Military History Quarterly, Autumn 2015

This issue is centered on World War II but there are other topics that are covered that are not related to the war.

In the comments section there is a part called Fatal Fallout. The question asked is how many people involved in the cleanup of Hiroshima and Nagasaki died from the radiation that was still there. The answer is that no one really knows. It would have been a matter of those who later died from cancer and other diseases but how many of those might have been caused by lingering radiation versus how many had nothing to do with the soldier's time in the cities is unanswerable.

One of the articles is On the Ground in Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. It's material from a Japanese physician and what he saw himself when he went into the city and saw what had happened to the people there.

A major article is Why Japan Agreed to Unconditional Surrender. It goes into how the U.S. dealt with coming up with a strategy to get an unconditional surrender from the Japanese government which had never lost a war and which still had a sizable number of military leaders who wanted to carry on with the war.

The article also discusses the planned American invasion of Japan itself. The article also discusses what would have happened if the U.S. had concentrated on destroy Japanese railroads and infrastructures as it had concentrated on destroying cities in general and if that would have helped to shorten the war without the use of the atomic bombs.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page