Tension lay on the Imperial Palace over 10 and 11 August. Nobody knew whether the Allies would accept Japan’s counter-offer, and, if they did so, whether the military would abide by the decision to surrender. In the period of ‘Government by assassination’ during the 1930s, young officers from ultra-nationalist sects freely killed politicians who opposed the militarist agenda, and there was no reason to think they would not do so again.

General Anami announced the outcome of the conference at the Imperial Army headquarters on the morning of 10 August. Understandably, the officers were ‘greatly shocked’, particularly because the Emperor’s comments about the failure to prepare fortifications and his pessimism about the ‘final victory’ suggested a loss of faith in the army. Nonetheless, Anami stood by the Emperor and the decision of the Big Six. He made it clear to the officers that anyone who wished to act contrary to the Emperor’s decision would have to do so ‘over my dead body’.1

On the afternoon of 10 August, Hirohito consulted with his former prime ministers on his decision. There was no shortage of them – in the twenty years of his reign, Japan had managed to run through fifteen prime ministers. Five were dead, two by assassination at the hands of ultra-nationalists, but seven were in Tokyo and available to meet with the Emperor.

Of the former prime ministers, none was more influential than Prince Konoe Fumimaro.2 He had held the office from 1937 to 1939, and again from 1940 to 1941. Even outside of the cabinet, he remained one of the most powerful men in the country due to his personal popularity and connections within the government. Coming from the ancient and powerful Fujiwara clan, Konoe’s position entitled him to a seat in the House of Peers, the upper house of the Japanese parliament, or Diet. As a politician he had been independent, affiliated with neither the militaristic nor liberal democratic factions but acceptable to both. He had praised US President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and pushed democratic reforms, such as the expansion of the electoral franchise. He had staunchly opposed war against the Western powers and sought desperately to negotiate with Roosevelt, finally resigning in October 1941 when he saw that the militarists had taken control of the government and war was inevitable. But he had also accepted the Japanese invasion of China, approved the abolition of political parties and their forcible incorporation into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, and coined the slogan Hakkō ichiu – ‘the whole world under one roof’ – used to justify Japanese aggression.

Following his resignation Konoe watched events from the sidelines. Despite the censorship of the Japanese press, it was apparent to him by mid-1943 that Japan was going to lose the war, and that this loss could jeopardise not only the kokutai but the survival of the Chrysanthemum Throne itself. The fall of the royal houses of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary in the wake of defeat in 1917 and 1918 weighed on his mind. Konoe became the centre of a group of politicians – his friend Kido Koichi was among them – pushing to negotiate peace with the Allies. They succeeded in bringing down the government of hardliner Tōjō Hideki following the disastrous Japanese defeat at Saipan in July 1944, but the militarists, with their nihilistic fantasies of an apocalyptic battle to the death, kept the government in a vice. ‘When I think of the madmen leading the present situation, I can’t help but feel weary of life,’ Konoe remarked to his secretary the day before American troops landed on Okinawa.3

Konoe had previously urged the Emperor to seek terms with the Allies at a private meeting in February. He had arrived at the Imperial Palace at 1 pm on 9 August, and had managed to persuade Kido that Japan must accept the Potsdam Declaration. Kido, in turn, had gone to the Emperor.

Most of the former prime ministers Hirohito now consulted agreed with Konoe and supported the Emperor’s decision to accept the declaration. Two, however, had reservations.

One was Tōjō Hideki, who had led Japan into the war against the Western powers, and held office until the fall of Saipan. Even by the standards of the militarists, he was a zealot. An unimaginative, humourless man, Tōjō was the first to admit he owed his success to reliability and a capacity for hard work rather than innate brilliance. He boasted that he had no hobbies outside of his job. He was a lifelong anti-American, the experience of a single train journey across the United States having persuaded him that Americans were ‘soft’ people. The 1924 US law banning Asian immigration hardened his attitudes. He was a fierce critic of Western influence in Japan, from democratic ideas to young couples holding hands in public. Originally a member of the ‘strike north’ school, which favoured expansion at the expense of the Soviet Union, by the late 1930s he had changed his views in favour of forming an alliance with Nazi Germany (which he admired) and striking south. He became known as the enforcer of the Tōseiha (Control Faction), purging the Kwantung Army of officers of the rival Kōdōha (Imperial Way Faction) following the February 26 Incident. In doing so, he earned himself the nickname Kamisori – The Razor.

