ABSTRACT
IT IS HARD for someone who has not seen a country defeated and devastated by war to imagine what Japan was like in August 1945. Most Japanese cities had been destroyed by high explosive and fire bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had suffered horrific attacks by atomic bombs. The Japanese infrastructure was in ruins and basic necessities were in very short supply. It should have been obvious to Japanese leaders at the very latest by March of 1945 that not only had they no chance of winning the war, they would have to accept whatever terms the Allied Powers were prepared to offer them. The only alternative was to see the whole of Japan totally destroyed as Okinawa had been in early 1945 in the merciless fighting for control of the island. But the Japanese leadership dallied and quarrelled while the casualties and the damage mounted.
