SPEAKER_02: What you're about to hear is part six of a six part series on the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific theater. If you have not heard the earlier segments, please go check those out. You probably want to hear this in order, but there's a few of you out there who don't care about that sort of stuff. In which case, well, catch up and join us, won't you, for part six of the light and airy story that is Supernova in the East. December 7th, 1941. A date which will live in infamy.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_02: It's hardcore history. People who are knowledgeable about the Second World War, and many people are, it's one of those subjects that fascinates human beings the world over, understandably so. People who are aficionados of the Second World War knows that the rhythm of the Second World War reminds you of an opera or a musical theater production where the end is going to be like the end of the world, a Ragnarok or a Got-her-Damerang. And the whole last year of the war is whipping yourself up like a roller coaster going uphill waiting for that giant dip where you're building up to that horrific ending.
SPEAKER_02: The last year of the Second World War is the worst year of the Second World War. And the kind of numbers that demonstrate that are, for example, casualties, killings. Look at the German deaths, for example, in January 1945. That's a month that is mind-blowing. The Germans will have more than 400,000 of their soldiers, maybe closer to 450,000 of their soldiers die in that month alone. For comparison purposes, that is more military deaths than the United States suffered, all branches of service, all cause of mortality for the whole war. Historian Neil Ferguson says the German military loses more soldiers in the last year of the war than the entire rest of the war put together. And some of the latest estimates of casualty numbers suggest the Germans were losing, on average, 10,000 soldiers every day in 1945. So from January 1st to May 8th when the war ended in Europe, 10,000 a day on average. That is almost twice as many people as the United States lost at the Battle of Antietam, which many military historians consider to be the worst day in US military history and the Germans were getting it day after day after day. If you think to yourself, and this would be totally understandable, who cares, right, the Germans are reaping what they sowed, that would be fine except it's hardly just the Germans. In his book How Wars End, author Gideon Rose says that every month in 1945 between 100,000 and 250,000 non-combatants in Asia were dying again every month due to the actions of Japanese forces. These are data points, but you have to add all the other data points up too and see the conveyor belt of death, the factory assembly line of human destruction that's going on in 1945, or really the last year of the war. I mean, you don't have to really imagine too much to just know that the Holocaust is going on during this time period in Europe and people are dying in those camps every day. So every day the war continues. That tally goes up reliably. I'm reminded of a song by the rock band the MC5 from the late 1960s, early 1970s. They wrote a song which I think is about the Vietnam War and it's entitled The Human Being Lawnmower. And to me the imagery, as horrific as it is, works better for the Second World War and especially the end of the Second World War than it does for Vietnam. A lawnmower that cuts human beings instead of blades of grass, or an assembly line that's reliably heading towards a furnace or a chopping machine with people on it. And when the lead singer would say the words the human being lawnmower, he would emphasize what was going on by then saying chop chop chop chop chop. Human being lawnmower chop chop chop chop chop. That's what's going on in the last year of the war. So why is the last year of the war still going on? Neil Ferguson in his book The War of the World quotes an aide to US General Omar Bradley who is fighting the Third Reich in Europe. And the aide made this statement, Ferguson says, at the end of 1944. And the statement was, quote, if we were fighting reasonable people, they would have surrendered long ago. End quote. But they're not fighting reasonable people, clearly. They're fighting a fanatical regime in the Third Reich which is committed to going down with the ship and taking the entire country down with them. And the Japanese we've already pointed out, to outside observers who are not Japanese, it's always looked fanatical. Hitler and his cohorts know that they're not surviving the post-war period regardless. They're all going to hang at the end of a rope. So maybe that influences their decision to take everything down with them. His propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had famously said, if we have to leave, we'll close the door behind us with a slam that all the world will hear. Pity that all the German civilians need to go with them. And in the Japanese situation, their military is planning for a last-ditch stand on the home islands. If it comes to that, the army thinks they can put two and a half million Japanese soldiers into Japan's built-up cities. And then add to those numbers with a ton of civilians that, as we said in the last segment, are training with bamboo spears by this time and make life impossible for an invading army. What's the goal? What's the endgame? Well, both the Germans and the Japanese are hoping to inflict a last big blow against their enemies that causes their enemies to rethink the peace terms. Because, as even a cursory understanding of the Second World War makes clear, the peace terms are unconditional surrender. And the reason we know that is the Allies made an attempt to broadcast this, make it known to everybody. The terms are, you give up, and then we decide what we're going to do to you. Now this is controversial. After all, if the terms of surrender are going to be that harsh, the Axis powers are going to fight longer than they otherwise might. Which means the human being lawnmower, the conveyor belt of destruction continues longer, the Holocaust goes on longer, the Asian civilians die, you know, more day. I mean, just, it's controversial. But there's an attitude, if you look at the sources, that you need an unconditional surrender if you're going to finally end this recurring problem. And the Germans especially are seen as a recurring problem. My stepfather, who was half German by ancestry, had said, look at the German history over the past hundred years, right? The Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Second World War. That is three generations of German youth going off to fight in wars that destabilize the international system. Franklin Roosevelt thought it was Prussian or Junker militarism that was at fault, and that countries needed to have finally this tendency rooted out of them. And to do that, a free hand would be necessary. You couldn't have some sort of deal, like the deal that ended the First World War. You needed the ability to remake these societies to finally end the repeat offender status of some of these places, right, who would upset the peace of the world. So for many people, it was this view that the entire sacrifice of all three of those wars, but especially the Second World War, would be in vain if it didn't end the right way. There's a quote from Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Breckinridge Long that's used in Gideon Rose's book where he says, quote, we are fighting this war because we did not have an unconditional surrender at the end of the last one. End quote. It's controversial, though, and people like Winston Churchill sometimes seem to vary in his views that you find on whether or not he was for it or open to some sort of conditional peace in his book series, the Second World War, which cannot be taken as gospel truth. You know, you take it with a grain of salt because he's bolstering his own post-war image, but he knows that unconditional surrender is controversial, so he tries to defend it. And he says that they tried to sit down and come up with conditional terms, right? If it was not going to be unconditional, what should the surrender terms be? And he wrote, quote, they looked so terrible when set forth on paper and so far exceeded what was in fact done that their publication would only have stimulated German resistance. They had in fact only to be written out to be withdrawn. End quote. We should also recall that there were political reasons in the Allied alliance for doing this, too. The Soviets were very suspicious that the Western allies would cut a separate deal with Germany and sort of leave them in the lurch. An announced public pledge for an unconditional surrender helped bind all the allies together in a united cause, right? No one's going to make a separate peace. But it meant the war would go on longer. And both Japan and Germany were hoping for some sort of last-ditch punch in the nose that would wake the allies up to the fact that, you know, this war could continue for years if you didn't come up with a better peace deal. I mean, that's really what something like the Battle of the Bulge, the Second Battle of the Ardennes in 1944, that could be the only reason to do that. Because there was no war-winning element to that. The whole point was to do such damage and maybe have a whole bunch of Allied troops sort of surrounded and endangered so you could maybe bargain with them. And in Japan they were continually looking for the last great battle that would help wake the allies up to the idea that unconditional surrender was a bridge too far. When last we spoke we were talking about the Battle of Saipan in July 1944. Well, the Navy, the Japanese Navy had thought that the war had been decided, some of the naval experts, after the Battle of Guadalcanal and most of the rest at least after the Battle of Midway, in the Japanese War Journal of Imperial Headquarters quoted in Richard B. Frank's book, Downfall, they were very open and this is official that the war was over in terms of who was going to win. And it said, quote, we can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan's 100 million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight. End quote. That is an amazing statement. We will sacrifice all the people in this country to get a better deal than unconditional surrender. And what was it that the Japanese really were holding out for? The Emperor. They were worried that an unconditional surrender might mean that the Emperor and the entire imperial system would be tossed out. And this was something they could not live with. What's more, the idea that the Emperor might be treated as a war criminal and might be hung or something after the war was intolerable to a ton of Japanese people, including a ton of civilians. I mean, remember, there's a decent number of Japanese folk who consider this person a living God. His voice has never even been heard by the public. I mean, there's a whole lot of stuff that makes this an almost superhuman figure. And the idea that the country might have to lose. There really weren't 100 million people in Japan. It's more like 70 or 75 million. But I mean that you might have to sacrifice that to keep one guy on the throne. Wow, that's well, if we were fighting reasonable people, it would have been over already. This is not reasonable. I read a couple of different takes on this that suggested it was a lot more than the Emperor. This is the imperial system, which includes a lot of what we would call the oligarchy or the old guard. There's a lot of people who have a stake in the imperial system and they would all be thrown to the wolves if this went away. But it would seem to be the kind of thing where you're going to keep the human being lawnmower operating at breakneck speed to keep a single guy from the gallows after the war, maybe. The problem Japan has is different than Germany because one of the things we said at the end of the last segment was that the famous plot against Adolf Hitler on July 20th, Operation Valkyrie, where a bomb exploded in a meeting room, attempting to take Hitler out. Well, that's an attempt to get rid of the fanatic in chief, right? I mean, as I said, if we were fighting reasonable people, the war would be over long ago, but in Germany, you have to get rid of the unreasonable person at the top to have a chance to do that. Japan's government's very different. It's hard to put your finger on who's in charge. And we dealt with this extensively in the first segment of the program, pointing out that Japan's system was one that outsiders, certainly, but even insiders sometimes could have a tough time figuring where the buck stops. Author Ian W. Toll had written a line that just, I think, was a perfect summation of that where he said, quote, the same institutional defects that had produced Japan's irrational decision to launch the war in 1941 now prevented irrational decision to end it, end quote. And SCM Payne in his book, The Wars for Asia, 1911-1945, had said that Japan's government had been called a government by acquiescence or a system of irresponsibility. And he said, quote, because if everyone is responsible for policy, then policy formation becomes anonymous so that no one is actually held accountable. The primary value emphasized in decision making was a consensus reached through informal procedures, end quote, a consensus that required the most diehard fanatical elements of the military to be on board. And at least the army was not. And this, by the way, is why everybody spends so much time talking about the 19th century development of the Japanese constitutional system design and everything to get us to the Second World War because the Second World War is where a couple of major things happen where you just go, it's almost like a tragic flaw in Greek theater where it was built into the Japanese system a long time ago. And it only comes out when the system's under massive stress like, you know, a world war. But the fact that the army and navy, for example, have an outsized amount of control and influence tends to bend the decision making in a more hard line sort of way. And people who want to talk about peace actually put their own lives in danger to do so. So in both Germany and Japan, as the war starts to grind into the last year, anybody who tries to bring up the idea of peace or who suggests that the war may be lost are enemies of the regime. In Germany, in the last year of the war, between 10,000 and 20,000 people I read were hung or executed in some other way, soldiers and civilians alike, on charges of what was called defeatism. In Japan, Marius B. Jensen, the historian, says that the military was watching the people and had jailed some people for high level defeatism, as it was called. And Saburo Iannaga, in his book, The Pacific War, talked about how careful, those were his translated words, peace advocates and the government had to be. He says that they faced assassination or a coup, and he blames the army, but that's who he blames for a lot of things. The point being that even bringing up what might be a rational question, like do we have to have Armageddon, is that the way this whole thing has to go, could get you charged as an enemy of the state. And in a place like Germany, it could get you hung. So rationality isn't just in short supply, it's actively punished by death. I keep thinking of both the average Japanese person who may or may not have wanted to die for the emperor. Are they looking forward to actually taking up arms with their women and children and fighting alongside the Japanese army in the built up areas of Japan in house to house, hand to hand combat against the Allied forces? Something tells me there are going to be a lot of regular Japanese folks who would see that as a failure of government. And once again, there are going to be people who say, well, then they shouldn't have started the war, they shouldn't have mistreated all of the populations they dealt with so much, which is a fair point. But let's remember that if the Japanese are going to die because they're going to have to be rooted out of all these buildings, somebody is going to have to do the rooting out. And this is what my stepfather was referring to once when he talked to me about how it was a kind of a double edged sword reading in the newspapers about how well the war was going. Because my stepdad's a guy who got into the Second World War at the real tail end of it. So had there been a 1946 continuation of the war, that's when he would have been in the thick of it. So like a lot of people by the end of the war, he was kind of trying to time it out in his head, right? Is this thing going to be over before I'm on the front line areas? He was a naval guy, but the front line areas was right off the coast of Japan if there was 1946 fighting. And he said every time there'd be another victory and another island taken, another closer hop to Japan, you know, and more of the shrinking of the blast radius of Japan's supernova. He said that's the same as saying we're one step closer to the final battles for Japan's home islands, the Ragnarok, right? And he's thinking to himself, you know, everybody already knows how diehard the Japanese were on all these islands. We've already had to take from them that they don't care about as much as the home islands. And we still have to go do that. I mean, nobody was looking forward to this. I just keep thinking about how unnerving the previews to it all would be if I were a nearly fighting age young man in the United States in, say, April, early May 1945. And I'm reading about the Battle of Berlin, right? The last assault the Red Army launches on Hitler's capital city with Hitler in it. That the last big battle, right? It's going to end right here. Ragnarok in Berlin. If I'm reading about that, something that turns into arguably the worst urban combat in human history. The Red Army loses more than 80,000 men in 16 days. The Germans lose more, more than 20,000 civilians. Hitler kills himself in the bunker with the Soviet troops yards away. The only way it could have been more last ditch is if a Soviet soldier had broken down the bunker doors and stabbed Hitler with a bayonet. And Hitler is not perceived as any more fanatical than Japanese leadership and maybe your average Japanese loyal soldier and maybe even his wife and child. Who knows? But to somebody like yours truly reading the paper, this would have looked like a horrible preview of what the Tokyo situation is going to look like in a few months when we get to that. And yet the alternative to Ragnarok is to let the human being lawnmower continue to rack up obscene monthly death totals until it's stopped. There are no good choices, are there? And choices are where people like yours truly, I know many of you too, we can't help but look at the choices and become fascinated with... I mean it's tempting always for a person who's into war games and chess and all that stuff to think about this in terms of a game. Like a geo-strategic card game. And the danger with that is all the decisions look so much easier when you're looking at them now. You have no idea all the little influences and roadblocks and inhibitors and pressures and everything else that was working on the historical figure. I always have this image of them coming back in a time machine and hearing someone like yours truly say, well here's what you should have done and having them say, oh yeah, sure, you don't think I would have done that if I could have but I couldn't have because of all these things that are not even in your history books that were acting on me. So with that having been said, it's still hard for me to not look at this sometimes like a card game. And in 1944 what's fascinating of that year is that the Germans and the Japanese only have a few meaningful cards left to play. A limited amount of harbored and stockpiled strength. A little bit of rocket fuel if you will that they've kept aside for just this time. So what do you do with it? What do you use it for? What is a worthy goal to use some of your last remaining strength for if winning the war probably isn't on the table? I never like to say it's never on the table because war is full of weirdness to the degree that you just ever, you can't ever say ever. Somebody's always pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat. Basically there are no war winning cards left to play, at least no obvious war winning cards left to play. So how do you play what cards you still have left? That's fascinating to me. The Germans offensive in late 1944, the one in the second Ardennes as it's called, we Americans call it the Battle of the Bulge. That's an example of Hitler playing one of those last cards. I've got the stockpile of stuff. Let's use it here. What was he trying to do? Historians and armchair generals ever since have been critiquing that decision. There were a lot of people even at the time that maybe would have liked to have seen all of that stockpiled strength used against the Red Army instead to maybe forestall what happened in Berlin long enough to let the Allies get there first. The Western Allies would be a better way to put it, right? Because the Soviet Union's an ally as well. Regardless, hindsight's 20-20, right? The Japanese cards that they have to play, they're playing early on in 1944. They launch an offensive in the Burma-India theater in March 1944. And then a month later they launch the largest offensive of the war on their part. I think I read the largest offensive in Imperial Japanese Army history with the Ichigo campaign in China. We mentioned both these campaigns briefly in the last segment. But the Ichigo campaign is the kind where you look at and you don't even know how the Japanese do it. We mentioned a long time ago that to me the Japanese look like one of the peoples on the planet that punch above their weight class. Because they are able to pull off stuff where you would look at their population numbers and their geographical questions and their history and think that they're just not going to be able to do that. And then they achieve it anyway. And I sometimes wonder looking at their history if maybe they just have to. We've talked about the limitations of their somewhat dysfunctional subpar usually in terms of outcome government design. We've talked about the problems that they have with the organization of the military. And how you have this issue with mid-level officers able to exert an undue amount of control and influence over military policy. These are all things that put the Japanese into very tough situations. And time and again somehow despite all of the impediments and the odds against them the Japanese people managed to pull the fat out of the fire more times than not. I read somewhere that for the Ichigo offensive the Japanese stockpiled ammunition for two years and aviation air fuel for eight months. And when they launch this multi-stage offensive that will go from April 1944 to at least December 1944. I believe there's still significant fighting going on in January 1945. The half a million Japanese troops, more than 15,000 vehicles, more than 100,000 animals, launched this assault on China that is ferocious. And we should point out that nowhere in the Pacific was anybody facing armies like 500,000 Japanese soldiers. These are land war in Asia sized armies. The big battles in the Pacific later on are going to be fractions of this number. The only exception I can think of is the Philippines campaign which is still to come. But even then the Japanese are more on the defensive there whereas in China on the Ichigo offensive it is a massive many months long assault. But when you're fighting Chinese armies which are traditionally very large and in this campaign the Japanese are often outnumbered and fighting multiple Chinese armies which means lots of troops. You better have lots of troops. The irony of the whole thing is that the Japanese will in large part succeed in many ways in this offensive. If you were judging this offensive outside of the context of the war you'd go, wow, they pulled off a lot of upsets here. Almost knocked the Nationalists out of the war, did retake the American air bases they wanted eliminated, did connect these territories they wanted connected. But as so many historians I was reading pointed out, so what? So you took this giant amount of remaining rocket fuel you'd stored up and saved to use somehow and you did it in a way that won't slow the Allied advance across the Pacific islands and toward the Japanese homeland at all? Right, was that a wasted card? You actually achieved a lot of what you wanted to achieve. It actually worked out pretty well judging by a non-contextual sort of standard but in a contextual sort of standard didn't do anything to slow down the losing of the war. Needless to say it keeps the human being lawn mower working overtime. I mean 750,000 Chinese soldiers may have been killed. I've seen like 100,000 Japanese as a death toll sometimes. The numbers are hard to trust and differ source to source and the methodology is different. But there may have been 200,000 Chinese civilian deaths due to this offensive. And in the same way that there are critics of Hitler's decision to use some of his last precious rocket fuel against the Western allies instead of against the Soviets saying that it was essentially a boon for communism and it trapped more of central Europe behind the iron curtain. A similar charge is sometimes made against the Japanese for the Ichigo campaign. For example Japanese military historian Hirata Keshi writing in the Battle for China proclaims the Ichigo campaign to have been a disaster for both the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese. He says the only winners were the communists because they sat back and watched their two worst enemies, the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese kill each other off. The Nationalist and the Communist Chinese of course have been fighting a civil war when the Japanese invasion of China sort of temporarily put a damper on that but it will spring into new life after the Japanese are defeated. And because perhaps of the damage that was done to the Nationalists, the Nationalists will lose that civil war and well of course we have a Communist China today. So there are some historians who suggest that the Japanese helped give us a Communist China today. It's interesting and fascinating to contemplate isn't it? Considering that in 1944 Japan was probably the most anti-communist country in the world. There's some historical irony to it isn't it? Talk about not getting what you wished for. I happen to find much more intrigue in the Japanese offensive in Burma, the one that kicks off a month before Ichigo and was supposed to act sort of in tandem with it. To me it's much more interesting because there's a wild card element involved and if you're where the Japanese are at this time in the war, wild cards look good. How about playing a joker card in a campaign? Introduce a little chaos somewhere where it might do some good for your war effort. And if you can't win the war what can you do? The Japanese offensive in central Burma is known as the Yugo campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. In Anglo-American histories it's often referred to as the invasion of India in 1944. Now most military history accounts of the Yugo campaign state the sort of goals that also don't really do a whole lot to keep Japan from losing the war. Doesn't even really do much to slow it down. I mean you know I love the encyclopedia of military history by our Ernest Dupuis and Trevor Dupuis. They describe the Japanese goals this way. By the way, Kawabe and Mutaguchi are two Japanese generals. Second, to cut the railroad line into Assam which passed through Manapur and which carried almost all the supplies into China that they were sending. So this doesn't sound a whole lot different than the Ichigo campaign does it? The sort of sound military objectives that won't keep you from losing the war. But there's a secondary consideration or a lot of my history books will call it a secondary objective. Sometimes they'll have a whole paragraph outlying the seizing of the railheads and all these military things and then add like a couple of words or a single sentence at the end of the paragraph and say something to the effect of, oh yeah, and maybe prompt some sort of a rebellion in India. That little secondary consideration is the most interesting part of this plan to me. And the most scary to a dedicated imperialist like Winston Churchill. In his book, well series of books, The History of the Second World War, written not that long after the Second World War, and sometimes you can see it as almost a window into the psychology of Winston Churchill. Churchill doesn't talk at all about seizing this railhead or this. He lays out what the head of the greatest colonial power in human history, his worry is. And he puts it this way. He says, quote, they meaning the Japanese proposed to invade eastern India and raise the flag of rebellion against the British. End quote. Raise the flag of rebellion against the British. What would that even mean? Well, first, we have to recall the global situation in 1944. A ton of the world are colonial possessions during this time period. I mean, go look at a map. And a lot of the places that aren't colonial possessions are de facto ones where they're sort of under the control of other people. I mean, but almost all of Africa is colonized during this period. Most of the places that the Japanese took over after the Pearl Harbor attacks, they didn't take from the indigenous peoples. They conquered those places from the colonial countries that had taken them over a long time ago. I mean, the Japanese threw out the Dutch who were controlling places like Java and Sumatra. They threw out the French who were in Indochina, right? Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam today. They threw the British out of Burma. And now the British were in India. And what if the Japanese could have cloud seeded a revolution there? It's a weird thought, isn't it? Cloud seeding a revolution. But if you look at the histories of the late 1940s after the Second World War, the 1950s, the 1960s, really into the 1970s, there are so many wars and struggles and political problems that one could broadly classify as the unraveling of colonialism. I mean, the Vietnam War is as a result of the unraveling of colonialism. And so many of these places that will fall into these categories in the decades after the Second World War have the seeds and the nucleus of those things in existence already. I remember a history professor pointing out that one of the key amplifiers and accelerators of this process was that the Japanese didn't just throw out these colonial powers when they took over these countries from them. They threw them out quickly and at the same time. So instead of the Dutch having to leave the Indies, and then ten years later the French having to leave Indochina, and then ten years after that the British having to leave India, the Japanese threw them all out in a matter of months and kept them out of those territories for years. And so when those countries evicted the Japanese and retook their colonial possessions, those colonial possessions had not had their colonial masters there for some time. Tough to put those genies back in the bottle, especially when those areas weren't too happy with the colonial masters already. India is a perfect example of that. By 1944 there are some seriously angry Indians, and they're angry at the British. Recall our conversation earlier on when we had talked about how the Indians who already were, for years before this time, advocating for independence from Britain, how they even found themselves in the Second World War. It was a slap in the face. The British Viceroy just said, we're in. Didn't ask Indian leadership or the top people in India at all. In 1942 when talks broke down on Indian independence, Mohandas Gandhi, called Mahatma Gandhi, the great soul, he starts the Quit India campaign, which says we're not going to cooperate with the war effort. For his troubles he gets thrown into jail along with most of the leadership of his political party. There will be something like 100,000 Indians thrown into prison during this time period. There will be riots, rebellions, protests, and some of these protest troops will open fire, and hundreds, if not thousands, those numbers are debatable, will be killed. There is a famine in Bengal in 1943, which we also mentioned, which will stretch into 1944, which it's a very controversial issue. It's often blamed on war-related things. And a guy who gets the lion's share of the blame on the part of some people is Winston Churchill. He's called genocidal by some Indians today, but millions will die in this. It contributes to the mood. Brigadier Peter Young, who wrote a book in the 1970s called A Dictionary of Battles, claims that it was taking 100,000 British and Indian soldiers to keep the lid on unrest in India during this time period. So this is even before the Japanese make their move here. Worth pointing out that India is not the kind of place, no country is, but especially not India, that is of like mind about anything. It is an enormous country and potentially the most diverse country I've ever seen top to bottom, side to side. And it was even bigger in this period than it is now because its territories included the modern states of Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. Some of these people support the British. There are princely groups, for example, that have an arrangement with the colonial powers. The Muslims and the Hindus have different opinions on things. We mentioned earlier there's two and a half million Indian soldiers fighting for the allies. But there's also Indian soldiers fighting with the Japanese against the allies. It's a much smaller number. But in this campaign, this invasion of India in 1944, they're going to play an important role. They're led by a charismatic Indian figure, his name is Subhas Chandra Bose. And if you wanted to make a really poor analogy, and I apologize for this, but Gandhi and Martin Luther King have some similarities, because Martin Luther King modeled some of his tactics on Gandhi's nonviolent approach. Well, if you want to equate those two, then Subhas Chandra Bose is more like an unreformed version of Malcolm X. His attitude is much more of by any means necessary. And whereas Gandhi eschews violence to get the British out of India, Bose embraces it. And he's leading a bunch of Indian troops. I think the Indian army fighting with the Japanese is like 16, 17,000 people. I think he's leading 7 or 8,000 in this assault on India. A lot of these Indians were POWs, and they were offered the chance. You know, when Singapore fell, a lot of them fell into Japanese hands. They were offered this chance to be in horrific POW conditions or join this army. And a lot of them unsurprisingly did. But Bose is involved in trying to tell the Japanese commander, listen, you defeat the British military forces here, and I will go into India with these Indians, we'll carry Indian flags of independence, and we'll raise India to rebellion. What would happen if that actually occurred? I mean, I can't think of any card the Japanese could play at this point in the war that would create more, if you'll pardon the Star Wars reference, but more of a disturbance in the allied force than prompting a rebellion in India. Now, because India is not of one mind, I don't think you'd ever see anything like India just flip to the Axis powers, but you could easily see India descend into chaos, because you'll see it after the Second World War during the chaos involved in independence. And India is one of those countries that five minutes after it descends into chaos, you have a humanitarian catastrophe on your hands. If it's taken a hundred thousand British and Indian troops to keep Indian unrest under control without any of that, what's it going to take if India goes sideways on the Allies? What's more, if you really want to start talking about fascinating