Tōjō became the face of Japanese militarism in the English-speaking world during the Second World War, although he was not a leader by temperament. His country’s military disasters lessened his influence, but he nonetheless remained a powerful figure, and he now advised the Emperor against accepting disarmament. Japan, he said, was like a shellfish. The military was its shell, and without it the organism inside would die.4 He was joined in this view by General Koiso Kuniaki, his successor. Like Tōjō and Chief of Staff General Umezu, Koiso was a militarist from the Tōseiha faction.

Hirohito listened to all the advice he received, but made no further decision.

In the early hours of the morning on 12 August, the answer finally arrived from Washington in the form of Byrnes’ note, which was also broadcast on American radio at 12.45 am Tokyo time. It was not the response the Japanese government had hoped for. It contained no guarantee of the Emperor’s position, and worse, stated that his authority would be subject to the Allies’ supreme commander. The Japanese translators were so rattled they deliberately mistranslated ‘subject to’ to a term more like ‘circumscribed by’ to make it more palatable.5 Even so, a number of junior officers were enraged by it.

At a meeting of the full cabinet, Suzuki vacillated. Based on the content of Byrnes’ note, he now favoured rejecting the Potsdam Declaration. For this he was castigated by Tōgō Shigenori, and later by Kido. Not only would millions more die, Kido pointed out, but Suzuki was going against the express will of the Emperor. They succeeded, and Suzuki returned to the fold. Admiral Yonai, for his part, argued it would be much better to surrender in response to the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war than to surrender due to civil unrest. And civil unrest could not be avoided indefinitely, particularly now that American bombers were dropping leaflets over Japan outlining the negotiations.

So throughout 13 and 14 August, there was once more deadlock in Tokyo. Posters began to appear in the city bearing the message ‘Kill Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido!’. They were probably the work of fanatical officers who (correctly) guessed Kido was persuading the Emperor to accept the declaration. In the circumstances, Kido moved into the Imperial Palace. The Big Six had a series of fruitless meetings. At one, on the night of 14 August, they got an indication of just how far some of Japan’s military leaders were willing to go. Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō, the ‘father of Kamikaze’, burst into the room and called on them to form a plan to continue the war and take it to the Emperor for his approval. ‘If we are prepared to sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a special attack [Kamikaze] effort, victory will be ours!’ he assured them.6 The US began doubting that Japan would surrender and resumed bombing raids.

But the Emperor himself did not waver. If the Allied response amounted to an acceptance of his offer to surrender subject to the kokutai being preserved, then he was willing to take it. He advised his family of his decision, but also assured them he would continue the war if this condition could not be met.7

A second and final imperial conference to discuss the Byrnes note was held at 11 am on 14 August, Tokyo time, at the same location as the earlier one. Umezu, Toyoda and Anami urged the Emperor to reject the note and continue the war. But he was resigned: ‘I have listened carefully to each of the arguments presented in opposition to the view that Japan should accept the Allied reply as it stands and without further clarification or modification, but my own thoughts have not undergone any change . . . In order that the people may know my decision, I request you to prepare at once an imperial rescript so that I may broadcast to the nation. Finally, I call upon each and every one of you to exert himself to the utmost so that we may meet the trying days which lie ahead.’8

It was an emotional meeting. ‘Tears flowed unceasingly,’ recalled one witness. But it was a final decision. At 2.49 am on 14 August, the first confirmation of the Japanese surrender reached Washington, D.C.

Anami briefly considered taking some sort of extreme action to prevent the reply being sent to Washington, bailing up Umezu in the toilets to sound him out on a plan. But Umezu would not support him. At 3 pm Anami reported the Emperor’s decision to the officers at the Imperial Army headquarters. After some tense discussion, the senior officers coerced each other into signing an agreement not to act contrary to the Emperor’s direction.

But it was far from clear if officers further down the chain of command would also comply, not to mention the millions of soldiers still deployed overseas. Hence the Emperor’s decision to make his broadcast, a plan created by Kido and the Palace household staff. Sometime during 14 August employees from the Japan Broadcasting Corporation attended the Palace and Hirohito delivered the speech into a phonograph.

