Publish Date: Aug. 20, 1945
Cover Story: Japan: Last Days
How TIME Covered the News: For the U.S., World War II started with “the day that will live in infamy”—the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—and, no matter the military successes against Hitler in Europe, the conflict wouldn’t end until Japanese power in Asia was also vanquished. On its last legs, Japan surrendered only after a devastating American onslaught, which included the nuclear bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Even before the bombings, the strain on her productive system, no match for the great western powers, must have been terrific. The strain on her island people must have been more so. All nations at war secretly long for peace, and in Japan, the markers, commemorating the dead in the Shinto shrines had increased ominously in death’s rich wartime harvest.”