Army Historian Answers World War II Questions

PeePeePooPooMan42 asks,

How did the allies in World War II decipher German enigma?

As a former military intelligence officer myself, the story

of breaking the Enigma codes is fascinating to me.

I'm Peter Knight from the US Army

Center of Military History.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is World War II Support.

[upbeat music]

AceofSpades629 asks, What is the best statistic

that puts the scale of World War II into perspective?

One statistic

that really stands out is the death toll,

upwards of 85 million people,

including military and civilians perish.

There were 100 million combatants from 50 nations.

In terms of gross domestic product spending,

the United States spent between 35

and 40% annually, Germany 50%.

Here is a question from Quora.

What is the timeline of World War Two?

Most historians

and scholars agree, the proximate start

of the Second World War is Hitler's invasion

of Poland on September 1st, 1939,

because at that point,

Hitler's invasion causes Great Britain

and France to declare war on Germany

because they have guaranteed the security of Poland.

Our next point will come in 1941

when the Soviet Union is invaded by Hitler.

Russia had initially signed a non-aggression pact

with Hitler, and they agreed to divide Poland

between them when Hitler invaded in September,

however, Hitler turns the tables on Joseph Stalin

and invades the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

This brings us to our third turning point,

the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943.

This is a battle for control of the Atlantic Sea lanes

that enable the United States

to send war material across the Atlantic

to the aid of Russia and Britain.

Unless they can secure those sea lanes,

that equipment will be taken out

and the German U-boats run roughshod,

sinking millions of tons of Allied shipping.

Our next point would be the D-Day landings

on June the sixth, 1944, the allies established a beachhead

and a foothold on the continent of Europe

and open up a crucial second front

against Hitler's Nazi forces.

Our next major point are the two atomic bombings

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August the sixth

and the ninth 1945, Emperor Hirohito

knows it's only a matter of time

and he gives a radio address.

This is the first time that many

of his subjects in Japan have ever heard his voice,

and he asks them to endure the unendurable

and submit to the unconditional surrender

to the allied powers, which brings us to our final point.

September 2nd, 1945, the Japanese sign the instrument

of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay

and World War II is brought to an end.

HHT_Lucas asks,

Y'all ever think about how the Nazis were on meth

like all the time?

Nazi soldiers did indeed

get methamphetamines distributed to them.

The idea was that these very powerful drugs

would allow them to stay awake for longer periods of time,

would enhance their mental alertness,

their aggressiveness, essentially enable them

to succeed and win in combat.

But there were some significant side effects,

extreme exhaustion and hallucinations.

That being said, it wasn't just the troops

that were getting drugs.

Hitler received all kinds of opioid injections, oxycodone,

cocaine that were used to help him cope

and get through his day.

On the allied side, GIs and and other allied troops

got what were called Go pills,

Benzedrine, which was an amphetamine, not a methamphetamine.

So these are less powerful

and less potent than the pills the Germans were taking,

and most of the time, Benzedrine was used by allied pilots

that were on these very long bombing run missions,

just to stay awake.

Nobodygrotesque asks,

What are some World War II movies

that are the most historically accurate

that one can learn from?

the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan

its opening sequence

of the troop landings on Omaha Beach on D-Day

are some of the most realistic depictions I've ever seen,

and they're based largely on soldier accounts.

There's a moment where you'll see soldiers disembarking

from the landing craft and they'll immediately

be submerged in the water.

That's very true to life

because as the landing craft approached the beaches,

some of the parts of the beach

had received some early naval gunfire

and there were craters

and they're stepping off into water

that is over their heads.

So some of these soldiers

who are immediately immersed in the water

and sinking like a stone, they're panicking

and they're getting shot at it the same time,

and some of these unfortunate soldiers

will drown in the process.

Another movie is The Longest Day based on the book

by Cornelius Ryan that shows a lot of the D-Day activities.

For example, the use of dummy paratroopers,

these little straw men that they dressed up

to look like soldiers

and they'd throw them out of the aircraft

to confuse the German forces

as to where the airborne divisions were going to land.

The German term for the dummy was gummipoopen,

and you hear them talking about this over the radio

and they're just ranting about it.

[speaking in foreign language]

It's somewhat humorous in that context.

Kyle Lindsey has a question Ever heard

of the Ghost Army in World War II?