Kido’s concerns about the military rejecting the surrender were far from unjustified. As soon as Japan’s offer became public on 10 August, a group of fanatical junior officers from the Army General Staff and the Imperial Guards Division began plotting against the government. Coming to the conclusion that loyalty to the Imperial house trumped loyalty to the Emperor, they decided the people of Japan were better off dead than surrendered. On 14 August, they created their final plan. They would overthrow the government, destroy the phonograph of the Emperor’s speech, kill Suzuki, Kido and Hiranuma, and create a new regime to continue the war.

That evening, they went to Anami’s residence to persuade him to join them. They found him writing his will, clearly preparing to commit suicide. He refused to go along with them, but did not take any action to prevent the impending coup. Later that night, he cut open his belly and then his throat, leaving the following cryptic message in his suicide note: ‘Believing firmly that our sacred land shall never perish, I – with my death – humbly apologise to the Emperor for the great crime.’

The rebels managed to win over some other officers and soldiers by claiming they were acting on Anami’s and Umezu’s orders. When two senior officers, Lieutenant General Mori Takeshi and Lieutenant Colonel Shiraishi Michinori, refused to join the rebels they were cut down with swords. Shortly after midnight, the rebels surrounded the Imperial Palace and cut the telephone wires leading to it.

The sources conflict on whether Hirohito was awake and aware of what was happening. He wrote in Shōwa Tennō Dokuhakuroku that he was watching events unfold through the shutters of his window. If so, the scene must have reminded him of the snowy night in February 1936 when officers of the Kōdōha faction attempted to seize control of the government. Bearing banners reading ‘Revere the Emperor – Destroy the Traitors’, the Kōdōha officers had drawn up a hit list of senior public figures whose views were unacceptably liberal and pro-Western. They managed to take control of the Army Ministry and police headquarters, and assassinated the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, and the Inspector-General of Military Education. But they failed to secure the Imperial Palace, and most of their intended targets (including Suzuki) escaped. The army did not move against the rebels, and a stalemate ensued.

Back then, Hirohito had acted decisively, threatening to personally lead the Imperial Guard against the rebels if the army did not stop them. Leaflets were dropped over the rebel-held positions calling on them to surrender. The ordinary soldiers, who had blindly followed the orders of the rebel officers without question, deserted back to the government. The rebellion collapsed and the officers either committed suicide or were captured and executed.

Now, Hirohito had acted decisively again, although as in February 1936, it had taken him some time to come to his decision.

The rebels moved into the Palace and began searching for Kido and the phonograph. They found neither – Kido was hiding in a basement, and the phonograph was subsequently smuggled out of the Palace and back to the offices of the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation in a basket of laundry. In the labyrinthine Palace, the rebels became lost and confused. In the meantime, other groups went to the homes of Suzuki and Hiranuma, intending to kill them. Both were warned and escaped, although the rebels burned down their houses, which had managed to survive American air raids.

Early in the morning of 15 August, hearing that the Eastern District Army was quickly moving against them, the rebels gave up. They took to the streets, trying to broadcast their views, and by midmorning the leaders had committed suicide. By then the news that Japan had surrendered had been broadcast around the world. The Second World War was over.

Hirohito’s speech was broadcast on radio throughout Japan at midday on 15 August, just a few hours after the collapse of the uprising (which came to be known as the Kyūjō incident). It was then picked up, translated, and spread throughout the world. The ‘Jewel Voice Broadcast’, as it is called, might not have had the effect it was intended to. It was written in the classical, literary form of the Japanese language, which most Japanese speakers struggled to understand, and it was made vague on purpose.

‘To our good and loyal subjects,’ the Emperor began, before offering a euphemistic, self-justifying, and at times comically understated explanation of Japan’s situation. As the official English translation of the speech ran:

We have ordered Our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that Our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration. To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations as well as the security and well-being of Our subjects is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by Our Imperial Ancestors and which lies close to Our heart. Indeed, We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement. But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.9

