This week in the war, on 8 June 1945, Emperor Hirohito presided over a meeting of the Japanese cabinet. They decided that Japan would continue fighting until the very end.

Japanese kamikaze pilots were still effective and, in his book Second World War (Stoddart, 1989), Martin Gilbert reports that, on average, an American infantryman on Okinawa could expect to become a casualty after three weeks of fighting.