Miracle Of Deliverance -
The Case for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Forty years have passed since the first atomic bomb took the lives of 90,000 in Hiroshima on 6 August1945. It was an act of destruction deliberately calculated to be of such unprecedented frightfulness that it would shock the fanatical military rulers of Japan, with their policies of fighting to the last man, into immediate surrender.

In fact, the Japanese powers dismissed the world's first atomic attack as being less effective than earlier fire bomb raids on Tokyo, and they continued, even after a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, to demand that national honour required the entire population to fight on to the death. Miracle of Deliverance tells what a close run thing Japan's surrender was, and how it fell to the Emperor Hirohito, regarded there as a near-deity, to take upon himself alone the decision ‘to accept the unacceptable,’ and surrender.

Whilst this drama was being agonisingly played out in Tokyo, the Allied Supreme Commander in South-east Asia, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, was mounting a huge British invasion of Malaya and assault on Singapore, which had been humiliatingly wrested from the British in 1941. When surrender came the fleet was already at sea, and Mountbatten's D-Day went ahead over beaches so disastrously ill-chosen that the landings were bogged down in chaos even without Japanese resistance. ‘Operation Zipper’ would have been a bloodbath on the scale of Gallipoli in the First World War, had it happened under fire.

The British beach-head was to be followed by a mainly American invasion of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu two months later, and then by a massive Allied invasion of the main island of Honshu in March 1946. Based on the known Japanese resolve to fight to the death in every battle, estimates of Allied casualties in a seizure of Singapore and an invasion of Japan exceeded half a million dead.

The survival of the many Allied fighting men - and the Japanese who must otherwise have died in millions - provides the phrase, miracle of deliverance, taken from Winston Churchill's expression of relief when he heard that an atomic weapon had been successfully developed.

The author, Stephen Harper, is one of thousands of men now in their sixties who have reason to believe that they owe the past forty years of living to the atomic bombs. He was twenty when he took part in the final operations described in the book. He was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express for over twenty years, working in many world capitals. His postwar travels as a correspondent have taken him to Japan and most other countries in the area under their wartime domination.

© Stephen Harper 1985

First published 1985 by Sidgwick and Jackson Limited

ISBN 0 283 99282 4