WWII: The Last Day [20:41]

YouTube ^ | August 14, 2026 | The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

[SunkenCiv]

Fighting in the Second World War went on until the very end.

WWII: The Last Day | 20:41 
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered | 1.64M subscribers | 14,619 views | August 14, 2026

[SunkenCiv]

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

[SunkenCiv]

81 years.

[SunkenCiv]

V-J Day (Victory over Japan Day) marks the end of World War II, commemorating Japan’s surrender to the Allies. The specific date of observance varies by country due to time zone differences and the distinction between the announcement of surrender and the formal signing of the Instrument of Surrender.

August 15, 1945: Recognized by the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Canada. This date marks the day Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender via radio.

September 2, 1945: The official date recognized in the United States. This day commemorates the formal surrender ceremony held aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, where President Harry S. Truman proclaimed it as V-J Day.

September 3, 1945: Observed in the Philippines (as the surrender of Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita) and China (as Victory of the War of Resistance against Japan).

While VE Day (Victory in Europe Day) on May 8, 1945, ended the war in Europe, V-J Day marked the conclusion of the global conflict. In the United States, it is a significant historical observance but not a federal holiday, though it is a state holiday in Rhode Island.

AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts.

https://search.brave.com/search?q=vj+day

[SunkenCiv]

• The Kyūjō Incident (1945) - The Last 24 Hours of World War II - Full Documentary [01/08/2023]

[Leaning Right]

The Kyūjō incident is important. It shows just how fanatical elements of the Japanese army were. Even two atomic bombs didn’t convince them to surrender.

[21twelve]

“It shows just how fanatical elements of the Japanese army were.”

And the fanatical fighting on Okinawa and other islands showed what we (and the Japanese) would have been up against with a land invasion. Lots of lives on both sides were saved.

I wonder how a prolonged war with Japan would have changed history. Would the Russians have invaded and taken over half of Japan? Would they have sat on the sidelines and waited until neither Japan or the USA had much fight left in them and taken on both of us?

[21twelve]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDlUSeeRu0U

Colorized video of the celebrations in San Diego and San Francisco. Thousands in the street, lots of young sailors mugging for the camera.

[Buttons12]

Busy preparing to defend the homeland with bamboo sticks, while America was busy deploying an atom bomb.

[chajin]

There was a faction in the Japanese leadership that called for the people to be willing to all die, so they could come back as kami (ghosts in context) and so haunt Japan that no conquering army could survive there.

[Gunslingr3]

I wonder how a prolonged war with Japan would have changed history. Would the Russians have invaded and taken over half of Japan?

100% yes the Russians would have invaded Japan (mainland). The Japanese surrender in fact came after Russia declared war on them and invaded their holdings in Manchuria and then the Soviets followed through on plans to invade the Kurile islands (August 18th) after the emperor’s announcement on the 15th. They didn’t draw up and execute the plans in three days.

Read about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria August 9th. They steamrolled the Japanese.

Had Japan fought to the most bitter end, it’s a certainty that Japan would have been divided like postwar Germany. I think it most likely the U.S. wouldn’t have been in Korea at all postwar in the case of a split Japan. No telling what that would have ultimately meant for American involvement in Vietnam, but I have to think it would have made it only less likely.

[Paal Gulli]

I have read it posited that there never in any case would have been a ground invasion of Japan because Curtis LeMay inherited 10,000 bombers from the European theater after VE Day.

Much of Japan’s resiliency to precision bombing was due their decentralization of production of war materiel, which is why LeMay favored fire bombing. He knew that only 5% of bombs dropped in Europe had landed anywhere near the target, but in Japan, even indiscriminately dropped napalm would without fail burn down thousands of wooden structures, which was his rationale for the low-level fire bombing of Tokyo on 9 an 10 March ‘45 (which killed more people than both atom bombs and were the deadliest two days in the history of warfare).

With the bombers from the European campaign, he could have had a thousand planes over Japan, every day, seven days a week, dropping napalm on anything that appeared to be manmade. LeMay literally could have turned the entire island into a pile of ash without putting a single Allied boot on the ground.

And I suspect LeMay had the political clout to implement a plan such as this because in 1948 was was made the second commander of SAC (because the original pick didn’t work out). And he obviously had no compunction about burning civilians to death to bring the war to an end.