'Inevitable this bomb was going to be used'

World leaders were already planning for life after the war as early as 1939. None at the time could have imagined when, where or how it would end. “What we got in August 1945 was a miraculous deliverance,” historian Richard Frank told more than 600 attendees of the 2015 International Conference on World War II Saturday in New Orleans.

One of human history’s most profound moments came that month when American aviators dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later. “For the World War II generation, it ended their war,” said Conrad Crane, director of historical services at the Army Heritage and Education Center. “For the Cold War generation, it began their war.”

The final months were among the most devastating, deadly and significant in World War II. “It was a fight to the very finish,” said Nick Mueller, president and chief executive officer of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, which produced the fifth annual conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of the war that brought an end to Axis tyranny, claimed the lives of more than 60 million people around the planet and changed the course of human history.

In Europe, the war’s final months revealed perhaps the darkest chapter in that history: the Holocaust. As Allied forces closed in on Germany and its conquests, Nazi concentration camps were discovered, largely abandoned by their guards, and filled with corpses, the dying, and emaciated survivors. “Band of Brothers” screenwriter John Orloff told conference attendees that he had great difficulty during his research for an episode in the acclaimed miniseries’ ninth episode, titled “Why We Fight.” Veterans of the 101st Airborne Division, other than former Maj. Dick Winters, were unwilling to discuss the horrific scene they encountered at the Landsberg German concentration camp in April 1945. “None of them would discuss it,” Orloff said. “They would not say anything about Landsberg.”

Winters, however, was passionate that the story be told. “He told me, ‘I was there. It happened. And everyone needs to know it happened.’”

The Germans continued to take, hold and kill Jewish prisoners in concentration camps into the late spring of 1945, not accepting that the so-called “final solution” would be their own defeat.

In the dusk of the fighting in Europe, top Nazi leaders continued to order military and civilian defenses of Berlin as Soviet tanks and troops closed in around them, entering the city. An estimated 8 million artillery shells barraged Berlin on the morning after Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday. Nine days later, the infamous dictator committed suicide. Two days after that, the Red Army controlled Berlin. “It fell piecemeal, very often street by street,” Polish historian Alexandra Richie told the conference.

Nazi officials, under Hitler’s orders to never surrender, blew up what was left of Berlin’s stores to deny food supplies to the Soviets in those final days. The German army was down to 60 tanks and 45,000 soldiers – including teen-aged “Hitler youth” who had to wear woolen caps to keep their helmets from slipping off their heads – when more than 2 million Soviets poured in. Richie said “a kind of civil war” divided Berliners loyal to the Third Reich from those who saw no point in resisting the inevitable. Millions fled, and a half-million Germans were killed in the battle for Berlin before the Nazi surrender to the western Allies on May 8, 1945.

As Allied victory was being achieved in Europe, top scientists and technicians in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington state were working on a multi-billion-dollar secret weapon that would ultimately bring an end to the fighting in the Pacific and Asia. President Harry Truman, who had only been in office since April 12, 1945, after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, had known little of the atomic bomb or the clandestine mission to build, test and deploy it. And, explained Dr. Michael Neiberg of the U.S. Army War College, “no one knew it was going to work until the test in July 1945.”

Truman was at the Potsdam Conference in Germany – negotiating next steps with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Great Britain’s Clement Atlee – in late July 1945 when he received the message that a plutonium bomb test in the United States was successful. By that time, with two atomic weapons long in the development and making, war-ending use was beyond the point of anyone’s decision, scholars at the conference said. “It was inevitable this bomb was going to be used,” researcher and author Robert Norris told the crowd.

Several realities of the summer of 1945 contributed to that inevitability, according to the speakers. The Japanese and their death-before-defeat policy had made combatants of nearly all adults – men between the ages of 15 and 60 and women between 17 and 40 – who were preparing an all-out defense of the main islands of Japan in the event the Operation Olympic invasion were to be executed. Like the Germans, the Japanese had orders to never surrender. After the first U.S. atomic bomb was unleashed, the Red Army stormed into Manchuria and began routing the Japanese there. Soviet personnel outnumbered the Japanese 2 to 1. More than 5,000 Soviet warplanes were no match for just 50 under Japan’s flag. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese were killed or taken prisoner, combatant and civilian alike. A U.S. invasion on the southern Japan island of Kyushu would have begun with devastating bloodshed, the historians said, and likely would have ended in starvation and many millions more dead if plans to bomb and impose blockades, cutting off food and other supplies to the island, had been fulfilled. And a split between north and south, as would happen in Korea the following decade, was a strong possibility if the Soviets had continued their thrust against Japan.

“There really was no decision to use the bomb,” Crane said. “The only decision that might have been made was a decision not to use it.”

The bombs were dropped. Japan surrendered. And World War II was over.

The big meetings between Allied leaders – Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam – considered postwar consequences at the same time military strategies were devised for the fighting under way. The Soviet Union, following the war, would control eastern Europe and a Germany divided between east and west. The United Nations would be formed to replace the League of Nations that had failed to keep Germany from re-militarizing after World War I. Reparations were to be collected in kind, rather than in treasure, and the Allies would decide how, and if, to rebuild the devastated nations they had defeated and would occupy.

The second half of the century was staged to proceed without fear that Germany, Japan and Italy would ever resume their earlier totalitarian goals. The century also faced a different kind of tension, the knowledge that atomic weapons, more than 70,000 of which would be made in the decades to come, have the capability to bring an end to anything.