Show 67 - Supernova in the East VI 05:45:52

What you're about to hear is part six of a six-part series on the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific Theater. If you have not heard the earlier segments, please go check those out. You probably want to hear this in order, but there's a few of you out there who don't care about that sort of stuff, in which case, well, catch up and

Join us, won't you, for part six of the light and airy story that is Supernova in the East. December 7th. It's history. 1941, a date which will live in infamy. It's hardcore history. People who are knowledgeable about the Second World War, and many people are. It's one of those subjects that fascinates human beings the world over, understandably so.

People who are aficionados of the Second World War knows that the rhythm of the Second World War reminds you of an opera or a musical theater production where the end is going to be like the end of the world, a Ragnarok or a Götterdämmerung. And the whole last year of the war is whipping yourself up like a roller coaster going uphill waiting for that giant dip where you're building up to that horrific ending.

The last year of the Second World War is the worst year of the Second World War. And the kind of numbers that demonstrate that are, for example, casualties, killings. Look at the German deaths, for example, in January 1945. That's a month that is mind-blowing. The Germans will have more than 400,000 of their soldiers, maybe closer to 450,000 of their soldiers die in that month alone.

For comparison purposes, that is more military deaths than the United States suffered, all branches of service, all cause of mortality for the whole war.

Historian Neil Ferguson says the German military loses more soldiers in the last year of the war than the entire rest of the war put together. And some of the latest estimates of casualty numbers suggest the Germans were losing on average 10,000 soldiers every day in 1945. So from January 1st to May 8th when the war ended in Europe, 10,000 a day on average.

That is almost twice as many people as the United States lost at the Battle of Antietam, which many military historians consider to be the worst day in U.S. military history, and the Germans were getting it day after day after day.

If you think to yourself, and this would be totally understandable, who cares, right? The Germans are reaping what they sowed. That would be fine, except it's hardly just the Germans. In his book, How Wars End, author Gideon Rose says that every month in 1945, between 100,000 and 250,000 noncombatants in Asia were dying again every month due to the actions of Japanese forces.

These are data points, but you have to add all the other data points up too and see the conveyor belt of death, the factory assembly line of human destruction that's going on in 1945, or really the last year of the war. I mean, you don't have to really imagine too much to just know that the Holocaust is going on during this time period in Europe, and people are dying in those camps every day. So every day the war continues. That tally goes up reliably today.

I'm reminded of a song by the rock band The MC5 from the late 1960s, early 1970s. They wrote a song which I think is about the Vietnam War, and it's entitled The Human Being Lawnmower. And to me, the imagery, as horrific as it is, works better for the Second World War, and especially the end of the Second World War, than it does for Vietnam, a lawnmower that cuts trees.

human beings instead of blades of grass or an assembly line that's reliably heading towards a furnace or a chopping machine with people on it and when the lead singer would say the words the human being lawnmower he would emphasize what was going on by then saying chop chop chop chop chop human being lawnmower chop chop chop chop chop that's what's going on in the last year of the war so why is the last year of the war still going on

Neil Ferguson, in his book, The War of the World, quotes an aide to U.S. General Omar Bradley, who was fighting the Third Reich in Europe. And the aide made this statement, Ferguson says, at the end of 1944. And the statement was, quote, if we were fighting reasonable people, they would have surrendered long ago, end quote. But they're not fighting reasonable people, clearly.

They're fighting a fanatical regime in the Third Reich, which is committed to going down with the ship and taking the entire country down with them. And the Japanese, we've already pointed out, to outside observers who are not Japanese, it's always looked fanatical. Hitler and his cohorts know that they're not surviving the post-war period regardless. They're all going to hang at the end of a rope. So maybe that influences their decision to take everything down with them.

His propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had famously said, if we have to leave, we'll close the door behind us with a slam that all the world will hear. Pity that all the German civilians need to go with them.

And in the Japanese situation, their military is planning for a last ditch stand on the home islands. If it comes to that, the army thinks they can put two and a half million Japanese soldiers into Japan's built up cities and then add to those numbers with a ton of civilians that, as we said in the last segment, are training with bamboo spears by this time and make life impossible for an invading army. What's the goal? What's the end game?

Well, both the Germans and the Japanese are hoping to inflict a last big blow against their enemies that causes their enemies to rethink the peace terms.

Because as, you know, even a cursory understanding of the Second World War makes clear, the peace terms are unconditional surrender. And the reason we know that is the Allies made an attempt to broadcast this, make it known to everybody. The terms are, you give up, and then we decide what we're going to do to you. Now, this is controversial. After all, if the terms of surrender are going to be that harsh—

The Axis powers are going to fight longer than they otherwise might, which means the human being lawnmower, the conveyor belt of destruction continues longer. The Holocaust goes on longer. The Asian civilians die, you know, more day. I mean, just it's controversial. But there's an attitude if you look at the sources that

that you need an unconditional surrender if you're going to finally end this recurring problem. And the Germans especially are seen as a recurring problem. My stepfather, who was half German by ancestry, had said, look at the German history over the past hundred years, right? The Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Second World War. That is three generations of German youth going off to fight in wars that destabilize the international system.

Franklin Roosevelt thought it was Prussian or Juncker militarism that was at fault and that countries needed to have finally this tendency rooted out of them.

And to do that, a free hand would be necessary. You couldn't have some sort of deal like the deal that ended the First World War. You needed the ability to remake these societies to finally end the repeat offender status of some of these places, right, who would upset the peace of the world. So for many people, it was this view that the entire sacrifice process

of all three of those wars, but especially the Second World War, would be in vain if it didn't end the right way. There's a quote from Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Breckinridge Long that's used in Gideon Rose's book where he says, quote, we are fighting this war because we did not have an unconditional surrender at the end of the last one, end quote. It's controversial, though, and people like Winston Churchill sometimes seem to

vary in his views that you find on whether or not he was for it or open to some sort of conditional peace in his book series the second world war which cannot be taken

as gospel truth. You know, you take it with a grain of salt because he's bolstering his own post-war image. But he knows that unconditional surrender is controversial, so he tries to defend it. And he says that they tried to sit down and come up with conditional terms, right? If it was not going to be unconditional, what should the surrender terms be? And he wrote, quote,

End quote. We should also recall that there were political reasons in the Allied alliance for doing this too. The Soviets were very suspicious that the Western allies would cut a separate deal with Germany.

and sort of leave them in the lurch. An announced public pledge for an unconditional surrender helped bind all the allies together in a united cause, right? No one's going to make a separate peace, but it meant the war would go on longer. And both Japan and Germany were hoping for some sort of last ditch punch in the nose that would wake the allies up to the fact that, you know, this war could continue for years if you didn't

come up with a better peace deal. I mean, that's really what something like the Battle of the Bulge, the Second Battle of the Ardennes in 1944, that could be the only reason to do that.

Because there was no war-winning element to that. The whole point was to do such damage and maybe have a whole bunch of Allied troops sort of surrounded and endangered so you could maybe bargain with them. And in Japan, they were continually looking for the last great battle that would help wake the Allies up to the idea that unconditional surrender was a bridge too far. When last we spoke, we were talking about the Battle of Saipan in July 1944.

Well, the Navy, the Japanese Navy, had thought that the war had been decided, some of the naval experts after the Battle of Guadalcanal and most of the rest at least after the Battle of Midway. In the Japanese War Journal of Imperial Headquarters quoted in Richard B. Frank's book Downfall, they were very open, and this is official, that the war was over in terms of who was going to win.

And it said, quote, we can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan's 100 million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight. End quote. That is an amazing statement. We will sacrifice all the people in this country to get a better deal than unconditional surrender. And what was it that the Japanese really were holding out for?

the emperor they were worried that an unconditional surrender might mean that the emperor and the entire imperial system would be tossed out and this was something they could not live with what's more the idea that the emperor might be treated as a war criminal and might be hung or something after the war was intolerable to a ton of japanese people including a ton of civilians i mean remember there's a decent number of japanese folk who consider this person a living god

His voice has never even been heard by the public. I mean, there's a whole lot of stuff that makes this an almost superhuman figure. And the idea that the country might have to lose, there really weren't 100 million people in Japan. It's more like 70 or 75 million. But I mean, that you might have to sacrifice that to keep one guy on the throne? Wow. That's, well, if we were fighting reasonable people, it would have been over already. This is not reasonable at all.

I read a couple of different takes on this that suggested it was a lot more than the emperor. This is the imperial system, which includes a lot of what we would call the oligarchy or the old guard. There's a lot of people who have a stake in the imperial system and they would all be thrown to the wolves if this went away. But it would seem to be the kind of thing where...

You're going to keep the human being lawnmower operating at breakneck speed to keep a single guy from the gallows after the war, maybe.

The problem Japan has is different than Germany, because one of the things we said at the end of the last segment was that the famous plot against Adolf Hitler on July 20th, Operation Valkyrie, where a bomb exploded in a meeting room attempting to take Hitler out. Well, that's an attempt to get rid of the fanatic in chief, right? I mean, as I said, if we were fighting reasonable people, the war would be over long ago. But in Germany, you have to get rid of the unreasonable person at the top to have a chance to do that. Japan's government's very different.

It's hard to put your finger on who's in charge. And we dealt with this extensively in the first segment of the program, pointing out that Japan's system was one that outsiders certainly, but even insiders sometimes, could have a tough time figuring where the buck stops in

Author Ian W. Toll had written a line that just, I think, was a perfect summation of that, where he said, quote, the same institutional defects that had produced Japan's irrational decision to launch the war in 1941 now prevented a rational decision to end it, end quote. And S.C.M. Payne, in his book, The Wars for Asia, 1911-1945, said,

had said that Japan's government had been called a government by acquiescence or a system of irresponsibility. And he said, quote, because if everyone is responsible for policy, then policy formation becomes anonymous so that no one is actually held accountable. The primary value emphasized in decision-making was a consensus reached through informal procedures, end quote.

a consensus that required the most diehard fanatical elements of the military to be on board, and at least the Army was not.

And this, by the way, is why everybody spends so much time talking about the 19th century development of the Japanese constitutional system design and everything to get us to the Second World War because the Second World War is where a couple of major things happen where you just go, it's almost like a tragic flaw in Greek theater where it was built into the Japanese system a long time ago and it only comes out when the system's under massive stress like, you know, a world war or

But the fact that the Army and Navy, for example, have an outsized amount of control and influence tends to bend the decision-making in a more hard-line sort of way. And people who want to talk about peace actually put their own lives in danger to do so. So in both Germany and Japan, as the war starts to grind into the last year, anybody who tries to bring up the idea of peace or who suggests that the war may be lost or

are enemies of the regime. In Germany, in the last year of the war, between 10 and 20,000 people, I read, were hung or executed in some other way, soldiers and civilians alike, on charges of what was called defeatism.

In Japan, Marius B. Jensen, the historian, says that the military was watching the people and had jailed some people for high-level defeatism, as it was called. And Saburo Iyanaga, in his book, The Pacific War, talked about how careful, those were his translated words, peace advocates in the government had to be.

He says that they faced assassination or a coup, and he blames the army, but that's who he blames for a lot of things. The point being that even bringing up what might be a rational question, like do we have to have Armageddon? Is that the way this whole thing has to go? Could get you charged as an enemy of the state. And in a place like Germany, it could get you hung. So rationality isn't just in short supply. It's actively punished by death.

I keep thinking of both the average Japanese person who may or may not have wanted to die for the emperor. Are they looking forward to actually taking up arms with their women and children and fighting alongside the Japanese army in the built-up areas of Japan in house-to-house, hand-to-hand combat against the Allied forces? Something tells me there are going to be a lot of regular Japanese folks who would see that as a failure of government. And...

Once again, there are going to be people who say, well, then they shouldn't have started the war. They shouldn't have mistreated all of the populations they dealt with so much, which is a fair point. But let's remember that if the Japanese are going to die because they're going to have to be rooted out of all these buildings, somebody is going to have to do the rooting out.

And this is what my stepfather was referring to once when he talked to me about how it was a kind of a double-edged sword reading in the newspapers about how well the war was going. Because my stepdad's a guy who got into the Second World War at the real tail end of it. So had there been a 1946 war,

continuation of the war that's when he would have been in the thick of it so like a lot of people by the end of the war he was kind of trying to time it out in his head right is this thing going to be over before I'm on the frontline areas he was a naval guy but the frontline areas was right off the coast of Japan if there was 1946 fighting

And he said every time there'd be another victory in another island, taking another closer hop to Japan, you know, and more of the shrinking of the blast radius of Japan's supernova. He said that's the same as saying we're one step closer to the final battles for Japan's home islands.

the ragnarok right and he's thinking to himself you know everybody already knows how die hard the japanese were on all these islands we've already had to take from them that they don't care about as much as the home islands and we still have to go do i mean nobody was looking forward to this i just keep thinking about how unnerving the previews to it all would be

If I were a nearly fighting age young man in the United States in, say, April, early May 1945, and I'm reading about the Battle of Berlin, right, the last assault the Red Army launches on Hitler's capital city with Hitler in it, the last big battle, right, it's going to end right here, Ragnarok in Berlin, right?

If I'm reading about that, something that turns into arguably the worst urban combat in human history, the Red Army loses more than 80,000 men in 16 days. The Germans lose more, more than 20,000 civilians. Hitler kills himself in the bunker with the Soviet troops yards away. The only way it could have been more last ditch is if a Soviet soldier had broken down the bunker doors and stabbed Hitler with a bayonet.

and hitler is not perceived as any more fanatical than japanese leadership and maybe your average japanese loyal soldier and maybe even his wife and child who knows but to somebody like yours truly reading the paper this would have looked like a horrible preview of what the tokyo situation is going to look like in a few months when we get to that

And yet the alternative to Ragnarok is to let the human-being lawnmower continue to rack up obscene monthly death totals until it's stopped. There are no good choices, are there?

And choices are where people like yours truly, I know many of you too, we just, we can't help but look at the choices and become fascinated with, I mean, it's tempting always for a person who's into war games and chess and all that stuff to think about this in terms of a game, like a geo-strategic card game. And the danger with that is all the decisions look so much easier when you're looking at them now. You have no idea all the little influences and roadblocks and, you know,

inhibitors and pressures and everything else that was working on the historical figure i always have this image of them coming back in a time machine and hearing someone like yours truly say well here's what you should have done and having them say oh yeah sure you don't think i would have done that if i could have but i couldn't have because of all these things that are not even in your history books that were acting on me so with that having been said it's still hard for me to not look at this sometimes like a card game and in 1944 what's fascinating of that year

is that the Germans and the Japanese only have a few meaningful cards left to play. A limited amount of harbored and, um...

stockpiled strength, a little bit of rocket fuel, if you will, that they've kept aside for just this time. So what do you do with it? What do you use it for? What is a worthy goal to use some of your last remaining strength for if winning the war probably isn't on the table? I never like to say it's never on the table because war is full of

weirdness to the degree that you just ever you can't ever say ever somebody's always pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat but basically there are no war winning cards left to play at least no obvious war winning cards left to play so how do you play what cards you still have left that's fascinating to me

The Germans offensive in late 1944, the one in the second Ardennes, as it's called, we Americans call it the Battle of the Bulge. That's an example of Hitler playing one of those last cards. I've got the stockpile of stuff. Let's use it here. What was he trying to do? Historians and armchair generals ever since have been critiquing that decision. There were a lot of people even at the time that maybe would have liked to have seen all of that stockpiled strength destroyed.

used against the red army instead to maybe forestall what happened in berlin long enough to let the allies get there first the western allies would be a better way to put it right because the soviet union's an ally as well but regardless you know hindsight's 2020 right the japanese cards that they have to play they're playing um early on in 1944

I mean, they launch an offensive in the Burma India Theater in March 1944. And then a month later, they launched the largest offensive of the war on their part. And I think I read the largest offensive in Imperial Japanese Army history with the Ichigo campaign in China. We mentioned both these campaigns actually briefly in the last segment.

But the Ichigo campaign is the kind where you look at and you don't even know how the Japanese do it. We mentioned a long time ago that to me, the Japanese look like one of the peoples on the planet that punch above their weight class because they are able to pull off stuff where you would look at their population numbers and their geographical questions and their history and think that they're just not, they're not going to be able to do that. And then they achieve it anyway. And I sometimes wonder looking at their history, if maybe they just have to.

We've talked about the limitations of their somewhat dysfunctional subpar, usually in terms of outcome, government design,

We've talked about the problems that they have with the organization of the military and how you have this issue with mid-level officers able to exert an undue amount of control and influence over military policy. These are all things that put the Japanese into very tough situations. And time and again, somehow, despite all of the impediments and the odds against them, the Japanese people managed to pull the fat out of the fire more times than not.

I read somewhere that for the Ichigo offensive, the Japanese stockpiled ammunition for two years and aviation air fuel for eight months. And when they launch this multi-stage offensive that will go from April 1944 to at least December 1944, I believe there's still significant fighting going on in January 1945.

The half a million Japanese troops, more than 15,000 vehicles, more than 100,000 animals, launched this assault on China that is ferocious. And, you know, we should point out that nowhere in the Pacific was anybody facing armies like 500,000 Japanese soldiers. These are land war in Asia-sized armies. OK, I mean, the big battles in the Pacific later on are going to be fractions of this number.

The only exception I can think of is the Philippines campaign, which is still to come. But even then, the Japanese are more on the defensive there, whereas in China, on the Ichigo offensive, it is a massive, many months long assault. But when you're fighting Chinese armies, which are traditionally very large, and in this campaign, the Japanese are often outnumbered and fighting multiple Chinese armies, which means lots of troops. You better have lots of troops.

The irony of the whole thing is that the Japanese will in large part succeed in many ways in this offensive. If you were judging this offensive outside of the context of the war, you'd go, wow, they pulled off a lot of upsets here. Almost knocked the nationalists out of the war, did retake the American air bases they wanted eliminated, did connect these territories they wanted connected. But as so many historians I was reading pointed out, so what?

So you took this giant amount of remaining rocket fuel you'd stored up and saved to use somehow, and you did it in a way that won't slow the Allied advance across the Pacific Islands and toward the Japanese homeland at all, right? Was that a wasted card? You actually achieved a lot of what you wanted to achieve. It actually worked out pretty well, judging by, you know, a non-contextual sort of standard, but in a contextual sort of standard, didn't do anything to slow down the losing of the war.

Needless to say, it keeps the human being lawnmower working overtime. I mean, 750,000 Chinese soldiers may have been killed. I've seen like 100,000 Japanese as a death toll sometimes. The numbers are hard to trust and differ source to source and the methodology is different. But there may have been 200,000 Chinese civilian deaths due to this offensive.

and in the same way that there are critics of hitler's decision to use some of his last precious rocket fuel against the western allies instead of against the soviets saying that it was a essentially a boon for communism and it trapped more of central europe behind the iron curtain a similar charge is sometimes made against the japanese for the ichigo campaign

For example, Japanese military historian Hira Takeshi writing in The Battle for China proclaims the Ichigo campaign to have been a disaster for both the Japanese and the nationalist Chinese. He says the only winners were the communists because they sat back and watched their two worst enemies, the Japanese and the nationalist Chinese, kill each other off.

The nationalist and the communist Chinese, of course, had been fighting a civil war when the Japanese invasion of China sort of temporarily put a damper on that. But it will spring into new life after the Japanese are defeated.

And because perhaps of the damage that was done to the nationalists, the nationalists will lose that civil war. And well, of course, we have a communist China today. So there are some historians who suggest that the Japanese helped give us a communist China today. It's interesting and fascinating to contemplate, isn't it? Considering that in 1944, Japan was probably the most anti-communist country in the world. There's some historical irony to it, isn't it? Talk about not getting what you wished for.

I happen to find much more intrigue in the Japanese offensive in Burma, the one that kicks off a month before Ichigo and was supposed to act sort of in tandem with it. To me, it's much more interesting because there's a wild card element involved. And if you're where the Japanese are at this time in the war, wild cards look good. How about playing a joker card in a campaign, right? Introduce a little chaos somewhere interesting.

where it might do some good for your war effort? And if you can't win the war, what can you do? The Japanese offensive in central Burma is known as the Yugo campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. In Anglo-American histories, it's often referred to as the invasion of India, 1944. Now, most military history accounts say

of the Yugo campaign state the sort of goals that also don't really do a whole lot to keep Japan from losing the war. It doesn't even really do much to slow it down. I mean, you know, I love the Encyclopedia of Military History by R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor Dupuy. They describe the Japanese goals this way. By the way, Kawabe and Mutaguchi are two Japanese generals.

quote kawabe had directed mutaguchi to prepare for an offensive across the mountains into eastern india with three of his divisions which with attached units totaled nearly a hundred thousand veteran combat troops the objective was twofold they write first to seize the infall kohima plain of manipur the logical assembly area and base for any allied invasion of central burma from india

second to cut the railroad line into assam which passed through manapur and which carried almost all the supplies um all the supplies into china that they were sending end quote so this doesn't sound a whole lot different than the ichigo campaign does it the sort of uh sound military objectives that won't keep you from losing the war

But there's a secondary consideration, or a lot of my history books will call it a secondary objective. Sometimes they'll have a whole paragraph outlying the seizing of the railheads and all these military things, and then add like a couple of words or a single sentence at the end of the paragraph and say something to the effect of, oh yeah, and maybe prompt some sort of a rebellion in India. That little secondary consideration is

is the most interesting part of this plan to me and the most scary to a dedicated imperialist like Winston Churchill. In his book, a series of books, The History of the Second World War, written not that long after the Second World War, and sometimes you can see it as almost a window into the psychology of Winston Churchill.

Churchill doesn't talk at all about seizing this railhead. He lays out what the head of the greatest colonial power in human history, his worry is. And he puts it this way. He says, quote, they, meaning the Japanese, propose to invade eastern India and raise the flag of rebellion against the British. End quote. Raise the flag of rebellion against the British. What would that even mean?

Well, first we have to recall the global situation in 1944. A ton of the world are colonial possessions during this time period. I mean, go look at a map.

And a lot of the places that aren't colonial possessions are de facto ones where they're sort of under the control of other people. I mean, but almost all of Africa is colonized during this period. Most of the places that the Japanese took over after the Pearl Harbor attacks, they didn't take from the indigenous peoples. They conquered those places from the colonial countries that had taken them over a long time ago. I mean...

The Japanese threw out the Dutch who were controlling places like Java and Sumatra. They threw out the French who were in Indochina, right? Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam today. They threw the British out of Burma. And now the British were in India. And what if the Japanese could have cloud seeded a revolution there?

It's a weird thought, isn't it? Cloud seeding a revolution. But if you look at the histories of the late 1940s after the Second World War, the 1950s, the 1960s, really into the 1970s, there are so many wars and struggles and political problems that one could broadly classify as the unraveling of colonialism. I mean, the Vietnam War is as a result of the unraveling of colonialism.

And so many of these places that will fall into these categories in the decades after the Second World War have the seeds and the nucleus of those things in existence already. I remember a history professor pointing out that one of the key amplifiers and accelerators of this process is

was that the Japanese didn't just throw out these colonial powers when they took over these countries from them. They threw them out quickly and at the same time. So instead of the Dutch having to leave the Indies, and then 10 years later, the French having to leave Indochina, and then 10 years after that, the British having to leave India, the Japanese threw them all out in a matter of months and kept them out of those territories for years.

And so when those countries evicted the Japanese and retook their colonial possessions, those colonial possessions had not had their colonial masters there for some time. Tough to put those genies back in the bottle, especially when those areas weren't too happy with the colonial masters already. India is a perfect example of that. By 1944, there are some seriously angry Indians and they're angry at the British.

recall our conversation earlier on when we had talked about how the Indians who already were for years before this time advocating for independence from Britain, how they even found themselves in the Second World War was a slap in the face. The British viceroy just said, we're in, didn't ask Indian leadership or the top people in India at all.

In 1942, when talks broke down on Indian independence, Mohandas Gandhi, called Mahatma Gandhi, the great soul, he starts the Quit India campaign, which says we're not going to cooperate with the war effort. For his troubles, he gets thrown into jail along with most of the leadership of his political party.

There will be something like 100,000 Indians thrown into prison during this time period. There will be riots, rebellions, protests. At some of these protests, troops will open fire and hundreds, if not thousands, those numbers are debatable, will be killed.

There is a famine in Bengal in 1943, which we also mentioned, which will stretch into 1944, which it's a very controversial issue. It's often blamed on war related things. And a guy who gets the lion's share of the blame on the part of some people is Winston Churchill. And he's called genocidal by some Indians today. But millions will die in this.

It contributes to the mood. Brigadier Peter Young, who wrote a book in the 1970s called A Dictionary of Battles, claims that it was taking 100,000 British and Indian soldiers to keep the lid on unrest in India during this time period. So this is even before the Japanese make their move here.

Worth pointing out that India is not the kind of place, no country is, but especially not India, that is of like mind about anything. It is an enormous country and potentially the most diverse country I've ever seen top to bottom, side to side. And it was even bigger in this period than it is now because its territories included the modern states of Pakistan and Bangladesh as well.

Some of these people support the British. There are princely groups, for example, that have an arrangement with the colonial powers. The Muslims and the Hindus have different opinions on things. We'd mentioned earlier there's two and a half million Indian soldiers fighting for the Allies. But there's also Indian soldiers fighting with the Japanese against the Allies. It's a much smaller number. But in this campaign, this invasion of India in 1944, they're going to play an important role.

They're led by a charismatic Indian figure. His name is Subhas Chandra Bose. And, you know, if you wanted to make a really poor analogy, and I apologize for this, but Gandhi and Martin Luther King have some similarities because Martin Luther King modeled some of his tactics on Gandhi's nonviolent approach. Well, if you want to equate those two, then Subhas Chandra Bose is more like an unreformed version of Malcolm X. His attitude is much more of by any means necessary.

And whereas Gandhi eschews violence to get the British out of India, Bose embraces it. And he's leading a bunch of Indian troops. I think the Indian army fighting with the Japanese is like 16, 17,000 people. I think he's leading 7,000 or 8,000 in this assault on India. A lot of these Indians were POWs and they were offered the chance. You know, when Singapore fell, a lot of them fell into Japanese hands. They were offered this chance to be in horrific POW conditions or join this army.

And a lot of them unsurprisingly did. But Bose is involved in trying to tell the Japanese commander, listen, you defeat the British military forces here and I will go into India with these Indians, we'll carry Indian flags of independence and we'll raise India to rebellion. What would happen if that actually occurred? I mean, I can't think of any card the Japanese could play at this point in the war against

that would create more, if you'll pardon the Star Wars reference, but more of a disturbance in the Allied force than prompting a rebellion in India. Now, because India is not of one mind, I don't think you'd ever see anything like India just flip to the Axis powers, but you could easily see India descend into chaos because you'll see it after the Second World War during the chaos involved in independence.

And India is one of those countries that five minutes after it descends into chaos, you have a humanitarian catastrophe on your hands. If it's taken 100,000 British and Indian troops to keep Indian unrest under control without any of that, what's it going to take if India goes sideways on the allies? What's more, if you really want to start talking about fascinating what-ifs or counterfactuals, why would this stop at India, right?

Those of you who remember the Arab Spring not that long ago will recall how amazing it is to see how quickly an idea and a mood, if you will, can spread. We once described ideas like an intellectual contagion, and there were many people who said that the Arab Spring was only made possible because of modern-day communications, but the

That's happened many times in the past. Those of you who look at the famous year of 1848, the so-called year of revolutions and how many revolutions sprung up in so many different countries at once. I mean, what if the Japanese could cloud seed a revolution here on the part of a bunch of these colonially oppressed? Is that a good way to put it? Subject peoples.

It's a joker card, right? It's to introduce a little chaos into the equation and see what happens. And let's recall that the Japanese propaganda has been laying the groundwork for this for years. That's why we brought it up much earlier in this conversation. I think maybe in the very first segment where we talked about Pan-Asianism, which is an intellectual doctrine with a long history and many countries have their own version of it. But the Japanese took a little bit of that and injected it into their concept of

of an economic union, the famous Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They were consistently saying things like their troops were pushing for Asia for the Asiatics.

We had quoted again in the first show, I think, that Japanese soldier who said that he was fired up by his teacher back in. I think it was their version of high school who was talking about the the white man and what he was doing in Asia to Asians. And that same teacher talked about black folks in the United States, Native Americans in the United States. And this Japanese soldier said he was fired up to free all these people.

In 1943, the Japanese make a big show of giving independence to a bunch of these countries like Burma, for example, although they're not really giving it to them. It's a great propaganda tool. And back in 1941, to name just one example, the Japanese foreign minister said, quote, Japan is determined to shatter the white man's mastery over all the Orient, end quote.

If you are a British man in London reading the London Times in the morning or a Frenchman in Paris doing the equivalent, that sends a chill up your spine, right?

