American History Hit - The End of the Pacific War

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

On August 14, 1945, the Japanese government accepted Allied terms of surrender. The war in the Pacific was over. But how had it come to this?Don is joined for this episode by Ian W. Toll, author of a three-volume history of the Pacific War. They discuss the Japanese view of surrender, the Allied offensive, Midway, Okinawa and finally the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Tuesday, August 14th, 1945, New York City. It's a scene so many of us have witnessed before.

Crowds packed into Times Square, shoulder to shoulder, not an inch to move. But today, here on the streets of Manhattan, the atmosphere is electric, almost unhinged. People are cheering, kissing, hugging, dancing in the streets. They rip apart phone books and toss off the pages like confetti. Even those in uniform, join in, tearing those off too. Hands stretched skyward beneath a flurry of waving flags. Star-spangled banners fluttering in a frenzy. Above them, the glowing ticker of one-time square spells it out.

Official. Truman announces Japanese surrender. The war in the Pacific is over. As Life magazine reported weeks later, it was as if Joy had been rationed and saved up for three years, eight months, and seven years, months and seven days since Sunday, December 7th, 1941. The tensions of war exploded into an orgy of frenzy and fun. Hello everyone. Welcome to American History Hit. Here in the summer of

2025, we find ourselves on the threshold of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War with Japan, a conflict of such fateful magnitude that its echoes can still be heard clearly in the geopolitics of our world today. From the azure waters of Hawaii, the the jungles of New Guinea, to the shattered cities of China and Japan. The Pacific War was a brutal, sprawling confrontation that redrew the map of Asia and transformed the United States into a global superpower across two oceans. And today, we are privileged to discuss the Pacific War with an author whose nearly 2,000-page trilogy on the subject ranks as one of the most definitive histories ever offered. Welcome to American History yet. Ian W. Toll. Thank you for coming. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you. As a son of a man who served in the U.S. Army in the Pacific in 1945, he was in Manila. I'm very gratified to meet you. Let me just explain to the audience. You've written other great histories, but the books we're referring to today. I just want them to know these titles. Pacific Crucible War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941 to 42, which was published in 2012. The Conquering Tide War in the Pacific Islands, 1942 to 43, 2015.

Twilight of the Gods, War in the Western Pacific, 1944 to 45 published in 2020. More than a decade, taking readers through the entirety of the Pacific War, you'll be doing podcasts for life. What does it mean to you that we're at the 80th anniversary of the Japanese surrender? Is the world, is America beginning to forget how important this was? I think in many ways it is, yes. I think as this war recedes in history, inevitably, the memories begin to fade.

There are a few veterans of the war still alive, but the youngest are. About 100. So it just doesn't have the same sort of salience in our culture as it did even 25 or 30 years ago. I suppose that's somewhat inevitable. No time marches on. Events recede the history. And yet, given the rising tensions in the Pacific, in some ways, that history is more relevant than ever before. Yeah. Well, let's do our part here today to change that story. We've only got a single episode with you. So we're going to try and keep this focused on the last phase of the war in the Pacific. But before we get there, what is it that made the Pacific War so distinctly different from the one in Europe? Was it simply that it was an ocean war driven by the Navy? I think that's one very important reason. Yes, I think you can begin just by looking at a map of Europe and looking at a map of the Pacific. Obviously, it's an ocean feeder. And what I've argued is that to really understand, what happened in the Pacific, you should sort of invert your understanding of warfare. We are, as Americans, we're a continental country, and really since our American Revolution, we've thought of our army as the principal arm of our national defense, our armed forces,

really going back to Washington. And when you come to the Pacific War, really, I think it's helpful to think of it first as a sea war and an air war, and the air war was carried on by both the Army and the Navy, in which the ground forces played a particular role. often in supporting sea and air operations by taking an island, for example, when we needed an air base, a naval base. And really, if we had invaded Japan, then the Army really would have played the most important role in that very terrible campaign. But because we didn't really, I think, to fully understand what happened there is begin with the naval war and then

understand ground fighting as a sort of adjunct or an auxiliary to that. Maybe this is a bit of a Spoiler, but why did it matter to our leadership that we emerged so wholly victorious no matter what in the Pacific? Well, I think there was a mood in the country, and I think FBR felt this in a very personal way, having seen what had happened in the First World War. I think there was a feeling that we had to win this war entirely in both Europe and in the Pacific in order to essentially kind of impose a new order. You know, I hesitate to use the word new world order because it's of charge. But that was the mood, I think, in 1944, 45 was we need to defeat these enemies completely and then rebuild. We need to be sure that Germany and Japan, you know, can never again challenge the peace of the world. Yeah.

