From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: Two Historians on How America Fought and Won The Pacific in WWII | Peter Robinson | Uncommon Knowledge - Uncommon Knowledge

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Thank you.
September 2, 1945.
Aboard the USS Missouri on Tokyo Bay,
representatives of the Empire of Japansigned the instrument of surrender.
80 years ago this summer, the war inthe Pacific, the war that had raged

(01:53):
from Pearl harbor to the Philippinesto Hiroshima, finally came to an end.
Historians Ian Toll andJonathan Horn on Uncommon Knowledge.
Now welcome to
Uncommon Knowledge.

(02:15):
I'm Peter Robinson.
A graduate of Yale,Jonathan Horn served as a speechwriter and
special assistant to President George W.
Bush.
Since leaving the White House, Mr.
Horn has established himselfas a historian and author.
His books include Washington's End andthe man who Would Not Be Washington,
his best selling biography of Robert E.

(02:36):
Lee, published this past spring.
Mr. Horn's newest book, The Fate ofthe Generals: MacArthur Wainwright and
the Epic Battle for the Philippines.
A graduate of Georgetown andthe Kennedy School at Harvard,
Ian Tolle served first as a financialanalyst in New York State and
the federal government before devotinghimself to the writing of history.

(02:59):
First, Mr. Toll published six the EpicHistory of the Founding of the U.S. navy.
Then he published hisclassic Pacific War trilogy.
I have the first volume here,Pacific Crucible.
This volume, the Conquering Tide andthe Twilight of the Gods.
Ian and Jonathan,thank you for joining me.
And I have to admit,I may as well just admit it.

(03:20):
I'm in awe.
Writing history is hard.
Writing prose is hard.
Writing beautiful prose in works ofhistory is the supreme accomplishment.
And I'm talking to two men who've pulledit off from Ian Toll's Pacific crucible.
By 8:10am on December 7, 1941,just minutes after the first bombs and

(03:44):
torpedoes had struck the shipslying in Pearl harbor,
the main battle force ofthe Pacific fleet was crippled.
And then, beginning just hours after theraid on Pearl harbor, land based bombers
and fighters of the Imperial Japanese Navylaunched a tightly choreographed
aerial blitzkrieg against American andBritish bases throughout the region.

(04:06):
Ian, we grow up learning aboutthe attack on Pearl Harbor.
In two hours, some 2400Americans killed,some 21American ships and
about 350American aircraft damaged ordestroyed.
But the attack on Pearl harborrepresented just one item
in the much larger Japanese offensive.
Can you take us through the,the scope of those first days?

>> Ian W. Toll (04:28):
Sure. Well, the Japanese objective in declaring
war, attacking us,attacking Great Britain on the same day,
ultimately was to get access tothe oil fields of Borneo and Sumatra.
They had an oil problem and so
their idea was to essentiallylaunch a southern offensive,

(04:48):
an amphibious naval air offensivewhich would take the Philippines,
Malaya and clearing the way forthem to get to those oil fields.
So the attack on Pearl harbor reallywas for the purpose of knocking out our
fleet to protect their left flankon this southern offensive.

(05:10):
And they launched a punishingoffensive across the entire region,
destroying about half ofAmerican air power in
the Philippines on the veryfirst day of the war,
landing in Malaya veryquickly wiping out the raf.

(05:30):
And then ships bringing troopsquickly came in behind to land
beachheads on those places andreally sort of sweeping all before them.
So it was an extraordinarily fast and
successful offensive acrossthe entire western Pacific.

>> Peter Robinson (05:46):
Question for both of you.
1941, Japan, population 71 million,
just over half as big as the 133million of the United States.
Japan's productive capacity,different ways of measuring this, but
you peg it at about one tenth that of theproductive capacity of the United States.
What were the Japanese thinking?

(06:07):
I mean, in retrospect,this is part of the large.
It's almost the permanent question onevery page when one's reading a book
of history is to forget the way it,
pretend that you don't knowthe way it all ended, so to speak.
So what did they have in their headswhen they launched this attack?

>> Ian W. Toll (06:26):
I think they saw Nazi Germany as unbeatable in Europe.
They expected Moscow to fall.
The German operation intoRussia had begun that June,
just a few months earlier, andNazi Germany and Japan were allies.
I think Japan saw essentiallyan opportunity to sort of pick up

(06:50):
the scraps of the British Empire of whatwas the American empire or territories.
And soreally it was a bet that Nazi Germany,
fascism was ascendant in the world and
that this was their opportunityto get a share of the spoils.

That sounds right.

>> Jonathan Horn (07:12):
Yeah.
I think if you look at the situationin 1941, it's also important to say
that the United States was vulnerablein places like the Philippines.
We hadn't made the investmentsnecessary to defend our far flung
colonies that the United States had.
So the Japanese were rightabout that potential gamble.
It just was the long term gamblethat they were so wrong on.

Okay. So Ken, I again, I want to stay for
just a moment on the on the sort ofthe initial impact, the initial collision.
SCOTT andlet me show you a brief video clip.

>> Speaker 4 (07:45):
Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker,
members of the Senate of the House of
Representatives yesterday, December 7th.
1941, a date which

(08:05):
will live in infamy.
The United States ofAmerica was suddenly and
deliberately attacked by naval and
air forces of the Empire of Japan.
I ask that the Congress declare

(08:29):
that since the unprovoked and
dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday,
December 7, 1941,
a state of war has existed

(08:52):
between the United States and
the Japanese Empire.

What I find so striking about that, first of all, Jonathan,
you and I were both speechwriters.
FDR was really good.
He commanded that chamber.
So there's something about fromthe get go, you have a sense that, and
it may be worth saying,because we've been through a quarter of
a century of presidencies that in oneway or another proved unsuccessful.

(09:23):
It may be worth saying then that you havethe sense that from the very get go,
the country has a leader.
But what I find even more striking,I find even more striking is the hoops and
hollering and cheers at the end.
Did they know what they were getting into?
Did they have any notion of the pricewe would pay in the Pacific?

>> Ian W. Toll (09:45):
Well, I think at that point, the overwhelming
emotion in that chamber was anger,absolute rage,
and a determination that Japan would pay.
And what was really extraordinary aboutthat moment was that it represented

(10:06):
the collapse literally overnightof the isolationist movement in
the United States, which was very strong.
It had strength in both parties.
It had strength in every region.
It's particularly strong in the Midwest.
But it was a very important movementwhich in some ways was even
gaining strength, you might say,in the fall of 1941.

(10:28):
And [COUGH] part ofthe reason that the attack
on Pearl Harbor was suchan extraordinary miscalculation,
was that the Japanese didn't consider atall that one of their greatest assets,
perhaps, this was true of the Germansas well, was the fact that the American
people were divided over the prospectof entering the war, bitterly divided.

(10:49):
And this attack, because it wasa surprise attack, because it destroyed
our Pacific Fleet in our Pacificstronghold, essentially just altered
those politics about as dramaticallyas you possibly could imagine.
Thus solving for FDR his biggest problem,which was how to unite the American

(11:09):
people, not only to get a declarationof war through Congress, but
to really unite the country andmobilize it for war.

So what we see in that video, FDR walks well, he's helped into.
We don't see him struggling because,of course, he'd had polio.
We don't see that.
But we see him in a chamberthat is unified in a way
that 48 hours earlier wouldhave been all but unimaginable.

>> Ian W. Toll (11:33):
Absolutely, yeah.

One more- >> Ian W. Toll
vote in the House.
Who was that?
Was that Jeanette Rankin?

>> Ian W. Toll (11:44):
Jeannette Rankin, exactly, yes, that's right.

Okay.

>> Ian W. Toll (11:47):
And it was unanimous in the Senate.

One last question about the very onset, as you've made clear, and
we'll come to the Philippines in a moment.
This also will illustrate the point.
The Japanese had this worked out.
This was a massive operation acrosstens of thousands of square miles,
and it moved fast andproved extremely successful.
How could our intelligencehave failed to pick it up?

I would say what's interesting is if you look at American war
planning in the years before World War II.

Right.

We did anticipate that if we had a war with Japan,
we would have a disasterin the Philippines.
It was pretty clear we had a colony onthe other side of the Pacific Ocean, but
we were unwilling to make the investmentsnecessary to be a great power to be able
to defend that colony.
And in the event of war with Japan, thatmeans that our soldiers in the Philippines

(12:42):
will be the ones who end up payinga terrible cost when war comes with Japan.

