The Fall of Japan, 1944–1945
The last year, when the Imperial Navy sortied to die, the submarines cut the islands off from their empire, and the bombers finished what the blockade had started.
By the middle of 1944 the outcome was no longer in doubt and the fighting became, if anything, harder. Japan’s navy spent its remaining strength on operations designed to trade ships for time; the American submarine campaign strangled an island economy that imported everything it burned and ate; and once the Marianas fell, the B-29 could reach the Home Islands from bases the fleet could not threaten.
What was left of Japanese air power went into defending those islands, with fighters designed for a different war and, increasingly, with pilots sent out on one-way missions. The machines here are the ones that fought that last year on both sides — from the largest warship ever built, sailing on a mission she was not expected to survive, to the deck on which the war formally ended on 2 September 1945.
