With the war for Europe over and the U.S.’s Pacific “island hopping” strategy seeing long-range bombers within striking distance of Japan, all that stood between the Allies and and end to World War 2 was taking that tenacious island nation.
In the months leading up to the Allies being on Japan’s doorstep however there was Okinawa. After 80 days of fighting there, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were dead or dying. The bloodshed there was seen by U.S. generals as a precursor to an even more deadly engagement on the Japanese homeland. You know what happens next.
In this, the penultimate installment of the In Focus 20-part series on World War 2 we see the fall of Imperial Japan. It was hastened into being by the dropping of two of the most devastating nuclear weapons ever used in a time of war. [In Focus]