But if you're a Vietnamese person in French Indochina or a Burmese person in Burma or an Indian person in India, and many of those people, if you look at the rules sometimes, not all places were the same, but they're living under rules that make them seem like second-class citizens. Some of the rules I've seen remind one of the Jim Crow South or apartheid South Africa. Well, the Japanese driving out your colonial rulers from China

far away from your homeland might look a lot more like liberation than conquest and if the japanese had only been able to walk the walk a little bit better and live up to their hype a little bit who knows what they might have accomplished but as we've said over and over they didn't and i don't know if that's because the entire thing was nothing this is what i learned growing up by the way but nothing but a fig leaf for japanese brutal imperialism the whole time or whether it was a case of

of the Japanese right hand not knowing or caring what the Japanese left hand was doing oftentimes the military people seem a lot more dismissive of this idea of Asia for the Asiatics and the Japanese is the tip of the spear for Asian independence than Japanese intellectuals citizens or soldiers do

It's a cause worth dying for if you think about it, though. I mean, many of the peoples fighting on the good guy side and the bad guy side in a whole lot of wars think they're fighting for good reasons. I'll never forget the Nazi daggers emblazoned with the phrase, God is with us. Bottom line, though, is that even though something like that is a huge long shot to

The Japanese might be trying to cloud seed a revolution here. And that's a fascinating concept when you're down to your last few cards. If India went sideways on the British, you would have a circumstance where the great supply center for the entire Asia war from the British Empire would be unusable or cut off. According to Brigadier Peter Young in his book, A Dictionary of Battles, it's already happening with sabotage and everything else.

Now, as a guy who'd rather swing for the fences at this point in the war, if I'm the one playing the Japanese geostrategic card hand or throw a Hail Mary pass or put all of my chips on one last roll of the die or one spin of the roulette wheel, this idea appeals to me a lot more than the Ichigo offensive. The problem, of course, is the way it's carried out. The Japanese do something here that, once again, I try to figure out an American equivalent.

If an American army went into battle without enough supplies and the plan was to take a chance on them starving to death, I wonder how the American people would react to that. And the reason I bring it up is because the Japanese are going to do this multiple times in Burma. There's a diversionary attack that they launched before the Yugo campaign in a place called Aragon. And the Japanese plan on not providing enough supplies for their troops.

I guess that's a good way to get away from a supply problem, right? Just don't supply enough. But the country is difficult to supply regularly. The Japanese will do the same thing in this Burma campaign where they send their troops to attack Imphal and Kohima, the places, and only give them something like 20 or 21 days worth of supplies regularly.

The goal, they say, is to take what you need to live, the bullets you need to fight, the food you need to eat, the medical supplies you need to take care of your wounded from the enemy after you defeat them. Which, of course, leads to the very interesting question, what happens if you don't? Or what happens if you don't defeat them in time to have what you need before the supplies run out? Well, it's a catastrophe, right?

And while General Mutaguchi is issuing press releases saying that this giant offensive is going to change the whole complexion of the war, real rah-rah stuff, some of his divisional commanders...

clearly see what's about to happen here um in his book hirohito's war francis pike talks about one of them lieutenant general i hope the name pronunciation is correct sato and um sato's troops are going to have to cross the chindwin river which is sort of one of these big dividing lines in order to make these attacks and pike writes quote

Lieutenant General Katoko Sato, commanding the 31st Infantry Division, had to transport his troops a thousand miles before the offensive was launched. He was deeply pessimistic about the plans for the campaign, though he was partially mollified by promises of 250 tons of supplies before March 25th, and then 10 tons per week afterwards. None of these supplies actually arrived.

Before leaving the Chindwin, Pike writes, Sato toasted his fellow officers with champagne, telling them, quote, I'll take the opportunity, gentlemen, of making something quite clear to you. Miracles apart, everyone is likely to lose his life in this operation. It isn't simply a question of the enemy's bullets. You must be prepared for death by starvation in these mountain fastnesses. End quote. Pike then says they were prophetic words. End quote.

Now, you don't see a lot of starvation. I mean, real, like, dying-from-hunger starvation amongst modern armies. But in fairness to the Japanese, part of the problem here is the terrain. It is awful country to try to get supplies to troops through. So much of the Asia-Pacific theater is, isn't it? And we'd used a line from several of my history books, sort of a saying amongst Japanese troops comparing the relative merits of places they might find themselves serving in, like...

One of them was that heaven was Java, hell was Burma, but no one returns alive from New Guinea. And we were trying to point out when we said that how terrible a place to fight New Guinea was. But Burma, if it's better, is only better by the nth degree. It has the same combination of wonderful terrain types that make a place like New Guinea so difficult to fight in.

heavy jungle with really high mountains. It's actually on the way to the Himalayan range. So you get these 7,000 foot mountains with heavy jungle and the jungle is so heavy. The British commander makes a mistake in thinking that the Japanese won't be able to get large numbers of troops through it. He's wrong about that, but the Japanese won't be able to get lots of supplies through it, which contributes to the starvation problem.

The other issue with terrain like this is it is absolutely made for disease. New Guinea is one of the wettest places in the world. Burma's wetter, up to five inches of rain a day during the monsoon season. And the monsoon season lasts half the year. It pretty much shuts down military operations, which is part of the reason why you haven't seen as much action in Burma, although there's been skirmishing and some things going on. I mean, you really only have half a campaign season.

But the disease is as bad as the worst places in the Asia-Pacific theater. Start with malaria and work your way down an exhaustive list. The majority of casualties are caused by disease and not by enemy bullets. And sometimes some of these units reach disease casualty rates of like 600%. And 600% means that people are coming back from recuperation and getting it again, that new people are being brought in as replacements and then they're getting sick.

It is completely muddy once the rain starts, and there's only a few good modern roads. And those places become the key points that are fought over. The army that the Japanese are fighting is one of the most diverse in the world. And I often try to imagine myself as a Japanese soldier during this time period from a small island nation. You find yourself in Burma, and in the north you're fighting Chinese troops and American troops, sometimes Chinese and American troops together. Right.

In this campaign, you're fighting the British Empire, whose armies are some of the most diverse ever fielded. So you have your troops from Great Britain, of course, your Englishmen, your Scotsmen, your Welshmen. I'm sure there are some Irish guys there. There always seem to be. But then you have a ton of Indians from all over India. You have the famous Gurkhas from Nepal who fight with the British. And then you have a bunch of people from sub-Saharan Africa, East and West Africa, the colonial regions are called.

but those form a multitude of modern-day African countries. The poor Japanese person is getting like a visual representation through the diversity of the army that they're facing of the depth of allied power and resources right here. Here's the way Yasmin Khan in her book India at War describes the kickoff of this campaign when the Japanese in the first week of March push across the Chindwin River and start this offensive, quote,

The Japanese did make an ambitious incursion into Indian territory, but by 1944, the Allies were fully prepared for it. In March 1944, the Japanese pushed into the northeast and advanced along the Imphal-Dimapur Road in an attempt to cut Imphal's supply lines and to capture the strategically pivotal Kohima.

The 14th Army, an eclectic collection of nearly half a million troops, including British infantrymen, Canadian and American pilots, the Assam Rifles, the King's African Rifles, and troops from the Gold Coast, had been trained, equipped,

and honed into a modern fighting force by now among the infantry morale was high there was an effective organizational esprit de corps and a powerful air support gave the allies a distinct advantage

Nonetheless, the Japanese made a massive thrust, sending in 85,000 men, far more than had been expected, and for a time it looked as if they might cut off and occupy northeast India at Kohima. But in stark contrast to 1942, she writes, the Japanese quickly became overstretched, as their supply lines were bogged down over hundreds of miles of difficult terrain, winding back into southeast Asia."

Basically what happens is the British are ready for this assault, but it just happens sooner than they thought it was going to happen, in greater strength than they expected, and more quickly than they'd accounted for, which puts them at a disadvantage initially. The Japanese are able to get around the flanks of a bunch of units. They cut one major force off that has to fight its way out, and then they basically surround their two areas that they're after, Imphal and Kohima. Kohima's a mountain area.

village that's heavily jungled about 80 miles north of Imphal and the Imphal plain is a large relatively open area the Japanese will basically put both of them under siege and several times try to assault them and overrun them

Part of the reason for the heroism here is that not only are they cut off, but the British Imperial forces are badly outnumbered. I think there's 15,000 to 20,000 Japanese attacking Kohima, for example, and something like 1,800 defenders at Kohima.

This is actually it's funny. This is both a little known affair, especially outside the British Empire and the Japanese homeland today. And yet it was voted in 2013, I believe, Britain's greatest battle of the modern era, beating out such famous encounters as Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and the British landings at Normandy on D-Day.

And yet the victory was won by an army that's known as the Forgotten Army. So does that tell you something? There's a couple of reasons that might explain this, starting with the terrain.

i mean jungle and mountain terrain has a way of frustrating large forces being used and in an earlier discussion when we were talking about guadalcanal and places like that we quoted from eric bergeron's book touched with fire where he talks about how so much of the fighting devolves down to like squads and companies and patrols and things like that that are very different than what

the large armies in, say, North Africa or the Western or Eastern Front in Europe or even in Italy are dealing with. In his book, Japan's Last Bid for Victory, The Invasion of India in 1944, author Robert Lyman describes it this way, quote,

When Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy of India, visited Headquarters 14th Army in August 1944, he was perplexed by the nature of the fighting, describing it in a letter to London as taking place strangely in what he called penny-packets,

he was right the battle did not involve massed brigades and divisions fighting in carefully choreographed coherence on a perhaps traditional model if a normally chaotic battlefield could ever be described thus but was instead lyman writes

A confused and disparate section and platoon, sometimes company-level struggle, fought at many different points of the compass in the jungle, matted hills and valleys encircling the Imphal Plain, and the swampy terrain around Bishanpur. None of the land battles were directly interconnected. The struggles for the north and northeast, the south and southeast, being conducted largely independent by both attacker and defender.

Add to that the fact that battle is a very strange term to use for 20th century large-scale conflict because it's so different than all the previous eras that came before it when a battle usually meant one really horrible day.

the really terrible battles in human history up until the modern era are two or three days long now we're not talking about sieges which can go on for months or even years but a battle is generally something on a small enough area where if you can get above the fray and the dust and the commotion and the chaos get up to a hill maybe with a little spyglass you can usually see the whole thing not here not in the 20th century and

You're better off referring to these things to avoid confusion, and they often are referred to, instead of battles, as operations. Operations that are the sum total of thousands of potentially fatal tasks.

So when you read the accounts of a veteran in these modern operations, their entire war experience may be when they ran into a concealed gun in a hill a mile away from the road that they're on that shuts down road traffic until they can figure out a way to outflank the gun and take it out. Right. That's one of those things.

you know thousands of little potentially fatal tasks that when you add them all together equals an operation like the imfall kohima campaign but it sure makes it less dramatic in the big picture sense and much harder to follow but in the small unit sense it is as dramatic and horrifying as any encounter you'll find in the war maybe worse

If you look at the big picture timeline in the first week of March, the Japanese crossed the Chin Win River, as we had said. They blow past the flanks of one major unit, surround it, and it has to fight its way out. Then they advance on Infal and Kohima and manage to put those places under siege. If this had been an earlier war,

Those places would be cut off, and the British and Imperial troops in those places would begin to run out of ammunition. They wouldn't have any reinforcements. They would run out of medical supplies. They would run out of food, and that would be that. The difference here, though, is, and this is what frustrates the Japanese, the Allies have the ability to supply the cutoff areas by air.

This is huge and it's a new development, right? And it was only really in the Second World War that the capability existed to even try this. And past attempts had been hit or missed, to say the least. I mean, when the German army is surrounded by the Soviets at Stalingrad, the Luftwaffe tries to fly in supplies and they can't manage to provide anywhere near enough for a starving army running out of ammunition that has to surrender. Right.

But here there are American air assets that have been flying supplies over what's called the hump, which are a bunch of mountain ranges into China. It's also called the Skyway to hell. And the British are able to borrow some of these big, heavy supply planes to add to their spitfire and hurricane fighters, which they're using in a mostly ground attack role to

to change the entire equation and begin to supply their cut-off troops with what they need to keep fighting and recall the japanese have only a limited amount of this stuff themselves they can't do the air supply thing

And if they can't take the supplies of the people that they cut off and are fighting at Imphal and Kohima, they're going to run out of supplies themselves. I like the way the British general in charge of this operation describes it. His name, by the way, is Lieutenant General William Slim. He's a very fine general. He cops to his mistakes initially here, underestimating the Japanese speed and size and whether or not they can get through the jungle with their troops effectively.

but then explains really the entire battle in the terms that will decide it. And he says, quote, "'As I struggled hard to redress my errors and to speed by rail and air these reinforcements, I knew that all depended on the steadfastness of the troops already meeting the first impetus of attack. If they could hold until help arrived, all would be well. If not, we were near disaster.'" End quote.

So that's what has to happen, and the air supply helps. But bottom line, it's a question of heroism. And I am not a glory guy when it comes to war. Put me in the camp of the William Tecumseh Shermans, the American general who had said that war's glory is all moonshine. I don't think killing other people is glorious, but I think surviving against incredible odds is

putting up with the privation and the hardship enduring the unendurable for the sake of whatever is motivating you to do so can often be heroic and it's a shame that things like the colonial overtones or if you're the japanese or the germans the evil cause in which you're you're fighting that that somehow or sometimes overshadows the heroism of the troops involved um

rarely do you read combat accounts where the troops are talking about things like, you know, a German soldier saying he's ready to fight and die for more Lebensraum for Germany, right? Or an American who's fighting and dying for the larger cause of freedom for the world. Or a Japanese soldier who's fighting and dying to conquer and control other Asian peoples. Or even a British soldier from Kent, maybe, right?

or a place like that ready to lay down his life so Britain can maintain its colonial dominance of a place like India. That's generally not what it's about. At bottom line, of course, it's about kill or be killed. But above that, you'll read so many accounts where soldiers are fighting for their comrades or their unit or the esprit de corps of the group that they belong to or maybe just to not let down the

Those other people that are depending on them. I mean, it's very baseline stuff. Your worldview and your horizon shrinks and the lens you view things through is very narrow and immediate.

So I don't like the idea that and this is a problem in India. I read that the Indians have a hard time sometimes trying to figure out how to portray this whole affair because it's so overshadowed with the colonial question. Were Indian troops fighting with the British mercenaries fighting for the colonial master or were they heroes fighting for post-war Indian independence? I mean, it's a complicated question. And as

John Toland wrote in his book, The Rising Sun, this whole Burma campaign is an ideological and geographic nightmare. But that shouldn't overshadow what was done there by all the soldiers on all sides. I mean, read some of the accounts. First of all, the Japanese threw themselves at the enemy wave after wave, sometimes suicidally.

The British general Slim was very critical of the throwing away of Japanese lives. He also had a true admiration for the Japanese as a fighting people because, well, let me just quote what's said in Robert Lyman's book, Japan's Last Bid for Victory, quote,

With the difficulties posed by the climate came a stark reminder to any British Commonwealth troops who had not yet experienced the toughness of their adversary, of just how extraordinarily fit and physically hardy were the Japanese, how committed they were to achieving their objectives, how apparently unconcerned they were with regard to human comforts, and how determined they were to do what the Emperor, through their officers, demanded, or die in the attempt—

repeated fanatical and suicidal attacks were thrown at the british indian and gurkha defenders and counter-attacks had to face the toughest defensive positions imaginable prepared by men whom general slim was to describe as warrior ants as the days went by the battlefield became one large charnel house littered with bodies in various states of decomposition as it was rarely easy to recover and bury the dead end quote

You can even look, by the way, at the photographs. And as the battle goes on, the areas that are highly fought over go from, you know, heavy, lush jungle where you can't see five feet in front of your face to terrain that looks like First World War battlefields, especially the ones that used to be forests but have been shelled into wasteland.

General Slim actually says that the battle for Kohima is the only one he'd seen in the Second World War that reminded him of the First World War. Hard to know which is different. Kohima, the British forces, the imperial forces were so badly outnumbered that they eventually get pushed onto one hill, something like 350 square meters, and they will be fighting over a tennis court, an actual, it's called the tennis court.

where the Japanese are on one side of the tennis court fighting British imperial forces on the other side of the tennis court, and they're throwing grenades at each other for days and days and days. That's not glorious, but it's heroic on both sides. In his book, Hirohito's War, author Francis Pike tries to give a sense of what the fighting was like and writes, quote,

Most famously, there was a five-day tussle across the tennis courts belonging to the deputy commissioner's bungalow. Soldiers dug in on either side had to live through torrential rain and eat, shit, and sleep in their trenches. The courts were covered in the bloated bodies of slain Japanese soldiers. Enormous black flies filled the air. The stench of death was gut-wrenching. Major John Nettlefield observed, quote,

The place stank. The ground everywhere was plowed up with shell fire, and human remains lay rotting as the battle raged over them. Flies swarmed everywhere and multiplied with incredible speed. Men retched as they dug in. End quote. Pike continues, quote.

Hand grenades rather than tennis balls crisscrossed the courts. The resilience of the defenders proved the morale that General Slim had instilled in his troops. In one notable engagement, John Harmon, son of the millionaire owner of Lundy Island, a Lance Corporal with the Queen's Royal West Kent Regiment, single-handedly charged a Japanese trench, killed its five occupants before being fatally shot returning to his own lines.

Dying in his company commander's arms, he gave his last words. I got the lot. It was worth it. End quote. But this is unsustainable for the Japanese because unlike their opponents, they are running out of supplies and not just food, but ammunition, bullets, shells, medical stuff, everything. When you look at the numbers that the Japanese units were reduced to,

I have a hard time finding similar numbers in any conflict anywhere because normally units break and run before they hit those kinds of numbers. I mean, in one situation that Pike recalls, one soldier says that the losses had been dreadful, the regiment had started out 3,800 strong and now just had a few hundred men left and many of them invalids.

General Sato asks his superior, General Mutaguchi, a man often referred to as a blockhead by some of his subordinates, permission to retreat. He's denied. He asks again, and he's denied, and then says, quote, This is shameful. Mutaguchi should apologize for his own failure to the dead soldiers and the Japanese people, end quote.

General Mutaguchi's response is to sack General Sato and send a subordinate with a sword to him so he can kill himself, which Sato refuses to do. Mutaguchi will do the unthinkable here and sack three of his divisional generals, one for incompetence, one for ill health, and Sato for disobedience. Sato doesn't care. He orders his troops to retreat.

right around the same time that the monsoons open up. The Japanese on the defensive are just as difficult for the Allies to deal with as they are on the offensive, and they have to be dug out position by position at huge cost to the Allied soldiers who have to do this.

In his book, Japan's Last Bid for Victory, author Robert Lyman tries to give a sense of how hard it was to dig the Japanese out of these defensive positions. He says that the British Imperial forces ate away slowly at the Japanese defenses and said, quote,

nowhere were sudden gains made but by gradual perseverance and the application of focused firepower the japanese were destroyed bunker by bunker trench by trench rarely did the japanese run or retreat remaining to die where they fought lieutenant lindhorn haiget of the dorsets considered the japanese to be magnificent trench warriors quote ever

Every army in the world talks about holding positions to the last man. Virtually no other army, including the Germans, ever did. But the Japs did. Their positions were well-sighted, and they had a good eye for ground. They relied on rushing and shouting in the attack.

we thought they were formidable fighting insects and savages we took few prisoners about one or two in the whole war we wanted prisoners but wounded men would have a primed grenade under them so stretcher bearers were very careful end quote british general william slim concurs and he says quoted in francis pike's book quote

Whatever his thoughts about the capabilities of Japanese commanders, Slim was profuse in his admiration for Japanese troops. Quote, There can be no question of the supreme courage and hardyhood of the Japanese soldiers who made the attempts. I know of no army that could have equaled them. End quote. Reading of the Japanese experiences in the retreat is horrifying.

They literally are starving to death. When the skies open up and the rains start, it turns into a wetter version of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. The troops are committing suicide left and right. The Japanese refer to the road out as the road of human remains. It's often translated into the road of bones. There are many stories of...

Soldiers taking grenades, sometimes in pairs, and they will embrace their comrade and blow up a grenade between them. There are medical orderlies injecting wounded troops with something to kill them quickly. The eating grass, potatoes, snails, lizards, snakes, monkeys, anything they can get their hands on.

It's one of the worst retreats I've ever read about. And when it's over, the Japanese between the fighting in Kohima, Imphal, Imphal was under siege, by the way, for like 88 days before it was broken, and the diversionary attack in the Arakan area, about 65,000 Japanese die. Most of those fatalities occurred during the retreat and were caused by either suicide, disease, or starvation.

the Allies suffered a fraction of the number of deaths. And according to author John Toland, quote,

In all, 65,000 men died, more than two and a half times the number lost on Guadalcanal, and about as many as fell on Leyte. Mutaguchi, his chief of staff, and senior staff officers were relieved of their posts, as was Kawabe and his chief of staff. The command shake-up and the destruction of the 15th Army, the Japanese 15th Army,

infected every other unit in Burma. And by the end of the year, Japanese rule was at the point of collapse. End quote. This is one of the worst defeats in Japanese history. Some historical sources call it the worst defeat they'd ever suffered up till this time. And yet, interestingly enough, this is considered to be

a subsidiary front in the war because it's not a decisive one as we said if you're going to play a bunch of cards what can this card do to forestall japanese defeat which is coming at an increasingly rapid pace from the other geographic direction entirely from the pacific the pacific was the last thing we were talking about when we left off the last segment we were in mid 1944

The Americans had just taken Guam, Saipan, Tinny, and the Marianas Islands. And before the last Japanese snipers are cleared out of the trees, the American naval construction engineering people, the Seabees, are out there building airfields. And this means the Japanese are on the clock, and they know it. They can do the math. They realize these islands are probably in range. Round trip of America's brand-new super bomber, the B-29,

Never used against Germany, by the way. Looks like an early 1950s Cold War bomber rather than a Second World War bomber. As soon as they can get them to these islands, get all of the necessary support materials together, and these airfields finished, the bombing starts. And the Japanese do not have to imagine what it might be like to have their cities bombed. They can look at real photographs of what's happening to their Axis partner, Germany, right now.

By 1945, by the end of the war, I believe amongst mid and large-sized German cities, only Heidelberg is significantly untouched. I'm going from memory here, but as I recall, Heidelberg, special in that regard. You want to go see what Germany used to look like? You got to go to Heidelberg unless you want to see a recreation. I was in Munich and they've rebuilt some of it to look just like it looked before, but it has a feel to me when you're used to the old buildings of like a movie set.

But what are they supposed to do? That generation in Germany created the conditions where the cultural, architectural heritage of Germans forever into the future is gone. And they're not the only ones who suffer. It's a cultural monument that we all suffer because it's gone. Significant that one generation of human beings could cost... I mean, it's the same thing Churchill looked at when he saw the films of the German cities in rubble and wondered if...

This was a bridge too far to win the war. But if you look at how events unfolded, it all is pretty understandable. You can see how people got sucked into this idea that anything's better than losing this war, total war. And anything means using everything you have. And there are a lot of people arguing that this bombing stuff shortens wars. And as we've seen, the human being lawnmower is at work at all times, every day, racking up its daily totals.

If you shut the war down months early, well, that's that many daily totals that don't go into the fiery furnace. It's logical insanity is the way it's been described. If the Japanese were reasonable people, they would surrender now. See, there's many points in 1944 where you go, okay, now would be a really good time to spare your cities and the cultural heritage of the Japanese people and all that for the future.

But part of what makes the Japanese so compelling, I mean, 500 years from now when the young people are reading the history and getting interested in the subjects, Japan is going to be, I think, compelling the way that many other people throughout the past who were willing to fight for

for their country, right? This is a kind of a patriotic sort of a feeling taken to extremes and then becoming poisonous. And we talked about this earlier in this series, didn't we? We called it super patriotism. The Japanese are going to go to lengths that you admire because it shows how far the human spirit can be pushed, right? It's interesting to see some of our extremes. At the same time, it's

debilitating to watch because it's often being used in a way that seems wasteful doesn't have to happen and that's why sometimes you'll read these books about the kamikaze for example and they will they will make it beautiful in a Japanese cultural sense and talk about the falling of the cherry blossoms and all these sorts of things but

um in order to put some sort of an artistic or spiritual coating on the idea of a young man with his whole life ahead of him flying his airplane extra loaded with bombs into an allied ship now i've read the letters from kamikaze pilots and and you get all sorts of different people who do that for all sorts of different reasons it's not this monolithic fanatical robot image we thought of them when i was growing up not at all

But there's a number of people out there that think that this is what you should be doing if you love your country, right? Same thing these Japanese soldiers did when they would strap themselves and put a mine on their back and then run under an American or a British tank and blow themselves up. Most armies don't do that. The Japanese are like everyone else, only more so, right? And the B-29 countdown has begun once these Marianas Islands have fallen into U.S. hands.

The question of what to do next is paramount at this particular time, and the high command of the Allies disagrees over what this should be. And the main disagreement is within the United States chain of command. The Army and the Navy have different ideas on how the rest of the war should go. Both sides would like to sort of end up at least off the coast of Japan as the end destination, but the path to get there...

Well, the Navy has one idea under Admiral Ernest King, who's a tough customer. And the army in this situation, he's not the general of the army, that would be George Marshall, but the guy whose opinion matters in this situation is our old friend Douglas the Situation MacArthur, who comes to Hawaii in mid-1944 for a big strategy conference over what to do next,

And Franklin Delano Roosevelt's going to be there, which is a huge deal. I mean, when you look at how really, really sick Franklin Roosevelt is in 1944, I mean, it is not too much to say that he is dying. I've read a bunch of good books lately that talk about how pretty much everyone who hadn't seen him for a while is shocked when they do.

Even MacArthur wrote that after seeing him, he just knew he didn't have a long time left. And by the way, Roosevelt is running for office at this time for his fourth. No other president has ever been elected more than twice or run more than twice. I mean, Roosevelt is dying and he's going for his fourth term. I love the the whole sort of.

reality series mood that is cast when this conference kicks off because Roosevelt arrives. The Navy's waiting for them. Everybody's, you know, very, because when the president shows up, you know, everybody salutes a lot and everybody's, everything's been prepared and everybody's ready. And, and, and Douglas MacArthur is not there at the meeting with the president. He doesn't show, he doesn't show up for 40 minutes. And I love the way

Author Jonathan W. Jordan describes it in his book, American Warlords. President Roosevelt is on the USS Baltimore with the Navy guys, and they've been waiting for like 40 minutes, and that's where the narrative picks up. Quote, "'Forty minutes after Baltimore's gangplank was lowered to the pier, the air was split by the shriek of a police siren. A motorcycle escort appeared, leading what Sam Rosenman remembered as, quote, "'the longest open car I've ever seen.'"

in front was a chauffeur in khaki and in the back one lone figure and quote jordan continues quote that figure wore a crushed general's hat and a brown leather jacket mr ketch had arrived let me stop the narrative real quick mr ketch was um the code name or the something like that for macarthur that the president and the other side had so this was mr ketch mr ketch had arrived

"'MacArthur's car drove to the gangplank "'to the wild applause of the crowd. "'He bounded up the ramp, "'stopping halfway to acknowledge another round of applause, "'then strode onto the cruiser's deck. "'He saluted the commander-in-chief "'before shaking Roosevelt's outstretched hand.'

"'Hello, Douglas,' said Roosevelt. "'What are you doing with that leather jacket on? "'It's darn hot today.' "'Well, I've just landed from Australia,' MacArthur said with a smile. "'It's pretty cold up there.'"

Jordan points out that MacArthur had actually had time to shave and get ready and the whole thing. He wore the leather jacket for effect. That's his branding, like the corncob pipe and the crushed hat. And he's in Hawaii and he shows up in the whole garb.

Because he's in costume. I mean, uniform. He's an interesting... See, and we've said this before, you have to acknowledge, I think anyway, Douglas MacArthur's military talent. Sometimes he does extraordinary things, but he is an interesting guy. Talks about himself in the third person, as we said before. No one who talks about himself in the third person is your normal kind of customer. Just gonna make a broad brush statement about that. George likes spicy chicken.

Little Seinfeld joke there for you Seinfeld fans. MacArthur's favorite pronoun is I. And it's the one he used when he was forced out of the Philippines by the Japanese way back in 1942. I shall return. It's one of the most famous phrases of all time. But as we pointed out at the time, there were a bunch of historians and contemporaries who were saying, you know, he should have said the United States will return or something. But he made it personal.

And because he made it personal, it's one of the things that goes into his argument that he makes at the strategy conference about, you know, what should happen next? Well, he said, we should go back to the Philippines. I'm going to return. And he gave a whole host of good reasons why that should be the way, you know, sort of to Japan. Let's take the Philippines. We promised those people. We have POWs in there that the Japanese will kill. There's a lot of good reasons. But part of it was, you know, he'd made a promise and this was wrapped up in his destiny somehow. Yeah.

