William Tyler
Victory in East and West

1945 saw the end of the Second World War in Europe as the USSR and the Allies closed in on Germany and ultimately Berlin. Further east, the Americans, island hopping across the Pacific, faced the final huge challenge of invading the Japanese Islands themselves. President Truman, FDR having died in April, ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, a decision that took the world into the nuclear age, which has been much debated ever since.