In 1942, the United States launched the Manhattan Project, determined to build an atomic bomb before the end of World War II, with the support of the United States government, a large number of outstanding nuclear scientists from the United States, Britain, and Canada gathered together to secretly conduct nuclear weapons research.
Over a period of more than three years, the government has invested a total of more than two billion DOLLARs to support the study.
On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico, USA, and the Manhattan Project ended.
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese military town of Hiroshima, causing a large number of building damage and casualties; on August 9, the United States sent bombers to Japan again, originally planning to drop the second atomic bomb on Kokura, but due to weather reasons, it could not be accurately dropped, so it temporarily turned to Nagasaki to drop.
On the same day, the Soviet Union joined the war against Japan.
On August 15, 1945, the Japanese Emperor finally accepted the Potsdam Proclamation and issued an edict announcing unconditional surrender through radio.
The atomic bomb that the United States had planned to drop on Japanese territory was ready, but it was forced to terminate because of Japan's surrender. After that, due to the enormous lethality and destructiveness of nuclear weapons, even if war broke out between countries, they no longer used nuclear weapons rashly.
Japan became the only country to have suffered from nuclear bombing.
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Why did the United States decide to drop nuclear weapons on Japan? The interval between the dropping of nuclear weapons on Japanese territory by the United States and Japan's unconditional surrender was very short, and were nuclear weapons the ultimate cause of Japan's surrender? What exactly was the reason for Japan's failure?
Before entering the main topic, new friends can pay attention to it a little, not only not missing the wonderful content of the future, but also reviewing the wonderful content of the past period.
New hatreds and old hatreds are also fate
After the end of the First World War, Western countries were seriously damaged by the war and their strength was urgently needed to restore and develop a relatively peaceful environment.
Influenced by the anti-war sentiment of various countries, and in order to cultivate the strength to resist the Soviet Union, the Western countries turned a blind eye to the expansion of the fascist countries and tried to bring disaster to the east, while they themselves took the opportunity to restore their strength, fish in muddy waters, and reap the benefits of fishermen.
With the acquiescence of the appeasement policies of Britain, France, and the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and other fascist countries have accelerated the pace of foreign aggression and expansion.
The signing of the Munich Agreement of 1938 further fueled its aggressive ambitions. Britain and the United States and other countries thought that they could stay out of the matter, but in September 1939, Germany's blitzkrieg against Poland completely exposed the ambitions of the fascist countries to conquer the world, and the appeasement policy completely failed.
The hatred between the United States and Japan has to be traced back to before World War I. As early as the end of the 19th century, the United States and Japan have been competing for hegemony in China and the Asia-Pacific region.
After the Russo-Japanese War, Japan's power in the Northeast was strengthened, and the interests of the United States were damaged, and the relationship between the two countries was once very tense.
At the Washington Conference held after World War I, because of the principle of "open doors and equal opportunities," Japan was forced to hand over the absolute superiority it had painstakingly sought in China, which greatly intensified the contradictions between the United States and Japan and intensified the struggle between the two countries for hegemony in the Far East Pacific region.
Later, Japan openly announced the abrogation of the naval arms treaty, which caused a serious impact on the world system formed after World War I with the superiority of the United States and seriously damaged the interests of the United States.
In 1941, in order to eliminate the main force of the Us army in the Pacific, to demoralize the United States, and at the same time to break the resources and economic sanctions imposed by the Allies on Japan, to plunder oil resources to ensure the continuation of aggressive activities,
The Japanese army launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in the United States, hoping to win concessions from the United States and reduce the pressure on Japan in the Asia-Pacific theater.
After two rounds of bombing, Pearl Harbor suffered heavy losses, and after the sneak attack, Japan officially declared war on the United States.
Pearl Harbor is an important transportation hub in the Pacific Ocean and has an extremely important strategic position, and Japan's move has undoubtedly greatly angered the United States. Next
President Roosevelt delivered a speech of national shame, declaring war on Japan, and the Pacific War broke out.
At the beginning of the war,
After Japan gained a certain advantage in attacking Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded the Philippines, and due to the lack of support, the U.S. army was eventually captured by about 80,000 people.
Captured U.S. troops have also been subjected to inhuman abuse because of the strained relationship between the two countries. Among them, nearly fifteen thousand soldiers died on foot to the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, known as the Bataan Death March.
