The war was over, but only in theory. The armed forces of Japan were expecting an invasion of the home islands, and they were prepared to repel such intrusion with the lives of every human being who could walk and swing a stick. The Japanese diplomatic corps was counting on a last-minute alliance with the Soviet Union, which would hopefully stop an American ground invasion. On July 28, 1945, the Japanese prime minister Admiral Baron Kantaro Suzuki publicly announced that Japan would ignore the latest peace plan from the Allies, the Potsdam Procla­mation, and continue to fight. On August 2, the new president of the United States, Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), weighing the pros and cons of using this new type of weapon, gave the order to drop the bombs on Japan.

The 509th Composite Group of the 313th Bombardment Wing of the U. S. Army Air Force had trained and prepared to drop the atomic bombs. The personnel and aircraft were assigned to the air base on Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean. Special air-conditioned buildings were erected for assembling and testing the bombs, and loading pits were sunken into the pavement off the runway for gently lifting the heavy devices into waiting aircraft. A new custom-fitted B-29 four-engine bomber, named the Enola Gay for its pilot’s mother, took off in the early morning of August 6 carry­ing the uranium bomb, “Little Boy,” number L-11.

The target was Hiroshima, the seventh largest city in Japan with a pop­ulation of about 350,000. It had been spared the bombings of most other industrial cities in Japan, and it was hoped that its complete destruction by a single device would convince the government of Japan of the futility of resistance. Dropping an atomic bomb on Tokyo, the largest city, would have been pointless. All the buildings had long since been burned to the ground or knocked over by a relentless conventional bombing campaign, and an atomic bomb explosion would have made no difference.

The bombing run was perfect and by the textbook, with clear weather, no enemy fighter planes, and no antiaircraft fire. At 9:15:17 a. m. Hiro­shima time, “Little Boy” was released from an altitude of 31,000 feet (9,500 m). Exactly 44.4 seconds later, it exploded 1,968 feet (600 m) above the

center of the city, and Hiroshima was lost to Japan by a device that had never been tested. Casualties were impossible to count, but are thought to be more than 83,000 people.

The government of Japan was oddly silent about this event. It would take a few days for the enormity of it to sink in. Bomber command sent another B-29, “Bock’s Car,” with a plutonium-fueled implosion bomb on August 9. The target was the undisturbed city of Kokura, home to 110,000 people and the site of a major army arsenal. Fortunately for Kokura, it was clouded over that day, and the bomber moved to the secondary target, Nagasaki. It had 212,000 people and a large Mitsubishi armaments plant.

At 10:58 a. m. Nagasaki time, “Fat Man” dropped, almost directly over a soccer field, and Nagasaki went up in a mushroom-shaped cloud. Six days later, at noon Japan standard time, the people of the Empire of the Rising Sun for the first time in history heard the voice of their emperor, Hirohito (1901-89), over the radio via a phonograph record, made two days before. This unprecedented “Jewel Voice Broadcast” carried a carefully prepared message, beginning as:

TO THE SUBJECTS OF JAPAN

After examining Japan’s current situation and condition, I have decided to take extraordinary measures. I have ordered our government to inform the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union that Japan will accept the provisions of the joint declaration.

The speech went on to admit that “the war has not progressed entirely as we have wished,” and it mentions that “the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon.” The war with Japan was finally over.