I asked that question because we're going to be talking about that later. And there are many moments along the way that a negotiated surrender is an important term, you know, having to do with those last months. This is, of course, is Japanese and the United States fighting mainly. but how much are other allies involved in this war in the Pacific? Well, you also have the war in China, which had begun in 1937. So many years before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, you had hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, moving through China and trying to force the Chinese to peace settlement.

And so it's important to note that this was one of the largest and most catastrophic ground wars in history that's happening at the same time. In the Pacific, our allies were the British, The Australians, the New Zealanders, the Canadians, the Commonwealth countries, basically. And then, of course, the Philippines, very important ally. And some of the other island nations of the Pacific contributed in various ways. It's such an important factor that is often overlooked. I think of the Philippines especially and how much the Filipino guerrillas were a part of that struggle.

What led up to the war was very complicated, but more than anything, it was the radical shift in Japan to the hard run. those hawks who perceived the decades after World War I as their moment to create empire. Why so urgently? Were they queued by Germany's success? Yes, most definitely. You had an imperialist ambition that existed within the Army in particular. Really, if you look at post-Maging Euro-Jan, under the document called the major constitution, the military had a particularly important role.

and the role of the emperor was somewhat ambiguous. And what happened was in the 1920s and then particularly the 1930s is that you had very ambitious factions within the Army and the Navy, which decided that they would essentially like to seize control of Japan and to control every aspect of Japanese foreign policy. And they were able to do that and to essentially sort of force the country into this imperialist adventure in Manchuria, then in China, and then finally the strike on Pearl Harbor,

the attack on Britain and the Pacific War, very much short of over the clear preferences of Hirohita, the emperor, who generally opposed these sorts of imperialist adventures that intended to acquiesce in the master of military had gone ahead with them. And so really, part of the story of the Pacific War is really a failure of Japanese regime to make coherent decisions. and instead allowing, you know, hot heads and very ambitious men in the military to sort of drive events. Some of the same things are going on, of course, in the Pacific as they are in Europe.

I mean, we have economic hardship. Interesting. An over-dependence of imports, which is specific to Japanese situation, it being an island country. There's a persistent belief that Japan ought to lead Asia, land of the rising sun and all this. And there is an important factor, which is the. expansionist policies of the United States, specifically in Hawaii and in the Philippines, which are now threatening Japanese hegemony in this area. Was there kind of a monroe doctrine for Japan? Were we even part of creating that? Yeah, I think they really had accepted what you might

call the kind of Nazi view of history, which is that the strong nations would dominate, the nations around them. And as you had said in your last question, the Japanese really saw, their decision to strike us at Pearl Harbor was intimately connected to this view that they had, that the Nazis were unstoppable in Europe, that they were going to conquer Russia. They were literally converging on Moscow the same week that they hit us at Pearl Harbor. And so the Japanese certainly, there was a master race ideology that had emerged and become very important in the 1930s. And I think their view was, we are the leading nation of Asia, and we should,

dominate Asia. And that was certainly part of their vision and why they went on this extraordinary rampage that seems so short-sighted and risky and foolish in retrospect. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like this to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at a.H at history hit.com. We'd love to hear from you. The U.S. strategy was really, is usually talked about as a matter of island hopping across the Pacific, which of course was certainly for the Marines and the Army. But that ignores the massive coordination required between the ground forces and the Navy, which had never been, of course, never happened on this scale. It played a huge role in how this war was executed successfully or not.

