"Doctors said not to give them any because it would hurt them more, so all you could do was turn your face and walk away," he said, recalling Aug. 6, 1945.

"I'll never forget those voices crying 'water, water, water.'Ê"

Nearly 200 of Hara's junior high school classmates, working less than a mile from ground zero - the spot above which the bomb detonated - perished instantly.

"You couldn't tell who was who, they were all burned so badly," he said.

For the citizens of Hiroshima and, on Aug. 9, Nagasaki, the dropping of the atom bomb ushered in years of suffering. For the rest of the world, the nuclear age that dawned in the fireball above Hiroshima would cast long shadows of fear for decades to come.

Survival also seemed far from assured in the early 1940s.

Virtually all of Europe, and much of North Africa, was under the control of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, while Japanese forces extended their holdings into a vast expanse that, at its peak, stretched from Myanmar (Burma) to the tip of the Aleutian island chain off Alaska and as far south as New Guinea.

Epics of heroic endurance played out around the globe.

Britain suffered through months of near-constant German bombing, while scores in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) starved in a Nazi blockade that lasted 900 days.

Millions, mostly Jews - 6 million of whom died - suffered in Nazi-run extermination and concentration camps throughout Europe. Following liberation, many survivors fled the continent for Palestine, where the state of Israel was founded in 1948.

In the Philippines, the Bataan Death March claimed the lives of more than 10,000 Allied prisoners of war.

Both prisoners and locals from conquered Asian nations died under harsh conditions as forced laborers, while thousands of women were forced to serve as sex slaves to Japanese troops - actions that created anti-Japanese feelings throughout Asia that still complicate diplomacy.

Some 55 million people, both military and civilians, are estimated to have died by the time the war ended in 1945.

Even as early as 1941, both Germany and Japan were making what turned out to be crucial blunders.

On June 22, the Germans invaded Russia across a vast 1,118-mile front stretching from the Baltics to the Black Sea.

Although the Germans made substantial gains several times, they proved unsustainable, with the savaging from the Red Army and a vicious Russian winter playing a key part in their country's ultimate collapse.

As part of a series of lightning strikes around Asia, Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941.

This precipitated the entrance of the United States into a war from which it had stood aside, ending its isolationist days for good and eventually leading to its self-assumed role of world policeman.

Gradually the tide began to turn.

The Japanese navy lost three carriers in less than five minutes on June 4, 1942, in the Battle of Midway. Another sank later that day. It was a blow from which Japan never recovered.

On Oct. 23, British and Commonwealth forces began a successful offensive against German and Italian forces at El Alamein in Egypt, while victory at Stalingrad in January 1943, after heavy fighting, spelled the beginning of the end in Russia.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was forced to resign July 25, 1943, and Italy surrendered Sept. 8.

The "D-Day" invasion of June 6, 1944 - the largest sea-borne invasion in history - saw Allied troops land in France at the start of a push through Europe.

The "Battle of the Bulge" counteroffensive in December postponed the final reckoning, but the writing was on the wall for the Third Reich as 1945 began.

In a bizarre twist of fate, three leaders of the major warring powers died within a month of each other that spring.

Roosevelt died of a stroke on April 12, Mussolini was murdered on April 28 and Hitler committed suicide on April 30.

The last remaining Axis leader, Japan's Emperor Hirohito, would die an old man in January 1989.

On May 7, Germany surrendered.

Meanwhile, Japanese forces had been forced back across the Pacific in a brutal island-hopping campaign. The July 1944 fall of Saipan paved the way for saturation bombing of Japan itself, which started later that year.

The battle of Okinawa, which began in April 1945, killed 12,000 U.S. soldiers, took about 250,000 Japanese lives and left the home islands vulnerable. That summer, amid a flurry of negotiations, both sides girded themselves for an invasion.

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