Killing the Rising Sun summary

After the bloody fighting on Peleliu, Americans began to realize that, since Japanese soldiers considered their Emperor to be a divine being, they were willing to fight to the death in his honor.

Japanese soldiers were also fighting for hakkō ichiu, which translates to “eight crown cords under one roof.” This referred to their ultimate goal: to unite all of Asia under Japanese Emperor Hirohito.

After more than 12 years as president and commander in chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt passed away on April 12, 1945. Under extreme pressure to end the war, Roosevelt had been smoking at least one pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day, which likely contributed to the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him.

The task of achieving victory in the Pacific now fell to his vice president, Harry S. Truman. But Truman would soon have a critical tool at his disposal that had remained in its developmental stages during his predecessor’s time: the atomic bomb.

In the early morning hours of July 16, 1945, President Truman was in Potsdam, a small town outside Berlin, Germany. He was there to attend a summit with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Negotiations were underway to bring order to Europe after the chaos of war, but Truman was about to get some important news from back home.

At precisely 5:30 a.m., in a flat stretch of the New Mexico desert known as Jornada del Muerto, the Trinity test was scheduled to begin. J. Robert Oppenheimer had christened the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb with the codename “Trinity.”

Prior to August 6, 1945, Hiroshima had remained untouched by US bombing raids. But since many of the city’s 350,000 residents were soldiers, and the city’s port was one of the Japan’s largest military supply depots, Hiroshima remained a target.

Three days before the scheduled bombing of Hiroshima, B-29 bombers had flown over the city, dropping pamphlets that read, “Civilians, evacuate at once.”

After Hiroshima, the atomic bomb was no longer a secret, and an uneasy mix of fear and celebration began to set in across the Allied nations.

The New York Times expressed what many people were at once worried about: the atomic bomb would become a justifiable new weapon of war, perhaps used by other nations in the future.

Truman didn’t want any more people to die, but a thought hung in his mind: would he have to drop a third atomic bomb on Tokyo before this would end?

While the Japanese culture saw surrender as dishonorable, there was also a fear of criminal punishment among the country’s military leaders, which was also preventing the end of the war.