After entering the camp, a large number of soldiers were used for hard labor and human experiments, resulting in the deaths of about twenty-six thousand people.
In May 1942, the United States and Japan engaged in naval battles in the Coral Sea, and the Japanese army was forced to interrupt the attack on Port Moresby because it could not replenish its air power in time.
In the end, the United States stopped the Japanese from moving south at a large cost, so the Battle of the Coral Sea was considered a tactical victory for the Japanese and a strategic victory for the Allies.
This was also the first time that Japan suffered setbacks in the Pacific, and the Pacific theater thus entered a stage of strategic stalemate.
In June 1942, the United States ambushed the Japanese mobile fleet at Midway, causing great losses to the Japanese carrier fleet at a relatively small cost.
In August, in order to protect the transport routes between the Allies, the Allies conducted a small landing on Guadalcanal, after which they gradually increased their strength. After more than half a year of fierce fighting, Japan's front here was unsustainable, lost its strategic initiative, fell into a passive situation, and was forced to turn to strategic defense in the Pacific theater.
After that, the Allies gradually approached the Japanese territory.
In June 1945, the United States launched the Okinawa Campaign, which was also the most casualty campaign in the Pacific Theater, and after more than eighty days of fierce fighting, the United States completely eliminated Japan's sea and air power, dealing a heavy blow to Japan.
Elk boiling ants move on all sides
By 1945, the U.S. military gradually approached Japan after a series of island-hopping battles, but the U.S. military also paid a heavy price for it.
This also made the United States realize that it was necessary to make greater sacrifices to invade the Japanese mainland, and in order to reduce casualties and reduce war losses, the United States had to change its original battle plan.
In fact
The United States had already made a strategic plan to invade Japan, code-named "Operation Fall", and planned to invest 2.5 million troops to invade the Japanese mainland and complete the final blow against Japan.
The operation consisted of operations, The Olympics, which was planned to invade Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu under the suppression and bombardment of air and sea forces, and Operation Crown (also known as The Little Crown), a battle plan for Honshu Island, Japan's largest island.
But after the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the U.S. counterattack was more intense than expected, and after recalculation, if the original plan was carried out, the United States would lose about a million troops when it invaded the Japanese mainland.
That number is much higher than the U.S. expected. In the face of imminent danger, in order to preserve the mainland and Korea, Japan also carried out an unprecedented war mobilization, and its military preparations also counted civilians, and the old and weak women and children were involved in it. In this situation, the United States finally abandoned the decline action.
Nevertheless, Japan's situation is not optimistic. On the one hand,
The United States has a crush on Japan, and on the other hand, Japan has been betrayed by its allies.
During the war, Germany, Italy, and Japan came together for a short period of time because of their interests. Although due to distance and ethnic reasons, the two sides did not achieve effective cooperation, but also on different battlefields to contain the Allies, objectively reducing a lot of pressure on the other side.
In the middle and late stages of the war, the Axis powers were already in a rather unfavorable situation. Italy had surrendered to the Allies as early as 1943, and Germany and Japan were already unable to take care of themselves under the Allied offensive.
In April 1945, the Soviet Union gathered some 2.5 million troops to launch a decisive attack on Berlin, and more than twenty days later Berlin fell, and Hitler committed suicide in the basement of the Chancellery.
Hitler's death dealt a heavy blow to Germany, and the morale of the German army was low, and there was a wave of suicide at one point.
On the other hand
The protracted war also caused great loss of human, material and financial resources to Germany, and the remaining resources were difficult to support the continuation of the war.
Germany signed the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender on 8 May 1949. Germany's surrender left Japan in a state of isolation, and by this time, the war was basically over in other battlefields, and Japan inevitably faced a situation of more than a dozen.
In fact, some speculate that the United States is actually preparing to apply the results of the Manhattan Project to Germany.
But Germany announced its unconditional surrender as early as May 8, and the war on the European battlefield basically ended here.
As a result, the focus of World War II shifted to the Pacific Theater.
Domestic and foreign difficulties are expected to fall
At that time, Japan mainly faced the offensive of China, the United States and the Soviet Union.
While Japan had to resist the Allied offensive in the Pacific Theater and retreat, it also had to draw out troops to throw troops into the Chinese battlefield to resist the counter-offensive of the army, which could be described as a left and right, which was very difficult. Later, as the Soviet Union sent troops to the Northeast Theater, the situation in Japan took a sharp turn for the worse.
