The "anti-Finest Hour" of the British electorate.
And thus, the decline of Britain begins.
Once Germany was no longer a threat to Communism, then anti-communist Churchill had to go.
Communists Hail Victory, Promise Support
Americans searching German Homes (at 3am)
This following is a good review. http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch18.htm
I had a friend in Toastmasters who was part of the occupation. He would tell stories of supervising German laborers. He had his Germans trained to be on the look out for American officers and bring him his unloaded gun if they saw one. Said most of the Germans were good people but he would never had done such with the Nazi prisoners.
THE U.S. ARMY IN THE OCCUPATION OF GERMANY
1944-1946
http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/index.htm#contents
Poor Korea, liberated by after-thought
ping
Churchill.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/27/opinion/27iht-edwarn.html
The Ultimatum to Japan Didn’t Detail Consequences
By Denis Warner
Published: July 27, 1995
MELBOURNE— Soon after daylight on July 27, 1945, Tokyo radio monitored the Potsdam Declaration issued in the name of the three major Allied powers —the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union — then engaged in the war against Japan.
In the declaration, the three governments agreed that Japan should be given the opportunity to end the fighting. They called on Tokyo to “proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
Although it was an ultimatum, a little carrot went along with the club. The declaration promised that acceptance would ensure that Japan would neither be enslaved as a race nor destroyed as a nation.
It made no mention of the means that would be used to bring about Japan’s immediate and total destruction. However, the orders had already been issued that would lead to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. These could, and almost certainly would, have been canceled if there had been a positive response from Tokyo. Whether the Potsdam declaration was warning enough will no doubt be debated for centuries to come.
Long before the first nuclear test, the United States had considered using the bomb in a nonmilitary demonstration to persuade the Japanese that the atomic age had arrived and that they had no alternative but togive up.
How to do it was the problem. To announce a time and place over the Japanese homeland was to invite a swarm of kamikaze planes to shoot down the aircraft carrying the demonstration bomb.
Moreover, no one was fully confident at the time of the debate that the atomic weapon would really work. An announced demonstration that failed would hold the United States up to ridicule and reinforce the hand of those in Japan who wanted to continue the war at any cost.
The overriding American consideration was to save the horrendous casualties that every day seemed more certain to result from the invasion of the Japanese home islands scheduled for November 1, 1945.
“The decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese,” said Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, in his book “On Active Service.”
“No explanation can change that fact and I do not wish to gloss over it,” he went on. “But this deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war.”
In hindsight, it seems the Potsdam declaration might have been more specific. In any event, it did not product the desired result.
Unaware that the atomic bomb had been tested successfully in New Mexico, and having abandoned their own efforts to produce a nuclear weapon, the Japanese interpreted the warning from Potsdam to mean that the firebombing would continue until all their cities had been razed.
Such a prospect did not faze the hard-liners in Japan who wanted to continue the war. They were still confident that the fury of the kamikaze attacks when American forces attempted to land would lead to peace negotiations on more acceptable terms.
Nevertheless, to three members of the six-man Supreme War Council in Tokyo, who met immediately to consider the Potsdam declaration, it seemed that at last there was a way out for Japan — peace with as much honor as the nation could reasonably expect. Japan was not being asked to surrender unconditionally; the conditions applied only to its armed forces.
“This is a very favorable chance for Japan,” said Shigenori Togo, the foreign minister, who had opposed the decision to go to war in 1941 and had now emerged as a leading advocate of peace.
He was supported by Kantaro Suzuki, the elderly prime minister who had commanded the Japanese torpedo fleet in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05,and had narrowly escaped death when he was shot as the militarists were launching themselves into the occupation of Manchuria in 1936.
Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister, who had opposed Japan’s alliance with Hitler and the war against the United States, also agreed that Tokyo should seek peace.
More than 300,000 civilians had been killed in the air attacks, a half million more had been wounded and millions were homeless. With the economy in ruins, only disaster could mount on disaster if the war continued.
Despite Stalin’s presence at the Potsdam meeting, and the ominous movement of vast numbers of Russian troops and equipment into the Far East, the other three members of the council believed the Soviet Union might still use its good offices to bring about a more acceptable end to hostilities. If not, then Japanese forces would give the Americans such a bloody nose when they invaded Kyushu that Washington would be happy to call the whole thing off.
What was needed now, they argued, was a resolute show of strength so that neither the Allies nor the Japanese people would be in any doubt about Japan’s determination.
Led by General Korechika Anami, the war minister, the army and navy chiefs of staff effectively won the day. They wanted to lay down their own conditions for ending the war. These included the protection and retention of the Emperor, a token Allied occupation that excluded Tokyo, and Japan’s right to disarm its military forces and to conduct any war crimes trials of its own people that it deemed necessary.
Thus, since the council’s decisions had to be made by consensus, Japan slammed the shutters on the window of opportunity opened by the Potsdam declaration.
At a press conference the next day, a vacillating Prime Minister Suzuki, under pressure from General Anami, said the government did not regard the declaration as an important issue and would pay no attention to the ultimatum.Foreign Minister Togo protested angrily to Mr. Suzuki about his comments. But it was now too late.
Radio Tokyo announced that Japan would continue to fight, while on the other side of the Pacific, American B-29 bombers took off to fly the remaining parts of the bomb to Tinian in the Marianas, where the crew of the Enola Gay was preparing for its fateful mission to Hiroshima.
The writer, who covered the war in the Pacific for Australian and British newspapers, contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.