VJ Day & the end of the war

In May 1945, a war weary Britain and her allies, including the United States of America, Canada, and Russia (the USSR), had finally defeated Hitler’s Third Reich and the evils of Nazi Germany. In an address to the people of the UK, and to the wider world, the Prime Minister of the time, Winston Churchill, had celebrated the Allies’ success, but had added a note of caution, warning that ‘there is another foe who occupies large portions of the British Empire, a foe stained with cruelty and greed – the Japanese’. It was a sentiment echoed by US President Harry S Truman, who described the European success as ‘a victory only half won’.

Troops who had fought in Europe as part of the ‘British Liberation Army’, or ‘BLA’, now prepared for action in the Pacific theatre of the Far East, noting with irony that the initials of the BLA perhaps stood for ‘Burma Looms Ahead’. The seriousness of the task at hand was only too apparent – a day after the celebrations of VE Day, the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Victorious was hit for the second time in five days by Japanese kamikaze planes. It would take another three months before the eventual end of the Second World War, but the nature of the final defeat of Japan would be one of the greatest controversies of the entire conflict, with the dropping of two atomic bombs on the nation’s territory in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 200,000 people, mainly civilians.