August 6, 1945
The fighting against Japan during World War II began after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It involved very difficult, island-to-island combat with the ultimate goal of surrounding and then attacking the Japanese mainland. In battles such as Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, fighting was often hand-to-hand and always brutal. Japanese soldiers were willing to fight to the death.
By August 1945, President Harry Truman faced a decision. Plans were in place for an invasion of Japan. Called Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan would have been the largest invasion of its kind in human history, larger than the D-Day invasion of Europe. Historians argue over the casualty figures such an invasion would have created, but few argue they would have been high. The Japanese had built up their defenses around areas American soldiers were likely to use to come ashore and Japanese soldiers and civilians were being trained to defend Japan until the bitter end. Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued in a post-war editorial that an invasion of Japan would have resulted in one million American casualties. Japanese casualties would have been far greater.
Due to the American development of an atomic bomb, Truman had another option. Although this new technology had never before been used against another nation, Truman knew this weapon would change the course of the war. On the heels of a brutal battle on the Japanese island of Okinawa, Truman knew he needed to end the war as quickly as possible. His best option to do this was to use the atomic bomb against the Japanese mainland. The city of Hiroshima was chosen as the first target.
The bomb called “Little Boy” because of its shape was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets’ plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets’ B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. At 8:15 a.m. local time, “Little Boy” was dropped, exploding 1,800 feet over Hiroshima and unleashing the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. Approximately 80,000 people were killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 were injured. Thousands more died from radiation by the end of the year. Three days later, a second atomic bomb called “Fat Man” was dropped over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.
Six days after the second atomic bomb was dropped, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of his country on the radio. Japan would formally surrender on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri. World War II would end after six years of global conflict. Although not easy to achieve, estimates put the death toll of the war at approximately 50 to 70 million people worldwide—a horrific loss of life.