Great Netflix movie: Trinity and Beyond.

Guess before you get to the end: how many nuclear tests did the US explode in the Pacific? The number is unbelievable.

Even then some ubiquitous crazy junior officers of the Japanese Army launched a coup attempt to stop the Emperor’s surrender message from being broadcast. They stormed the imperial palace, killed the general commanding the imperial guard, ransacked the imperial palace looking for the vinyl record of the surrender message that Hirohito had already recorded, and almost assassinated the prime minister. Though some of the senior generals of the Army had given these officers mixed signals upon whether they’d support a coup or not, in the end enough senior leaders decided to follow Hirohito’s order that the coup collapsed and the surrender message was transmitted to the Japanese nation and armed forces.

The termination of the war speech made no direct reference to a surrender of Japan. This created confusion in the minds of many listeners who were not sure if Japan had surrendered or if Hirohito was exhorting them to resist the enemy invasion.

Many elements of the Japanese military were extremely opposed to the idea that Hirohito was going to end the war, as they believed that this was dishonourable. Consequently, as many as one thousand officers attempted to raid the Imperial palace on the evening of August 14, to destroy the recording. The recording was successfully smuggled out of the palace in a laundry basket of women’s underwear and broadcast the following day, although another attempt was made to stop it from being played at the radio station.

In fact the announcement put a humanitarian spin on the whole thing:

Should we continue fighting in the war, it would cause not only the complete Annihilation of our nation, but also the destruction of the human civilization. With this in mind, how should I save billions of our subjects and their posterity, and atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why I ordered the Imperial Government to accept the Joint Declaration.

People don’t know that a third device was en route to Japan, they were a month away from losing another city, it was high noon:

Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, “You got another one of those damn things?” I said, “Yessir.” He said, “Where is it?” I said, “Over in Utah.” He said, “Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.” I said, “Yessir.” I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.

That’s from a Paul Tibbets [the B-29 pilot] interview back in 2007.

You’ve hit it, too, on the atom bomb thing. The key advantage of the atom bomb is not its destructive power per se, but its logistical effectiveness. A three-bomber raid is much easier and cheaper to mount than a thousand-bomber raid.