The war between China and Japan began long before World War II spread across the globe.
Since 1931, China has been engaged in an extremely arduous struggle against the Japanese aggressors.
During this period, both China and Japan invested a lot of manpower and material resources, and they also suffered a lot of losses.
In contrast, the Japanese were better equipped and had a tradition of slaughtering civilians, whether they were resisting or cooperating. In the fourteen years until the end of the war, the Total Number of Chinese Military and Civilian Casualties totaled about 35 million.
The Japanese casualties varied. But there is no doubt that China's insistence on the War of Resistance has pinned down a considerable part of the Japanese army and reduced the pressure on other battlefields.
Although the United States initially suffered a little loss in the face of Japan, it has changed the passive situation due to the addition of the Allies and the containment of other battlefields, and instead chased after the Japanese doorstep.
Although the United States has also paid a huge price for this, japan itself is also facing serious threats, and there is even a crisis of national annihilation.
The Soviet Union also stepped in at this time.
In fact, japan and the Soviet Union initially signed a neutrality treaty in 1941, guaranteeing non-aggression, which allowed the Soviet Union to concentrate on Germany.
Cooperation between Japan and the Soviet Union was also one of the reasons for the German-Japanese centrifugal centrifugal movement. After germany's surrender, Japan desperately hoped that the Soviet Union could renew its contract and remain neutral.
But the Soviet Union not only ceased to perpetuate the neutrality pact, but directly declared war on Japan.
The day after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, it directly sent troops into the northeast battlefield of China in four ways, and surrounded the Kwantung Army left by Japan in the northeast battlefield with a typical double-pincer attack.
Under the powerful offensive of the Soviet Union, the Japanese army quickly collapsed, which became the last large-scale military operation during World War II, known as the August Storm.
The Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan was not entirely based on the idea of ending the war as soon as possible.
On the one hand, the United States had dropped the first atomic bomb at this time, and Japan was already at the end of the crossbow, and at this time, the loss of troops was minimal, and it could prevent the United States from monopolizing the fruits of victory. At that time, the United States detonated the atomic bomb in Japan by means of an airburst.
Not only because the Manhattan Project was invested too much, it was necessary to show its power through real practice and have an account for domestic capital, but also to show its strength to the then sworn enemy of the Soviet Union and the whole world. The Soviet Union was bound to make a show of success.
In order to bring the Soviet Union into the war, the Allies promised great benefits at the Yalta Conference, so the Soviet Union fulfilled its covenant and declared war on Japan within three months of Germany's surrender.
After the war, it signed a treaty of friendship and alliance with China, which exchanged part of China's sovereignty for its own peaceful development environment.
Some argue that the two U.S. drops of nuclear bombs were the direct cause of Japan's surrender, but in fact, as early as the summer of 1944, after Japan's crushing defeat at the Battle of mariana led to the collapse of the absolute defense circle established by one hand,
The United States began to bomb the Japanese mainland, sending B29 bombers to drop incendiary bombs and high-explosive bombs on Tokyo and other places in Japan.
The number of casualties in the Bombing of Tokyo, which lasted for more than a year, is uncountable, but Japan still has not surrendered.
The reason for this is the support of Japan's fanatical Bushido spirit.
In the face of the united states' step by step, Japan even shouted the slogan of "one hundred million jade fragments" to mobilize the whole country to throw itself into this local decisive battle in an attempt to reverse the defeat. After that, even after two nuclear bombs, only the people and the city's base were damaged on the Japanese mainland, and the loss of military strength was far smaller than we thought. In fact, at that time, Japan's main army was still stationed in the three eastern provinces of China, and if Japan decided to counterattack, then this was the main force and springboard of the Japanese counter-offensive.
However, it is not difficult to find that even if Japan's military strength is retained, the bombardment of the mainland has shaken the military to a certain extent. Soldiers in the front fought, but the safety of their families in the rear could not be guaranteed.
After a long war, the economic and social development of the whole country has been very decadent, and the national war-weariness and anti-war sentiment have reached its peak.
Under the combined effect of many factors, the third nuclear bomb that the United States was preparing to drop, code-named "Rufus", later known as the "Devil's Core", had not yet had time to drop it, and Japan announced its unconditional surrender.
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