan had signed a non-aggression pact,

in spite of years of hostility over economic interests in the Far East.

The Japanese were trying very hard to keep the Soviets friendly.

They would, for instance, allow the United States, a combatant,

to send equipment directly to Soviet bases in Vladivostok

without torpedoing them as a way of trying to keep

the Soviet Union on side.

In the 1930s, the two countries had fought bitterly

over Manchuria.

Overrun by Japan in 1931,

eight years later, the Russians had exacted revenge.

The Soviets had beaten the Japanese at Khalkhyn Gol in 1939.

A very bloody battle that virtually destroyed

two divisions of the Kwantung Army.

And so, they'd given the Japanese a bloody nose.

The Soviet Union holds a special place

in the Japanese psyche.

The Soviet Union is the ultimate arch enemy.

It's the one that you fear.

If Russia were to attack northern Manchuria,

it would tilt the balance of power against Japan.

Historically, Japan was really worried about

a southern advance of Soviet geopolitical presence.

And during World War II, there was always this fear

that the Soviet Union was there, sitting there.

Now the Japanese find the Soviets are repeatedly dodging

their requests for mediation.

Stalin has other plans.

On May the seventh, Germany finally surrenders.

The atrocities of Nazi brutality were reflected

in the delirious joy of the liberated.

Stalin swiftly claims the territories of Eastern Europe,

expanding his reach.

And he now offers the full force of Soviet might against the Japanese.

To Byrnes and the Truman administration, the offer looks ominous.

He wants influence to control a future China.

He wants influence to keep Japan under his thumb,

and he wants influence in terms of his relationship

with the United States.

For Truman now, the question is,

invade without Soviet help and risk huge casualties,

or enlist Russian help and risk communism

spreading through the Pacific.

Now the Americans have buyer's remorse.

Truman has no doubt that once the Soviets get across into Manchuria,

they're gonna take Japan itself.

They will divide Japan the same way Germany's gonna be divided,

into a communist East and a capitalist West.

With the future world order at stake,

Truman heads to Germany to meet with Stalin and Churchill.

Deep in New Mexico, Manhattan Project engineers

are on the verge of opening a new and even darker prospect.

They're quest to unlock the vast energies

trapped within atomic nuclei is complete.

On July the 16th, they test the world's first atomic bomb.

The blast creates a seven-mile high mushroom cloud.

In a few seconds, the terrifying elemental forces

of the atom are unleashed on the world.

And President Truman sees a way to avoid an invasion.

The pressure to deploy the bomb is immense.

He's terrified that if he doesn't use the bomb,

and the Americans straight up have to invade Kyushu and suffer casualties,

and the American people find out he had this bomb and didn't use it,

that he will be crucified.

The majority of those around Truman urge he deploy it.

Pro-bomb people say, "Look, this is a weapon like any other.

I mean we've created a new weapon, let's use it to end the war."

The ethics of this destructive weapon

are not a priority for Truman.

Using an atomic bomb was not going to cross any moral lines

that hadn't already been crossed.

The attack on Tokyo in March had killed so many people

that nothing the atomic bomb could do was going to change the nature

of the bombing campaign.

Rather than having tens of thousands of bombs dropped on a city,

this was going to be one bomb.

Of the president's team, only Leahy is vehemently

against using the bomb.

His opposition is on every level, but the ethics and the morality of it

are the driving force.

This is a bomb that can destroy a city.

You know, something that is new and radioactive,

and could kill for God knows how many years afterwards.

But for Byrnes, the bomb deals with two problems at once.

It's their way to warn off the Soviets.

To say, "Look, we can threaten the Japanese with this weapon,

but if you try to get involved in further expansion in the Far East,

we can threaten you with it as well."

Just hours after the test, the Navy loads the components

for the first of two bombs onto the USS Indianapolis.

The destination, Tinian.

A tiny island in the Pacific, where air crews are ready.

Truman authorizes the Air Force to use the bomb

where and when it sees fit.

But some of the project scientists express grave doubts.

Led by physicist, Leo Szilard, 70 scientists signed a petition

against the use of the nuclear weapon.

They say, "Look, we have this weapon. It's a trump card.

We now have this massive deterrent.

It would be utterly inhumane to actually deploy this

against human beings."

Szilard takes the petition to Byrnes,

but he never passes it onto the president.

On the 26th of July, the Allies give Japan an ultimatum.

At Potsdam, they demand the unconditional surrender

of Japan's armed forces.

The British, Chinese, and United States governments

have given the Japanese people adequate warning

of what is in store for them.

The statement deliberately makes no mention of the emperor.

By hinting that the emperor can stay, the Allies leave the Japanese

with a face-saving path to surrender.

They could have said it more clearly.

It's certainly not a clear enough statement

for the Japanese to automatically know they could keep the emperor.

For military hardliners, surrender under any circumstances

is not an option.

The Allies go on to demand an occupation of Japan

and full disarmament of their forces.

Even for the peace-seeking faction, the terms are too much.

The prime minister makes a statement that they will ignore

or treat with contempt in the Potsdam Declaration.

The statement all but seals the fate of millions of Japanese.

The empire has run out of time.