what-ifs or counterfactuals, why would this stop at India? Those of you who remember the Arab Spring not that long ago will recall how amazing it is to see how quickly an idea and a mood, if you will, can spread. We once described ideas like an intellectual contagion, and there were many people who said that the Arab Spring was only made possible because of modern-day communications, but that's happened many times in the past. Those of you who look at the famous year of 1848, the so-called Year of Revolutions, and how many revolutions sprung up in so many different countries at once, I mean, what if the Japanese could cloud-seed a revolution here on the part of a bunch of these colonially oppressed, is that a good way to put it, subject peoples? It's a joker card, right? To introduce a little chaos into the equation and see what happens. And let's recall that the Japanese propaganda has been laying the groundwork for this for years. That's why we brought it up much earlier in this conversation, I think maybe in the very first segment where we talked about Pan-Asianism, which is an intellectual doctrine with a long history, and many countries have their own version of it, but the Japanese took a little bit of that and injected it into their concept of an economic union, the famous Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They were consistently saying things like their troops were pushing for Asia for the Asiatics. We had quoted, again, in the first show, I think, that Japanese soldier who said that he was fired up by his teacher back in, I think it was their version of high school, who was talking about the white man and what he was doing in Asia to Asians, and that same teacher talked about black folks in the United States, Native Americans in the United States, and this Japanese soldier said he was fired up to free all these people. In 1943, the Japanese make a big show of giving independence to a bunch of these countries, like Burma, for example, although they're not really giving it to them. It's a great propaganda tool. And back in 1941, to name just one example, the Japanese foreign minister said, quote, Japan is determined to shatter the white man's mastery over all the Orient, end quote. If you are a British man in London reading the London Times in the morning, or a Frenchman in Paris doing the equivalent, that sends a chill up your spine. But if you're a Vietnamese person in French Indochina, or a Burmese person in Burma, or an Indian person in India, and many of those people, if you look at the rules sometimes, not all places were the same, but they're living under rules that make them seem like second-class citizens. Some of the rules I've seen remind one of the Jim Crow South or apartheid South Africa. Well, the Japanese driving out your colonial rulers from far away from your homeland might look a lot more like liberation than conquest. And if the Japanese had only been able to walk the walk a little bit better and live up to their hype a little bit, who knows what they might have accomplished. But as we've said over and over, they didn't. And I don't know if that's because the entire thing was nothing, this is what I learned growing up, by the way, but nothing but a fig leaf for Japanese brutal imperialism the whole time, or whether it was a case of the Japanese right hand not knowing or caring what the Japanese left hand was doing. Often times the military people seem a lot more dismissive of this idea of Asia for the Asiatics and the Japanese as the tip of the spear for Asian independence than Japanese intellectuals, citizens, or soldiers do. It's a cause worth dying for if you think about it, though. I mean, many of the people fighting on the good guy side and the bad guy side, and a whole lot of wars think they're fighting for good reasons. I'll never forget the Nazi daggers emblazoned with the phrase, God is with us. Bottom line, though, is that even though something like that is a huge long shot, the Japanese might be trying to cloud seed a revolution here, and that's a fascinating concept when you're down to your last few cards. If India went sideways on the British, you would have a circumstance where the great supply center for the entire Asia war from the British empire would be unusable or cut off. According to Brigadier Peter Young in his book A Dictionary of Battles, it's already happening with sabotage and everything else. Now as a guy who'd rather swing for the fences at this point in the war, if I'm the one playing the Japanese geo-strategic card hand, or throw a hail Mary pass, or put all of my chips on one last roll of the die, or one spin of the roulette wheel, this idea appeals to me a lot more than the Ichigo offensive. The problem, of course, is the way it's carried out. The Japanese do something here that, once again, I try to figure out an American equivalent. If an American army went into battle without enough supplies, and the plan was to take a chance on them starving to death, I wonder how the American people would react to that. And the reason I bring it up is because the Japanese are going to do this multiple times in Burma. There's a diversionary attack that they launched before the Yugo campaign in a place called Aragon, and the Japanese plan on not providing enough supplies for their troops. I guess that's a good way to get away from a supply problem, right? Just don't supply enough. But the country is difficult to supply regularly. The Japanese will do the same thing in this Burma campaign where they send their troops to attack Imphal and Kohima, are the places, and only give them something like 20 or 21 days worth of supplies. The goal, they say, is to take what you need to live, the bullets you need to fight, the food you need to eat, the medical supplies you need to take care of your wounded, from the enemy after you defeat them. Which, of course, leads to the very interesting question, what happens if you don't? Or what happens if you don't defeat them in time to have what you need before the supplies run out? Well, it's a catastrophe, right? And while General Mutaguchi is issuing press releases saying that this giant offensive is going to change the whole complexion of the war, real rah rah stuff, some of his divisional commanders clearly see what's about to happen here. In his book, Hirohito's War, Francis Pike talks about one of them, Lieutenant General, I hope the name of the pronunciation is correct, Sato, and Sato's troops are going to have to cross the Chindwin River, which is sort of one of these big dividing lines, in order to make these attacks. And Pike writes, quote, Lieutenant General Katoku Sato, commanding the 31st Infantry Division, had to transport his troops a thousand miles before the offensive was launched. He was deeply pessimistic about the plans for the campaign, though he was partially mollified by promises of 250 tons of supplies before March 25th, and then 10 tons per week afterwards. None of these supplies actually arrived. Before leaving the Chindwin, Pike writes, Sato toasted his fellow officers with champagne, telling them, quote, Miracles apart, everyone is likely to lose his life in this operation. It isn't simply a question of the enemy's bullets. You must be prepared for death by starvation in these mountain fastnesses. End quote. Pike then says they were prophetic words. End quote. Now, you don't see a lot of starvation, I mean real, like, dying from hunger starvation, amongst modern armies. But in fairness to the Japanese, part of the problem here is the terrain. It is awful country to try to get supplies to troops through. So much of the Asia Pacific theater is, isn't it? And we used a line from several of my history books, sort of a saying amongst Japanese troops comparing the relative merits of places they might find themselves serving in. Like, one of them was that heaven was Java, hell was Burma, but no one returns alive from New Guinea. And we were trying to point out when we said that how terrible a place to fight New Guinea was, but Burma, if it's better, is only better by the nth degree. It has the same combination of wonderful terrain types that make a place like New Guinea so difficult to fight in. Heavy jungle with really high mountains. It's actually on the way to the Himalayan range, so you get these 7,000 foot mountains with heavy jungle. And the jungle is so heavy that the British commander makes a mistake in thinking that the Japanese won't be able to get large numbers of troops through it. He's wrong about that. But the Japanese won't be able to get lots of supplies through it. Which contributes to the starvation problem. The other issue with terrain like this is it is absolutely made for disease. New Guinea is one of the wettest places in the world. Burma's wetter. Up to 5 inches of rain a day during the monsoon season. And the monsoon season lasts half the year. It pretty much shuts down military operations, which is part of the reason why you haven't seen as much action in Burma, although there's been skirmishing and some things going on. You really only have half a campaign season, but the disease is as bad as the worst places in the Asia Pacific theaters. Start with malaria and work your way down an exhaustive list. The majority of casualties are caused by disease and not by enemy bullets. And sometimes some of these units reach disease casualty rates of like 600%. And 600% means that people are coming back from recuperation and getting it again. That new people are being brought in as replacements and then they're getting sick. It is completely muddy once the rain starts and there's only a few good modern roads. And those places become the key points that are fought over. The army that the Japanese are fighting is one of the most diverse in the world. And I often try to imagine myself as a Japanese soldier during this time period from a small island nation. You find yourself in Burma and in the north you're fighting Chinese troops and American troops. Sometimes Chinese and American troops together. In this campaign you're fighting the British Empire whose armies are some of the most diverse ever fielded. So you have your troops from Great Britain of course. You're Englishmen, you're Scotsman, you're Welshman. I'm sure there are some Irish guys there. There always seem to be. But then you have a ton of Indians from all over India. You have the famous Gurkhas from Nepal who fight with the British. And then you have a bunch of people from Sub-Saharan Africa, East and West Africa the colonial regions are called. But those form a multitude of modern day African countries. The poor Japanese person is getting a visual representation through the diversity of the army that they're facing. Of the depth of allied power and resources right here. Here's the way Yasmin Khan in her book India at War describes the kick off of this campaign when the Japanese in the first week of March push across the Chindwin River and start this offensive. The Japanese did make an ambitious incursion into Indian territory. But by 1944 the allies were fully prepared for it. In March 1944 the Japanese pushed into the northeast and advanced along the Imphal-Dhimmapur road in an attempt to cut Imphal supply lines and to capture the strategically pivotal Kohima. The 14th Army, an eclectic collection of nearly half a million troops, including British infantrymen, Canadian and American pilots, the Assam rifles, the King's African rifles and troops from the Gold Coast had been trained, equipped and honed into a modern fighting force by now. Among the infantry morale was high, there was an effective organizational esprit de corps and a powerful air support gave the allies a distinct advantage. Nonetheless the Japanese made a massive thrust sending in 85,000 men, far more than had been expected and for a time it looked as if they might cut off and occupy northeast India at Kohima. But in stark contrast to 1942, she writes, the Japanese quickly became overstretched as their supply lines were bogged down over hundreds of miles of difficult terrain winding back into southeast Asia. Basically what happens is the British are ready for this assault but it just happens sooner than they thought it was going to happen, in greater strength than they expected and more quickly than they'd accounted for, which puts them at a disadvantage initially. The Japanese are able to get around the flanks of a bunch of units, they cut one major force off that has to fight its way out and then they basically surround their two areas that they're after, Imphal and Kohima. Kohima is a mountain village that's heavily jungled about 80 miles north of Imphal and the Imphal plain is a large, relatively open area. The Japanese will basically put both of them under siege and several times try to assault them and overrun them. Part of the reason for the heroism here is that not only are they cut off but the British imperial forces are badly outnumbered. I think there's 15 to 20,000 Japanese attacking Kohima for example and something like 1800 defenders at Kohima. This is actually, it's funny, this is both a little known affair especially outside the British empire and the Japanese homeland today and yet it was voted in 2013 I believe, Britain's greatest battle of the modern era. Beating out such famous encounters as Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and the British landings at Normandy on D-Day and yet the victory was won by an army that's known as the Forgotten Army. So does that tell you something? There's a couple of reasons that might explain this starting with the terrain. I mean jungle and mountain terrain has a way of frustrating large forces being used and in an earlier discussion when we were talking about Guadalcanal and places like that, we quoted from Eric Bergered's book, Touched with Fire, where he talks about how so much of the fighting devolves down to like squads and companies and patrols and things like that that are very different than what the large armies in say North Africa or the Western or Eastern front in Europe or even in Italy are dealing with. In his book Japan's Last Bid for Victory, the Invasion of India in 1944, author Robert Lyman describes it this way, quote, If a normally chaotic battlefield could ever be described thus, but was instead, Lyman writes, and southeast being conducted largely independent by both attacker and defender, end quote. Add to that the fact that battle is a very strange term to use for 20th century large scale conflict because it's so different than all the previous eras that came before it when a battle usually meant one really horrible day. The really terrible battles in human history up until the modern era are two or three days long. Now we're not talking about sieges, which can go on for months or even years, but a battle is generally something on a small enough area where if you can get above the fray and the dust and the commotion and the chaos, get up to a hill, maybe with a little spyglass, you can usually see the whole thing. Not here, not in the 20th century. You're better off referring to these things to avoid confusion, and they often are referred to instead of battles as operations. Operations that are the sum total of thousands of potentially fatal tasks. So when you read the accounts of a veteran in these modern operations, their entire war experience may be when they ran into a concealed gun in a hill a mile away from the road that they're on that shuts down road traffic until they can figure out a way to outflank the gun and take it out. That's one of those thousands of little potentially fatal tasks that when you add them all together equals an operation like the Yim Fal Kohima campaign. But it sure makes it less dramatic in the big picture sense and much harder to follow. But in the small unit sense, it is as dramatic and horrifying as any encounter you'll find in the war, maybe worse. If you look at the big picture timeline in the first week of March, the Japanese cross the Chinwin River, as we had said, they blow past the flanks of one major unit, surround it, and it has to fight its way out. Then they advance on Yim Fal and Kohima and manage to put those places under siege. If this had been an earlier war, those places would be cut off and the British and imperial troops in those places would begin to run out of ammunition. They wouldn't have any reinforcements. They would run out of medical supplies. They would run out of food. And that would be that. The difference here though is, and this is what frustrates the Japanese, the Allies have the ability to supply the cut off areas by air. This is huge and it's a new development. It was only really in the second world war that the capability existed to even try this and past attempts had been hit or missed to say the least. I mean, when the German army is surrounded by the Soviets at Stalingrad, the Luftwaffe tries to fly in supplies and they can't manage to provide anywhere near enough for a starving army running out of ammunition that has to surrender. But here there are American air assets that have been flying supplies over what's called the hump, which are a bunch of mountain ranges, into China. It's also called the skyway to hell. And the British are able to borrow some of these big, heavy supply planes to add to their Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, which they're using in a mostly ground attack role, to change the entire equation and begin to supply their cut off troops with what they need to keep fighting. And recall, the Japanese have only a limited amount of this stuff themselves. They can't do the air supply thing. And if they can't take the supplies of the people that they cut off and are fighting at Imphal and Kohima, they're going to run out of supplies themselves. I like the way the British general in charge of this operation describes it. His name, by the way, is Lieutenant General William Slim. He's a very fine general. He cops to his mistakes initially here, underestimating the Japanese speed and size and whether or not they can get through the jungle with their troops, but then explains really the entire battle in the terms that will decide it. And he says, quote, as I struggled hard to redress my errors and to speed by rail and air these reinforcements, I knew that all depended on the steadfastness of the troops already meeting the first impetus of attack. If they could hold until help arrived, all would be well. If not, we were near disaster. End quote. So that's what has to happen. And the air supply helps. But bottom line, it's a question of heroism. And I am not a glory guy when it comes to war. Put me in the camp of the William Tecumseh Shermans, the American general, who had said that war's glory is all moonshine. I don't think killing other people is glorious. But I think surviving against incredible odds, putting up with the privation, the hardship, enduring the unendurable for the sake of whatever is motivating you to do so can often be heroic. And it's a shame that things like the colonial overtones, or if you're the Japanese or the Germans, the evil cause in which you're fighting, that that somehow or sometimes overshadows the heroism of the troops involved. Rarely do you read combat accounts where the troops are talking about things like, you know, a German soldier saying he's ready to fight and die for more Lebensraum for Germany, right? Or an American who's fighting and dying for the larger cause of freedom for the world. Or a Japanese soldier who's fighting and dying to conquer and control other Asian peoples. Or even a British soldier from Kent, maybe. Or a place like that, ready to lay down his life so Britain can maintain its colonial dominance of a place like India. That's generally not what it's about. Some line, of course, it's about kill or be killed. But above that you'll read so many accounts where soldiers are fighting for their comrades, or their unit, or the esprit de corps of the group that they belong to, or maybe just to not let down those other people that are depending on them. I mean, it's very baseline stuff. Your worldview and your horizon shrinks and the lens you view things through is very narrow and immediate. So I don't like the idea that, and this is a problem in India. I read that the Indians have a hard time sometimes trying to figure out how to portray this whole affair because it's so overshadowed with the colonial question. Were Indian troops fighting with the British mercenaries fighting for the colonial master? Or were they heroes fighting for post-war Indian independence? I mean, it's a complicated question. And as John Toland wrote in his book, The Rising Sun, this whole Burma campaign is an ideological and geographic nightmare. But that shouldn't overshadow what was done there by all the soldiers on all sides. I mean, read some of the accounts. First of all, the Japanese threw themselves at the enemy wave after wave, sometimes suicidally. The British general Slim was very critical of the throwing away of Japanese lives. He also had a true admiration for the Japanese as a fighting people because, well, let me just quote what's said in Robert Lyman's book, Japan's Last Bid for Victory. With the difficulties posed by the climate came a stark reminder to any British Commonwealth troops who had not yet experienced the toughness of their adversary, of just how extraordinarily fit and physically hardy were the Japanese. How committed they were to achieving their objectives, how apparently unconcerned they were with regard to human comforts, and how determined they were to do with the emperor through their officers demanded, or die in the attempt. The And counter attacks had to face the toughest defensive positions imaginable, prepared by men whom General Slim was to describe as warrior ants. As the days went by, the battlefield became one large charnel house, littered with bodies in various states of decomposition, as it was rarely easy to recover and bury the dead. You can even look, by the way, at the photographs, and as the battle goes on, the areas that are highly fought over go from, you know, heavy lush jungle where you can't see five feet in front of your face to terrain that looks like First World War battlefields, especially the ones that used to be forests but have been shelled into wasteland. General Slim actually says that the battle for Kohima is the only one he'd seen in the Second World War that reminded him of the First World War. Hard to know which is different. Kohima, the British forces, the imperial forces were so badly outnumbered that they eventually get pushed onto one hill, something like 350 square meters, and they will be fighting over a tennis court, an actual, it's called the tennis court, where the Japanese are on one side of the tennis court. They're on the other side of the tennis court fighting British imperial forces on the other side of the tennis court, and they're throwing grenades at each other for days and days and days. That's not glorious, but it's heroic on both sides. In his book, Hirohito's War, author Francis Pike tries to give a sense of what the fighting was like and writes, quote, Most famously, there was a five-day tussle across the tennis courts belonging to the deputy commissioner's bungalow. Soldiers dug in on either side had to live through torrential rain and eat, shit, and sleep in their trenches. The courts were covered in the bloated bodies of slain Japanese soldiers. Enormous black flies filled the air. The stench of death was gut-wrenching. Major John Nettlefield observed, quote, The place stank. The ground everywhere was plowed up with shell fire, and human remains lay rotting as the battle raged over them. Flies swarmed everywhere and multiplied with incredible speed. Men retched as they dug in. End quote. Pike continues, quote, Hand grenades rather than tennis balls crisscrossed the courts. The resilience of the defenders proved the morale that General Slim had instilled in his troops. In one notable engagement, John Harman, son of the millionaire owner of Lundy Island, a lance corporal with the Queens Royal West Kent Regiment, single-handedly charged a Japanese trench, killed its five occupants before being fatally shot returning to his own lines. Dying in his company commander's arms, he gave his last words, I got the lot. It was worth it. End quote. But this is unsustainable for the Japanese because unlike their opponents, they are running out of supplies. And not just food, but ammunition, bullets, shells, medical stuff, everything. When you look at the numbers that the Japanese units were reduced to, I have a hard time finding similar numbers in any conflict anywhere because normally units break and run before they hit those kinds of numbers. In one situation that Pike recalls, one soldier says that the losses had been dreadful, the regiment had started out 3800 strong and now just had a few hundred men left and many of them invalids. General Sato asks his superior, General Mutaguchi, a man often referred to as a blockhead by some of his subordinates, permission to retreat. He's denied. He asks again and he's denied. And then says, quote, this is shameful. Mutaguchi should apologize for his own failure to the dead soldiers and the Japanese people. End quote. General Mutaguchi's response is to sack General Sato and send a subordinate with a sword to him so he can kill himself, which Sato refuses to do. Mutaguchi will do the unthinkable here and sack three of his divisional generals, one for incompetence, one for ill health and Sato for disobedience. Sato doesn't care. He orders his troops to retreat right around the same time that the monsoons open up. The Japanese on the defensive are just as difficult for the Allies to deal with as they are on the offensive and they have to be dug out position by position at huge cost to the Allied soldiers who have to do this. In his book Japan's Last Bit for Victory, author Robert Lyman tries to give a sense of how hard it was to dig the Japanese out of these defensive positions. He says that the British Imperial forces ate away slowly at the Japanese defenses and said, quote, nowhere were sudden gains made, but by gradual perseverance and the application of focused firepower, the Japanese were destroyed. Bunker by bunker, trench by trench. Rarely did the Japanese run or retreat, remaining to die where they fought. Lieutenant Lindhorn Heiget of the Dorsets considered the Japanese to be magnificent trench warriors. Quote, every army in the world talks about holding positions to the last man. Virtually no other army, including the Germans, ever did, but the Japs did. Their positions were well-sighted and they had a good eye for ground. They relied on rushing and shouting in the attack. We thought they were formidable fighting insects and savages. We took few prisoners, about one or two in the whole war. We wanted prisoners, but wounded men would have a primed grenade under them, so stretcher bearers were very careful. End quote. British General William Slim concurs and he says, quoted in Francis Pike's book, quote, Whatever his thoughts about the capabilities of Japanese commanders, Slim was profuse in his admiration for Japanese troops. Quote, there can be no question of the supreme courage and hardihood of the Japanese soldiers who made the attempts. I know of no army that could have equaled them. End quote. Reading of the Japanese experiences in the retreat is horrifying. They literally are starving to death. When the skies open up and the rains start, it turns into a wetter version of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
SPEAKER_02: The troops are committing suicide left and right. The Japanese refer to the road out as the road of human remains. It's often translated into the road of bones. There are many stories of soldiers taking grenades, sometimes in pairs, and they will embrace their comrade and blow up a grenade between them. There are medical orderlies injecting wounded troops with something to kill them quickly. Eating grass, potatoes, snails, lizards, snakes, monkeys, anything they can get their hands on, it's one of the worst retreats I've ever read about. And when it's over, the Japanese between the fighting in Kohima, Imphal, Imphal was under siege, by the way, for like 88 days before it was broken, and the diversionary attack in the Erekon area, about 65,000 Japanese die. Most of those fatalities occurred during the retreat and were caused by either suicide, disease, or starvation. The Allies suffered a fraction of the number of deaths. According to author John Toland, quote, In all, 65,000 men died, more than two and a half times the number lost on Guadalcanal, and about as many as fell on Leyte. Mutaguchi, his chief of staff, and senior staff officers were relieved of their posts, as was Kawabe and his chief of staff. The command shakeup and the destruction of the 15th Army, the Japanese 15th Army, infected every other unit in Burma, and by the end of the year, Japanese rule was at the point of collapse. End quote. This is one of the worst defeats in Japanese history. Some historical sources call it the worst defeat they'd ever suffered up till this time. And yet, interestingly enough, this is considered to be a subsidiary front in the war, because it's not a decisive one, as we said. If you're going to play a bunch of cards, what can this card do to forestall Japanese defeat, which is coming at an increasingly rapid pace from the other geographic direction entirely, from the Pacific. The Pacific was the last thing we were talking about when we left off the last segment. We were in mid-1944. The Americans had just taken Guam, Saipan, Tinian, the Marianas Islands, and before the last Japanese snipers are cleared out of the trees, the American naval construction engineering people, the Seabees, are out there building airfields. And this means the Japanese are on the clock, and they know it. They can do the math. They realize these islands are probably in range. Round trip of America's brand new super bomber, the B-29, never used against Germany, by the way. Looks like an early 1950s Cold War bomber rather than a Second World War bomber. As soon as they can get them to these islands, get all of the necessary support materials together, and these airfields finished, the bombing starts. And the Japanese do not have to imagine what it might be like to have their cities bombed. They can look at real photographs of what's happening to their Axis partner, Germany, right now. By 1945, by the end of the war, I believe amongst mid- and large-sized German cities, only Heidelberg is significantly untouched. I'm going from memory here, but as I recall, Heidelberg special in that regard. You want to go see what Germany used to look like? You got to go to Heidelberg unless you want to see a recreation. I was in Munich, and they've rebuilt some of it to look just like it looked before. But it has a feel to me when you're used to the old buildings of like a movie set. But what are they supposed to do? That generation in Germany created the conditions where the cultural, architectural heritage of Germans forever into the future is gone. And they're not the only ones who suffer. It's a cultural monument that we all suffer because it's gone. Significant that one generation of human beings could cost... I mean, it's the same thing Churchill looked at when he saw the films of the German cities in rubble and wondered if this was a bridge too far to win the war. But if you look at how events unfolded, it all is pretty understandable. You can see how people got sucked into this idea that anything's better than losing this war, total war, and anything means using everything you have. And there are a lot of people arguing that this bombing stuff shortens wars. And as we've seen, the human being lawnmower is at work at all times every day racking up its daily totals. If you shut the war down months early, well, that's that many daily totals that don't go into the fiery furnace. It's logical insanity is the way it's been described. If the Japanese were reasonable people, they would surrender now. See, there's many points in 1944 where you go, okay, now would be a really good time to spare your cities and the cultural heritage of the Japanese people and all that for the future. The part of what makes the Japanese so compelling, I mean, 500 years from now when the young people are reading the history and getting interested in the subjects, Japan is going to be, I think, compelling the way that many other people throughout the past who were willing to fight for their country. This is kind of a patriotic sort of a feeling taken to extremes and then becoming poisonous. And we talked about this earlier in this series. We called it super patriotism. The Japanese are going to go to lengths that you admire because it shows how far the human spirit can be pushed. It's interesting to see some of our extremes. At the same time, it's debilitating to watch because it's often being used in a way that seems wasteful. It doesn't have to happen. And that's why sometimes you'll read these books about the kamikaze, for example. And they will make it beautiful in a Japanese cultural sense and talk about the falling of the cherry blossoms and all these sorts of things in order to put some sort of an artistic or spiritual coating on the idea of a young man with his whole life ahead of him flying his airplane, extra loaded with bombs, into an allied ship. Now, I've read the letters from kamikaze pilots and you get all sorts of different people who do that for all sorts of different reasons. It's not this monolithic, fanatical robot image we thought of them when I was growing up. Not at all. But there's a number of people out there that think that this is what you should be doing if you love your country, right? The same thing these Japanese soldiers did when they would strap themselves and put a mine on their back and then run under an American or a British tank and blow themselves up. Most armies don't do that. The Japanese are like everyone else only more so, right? And the B-29 countdown has begun once these Marianas islands have fallen into U.S. hands. The question of what to do next is paramount at this particular time and the high command of the allies disagrees over what this should be and the main disagreement is within the United States chain of command. The army and the navy have different ideas on how the rest of the war should go. Both sides would like to sort of end up at least off the coast of Japan as the end destination but the path to get there? Well, the navy has one idea under Admiral Ernest King who's a tough customer and the army in this situation, he's not the general of the army, that would be George Marshall, but the guy whose opinion matters in this situation is our old friend Douglas the Situation MacArthur. Who comes to Hawaii in mid-1944 for a big strategy conference over what to do next and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's going to be there which is a huge deal. I mean, when you look at how really, really sick Franklin Roosevelt is in mid-1944, I mean, it is not too much to say that he is dying. I've read a bunch of good books lately that talk about how pretty much everyone who hadn't seen him for a while is shocked when they do. Even MacArthur wrote that after seeing him, he just knew he didn't have a long time left. And by the way, Roosevelt is running for office at this time for his fourth. No other president has ever been elected more than twice or run more than twice. I mean, Roosevelt is dying and he's going for his fourth term. I love the whole sort of reality series mood that is cast when this conference kicks off because Roosevelt arrives, the navy is waiting for them, everybody's, you know, very, because when the president shows up, you know, everybody salutes a lot and everybody's, everything's been prepared, everybody's ready and, and, and Douglas MacArthur is not there at the meeting with the president. He doesn't show up for 40 minutes. And I love the way author Jonathan W. Jordan describes it in his book, American Warlords. President Roosevelt is on the USS Baltimore with the navy guys and they've been waiting for like 40 minutes and that's where the narrative picks up.
SPEAKER_02: 40 minutes after Baltimore's gang plank was lowered to the pier, the air was split by the shriek of a police siren. A motorcycle escort appeared leading what Sam Rosenman remembered as quote, the longest open car I've ever seen. In front was a chauffeur in khaki and in the back one lone figure, end quote, Jordan continues, quote, that figure wore a crushed general's hat and a brown leather jacket. Mr. Ketch had arrived. Let me stop the narrative real quick. Mr. Ketch was the code name or something like that for MacArthur that the president and the other side had. So this was Mr. Ketch. Mr. Ketch had arrived. What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It's darn hot today. Well, I've just landed from Australia, MacArthur said with a smile. It's pretty cold up there, end quote. Well, Jordan points out that MacArthur had actually had time to shave and get ready and the whole thing. He wore the leather jacket for effect. That's his branding like the corncob pipe and the crushed hat and he's in Hawaii and he shows up in the whole garb because he's in costume. I mean uniform. He's an interesting. See, and we've said this before, you have to acknowledge, I think anyway, Douglas MacArthur's military talent. Sometimes he does extraordinary things, but he is an interesting guy. He talks about himself in the third person, as we said before. No one who talks about himself in the third person is your normal kind of customer. Just going to make a broad brush statement about that. George likes spicy chicken. Little Seinfeld joke there for you Seinfeld fans. MacArthur's favorite pronoun is I. And it's the one he used when he was forced out of the Philippines by the Japanese way back in 1942. I shall return. It's one of the most famous phrases of all time. But as we pointed out at the time, there were a bunch of historians and contemporaries who were saying, you know, he should have said the United States will return or so, but he made it personal. And because he made it personal, it's one of the things that goes into his argument that he makes at the strategy conference about, you know, what should happen next? Well, he said, we should go back to the Philippines. I'm going to return. And he gave a whole host of good reasons why that should be the way, you know, sort of to Japan. Let's take the Philippines. We promised those people. We have POWs in there that the Japanese will kill. There's a lot of good reasons. But part of it was he, you know, he'd made a promise and this was wrapped up in his destiny somehow. And he wanted to go through the Philippines. And then you go up toward Okinawa, which is it's Japanese, but not Japanese. It depends on who you talk to talk to in Okinawa. They have a different opinion sometimes, but it's considered a home island. And then from Okinawa, you keep going. What the Americans need is a place that can serve the same role that Great Britain serves in the Normandy landings. You know, on D-Day, you had a big place where you could get all your troops together and all the supplies you need and build up and then boom, cross the water and you're there and your supply hub's right off the shore. The problem is there's nothing right off the shore from Japan. So if you take the Philippines and you decide that this is going to be your big supply hub where you can gather troops together for the eventual invasion of Japan, it's still a long sea ride to Japan from there. The Navy, Ernest King, Admiral Ernest King has sent, he wanted to come himself, but maybe the actual face-to-face meeting at a strategy session between a guy like MacArthur and a guy like King, and we talked about what they were like earlier, might have been too many sparks for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to keep from blowing up. So he sends a subordinate, he sends Admiral Nimitz, who he then accuses of not having a spine, he'll never represent things against him. He'll get eaten up by Douglas MacArthur was basically the gist of his statements. And Douglas MacArthur prevails in the strategy session because the Navy wants to go take Formosa, which is modern-day Taiwan, and use that as the big supply base that they can start the Japan attack from. MacArthur wins out though in the long run on this deal, but that doesn't stop the Navy advance. The island hopping that's been going on now for a long time, and the Marianas Islands campaign we just talked about is the latest island hop. So that's going to continue through the Central Pacific too. So think of two routes of approach to Japan. MacArthur is going to go up through the Philippines in that route. The US fleet and the Marines and some army help is going to go through the Central Pacific. Next major stop on the list, Iwo Jima, but there's going to be a little quick thing that the Navy wants to take care of first. I've actually read a lot about this because it's controversial. How an island chain like the island chain that contains the island of Peleliu, how that ends up on the to-do list eventually. Because there's a lot of history that suggests that it was supposed to be crossed off or that it never should have happened. It's interesting. And the reason it actually matters is because what will happen on Peleliu is not what is expected to happen on Peleliu. And when things go wrong, people ask questions for a long time afterwards. When you lose a lot of Marines, people start going, was this trip really necessary? And Peleliu is controversial that way. Peleliu is a little island. It's a coral reef basically. Sort of off the coast of the Philippines a ways. And one of the arguments for why this was necessary is it was going to take these islands so they couldn't use air bases against MacArthur when he lands in the not too distant Philippines. Well, the prediction is that they'll go in there, they'll take these islands in two days, maybe four days. Should be a sharp little fight, little like Tarawa. So it's going to be rough for a very short period of time, but maybe really rough. And instead, the situation on Peleliu turns into a kind of disaster. It turns into, I've seen it called the worst combat that the U.S. Marines ever saw. I think that's arguable, but the invasion of Peleliu is something that reminds me of what the Japanese had wanted to do in terms of their grand strategy of taking all these islands and then forcing the Americans and the British and the Australians and the New Zealanders and the South Africans and on and on and on to take them back at super high cost. Because the Japanese were going to reinforce these places, have guns everywhere and steel doors and it was going to be like something out of a James Bond film. But they never really did that on the outer islands very much. On Peleliu though, it's sort of, let's call it the model home for what the Japanese would have liked to have seen all these islands built up to a level of. When you have metal doors that open up and a gun pops up and fires and goes back inside and the metal doors close, I'm calling that James Bond-ish. That's the kind of stuff that the people who landed on Peleliu got to deal with. That and the fact that they're on an absolute coral atoll. It is not dirt. It is rock. And it is usually around 110 degrees or more in the daytime on a rock. This is one of those campaigns by the way that you wish there was more visual material to see, photographs, movies, those kinds of things. But I read that because the military had told the media that this was going to be over in two or four days, a quick short sharp fight, most of them chose to go elsewhere. There's lots of other stories in the Pacific. How about MacArthur planning to come back to the Philippines and go cover that. So you don't get Peleliu because you didn't know Peleliu was going to be what Peleliu is. One of the Marine Corps, the US Marine Corps toughest battles ever and when you see the lineage of the US Marines from the second world war, it is one of those place of honor sorts of battles. But it wasn't supposed to be. There's lots of good accounts. The Marines land on September 15th, 1st Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division. The 5th is there, the 7th is there, the 11th is providing artillery support. And they're expecting the Japanese to do what the Japanese have done on the other islands and the Americans are doing what they've done just better, pounding the beach with heavy duty weapons from the cruisers offshore and the battleships offshore. And then the bombers come in, strafe the beaches, bomb the heck out of everything. But the Japanese don't do what they've done in their other battles. No bonsai charges on the beach to waste away their strength, none of that sort of stuff. They're going to oppose the American landing on the beach lightly but then require the Americans to go and get them in their prepared positions in what is one of the better fortresses you will ever see that was designed by Japanese engineers. More than 500 tunnels on the island, many of which have been used for mining purposes. So they're interconnected and they go to logical places and they're designed in a sort of strategic sense. There are going to be times on this island where the Americans can hear and know that the Japanese are under them, in the ground, and they just can't even get to them. In his book, Eagle Against the Sun, Ronald H. Spector has a good sort of overview of the start of this thing and he writes, By the way, the island, like two miles wide, I think it's six square miles overall, tiny. Quote, Blast walls of reinforced concrete or oil drums filled with coral protected the entrances to the caves, which often faced each other from the sheer walls of twisting gorges and were thus mutually supporting. In the larger cave fortresses, he writes, the Japanese had installed electric lighting, ventilating systems, stairs, telephones, and radio communications. One large cave was discovered, now he's quoting somebody, quote, The Marines are going to land an assault right into the teeth of defenses that remind me of the kind of defenses that the British and the French soldiers sometimes had to assault head on on the Western front in the First World War. You know, prepared German trenches that had the guns sighted and crossfire set up and barbed wire put up. I mean, this is, it's not the sort of fight you want Marines in necessarily because they're fast moving, lightly armed and equipped people designed to, you know, get in quickly, bypass strong points. This is going to throw them the right into the teeth of all this. This is where some of the criticism, by the way, of Peleliu comes in. And this is where the war memoirs take over. There are some fantastic accounts of Peleliu. The best, of course, is one of the best war memoirs of all time. It's called With the Old Breed at Peleliu in Okinawa by E.B. Sledge, Eugene Sledge. They've made movies from Sledge's writing now, but it was never intended for this. This was therapeutic for this Marine. Wrote it for himself from notes he took during the fighting for his family. He's one of the most attractive, maybe that's a better way to put it, the sort of individuals you will ever meet. He's dead now, but I mean, became a biology professor after the war, soft spoken Southern guy. You can't, in your mind's eye, picture the old man, Eugene Sledge, doing the things the young man, the young Marine, Eugene Sledge had to do and live through. But that's part of what his war memoir is all about. That all these people were like him, and that the war made them do and live through the most outrageously extreme things. Sledge talks about the hitting the beach moment, which he says is like cinematic. The Amtrak is moving from the ships toward the shore, and one of the other soldiers pulls out some whiskey and says, Well, this is it, boys, and then Sledge says, Just like in the movies. But once they hit the beach, it's not like the movies at all. Sledge writes, quote, The world was a nightmare of flashes, violent explosions, and snapping bullets. Most of what I saw blurred. My mind was benumbed by the shock of it. I glanced back across the beach and saw a duck, a rubber-tired amphibious truck, that's what they were called, roll up on the sand at a point near where we had just landed. The instant the duck stopped, it was engulfed in a thick, dirty black smoke as a shell scored a direct hit on it. Bits of debris flew into the air. I watched with that odd, detached fascination, peculiar to men under fire, as a flat metal panel about two feet square spun high into the air and then splashed into shallow water like a big pancake. I didn't see any men get out of the duck. He continues, Up and down the beach and out on the reef, a number of amtracks and ducks were burning. Japanese machine gun bursts made long splashes on the water, as though flaying it with some giant whip. The geysers belched up relentlessly where the mortar and artillery shells hit. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a group of Marines leaving a smoking amtrack on the reef. Some fell as bullets and fragments splashed among them. Their buddies tried to help them as they struggled in knee-deep water. I shuddered and choked. A wild, desperate feeling of anger, frustration, and pity gripped me. It was an emotion that always would torture my mind when I saw men trapped and was unable to do anything but watch as they were hit. My own plight forgotten momentarily, I felt sickened to the depths of my soul. I asked God, why, why, why? I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust. End quote. In Matthew A. Rizel's book, The Things Our Fathers Saw, where he interviews veterans throughout the book, he interviews Peleliu veterans, including 19-year-old Marine Dan Lawler, who was also in the wave that attacked Peleliu and says this, quote, We hit the island, which was only four miles long by two miles wide. I was in the first assault wave. It was hell, and everyone was scared. It was an awful feeling. As we disembarked, I looked up and down the beaches and all you could hear was screaming, and men were falling and dying. There was artillery, mortar, and machine gun fire constantly. We fought all day, and by evening we reached the airstrip about a half mile from the beach. We set up for the night along the sides of the airstrip. The temperature was from 102 degrees at night to 120 degrees in the daytime. We went in with two canteens of water. That's a gallon of water. This island was two degrees off the equator. By noontime, we were out of water. End quote. Rizel also quotes another Marine from that day named John Murray who says that the first thing he saw after he landed was a Japanese machine gunner chained to his machine gun. He says they were not going to give up. In the last segment, we had quoted a line from Paul Fussell's wonderful book on war called War Time. He had a whole chapter called The Real War Will Never Get Into the Books. It was based on a saying that soldiers had. The problem with the real war getting into the books is that no country likes to show their own soldiers getting chewed up. I have a book called Life Goes to War. In the Second World War, it's this book of all the Life magazine photos. You'll occasionally see dead Americans tastefully shown. But they have no problem showing thousands and thousands of dead Japanese after a Banzai attack. But what hit me as a child who was interested in war was the first real stuff that I ran into that didn't sanitize it from the American side. You go around playing in your army helmet and your army clothes and it looks all glorious. Then you run into some of the artwork of a guy like Life magazine's Tom Lee. Lee is a famous artist. He was in the second wave at Peleliu. He landed about an hour after the first wave. Lee had up until this time been doing the same sort of artwork that we could call today sort of propaganda artwork. But Peleliu changed him. I have an account from author James Jones who was in the Pacific War. He's talking about these artists and he says this about Tom Lee. He was a very famous American magazine after their takeover of the defunct army program. Various of his works appeared in the magazine and up until the time he went into Peleliu, most of them could be pretty well classified as excellently done but high grade propaganda. There was very little American blood, very little tension, very little horror. But the story was what could be called the Bravo America and this is your boy type of war art. His almost photographic style easily lent itself to that type of work as did the styles of Rockwell and others. But something apparently happened to Lee after going into Peleliu, Jones writes. The pictures painted out of his Peleliu experience show a new approach. There is the tension of terror in the bodies here and the distorted facial expressions of the men under fire show it too. If his propagandistic style has not changed, his subject matter certainly has. I ran into this as a kid seeing a couple of Lee's most famous pieces of work. One was called the 2000 yard stare where Lee had done a piece of art showing what soldiers looked like after combat for a long time. Today we would recognize it as what's sometimes called combat neuroses. Tom Lee wrote about the painting that he did of the Marine with the so called 2000 yard stare and said quote, he, meaning the Marine, left the states 31 months ago. He was wounded in his first campaign. He has had tropical diseases. He half sleeps at night and gouges japs out of holes all day. Two thirds of his company has been killed or wounded. He will return to attack this morning. How much can a human being endure? End quote. Lee also is the one who painted a painting called the price. This was a very controversial piece. When it was published by life magazine, Ian W. Toll says people complained and canceled their subscriptions because it showed a Marine suffering what a Marine really suffered. Lee was accused of embellishing and overdramatizing something which if you think about it sounds silly. He's overdramatizing war. Lee fought back saying every single painting he did showed what he really saw. And the painting, the price, I'm not the only guy by the way. I was doing research on this and found that other people were similarly affected. If you're not used to seeing your own side as war victims, when an artist paints it and this showed a photo, almost photo realistic quality of a Marine who had been hit by mortar fire on the beach at Peleliu as Tom Lee watched and his arm is destroyed and half his face is gone. And Lee described it this way. He said quote, I fell flat on my face just as I heard the whoosh of a mortar that I knew was too close. A red flash stabbed at my eyeballs. About 15 yards away on the upper edge of the beach, it smashed down four men from our boat. One figure seemed to fly to pieces. With terrible clarity, I saw the head and one leg sail into the air. I got up, ran a few steps and fell into a small hole as another mortar burst through dirt on me. Lying there in terror, looking longingly up the slope for better cover, I saw a wounded man near me, staggering in the direction of the LVT. His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick. As he bent over in his stumbling, shock-crazy walk, the half of his face that was still human had the most terrifying look of abject patience I've ever seen. He fell behind me in a red puddle on the white sand. But to me, this isn't gratuitous to say these things. This is what makes what these Marines did. And yes, let's be fair, what the Japanese resisting them also did, what it is. If you have some easy run and nobody gets hurt, well, it's a different style of thing, isn't it? The reason Peleliu elicits the kind of admiration and horror that it does is because that's not what happens. These men have to see things like this or experience it and then keep going. And as I said, I'm not a glory person. I don't think shooting and killing other people is glorious. But there is something heroic about being able to keep going when assaulted by these sorts of sights, sounds, and possible damage to yourself. And I break, by the way, the heroism down to two separate categories. The heroism while these soldiers and Marines, and yes, Japanese soldiers too, while they're actually fighting and dying in combat. And then the different kind of heroism that comes with trying to reestablish some sort of a normal life when you go home and have to live with all of this stuff in your memory banks for maybe decades. As I believe I mentioned earlier, I used to talk to American veterans of the Second World War. And specifically the ones that were the most difficult nuts to crack were those from the Pacific. And a bunch of them wouldn't talk at all. The ones who I was told had seen the most combat. But look at what they're trying to grapple with and how could they ever explain it to you. The things in Sledge's book, there are three or four things that when you read them, you go, okay, this is something that's going to stay with you the rest of your life. I mean, all of it will be, but there are certain things where you just go, holy cow. And Sledge had said once that if you were 100 yards behind the front line, you didn't understand it. You could be a rear support person and still be in great danger in the Second World War, but it's different. And we said this in the last segment, the last part of the show, I'm sure, where it's different when you're in the meat grinder. And you absolutely every single day are going from one position to another position to another position, rooting out and killing the people in each of these positions. Sledge says the worst experience he ever had in the Second World War was on Peleliu trying to cross an open airfield, which a lot of the soldiers remembered, under artillery and mortar fire. He said, quote, To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it. The attack across Peleliu's airfield was the worst combat experience I had during the entire war. It surpassed, by the intensity of the blast and shock of the bursting shells, all the subsequent horrifying ordeals on Peleliu and Okinawa. End quote. That sort of mirrors what Ernst Junger in his fabulous book on the First World War, The Storm of Steel, had said about artillery. He said that being under artillery attack was like being tied to a stake and having somebody swinging at your head with a sledgehammer over and over again and just missing by a little, but you were sure that the next shot of the sledgehammer was going to get you. Surviving that artillery barrage while you run and try to avoid getting hit is the sort of thing that will give you nightmares the rest of your life. But he has two other incidents in the book that fall, in my mind, under the category of this is not what you're ready for when you go to war. You're ready to take on the enemy and deal with, you know, shooting at somebody or being shot at. But he talks about, for example, one incident where they're all on patrol at night on Peleliu and it's dark and they're trying to maintain quiet and secrecy and then one of their guys cracks up and starts raving and screaming and threatening the whole unit. And they don't know what to do. They're panicking. What do we do with this guy? He's our friend. He's our buddy. So first they try to give him morphine. Then they try to knock him out with a punch to the jaw. Then more morphine and nothing is working and eventually one of the officers or the sergeant says, use an entrenching tool, knock him out. And they hit him in the head with basically a shovel. And instead of injuring him, he dies. And the person who hit him in the head with the shovel has to live with that the rest of his life. You know, it's one thing to say I killed the enemy and they were a bunch of fanatical robots and they did terrible things to our troops so I don't feel bad about it. It's another thing to hit your own guy in the head with an entrenching tool and kill him. Sledge tells a worse story than that later on when he's talking about, and this is like horror movie stuff like Freddy Krueger jump scare horror stuff, but the Japanese at night with their infiltration tactics drove the Americans crazy. And over and over you read veterans saying, I hated the night. They would be in two-man foxholes so one person could sleep while the other person watched and stayed on guard. But the problem is at night you thought every single sound was the Japanese. And they'd come close to the foxholes and scream things at you to keep you on edge. But sometimes they'd do more than scream. They'd grab a couple of edged weapons and jump into some of these foxholes. And not only did the people in the foxholes who all of a sudden had Japanese in their foxholes with them have to deal with them, but so did every American around that foxhole who could hear what was happening. I read this over and over again with different Marines in different books talking about the sounds. What does it sound like when one guy is gouging out another guy's eyes and kills him by doing that? Sledge says, quote, with a wild yell the Japanese jumped into the hole with the two Marines. A frantic, desperate hand-to-hand struggle ensued, accompanied by the most gruesome combination of curses, wild babbling, animalistic guttural noises and grunts. Sounds of men hitting each other and thrashing around came from the foxhole. End quote. Okay, again, though, that's combat, right? You're going to wake up with some nightmares from that. But it's what happens next that gives a different sort of vibe to the whole thing when Sledge says a man jumps out of the foxhole and starts running in the dark toward the other Marine foxholes. So a Marine stands up, uses his gun like a club and smacks the figure in the head, knocking him down. That figure stays around in the dark groaning and thrashing around until another Marine goes up and shoots him in the head. And in the morning they find out that it wasn't a Japanese soldier that they shot in the head. It was one of their own. Sledge says, quote, a few hours later, as objects around me became faintly visible with the dawn, I noticed that the still form lying to my left didn't appear Japanese. It was either an enemy in Marine dungarees or leggings, or it was a Marine. I went over to find out which. Before I got to the prone body, its identity was obvious to me. My God, I said in horror. Several men looked at me and asked what was the matter. It's Bill, I said. End quote. He then is asked by the officer, you know, who shot him? Did he get killed by one of the Japs, he said? Sledgehammers, which was Sledge's nickname, says, quote, I didn't answer. Just looked at him with a blank stare and felt sick. I looked at the man who had crawled past me to check on the groaning man in the dark. He had shot Bill through the temple, mistakenly assuming him to be Japanese. And then he says, as the realization of his fatal mistake hit him, the man's face turned ashen. His jaw trembled and he looked as though he were going to cry. End quote. This is something above and beyond what you expect when you go to kill the enemy. And I understand so much better after reading Sledge's book, why it was so hard, sometimes impossible to get these Pacific War veterans, especially these Marines, to tell you much about their experience. Because how could you have understood? What sort of context did you have to properly assess what this person was trying to make you understand? And Sledge addresses this, too, and says, quote, To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement. But to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror, from which escape seemed less and less likely, as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning. Life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines, service troops and civilians. End quote. When you look at the casualties on Peleliu, it's like 8,000 Americans roughly, about 16 or 1700 dead, which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize the size of the island, right? It's like Tarawa. The numbers at Tarawa and the Gilbert Islands earlier don't seem like that much until you realize it's like three days of fighting for another little tiny spit of nothing land-wise. If you could divide the casualties by the square footage of the battlefield, you could see how particularly nasty these Pacific battles were. And you don't even have to do that for the Japanese because they lose between 11,000 and 13,000 men. Their commanding officer, of course, near the end of the campaign burns the regimental colors, kills himself. And the only people who surrender are the normal small, small handful of mostly Korean and Okinawan laborers. The last organized Japanese units to surrender on Peleliu don't do so until 1947, two years after the war is over. Does that tell you how committed they were to resisting and how hard an opponent they were? The 1st Marine Division, especially the 1st Regiment, severely chewed up. The 1st Regiment, I believe, suffers twice as many casualties as is normally considered to be a unit that's just completely out of commission. It would take them months to recover. It's some of the worst, if not the worst, casualty rates the Marines suffer ever in their history. And Peleliu doesn't get enough attention. It's not hard to see how an event like Peleliu, though, gets downplayed. After all, what country in the Second World War was not exercising a high level of censorship when it comes to showing their public back home what the war was really like? I mean, most Americans got their visual impressions of what the war looked like through newsreel footage in the movie theaters, right? You often show it in between two halves of a double feature, right? You go to see your escapist entertainment, you buy your popcorn and your Coke, you sit down in the theater, and you're confronted with Peleliu? How's that going to make parents of a Marine somewhere in the Pacific that they just get occasional cards from? You're wondering, how's Junior doing? And then you see the footage of Peleliu? Or you're a 15 or 16-year-old American boy thinking, okay, in the next couple of years I'm going off to war? And then you show them what a two or three or four-day battle estimations were, what that looks like when it turns into a 73 or 74-day battle instead? With the highest casualty rates Marines have seen? I mean, that's the kind of thing that not only does the public not want to really see that, the government doesn't really want to show it to them. What's more, we should point out that there's a giant, giant historical news event happening only about 700 miles away that overshadows this whole thing and overlaps it time-wise. Because while Peleliu is being fought over, Douglas MacArthur is returning to the Philippines. And if you didn't know how big of an historical event this was, Douglas MacArthur's press relations people would see to it that you did. But Peleliu is hardly the only thing that gets overshadowed by all of these big, exciting historical occasions that are much more positive and would look much better in the movie theater, in the newsreel, between the two halves of the double feature. I mean, how about submarine warfare and what that's doing to the Japanese? The non-sexy side of war, as we've been calling it, the logistics, the supply. And what's fascinating to me is not only are things like logistics and supply not all that interesting to people like yours truly, or the people who want to war game the Second World War, I can honestly tell you I've war gamed many times Japanese naval combat. I have never once in my life war gamed a submarine trying to sink a merchant vessel while some escort ship tries to catch the submarine first. I mean, not only do I not do that, but the Japanese cadets at the Naval Academy don't want to do that. There's a book called The Japanese Navy in World War II, edited by David C. Evans, and what it really is is sort of a debriefing of the Japanese admirals after the war. And they all but say that. Nobody cared about this. They blame it on the Japanese penchant for the offense. They want the colorful offense. They want the big decisive naval battles, which by the way, the Americans and the Japanese both subscribe to the to the mayhem idea of the decisive naval battle. So neither one of those countries navies were really excited about things like commerce rating. But the Japanese didn't put any effort into it at all. One admiral had said that if they had thought the United States would use their submarines the way the Germans were using U-boats in the Atlantic to go after merchant shipping, they might not have launched the war at all. That shows you how unprepared they were to deal with it. And as we had said earlier, one of the things about naval warfare is in general, if you find out that you haven't built the right ships, that is a problem that takes at least a couple of years to solve. Like when you find out because of experience in the Second World War that aircraft carriers are going to be the new queen of the seas and not battleships, well, you don't magically have aircraft carriers. You got to go and make some and that takes years. So if you find out that you don't have enough escorts for your merchant ships, that's a problem you can't solve all that quickly. And it took the Japanese a while to realize it because it took the Americans and the other allies a while to really make a dent in the enemy's commercial shipping. There's lots of reasons for this. And we mentioned one of them earlier in the series. We talked about the absolute terribleness of American torpedoes. And I've read all kinds of accounts where it's called a scandal, a national disgrace, people should have gone to jail. I mean, the stories from the Japanese about ships coming back into port with unexploded American torpedoes sticking out of the side of the merchant vessels. Or all the American pilots who dropped their torpedoes right close by an enticing Japanese naval target only to watch the torpedoes go right under it. Well, that will impact your submarine success rate until you fix that. But by mid 1944, the Americans have fixed that. And now you start to see the tonnage totals of Japanese merchant shipping skyrocket.
SPEAKER_02: And submarines will account for about 60% of the Japanese merchant ships that are sent to the bottom of the sea with aircraft, allied aircraft of all kinds and from all allied countries, accounting for most of the rest. But when you look at the numbers, you get an idea of how the impact is affecting the Japanese ability to do anything. When we talked about the supply problems in Burma, how did the Japanese get supplies over those mountains through those jungles on those terrible roads? Well, the Pacific's even worse. The Japanese at the time of the Pearl Harbor attacks had about 6 million tons of merchant shipping. And no nation in the Second World War has enough. Merchant shipping is always in short supply for everyone, including the United States, who can build merchant ships faster than anyone ever thought possible. The Japanese will build another 3.5 million tons of merchant shipping during the war. But by December 1944, even with all that, they're down to 2,500,000 tons. And the Americans are sinking hundreds of thousands of tons a month. And the only way that that number will slow down and they'll start sinking less merchant shipping is because eventually they're so successful, they run out of targets. Essentially, by late 1944, American submarines are doing to Japan what German U-boats were hoping to do to Britain, another island nation, back during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942. Starve an island nation of the resources that it needs to continue to fight the war. Bring them to their knees. But the German Navy's idea of bringing Britain to its knees in 1942 in the Battle of the Atlantic would have involved some sort of peace arrangement, right? What if you are dropped to your knees as a nation, but you still don't give up, right? We know if these were reasonable people, they would have surrendered long ago. What if you cripple them and they don't give in anyway? There's a fantastic anecdote. And Ian W. Towle, by the way, as an author, is so good at finding these historical anecdotes that helps dramatize both where the supply problem has the Japanese in terms of options by October 1944, but also the mood amongst the leadership and the decision makers. And I have to say, there's a little bit of a sickness, I think, to finding this so interesting, but I've always been fascinated with that mood that you find. Well, we always say the extremes of the human experience, but think about the people in Hitler's bunker, you know, as the Battle of Berlin is ramping up. So Hitler during the last month and what it's like in that room and all those people's psychological states under that kind of crushing pressure. I'm fascinated by that. You have a similar dynamic going on in Japan at this time period. And in this anecdote, Ian W. Towle brings you into a conference between army heads and navy heads in Japan. And these guys are putting the finishing touches on their plan to respond to this great historical event we mentioned earlier that's going to overshadow Peleliu, right? The return of Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines. And the plan is the Americans are going to land October 20th on the Philippine island of Leyte and it's going to be on, right? The Japanese know by that time that the Americans are going to land in the Philippines and probably on Leyte. And so they have a plan that's been ready for a little while to go disrupt this. And they're basically going to throw in everything the Japanese fleet has left in order to accomplish this goal. But before the plan can happen, there's this conference that Towle talks about. And a general in the army, Satou, who we mentioned earlier, basically turns to the navy and says, you know, how is this going to be worth the fuel that we're going to use for the navy to conduct this operation, right? He says that there's a fleet of merchant ships, six of them carrying 60,000 tons of oil to Japan right now. And that the fleet would basically use all of that, whereas we could use that 60,000 tons of oil to do a lot of things for the civilians, for the other war effort areas. And it's funny because 60,000 tons of oil a couple years ago would not have been anywhere near this important. But we understand that scarcity makes things valuable, law of supply and demand and all that. But when the general says this to the navy, he essentially exposes the fact that this is less about the Japanese navy trying to make a war winning difference here, although they'd like to, than it is about making an honorable end. Towle says that their plan here boils down to like a naval version of one of those suicidal bonsai attacks the Japanese have been doing on land with thousands of their soldiers will run into machine gun fire with bayonets. But that's where we are in this story. And one of the things that Towle's antidote deals with is the fact that these hard bitten old military guys who are in a room with their sister service, right, and the Japanese navy and army don't much care for each other. So if the one place you don't want to wear your emotions on your sleeve is in a room full of these kind of people, right? But everybody's crying. Towle writes quote, and he begins this anecdote right after the Japanese general says to the navy, you know, how are you going to be able to accomplish anything worth this fuel? The 60,000 tons of oil is more important and Towle writes quote. Towle then points out that everybody's weeping quote. Sobbing freely, Rear Admiral Tasuku Nakazawa of the naval general staff replied on behalf of the navy. He was grateful to the general for his kindness. But now quote, and quoting the admiral, now the combined fleet of the Empire of Japan wishes to be given a place to end her life. End quote. Towle then says that there's talk of this being a last chance so that the fleet can have a glorious death. And then the admiral points out that this is the navy's earnest wish. Towle continues quote. After a choked silence with tears streaming down his face, Sato agreed that the 60,000 tons of oil should be offered as a quote end quote parting present to the navy. End quote. Towle then quotes Sato writing that as he walked out of the meeting to the sound of air raid sirens, he had prayed for the heroic end of the combined fleet. This idea of a heroic death is one of the fascinating parts of this story. Because if you read the accounts of this affair, it's interesting that the Japanese fleet, even though they know they're being sent on one of these things that's probably a one way mission, do they rebel? How many fleets around the world in world history would have just rebelled? Struck the colors, put up some red flag, say we're not fighting. No, the Japanese sailors have a problem with this too, but for different reasons entirely. If they're going to go down in a blaze of glory, they want it to be glorious. They want to be fighting the best the United States has so that if they do manage to land some lucky or divinely inspired punch, it can do some real damage. Put us against the US carriers. They're mad that the plan calls for them to go after cargo ships and supply vessels and oilers and the stuff like that, the boring logistical side of war, right? The non-sexy side as we've been talking about. That's going to be the target so that MacArthur's recently landed troops are starved right on the beaches of bullets and food. But no sailor wants to lose his life trying to fight a cargo vessel, right? That's a no win situation. If you win, there's no honor. If you lose, you're lost to a cargo vessel. And in Masanori Ito's classic book, The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy, he says the admiral here, whose name is Kurita, is being bombarded with, and that's not usual in the Japanese Navy, from notes from average sailors to being stopped by his officers and asked about this. And Ito quotes one of the notes that the admiral received from just a Japanese sailor, and the note says, quote, And Ito says, And it's a losing end of a war that's not necessarily near over. I mean, you have to continue to fight after the decision has happened. And how do you do that? Well, the admiral's got to rally his sailors and he said, quote, And it's a losing end of a war that's not necessarily near over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over over ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok OK ok ships and supply ships and those kinds of non-heroic targets. But there's an understanding might be a good way to put it that if you run into any American aircraft carriers, you can attack them. So maybe we'll call that an out clause in the plan. The plan, by the way, is one similar to a naval plan the Japanese tried earlier in the war. Essentially in order to get to these cargo ships and these oilers and these supply ships, the Japanese have to lure the warships that are protecting them away. So if you think about a defenseless flock of sheep, the Japanese plan here calls for something to be used as bait to try to attract the sheep dog and take them away from the flock. And then the Japanese, divided into several separate flotillas coming from several different angles, will pounce on the beachhead area. And each one of these separate flotillas has its own destiny and its own story in the giant battle of Leyte Gulf. That's why it's really best thought of as three to five, depending on who you're reading, separate naval battles, smaller ones. They all have their own names, by the way, but they're all the separate fleets and their destinies. The Japanese flotilla that is designed to be the bait in this plan is using the very best sort of lure that you can have if you're trying to attract late 1944 admirals. Also happens to be the one ship you normally don't want to let the other side find under any conditions. It's the Japanese aircraft carriers. They're going to be the equivalent of the matador's cape in this plan to attract the attention of a bull. This so happens that the American admiral's nickname is Bull, Admiral Bull Halsey. While if the plan goes as planned, the bull is charging up to the northeast area of Luzon, up far away from the beachheads, the other Japanese flotillas can come in from multiple angles and destroy the Americans either best case scenario while they're actually landing, but even a couple of days afterwards, you could probably cause great damage, right? You got big ships coming in here, although no aircraft carriers, but that's the plan. Whatever chance these sailors had in this upcoming event has been whittled away in the previous couple of weeks because as part of the softening up campaign that happens before the MacArthur landings, American carrier planes have been savaging the entire region. I mean, certainly everything that floats on the ocean, but I mean going far inland and hitting facilities, especially airfields, taking out Japanese aircraft at an alarming pace and it's easy to understand why, by the way, at this point in the war, all of the advantages that the Japanese pilots and planes had earlier in the war are tipped on its head and the Americans have all of those same advantages now. They've got the veteran pilots. The Americans have the better machines now. The kill ratios are remarkably one-sided, but I mean in one air battle that goes on for several days in the airspace above Formosa, which is now Taiwan, in the days leading up to MacArthur's return to the Philippines, the Japanese lose something like 700 planes. That's according to my encyclopedia of military history. In Masanori Ito's book, he quotes one admiral as saying, we lost 205 planes on Palau right after we lost 345 planes over a truck and you just get this sense of an intense level of grinding at this point in the war and the Japanese industry can't possibly keep up with these kind of losses and forget about the machines that you're losing for a minute. In most of these cases, you're losing the pilots too and the pilots that are going up in these air battles are often very, very green and they're going up against American carrier pilots that are some of the best aviators the United States has ever produced. So when it comes to equipment, the Japanese are now very outclassed in the war. The one place they can actually put up a good fight is when it comes to their own people's willingness to fight to the death. And I mean the land battles, even with Japanese equipment being inferior, with their logistics shattered, are still going to be horribly difficult opponents. But all the Bushido spirit in the world doesn't make your aircraft better, right? So they suffer terribly and if the Japanese fleet's actions here in the Philippines was a long shot before you lose 700 planes that are supposed to play a very big role in this affair, how much more of a long shot is it after you lose them? Winston Churchill in his history of the Second World War said that the enemy's air force was broken before the battle of Leyte was joined. Speaking of that, this whole affair is part of the tri-phibious operations that surround the great MacArthur return to the Philippines, right? The giant news story that we talked about earlier. That happens on October 20th, 1944. The Americans launched this whole campaign early. MacArthur arrives early. The good news is it catches the Japanese wrong-footed, I guess you could say. The bad news is the Americans aren't exactly as prepared as they'd like to be either. But even with all the problems, they still manage the absolutely unbelievable task of landing more than 100,000 people by midnight on the first day. That's amazing. I've actually seen a couple of histories say D plus one, which would be the next day, but most of them say on the first day, compare and contrast that with the earlier landings in the war. Places like Tarawa, which were a chaotic mess with far fewer people having to be landed. Now, we should point out there wasn't much resistance on the beaches. The Japanese strategy here is to confront MacArthur more inland where you're out of the range of all the big guns that were firing on the beachheads and the planes. But there's some resistance. About 100,000 guys by midnight on the first day, that's a well-oiled machine at this point. And the great factory assembly line and the logistics supply chains and all that boring stuff that the United States is so good at in its corporate peacetime economy really coming in handy at events like this. And MacArthur's total invasion force will number something like 175,000 to 200,000 men. And boy, what a difference a couple of years in the Pacific war makes, doesn't it? It's no longer the little brother to places like Europe where the numbers are smaller. We're starting to creep up to numbers that they wouldn't sneeze at on the Western front. The Japanese resistors, by the way, who are spread out over a bunch of the different Philippine islands, they're estimated to be between 300 and 350,000 men. So a large battle indeed. One thing that is worth pointing out is that there are really two kinds of island battles in this war, the kind that have a relatively free area without a civilian population to worry about and the kind that don't. Peleliu, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, not a big civilian population to worry about. Saipan, Okinawa, the Philippines, just the opposite. And we had just talked in the last segment about the disaster, the humanitarian nightmare that Saipan was with civilians jumping off of cliffs and getting caught in the crossfire and the high level of civilian deaths. Well, Saipan's miniature compared to the 15 to 16 million people that live in the Philippines. And Okinawa is very populated too. So in the distance, you can see these areas that the human being lawnmower is going to just crisscross. And when we had given those numbers at the beginning of this segment, where we were talking about every month in 1944, what did it say, 200 to 250,000 innocent civilian casualties in Asia. This is in Asia, but you can see these numbers in the distance, right? I mean, wait till the Japanese and the Americans start fighting over the urban center that is Manila in 1945. MacArthur, by the way, will show up himself on the first day, step out of the landing craft or the whaler I read in one account with his pressed khakis, aviator sunglasses, his completely non-regulation, and I don't know how he gets away with it. Philippine field Marshall cap, as he called it, steps out of the craft, gets his pants wet from the knees down in a photo that is so good, you can't believe it's not staged. I mean, it looks like a poster. The camera people on the shore get him striding back onto Philippine soil a couple of years after he was unceremoniously thrown out of it. At some point, he'll get his hands on a microphone and say, people of the Philippines, I have returned. Rally to me. And he'll begin his campaign to, along with the help of the Filipinos, throw the Japanese out of the Philippines. The first Japanese fleet is not sighted for three days. And two submarines in the late night hours on October 23rd, I think it is, spot one of these flotillas. And this is traditionally the beginning of the battle of Leyte Gulf, the naval battle of Leyte Gulf. Put me in the category of those who think that this is a highly overrated battle, although people differ. Francis Pike in Hirohito's War says the reason it doesn't get the attention some of its more vigorous proponents wish that it would is because the stakes aren't that high. And he mentioned several other very famous naval battles throughout history and talks about how the decision which way that battle went, one way or the other, had huge war-changing ramifications. And this doesn't. I would even suggest that a battle that I've done 45 minutes on before the Battle of Jutland, which if it were a boxing match, you would say it ended as a no contest. I would say that that counts as a much more interesting affair because if one side had had an overwhelming victory and that was possible, well, that would have been a huge war-changing sort of event. The best the Japanese can hope for here is to lengthen the war. And if they lengthen the war, maybe get better peace terms. So anybody that is giving their life in this contest is doing this in order to establish, well, in this case, keep the imperial system and the emperor, right? The imperial polity, as it's sometimes called, because that's the sticking point. But there are a lot of people who look at this battle as something more than an execution, and I don't think I'm one of them. By that I mean the Battle of Leyte Gulf has a couple of things associated with it that sound really like a big deal. For example, you'll hear that it is the greatest naval battle of all time or the largest naval battle of all time, which might be true. But what that kind of conceals is that the United States outnumbers the Japanese in warships four or five to one. They outnumber them in aircraft five to one. The Japanese have almost no aircraft capability. This is a very one-sided affair from the get-go. The only reason though it has some drama, it reminds me, I have to say, of one of those early Mike Tyson fights where he was knocking out guys in 45 seconds, but you bought the pay-per-view, so they always had to have a post-fight analysis segment where somebody would have to try to find a way that the other guy might have won. You know, oh, he tapped him on the chin at the 16-second mark, and if that had hurt Mike, we'd have had a whole different fight right here. That's kind of how I feel about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It's a disaster for the Japanese, except a mistake happens at some point in the affair that allows one Japanese flotilla to get into the backfield, you would say, if this were football, begin tearing up some escort carriers. If the escort carriers had all been torn up, could have broken into the landing area, which might have been vulnerable. I mean, there's a lot of mights and what-ifs, and that is history, right? Especially military history, but I think sometimes the idea that this would have been catastrophic is overplayed. There's a case to be made that if all the worst things had happened and the Japanese fleet started tearing up the beachhead areas, that that just would have made them stationary when the American planes eventually came back and found that, and they would have lost even more ships. The bottom line is when the Battle of Leyte Gulf's over though, the Japanese lose four aircraft carriers, three battleships, 10 cruisers, 11 destroyers, and they sink, you know, like a light carrier, they sink an escort carrier. I mean, it's just a disaster. One of their fleets gets wiped out in one of the greatest ambush attacks in naval history where, and it's sort of a little karmic retribution, a bunch of the battleships were old World War I type battleships that were damaged at Pearl Harbor were raised, refloated, refitted, and were here and participated in the ambush and did a lot of damage. But I mean, from an American standpoint, you could look at it as a rah-rah moment because it really inflicts a defeat on the Japanese Navy that they never recover from, and the Navy will be reduced to impotence after this. American air power just shredded Japanese naval assets whenever it found it. A lesson that had already been learned several times in this war is reinforced and that by October 1944, if one side has powerful naval air assets and the other doesn't, the way the battle is going to go is pretty much a foregone conclusion. So with the exception of the one fantastic night ambush where the American battleships from Pearl Harbor ended up crushing that one Japanese flotilla, the damage is pretty much done by American aircraft. Just as the Japanese admirals assumed it would be. The Battle of Leyte Gulf is famous for something else though too. It's considered to be the battle where the suicide attacks known as kamikaze attacks first happen in real numbers. There may have been some early attacks earlier and there were definitely suicide attacks with the Japanese all throughout the war. But as an organized effort, unleashing trained and tactically organized for maximum effect suicide squads, you first see this at Leyte Gulf. And John Toland in his 1970 book, The Rising Sun Chronicles, one of these early famous attacks. And it's famous because the kamikaze came in and did some damage. And I try to imagine the Americans watching this as it unfolds, trying to figure out what it is they're seeing and trying to come to grips with are these guys deliberately trying to smash into us and take their own lives? The event happens in that one moment in time at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Didn't we say that the enemy flotillas, enemy if you're an American, get into the back field right and they're fighting with these escort carriers and you do have the rather interesting moment where you have the super battleship Yamato for the first time in the war, I believe firing its guns in anger, it's 18.1 inch guns, shells the size of Volkswagens at American carriers 18 or 19 miles away, escort carriers, it must be said they were called Jeep carriers. And then about an hour after these Japanese battleships inexplicably turn away, giving the escort carriers after having lost a ship and others damaged a reprieve from the governor, and then something else shows up and Toland writes, quote, and by the way, I'm going to add the word escort carrier in front of all these ships that are escort carriers where he just gives the name it gets confusing, quote, For over an hour, all was quiet. Then at 1050, General Quarters was again sounded on the five surviving Jeep carriers. Nine enemy planes were approaching at mast level, so low that radar had failed to pick them up. They climbed to several thousand feet as American fighters tried to intercept them. Five Zero fighters with bombs lashed to their wings emerged from the milling mass and slanted down toward the Jeeps. They were led by a recently married lieutenant commander. I hope I pronounced his name correctly. Yukio Seki. One Zero, Toland writes, headed for the bridge of the escort carrier Kitkun Bay, its machine guns winking. Onlookers expected it to pull up. Instead, it drove into the port catwalk, exploded and tumbled on into the sea. Two others roared straight at the escort carrier Fanshawe Bay, also with obvious intent to crash into her, only to disintegrate at the last moment. The final two veered off from the heavy fire thrown up by the escort carrier White Plains. One, trailing smoke, banked toward the escort carrier St. Low in a right turn as if intending to land. But the pilot pushed the little plane over, slamming it into the flight deck. Fire spread throughout the hangar deck, setting off a chain of violent internal explosions. After having survived the running battle unscathed, St. Low sank. End quote. I've been fascinated by this phenomenon of the Kamikaze since I first learned about him as a kid, and I know many of you have been fascinated with them too. And like me, if you've continued to read up on them, your views on them have probably changed 180 degrees too. When I was a kid, we were basically taught these were fanatic Kool-Aid drinkers who would give their lives up without even giving it a second thought for the Emperor. Very non-complicated robots. And now when you read their last letters and their diary entries, the whole time that they were training for these missions, but knowing that they were dead men walking or dead men flying or dead men piloting the human torpedo, whatever it might have been, your heart breaks in a lot of these cases. First of all, these are not your hard-bitten military men, which I found very interesting. When the program was first developed, they asked military men to volunteer. And do you know how many military men did? According to anthropologist Amiko Onuki-Tyrne, who wrote the fabulous book Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms, the number of hard-bitten military men that said, yeah, I'll volunteer for that suicide mission was none. And she italicized the word none. This is a bit of a problem if you're trying to kickstart a brand new program and get people interested in it. So apparently the military just decided to then point to some people and say, okay, you're volunteering, you're volunteering, you're volunteering. And one of them was this pilot John Toland had used in his book, Yuki Osaki, portrayed as this willing, ready-to-die-for-the-emperor guy. Turns out, not so willing. But that was not news that made it into the propaganda at the time. Before he flies off to crash his plane into an enemy ship, he does an interview with a reporter whose job it is to get the good story for the Japanese propaganda, and instead gets a whole bunch of stuff from this pilot that he can't release. He talks about it in a letter decades later. But the great Yukio Seki, early kamikaze pilot, spat this out to the reporter at the time. Quote, there is no more hope for Japan if it has to kill such a skillful pilot like myself. I can hit an aircraft carrier with an 1,102 pound bomb and return alive without having to make a suicidal plunge. Onuki Tierney then says, quote, at that time, Seki had been married for only six months to a woman with whom he was passionately in love. He explained to the reporter, quote, if it is in order, I will go. But I am not going to die for the emperor or for Imperial Japan. I am going for my beloved wife. If Japan loses, she might be raped by Americans. I am dying for someone I love most to protect her. End quote. This mirrors what you read from a lot of these pilots. Although it should be noted, there were thousands of them and they run the gamut in terms of the differences in their background. Some of them do seem a little like the robotic figures who seem to have been brainwashed into just dying for the emperor and happy to do it. Some of those people fit that mold, but most of them don't. What's more, since they can't get the professionals to volunteer to do this, they go after cadets and training pilots and students at the university. This is one of the really weird things about this program. You can see the Nazi Germany regime, for example, maybe picking up the derelicts off the street or the people, the undesirables that they'd thrown into concentration camps or those kinds, the discredited people and making them the suicide pilots. The Japanese instead make a lot of these suicide pilots come from their best and their brightest. The kids at the elite colleges, really, if you look at them and you read the accounts, they almost seem like the people that were picked on by all these macho military types who when they finally show up to be kamikazes are picked on even more, treated like nerds, the four eyes, the brainiacs. It's interesting to read who these people were, though. Ian W. Toll in his book Twilight of the Gods has a quick rundown and he writes, quote, About half of the kamikaze pilots of 1945 have been drawn from the ranks of university students. Many were cosmopolitan intellectuals who had been exposed to foreign ideas and influences, including Western philosophy and literature. These traits had not endeared them to their officers and NCOs in military training camps. Many young scholars had been singled out for special abuse, including vicious beatings, leaving them with feelings of contempt and loathing for military authority and for the tyrannical regime that held the nation's fate in its grip. In diaries and letters, many of these future kamikazes identified themselves as political liberals and democrats. Some found much to admire in the American model of society and government. Others harbored radical, utopian, pacifist, or even Marxist views. End quote. Onuki Tierney runs down the backgrounds of a lot of these people. Most of them speak multiple languages. Their reading list would shame an English professor. This is, these are the very people you look at as the people who are going to have to rebuild Japan, right? Instead they're being thrown into the meat grinder.
SPEAKER_02: Reading the accounts from these people is fascinating. First of all, they all seem to be patriots, even if they disagree with the government. Some of them specifically are looking forward to helping the post-war Japan emerge. A lot of them think about themselves as helping their families back home and trying to make a difference to see that they don't end up bombed or occupied. Some of the pilots expressed all sorts of worry and remorse about the way their own army were treating captive populations. This is not what you expect. I was thinking how very different this is, right? How you couldn't expect any other major military in the second world war to do something like this. But then I was doing some research and I came across, I think it was like a letter to the editor or something like that by a person who identified themselves as a US Marine. They didn't say in what era. All they had written though was if they had found themselves in a situation where their country was about to be occupied, where their government or their military superiors said that they could reduce the chances of that happening if they'd be willing to sacrifice their lives flying their plane into an enemy ship. This person who identified as a US Marine said he would be happy to do that. Then I thought to myself, the Japanese are just like everyone else, only more so, right? You can kind of see where all this hails from. They just took it to levels that in most societies are theoretical. The one part that really got to me the most, well, there were several. There was the one about the Christian pilots. You forget that there's a sizable Christian population in Japan and you think of suicide as being prohibited by the religion, but there were Japanese kamikaze pilots who brought their Bibles into the cockpit with them, taped the photo of their mother to their chest. And when I was reading about this, one person had said, well, isn't suicide frowned upon by the church? And someone else explained that they just didn't see it as suicide. They looked at it as the war bringing death to them rather than they seeking it out. Some of these other people were making very rational calculations because as another historian pointed out, they weren't making a choice between a suicide attack that killed them and a wonderful world of rainbows and unicorns, right? That wasn't their other option. Their other option was probably dying somewhere else, maybe anonymously, your corpse left in a decaying jungle somewhere. Your family never known what even happens to you or you could die a hero. And I think I read, don't quote me on this, that they got the kamikaze pilots got an immediate increase in two ranks, two military ranks. And if that's the case, well, now it's even a financial decision, right? You can die in a jungle somewhere and your family's at one level of poverty, or you could increase the amount of money that the state pays to, you know, grieving families and widows for upkeep and all that sort of stuff. If you get your rank right, I mean, so you start to see actual maybe thinking going on in some of these decisions. And then one other thing that just moved me was how the they were supposed to be volunteers, but many historians will use the word volunteer with quotation marks because the circumstances these 20 to 24 year old guys were put in, were such that they were forced into moral quandaries. And the only people that passed the moral quandaries and became the kamikaze pilots, in other words, the only ones that this strategy worked on, were sort of the most moral amongst them. For example, a lot of these volunteer sessions were framed in a way that you understood that if you said no, that you wouldn't volunteer, that meant that your refusal was consigning some other person to death. And a lot of these people couldn't handle that. But the part that moved me the most, because it's one of those things I wonder about, I wondered in a show we did on executions once, what goes through your mind the night before your own execution. This is similar. You wonder, okay, if you're a kamikaze pilot, and you know tomorrow's go time, what's your last night like? And apparently, the last nights were not spent alone, you spent it with the other people that were going to go with you. And in Onuki Tierney's book, she quotes a guy who wrote all this in a letter decades later to somebody else whose job it was to cater to these pilots on their last night of life. And he writes what that was like. He is identified, by the way, as Kasuga Takeo, and he wrote, quote, at the hall where their farewell parties were held, the young student officers drank cold sake the night before their flight. Some gulped the sake in one swallow, others kept gulping down a large amount. The whole place degenerated into chaos. Some broke hanging light bulbs with their swords. Some lifted chairs to break the windows and tore white tablecloths. A mixture of military songs and curses filled the air. While some shouted in rage, others cried aloud. It was their last night of life. They thought of their parents, their faces and images. Lovers' faces and their smiles. A sad farewell to their fiancés. All went through their minds like a running horse lantern. Although they were supposedly ready to sacrifice their precious youth the next morning for Imperial Japan and for the Emperor, they were torn beyond what words can express. Some putting their heads on the table. Some writing their wills. Some folding their hands in meditation. Some leaving the hall. And some dancing in frenzy while breaking flower vases. They all took off with the rising sun headband the next morning. But this scene of utter desperation has hardly been reported. I observed it with my own eyes as I took care of their daily life." I don't know how representative that account is of the kamikaze last night experience. There may be different experiences I would imagine there were. And we should also point out that it was hardly just as pilots that these young people who the government could count on to reliably kill themselves trying to kill the enemy. It wasn't just airplanes. I mean, they had something known as a human torpedo. They had bombs that they dropped. I think they may be rocket propelled bombs they dropped from aircraft that have a human pilot. They have motor boats that they load with explosives that are designed to be driven into the enemy ships. There's a whole bunch of ingenious ways to utilize the willingness of your young men to kill themselves for the cause. But it's this regardless of their positions on the issues and regardless of how much they might dislike the government or whatever it might be. There's a strain of patriotism that runs through these people that's noticeable in all their writings a love of country that did not always mean a love of emperor or government or any of these things. Sometimes it was just the concept of Japan or what Japan might be in the future after the war. But one kamikaze quoted in Umeiko Onuki-Tirne's book said that he found quote our love of country to be of frightening intensity. End quote. I think that's a great way to put it. Frightening intensity. What happens when you take something that most countries have, you know, patriotism on the part of their people and turn it up to an above maximum level. Turn it up to 11. The fact that you would embark on this program though in 1944, late 1944 is a sign of the desperate times. If you needed to be reminded of that in late November 1944 the Japanese will be. When the clock finally runs out on them, on the Marianas Islands airfield construction timeline because the CBs working on airfields in the recently conquered islands in the Marianas gets them operational. The B-29 super fortresses, the new bombers that are so new they've not been used in Europe, although there are other reasons they were not used in Europe, but not used in Europe. They will land on these islands and the bombing attacks begin. Japan has been bombed before. The Doolittle raids were more of a pinprick for morale purposes, but the B-29s were taking off from areas around the Indochina theater, but just barely able to reach the edge of Japanese soil. The raids were not enormous. In late November the attacks begin and the Japanese will find themselves bombed at times in the capital by more than a hundred of these big planes at a time. These are not known to be particularly effective attacks going after airplane facilities and things like that. Sometimes they get lucky, but most of the time the bombing is inaccurate. But here's the thing from a civilian standpoint, let's just acknowledge something. I don't think any of us, well there's probably some of us actually, have been under a bombing attack before. These kind of bombing attacks are in some ways scarier than ones you might face today, although it depends on whether you're the target or not because these bombing attacks have a lot more planes and a lot less accuracy. Part of the reason you have so many more planes is because you are so much less accurate. You need lots of planes and lots of bombs over a wide area to even hope to hit your target. Which they don't often for all sorts of reasons, the jet stream and a bunch of other ones included, but that doesn't lessen the fact that if you're a Japanese civilian, maybe a Japanese civilian who's had heavily filtered news reports about how the war is going, if you have bombs all of a sudden falling on your capital city and most of the planes that drop those bombs are getting away, that puts the credibility of the government's accounts on how the war is going in rather stark relief, doesn't it? That having been said, in terms of concrete results, the early air war here from the Marianas, the bombing of Japan, somewhat underwhelming in terms of results. The US idea about precision bombing seems to founder on the rocks of Japan's cloudy weather and high winds. There's all sorts of reasons that that might be an issue and in addition to that, they're losing a decent number of planes. Early on, a lot of pressure on the air service to be more effective because things are heating up as we transition from the year 1944 to the terrible half year of 1945. The monthly totals of which we led this segment off with, if you recall, because they were so awful, a lot of pressure on the air service to figure out a way to increase the pressure on the Japanese to put an end to something that's already over. They just haven't admitted it yet. And the problem here is that even though it's almost over, it's getting worse. And this defies what's supposed to happen. When you have an enemy who's for all intents and purposes beaten, who's devoid of the natural resources they need, who's troops, I mean, starving troops, I mean, all over the place. You look, the Japanese just look like they're just been battered from pillar to post. So this should be getting easier for the allies fighting them. But it's not. The casualties are getting worse. The civilian casualties are starting to absolutely go through the roof. And if we wanted to think of what's about to happen here in 1945, it's worth thinking about it as a whole instead of this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Because if you're waking up reading your morning paper in the middle of Iowa one day and you're trying to get a handle on the world situation, you're going to have updates on the front page from each of these places, either something about to begin and preparations going on or fighting continuing in this other spot or mopping up operations in this other place. There's there's a bunch of things that are not only happening at the same time, but drawing and competing for resources with each other. There will never be enough U.S. fleet assets in the area. MacArthur will be wanting them just where they will be wanting them in the Central Pacific. I mean, so all of this is happening at the same time. And if you're in the Japanese high command, you are being battered with incident after incident after incident. And it seems to be having no effect on the main leadership's opinion on whether or not the warship can continue, which is surprising, to say the least. Start with MacArthur. At the beginning of 1945, MacArthur makes the leap to the island of Luzon, which is where Manila is in the Philippines. MacArthur's moving quickly because he's convinced and he appears to be right, I think, that there are POW camps on the Philippines that have had American and Filipino troops there since MacArthur left years before who are waiting for him to come back. And he wants to rescue them before the Japanese kill their prisoners, which they are doing once again with alarming frequency. The situation in Manila will become an unbelievable nightmare. The Japanese general, who is awesome, by the way, MacArthur is really up against a good guy, but he decides not to defend the city. But there's a naval commander there who's got what we would call, if they were United States Marines, they'd be Marines, naval infantry there, something like 15,000 of them. And he says, well, I'm staying. And he defends the old city, which is, you know, sort of a colonial concrete stone. I mean, it's a rather impregnable place. And he gets nailed down in there and will have the U.S. fighting house to house in urban combat of the sort they have not seen in this war at all and will not see again. It's probably the sort of fighting they could have expected, though, had they gone into Japan in 1946 and invaded the home islands. Forget about the military side of this for a minute, because as expected, right, the U.S. will win here. The Japanese will die almost to the last man. And something like 100,000 Filipino civilians will die. When I first saw that number, I knew it was large. I thought they were talking about maybe all the civilians that died in the Philippines during this time period. And I actually have seen an account or two that sort of insinuates that. But most of them say in this fighting over the city of Manila, 100,000 Philippine civilians. Ladies and gentlemen, that's in a month. And the stories are among some of the worst I've ever encountered. There's one that I — it's funny, you know, I know we're all a little weird if we listen to this, maybe, I don't know. But I have certain eyewitness stories that stay with me. And they stay with me in part because regularly I have to go back and reread them. And I have no idea why. There's one story — and I'll have to do a show on this someday. The mental health will allow me to get through something like that. But there's a story involving the Ainzats group and an eyewitness who was watching lots and lots and lots of Jewish civilians being lined up and killed over and over again. And it involved a young woman. And as she passes by the eyewitness on the way to her death, she just says to him, while pointing to herself, 24, meaning I'm 24 years old. That one kills me. I looked it up last month again. There are some scenes from the Philippines that just as a — listen, as a human being, I was going to say as a father, but let's not patronize everyone else. There were certain experiences one can imagine living through and then ones that one can't imagine going on afterwards. And the best way to describe — and I don't mean this for — I'm not trying to be gratuitous here. It's important to understand what's going on, though. And when we use that euphemism of the human being lawnmower, what that means in reality, because this is, as we said, something that is remorseless. It's month to month. It's a reliable tally of people. And this is what those statistics boil down to on the ground. In the book Rampage, John M. Scott tells the story of — well, I guess ultimately of a family who are rounded up by the Japanese right as their troops are starting to torch the city of Manila. And this is the sort of stuff MacArthur was worried about when he was worried about the POWs having something happen to them. So Scott's piece starts with these men being rounded up, taken to this school, and then eventually moved out to this canal at night. And they have their hands tied behind their back, and the Japanese has a flashlight. And they start cutting off the heads of the people in this group that's been taken to the canal by flashlight. And then when it is the turn of this gentleman that in Scott's book is identified as 25-year-old Ricardo San Juan, when they get to him, they chop his head off, but not quite. And they have a picture of him, I believe it's him in the book, showing him years later. And he clearly looks like somebody whose head was almost chopped off. That's what it looks like after it heals. But he plays dead and he lays there, and you're thinking to yourself as he's laying around a lot of other decapitated people who were with him alive just one second ago, you're thinking, okay, this is the kind of experience that will ruin the rest of your life, don't you? But this is where his experience begins to get horrific. And like I said, this is not meant to be gratuitous. This is meant to put some context on these enormous numbers like 100,000 civilians die in a month while Manila's being fought over. And I do not count these sorts of incidents as collateral damage at all. This is intentional on someone's part at some level of the command structure. So Scott talks about everything that this poor guy goes through personally and then says, quote, but the night's terror had only begun. The Japanese returned to the same spot with a second group of captives. On his belly in the brush, Ricardo San Juan counted 19 women and 27 children. Among them, he saw his 25-year-old wife, Virginia, and the couple's three children. Four months pregnant at the time, Virginia held the couple's youngest child in her arms, one-year-old Jose. The Japanese had tied the adults together with a long strand of rope looped around the upper left arm of each woman. Guards herded the woman into a circle around the children. The Japanese then formed a perimeter around them. To San Juan's horror, Scott writes, the soldiers began to bayonet the children and even the infants, including two-month-old Celia Fajardo wrapped in a gray flannel sleep suit. Now quoting the eyewitness, quote, some of the babies were grabbed from the arms of their mothers and were held by their two hands in midair by one of the Japanese soldiers, he later told investigators. At that instant, he says, the executioner would stab them in that position. Scott continues, quote, the orgy of violence escalated. Hidden in the dark thicket barely eight feet away, San Juan watched a soldier plunge his bayonet into the chest of his five-year-old son, Crescencio. He heard the boy cry out before he collapsed and died. The same soldier then snatched up his infant son, Jose. That baby of mine, San Juan recalls, was thrown into the air and then caught with the point of a bayonet. Those were his words. The author continues, quote, soldiers likewise killed his three-year-old daughter Corazon, her name Spanish for heart, but San Juan did not see it. That was the only mercy he experienced that night. With the children littered on the ground dead, the Japanese pounced on the mothers with blood-soaked bayonets. The same soldier who had tried to cut off his head ran his blade through the belly of San Juan's pregnant wife, end quote. So if one death is a tragedy and a million deaths a statistic, stories like that put a little bit more flashback on the bones of who these numbers were. And while I wish these were completely isolated examples, they're all too common, both in your history books and amongst the Japanese. And here's the thing is if we were talking about something that happened in the biblical era and you said that one army treated the civilians in areas that it held captive or other soldiers that fell into its hands this way, you'd hardly blink. But it's very unusual behavior in the mid-20th century by a major power. And while you can certainly find examples that are easily as off the charts as this with say the Germans, certainly, but I mean even the Red Army, maybe even the allies in certain circumstances, the non-Soviet allies, but those are just that. They're outliers. The Japanese do this over and over and over again. In Scott's book, he has a section in the index and under the heading of massacres and atrocities, it goes down a whole page in small print.
SPEAKER_02: And this is just mostly in the Philippines. It's things like behind the shell service station. There was a massacre behind the shell service station. Against civilians suspected of guerrilla ties, De La Salle massacre, Fort Santiago's seal dungeon, mass starvation, German Club massacre, Philippine General Hospital killing of men, POWs on Palawan, Red Cross massacre, Santo Domingo church massacre, over and over and over again. It's fascinating to wonder about this, isn't it? There's a book called Embracing Defeat that is about Japan's coming to grips with losing the war right afterwards in 1946, 1947, 1948. And one of the things I found interesting when reading it was that there was a big backlash amongst the civilians to returning soldiers when these sorts of stories of this kind of behavior filtered down to the public after the war. Obviously they were not getting this during the war. And there was a backlash that one might compare to the way some Vietnam veterans were treated over the whole taunting at the airport when they would arrive back in country for being baby killers. That was the epithet yelled at them.
SPEAKER_02: MacArthur will find himself occupied in liberating the Philippines for the rest of the war. Now he will declare at certain times that the fighting has ceased in order to basically say I have liberated the Philippines. But when the war actually ends, there's tens of thousands, I think it's like 50,000 men still under the same Japanese general who have to give up their arms and surrender. So I would say that the island wasn't pacified. But MacArthur will continually be fighting there in hard slogging for the rest of the war, as I said. So while that's going on, you now have the determination to take the island of Iwo Jima. And right afterwards, Okinawa, these places, if you look in the map, are the Japanese in Hirohito's war, Herbert P. Bix says that the emperor looked at those areas as a moat. And the idea, of course, of the moat is to absorb the force of your enemy's charge and weaken them before they get to the castle walls. And Okinawa is like a southern area of the moat and Iwo Jima is like an eastern area of the moat. Iwo is a tiny little place, a little volcanic island, eight square miles. It's a nothing little place, but it can hold a couple of airfields. This is, as we've said in this whole war, airfields. I mean, a lot of this fighting is over airfields. Having or not having an airfield can make a huge difference. They're the ultimate strategic location in the middle of the vast distances of the Pacific. So the Americans want to take Iwo and the Japanese are once again ready for them. So what happened in Peleliu begins to be the new trend to have these places be built up and they've had more time, right? The outlying islands, they hadn't had as much time or ability to really get the defenses the way they hoped to get them at Peleliu. You had the guns peeking out from behind steel doors. Iwo takes it the next step higher than that. One of the most fortified places in the Second World War in terms of places that any of the allies had to overcome. And Iwo Jima is one of the most, if not the most famous battle that ever involved the U.S. Marines. But the reason for that is because it was so nightmarish. That's how you make a reputation is you go through something that is like walking through hell. And when you read the accounts of the survivors and the veterans from Iwo, it's interesting how often and many of these people had been on other island fights before and so had something to compare it to how often they would say, I can't even describe it to you. It was like nothing I'd ever seen. There's a few of these in Patrick K. O'Donnell's fine book, Into the Rising Sun, where he interviews veterans. I marked a couple of them. Mike Vinich from the 5th Marine Division said, quote, I can't hardly even describe it to you. The misery and the difference between this and all the other island fighting I'd experienced. Coming to Iwo was a different kind of fight. End quote. He has the remembrances of the last surviving person who was on the flag raising team on Mount Suribachi, a famous incident, won all sorts of awards, maybe the most famous photograph taken in the Pacific War of these people on Mount Suribachi, Charles Lindbergh. And he said of the island, quote, Iwo Jima was a massacre. I never expected anything like that. People were dying left and right. Japanese were in caves and bunkers. You had to route them out. End quote. Dean Voight of the 5th Marine Division said, quote, Iwo Jima was as close to hell as you could get. I can't even begin to describe it to you. It was always hot, meaning active gunfire all the time and explosions going off, people getting killed left and right. End quote. We should remind ourselves that these people had been to other places that are considered to be very bad fights as well. So when they're saying that Iwo Jima is on another level, clearly it is. And the Japanese had eight months to prepare for this. And this does go back. I mean, you know, in many ways, everyone's critical of Japanese strategy during the war and many other things. They kind of did keep their eyes on the goal of making the Allies have to take these islands position to position to position and take huge casualties doing it in the hopes that they'd get tired of it. After all, how many Americans even could find Iwo Jima on a map? How many American boys is it worth to take a place like that? Especially if the people back home aren't thinking of many of the larger strategic implications. I mean, Iwo Jima is halfway between Saipan and Tokyo. Great place for an airfield. Lots of reasons you might want it. How many boys is it worth? The Marines are going to give more than they thought they would have to. And that's partly why it becomes this great battle in their history. It's a crucible. The island has more than 800 positions, pillboxes, bunkers, gun emplacements. The tunnels on this island stretch for miles underground. And I've read different accounts. I've heard it's three miles, seven miles, 10 miles, 16 miles. I have no idea which of those is true, but some of them are big enough to drive a fully loaded truck into. The commander is 75 feet deep, has electric lights, is completely protected from all those giant battlefield shells. And his plan is to let the Americans get on the beaches with their three divisions and something like 70,000 plus men. And then when everything was crammed and crowded into what would become one of the most congested battlefields in world history, if you look at the numbers, right, how many people are on an island eight miles square, then you start dropping giant mortar rounds on these crowded beaches, which have sand so fine and volcanic that no one can dig in it to give themselves a little shelter. You start tearing up the people on the beaches. I mean, it's something like 2,000 casualties right away. Bam. The Marines are going to suffer 8,000 casualties in the first week. Remember, casualties means wounded, missing, killed, prisoners, right, all of it. Here's the thing. It's easy to sort of forget the whole wounded thing until you start reading these accounts of these veterans and you realize how long ago they're talking about when they talk about being wounded in a place like Iwo Jima. And yet they're still blind or they're still in a wheelchair or whatever the injury back then did to them. They've lived with the rest of their lives. So whereas one might think about killed and wounded on a very different level, and whereas wounded might mean anything from slightly wounded to grievously wounded, we should recall the toll that that takes on people's lives forever afterwards also. And in addition to that, and I mean needless to say when you think about it for two seconds, but combat produces all sorts of injuries from the physical to the emotional to the spiritual and often all of them together in Patrick K. O'Donnell's Into the Rising Sun. He quotes Iwo Jima veteran from the 5th Marine Division, Dean Winters, who talks about some fighting that goes on and then he begins to talk about the next day when he says, quote, The next day we were attacked again, losing several men killed or wounded. Every hundred yards there was another canyon where you had to dig the enemy out. One of our comrades was captured by the Japanese and pulled into a cave where they tortured him by splitting his finger webs up to his wrists. He was screaming uncontrollably. Our lieutenant got so angry he went in after him and was killed in the process. There was hardly any of us left in the entire company. For me, I was hit on March 14th. My hip joint was shot all to pieces. Four Marines from the Marine Corps Band were moving me to the rear and one of the men was killed in the process. Since the war, he says, I've been confined to a wheelchair and have tried to live a good life. However, I relive the war every day. End quote.
SPEAKER_02: That's an example of what the wounded in action statistic often boils down to, worth bearing in mind. That's a man who thinks about the war, a war from 70 plus years ago, every single day, right when he wakes up.
SPEAKER_02: If you read a lot about these various battles in the Pacific, as many of you have, I know, you begin to notice similarities and differences. The differences begin to stand out so you can differentiate one battle from another. But it's interesting how many of the people on both sides talk about how terrible the wounds are and how unlike many of these other island battles they were. And I've seen all sorts of reasons suggesting why that might be. A lot of mortars used, for example, in the Japanese were using these massive ones. I mean, a lot of times mortars are like 60 millimeter mortars, which are they're kind of light mortars. The Japanese are using ones that are like 12 inch mortars shooting 750 pound projectiles that have been, ash cans, flying ash cans is the way one veteran described them. Many refrigerators going so slow as they arc up in the air, you can see them and watch them and then when they blow up, they leave a giant hole in the ground and whatever was anywhere nearby is gone. There's no place to hide on an island this small. Everything's within range. At no time does the commander allow, although there are some people who do it anyway, the suicidal charges that the Japanese have launched all throughout the war that use up so much of their manpower for no good reason. He's keeping his people hiding and their job is to kill Americans, not to get killed charging them. They have to be methodically taken out. One Japanese survivor had said that it was like watching people try to exterminate insects. It was just methodical. And if you ever watch film, I was going to say video film of this stuff, that's what it looks like. It looks like workman a lot of the time, sealing up caves, blowing up stuff, lots and lots of flamethrower usage, which turned out to be very important for this because a lot of the time you couldn't get the Japanese out any other way. But the wounds caused by all this equipment are terrible and remarked upon. Life magazine reporter Bob Sherrod had said, and he's quoted in many of my sources, Ian W. Toll adds some context though when he writes, quote, in the first five days of the battle, the Marines suffered an average of more than 1200 casualties per day. The beaches and the flat terrain around the airfields were strewn with dead. Shell craters left records of direct hits. Some contained the mashed up remains of 10 or 12 Marines. Exploring the terraces above Red Beach, Bob Sherrod observed, quote, nowhere in the Pacific War had I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay 50 feet away from any body. In one spot on the sand, far from the nearest cluster of dead, I saw a string of guts 15 feet long. End quote. Another Sherrod narrative or the same one later, I don't know, is picked up by Francis Pike in Hirohito's War. Francis Pike's account, by the way, picks up after the Marines get off the beach on the first day and start moving inland. And Pike used a word I'd never seen before. So I looked it up and I'm substituting the more commonly used term, let's put it that way. And Pike gives his own version of context on the first day and writes, quote, advancing towards Chidori Airport, the leading Marines were suddenly cut down by concealed underground positions. General Kuribayashi's death machine roared into action. It turned into a battle like no other in World War Two. Japan's defenders had the advantage over attackers. Mobility, which characterized the advantage usually afforded the attacker in this situation, was entirely nullified in a fight that had to be won hole by hole, pillbox by pillbox, and cave by cave. By the end of the first day of fighting, 600 Americans lay dead and a further 2,000 more had been wounded. Usually, some of the highest casualties were engineers of the 133rd Seabees. The western beaches, he writes, were strewn with wrecked machines, body parts, and mangled bodies. At 5 p.m., a sickened Keith Wheeler told Robert Sherrod of Life Magazine, quote, there's more hell in there than I've seen in the rest of the war put together, end quote. The noise was almost unbearable, Sherrod noted. Now quoting Sherrod, who was an eyewitness to this, quote, as the shells burst, as they crashed and shrieked, one of the wounded rose from his stretcher. He rose slowly, bending at the waist. His head was bare and his arms were straight and rigid at his side. He sat, mouth open, and screamed, oh my God, my God, good God almighty. The corporal sobbed into the dirt, end quote. In the book, A Tune Called Iwo Jima by Dan King, he quotes a Japanese veteran named Omegari, who comments on the fact that the Marines named one part of Iwo Jima the meat grinder. And King says that Omegari could easily understand why the Marines called it that, saying, quote, men didn't just die on Iwo Jima. They were ripped apart, torn to shreds and scattered. I saw torsos with no limbs, dismembered legs, arms, and hands, and internal organs splashed onto the rocks, end quote. The author then says Captain Fred Haynes, later Major General Fred Haynes, the operations officer for the 28th combat team. He says he may have summed it up best when he said, quote, each day we learn new ways to die, end quote. These are the American accounts. The Japanese accounts are of people who are living, and this is the word you'll see so often, like troglodytes underground with virtually no water. The island has virtually no water. People who know they're going to die are living amongst the dead and are dealing with, any time they come out of their holes, just absolutely overwhelming firepower. Their job, we should recall, was always to die, and victory or defeat will be measured by how many Americans they're able to take with them. They take enough Americans with them to influence public opinion back in the United States, which was a large part of their goal, right? To get the home front asking the questions of whether or not all this is worth it. It reminds me of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. That wasn't intended to have some stunning victory over South Vietnamese and U.S. forces in the field. It was intended to influence public opinion back on the home front, to tell those people that you've been told the war is almost over, well, you've been lied to, otherwise, how could we do this still? The Japanese are kind of sending the same message back to the United States, and the Americans on the home front are hearing it loud and clear. Maybe Americans take almost 29,000 casualties and need more than a month to take an island that's four and a half miles long and two miles wide, that most Americans don't even know where it is. The Japanese, of course, as is their trademark now, and that's something that no one else does on a regular basis, lose almost everyone again. They had between 21,000 and 22,000 guys on the island. Slightly over 200 will be taken prisoner, and most of those, as usual, are Korean and Taiwanese workers who are generally impressed in the service and don't want to be there to begin with. So here we are with the war seemingly, you know, certainly in the end stages here, right? We're approaching Japan proper, and yet the fighting is getting harder. And the people back home notice, and they want answers. In the wonderful book Implacable Foes, historians Waldo Henrichs and Mark Alechio write this, quote, The toll in lives lost on Iwo Jima produced a strong reaction at home and weighed heavily on the minds of those who directed the war. On March 15th, in the midst of the battle, the Navy released an anguished letter it had received from an unidentified woman pleading, quote, Please, for God's sake, stop sending our finest youth to be murdered on places like Iwo Jima. She continued in the letter, quote, It is too much for boys to stand, she wrote. Too much for mothers and homes to take. It is driving some mothers crazy. Why can't objectives be taken in some other way? It is most inhuman and awful. Stop! Stop! End quote. It's interesting that the Navy released that, isn't it? But according to these historians and others, a lot of it has to do with an effort to begin to gird the public for what is to come. They are starting to almost celebrate in advance because the war in Europe against Nazi Germany is clearly winding up, right? And the defeat is imminent over there. So the tendency is to think, yeah, victory is near and we can celebrate and we can stop all this rationing and the boys can come home and the killing can stop and all that. Not so fast. The Japanese just inflicted 29,000 casualties for a tiny little volcanic rock in the middle of nowhere and they're not showing any signs of being willing to surrender. And Henrichs and Gallichia write, quote, And by the way, Forrestal is the Secretary of the Navy. Forrestal's willingness to publish the unidentified woman's letter and his acknowledgement that many others like it had been received suggests that he and his advisors recognized that they were reaching a critical moment in the war. As the letters made clear, a significant segment of the public was beginning to find the war's cost intolerable, just as American forces were drawing closer to Japan. Murder fighting lay ahead, and that reality had to be confronted directly, Forrestal seemed to say. Towards that end, they write, the armed forces were aiding newsreel companies in producing more realistic reports of the fighting in Europe and the Pacific. During the battle for Iwo Jima, raw footage was dispatched back to the newsreel companies in New York and was ready for distribution within two weeks of the initial landings. The newsreels produced from the film displayed the horror of war with disturbing candor. Bosley Crowther, a writer for the New York Times, observed that, quote, The newsreels, thank heaven, are getting tougher. They're letting us have it right between the eyes, end quote. And the historians finished by saying, quote, Of particular note, Crowther added, was Pacific Fury, the name of a film, a forthcoming film on the capture of Peleliu and nearby Anguar, that looked closely into the faces of the men who fought these battles and thus personalized the strain and suffering they endured, end quote. That was a long quote, and I apologize for that, but I wanted to get the historians to weigh in on this because trying to gauge what a public mood might have been like at a time like this is something that historians are particularly well suited to do. And it's funny how this dovetails, though, to the original Japanese concept here, when you factored it down to the basic question of who was going to win the war, it was going to be whoever was willing to suck up more casualties for a bunch of places that really didn't mean that much to Americans. It's not like we're talking about the Japanese conquering a U.S. state in North America, right? And I'm not quite to the death for that, but do Americans care about Iwo Jima that much? Because the Japanese care for it a lot, but it's a lot closer to them, isn't it? Not only is it the American public, by the way, who's starting to fume a little bit about this and get a little impatient, especially amongst people who've lost people or people who are going to lose people in the future if this continues, you're starting to see discord being sown by some of the media outlets. I mean, the San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper that's owned by William Randolph Hearst, makes the predictable criticism here that this is bad leadership, right? It's a little Monday morning quarterbacking where they're saying, well, if MacArthur was in charge of this, this wouldn't have happened, right? He's a genius. He's known for saving his troops' lives. If he was here, you know, in other words, sort of casting blame on this idea that command should have been divided at all and that anybody but MacArthur should have been in command. Now, we should point out though, Hearst is a guy who would probably gladly support Douglas MacArthur for the Republican nomination for president in the next election. So this is maybe not all it appears to be on the surface, but it's a sign. It's a sign that people aren't happy with the level of casualties that are being taken and people are wondering whether or not it's worth it. Either we're not fighting it right or maybe we shouldn't be fighting it at all. This is a worrying sign for a country about to see a skyrocketing in the amount of casualties that you have to have in this theater to get this over with. Look at what the Russians are starting to take the Soviets in their last push towards Berlin. It's horrifying. And what the Germans take, you know, in the process as well. That's what those numbers we started off this segment were all about. It's a meat grinder and they're getting it done in the European theater a couple of months before it's going to happen here in the Pacific. Is there a way out of hell here? Well, maybe. Maybe is the key word here because there are different views on ways that the war can be shortened. But because there's not enough data for one side or another to whip out there in support of their argument that it becomes sort of a he said she said wartime situation. There's a group of people who believe that a weapon already exists that would make the dreaded 1946 invasion of Japan scenario go up in a puff of smoke, become moot instantly. You wouldn't have to have any more of those Iwo Jima's. This is the sort of weapon that the mother writing that we couldn't take any more of sending our flower of our youth to go die for these meaningless places. Well what if you had a way around that problem? What would that be worth to you or to your country or to the allies? There are people who are proponents of the idea that bombing from the air can be decisive in a war. The theory can go either way. It's got proponents and opponents. But the best short enunciation of the hypothesis I've ever seen I ran across in Gwen Dyer's book War and he quotes the British head of Bomber Command Sir Arthur Harris who said during the war quote there are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet and we shall see end quote. Aerial theorists in multiple countries both axis and allied have been thinking about this sort of stuff for a while. Now in Germany you're starting to finally see bombing make a difference. It kind of looks in the statistics and these arguments are still ongoing too that the bombing was sort of something that was a pinprick for Germany for a long time or that they could work around and then all of a sudden late 1944 early 1945 you reach like all of a capsize moment where it starts to be having a huge impact on things which let's be fair there were other things happening to the German military that also would have played into what turns out to be like a systemic failure at a certain point. But let's remember for contextual reasons what aerial weaponry is doing to Germany late in the war. In the book Choices Under Fire Moral Dimensions of World War II historian Michael Bass writes quote on February 3rd 1945 the US 8th Air Force sent 937 bombers and 613 escorting fighters over Berlin. They leveled large parts of the city and killed some 25,000 persons. On February 14th and 15th 800 British and 400 American bombers flew in over Dresden igniting a firestorm that burned for a week and killed at least 60,000 non-combatants. End quote. Now I've seen a much lower casualty figure for Dresden than that but even if it only killed 25,000 only 25,000 and this in a country that has relatively sophisticated civil defense facilities. I mean these people are mostly in bomb shelters and you get those kind of casualties how horrible would they be they were running out in the open. Germany is getting hit multiple times a week and by the end of the war I believe Heidelberg is the only mid to large size German city that is not decimated by the bomb damage or really completely wiped off the map. Go look at photos. It is shocking. You are not seeing those kinds of results in the Pacific Asia theater yet. This is how total war turns things morally topsy-turvy right is that the people who are running the B-29 super fortresses out of the Marianas Islands since 1944 bombing Japan they're in trouble for not doing the sort of damage that we just mentioned in Europe but today people look on that as horrifying. I guarantee you when the allied populations woke up in their newspaper and read about those bombing raids in Germany that I just quoted from Michael Bess's book those are good things to them not bad things. There's a difference between you know they say in cold blood or in hot blood with murders and crimes war is hot blood us today trying to make sense of their decision making is done in cold blood and it's a very different thing. The idea that the commanders of the American air assets in the Marianas are in trouble for not doing more damage to Japan not being more effective gives you an idea though of what the priorities are in January 1945 they bring in new leadership to see if they can shake up the results here and the guy who comes in to do that is one of the famous proponents of aerial bombing. He is a guy who is much it was as much of a caricature as MacArthur is or General Patton is and he's a lot like Patton the kind of guy who has those sort of can do almost heartless toward the enemy sorts of attitudes in wartime and then when we go from hot blood to cold blood they look horribly out of place. There are a couple of figures in the famous movie Dr. Strangelove where if you mash them together you get one General Curtis LeMay and that's who gets brought in to shake things up with the B-29 super fortresses. Oh incidentally the most expensive weapon the US paid for for this war. I mean it's the most expensive weapons program and you win a trivia contest against people with a line like that but that puts a lot of pressure on the people that were out there risking their reputations to promote this thing. This is going to have a decisive impact on the war. Well in a couple of months of bombing Japan it hasn't done squat. LeMay said after he took over the air assets in the Marianas quote this outfit has been getting a lot of publicity without having really accomplished a hell of a lot in bombing results end quote. So he changes strategies adopts doctrines and ideas that have been percolating in the US air thinking might be a good way to put it for years now all the way back to 1939 they were noticing that Japan might be extra vulnerable to the setting of fires from the air they do experiments in 1943 where they build mock-up cities of both German and Japanese cities so they can test stuff out. LeMay had spent some time in Indochina with another American air general named Chennault who was a proponent of incendiaries right using mixing incendiaries in your in your bomb loads which is a pretty common thing for most countries to do by the way and they burned down the Chinese city of Hankou to deny it to the Japanese and learned quite a bit about how the Asian construction materials like lots of wood for example how they could best be set on fire so when LeMay gets to the Marianas and sees the meager results and the high casualty rates that they've been suffering on these raids to Japan he changes things up and he puts a bunch of different things in place some his own sorts of ideas others that he grabbed from years of thinking about this amongst American thinkers and he launched a couple of preliminary raids using these new methods and then he puts it together looks at the data from those smaller raids and then launches one in March that is what nightmares are made of.
SPEAKER_02: It was called Operation Meeting House March 9th 1945 about 330 some B-29 super fortresses take off from the Marianas Islands heading for Tokyo they carry a bomb load that it would take a thousand B-17 flying fortresses the big American bomber that flew over Europe it would take a thousand of them to carry the bomb load of these 330ish B-29s and the bomb load has been tweaked a lot more incendiaries added certain particular incendiaries with napalm which is a relatively new development certainly in terms of deployment I think they discovered it back in 1942 but it's jellied gasoline kind of and like so many of the incendiaries used by the major powers in the second world war if it splashes on you it just continues to burn phosphorous is like that too you can't put it out very difficult. So these planes are going to come in low which is against everything they were designed to do this is a fantastically high level bomber the B-29 that offers protection and all kinds of other benefits to bring them in low is to go against the design ideas but the winds over Japan are crazy the cloud cover is almost constant and if the planes go in at 5,000 feet instead of 25,000 feet you avoid all those problems the Americans had learned that it is suicidal to do that in a place like Germany with their air defenses but LeMay believes you can do it in Japan especially if you do it at night because the Japanese air defenses at night are significantly worse than they are in the daytime the problem with going in at night is you kind of expose the fallacy of the basic idea that Americans celebrate with their bombing doctrine the Americans are a precision bomber country they have these great bomb sites and optics and these tactics that have been developed to try to hit installations and factories and railway yards and infrastructure and things that help the war effort but not target civilians not bomb indiscriminately over whole areas but in the mid 20th century precision bombing in the daytime is hit or miss if you'll pardon the pun at night you're just kidding yourself I mean you're not even trying it's an area attack at night and to use incendiaries in an area attack at night is to decide that you want to burn down a city how do you measure the effectiveness what's a good outcome for you if you launch a bombing raid on a city with the goal of burning it down you get congratulated if you burn it down and there's not a country in the war that would use in their propaganda or their public statements the idea that they're deliberately trying to kill civilians so everybody has you know a sort of a rationale a logical insanity I think we called it for a lot of why they do what they do and what they're targeting the Americans never ever waver from the public pronouncement that they're going after military targets and they can defend that in Japan because the military targets have all been decentralized I mean they had a lot of little workshops aiding the defense effort mixed all over Tokyo one author that I read had called the bombing raid target a classic mixed target meaning that you had infrastructure industry and civilians with homes and schools and hospitals all mixed together but in a flammable city if you can set it on fire and burn everything down you'll get all those military targets but you'll get everything else too the March 9th which will continue into March 10th almost three hour raid by these more than 300 bombers takes out 16 square miles of Tokyo remember this is an experiment wondering how this is all going to work I mean for all the manos he's going to get tons of planes shot down and when the results come back in everyone's overjoyed because this is the most effect these B-29s have been able to have so far I think in all the raids up till now they'd killed less than 2,000 people in Tokyo but in this three hour less than three hour raid they kill a hundred thousand the US strategic bombing survey said that quote probably more persons lost their lives by fire in Tokyo in a six hour period than at any equivalent period of time in the history of man end quote let that sink in for a minute the worst military attack ever the most costly the most damaging and that hundred thousand number is an estimate Marius B Jensen thinks it's closer to a hundred and twenty thousand no one knows the very records that might help shed some light on that burned up in the very fire that took all those lives the number of official injuries of people seeking help and documented was over forty thousand many of the statistical surveys I was looking at triple that number and if you
SPEAKER_02: look at photographs of the 16 square miles something like 40% of Tokyo's main area it's ash I mean you have brick and stone and metal buildings sprinkled here and there and you can see the outlines of the roads but everything else looks like the bottom of your barbecue including the people the people inside those buildings by the way did not find sanctuary those buildings turned into ovens and the accounts that are available are it sounds like gratuitous stuff to even mention it I've always wondered about what I always like to call the worst places to be in the world at any given time right this battlefield that disaster site whatever it might be and I always darkly joke that the worst place to be is like a tie for a hundred different incidents but how is this not on it in his biography of general Curtis LeMay author Warren Kozak gives you the rundown of how this goes and the weapons and the technical side of this right because remember the Americans are trying to figure out how to be effective with this weapon system they're trying out different mixes of things different tactics strategies altitudes bomb loads and the composition thereof and Kozak writes quote each plane would fly individually in three staggered lines between 5000 and 7000 feet the first planes to take off would fly at slower speeds in order for the later planes to catch up it would be unlike anything yet seen in the war three long lines of bombers coming in at very low altitude the bombardier's job would be greatly simplified because a small group of planes coming from a different direction would drop incendiaries in the front and back of the target zone before the lines of bombers arrived similar to lighting up both ends of a football field at night the planes coming after them from another direction would see the fires that the lead bombers had set and then bomb the area in between the plan he writes was brilliant in its simplicity the human cost he says would be determined later and quote he continues quote LeMay decided to drop e46 clusters meaning cluster bomblets the witnesses said they look like bananas all clustered on a tree and then when they were dropped they would all the bananas would split off separately I'm sorry he says LeMay decided to drop e46 clusters that would explode at 2,000 feet above the ground each cluster would release 38 incendiary bombs of napalm and phosphorus creating a rain of fire over the city in all 8,519 clusters would be dropped releasing four hundred and ninety six thousand individual cylinders weighing six point two pounds each resulting in sixteen hundred and sixty five tons of incendiaries to be dropped on Tokyo that night end quote if there's one thing that has been learned about strategic bombing to this point in the war is that sometimes you get lucky or unlucky depending on whose point of view we're looking at this from sometimes the climatic conditions are perfect sometimes you have some wind in the region if everything were to conspire against the civilians in the city the bombs mixed with the wind mixed with the climate and all that could create something called a firestorm this happened in Germany several times Dresden we just mentioned Hamburg's a famous one and what that does is take the casualties from something that might be a six thousand or an eight thousand or a twelve thousand dead civilian night which sounds horrible and converted into something amplified into something like a twenty five thousand thirty or thirty five thousand dead civilian night in his book war military historian Gwyn Dyer had said that if the British Bomber Command could reliably create these firestorms you know whenever they wanted to the war would be over in six months that sounds like an opinion to me but it's an interesting idea being able to create these equivalents of a natural disaster right a global weather-oriented disaster for example a flood a volcanic eruption a tsunami something like that right a freeze whatever it might be to be able to do this as a weapon of war well it's interesting to speculate what that might mean for the war effort and that's exactly what people do I mean how do you order a raid that might kill a hundred thousand people how does one live with oneself the way you do it though is by telling yourself that you saved even more than that now as an aside here I've done more than ten hours of talking about the logical insanity the moral logic of strategic bombing as the proponents of that theory see it and I would suggest that the jury is still out that nothing has been decided yet on whether the people who suggest that a shorter war that is nastier is actually more merciful and humanitarian than a longer war that isn't right that the idea being throwing the monkey wrench into the human being lawnmower right that anything that short circuits the ever functioning conveyor belt of death here is the greater good in the minds of people who can manage to sleep at night ordering the deaths of that many people Blamey said over and over as did a lot of the people who work with that this was going to shorten the war and that shortening the war was the most important thing it is so hard to not judge this sort of action by the standards of now but what I constantly try to remind myself is that 1945 by then they're not operating by our moral standards anymore they're six years into total war a war of survival extermination the the very highest possible stakes and all sorts of terrible things done up until this point I mean how do you order to burn a hundred thousand people well you know a little at a time you work your way up to it we shouldn't forget that the side that's being bombed here were some of the early proponents of bombing cities I mean the Germans did it to Warsaw they did it to Rotterdam they did it to Britain for nine solid heavy months and killed more than 40,000 non-combatants in Britain earlier in the war in 1945 they're launching v2 rockets at Britain killing more than some somewhere around 10,000 people with the v2s add the v1s it is more than 10,000 people so nothing has stopped the Japanese were bombing Chinese cities and killing civilians before the Second World War even started for most countries they were dropping let's remember I mean this is a war where the Japanese are are infecting fleas with the plague the plague bacillus and then dropping that on Chinese cities from the air to see what happens when someone says how can you drop in sandy areas that kill a hundred thousand civilians you say you work up to it by 1945 the war is it a kind of an insane sort of level but nobody feels that all of a sudden killing a hundred thousand people in Tokyo is you know tons worse than killing 60,000 in Hamburg or 35,000 in Dresden see what happens when when it gets insane we're in crazy territory by 1945 it's easy to forget too that these numbers which are impossible to conceptualize involve real people with human experiences on the ground of the sort unimaginable listen to the eyewitness accounts or what the historians have to say historian Conrad C crane in his book bombs cities and civilians writes about operation meeting house the March 9th 10th raid on Japan and says quote the selected zone of attack covered six important industrial targets and numerous smaller factories railroad yards home industries and cable plants but it also included one of the most densely populated areas in the world end quote he goes on to say 135,000 people per square mile he continues quote before operation meeting house was over between 90,000 and a hundred thousand people had been killed most died horribly as intense heat from the firestorm consumed the oxygen boiled water in canals and sent liquid glass rolling down the streets thousands suffocated in shelters or parks panicked crowds crushed victims who had fallen in the streets as they surged towards waterways to escape the flames perhaps the most terrible incident he writes came when one b-29 dropped seven tons of incendiaries on and around the crowded I believe it is kokatoe bridge hundreds of people were turned into fiery torches and quote splashed into the river below in sizzling hisses end quote that's from an eyewitness one writer crane says described the falling bodies as resembling tent caterpillars that had been burned out of a tree tail gunners crane says were sickened by the sight of hundreds of people burning to death in flaming napalm on the surface of the Sumida River a doctor who observed the carnage there later said quote you couldn't even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood end quote crane then says quote b-29 crews fought superheated updrafts that destroyed at least 10 aircraft and wore oxygen masks to avoid vomiting from the stench of burning flesh by the time the attack had ended almost 16 square miles of Tokyo were burned out and over 1 million people were homeless end quote Gwen Dyer had quoted an eyewitness of one of the fire storms in Germany who had said that the sound that you hear during it was like a an old church organ that was very loud and playing all the notes at once as we said generally the conditions have to contribute to create these sorts of firestorms and there was already something like a 30 gusting maybe to 40 mile per hour wind in Tokyo when this happens so that makes it a fire danger already and Tokyo was known as a city prone to fires and Japan had a problem with that Tokyo had a very specific problem with that that's why the US had identified it years before as prone to incendiaries and it really burns it creates its own weather just like the firestorms in Dresden and in Hamburg where the winds start turning into almost a tornado and you read account after account of people being swept away by an invisible hand of wind that just pulls them away and it's it's so bad that you can't see anything because it's blowing pebbles and rocks into your face the accounts from some of these German attacks talk about the asphalt melting and that happens everywhere so you try to run down the streets and you find yourself sinking in molten asphalt they talk about the wind sucking all the oxygen out of things you'll find these air raid shelters in Germany where everybody's just suffocated the temperature reaches 1800 degrees in the center of some of this fire area and people just start exploding in flame you'll read over and over about people just like matchsticks explode a lot of people who found them their their avenue of escape cut off in every direction just sat down in the street one of my sources said faced the imperial palace and waited to die and were found there the photographs are there are not many but it and the photographs to be honest the photographs of the bombing bodies in in Europe too are hard to handle we're talking about large piles of bodies and in the Tokyo raid they're they're all burned carbonized in the rising Sun author John Toland follows one person who lived through this father bundles his four children and his wife up in something that he hopes will protect them from the fire and they take off trying to get away and Toland writes quote they pushed their way across the bridge to escape the roaring blaze that was pursuing them quote-unquote like a wild animal a strong wind sucked into the flames swept a stinging storm of pebbles into their faces they turned back to the gale and plotted slowly away from the conflagration fascinated at the site of oil drums rocketing through the roof of a cable factory near the river and exploding into balls of fire a hundred feet in the air the center of Tokyo he writes was as incandescent as the Sun billowing clouds of smoke surged up illuminated below by orange flames thousands crouched terrified in their wooden shelters where they would be roasted alive and quote an author whose name I absolutely can't pronounce and a thousand apologies I couldn't find anything online huito Edwin I'm gonna go with he wrote a book the night Tokyo burned many years ago where he took some eyewitness accounts and put them together of people who have visualized something that I don't think any of us can imagine it's both fascinating and repellent at the same time so he has one eyewitness encountered by a captain the author says they had just gone to this bridge to check out conditions there because people were running towards water wherever they could find it the author says quote and there they were stunned by the sight of countless dead bodies that lay everywhere around they were in a forest of corpses in every direction bodies were crumpled so closely together that they must have been touching when they died they lay there now mute evidence of the fury of the American attack on Tokyo's civil population the captain looked out over the Icheta River and shook his head what a pitiful situation it was so appalling that it exceeded the imagination's ability to deal with it what could rescuers do in a situation like this there was no one to rescue touch one of the roasted bodies and the flesh would crumble in the hand humanity reduced to the essential turned into carbon end quote the account continues and this is not to be gratuitous this is to give us an idea of exactly what mankind's capabilities what our human capabilities have finally achieved what levels now of damage we can do this is the sort of thing you read about after a giant you know act of God natural disaster type thing not something that someone targeted at someone he then talks about the captain looking at the bank of the river and seeing how the waves that had been wind driven had pushed all of the corpses he says tens of thousands of them up against the beach and stacked them like cordwood it was this weird sight when you read the accounts of operation meeting house and the result afterwards it sounds like the American Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the general of the army George Marshall were both quite bothered by the civilian casualties in the bombings in Europe and the Pacific but they seem to be amongst a very small group of people who are not only is this considered to be a better than expected result but LeMay will turn the bombers around two days later and do it again and then turn around a couple days after that and do him again and will continue to fire bomb Japanese cities until he runs out of incendiaries to use on them and there's a temporary lull while they try to you know get more to his plane they'd underestimated how many bombing runs that he could do but he's a taskmaster and he's a guy who gets things done but he's also very blunt about what war especially modern war mid 20th century war boils down to and he's again I had said earlier a caricature but not a caricature like a cartoon character a caricature like a two-dimensional figure that doesn't seem like a fully fleshed out human being because the caricature isn't but the caricature said about the bombing in Tokyo this is quoted in Conrad Crane's book by the way quote we were going after military targets no point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter of course there's a pretty thin veneer in Japan but the veneer was there it was their system of dispersal of industry all you had to do was visit one of those targets after we'd roasted it and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home the entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war men women children we knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burn that town had to be done end quote so how do people that order those kind of things done sleep at night well maybe if they have a problem sleeping at night if they don't figure out some way to end this whole thing by throwing a monkey wrench into the assembly line of death in Warren Kozak's biography LeMay he describes a letter that LeMay described in his memoirs as sticking in his head something he thought about and Kozak says quote in his memoirs LeMay makes more than one reference to a letter that continually weighed on him now quoting the letter quote dear general this is the anniversary of my son Nikki being killed over Hamburg Berlin Tokyo you killed him general I just wanted to remind you of it I'm going to send you a letter each year on the same date the anniversary of his death to remind you end quote Kozak then says this quote LeMay's only way to stop these types of letters from coming was to end the war he rationalized the potentially significant loss of Japanese life on the ground with the following logic Marines were suffering horrendous casualties on Iwo Jima in a slow agonizing fighting evidence that the Japanese were becoming even more ferocious the closer Americans came to the home islands and unlike the US or German industry which was factory centered Japanese manufacturing was greatly decentralized individual parts for airplanes tanks and bombs were produced in homes and in backyards quote this is LeMay talking now no matter how you slice it you're gonna kill an awful lot of civilians thousands and thousands but if you don't destroy Japan's capacity to wage war we're going to have to invade Japan and how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan 500,000 seems to be the lowest estimate some say a million we're at war with Japan we were attacked by Japan end quote in 1939 pretty much every major country in the Second World War decried the idea of bombing civilians by 1945 none of those countries have a moral leg to stand on anymore because either they've already done it themselves or they've done things you might even see and call worse now it is unfair to judge the moral sensibilities of a guy like Curtis LeMay in a vacuum I mean you have to really try to figure out where he was on the scale of his age and day how did the general public in the United States feel about this they overwhelmingly supported it just like the British public overwhelmingly supported their bombing campaigns just like the German public overwhelmingly supported their bombing campaigns just like the Japanese public overwhelmingly supported their bombing campaigns all of these populations of course are having their information constantly
SPEAKER_02: pruned and redacted and filtered so that they just get what the government wants them to see and they're being heavily propagandized to feel a certain way and adopt a certain view that's uniform it's it's happening in every country for example the hundreds of newspapers in the United States that celebrate and tout this fire bombing of Japan they don't show mounds of charred human corpses they don't play that side of it up they may not even know how many people died it's all about how many structures were burned how much damage was done to the war effort and all those kind how many of our own planes got home safe this is exactly how other countries would portray a similar situation involving their forces what's more we have to recall the amount of propaganda out there making sure that people were prepared for this level of commitment and nastiness in his book bombs cities and civilians Conrad Crane quotes a little bit of the dialogue from one of these movies they made in 1944 that's one of those partnership deals between Hollywood and and the government right these are propaganda films or films that have a message that bolsters up the homefront and it involved a film with Dana Andrews who was playing a Doolittle pilot one of those pilots that symbolically bombed Japan back in 1942 got captured and was going to be executed and so they put these words in his mouth just before they're leading him away to have I guess his head cut off the film by the way was called the Purple Heart and this is the kind of dialogue that preps one for an air campaign like this quote it's true we Americans don't know very much about you Japanese and never did and now I realize you know even less about us you can kill us all of us or part of us but if you think that's going to put the fear of God into the United States of America and stop them from sending other flyers to bomb you you're wrong dead wrong they'll blacken your skies and burn down your cities to the ground and make you get down on your knees and beg for mercy this is your war you wanted it you asked for it and now you're going to get it and it won't be finished until your dirty little Empire's wiped off the face of the earth and quote and then they lead the hero off execute him make you feel extra angry and you're ready to go burn down some Japanese cities yourself those who actually had to do that though are to be pitied there are a lot you know you never get the stories of people who return just fine never thought another day about it and and moved on but you do hear the stories of those who were traumatized by it lots of tales of people returning back to their base with their clothes smelling like burnt human flesh pilots and crew members turning in after-action reports with shaking hands in Matthew A. Rizzell's book the things our fathers saw one of the crew members said this quote we had to kill in order to end the war we heard about the thousands of people we killed the Japanese wives the children and the elderly that was war but I know every b-29 air crewman for the next two or three years would wake up at night and start shaking yes the raids were successful but horribly so and the quote general Lumet and the air course position here is basically that we are going to continue to do this to you and you can't stop it until you say you've had enough and you end the war and yet as crazy as it sounds as bad as things already are for Japan they're not gonna end the war and Herbert P Bix
SPEAKER_02: historian Herbert P Bix writes in Hirohito and the making of modern Japan quote two days after Emperor Hirohito's inspection of bomb damage in the capital that means after the big Tokyo fire bombing no less a person than retired former minister Shiro Hara Kijiro once the very symbol of cooperation with Britain and the United States gave expression to a feeling that was widely held by Japan's ruling elites at this time namely Japan had to be patient and resist surrender no matter what Shiro Hara had earlier advised foreign minister Shigemitsu that the people would gradually get used to being bombed daily in time unity and resolve would grow stronger and this would allow the diplomats quote room to devise plans for saving the country in this time of unprecedented crisis end quote Bix then goes on to quote a letter from the same foreign minister ten days after the Tokyo fire bombing which said quote if we continue to fight back bravely even if hundreds of thousands of non-combatants are killed injured or starved even if millions of buildings are destroyed or burned and then Bix finishes his thought by saying there would be room to produce a more advantageous international situation for Japan end quote that's the same line we've been hearing for a long time now isn't it that if we can just shift the momentum here change our luck a little bit get lucky have one victory we can go to the negotiating table then and not be without something to use to bargain with right but way back in February some of the people who it's very hard to divine who was really for peace and who wasn't but some of the people that are often credited with being more in the peace faction had tried to sway the hardliners knowing that the hardliners biggest fear over any eventuality was communism by saying if this keeps up you're gonna get the people overthrowing the government and the Emperor and everything else and that'll be worse than what the Allies would do to us if we surrendered and even with all that hanging over the heads of the Japanese leadership and the elite here like a sword of Damocles with more fire bombings you know to continue Japan fights on and on April 1st Allied troops land on Japanese soil on the island of Okinawa and not only the Americans are in on it this time but elements of the British Navy the British Pacific Fleet are there now I mean Germany's almost had it no reason to keep the fleet in the Mediterranean Italy's out of the war no reason to keep it in the North Sea or the Atlantic bring it here into the Pacific with those aircraft carriers with the armored flight decks that'll be useful against kamikaze attacks and help us take the first of the Japanese home islands although it's iffy whether you would consider Okinawa one of the home islands some of the Okinawans wouldn't consider it one of the home islands but it turns out to be a battle that acts as a preview a version in miniature of what the Allies can expect as they continue to move toward Japan and you know islands like Kyushu right okay now I has something similar to Japan also that the Allies will have to deal with lots and lots of non-combatants civilians and they're not running off to some refugee camp they're not fleeing to another part of the country they're stuck there on an island 60 miles long but only about 10 to 12 miles wide in some spots and you're talking hundreds of thousands of people more than a hundred thousand Japanese soldiers more than a hundred thousand American troops okay now is gonna produce the highest casualties of the Pacific War and some of the worst casualty rates in American military history and by the end of the ordeal of Okinawa both the Japanese and the US military will be showing cracks in their psychological facades at first it goes better than anyone on the Allied side
SPEAKER_02: has a right to expect the invasion as we said kicks off April 1st and there is seemingly little to no resistance you still have the big American bombardment of the beaches the entire choreographed military ballet goes the way it has for several islands now but the Japanese are in the interior staying away from where the big guns can hurt you and are planning to let the Americans come to them and then they're gonna take as many of them with them as they can but for four or five days the Americans don't run into anyone by and large I mean the Marines will sweep up toward the north of the island and take a little few of the smaller islands just offshore of Okinawa the army units for the most part will sweep south and it's not until like the 4th or the 5th of April till they run into the prepared defenses on both ends of the island especially the south and around the time they do is when the big Japanese suicide air and naval suicide attack that's meant to be the answer the response to this US-Okinawa invasion hits you get a chance to see how things are going to be amplified as you get closer to the Japanese homeland which is less than 400 miles away from Okinawa by the way and what was a trickle for example of suicide planes earlier in the war when they first showed up becomes an absolute flood at Okinawa and there's all kinds of suicide things ready at Okinawa the Americans find several hundred speed boats loaded with explosives before they can be used against the Americans the Japanese will be using a guided bomb where a person guides the bomb after they drop it from a giant aircraft in this encounter but but the main assaults and damage is going to be carried out by your standard kamikaze planes and the new tactics going to be or the tactic I'm not sure how new it is to mix kamikaze planes in with planes that are doing conventional attacks you know normal bombers and so if you're an American anti-aircraft gunner how do you know the difference and who do you shoot at it becomes confusing and there's going to be I think 10 full-on kamikaze assaults during the whole Okinawan campaign but in between the big assaults you have a single kamikaze here or there or a couple of them attacking and in one 40-day period the US fleet will be hit by some kamikaze attack every single day can't relax for one minute and it's hard not to look at this as perhaps the first real test of what modern naval combat is going to look like because there hasn't been modern naval combat between two first-rate naval powers since the Second World War the little bits that you've gotten have shown how important missiles are going to be in naval combat well haven't had a war where hundreds of naval missiles have been launched at fleets of ships the closest comparison you can find is what's going on you know off the coast of Okinawa when sometimes hundreds of kamikazes mixed in with hundreds of bombers will show up and attempt to get through the American defensive screen and sink American ships they have far more success setting them on fire than outright sinking them but they begin to whittle down the American strength and not in a way where you have a danger of the whole fleet being sunk or anything like that but it's costing a lot of sailors lives who are getting horribly burned the ones who survive it's taking out a lot of smaller ship and a bunch of American carriers end up getting injured enough to go back for repairs I read one observer who was comparing the fact that the most countries have wooden flight decks including the Japanese and the Americans but the British who we had just mentioned had shown up here with their fleet or one of their fleets their Pacific fleet and their aircraft carriers have armored flight decks which cuts down I guess on the number of aircraft you can keep on board so that's a downside but when the kamikazes hit it the observer had said that if this happens to an American vessel it's back to port for six months of repair if it happens to it an English British vessel you just call the sweeper squad in right come on just hose off the deck here and send this kamikaze what's left of this kamikaze plane right into the ocean the Japanese will lose thousands upon thousands of aircraft in the Okinawan campaign I've seen numbers all over the map and just going by the encyclopedia of military history though they claim somewhere north of 7,000 somewhere south of 8,000 aircraft chewed up in this campaign but they also manage to sink 36 of the u.s. fifth fleets ships and damage another 368 more that is not insignificant and we should recall that the Japanese are stockpiling all these kind of things on the home islands for future assaults there was a surface component that was supposed to work with these kamikaze attacks and the interesting aspect of that is that it involved the super battleship Yamato whose sister ship was sunk a few battles ago the Musashi and neither ship having done much in this war both ships had every right to be the queen of the seas when they were launched and commissioned only the technological wheel of fortune had passed them by and over the course of several hours the American aircraft sometimes a hundred at a time will sink her just as easily as they sunk her sister ship the Musashi lots of bombs lots of torpedoes but there was nothing to it the Americans lose between 10 and 15 aircraft sinking not just the Yamato but the cruiser and the destroyers with it it's nothing you look at the disparity between what those 10 or 15 aircraft cost the United States in time labor resources opportunity cost everything else versus what the Yamato cost the Japanese technology has a way doesn't it of taking something that was very valuable not that long ago and making it practically worthless now on April 12th just as things are really starting to get nasty on Okinawa itself in the land combat the American president who has served more time in office than any other president in American history dies in that office Roosevelt was famously trying to get a little of his strength back in Warm Springs Georgia when he's having his portrait painted and tells the people in the room that he's got a terrible headache and succumbs very quickly to a cerebral hemorrhage stroke type incident this is not a surprise to anyone who was around the man at all you read account after account after account for a good year before his death that he looks like death is at his door a lot of people thought it was irresponsible for the man to run for his fourth term in office as sick as he obviously was what's more if you're in the middle of a war especially and you're a world leader and you know how sick you are wouldn't you be really concerned with who your successor is that's part of the interesting angle here the president of the United States has only recently picked a new vice president so a guy who's in office for four terms so long that most of the soldiers on the ground have no memory of any other president in their lives he's got a new vice president as of January 1945 so it's April something like 82 or 83 days he's had this guy and he's not someone that really anyone knows his name is Harry Truman it's interesting isn't it that of the so-called big three allied commanders in the war you know allied leaders Roosevelt Churchill and Stalin only Stalin is still in power at the end of the war Churchill famously gets well he loses the election in July 1945 so he has to give up power and Roosevelt dies and so Harry Truman who was said to have cried on someone's shoulder saying you know that he's not big enough for the job when he hears that it is his job he'll he'll say to Eleanor Roosevelt Franklin's widow is there anything I can do for you and she says is there anything I can do for you you're the one in trouble now and Truman himself has written that when he found out he was president it felt like the whole world stars moon and universe fell on top of him this is a guy who in his 82 or 83 days as vice president of the United States met alone with the president of the United States a mere two times and oh yeah that guy the guy dying where everyone knew he was dying didn't even mention to the vice president that they've been working on a secret weapon that he might now inherit it's borderline negligent and Truman is no Roosevelt if you're gonna take over in wartime and especially if you're gonna take over at this kind of a critical moment in wartime you'd like to think you have some really august figure and Truman's opponents and and people who didn't like him would often call him a failed haberdasher he is not someone that when you look at him you think okay this is gonna be one of the really powerful august movers and shakers but it's going to be up to him on what to do for the rest of the war and there's gonna be some pretty darn big decisions as you can imagine actually the end stages of the Second World War not a good time to be one of the leaders in the Second World War on either side and as we said Churchill loses an election he's gone from power Roosevelt dies Mussolini will be executed by partisans on April 28th Hitler will die in early May and Germany will surrender by the way in early May May 7th May 8th in there May 8th really so things are clearly winding down but what this means is in the middle of the Okinawan battle Japan becomes the only one still fighting the only major powers still on the axis side fighting and the fighting is getting more vicious all the time the Japanese have several lines cut across the width of the island and they're forcing Americans to take them on head-on and you begin to see the kind of combat that reminds one more of the First World War than the second in fact I think it was Ian W. Toll that referred to Okinawa as a Pacific for done if you look at a picture of the Okinawan campaign especially one taken over at the Shuri line in the south after the fighting has been going on for a while you'd be hard-pressed to say that wasn't the First World War battlefield and it just looks like giant piles of dirt with some roads cut through it I mean there's nothing green left anywhere no trees no stumps no grass no nothing holes in the ground where the troops are trying desperately to not be killed by mortars or artillery shells and just like the First World War because the situation is so dangerous that people can't go about their business including things like going to the latrine in the rear area everything stays where it is excrement trash bodies and that contributes to something which well in the First World War it shattered the sensibilities of a lot of the people forced to live in those circumstances and in with the old breed at Peleliu and Okinawa E.B. Sledge Eugene Sledge was at Okinawa and describes just what it was like over on the Shuri line and remember sometime in this conflict the rain starts and makes everything worse if you're already living in a latrine what happens when you add water right and Sledge writes quote everywhere lay Japanese corpses killed in the heavy fighting infantry equipment of every type US and Japanese was scattered about helmets rifles B.A.R.s packs cartridge belts canteen shoes ammo boxes shell cases machine gun ammo belts all were strewn around us up to and all over half moon that's one of the battle areas he says quote the mud was knee-deep in some places probably deeper in others if one dared venture there for several feet around every corpse maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain there wasn't a tree or bush left all was open country shells had torn up the turf so completely he writes that ground cover was non-existent the rain poured down on us as evening approached the scene was nothing but mud shell fire flooded craters with their silent pathetic rotting occupants knocked out tanks and Amtrak's and discarded equipment utter desolation the stench of death he writes was overpowering end quote how does one deal with that well Sledge says quote I existed from moment to moment sometimes thinking death would have been preferable we were in the depths of the abyss the ultimate horror of war during the fighting around Umer Brogel pocket on Peleliu I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives but in the mud and driving rain before Shuri we were surrounded by maggots and decay men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool end quote Sledge also describes what happens when they're out there killing lots of Japanese which they were and then the shells come in and chew up the bodies that were laying on the ground which is the environment that the Marines and the army troops have to actually live in and he writes quote the situation was bad enough but when enemy artillery shells exploded in the area the eruptions of soil and mud uncovered previously buried Japanese dead and scattered chunks of corpses like the area around our gun pits the ridge was a stinking compost pile if a marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge he writes he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets cartridge belt leggings lacings and the like then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade we didn't talk about such things they were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans the conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming nor do authors normally write about such vileness unless they've seen it with their own eyes it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane but I saw much of it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity end quote the actual fighting and trying to get people out of caves and defensive positions if you weren't actively involved in the kind of combat sledge was just talking about was a kind of horrific and extremely dangerous tediousness and E&W toll says quote it was slow bloody treacherous work involving flamethrowers grenades satchel charges small arms bayonets and even knives and bare hands general Buckner the American commander referred to these tactics as the blowtorch and corkscrew method end quote he then goes on to talk about how unbelievably brave and tenacious both sides were in fighting for things like high ground positions which would often change hands then change hands again then change hands again sometimes 10-12 times toll writes quote naval gunfire and air support were valuable on Okinawa but they never superseded the bravery initiative and grit of individual infantry units in the end the soldiers and Marines had to dig their enemies out of the ground and kill them there was no other way rarely could they gain an advantage through flanking maneuvers on the constricted terrain around the Shuri ridges each battalion was wedged into a densely populated section of the line on average a thousand troops for every 600 yards and the only way to hit the enemy was by frontal assault they might briefly seize control of the top of a facing Ridge but then be driven back by heavy artillery fire from positions farther south or by Japanese infantry counter-attacks in superior force that was a recurring pattern on Okinawa the high ground often changed hands in a succession of attacks and counter-attacks sometimes as many as a dozen times American and Japanese dead he writes were splayed side by side on the battlefield all foliage had been blasted or burned away from the once verdant landscape and the zones between the opposing lines were scarred and denuded wasteland artillery and mortar shells fell relentlessly shaking the walls of the trenches and foxholes Japanese infiltration attacks were a nightly horror more than on any previous Pacific battlefield infantrymen suffered psychotic breaks and had to be evacuated as quote-unquote psycho cases the war correspondent John Lardner saw a soldier led away from the front line by two medical corpsmen he was uninjured but wide-eyed and shrieking they'll get every one of you they'll get every one of you end quote but it's not just the conditions that would drive you crazy here I mean the soldiers are put in the kind of positions that I remember and I think I've mentioned before the the Vietnam class which was all the rage when I was in college they were taught on a lot of campuses and they would bring in these Vietnam veterans to to talk to us military history majors we military history majors and I'll never forget how often the problems happened when the soldiers were forced to deal with civilians or people that did not fit the mold of what one is preparing themselves to fight in boot camp and all these other things right and an enemy soldier killer be killed it's different when the enemy soldier is 12 years old or a woman and the hundreds of thousands of civilians on Okinawa made it absolutely impossible to avoid hurting these people and I had said earlier that there was nowhere to run that they hadn't been evacuated actually some had been evacuated something something like 80,000 had been evacuated there had been others moved to other parts of the island by the Japanese considered to be safer but several hundred thousand were still in the way and in caves and trying to stay away from the combat others had been drafted by the Japanese because remember as far as they're concerned okay now has been under Japanese control for a generation so they impress people into the sort of the home guard they have a calling them Hitler youth is perhaps not right but they have sort of a militant youth organization that has boys 14 to 17 years old in it they get thrown into things girls 14 to 17 year old who are nurses nursing students get thrown into this and everybody's gonna take casualties in his book the battle for Okinawa survivor and and higher command official colonel Hiromichi Yahara describes running into some of these and girls is the young women I don't know what you would call somebody 14 15 16 running into them who are doing work in one of these caves all of them very aware that they're probably on a kind of a suicide mission here and Colonel Yohara writes quote during the construction meaning of one of these places I often visited sukazan to encourage the workers young civilians including many boys and girls had been conscripted to work on the tunnels and the airfield deep in the tunnel on one of my visits I found several girls repairing a water leak when I praised their effort one girl stood and said sweetly quote we'll do our best until the end end quote I was deeply touched he writes by their devotion to duty the end of course means when they all die a lot of those people will end up being killed by being stuck in the crossfire just like the soldiers right dying from artillery or mortars they will sometimes be trapped in caves with military people and so everyone dies sometimes they will be trapped in caves and too afraid that the civilian population is absolutely terrified just like the people on Saipan were the Americans they've been fed this idea that they're gonna be tortured and raped and killed in the most horrible ways and so they're trying not to surrender to the Americans but that means that when some American calls out into a cave and says you know come on out with your hands up and no one does they throw a grenade into the cave and keep going a lot of people die that way but the worst is when the civilians sometimes with Japanese using them as human shield sometimes with the Japanese dressed up as civilians trying to get away in a crowd of civilians will usually at night rush American lines and these soldiers had orders not to let anybody do that for obvious reasons you might be able to live with yourself for a long time knowing that you killed an enemy soldier who was trying to kill you it's a lot harder as I said about the Vietnam veterans when it's someone you're not ready to ever think of yourself having participated in snuffing the lives out of it's one of the things that creates the extra tragedy in Patrick K O'Donnell's book into the rising Sun he interviews a bunch of marine veterans who talk about these incidents that they remember and you can just see how the killing of civilians can sometimes get through the psychological defenses that these soldiers have that might have protected them had they been able to say you know it was me against the other soldier fair fight it's a little different when something like what happened to Joe McNamara from the 6th Marine Division happens and he's quoted in the book as saying quote one night there was a bunch of firing they passed the word be alert they're coming through the the next morning we found out it was the civilians that had tried to come through the lines and they were out in this open field all killed Jesus Christ dead children women old men they said there were Japanese among them forcing them to go we were putting out pamphlets every day telling them the Okinawan civilians to stay on the main roads and not to come through our lines there were a lot of them killed it was horrifying to see dead babies dead children we didn't have anything to do with it another group accidentally did it just the thought of all those people you try to get them the civilians out of the caves also as we were advancing we knew they were in there and we tried to get them out if we couldn't we didn't know if there were soldiers in there and tossed in hand grenades in a cave you don't know who's in there or what they're doing end quote Elmer Mapes of the 6th Marine Division's also quoted similar situation says that they told the people from Okinawa stay away from the lines you're gonna get hurt but he says that the Japanese would put on civilian clothes and try to blend in with the crowds or use them as human shields as we said and he says quote things were quiet for a while when all of a sudden just everything started machine guns rifles you could hear the screams I wasn't right next to it I was in a foxhole 20 yards or so away after everything quieted down there was a solitary baby crying just a little tiny baby no other sound the baby was crying in the night everyone was dead except this poor little baby there the mother was probably dead and quote Patrick Almond is also quoted and also remembered that same baby you can see how something like that might Pierce the normal psychological defenses that anyone who has to face another soldier in combat may have put up right it has a way to get through your emotional armor one of the things almond said though was running into a sniper who was just a child and he says quote the only thing I really vividly remember was this particular sniper he killed three or four of my men we located him by the sound of the bolt on his rifle they flushed him out with a grenade he was a 12 year old boy his magazine spring was broken so he was only able to slowly fire one shot at a time he was a damn good shot O'Donnell says he sighs now and then says the range was only 50 feet the Japanese had left him there and he did what they left him to do we shot him right there and the quote how does one deal with this I was trying to figure out how I would deal with it and then while I was reading soldiers remembrances of the situation I came across one who basically said he had to drink he couldn't continue to exist like this and kill like this without something to numb his emotions and in the mammoth book of eyewitness World War two edited by Johnny Lewis he quotes John Garcia from the 7th division of the US infantry so this is an army soldier by the way he's talking about the Japanese general who had committed suicide by the time the fighting is over and he writes quote we buried general Ushijima and his men inside a cave this was the worst part of the war which I didn't like about Okinawa they were hiding in caves all the time women children soldiers we get up on a cliff and lower down barrels of gasoline and then shoot at it it would explode and just bury them to death he continues I personally shot one Japanese woman because she was coming across a field at night we kept dropping leaflets not to cross the field at night because we couldn't tell if they were soldiers we would set up a perimeter anything in front we'd shoot at it this one night I shot and when it came daylight it was a woman there and a baby tied to her back the bullet had gone through her and out the baby's back that still bothers me that hounds me I still feel I committed murder you see a figure in the dark it's stooped over you don't know if it's a soldier or a civilian end quote he continues right from that point quote I was drinking about a fifth and a half of whiskey every day sometimes homemade sometimes what I could buy it was the only way I could kill I had friends who were Japanese and I kept thinking every time I pulled the trigger on a man or pushed a flamethrower down into a hole what is this person's family gonna say when he doesn't come back he's got a wife he's got children somebody end quote he continues quote oh I still lose nights of sleep because of that woman I shot I still lose a lot of sleep I still dream about her I dreamed about it perhaps two weeks ago end quote and then the interviewer says he let out a deep breath something more turbulent than a sigh those are the remembrances of a man who may have come home with no visible wounds on his body but is clearly bearing some scars for the rest of his days how many more of those people are you going to have when you have to invade the Japanese home islands and maybe a better question to ask although I'm not sure is what is an invasion of the home islands going to do to the civilians because when you look at what it did to them on Okinawa you stand back and a hair on the back of your neck stands up no one knows how many died by the way I mean no canal has got slightly less than half a million people during this time period and there may have been as many as a hundred and fifty thousand of them killed the loan numbers are way down by thirty thousand so that shows you the range here but so many of them die in circumstances that absolutely break your heart and if you want to read a very disturbing book in the early 1980s that's my audience right want to read a very disturbing book yes of course we do in the early 80s a in okanawa newspaper went around and collected the stories of survivors sort of piecing together little bits of the mosaic that is this whole affair on a memory by memory basis and the results are horrific and every story its own personal readers digest survival or not story
SPEAKER_02: the story of the nurses 14 15 16 years old nursing students and what they went through and how many of them died in the horror of that the killing of their own wounded which was happening on a widespread basis and again maybe that's a little glimpse of the future here when the Japanese home islands are invaded one of the survivors um one of these nurses quoted talks about one of those incidents and in the book it says quote the American artillery bombardment continued throughout April and May so at the end of May the naval units moved temporarily down south there were many seriously wounded men in the shelter and those who were unable to move by themselves were euthanized with potassium cyanide at the start it was mixed in with their food the wounded just lay there writhing in agony after one of the group ate some of the food and died none of the others would eat it so the next method they tried was injection many men dying from what were passed off as injections for quote the good of your health end quote after watching one of the wounded men die from his injection the other patients struggled violently and were held down by several staff while they were given their injections Toshiko who's one of the nurses who witnessed all this talked about this as the most horrific of her war experiences quote they died almost immediately after the injection they just let out a little sigh or groan before both hands started to twist and contort end quote this was happening all over the island and in other circumstances the soldiers are being recorded as being resigned to this fate but the part that if you're looking at Okinawa as a preview of the Japanese home islands that most takes your breath away it's the group suicides and I should point out that you can find examples of this I mean there's a lot of people in Germany killing themselves as the Red Army approaches their territories and there's whole books on that but the experience in the Pacific is different those were spontaneous things in the Pacific it's not always clear whether this is what the people who are killing themselves want to do whether they feel compelled to but would rather live whether they've been fed a bunch of propaganda that makes them think they have no choice but one of the most horrific things I've ever read in my life involves one of these caves where these civilians are holed up the Japanese soldiers give them all a bunch of grenades to kill themselves but there's not enough grenades and a bunch of the ones they they get our duds so they have to figure out a way without any weapons how they're all gonna kill each other and they're all relate these are family members and just to make matters worse by the way as soon as the first grenades do go off and these people start committing suicide Americans outside the cave think that they're being attacked so they start shooting into the cave so the civilians are caught between people blowing themselves up in one part of the cave and Americans shooting into the cave thinking that they're being attacked the man's name by the way is Kinjo who's having this memory and he says that between the Americans shooting from one side and people blowing themselves up from the other he was sort of in a state of shock but then as his eyes clear he notices a former official who had picked up a piece of wood and who had started bashing his wife and children with it saying that the bizarre suicidal environment in that cave had obviously turned that man into a madman that he would bash his own wife and children to death with a piece of wood but then they all realized that they need something if they don't have a grenade to kill themselves and their loved ones with and this is where it gets mind-boggling I mean can you imagine having to kill your family members can you imagine having to do it by hand can you imagine how hard it would be if they just sat there told you they loved you and then waited patiently for you to do it quoting from the account in descent into hell now quote those people who had not been able to take their own lives with grenades were worried about being left alive they had to find other ways to kill themselves and the former ward chairman's behavior the guy who bashed his family had set the example some used scythes and razor blades to slash themselves while others strangled themselves with lengths of rope as the mayhem unfolded they found all sorts of ways to kill including bashing others to death with rocks and sticks men bash their wives and parents bashed their children young people killed the elderly and the strong killed the weak what they all felt in common was the belief that they were doing this out of love and compassion end quote then Kinjo and his brother have to do the same thing to their family members quote Kinjo and his elder brother also had to fulfill their role everything that was happening around them made them understand that they had to carry out their duty as well Kinjo said quote I think it was our mother we hit first end quote as he and his brother began bashing her in the head Kinjo screamed out until she became a blur through the tears flowing from his own eyes for the first time in his life he wept uncontrollably quote I have never wailed like that sense end quote the account then says quote the brothers used sticks to rain blow after blow on their mother watching her from behind as they're pounding center step by step towards her death is still a vivid image in Kinjo's mind however it says he has no recollection of what he did to his sister and brother after that end quote imagine finding yourself in a situation like that and now think about how many more people are going to find themselves in that situation are we to believe that this is going to somehow end on Okinawa or is this a Nostradamus like view of what's still to come for everyone I was fascinated by some comments in Hiromichi Yohara's book the battle for Okinawa he was a colonel and he in the book started to ask real angry questions about Japan's leadership and how they can let this happen and all throughout this series we've been talking about that too this idea of the leadership as just immune sometimes to the suffering of their own people their own soldiers Yohara talks about how this idea of the Japanese not surrendering but killing themselves instead developed and then says by the Second World War the greater East Asia Wars they call it this was sort of ingrained and you were ordered to not be taken prisoner but he's asking what the point is and he writes quote Japan had never lost a war we had also never waged a war in which large forces were isolated from mainland support thus not to be taken prisoner became a fixed principle part of our military education since the middle of the greater East Asia War most Japanese garrisons in the Pacific Islands adhered to this supreme Japanese principle never surrender to the enemy officers and men he writes usually committed suicide as a last resort to avoid the ultimate shame of capture our 32nd Army was now faced with this situation must 100,000 soldiers die because of tradition from this point on he writes it was but a battle to kill the remaining Japanese soldiers for nothing we could cause the enemy little damage they could walk freely on the field of battle the war of attrition was over and we would simply be asking the enemy to use his formidable power to kill us all indeed he writes it is a high ideal to fight to the end to maintain national morale but were our leaders worth the sacrifice of an entire people with the end of the war in sight they shouted us millions of people must die for our nation why are they really aware of the entire war situation it was foolish he writes to force everyone to die simply because Japan had never before lost a war end quote he says the decision to surrender should have been made as quickly as possible he says at least before Okinawa was lost Colonel Yohara also mentions the American propaganda efforts the attempts to get Okinawans and Japanese to surrender to convince them that you know that the Americans are not the terrible monsters they've been told to be that everyone will be safe you may recall that these efforts were done on Saipan and they're going to be stepped up here in W total says more than on any other previous Pacific battlefield the Americans are trying to persuade their enemies to give up the fight he says they'll drop tons of leaflets 30,000 in one day alone that they will mount loudspeakers on jeeps trucks patrol boats they'll drop loudspeakers with parachutes hoping that the broadcast before it hits the ground will reach people in caves he even says that they're using American Japanese citizens to create really good translations they're using cultural sensitivities to realize how the word surrender might be a sort of a trigger might be the modern term for it so they don't use the word surrender and Colonel Yohara writes quote American propaganda was transmitted from small craft offshore there were daily broadcasts in fluent Japanese now he's quoting the broadcast okinawa and civilians we will guarantee your lives we will give you food and medicine please move toward minne toga before it is too late alternatively Japanese soldiers you fought well and proudly for the cause of Japan but now the issue of victory or defeat has been decided to continue the battle is meaningless we will guarantee your lives please come down to the beach and swim out to us end quote Yohara continues by saying quote thus the enemy struck not only with broadcasts and shells but also with countless propaganda leaflets dropped from the sky none of it showed the viciousness so typical of propaganda they said candidly the Japan's defeat was inevitable they spoke of Japan's leaders and their indifference to the lives of subordinates end quote and perhaps one could argue that on Okinawa they're working at least by the really tough standards the Japanese have set for the first time you're gonna see a decent number of Japanese soldiers surrendering and sometimes as units this is unheard of in the Pacific War I think it's something like 11,000 or so Japanese surrender but as usual a nice proportion of those are really Korean and Taiwanese laborers impressed into service but it's like 7,000 Japanese soldiers which is significant and you want to say that this is a sign that as we've pointed out the Japanese are like everyone else only more so it took them longer to get to the point of morale collapse but here it is but other historians will point out that maybe that's the backwards way of looking at it rather than noticing how many you managed to get to surrender look how many didn't the Japanese suffer something like a hundred and ten thousand casualties in Okinawa and a hundred thousand of those are people that either fought to the death or took their own lives at the end that's terrifying if you're trying to extrapolate data on what an invasion of Japan's casualty rate might look like maybe you think to yourself that you don't care what the enemy's casualty rate is well what about the civilians the numbers of Okinawans who died range anywhere from thirty thousand to I've seen a hundred and fifty hundred sixty thousand his numbers thrown out there extrapolate that out for Japanese civilians and maybe you say well listen once again this is the enemy side I'm not going to worry too much about their people okay what about your people and I don't know how many non-Americans were going to participate in a eventual invasion of Japan but the American casualties on Okinawa are frightful the worst in the Pacific War so far 50,000 casualties basically almost 13,000 dead 5,000 sailors dead author Richard B Frank had said that the Navy and marine losses at Okinawa by themselves constituted about 17% of all the casualties sustained by the Navy and the Marines for the whole war so there's an idea of how nasty things are oh yeah another sign maybe of sort of war fatigue is that you can see the casualties the psychological casualties on the US side spike I've heard all sorts of possible reasons for this some saying that the battlefield in Okinawa was sometimes so like a First World War battlefield that you started to see a lot of the same sort of combat fatigue battle fatigue psychological casualties that they saw in the First World War I've seen others blame it on the flood of replacement soldiers that the terrible casualties necessitated I mean the stories are legendary if you read them about how quickly those people tend to die when they arrive in battle the first time they haven't acquired the skills necessary to survive they always remind me when you read the stories of those of those sea turtles that have to hatch on the shore and then run the gauntlet of predators and threats to make it to the safety of the sea well those replacement soldiers if they if they can last a little bit in combat will develop the skills necessary to survive but combat is so unforgiving that tons of them get wiped out you know very quickly and the old soldiers don't ever want to get to know them very well because they die so fast but it's not just in a military sense at all that you're starting to see the psychological tension mounting earlier we quoted a letter from a mother that Navy Secretary Forrestal had released to the public which you know it cuts right through the emotion of a personal letter like that cuts right through the names and dates and places and and all the other narrative and somehow reestablishes a little bit of the emotional connection to the story and in implacable foes historians Waldo Henrichs and Mark Galickio do the same thing they use a letter as part of trying to give a sense of how done with this the American people are I mean Okinawa comes after Iwo Jima which comes after Peleliu I mean these are body blows in terms of a war that listen if you'd ever been through a pandemic and you're just ready to take the mask off and go back to normal and not have a lot of deaths that's how Americans and a lot of people in the rest of the world are feeling by 1945 and Henrichs and Galickio writing this by the way while the Okinawan battle is still going on right quote the battle for Okinawa dragged on as the casualties mounted so did the questioning of American strategy in mid-may following one of his daily war journal broadcasts radio commentator Martin Agronski received an angry letter from a Mrs. CJH the mother of a soldier on Okinawa asking why the army war department and American leaders generally were not being held accountable for quote all this slaughter of American boys end quote an anguished string of questions followed now quoting the questions from the letter quote why haven't reinforcements reached those boys on Okinawa why must the same troops fight for 45 days why only six divisions in the first place why must every battle in the Pacific be bloody it was bloody Tarawa bloody Saipan bloody Peleliu bloody Leite bloody Iwo Jima bloody Okinawa bloody Mindanao all of three divisions there she writes bloody Luzon not finished and it will be bloody Borneo doesn't it ever enter anyone's mind that we are paying a needless too high a price in human blood in the Pacific end quote and once again you get the questions over strategy over the which leader should be in charge people go after General Buckner and his decision to go head-on into the defenses of the Japanese at Okinawa rather than try an amphibious assault around the flanks but Buckner can't much really respond to that because he becomes the highest American general in the war to die in combat when he's killed in an artillery attack and of course the Japanese generals die too they all kill themselves before the fighting on Okinawa is even completed the brand-new American president still on the job for less than two months at this point gives a speech to the news media you can tell that he seems uncomfortable at this point still with scripted announcements and cameras and as we were called earlier I mean he's the first American president without the initials FDR that anyone's experienced in a dozen years but he gives a warning to Japan the Japanese people in fact the entire world then if you don't want to have the same thing happen to you that happened to Germany give up now there can be no peace in the world until the military power of Japan is
SPEAKER_01: destroyed with the same completeness as was the power of the European dictators to do that we are now engaged in a process of deploying millions of our armed forces against Japan in a mass movement troops and supplies and weapons over 14,000 miles a military and naval fleet unequaled in all history substantial portions of Japan's key industrial centers have been leveled to the
SPEAKER_01: ground in a series of record incendiary raids what has already happened to Tokyo will happen to every Japanese city whose industries feed the Japanese war machine if the Japanese insist on continuing resistance beyond the point of reason their country will suffer the same destruction as Germany our blows will destroy their whole modern industrial plant and organization which they have built up during the past century and which they are now devoting to a hopeless cause we have no desire or intention to destroy or enslave the Japanese people but only surrender can prevent the kind of ruin which they have seen come to Germany as a result of continued useless resistance the whole situation in Germany is creating all sorts of very interesting societal and economic