Can you comment on where that was in 1945 as we approached the end of the war? Yeah. All the issue of joint operations really had been fairly ad hoc throughout the Second World War and before the Second World War. We really had no tradition of placing one service under the command of another, which at least for discrete operations, eventually it became clear that was necessary to deal with this command problem. But before the Second World War and going all the way back to the birth of the Republic, we had a Secretary of War and a Secretary of the Navy. These are two civilian cabinet officers that would sit in the cabinet reporting directly to the president. And there was no way to resolve differences between them except by asking the president to make a decision. And then under those two civilian cabinet officers, you had a separate military chain of command,

which again, there was no tradition and no mechanism to sort of blend those two chains of command. All of that was done after the Second World War, with the creation of the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs and Staff, the formal charter. So all of that is a bit of a long-winded way of saying that whenever the Army and the Navy, the other services, the Marines, the Air Force had to work together, they had to do it in sort of an ad hoc way, you know, sitting down and agreeing on a plan and then maybe agreeing on kind of a contingent command table just for that one operation. And personal competition between the military leadership was a huge challenge.

I mean, you had big egos involved here. You have MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur representing the Army in the Southwest Pacific. You have Nimitz for the Navy, Halsey later in the war. In 1945, who was really calling the shots, especially with the president, just months from dying? Well, you know, you have to sort of look at Douglas MacArthur as a kind of a singular figure because you really was different from everybody else, not just in the Pacific, but I would say, trust the entire global armed forces because of his fame, really. His extraordinary public relations, the fact that he had strong supporters in the press, William Randolph Hearst.

It was on sort of a personal mission to put MacArthur in charge of the Pacific War. And he was enormously popular with the American people, which I think gave him a sense that he had a sort of an independent base of power. And, of course, that came to a head in Korea when he finally Truman fired him for insubordination. So McCarthy was certainly the most visible figure in 1945 of all of the commander. in the Pacific. Beneath the hood, though, you still had a Navy that had a very particular idea of how they wanted to win the Pacific War. The key figure was Ernest King, who was the Chief of Naval Operations, he's based in Washington.

He's the senior ranking admiral in the Navy. And probably, if you look at the entire Pacific War, maybe the single most influential figure, putting aside MacArthur in the tremendous public profile he had. But the way in which the blueprint that we used to win the war is really Kane's blueprint more than anyone else's. And he's an almost completely forgotten figure. And that's partly because he didn't really want attention either during or after the war and didn't make a point of sort of reporting what he had done. And then I should say you also had the Air Force, which Army Air Force would become the Air Force, half Arnold was the commanding general of the Air Force.

And they had a very particular idea of how they would like to win this. War, and they really were using the B-29, the new Boeing plane, to wipe out Japanese cities, which they had begun doing in March, 1945, by the time we dropped the atomic bombs, they had just essentially leveled most of Ferdinjapan with these firebombing incendiary raids. And so the Air Force also, you know, believed that they were winning the war, that they could do it more or less on their own. So you really have these three services that all had their kind of visions of how to win the war, in a way they were working together, even though there was a lot of rivalry there because each of them were putting tremendous pressure on Japan.

It's an amazing story of reorganization after World War II, including the building of the biggest office in the world, which is the Pentagon. And for all of this to get under one roof, quite literally, is an amazing tale. In general, the Pacific War is a chronicle of epic battles on land sea that often could have gone one way or the other. I'm going to save your breath and tell this list myself. 1942, the Japanese would seem to have such an advantage. I mean, they storm across the Pacific in the days right after Pearl Harbor, take enormous amounts of territory, including the Philippines. But then things start to change, the Battle of Coral Sea,

first battle of the naval ships where they don't see each other. Very interesting. Of course, Midway in June, which is an incredibly good fortune for the U.S. Japanese lose advantage of aircraft carriers that will never be able to replace. For the Marines, the U.S. siege of Guadalcanal, which is eventually one but takes five months of fighting. All of this kicks off the island campaign. All of this taken one step in another. When would you say the tide began to turn for the United States most specifically?