It's one of those wild true tales

that sounds like a Hollywood script, but actually happened.

The name of the unit

is the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops Unit.

This unit's mission is to create the illusion

of military forces in different places

through the use of inflatable tanks,

inflatable troop carrying ships,

fake weaponry, fake radio transmission traffic,

all for the purpose of deceiving

the Axis powers into thinking

that certain troop formations might be larger

than they actually were,

or in the case of the preparation

for Operation Overlord, D-Day,

creating an entire fictional first US army group

allegedly led by General George S. Patton

that would make a landing at the Pas de Calais

as opposed to Normandy

and selling the Germans on that fake plan.

AnniElocin writes, I still don't understand.

Why would Japan bomb Pearl Harbor?

One of the biggest reasons why Japan

decides that they have to attack the US Pacific fleet

is because of an oil embargo

President Franklin Roosevelt imposed upon Japan.

Pearl Harbor is located on the island of Oahu.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,

chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy

believes that they must strike

and cripple the US Pacific fleet

in order to allow Japan the freedom

to embark on their military campaigns

to conquer the Dutch East Indies

and British Malaya over here

that contain the natural resources, oil

and rubber that the Japanese absolutely need

to sustain their war machine and their industrial economy.

If we look at where Japan is, the Philippine Islands

is between the Japanese home islands

and those desired targets.

The United States controls the Philippine Islands

and they will be attacked within nine hours

after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese will attack Pearl Harbor

on Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941.

They will succeed in crippling several of the battleships,

especially the USS Arizona

that will carry over 2000 soldiers to their death,

and it does do a lot to set back the US Pacific fleet,

but it does not succeed in destroying it.

Japan missed our oil and fuel refineries

and our big dry dock facilities that will enable us

to continue to fuel and supply our fleet and repair it

and recover from the loss.

@MatchlessMine asks,

When did Hitler declare war on the US?

Adolf Hitler declares war on the United States

on December 11th, 1941, a mere four days

after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.

Sipwell asks How effective were German U-boats

in World War II?

From the start in 1939, easily through most of 1942,

German U-boats successfully sank over six million tons

of allied shipping.

You're sinking allied shipping

faster than the allies can build the ships.

Some of those sinkings occur within sight

of the US coastline.

The biggest single factor

that turns the tables on the German U-boats

is the cracking of the German enigma codes.

The cracking of the enigma codes allows the allies

better success in locating the U-boats and destroying them.

This is huge because with the German U-boat threat negated,

this enables the allied forces to move enough men

and material, planes, vehicles, weapons over to England

to be able to stage for the invasion of Western Europe.

PeePeePooPooMan42 asks,

How did the allies in World War II decipher German enigma

if there were millions of possibilities for letters

and it was being changed every day?

I absolutely love this question.

As a former military intelligence officer myself,

the story of breaking the enigma codes

is fascinating to me.

The allies are able to crack the German enigma

due to a number of different factors.

Polish cryptanalysts

and mathematicians were able

to reconstruct the German enigma machine

and smuggle a version of it out of Poland

just as the Germans were invading

in September, 1939, that copy of Enigma

was given to the British.

The British then take it

and put it in the hands of their cryptanalysts

working out of Bletchley Park

and those cryptanalysts partner

with American mathematicians and cryptanalysts

and one in particular by the name of Alan Turing.

He is able to invent an electro mechanical machine

that is able to compute the different combinations

that the enigma machine can generate

and then they're able to crack the enigma codes

because of the human frailties of the system.

Those who would be creating enigma traffic

would use certain phrases the same way each day

and looking for those same phrases or messages

or plain text, which we refer to as cribs,

helped the code breakers be able to determine

what the enigma machine settings would be.

Most experts will estimate the cracking

of enigma alone shorten the war

anywhere between two and four years.

Here's a question from World War II Subreddit.

How far back does the chain of events go

to lead to World War II?

World War II has its roots in the First World War

and the Treaty of Versailles,

Germany is forced to pay crippling reparations

to demilitarize and accept full responsibility

for the First World War.

This, combined with the Great Depression

absolutely cripples the German economy

and the German people are looking

for a hope, a way out of this.

Adolf Hitler provides that

by promising to remilitarize Germany,

to revive the German economy

and its war machine for the purposes

of territorial expansion.

