Victory

Victory. Defeat of Imperial Japan. During 1945, Japan rejected the Allies' demand for unconditional surrender, refused direct talks with American officials, and strengthened defenses against more than 750,000 US troops preparing to invade. While the Japanese delayed, B-29s based in the Marianas bombed Japanese cities resulting in 260,000 fatalities. Estimates of US casualties stemming from an invasion of Kyushu, the smallest of the four Japanese home islands. , were based on the casualties sustained in the Okinawa campaign. Those estimates were as high as 230,000., In April 194, American scientists reported to President Harry Truman that they could produce a weapon capable of mass destruction. Code-named the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb was centered at Oak Ridge where the government had built a mysterious city of 75,000 and companies such as Eastman-Kodak and Union Carbide had built facilities to obtain the uranium and plutonium used in the device. , President Truman decided to use the new weapon to force Japan's quick surrender o. On August 6, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima resulting in at least 78,000 fatalities. Japan did not capitulate. On August 9, another B-29 dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. At least 39,000 more died. On August 14, Emperor Hirohito directed his 70 million subjects to stop fighting. On September 2, 1945, General MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The war was over. The death toll from Tennessee was 5,731 servicemen and women.