From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: Two Historians on How America Fought and Won The Pacific in WWII

>> Peter Robinson: I'm Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge. To honor the remarkable scholarship of Tom Sowell, renowned economist, social theorist, public intellectual, and Hoover Senior Fellow, we're inviting everyone inspired by his work to enter two national contests. The Thomas Sowell Essay Contest is open to high school students and college undergraduates.

 

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All entries are due by August 31st. Let me repeat that date. That's an important one. All entries are due by August 31st. To learn more and apply, visit Hoover.org/Thomas-Sowell-Legacy, Hoover.org/ Thomas-Sowell-Legacy. Thank you. September 2, 1945. Aboard the USS Missouri on Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the instrument of surrender.

 

80 years ago this summer, the war in the Pacific, the war that had raged from Pearl harbor to the Philippines to Hiroshima, finally came to an end. Historians Ian Toll and Jonathan Horn on Uncommon Knowledge. Now welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. 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 himself as a historian and author. His books include Washington's End and the man who Would Not Be Washington, his best selling biography of Robert E. Lee, published this past spring. Mr. Horn's newest book, The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur Wainwright and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.

 

A graduate of Georgetown and the Kennedy School at Harvard, Ian Tolle served first as a financial analyst in New York State and the federal government before devoting himself to the writing of history. First, Mr. Toll published six the Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. navy. Then he published his classic Pacific War trilogy.

 

I have the first volume here, Pacific Crucible. This volume, the Conquering Tide and the Twilight of the Gods. Ian and Jonathan, thank you for joining me. And I have to admit, I may as well just admit it. I'm in awe. Writing history is hard. Writing prose is hard.

 

Writing beautiful prose in works of history is the supreme accomplishment. And I'm talking to two men who've pulled it off from Ian Toll's Pacific crucible. By 8:10am on December 7, 1941, just minutes after the first bombs and torpedoes had struck the ships lying in Pearl harbor, the main battle force of the Pacific fleet was crippled.

 

And then, beginning just hours after the raid on Pearl harbor, land based bombers and fighters of the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a tightly choreographed aerial blitzkrieg against American and British bases throughout the region. Ian, we grow up learning about the attack on Pearl Harbor. In two hours, some 2400Americans killed, some 21American ships and about 350American aircraft damaged or destroyed.

 

But the attack on Pearl harbor represented just one item in the much larger Japanese offensive. Can you take us through the, the scope of those first days?

>> Ian W. Toll: Sure. Well, the Japanese objective in declaring war, attacking us, attacking Great Britain on the same day, ultimately was to get access to the oil fields of Borneo and Sumatra.

 

They had an oil problem and so their idea was to essentially launch a southern offensive, an amphibious naval air offensive which would take the Philippines, Malaya and clearing the way for them to get to those oil fields. So the attack on Pearl harbor really was for the purpose of knocking out our fleet to protect their left flank on this southern offensive.

 

And they launched a punishing offensive across the entire region, destroying about half of American air power in the Philippines on the very first day of the war, landing in Malaya very quickly wiping out the raf. And then ships bringing troops quickly came in behind to land beachheads on those places and really sort of sweeping all before them.

 

So it was an extraordinarily fast and successful offensive across the entire western Pacific.

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

 

What were the Japanese thinking? I mean, in retrospect, this is part of the large. It's almost the permanent question on every page when one's reading a book of history is to forget the way it, pretend that you don't know the way it all ended, so to speak. So what did they have in their heads when they launched this attack?

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: I think they saw Nazi Germany as unbeatable in Europe. They expected Moscow to fall. The German operation into Russia had begun that June, just a few months earlier, and Nazi Germany and Japan were allies. I think Japan saw essentially an opportunity to sort of pick up the scraps of the British Empire of what was the American empire or territories.

 

And so really it was a bet that Nazi Germany, fascism was ascendant in the world and that this was their opportunity to get a share of the spoils.

>> Peter Robinson: That sounds right.

>> Jonathan Horn: Yeah. I think if you look at the situation in 1941, it's also important to say that the United States was vulnerable in places like the Philippines.

 

We hadn't made the investments necessary to defend our far flung colonies that the United States had. So the Japanese were right about that potential gamble. It just was the long term gamble that they were so wrong on.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay. So Ken, I again, I want to stay for just a moment on the on the sort of the initial impact, the initial collision.

 

SCOTT and let me show you a brief video clip.

>> Speaker 4: Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate of the House of Representatives yesterday, December 7th. 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

 

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 from the 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 one way or another proved unsuccessful. It may be worth saying then that you have the 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 price we would pay in the Pacific?

>> Ian W. Toll: 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 about that moment was that it represented the collapse literally overnight of 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 movement which in some ways was even gaining strength, you might say, in the fall of 1941.

 

And part of the reason that the attack on Pearl Harbor was such an extraordinary miscalculation, was that the Japanese didn't consider at all that one of their greatest assets, perhaps, this was true of the Germans as well, was the fact that the American people were divided over the prospect of entering the war, bitterly divided.

 

And this attack, because it was a surprise attack, because it destroyed our Pacific Fleet in our Pacific stronghold, essentially just altered those politics about as dramatically as you possibly could imagine. Thus solving for FDR his biggest problem, which was how to unite the American people, not only to get a declaration of war through Congress, but to really unite the country and mobilize it for war.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: 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 chamber that is unified in a way that 48 hours earlier would have been all but unimaginable.

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: Absolutely, yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: One more-

>> Ian W. Toll: There was one dissenting vote in the House.

>> Peter Robinson: Who was that? Was that Jeanette Rankin?

>> Ian W. Toll: Jeannette Rankin, exactly, yes, that's right.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Ian W. Toll: And it was unanimous in the Senate.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 across tens of thousands of square miles, and it moved fast and proved extremely successful. How could our intelligence have failed to pick it up?

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

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Jonathan Horn: We did anticipate that if we had a war with Japan, we would have a disaster in the Philippines. It was pretty clear we had a colony on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, but we were unwilling to make the investments necessary to be a great power to be able to defend that colony.

 

And in the event of war with Japan, that means that our soldiers in the Philippines will be the ones who end up paying a terrible cost when war comes with Japan.

>> Peter Robinson: So we knew that much. All right, let's go now to the 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 islands in the western Pacific.

 

Spain had ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898 after the Spanish American War. Describe the American presence in the Philippines the day before the Japanese attacked, and also the country's strategic importance. Why did we even want it? Whether we should make the Philippines a colony was actually controversial in American politics from 1898 on, as I recall.

 

Give us the background before the Japanese attack.

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

 

There was this sense that if you had the Philippines, they would serve as a shield to American interests in the Pacific. And there was also this theory that great powers needed naval bases and the Philippines would allow America to have great power in Asia. But that only worked, of course, if you were willing to make investments necessary to be a great power.

 

And in the end, very quickly, army strategists looking at the Philippines realized that instead of being a shield for American interests in the Pacific, the Philippines is actually our heel of Achilles. That's the term that Teddy Roosevelt himself 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 close the Philippines are to Japan. Look how far American reinforcements will have to sail across the Pacific Ocean to come to the rescue of the Philippines in the event of war. And you can see a disaster is brewing.

 

Now, there is a plan that American strategists come up with in the years before World War II. This is called War Plan Orange. The forces are gonna retreat to the Bataan Peninsula, and they're gonna-

>> Peter Robinson: Just outside of Manila.

>> Jonathan Horn: Right, and it's a little stubby piece of land between the South China Sea and Manila Bay.

 

And you're gonna hold out there for as long as you can until forces maybe from Pearl Harbor are able to come across.

>> Peter Robinson: Until the Navy comes to the rescue, right?

>> Jonathan Horn: Right, but strategists knew this didn't really make sense. The math didn't add up. The reinforcements from Pearl Harbor were not gonna be able to get there in time as long as it would take, as long as those forces would be able to hold out.

 

And that was even before the attack on Pearl Harbor. So you can imagine the disaster you're looking at on December 8, 1941.

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

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: The same day, but it's a different date because of the International Date Line.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 from Manila to the Bataan Peninsula. So Warplant Orange is in effect.

 

MacArthur, himself, commanding officer of American forces, withdraws further, leaving Bataan for Corregidor Island, a fortress island in the middle, so to speak, of Manila Bay. Correct me if I got the timeline wrong. In March, General MacArthur leaves his command for Australia, a point to which we will return.

 

In April, American and Filipino forces in Bataan surrender. And in early May, the Japanese opened an assault on Corregidor island, by then the last American stronghold. On May 6, General Jonathan Wainwright, one of the two generals you write about here. On May 6th, General Wainwright surrenders Corregidor, ending organized resistance to the Japanese.

 

This is one of the worst American military defeats in American history. Why did the defeat prove so bitter and tell us what MacArthur was doing hightailing it out of there? I'm putting it provocatively because it's an issue. Explain that.

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

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: How many?

>> Jonathan Horn: Nearly eighty thousand United States troops, mostly Filipinos-

>> Peter Robinson: In Singapore.

>> Ian W. Toll: More hundred thousand.

>> Peter Robinson: A hundred thousand? All right, so these are two. The Japanese take Singapore. Churchill's beside himself because it's such a blow to British morale for a hundred thousand men to lay down their arms in surrender.

 

And when then we do the same thing in Bataan.

>> Jonathan Horn: Well, I think one difference is that if you look at the situation, this goes to your question, why was MacArthur withdrawn from the Philippines?

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Jonathan Horn: If you look at the situation in February and March 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 Americans see what they so desperately wanna see, which is evidence that we are fighting back against the Japanese.

 

And that fight has become synonymous with the name Douglas MacArthur. And that happens for a very simple reason. There's only one means of communication with the outside world, that is the radio. Douglas MacArthur is in control of the radio. And the communiqués he issues tend to mention only one person, Douglas MacArthur.

 

Now, I think it's fair to say to MacArthur, I think he was willing to stay in the Philippines, and he was willing to die. I do not think he was willing to become a prisoner of war. He said over and over again, the Japanese would never take him alive.

 

And they ultimately didn't take him alive because a decision is made in Washington to order MacArthur out of the Philippines.

>> Peter Robinson: That decision is made by FDR himself, or at least approved by FDR himself. And why did they take that decision?

>> Jonathan Horn: Well, the order is given to order MacArthur out of the Philippines because it is seen that he is too important to go down with the ship.

 

And of course, if you look at it on the other way, it would seem to be an incredibly dishonorable act for the captain to desert the sinking ship. But there's this other attitude that-

>> Peter Robinson: This is why it's controversial eight decades later.

>> Jonathan Horn: Right, right, but there's this other attitude that he is too important to go down with his ship.

 

And now MacArthur himself tells the story that he made the decision for two reasons. One, he thinks he'll be could be court-martialed unless he obeys. Now, that seems really very unlikely to me. The order did come from Franklin Roosevelt.

>> Peter Robinson: And it was in the form of an order.

 

 

>> Jonathan Horn: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: He was not given options.

>> Jonathan Horn: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: The commander in Chief said leave.

>> Jonathan Horn: Now, would they have court-martialed him for disobeying an order, refusing to abandon his men? Politics were very high on the list of considerations that went into the decision. And if ordering the general out of the Philippines looks bad, court-martialing the general for refusing to go looks worse.

 

So I think that's extremely unlikely. Now, the other reason MacArthur gives for his agreement to go is he says he is convinced that he can make a return to the Philippines from Australia almost immediately. Now, if he really believed that, it's almost delusional. He knows that the Navy is not able to break the Japanese blockade of the Philippines.

 

And he also knows that there are not supplies and other equipment necessary to launch an invasion back toward the Philippines in Australia at the present moment. But he says, I think he almost allows himself to be deluded on this point in as he makes his way to Australia.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: All right, so you don't hold it against him.

>> Jonathan Horn: The people on Bataan held it against him.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, so now Bataan and the so-called Bataan Death March, this is something 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 they began to realize the way the Japanese treated prisoners. And later we'll come to it again in a 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 is shocking to the American conscience, shocking to the American sense.

 

Describe this. Go into it a bit.

>> Ian W. Toll: The death march.

>> Peter Robinson: Well, the death march. Let's start with the death march. What was it?

>> Ian W. Toll: It was the first and most notorious of the Japanese atrocities against surrendered prisoners. They had not made any adequate plans to deal with the number of prisoners that they had in Bataan.

 

So they essentially just sort of marched them at gunpoint out of the peninsula. Many of them were very ill or wounded-

>> Peter Robinson: And by then they hadn't had proper nutrition for weeks, at least, isn't that right?

>> Jonathan Horn: They were living on a thousand calories a day. These are men who were supposed to be fighting in foxholes.

 

But if you were living on thousand calories a day, you could barely get out of bed.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Ian W. Toll: And as you say, shocked the American people. I think it aroused a sense of peculiar sense of hatred for the Japanese that we didn't ever even really have against the Germans, because the Germans, although they treated the Soviet prisoners very badly, by and large, they adhered to the international standards with the treatment of American and allied prisoners.

 

And so this is part of what explains this kind of searing hatred animosity that was felt by the Americans for the Japanese.

>> Jonathan Horn: If I might.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yes, please.

>> Jonathan Horn: In fact, it was censored from the American people for a time.

>> Peter Robinson: Is that so?

>> Jonathan Horn: We didn't know about the Bataan Death March immediately.

 

And when we first got word of it, it was considered too explosive to share with the American people. And we're worried that the Japanese might 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 news of the Bataan Death March, his reaction, as recorded, was, they will pay.

>> Peter Robinson: And you quote, Jonathan, in your book, you quote a letter. General Wainwright, if I'm remembering this correctly, was not actually part of the Bataan Death March, but he spent a good long time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

 

Now he's a commanding officer. So they would have extended whatever professional courtesy, so 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 for being thin early in his life.

 

But his weight has fallen to 145 pounds, less.

>> Jonathan Horn: 125 pounds.

>> Peter Robinson: 125 pounds.

>> Jonathan Horn: 125 pounds, he's a 6 foot 2 man. His nickname in college at West Point was skinny, but he's not skinny like me. Not like he was skinny in the tough sort. And that is the way he's able to smuggle news, he is able to eventually send word back home.

 

And that's the way he's able to smuggle news of his mistreatment, by indicating that he's no longer. He weighs only now as much as he did when he first started as a cadet at West Point. And that's a significant point of intelligence that he's able to get past Japanese sensors.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: I see.

>> Jonathan Horn: But there was no professional respect from the Japanese for General Wainwright. The Japanese had a code, and it did not include surrender, and for a general to surrender was just simply disgraceful and unthinkable. And for them, they really only had one remedy, which was suicide, and so he was considered an oddity in his captivity.

 

Now, of course, the Japanese knew that Westerners did do this. 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 encompassed all the Philippines. He could have gone to one of the lower islands on Mindanao and hopped on a B17 and maybe got into Australia, too.

 

But he makes his vow that he's gonna stay with his men because, as he writes, no other course of action would be honorable. And so he knows when he writes those words that he's going to become a prisoner of the Japanese. He's already seen, as you put it, that the Japanese themselves don't believe in surrender.

 

And a people who don't believe in the concept of surrender are not likely to treat prisoners of war well.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, every episode that you mentioned, we could talk about for hours, we can't do this with television, 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 but unbroken Japanese advances, come three days in early June 1942, the Battle of Midway. Ian Toll in Pacific crucible, Midway blunted the tip of the Japanese spear. We'll come to the battle itself in a moment but explain the strategic importance to the United States of blunting that spear.

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: 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, and they were threatening really to run right down through the axis of southern Oceania, the island groups north of Australia.

 

And potentially severing our sea communications with Australia and New Zealand, which our strategists in Washington saw as a kind of a critical issue. We needed to maintain those places as places where we could rebuild our military power for the eventual counteroffensive that MacArthur would lead in the south.

 

And so blunting the tip of the spear meant essentially getting rid of some of their aircraft carriers that was the tip of the spear. Their ability to strike across great distances with these very, very adept carrier air groups. And we knocked out four of their best fleet carriers with all of their airplanes in that battle.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: It was a very near run battle, wasn't it?

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

>> Peter Robinson: Could I ask just a background question to that battle?

>> Ian W. Toll: Yep.

>> Peter Robinson: 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.

>> Peter Robinson: Our naval command wanted to attack fast.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: In some ways, whether we were ready or not.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Why?

>> Ian W. Toll: 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 overall strategy of the pacific.

 

 

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

>> Ian W. Toll: 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.

>> Peter Robinson: I see.

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: 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 for what we were gonna do in the pacific. And he wanted to get the war underway early because he wanted to essentially try to hit the Japanese before they had a chance to really dig in.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: I see.

>> Ian W. Toll: And I think it was partly about, it was considerations of morale, the feeling that we need to be fighting from the beginning. Our aircraft carriers had survived the attack on Pearl harbor just because of an accident they happened to not be important. And we had what was really an extraordinary intelligence coup by intercepting and decoding enough of the Japanese plans.

 

That we were able to anticipate this move against Midway and Nimitz was able to use that intelligence.

>> Peter Robinson: Nimitz was.

>> Ian W. Toll: Chester Nimitz was the commander of the Pacific fleet.

>> Peter Robinson: And he was in Pearl Harbor.

>> Ian W. Toll: In Pearl harbor.

>> Peter Robinson: So the major figures, but there are a lot of important figures, but the two major figures would be Ernest King.

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: Yep.

>> Peter Robinson: Admiral King here in Washington.

>> Ian W. Toll: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: And then admiral Nimitz in Pearl harbor.

>> Ian W. Toll: His subordinate, that's right, theater commander in the Pacific. And so Nimitz, with this gift of essentially knowing most of what the Japanese plan was to move against Midway, which is this little atoll at the end of the about 1,000 miles from Hawaii.

 

Was able to position his three aircraft carriers, was all he had, to launch sort of a punishing surprise attack on the Japanese task force while their planes were away bombing Midway. And he essentially was able to sort of use this intelligence in order to put our carriers into a position to win what was a pretty chaotic battle.

 

 

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

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

 

If even one of those Japanese aircraft 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 of this might have gone differently.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: 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's overwhelming industrial military might. So this correlation of forces changes at Midway,

>> Ian W. Toll: Yep.

>> Peter Robinson: 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: Yeah, well, we were mobilizing very quickly, and this really is maybe the single most extraordinary story of America's involvement in the Second World War was how quickly we were able to retool our economy and put it on a war footing.

 

And so we understood well that we would be able to overwhelm Japan by sheer weight of ships and planes and tanks and troops, given enough time. And Midway was important, particularly because it was early in the war. It was six months after Pearl Harbor. It was a devastating counterpunch in the early stages of the war.

 

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 continue this process of mobilizing, pouring out these military assets which would be used to strangle Japan.

>> Peter Robinson: 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: Well, you have the critical question at this point in Europe is what's gonna happen on the Eastern Front.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

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

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: It already looks that way.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so my amateur's view feeling was that in June of 42, Hitler's at maximum expansion, but people who, you can already see that he's gonna actually begin contracting.

>> Ian W. Toll: I mean, if you look at what our military leaders are saying, by mid-1942, there's a growing sense of confidence that we're gonna win this war both in Europe.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Both in Europe and-

>> Ian W. Toll: And in the Pacific, that Hitler has bitten off more than he can chew in Russia, that our supplies are beginning to get through to Russia, and that with our help and the help of our allies, the British, eventually they would be able to turn the tide of that war.

 

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 politics that 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 treat the Pacific war as our primary theater, that the Japanese were our real enemy, that they had attacked us, that we should place the emphasis, we should be sending most of our military power to the Pacific.

 

And by scoring this extraordinary victory so early in the war, I think gave FDR a little more breathing room to pursue a Europe first global strategy, which was the correct strategy, I think.

>> Peter Robinson: Anything you'd care to?

>> Jonathan Horn: Well, I would say that MacArthur himself never accepted the European strategy.

 

For him, the Pacific always remained the key. And specifically his theater in the Pacific, his return to the Philippines.

>> Ian W. Toll: Absolutely.

>> Jonathan Horn: And so every-

>> Ian W. Toll: A pattern continued in the Koreas.

>> Jonathan Horn: Right, and every action Ian is talking about, MacArthur sees, and his response is, okay, the next logical step is send more forces to me.

 

 

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

>> Jonathan Horn: That is well put, I think that's well put.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 of Guadalcanal takes place, forcing the Japanese to withdraw from the island. In November of 1943, the Battle of Tarawa, did I pronounce that correctly?

>> Ian W. Toll: Tarawa.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 get from all this comes from your books, boys. So this brings us back to the Philippines. On October 20, 1944, General MacArthur lands on the Island of Leyte.

 

Did I pronounce that correctly?

>> Jonathan Horn: Leyte, yes.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 full operational control of both the army and the Navy, and the Navy refused.

 

Explain, and this is the moment, of course, tell us what was involved in the recapture of the Philippine Islands, but this is the moment to sketch out the character and person of General MacArthur.

>> Jonathan Horn: Well, first of all, I think you have to say that even months before this return to the Philippines was no certain thing.

 

There were other people, including Admiral King especially, who believed that returning to the Philippines was a mistake, we were advancing along two axes. The Navy was coming, taking the central axis across the Pacific, and MacArthur was coming up through New Guinea toward the Philippines. And you can see them, they're coming together toward a point.

 

They're both headed toward the Philippines. But there's some attitude that the Philippines should be bypassed, and by that meaning, don't fight a battle there. Just leave the Japanese forces occupying the Philippines to rot on the vine as it said.

>> Peter Robinson: The Philippines were nothing but trouble in the first place from a military point of view.

 

 

>> Jonathan Horn: And, well, but they were also American soil.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, all right.

>> Jonathan Horn: 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: I said to the people of the Philippines, whence I came, I shall return.

 

 

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

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: George Marshall, Chief of Staff, army chief of Staff, running things from Washington.

>> Jonathan Horn: Right, in 1944, as this debate is happening about whether to go to Taiwan or to the Philippines. And George Marshall writes, we all have to remember what our great objective is, which is defeating Japan.

 

And here is the Army Chief of Staff needing to remind the most important army commander in the Pacific what the great objective is. It's defeating Japan, and MacArthur himself admits that is not my primary objective, my primary objective is to return to the Philippines. And he even says that in his memoir, well, afterwards, that had always been his primary objective.

 

We had a moral vow to return because we had failed the people of the Philippines, we had failed our prisoners of war on the Philippines, and he felt America had been forced out at the point of a bayonet, and we had to return the same way.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 overview of the mass of this battle and explain the significance.

>> Ian W. Toll: Well, it really was several different battles that got grouped into this heading, battle of Leyte Gulf.

 

Somewhat of a misnomer in that no part of 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. It was really the last concerted Japanese effort to bring about a big naval battle, which they hoped to win in the hopes that that would then trigger the end of the war through some sort of a negotiated settlement.

 

 

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

>> Ian W. Toll: They recognized that they were being overpowered by a bigger, stronger country. And they had their historical precedent of the Russo Japanese War in which they had scored this extraordinary victory, wiping out the Russian fleet at the battle of Tsushima.

 

This Russian fleet that had sailed all the way around the world.

>> Peter Robinson: That year is.

>> Ian W. Toll: That's 1905, and then that's followed by negotiations in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in which President Theodore Roosevelt is mediating between them and a peace treaty is struck. Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize for that.

 

So in the minds of the Japanese, this history was very much front of mind for them. And so they knew that they needed eventually some sort of a negotiated peace treaty with the Americans. And what they hoped to do is score another Tsushima, essentially another devastating naval victory that then would open the way to negotiations and the end of the war.

 

Many of the fleet commanders who were involved in sailing this large Japanese fleet into battle are very pessimistic about their chances, and yet they feel that the honor of the Japanese Navy really requires them to fight this battle. And the result is a pretty devastating defeat, it really is the last.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: They were right to be pessimistic.

>> Ian W. Toll: 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 task force just north of Leyte, surprise attack by the biggest battleships in the world. And all of that was due to sort of a controversial decision by 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 attacks occurred during this battle. There was every kind of naval fighting. There was the last battle line fight in the fight between battleships and the battle of Surigao Strait. There were the carrier fight off of Ngano, there were submarine attacks on both sides.

 

There were the appearance of the kamikaze, which became the single most important weapon for the Japanese naval weapon in the last year of the war. And so all of this happened in a very compressed period of time. But that really was the last time that the Japanese Navy was able to act together as a fleet.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Jonathan.

>> Jonathan Horn: Well, by the way, they almost succeeded, it's important to say it was a lot of luck.

>> Peter Robinson: Another near run.

>> Jonathan Horn: Yeah, exactly, and if they had, it would not have been impossible to imagine them destroying MacArthur's invasion of Leyte. So, it was It was a near victory that turned into a calamity for the Japanese.

 

It also shows, I think, that the Japanese realized that losing the Philippines was a catastrophe for them, that they even embarked on this expedition, on this risky plan. But it has to be said, it almost succeeded.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 watching Second World War shows on television, which no longer even exist, of course, that war in which my own father took place in the Pacific, that war seemed somehow alive, current. I read your two books and the passage of 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 to the Civil War in my mind. And so, you said a couple of times that, or you, I think it was you who said the radio communication and MacArthur was in charge of radio. And you know, there are going to be kids listening to this to whom that does not compute.

 

What do you mean I have my iPhone right here, I can talk? How can anybody be in charge of radio? But I wonder if you can just both of you actually take a moment. Well, Ian, perhaps at sea, and then we'll come to the land battle for the Philippines.

 

Who's in charge of the battle of Leyte Gulf? Who coordinates this? Nimitz is back in Pearl Harbor, he's not in charge of anybody, this is individual commanders on individual. The amount of personal initiative, the way training and some sense of honor is enough to force men to very knowingly risk death and mayhem and maiming themselves and sailors is just astonishing.

 

No, Viewed from today, is it not?

>> Ian W. Toll: Well, I mean, it's an extraordinary chapter in our history and in World history. It's the largest, bloodiest, most historically 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, and that's been a very important part of the way the war is remembered.

 

It's partly why we still find it so fascinating. I think maybe we have a sense that we were better as a country then than we are now.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 and Filipino guerrillas take Manila, although the fighting in the city continues for a month. Also in February, the Japanese withdraw to fortified positions in the Sierra Madre Mountains, where fighting 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 them correct my pronunciation is one of the longest engagements in the entire Pacific War.

 

The Japanese are very good at withdrawing and hunkering down. How did the 6th army perform? Was MacArthur a great general?

>> Jonathan Horn: Well, I think, first of all, it's important to say that the Battle of Manila was One of the bloodiest and most 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. The Japanese had stayed in the city and had not left, MacArthur himself had assumed from the start.

>> Peter Robinson: Manila's how big, roughly, population.

>> Jonathan Horn: This is a major city.

>> Peter Robinson: Million?

>> Jonathan Horn: Yeah, about, and its population is swell during wartime, but people are now realizing that maybe it's good to get out of Manila.

 

And MacArthur's operating under this assumption that there was no major battle for Manila in 1898. The Spanish sort of did a play act battle and then left, and that there had been no major battle in 1942. He had declared the city an open city himself and left to Corregidor because he wanted to save Manila, this is his home.

 

But the Japanese, in the end, and remember what you said, they don't believe in surrender, in the end, MacArthur is planning a victory parade for Manila. But what's happening is the Japanese are actually fighting block by block, and they are destroying whatever they can't hold, and that includes the people of Manila.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: 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.

>> Jonathan Horn: It takes MacArthur by surprise.

>> Peter Robinson: It takes MacArthur by surprise, right.

>> Jonathan Horn: 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 forces on Luzon than you know about, and him underplaying it, being certain that the Japanese won't make a stand in Manila. But they do make a last stand in Manila, and the result is absolute catastrophe. The American forces do come in, but they 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 in Manila, this destruction is 100,000.

>> Peter Robinson: That must include civilians. My goodness. All right.

>> Jonathan Horn: Because the Japanese are essentially killing and mutilating everybody as they are abandoning their positions.

 

MacArthur refuses to use air power on the city, but he eventually consents to use artillery, which can wreck a city as well as anything. But the blame for this clearly rests on the Japanese. And it's the great irony of MacArthur's vow to return to the Philippines. He believes this is a city he considers to be his home.

 

It's been his objective to return to the city, and it's been his obsession, and it Ends with the city he loves being absolutely destroyed.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

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

>> Jonathan Horn: The pearl of the Orient.

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: And a lot of Filipino historians have speculated, you know, how history might have been different if that city in particular had been preserved. It might have put the country on a much better post war path.

>> Peter Robinson: So why would it be? This is this difference between the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific and the way they're remembered.

 

It feels to me as though this is subjective, so I may simply be mistaken, but it feels to me as though our generation has a much clearer. I can close my eyes and call to mind one photograph after another of a devastated Berlin. I don't think I can recall seeing a photograph, except in your books of a devastated Manila.

 

Somehow that doesn't seem as present in the American consciousness. Why would that be?

>> Jonathan Horn: I think it's because people are more familiar with Europe. The geography of the Pacific is a mystery for most Americans. And even when we take the Philippines for the first time in 1898, the joke is that William McKinley doesn't even know where 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. And it's difficult even now for Americans to understand the geography. And you read it right now as tensions rise with China. Even now, I think Americans read the geography of the Pacific and they're sort of reading over it, not really sure where these various islands are actually are.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Right. Okay, island hopping again. Timeline. February, March 1945. The Battle of Iwo Jima. The Marines capture the island after brutal fighting. March 9 and 10, 1945. Operation Meeting House. The massive incendiary raid on Tokyo is carried out by the US Army Air Forces under the command of Major General Curtis LeMay.

 

And incendiary attacks on Japanese cities continue for the rest of the war. April to June 1945. The Battle of Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific. Okay, so we're moving into the final phase of the war. Ian explained the strategic significance of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. And if Americans have trouble finding the Philippines, who, where are.

 

Who cares about Iwo Jima and Okinawa? And yet if every American who cares at all about a military history can picture anything, it's the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. How can this be? How did those two small islands come to be of such importance that thousands fought and died for them?

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: 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 from the southern end of Kyushu, which is the SouthernMost of the four Japanese islands. So we're closing the ring now around the Japanese home islands.

 

And Iwo Jima really was taken for the purpose of essentially clearing the flight path for the B29 bombers that are now, as you say, burning down Japanese cities operating from the Marianas. Iwo Jima's on just about a direct flight line from the Marianas north to Japan and then Okinawa.

 

After prolonged debate, Raymond Spruance, who is the great fleet commander, had argued that Okinawa should be our base of operations. Finally, they'd ruled out taking Taiwan, judging that it was too large and that taking Okinawa would give us most of the same benefits on an island that was closer to Japan.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Our base of operations for what?

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

>> Peter Robinson: All right, the incendiary raids. After taking command of air operations against Japan in early 1945, LeMay. This is General LeMay, shifts from high altitude attacks. These bombers are designed for high altitude attacks.

 

It turns out they're very inaccurate. And he invents, as far as I can tell, low altitude nighttime incendiary raids. And what's he up to there?

>> Ian W. Toll: Well, they were just adapting to the use of this new new plane, the B29, the biggest military aircraft that had ever gone into general production.

 

They were getting enormous numbers of them off the Boeing assembly lines in the States. And this had been a tremendous investment that, that the Congress had agreed to, and they wanted results. It had been designed as a plane that could carry a heavy bomb load to a great distance.

 

And really the army air forces between the wars were trying to develop these techniques for precision bombing of targets. There was a device called the Norden bombsight, a great promise was held out for this thing. And, essentially, we were not getting the results that LeMay wanted. And so he thought a shift to a different kind of a tactic, going in at 5,000ft instead of 25,000ft.

 

Going in at night, and just scattering these napalm incendiaries over the most thickly settled part of these wooden and paper cities would essentially deal a sort of a devastating blow that would SAP the Japanese ability to carry on the war. And perhaps convince the leadership that there was no option but surrender.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: 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 than 1,600 tons of bombs on Tokyo, including napalm, jellied gasoline, so forth. Destroying some 16 square miles of the city, much of which, of course, is constructed of wooden structures.

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: Yep.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 ourselves simply inured to attacks on civilians, or is there a purely military justification for those firebombings?

 

What's going on?

>> Ian W. Toll: Well, I mean, I think there was a step by step sort of a process. Prior to the war, our government and our military had been very emphatic that air power should not be used to hit civilian targets. And it had taken really a very strong stand on the ethics and the morality of bombing civilian targets.

 

As you say, the Germans bombed the hell out of British cities during the blitz, arousing a very understandable feeling among the British people that they wanted retribution for that. When we got into the war against Germany, we were trying to destroy their war machine by hitting plants. So, you go from trying to hit precision factories, bridges, railheads.

 

The next step is, well, let's hit the worker housing around the plants in order to, dehouse them, was the term. And then from there you go to the step of let's just start bombing these cities. And then you take the final step, which I know 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 not just do it with one bomb.

 

And so the point is that you would not have gone from zero to four on that scale, it had to be a step by step kind of a thing. And this is in the context of a tremendous war, a brutal war in which atrocities are being committed and a sense by 1945 that we needed to end this thing as quickly as possible.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: That all sounds right to you?

>> Jonathan Horn: Yeah, I think you also have to look at the situation, which is there are costs to not taking these measures as well, which is these things aren't happening in a vacuum. There are people all across Asia suffering at the hands of the Japanese, they're carrying out massacres and atrocities wherever they have gone.

 

And if we are headed toward a discussion, I assume-

>> Peter Robinson: Of course, I mean-

>> Peter Robinson: We'll release this on the 80th anniversary of, it'll be in August-

>> Jonathan Horn: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: So there will be a lot of talk about this.

>> Jonathan Horn: There was no option on the table that wasn't going to include huge amounts of casualties.

 

I mean, these would have been American casualties if they had invaded, it would have been Japanese civilians. And so, Churchill, I think, puts it best in his history of World War II, which is there really wasn't a decision to make about the atomic bomb. We think back and say there must have 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 just a 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 Hiroshima, 70 to 80,000 are killed instantly.

 

By the end of the year, radiation sickness raises the toll to about 100,000. Note, by the way, that 100,000 had already died in two nights of firebombing in Tokyo. On August 9th, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, some 40,000 die instantly, by the end of the year, the death toll rises to 70,000.

 

I should note that these figures, there are differing estimates and so forth.

>> Ian W. Toll: There's a lot of guesswork involved.

>> Peter Robinson: Right, and on August 15, at noon, Japanese time, the Jewel voice broadcast, permitting his subjects to hear his voice for the first time, the Emperor Hirohito announces that Japan has surrendered.

 

All right, it'll take a moment to set this up, but I'd like to set it up because every American has to think this through, and I'm just fascinated to hear what professional historians make of it. Two quotations, the first comes from the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. She's writing a 1958 pamphlet opposing Oxford University's decision to award Harry Truman an honorary degree.

 

The war's over, the 50s are, Truman's now a former president, she won't have it. Quote, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki we are not confronted with a borderline case. In the bombing of these cities it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end. I have long been puzzled by the common cant about President Truman's courage in making this decision.

 

Mr. Truman was brave because, and only 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 early nuclear age and a Catholic priest. Quote, the atomic bombs allowed the emperor and the peace faction, so called peace faction, in the Japanese government to negotiate an end to the war.

 

Of course, the United States eventually could have defeated Japan without the atomic bomb, but all the viable alternative scenarios to secure victory would have meant significantly higher Allied casualties and higher Japanese casualties. Arguing that dropping the bombs was the least-harmful option to President Truman will hardly be persuasive to those who see everything in a sharp black-and-white focus.

 

Yet this is how I see it. If someone can present to me a viable and more moral way to have ended World War II, I will change my position, close quote. Ian, what do you make of Elizabeth Anscombe and Father Miscamble?

>> Ian W. Toll: Well we're gonna be debating, Debating the morality of the atomic bombings forever.

 

This is not. We're not going to settle this debate. This is one of the most closely scrutinized issues of World War II. We now have had four or five generations of scholars doing the pick and shovel archival work. We understand very clearly what happened. And the answer as to the whether whether it was the right decision or not is not going to be found there.

 

It's really.

>> Peter Robinson: It's not in the documents.

>> Ian W. Toll: 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 that were developed in the 60s and 70s. One was that the.

 

The real purpose of the bombing of Hiroshima was to intimidate the Soviets. This atomic diplomacy kind of a concept, I think that has not fared well in more recent scholarship, although it is clear that 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.

 

It is not true that the Japanese government was looking for a way to surrender, but it is true that there was a peace party.

>> Peter Robinson: Take a moment on that one, because that is still in the air.

>> Ian W. Toll: There are some who say, and this is where the story gets complicated and complexity sort of unavoidable here in this story.

 

But there was a peace party within the Japanese government that wanted to bring Moscow, the Soviet government, in to mediate talks with the United States, looking toward a sort of a negotiated surrender. Again, they're looking back on this model of the Russo Japanese War. Stalin is stringing them along in a very sort of a cunning, devious way, characteristically with his intention of attacking the Japanese forces in Manchuria as soon as he could move his army into position in Siberia to do that.

 

And he had promised at Yalta, he had promised us that he would join the Pacific War within three months of the fall of Germany. Our government, meanwhile, has broken the Japanese diplomatic codes. So we have a window into what's happening in Tokyo. We're reading their diplomatic traffic. We know that they're urgently trying to bring Moscow in as a mediator.

 

And we have evidence that the Emperor is behind this effort. So we know that there is a part of the Japanese government that wants to end the war and may be willing to accept surrender on close to terms that we would find acceptable. But the military leaders were determined to.

 

To fight to the end and would have prevented any kind of move towards surrender. The atomic bombings and the Russia coming into the war, which they did the same day we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Those two events provided the kind of shock that allowed for this final process where these two deadlock sides of the ruling circle went to the emperor and said, we need you to decide.

 

And he said, we're going to surrender.

>> Peter Robinson: It is absolutely astonishing. Again, correct. It is astonishing that the war cabinet in Japan, after two atomic weapons and the Russian entry into Manuria, is still deadlocked.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: They have to go to the Emperor to get the deciding vote for surrender is that, that is correct, isn't it?

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: Yes, it is.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, so we have. I mean, there's a peace faction, but there's also a faction which is willing to see Japan reduced to cinders out of this note. I mean, there is such a thing as a death wish in some weird way.

>> Ian W. Toll: It's the army.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: It's the army.

>> Ian W. Toll: Really.

>> Peter Robinson: Yeah. Okay.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Jonathan.

>> Jonathan Horn: 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 necessarily being had in real time in 1945. That's, if you look at the options.

 

If you're starving Japan would have surely resulted in more civilian deaths. Invasion would have resulted. I mean, that was something that was very much in the mind of American policymakers. How many Americans would die invading 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 Japanese civilians would have died. You have prisoners of war in Japan who were going to die. 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 in the context of the moment.

>> Peter Robinson: So let's take a moment on that one, because I find this absolutely fascinating, and I believe it says something about what they were actually thinking.

 

And if you read Elizabeth Anscombe, she believes that Harry Truman made a decision and that there's a kind of calculus that was weighed and he chose the wrong and evil, but that isn't the way it happened. Isn't that correct that we know that? The peculiar thing is that after the war, Harry Truman did take responsibility and said he made the decision.

 

We have no documentary evidence that there was a presidential decision. And indeed, the notion that the use of atomic weapons is reserved to the commander in chief is only codified after the war that there was no need for the President to make a decision because everybody understood that if any weapon we got that would help us win the war more quickly would be used.

 

Final note on this. I once asked Jonathan and I belong to a club for former presidential speechwriters. And when I first joined that, started attending meetings of that club, there was a man called George Elsey who had written for Harry Truman and had been with Truman in Potsdam.

 

And to the extent you'll see it in certain histories, there's a note asking Truman's permission to release a certain press release explaining the bomb. And on the other side, Truman says, approved, but not before such and such a date, which is the date on which he will have left Potsdam.

 

He doesn't want to have to explain this to Stalin in detail in person. And the man to whom he handed that to have it transmitted back to Washington was George Elsey. And I asked Elsey, was that a decision? Implicitly, was that a presidential decision? Now, George Elsey was in his 90s by the time I asked him this, but he said, you don't understand.

 

And it was the sort of an assertion of nobody could understand what it was like. We wanted to end the war. There was never any question that if that experiment, the Trinity explosion in the New Mexico desert, if it was successful, nobody doubted that that bomb would be used.

 

That's my understanding from talking to a then very old man, but. But that's supported. And that is what the documents indicate.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah. There was only one written order to drop the atomic bombs and that was written by George Marshall's deputy in Washington, Governor Handy. But Truman ordered the use of atomic bombs.

 

He did it verbally to Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War. And there are a few interesting wrinkles to this story. In his diary, Truman wrote the day he gave this order, he said, I've told Stimson that we're going to warn the Japanese and that we are not going to use this weapon against civilian target.

 

It's be going to. Gonna be a military target, this extraordinary passage is sitting there in his diary. And I think historians have seen that as a sort of a ham fisted effort to sort of shape the perceptions of historians and biographers, knowing that they'd be reading the President's diary.

 

Of course, anything the President writes in his diary is gonna be important. But this is not what was ordered, what was ordered was dropped two bombs on two of the four cities that have been selected by the target committee as of a certain date. As you say that he wanted to be at sea when the first one was dropped, and then that order was put in writing in Washington and it was carried out.

 

And so, what's Truman doing there? I mean, is it just an effort to sort of shape the way historians, obviously that wasn't gonna work. Or did it show that he had real pangs of conscience, and that maybe if he had been president, if he hadn't just stepped into the role recently.

 

If he'd been president for a year, if he sort of found his footing, if he's more confident, he would have given that order, and then history might have played out very differently.

>> Jonathan Horn: Can you imagine the scandal if Americans had carried out this invasion of the main islands of Japan, and it had gone anywhere close to how we think it might have gone.

 

With huge numbers of casualties, and then the American people had discovered he had an atomic bomb. In the 1945 calculus, it would have been the largest scandal in the history of the United States.

>> Peter Robinson: 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,- Chief of staff is a complicated term. It sort of begins, but he's the military representative to the White House. He becomes very close to Roosevelt and he stays into the Truman administration because of course, as you point out.

 

Roosevelt dies completely unexpectedly in April, and Harry Truman is dropping the bomb in August, things are moving extremely fast. So Leahy's on hand. Admiral Leahy and Dwight Eisenhower both in later years said that they opposed the use of the atomic bomb. And Edward Teller, who spent his final years at the Hoover Institution and was on the Manhattan Project.

 

He appears in the movie Oppenheimer, not he, but someone playing him. Edward Teller, told me to my face that what he wanted to do, what he told everybody at the Manhattan Project we should do, was drop an atmospheric demonstration over Japan. As far as I can tell, these are three redoubtable figures.

 

As far as I'm aware, there is no written evidence that they made these suggestions or opposed the use of the bomb, or called for an atmospheric demonstration at the time, is that correct?

>> Jonathan Horn: There was the suggestion of using the bomb on a non city, I believe.

>> Peter Robinson: Is that so?

 

 

>> Jonathan Horn: It was dismissed as basically-

>> Peter Robinson: It was dismissed, okay.

>> Jonathan Horn: It was thought that it would not be effective, it would not send the right message to the Japanese.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah, no, it's a very tangled story, you see in this you will see Stimson at various times saying we should demonstrate the bomb.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Stimson was Secretary of War.

>> Ian W. Toll: Secretary of War. You'll see Truman agreeing with these suggestions, so it really is, as you say, these events are compressed in time. There's a lot happening at the 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 amount of important diplomatic work that's happening.

>> Peter Robinson: I think they didn't quite know what the bomb was.

>> Ian W. Toll: No, you're right, I think that there was a sort of a sense that this is the next step.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Ian W. Toll: We've already been burning 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 is different, this is a different category. We're here at the Hoover Institution, so we should mention that of the many people who criticized the decision to use atomic bombs was the former President.

 

Herbert Hoover said that he was revolted by it, and used similar strong language often throughout the years after the bombings. And it wasn't just Leahy and Eisenhower, it was Ernest King, it was Chester Nimitz.

>> Peter Robinson: King as well?

>> Ian W. Toll: Absolutely.

>> Peter Robinson: King and Nimitz as well?

>> Ian W. Toll: Yep, well in private, they didn't publicly the way Eisenhower, Howard and Leahy criticized, but in private they made it clear that they regretted the use of the atomic bomb against a city.

 

 

>> Jonathan Horn: MacArthur did too.

>> Ian W. Toll: MacArthur did too. MacArthur said that he was, I think he used very strong language, again in private, but they were-

>> Peter Robinson: Even William Halsey?

>> Jonathan Horn: Halsey-q

>> Ian W. Toll: Killed-

>> Peter Robinson: The extremely aggressive-

>> Ian W. Toll: Kill Japs, kill more Japs, he said it was a mistake.

 

So the military leadership of the United States, I would say you could almost say that the top echelon of the military retrospectively regretted the use of the bomb against a city.

>> Peter Robinson: But Ernest King and Chester Nimitz were not saying it was a mistake to use the bomb, they should have let us invade.

 

 

>> Ian W. Toll: No, I believe that they thought it was unnecessary. And the thing is that it is quite possibly true that Japan would have surrendered without the use of the atomic bomb. It would have taken longer and even an additional two weeks in the war. Stalin might have swept into Korea, he wanted Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan.

 

Hokkaido might have spent 45 years on the other side of the Iron Curtain, that easily could have happened, if the war had lasted two weeks longer. Hokkaido might have been the equivalent of East Germany, so it was important to win the war quickly. And I think partly what the bombs did is they stopped the clock on the war right when the Red army was starting to move, and that had long term consequences in Asia.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Can I, sorry, I find it absolutely fascinating hearing what professionals make of all this. Let me read you from an essay, famous essay, intentionally provocative essay, 1981 Paul Fussell,

>> Ian W. Toll: Yep.

>> Peter Robinson: Who served in Europe-

>> Ian W. Toll: Thank God for the bomb.

>> Peter Robinson: Thank God for the atomic bomb.

 

And he's responding here to a comment by the late economist, now late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, that dropping the bombs made a difference in Japanese surrender. And Galbraith said of at most two or three weeks, okay, here's Fussell. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9th and the actual surrender on the 15th, not two weeks, but less than that, the war pursued its accustomed course.

 

On 12 August, eight captured American fliers were executed, heads chopped off. The fifty-first United States submarine Bonefish 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 happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith.

 

What did he do in the war? He worked in the office of Price Administration in Washington. I don't demand that he experience having his ass shot off, I merely note That he didn't, okay, that's vivid, it's colorful, it's intentionally provocative, but it sets up an important question. What degree of deference do we owe to the actual experience and judgment of those who were there?

 

 

>> Jonathan Horn: Well, I think that's history. And it's very easy to look back on what happened in the past, and it's something that I think Americans become too comfortable with looking back and saying they would have done things differently. But it's also important to say that we are denying, in some sense, the agency of the Japanese themselves.

 

They were the ones who were keeping this war going. They were the ones who had started this aggression and territorial expansion that led to the war. They were the ones that attacked Pearl Harbor, and they were the ones who had this philosophy of no surrender and that led to this terrible.

 

Which we can all agree is terrible, but terrible point that this became necessary to do in 1945.

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

 

It might as well be the First World War, or it might almost as well be 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 both write bestsellers, I'm delighted to say.

 

You both work very carefully at the craft of prose, which suggests to me that you take seriously your position in a democracy, you are performing a service for your fellow citizens. How do we convey the reality of what you describe here? Do we do the job that we need to do in teaching history, even recent history, even the history of grandparents and great grandparents, and how could we do better?

 

You must reflect on this.

>> Ian W. Toll: Yeah, I do, teaching history, you have the dilemma that you begin teaching children when they're very young, right? We want our first graders and second graders to be introduced to history. There's only so much you can get across to a child that age, right?

 

 

>> Jonathan Horn: Sure enough.

>> Ian W. Toll: You need a sort of simplified narrative, which then is going to become more complex as they get older and as you come through high school and into college. So gradually, you need to really develop the more difficult and nuanced themes have to come later.

 

Maybe some of the myths, there was some wisdom in the way that we did this in the past with children, particularly young children, teaching them some of our national myths and then letting that picture be complicated as they get older. But in general, I share the criticisms that many conservatives have had of the way history has been taught in schools, in universities.

 

And I think part of the reason people still buy books like these is because they get to a certain point in life, and they realize I didn't learn as much as I would have liked to learn when I went through school. And I think particularly people get into their 30s and their 40s and they look back on their lives and they say, I've lived through some interesting history.

 

So you're ready to sort of receive this information more when you reach a certain point. Which is another way of saying that 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 delve into these things at a later age is something that I think we'll always see, and that's natural, that's to be encouraged, I think.

 

 

>> Peter Robinson: Jonathan.

>> Jonathan Horn: You know what I think children respond to is stories about people, people making difficult decisions, children understand that more than we think. It's when we remove the people from the story and we talk about history as if it was inevitable. And the various different movements, and that you lose attention, people are interesting.

 

Biography is interesting, that needs to be part of the way we teach history to children.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, Jonathan Horn, author of The Fate Of The Generals: MacArthur Wainwright and the Epic Battle For The Philippines. Ian Toll, author of the 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 Twilight Of The Gods, War In The Western Pacific, 1944 to 1945.

 

I'm in awe of you to get the facts right and to make the prose beautiful, and you both pull it off. Ian, Jonathan, thank you.

>> Ian W. Toll: Thank you Peter.

>> Jonathan Horn: Thank you.

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

>> Speaker 6: A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

 

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor, they have been repaid manyfold, and the end is not yet.