And he wanted to go through the Philippines. And then you go up toward Okinawa, which is it's Japanese, but not Japanese. It depends on who you talk to. Talk to an Okinawan. They have a different opinion sometimes. But but it's it's considered a home island. And then from Okinawa, you keep going with what the Americans need is.

is a place that can serve the same role that Great Britain serves. In the Normandy landings, you know, on D-Day, you had a big place where you could get all your troops together and all the supplies you need and build up and then, boom, cross the water and you're there and your supply hub's right off the shore. The problem is there's nothing right off the shore from Japan. So if you take the Philippines out,

and you decide that this is going to be your big supply hub where you can gather troops together for the eventual invasion of Japan, it's still a long sea ride to Japan from there. The Navy, Ernest King, Admiral Ernest King has sent, he wanted to come himself, but he

maybe the actual face-to-face meeting at a strategy session between a guy like MacArthur and a guy like King, and we talked about what they were like earlier, might have been too many sparks for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to keep from blowing up. So he sends a subordinate, he sends Admiral Nimitz,

who he then accuses of not having a spine. He'll never represent things against him. He'll get eaten up by Douglas MacArthur was basically the gist of his statements. And Douglas MacArthur prevails in the strategy session because the Navy wants to go take Formosa, which is modern day Taiwan, and use that as the big supply base that they can start the Japan attack from.

MacArthur wins out, though, in the long run on this deal. But that doesn't stop the Navy advance, the island hopping that's been going on now for a long time. And the Marianas Islands campaign we just talked about is the latest island hop. So that's going to continue through the Central Pacific, too. So think of two routes of approach to Japan.

MacArthur is going to go up through the Philippines and that route, the U.S. fleet and the Marines and some Army help is going to go through the Central Pacific. You know, next major stop on the list, Iwo Jima. But there's going to be a little quick thing that the Navy wants to take care of first. Or I've actually read a lot about this because it's controversial how an island chain like

the island chain that contains the island of Peleliu, how that ends up on the to-do list eventually, because there's a lot of history that suggests that it was supposed to be crossed off or that it never should have happened. It's interesting. And the reason it actually matters is because what will happen on Peleliu is not what is expected to happen on Peleliu. And when things go wrong, people ask questions for a long time afterwards, right? When you lose a lot of Marines, people start going, well, was this trip really necessary or,

And Peleliu is controversial that way. Peleliu is a little island. It's a coral reef, basically, sort of off the coast of the Philippines a ways. And one of the arguments for why this was necessary is it was going to take these islands so they couldn't use air bases against MacArthur when he lands in the not too distant Philippines area.

Well, the prediction is, is that they'll go in there. They'll take these islands two days, maybe four days. Should be a sharp little fight, a little like Tarawa. So it's going to be rough for a very short period of time, but maybe really rough. And instead, the situation on Peleliu turns into a kind of disaster. It turns into, I've seen it called the worst combat that the U.S. Marines ever saw.

I think that's arguable, but the invasion of Peleliu is something that reminds me of what the Japanese had wanted to do

In terms of their grand strategy of taking all these islands and then forcing the Americans and the British and the Australians and the New Zealanders and the South Africans and on and on and on to take them back at super high cost because the Japanese were going to reinforce these places have guns everywhere and steel doors and it was going to be like something of a James Bond film but they never really did that on the outer islands very much.

On Peleliu, though, it's sort of, let's call it the model home for what the Japanese would have liked to have seen all these islands built up to a level of. I mean, when you have metal doors that open up and a gun pops up and fires and goes back inside and the metal doors close, I'm calling that James Bond-ish. That's the kind of stuff that the people who landed on Peleliu got to deal with. That and the fact that they're on an absolute coral atoll. It is not dirt. It is rock.

and it is usually around 110 degrees or more in the daytime on a rock.

This is one of those campaigns, by the way, that you wish there was more visual material to see, you know, photographs, movies, those kind of things. But I read that because the military had told the media that this was going to be over in two or four days, right, a quick, short, sharp fight, most of them chose to go elsewhere, right? There's lots of other stories in the Pacific. How about MacArthur planning to come back to the Philippines, right? We can go cover that. And so you don't get Peleliu because you didn't know Peleliu was going to be what Peleliu is, right?

one of the Marine Corps, the U.S. Marine Corps' toughest battles ever. And when you see the lineage of the U.S. Marines from the Second World War, it is one of those place of honor sorts of battles. But it wasn't supposed to be. There's lots of good accounts. The Marines land on September 15th, 1st Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division. The 5th is there. The 7th is there. The 11th is providing artillery support there.

And they're expecting the Japanese to do what the Japanese have done on the other islands. And the Americans are doing what they've done just better, right? Pounding the beach with, you know, heavy duty weapons from the cruisers offshore and the battleships offshore. And then the bombers come in, strafe the beaches, bomb the heck out of everything. But the Japanese don't do what they've done in their other battles. No bonsai charges on the beach to waste away their strength. None of that sort of stuff.

They're going to oppose the American landing on the beach lightly, but then require the Americans to go and get them in their prepared positions in what is one of the better fortresses you will ever see that was designed by Japanese engineers who

More than 500 tunnels on the island, many of which had been used for mining purposes. So they're interconnected and they go to logical places and they're designed in a sort of strategic sense. There are going to be times on this island where the Americans can hear and know that the Japanese are under them, you know, in the ground. They just can't even get to them.

In his book Eagle Against the Sun, Ronald H. Spector has a good sort of overview of the start of this thing, and he writes, quote, By the way, the island, like two miles wide, I think it's six square miles overall, tiny. Quote,

The Americans had little information about the terrain on Peleliu, except some inadequate aerial photos. As a result, they failed to recognize its potential for defense. The northern peninsula of the small island was a series of jagged coral ridgelines, honeycombed with natural caves, which the Japanese had improved into almost impregnable fortresses.

Blast walls of reinforced concrete or oil drums filled with coral protected the entrances to the caves, which often faced each other from the sheer walls of twisting gorges and were thus mutually supporting. In the larger cave fortresses, he writes, the Japanese had installed electric lighting, ventilating systems, stairs, telephones, and radio communications. One large cave was discovered, now he's quoting somebody, quote,

to have nine staggered levels and so many entrances that it was all but impossible to count them. End quote. The Marines are going to land an assault right into the teeth of defenses that remind me of the kind of defenses that the British and the French soldiers sometimes had to assault head-on on the Western Front in the First World War.

you know, prepared German trenches that had had the guns sighted and crossfire set up and barbed wire put up. I mean, this is it's not the sort of fight you want Marines in necessarily because they're fast moving, lightly armed and equip people designed to, you know, get in quickly, bypass strong points. This is going to throw them the right into the teeth of all this.

This is where some of the criticism, by the way, of Peleliu comes in. And this is where the war memoirs take over. There are some fantastic accounts of Peleliu. The best, of course, is one of the best war memoirs of all time. It's called With the Old Breed at Peleliu in Okinawa by E.B. Sledge, Eugene Sledge.

They've made movies from Sledge's writing now, but it was never intended for this. This was therapeutic for this Marine wrote it for himself from notes he took during the fighting for his family. He's one of the most attractive. Maybe that's a better way to put it. Sort of individuals you will ever meet.

He's dead now, but he became a biology professor after the war, soft-spoken Southern guy. You can't in your mind's eye picture the old man Eugene Sledge doing the things the young man, the young Marine Eugene Sledge had to do and live through.

but that's part of what his war memoir is all about, that all these people were like him and that the war made them do and live through the most outrageously extreme things.

Sledge talks about the hitting the beach moment, which he says is like cinematic, says, you know, the Amtrak is moving from the ships toward the shore and one of the other soldiers pulls out some whiskey and says, well, this is it, boys. And then Sledge says, just like in the movies. But once they hit the beach, it's not like the movies at all. Sledge writes, quote,

Shells crashed all around. Fragments tore and whirred, slapping on the sand and splashing into the water a few yards behind us. The Japanese were recovering from the shock of our pre-landing bombardment. Their machine gun and rifle fire got thicker, snapping viciously overhead in increasing volume.

Our Amtrak, the amphibious vehicle, spun around and headed back out as I reached the end of the beach and flattened on the deck. The world was a nightmare of flashes, violent explosions, and snapping bullets. Most of what I saw blurred. My mind was benumbed by the shock of it. I glanced back across the beach and saw a duck. It

a rubber-tired amphibious truck, that's what they were called, roll up on the sand at a point near where we had just landed. The instant the duck stopped, it was engulfed in a thick, dirty black smoke as a shell scored a direct hit on it.

bits of debris flew into the air i watched with that odd detached fascination peculiar to men under fire as a flat metal panel about two feet square spun high into the air and then splashed into shallow water like a big pancake i didn't see any men get out of the duck he continues

Up and down the beach and out on the reef, a number of Amtrak's and ducks were burning. Japanese machine gun bursts made long splashes on the water as though flaying it with some giant whip. The geysers belched up relentlessly where the mortar and artillery shells hit. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a group of Marines leaving a smoking Amtrak on the reef.

Some fell as bullets and fragments splashed among them. Their buddies tried to help them as they struggled in knee-deep water. I shuddered and choked. A wild, desperate feeling of anger, frustration, and pity gripped me. It was an emotion that always would torture my mind when I saw men trapped and was unable to do anything but watch as they were hit. My own plight forgotten momentarily, I felt sickened to the depths of my soul. I asked God, why, why, why?

I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust. End quote.

In Matthew A. Rizal's book, The Things Our Fathers Saw, where he interviews veterans throughout the book, he interviews Peleliu veterans, including 19-year-old Marine Dan Lawler, who was also in the wave that attacked Peleliu and says this, quote, "'We hit the island, which was only four miles long by two miles wide. I was in the first assault wave. It was hell, and everyone was scared. It was an awful feeling.'

as we disembarked i looked up and down the beaches and all you could hear was screaming and men were falling and dying there was artillery mortar and machine-gun fire constantly we fought all day and by evening we reached the airstrip about a half mile from the beach

we set up for the night along the sides of the airstrip the temperature was from 102 degrees at night to 120 degrees in the daytime we went in with two canteens of water that's a gallon of water this island was two degrees off the equator by noontime we were out of water end quote rozelle also quotes another marine from that day named john murray

who says that the first thing he saw after he landed was a Japanese machine gunner chained to his machine gun. And he says they were not going to give up. In the last segment, we had quoted a line from Paul Fussell's wonderful book on war called wartime. And he had a whole chapter called the real war. We'll never get into the books. And it was based on, on a saying that soldiers had. And, and,

The problem with the real war getting into the books is that no country likes to show their own soldiers getting chewed up. I have a book called Life Goes to War in the Second World War. It's this book of all the Life magazine photos, and you'll occasionally see dead Americans, you know, tastefully shown, but they have no problem showing thousands and thousands of dead Japanese after a bonsai attack.

But what hit me as a child, you know, who was interested in war, was the first real stuff that I ran into that didn't sanitize it from the American side, right? You go around playing in your army helmet and your army clothes, and it looks all glorious. And then you run into some of the artwork of a guy like Life Magazine's Tom Lee. Lee's a famous artist, and he was in the second wave at Peleliu. So he landed about an hour after the first wave. And Lee...

had up until this time been doing the same sort of artwork that we could call today sort of propaganda artwork but Peleliu changed him I have an account from um author James Jones who was in the Pacific War and he's talking about these artists and he says this about Tom Lee quote

Lee was one of the artists put into the field by Life magazine after their takeover of the defunct army program. Various of his works appeared in the magazine, and up until the time he went into Peleliu, most of them could be pretty well classified as excellently done, but high-grade propaganda. There was very little American blood, very little tension, very little horror. Mostly it was what could be called the Bravo America and This Is Your Boy type of war art.

His almost photographic style easily lent itself to that type of work, as did the styles of Rockwell and others.

But something apparently happened to Lee after going into Peleliu, Jones writes. The pictures painted out of his Peleliu experience show a new approach. There is the tension of terror in the bodies here, and the distorted facial expressions of the men under fire show it, too. If his propagandistic style has not changed, his subject matter certainly has."

I ran into this as a kid, seeing a couple of Lee's most famous pieces of work. One was called The 2,000-Yard Stare, where Lee had done a piece of art showing what soldiers look like after combat for a long time. Today we would recognize it as what's sometimes called combat neuroses.

Tom Lee wrote about the painting that he did of the Marine with the so-called 2,000-yard stare and said, quote, "'He,' meaning the Marine, "'left the States 31 months ago. "'He was wounded in his first campaign. "'He has had tropical diseases. "'He half-sleeps at night "'and gouges japs out of holes all day. "'Two-thirds of his company has been killed or wounded. "'He will return to attack this morning.'

How much can a human being endure? End quote. Lee also is the one who painted a painting called The Price. This was a very controversial piece when it was published by Life magazine. Ian W. Toll says people complained and canceled their subscriptions because it showed a Marine suffering what a Marine really suffered.

Lee was accused of embellishing and over-dramatizing something, which, if you think about it, sounds silly. He's over-dramatizing war, and Lee fought back, saying every single painting he did showed what he really saw, and the painting, the price... I'm not the only guy, by the way. I was doing research on this and found that other people were similarly affected. If you're not used to seeing your own side as war victims, when an artist paints it, and this showed a photo...

almost photorealistic quality of a Marine who had been hit by mortar fire on the beach at Peleliu as Tom Lee watched and his arm is destroyed and half his face is gone. And Lee described it this way. He said, quote,

I fell flat on my face just as I heard the whoosh of a mortar that I knew was too close. A red flash stabbed at my eyeballs. About 15 yards away on the upper edge of the beach, it smashed down four men from our boat. One figure seemed to fly to pieces. With terrible clarity, I saw the head and one leg sail into the air.

i got up ran a few steps and fell into a small hole as another mortar burst through dirt on me lying there in terror looking longingly up the slope for better cover i saw a wounded man near me staggering in the direction of the lvt's the landing vehicles

His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick. As he bent over in his stumbling, shock-crazy walk, the half of his face that was still human had the most terrifying look of abject patience I've ever seen. He fell behind me in a red puddle on the white sand." But to me, this isn't gratuitous to say these things,

this is what makes what these marines did and yes let's be fair what the japanese resisting them also did what it is if you have some easy run and nobody gets hurt well it's a different style of a thing isn't it the reason pellaloo elicits the kind of admiration and horror that it does is because that's not what happens

These men have to see things like this or experience it and then keep going. And as I said, I'm not a glory person. I don't think shooting and killing other people is glorious, but there is something heroic about being able to keep going when assaulted by these sorts of sights, sounds, and possible damage to yourself.

And I break, by the way, the heroism down to two separate categories. The heroism while these soldiers and Marines, and yes, Japanese soldiers too, while they're actually fighting and dying in combat. And then the different kind of heroism that comes with trying to reestablish some sort of a normal life when you go home and have to live with all of this stuff in your memory banks for maybe decades.

As I believe I mentioned earlier, I used to talk to American veterans of the Second World War, and specifically the ones that were the most difficult nuts to crack were those from the Pacific, and a bunch of them wouldn't talk at all, the ones who I was told had seen the most combat.

But look at what they're trying to grapple with and how could they ever explain it to you? The things in Sledge's book, there are three or four things that when you read them, you go, okay, this is something that's going to stay with you the rest of your life. I mean, all of it will be, but there are certain things where you just go, holy cow. And Sledge had said once that if you were 100 yards behind the front line, you didn't understand it.

You could be a rear support person and still be in great danger in the Second World War, but it's different. And we said this in the last segment, the last part of the show, I'm sure, where it's different when you're in the meat grinder and you absolutely every single day are going from one position to another position to another position, rooting out and killing the people in each of these positions.

Sledge says the worst experience he ever had in the Second World War was on Peleliu, trying to cross an open airfield, which a lot of the soldiers remembered, under artillery and mortar fire. He said, quote, "...to be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it. The attack across Peleliu's airfield was the worst combat experience I had during the entire war."

It surpassed, by the intensity of the blast and shock of the bursting shells, all the subsequent horrifying ordeals on Peleliu and Okinawa. End quote.

That sort of mirrors what Ernst Junger in his fabulous book on the First World War, The Storm of Steel, had said about artillery. He said that being under artillery attack was like being tied to a stake and having somebody swinging at your head with a sledgehammer over and over again and just missing by a little, but you were sure that the next shot of the sledgehammer was going to get you.

surviving that artillery barrage while you run and try to avoid getting hit is the sort of thing that will give you nightmares the rest of your life. But he has two other incidents in the book that

that fall in my mind under the category of this is not what you're ready for when you go to war. You're ready to take on the enemy and deal with, you know, shooting at somebody or being shot at. But he talks about, for example, one incident where they're all on patrol at night on Peleliu and it's dark and they're trying to maintain quiet and secrecy. And then one of their guys cracks up and starts raving and screaming and threatening the whole unit.

And they don't know what to do. They're panicking. What do we do with this guy? He's our friend. He's our buddy. So first they try to give him morphine. Then they try to knock him out with a punch to the jaw. Then more morphine and nothing is working. And eventually one of the officers or the sergeant says, use an entrenching tool, knock him out. And they hit him in the head with basically a shovel. And instead of injuring him, he dies.

And the person who hit him in the head with a shovel has to live with that the rest of his life. You know, it's one thing to say I killed the enemy and they were a bunch of fanatical robots and they did terrible things to our troops so I don't feel bad about it. It's another thing to hit your own guy in the head with an entrenching tool and kill him. Sledge tells a worse story than that later on when he's talking about, and this is like horror movie stuff, like Freddy Krueger jump scare horror stuff, but the Japanese at night with their infiltration tactics are,

drove the Americans crazy. And over and over you read veterans saying, I hated the night. They would be in two-man foxholes so one person could sleep while the other person watched and stayed on guard. But the problem is, is at night you thought every single sound was the Japanese. And they'd come close to the foxholes and scream things at you to keep you on edge.

But sometimes they do more than scream. They grab a couple of edged weapons and jump into some of these foxholes. And not only did the people in the foxholes, who all of a sudden had Japanese in their foxholes with them, have to deal with them, but so did every American around that foxhole who could hear what was happening.

I read this over and over again with different Marines in different books talking about the sounds. I mean, what does it sound like when one guy is gouging out another guy's eyes and kills him by doing that?

Sledge says, quote, with a wild yell, the Japanese jumped into the hole with the two Marines. A frantic, desperate hand-to-hand struggle ensued, accompanied by the most gruesome combination of curses, wild babbling, animalistic guttural noises and grunts. Sounds of men hitting each other and thrashing around came from the foxhole. End quote. Okay, again, though, that's combat, right? You're going to wake up with some nightmares from that, but it's what happens next that gives...

A different sort of vibe to the whole thing when Sledge says a man jumps out of the foxhole and starts running in the dark toward the other Marine foxholes. So a Marine stands up, uses his gun like a club, and smacks the figure in the head, knocking him down. That figure stays around in the dark, groaning and thrashing around until another Marine goes up and shoots him in the head. And in the morning, they find out that it wasn't a Japanese soldier that they shot in the head. It was one of their own. Sledge says, quote,

A few hours later, as objects around me became faintly visible with the dawn, I noticed that the still form lying to my left didn't appear Japanese. It was either an enemy in marine dungarees or leggings, or it was a marine. I went over to find out which. Before I got to the prone body, its identity was obvious to me. My God, I said in horror. Several men looked at me and asked what was the matter. It's Bill, I said."

He then is asked by the officer, you know, who shot him? Did he get killed by one of the Japs, he said? And Sledgehammer, which was Sledge's nickname, says, quote, I didn't answer. Just looked at him with a blank stare and felt sick. I looked at the man who had crawled past me to check on the groaning man in the dark. He had shot Bill through the temple, mistakenly assuming him to be Japanese.

and then he says as the realization of his fatal mistake hit him the man's face turned ashen his jaw trembled and he looked as though he were going to cry end quote this is something above and beyond what you expect when you go to kill the enemy and i understand so much better after reading sledge's book why it was so hard sometimes impossible to get these pacific war veterans especially these marines

to tell you much about their experience because how could you have understood what sort of context did you have to properly assess what this person was trying to make you understand and sledge addresses this too and says quote

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement. But to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror, from which escape seemed less and less likely, as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on.

Time had no meaning. Life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines, service troops, and civilians."

When you look at the casualties on Peleliu, it's like 8,000 Americans roughly, about 1,600 or 1,700 dead, which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize the size of the island, right? It's like Tarawa. The numbers at Tarawa and the Gilbert Islands earlier don't seem like that much until you realize it's like three days of fighting.

for another little tiny spit of nothing land wise if you could divide the casualties by the square footage of the battlefield you could see how particularly nasty these pacific battles were and you don't even have to do that for the japanese because they lose between 11 and 13 000 men their commanding officer of course near the end of the campaign burns the regimental colors um kills himself

And the only people who surrender are the normal small, small handful of mostly Korean and Okinawan laborers. The last organized Japanese units to surrender on Peleliu don't do so until 1947, two years after the war is over. Does that tell you how committed they were to resisting and how hard an opponent they were?

The 1st Marine Division, especially the 1st Regiment, severely chewed up. The 1st Regiment, I believe, suffers twice as many casualties as is normally considered to be a unit that's just completely out of commission. It would take them months to recover. It's some of the worst, if not the worst, casualty rates the Marines suffer ever in their history. And Peleliu doesn't get enough attention. It's not hard to see...

How an event like Peleliu, though, gets downplayed? After all, what country in the Second World War was not exercising a high level of censorship when it comes to showing their public back home what the war was really like? I mean, most Americans got their visual impressions of what the war looked like,

through newsreel footage in the movie theaters right you often show it uh in between two halves of a double feature right you go to see your escapist entertainment you buy your popcorn and your coke you sit down in the theater and you're confronted with pelaloo how's that going to make parents of a marine somewhere in the pacific that they just get occasional cards from you're wondering how's junior doing and then you see the footage of pelaloo

Or you're a 15 or 16 year old American boy thinking, OK, in the next couple of years, I'm going off to war. And then you show them what a two or three or four day battle estimations were, what that looks like when it turns into a 73 or 74 day battle instead with the highest casualty rates Marines have seen. I mean, that's the kind of thing that not only does the public not want to really see that the government doesn't really want to show it to them.

What's more, we should point out that there's a giant, giant historical news event happening only about 700 miles away that overshadows this whole thing and overlaps it time-wise. Because while Peleliu's being fought over, Douglas MacArthur's returning to the Philippines. And if you didn't know how big of an historical event this was, Douglas MacArthur's press relations people would see to it that you did.

But Peleliu is hardly the only thing that gets overshadowed by all of these big, exciting historical occasions that are much more positive and would look much better in the movie theater and the newsreel between the two halves of the double feature. I mean, how about submarine warfare and what that's doing to the Japanese?

The non-sexy side of war, as we've been calling it. The logistics, the supply. And what's fascinating to me is not only are things like logistics and supply not all that interesting to people like yours truly or the people who want to war game the Second World War. I can honestly tell you I've war gamed many times Japanese naval combat. I have never once in my life

war-gamed a submarine trying to sink a merchant vessel while some escort ship tries to catch the submarine first I mean not only do I not do that but the Japanese cadets at the Naval Academy don't want to do that there's a book called the Japanese Navy in World War II edited by David C Evans and what it really is a sort of a debriefing of the Japanese admirals after the war and they all but say that nobody cared about this they blame it on the Japanese penchant for the offense and

Right. They want the colorful offense. They want the big, decisive naval battles, which, by the way, the Americans and the Japanese both subscribe to the to the mayhem idea of the decisive naval battle. So neither one of those countries navies were really excited about things like commerce rating. But the Japanese didn't put any effort into it at all.

One admiral had said that if they had thought the United States would use their submarines the way the Germans were using U-boats in the Atlantic to go after merchant shipping, they might not have launched the war at all. That shows you how unprepared they were to deal with it.

And as we had said earlier, one of the things about naval warfare is in general, if you find out that you haven't built the right ships, that is a problem that takes at least a couple of years to solve. Like when you find out because of experience in the Second World War that aircraft carriers are going to be the new queen of the seas and not battleships, well, you don't magically have aircraft carriers. You've got to go and make some, and that takes years.

So if you find out that you don't have enough escorts for your merchant ships, that's a problem you can't solve all that quickly. And it took the Japanese a while to realize it because it took the Americans and the other allies a while to really make a dent in the enemy's commercial shipping. There's lots of reasons for this. And we mentioned one of them earlier in the series. We talked about the absolute terribleness of American torpedoes.

And I've read all kinds of accounts where, I mean, it's called a scandal, a national disgrace. People should have gone to jail. I mean, the stories from the Japanese about ships coming back into port with unexploded American torpedoes sticking out of the side of the merchant vessels or all the American pilots who dropped their torpedoes right right close by an enticing Japanese naval target only to watch the torpedoes go right under it.

Well, that will impact your submarine success rate until you fix that. But by mid-1944, the Americans have fixed that. And now you start to see the tonnage totals of Japanese merchant shipping skyrocket. And submarines will account for about 60% of the Japanese merchant ships that are sent to the bottom of the sea with aircraft, allied aircraft of all kinds and from all allied countries, accounting for most of the rest.

But when you look at the numbers, you get an idea of how the impact is affecting the Japanese ability to do anything. When we had talked about the supply problems in Burma, how did the Japanese get supplies over those mountains, through those jungles, on those terrible roads? Well, the Pacific's even worse. The Japanese, at the time of the Pearl Harbor attacks, had about 6 million tons of merchant shipping.

And no nation in the Second World War has enough. Merchant shipping is always in short supply for everyone, including the United States, who can build merchant ships faster than anyone ever thought possible. The Japanese will build another three and a half million tons of merchant shipping during the war. But by December 1944, even with all that, they're down to 2,500,000 tons. And the Americans are sinking hundreds of thousands of tons a month.

And the only way that that number will slow down and they'll start sinking less merchant shipping is because eventually they're so successful, they run out of targets. Essentially, by late 1944, American submarines are doing to Japan what German U-boats were hoping to do to Britain, another island nation, back during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942.

starve an island nation of the resources that it needs to continue to fight the war bring them to their knees but the german navy's idea of bringing britain to its knees in 1942 in the battle of the atlantic would have involved some sort of peace arrangement right

What if you are dropped to your knees as a nation, but you still don't give up, right? We know if these were reasonable people, they would have surrendered long ago. What if you cripple them and they don't give in anyway?

There's a fantastic anecdote, and Ian W. Toll, by the way, is an author who is so good at finding these historical anecdotes, that helps dramatize both where the supply problem has the Japanese in terms of options by October 1944.

but also the mood amongst the leadership and the decision makers. And I have to say, there's a little bit of a sickness, I think, to finding this so interesting, but I've always been fascinated with that mood that you find. Well, we always say the extremes of the human experience, but think about the people in Hitler's bunker, you know, as the Battle of Berlin is ramping up. So Hitler during the last month and what it's like in that room and all those people's psychological states under that kind of crushing pressure. I'm fascinated by that.

You have a similar dynamic going on in Japan at this time period. And in this anecdote, Ian W. Toll brings you into a conference between army heads and navy heads in Japan. And these guys are putting the finishing touches on their plan to respond to this great historical event we mentioned earlier that's going to overshadow Peleliu, right? The return of Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines, right?

And the plan is the Americans are going to land October 20th on the Philippine island of Leyte. And it's going to be on, right? Well, the Japanese know by that time that the Americans are going to land in the Philippines and probably on Leyte. And so they have a plan that's been ready for a little while to go disrupt this. And they're basically going to throw in everything the Japanese fleet has left in order to accomplish this goal.

But before the plan can happen, there's this conference that Toll talks about. And a general in the army, Sato, who we mentioned earlier, basically turns to the Navy and says, you know, how is this going to be worth the fuel that we're going to use for the Navy to conduct this operation, right? He says that there's a fleet of merchant ships, six of them, carrying 60,000 tons of oil to Japan right now.

And that the fleet would basically use all of that, whereas we could use that 60,000 tons of oil to do a lot of things for the civilians, for the other war effort areas. And it's funny because 60,000 tons of oil a couple years ago would not have been anywhere near this important. But we understand that scarcity makes things valuable, law of supply and demand and all that. But when the general says this to the Navy...

He essentially exposes the fact that this is less about the Japanese Navy trying to make a war-winning difference here, although they'd like to, than it is about making an honorable end. Toll says that their plan here boils down to like a naval version of one of those suicidal bonsai attacks the Japanese have been doing on land where thousands of their soldiers will run into machine gun fire with bayonets.

