On Sunday morning, September 2, 1945, aboard the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay, the delegation led by the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Mamoru Sigemicu signed the document on the surrender of Japan, formally ending the Second World War. With the unconditional Japanese capitulation, the Allies won a complete victory over the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy and Japan), but even today it is a matter of debate whether the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary for this capitulation, since the Soviet Union’s promise faithfully opened the new front and Under the command of General Vasilevsky, he regrouped approximately 1 million soldiers to the Far East. On August 9, the Red Army attacked the Japanese in Manchuria from several directions, and thanks to the gigantic operation, the Japanese invaders were pushed out of the territories they conquered in a few days.
Japan’s policy of conquest
Starting in the 1930s, Japan expanded in the Far East and the Pacific region, in 1931 it occupied Manchuria, then in 1937 it subjugated most of China, two years later it invaded Mongolia, where it was stopped by the Soviet Red Army in 1940 and invaded the northern part of Indochina. World War II began in the Pacific theater on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked the United States without a declaration of war, causing severe damage to the American fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese forces then pushed on almost unimpeded, first invading Burma, then occupying Singapore, the Philippines, the Netherlands Indies and already threatening Australia. The creation of the “Greater East Asian Common Prosperity Zone” envisioned in Tokyo is almost within reach. The Imperial Japanese Army in the XX. at the beginning of the 20th century, it was already one of the most modern armies in all of Asia, the staff was well trained, highly disciplined and very well equipped with the most modern combat equipment of the time. However, the huge financial and numerical superiority of the Americans began to take effect after a while, even that of the Japanese continued to decrease. The Japanese soldiers fought excellently, but even though they were obsessed and self-sacrificing, from the end of 1942 they had to set up for defense. The American general staff used the strategy of “jumping from island to island”, which meant that they immediately built airfields on the occupied islands, and only after their planes had taken off from there, did they begin to eliminate the remaining Japanese formations on the island. After Germany’s defeat, the Allies called on the island nation to give up further fighting, but Japan refused unconditional capitulation, so the Americans decided to use the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, the weapon of destruction was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and three days later on Nagasaki, which immediately killed tens of thousands of people.
Japan finally capitulated
Surrender was unacceptable to the Japanese, as the country had never been invaded and never lost a war in its history. However, as a result of the atomic bombs and the beginning of the Soviet military operations, on August 14 Emperor Hirohito convinced the government that Japan would accept the capitulation terms. The next day, the emperor announced the Japanese surrender to his people, and many of them heard the emperor’s voice for the first time. On August 28th The Allied invasion of Japan took place, followed by the surrender ceremony on September 2 held the USS Missouri on a battleship, where Japanese government officials signed the Japanese surrender document in front of an Allied delegation led by US General Douglas MacArthur. After the twenty-minute ceremony, the Japanese delegation left the American warship, thus officially ending the Second World War, which claimed tens of millions of lives.
Literature used:
https://arcanum.blog.hu/2018/09/04/a_japan_kapitulacio_a_magyar_sajtoban
Dénes Halmosy: International treaties 1918–1945. Budapest: Economist. and Jogi K., 1983
Beevor, Antony. The Second World War. Gold Book, p. 768. (2013)
Ránki, György. History of the Second World War (in Hungarian). Budapest: Gondolat, p. 653. (1973)