In the early hours of August the sixth,

three B-29s head towards Japan.

On board the Enola Gay is the bomb, Little Boy,

containing 141 pounds of enriched uranium.

The target, Hiroshima…

a city of 350,000 people.

At 8:15 am during the morning rush-hour, the atomic bomb is dropped.

The bomb was finally released

exactly at the designated hour

and the explosion occurred as planned.

It explodes 1,900 feet above the Shima Hospital.

A burst of neutron and gamma radiation emanates out,

along with deadly shockwaves.

At 8:14, it was a sunny day.

At 8:15, it was a hellscape.

What happens on the sixth of August

is absolutely shocking.

People and life were vaporized, incinerated.

Many died from massive doses of gamma radiation.

In less than a second, 70,000 people are killed.

The super hurricane force wind flattened buildings

in instants.

A giant mushroom of smoke

rises from the five and a half thousand-degree fire storm.

Nothing in the human experience had prepared anybody

for such totalizing damage so instantaneously.

One of the eeriest effects of the atomic bomb

was that the shadows of individuals who had been vaporized were preserved

on concrete or stone where they had been standing.

Beyond Ground Zero, the human devastation is unprecedented.

Thirteen-year-old Setsuko is in her first class of the day.

I saw the blueish white flash.

I had the sensation of flying up in the air.

I woke up in the total darkness and silence.

And I started hearing faint voices.

There were saying, "God help me. Mother help me."

Those caught outside in the blast suffer hideous burns.

They were begging for water.

"Water, please. Please give me water."

Flesh and skin were hanging from their bones.

Skin from the upper torso hanging like a shirt from the waist down.

They didn't look like human beings at all.

Setsuko is relatively unscathed.

Her sister, Iyako, is not so lucky.

My sister and her child

were burned, blackened and swollen.

Just a chunk of flesh melted.

Just unrecognizable.

By the end of the day, thousands more die

from radiation injuries.

And when the darkness fell, we just sat on the hill

and watched all night, the entire city burn.

Setsuko loses 351 of her school friends

and eight members of her family.

The Japanese are in disarray.

They have no idea what has hit them.

They knew that it was some really,

really powerful bomb, but they did not know what it was.

Returning from Europe on board the USS Augusta,

Truman receives word of the explosion.

When Truman announces that the atom bomb has been dropped

and everyone cheers, there's one person not cheering,

and that's his chief of staff, William Leahy.

He believes the United States has done something

that was ethically wrong, it didn't have to do,

and that it would have been far better for the world and for US security

not to do.

Sixteen hours later, President Truman

announces to the world that the US has dropped

a nuclear weapon on Japan.

The threat is, that this was simply one of many.

If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin

from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth.

Foreign Minister Togo urges the leadership to assemble

and consider calling an end to the war,

but the military die-hards refuse to even meet.

Most of them said this was just another bombing.

It was just like any other bombing.

They weren't aware this was a special kind of weapon.

And they kind of poo-pooed it and said, "Oh, you know,

this is not worth surrendering over. We've absorbed much worse bombings

in Tokyo with conventional weaponry."

But in the Soviet Union, Stalin looks on with alarm.

He brings forward his declaration of war on Japan.

When the atomic bomb went in,

all of his dreams of Soviet influence

were subject to possible disintegration.

Having just one dropped was enough

to cause him to move the attack date up.

The Soviets wanna get into it 'cause they wanna play a role

in the Pacific peace.

If the war ends in July 1945, the Soviets are not a combatant.

They have no say, a seat in the peace table.

On August the ninth, just before 1:00 a.m.,

the Soviets invade Japanese held Manchuria.

One-and-a-half million troops simultaneously attack

on three separate fronts.

They caught the Japanese flatfooted.

The Soviet attack accomplishes enough to paralyze

the commanding control of the Japanese.

They very simply outclassed Kwantung Army.

When news reaches Tokyo that the flagship

of the Japanese Imperial Army has been overrun,

Prime Minister Suzuki calls an emergency meeting

of the Supreme War Council.

But the situation is about to escalate yet again.

Four minutes into the meeting,

notice is brought in that a second bomb

has been dropped on Nagasaki.

At 11:01 a.m., the United States had deployed

the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, on the city.

Within the flash of a light,

70,000 people dead and dying.

The ground zero of that target was the Urakami Cathedral,

the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in all of Asia at that time.

Complete and utter devastation.

Almost 10,000 Catholics perish.

Alongside the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese,

even Allied POWs are killed.

The Nagasaki bomb is far more powerful than the one used on Hiroshima.

The population suffer gamma radiation levels

17 times the lethal dose.

Individuals who look like they had virtually no injury at all

would suddenly develop symptoms like bleeding from the mouth,

nostrils, and the rectum.

And then they would abruptly die.

The War Council debate the situation for 13 hours.

For the Japanese, the predicament has become infernal.

They're under attack from the Americans

who have unlimited conventional capability.

And now you have one-and-a-half million Red Army troops

marching through Manchuria and prepared to cross

to the Japanese islands.

But even now, the council is divided.

Three favor peace and are willing to accept the Potsdam Declaration.

Three refuse.