Well, you know, if I were to be pedantic about it, Donna might ask, is it necessary for there be a for a fornit which the tide turn. You know, I mean, there have been books published arguing, should we call Midway or Guadafin al, the turn of the tide. And my view has always been, is that necessarily a really illuminating question or not? I mean, and, you know, honestly, I just think of it as, you know, if a boa constrictor gets a man in its grip and starts crushing the life little by little out of that man, at one point would you say, well, that was the turn of the tide, you know, that moment. So I really think of it as, you know, the Japanese kind of pulled off this extraordinary coup by knocking our entire battle line out of. of action, eight battleships knocked out of action in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the Pacific War with this attack of Pearl Harbor. And then an extraordinarily effective kind of sea air amphibious Litzkrieg across the

western and south Pacific in which, as you say, they took an enormous amount of territory very quickly. But what that, particularly that strike on Pearl Harbor, what it did was it changed the political conditions in the United States and it kind of focused the energy of the American people. people in a way that was clearly going to mobilize this giant economy of ours for war and would result in an enormous amount of ships and troops and airplanes blowing out into the Pacific. And I think I'm a bit of a determinist on this point. I think eventually we were going to overwhelm the Japanese just by superior mass.

And it was really just a question of how long that would take. So, you know, Midway immensely important, as you say, for Japanese. aircraft carriers, four of their best aircraft carriers, with all of their planes sent to the bottom of the Pacific, blunting their ability to use their naval air power in order to sort of soften up territories in advance of it. And they never again were able to take territory after that. And then Guadalcanal, tremendous losses, naval losses, air losses, and troop losses, all three over that five-month campaign occurring later in 1942. You know, both of these events, these battles, these campaigns were very important in turning the tide.

But I wouldn't necessarily emphasize one or the other. Really, it was more of a continuous process. Right. And by 1943, for sure, the strategy really is for Japan to, it's a war of attrition, basically, right? Let's make this so unattractive for the Americans to come all the way across the Pacific. I have to say, every time I look at those maps in your book or elsewhere, it's such an amazing thing that a war was fought in those days with the technology available so far away from the shores of American shores, it just kind of blows your mind.

Strongly agree. Strongly agree. And most of all, once you kind of wrap yourselves around that, you realize why wouldn't we have negotiated? That's why I asked that question right at the beginning was like, what was so important that all the way across the ocean, which was even farther then than it is today, would it be so important to control that? That seems such an interesting question to me. We are also dealing with a different culture, obviously, and the emperor's intervention is going to be important to the

ending of this war. Let's talk a little bit more about the internal resistance he faced. Sure. Well, we had talked a little bit about the role of the Army, the Navy, the factions within those institutions and the way that they had essentially been able to sort of force Japan into this career of overseas aggression beginning in the early 1930s. And the way in which Hirohito, who was a weak figure in many ways, would acquiesce after the fact in many of these. And then when the early part of the Pacific War, you know, seemed sort of surprised and even thrilled at the victories that his forces were winning.

But gradually came to understand that this had been a historic error to attack the Allies, particularly the United States. The fact that Germany was on its way to defeat in Europe, I think, opened the eyes of many clear-thinking Japanese. They realized this entire project essentially had been a way to take advantage of what was happening in Europe by grabbing the spoils of these failing European empires in Asia. And if Nazi Germany was going down to total defeat, Japan would stand alone. And so, you know, by mid-1944, within the intercounciles of Japanese power, you know, military, you know, military. military leaders were beginning to say, we don't really have a way to win this. But that's not the same as saying we need to accept the terms of surrender that are on offer, which is unconditional

surrender. And so the war at that point really became a way of trying to extract a high enough cost in blood and pressure to make these operations costly enough to the Americans in particular that political conditions would change and we would sit down and negotiate. The Japanese really have very much in mind the history of their Russo-Japanese War, 1904 to 1905, when they had defeated Russia in Korea and particularly at sea. And it was Peter Roosevelt who mediated peace talks between Russia and Japan, resulting in a treaty that gave each side part of what they wanted. But Japanese very much had in mind an end of the Pacific War that would be analogous to that, the negotiated peace in which they would get some part, they would keep some,

part of the empire they had conquered and would come to a new understanding. And so when FDR insisted, beginning in 1943, upon this doctrine of unconditional surrender, that became an obstruction to that. And the Japanese essentially said, we need to break that. We need to break this concept of an unconditional surrender. It needs to be a conditional peace, a negotiated peace, in which really the bottom line became for them, you must leave the emperor on its throne. We must not have any foreign troops occupying our.

loyal, and we need to keep the territories that we had before 1941. And those became the points on which really the Army in particular insisted on continuing a fight long after it was hopeless. One of the chapters that really gets forgotten these days is Okinawa. It must have been nearly impossible for Americans to process this in late spring 45. By this time, the Philippines are taken back. We have fought the Japanese, as far as American public's concerned, to almost through their doorstep.

