Washington, (AFP) : The US atomic bombings and the Soviet Union's entry into World War II that led to Japan's surrender were "God's gifts," the Japanese navy minister at that time was quoted saying in documents released by the National Security Archive.

Mitsumasa Yonai told an adviser to the Japanese ruling elite that the two events provided a good excuse to surrender at a time when local hostility to Emperor Hirohito and his government was increasing rapidly.

The conversation was among the first published complete translations from the Japanese of accounts of key high level meetings and discussions in Tokyo leading to the end of the war, the archive said.

They were released on Friday on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima as part of a comprehensive on-line collection, including declassified US government documents, on the first use of the atomic bomb and the end of the war in the Pacific.

"It may be inappropriate to put it in this way, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, God's gifts," Yonai said nearly a week after an American B-29 dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Three days later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The twin bombings killed some 210,000 people. "Now we can end the war without making it clear that we have to end the war because of the domestic situation," said Yonai, who was among the six-member inner cabinet led by Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki.