The Atomic Bomb Ends the War

After the battle of Iwo Jima, the Japanese Empire was reduced back to the mainland of Japan. Japan however was not going to surrender without a fight. Japan, had a large standing army on the mainland that was prepared to defend at all costs. In the case that the United States adopted a frontal attack, it would have been a long and desperate struggle. President Harry S. Truman did not want to send American soldiers into such a deadly and demoralizing battle. Military estimates presented a possibility of 1 million American casualties and 500,000 British Casualties. During the war, the Army commissioned the Manhattan project, in which the atomic bomb was developed and built. The Atomic bomb project created bombs which weighed less than a dozen tons and could be dropped by a single bomber but had the destructive capability seen in thousands of tons of TNT. J. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the project which had up to 600,000 members, although few were informed of its true goal. President Truman told the Japanese to surrender or face severe and total destruction, but his request was denied. On August 6th, a B-29 bomber dropped "Little Boy", a five ton bomb (with the power of fourteen kilotons of TNT) in Hiroshima destroying the city and killing approximately 100,000 people. Despite this, Japan did not surrender so President Truman ordered the army to drop Fat Man three days later, a bomb with the destructive power of twenty-one kilotons of TNT, onto Nagasaki, killing an additional 80,000 people. At this point Emperor Hirohito cried to his advisers that they needed to surrender, as the destruction of the Japanese people was far too much for him. On September 22nd, Japan formally surrendered on the USS Missouri as a result of the two bombings.

By Tyler Adams and Katie Lacek