But that's where we are in this story. And one of the things that Toll's antidote deals with is the fact that these hard-bitten old military guys who are in a room with their sister service, right? And the Japanese Navy and Army don't much care for each other. So if the one place you don't want to wear your emotions on your sleeve is in a room full of these kind of people, right? But everybody's crying.

toll writes quote and he begins this anecdote right after the japanese general says to the navy you know how are you going to be able to accomplish anything worth this fuel the 60 000 tons of oil is more important and toll writes quote the speech brought the entire room including sato to the brink of tears he had put japan's predicament into stark relief

The honor of the once mighty Imperial Japanese Navy now mattered less than six tankers and the oil that they carried. Even a general could see that the fleet's diminished status was a portent of doom. Quote, this was the saddest feeling I had ever experienced. End quote. Sato wrote. Toll then points out that everybody's weeping. Quote,

sobbing freely rear admiral tasuku nakazawa of the naval general staff replied on behalf of the navy he was grateful to the general for his kindness but now quote and quoting the admiral now the combined fleet of the empire of japan wishes to be given a place to end her life end quote

Toll then says that there's talk of this being a last chance so that the fleet can have a glorious death. And then the admiral points out that this is the Navy's earnest wish. Toll continues, quote, After a choked silence with tears streaming down his face, Sato agreed that the 60,000 tons of oil should be offered as a, quote, end quote, parting present to the Navy, end quote.

Toll then quotes Sato, writing that as he walked out of the meeting to the sound of air raid sirens, he had prayed for the heroic end of the combined fleet. This idea of a heroic death is one of the fascinating parts of this story, because if you read the accounts of this affair, it's interesting that the Japanese fleet was

even though they know they're being sent on one of these things that's probably a one-way mission do they rebel how many fleets around the world in world history would have just rebelled you know struck the colors put up some red flag say we're not fighting no the japanese sailors have a problem with this too but for different reasons entirely if they're going to go down in a blaze of glory they want it to be glorious

They want to be fighting the best the United States has so that if they do manage to land some lucky or divinely inspired punch, it can do some real damage. Put us against the U.S. carriers. They're mad that the plan calls for them to go after cargo ships and supply vessels and oilers and the stuff like that. The boring stuff.

logistical side of war right the non-sexy side as we've been talking about that's going to be the target so that mcarthur's recently landed troops are starved right on the beaches of bullets and food but no sailor wants to lose his life trying to fight a cargo vessel right that's a no-win situation if you win there's no honor if you lose you lost to a cargo vessel

And in Masanori Ito's classic book, The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy, he says the admiral here, whose name is Kurita, is being bombarded with, and that's not usual in the Japanese Navy, from notes from average sailors to being stopped by his officers and asked about this. And Ito quotes one of the notes that the admiral received from just a Japanese sailor. And the note says, quote,

End quote.

And Ito says it prompts the admiral against his will, really, to call his underlings around him. And he addresses them and he gives another one of these speeches that just to me, it's a tone thing. You get a sense of the mood here. And as an American, we have no we have no historical analogy, certainly not within living memory of.

to allow us to put ourselves in the emotional shoes if you will of someone who's on the losing end of a war that's not necessarily near over i mean you have to continue to fight after the decision has happened and how do you do that well the admiral's got to rally his sailors and he said quote

i know that many of you are strongly opposed to this assignment but the war situation is far more critical than any of you can possibly know would it not be a shame to have the fleet remain intact while our nation perishes

"'I believe that Imperial General Headquarters is giving us a glorious opportunity. "'Because I realize how very serious the war situation actually is, "'I am willing to accept even this ultimate assignment to storm into Leyte Gulf. "'You must all remember that there are such things as miracles. "'What man can say that there is no chance for our fleet to turn the tide of war in a decisive battle?'

We shall have the chance to meet our enemies. We shall engage his task forces. I hope that you will not carry your responsibilities lightly. I know that you will act faithfully and well. End quote. And then Ito says, the assembled officers raised their arms in unison and yelled, Banzai!

Well, I'm not going to say that that admiral is misinforming his staff, but maybe he's being a little disingenuous because the plan is to go after cargo ships and supply ships and those kinds of non-heroic targets. But there's an understanding, might be a good way to put it, that if you run into any American aircraft carriers, you can attack them. So maybe we'll call that an out clause in the plan. The plan, by the way...

is one similar to a naval plan the Japanese tried earlier in the war. Essentially, in order to get to these cargo ships and these oilers and these supply ships, the Japanese have to lure the warships that are protecting them away. So if you think about a defenseless flock of sheep, the Japanese plan here calls for something to be used as bait to try to attract the sheepdog away.

and take them away from the flock. And then the Japanese, divided into several separate flotillas coming from several different angles, will pounce on the beachhead area. And each one of these separate flotillas has its own destiny and its own story in the giant Battle of Leyte Gulf.

That's why it's really best thought of as three to five, depending on who you're reading, separate naval battles, smaller ones. They all have their own names, by the way, but they're all the separate fleets and their destinies. The Japanese flotilla that is designed to be the bait in this plan is using the very best sort of lure that you can have if you're trying to attract late 1944 admirals,

also happens to be the one ship you normally don't want to let the other side find under any conditions it's the japanese aircraft carriers they're gonna be the equivalent of the matador's cape in this plan to attract the attention of a bull just so happens that the american admiral's nickname is bull admiral bull halsey and while if the plan goes as planned

The bull is charging up to the northeast area of Luzon, you know, up far away from the beachheads. The other Japanese flotillas can come in from multiple angles and destroy the Americans either, you know, best case scenario while they're actually landing. But even a couple of days afterwards, you could probably cause great damage, right? You got big ships coming in here, although no aircraft carriers. But that's the plan. Whatever chance these sailors had in this upcoming event, you

has been whittled away in the previous couple of weeks because as part of the softening up campaign that happens before the MacArthur landings, American carrier planes have been savaging the entire region. I mean, certainly everything that floats on the ocean, but I mean, going far inland and hitting facilities, especially airfields,

taking out Japanese aircraft at an alarming pace. And it's easy to understand why, by the way. At this point in the war, all of the advantages that the Japanese pilots and planes had earlier in the war are tipped on its head. And the Americans have all of those same advantages now. They've got the veteran pilots. The Americans have the better machines now. So the kill ratios are remarkably one-sided.

But I mean, in one air battle that goes on for several days in the airspace above Formosa, which is now Taiwan, in the days leading up to MacArthur's return to the Philippines, the Japanese lose something like 700 planes. That's according to my encyclopedia of military history. In Masanori Ito's book, he quotes one admiral as saying, you know, we lost 205 planes in

on Palau right after we lost 345 planes over truck. And you just get this sense of an intense level of grinding at this point in the war. And the Japanese industry can't possibly keep up with these kind of losses. And forget about the machines that you're losing for a minute. In most of these cases, you're losing the pilots, too.

And the pilots that are going up in these air battles are often very, very green. And they're going up against American carrier pilots that are some of the best aviators the United States has ever produced.

So when it comes to equipment, the Japanese are now very outclassed in the war. The one place they can actually put up a good fight is when it comes to their own people's willingness to fight to the death. And I mean, the land battles, even with Japanese equipment being inferior, with their logistics shattered, are still going to be horribly difficult opponents.

But all the Bushido spirit in the world doesn't make your aircraft better, right? So they suffer terribly. And if the Japanese fleet's actions here in the Philippines was a long shot before you lose 700 planes that are supposed to play a very big role in this affair, how much more of a long shot is it after you lose them? Winston Churchill in his history of the Second World War said that the enemy's air force was broken before the Battle of Leyte was joined.

Speaking of that, this whole affair is part of the triphibious operations that surround the great MacArthur return to the Philippines, right? The giant news story that we talked about earlier. That happens on October 20th, 1944.

The Americans launched this whole campaign early. MacArthur arrives early. The good news is it catches the Japanese wrong footed, I guess you could say. The bad news is the Americans aren't exactly as prepared as they like to be either. But even with all the problems, they still manage the absolutely unbelievable task of landing more than 100,000 people by midnight on the first day.

That's amazing. I've actually seen a couple of histories say D plus one, which would be the next day. But most of them say on the first day, compare and contrast that with the earlier landings in the war. Places like Tarawa, which were a chaotic mess with far fewer people having to be landed.

Now, we should point out there wasn't much resistance on the beaches. The Japanese strategy here is to confront MacArthur more inland where you're out of the range of all the big guns that were firing on the beach heads and the planes. But there's some resistance. About 100,000 guys by midnight on the first day. That's...

well-oiled machine at this point in it and the great factory assembly line and the Logistics supply chains and all that boring stuff that the United States is so good at in its corporate peacetime economy really coming in handy and events like this and MacArthur's total invasion force will number something like a hundred and seventy five thousand to two hundred thousand men and Boy, what a difference a couple of years in the Pacific War makes doesn't it?

It's no longer the little brother to places like Europe where the numbers are smaller. We're starting to creep up to numbers that they wouldn't sneeze at on the Western Front. The Japanese resistors, by the way, who are spread out over a bunch of the different Philippine islands, they're estimated to be between 300,000 and 350,000 men. So a large battle indeed.

One thing that is worth pointing out is that there are really two kinds of island battles in this war. The kind that have a relatively free area without a civilian population to worry about and the kind that don't. Peleliu, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, not a big civilian population to worry about. Saipan, Okinawa, the Philippines, just the opposite.

And we had just talked in the last segment about the disaster, the humanitarian nightmare that Saipan was with civilians jumping off of cliffs and getting caught in the crossfire and the high level of civilian deaths. Well, Saipan's miniature compared to the 15 to 16 million people that live in the Philippines.

And Okinawa is very populated, too. So in the distance, you can see these areas that the human being lawnmower is going to just crisscross. And when we had given those numbers at the beginning of this segment, what we were talking about every month in 1944, what did it say? 200 to 250,000 civilian, innocent civilian casualties in Asia. This is in Asia, but...

You can see these numbers in the distance, right? I mean, wait till the Japanese and the Americans start fighting over the urban center that is Manila in 1945. MacArthur, by the way, will show up himself on the first day, step out of the landing craft or the whaler I read in one account with his pressed khakis,

his aviator sunglasses, his completely non-regulation, and I don't know how he gets away with it, Philippine field marshal cap, as he called it.

steps out of the craft, gets his pants wet from the knees down in a photo that is so good you can't believe it's not staged. I mean, it looks like a poster. The camera people on the shore get him striding back onto Philippine soil a couple of years after he was unceremoniously thrown out of it. At some point, he'll get his hands on a microphone and say, people of the Philippines, I have returned. Rally to me.

And he'll begin his campaign to, along with the help of the Filipinos, throw the Japanese out of the Philippines. The first Japanese fleet is not sighted for three days. And two submarines in the late night hours on October 23rd, I think it is, spot one of these flotillas. And this is traditionally the beginning of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the naval battle of Leyte Gulf.

Put me in the category of those who think that this is a highly overrated battle, although people differ. Francis Pike in Hirohito's War says the reason it doesn't get the attention some of its more vigorous proponents wish that it would is because the stakes aren't that high. And he mentions several other very famous naval battles throughout history and talks about how the decision which way that battle went, one way or the other, had huge war-changing ramifications. Right.

And this doesn't. I would even suggest that a battle that I've done 45 minutes on before, the Battle of Jutland, which if it were a boxing match, you would say it ended as a no contest. I would say that that counts as a much more interesting affair because if one side had had an overwhelming victory and that was possible, well, that would have been a huge war changing sort of event.

The best the Japanese can hope for here is to lengthen the war. And if they lengthen the war, maybe get better peace terms. So anybody that is giving their life in this contest is doing this in order to establish, well, in this case, keep the imperial system and the emperor, right? The imperial polity, as it's sometimes called, because that's the sticking point. But there are a lot of people who look at this battle as something more than an execution, and I don't think I'm one of them.

And by that, I mean the Battle of Leyte Gulf has a couple of things associated with it that sound really like a big deal. For example, you'll hear that it is the greatest naval battle of all time or the largest naval battle of all time, which might be true. But what that kind of conceals is that the United States outnumbers the Japanese in warships four or five to one. They outnumber them in aircraft five to one, five.

The Japanese have almost no aircraft capability. They certainly have... I mean, it's just... This is a very one-sided affair from the get-go. The only reason, though, it has some drama... You know, it reminds me, I have to say, of one of those early Mike Tyson fights where he was knocking out guys in 45 seconds, but you bought the pay-per-view, so they always had to have...

a post-fight analysis segment where somebody would have to try to find a way that the other guy might have won. You know, oh, he tapped him on the chin at the 16-second mark, and if that had hurt Mike, we'd have had a whole different fight right here. And that's kind of how I feel about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It's a disaster for the Japanese, except a mistake happens at some point in the affair that allows one Japanese flotilla to

to get into the backfield, you would say, if this were football, begin tearing up some escort carriers. And if the escort carriers had all been torn up, could have broken into the landing area, which might have been vulnerable. I mean, there's a lot of mights and what ifs. And that is history, right? Especially military history. But I think sometimes the idea that this would have been catastrophic is overplayed.

There's a case to be made that if all the worst things that happened in the Japanese fleet started tearing up the beachhead areas, that that just would have made them stationary when the American planes eventually came back and found that. And they would have lost even more ships. The bottom line is when the Battle of Leyte goes over, though, the Japanese lose four aircraft carriers, three battleships, 10 cruisers, 11 destroyers. And they sink, you know, like a light carrier. They sink an escort carrier. I mean, it's just a disaster.

One of their fleets gets wiped out in one of the greatest ambush attacks in naval history where, and it's sort of a little karmic retribution, a bunch of the battleships were old World War I type battleships that were damaged at Pearl Harbor were raised, refloated, refitted, and were here and participated in the ambush attacks.

And did a lot of damage. But I mean, from an American standpoint, you could look at it as a rah-rah moment because it really inflicts a defeat on the Japanese Navy that they never recover from. And the Navy will be reduced to impotence after this. American air power just shredded Japanese naval assets whenever it found it.

A lesson that had already been learned several times in this war is reinforced in that by October 1944, if one side has powerful naval air assets and the other doesn't, the way the battle's going to go is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

So with the exception of the one fantastic night ambush where the American battleships from Pearl Harbor ended up crushing that one Japanese flotilla, the damage is pretty much done by American aircraft, just as the Japanese admirals assumed it would be. The Battle of Leyte Gulf is famous for something else, though, too. It's considered to be the battle where...

the suicide attacks known as kamikaze attacks first happen in real numbers there may have been some early attacks earlier and there were definitely suicide attacks with the japanese all throughout the war but as an organized effort unleashing trained and tactically organized for maximum effect suicide squads you first see this at latee gulf

and john toland in his 1970 book the rising sun chronicles one of these early famous attacks and it's famous because the kamikaze came in and did some damage and i try to imagine the americans watching this as it unfolds trying to figure out what it is they're seeing and trying to come to grips with are these guys deliberately trying to smash into us and take their own lives

The event happens in that one moment in time at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Didn't we say that the enemy flotillas, you know, enemy if you're an American, get into the backfield, right? And they're fighting with these escort carriers. And you do have the rather interesting moment where you have the super battleship Yamato for the first time in the war, I believe, firing its guns in anger. It's 18.1-inch guns, shells the size of Volkswagen's at American carriers 18 or 19 miles away. Escort carriers, it must be said, they were called Jeep carriers.

And then about an hour after, these Japanese battleships inexplicably turn away, giving the escort carriers, after having lost a ship and others damaged, a reprieve from the governor. And then something else shows up, and Toland writes, quote, and by the way, I'm going to add the word escort carrier in front of all these ships that are escort carriers where he just gives the name. It gets confusing. Quote,

For over an hour, all was quiet. Then at 10.50, General Quarters was again sounded on the five surviving jeep carriers. Nine enemy planes were approaching at mast level, so low that radar had failed to pick them up. They climbed to several thousand feet as American fighters tried to intercept them. Five

Five zero fighters, with bombs lashed to their wings, emerged from the milling mass and slanted down toward the jeeps. They were led by a recently married lieutenant commander. I hope I pronounce his name correctly. Yukio Seki.

"'One-zero,' Toland writes, "'headed for the bridge of the escort carrier Kitkun Bay, its machine guns winking. "'Onlookers expected it to pull up. "'Instead, it drove into the port catwalk, exploded, and tumbled on into the sea. "'Two others roared straight at the escort carrier Fanshawe Bay, "'also with obvious intent to crash into her, only to disintegrate at the last moment.'

The final two veered off from the heavy fire thrown up by the escort carrier white planes. One, trailing smoke, banked toward the escort carrier St. Lowe in a right turn as if intending to land. But the pilot pushed the little plane over, slamming it into the flight deck. Fires spread throughout the hangar deck, setting off a chain of violent internal explosions. After having survived the running battle unscathed, St. Lowe sank.

End quote. I've been fascinated by this phenomenon of the kamikaze since I first learned about him as a kid, and I know many of you have been fascinated with them too. And like me, if you've continued to read up on them, your views on them have probably changed 180 degrees too. When I was a kid, we were basically taught these were fanatic things.

you know kool-aid drinkers who would give their lives up without even giving it a second thought for the emperor very non-complicated robots and now when you read their last letters and their diary entries the whole time that they were training for these missions but knowing that they were dead men walking or dead men flying or dead men piloting the human torpedo whatever it might have been your heart breaks in a lot of these cases

First of all, these are not your hard-bitten military men, which I found very interesting. When the program was first developed, they asked military men to volunteer. And do you know how many military men did? According to anthropologist Amiko Onuki Tierney, who wrote the fabulous book Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms, the number of hard-bitten military men that said, yeah, I'll volunteer for that suicide mission was none.

and she italicized the word none this is a bit of a problem if you're trying to kick start a brand new program and get people interested in it so apparently the military just decided to then point to some people and say okay you're volunteering you're volunteering you're volunteering and one of them was this pilot john tolan had used in his book yuki oseki poor

portrayed as this willing you know ready to die for the emperor guy turns out not so willing but that was not news that made it into the propaganda at the time before he flies off to crash his plane into an enemy ship he does an interview with a reporter whose job it is to get the good story for the japanese propaganda and instead gets a whole bunch of stuff from this pilot that he can't release he talks about it in a letter decades later but the

Great Yukio Seki, early kamikaze pilot, spat this out to the reporter at the time, quote, There is no more hope for Japan if it has to kill such a skillful pilot like myself. I can hit an aircraft carrier with an 1,102-pound bomb and return alive without having to make a suicidal plunge.

Onuki Tierney then says, quote, at that time, Seki had been married for only six months to a woman with whom he was passionately in love. He explained to the reporter, quote, if it is in order, I will go, but I am not going to die for the emperor or for Imperial Japan. I am going for my beloved wife. If Japan loses, she might be raped by Americans. I am dying for someone I love most to protect her, end quote.

This mirrors what you read from a lot of these pilots, although it should be noted there were thousands of them and they run the gamut in terms of the differences in their background. And some of them do seem a little like the robotic figures who seem to have been brainwashed into just dying for the emperor and happy to do it. Some of those people fit that mold, but most of them don't.

What's more, since they can't get the professionals to volunteer to do this, they go after like cadets and training pilots and students at the university. This is one of the really weird things about this program. You could see the Nazi Germany regime, for example, maybe picking up the derelicts off the street.

or the people, the undesirables that they'd thrown into concentration camps or those kinds of, you know, the discredited people and making them the suicide pilots. The Japanese instead make,

a lot of these suicide pilots come from their best and their brightest the kids at the elite colleges really if you look at them and you read the accounts they almost seemed like the people that were picked on by all these macho you know military types who when they finally show up to be kamikazes are picked on even more treated like nerds the four eyes the the uh brainiacs of i mean it's

It's interesting to read who these people were, though, and Ian W. Toll in his book Twilight of the Gods has a quick rundown, and he writes, quote,

These traits had not endeared them to their officers and NCOs in military training camps. Many young scholars had been singled out for special abuse, including vicious beatings, leaving them with feelings of contempt and loathing for military authority and for the tyrannical regime that held the nation's fate in its grip.

In diaries and letters, many of these future kamikazes identified themselves as political liberals and Democrats. Some found much to admire in the American model of society and government. Others harbored radical, utopian, pacifist, or even Marxist views. End quote. Onuki Tierney runs down the backgrounds of a lot of these people.

Most of them speak multiple languages. Their reading list would shame an English professor. These are the very people you look at as the people who are going to have to rebuild Japan, right? Instead, they're being thrown into the meat grinder. Reading the accounts from these people is fascinating. First of all, they all seem to be patriots, even if they disagree with the government.

Some of them specifically are looking forward to helping the post-war Japan emerge. A lot of them think about themselves as helping their families back home and trying to make a difference to see that they don't end up bombed or occupied. Some of the pilots expressed all sorts of worry and remorse about the way their own army were treating captive populations. This is not what you expect.

I was thinking how very different this is, right? How you couldn't expect any other military, major military in the Second World War to do something like this. But then I was doing some research and I came across, I think it was like a letter to the editor or something like that by a person who identified themselves as a U.S. Marine. They didn't say in what era.

All they had written, though, was if they had found themselves in a situation where their country was about to be occupied, where their government or their military superiors said that they could reduce the chances of that happening, if they'd be willing to sacrifice their lives, you know, flying their plane into an enemy ship, this person who identified as a U.S. Marine said he would be happy to do that. And then I thought to myself, what?

The Japanese are just like everyone else, only more so, right? I mean, you can kind of see where all this hails from. They just took it to levels that in most societies are theoretical. The one part that really...

got to me the most well there were several I mean there was the one about the Christian pilots you forget that there's a sizable Christian population in Japan and you think of suicide as being prohibited by the religion but there were Japanese kamikaze pilots who brought their Bibles into the cockpit with them taped the photo of their mother to their chest and

And when I was reading about this, one person had said, well, isn't suicide frowned upon by the church? And someone else explained that they just didn't see it as suicide. They looked at it as the war bringing death to them rather than they seeking it out. Some of these other people were making very rational calculations because as another historian pointed out, they weren't making a choice between a suicide attack that killed them and a wonderful world of rainbows and unicorns, right? That wasn't their other option. Their other option was probably dying somewhere else, maybe

maybe anonymously, your corpse left in a decaying jungle somewhere, your family never known what even happens to you, or you could die a hero. And I think I read, don't quote me on this, that they got the kamikaze pilots got an immediate increase in two ranks, two military ranks. And if that's the case, well, now it's even a financial decision, right? You can die in a jungle somewhere and your family's at one level of

poverty or you could increase the amount of money that the state pays to, you know, grieving families and widows for upkeep and all that sort of stuff. If you get your rank, I mean, so you start to see actual

maybe thinking going on in some of these decisions. And then one other thing that just moved me was how they were supposed to be volunteers, but many historians will use the word volunteer with quotation marks because the circumstances these 20 to 24-year-old guys were put in were such that they were forced into moral quandaries. And the only people that passed the moral quandaries and became the kamikaze pilots, in other words, the only ones that this strategy worked on,

were sort of the most moral amongst them. For example, a lot of these volunteer sessions were framed in a way that you understood that if you said no, that you wouldn't volunteer, that meant that your refusal was consigning some other person to death. And a lot of these people couldn't handle that.

but the part that moved me the most, because it's one of those things I wonder about. I wondered in a show we did on executions once, what goes through your mind the night before your own execution? This is similar. You wonder, okay, if you're a kamikaze pilot and you know tomorrow's go time, what's your last night like? And apparently the last nights were not spent alone. You spent it with the other people that were going to go with you. And in, oh,

Onuki Tierney's book, she quotes a guy who wrote all this in a letter decades later to somebody else whose job it was to cater to these pilots on their last night of life. And he writes what that was like. He is identified, by the way, as Kasuga Takeo, and he wrote, quote,

At the hall where their farewell parties were held, the young student officers drank cold sake the night before their flight. Some gulped the sake in one swallow. Others kept gulping down a large amount. The whole place degenerated into chaos. Some broke hanging light bulbs with their swords. Some lifted chairs to break the windows and tore white tablecloths. A mixture of military songs and curses filled the air. While

While some shouted in rage, others cried aloud. It was their last night of life. They thought of their parents, their faces and images, lovers' faces and their smiles, a sad farewell to their fiancés. All went through their minds like a running horse lantern. Although they were supposedly ready to sacrifice their precious youth the next morning for Imperial Japan and for the Emperor, they were torn beyond what words can express.

some putting their heads on the table, some writing their wills, some folding their hands in meditation, some leaving the hall, and some dancing in frenzy while breaking flower vases. They all took off with the rising sun headband the next morning, but this scene of utter desperation has hardly been reported. I observed it with my own eyes as I took care of their daily life."

Now, I don't know how representative that account is of the kamikaze last night experience. There may be different experiences. I would imagine there were. And we should also point out that it was hardly just as pilots that these young people who the government could count on to reliably kill themselves trying to kill the enemy wasn't just airplanes. I mean, they had something known as a human torpedo.

They had bombs that they dropped. I think they may be rocket propelled bombs they dropped from from aircraft that have a human pilot. They have motor boats that they load with explosives that are designed to be driven into the enemy ships. I mean, there's a whole bunch of ingenious ways to utilize the willingness of your young men to kill themselves for the cause.

But it's this, regardless of their positions on the issues and regardless of how much they might dislike the government or whatever it might be, there's a strain of patriotism that runs through these people that's noticeable in all their writings, a love of country that did not always mean a love of emperor or government or any of these things. Sometimes it was just the concept of Japan or what Japan might be in the future after the war. But one kamikaze quoted in Umiko Onuki Tierney's book is,

said that he found, quote, our love of country to be of frightening intensity, end quote. I think that's a great way to put it, frightening intensity. What happens when you take something that most countries have, you know, patriotism on the part of their people, and turn it up to an above maximum level, turn it up to 11? The fact that you would embark on this program, though, in 1944, late 1944, is a sign of the desperate times, right?

If you needed to be reminded of that in late November 1944, the Japanese will be when the clock finally runs out on them.

on the Marianas Islands airfield construction timeline because the CBs working on airfields in the recently conquered islands in the Marianas gets them operational. And B-29 superfortresses, the new bombers that are so new they've not been used in Europe, although there are other reasons they were not used in Europe, but not used in Europe, they will land on these islands and the bombing attacks begin.

Japan has been bombed before. The Doolittle raids were more of a pinprick for morale purposes, but the B-29s were taking off from areas around the Indochina theater, but just barely able to reach the edge of Japanese soil. The raids were not enormous. In late November, the attacks begin and the Japanese will find themselves bombed at times in the capital by more than 100 of these big planes at a time.

These are not known to be particularly effective attacks going after airplane facilities and things like that. Sometimes they get lucky, but most of the time the bombing is inaccurate. But here's here's the thing. From a civilian standpoint, let's just acknowledge something. I don't think any of us. Well, there's probably some of us actually have been under a bombing attack before.

And these kind of bombing attacks are in some ways scarier than ones you might face today, although it depends on whether you're the target or not, because these bombing attacks have a lot more planes and a lot less accuracy. And part of the reason you have so many more planes is because you are so much less accurate. You need lots of planes and lots of bombs over a wide area to even hope to hit your target.

Which they don't often for all sorts of reasons, the jet stream and a bunch of other ones included. But that doesn't lessen the fact that if you're a Japanese civilian, maybe a Japanese civilian who's had heavily filtered news reports about how the war is going. If you have bombs all of a sudden falling on your capital city and most of the planes that drop those bombs are getting away, that puts the credibility of the government's accounts on how the war is going in rather stark relief, doesn't it?

That having been said, in terms of concrete results, the early air war here from the Marianas, the bombing of Japan, somewhat underwhelming in terms of results. The U.S. idea about precision bombing seems to founder on the rocks of Japan's cloudy weather and high winds. There's all sorts of reasons that that might be an issue. And in addition to that, they're losing a decent number of planes.

So early on, a lot of pressure on the air service to be more effective because things are heating up. As you know, we transitioned from the year 1944 to that terrible year, half year really of 1945. The monthly totals of which we led this segment off with, if you recall, because they were so awful, a lot of pressure on the air service to figure out a way to increase the pressure on the Japanese to put an end to something that's already over.

They just haven't admitted it yet. And the problem here is that even though it's almost over, it's getting worse. And this defies what's supposed to happen. When you have an enemy who's for all intents and purposes beaten, who's devoid of the natural resources they need, who's troops, I mean, starving troops, I mean, all over the place you look, the Japanese just look like they're just been battered from pillar to post. So this should be getting easier for the allies fighting them, but it's not. Right.

The casualties are getting worse. The civilian casualties are starting to absolutely go through the roof. And if we wanted to think of what's about to happen here in 1945, it's worth thinking about it as a whole instead of this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Because if you're waking up reading your morning paper in the middle of Iowa one day and you're trying to get a handle on the world situation, you're going to have updates on the front page from each of these places, either something about to begin and preparations going on,

or fighting continuing in this other spot, or mopping up operations in this other place. There's a bunch of things that are not only happening at the same time, but drawing and competing for resources with each other.

