Sarah Paine

The whole place went up in flames.

In fact, it got so hot, the canals boiled.

It's an operational solution.

It's unconditional surrender after a protracted war of annihilation that destroys just about every single Japanese sitting, minus a couple that survived.

What broke this down, mate?

And here's what happened.

It's three really bad things that happened in four days.

Talk about a concentration of really bad events from a Japanese point of view happening all at once.

This is the psychological shattering that actually happens to the Japanese.

First, the United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Two days later, the Russians pour 1.5 million people into Manchuria.

the nightmare scenario of the Japanese army.

And they know if this war protracts, the Russians are going to come down through Manchuria, down the Korean Peninsula, onto Hokkaido, and down the home islands.

It'll yield a divided Japan if it goes on for a long time.

And then you have the next day, the United States drops the second atomic bomb with a bluff.

The idea being we're going to keep doing this daily or every other day, except we don't have any more atomic bombs and we cannot build them quickly for a long time.

So that's big bluff.

But the emperor then has had enough and he breaks the deadlock in the cabinet and the cabinet allows the deadlock to be broken the next day.

And then he makes an unprecedented radio broadcast, never had that happened before, to his subjects telling them, game over.

And then the next day, he sends three imperial princes to the Manchurian Chinese and Southern theaters, conveying his orders that game over.