It was necessary to avoid the words ‘defeat’ and ‘surrender’, as to imply that the army and navy had failed was unacceptable. Saying outright that Hirohito’s governments had thrown Japan into an unwinnable war with an alliance of much stronger powers was likewise impossible, as the Emperor identified himself as the one who had declared war on the United States and Britain in the first place. Once the official narrative changed to place the blame on Tōjō and the other militarists for starting the war against the Emperor’s wishes, the ultimate futility of the war was readily accepted in Japan. The reference to the war developing ‘not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’, which comes across as laughable to English speakers, probably had two causes – the heavy editing of the original document and the difficulties of translating classical Japanese into English. Some sources suggest the original line was closer to ‘the war situation gets worse and worse every day’ but that this was edited for being too blunt. The Japanese translators, not being native English speakers, probably missed how absurd the line sounded. Even with the heavy censorship in wartime Japan, ordinary people would have been aware the situation was much worse than ‘not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. John W. Dower gives the line as the war ‘did not turn in Japan’s favour, and trends of the world were not advantageous to us’.10

One of those trends was the ‘new and most cruel bomb’ threatening the ‘total extinction of human civilisation’. Hirohito reiterated Japan’s justification for war, by expressing his ‘deepest sense of regret to Our Allied nations of East Asia, who have consistently cooperated with the Empire towards the emancipation of East Asia’. He assured his subjects that he had been able to protect and safeguard the kokutai, and warned them against emotional outbursts and causing strife (perhaps with that morning’s rebellion in mind). He finished by confirming that his thoughts were with the bereaved families of Japan’s war dead, the wounded, and those who had lost their homes, and he called for unity in the face of hardship.

For Hirohito, the broadcast was the beginning of the revision of his image, both in Japan and overseas. He painted himself as a humanist and a pacifist, who had made the difficult decision to end the war in order to spare the world the horror of further destruction from nuclear weapons. Kido may have had a hand in this; certainly he was one of the authors of the broadcast.

In Japan, the broadcast was received initially with confusion, then with shock and disbelief. When it was announced that the Emperor would be speaking to the nation, many people assumed he would quash the rumours of surrender and make a final appeal to the people to fight to the death. This was what 28-year-old Aihara Yū, a farmer’s wife in a small rural village in Shizuoka prefecture, expected when she was called back from the fields to hear the broadcast. The villagers gathered around the village’s sole radio to listen to the single, state-run radio station.11

Like most of the people listening, she struggled to understand the message. There was a lot of static, the Emperor’s voice was oddly high-pitched and his delivery halting, and he used a great many unfamiliar words and phrases. The villagers looked at each other for any sign of comprehension. Finally, an educated man from Tokyo, having sought refuge in the village from the bombing raids, said simply, ‘This means that Japan has lost.’

Aihara’s first thought was for her husband, who had been conscripted into the army and sent to Manchuria. All night, she prayed that he would not commit suicide but would instead return to her. But it was very difficult to get any news from Soviet-occupied areas, and she heard nothing for three years. Then she learned that he had been killed in battle with the Red Army five days before the surrender.

For people who had been told to die ‘like shattered jewels’, the news of surrender was difficult to understand. Army propaganda emphasised the brutality of the Allied soldiers and insisted again and again that the people of Japan would be better off dead than falling alive into their hands. During the Battle of Okinawa some 150,000 of the island’s 300,000 civilians had died, used as human shields by the Japanese Army or pressured to commit suicide. In extreme cases, par-ents killed their children, or children killed their parents. At Tokashiki Island near Okinawa, Kinjō Shigeaki recalled how he and his brother, both teenagers, acted when they knew the fall of the island was imminent:

The first one we killed was the person who had given us life, our own mother. It was chaos so I don’t remember the details. But I do remember using a cord . . . we tried to strangle her and . . . we tried many things but finally we killed her with a rock by hitting her in the head. We did a really brutal thing . . . I was 16, an age at which one is most impressionable. For the first time in my life I cried out loud, overwhelmed by grief. For the rest of my life, I will never cry like that again. Then we killed our younger siblings before we were to die. That’s what the war made us do. We were manipulated.12

Across Japan, people who had been prepared to take similar steps now had to accept the reality of defeat. An abhorrence of war and an appreciation of the folly of taking on the United States and the British Empire began to take hold. In the space of a few weeks, one of the most militaristic societies in the world changed to one of the most pacifistic.