There will never be enough U.S. fleet assets in the area. MacArthur will be wanting them just where they would be wanting them in the Central Pacific. I mean, so all of this is happening at the same time. And if you're in the Japanese high command, you are being battered with incident after incident after incident. And it seems to be having no effect on the main leadership's opinion on whether or not the war should continue, which is surprising, to say the least.

Start with MacArthur. At the beginning of 1945, MacArthur makes the leap to the island of Luzon, which is where Manila is in the Philippines. MacArthur's moving quickly because he's convinced, and he appears to be right, I think, that there are POW camps on the Philippines that have had American and Filipino troops there since MacArthur left years before who are waiting for him to come back, and he wants to rescue them before the Japanese kill their prisoners, which they are doing once again with alarming frequency.

The situation in Manila will become worse

An unbelievable nightmare. The Japanese general, who is awesome, by the way, MacArthur is really up against a good guy, but he decides not to defend the city. But there's a naval commander there who's got what we would call, if they were United States Marines, they'd be Marines, naval infantry there, something like 15,000 of them. And he says, well, I'm staying. And he defends the old city, which is, you know, sort of a colonial concrete stone. I mean, it's a rather impregnable place. And he gets...

nailed down in there and will have the U.S. fighting house to house in urban combat of the sort they have not seen in this war at all and will not see again. It's probably the sort of fighting they could have expected, though, had they gone into Japan in 1946 and invaded the home islands. Forget about the military side of this for a minute because, as expected, right, the U.S. will win here. The Japanese will die almost at the last man.

And something like 100,000 Filipino civilians will die. When I first saw that number, I knew it was large. I thought they were talking about maybe all the civilians that died in the Philippines during this time period. And I actually have seen an account or two that sort of insinuates that. But most of them say in this fighting over the city of Manila, 100,000 Philippine civilians. Ladies and gentlemen, that's in a month.

And the stories are amongst some of the worst I've ever encountered. There's one that I, it's funny, you know, I mean, I know we're all a little weird if we listen to this, maybe, I don't know, but I have certain eyewitness stories that stay with me and they stay with me in part because I,

I have to go back and reread them. And I have no idea why there's one story and I'll have to do a show on this someday. If you know the mental health will allow me to get through something like that. But there's a story involving the Einsatzgruppen and an eyewitness who was watching lots and lots and lots of Jewish civilians being lined up and killed over and over again. And it involved a young woman. And as she passes by the eyewitness on the way to her death, she just says to him, I

while pointing to herself 24 meaning i'm 24 years old that one kills me i looked it up last month again but there's some scenes from the philippines that just as a listen as a human being i was certain experiences one can imagine living through and then um ones that one can't imagine going on afterwards and the best way to describe and and i don't mean this for um

I'm not trying to be gratuitous here. It's important to understand what's going on, though. And when we use that euphemism of the human being lawnmower, what that means in reality, because this is, as we said, something that is remorseless. It's month to month. It's a reliable tally of people. And this is what those statistics boil down to on the ground. In the book Rampage, John M. Scott tells the story of

well, I guess ultimately of a family who are rounded up by the Japanese right as their troops are starting to torch the city of Manila. And this is the sort of stuff MacArthur was worried about when he was worried about the POWs having something happen to them. So Scott's piece starts with these men being rounded up, taken to this school, and then eventually moved out to this canal at night. And they have their hands tied behind their back, and the Japanese has a flashlight on.

And they start cutting off the heads of the people in this group that's been taken to the canal by flashlight. And then when it is the turn of this gentleman that in Scott's book is identified as 25-year-old Ricardo San Juan, when they get to him, they chop his head off, but not quite.

and they have a picture of him i believe it's him in the book showing you um him years later and he clearly looks like somebody whose head was almost chopped off that's what it looks like after it heals but he plays dead and he lays there and you're thinking to yourself as he's laying around a lot of other decapitated people who were with him alive just one second ago you're thinking okay this is the kind of experience that will ruin the rest of your life don't you

But this is where his experience begins to get horrific. And like I said, this is not meant to be gratuitous. This is meant to put some context on these enormous numbers like 100,000 civilians die in a month while Manila is being fought over. And I do not count these sorts of incidents as collateral damage at all. This is intentional on someone's part at some level of the command structure. So Scott...

Talks about everything that this poor guy goes through personally and then says, quote, but the night's terror had only begun. The Japanese returned to the same spot with a second group of captives.

On his belly in the brush, Ricardo San Juan counted 19 women and 27 children. Among them, he saw his 25-year-old wife, Virginia, and the couple's three children. Four months pregnant at the time, Virginia held the couple's youngest child in her arms, one-year-old Jose. The Japanese had tied the adults together with a long strand of rope looped around the upper left arm of each woman.

Guards herded the woman into a circle around the children. The Japanese then formed a perimeter around them.

To San Juan's horror, Scott writes, the soldiers began to bayonet the children and even the infants, including two-month-old Celia Fajardo, wrapped in a gray flannel sleep suit. Now quoting the eyewitness, quote, some of the babies were grabbed from the arms of their mothers and were held by their two hands in midair by one of the Japanese soldiers, he later told investigators.

At that instant, he says, the executioner would stab them in that position. Scott continues, quote,

The same soldier then snatched up his infant son, Jose. That baby of mine, San Juan recalls, was thrown into the air and then caught with the point of a bayonet. Those were his words. The author continues, quote, soldiers likewise killed his three-year-old daughter, Corazon, her name Spanish for heart. But San Juan did not see it. That was the only mercy he experienced that night.

With the children littered on the ground dead, the Japanese pounced on the mothers with blood-soaked bayonets. The same soldier who had tried to cut off his head ran his blade through the belly of San Juan's pregnant wife. End quote. So if one death is a tragedy and a million deaths a statistic, stories like that put a little bit more flashback on the bones of who these numbers were.

and while i wish these were completely isolated examples they're all too common both in your history books and amongst the japanese and here's the thing is if we were talking about something that happened in the biblical era and you said that one army treated the civilians in areas that it held captive or other soldiers that fell into its hands this way you'd you'd hardly blink and

But it's very unusual behavior in the mid 20th century by a major power. And while you can certainly find examples that are easily as off the charts as this with, say, the Germans, certainly, but I mean, even the Red Army, maybe even the allies in certain circumstances, the non-Soviet allies. But those are just that they're outliers, right?

The Japanese do this over and over and over again. In Scott's book, he has a section, you know, in the index and under the heading of massacres and atrocities, it goes down a whole page in small print. And this is just mostly in the Philippines. It's things like behind the shell service station. There was a massacre behind the shell service station against civilians suspected of guerrilla ties.

De La Salle Massacre, Fort Santiago's Seal Dungeon, Mass Starvation, German Club Massacre, Philippine General Hospital, Killing of Men, POWs on Palawan, Red Cross Massacre, Santo Domingo Church Massacre, over and over and over again. It's fascinating to wonder about this, isn't it? There's a book called Embracing Defeat that is about Japan's coming to grips with losing the war right afterwards, in 46, 47, 1948.

And one of the things I found interesting when reading it was that there was a big backlash amongst the civilians to returning soldiers when these sorts of stories of this kind of behavior filtered down to the public after the war. Obviously, they were not getting this during the war.

And there was a backlash that one might compare to the way some Vietnam veterans were treated over the whole, you know, taunting at the airport when they would arrive back in country for being baby killers. That was the epithet yelled at them. MacArthur will find himself occupied in liberating the Philippines from

for the rest of the war now he will declare at certain times that the fighting has ceased in order to basically say i have liberated the philippines but when the war actually ends there's tens of thousands i think it's like 50 000 men still under the same japanese general who have to give up their arms and surrender so i would say that the island wasn't pacified

But MacArthur will continually be fighting there in hard slogging for the rest of the war, as I said. So while that's going on, you now have the determination to take the island of Iwo Jima and right afterwards, Okinawa. These places, if you look in the map, are the Japanese in Hirohito's war. Herbert P. Bick says that the emperor looked at those areas as a moat.

And the idea, of course, of the moat is to absorb the force of your enemy's charge and weaken them before they get to the castle walls. And Okinawa is like a southern area of the moat, and Iwo Jima is like an eastern area of the moat. Iwo is a tiny little place, a little volcanic island, eight square miles. It's a nothing little place.

but it can hold a couple of airfields this is as we've said in this whole war airfields i mean a lot of this fighting is over airfields having or not having an airfield can make a huge difference they're the ultimate strategic location in the middle of the vast distances of the pacific so the americans want to take iwo and the japanese are once again ready for them so what happened in palalu begins to be the new trend

to have these places be built up and they've had more time, right? The outlying islands, they hadn't had as much time or ability to really get the defenses the way they hoped to get them at Peleliu. You had the guns peeking out from behind steel doors. Iwo takes it the next step higher than that. One of the most fortified places in the Second World War in terms of places that any of the allies had to overcome.

And Iwo Jima is one of the most, if not the most famous battle that ever involved the U.S. Marines. But the reason for that is because it was so nightmarish. That's how you make a reputation is you go through something that is like walking through hell.

And when you read the accounts of the survivors and the veterans from Iwo, it's interesting how often, and many of these people had been on other island fights before and so had something to compare it to, how often they would say, I can't even describe it to you. It was like nothing I'd ever seen. There's a few of these in Patrick K. O'Donnell's fine book, Into the Rising Sun, where he interviews veterans. I marked a couple of them.

Mike Vinich from the 5th Marine Division said, quote, I can't hardly even describe it to you. The misery and the difference between this and all the other island fighting I'd experienced. Coming to Iwo was a different kind of fight. End quote.

He has the remembrances of the last surviving person who was on the flag-raising team on Mount Suribachi, a famous incident, won all sorts of awards, maybe the most famous photograph taken in the Pacific War of these people on Mount Suribachi, Charles Lindbergh. And he said of the island, quote, "'Iwo Jima was a massacre. I never expected anything like that. People were dying left and right.'

Japanese were in caves and bunkers. You had to route them out, end quote. Dean Voigt of the 5th Marine Division said, quote, Iwo Jima was as close to hell as you could get. I can't even begin to describe it to you. It was always hot, meaning active gunfire all the time and explosions going off, people getting killed left and right, end quote.

we should remind ourselves that these people had been to other places that are considered to be very bad fights as well. So when they're saying that Iwo Jima is on another level, clearly it is. And the Japanese had eight months to prepare for this.

And this does go back, I mean, you know, in many ways, everyone's critical of Japanese strategy during the war and many other things, but they kind of did keep their eyes on the goal of making the Allies have to take these islands position to position to position and take huge casualties doing it in the hopes that they'd get tired of it. After all, how many Americans even could find Iwo Jima on a map?

How many American boys is it worth to take a place like that? Especially if the people back home aren't thinking of many of the larger strategic implications. I mean, Iwo Jima is halfway between Saipan and Tokyo. Great place for an airfield. Lots of reasons you might want it. How many boys is it worth? The Marines are going to give more than they thought they would have to. And that's partly why it becomes this great battle in their history. It's a crucible.

The island has more than 800 positions, pillboxes, bunkers, gun emplacements. The tunnels on this island stretch for miles underground. And I've read different accounts. I've heard it's three miles, seven miles, 10 miles, 16 miles. I have no idea which of those is true, but some of them are big enough to drive a fully loaded truck into. The Commander's is 75 feet deep, has electric lights.

is completely protected from all those giant battlefield shells and his plan is to let the americans get on the beaches with their three divisions and something like 70 000 plus men and then when everything was crammed and crowded into what would become one of the most congested battlefields in world history if you look at the numbers right how many people are on an island eight miles square then you start dropping giant mortar rounds on these crowded beaches

which have sand so fine and volcanic that no one can dig in it to give themselves a little shelter, and you start tearing up the people on the beaches. I mean, it's something like 2,000 casualties right away. Bam.

The Marines are going to suffer 8,000 casualties in the first week. Remember, casualties means wounded, missing, killed prisoners, right? All of it. Here's the thing. It's easy to sort of forget the whole wounded thing until you start reading these accounts of these veterans.

And you realize how long ago they're talking about when they talk about being wounded in a place like Iwo Jima. And yet they're still blind or they're still in a wheelchair or whatever the injury back then did to them. They've lived with the rest of their lives. So whereas one might think about killed and wounded on a very different level, and whereas wounded might mean anything from slightly wounded to grievously wounded, they're

we should recall the toll that that takes on people's lives forever afterwards also. And in addition to that, and I mean needless to say, when you think about it for two seconds, but combat produces all sorts of injuries, from the physical to the emotional to the spiritual, and often all of them together. In Patrick K. O'Donnell's Into the Rising Sun, he quotes Iwo Jima veteran from the 5th Marine Division, Dean Winters, who,

who talks about some fighting that goes on, and then he begins to talk about the next day. And he says, quote,

The next day we were attacked again, losing several men killed or wounded. Every hundred yards there was another canyon where you had to dig the enemy out. One of our comrades was captured by the Japanese and pulled into a cave where they tortured him by splitting his finger webs up to his wrists. He was screaming uncontrollably. Our lieutenant got so angry he went in after him and was killed in the process.

There was hardly any of us left in the entire company. For me, I was hit on March 14th. My hip joint was shot all to pieces. Four Marines from the Marine Corps Band were moving me to the rear, and one of the men was killed in the process. Since the war, he says, I've been confined to a wheelchair and have tried to live a good life. However, I relive the war every day. End quote. That's an example of what

the wounded inaction statistic often boils down to, worth bearing in mind. That's a man who thinks about the war, a war from 70-plus years ago, every single day, right when he wakes up.

If you read a lot about these various battles in the Pacific, as many of you have, I know, you begin to notice similarities and differences. And the differences begin to stand out so you can differentiate one battle from another. At Iwo, it's interesting how many of the people on both sides talk about how terrible the wounds are and how unlike many of these other island battles they were.

And I've seen all sorts of reasons suggesting why that might be. A lot of mortars used, for example, in the Japanese were using these massive ones. I mean, a lot of times mortars are like 60 millimeter mortars, which are they're kind of light mortars. These Japanese are using ones that are like 12 inch mortars shooting 750 pound projectiles that have been declared ash cans, flying ash cans is the way one veteran described them.

mini refrigerators going so slow as they arc up in the air you can see them and watch them and then when they blow up they leave a giant hole in the ground and whatever was anywhere nearby is gone and there's no place to hide on an island this small everything's within range

At no time does the commander allow, although there are some people who do it anyway, the suicidal charges that the Japanese have launched all throughout the war that use up so much of their manpower for no good reason. He's keeping his people hiding and their job is to kill Americans, not to get killed charging them.

They have to be methodically taken out. One Japanese survivor had said that it was like watching people try to exterminate insects. It was just methodical. And if you ever watch film, I was going to say video film with this stuff, that's what it looks like. It looks like workmen a lot of the time, sealing up caves, blowing up stuff, lots and lots of flamethrower usage happening.

which turned out to be very important for this because a lot of the time you couldn't get the Japanese out any other way. But the wounds caused by all this equipment are terrible and remarked upon. Life magazine reporter Bob Sherrod had said, and he's quoted in many of my sources, Ian W. Toll adds some context though when he writes, quote,

In the first five days of the battle, the Marines suffered an average of more than 1,200 casualties per day. The beaches and the flat terrain around the airfields were strewn with dead. Shell craters left records of direct hits. Some contained the mashed-up remains of 10 or 12 Marines. Exploring the terraces above Red Beach, Bob Sherrod observed, quote, "...nowhere in the Pacific War had I seen such badly mangled bodies."

many were cut squarely in half legs and arms lay 50 feet away from anybody in one spot on the sand far from the nearest cluster of dead i saw a string of guts 15 feet long end quote another charade narrative or the same one later i don't know is picked up by um francis pike and hirohito's war

Francis Pike's account, by the way, picks up after the Marines get off the beach on the first day and start moving inland. And Pike used a word I'd never seen before. So I looked it up and I'm substituting the the more commonly used term. Let's put it that way. And Pike gives his own version of context on the first day and writes, quote,

Advancing towards Chidori Airport, the leading Marines were suddenly cut down by concealed underground positions. General Kurabayashi's death machine roared into action. It turned into a battle like no other in World War II.

Japan's defenders had the advantage over attackers. Mobility, which characterized the advantage usually afforded the attacker in this situation, was entirely nullified in a fight that had to be won hole by hole, pillbox by pillbox, and cave by cave. By the end of the first day of fighting, 600 Americans lay dead, and a further 2,000 more had been wounded.

unusually some of the highest casualties were engineers of the 133rd cbs the western beaches he writes were strewn with wrecked machines body parts and mangled bodies at 5 p.m a sickened keith wheeler told robert charade of life magazine quote there's more hell in there than i've seen in the rest of the war put together end quote the noise was almost unbearable charade noted

Now, quoting Sherrod, who was an eyewitness to this, quote, "'As the shells burst, as they crashed and shrieked, one of the wounded rose from his stretcher. He rose slowly, bending at the waist. His head was bare, and his arms were straight and rigid at his side. He sat, mouth open, and screamed, "'Oh, my God! My God! Good God Almighty!' The corporal sobbed into the dirt." End quote.

In the book A Tomb Called Iwo Jima by Dan King, he quotes a Japanese veteran named Omagare.

who comments on the fact that the Marines named one part of Iwo Jima the meat grinder. And King says that Omagari could easily understand why the Marines called it that, saying, quote, Men didn't just die on Iwo Jima. They were ripped apart, torn to shreds, and scattered. I saw torsos with no limbs, dismembered legs, arms, and hands, and internal organs splashed onto the rocks.

End quote. The author then says Captain Fred Haynes, later Major General Fred Haynes, the operations officer for the 28th Combat Team. He says he may have summed it up best when he said, quote, each day we learn new ways to die. End quote. These are the American accounts. The Japanese accounts are of people who are living, and this is the word you'll see so often, like troglodytes.

underground with virtually no water. The island has virtually no water. People who know they're going to die are living amongst the dead and are dealing with, anytime they come out of their holes, just absolutely overwhelming firepower. But their job, we should recall, was always to die. And victory or defeat will be measured by how many Americans they're able to take with them. And they take enough Americans with them to

to influence public opinion back in the United States, which was a large part of their goal, right? To get the home front asking the questions of whether or not all this is worth it. It reminds me of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War.

That wasn't intended to have some stunning victory over South Vietnamese and U.S. forces in the field. It was intended to influence public opinion back on the home front, to tell those people that you've been told the war is almost over, well, you've been lied to. Otherwise, how could we do this still? The Japanese are kind of sending the same message back to the United States, and the Americans on the home front are hearing it loud and clear.

The Americans take almost 29,000 casualties and need more than a month to take an island that's four and a half miles long and two miles wide that most Americans don't even know where it is. The Japanese, of course, as is their trademark now, and that something that no one else does on a regular basis, lose almost everyone again. They had between 21 and 22,000 guys on the island and

slightly over 200 will be taken prisoner and most of those as usual are korean and taiwanese workers who are generally impressed into service and don't want to be there to begin with so here we are with the war seemingly you know certainly in the end stages here right we're approaching japan proper and yet the fighting is getting harder and the people back home notice and they want answers

In the wonderful book Implacable Foes, historians Waldo Henricks and Mark Alicchio write this, quote, The toll in lives lost on Iwo Jima produced a strong reaction at home and weighed heavily on the minds of those who directed the war. On March 15th, in the midst of the battle, the Navy released an anguished letter it had received from an unidentified woman pleading, quote,

"'Please, for God's sake, stop sending our finest youth to be murdered on places like Iwo Jima.' She continued in the letter, "'It is too much for boys to stand,' she wrote. "'Too much for mothers and homes to take. It is driving some mothers crazy. Why can't objectives be taken in some other way? It is most inhuman and awful. Stop! Stop!'' It's interesting that the Navy released that, isn't it?

But according to these historians and others, a lot of it has to do with an effort to begin to gird the public for what is to come. They are starting to almost celebrate in advance because the war in Europe against Nazi Germany is clearly winding up, right? And the defeat is imminent over there. So the tendency is to think, yeah, victory is near and we can celebrate and we can stop all this rationing and the boys can come home and the killing can stop and all that.

not so fast the japanese just inflicted 29 000 casualties for a tiny little volcanic rock in the middle of nowhere and they're not showing any signs of being willing to surrender and uh henriks and galicia write quote and by the way uh forestall is the secretary of the navy quote

forestall's willingness to publish the unidentified woman's letter and his acknowledgment that many others like it had been received suggests that he and his advisers recognized that they were reaching a critical moment in the war

As the letters made clear, a significant segment of the public was beginning to find the war's cost intolerable, just as American forces were drawing closer to Japan. Harder fighting lay ahead, and that reality had to be confronted directly, Forrestal seemed to say. Towards that end, they write, the armed forces were aiding newsreel companies in producing more realistic reports of the fighting in Europe and the Pacific."

During the battle for Iwo Jima, raw footage was dispatched back to the newsreel companies in New York and was ready for distribution within two weeks of the initial landings. The newsreels produced from the film displayed the horror of war with disturbing candor. Bosley Crowther, a writer for the New York Times, observed that, quote, the newsreels, thank heaven, are getting tougher. They're letting us have it right between the eyes, end quote.

And the historians finished by saying, quote, of particular note, Crowther added, was Pacific Fury, the name of a film, a forthcoming film on the capture of Peleliu and nearby Angwar, I think it's Angwar, that looked closely into the faces of the men who fought these battles and thus personalized the strain and suffering they endured, end quote. That was a long quote, and I apologize for that, but I wanted to get the historians'

to weigh in on this because trying to gauge what a public mood might have been like at a time like this is something that historians are particularly well suited to do. And, you know, it's funny how this dovetails, though, to the original Japanese concept here when you factored it down to the basic concept

question of who was going to win the war. It was going to be whoever was willing to suck up more casualties for a bunch of places that really didn't mean that much to Americans. It's not like we're talking about the Japanese conquering a U.S. state in North America, right? You're going to fight to the death for that. But do Americans care about Iwo Jima that much? Because the Japanese care for it a lot, but it's a lot closer to them, isn't it?

Not only is it the American public, by the way, who's starting to fume a little bit about this and get a little impatient, especially amongst people who've lost people or people who are going to lose people in the future if this continues, you're starting to see discord being sown by some of the media outlets. I mean, the San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper that's owned by William Randolph Hearst, makes the predictable criticism here that

this is bad leadership, right? It's a little Monday morning quarterbacking where they're saying, well, if MacArthur was in charge of this, this wouldn't have happened, right? He's a genius. He's known for saving his troops' lives. If he was here, you know, in other words, sort of casting blame on this idea that command should have been divided at all and that anybody but MacArthur should have been in command. Now, we should point out, though, Hearst is a guy who would probably gladly support Douglas MacArthur for the Republican nomination for president in the next election. So,

This is maybe not all it appears to be on the surface, but it's a sign. It's a sign that people aren't happy with the level of casualties that are being taken and people are wondering whether or not it's worth it. Either we're not fighting it right or maybe we shouldn't be fighting it at all.

This is a worrying sign for a country about to see a skyrocketing in the amount of casualties that you have to have in this theater to get this over with. Look at what the Russians are starting to take the Soviets in their last push towards Berlin. It's horrifying. And what the Germans take is

You know, in the process as well. That's what those numbers we started off this segment were all about. It's a meat grinder. And they're getting it done in the European theater a couple of months before it's going to happen here in the Pacific. Is there a way out of hell here? Well, maybe. Maybe is the key word here. Because there are different views on ways to

that the war can be shortened but because there's not enough data for one side or another to whip out there in support of their argument that it becomes sort of a he said she said wartime situation there's a group of people who believe that a weapon already exists and

that would make the dreaded 1946 invasion of Japan scenario go up in a puff of smoke, become moot instantly. And you wouldn't have to have any more of those Iwo Jimas. This is the sort of weapon that the mother writing that we couldn't take any more of sending our flower of our youth to go die for these meaningless places. Well, what if you had a way around that problem, right? What would that be worth to you or to your country or to the allies?

There are people who are proponents of the idea that bombing from the air can be decisive in a war. The theory can go either way. It's got proponents and opponents, but the best short enunciation of the hypothesis I've ever seen, I ran across in Gwen Dyer's book, War, and he quotes the British head of bomber commands, Sir Arthur Harris, who said during the war, quote, there are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war.

well my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet and we shall see end quote aerial theorists in multiple countries both axis and allied have been thinking about this sort of stuff for a while

Now, in Germany, you're starting to finally see bombing make a difference. It kind of looks in the statistics, and these arguments are still ongoing, too, that the bombing was sort of something that was a pinprick for Germany for a long time or that they could work around. And then all of a sudden, late 1944, early 1945, you reach like all of a capsized moment where it starts to be having a huge impact on things.

which, let's be fair, there were other things happening to the German military that also would have played into what turns out to be like a systemic failure at a certain point. But let's remember for contextual reasons what aerial weaponry is doing to Germany late in the war. In the book Choices Under Fire, Moral Dimensions of World War II, historian Michael Bess writes, quote,

On February 3, 1945, the U.S. 8th Air Force sent 937 bombers and 613 escorting fighters over Berlin. They leveled large parts of the city and killed some 25,000 persons. On February 14 and 15, 800 British and 400 American bombers flew in over Dresden, igniting a firestorm that burned for a week and killed at least 60,000 noncombatants.

End quote. Now, I've seen a much lower casualty figure for Dresden than that, but even if it only killed 25,000, only 25,000? And this in a country that has relatively sophisticated civil defense facilities. I mean, these people are mostly in bomb shelters and you get those kind of casualties. How horrible would they be if they were running out in the open?

Germany is getting hit multiple times a week. And by the end of the war, I believe Heidelberg is the only mid to large size German city that is not decimated by the bomb damage or really completely wiped off the map. Go look at photos. It is shocking. You are not seeing those kinds of results in the Pacific Asia theater yet.

This is how total war turns things morally topsy-turvy, right? Is that the people who are running the B-29 superfortresses out of the Marianas Islands since 1944 bombing Japan, they're in trouble for not doing the sort of damage that we just mentioned in Europe. But today, people look on that as horrifying, right?

But in a war, if you had a I mean, I guarantee you when the allied populations woke up in their newspaper and read about those bombing raids in Germany that I just quoted from Michael Bess's book, those are good things to them, not bad things. There's a difference between, you know, they say in cold blood or in hot blood with murders and crimes. War is hot blood. Us today trying to make sense of their decision making is done in cold blood. And it's a very different thing.

The idea that the commanders of the American air assets and the Marianas are in trouble for not doing more damage to Japan, not being more effective, gives you an idea, though, of what the priorities are. And in January 1945, they bring in new leadership to see if they can shake up the results here.

And the guy who comes in to do that is one of the famous proponents of aerial bombing. He is a guy who is much, who is as much of a caricature as MacArthur is or General Patton is. And he's a lot like Patton, the kind of guy who has those sort of can do almost heartless toward the enemy sorts of attitudes in wartime. And then when we go from hot blood to cold blood, they look horribly out of place and

There are a couple of figures in the famous movie Dr. Strangelove where if you mash them together, you get one General Curtis LeMay. And that's who gets brought in to shake things up with the B-29 superfortresses. Oh, incidentally, the most expensive weapon the U.S. has.

paid for for this war. I mean, it's the most expensive weapons program and you win a trivia contest against people with a line like that. But that puts a lot of pressure on the people that were out there risking their reputations to promote this thing. Right. This is going to this is going to have a decisive impact on the war. Well, in a couple of months of bombing Japan, it hasn't done squat.

LeMay said after he took over the air assets in the Marianas, quote, this outfit has been getting a lot of publicity without having really accomplished a hell of a lot in bombing results, end quote.

So he changes strategies, adopts doctrines and ideas that have been percolating in the U.S. Air thinking might be a good way to put it for years now, all the way back to 1939. They were noticing that Japan might be extra vulnerable to the setting of fires from the air. They do experiments in 1943 where they build mock-up cities of both German and Japanese cities so they can test stuff out.

LeMay had spent some time in Indochina with another American air general named Chenault, who was a proponent of incendiaries, right, mixing incendiaries in your bomb loads, which is a pretty common thing for most countries to do, by the way. And they burned down the Chinese city of Hankou to deny it to the Japanese and learned quite a bit about how the Asian construction works.

materials like lots of wood, for example, how they could best be set on fire. So when LeMay gets to the Marianas and sees the meager results and the high casualty rates that they've been suffering on these raids to Japan, he changes things up. He puts a bunch of different things in place, some his own sorts of ideas, others that he grabbed from years of thinking about this amongst American thinkers.