And then Okinawa happens, which is this horror show. We're only 350 miles from Kyushu, which is the lowest island of the Japanese archipelagon. And then you have 82 days of grinding warfare that leaves 12,000 U.S. dead, 100,000 Japanese killed. So many civilians caught in the crossfire. That is also the scene of this other part of this time, the war, which is the kamikaze attacks, which a huge thing that we now look back on as just this desperate maneuver, was actually really effective, wasn't it? Well, it was. It was effective in the sense that the Japanese essentially figured out a way to develop a guided missile,

25 years before anybody had a guided missile that didn't involve a man at the controls. And so turning an airplane with a bomb into a guided missile is something that no one had ever seen before. In our anti-aircraft tactics, as effective as they were, they really had become, you know, we'd reached a sort of stage of excellence with the use of anti-aircraft. weapons and planes protecting naval task forces, that really this was the only way the Japanese could hit our ships, and they did hit many of them. At Okinawa, they sank, actually sank, I think, something like 34 ships. Most of the ships they hit were destroyers or other smaller vessels that were on the

periphery of the task force, but you also had a number of battleships and aircraft carriers that took devastating kamikaze hits. And so it was an absolute horror show. And it was also, as you say, it was kind of symbolized for the American people, both our servicemen and people at home, the sort of unique singular fanaticism of the Japanese that they would send their young men in these deliberate suicide attacks on such a large scale. And so I think that contributed also to the mood that led to the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Aside from seeing this sort of crazy act of this plane going into the ship,

were Americans, did they have the intelligence to understand that this was an organized effort? Well, yes. Clearly, they understood that it was an organized effort, certainly by Okinawa. You know, the first organized kamikaze attacks happened in the Philippines in October, 1944. And so the Navy, by, you know, by 1945, they'd seen lots of these. They understood exactly what was happening. they knew that there were entire air bases in Cushu in particular devoted to kamikaze attacks, and that essentially the Air War, Japanese Air War, had reached a point by the spring of 1945 where they were almost entirely concentrating all of their air resources into these kamikaze attacks.

So, yes, there was a tremendous amount of thought and development of doctrines to defend against these attacks. And they became quite effective, actually, by the end of the end of, the war, it's just that with these attacks, if you get, you know, if one plane out of 30 gets through and hits a ship, it potentially can destroy that ship. And so these were really very, very severe losses that we were suffering. I did not understand this myself. And I did a TV show in, I think, 2008, where I dive down to one of these boats that were on the picket, you know, the picket boats that were out there on the periphery, as you say, it's called the USS Emmons. And it was in 186 feet of water at this time. And we dive down to this thing for the TV shoot. And I couldn't believe the

gash in the side of this boat. I mean, just like the, I'm talking four inches of metal is just crushed by this thing. And it's enormous. You can see literally the shape of an airplane going into this thing. That's how effective this was. Yeah. That's a deep dive. Thank you. And so we come to the fateful days, surrender coming up, which is going to happen in sort of two stages. The official surrender will be signed in September. But August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announces Japan's surrender intention to surrender in a national radio broadcast, which marks VJ Day. That's when everyone's dancing in the streets in New York and in many allied nations. September 2nd, 1945 will be the former surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. We talked about

the terms of surrender. They came out of the Postom Declaration, right? That's right. Yes. The Potsdam laid out that essentially the conditions. And, you know, one of the debates internally that we had was whether or not we should signal to the Japanese that the emperor would be permitted to remain on his throne as a constitutional monarch analogous to the British king, for example. And the decision was made in POSAM not to do that. That flaws had been included in the draft and then was removed. And I think partly because it was seen as a potentially weakening of the unconditional surrender doctrine that FBR had. So Harry Truman, as the new American president, felt as if that wouldn't play well at home

