LAST AIR BATTLES OF WORLD WAR II
WORLD WAR II WAS A GLOBAL CONFLAGRATION THAT TRANSCENDED GEOGRAPHY AND TIME ITSELF—A FACT BEST ILLUSTRATED ON THE DAY THE SHOOTING STOPPED.
In the Western Pacific on August 14, 1945, thousands of American airmen took off in wartime and landed in peacetime after midnight. Almost simultaneously, Allied and Japanese fliers fought and slew one another on August 15, mostly without knowing that Tokyo had agreed to surrender.
It had much to do with time zones.
Over the previous several days rumors and conflicting reports had skittered over radio broadcasts from Washington, D.C.: Japan was about to surrender; Japan was not surrendering. On the 10th, Tokyo had announced tentative acceptanceof the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender, provided that the emperor kept his throne. Meanwhile, the Japanese war cabinet remained divided over surrendering. The situation remained tentative, viscerally uncertain.
The U.S. Twentieth Air Force had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs on August 6 and 9, immediately followed by the Soviets’ declaration of war and invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria. As Japan reeled under the triphammer blows, millions of people anticipatedTokyo’s capitulation. Days passed in gnawing uncertainty.
After 45 months of combat across the world’s greatest ocean, U.S. servicemen were bone weary from the sanguinary slogging that ponderously advanced westward from Hawaii to Honshu—at an average rate of about three miles per day. In that time more than 400,000 Americans had died in combat or from war-related causes in defeating first Italy, then Germany and now perhaps Japan. Men were tense, dubious, sleep-deprived. They did not know what to believe.
On the afternoon of August 14 (Tokyo time), Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s powerful XXI Bomber Command launched 750 B-29s from the Mariana Islands,