And he launched a couple of preliminary raids using these new methods, and then he puts it together, looks at the data from those smaller raids, and then launches one in March that is what nightmares are made of. It was called Operation Meeting House. March 9th, 1945. About 330-some B-29 Superfortresses take off from the Marianas Islands heading for Tokyo.

They carry a bomb load that it would take a thousand B-17 flying fortresses, the big American bomber that flew over Europe. It would take a thousand of them to carry the bomb load of these 330-ish B-29s. And the bomb load has been tweaked.

A lot more incendiaries added, certain particular incendiaries with napalm, which is a relatively new development, certainly in terms of deployment. I think they discovered it back in 1942. But it's jellied gasoline, kind of. And like so many of the incendiaries used by the major powers in the Second World War, if it splashes on you, it just continues to burn. Phosphorus is like that, too. You can't put it out. Very difficult.

So these planes are going to come in low, which is against everything they were designed to do. This is a fantastically high-level bomber, the B-29. That offers protection and all kinds of other benefits. To bring them in low is to go against the design ideas. But the winds over Japan are crazy. The cloud cover is almost constant. And if the planes go in at 5,000 feet instead of 25,000 feet, you avoid all those problems.

The Americans had learned that it is suicidal to do that in a place like Germany with their air defenses. But LeMay believes you can do it in Japan, especially if you do it at night, because the Japanese air defenses at night are significantly worse than they are in the daytime. The problem with going in at night is you kind of expose the fallacy of

of the basic idea that americans celebrate with their bombing doctrine the americans are a precision bomber country they have these great bomb sites and optics and these tactics that have been developed to try to hit installations and factories and railway yards and infrastructure and things that help the war effort but not target civilians not bomb indiscriminately over whole areas but in the mid-20th century precision bombing in the daytime is hit or miss if you'll pardon the pun

At night, you're just kidding yourself. I mean, you're not even trying. It's an area attack at night. And to use incendiaries in an area attack at night is to decide that you want to burn down a city. How do you measure the effectiveness? What's a good outcome for you if you launch a bombing raid on a city with the goal of burning it down?

You get congratulated if you burn it down. And there's not a country in the war that would use in their propaganda or their public statements the idea that they're deliberately trying to kill civilians. So everybody has, you know, a sort of a rationale, a logical insanity, I think we called it, for why they do what they do and what they're targeting. The Americans never, ever,

waiver from the public pronouncement that they're going after military targets and they can defend that in Japan because the military targets have all been decentralized I mean they had a lot of little workshops aiding the defense effort mixed all over Tokyo and

One author that I read had called the bombing raid target a classic mixed target, meaning that you had infrastructure, industry and civilians with homes and schools and hospitals all mixed together. But in a flammable city, if you can set it on fire and burn everything down, you'll get all those military targets, but you get everything else, too.

the march ninth which will continue into march tenth almost three hour raid by these more than three hundred bombers takes out sixteen square miles of tokyo remember this is an experiment

wondering how this is all going to work. I mean, for all LeMay knows, he's going to get tons of planes shot down. And when the results come back in, everyone's overjoyed because this is the most effect these B-29s have been able to have so far. I think in all the raids up till now, they'd killed less than 2,000 people in Tokyo. But in this three-hour, less than three-hour raid, they kill 100,000 people.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said that, quote, probably more persons lost their lives by fire in Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any equivalent period of time in the history of man, end quote. Let that sink in for a minute. The worst military attack ever, the most costly, the most damaging, and that 100,000 number is an estimate.

Marius B. Jensen thinks it's closer to 120,000. No one knows. The very records that might help shed some light on that burned up in the very fire that took all those lives. The number of official injuries of people seeking help and documented was over 40,000. Many of the statistical surveys I was looking at triple that number.

And if you look at photographs of the 16 square miles, something like 40% of Tokyo's main area, it's ash. I mean, you have brick and stone and metal buildings sprinkled here and there. And you can see the outlines of the roads, but everything else looks like the bottom of your barbecue, including the people. The people inside those buildings, by the way, did not find sanctuary. Those buildings turned into ovens. And the accounts...

that are um available i mean it sounds like gratuitous stuff to even mention it uh i've always wondered about what i always like to call the worst places to be in the world at any given time right this battlefield that disaster site whatever it might be and i always you know darkly joke that the worst place to be is like a tie for a hundred different incidents but how is this not on it

in his biography of General Curtis LeMay, author Warren Kozak, gives you the rundown of how this goes and the weapons and the technical side of this, right? Because remember, the Americans are trying to figure out how to be effective with this weapon system. They're trying out different mixes of things, different tactics, strategies, altitudes, bomb loads, and the composition thereof. And Kozak writes, quote,

Each plane would fly individually in three staggered lines between 5,000 and 7,000 feet. The first planes to take off would fly at slower speeds in order for the later planes to catch up. It would be unlike anything yet seen in the war. Three long lines of bombers coming in at very low altitude. The

The bombardier's job would be greatly simplified because a small group of planes coming from a different direction would drop incendiaries in the front and back of the target zone before the lines of bombers arrived.

similar to lighting up both ends of a football field at night. The planes coming after them from another direction would see the fires that the lead bombers had set and then bomb the area in between. The plan, he writes, was brilliant in its simplicity. The human cost, he says, would be determined later. End quote. He continues, quote.

LeMay decided to drop E46 clusters, meaning cluster bomblets. The witnesses said they look like bananas all clustered on a tree. And then when they were dropped, they would all the bananas would split off separately. I'm sorry. He says LeMay decided to drop E46 clusters that would explode at 2000 feet above the ground.

Each cluster would release 38 incendiary bombs of napalm and phosphorus, creating a rain of fire over the city. In all, 8,519 clusters would be dropped, releasing 496,000 individual cylinders weighing 6.2 pounds each.

resulting in 1665 tons of incendiaries to be dropped on Tokyo that night end quote if there's one thing that has been learned about strategic bombing to this point in the war is that sometimes you get lucky or unlucky depending on whose point of view we're looking at this from sometimes the climatic conditions are perfect sometimes

Sometimes you have some wind in the region. If everything were to conspire against the civilians in the city, the bombs mixed with the wind, mixed with the climate and all that could create something called a firestorm. This happened in Germany several times. Dresden, we just mentioned. Hamburg's a famous one. And what that does is

is um take the casualties from something that might be a 6 000 or an 8 000 or a 12 000 dead civilian night which sounds horrible and convert it into something amplify it into something like a 25 030 or 35 000 dead civilian night

In his book, War, military historian Gwynne Dyer had said that if the British Bomber Command could reliably create these firestorms, you know, whenever they wanted to, the war would be over in six months. That sounds like an opinion to me, but it's an interesting idea being able to create these

these equivalents of a natural disaster right a global weather-oriented disaster for example a flood um a volcanic eruption a tsunami something like that right a freeze whatever it might be um to be able to do this as a weapon of war well it's interesting to speculate what that might mean for the war effort and that's exactly what people do

I mean, how do you order a raid that might kill 100,000 people? How does one live with oneself? The way you do it, though, is by telling yourself that you saved even more than that. Now, as an aside here, I've done more than 10 hours of talking about the logical insanity, the moral logic of strategic bombing as the proponents of that theory see it. And I would suggest that the jury is still out.

Nothing has been decided yet on whether the people who suggest that a shorter war that is nastier is actually more merciful and humanitarian than a longer war that isn't. Right. The idea being throwing the monkey wrench into the human being lawnmower. Right. That anything that short circuits the ever functioning conveyor belt of death here is the greater good in the minds of people today.

who can manage to sleep at night ordering the deaths of that many people. Blumet said over and over, as did a lot of the people he worked with, that this was going to shorten the war and that shortening the war was the most important thing. It is so hard to not judge this sort of action by the standards of now. But what I constantly try to remind myself is that 1945 is

By then, they're not operating by our moral standards anymore. They're six years into total war, a war of survival, extermination, the very highest possible stakes and all sorts of terrible things done up until this point. I mean, how do you order to burn 100,000 people? Well, you know, a little at a time. You work your way up to it.

We shouldn't forget that the side that's being bombed here were some of the early proponents of bombing cities. I mean, the Germans did it to Warsaw. They did it to Rotterdam. They did it to Britain for nine solid heavy months and killed more than 40,000 noncombatants in Britain earlier in the war.

In 1945, they're launching V2 rockets at Britain, killing more than or sometime more around 10,000 people with the V2s. Add the V1s, it is more than 10,000 people. So nothing has stopped. The Japanese were bombing Chinese cities and killing civilians before the Second World War even started. For most countries, they were dropping. Let's remember, I mean, this is a war where the Japanese are infecting fleas with the plague, the plague bacillus, and then dropping that on Chinese cities from the air to see what happens next.

When someone says, how can you drop incendiaries that kill 100,000 civilians? You say you work up to it. By 1945, the war is at a kind of an insane sort of level. But nobody feels that all of a sudden killing 100,000 people in Tokyo is, you know, tons worse than killing 60,000 in Hamburg or

35 000 in dresden see what happens when when it gets insane we're in crazy territory by 1945 it's easy to forget too that these numbers which are impossible to conceptualize involve real people with human experiences on the ground of the sort that are unimaginable listen to the eyewitness accounts or what the historians have to say

Historian Conrad C. Crane, in his book Bombs, Cities, and Civilians, writes about Operation Meeting House, the March 9th, 10th raid on Japan, and says, quote,

The selected zone of attack covered six important industrial targets and numerous smaller factories, railroad yards, home industries, and cable plants. But it also included one of the most densely populated areas in the world. End quote. He goes on to say 135,000 people per square mile. He continues, quote,

Before Operation Meeting House was over, between 90,000 and 100,000 people had been killed. Most died horribly as intense heat from the firestorm consumed the oxygen, boiled water in canals, and sent liquid glass rolling down the streets. Thousands suffocated in shelters or parks. Panicked crowds crushed victims who had fallen in the streets as they surged towards waterways to escape the flames, and

Perhaps the most terrible incident, he writes, came when one B-29 dropped seven tons of incendiaries on and around the crowded, I believe it is Kokotoy Bridge. Hundreds of people were turned into fiery torches and, quote, splashed into the river below in sizzling hisses, end quote. That's from an eyewitness. One writer, Crane says, described the falling bodies as resembling tent caterpillars that had been burned out of a tree.

tail gunners crane says were sickened by the sight of hundreds of people burning to death in flaming napalm on the surface of the sumida river a doctor who observed the carnage there later said quote you couldn't even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood end quote

Crane then says, quote, B-29 crews fought superheated updrafts that destroyed at least 10 aircraft and wore oxygen masks to avoid vomiting from the stench of burning flesh. By the time the attack had ended, almost 16 square miles of Tokyo were burned out and over one million people were homeless, end quote.

Gwen Dyer had quoted an eyewitness of one of the firestorms in Germany who had said that the sound that you hear during it was like an old church organ that was very loud and playing all the notes at once. As we said, generally the conditions have to contribute to create these sorts of firestorms.

And there was already something like a 30 gusting maybe to 40 mile per hour wind in Tokyo when this happened. So that makes it a fire danger already. And Tokyo was known as a city prone to fires. And Japan had a problem with that. Tokyo had a very specific problem with that. That's why the U.S. had identified it years before as prone to incendiaries. And it really burns. It creates its own weather problem.

Just like the firestorms in Dresden and in Hamburg where the winds start turning into almost a tornado when you read account after account of people being swept away by an invisible hand of wind that just pulls them away. And it's so bad that you can't see anything because it's blowing pebbles and rocks into your face.

The accounts from some of these German attacks talk about the asphalt melting, and that happens everywhere. So you try to run down the streets and you find yourself sinking in molten asphalt. They talk about the wind sucking all the oxygen out of things. You'll find these air raid shelters in Germany where everybody's just suffocated. The temperature reaches 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

in the center of some of this fire area and people just start exploding in flame. You'll read over and over about people just like matchsticks explode.

A lot of people who found their avenue of escape cut off in every direction just sat down in the street. One of my sources said faced the Imperial Palace and waited to die and were found there. The photographs are, there are not many, but, and the photographs, to be honest, the photographs of the bombing bodies in Europe too are hard to handle. We're talking about large piles of bodies and in the Tokyo raid, they're all burned, carbonized.

In The Rising Sun, author John Toland follows one person who lived through this. A father bundles his four children and his wife up in something that he hopes will protect them from the fire, and they take off trying to get away. And Toland writes, quote...

They pushed their way across the bridge to escape the roaring blaze that was pursuing them, quote, end quote, like a wild animal. A strong wind sucked into the flames, swept a stinging storm of pebbles into their faces. They turned back to the gale and plotted slowly away from the conflagration, fascinated at the sight of oil drums rocketing through the roof of a cable factory near the river and exploding into balls of fire a hundred feet in the air. The

The center of Tokyo, he writes, was as incandescent as the sun. Billowing clouds of smoke surged up, illuminated below by orange flames. Thousands crouched, terrified, in their wooden shelters where they would be roasted alive. End quote.

An author whose name I absolutely can't pronounce, and a thousand apologies. I couldn't find anything online. Hoito Edwin, I'm going to go with. He wrote a book, The Night Tokyo Burned, many years ago, where he took some eyewitness accounts and put them together of people who have visualized something that I don't think any of us can imagine. It's both fascinating and repellent at the same time. So he has one eyewitness encountered by a captain who,

The author says they had just gone to this bridge to check out conditions there because people were running towards water wherever they could find it. The author says, quote, And there they were stunned by the sight of countless dead bodies that lay everywhere around. They were in a forest of corpses. In every direction, bodies were crumpled so closely together that they must have been touching when they died. They lay there now, mute evidence of the fury of the American attack on Tokyo's civil population.

The captain looked out over the Ichida River and shook his head. What a pitiful situation it was. So appalling that it exceeded the imagination's ability to deal with it. What could rescuers do in a situation like this? There was no one to rescue. Touch one of the roasted bodies and the flesh would crumble in the hand. Humanity reduced to the essential, turned into carbon. End quote. The account continues, and this is not to be gratuitous,

This is to give us an idea of exactly what mankind's capabilities, what our human capabilities have finally achieved, what levels now of damage we can do. This is the sort of thing you read about after a giant, you know, act of God, natural disaster type thing, not something that someone targeted at someone.

He then talks about the captain looking at the bank of the river and seeing how the waves that had been wind-driven had pushed all of the corpses, he says tens of thousands of them, up against the beach and stacked them like cordwood. It was this weird sight when you read the accounts later.

of Operation Meeting House and the result afterwards. It sounds like the American Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and the General of the Army, George Marshall, were both quite bothered by the civilian casualties and the bombings in Europe and the Pacific, but they seem to be amongst a very small group of people who are. Not only is this considered to be a better-than-expected result,

but LeMay will turn the bombers around two days later and do it again and then turn around a couple days after that and do them again and will continue to firebomb Japanese cities until he runs out of incendiaries to use on them and there's a temporary lull while they try to get more to his plane. They'd underestimated how many bombing runs that he could do but he's a taskmaster and he's a guy who gets things done and

But he's also very blunt about what war, especially modern war, mid-20th century war, boils down to. And he's, again, I said earlier, a caricature, but not a caricature like a cartoon character, a caricature like a two-dimensional figure that doesn't seem like a fully fleshed out human being because the caricature isn't. But the caricature said about the bombing in Tokyo, quote,

This is quoted in Conrad Crane's book, by the way. Quote, We were going after military targets. No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter. Of course, there's a pretty thin veneer in Japan, but the veneer was there. It was their system of dispersal of industry. All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we'd roasted it and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home.

The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war. Men, women, children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done. End quote. So how do people that order those kind of things done? Sleep at night? Well, maybe if they have a problem sleeping at night. If they don't figure out some way.

to end this whole thing by throwing a monkey wrench into the assembly line of death in warren kozak's biography lemay he describes a letter that lemay described in his memoirs as sticking in his head something he thought about and kozak says quote in his memoirs lemay makes more than one reference to a letter that continually weighed on him now quoting the letter quote

End quote. Kozak then says this, quote,

LeMay's only way to stop these types of letters from coming was to end the war. He rationalized the potentially significant loss of Japanese life on the ground with the following logic—

Marines were suffering horrendous casualties on Iwo Jima in a slow, agonizing fighting. Evidence that the Japanese were becoming even more ferocious, the closer Americans came to the home islands. And unlike the U.S. or German industry, which was factory-centered, Japanese manufacturing was greatly decentralized. Individual parts for airplanes, tanks, and bombs were produced in homes and in backyards. Quote,

This is LeMay talking now. No matter how you slice it, you're going to kill an awful lot of civilians, thousands and thousands. But if you don't destroy Japan's capacity to wage war, we're going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? 500,000 seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million. We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. End quote. In 1939...

Pretty much every major country in the Second World War decried the idea of bombing civilians. By 1945, none of those countries have a moral leg to stand on anymore because either they've already done it themselves or they've done things you might even see and call worse. Now, it is unfair to judge the moral sensibilities of a guy like Curtis LeMay in a vacuum. I mean, you have to really...

try to figure out where he was on the scale of his age and day. How did the general public in the United States feel about this? They overwhelmingly supported it, just like the British public overwhelmingly supported their bombing campaigns, just like the German public overwhelmingly supported their bombing campaigns, just like the Japanese public overwhelmingly supported their bombing campaigns.

All of these populations, of course, are having their information constantly pruned and redacted and filtered so that they just get what the government wants them to see. And they're being heavily propagandized to feel a certain way and adopt a certain view. That's uniform. It's happening in every country.

for example the hundreds of newspapers in the united states that celebrate and tout this firebombing of japan they don't show mounds of charred human corpses they don't play that side of it up they may not even know how many people died it's all about how many structures were burned how much damage was done to the war effort and all those kind how many of our own planes got home safe this is exactly how other countries would portray a similar situation involving their forces

What's more, we have to recall the amount of propaganda out there making sure that people were prepared for this level of commitment and nastiness. In his book, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians, Conrad Crane quotes a little bit of the dialogue that

from one of these movies they made in 1944 that's one of those partnership deals between Hollywood and and the government right these are propaganda films or films that have a message that bolsters up the you know home front and it involved a film with Dana Andrews who was playing a Doolittle pilot one of those pilots that symbolically bombed Japan back in 1942 got captured and was going to be executed

And so they put these words into his mouth just before they're leading him away to have, I guess, his head cut off. The film, by the way, was called The Purple Heart. And this is the kind of dialogue that preps one for an air campaign like this.

Quote, it's true we Americans don't know very much about you Japanese and never did. And now I realize you know even less about us. You can kill us, all of us, or part of us. But if you think that's going to put the fear of God into the United States of America and stop them from sending other flyers to bomb you, you're wrong, dead wrong.

They'll blacken your skies and burn down your cities to the ground and make you get down on your knees and beg for mercy. This is your war. You wanted it. You asked for it. And now you're going to get it. And it won't be finished until your dirty little empire is wiped off the face of the earth. End quote. And then they lead the hero off, execute him, make you feel extra angry, and you're ready to go burn down some Japanese cities yourself.

Those who actually had to do that, though, are to be pitied. You know, you never get the stories of people who returned just fine, never thought another day about it and moved on, but you do hear the stories of those who were traumatized by it. Lots of tales of people returning back to their base with their clothes smelling like burnt human flesh, pilots and crew members turning in after-action reports with shaking hands,

In Matthew A. Rizal's book, The Things Our Fathers Saw, one of the crew members said this, quote, We had to kill in order to end the war. We heard about the thousands of people we killed, the Japanese wives, the children, and the elderly. That was war. But I know every B-29 air crewman for the next two or three years would wake up at night and start shaking. Yes, the raids were successful, but horribly so. End quote.

General LeMay and the Air Corps' position here is basically that we are going to continue to do this to you, and you can't stop it until you say you've had enough and you end the war. And yet, as crazy as it sounds, as bad as things already are for Japan, they're not going to end the war. And Herbert P. Bix, historian Herbert P. Bix, writes in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan that,

Two days after Emperor Hirohito's inspection of bomb damage in the capital, that means after the big Tokyo firebombing, no less a person than retired former minister Shidihara Kijiro, once the very symbol of cooperation with Britain and the United States, gave expression to a feeling that was widely held by Japan's ruling elites at this time. Namely, Japan had to be patient and resist surrender no matter what.

shidihara had earlier advised foreign minister shigemitsu that the people would gradually get used to being bombed daily in time unity and resolve would grow stronger and this would allow the diplomats quote room to devise plans for saving the country in this time of unprecedented crisis end quote

Bix then goes on to quote a letter from the same foreign minister 10 days after the Tokyo firebombing, which said, quote, If we continue to fight back bravely, even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed, injured or starved, even if millions of buildings are destroyed or burned.

And then Bix finishes his thought by saying there would be room to produce a more advantageous international situation for Japan. End quote. That's the same line we've been hearing for a long time now, isn't it? That if we can just shift the momentum here, change our luck a little bit, get lucky, have one victory, we can go to the negotiating table then and not be without something to use to bargain with, right? But

way back in February, some of the people who, it's very hard to divine who was really for peace and who wasn't, but some of the people that are often credited with being more in the peace faction

had tried to sway the hardliners, knowing that the hardliners' biggest fear over any eventuality was communism, by saying, if this keeps up, you're going to get the people overthrowing the government and the emperor and everything else, and that'll be worse than what the Allies would do to us if we surrendered. And even with all that hanging over the heads of the Japanese leadership and the elite here like a sword of Damocles...

with more fire bombings you know to continue japan fights on and on april 1st allied troops land on japanese soil on the island of okinawa and not only the americans are in on it this time

But elements of the British Navy, the British Pacific Fleet are there now. I mean, Germany's almost had it. No reason to keep the fleet in the Mediterranean. Italy's out of the war. No reason to keep it in the North Sea or the Atlantic. Bring it here into the Pacific with those aircraft carriers, with the armored flight decks. That'll be useful against kamikaze attacks and help us take the

the first of the Japanese home islands, although it's iffy whether you would consider Okinawa one of the home islands. Some of the Okinawans wouldn't consider it one of the home islands, but it turns out to be a battle that acts as a preview, a version in miniature of what the Allies can expect as they continue to move toward Japan and, you know, islands like Okinawa

kyushu right okinawa has something similar to japan also that the allies will have to deal with lots and lots of non-combatants civilians and they're not running off to some refugee camp they're not fleeing to another part of the country they're stuck there on an island 60 miles long but only about 10 to 12 miles wide in some spots and you're talking hundreds of thousands of people

more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers, more than 100,000 American troops, Okinawa is going to produce the highest casualties of the Pacific War and some of the worst casualty rates in American military history. And by the end of the ordeal of Okinawa, both the Japanese and the U.S. military will be showing cracks in their psychological facades.

At first, it goes better than anyone on the Allied side has a right to expect. The invasion, as we said, kicks off April 1st, and there is seemingly little to no resistance.

You still have the big American bombardment of the beaches. The entire choreographed military ballet goes the way it has for several islands now. But the Japanese are in the interior, staying away from where the big guns can hurt you and are planning to let the Americans come to them. And then they're going to take as many of them with them as they can. But for four or five days, the Americans don't run into anyone.

by and large. I mean, the Marines will sweep up toward the north of the island and take a little few of the smaller islands just offshore of Okinawa. The Army units, for the most part, will sweep south, and it's not until like the 4th or the 5th of April till they run into the prepared defenses on both ends of the island, especially the south. And around the time they do is when the big Japanese military

suicide air and naval suicide attack that's meant to be the answer the response to this u.s okinawan invasion hits

You get a chance to see how things are going to be amplified as you get closer to the Japanese homeland, which is less than 400 miles away from Okinawa, by the way. And what was a trickle, for example, of suicide planes earlier in the war when they first showed up becomes an absolute flood at Okinawa. And there's all kinds of suicide things ready at Okinawa. The Americans...

find several hundred speedboats loaded with explosives before they can be used against the Americans. The Japanese will be using a guided bomb where a person guides the bomb after they drop it from a giant aircraft in this encounter. But the main assaults and damage is going to be carried out by your standard kamikaze planes. And the new tactics going to be

or the tactic, I'm not sure how new it is, to mix kamikaze planes in with planes that are doing conventional attacks, you know, normal bombers. And so if you're an American anti-aircraft gunner, how do you know the difference and who do you shoot at? It becomes confusing. And there's going to be, I think, 10,

full-on kamikaze assaults during the whole Okinawan campaign. But in between the big assaults, you have a single kamikaze here or there, a couple of them attacking. And in one 40-day period, the U.S. fleet will be hit by some kamikaze attack every single day. Can't relax for one minute. And it's hard not to look at this as...

perhaps the first real test of what modern naval combat is going to look like, because there hasn't been modern naval combat between two first-rate naval powers since the Second World War. The little bits that you've gotten have shown how important missiles are going to be in naval combat. Well, we haven't had a war where hundreds of naval missiles have been launched at fleets of ships. The closest comparison you can find is what's going on

off the coast of Okinawa when sometimes hundreds of kamikazes mixed in with hundreds of bombers will show up and attempt to get through the American defensive screen and sink American ships. They have far more success setting them on fire than outright sinking them,

but they begin to whittle down the American strength, and not in a way where you have a danger of the whole fleet being sunk or anything like that, but it's costing a lot of sailors' lives who are getting horribly burned, the ones who survive. It's taking out a lot of smaller ship, and a bunch of American carriers end up getting injured enough to go back for repairs. I read one observer who was comparing the fact that most countries have wooden flight decks, including the Japanese and the Americans themselves,

But the British, who we had just mentioned, had shown up here with their fleet or one of their fleets, their Pacific fleet. And their aircraft carriers have armored flight decks, which cuts down, I guess, on the number of aircraft you can keep on board. So that's a downside. But when the kamikazes hit it, the observer had said that if this happens to an American vessel, it's back to port for six months of repair. If it happens to an English, a British vessel, you just call the sweeper squad in.

Come on and just hose off the deck here and send this kamikaze, what's left of this kamikaze plane right into the ocean. The Japanese will lose thousands upon thousands of aircraft in the Okinawan campaign. I've seen numbers all over the map and just going by the Encyclopedia of Military History, though, they claim somewhere north of 7,000, somewhere south of 8,000 aircraft chewed up in this campaign. But they also manage...

to sink 36 of the U.S. Fifth Fleet's ships and damage another 368 more. That is not insignificant. And we should recall that the Japanese are stockpiling all these kind of things on the home islands for future assaults.

There was a surface component that was supposed to work with these kamikaze attacks. And the interesting aspect of that is that it involved the super battleship Yamato, whose sister ship was sunk a few battles ago, the Musashi. And neither ship, having done much in this war, both ships had every right to be the queen of the seas when they were launched and commissioned. Only the technological wheel of fortune had passed them by and

And over the course of several hours, the American aircraft, sometimes 100 at a time, will sink her just as easily as they sunk her sister ship, the Musashi. Lots of bombs, lots of torpedoes, but there was nothing to it. The Americans lose between 10 and 15 aircraft sinking, not just the Yamato, but the cruiser and the destroyers with it. It's nothing.

You look at the disparity between what those 10 or 15 aircraft cost the United States in time, labor, resources, opportunity cost, everything else, versus what the Yamato cost the Japanese. Technology has a way, doesn't it, of taking something that was very valuable not that long ago and making it practically worthless now. On April 12th, just as things are really starting to get nasty on Okinawa itself in the land combat area,

The American president who has served more time in office than any other president in American history dies in that office. Roosevelt was famously trying to get a little of his strength back in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he's having his portrait painted and tells the people in the room that he's got a terrible headache and succumbs very quickly to a cerebral hemorrhage stroke type incident.

This is not a surprise to anyone who was around the man at all. You read account after account after account for a good year before his death that he looks like death is at his door. A lot of people thought it was irresponsible for the man to run for his fourth term in office as sick as he obviously was. What's more, if you're in the middle of a war, especially, and you're a world leader and you know how sick you are, wouldn't you be really concerned with who your successor is?

That's part of the interesting angle here. The president of the United States has only recently picked a new vice president. So a guy who's in office for four terms, so long that most of the soldiers on the ground have no memory of any other president in their lives. He's got a new vice president as of January 1945. So it's April.

Something like 82 or 83 days he's had this guy, and he's not someone that really anyone knows. His name is Harry Truman. It's interesting, isn't it, that of the so-called big three allied commanders in the war, you know, allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, only Stalin is still in power at the end of the war. Churchill famously gets... Well, he loses the election in July 1945, so he has to give up power, and Roosevelt dies. And so Harry Truman...

who was said to have cried on someone's shoulder saying, you know, that he's not big enough for the job. When he hears that it is his job, he'll say to Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin's widow, is there anything I can do for you? And she says, is there anything I can do for you? You're the one in trouble now. And Truman himself has written that when he found out he was president, it felt like the whole world, stars, moon and universe fell on top of him.