So we knew that much.
All right, let's go now tothe attack on the Philippines.
Within hours of attacking Pearl Harbor,the Japanese bombed American planes and
military installations in the Philippines,just as Ian said a moment ago,
an archipelago of 7,000 islandsin the western Pacific.
Spain had ceded the Philippinesto the United States in 1898

(13:11):
after the Spanish American War.
Describe the American presence in thePhilippines the day before the Japanese
attacked, andalso the country's strategic importance.
Why did we even want it?
Whether we should make the Philippinesa colony was actually controversial in
American politics from 1898 on,as I recall.
Give us the backgroundbefore the Japanese attack.

Right, and it's interesting to note that Arthur MacArthur,
note that last name, the father of DouglasMacArthur actually led the very first
American troops into the city of Manilain 1898 during the Spanish American War.
And Arthur MacArthur,you can look at him and get a prism,
a sense of why Americans thoughtthe Philippines were so important.

(13:53):
There was this sense thatif you had the Philippines,
they would serve as a shield toAmerican interests in the Pacific.
And there was also this theory thatgreat powers needed naval bases and
the Philippines would allow Americato have great power in Asia.
But that only worked, of course,
if you were willing to make investmentsnecessary to be a great power.
And in the end, very quickly, armystrategists looking at the Philippines

(14:16):
realized that instead of being a shieldfor American interests in the Pacific,
the Philippines is actuallyour heel of Achilles.
That's the term that Teddy Roosevelthimself comes to use to describe
the Philippines,because it's a major vulnerability.
Because in the event of war with Japan,just look at the geography.
Look how closethe Philippines are to Japan.
Look how far American reinforcementswill have to sail across

(14:39):
the Pacific Ocean to come to the rescueof the Philippines in the event of war.
And you can see a disaster is brewing.
Now, there is a plan that Americanstrategists come up with in the years
before World War II.
This is called War Plan Orange.
The forces are gonna retreat tothe Bataan Peninsula, and they're gonna-

Just outside of Manila.

Right, and
it's a little stubby piece of land betweenthe South China Sea and Manila Bay.
And you're gonna hold out there for
as long as you can until forces maybe fromPearl Harbor are able to come across.

Until the Navy comes to the rescue, right?

Right, but strategists knew this didn't really make sense.
The math didn't add up.
The reinforcements from Pearl Harbor werenot gonna be able to get there in time as
long as it would take, as long as thoseforces would be able to hold out.
And that was even beforethe attack on Pearl Harbor.
So you can imagine the disaster you'relooking at on December 8, 1941.

Okay, so let me give you a timeline here.
The Japanese opened their attack onthe Philippines on December 8, 1941,
just as you say,the day after Pearl Harbor.

>> Ian W. Toll (15:41):
The same day, but
it's a different date becauseof the International Date Line.

Got it, thank you.
That's how good you are, Ian.
That's how good you are.
By the end of the month, American and
Filipino troops have withdrawn fromManila to the Bataan Peninsula.
So Warplant Orange is in effect.
MacArthur, himself,commanding officer of American forces,
withdraws further, leaving Bataan forCorregidor Island,

(16:08):
a fortress island in the middle,so to speak, of Manila Bay.
Correct me if I got the timeline wrong.
In March, General MacArthurleaves his command for Australia,
a point to which we will return.
In April, American andFilipino forces in Bataan surrender.
And in early May, the Japanese openedan assault on Corregidor island,

(16:31):
by then the last American stronghold.
On May 6, General Jonathan Wainwright, oneof the two generals you write about here.
On May 6th,General Wainwright surrenders Corregidor,
ending organized resistanceto the Japanese.
This is one of the worst Americanmilitary defeats in American history.

(16:57):
Why did the defeat prove so bitter and
tell us what MacArthur was doinghightailing it out of there?
I'm putting it provocativelybecause it's an issue.
Explain that.

Absolutely, and first of all, the surrender on Bataan in April 9,
1942, is the largest surrenderof American forces in history.

How many?

Nearly eighty thousand United States troops, mostly Filipinos-

In Singapore.

>> Ian W. Toll (17:23):
More hundred thousand.

A hundred thousand?
All right, so these are two.
The Japanese take Singapore.
Churchill's beside himself becauseit's such a blow to British morale for
a hundred thousand men to laydown their arms in surrender.
And when then we dothe same thing in Bataan.

Well, I think one difference is that if you look
at the situation,
this goes to your question, why wasMacArthur withdrawn from the Philippines?

Right. >> Jonathan Horn
at the situation in February andMarch of 1942, all across the Pacific,
the Japanese are advancing.
They're going to take Singapore,they're gonna take Hong Kong,
they're taking the Dutch East Indies.
Even Australia doesn't look safe.
Guam falls, wake island has fallen.
Only in the Philippines can Americanssee what they so desperately wanna see,

(18:07):
which is evidence that we are fightingback against the Japanese.
And that fight has become synonymouswith the name Douglas MacArthur.
And that happens for a very simple reason.
There's only one means of communicationwith the outside world, that is the radio.
Douglas MacArthur is incontrol of the radio.
And the communiqués he issuestend to mention only one person,

(18:32):
Douglas MacArthur.
Now, I think it's fairto say to MacArthur,
I think he was willing to stay in thePhilippines, and he was willing to die.
I do not think he was willingto become a prisoner of war.
He said over and over again,the Japanese would never take him alive.
And they ultimately didn't take himalive because a decision is made
in Washington to order MacArthurout of the Philippines.

(18:55):
That decision is made by FDR himself, or
at least approved by FDR himself.
And why did they take that decision?

Well, the order is given to order MacArthur out of the Philippines
because it is seen that he is tooimportant to go down with the ship.
And of course, if you look at it onthe other way, it would seem to be
an incredibly dishonorable act forthe captain to desert the sinking ship.
But there's this other attitude that->> Peter Robinson: This is why it's
controversial eight decades later.
Right, right,

(19:22):
but there's this other attitude that he istoo important to go down with his ship.
And now MacArthur himself tells the storythat he made the decision for two reasons.
One, he thinks he'll be could becourt-martialed unless he obeys.
Now, that seems reallyvery unlikely to me.
The order did come fromFranklin Roosevelt.

And it was in the form of an order.

Yes. >> Peter Robinson
given options.
Right. >> Peter Robinson
said leave.
Now, would they have court-martialed him for
disobeying an order,refusing to abandon his men?
Politics were very high on the listof considerations that went into
the decision.
And if ordering the general outof the Philippines looks bad,
court-martialing the general forrefusing to go looks worse.
So I think that's extremely unlikely.

(20:03):
Now, the other reason MacArthur gives for
his agreement to go is he says he isconvinced that he can make a return
to the Philippines fromAustralia almost immediately.
Now, if he really believed that,it's almost delusional.
He knows that the Navy is not ableto break the Japanese blockade of
the Philippines.
And he also knows thatthere are not supplies and

(20:25):
other equipment necessary tolaunch an invasion back toward
the Philippines in Australiaat the present moment.
But he says, I think he almost allowshimself to be deluded on this point in as
he makes his way to Australia.

All right, so you don't hold it against him.

The people on Bataan held it against him.

All right, so now Bataan and the so-called
Bataan Death March, this issomething that runs through the war.
You both make a great deal of it.
Let's deal with it right now.
The shock Americans felt as theybegan to realize the way the Japanese
treated prisoners.

(21:07):
And later we'll come to it again ina moment when we get to the island hopping
strategy, the way they would fight,insist on fighting to the last man.
There is something here that isshocking to the American conscience,
shocking to the American sense.
Describe this.
Go into it a bit.

>> Ian W. Toll (21:24):
The death march.

Well, the death march.
Let's start with the death march.
What was it?

>> Ian W. Toll (21:28):
It was the first and
most notorious of the Japanese atrocitiesagainst surrendered prisoners.
They had not made anyadequate plans to deal with
the number of prisonersthat they had in Bataan.
So they essentially just sort of marchedthem at gunpoint out of the peninsula.

(21:50):
Many of them were very ill or wounded->> Peter Robinson: And
by then they hadn't had proper nutritionfor weeks, at least, isn't that right?

They were living on a thousand calories a day.
These are men who were supposedto be fighting in foxholes.
But if you were living onthousand calories a day,
you could barely get out of bed.

Right.

>> Ian W. Toll (22:07):
And as you say, shocked the American people.
I think it aroused a sense ofpeculiar sense of hatred for
the Japanese that we didn't ever evenreally have against the Germans,
because the Germans, although they treatedthe Soviet prisoners very badly, by and
large, they adhered to the internationalstandards with the treatment of

(22:29):
American and allied prisoners.
And so this is part of what explainsthis kind of searing hatred
animosity that was felt bythe Americans for the Japanese.

If I might.

>> Ian W. Toll (22:43):
Yes, please. >> Jonathan Horn
it was censored fromthe American people for a time.

Is that so? >> Jonathan Horn
the Bataan Death March immediately.
And when we first got word of it,
it was considered too explosive toshare with the American people.
And we're worried that the Japanesemight do worse to our prisoners if it
became public.
And when it finally did become public,of course it did.
It became front page news everywhere.
But when MacArthur first heard the newsof the Bataan Death March, his reaction,

(23:08):
as recorded, was, they will pay.
And you quote, Jonathan, in your book,
you quote a letter.
General Wainwright,if I'm remembering this correctly,
was not actually part ofthe Bataan Death March, but
he spent a good long time ina Japanese prisoner of war camp.
Now he's a commanding officer.
So they would have extendedwhatever professional courtesy, so

(23:30):
to speak, they would have given to him.
And you quote a letter in which he writes.
He himself writes that his weight.
Now, he was never an enormously heavy man.
He was tall, but he was known forbeing thin early in his life.
But his weight has fallen to 145 pounds,less.

125 pounds.

125 pounds.

125 pounds, he's a 6 foot 2 man.
His nickname in college at West Pointwas skinny, but he's not skinny like me.
Not like he was skinny in the tough sort.
And that is the way he'sable to smuggle news,
he is able to eventuallysend word back home.
And that's the way he's able tosmuggle news of his mistreatment,

(24:11):
by indicating that he's no longer.
He weighs only now as much as he did whenhe first started as a cadet at West Point.
And that's a significant point ofintelligence that he's able to get past
Japanese sensors.

I see.

But there was no professional respect from the Japanese for
General Wainwright.
The Japanese had a code, andit did not include surrender, and for
a general to surrender was justsimply disgraceful and unthinkable.
And for them, they really only hadone remedy, which was suicide, and so
he was consideredan oddity in his captivity.
Now, of course, the Japanese knewthat Westerners did do this.

(24:46):
And it's important to say that Wainwright,after MacArthur left,
he had made this vow.
He had said on his diary on April 2, 1942,because he could have potentially escaped,
too, his command encompassedall the Philippines.
He could have gone to one ofthe lower islands on Mindanao and
hopped on a B17 andmaybe got into Australia, too.
But he makes his vow that he'sgonna stay with his men because,

(25:09):
as he writes, no other courseof action would be honorable.
And so he knows when he writes those wordsthat he's going to become a prisoner of
the Japanese.
He's already seen, as you put it,
that the Japanese themselvesdon't believe in surrender.
And a people who don't believe inthe concept of surrender are not likely to
treat prisoners of war well.

All right, every episode that you mentioned, we could talk
about for hours, we can't do this withtelevision, we have to move along.
But it is all stirring and fascinating,
Midway back to sea and back to Ian.
After six months of all butunbroken Japanese advances,

(25:53):
come three days in early June 1942,the Battle of Midway.
Ian Toll in Pacific crucible,
Midway blunted the tipof the Japanese spear.
We'll come to the battle itselfin a moment [COUGH], but
explain the strategic importance tothe United States of blunting that spear.

>> Ian W. Toll (26:16):
Yeah, the Japanese, they'd shown they had the capacity to take
an enormous amount of territory,to take it very quickly.
They did this with air power,with troop landings,
with naval power, andthey were threatening really to
run right down throughthe axis of southern Oceania,

(26:40):
the island groups north of Australia.
And potentially severing our seacommunications with Australia and
New Zealand,
which our strategists in Washingtonsaw as a kind of a critical issue.
We needed to maintain those places asplaces where we could rebuild our military

(27:01):
power for the eventual counteroffensivethat MacArthur would lead in the south.
And so blunting the tip of the spearmeant essentially getting rid
of some of their aircraft carriersthat was the tip of the spear.
Their ability to strike acrossgreat distances with these very,

(27:22):
very adept carrier air groups.
And we knocked out four oftheir best fleet carriers
with all of theirairplanes in that battle.

It was a very near run battle, wasn't it?

>> Ian W. Toll (27:36):
It was, there was a lot of contingency,
historians call it a lot of luck.
A lot of luck.

Could I ask just a background question to that battle?

>> Ian W. Toll (27:46):
Yep.

Why didn't we wait longer,
why didn't we build more carriers,amass more force,
as you point out very clearly,>> Ian W. Toll: Yep.
Our naval command wanted to attack fast.

>> Ian W. Toll (28:03):
Yeah.

In some ways, whether we were ready or not.

>> Ian W. Toll (28:05):
Yeah.

Why?

>> Ian W. Toll (28:07):
Well, I mean, there was a lot of debate about this, actually,
but I think Ernest King,who probably more than any other one
military officer shaped the overallstrategy of the pacific.

Ernest King, he had various titles,
commander of naval operations,he was the top man in Washington.

>> Ian W. Toll (28:27):
Yeah, he combined the two top commands in the navy,
chief of naval operations and.
And a command that no longer exists,Commander in chief of the U.S. fleet.

I see.

>> Ian W. Toll (28:37):
So he wore two hats and kept a very low profile,
in fact is largely forgotten by history.
But he really had a sort of blueprint forwhat we were gonna do in the pacific.
And he wanted to get the warunderway early because
he wanted to essentiallytry to hit the Japanese

(28:58):
before they had a chance to really dig in.

I see.

>> Ian W. Toll (29:03):
And I think it was partly about,
it was considerations of morale,
the feeling that we need to befighting from the beginning.
Our aircraft carriers had survivedthe attack on Pearl harbor just because of
an accident they happenedto not be important.

(29:25):
And we had what was reallyan extraordinary intelligence coup by
intercepting anddecoding enough of the Japanese plans.
That we were able to anticipatethis move against Midway and
Nimitz was able to use that intelligence.

Nimitz was.

>> Ian W. Toll (29:41):
Chester Nimitz was the commander of the Pacific fleet.

And he was in Pearl Harbor.

>> Ian W. Toll (29:46):
In Pearl harbor.

So the major figures, but there are a lot of important figures,
but the two major figureswould be Ernest King.

>> Ian W. Toll (29:53):
Yep.

Admiral King here in Washington.

>> Ian W. Toll (29:55):
Right.

And then admiral Nimitz in Pearl harbor.

>> Ian W. Toll (29:57):
His subordinate, that's right, theater commander in the Pacific.
And so Nimitz,with this gift of essentially
knowing most of what the Japaneseplan was to move against Midway,
which is this little atoll at the endof the about 1,000 miles from Hawaii.
Was able to position his threeaircraft carriers, was all he had,

(30:21):
to launch sort of a punishingsurprise attack on the Japanese
task force while their planeswere away bombing Midway.
And he essentially was able tosort of use this intelligence in
order to put our carriers into a positionto win what was a pretty chaotic battle.

So we had intelligence, but it still came down to luck, or
luck played an element, why?

>> Ian W. Toll (30:50):
Well, I mean, it was, we might not have found the carriers.
Many of the search planes that wentout flew the wrong headings and
missed them entirely.
The dive bombers of the Yorktown andthe Enterprise,
they might not have scored a devastating,a lethal blow on one or
two or even three ofthe Japanese aircraft carriers.

(31:14):
If even one of those Japaneseaircraft carriers had survived and
was able to launch a counter strike,maybe they would have knocked out two or
even three of our carriers.
Instead, they only got one,the Yorktown, and so
you could easily see how all ofthis might have gone differently.

Right.

>> Ian W. Toll (31:32):
Yeah.

Again, I'm gonna quote you, Ian, in Pacific Crucible for
the remaining war,Japan's transcendent fighting spirit.
You put fighting spirit in quotations,
was to be pitted against America'soverwhelming industrial military might.
So this correlation offorces changes at Midway,

>> Ian W. Toll (31:54):
Yep.

And remains the determining substructure of the conflict
for From that point to the end.
Explain that if you would,for just a moment.

>> Ian W. Toll (32:03):
Yeah, well, we were mobilizing very quickly, and this really
is maybe the single most extraordinarystory of America's involvement
in the Second World War was how quicklywe were able to retool our economy and
put it on a war footing.
And so we understood wellthat we would be able to

(32:23):
overwhelm Japan by sheerweight of ships and
planes and tanks andtroops, given enough time.
And Midway was important, particularlybecause it was early in the war.
It was six months after Pearl Harbor.
It was a devastating counterpunchin the early stages of the war.

(32:45):
And by doing that,it bought time, bought time for
our commanders in the Pacific,and it bought time for
our country here at home to continuethis process of mobilizing,
pouring out these military assetswhich would be used to strangle Japan.

And give me just in a couple of sentences how do things stand in
the war in Europe at about this point,June of 1942?

>> Ian W. Toll (33:13):
Well, you have the critical question at this point in
Europe is what's gonnahappen on the Eastern Front.

Right.

>> Ian W. Toll (33:21):
And Stalingrad,
the early stages of the battle ofStalingrad are in this summer of 1942.
And by the end,you have the German defeat there,
and soyou're beginning to see that the war in
the east is gonna be a devastating defeat.

It already looks that way.

>> Ian W. Toll (33:43):
Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
my amateur's view feelingwas that in June of 42,
Hitler's at maximum expansion,but people who,
you can already see that he'sgonna actually begin contracting.
I mean, if you look at what our military leaders are saying,
by mid-1942,there's a growing sense of confidence that

(34:07):
we're gonna win this war both in Europe.

Both in Europe and- >> Ian W. Toll
that Hitler has bitten off morethan he can chew in Russia,
that our supplies are beginningto get through to Russia, and
that with our help andthe help of our allies, the British,
eventually they would be ableto turn the tide of that war.

(34:30):
And these two conflicts are linked,they're very closely linked, right?
So the victory at Midway was important,one of the reasons it was important
is because it affected the politicsthat FDR was dealing with at home.
There was a lot of sentiment in Congress,in the press, among many of the American
people that really we should treatthe Pacific war as our primary theater,

(34:55):
that the Japanese were our real enemy,that they had attacked us, that we should
place the emphasis, we should be sendingmost of our military power to the Pacific.
And by scoring this extraordinaryvictory so early in the war,
I think gave FDR a little morebreathing room to pursue a Europe first
global strategy,which was the correct strategy, I think.

(35:19):
Anything you'd care to?

Well,
I would say that MacArthur himselfnever accepted the European strategy.
For him,the Pacific always remained the key.
And specifically his theater in thePacific, his return to the Philippines.

>> Ian W. Toll (35:36):
Absolutely.

And so every- >> Ian W. Toll
the Koreas.
Right, and every action Ian is talking about, MacArthur sees, and
his response is, okay, the next logicalstep is send more forces to me.

He was a great man, as you will insist, before this is over.
But what it comes down to is wherever hewas standing was the most important place
in the world.

That is well put, I think that's well put.

All right, so back to your man, Douglas MacArthur,
General MacArthur, again,let me brief timeline here.
In the second half of 1942,the Marines land on Guadalcanal,
one of the Solomon Islands.
The naval battle ofGuadalcanal takes place,
forcing the Japanese towithdraw from the island.
In November of 1943, the Battle of Tarawa,did I pronounce that correctly?

>> Ian W. Toll (36:26):
Tarawa.

Tarawa, the Battle of Tarawa, one of the Gilbert Islands.
In June 1944, the invasion of Saipan,one of the Mariana Islands, and
the Battle of the Philippine Sea,which ended the ability of the Japanese to
conduct carrier operations, which I getfrom all this comes from your books, boys.
So this brings us back to the Philippines.
On October 20, 1944, General MacArthurlands on the Island of Leyte.

(36:53):
Did I pronounce that correctly?

Leyte, yes.

Leyte, fulfilling his vow to return famous news
camera footage, MacArthur wading ashore.
On October 23 to 26,the Battle of Leyte Gulf takes place.
The largest naval battle of the war.
Jonathan MacArthur demanded fulloperational control of both the army and

(37:17):
the Navy, and the Navy refused.
Explain, andthis is the moment, of course,
tell us what was involved in the recaptureof the Philippine Islands, but
this is the moment to sketch out thecharacter and person of General MacArthur.

Well, first of all, I think you have to say that even months
before this return to the Philippineswas no certain thing.
There were other people, includingAdmiral King especially, who believed that
returning to the Philippines was amistake, we were advancing along two axes.
The Navy was coming, taking the centralaxis across the Pacific, and

(37:54):
MacArthur was coming up throughNew Guinea toward the Philippines.
And you can see them,they're coming together toward a point.
They're both headedtoward the Philippines.
But there's some attitude thatthe Philippines should be bypassed, and
by that meaning,don't fight a battle there.
Just leave the Japanese forcesoccupying the Philippines to rot on

(38:16):
the vine as it said.

The Philippines were nothing but
trouble in the first placefrom a military point of view.

And, well, but they were also American soil.

All right, all right.

And this is where Douglas MacArthur's vow to
return becomes so important,because when he reached Australia in 1942,
he makes this vow, I shall return.

>> Speaker 5 (38:34):
I said to the people of the Philippines,
whence I came, I shall return.

Of course,
those are three of the mostfamous words in American history.
And people always say,why didn't you say, we shall return?
But the answer is, it would havemade no sense because America was
still in the Philippines whenhe left the Philippines.
But it really is a personal vow,and in fact,
there's this letter from George Marshall.

George Marshall, Chief of Staff, army chief of Staff,
running things from Washington.

Right, in 1944,
as this debate is happening about whetherto go to Taiwan or to the Philippines.
And George Marshall writes,
we all have to remember what our greatobjective is, which is defeating Japan.
And here is the Army Chief of Staffneeding to remind the most important army

(39:28):
commander in the Pacificwhat the great objective is.
It's defeating Japan, and MacArthurhimself admits that is not my primary
objective, my primary objectiveis to return to the Philippines.
And he even says that in his memoir, well,
afterwards, that had alwaysbeen his primary objective.
We had a moral vow to return because wehad failed the people of the Philippines,

(39:51):
we had failed our prisoners of war onthe Philippines, and he felt America had
been forced out at the point of a bayonet,and we had to return the same way.

All right, let's take the Philippines by sea and
we'll come back to land.
The battle of Leyte Gulf,four days, some 300 ships,
some 200,000 sailors, staggering in scope.
Give us a paragraph or two overviewof the mass of this battle and
explain the significance.

>> Ian W. Toll (40:24):
Well, it really was several different battles that got
grouped into this heading,battle of Leyte Gulf.
Somewhat of a misnomer in that no partof the battle took place in Leyte Gulf.
It took place all around the Philippines,probably would have been better to call it
the naval battle of the Philippines,but that ship sailed long ago.

(40:47):
It was really the last concerted Japaneseeffort to bring about a big naval battle,
which they hoped to win in the hopesthat that would then trigger
the end of the war through somesort of a negotiated settlement.

They didn't want to settle into a war of attrition,
they wanted to forcea major decisive conflict.
Is that roughly correct?

>> Ian W. Toll (41:13):
They recognized that they were being overpowered by a bigger,
stronger country.
And they had their historicalprecedent of the Russo Japanese War
in which they had scoredthis extraordinary victory,
wiping out the Russian fleetat the battle of Tsushima.

(41:34):
This Russian fleet that had sailedall the way around the world.

That year is.

>> Ian W. Toll (41:40):
That's 1905, and
then that's followed by negotiationsin Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in which
President Theodore Roosevelt is mediatingbetween them and a peace treaty is struck.
Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize forthat.
So in the minds of the Japanese,
this history was very muchfront of mind for them.

(42:02):
And so they knew that theyneeded eventually some sort of
a negotiated peace treatywith the Americans.
And what they hoped to do is score anotherTsushima, essentially another devastating
naval victory that then would open the wayto negotiations and the end of the war.
Many of the fleet commanders who wereinvolved in sailing this large Japanese

(42:27):
fleet into battle are very pessimisticabout their chances, and yet they
feel that the honor of the Japanese Navyreally requires them to fight this battle.
And the result is a pretty devastatingdefeat, it really is the last.

They were right to be pessimistic.

>> Ian W. Toll (42:46):
They were right to be pessimistic, but it was also a large and
chaotic naval battle,many different things happened.
There was an attack on a taskforce just north of Leyte,
surprise attack by the biggestbattleships in the world.
And all of that was due to sortof a controversial decision by

(43:09):
Admiral Halsey to go North,chase after another Japanese task force.
Essentially, he took the bait.
It was the first kamikaze attacks,
the first organized kamikaze attacksoccurred during this battle.
There was every kind of naval fighting.
There was the last battle line fightin the fight between battleships and

(43:31):
the battle of Surigao Strait.
There were the carrier fight off of Ngano,
there were submarineattacks on both sides.
There were the appearance of the kamikaze,which became the single most important
weapon for the Japanese navalweapon in the last year of the war.

(43:52):
And so all of this happened ina very compressed period of time.
But that really was the last time thatthe Japanese Navy was able to act
together as a fleet.

Jonathan.

Well, by the way, they almost succeeded,
it's important to sayit was a lot of luck.

Another near run.

Yeah, exactly, and if they had, it would not have been
impossible to imagine them destroyingMacArthur's invasion of Leyte.
So, it was It was a near victory thatturned into a calamity for the Japanese.
It also shows, I think,
that the Japanese realized that losing thePhilippines was a catastrophe for them,
that they even embarked on thisexpedition, on this risky plan.

(44:30):
But it has to be said,it almost succeeded.

By the way, can I ask just to establish for viewers today.
Excuse, let me just put it this way.
When I was a little kid watchingSecond World War shows on television,
which no longer even exist, of course,
that war in which my own fathertook place in the Pacific,

(44:55):
that war seemed somehow alive, current.
I read your two books and the passageof these decades, I'm now in the, what,
let's say the second half of middle age,let's put it that way.
It seems closer now tothe Civil War in my mind.
And so, you said a couple of times that,or you, I think it was you who said

(45:18):
the radio communication andMacArthur was in charge of radio.
And you know,
there are going to be kids listeningto this to whom that does not compute.
What do you mean I have myiPhone right here, I can talk?
How can anybody be in charge of radio?
But I wonder if you can just bothof you actually take a moment.
Well, Ian, perhaps at sea, andthen we'll come to the land battle for

(45:41):
the Philippines.
Who's in charge ofthe battle of Leyte Gulf?
Who coordinates this?
Nimitz is back in Pearl Harbor,he's not in charge of anybody,
this is individualcommanders on individual.
The amount of personal initiative,the way training and

(46:04):
some sense of honor is enough to forcemen to very knowingly risk death and
mayhem and maiming themselves andsailors is just astonishing.
No, Viewed from today, is it not?

>> Ian W. Toll (46:23):
Well, I mean, it's an extraordinary chapter in our history and
in World history.
It's the largest, bloodiest, mosthistorically important war in our history.
So, yes, absolutely, of course,and, I think that there's a sense
that we share as Americans,that this was when we were at our best,

(46:47):
and that's been a very important partof the way the war is remembered.
It's partly why we still find it sofascinating.
I think maybe we have a sense that we werebetter as a country then than we are now.

Hold that thought, we'll come to that.
The Philippine land battle, again,briefly, the timeline, January,
the U.S. 6th army lands in Luzon,which again, correct my pronunciation.
In February, American forces andFilipino guerrillas take Manila,
although the fighting inthe city continues for a month.

(47:23):
Also in February, the Japanesewithdraw to fortified positions in
the Sierra Madre Mountains, wherefighting continues until well into May.
And the Battle of Wawa Dam,I see these things in print, but
I have no idea how to pronounce themcorrect my pronunciation is one of
the longest engagements inthe entire Pacific War.
The Japanese are very good atwithdrawing and hunkering down.

(47:48):
How did the 6th army perform?
Was MacArthur a great general?

Well, I think, first of all, it's important to say that the Battle
of Manila was One of the bloodiest andmost terrible battles of World War II,
I mean, the entire city of Manila,by the end, is basically destroyed.
The Japanese,their high command had not planned
to fight a battle in Manila,but naval forces.

(48:17):
The Japanese had stayed in the city andhad not left,
MacArthur himself hadassumed from the start.

Manila's how big, roughly, population.

This is a major city.

[INAUDIBLE] million?

Yeah, about, and its population is swell during wartime,
but people are now realizing thatmaybe it's good to get out of Manila.
And MacArthur's operating underthis assumption that there was no
major battle for Manila in 1898.
The Spanish sort of did a playact battle and then left, and
that there had been nomajor battle in 1942.

(48:52):
He had declared the cityan open city himself and
left to Corregidor because he wantedto save Manila, this is his home.
But the Japanese, in the end, and rememberwhat you said, they don't believe in
surrender, in the end, MacArthur isplanning a victory parade for Manila.
But what's happening is the Japanese areactually fighting block by block, and they

(49:14):
are destroying whatever they can't hold,and that includes the people of Manila.

And even at this point in the war, this takes us by surprise,
the fierceness of the opposition,the refusal to surrender this street and
then the next street.

It takes MacArthur by surprise.

It takes MacArthur by surprise, right.

And I think this is a pattern that happens with
MacArthur over and again.
With him sort of ignoring intelligence,
being told there are more forceson Luzon than you know about, and
him underplaying it, being certain thatthe Japanese won't make a stand in Manila.
But they do make a last stand in Manila,and the result is absolute catastrophe.

(49:52):
The American forces do come in, butthey have to fight block by block, and
they make a final stand.
The Japanese in the walled city,the old walled city,
this is a great sort of relic of history,and it is destroyed by this battle.
And over 100,000 people are killed inManila, this destruction is 100,000.

That must include civilians.
My goodness.All right.

Because the Japanese are essentially killing and
mutilating everybody as theyare abandoning their positions.
MacArthur refuses to use air power on thecity, but he eventually consents to use
artillery, which can wrecka city as well as anything.
But the blame forthis clearly rests on the Japanese.
And it's the great irony of MacArthur'svow to return to the Philippines.

(50:36):
He believes this is a cityhe considers to be his home.
It's been his objective to return tothe city, and it's been his obsession, and
it Ends with the city he lovesbeing absolutely destroyed.

All right.

>> Ian W. Toll (50:50):
Yeah. Manila was considered, you know,
maybe the most beautiful city in Asia.
And it was just absolutely leveled.

The pearl of the Orient.

>> Ian W. Toll (50:57):
And a lot of Filipino historians have speculated, you know, how
history might have been different if thatcity in particular had been preserved.
It might have put the countryon a much better post war path.

So why would it be?
This is this difference between the warin Europe and the war in the Pacific and
the way they're remembered.
It feels to me as though this issubjective, so I may simply be mistaken,
but it feels to me as though ourgeneration has a much clearer.
I can close my eyes and

(51:39):
call to mind one photograph afteranother of a devastated Berlin.
I don't think I can recallseeing a photograph,
except in your books ofa devastated Manila.
Somehow that doesn't seem as presentin the American consciousness.
Why would that be?

I think it's because people are more familiar with Europe.
The geography of the Pacific isa mystery for most Americans.
And even when we take the Philippines forthe first time in 1898, the joke is that
William McKinley doesn't even knowwhere the Philippines are on a map.
And I don't think that's fair.
But that was the joke,and that problem remains.
As you look at the Philippines,the distances are just vast.

(52:17):
And it's difficult even now forAmericans to understand the geography.
And you read it right now astensions rise with China.
Even now, I think Americans read thegeography of the Pacific and they're sort
of reading over it, not really sure wherethese various islands are actually are.

Right.
Okay, island hopping again.
Timeline.
February, March 1945.
The Battle of Iwo Jima.
The Marines capture the islandafter brutal fighting.
March 9 and 10, 1945.
Operation Meeting House.
The massive incendiary raidon Tokyo is carried out by
the US Army Air Forces under the commandof Major General Curtis LeMay.

(52:57):
And incendiary attacks on Japanesecities continue for the rest of the war.
April to June 1945.
The Battle of Okinawa, the largestamphibious assault in the Pacific.
Okay, so we're moving intothe final phase of the war.
Ian explained the strategicsignificance of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

(53:21):
And if Americans have trouble findingthe Philippines, who, where are.
Who cares about Iwo Jima and Okinawa?
And yet if every American who cares atall about a military history can picture
anything, it's the raisingof the flag on Iwo Jima.
How can this be?
How did those two small islandscome to be of such importance that
thousands fought and died for them?

>> Ian W. Toll (53:44):
Well, what's most important, I think,
about them in the context of this war,is that they're close to Japan.
Iwo Jima is 650 miles,I think, from Tokyo.
Okinawa's 400 miles fromthe southern end of Kyushu,
which is the SouthernMost ofthe four Japanese islands.
So we're closing the ring nowaround the Japanese home islands.

(54:07):
And Iwo Jima really was taken forthe purpose of essentially clearing
the flight path forthe B29 bombers that are now, as you say,
burning down Japanese citiesoperating from the Marianas.
Iwo Jima's on just abouta direct flight line from

(54:29):
the Marianas north to Japan andthen Okinawa.
After prolonged debate, Raymond Spruance,who is the great fleet commander,
had argued that Okinawa shouldbe our base of operations.
Finally, they'd ruled out taking Taiwan,
judging that it was too large andthat taking Okinawa would give us most of

(54:52):
the same benefits on an islandthat was closer to Japan.

Our base of operations for what?

>> Ian W. Toll (54:58):
Operations for the prospective invasion of Japan and
the end of the war.

All right, the incendiary raids.
After taking command of air operationsagainst Japan in early 1945, LeMay.
This is General LeMay,shifts from high altitude attacks.
These bombers are designed forhigh altitude attacks.
It turns out they're very inaccurate.

(55:23):
And he invents, as far as I can tell,low altitude nighttime incendiary raids.
And what's he up to there?

>> Ian W. Toll (55:34):
Well, they were just adapting to the use of this new new plane,
the B29,
the biggest military aircraft that hadever gone into general production.
They were getting enormous numbers ofthem off the Boeing assembly lines in
the States.
And this had beena tremendous investment that,

(55:55):
that the Congress had agreed to,and they wanted results.
It had been designed as a planethat could carry a heavy bomb
load to a great distance.
And really the army airforces between the wars were
trying to develop these techniques forprecision bombing of targets.

(56:22):
There was a device calledthe Norden bombsight,
a great promise was held out forthis thing.
And, essentially, we were not gettingthe results that LeMay wanted.
And so he thought a shift toa different kind of a tactic,

(56:42):
going in at 5,000ft instead of 25,000ft.
Going in at night, andjust scattering these napalm incendiaries
over the most thickly settledpart of these wooden and
paper cities would essentiallydeal a sort of a devastating

(57:03):
blow that would SAP the Japaneseability to carry on the war.
And perhaps convince the leadershipthat there was no option but surrender.

All right, so now we begin to move into the final phases here.
On the night of March 9th and 10th,taking off from the Marianas,
some 300 B29s released more than1,600 tons of bombs on Tokyo,
including napalm,jellied gasoline, so forth.

(57:37):
Destroying some 16 square miles ofthe city, much of which, of course,
is constructed of wooden structures.

>> Ian W. Toll (57:42):
Yep.

And killing as many as 100,000 people, mostly civilians.
Now, by March 1945,the Germans have repeatedly bombed London,
the British, and we, Americans,bomb Dresden, what is going on?
By this point in the war, are we ourselvessimply inured to attacks on civilians,

(58:08):
or is there a purely militaryjustification for those firebombings?
What's going on?

>> Ian W. Toll (58:14):
Well, I mean,
I think there was a stepby step sort of a process.
Prior to the war, our government andour military had been very
emphatic that air power should notbe used to hit civilian targets.
And it had taken really a verystrong stand on the ethics and

(58:38):
the morality of bombing civilian targets.
As you say, the Germans bombed the hellout of British cities during the blitz,
arousing a very understandablefeeling among the British people that
they wanted retribution for that.
When we got into the war against Germany,

(59:01):
we were trying to destroy theirwar machine by hitting plants.
So, you go from trying to hit precisionfactories, bridges, railheads.
The next step is, well, let's hitthe worker housing around the plants
in order to, dehouse them, was the term.

(59:22):
And then from there you go to the step oflet's just start bombing these cities.
And then you take the final step, which Iknow we're anticipating, which is, well,
if you have one bomb that can do the job,you've already been doing it with these
incendiaries, why notjust do it with one bomb.
And so the point is that youwould not have gone from zero to

(59:42):
four on that scale, it had to bea step by step kind of a thing.
And this is in the contextof a tremendous war,
a brutal war in which atrocitiesare being committed and
a sense by 1945 that we needed to endthis thing as quickly as possible.

>> Peter Robinson (01:00:02):
That all sounds right to you?

>> Jonathan Horn (01:00:03):
Yeah, I think you also have to look at the situation,
which is there are costs to nottaking these measures as well,
which is these things aren'thappening in a vacuum.
There are people all across Asiasuffering at the hands of the Japanese,
they're carrying out massacres andatrocities wherever they have gone.

(01:00:24):
And if we are headed toward a discussion,I assume-

Of course, I mean-
>> [CROSSTALK]
We'll release
this on the 80th anniversary of,
it'll be in August->> Jonathan Horn: Right.
So there will be a lot of talk about this.

There was no option on the table that wasn't going
to include huge amounts of casualties.
I mean, these would have been Americancasualties if they had invaded,
it would have been Japanese civilians.
And so, Churchill, I think, puts itbest in his history of World War II,
which is there really wasn't a decisionto make about the atomic bomb.

(01:00:59):
We think back and say there musthave been this decision, but
there was really no decision.
It was always known it was gonna be used,if it could be used.
And it would have been justa massive scandal if we had had
a weapon like that and we hadn't used it,
we had sent huge numbers of Americans->> Peter Robinson: Let me return to that.
So the timeline here, August 6th, 1945,the United States drops an atomic bomb on

(01:01:23):
Hiroshima, 70 to 80,000are killed instantly.
By the end of the year, radiation sicknessraises the toll to about 100,000.
Note, by the way,
that 100,000 had already died intwo nights of firebombing in Tokyo.
On August 9th, the United Statesdropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki,
some 40,000 die instantly, by the end ofthe year, the death toll rises to 70,000.

(01:01:45):
I should note that these figures, thereare differing estimates and so forth.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:01:49):
There's a lot of guesswork involved.

Right, and on August 15, at noon, Japanese time,
the Jewel voice broadcast, permittinghis subjects to hear his voice for
the first time, the Emperor Hirohitoannounces that Japan has surrendered.
All right,it'll take a moment to set this up, but
I'd like to set it up [COUGH] becauseevery American has to think this through,

(01:02:13):
and I'm just fascinated to hear whatprofessional historians make of it.
Two quotations, the first comes from theBritish philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.
She's writing a 1958 pamphletopposing Oxford University's
decision to award Harry Trumanan honorary degree.

(01:02:33):
The war's over, the 50s are, Truman's nowa former president, she won't have it.
Quote, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki weare not confronted with a borderline case.
In the bombing of these cities it wascertainly decided to kill the innocent as
a means to an end.
I have long been puzzled by the commoncant about President Truman's courage in
making this decision.

(01:02:54):
Mr. Truman was brave because, andonly because, what he did was so bad,
close quote.
Here's the second quotation,Wilson Miscamble, who by the way,
is both a historian of the earlynuclear age and a Catholic priest.
Quote, the atomic bombs allowedthe emperor and the peace faction, so
called peace faction, in the Japanesegovernment to negotiate an end to the war.

(01:03:18):
Of course,
the United States eventually could havedefeated Japan without the atomic bomb,
but all the viable alternative scenariosto secure victory would have meant
significantly higher Allied casualties andhigher Japanese casualties.
Arguing that dropping the bombs was theleast-harmful option to President Truman
will hardly be persuasive to thosewho see everything in a sharp

(01:03:39):
black-and-white focus.
Yet this is how I see it.
If someone can present to me a viable andmore moral way to have ended World War II,
I will change my position, close quote.
Ian, what do you make ofElizabeth Anscombe and Father Miscamble?

>> Ian W. Toll (01:03:57):
Well [COUGH], we're gonna be debating,
Debating the morality ofthe atomic bombings forever.
This is not.
We're not going to settle this debate.
This is one of the most closelyscrutinized issues of World War II.
We now have had four or
five generations of scholars doingthe pick and shovel archival work.

(01:04:19):
We understand very clearly what happened.
And the answer as to the whetherwhether it was the right decision or
not is not going to be found there.
It's really.

It's not in the documents.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:04:31):
It's not.
It's a philosophical and moral debate.
There were a tradition of.
They were called revisionist historians.
I don't particularly like that term, but
there were various theories thatwere developed in the 60s and 70s.
One was that the.
The real purpose of the bombing ofHiroshima was to intimidate the Soviets.

(01:04:54):
This atomic diplomacy kind of a concept,I think that has not fared well in more
recent scholarship, although it is clearthat Jimmy Burns, the Secretary of State,
Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War,had at various times said, this is
a potential benefit of the atomic bomb,that it'll be easier to deal with Stalin.

(01:05:15):
It is not true that the Japanesegovernment was looking for
a way to surrender, butit is true that there was a peace party.

Take a moment on that one, because that is still in the air.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:05:25):
There are some who say, and this is where the story gets
complicated and complexity sort ofunavoidable here in this story.
But there was a peace party withinthe Japanese government that wanted to
bring Moscow, the Soviet government, into mediate talks with the United States,
looking toward a sort ofa negotiated surrender.

(01:05:46):
Again, they're looking back on thismodel of the Russo Japanese War.
Stalin is stringing them alongin a very sort of a cunning,
devious way,characteristically with his intention of
attacking the Japanese forcesin Manchuria as soon as he
could move his army intoposition in Siberia to do that.

(01:06:10):
And he had promised at Yalta,he had promised us that he would join
the Pacific War within threemonths of the fall of Germany.
Our government, meanwhile,has broken the Japanese diplomatic codes.
So we have a window intowhat's happening in Tokyo.
We're reading their diplomatic traffic.
We know that they're urgently tryingto bring Moscow in as a mediator.

(01:06:36):
And we have evidence thatthe Emperor is behind this effort.
So we know that there is a part ofthe Japanese government that wants to end
the war and may be willing toaccept surrender on close to terms
that we would find acceptable.
But the military leaderswere determined to.
To fight to the end and

(01:06:56):
would have prevented any kindof move towards surrender.
The atomic bombings andthe Russia coming into the war,
which they did the same day wedropped the bomb on Nagasaki.
Those two events provided the kindof shock that allowed for
this final process where thesetwo deadlock sides of the ruling

(01:07:16):
circle went to the emperor andsaid, we need you to decide.
And he said, we're going to surrender.

It is absolutely astonishing.
Again, correct.
It is astonishing that the war cabinetin Japan, after two atomic weapons and
the Russian entry into Manuria,is still deadlocked.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:07:35):
Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
the Emperor to get the deciding vote forsurrender is that, that is correct,
isn't it?
Yes, it is.

All right, so we have.
I mean, there's a peace faction, butthere's also a faction which is willing to
see Japan reduced tocinders out of this note.
I mean, there is such a thing asa death wish in some weird way.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:07:51):
It's the army.

It's the army.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:07:53):
Really. >> Peter Robinson

Okay. >> Ian W. Toll (01:07:53):
Yeah.

Jonathan.

I mean, I think.
I mean, a lot.
Even this discussion, of course,is a form of revisionism, because it
wasn't a discussion that was necessarilybeing had in real time in 1945.
That's, if you look at the options.
If you're starving Japan would havesurely resulted in more civilian deaths.

(01:08:16):
Invasion would have resulted.
I mean, that was something that was verymuch in the mind of American policymakers.
How many Americans would dieinvading the main islands of Japan?
And the estimates were all over the place.
But one thing was agreed,they were not low.
It was going to be a high number, and
a large number of Japanesecivilians would have died.
You have prisoners of war inJapan who were going to die.

(01:08:41):
And if you continue, of course,in the other bombings, as you pointed out,
you lead to large numbers of deaths.
So there was no way,if you think about it,
that this decision, again,it was sort of just taken.
It has to be viewed inthe context of the moment.

So let's take a moment on that one,
because I find thisabsolutely fascinating, and
I believe it says something aboutwhat they were actually thinking.
And if you read Elizabeth Anscombe, shebelieves that Harry Truman made a decision
and that there's a kind of calculus thatwas weighed and he chose the wrong and
evil, but that isn't the way it happened.
Isn't that correct that we know that?

(01:09:21):
The peculiar thing is that after the war,Harry Truman did take responsibility and
said he made the decision.
We have no documentary evidence thatthere was a presidential decision.
And indeed, the notion that the useof atomic weapons is reserved to
the commander in chief is only codifiedafter the war that there was no need for

(01:09:44):
the President to make a decision becauseeverybody understood that if any
weapon we got that would help us winthe war more quickly would be used.
Final note on this.
I once asked Jonathan andI belong to a club for
former presidential speechwriters.
And when I first joined that,started attending meetings of that club,

(01:10:08):
there was a man called George Elseywho had written for Harry Truman and
had been with Truman in Potsdam.
And to the extent you'll see it incertain histories, there's a note asking
Truman's permission to release a certainpress release explaining the bomb.
And on the other side, Truman says,approved, but not before such and

(01:10:29):
such a date, which is the date onwhich he will have left Potsdam.
He doesn't want to have to explainthis to Stalin in detail in person.
And the man to whom he handed that tohave it transmitted back to Washington
was George Elsey.
And I asked Elsey, was that a decision?
Implicitly, was thata presidential decision?

(01:10:50):
Now, George Elsey was in his 90s bythe time I asked him this, but he said,
you don't understand.
And it was the sort ofan assertion of nobody
could understand what it was like.
We wanted to end the war.
There was never any questionthat if that experiment,
the Trinity explosion in the New Mexicodesert, if it was successful,

(01:11:13):
nobody doubted that thatbomb would be used.
That's my understanding from talkingto a then very old man, but.
But that's supported.
And that is what the documents indicate.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:11:23):
Yeah.
There was only one written orderto drop the atomic bombs and
that was written by George Marshall'sdeputy in Washington, Governor Handy.
But Truman orderedthe use of atomic bombs.
He did it verbally to Henry Stimson,the Secretary of War.
And there are a few interestingwrinkles to this story.

(01:11:44):
In his diary, Truman wrote the dayhe gave this order, he said,
I've told Stimson that we'regoing to warn the Japanese and
that we are not going to use thisweapon against civilian target.
It's be going to.Gonna be a military target,
this extraordinary passage issitting there in his diary.

(01:12:05):
And [COUGH] I think historians have seenthat as a sort of a ham fisted effort
to sort of shape the perceptionsof historians and
biographers, knowing that they'dbe reading the President's diary.
Of course, anything the President writesin his diary is gonna be important.
But this is not what was ordered, what wasordered was dropped two bombs on two of

(01:12:27):
the four cities that have been selected bythe target committee as of a certain date.
As you say that he wanted to be at seawhen the first one was dropped, and
then that order was put in writing inWashington and it was carried out.
And so, what's Truman doing there?

(01:12:48):
I mean, is it just an effort tosort of shape the way historians,
obviously that wasn't gonna work.
Or did it show that he had real pangsof conscience, and that maybe if he
had been president, if he hadn'tjust stepped into the role recently.
If he'd been president for a year,if he sort of found his footing,

(01:13:09):
if he's more confident,he would have given that order, and
then history might haveplayed out very differently.

Can you imagine the scandal if Americans
had carried out this invasion ofthe main islands of Japan, and
it had gone anywhere close tohow we think it might have gone.
With huge numbers of casualties, and
then the American people haddiscovered he had an atomic bomb.

(01:13:36):
In the 1945 calculus,
it would have been the largest scandalin the history of the United States.

All right, can I ask one other point about all of this?
Again, these are just amateurs thoughts,you guys are professionals.
But, Admiral Leahy,who was Franklin Roosevelt's
chief of staff and chairman,- Chiefof staff is a complicated term.

(01:14:05):
It sort of begins, but he's the militaryrepresentative to the White House.
He becomes very close to Roosevelt and
he stays into the Truman administrationbecause of course, as you point out.
Roosevelt dies completelyunexpectedly in April, and
Harry Truman is dropping the bomb inAugust, things are moving extremely fast.
So Leahy's on hand.

(01:14:27):
Admiral Leahy andDwight Eisenhower both in later years said
that they opposed the useof the atomic bomb.
And Edward Teller, who spent his finalyears at the Hoover Institution and
was on the Manhattan Project.
He appears in the movie Oppenheimer,not he, but someone playing him.

(01:14:48):
Edward Teller, told me to myface that what he wanted to do,
what he told everybody atthe Manhattan Project we should do,
was drop an atmosphericdemonstration over Japan.
As far as I can tell,these are three redoubtable figures.
As far as I'm aware, there is nowritten evidence that they made these

(01:15:11):
suggestions oropposed the use of the bomb, or called for
an atmospheric demonstration at the time,is that correct?

There was the suggestion of using the bomb on a non city,
I believe.

Is that so? >> Jonathan Horn
as basically->> Peter Robinson: It was dismissed, okay.

It was thought that it would not be effective,
it would not send the rightmessage to the Japanese.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:15:33):
Yeah, no, it's a very tangled story, you see in this
you will see Stimson at various timessaying we should demonstrate the bomb.

Stimson was Secretary of War.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:15:41):
Secretary of War.
You'll see Truman agreeingwith these suggestions, so
it really is, as you say,these events are compressed in time.
There's a lot happening atthe same time around the world.
You have the war ending at the same time,the post war order is being born.
So there's a tremendous amountof important diplomatic

(01:16:01):
work that's happening.

I think they didn't quite know what the bomb was.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:16:06):
No, you're right,
I think that there was a sort ofa sense that this is the next step.

Right. >> Ian W. Toll
down these cities,now we can do it with one plane, one bomb,
it's just the next step.
And it wasn't really until afterward,in retrospect, that it became clear
actually this is something new, this isdifferent, this is a different category.
We're here at the Hoover Institution,so we should mention that of the many

(01:16:33):
people who criticized the decision to useatomic bombs was the former President.
Herbert Hoover said thathe was revolted by it, and
used similar strong language oftenthroughout the years after the bombings.
And it wasn't just Leahy and Eisenhower,it was Ernest King, it was Chester Nimitz.
King as well?

>> Ian W. Toll (01:16:52):
Absolutely. >> Peter Robinson
Nimitz as well?
Yep, well in private, they didn't publicly the way Eisenhower,
Howard and Leahy criticized, butin private they made it clear that they
regretted the use of the atomicbomb against a city.

MacArthur did too.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:17:06):
MacArthur did too. [COUGH] MacArthur said that he was,
I think he used very strong language,again in private, but they were-

Even William Halsey?

Halsey-q >> Ian W. Toll

The extremely
aggressive->> Ian W. Toll: Kill Japs,
kill more Japs, he said it was a mistake.
So the military leadershipof the United States,
I would say you could almost saythat the top echelon of the military
retrospectively regretted the useof the bomb against a city.
But Ernest King and Chester Nimitz were not saying it was

(01:17:39):
a mistake to use the bomb,they should have let us invade.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:17:43):
No, I believe that they thought it was unnecessary.
And the thing is that it isquite possibly true that Japan
would have surrendered withoutthe use of the atomic bomb.
It would have taken longer and
even an additional two weeks in the war.

(01:18:08):
Stalin might have swept into Korea,
he wanted Hokkaido,the northern island of Japan.
Hokkaido might have spent 45 years onthe other side of the Iron Curtain,
that easily could have happened,if the war had lasted two weeks longer.
Hokkaido might have beenthe equivalent of East Germany, so
it was important to win the war quickly.

(01:18:30):
And I think partly what the bombsdid is they stopped the clock on
the war right when the Redarmy was starting to move, and
that had long term consequences in Asia.

Can I, sorry, I find it absolutely fascinating
hearing what professionalsmake of all this.
Let me read you from an essay, famousessay, intentionally provocative essay,
1981 Paul Fussell,>> Ian W. Toll: Yep.
Who served in Europe- >> Ian W. Toll
Thank God for the atomic bomb.

(01:19:04):
And he's responding here toa comment by the late economist,
now late economist John Kenneth Galbraith,
that dropping the bombs madea difference in Japanese surrender.
And Galbraith said of at most two orthree weeks, okay, here's Fussell.
During the time between the droppingof the Nagasaki bomb on August 9th and
the actual surrender on the 15th,not two weeks, but less than that,

(01:19:26):
the war pursued its accustomed course.
On 12 August, eight captured Americanfliers were executed, heads chopped off.
The fifty-first United States submarineBonefish was sunk, all aboard drowned.
The destroyer Callaghan went down,the seventieth to be sunk, and
the destroyer escort Underhill was lost.
That's a bit of what happenedin six days of the two or

(01:19:47):
three weeks posited by Galbraith.
What did he do in the war?
He worked in the office ofPrice Administration in Washington.
I don't demand that he experiencehaving his ass shot off,
I merely note That he didn't,okay, that's vivid, it's colorful,
it's intentionally provocative, butit sets up an important question.

(01:20:09):
What degree of deferencedo we owe to the actual
experience andjudgment of those who were there?

Well, I think that's history.
And it's very easy to look backon what happened in the past, and
it's something that I thinkAmericans become too comfortable
with looking back and saying theywould have done things differently.
But it's also important to say thatwe are denying, in some sense,
the agency of the Japanese themselves.
They were the ones who werekeeping this war going.

(01:20:40):
They were the ones who hadstarted this aggression and
territorial expansion that led to the war.
They were the ones that attackedPearl Harbor, and they were the ones
who had this philosophy of no surrenderand that led to this terrible.
Which we can all agree is terrible, but
terrible point that this becamenecessary to do in 1945.

All right, final question here.
The passage of time andthe teaching of history.
This lived memory ofthe Second World War is gone,
it is just gone, andthe footage is in black and white.

(01:21:22):
It might as well be the First World War,or
it might almost as wellbe the Second World War.
And yet the two of you have just argued,totally persuasively,
in my judgment,that it matters to us today.
So you're both historians, you bothwrite bestsellers, I'm delighted to say.
You both work very carefullyat the craft of prose,

(01:21:45):
which suggests to me that you takeseriously your position in a democracy,
you are performing a service foryour fellow citizens.
How do we convey the realityof what you describe here?
Do we do the job that we need to do inteaching history, even recent history,

(01:22:08):
even the history of grandparents and greatgrandparents, and how could we do better?
You must reflect on this.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:22:15):
Yeah, I do, teaching history, you have the dilemma that you
begin teaching children whenthey're very young, right?
We want our first graders and secondgraders to be introduced to history.
There's only so much you can getacross to a child that age, right?

Sure enough.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:22:33):
You need a sort of simplified narrative,
which then is going to become morecomplex as they get older and
as you come through high school andinto college.
So gradually, you need to reallydevelop the more difficult and
nuanced themes have to come later.

(01:22:55):
Maybe some of the myths,
there was some wisdom in the way thatwe did this in the past with children,
particularly young children, teachingthem some of our national myths and
then letting that picture becomplicated as they get older.
[COUGH], But in general, I sharethe criticisms that many conservatives

(01:23:17):
have had of the way history has beentaught in schools, in universities.
And I think part of the reason peoplestill buy books like these is because they
get to a certain point in life, andthey realize I didn't learn as much
as I would have liked to learnwhen I went through school.
And I think particularly people get intotheir 30s and their 40s and they look back

(01:23:39):
on their lives and they say, I've livedthrough some interesting history.
So you're ready to sort of receive this
information more when youreach a certain point.
Which is another way of sayingthat it's largely middle-aged and
older people who read these books,but there's a reason for that.
And that desire to kind of go back and

(01:24:00):
delve into these things at a later age issomething that I think we'll always see,
and that's natural,that's to be encouraged, I think.

Jonathan.

You know what I think children respond to is stories about
people, people making difficult decisions,
children understand thatmore than we think.
It's when we removethe people from the story and
we talk about history asif it was inevitable.
And the various different movements,and that you lose attention,

(01:24:30):
people are interesting.
Biography is interesting,
that needs to be part of the waywe teach history to children.

All right, Jonathan Horn,
author of The Fate Of TheGenerals: MacArthur Wainwright and
the Epic Battle For The Philippines.
Ian Toll, author ofthe Pacific War Trilogy, Pacific Crucible,
War at Sea In The Pacific,1941 to 1942, The Conquering Tide,
War In The Pacific Islands,1942 to 1944, and

(01:25:00):
Twilight Of The Gods,War In The Western Pacific, 1944 to 1945.
I'm in awe of you toget the facts right and
to make the prose beautiful,and you both pull it off.
Ian, Jonathan, thank you.

>> Ian W. Toll (01:25:14):
Thank you Peter.

Thank you.

For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and
Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.

>> Speaker 6 (01:25:22):
A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb
on Hiroshima anddestroyed its usefulness to the enemy.
The Japanese began the warfrom the air at Pearl Harbor,
they have been repaid manyfold,and the end is not yet.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: Two Historians on How America Fought and Won The Pacific in WWII | Peter Robinson | Uncommon Knowledge