Eighty years ago, as the German surrender was being celebrated in the streets of London, New York and Paris, the slaughter was continuing elsewhere. Russian troops were still being killed as they fought Nazi holdouts in Silesia, and the war against Japan was very far from a victorious end. It would take a totally unprecedented attack with a totally new weapon to finally bring an end to the bloodshed.
By 8 May 1945, the Americans had only taken a very small part of Japan — the 11.5 square miles of Iwo Jima island — a conquest very expensive in blood: 6,821 US troops were lost and three times as many were seriously injured. Japanese combat was very different from that of the Americans: they would fight to the death with no thought for their own survival, and their tactics were designed to circumvent the vast superiority of American firepower. Victory over the remaining 145,937 square miles of Japan, therefore, would inevitably come at the cost of far more lives than all the allies had worldwide.
The Japanese had no intention of surrendering. They were determined to continue to inflict such heavy casualties that the allies would give up their demand for unconditional surrender and instead accept a negotiated settlement that would assure the continuation of the imperial dynasty — a strategy they called Ketsugō (Operation Decisive). And, with more than three and a half million Japanese troops still on duty in the home islands, not counting those being evacuated from China and Korea, they had the manpower to make it happen. Beside combat forces, which would attack using aircraft and small arms, there was the Civilian Volunteer Corps — all able-bodied men and women armed with rifles and pistols taken from the British, Chinese and Dutch troops defeated earlier in the war. But what really made the Japanese so confident, what made them truly a force to be reckoned with, was their extraordinary stoicism. Uniquely, they really did prefer death to surrender.
But because Ketsugō was not studied properly by foreign historians for decades, a false narrative took hold — one that serves as useful propaganda for the Russians to this day. This asserts that when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Japan was already defeated. Cut off from oil supplies immobilising aircraft and ships, surrender was only days away at most. The only reason the bomb was dropped, in this telling, was to frighten Stalin into accepting US supremacy in Europe in spite of the superiority of the Red Army. The deaths of the men and women of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prolonged suffering of the survivors poisoned by radioactive fallout were most cruelly inflicted for cynical American political purposes.
Every part of this narrative is wrong. In reality, when Hiroshima was bombed, Japan could still count on as many as 10,000 aircraft for kamikaze suicide attacks. Second, nobody in the chain of command, from President Truman right down to Paul Tibbets, the 29-year-old pilot of the B-29 that dropped the “Little Boy” fission bomb, knew anything about immediate radiation or the subsequent radioactive fall-out — apart from the sheer size of the explosion, they had no idea of what they were about to unleash. The reason the bomb was dropped was that US military leaders and President Truman were terrified by the thought of all the Iwo Jima battles it would take to conquer the rest of Japan.
Despite the desperate damage inflicted, the bomb did serve one enduring purpose. For decades after, all of us remembering VE day in May 1945, looking at those pictures of celebrating couples kissing enthusiastically, could be certain of one thing: there would be no more wars in Europe. That certainty was not because of the actions of the United Nations, utterly ineffectual even then, nor the result of some Great Power diplomacy in the Security Council, which only fails when it is most needed. Instead, the very long peace that Europe enjoyed — an unprecedented 77 years without a major war — was “the sturdy child of (nuclear) terror”, as Churchill said, a thing far more reliable than any human wisdom. And this only came when the bomb was dropped two months after the emotional celebrations of VE day.
That was still true on 24 February 2022, when Putin, who had been creeping into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, dramatically escalated and invaded Ukraine outright, aiming straight for its capital, Kiev. For it wasn’t the protective arm of nuclear deterrence that failed on that fateful day and led the Russians to make their reckless move. It was the failure of Nato, and its attendant governments, to reaffirm deterrence in word and deed during the weeks and days of growing tension before the invasion.
“It wasn’t the protective arm of nuclear deterrence that led the Russians to make their reckless move.”
In fact it can be argued that the Biden administration unwittingly triggered the Russian escalation when, at the behest of the always-wrong CIA, which was predicting the swift fall of the city, it evacuated the US diplomatic mission in Kiev. That, in turn, precipitated a mass flight of other Western (and Middle Eastern) diplomats. Even worse, the German government contrived to outdo Biden’s foolish move by declaring that it would not stop the Nord Stream II doubling of gas imports from Russia, even if there was “some incident” in Ukraine. For the German-speaking Putin it was a big green light to invade.
Russia’s “post-modern” invasion did not rely on firepower. It aimed to capture Kiev and conquer the country by giving the impression of strength: the image of that endless double column of armoured vehicles was a powerful one. When that fashionable fantasy collided with the reality of stubborn Ukrainian defenders firing anti-tank rockets at very close range, Nato’s leaders had an opportunity to take immediate action. They could go into an emergency session to demand an end to the fighting, and a prompt return to pre-combat positions.
But no such session happened because only the British and the new Nato members who had long lived under Soviet rule were willing to oppose the Kremlin head-on. The Biden administration was mostly focused on “avoiding escalation” and the French, Germans and Italians as usual loudly demanded a voice in Nato’s decisions while offering only platitudes when it was their turn to speak .
As a result, on VE day 2025, a war still rages while a fragmented alliance struggles to cobble together an effective defence strategy. So as flags are waved in celebration of that long-past victory, men are again dying, and European governments again hoping that the US will step in and do the heavy lifting. It was, after all, an approach that worked well enough in the past, when the US had far larger forces and Russia was everyone’s bad guy.
But today everything has changed. There is an enemy that the Americans are more worried about than Putin: Xi Jinping, the Mussolini of our time, who is determined to show that today’s Chinese are courageous and formidable fighters, unlike their defeated ancestors. And as China openly prepares for war, the US has no choice but to prioritise the “Indo-Pacific”. Perhaps, as Europe finds itself abandoned, or at least insufficiently protected, and unwilling to rearm in earnest, it is now the time to ask: for how long will the nuclear deterrent hold?