There were factions within the military,

particularly in the army, that believe that the surrender

was just out of the question.

They would fight till the end.

With the leadership at stalemate,

and fearing the government will be brought to its knees,

Prime Minister Suzuki makes an extraordinary move.

Not long before midnight on August ninth,

the emperor gets word that he needs to appear

because they're deadlocked.

It comes down to the emperor to make a stand.

Hirohito, until now insulated from the war,

finds himself with the fate of the Japanese people in his hands.

With no Kwantung Army,

there's gonna be one battle left, and that's gonna be in Japan.

It's gonna be against Russians, and it's gonna be against Americans.

And, "Oh, by the way, a lot of Chinese hate us too."

So it's gonna cost the Japanese a large chunk of their population.

Hirohito makes a momentous decision.

At mid-day on August the 15th, the emperor himself

addresses the public on national radio.

It was the first time people had heard the emperor speak.

And so his voice was called the "Gyokuon" or the "jeweled sound".

He tells the nation that the attack is so horrific

they cannot continue the war.

It is time for Japan to surrender.

People just stood there in a stunned way.

Just stunned.

There was sense of relief.

The end of war, that means peace.

But after decades of being told Japan is invincible,

the humiliation is unbearable.

Many Japanese feel sorry for the emperor.

They feel as though they've let the emperor down.

I did see several soldiers just throwing themselves onto the ground,

just sobbing and…

That was an unthinkable announcement.

As expected, factions of the military refused to obey.

He was immediately informed that two of the overseas commanders

initially announced they would not comply

with the surrender order even from the emperor.

In a bid to avoid insurrection,

Hirohito delivers a second message to the armed forces.

This time, stressing the entry of the Soviets into the war against them.

The emperor cites Soviet intervention as a factor

on the belief that that is going to be far more persuasive

to those commanders than atomic bombs.

Just weeks after the atomic attacks

and the Soviet invasion,

all the armed forces are persuaded to lay down their arms.

…which was the brutal, costly, Eastern half

of the most horrible worldwide war in human history

is now within minutes of ending for good.

General MacArthur…

On the second of September,

General MacArthur accepts the official surrender.

And begins a six year Allied occupation of Japan.

The Americans form the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission

to assess the effects of the explosions.

Staffed by some 1,000 US and Japanese medics,

the Commission's work draws serious criticism.

The broken, surviving people

were marched in front of doctors to be examined,

to be inspected like rats in a lab.

Their scarring was measured,

their injuries were noted.

They were not treated in any way, shape or form.

That's a level of inhumanity

that is almost indescribable.

And you can imagine how we felt.

We were used as guinea pigs twice.

First as a target, second as an object of medical research.

But the nightmare is far from over.

Victims are often shunned for fear of contagion.

And the steady passage of time reveals the insidious nature

of radiation's long-term effects.

Birth deformities, cardiovascular diseases,

and deadly cancers.

The violence that was initiated on August sixth

and August ninth in 1945,

continues to this day.

Using nuclear weapons is really like waging war on the future.

Chillingly, the world is not to know what the victim's suffer.

The US suppresses virtually all film and images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japanese newsreel is confiscated and American military footage classified.

The images that were distributed

were the sort of grainy films that primarily showed

the destructiveness of the blast.

They did not show bodies of burnt children and women,

and the absolute carnage that was caused.

It was not until 1970 that footage showing the human suffering

is broadcast on US television.

By the river, people lay bleeding from their faces or hands,

and died without weeping.

People trapped under fallen houses called patiently,

meekly, "Help, if I may ask."

The public finally learns the true extent

of the effects of deadly radiation.

Serious questions are now asked about the decision to drop the bombs.

There is a sense in Japan that the second bomb

was the unnecessary bomb.

This is no longer a science project.

This is something that has brought devastation and destruction

in ways that had never experienced by humans throughout their entire history.

How can that possibly happen?

The atomic bombs close a chapter

on the deadliest conflict in history.

Germany and Japan's aggression

left almost no corner of the globe untouched,

but their defeat came at a huge human cost.

And the consequences reverberate to this day.

Across East Asia, there is still great bitterness towards Japan

for its violent expansionism.

Twenty-five million people died in the Pacific War.

Every day the war continued in 1945,

at least 10,000 other Asians were dying in China, Vietnam,

and what's now Indonesia.

About 90 percent of them were non-combatants.

Ten thousand every single day.

But in the aftermath of the war,

it becomes expedient to downplay the barbarities.

And re-frame Japan in a fresh light.

The world faces new threats, Stalin and the rise of communism.

To maintain stability and American authority,

the US retains Emperor Hirohito.

Japan changes from being seen as an enemy

that needs to be transformed

to actually, a very important bulwark against communism.

As sort of a large American military base.

Japan becomes the Pacific outpost of American democracy,

but in 1949, the Soviets test their first atomic weapon.

Today, there are over 15,000 nuclear weapons on the planet.

We've lived for decades under the shadow

of possible nuclear annihilation.

And those weapons that were available in 1945

were veritable firecrackers

compared to the weapons that are available today.

With global tensions mounting, the threat of nuclear war

is rising once again.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com