In the meantime,

Japan embarks upon imperial expansion,

invading China in 1931.

These are the chain of events that set things in motion.

A question from the Ask Historian Subreddit is,

Were there any nations totally unaffected by World War II?

The short answer to that question is no.

Although there are 14 nations

that maintained neutrality status

throughout the entirety of the Second World War.

Among those 14 were nations like Sweden, Switzerland,

Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ireland,

small little states like Lichtenstein and the Vatican City,

and they would help either side as it suited their purposes.

This map, although it's in Russian,

certainly shows you the battle lines

and movements of large troop formations across the globe

over the course of the Second World War.

And as you can see, the war leaves basically

no part of the planet unscathed.

Here you can see a lot of the action in Europe.

You look in the Pacific,

it's a much more spread out, wide area,

different island chains,

but then India of course is part of the British empire,

and so Britain is going to fight to protect that

and the China Burma India area is referred to

as a China Burma India theater

where the American Commander Vinegar Joe Stilwell

works to advance allied interests

and defeat Japanese forces in this area.

So as you can see,

between the European Theater of Operations

and the Pacific Theater of Operations,

this is truly a global conflict.

RippinDankBonks wants to know What was the point

of the invasion of Normandy from a tactical standpoint?

The invasion of Normandy

from a tactical standpoint probably doesn't make

a lot of sense to the average viewer

when you have to fight up over the beach

against elevated German positions in concrete pill boxes,

it seems like an impossible task,

but you have to remember,

you can't just airdrop armored divisions

from planes onto the ground in Europe,

there are German armored forces

already on the continent.

They have to create a beachhead.

The Normandy beachhead is the ideal place for the allies

to strike because it is the weakest point

of the Atlantic wall defenses

and it has the best beach front area

to make their amphibious assault

onto the continent of Europe.

This picture is taken just after D-Day.

Now they're gonna begin

to pump their logistics up onto the European continent.

The balloons that you see are designed

to be an impediment to enemy aircraft.

They have cables there

that would entangle the aircraft if they were to try

to fly a bombing run or a strafing run along the beach.

DougSaysHowdy03 asks,

What is your favorite war tactic that was used

or developed in World War II?

One of my favorites is hedgerow busting,

as allied forces were bogged down in the hedgerow country

in Normandy, the hedgerows are these large

earthen embankments

that mark the property boundaries of farmers' fields.

The Germans used these earthen berms as defensive lines

that they would hide behind

and then place their crew serve weapons

and wreak havoc on any allied troops

that were coming across the fields.

The allies had to find a way

to quickly get across the hedgerow country.

They take some of these steel beams that were used

to make the hedgehogs, the tetrahedron shaped obstacles

that you see on the landing beaches on D-Day,

they cut some of those with acetylene torches

and welded them to the front of their Sherman tanks,

and then they used that protrusion

to bust through the earthern berm of the hedgerow,

and this was highly effective so they could spearhead

with the tanks and then the infantry

could follow on through,

and that was what they used to help bust out

of the hedgerow country

where they would launch Operation Cobra

and Patton's third army would start

to sweep across the European continent.

Ironside asks, Reading up on World War II

for the first time, the axis powers versus the allies ey,

who named them, a damn fan fiction writer.

The name Axis Powers is actually coined

by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who referred

to his relationship to Nazi Germany

as forming an axis around which the rest

of the European nations would rally around.

The term allies is actually a holdover from World War I

because that is how the triple ante powers Russia,

Great Britain, France referred to themselves.

The allies are united out of necessity

to keep one another in the war to be able

to sustain their ability to wage the war.

For the axis powers,

their shared interest is territorial expansion,

but each of them are not necessarily

so invested in helping one another

unless it's really necessary.

You're not gonna find German troops fighting in the Pacific,

for example, and the level of cooperation

of the political leadership is much greater

on the allied side than you will find on the axis side.

Mussolini often becomes more of a puppet

of Hitler than anything else.

NFTCryptoGod asks, What is the Blitzkrieg?

Blitzkrieg is a term that western journalists like to apply

to the German approach to offensive operations.

The better term is or maneuver warfare,

and the Germans use this tactic which involves speed

and the combination of infantry,

artillery, armor and close air support

to attack the enemy in their weakest positions,

to allow them to bypass enemy strong points

and then surround the enemy and destroy them.

German forces could cover hundreds of miles

of territory in a matter of a few hours.

Opponents could not respond with a coherent defense in time.

in a matter of weeks, they will overrun France

and force the British forces to evacuate

from the continent of Europe through Dunkirk.

DeniseViolaplay asks, Wow,

I never knew about the World War II Bat Bomb project.

In the New Mexico desert

where the Manhattan Project is underway at Los Alamos

trying to develop the atomic bomb,

there was also the idea

that we could use bats to deliver incendiary devices

against Japanese villages whose buildings

were made largely of paper and wood.

You would freeze the bats

and then place the incendiary napalm containing devices

to the chest of the bats

and place them in canisters

that could then be parachuted down onto enemy soil.

And then the bats,

once they were released from their canisters,

would take refuge in the various Japanese building

structures and then the incendiary device would go off.

They tested this in New Mexico

and they ended up burning down other structures

rather unintentionally, and I think

they thought better the idea

because once you release the bats,

you can't get them to stop,

after that it's really out of your hands.

Tripster asks, Why was Iwo Jima

so important to the war effort?

It's just a naked eight mile square rock in the Pacific.

Iwo Jima is certainly more significant than that.

In 1945,

the allied forces have captured the Mariana Islands.

Those islands will allow B29 long range bombers

to range the Japanese home islands.

Iwo Jima lies halfway between the Mariana Islands

and the Japanese home islands,

and the Japanese had an early warning radar system

deployed on Iwo Jima that needed to be knocked out

to enable those bombing runs from the Mariani

to be successful, one of the most famous pictures

in all of history is an associated press photo

that captures US Marines raising the flag

atop Mount Suribachi

the highest elevation on the island of Iwo Jima.

What's interesting about this

is this is the second flag raising.

There was an earlier flag raising,

but then they had to continue fighting

against Japanese that were still resisting

and still, the island of Iwo Jima was not completely secured

until a couple of weeks later

after five weeks of brutal fighting.

SouthsideTilly asks,

Please tell me about the night witches.

The Night Witches were the 588 night bombing regiment

of the Soviet Red Air Force.

This was an all female unit

and does as many as 23,000 missions

and they used these little wooden biplanes.

The speeds of these planes were so slow.

German fighter planes were too fast to even try

to maneuver against these more primitive planes

and these planes would basically throttle down

their engines when they were about to drop their ordinance

and when they did so, they made this whooshing sound

and that's what made the Germans

name these all female pilot squadron.

[speaking in foreign language]

Or Knight Witches.

Their leader was one of the first, actually the first

to receive a state funeral,

having earned the status of hero of the Soviet Union,

her plane crashed in the Battle of Stalingrad.

Here's a question from the Explain Like I'm Five Subreddit,

Why is it Germany, Italy

and Japan allied despite all believing themselves

to be the superior races?

The real reason why these countries ally together

is shared interest in territorial expansion.

For Germany, its Hitler's concept of, living space

for the German peoples

and trying to unite those parts of Europe

that are predominantly German.

For Italy, it's expanding into Africa,

namely Ethiopia, for Japan,

the invasion of China in 1931

and expanding in through Manchuria.

With regard to their superiority of their respective races,

I think they all held that to themselves

and perhaps that was a bit of division between them

as well because they're never as close of an alliance

as the allies will be.

Our next question is from Quora.

Before GPS, how did soldiers in combat

accurately know their location

on the battlefield when they called in close air support?

For soldiers to understand their location

and a target's location, they have to use

the good old fashioned map

and magnetic lensatic compass, I have one here.

This is standard US GI issued magnetic compass.

Soldiers would have to take a known point

on the terrain, shoot an azimuth to it,

and then do the same with some other points

and then basically triangulate their positions

and confirm their position on the ground.

By the way, just an interesting side note

as we're talking about things like the compass

that are a part of a standard GI's equipment kit,

the American GIs would often wear identification bracelets.

They didn't have dog tags necessarily at that time.

This particular soldier, Raymond Toinbee,

served in the 36th Infantry Division in Italy.

Okay, next question.

Innergameofdenthemen asks,

What did Churchill actually do in World War II?

Sir Winston Churchill is the prime minister of Great Britain

and his relationship with US President

Franklin Roosevelt is absolutely essential

to cementing allied war strategy

to allow the allies to prevail.

