In February 1945, the leaders of the Allied powers, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, met in Yalta, Crimea, to discuss the post-war reorganization of Europe. They agreed on dividing Germany into occupation zones and made plans for the establishment of the United Nations. The conference also addressed issues related to Poland's borders, the reestablishment of democratic governments, and the treatment of Germany after the war. In early 1945, the United States launched an amphibious assault on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima and the Japanese island of Okinawa. The battle was fiercely fought, with heavy casualties on both sides, but the U.S. forces ultimately captured both the islands.
The war in Europe is reaching its end. While Nazi Germany is losing ground to the Soviets in the east, the US forces are making their way on the western front. On 4th April 1945, the American forces liberated Ohrdruf, a slave labour camp where they were shocked to see people in horrifying, near-death conditions. It was then that the Western world saw first-hand the Nazi persecution of Jews. Antisemitism was prevalent throughout Europe at the time. In Germany, however, they were regarded as a threat to society and an impure race. The Nazis believed in the idea of superior Aryan Germans and that racial cleansing was necessary to create the required lebensraum or living room for Germans.
To achieve this, they set up large concentration camps where inmates were worked to death, starved, hanged or shot. These camps stunk from the smell of dead bodies. It was cumbersome to conduct mass killings by simply hanging or shooting. To make the genocide more efficient, they organised what is known as the final solution. Gas chambers were used to industrialise the mass genocide of Jews. The Soviet forces made similar discoveries on the eastern front. A total of 6 million Jews and 11 million civilians and POWs were killed. The Holocaust remains to this day, one of the most barbaric events to ever occur.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific Theatre, the attack on Pearl Harbour forced US' hand to enter the war. The Japanese had expanded across South East and Central Asia. The US forces had managed to recover and entered a war of attrition, capturing one Pacific Island at a time. As US forces made their way towards Japan, Japanese forces fought with higher intensity and desperation. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the very first kamikaze strikes occurred.
By early 1945, the war in the Pacific was savagely violent. The US had captured all the Japanese-occupied Islands and could use them as a base to directly reach Japan itself. On 10th March 1945, the USAAF conducted a firebombing raid on Tokyo. The city was set ablaze using tonnes of incendiary-type bombs, killing 100,000 people and flattening 16 sq. miles. This was the single most destructive air raid that was conducted at the time. The US was planning an invasion of mainland Japan with a colossal force to end the war. Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project provided an alternate option.
The Manhattan Project was initiated in December 1941, when Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 stating that Germany was working on a nuclear weapon program and it was possible to harness the energy of an atom to create a weapon of mass destruction. The Manhattan Project was US's response to the German Nuclear Program, starting a race to develop a nuclear weapon first. On 16th July 1945, Trinity, the codename for the first nuclear weapon was conducted. This proved that an invasion with casualties was not necessary.
On 7th May, Germany officially surrendered and Stalin claims territories of eastern Europe, while the war in the Pacific is still ongoing. In the Potsdam Declaration of 16th July, the allied countries announced the terms of Japan's surrender, ending with an ultimatum. If the terms were not met, "the alternate for Japan is prompt and utter destruction." After Japan rejected the terms, on 6th August 1945, at 08:15, the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb sent the world into shock, killing 70,000 people in an instant. On 9th August, at 11:01, the US deployed a second atomic bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki, bringing one of the ugliest wars that almost included the entire world to an end. It was not an ethical decision for the US to use the nuclear option as they had already killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Tokyo air raids. The second bombing on Nagasaki, however, was debatable as to whether it was necessary.
These bombs caused wide-scale devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those not killed by the physical shockwaves and heat died due to radiation exposure. Humans that seemed unaffected would slowly start showing symptoms of bleeding from their mouths, cardiac diseases, cancer, etc. Human flesh had completely melted, making them unrecognizable. To this day, Japan suffers from the bombings due to the exposure to radiation. People suffer from birth defects, cancer and an increase in various diseases.
On 25 April 1945, delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco for the United Nations Conference on International Organization. The Conference agreed upon the Charter of the United Nations and the Statute of the new International Court of Justice. On 24th October 1945, the Charter is ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council and the majority of the other signatories. Thus, the United Nations came into existence as a tool for world peace and a format to resolve international disputes. However, as they say, history has a way of repeating itself.
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