Japan formally surrendered in September Japanese expansion in East Asia began in with the invasion of Manchuria and continued in with a brutal attack on China. On September 27, , Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, thus entering the military alliance known as the " Axis. Faced with severe shortages of oil and other natural resources and driven by the ambition to displace the United States as the dominant Pacific power, Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia.
The attack severely damaged the American fleet and prevented, at least for the short term, serious American interference with Japanese military operations. In response, the United States declared war on Japan.
Pacific Theater. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan achieved a long series of military successes. Japanese troops also invaded neutral Thailand and pressured its leaders to declare war on the United States and Great Britain. The turning point in the Pacific war came with the American naval victory in the Battle of Midway in June The Japanese fleet sustained heavy losses and was turned back. In August , American forces attacked the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, forcing a costly withdrawal of Japanese forces from the island of Guadalcanal in February Allied forces slowly gained naval and air supremacy in the Pacific, and moved methodically from island to island, conquering them and often sustaining significant casualties.
The Japanese, however, successfully defended their positions on the Chinese mainland until In October , American forces began retaking the Philippines from Japanese troops, who surrendered in August The Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 22, Polish officers and the imprisonment or execution of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD in the Baltic states and eastern Poland annexed by the Red Army.
The mass-bombing of civilian areas, notably the cities of Warsaw, Rotterdam and London, included the aerial targeting of hospitals and fleeing refugees by the German Luftwaffe, along with the bombings of Tokyo and the German cities of Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne by the Western Allies.
These bombings may be considered war crimes. The latter resulted in the destruction of more than cities and the death of more than , German civilians. However, no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed before or during World War II. The German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was responsible for the Holocaust, the killing of approximately 6 million Jews, 2. About 12 million, mostly Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced laborers.
In addition to Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags labor camps led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war POWs and Soviet citizens who were thought to be Nazi supporters. Of the 5. Soviet ex-POWs and repatriated civilians were treated with great suspicion as potential Nazi collaborators, and some were sent to the Gulag upon being checked by the NKVD. Japanese POW camps, many of which were used as labor camps, also had high death rates.
While 37, prisoners from the UK, 28, from the Netherlands, and 14, from the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number of Chinese released was only After , the number reached 10 million. About , of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia, and only 52, were repatriated to Java.
Canada had a similar program. A calculation made by the British Mission to Japan and based on a preliminary analysis of the study of the Joint Medical-Atomic Bomb Investigating Commission gives the following calculated values for per cent mortality at increasing distances from X:. It seems almost certain from the various reports that the greatest total number of deaths were those occurring immediately after the bombing.
The causes of many of the deaths can only be surmised, and of course many persons near the center of explosion suffered fatal injuries from more than one of the bomb effects. The proper order of importance for possible causes of death is: burns, mechanical injury, and gamma radiation. Early estimates by the Japanese are shown in D below:. The Manhattan Engineer District's best available figures are: TABLE A: Estimates of Casualties Hiroshima Nagasaki Pre-raid population , , Dead 66, 39, Injured 69, 25, Total Casualties , 64, The relation of total casualties to distance from X, the center of damage and point directly under the air-burst explosion of the bomb, is of great importance in evaluating the casualty-producing effect of the bombs.
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