He was a hard drinker and incessant smoker.

He actually had a pension for liking to walk

around naked in his household

and he even did so at the White House

when he was visiting there one time.

His favorite outlet was painting.

He actually had his own painting studio

at his home in Chartwell.

Winston Churchill is an inspiration to the British people.

His people were able to look to him

and he provided them a beacon of hope

on which to focus.

In late 1940 and 41,

as the Germans are bombing London, Churchill is a steady,

calm voice to the British people, telling them

that we will continue to resist

and that we will never surrender to Nazi tyranny.

Here's another one from the Ask Historian Subreddit,

In the famous scene from the movie Dar Untergang,

and here they're actually referring to the movie Downfall.

Hitler orders all of his generals

to leave the room except Keitel, Jodl, Krebs and Burgdorf.

Who were they

and why were they different or more important?

So the movie Downfall depicts the final days

for Adolf Hitler as he's hunkered down in the Führer Bunker

in Berlin as the Soviet red army closes in

on the German capital

and Hitler is forced to face the reality

that his last ditch efforts

to defend the German capital are amounting to nothing.

He dismisses most of the officers in the room

and sticks only with his very close inner circle.

Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of staff

of the German high command.

Alfred Jodl is the chief operations officer

of the German.

Hans Krebs is the chief of staff

for the German high headquarters

and Burgdorf is Hitler's Agitant general.

This is his inner circle,

along with his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels,

and they're the ones that remain in the room

and he goes into this long tirade, berating his generals,

calling them cowards, but it's really just a raging rant

after which he admits that the war is lost.

That fateful meeting takes place on the 22nd of April, 1945

as the Red Army is closing in on Berlin

and the deterioration is just accelerating.

Hitler is thinking in his own mind that he's a dead man

and now he's trying to figure out, well, if I'm gonna die,

I think I wanna die on my own terms.

He looks at what happens to Benito Mussolini

who is hung and his body left on display

in Milan on April 28th, 1945,

to be humiliated

and desecrated by Italian partisans in his country.

He decides that it's better for him

to take his own life, which he does.

He takes a pistol and shoots himself in the head.

He leaves instructions to take his body and burn it.

However, when the Soviets take Berlin,

they go into the Führer bunker,

they actually find some dental remains

and they're able to positively identify Hitler

from his dental records and confirm that he's dead,

though they don't make that fact known

to the rest of the world.

Here's another one.

What do you think was the turning point

of World War II?

One of the big turning points is Hitler's decision

to invade the Soviet Union.

He's banking on his ability having overrun Western Europe,

that he can conquer the Soviet Union

before the British, French

and the Americans amass a force against him.

The turning point comes at the battle of Stalingrad.

The entire German sixth army is surrounded in Stalingrad

and forced to surrender.

220,000 German troops,

91,000 will survive to surrender to Soviet forces.

At that point, Germany's momentum

on the eastern front is done.

They will now go on the defensive

and will remain on the defensive

for the duration of the war.

Nealbrownfan69 asks

and I quote, US education is dog [beep].

Why we never talk

about how we hit North Africa first in World War II?

This is a matter of strategy, in 1942,

the Americans are all for going immediately

for the cross channel invasion into Northern Europe.

In order to facilitate a cross channel invasion

into Northern Europe,

you have to have enough water transport

to put your troops and all of your material on the ground.

They did not have enough landing craft

to be able to accomplish that feat.

What they decided was the American troops

have to commit somewhere

so that they can get some combat experience on the ground

'cause they haven't really fought since World War I.

That is why we do the torch landings in 1942

to land in North Africa

and trap Rommel's army

between the British eighth Army under Montgomery

coming out of Egypt and the American forces

coming in through Morocco and Algiers.

Mike Miller wants to know, Patton was a great general,

but do you think he would be good

as the top general of an army?

He was a little crazy laugh out loud,

which is what made him interesting.

George S. Patton was certainly one

of the most talented generals that the Americans had.

He was a fighting general.

Taylor made to command an armored division,

an armored corps, and an army in combat,

and he does all of those things in World War II.

He was not the diplomat that Dwight Eisenhower was.

I don't know that he would've been a great supreme commander

in terms of working with the allied partners.

Patton was very outspoken, very passionate

and very pragmatic,

and also a bit of a prima donna

when it came to ensuring the success

of his own campaigns

and getting his name in the headlines a bit.