to do that. And so that was the decision that was made. It is at Postum that Truman gets the word that the atomic test had succeeded. This is July 26, 1945. And so his decision will come out of this information. That in itself is a movie that's waiting to be made, that moment between the 3,000, three of them, where one of them thinks he knows something the other ones don't, and the other ones know they know it, which is to say Stalin had that information. Incredible. So let's talk,

of course, about the atomic bomb and the use of that to end the war. Hiroshima is attacked on August 6th. 120,000 are killed. The city is flattened. Why were these two locations chosen? I know that Nagasaki was a secondary choice, right? Yes, it was. There had been a subcommittee set up, essentially, to choose targets as part of the Manhattan Project. And the committee had chosen four cities, including Nagata and what is today Fukuoka, I think was called Kupura in 1945. We had these four cities, and they had been chosen essentially because it was judged that they had the topographical characteristics or that they had not been

destroyed by the conventional bombing race that happened since March. And so that these four cities seem to offer the best opportunity to sort of demonstrate the singular power of the atomic bomb. That was the main reason that was chosen. Leslie Groves, the general in charge of the Manhattan Project and wanted Kyoto included on the list. Henry Stinson, the Secretary of War, had removed that city as of its historical and cultural importance to the Japanese. Rose had then tried to put it back on the list since and took it off a second time. So we very easily could have destroyed Kyoto. within the atomic bomb if Stinson hadn't been there to make that decision.

But that was the reason the four cities were chosen, really. It wasn't because of any particular military importance of cities. There are a lot of theories about how these chess pieces play. One of the big pieces is the USSR, which is sometime now from the surrender of Nazi Germany. They are freed up now. They invade Manchuria and are pressing down, if you look at your geography, very close, relatively speaking, to Japan. That becomes a big factor, no matter how you look at this use of the atomic bomb,

but the fact that the Russians are coming, so to speak, is a big deal. Where do you land on that issue? Well, this is where the history gets very complex, and an enormous amount happened just in the space of a few weeks. As you say, the Soviets entered the war on August night, the same day we hit Nagasaki. FBR and Churchill had been asking for Stalin's commitment to join the war in the Pacific, in the successive Allied conferences in 1944 and 45, Stalin had promised that Yalta that his forces would enter the Pacific War three months after the defeat of Germany, which had happened in

early May. And so you had this commitment that the Allies had asked for, but as the summer progressed, it became clear that we were entering this new era, which eventually would be called the Cold War, in which you have a competition between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, Eastern Europe in particular, is bad blood. There was a lot of positioning for the post-war future. And so we really had second thoughts about the USSR coming into the war. The Red Army, the largest, the most sort of efficient army on the Asian mainland, was now going to be let loose and they could very easily roll into China and to Korea.

You know, as you say, they were coming down the island chain south of the Comtrakka Peninsula. And we now know that Stalin had actually told his army that he wanted Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. And if the war had gone even a few weeks longer, the Red Army might have been in Hokkaido. And then you could imagine a future in which Hokkaido is like the analogous to the East Germany of Japan. You have the northern island of Japan, essentially on the other side of the Iron Curtain for the entire 45 years. years of the Cold War, that easily could have happened. And so part of the dynamic at the end of the war, and I think part of the reason that the decision was made to use the atomic bombs, was to try to force the issue, force the Japanese to make

a decision to, you know, we knew that there were divisions within the regime. There was a party that was much more open to a peace treaty and on American or allied terms. And so the bombs, what they did is they and the entry of the USSR and the war, those two things were a shock within Tokyo that kind of forced the process that led to the decision to surrender. Boy, there are books written at length on this subject. Conspiracies about, you know, whether, you know, all kinds of ways of cutting this. I would recommend to people landing on an article that you wrote for the Museum of World War II in New Orleans, which I happened to land on yesterday reviewing these facts.

