What event ended World War II?

1 Answer
Mar 7, 2016

With 76.8 million dead (some 3% of the World's 1940 population) and violence across almost the entire planet, it is hard to define a single event that ended the War.

Explanation:

Useful sources: John Keegan's "The Second World War" and my own chronology -- John Thompson, "Spirit over Steel: A Chronology of the Second World War".

The Second World War took 21 years to begin, was fought for six years (even longer in China) and seems to have taken 76.8 million lives.

If you turn the war into a narrative, the turning point seems to have occurred more or less simultaneously between August 1942 and February 1943, with the turning points in November. These would be the campaigns around Stalingrad, at El-Alamein in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

If you are asking what brought Japan to declare its willingness to surrender in mid-August 1945, it is a matter of record that the Japanese cabinet never discussed unconditional surrender (which the Allies demanded of them) until the evening of August 9th. Three things happened that day.

  1. The second atomic bombing at Nagasaki proved the Americans had more of these bombs that could gut a city in seconds. No big dramatic air-raids, just extinction...

  2. The Japanese Army in Manchuria was proving utterly incapable of stopping the Soviet invasion... and the Soviet Army was now a lot more dangerous than the Japanese remembered from their border war in 1939. This meant all of Japan's colonies in China were in danger.

  3. A massive Allied fleet of 21 Aircraft Carriers and 16 Battleships loomed up off the east coast of Honshu (2.1 million tons of warship -- the largest fleet ever assembled) and started hitting targets all up and down the coast. Clearly an invasion was going to come within months if not weeks.

These three conditions together stripped the illusions from the Japanese government that they could get a treaty or cease-fire that would leave them with something to show for their aggression.