selves in the heart of the Japanese Empire by seizing Okinawa, the main island of the Ryukyu chain.
By the early summer of 1945 it was clear that Japan had lost the war. Her cities were being wiped out one by one; her factories were fast being destroyed; her navy and merchant marine were largely gone; her overseas armies, though on the whole intact, were almost isolated from the homeland; and the final collapse of Germany meant that the entire strength of the United States and Great Britain could be turned against Japan. The Americans were obviously poised for an assault upon the home islands of Japan. With the crushing superiority of American arms, and the blind determination of Japanese soldiers and civilians to fight to the death, as they had been trained to do, a terrible massacre of the people and complete destruction of the nation seemed inevitable.
The Japanese people themselves, fatalists by long tradition, and victims of militaristic and nationalistic propaganda which taught them to obey orders without question, stoically watched their homes burned by incendiary raids and their friends and relatives killed. They appeared to be either unaware of their impending doom or else resigned to it. But fortunately for Japan there were men in the government who could comprehend the situation and who preferred the disgrace of defeat to national suicide.
The growing disasters brought on by the war had tended to discredit the leadership of the militarists, and the government had been slowly gravitating again into the hands of the more moderate bureaucrats. These men were spurred into immediate action by the drop-