WAR WITHOUT MERCY

That afternoon, Monna sat at the coast, looking blankly out to sea. Suddenly, he noticed some fishermen setting off in a boat in the restricted area where the Fukuryu had been training. The fishermen seemed very happy. That's when Monna realized the war was over.

Some citizens, too, felt disbelief and anger. During the war, Kiyoko Kano, 79, had been a farmer's daughter in a small village not far from Hiroshima. She showed her diary from those days to NEWSWEEK. It records how she had faithfully arisen at dawn some mornings for "bamboo-spear fight training," and how she struggled to accept what the emperor was saying over the village radio on Aug. 15. "It sounded as though there was a truce situation. All of us felt disappointed," she wrote after hearing the emperor's declaration of surrender, bringing peace. "We could not help but feel frustrated."

Toshiharu Konada, the kaiten pilot, could not believe what he was hearing from the emperor on the radio that day. He thought about following the example of a comrade who had committed suicide while sitting, fully uniformed, on his kaiten. "But then," says Konada, "there was this very strong desire welling up inside me, wanting to watch how my country was going to survive." After the emperor's speech, at least 500 Japanese officers committed suicide. But the rest of the nation heeded the emperor, who was regarded as a divinity, and there was no organized resistance.

On the island of Guam, Pete Beninato and his Marine Corps buddies in the Third Tank Battalion had been pre-paring to invade Japan. "We weren't too anxious to go in there. The Japanese would fight to the last man--no surrender." When Beninato's men heard that America had dropped atomic bombs (on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9), destroying two entire cities, the reaction was incredulity. "We just looked at each other," Beninato recalls, amazed that so much destructive power could be concentrated in a single bomb. "Now people say we shouldn't have done it. But they weren't over there," he says. "They weren't getting shot at. They weren't expecting 80 to 85 percent casualties. I could've kissed [President] Truman."

When the Japanese surrender was announced on Aug. 15, "we liked to go crazy," says Beninato, a retired heavy-machinery salesman living in Louisiana. "Where the beer came from I had no idea, but we drank a lot of it."

Signalman Bowell was in Seattle, where his battered ship had gone for repairs. "There was no celebration," he recalls. "We were just too tired." Bowell did not know it yet, but he was suffering from what a later generation would call posttraumatic stress disorder. He would soon suffer from fainting spells. In the fall of 1945, Bowell's ship sailed to Japan for the occupation. Ashore, he was astonished when Japanese soldiers bowed to him. "I was surprised to find how genteel they were," he recalls.