The War in the Pacific raged for fourteen years. It began when the Imperial Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria on September 18, 1931 and ended on September 2, 1945 when Japan accepted the Potsdam Conference terms of unconditional surrender. While the end had been in sight for several months, it came into focus on August 6, 1945 when ‘Little Boy,’ an American-produced uranium-based Atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. With no response from Japanese authorities, ‘Fat Boy,’ a plutonium-based Atomic bomb was exploded over Nagasaki a little after 11:00AM, on Thursday August 9. That was enough for the Emperor. By War’s end millions were dead, including 1.6 million Japanese.
In his 1946 book Hiroshima, John Hersey wrote of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima. His descriptions helped keep the Cold War “cold,” but the damage those bombs caused should be measured in relation to the carnage Japan’s Imperial Army inflicted on Asia, especially China. The 340,000 people who died as a consequence of those two bombs is a lot, but pales when compared to the 4,000,000 Chinese who died during the Japanese occupation and to the more than 400,000 Allied casualties (mostly Americans) in the Pacific and on its islands.