The President

...

... From the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to the August 2025 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast.

And peace at last.

On the 15th of August, 2025, the UK commemorated the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, the day on which the surrender

of Japan and the end of World War II was announced. This was a significant moment at

Bletchley Park as it meant the end of almost six years of non-stop code-breaking and intelligence

work. For many it also brought an abrupt halt to years of training

to learn Japanese and long journeys to reach postings in India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere in

preparation for the upcoming invasion of Japan itself. In this It Happened Here episode,

we're joined by Bletchley Park's historians, Dr Tom Cheatham and Dr David Kenyon,

to discuss how the Japanese war ended and the part played by Bletchley Park and Signals Intelligence.

Our thanks go to Owen Mugan and Dr Ben Thompson for voicing our historical documents.

This is Bletchley Park.

It happened here.

David, we've arrived at August 1945. We're nearing the end of the war. Can you

give us an overview of the situation we find ourselves in?

Well, as we've discussed in this podcast before, the European war ended in May,

but of course the war in the Far East, the war against Japan continued.

And after the various surrender documents with the Germans had been signed,

there was a follow-up conference, the Potsdam conference, which took place in the last two weeks of July in Potsdam, in Germany, in Berlin. And this was an occasion for the leaders of the victorious powers in Europe to decide how they were going to divide the world amongst themselves, how they were going to sort out the future. And of course, one of the questions in that discussion is what we're going to do about Japan. And one of the outcomes of the conference

...