Japan had already been driven from some of its conquered territories by the Allies, but at the time of surrender the Japanese Empire still ruled hundreds of millions of people in Japanese-occupied China, Manchukuo, Korea, Burma, South-East Asia (modern Malaysia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia), and the East Indies (modern Indonesia). In their rapid advance through the region in December 1941 and early 1942, the Japanese had captured some 140,000 Western prisoners and interned 130,000 Western civilians.13 A complete unpreparedness to provide for so many captives, a profoundly hostile attitude towards the surrender and Westerners generally, and the collapse of communication and supply lines throughout the Empire in the face of Allied attacks meant that most of the captives had been appallingly treated. As at August 1945, the Japanese were holding throughout the Asia-Pacific 37,583 prisoners from the United Kingdom, Commonwealth and Dominions, 28,500 from the Netherlands and 14,473 from the United States.14 Around a quarter to a third of the total Japanese prisoners of war and civilian internees had died in captivity.

Australia had lost 22,376 men and women captured in the Pacific War, of whom 8,031 died through overwork, starvation, disease, mistreatment, or outright execution.15 Many thousands of Indians and Chinese were also being used for forced labour, but the Japanese government refused to recognise them as prisoners of war. Additionally, hundreds of thousands more Asian civilians, men and women, were being held either as forced labourers, called rōmusha, or as sex slaves in army and navy brothels through the comfort women system.

At the time of the surrender, 12,000 British, Dutch and Australian prisoners of war were being held in Changi Prison in Singapore. Having built a pirate radio, at night they were able to listen to the news and get some idea of what was going on with the war. One young prisoner recalled the first rumours of surrender spreading among the emaciated and starving men during the night of 10 August:

. . . shortly after midnight, the official and pirate radio operators had their greatest moment. Crouched in the darkness beside their faintly-glowing machines they heard from London the breath-taking news . . . the penalty for wireless operating was death. The only safeguard was secrecy. Yet who could rest all night with this stupendous fact bursting within him?

Out of the cells they came, dark shadows slipping along the corridors. ‘Wake up’. Sleepers felt themselves shaken as the words were hissed in their ears.

‘What’s up?’ Another party to unload rice, perhaps, or another move.

‘The news – it’s all over son, Japan is out. Down at home they are going mad and God-knows-everything.’

‘Who says so?’ a voice is heard drawling sarcastically. Everyone had been caught by rumours.

‘It’s right, I tell you. I heard it myself. The Nips are going for the Parker [i.e. reaching for a pen to sign the Instrument of Surrender]. You are free, digger. Think of it; free.’

In their excitement and desire to convince the doubters, the newsbringers were half-choking.16

The news was broken officially to the prisoners on 17 August. It took longer to reach remote work parties in Burma and Thailand, but spread quickly nonetheless. The reactions of guards and prisoners alike varied a great deal from place to place. At a camp on Mergui Road in Burma, the Japanese soldiers suddenly became friendly and distributed their stockpiles of food to the prisoners. At a large camp in Thailand, the news first came unofficially on 15 August from a Thai with a radio, then the prisoners were given the rest of the day off work. On 17 August, a prisoner from Australia’s 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion recalled the exact moment of the official announcement:

At 11 a.m. the bugle sounded. It was not the lugubrious Japanese call which for so long had been the summons to parade. It was the old familiar ‘Fall in A, Fall in B, Fall in every Company!’ There was a tremendous din of chatter as 2,500 British, Australians and Americans took their places on the parade ground.

The senior prisoner in the camp, a British warrant-officer, climbed on to a box in front of the parade. The noise subsided, and the silence was complete as he spoke.

‘Gentlemen!’ he said, ‘this is the happiest moment of my life. The Japanese commandant has asked me to inform you that the war has ended!’

For perhaps ten seconds there was not a sound. The unbelievable had happened, and it first had to be believed. Then the air was rent with sound as 2,500 men yelled and shouted as they had never done before.17

At his headquarters in Manila, General MacArthur learned that President Truman had appointed him Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and placed him in charge of the impending Allied occupation of Japan. ‘It was a notable day for me, too – I was made Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers,’ he wrote in his memoir, Reminiscences. ‘The felicitations, the congratulatory messages, and the honours that were now heaped upon me were too numerous to count. They gave me far too much credit.’18 He then quoted them at length for the rest of that page and most of the next. Indeed, Reminiscences contains many such passages where MacArthur lists his own achievements and quotes the praise given him by others. Modesty was not one of his attributes.

