p The Soviet victory over Germany had a decisive bearing on the strategic situation in the Pacific. Germany had massed all her resources against the USSR, especially after Stalingrad, which enabled the US and British commands, who were not involved in any active engagement in Europe, to concentrate part of their forces in the Pacific and, from November 1943 onward, to assume the offensive. Throughout 1942 and 1943 253 the United States had a mere 13 divisions in that theatre, complemented by 6 Australian divisions and an insignificant British force. That speaks of the scale of the operations, listless and half-hearted, amounting, in effect, to but the one Guadalcanal Operation. Not until September 1943 did US troops mount an action in New Guinea, dragging it out to September 1944. Simultaneously, engagements were fought to oust the Japanese from the Gilbert and Marshall islands. The lull on the Burma front lasted until January 1944, when the British took the offensive with extremely limited resources. .

p In autumn 1944 operations began on a grander scale, when the Americans landed in the Philippines. The Japanese navy attempted an attack on US naval forces covering the operation, but was badly defeated, losing four battleships, three aircraft carriers, three light carriers, one carrier escort, 14 cruisers, 32 destroyers and n submarines. US losses amounted to one light aircraft carrier, three carrier escorts, six destroyers, three destroyer escorts, one transport and seven submarines.  [253•1  The naval victory enabled the United States to complete the Philippines operation at the end of April 1945, whereupon an Anglo-American operation was launched in Indonesia. There, as in the Philippines, the Allied action was distinctly colonialist in complexion.

p An offensive by American, British and Chinese troops, supported by local guerrillas, unfolded in Burma, with the Japanese accepting defeat in May-August 1945.

p The last of the operations in the Pacific war theatre was the US landing on Okinawa in the morning of April i, 1945, under covering fire from ten battleships, thirteen cruisers and 23 destroyers.  [253•2  The Japanese garrison of 72,000 resisted the 45o,ooo-strong landing force until June 21.  [253•3  On capturing the island, the United States virtually ceased hostilities against Japan, excluding air assaults on Japanese cities.

p In autumn 1944 the bombing of Japan became methodical. Out of Japan’s 206 large cities as many as 81 were substantially damaged. Forty-nine per cent of the buildings in Tokyo, Kawasaki and Yokohama were destroyed, 32.6 per cent in Kobe and Osaka and 31 per cent in Nagoya (those are six 254 biggest Japanese cities). Nearly three-quarters of the damage was to dwellings, schools and hospitals. Meanwhile, factories, transport facilities and railways suffered insignificantly.  [254•1  More than four million homeless in the bombed Japanese capital and nearly 22 million in the rest of the country camped among the rubble or migrated to the country.  [254•2 

p Nothing the allies did affected Japan’s military backbencher land army, which at the beginning of 1945 was an effective’force of 4,100,000 men, with another 1,265,000 in the navy.  [254•3  So long as the Japanese Government had this force it would obviously not surrender. The decisive battles were still ahead. The Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff drew up Plan Olympic, scheduling the seaborne invasion of Kyushu for November 1945, with action developing under Plan Coronet in February of the following year. The war was not expected to end before 1947.

p Military and political leaders in the United States and Britain were not certain, however, that their troops would grind down the Japanese will to resist even within those liberal terms. Churchill said as much quite frankly. "These operations,” he said, "involved an effort not surpassed in Europe, and no one could measure the cost in British and American life and treasure they would require. Still less could it be known how long the stamping out of the resistance of Japan in many territories she had conquered, and especially in her homeland, would last."  [254•4 

p So much the greater was the importance the US and British ruling element attached to the Soviet Union’s entering the war in the Pacific. At Big Three summit conferences the subject was raised with much insistence. There was, of course, another side to it: reactionary groups in the USA,and Britain did not expect a quick Soviet victory and hoped a war of attrition would sap the strength of the USSR, enabling them to re-establish their influence in Asia, as well as in Europe. That was what lay behind the strange US leisureliness after capturing Okinawa, while the bombing of residential quarters in the Japanese cities from air and sea was redoubled in order, 255 as the US military thought, to hammer into the Japanese and other Asian nations a “healthy” respect for US superiority and convince them of the US “predestination” of dominating other lands.

p Not content, the US imperialists weighed various schemes to reduce the impact of the impending Soviet entry into the war against Japan so as to prevent the relation of world forces tipping in favour of the national and social emancipation of the peoples. That was what prompted them to use the newlydeveloped atomic bomb, which, they figured, would face the nations with the dilemma of either being reduced to atomic dust or accepting US diktat.

p The US President ordered the atomic bombs dropped not on military targets, but peaceful citizens. In the epicentre of the bomb released over Hiroshima on August 6 were hostels for children evacuated from Tokyo. This was no pilot’s error: the target, picked in advance, was a large concrete bridge in the immediate proximity of the hostels. The bomb exploded at an altitude of less than 600 metres, destroying 60,000 houses in an area of 14 square kilometres.  [255•1  The same fate befell Nagasaki on August 9. Casualties in Hiroshima totalled over 306,000 out of a population of 430,000 and in Nagasaki nearly 137,000 out of 2oo,ooo.  [255•2  And a quarter of a century later the radiation disease is still reaping a harvest among the survivors.

p The act was a blatant crime against humanity, the guilt for which falls squarely on the US imperialists, who showed a callous disregard for elementary, universally accepted standards of international law and for the customs of war and humane principles. The bombings amounted to a deliberate extermination of civilians. "Hair-raising pictures arise in the memory of staggering devastation,” Japanese authors recall. "Few escaped; people perished in explosions and fires, and from atomic radiation. On March 10, 1945, as many as 100,000 people died in the big US night raid on the eastern section of Tokyo. Those who saw the streets piled high with bodies, who saw Sumida River filled with corpses, will never forget that night."  [255•3 

p The anger that swept the world betokened a moral and political defeat for the US imperialists. Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times military observer, wrote: "The use of the atomic bomb cost us dearly; we are now branded with the mark of the beast."  [256•1 

p An advocate of aggression and a prominent participant in the US Government’s fateful atomic bomb decision, Admiral William D. Leahy, the President’s adviser, said: "In being the first to use it, we have adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages— These new and terrible instruments of uncivilised warfare represent a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man."  [256•2 

p The US ruling element, however, was anything but conscience-stricken. It was thrown into wild jubilation by the lowering clouds of the atomic explosions. The sycophant press averred euphorically the new weapon would bend the world to the will of the United States. It devised elaborate arguments to prove that in the new atomic age the concept of national sovereignty was outdated and the nations were preordained to submit to a world government dominated by the United States.

p The atomic bombs made no immediate military impact on the course of the war. US war historian Morton, for one, holds that neither the Hiroshima nor the Nagasaki tragedies had inclined the Japanese to surrender.  [256•3  Churchill, too, says in his war memoirs: "It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb."  [256•4 

These and other anteceding developments added importance and weight to the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan.