ABSTRACT

JAPANESE TO 'FIGHT RESOLUTELY' On 26 July 1945 the Japanese Prime Minister, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, called a press conference to announce that his country rejected Allied calls for unconditional surrender. It would fight resolutely for the successful conclusion of the war in which it had been engaged since December 1941 when it attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. He had been warned by the new US President, Harry S. Truman, that failure to surrender would result in the 'complete and utter destruction' of Japan. Outside Japan few people took much notice of the Admiral's defiant words. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr probably did. From the battlefields of Italy he had returned in June 1945 to command the US Air Force 477th Composite Group at Godman Field, Kentucky. He was the second Black general in the history of the US regular armed forces. 1 No doubt he wondered whether his next journey would be to take part in the final assault on Japan. Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, of the German anti-aircraft artillery, was hoping for an early release from a British prisoner-of-war camp, to return to his devastated home town of Hamburg. He was part of the defeated German armed forces which had surrendered unconditionally on 8 May, thus ending the Second World War in Europe which had started on 1 September 1939. He was released in August.2 He later became the Chancellor of West Germany. In the stifling heat of a bug-infested Russian prison, Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet war hero, contemplated his sentence of eight years forced labour for an alleged anti-Stalin remark. He was one of millions of victims of the Stalinist system.3 Later he received the Nobel prize for literature. SecondLieutenant Eric Lomax endured another sweltering day of near starvation in the squalor of Changi jail, Singapore. He had been captured by the Japanese in 1942 and had survived working on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. Many thousands of his comrades had already perished.4 There was a rumour that the Japanese would shoot their prisoners as Allied armies drew near, as they had done on any number of occasions.5 In Plymouth, England, Michael Foot, a journalist, was not thinking of any of these

individuals. He did not know them. He was contemplating his new life as a Labour Member of Parliament. On that date he was unexpectedly the victor in the constituency of Plymouth Devonport, beating the former minister Leslie Hore-Belisha.6 By the time Foot knew his fate, he realized that he was part of a landslide. Everywhere Labour was winning in the wartime election of 1945. It was a win on the scale of the Liberal victory of 1906 and the 'National' (mainly Conservative) victory of 1931.