SPEAKER_02: problems around the world and especially in the United States I mean when you have a war ending in Europe with millions of men under arms there what happens to them do some fight the Japanese do some get demobilized and what happens to all the domestic political concerns and labor and management issues and all these things that have been put on hold as part of the unifying efforts that the country and many countries did the same thing put together for the war effort a lot of this stuff is starting to rise up to the surface again before the Americans and the Allies have reached the war's finish line here right just because Germany's defeated doesn't mean Japan is and as we've said earlier the Americans really have to gird themselves for what's to come because the plans for the invasion of Japan are harrowing slated to start in late 1945 move to the to the more important islands where places like Tokyo are by 1946 and the casualty estimates are horrific I'm not sure what the proper adjective to use is when the high numbers begin to look like a million men maybe will be casualties worth pointing out though that even today we argue over what the casualty numbers would have been no one knew what's more the tendency in the Pacific on the Allies part has been to underestimate the casualties that they'll suffer so no one knows the basic plans though that are being batted around boil down to two main ideas some people want to blockade the country which is already under a naval blockade to some degree but tighten that have ships just keep everything from coming in fuel medicine food everything starve them to death and then keep bombing them the way you're bombing them this may sound by the way like a merciful strategy blockades often do sound like the lesser of two evils but ask anyone who's ever lived through one when you start denying food and medicine to people you have a horrific circumstance without any bombs exploding and in the blockade and bombing scenario you're still gonna have Japanese cities burned out the other idea is to bomb them the way you're bombing them and then invade both of those ideas have huge downsides the Navy certainly understands after Okinawa that they're gonna be facing constant and withering attacks from kamikazes when they invade the home islands they had 40 straight days at one point on Okinawa that's gonna be something that whittles down strength and kills a lot of sailors over a long period of time but an invasion with ground troops this is a terrifying concept and no one knows how many people might die in something like that in July 1945 a bunch of things happened that changed the situation somewhat and clarify it somewhat two of these things overlap by the way there's gonna be a very big conference in Potsdam outside of Berlin in Germany the now you know in ruins Germany where the leaders of the Allied camp Stalin Truman now and his first one of these things and Churchill and his last one he'll actually lose the election during it and be replaced by a successor midway through the conference they had this conference that's mostly about what we do in Europe what's the post-war situation look like oh yeah and what about the Japanese who are still fighting when the conference is ongoing something happens back in the United States that changes the whole equation and Churchill has to be informed about this the Manhattan Project proves to be successful an atomic bomb test in New Mexico goes off without a hitch and the world enters into the nuclear era with very very few human beings on the planet earth realizing it Churchill finds out afterwards that the test which no one knew how it was gonna turn out how it went and he wrote about it in his history of the Second World War and said this quote the president meaning Truman invited me to confer with him forthwith he had with him General Marshall and Admiral Leahy up to this moment we had shaped our ideas towards an assault upon the homeland of Japan by terrific air bombing and by the invasion of very large armies we had contemplated the desperate resistance of the Japanese fighting to the death with samurai devotion not only in pitched battles but in every cave and dugout I had in my mind he writes the spectacle of Okinawa Island where many thousands of Japanese rather than surrender had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by hand grenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the right of suicide is what he means to quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British or more if we could get them there for we were resolved to share the agony now all this nightmare picture had vanished in its place was the vision fair and bright indeed it seemed of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks I thought immediately myself of how the Japanese people whose courage I had always admired might find in the apparition of this almost supernatural weapon an excuse which would save their honor and release them from their obligation of being killed to the last fighting man end quote I have a hard time here in the 21st century squaring the moral circle between the idea of a fair and bright vision as Churchill terms it and dropping atomic bombs on people but perhaps this should be taken into account that I'm not living in a world where cities are being bombed and incinerated multiple times a week and Churchill and these allied leaders making these decisions are what to them might seem a an incremental step up in nastiness to us seems like something that should never ever ever be done now someone might say we're reacting to this emotionally and in the time period where they're operating they're using logic right this is the human being lawnmower logic isn't it the idea that anything that puts a halt to the conveyor belt of death and saves more lives long term is the greater moral good but you got to do some really horrific things to get there I mean look how it perverts the entire goals of this atomic bomb I mean in a way if the goal here and it is is to shock a stubborn Japanese leadership into finally seeing the light here that they've lost the war a little like slapping a hysterical patient you know to get them to calm down enough to take in reality you want this bomb to be as horrible and terrible as possible the worse it is the more likely it is that it's going to do its job of being a monkey wrench into the gears of this conveyor belt of death it's a really weird place that the logical chain of thinking can get you to arrive at isn't it we called it logical insanity in the shows that we did on this evolution of the logic of things like strategic bombing but this is a lot bigger than that this goes to the human experience on so many levels I mean Gwen Dyer in his book war said that what's being done with things like atomic bombings and fire bombings that this is just the natural extension of what human beings have always done the weapons are just a lot more horrific than they used to be but I can't stop thinking about the idea about personal experience all these people
SPEAKER_02: making these decisions are doing so from a theoretical background as far as I know none of them have ever lived through a fire bombing or god forbid an atomic attack what if they had would they still feel like this was the right decision to make would they still feel like this was a bright and fair vision and I can hear people saying well you know then you're just making decisions from emotion rather than logic but look where logic has gotten us the emotional reactions to something like an atomic bombing when you read them today they're the ones that sound saying it's the logical decisions that seem crazy. Historian Michael Best in his book Choices Under Fire Moral Dimensions of World War II reminds us not to forget the equivalent of being on the ground rather than making this too intellectual of a discussion and he writes quote sometimes as we engage in the intellectual exercise of trying to understand the complexities of the war we can become inured to the underlying realities this psychological distancing from our subject no doubt reflects in a small way the manner in which the wartime leaders themselves gradually became calloused to the dreadful acts that were being perpetrated all around them and that they themselves were perpetrating as we analyze the wartime decisions we catch ourselves to our shock tossing around numbers of dead human beings ten thousand here a hundred thousand there almost as unfeelingly as the participants themselves this tendency towards psychological numbing is understandable and perhaps unavoidable but we need to resist it as vigorously as we can we must keep reminding ourselves what it really means in practice to speak the words firestorm or Hiroshima for hidden beneath the abstraction of the words words grown customary from heavy use lie the unimaginable cruelty and madness of what actually happened end quote in W toll in his book Twilight of the gods gives one of the better overall descriptions of this went on August 6 1945 the first atomic bombing attack in human history occurs and he writes quote little boy the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima that's the nickname little boy exploded at 816 a.m. 1870 feet above the ground only 550 feet wide of its aiming point the nuclear chain reaction it triggered created a core temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius igniting the air around it to a diameter of nearly a kilometer the fireball engulfed the center of the city vaporizing about 20,000 people on the ground thermal and ionizing radiation killed virtually all people within a kilometer of the surface of the fireball burning them to death or rupturing their internal organs farther out in successive concentric circles around the epicenter people were exposed to gamma rays neutron radiation flash burns the blast wave and firestorms the initial shockwave he writes raced away from the epicenter at greater than the speed of sound some 984 miles per hour streetcars were lifted from their tracks and scattered like toys clothing was torn from bodies nearly all wooden buildings within 2.3 kilometers were completely leveled and about half of all such buildings to a radius of 3.2 kilometers later investigators found the shadows of people caught within the inner radius around the hypocenter they had been vaporized but their bodies had left faint silhouettes on the pavement or on nearby walls end quote basically the atomic attack combined the bad side of the firestorms because the fires from the superheated everything exploded very quickly with horrific concussive blast damage like you would have in major bombings and then added just as a sprinkling of extra specialness on top horrible dispersion of radioactivity the stories all sound like people who are living through a natural disaster but now human beings can create the equivalent of natural disasters the effects of the bomb managed to take
SPEAKER_02: out most of the first responders the hospitals the doctors the firefighters everyone who might actually go out and improve the situation which leaves the people in a horrific situation for weeks afterwards as they die from radiation and the heartbreaking stories this is what I mean about if you could take these people who saw this as such a wonderful logical way to get the Japanese to end the war if you could have put Winston Churchill on the ground there and let him watch the scene going on as people trapped in burning buildings with their loved ones trying to get them out had to be abandoned because the flames were coming one of the most horrific stories connected with the Hiroshima bombing involves kids who are caught in the rubble as the fires approach and the parents don't even know what to do I mean there's the theoretical understanding what it means to drop a bomb on a city and then there's the reality of something like this in the book Hibakusha survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which is just remembrances by people one of these survivors Shiga Hiratsuka talks about the bomb exploding and says quote just
SPEAKER_02: then a brilliant flash like lightning appeared in the thunderous roar of an explosion reverberated around us in a moment our house collapsed and we found ourselves buried in its rubble as my husband and I worked frantically to free ourselves I heard a cry for help from the woman next door I called back to her if we get out before you will come and help you when we did finally pull ourselves free we saw the city of Hiroshima in ruins around us nowhere was a building left intact and in several places tongues of fire had begin licking outward suddenly panic stricken and completely forgetting about our neighbor I began searching for my children she continues as I was calling their names a voice emerged from a spot two or three meters away help mummy help it was my six-year-old daughter Kazuko hurrying to the spot I found her tightly wedged from the chest down by fallen plaster and timber I screamed to my husband to come quickly and do something he however could hardly move being badly bruised and bleeding from the shoulder he had no strength left it was all he could do to walk she continues and once again I imagine Winston Churchill and all the other decision-makers standing to the side watching this unfold quote my daughter kept calling to me it hurts mommy my legs hurt I can't move hurry and get me out I tugged at her but could not move her no matter how desperately I tried I just could not free her the fires were moving closer and closer we would not be able to stay there much longer finally when the flames began to lap around us we were stirred into moving no longer able to stand the intense heat I realized I was afraid to die I could not let myself be burned alive tears streaming from my eyes I placed my hands together as if in prayer and asked my daughter to forgive me Kazu I am a bad mother to you but please forgive me you don't want to die either I know mommy isn't brave enough to stay here and die with you I'm afraid of the fire Kazu forgive me forgive me then I chose an area that seemed to be safe from fire and fled towards it pulling my husband along by the hand I kept looking back at the ruins of our house as if I were being dragged by the hair from behind there had been no time to rescue our other child either end quote she spent the rest of the evening uttering apologies to her dead children and then her husband died this is one of many I always describe it as a mosaic right and everybody's individual story of how they dealt with this human caused version of a natural disaster when you put them together into the mosaic you get a picture it's a lot of individual stories but look at the stories and imagine if maybe emotion could have stirred the decision-makers rather than logic but once again to what end to allow a blockade to happen to starve people to allow an invasion to happen where the citizens of Japan are killed in house-to-house fighting what you're really getting here if we wanted to look at this through the long-term lens is a vision of a future to be avoided in that same book hibakusha Akira Nagasaki's quoted he tries to go back home and find his house and his relatives after the bombing and describes what is not that hard to imagine our future looking like if everything goes poorly and he writes quote the area around urakami Cathedral was completely burned out and the heat prevented me from approaching it was not until early the next morning that I made my way to what appeared to be the ruins of our house the whole area was a fire blackened desolation there was not even a charred remnant of the huge camphor tree that it stood behind our house all around me were strewn skeletons scattered bones and torsos of ebony ash I sank down exhausted when I'd recovered somewhat I began looking for my mother or rather her bones all I had to go by was the fact that she had gold teeth I held skull after skull in my hands and peered into the jaw area I wonder how many people skulls I picked up during my search I continued searching frantically there were times when squatting I even raised fire blackened heads to look at the teeth I spent that whole day the tenth picking up skulls and putting them down again and quote it is absolutely obvious that it is impossible for us to conceptualize what this is really like you can make movies about it and people have you can read survivor accounts and I've read a ton of those and yet there's this distance between what they experienced and what you can glean from it just by hearing about it and when you read the accounts of survivors they'll often refer to that one way or another that there's no way for you sitting here in a peaceful room to understand what I'm saying this is why I think I'm so attracted to the idea of bringing in you know the leaders who will have to decide to use these weapons and I'd like to add to the group the leaders on the Japanese side who are resistant to surrendering when it's clearly over in this war I'd like to bring them to and in an Ebenezer Scrooge like ghost of Christmas past present or future observer tour allow them to see what we're really talking about here and I remember in reading Michael Bess's book Choices Under Fire that even with all this stuff that I've read and even with the hours we've talked about these questions that there's always something you didn't think about like he mentions about the other things that are destroyed when the bomb goes off and he says quote at the same instant meaning when the bomb went off birds ignited in midair mosquitoes and flies squirrels family pets crackled and were gone and quote it's obvious but I didn't think about all the insect life instantly being wiped out it's a crazy kind of weapon isn't it and while there's burning corpses in the foreground it is absolutely understandable that you would miss the things in the background that you might have lost but those are considerable and when somebody starts rattling off what you lose in an attack like this a nuclear explosion well one history professor who was on the ground at Hiroshima and just marveled at the fact that the city was just gone he said of the atomic bomb that such a weapon has the power to make everything into nothing well what's everything Richard Rhodes quoted by Bess who had a study on this very subject tried to sum up some of the things besides the obvious things of burning corpses in the foreground and he wrote quote destroyed that is we're not only men women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns laundries theater groups sports clubs so in clubs boys clubs girls clubs love affairs trees and gardens grass gates gravestones temples and shrines family heirlooms radios classmates books courts of law pets gross reason markets telephones personal letters automobiles bicycles horses 120 war horses he points out musical instruments medicines and medical equipment life savings eyeglasses city records sidewalks family scrapbooks monuments engagements marriages employees clocks and watches public transportation street signs parents works of art end quote such a weapon has the power to make everything into nothing and still does by the way the nuclear sort of Damocles that hangs over our heads now starts then it is perhaps a sign of something that even after this ferocious attack at Hiroshima the Japanese government still isn't ready to surrender and before they can even come up with some decent conversation about the matter they get hit with another hammer blow two days later when the Soviet Union declares war on Japan this is extra nasty because the Japanese hardliners were living in this fantasy world where they thought they could use the Soviets as a way to get a better deal from the allies but when the Soviets declare war on you well hard to deny that that deal is now dead and then the day after that while the Japanese government is still figuring out how to respond to these you know we have an atomic bomb dropped on us and two days later the Soviet Union declares war on us and then on August 9th we get hit with another atomic bomb attack at Nagasaki if you get a hundred thousand eighty two hundred thousand people killed in Hiroshima the numbers at Nagasaki are lower because of the way the terrain is laid out and some other things but you know 45 to 65 thousand these are not in significant numbers needless to say and even after Nagasaki you can't get the army ministers on board to surrender unless they can have four conditions and all four conditions are unacceptable to the allies I mean they're things like you can't occupy Japan we'll try our own war criminals you know all kinds of I mean it wasn't going to happen but they're not going to surrender till it does and the U.S. and the allies are not going to stop attacking until they do in fact there are bombing raids launched on Japan after the two atomic bombs are dropped because nothing is going to stop until the surrender happens and finally and famously and in a way that's hard to figure out what really happened because the cold war made it in the interest of certain countries like the United States to maybe hide some of the emperor's decision-making in the second world war but the emperor steps in and famously says we have to endure the unendurable and breaks the tie between the officials and and says we're going to surrender the moment the emperor steps in is one of those times that a lot of people have focused on ever since understandably because it brings up all sorts of questions first one is is is if the emperor had this kind of power all along why did he wait till now to use it I mean did things have to get this bad before he exercised it the Japanese system as we've said all along as everyone says is a government that's opaque by design the decision-making is veiled and sort of you know seen through a gauzy lens and isn't always following you know the western idea of written down rules and for every I mean so there's there's some there's a vibe to it there's a feel to it there's protocol and stuff that's deeply embedded in Japanese cultural traditions and imperial traditions hard for outsiders to grasp and then there's also the hardcore realpolitik machiavellian people who will say things like if the emperor does something that we don't like we'll just get rid of him and get another emperor this is the same government that not long ago had been referred to as a government by assassination there were Japanese higher government officials right now right in this room with the emperor who carry bullets in their bodies from being assassination attempted assassination victims for policy decisions that were not nationalistic or right-wing enough not super patriotic enough one of the people who's key to this whole thing one of the people who's involved in the standoff is a general named Anami and he says Francis Pike mentions it mentions it in his book Hirohito's War he's contemplating maybe the alternate reality from surrender and he says quote would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower end quote that's like a samurai romance poem ending there right we all die and it's beautiful did it seem beautiful at Hiroshima with the descriptions there or Nagasaki or Tokyo but that's the kind of cultural blinders you're working with here on a certain segment of the military community in Japan and they have a veto power over policy that's a kind of tragedy sort of when you look at how it turned out and it is with almost a sense of resignation that when the emperor decides that we're going to finally give in here and surrender a coup is attempted by the same mid-level military guys who've had an inordinate amount of impact over policy all along right we talked about them these lieutenant colonels and these mid-level guys who actually bully and scare their superiors decide they're not going to stand for this they try to attempt a coup they want to get their hands on the emperor's message to the public announcing that they're going to surrender before it can be broadcast people will die the coup plotters will eventually realize they've failed they'll try to take over a radio station just so they want to be able to explain their motives it's denied they'll kill themselves some other people will commit suicide but you see the last gasp of these people trying to make a play for things to prevent this surrender which they've had a large hand in delaying to this point and there are generals we should point out on the mainland who've been beating the chinese who are going to look at this idea that they have to surrender is crazy we're going to have to go over and surrender to the people whose butt we've been kicking i don't think so don't forget hiro onoda and a ton of other japanese troops on these pacific islands aren't going to go anywhere for decades no matter what the emperor does here no other army had the phenomenon of their soldiers thousands of them fighting for years and years after the war was over either because they were such true believers they were never going to surrender regardless of what the truth of the situation happened to be or because they were such true believers that they refused to believe the truth of the situation was true but you didn't see this phenomenon in any of the other major armies in the second world war and it's rare to see it in any war ever it is a relic of the japanese imperial period which ends when the war does on september 2nd 1945 interestingly enough it coincides and is interconnected with the dawn of the war with the dawn of the next age in history and most of the time these eras in history aren't easy to pin down when they happen most people living through them whether it's the agricultural revolution or the age of discovery or the industrial era can't put their finger on exactly you know when it began or where they are in the historical moment but the nuclear age while everyone paying attention to current events knew exactly when it started and everyone figured it out at exactly the same time and because of what the japanese people went through at hiroshima and nagasaki the door is opened to a third world war which would be civilizationally transformative as albert einstein is supposed to have said that he didn't know with what weapons world war 3 would be fought but world war 4 he said would be fought with sticks and stones so by the time the human being lawnmower grinds to a halt in 1945 the death totals are some of the worst in recorded history if you just take the asia pacific theater alone between 25 and 30 million allied civilians are dead the second world war is one of those rare wars where civilian casualties vastly outnumbered military casualties in the first world war wasn't that way at all but military casualties are significant too just in that theater the allies lose four million allied dead a lot of those chinese we forget that the chinese play the role in the asia pacific theater that the soviets play in the european one ones who suck up the majority of the damage and keep the enemy occupied of those forces two and a half million japanese military deaths approximately and a million civilian ones these are the kind of death totals that will stick with you for a while and it's hard for me not to notice that we haven't had a great war between the great powers in the 75 years since the second world war ended of course there might be another reason for that and i can't help but notice that we haven't used nuclear weapons on human beings since either the human being lawnmower does not stay quiet for long because the death and destruction will kick up in the wake of the second world war in large part because of the structures and changes that were created by the second world war i mean when the japanese are thrown out of places like korea what moves into that vacuum or do the koreans just take over the next the next 15 to 25 years are going to be all of these areas having independence movements nationalist movements communist insurgencies and all kinds of things that can be tied directly to them having a soft or not so soft landing from their colonial eras and a lot of historians can can draw direct connections between the japanese throwing out the colonial overlords when they initially took over those areas and the amplification and acceleration of trends toward independence that were already underway in most of these places and if they weren't they were by the time the allies tried to retake control of them from the japanese at the end of the war i mean the indians were going to get independence pretty soon no matter what they were well on their way and it's only a couple of years after the second world war that they get independence but you're going to have things with korea and malaysia and vietnam and the rest of indochina i mean this is all going to be shaking out that will be contributing to the death of destruction and the human being conveyor belt of death you know the subsidiary second world war version for decades to come here's the the part though that i try to reconcile and i never have which is if the end result is something that people celebrate right if if a a nation's independence from outsiders for example is dependent on all these terrible things happening is it worth it can you put a price in lives and destruction on political or national independence that may be something that the answer differs depending on who you ask but what it does do is raise all sorts of questions that will lead you into moral quagmire after moral quagmire and you start with the idea that either inadvertently or by design does this mean that the japanese propaganda that portrayed their armies in these pan-asian terms these east asia co-prosperity sphere driven terms does that mean that their army actually was the military tip of the spear of the non-white world you know playing its role in doing what none of these colonial oppressed societies could do militarily defeat the colonial overlords i mean is there some truth to that and if there is how does that change the morality of the overall situation right if you say that you can't put a price on national or political independence what if you're the chinese and it cost you 20 million civilians to get yours and the people that killed those people are the japanese are you thankful to them for that it's it'll tie you up into moral knots won't it how about another it'll tie you up into moral knots won't it how about another one because if you play that game you know by taking the first step and wondering if the japanese are the tip of the spears freeing all these other people well could you make the argument that the allies are the equivalent of the democratic tip of the spear doing the same thing for the japanese people that they were doing for other asian peoples elsewhere i mean freeing them from an oppressive authoritarian totalitarian pseudo-fascist state in his book embracing defeat historian john dower looks at the post-war situation in japan and one of the elements the focus is on is how some japanese viewed it that way usually the people who had been most oppressed under the old regime artists free thinkers liberals communists socialists leftists of all kinds people who would end up in prison or in prison or tortured or censured or watched victims of the secret police in the state they often in dower's um book look like people who view themselves as having been freed by an alliance of other countries which is the way the united states will often portray its interventionist activities after the second world war right we don't have a problem with the people of this place it's their government their government's not free we're going to come in there defeat their military give them the freedom that they didn't have before let them run their own we did it in japan and we did it in japan a revolution as a gift was the way some of these japanese portrayed it and in his book dower reprints a cartoon from japanese cartoonist keito atsuro where he portrays the japanese as an individual in the foreground of one of these pieces of art a human being whose hands had been tied behind his back and then he has just had the bonds severed by a giant pair of scissors that is over his head in the piece of artwork and the scissors are sort of clothed in the stars and stripes garbs you get the idea that the scissors represent the united states the japanese person who had been in bondage represents japan and in the distance running away from the scene of the crime you can see the two figures one who is dressed as a military high level muckety muck representing the militarists the other looks like mr monopoly from your monopoly game and he represents the fat cat rich elites who are the puppet masters in the society and now the outside powers led by the united states in this case have freed the japanese people and handed democracy back to them and i mean it's interesting to contemplate because a lot of societies evolve politically through bloodshed i mean how many countries get independence from other countries through bloodshed how many get independence from their own oppressive governments by political revolution right the american revolution the french revolution bloody affairs there's just a different vibe isn't there when it's people from outside your country who have to kill your soldiers your civilians destroy your cities occupy your territory in order to give you these good things it's just fascinating to think about and like so much of the frayed ends of the rope at the end of the second world war how many loose ends here leave us wondering about moral questions i mean how about the number one question that often comes out of this time period the morality of the dropping of the atomic bomb now i am on record as saying that i think this is one of the most important ethical sorts of circumstances one can ask themselves about something that the entire potential future of humanity could rest on and its importance becomes clear anytime the issue actually raises its ugly head like in the middle of the cuban missile crisis everyone instantly understood the import of this you know moral issue known as nuclear weapons and this almost shakespearean question of to atomic bomb or to not atomic bomb what is not helpful useful satisfying or in any way instructive for the next time we might consider using such a weapon is to take it out of the context of the times because you end up creating a moral choice that never really existed for the people who had to make it and then judging them on that it's as though you have a plan a drop atomic weapons on hiroshima and nagasaki or plan b don't drop atomic weapons on them and they can live happily ever after but that was never plan b plan b is the one that makes plan a something that people would consider plan b is not to drop the atomic bomb but to continue with the fire bombing which continued after the atomic bombs were dropped as well historically continue with the fire bombing tighten the blockade on japan and they're already dropping uh sea mines from the air on japan's harbors so get that to a point where millions are dying from starvation or lack of medicine and then have the inevitable land invasion against a bunch of civilians who are training with bamboo spears in 1945 that was the ethical choice and it becomes a lot more murky when those are the plan a and plan b choices what should be pointed out though sometimes is that our views on these things have been colored by the intervening history and when you read what historical participants on the allied side saw these weapons like sometimes you might compare them to excalibur a super weapon that has fallen into the hands of people who see themselves as king arthur and a weapon like excalibur in the hands of an individual like king arthur is a potential awesome force for good see how murky and morally i mean this is this is the ethical dilemma of sauron's ring right in the lord of the rings isn't it i hope you will forgive me for once again somehow with my cynical nature seeing a silver lining to the dark cloud that is the atomic bombings of japan and it's a similar silver lining to the one i see for the holocaust i think that after the holocaust the fact that there was a holocaust saved a lot of lives i think those who died in concentration camps probably created such an international historical shock i don't know how long it lasts but it certainly lasted pretty strongly since that created an international moral line in the sand that has been violated many times since i mean look at rwanda for example but that has created a situation where it is radioactive to commit genocide on people the wieger is not withstanding perhaps i think the genocides that would have happened had the holocaust not happened haven't happened and therefore i think the holocaust saved some lives i feel the same way about the atomic bombings i i don't know if humanity ever collectively learns lessons but if we do i often think it comes with the equivalent of us you know touching history's hot stove and in this case in 1945 maybe the hot stove was an atomically heated one and had we not had an example of what these weapons do to people and to our societies and the things that we build you know the the power is that one historian said to turn everything into nothing that's a theoretical power until you see it and seeing it is shocking and the shock of it may have prevented us maybe from thinking we ever had to try to use these weapons again i mean think about had the weapon been delayed another year and the war ended before nuclear weapons were ever used do you think given what you know about how we are that we wouldn't have used them in the interim just to see what they do we were tempted many times and it was always hiroshima and nagasaki's example that created if not a feeling on the parts of the military or the political leaders maybe as strongly as we wanted certainly a feeling on the parts of global humanitarian public opinion and the pressures you know exerted by them and the images that were certainly for example cascading through president kennedy's brain as he contemplated the decisions he was making in the 1962 cuban missile crisis when he was looking at six or seven hundred million people dying you know in a few days is it possible that humanity and the japanese specifically suffered 150 200 000 250 000 deaths from a couple of 10 kiloton atomic bombs maybe a 15 kiloton one in nagasaki's case to teach us not to use dozens or hundreds of 30 megaton ones i mean if that's the case is this the atomic age beginning nightmarishly so that it doesn't have to end that way someday so that we don't have to have you know the war after the next war occur with our very best technological capabilities and those being sticks and stones hi everyone dan here with just a couple of quick words before we leave you the first one is if you were interested enough in the ideas surrounding strategic bombing that's the bombing of cities or the early history development use theories trying to come to grips with its potential destructive power of atomic and nuclear weapons we do have past shows on both of those subjects one is still in the free feed as of this recording anyway and that is the destroyer of worlds that's about six hours on that subject so maybe wait for a long car drive but we also have in the pay for archives off of our website they're like two or three bucks i think logical insanity the title of which we referenced in the past show you just heard twice maybe and also logical insanity extra for the stuff that didn't fit into logical insanity and those are available on the website if that sounds interesting to you once again i want to thank you for being the most patient audience on the planet and we appreciate it it allows us to do the work with the way we want to do it also another announcement for those of you who didn't get to see and want to see our first world war immersive experience exhibit war remains just want to let you know that it is now a part of the national world war one museum and memorial in kansas city missouri and you can go see it there this is the full set by the way we're talking i mean there's a home version of this but it doesn't have the the actual set it doesn't have the giant speakers under your feet to make the sound of things like shells vibrate through your spinal column there's a whole bunch of things that the actual we said it combined like virtual reality in a haunted house when you were a kid in terms of you know you can reach out and touch things and they're there right barbed wire rats everything feels just the way it should um the people at mwm and at flight school and at skywalker sound um they outdid themselves with this and if you have the home edition that's great too but there's nothing like standing on those speakers and just having it you know knock your socks off so if you find yourself in kansas city missouri and you'd like to experience it head over to the national world war one museum and memorial and check it out would you tell them i sent you
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