He had a bit of an ego there,

but he had a dogged determination

in combat, his exploits with the third US army

during the Battle of the Bulge where he comes

to the liberation of Bastogne,

covering many miles in just under 72 hours

and attacking the Germans, rescuing the 101st

that was encircled there.

It's one of the most tremendous feats

of armed combat in American and world history.

Mad_Season_1994 asks,

How much did the German population know

about the concentration camps during World War II?

How much did the Americans and other allies know?

German knowledge of the concentration camps varies

depending on their proximity to the camps

and their involvement in the operations of the camps.

While folks who lived in

or near the concentration camps probably knew of them

and had some idea of what was going on in there,

whether or not they were aware of the methods

of mass murder is up for debate.

When did senior leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt

find out about the camps?

They have knowledge of the camps as early as 1942

and then they have knowledge of the Zyklon B gas chambers

and the extermination method there in 1944.

Senior leaders like Eisenhower

and Patton actually make it a point

to take the local German citizenry

and make them walk through the camps,

such that Germany can never deny

what was taking place there.

The evidence of the Holocaust

and the treatment of the Jewish prisoners is irrefutable.

There are photographs, there is documented film footage

of liberating these camps,

seeing the emaciated bodies of the deceased

and the emaciated bodies of those still living

and seeing some of these prisoners

in striped pajama type outfits.

You just look at them

and you can see that they have been starving.

So for the American soldiers

that are rolling up on these camps

and liberating them, the shock effect is palpable.

The allied leadership is very adamant

that this be recorded such that future generations

could never dispute the fact.

Petite-Acorn asks,

Why was Eisenhower chosen

over other more experienced generals

as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe?

Dwight David Eisenhower never commanded

a large combat formation.

People wonder, well, why would we choose this man

as opposed to others who are much more seasoned,

have more battlefield experience

or leading larger size units?

Dwight Eisenhower was selected for this position

by General George C. Marshall,

the US Army's chief of staff.

In the years just prior to the outbreak of war

for the United States, Eisenhower is instrumental

in helping to craft the war plans

and war strategy of the United States

in the event that it were to enter the war,

he had the personality

and the diplomatic skills to be able to work

with both politicians

and his fellow general officers of the Allied Coalition.

He began as the commander

of American forces in the European Theater of Operations.

He's appointed such in 1942,

just ahead of Operation Torch, the landings in North Africa.

A year later, he's named the Supreme commander

of the Allied Expeditionary Force

that will make the cross channel invasion into Europe.

A question from Quora.

Was America's mainland bombed or attacked in World War II?

The answer is yes.

There was a Japanese sub

that lobbed some shells against a fort in Oregon

and against an oil field in Santa Barbara, California

and there were some 900 fuku 90 balloons

that Japan launched armed with incendiary explosive devices

that were meant to explode on North American US soil.

About 100 of those actually made it to US soil.

I believe that there were six Americans

and there were some women and children in that six

that were killed in the vicinity of Bly, Oregon

as a result of those balloons.

But that was the extent of the damage.

JohnBlackburn75 asked,

Did the Adam bomb really force surrender

of Japan or would it have happened anyway?

How many lives, if any, did the bomb save

on the US side and the Japanese side?

You have to remember

that the Japanese home islands had been firebombed

in the months preceding the two atomic bombs,

and still Japan had not yet surrendered.

The firebombing campaign

and especially the Tokyo firebombing alone

killed over 100,000 Japanese

'cause it created such a firestorm

that sucked up all the ambient oxygen and boiled the rivers.

It just absolutely obliterated everything.

The death toll and the destruction toll

exceeded even the two atomic bombs,

but still, Japanese resolve held firm.

And so I think it was the shock effect

of the atomic bombs being such a terrible

and powerful weapon, plus the knowledge

that the Soviet Union was going to enter the war now,

that's what's gonna break their back.

The planned invasion

of the Japanese home islands

was referred to as Operation Downfall.

Estimated casualties

for the allies were over one million, estimated casualties

for the Japanese population would be over 10 million.

And so it made the decision

for Harry Truman very pragmatic

in that he authorized the dropping of both atomic bombs

to avoid the horrific casualties that would come

with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

So those are all the questions for today,

and they were good ones.

Thanks for watching World War II Support.

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