And this is a very, I think a really effective view of it as far as, you know, pushing forward that which I was raised by, meaning a father who was sitting on a boat waiting to go in for the D-Day of Japan, he used to say to me, you're only here because of the atom bomb, which was a heck of a legacy to grow up with. But there was that factor of saving American lives and, of course, the Japanese lives on the other side of it, which everyone says the invasion would have been just a horrendous horror show, like Okinawa proved. Yes. On the other hand, you can find books that are arguing quite the opposite or not quite the opposite, but a major factor, which is this more of a geopolitical aspect of this stuff.

But again, I refer people to your article if they want to look it up because there's a nice balanced way of looking at this, which is, I think, really important at this point in time. Yeah, and I think the thing that we can't throw down the memory hole is the fact that the five-star command layer, the top echelon of our military, largely speaking, they afterward regretted the decision to use the atomic bomb. very few, I mean, really with the exception of Marshall, I think, and Leahy to some extent, the military did not have any important role in the decision to use the atomic bomb. Nimitz and MacArthur didn't even know about it until about a week before Hiroshima,

and they were informed. And so, you know, if you have all of these five-star admirals in general saying after the war, some in private, some in public, you know, really wish we hadn't dropped those bombs on Japanese cities, if that's the view that's coming through pretty clearly from, I think, seven out of the eight five-star officers, Marshall being the sole exception, expressed these kinds of feelings of regret or even outrage after the war. If those guys are saying that, I think that, you know, you need to probably reassess a little bit what was the traditional view that so many of us had growing up. I know exactly what your father meant. That was a

of you that many veterans came back with, that these things saved my life. And, you know, that's a, I think that's something you have to respect. That's a feeling that ran very deep in that generation. Sure. You describe in that article, people, you know, the weeping. These were GIs who were, you know, 22 years old, weeping that they suddenly have their adulthoods back. You know, that's how we are recording this.

As a matter of fact, on August 6th. And my sister's 80th birthday party is happening tonight. That woman was born. on the day the atomic bomb was dropped. Imagine that news to my father. Right. Crazy. So there was all that factor.

But in the end, let's just be coldly specific about this. Was it the atomic bombs that got Japan to surrender? Yeah, I mean, you had the atomic bombs and then you also had the Soviets coming into the war. And because these things, all of these events were compressed into such a short timeline, it is always going to be a challenge for historians to say, what was the relative importance of the atomic bomb? versus the Soviets coming into the war. The USSR suddenly declaring war on August 9, same day we hit Nagasaki, that was really, really important, not just because it created the immediate military emergency.

You had the army, Japanese army, and Manchuria being overrun, and the threat of Soviet invasion of Japan, those were bad enough. The threat of Soviet invasion of Japan also raised their question of whether or not the communists in Japan who were seen as a great threat by the Japanese right, whether they would be able to take over the country or part of the country if the Soviets came in. But maybe even more importantly, at this point, now this is the first week of August,

the last sort of straw that the Japanese regime was grasping at this point was to bring Stalin in as a mediator between the U.S. and Japan. They essentially wanted Stalin to step in and say, I will now facilitate a negotiated piece. between these two countries. And they allowed the Japanese allowed themselves to believe that this was a possibility. And Stalin in a very devious way, you know, gave them just enough reason to think maybe this was a possibility.

So when the Soviets declare war, it's not just the military emergency, you've got the Red Army coming. But it's the last sort of hope of this kind of mediated surrender, which is collapsed. And so both the atomic bombs and the entry of the U.S.S.R into the war, both of the military, these are very important factors, and it's hard to sort of weigh the importance of these two factors because they're happening at the same time. And this all leads to the occupation, which is led by General Douglas MacArthur and a major political, social reform of Japan, including a new adoption of a constitution in 1947. Reminder, on August 15th, 2025, we honor the historic 80th anniversary of the Japanese surrender in World War II. And maybe we'll, we'll,

all do that as we drive our hondas and toyotas and eat delicious sushi, which is the strange and beautiful irony of life. Our amazing guest today has been the author of the famous Pacific War trilogy, and in particular, Volume 3, Twilight of the Gods. And this has been Ian W. Toll. Thank you so much, Ian. It's been great to meet you. Thanks for having me on the pod. I appreciate it. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content, like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements,

to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now.