Douglas MacArthur was the son of an army captain. His father, Arthur MacArthur, raised the Union Flag over Missionary Ridge above Chattanooga, Tennessee, in November 1863. The army was Douglas’s life; he was born in an army hospital and he died in one. In the interim he graduated first in his class at West Point and saw action in the Philippines, the Veracruz Expedition, the First World War, and then, as Supreme Commander, in the Second World War in the Pacific. He had fought in battle with his own pistol, been decorated, and had never felt shy about wading into politics. Perhaps his most controversial moment was when he led the army against the Bonus Army, unemployed veterans who marched on Washington, D.C. in 1932, and cleared their camp out with tear gas. As Chief of Staff, he criticised pacifism, isolationism, and cuts to military spending. ‘When we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt!’ MacArthur shouted at the new president when he proposed to cut military spending during the Depression.19

MacArthur captured the public imagination, in no small part due to his own self-promotion. Biographer Arthur Herman wrote that he was ‘arguably the last American public figure to be worshipped unreservedly as a national hero’, although that adoration mostly followed his victory in the Second World War.20 He did not shy away from publicity. ‘Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son,’ recalled the elder MacArthur’s aide.21 After leaving the Philippines, General MacArthur famously announced, ‘I shall return,’ in a speech given from Australia. The US government asked him to amend it to: ‘We shall return.’ He refused.

In April 1942 MacArthur was appointed Supreme Allied Commander in the South-West Pacific Area. At the time, most of his troops were Australian. MacArthur found them unimpressive. Not appreciating either the difficulties of jungle fighting or the strength of the Japanese in Papua New Guinea, he did not understand why the Australian Army there was carrying out a fighting retreat rather than advancing.22 Then, when American troops arrived in New Guinea in force, he didn’t understand why they were struggling to make progress as well. He was an attacker, not a defender. But now he would take on a new role, as the effective leader of a defeated nation. He advised Tokyo to send emissaries to him in Manila and to place a radio station at his disposal, and then began preparations to move his HQ.

In Australia, newspapers on 16 August carried the headlines ‘Japan Surrenders’ and ‘Japanese War Minister Commits Hara-Kiri’. The rest of the day and the entirety of the next was given over to thanksgiving services and public celebrations.23 After a mass prayer service in the Domain gardens, half a million people gathered in Sydney to watch the victory parade. In Melbourne, the city centre was closed to traffic, a hundred-gun salute was fired from Alexandra Gardens, and crowds gathered outside the Shrine of Remembrance. The editorial of the Sydney Morning Herald captured the feelings of surprise, relief and elation:

Japan’s defeat closes the most terrible and far-flung war in history. From the flame lit by the Nazis in 1939 their Asiatic confederates kindled the torch that set this half of the world ablaze. Few dared hope that the fire could be extinguished so quickly after Europe’s deliverance. Not only have the Pacific nations been spared the prolongation of their sacrifices and sufferings – not only does heroic China see the end of her long agony – but the peoples of Europe will take fresh heart from the termination of the world war. Help which might have had to wait many months for Japan’s collapse can now be given them, at a most crucial time, through the early liberation of shipping and supplies. This is not the least of the consequences of the resounding victory which the Allies have won. Everywhere the tasks of salvage and reconstruction can go forward; the whole world emerges, dazedly but thankfully, into the dawn of peace.24

In Canberra, there was little to be done. Parliament was not sitting, and no cabinet meeting was scheduled until 26 August. Prime Minister Ben Chifley had a bad cold. Public servants in the Treasury were occupied rewriting the recently released 1945–46 budget.25

Evatt, however, had his mind on other things. As early as 17 August, he spoke to the press to make two key points. First, he insisted that Australia should have a voice at the upcoming peace conference. He was thinking of the Paris Peace Conference that followed the First World War, although as it turned out, no such conference happened. The almost immediate falling-out between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union was probably a significant reason. Evatt’s second point concerned the prosecution of war criminals, his personal war aim: ‘Just as those men responsible for the atrocities in Europe are being hunted down, so will be those Japanese responsible for the atrocities and barbaric treatment of men and women in the Pacific area. These men are going to get their deserts, and Australia will see that they do.’26

To Evatt, ‘these men’ included the Emperor, and the cabinet was with him unanimously.27