We focus on two linked anniversaries this year – the fall of Nazi Germany in May 1945, and the fall of Imperial Japan in August 1945.
Seventy-five years ago, these two regimes chose to the fight to the bitter end, long after it was clear the war was lost.
Traditionally, defeated powers sue for peace and negotiate a treaty which leaves them still intact. But the Nazi resistance continued until virtually the whole of Germany had been overrun and much of it destroyed by aerial bombing, that of the Japanese until threatened by nuclear devastation.
The irrationality of fascism, and the loss of control by mainstream political elites, seems to have been decisive in both cases: the Nazis and the Japanese militarists were deranged fanatics who preferred annihilation to surrender.
David Porter provides the in-depth analysis of the Battle of Berlin in our special this time. We also have Edmund West on Simon Bolívar and the Battle of Boyacá, the turning-point in the Latin American Wars of Independence, and Marc DeSantis on the consequences of the Anglo-German naval arms-race before the First World War.
Diver Rod Macdonald returns with a report on the underwater remains of the Japanese fleet destroyed at Truk in February 1944, and Patrick Mercer takes an unusual approach to his ‘Regiment’ series, with an article on an IRA unit’s dramatic attack on an Army checkpoint in 1989.