233. Shocks and surprises at the war’s end

Following the German surrender in May 1945, the ‘Big Three’ – the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain – met for the third and last time in conference. And this time, appropriately, they met on German territory, in Potsdam near Berlin. It was Soviet-held territory too, perhaps significant given the power with which the Soviet Union was emerging from the war.

Indeed, its delegation was the only one to keep the same leader, Joseph Stalin, at its head, as he had been at Tehran and Yalta.

Roosevelt had died.

As for the British, after nearly ten years without a general election, they finally held one, and to general surprise, the victorious war Prime Minister Churchill was defeated by his deputy, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader. Attlee would form the first ever Labour government with a parliamentary majority. He would also take over from Churchill as leader of the British delegation at Potsdam.

The conference took place under the shadow of the first successful test of a nuclear device, the day before the conference started. The US was now a nuclear power. That gave it quite an edge in international power politics.

Although the device had been designed to use against Nazi Germany, since only Japan was left in the war, and given how high the casualties would be in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the Americans dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. To make sure the message had got through, they dropped another on Nagasaki on the 9th. The Japanese surrendered on the 15th, the only concession to their sensibilities being that the Emperor was not deposed.

When the final Japanese surrender document was signed on 2 September, World War 2 was at last over.

Illustration: The A-bomb dome in Hiroshima, Japan. Public Domain

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License