This is a guy who in his 82 or 83 days as vice president of the United States met alone with the president of the United States a mere two times. And oh yeah, that guy, the guy dying where everyone knew he was dying, didn't even mention to the vice president that they'd been working on a secret weapon that he might now inherit. It's borderline negligent.

And Truman is no Roosevelt. If you're going to take over in wartime, and especially if you're going to take over at this kind of a critical moment in wartime, you'd like to think you have some really august figure. And Truman's opponents and people who didn't like him would often call him a failed haberdasher. He is not someone that when you look at him, you think, okay, this is going to be one of the really powerful, august movers and shakers. But it's going to be up to him to

on what to do for the rest of the war. And there's going to be some pretty darn big decisions, as you can imagine. Actually, the end stages of the Second World War, not a good time to be one of the leaders in the Second World War on either side. And as we said, Churchill loses an election. He's gone from power. Roosevelt dies. Mussolini will be executed by partisans on April 28th. Hitler will die in early May.

and Germany will surrender by the way in early May May 7th May 8th in there May 8th really so things are clearly winding down but what this means is in the middle of the Okinawan battle Japan becomes the only one still fighting the only major power still on the axis side fighting and the fighting is getting

more vicious all the time. The Japanese have several lines cut across the width of the island, and they're forcing the Americans to take them on head-on. And you begin to see the kind of combat that reminds one more of the First World War than the second. In fact, I think it was Ian W. Toll that referred to Okinawa as a Pacific for done.

If you look at a picture of the Okinawan campaign, especially one taken over at the Shuri line in the south after the fighting's been going on for a while, you'd be hard-pressed to say that wasn't a First World War battlefield. And it just looks like giant piles of dirt with some roads cut through it. I mean, there's nothing green left anywhere. No trees, no stumps, no grass, no nothing.

Holes in the ground where the troops are trying desperately to not be killed by mortars or artillery shells. And just like the First World War, because the situation is so dangerous that people can't go about their business, including things like going to the latrine in the rear area, everything stays where it is. Excrement, trash, bodies, and that contributes to something which...

well in the first world war it shattered the sensibilities of a lot of the people forced to live in those circumstances and

in with the old breed at Peleliu in Okinawa, E.B. Sledge, Eugene Sledge, was at Okinawa and describes just what it was like over on the Shuri line. And remember, sometime in this conflict, the rain starts and makes everything worse. If you're already living in a latrine, what happens when you add water, right? And Sledge writes, quote,

Everywhere lay Japanese corpses killed in the heavy fighting. Infantry equipment of every type, U.S. and Japanese, was scattered about. Helmets, rifles, BARs, packs, cartridge belts, canteens, shoes, ammo boxes, shell cases, machine gun ammo belts, all were strewn around us up to and all over Half Moon. That's one of the battle areas.

He says, quote,

Shells had torn up the turf so completely, he writes, that ground cover was non-existent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud, shellfire, flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants, knocked out tanks and Amtraks, and discarded equipment, utter desolation. The stench of death, he writes, was overpowering. End quote. How does one deal with that? Well, Sledge says, quote,

I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around Umur Brogul Pocket on Peleliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay.

Sledge also describes what happens when they're out there killing lots of Japanese, which they were, and then the shells come in and chew up the bodies that were laying on the ground, which is the environment that the Marines and the Army troops have to actually live in. And he writes, quote,

The situation was bad enough, but when enemy artillery shells exploded in the area, the eruptions of soil and mud uncovered previously buried Japanese dead and scattered chunks of corpses. Like the area around our gun pits, the ridge was a stinking compost pile. If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he writes, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting.

"'I saw more than one man lose his footing "'and slip and slide all the way to the bottom, "'only to stand up horror-stricken "'as he watched in disbelief "'while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, "'cartridge belt, leggings lacings, and the like. "'Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away "'with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade. "'We didn't talk about such things. "'They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans.'

The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness, unless they've seen it with their own eyes. It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much of it there on Okinawa, and to me the war was insanity."

The actual fighting and trying to get people out of caves and defensive positions, if you weren't actively involved in the kind of combat Sledge was just talking about, was a kind of horrific and extremely dangerous tediousness. And Ian W. Toll says, quote,

It was slow, bloody, treacherous work involving flamethrowers, grenades, satchel charges, small arms, bayonets, and even knives and bare hands. General Buckner, the American commander, referred to these tactics as the blowtorch and corkscrew method, end quote.

He then goes on to talk about how unbelievably brave and tenacious both sides were in fighting for things like high ground positions, which would often change hands, then change hands again, then change hands again, sometimes 10, 12 times. Toll writes, quote,

Naval gunfire and air support were valuable on Okinawa, but they never superseded the bravery, initiative, and grit of individual infantry units. In the end, the soldiers and marines had to dig their enemies out of the ground and kill them. There was no other way. Rarely could they gain an advantage through flanking maneuvers. On the constricted terrain around the Shuri ridges, each battalion was wedged into a densely populated section of the line. On average, the

a thousand troops for every 600 yards and the only way to hit the enemy was by frontal assault

They might briefly seize control of the top of a facing ridge, but then be driven back by heavy artillery fire from positions farther south or by Japanese infantry counterattacks in superior force. That was a recurring pattern on Okinawa. The high ground often changed hands in a succession of attacks and counterattacks, sometimes as many as a dozen times. American and Japanese dead, he writes, were splayed side by side on the battlefield,

All foliage had been blasted or burned away from the once verdant landscape, and the zones between the opposing lines were scarred and denuded wasteland. Artillery and mortar shells fell relentlessly, shaking the walls of the trenches and foxholes. Japanese infiltration attacks were a nightly horror. More than on any previous Pacific battlefield, infantrymen suffered psychotic breaks and had to be evacuated as quote-end-quote psycho-cases.

The war correspondent John Lardner saw a soldier led away from the front line by two medical corpsmen. He was uninjured, but wide-eyed and shrieking, "'They'll get every one of you! They'll get every one of you!' End quote. But it's not just the conditions that would drive you crazy here."

I mean, the soldiers are put in the kind of positions that I remember. And I think I've mentioned before the Vietnam class, which was all the rage when I was in college. They were taught on a lot of campuses and they would bring in these Vietnam veterans to to talk to us military history majors, we military history majors.

And I'll never forget how often the problems happened when the soldiers were forced to deal with civilians or people that did not fit the mold of what one is preparing themselves to fight in boot camp and all these other things, right? An enemy soldier, kill or be killed. It's different when the enemy soldier is 12 years old or a woman and the soldier

Hundreds of thousands of civilians on Okinawa made it absolutely impossible to avoid hurting these people.

And I had said earlier that there was nowhere to run, that they hadn't been evacuated. Actually, some had been evacuated. Something like 80,000 had been evacuated. There had been others moved to other parts of the island by the Japanese, considered to be safer. But several hundred thousand were still in the way and in caves and trying to stay away from the combat. Others had been drafted by the Japanese because, remember, as far as they're concerned, Okinawa has been under Japanese control for a generation. So they impress people into the sort of the home guard position.

They have a calling them Hitler Youth is perhaps not right, but they have sort of a militant youth organization that has boys 14 to 17 years old in it. They get thrown into things. Girls, 14 to 17 year old who are nurses, nursing students get thrown into this and everybody's going to take casualties. In his book, The Battle for Okinawa, survivor and higher command official Colonel Hiramichi Yahara says,

describes running into some of these and girls is the young women i don't know what you would call somebody 14 15 16 running into them uh who are doing work in one of these caves all of them very aware that they're probably on a kind of a suicide mission here and colonel yohara writes quote

During the construction, meaning of one of these places, I often visited Sukhazan to encourage the workers. Young civilians, including many boys and girls, had been conscripted to work on the tunnels and the airfield. Deep in the tunnel on one of my visits, I found several girls repairing a water leak. When I praised their effort, one girl stood and said sweetly, quote, we'll do our best until the end, end.

end quote i was deeply touched he writes by their devotion to duty the end of course means when they all die a lot of those people will end up being killed by being stuck in the crossfire just like the soldiers right dying from artillery or mortars they will sometimes be trapped in caves with military people and so everyone dies and

Sometimes they will be trapped in caves and too afraid. The civilian population is absolutely terrified, just like the people on Saipan were of the Americans. They've been fed this idea that they're going to be tortured and raped and killed in the most horrible ways. And so they're trying not to surrender to the Americans, but that means that when some American calls out into a cave and says, you know, come on out with your hands up and no one does, they throw a grenade into the cave and keep going. A lot of people die that way. But the worst is when...

The civilians, sometimes with Japanese using them as human shields, sometimes with the Japanese dressed up as civilians trying to get away in a crowd of civilians, will usually at night rush American lines. And these soldiers had orders not to let anybody do that for obvious reasons. You might be able to live with yourself for a long time knowing that you killed an enemy soldier who was trying to kill you. It's a lot harder, as I said about the Vietnam veterans, to

when it's someone you're not ready to ever think of yourself having participated in snuffing the lives out of it's one of the things that creates the extra tragedy in patrick k o'donnell's book into the rising sun he interviews a bunch of marine veterans who talk about these incidents that they remember and you can just see how the killing of civilians can sometimes

get through the psychological defenses that these soldiers have that might have protected them had they been able to say, you know, it was me against the other soldier. Fair fight. It's a little different when something like what happened to Joe McNamara.

from the 6th Marine Division happens, and he's quoted in the book as saying, quote, "'One night there was a bunch of firing. They passed the word. Be alert. They're coming through the lines. The next morning we found out it was the civilians that had tried to come through the lines, and they were out in this open field, all killed. Jesus Christ, dead children, women, old men.'"

They said there were Japanese among them, forcing them to go. We were putting out pamphlets every day telling them, the Okinawan civilians, to stay on the main roads and not to come through our lines. There were a lot of them killed. It was horrifying to see dead babies, dead children. We didn't have anything to do with it. Another group accidentally did it. Just the thought of all those people.

you try to get them the civilians out of the caves also as we were advancing we knew they were in there and we tried to get them out if we couldn't we didn't know if there were soldiers in there and tossed in hand grenades in a cave you don't know who's in there or what they're doing end quote

Elmer Mapes of the 6th Marine Division also quoted a similar situation. He says that they told the people from Okinawa, stay away from the lines, you're going to get hurt. But he says that the Japanese would put on civilian clothes and try to blend in with the crowds or use them as human shields, as we said. And he says, quote,

End quote. Patrick Almond is also quoted and also remembered that same baby.

You can see how something like that might pierce the normal psychological defenses that anyone who has to face another soldier in combat may have put up, right? It has a way to get through your emotional armor. One of the things Allman said, though, was running into a sniper who was just a child. And he says, quote,

The only thing I really vividly remember was this particular sniper. He killed three or four of my men. We located him by the sound of the bolt on his rifle. They flushed him out with a grenade. He was a 12-year-old boy. His magazine spring was broken, so he was only able to slowly fire one shot at a time. He was a damn good shot.

O'Donnell says he sighs now and then says the range was only 50 feet the Japanese had left him there and he did what they left him to do we shot him right there end quote how does one deal with this I was trying to figure out how I would deal with it and then while I was reading soldiers remembrances of the situation I came across one who basically said he had to drink he couldn't continue to

exist like this and kill like this without something to numb his emotions and in the mammoth book of eyewitness world war two edited by johnny lewis he quotes john garcia from the seventh division of the u.s. infantry so this is an army soldier and

By the way, he's talking about the Japanese general who had committed suicide by the time the fighting is over. And he writes, quote, We buried General Ushijima and his men inside a cave. This was the worst part of the war, which I didn't like about Okinawa. They were hiding in caves all the time. Women, children, soldiers. We'd get up on a cliff and lower down barrels of gasoline and then shoot at it. It would explode and just bury them to death. He continues, quote,

I personally shot one Japanese woman because she was coming across a field at night. We kept dropping leaflets not to cross the field at night because we couldn't tell if they were soldiers. We would set up a perimeter. Anything in front, we'd shoot at it. This one night, I shot, and when it came daylight, it was a woman there and a baby tied to her back. The bullet had gone through her and out the baby's back. That still bothers me. That hounds me.

I still feel I committed murder. You see a figure in the dark, it's stooped over. You don't know if it's a soldier or a civilian, end quote.

He continues right from that point, quote, I was drinking about a fifth and a half of whiskey every day, sometimes homemade, sometimes what I could buy. It was the only way I could kill. I had friends who were Japanese, and I kept thinking every time I pulled the trigger on a man or pushed a flamethrower down into a hole, what is this person's family going to say when he doesn't come back? He's got a wife. He's got children, somebody, end quote.

He continues, quote, Oh, I still lose nights of sleep because of that woman I shot. I still lose a lot of sleep. I still dream about her. I dreamed about it perhaps two weeks ago, end quote. And then the interviewer says he let out a deep breath, something more turbulent than a sigh. Those are the remembrances of a man who may have come home with no visible wounds on his body, but

but is clearly bearing some scars for the rest of his days. How many more of those people are you going to have when you have to invade the Japanese home islands? And maybe a better question to ask, although I'm not sure, is what is an invasion of the home islands going to do to the civilians? Because when you look at what it did to them on Okinawa, you stand back and a hair on the back of your neck stands up.

No one knows how many died, by the way. I mean, Okinawa's got slightly less than half a million people during this time period, and there may have been as many as 150,000 of them killed. The low numbers are way down by 30,000, so that shows you the range here. But so many of them die in circumstances that absolutely break your heart. And if you want to read a very disturbing book, in the early 1980s—that's my audience, right? Want to read a very disturbing book? Yes, of course we do—

In the early 80s, an Okinawan newspaper went around and collected the stories of survivors, sort of piecing together little bits of the mosaic that is this whole affair on a memory-by-memory basis, and the results are horrific. And every story its own personal readers digest, survival or not story,

The story of the nurses, 14, 15, 16 years old nursing students and what they went through and how many of them died and the horror of that. The killing of their own wounded, which was happening on a widespread basis. And again, maybe that's a little glimpse of the future here. When the Japanese home islands are invaded, one of the survivors, one of these nurses quoted, talks about one of those incidents. And in the book, it says, quote,

The American artillery bombardment continued throughout April and May. So at the end of May, the naval units moved temporarily down south. There were many seriously wounded men in the shelter, and those who were unable to move by themselves were euthanized with potassium cyanide.

At the start, it was mixed in with their food. The wounded just lay there, writhing in agony. After one of the group ate some of the food and died, none of the others would eat it. So the next method they tried was injection, many men dying from what were passed off as injections for, quote, the good of your health, end quote. After watching one of the wounded men die from his injection, the other patients struggled violently and were held down by several staff while they were given their injections.

toshiko who's one of the nurses who witnessed all this talked about this as the most horrific of her war experiences quote they died almost immediately after the injection they just let out a little sigh or groan before both hands started to twist and contort end quote this was happening all over the island and in other circumstances the soldiers are being recorded as being resigned to this fate

But the part that if you're looking at Okinawa as a preview of the Japanese home islands that most takes your breath away, it's the group suicides. And I should point out that you can find examples of this. I mean, there's a lot of people in Germany killing themselves as the Red Army approaches their territories. And there's whole books on that.

But the experience in the Pacific is different. Those were spontaneous things in the Pacific. It's not always clear whether this is what the people who are killing themselves want to do, whether they feel compelled to but would rather live, whether they've been fed a bunch of propaganda that makes them think they have no choice. But one of the most horrific things I've ever read in my life.

involves one of these caves where these civilians are holed up the japanese soldiers give them all a bunch of grenades to kill themselves but there's not enough grenades and a bunch of the ones they they get are duds so they have to figure out a way without any weapons how they're all going to kill each other and they're all related these are family members

And just to make matters worse, by the way, as soon as the first grenades do go off and these people start committing suicide, Americans outside the cave think that they're being attacked. So they start shooting into the cave. So the civilians are caught between people blowing themselves up in one part of the cave and Americans shooting into the cave thinking that they're being attacked. The man's name, by the way, is Kinjo, who's having this memory. And he says that between the Americans shooting from one side and people blowing themselves up from the other,

He was sort of in a state of shock. But then as his eyes clear, he notices a former official who had picked up a piece of wood and who had started bashing his wife and children with it, saying that the bizarre suicidal environment in that cave had obviously turned that man into a madman, that he would bash his own wife and children to death with a piece of wood.

But then they all realize that they need something if they don't have a grenade to kill themselves and their loved ones with. And this is where it gets mind boggling. I mean, can you imagine having to kill your family members? Can you imagine having to do it by hand? Can you imagine how hard it would be if they just sat there, told you they loved you and then waited patiently for you to do it? Quoting from the account in Descent into Hell Now, quote,

Those people who had not been able to take their own lives with grenades were worried about being left alive. They had to find other ways to kill themselves, and the former ward chairman's behavior, the guy who bashed his family, had set the example. Some used scythes and razor blades to slash themselves, while others strangled themselves with lengths of rope. As the mayhem unfolded, they found all sorts of ways to kill, including bashing others to death with rocks and sticks. Mayhem unfolded, and they found all sorts of ways to kill,

End quote. Then Kinjo and his brother have to do the same thing to their family members. Quote,

kinjo and his elder brother also had to fulfill their role everything that was happening around them made them understand that they had to carry out their duty as well kinjo said quote i think it was our mother we hit first end quote

As he and his brother began bashing her in the head, Kinjo screamed out until she became a blur through the tears flowing from his own eyes. For the first time in his life, he wept uncontrollably. Quote, I have never wailed like that since, end quote. The account then says, quote,

The brothers used sticks to rain blow after blow on their mother. Watching her from behind as their pounding sent her step by step towards her death is still a vivid image in Kinjo's mind. However, it says he has no recollection of what he did to his sister and brother after that. End quote. Imagine finding yourself in a situation like that.

And now think about how many more people are going to find themselves in that situation. Are we to believe that this is going to somehow end on Okinawa? Or is this a Nostradamus-like view of what's still to come for everyone? I was fascinated by some comments in Hiramichi Yahara's book, The Battle for Okinawa. He was a colonel, and he, in the book, started to ask real questions

angry questions about japan's leadership and how they can let this happen and all throughout this series we've been talking about that too this idea of the leadership as just immune sometimes to the suffering of their own people their own soldiers yohara talks about how this idea of the japanese not surrendering but killing themselves instead developed

and then says by the Second World War, the Greater East Asia War, as they call it, this was sort of ingrained and you were ordered to not be taken prisoner. But he's asking what the point is. And he writes, quote,

Japan had never lost a war. We had also never waged a war in which large forces were isolated from mainland support. Thus, not to be taken prisoner became a fixed principle, part of our military education. Since the middle of the Greater East Asia War, most Japanese garrisons in the Pacific Islands adhered to this supreme Japanese principle, never surrender to the enemy.

officers and men he writes usually committed suicide as a last resort to avoid the ultimate shame of capture our 32nd army was now faced with this situation must 100 000 soldiers die because of tradition from this point on he writes it was but a battle to kill the remaining japanese soldiers for nothing

We could cause the enemy little damage. They could walk freely on the field of battle. The war of attrition was over, and we would simply be asking the enemy to use his formidable power to kill us all. Indeed, he writes, it is a high ideal to fight to the end to maintain national morale. But were our leaders worth the sacrifice of an entire people?

With the end of the war in sight, they shouted at us, millions of people must die for our nation. Why? Are they really aware of the entire war situation? It was foolish, he writes, to force everyone to die simply because Japan had never before lost a war. End quote. He says the decision to surrender should have been made as quickly as possible. He says at least before Okinawa was lost.

Colonel Yahara also mentions the American propaganda efforts, the attempts to get Okinawans and Japanese to surrender, to convince them that, you know, that the Americans are not the terrible monsters they've been told to be, that everyone will be safe. You may recall that these efforts were done on Saipan.

And they're going to be stepped up here. Ian W. Toll says more than on any other previous Pacific battlefield, the Americans are trying to persuade their enemies to give up the fight. He says they'll drop tons of leaflets, 30,000 in one day alone, that they will mount loudspeakers on Jeeps, trucks, patrol boats. They'll drop loudspeakers with parachutes, hoping that the broadcast before it hits the ground will reach people in caves.

He even says that they're using American Japanese citizens to create really good translations. They're using cultural sensitivities to realize how the word surrender might be sort of a trigger, might be the modern term for it, so they don't use the word surrender. And Colonel Yahara writes, quote,

American propaganda was transmitted from small craft offshore. There were daily broadcasts in fluent Japanese. Now he's quoting the broadcast. Okinawan civilians, we will guarantee your lives. We will give you food and medicine. Please move toward Minnetoga before it is too late.

Alternatively, Japanese soldiers, you fought well and proudly for the cause of Japan. But now the issue of victory or defeat has been decided. To continue the battle is meaningless. We will guarantee your lives. Please come down to the beach and swim out to us. End quote. Yohara continues by saying,

Thus the enemy struck not only with broadcasts and shells, but also with countless propaganda leaflets dropped from the sky. None of it showed the viciousness so typical of propaganda. They said candidly that Japan's defeat was inevitable. They spoke of Japan's leaders and their indifference to the lives of subordinates. And perhaps one could argue that on Okinawa, they're working.

at least by the really tough standards the Japanese have set. For the first time, you're going to see a decent number of Japanese soldiers surrendering, and sometimes as units. This is unheard of in the Pacific War.

I think it's something like 11,000 or so Japanese surrender. But as usual, a nice proportion of those are really Korean and Taiwanese laborers impressed into service. But it's like 7,000 Japanese soldiers, which is significant. And you want to say that this is a sign that, as we've pointed out, the Japanese are like everyone else, only more so. It took them longer to get to the point of morale collapse. But here it is.

But other historians will point out that maybe that's the backwards way of looking at it. Rather than noticing how many you managed to get to surrender, look how many didn't. The Japanese suffer something like 110,000 casualties in Okinawa. And 100,000 of those are people that either fought to the death or took their own lives at the end. That's terrifying if you're trying to extrapolate data on what an invasion of Japan's casualty rate might look like.

Maybe you think to yourself that you don't care what the enemy's casualty rate is. Well, what about the civilians? The numbers of Okinawans who died range anywhere from 30,000 to I've seen 150,000, 160,000 is numbers thrown out there. Extrapolate that out for Japanese civilians. And maybe you say, well, listen, once again, this is the enemy side. I'm not going to worry too much about their people. Okay, what about your people?

And I don't know how many non-Americans were going to participate in the eventual invasion of Japan, but the American casualties on Okinawa are frightful. The worst in the Pacific War so far. 50,000 casualties, basically. Almost 13,000 dead. 5,000 sailors dead. Author Richard B. Frank had said...

that the Navy and Marine losses at Okinawa by themselves constituted about 17% of all the casualties sustained by the Navy and the Marines for the whole war. So there's an idea of how nasty things are. Oh, yeah. Another sign maybe of sort of war fatigue is that you can see the casualties, the psychological casualties on the U.S. side spike significantly.

I've heard all sorts of possible reasons for this. Some saying that the battlefield in Okinawa was sometimes so like a First World War battlefield that you started to see a lot of the same sort of combat fatigue, battle fatigue, psychological casualties that they saw in the First World War. I've seen others blame it on the flood of replacement soldiers that the terrible casualties necessitated. I mean,

the stories are legendary if you read them about how quickly those people tend to die when they arrive in battle the first time they haven't acquired the skills necessary to survive they always remind me when you read the stories of those of

of those sea turtles that have to hatch on the shore and then run the gauntlet of predators and threats to make it to the safety of the sea well those replacement soldiers if they if they can last a little bit in combat will develop the skills necessary to survive but combat is so unforgiving that tons of them get wiped out you know very quickly and the old soldiers don't ever want to get to know them very well because they die so fast

But it's not just in a military sense at all that you're starting to see the psychological tension mounting. Earlier we quoted a letter from a mother that Navy Secretary Forrestal had released to the public, which, you know, it cuts right through the emotion of a personal letter like that cuts right through the names and dates and places and all the other narrative and somehow reestablishes a little bit of the emotional connection to the story.

And in Implacable Foes, historians Waldo Henricks and Mark Gallicchio do the same thing. They use a letter as part of trying to give a sense of how done with this the American people are. I mean, Okinawa comes after Iwo Jima, which comes after Peleliu. I mean, these are body blows in terms of a war that, listen, if you'd ever been through a pandemic and you're just ready to take the mask off and go back to normal, you're

and not have a lot of deaths. That's how Americans and a lot of people in the rest of the world are feeling by 1945. And Henrikse and Gallicchio writing this, by the way, while the Okinawan battle is still going on, write quote, "'The battle for Okinawa dragged on.'"

As the casualties mounted, so did the questioning of American strategy. In mid-May, following one of his daily war journal broadcasts, radio commentator Martin Agronsky received an angry letter from a Mrs. C.J. H., the mother of a soldier on Okinawa, asking why the Army, War Department, and American leaders generally were not being held accountable for, quote, all this slaughter of American boys, end quote.

An anguished string of questions followed. Now quoting the questions from the letter, quote,

Why only six divisions in the first place? Why must every battle in the Pacific be bloody? It was bloody Tarawa, bloody Saipan, bloody Peleliu, bloody Leyte, bloody Iwo Jima, bloody Okinawa, bloody Mindanao, all of three divisions there, she writes, bloody Luzon, not finished, and it will be bloody Borneo. Doesn't it ever enter anyone's mind that

that we are paying a needless, too high a price in human blood in the Pacific? End quote. And once again, you get the questions over strategy, over which leader should be in charge. People go after General Buckner and his decision to go head-on into the defenses of the Japanese at Okinawa rather than try an amphibious assault around the flanks. But Buckner can't much really respond to that because he becomes the highest priority.

american general in the war to die in combat when he's killed in an artillery attack and of course the japanese generals die too they all kill themselves before the fighting on okinawa is even completed the brand new american president still on the job for less than two months at this point gives a speech to the news media

You can tell that he seems uncomfortable at this point still with scripted announcements and cameras. And as we recalled earlier, I mean, he's the first American president without the initials FDR that anyone's experienced in a dozen years. But he gives a warning to Japan, the Japanese people, in fact, the entire world, that if you don't want to have the same thing happen to you that happened to Germany, give up now. There can be no peace in the world anymore.

until the military power of Japan is destroyed with the same completeness as was the power of the European dictators. To do that, we are now engaged in a process of deploying millions of our armed forces against Japan in a mass movement of troops and supplies and weapons over 14,000 miles, a military and naval feat unequaled in all history.

Substantial portions of Japan's key industrial centers have been leveled to the ground in a series of record incendiary raids. What has already happened to Tokyo will happen to every Japanese city whose industries feed the Japanese war machine. If the Japanese insist on continuing resistance beyond the point of reason, their country will suffer the same destruction as Germany.

Our blows will destroy their whole modern industrial plant and organization, which they have built up during the past century, and which they are now devoting to a hopeless cause. We have no desire or intention to destroy or enslave the Japanese people, but only surrender can prevent the kind of ruin which they have seen come to Germany as a result of continued useless resistance.

The whole situation in Germany is creating all sorts of very interesting societal and economic problems around the world, and especially in the United States. I mean, when you have a war ending in Europe with millions of men under arms there, what happens to them? Do some fight the Japanese? Do some get demobilized? And what happens to all the domestic political concerns and labor and management issues and all these things that have been put on hold there?

as part of the unifying efforts that the country and many countries did the same thing, put together for the war effort. A lot of this stuff is starting to rise up to the surface again before the Americans and the allies have reached the war's finish line here, right? Just because Germany's defeated doesn't mean Japan is. And as we've said earlier, the Americans really have to gird themselves for what's to come because the plans for the invasion of Japan are harrowing.

slated to start in late 1945 moved to the um to the more important islands where places like tokyo are by 1946 and the casualty estimates are horrific i'm not sure what the proper adjective to use is when the high numbers begin to look like a million men maybe will be casualties worth pointing out though that even today we argue over what the casualty numbers would have been no one knew

What's more, the tendency in the Pacific on the Allies' part has been to underestimate the casualties that they'll suffer. So no one knows. The basic plans, though, that are being batted around boil down to two main ideas. Some people want to blockade the country, which is already under a naval blockade to some degree, but tighten that, have ships just keep everything from coming in. Fuel, medicine, food, everything. Starve them to death.

And then keep bombing them the way you're bombing them. This may sound, by the way, like a merciful strategy. Blockades often do sound like the lesser of two evils. But ask anyone who's ever lived through one. When you start denying food and medicine to people, you have a horrific circumstance without any bombs exploding. And in the blockade and bombing scenario, you're still going to have Japanese cities burned out.

The other idea is to bomb them the way you're bombing them and then invade. Both of those ideas have huge downsides. The Navy certainly understands after Okinawa that they're going to be facing constant and withering attacks from kamikazes when they invade the home islands. They had 40 straight days at one point on Okinawa. That's going to be something that whittles down strength and kills a lot of sailors over a long period of time. But an invasion with ground troops...

