The Unconditional Surrender of Japan

Abstract

From the first, the war against Japan in the Pacific — as distinct from the South-east Asia Command — was an American war. This was, perhaps, both natural and inevitable. The humiliation of the Pearl Harbor disaster stirred America more deeply than any happening in Europe could possibly have done. Whereas the Allied cause in the West, represented by a beleaguered Britain and a beset Soviet Union, was a source of interest, sympathy and alarm to the eastern seaboard of the United States, it had no hold upon the imagination of the Pacific coast and met with positive hostility from the embattled strongholds of isolation in the Middle West, where in 1940 and 1941 the propaganda of the ‘America First’ movement exercised a powerful influence.