Peter Eschauzier's letter to the editor of this newspaper last week (Manchester Cricket, Letters, August 1, 2025) was a great reminder about the upcoming 80th anniversary of "Victory over Japan" (V-J" Day), which marked the end of World War 2. V-J Day was also the finale for some fascinating, controversial, and nearly forgotten events in the west Pacific in the last few months of the war.
The personal story of Peter's mother put me in mind of the novel titled "The Gift of Rain", by Tan Twan Eng. This book tells an eerily similar story about a Japanese intelligence officer, who before the war posed as a tourist and photographer in Malay, at that time a British colony. In early 1942, the Malay Peninsula and then the supposedly "impregnable fortress" of Singapore fell quickly to Japanese forces coming overland from the north and, in the telling of the book, did so in part because of the intelligence provided by this man. Perhaps there were several such spies in Southeast Asia and Indonesia.
I’ve been a student of World War Two history since my teenage years and continue to be fascinated by new personal stories coming out of those years, including several from people I knew.
My father, Bob Stanley (Manchester native), was on a PT boat in the Pacific from 1943-45 and his unit saw some bits of hairy action, including shadowing the Japanese heavy cruiser Mogami during the battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October 1944. By spring 1945, his unit was still in an active war zone, most likely preparing for some part in the upcoming invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. We have a letter from Dad’s footlocker, written to him by his mother telling him that his brother Sunny had been killed in action in Germany in March 1945, mere weeks before V-E Day.
By the time he got this letter, the war in Europe was likely over, but Dad's war was not. The pain and fear my grandparents must have felt at this time is unimaginable to me.
Dad made it home OK after the war, as did my uncle Mike Madore, who was in the Marines and fought on Okinawa in 1945, one of the very nastiest battles of the entire war. I remember Mike telling me how grateful he and all of his buddies were for the dropping of the atomic bombs. Even when his unit landed in Japan after the surrender, they were fully prepared for heavy combat and relieved that it did not happen.
This ties in with the last thread; a story I heard from an elderly Japanese woman named Rose in our church congregation. She told me that she was a child of six or so in Japan at the end of the war, and that she and all her classmates had been trained to arm themselves with sharpened sticks, and to try, each and every one of them, to take out an American G.I.
Now, the non-personal history part: American military planners estimated that invading Japan could have cost the lives of between 250,000 and one million Americans, and some estimates were much higher. It is likely that Japanese losses would have been some multiple of American casualties, given our overwhelming advantage at that time of every kind of weaponry and firepower.
Even after the atomic bombs had dropped and American "conventional" bombing had otherwise destroyed more than 60 cities, there was still a war faction in the Japanese government that was committed to total suicidal defense of the Home Islands, including suicide planes and submarines, and of course the duty of every Japanese, soldier and civilian, to die honorably for the Emperor.
Our commonly understood history is that the A-bombs led directly to Japan's surrender. It was certainly President Truman's intention that dropping the two bombs in quick succession would force an unconditional surrender. Truman was also determined to make this happen before the Soviet Union could bring their forces to bear in the invasion of the Home Islands.
A bit of background here, going back to the start of the war. Hitler broke Germany's Non-Aggression Pact with the USSR when he invaded them in June 1941. Six months later, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and war was quickly declared between the US and Japan, the US and Germany, and Great Britain and Japan. Japan's Axis partner, Germany, declared war on the United States and, much to Hitler's disappointment, Japan did not return the favor by declaring war on the USSR. This was because Japan and the Soviets had themselves signed a non-aggression pact, in April 1941, each with the goal of securing one of their flanks. This pact remained in force past V-E Day (Germany's surrender in May 1945) and allowed Japan and the USSR to avoid two-front wars: the Soviets could concentrate on Germany and the Japanese on the US.
However, the Yalta agreement by "The Big Three" in February 1945 secretly called for the USSR to join the Pacific war three months after Germany's fall, and Stalin was determined not only to reclaim lost territories in the Far East, but also to invade and occupy northern Japan. He played the Japanese so skillfully that their "peace faction" actually asked the Soviets to mediate surrender terms with the US.
Stalin renounced the non-aggression pact nearly at the moment when his army attacked the Japanese in Manchuria, AFTER the A-bombs had fallen. At this point, the Japanese government realized there was no hope of anything but an unconditional surrender before these two titanic powers fell upon them; they also faced the specter of more atomic bombs, which, it turns out, the US was prepared to use. Japan surrendered before Stalin's forces could cross the sea to Hokkaido, Japan's most important northern island, much to Truman's relief, given what he had already seen of the Russians' behavior in occupied eastern Europe.
How different history might have been if Japan had been divided into zones of occupation like Germany was, after all the sacrifice and horror of the Pacific war.
Mike Dyer is a resident of Essex. He grew up in Manchester.
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