This is a terrifying concept, and no one knows how many people might die in something like that. In July 1945, a bunch of things happened that changed the situation somewhat and clarify it somewhat.

Two of these things overlap, by the way. There's going to be a very big conference in Potsdam outside of Berlin in Germany, the now, you know, in ruins Germany, where the leaders of the Allied camp, Stalin, Truman now in his first one of these things and Churchill in his last one. He'll actually lose the election during it and be replaced by his successor midway through the conference.

They had this conference that's mostly about what we do in Europe, what's the post-war situation look like. Oh, yeah, and what about the Japanese who are still fighting? When the conference is ongoing, something happens back in the United States that changes the whole equation, and Churchill has to be informed about this. The Manhattan Project proves to be successful. An atomic bomb test in New Mexico goes off without a hitch, and the world enters into the nuclear era again.

with very, very few human beings on the planet Earth realizing it.

Churchill finds out afterwards that the test, which no one knew how it was going to turn out, how it went, and he wrote about it in his history of the Second World War and said this, quote, The President, meaning Truman, invited me to confer with him forthwith. He had with him General Marshall and Admiral Leahy. Up to this moment, we had shaped our ideas towards an assault upon the homeland of Japan by terrific air bombing and by the invasion of very large armies.

we had contemplated the desperate resistance of the japanese fighting to the death with samurai devotion not only in pitched battles but in every cave and dugout i had in my mind he writes the spectacle of okinawa island where many thousands of japanese rather than surrender had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by hand grenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the right of suicide is what he means

To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives, and half that number of British, or more if we could get them there, for we were resolved to share the agony. Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision, fair and bright indeed it seemed, of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks—

I thought immediately myself of how the Japanese people, whose courage I had always admired, might find in the apparition of this almost supernatural weapon an excuse which would save their honor and release them from their obligation of being killed to the last fighting man. End quote. I have a hard time here in the 21st century,

squaring the moral circle between the idea of a fair and bright vision as churchill terms it and dropping atomic bombs on people but perhaps this should be taken into account that i'm not living in a world where cities are being bombed and incinerated multiple times a week and churchill and these allied leaders making these decisions are

what to them might seem a an incremental step up in nastiness to us seems like something that should never ever ever be done now someone might say we're reacting to this emotionally and in the time period where they're operating they're using logic right this is the human being lawnmower logic isn't it the idea that anything that puts a halt to the conveyor belt of death and saves more lives long term is the greater moral good but you got to do some

really horrific things to get there i mean look how it perverts the entire goals of this atomic bomb

I mean, in a way, if the goal here, and it is, is to shock a stubborn Japanese leadership into finally seeing the light here that they've lost the war, a little like slapping a hysterical patient, you know, to get them to calm down enough to take in reality, you want this bomb to be as horrible and terrible as possible. The worse it is, the more likely it is that it's going to do its job of being a monkey wrench into the gears of this conveyor belt of death.

It's a really weird place that the logical chain of thinking can get you to arrive at, isn't it? We called it logical insanity in the shows that we did on this evolution of the logic of things like strategic bombing. But this is a lot bigger than that. This goes to the human experience on so many levels. I mean, Gwen Dyer in his book War said that what's being done with things like atomic bombings and fire bombings, that this is just the natural extension of what human beings have always done, right?

The weapons are just a lot more horrific than they used to be. But I can't stop thinking about the idea about personal experience. All these people making these decisions are doing so from a theoretical background. As far as I know, none of them have ever lived through a firebombing or, God forbid, an atomic attack. What if they had?

Would they still feel like this was the right decision to make? Would they still feel like this was a bright and fair vision? And I can hear people saying, well, you know, then you're just making decisions from emotion rather than logic. But look where logic has gotten us. The emotional reactions to something like an atomic bombing, when you read them today, they're the ones that sound sane. It's the logical decisions that seem crazy.

historian michael bess in his book choices under fire moral dimensions of world war ii reminds us not to forget the equivalent of being on the ground rather than making this too intellectual of a discussion and he writes quote sometimes as we engage in the intellectual exercise of trying to understand the complexities of the war we can become inured to the underlying realities and

This psychological distancing from our subject no doubt reflects, in a small way, the manner in which the wartime leaders themselves gradually became calloused to the dreadful acts that were being perpetrated all around them, and that they themselves were perpetrating.

"'As we analyze the wartime decisions, "'we catch ourselves, to our shock, "'tossing around numbers of dead human beings. "'Ten thousand here, a hundred thousand there, "'almost as unfeelingly as the participants themselves. "'This tendency towards psychological numbing is understandable "'and perhaps unavoidable, "'but we need to resist it as vigorously as we can. "'We must keep reminding ourselves what it really means.'

in practice to speak the words firestorm or hiroshima for hidden beneath the abstraction of the words words grown customary from heavy use lie the unimaginable cruelty and madness of what actually happened end quote ian w toll in his book twilight of the gods gives one of the better overall descriptions of this when on august sixth nineteen forty five

the first atomic bombing attack in human history occurs. And he writes, quote, Little Boy, the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, that's the nickname, Little Boy exploded at 8.16 a.m., 1,870 feet above the ground, only 550 feet wide of its aiming point.

The nuclear chain reaction it triggered created a core temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius, igniting the air around it to a diameter of nearly a kilometer. The fireball engulfed the center of the city, vaporizing about 20,000 people on the ground.

Thermal and ionizing radiation killed virtually all people within a kilometer of the surface of the fireball, burning them to death or rupturing their internal organs. Farther out, in successive concentric circles around the epicenter, people were exposed to gamma rays, neutron radiation, flash burns, the blast wave, and firestorms. The initial shock wave, he writes...

raced away from the epicenter at greater than the speed of sound, some 984 miles per hour. Streetcars were lifted from their tracks and scattered like toys. Clothing was torn from bodies. Nearly all wooden buildings within 2.3 kilometers were completely leveled.

and about half of all such buildings to a radius of 3.2 kilometers. Later, investigators found the shadows of people caught within the inner radius around the hypocenter. They had been vaporized, but their bodies had left faint silhouettes on the pavement or on nearby walls. End quote.

basically the atomic attack combined the bad side of the firestorms because the fires from the superheated everything exploded very quickly with horrific concussive blast damage like you would have in major bombings and then added just as a sprinkling of extra specialness on top horrible dispersion of radioactivity

The stories all sound like people who are living through a natural disaster, but now human beings can create the equivalent of natural disasters. The effects of the bomb managed to take out most of the first responders, the hospitals, the doctors, the firefighters, everyone who might actually go out and improve the situation, which leaves the people in a horrific situation for weeks afterwards as they die from radiation.

And the heartbreaking stories, this is what I mean about if you could take these people who saw this as such a wonderful, logical way to get the Japanese to end the war, if you could have put Winston Churchill on the ground there...

and let him watch the scene going on as people trapped in burning buildings with their loved ones trying to get them out had to be abandoned because the flames were coming one of the most horrific stories connected with the hiroshima bombing involves kids who are caught in the rubble as the fires approach and the parents don't even know what to do i mean

There's the theoretical understanding what it means to drop a bomb on a city. And then there's the reality of something like this. In the book, Hibakusha, Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is just remembrances by people. One of these survivors, Shiga Hiratsuka, talks about the bomb exploding and says, quote, Just then, a brilliant flash like lightning appeared and the thunderous roar of an explosion reverberated around us.

In a moment, our house collapsed and we found ourselves buried in its rubble. As my husband and I worked frantically to free ourselves, I heard a cry for help from the woman next door. I called back to her. If we get out before you, we'll come and help you. When we did finally pull ourselves free, we saw the city of Hiroshima in ruins around us.

nowhere was a building left intact and in several places tongues of fire had begun licking outward suddenly panic-stricken and completely forgetting about our neighbor i began searching for my children and she continues

As I was calling their names, a voice emerged from a spot two or three meters away. "'Help, mummy, help!' It was my six-year-old daughter, Kazuko. Hurrying to the spot, I found her tightly wedged from the chest down by fallen plaster and timber. I screamed to my husband to come quickly and do something. He, however, could hardly move, being badly bruised and bleeding from the shoulder. He had no strength left. It was all he could do to walk.'

She continues, and once again, I imagine Winston Churchill and all the other decision-makers standing to the side watching this unfold. Quote, "'My daughter kept calling to me. "'It hurts, Mommy. My legs hurt. I can't move. Hurry and get me out.'

I tugged at her but could not move her. No matter how desperately I tried, I just could not free her. The fires were moving closer and closer. We would not be able to stay there much longer. Finally, when the flames began to lap around us, we were stirred into moving, no longer able to stand the intense heat. I realized I was afraid to die. I could not let myself be burned alive. Two

tears streaming from my eyes i placed my hands together as if in prayer and asked my daughter to forgive me kazoo i am a bad mother to you but please forgive me you don't want to die either i know mummy isn't brave enough to stay here and die with you i'm afraid of the fire kazoo forgive me forgive me

Then I chose an area that seemed to be safe from fire and fled towards it, pulling my husband along by the hand. I kept looking back at the ruins of our house as if I were being dragged by the hair from behind. There had been no time to rescue our other child either. End quote. She spent the rest of the evening uttering apologies to her dead children, and then her husband died.

This is one of many. I always describe it as a mosaic, right? And everybody's individual story of how they dealt with this human-caused version of a natural disaster. When you put them together into the mosaic, you get a picture. It's a lot of individual stories, but look at the stories and imagine if maybe emotion could have stirred the decision makers rather than logic. But once again, to what end? To allow a blockade to happen? To starve people?

to allow an invasion to happen where the citizens of Japan are killed in house-to-house fighting. What you're really getting here, if we wanted to look at this through the long-term lens, is a vision of a future to be avoided. In that same book, Hibakusha, Akira Nagasaka is quoted. He tries to go back home and find his house and his relatives after the bombing and describes the

what is not that hard to imagine our future looking like if everything goes poorly. And he writes, quote,

THE WHOLE AREA WAS A FIRE-BLACKENED DESOLATION. THERE WAS NOT EVEN A CHARRED REMNANT OF THE HUGE CAMPHOR TREE THAT HAD STOOD BEHIND OUR HOUSE. ALL AROUND ME WERE STRUNE SKELETONS, SCATTERED BONES AND TORSOES OF EBONY ASH. I SANK DOWN EXHAUSTED. WHEN I HAD RECOVERED SOMEWHAT, I BEGAN LOOKING FOR MY MOTHER, OR RATHER HER BONES.

All I had to go by was the fact that she had gold teeth. I held skull after skull in my hands and peered into the jaw area. I wonder how many people's skulls I picked up during my search. I continued searching frantically. There were times when, squatting, I even raised fire-blackened heads to look at the teeth. I spent that whole day, the 10th, picking up skulls and putting them down again."

It is absolutely obvious that it is impossible for us to conceptualize what this is really like. You can make movies about it and people have. You can read survivor accounts and

I've read a ton of those, and yet there's this distance between what they experienced and what you can glean from it just by hearing about it. And when you read the accounts of survivors, they'll often refer to that one way or another, that there's no way for you sitting here in a peaceful room to understand what I'm saying.

This is why I think I'm so attracted to the idea of bringing in, you know, the leaders who will have to decide to use these weapons. And I'd like to add to the group, the leaders on the Japanese side who are resistant to surrendering when it's clearly over in this war. I'd like to bring them to an in an Ebenezer Scrooge like ghost of Christmas past, present or future observer tour of

allow them to see what we're really talking about here and i remember in reading michael bess's book choices under fire that even with all this stuff that i've read and even with the hours we've talked about these questions that there's always something you didn't think about like he mentions about the other things that are destroyed when the bomb goes off and he says quote

At the same instant, meaning when the bomb went off, birds ignited in midair, mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone. End quote. It's obvious, but I didn't think about all the insect life instantly being wiped out. It's a crazy kind of weapon, isn't it? And while there's burning corpses in the foreground, it is absolutely understandable that you would miss the things in the background that you might have lost, and

but those are considerable. And when somebody starts rattling off what you lose in an attack like this, a nuclear explosion, well, one history professor who was on the ground at Hiroshima and just marveled at the fact that the city was just gone, he said of the atomic bomb that such a weapon has the power to make everything into nothing. Well, what's everything?

Richard Rhodes, quoted by Bess, who had a study on this very subject, tried to sum up some of the things besides the obvious things of burning corpses in the foreground, and he wrote, quote,

destroyed that is were not only men women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns laundries theater groups sports clubs sewing clubs boys clubs girls clubs love affairs trees and gardens grass gates gravestones temples and shrines family heirlooms radios classmates book

courts of law pets groceries and markets telephones personal letters automobiles bicycles horses 120 war horses he points out musical instruments medicines and medical equipment life savings eyeglasses city records sidewalks family scrapbooks monuments engagements marriages employees clocks and watches public transportation street signs parents works of art

end quote such a weapon has the power to make everything into nothing and still does by the way the nuclear sort of damocles that hangs over our heads now starts then it is perhaps a sign of something that even after this ferocious attack at hiroshima the japanese government still isn't ready to surrender

And before they can even come up with some decent conversation about the matter, they get hit with another hammer blow two days later when the Soviet Union declares war on Japan.

This is extra nasty because the Japanese hardliners were living in this fantasy world where they thought they could use the Soviets as a way to get a better deal from the allies. But when the Soviets declare war on you, well, hard to deny that that deal is now dead. And then the day after that, while the Japanese government is still figuring out how to respond to these, you know, we have an atomic bomb dropped on us. And two days later, the Soviet Union declares war on us. And then on August 9th, we get hit with another atomic bomb attack again.

at nagasaki if you get a hundred thousand eighty to a hundred thousand people killed in hiroshima the numbers at nagasaki are lower because of the way the terrain is laid out and some other things but you know 45 to 65 000 these are not insignificant numbers needless to say and even

After Nagasaki, you can't get the army ministers on board to surrender unless they can have four conditions. And all four conditions are unacceptable to the allies. I mean, there are things like you can't occupy Japan. We'll try our own war criminals, you know, all kinds of I mean, it wasn't going to happen, but they're not going to surrender till it does. And the U.S. and the allies are not going to stop attacking until they do.

In fact, there are bombing raids launched on Japan after the two atomic bombs are dropped because nothing is going to stop until the surrender happens. And finally and famously,

and in a way that's hard to figure out what really happened because the Cold War made it in the interest of certain countries like the United States to maybe hide some of the emperor's decision-making in the Second World War. But the emperor steps in and famously says, we have to endure the unendurable and breaks the tie between the officials and says, we're going to surrender.

The moment the Emperor steps in is one of those times that a lot of people have focused on ever since, understandably, because it brings up all sorts of questions. First one is, if the Emperor had this kind of power all along, why did he wait till now to use it? I mean, did things have to get this bad before he exercised it? The Japanese system, as we've said all along, as everyone says, is a government that's

that's opaque by design the decision making is veiled and sort of you know seen through a gauzy lens and isn't always following you know the western idea of written down rules and for every i mean there's there's some there's a vibe to it there's a feel to it there's protocol and stuff that's deeply embedded in japanese cultural traditions and imperial traditions hard for outsiders to grasp

And then there's also the hardcore Realpolitik Machiavellian people who will say things like, if the emperor does something that we don't like, we'll just get rid of him and get another emperor.

This is the same government that not long ago had been referred to as a government by assassination. There are Japanese higher government officials right now, right in this room with the emperor who carry bullets in their bodies from being assassination, attempted assassination victims for policy decisions that were not nationalistic or right wing enough, not super patriotic enough.

one of the people who's key to this whole thing one of the people who's involved in the standoff is a general named anami and he says francis pike mentioned it mentions it in his book hirohito's war he's contemplating maybe the alternate reality from surrender and he says quote would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower end quote

That's like a samurai romance poem ending there, right? We all die and it's beautiful. Did it seem beautiful at Hiroshima with the descriptions there or Nagasaki or Tokyo? But if that's the kind of cultural blinders you're working with here on a certain segment of the military community in Japan and they have a veto power over policy, that's a kind of tragedy sort of when you look at how it turned out.

And it is with almost a sense of resignation that when the emperor decides that we're going to finally give in here and surrender, a coup is attempted by the same mid-level military guys who've had an inordinate amount of

impact over policy all along right we talked about them these lieutenant colonels and these mid-level guys who actually bully and scare their superiors decide they're not going to stand for this they try to attempt a coup they want to get their hands on the emperor's message to the public announcing that they're going to surrender before it can be broadcast people will die and

The coup plotters will eventually realize they've failed. They'll try to take over a radio station just so they want to be able to explain their motives. It's denied. They'll kill themselves. Some other people will commit suicide. But you see the last gasp of these people trying to make a play for things to prevent this surrender, which they've had a large hand in making.

delaying to this point and there are generals we should point out on the mainland who've been beating the chinese who are going to look at this idea that they have to surrender is crazy we're gonna have to go over and surrender to the people whose butt we've been kicking i don't think so don't forget hiru onoda and a ton of other japanese troops on these pacific islands aren't going to go anywhere for decades no matter what the emperor does here

No other army had the phenomenon of their soldiers, thousands of them, fighting for years and years after the war was over, either because they were such true believers they were never going to surrender regardless of what the truth of the situation happened to be, or because they were such true believers that they refused to believe the truth of the situation was true.

But you didn't see this phenomenon in any of the other major armies in the Second World War, and it's rare to see it in any war ever. It is a relic of the Japanese imperial period, which ends when the war does on September 2nd, 1945.

Interestingly enough, it coincides and is interconnected with the dawn of the next age in history. And most of the time, these eras in history aren't easy to pin down when they happen. Most people living through them, whether it's the agricultural revolution or the age of discovery or the industrial era, can't put their finger on exactly when it began or where they are in the historical moment. But the nuclear age...

Well, everyone paying attention to current events knew exactly when it started and everyone figured it out at exactly the same time. And because of what the Japanese people went through at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the door is opened to a third world war, which would be civilizationally transformative. As Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, uh,

that he didn't know with what weapons World War III would be fought, but World War IV, he said, would be fought with sticks and stones. By the time the human being lawnmower grinds to a halt in 1945, the death totals are some of the worst in recorded history if you just take the Asia-Pacific theater alone.

between 25 and 30 million allied civilians are dead the second world war is one of those rare wars where civilian casualties vastly outnumber military casualties in the first world war wasn't that way at all but military casualties are significant too just in that theater the allies lose four million allied dead a lot of those chinese we forget that the chinese play the role in the asia pacific theater that the soviets play in the european one

ones who suck up the majority of the damage and keep the enemy occupied. Of those forces, two and a half million Japanese military deaths approximately and a million civilian ones. These are the kind of death totals that will stick with you for a while. And it's hard for me not to notice that we haven't had great war between the great powers in the 75 years since the Second World War ended.

Of course, there might be another reason for that, and I can't help but notice that we haven't used nuclear weapons on human beings since either.

The human being lawnmower does not stay quiet for long because the death and destruction will kick up in the wake of the Second World War, in large part because of the structures and changes that were created by the Second World War. I mean, when the Japanese are thrown out of places like Korea, what moves into that vacuum? Or do the Koreans just take over?

the next 15 to 25 years are going to be all of these areas having independence movements nationalist movements communist insurgencies and all kinds of things that can be tied directly to them having a soft or not so soft landing from their colonial eras and a lot of historians can can draw direct connections between the Japanese throwing out the colonial overlords when they initially took over those areas and

and the amplification and acceleration of trends toward independence that were already underway in most of these places. And if they weren't, they were by the time the Allies tried to retake control of them from the Japanese at the end of the war. I mean, the Indians were going to get independence pretty soon, no matter what. They were well on their way, and it's only a couple of years after the Second World War that they get independence.

But you're going to have things with Korea and Malaysia and Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. I mean, this is all going to be shaking out that will be contributing to the death and destruction and the human being conveyor belt of death. You know, the subsidiary Second World War version for decades to come.

Here's the part, though, that I try to reconcile and I never have, which is if the end result is something that people celebrate, right, if a nation's independence from outsiders, for example, is dependent on all these terrible things happening, is it worth it? Can you put a price in lives and destruction on political or national independence? That may be something different.

that the answer differs depending on who you ask. But what it does do is raise all sorts of questions that will lead you into moral quagmire after moral quagmire. I mean, start with the idea that

either inadvertently or by design does this mean that the japanese propaganda that portrayed their armies in these pan-asian terms these east asia co-prosperity sphere driven terms does that mean that their army actually was the military tip of the spear of the non-white world

you know, playing its role in doing what none of these colonial oppressed societies could do, militarily defeat the colonial overlords. I mean, is there some truth to that? And if there is, how does that change the morality of the overall situation, right? If you say that you can't put a price on national or political independence, what if you're the Chinese and it costs you 20 million civilians to get yours? And the people that

killed those people are the Japanese. Are you thankful to them for that? It's, it'll tie you up into moral knots, won't it? How about another one? Because if you play that game, you know, by taking the first step and wondering if the Japanese are the tip of the spear, freeing all these other people,

Well, could you make the argument that the allies are the equivalent of the democratic tip of the spear doing the same thing for the Japanese people that they were doing for other Asian peoples elsewhere? I mean, freeing them from an oppressive, authoritarian, totalitarian, pseudo-fascist state.

In his book, Embracing Defeat, historian John Dower looks at the post-war situation in Japan, and one of the elements that he focuses on is how some Japanese viewed it that way. Usually the people who had been most oppressed under the old regime, artists, freethinkers, liberals, communists, socialists, leftists of all kinds, people who would end up in prison or tortured or censured.

or watched victims of the secret police in the state, they often, in Dower's book, look like people who view themselves as having been freed by an alliance of other countries, right?

which is the way the United States will often portray its interventionist activities after the Second World War, right? We don't have a problem with the people of this place. It's their government. Their government's not free. We're going to come in there, defeat their military, give them the freedom that they didn't have before, let them run their own. We did it in Japan. And we did it in Japan. A revolution as a gift was the way some of these Japanese portrayed it. And in his book, Dower reprints a cartoon from Japanese cartoonist

kato at suro where he portrays the japanese as an individual in the foreground of one of these pieces of art a human being whose hands had been tied behind his back and then he has just had the bonds severed by a giant pair of scissors that is over his head in the piece of artwork and the scissors are sort of clothed in the stars and stripes garb so you get the idea that the scissors represent the united states

The Japanese person who had been in bondage represents Japan. And in the distance, running away from the scene of the crime, you can see the two figures, one who is dressed as a military high-level muckety-muck representing the militarists. The other looks like Mr. Monopoly from your Monopoly game, and he represents the fat cat,

rich elites who are the puppet masters in the society and now the outside powers led by the united states in this case have freed the japanese people and handed democracy back to them and i mean it's interesting to contemplate because a lot of societies evolve politically through bloodshed i mean how many countries get independence from other countries through bloodshed

How many get independence from their own oppressive governments by political revolution, right? The American Revolution, the French Revolution, bloody affairs. There's just a different vibe, isn't there? When it's people from outside your country who have to kill your soldiers, your civilians, destroy your cities, occupy your territory in order to give you these good things. It's just fascinating to think about. And like so much of the...

frayed ends of the rope at the end of the Second World War. How many loose ends here leave us wondering about moral questions? I mean, how about the number one question that often comes out of this time period, the morality of the dropping of the atomic bomb? Now, I am on record as saying that I think this is one of the most important ethical questions

sorts of circumstances one can ask themselves about, something that the entire potential future of humanity could rest on and its importance becomes clear any time the issue actually raises its ugly head. Like in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, everyone instantly understood the import of this

you know, moral issue known as nuclear weapons and this almost Shakespearean question of to atomic bomb or to not atomic bomb. What is not helpful, useful, satisfying, or in any way instructive for the next time we might consider using such a weapon is to take it out of the context of the times.

Because you end up creating a moral choice that never really existed for the people who had to make it and then judging them on that. It's as though you have a plan A, drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or plan B, don't drop atomic weapons on them and they can live happily ever after. But that was never plan B.

Plan B is the one that makes Plan A something that people would consider. Plan B is not to drop the atomic bomb, but to continue with the firebombing, which continued after the atomic bombs were dropped as well, historically. Continue with the firebombing, tighten the blockade on Japan, and they're already dropping sea mines from the air on Japan's harbors. So get that to a point where millions are dying from starvation or lack of medicine.

and then have the inevitable land invasion against a bunch of civilians who are training with bamboo spears in 1945. That was the ethical choice, and it becomes a lot more murky when those are the plan A and plan B choices.

What should be pointed out, though, sometimes is that our views on these things have been colored by the intervening history. And when you read what historical participants on the Allied side say,

these weapons like sometimes you might compare them to Excalibur a super weapon that has fallen into the hands of people who see themselves as King Arthur and a weapon like Excalibur in the hands of an individual like King Arthur is a potential awesome force for good see how murky this

and morally i mean this is this is the ethical dilemma of sauron's ring right in the lord of the rings isn't it i hope you will forgive me for once again somehow with my cynical nature seeing a silver lining to the dark cloud that is the atomic bombings of japan and it's a similar silver lining to the one i see for the holocaust

I think that after the Holocaust, the fact that there was a Holocaust saved a lot of lives.

I think those who died in concentration camps probably created such an international historical shock. I don't know how long it lasts, but it certainly lasted pretty strongly since that created an international moral line in the sand that has been violated many times since. I mean, look at Rwanda, for example, but that has created a situation where it is radioactive and

to commit genocide on people the Uyghurs notwithstanding perhaps I think the genocides that would have happened had the holocaust not happened haven't happened and therefore I think the holocaust saved some lives I feel the same way about the atomic bombings I don't know if humanity ever collectively learns lessons but if we do I often think it comes with the equivalent of us

you know, touching history's hot stove. And in this case, in 1945, maybe the hot stove was an atomically heated one. And had we not had an example of what these weapons do to people and to our societies and the things that we build, you know, the power is that one historian said to turn everything into nothing and

That's a theoretical power until you see it. And seeing it is shocking. And the shock of it may have prevented us maybe from thinking we ever had to try to use these weapons again. I mean, think about had the weapon been delayed another year and the war ended before nuclear weapons were ever used. Do you think given what you know about how we are today,

that we wouldn't have used them in the interim just to see what they do we were tempted many times and it was always hiroshima and nagasaki's example that created if not a feeling on the parts of the military or the political leaders maybe as strongly as we wanted certainly a feeling on the parts of global humanitarian public opinion and the pressures you know exerted by them

And the images that were certainly, for example, cascading through President Kennedy's brain as he contemplated the decisions he was making in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was looking at six or seven hundred million people dying, you know, in a few days. Is it possible that humanity and the Japanese specifically suffered this?

150 200 000 250 000 deaths from a couple of 10 kiloton atomic bombs maybe a 15 kiloton one in nagasaki's case to teach us not to use dozens or hundreds of 30 megaton ones i mean if that's the case is this the atomic age beginning nightmarishly so that it doesn't have to end that way someday

So that we don't have to have, you know, the war after the next war occur with our very best technological capabilities and those being sticks and stones.

Hi, everyone. Dan here with just a couple of quick words before we leave you. The first one is if you were interested enough in the ideas surrounding strategic bombing, that's the bombing of cities, or the early history development use theories trying to come to grips with its potential destructive power of atomic and nuclear weapons, we do have past shows on both of those subjects.

One is still in the free feed as of this recording anyway, and that is The Destroyer of Worlds. That's about six hours on that subject, so maybe wait for a long car drive. But we also have in the pay-for archives off of our website, they're like two or three bucks, I think, Logical Insanity, the title of which we referenced in the past show you just heard.

twice maybe and also logical insanity extra for the stuff that didn't fit into logical insanity and those are available on the website if that sounds interesting to you once again I want to thank you for being the most patient audience on the planet and we appreciate it it allows us to do the work with the way we want to do it also another announcement for those of you who didn't get to see and want to see the

Our first World War immersive experience exhibit, War Remains. Just want to let you know that it is now a part of the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. And you can go see it there. This is the full set, by the way. We're talking, I mean, there's a home version of this, but it doesn't have the actual set.

it doesn't have the giant speakers under your feet to make the sound of things like shells vibrate through your spinal column there's a whole bunch of things that the actual we said it combined like virtual reality in a haunted house when you were a kid in terms of you know you can reach out and touch things and they're there right barbed wire rats everything feels just the way it should um

the people at MWM and at Flight School and at Skywalker Sound, they outdid themselves with this. And if you have the home edition, that's great too, but there's nothing like standing on those speakers and just having it, you know, knock your socks off. So if you find yourself in Kansas City, Missouri, and you'd like to experience it, head over to the National World War I Museum and Memorial and check it out, would you? Tell them I sent you.

Support us with Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash Dan Carlin or go to our donate page at dancarlin.com forward slash dc-donate.