Historically High - World War 2: The Pacific Theater

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

World War 2 earned its World War moniker more so that its predecessor. It was truly a globe spanning series of events. The European Theater was condensed due to the geography of where it mostly occurred, The Pacific Theater was a whole different beast. Fought in a manner no war had ever been fought, over vast distances of ocean, countless islands, and through deadly jungles. The war in the Pacific showed the mighty battleship was no longer king of the seas, aircraft carriers were the future. It showed what the true industrial might of the USA was. It introduced an enemy so fanatical toward its Emperor they would make suicidal charges or crash their planes in the hopes of killing the enemy. And it proved true the famous quote by Admiral Yamamoto, just prior to Pearl Harbor, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yeah. Back from vacation. Freshly tanned. I took a little trip to one of the places that I am crossing off my bucket list. I got to go see Pearl Harbor. You went to Hawaii and got to see Pearl Harbor. I don't know if I'd lead with Pearl Harbor in that. That seems like a bit of a slight to a beautiful island state.

Yes, I got to go broaden my cultural horizons. It was a much needed and fantastic. vacation, I would like to thank the great state of Hawaii for rolling out the red carpet just by doing nothing but showcasing their beautiful island. Oh, and also you guys need to know this, because

I'm pretty shocked by the whole thing myself. You are, how many hours removed from an airplane? I don't know, like five, six? Five, six hours. This man was on an airplane coming back from Hawaii, landed. Did his research on vacation

also we could come back, and just absolutely crush this episode for you guys. Well, I will say this as well. I've done enough research on this topic over the years that it was literally just a refresher of glancing at stuff and me like, okay, that's what happened there, okay, this is what happened there. It's sort of like touching a new penis.

Like you've played on one for long enough to where you know what's going to make that happen. I know the general process of how this works. And by the process, I'm talking about the process of how the Pacific War during World War II went down. And that's what we're going to kind of cover here today from the start to the finish of this theater of war. We're not going to go into great detail on a lot of the major events because being major events,

they're going to deserve their own episodes. But it's always good to kind of lay the groundwork to know where the events occurred once those episodes do come out. And we've kind of already played around with it a little bit by doing both the Pearl Harbor episode and then also the Battle of Midway. So two of the major things we've already covered So we don't have to really get too deep on those Yeah, it's gonna kind of be like the overviews that we've done before World War II has so many theaters of war That they all can kind of

I mean if we tried to do all the theaters at one time Our catalog will probably be 12 hours on just overviews of World War II Because we have the European theater We're going to have the North African theater The Pacific Theater The Eastern Front is its own thing too I feel like they say that's part of the European theater, but that's its own thing. Well, and also, we're not going to mention it too much, but there was a North American theater, the Aleutian Islands.

Oh, yeah. Kind of weird that that's something that we don't ever hear about, but judging by how that whole mission went, I think that's probably why we don't hear about it a whole lot. Exactly. Yep. All right. Well, we won't spoil any further for you guys. We're going to go ahead and get straight in to the Pacific. All right. So how did this whole thing come about? Europe has already been popping off for a while, but what gets things going with a essentially neutral enemy up to that point and a country that's not into the war yet? We got to get in the time machine because somehow this starts pretty much right off of the heels of World War I. As many of the things of World War II do.

Yeah, I think we kind of alluded to that at the end of the World War I overview, where all of these issues that we thought the Treaty of Versailles and all these different things that we signed and everything like that we're going to, the League of Nations, we thought that the League of Nations would solve a lot of these issues. And it turns out that all that did was just spark new issues for other people. So it's,

we go all the way back to winning World War I. They were on the winning side. They were with us. They got some spoils. They weren't super pumped about what they got. And I think that sort of leads into where this triple alliance for World War II comes in is yet Italy, again, fighting on the winning side. But once the rationing out of land happened, Italy's like, well, what the shit, man? We fought one war 15 times and nobody really won that war, but we kind of kept some people busy.

Why don't we get more land? And I'm sure America and Britain and France are like, fuck you guys. You guys fought one war 15 times and you didn't win. Yeah, that's got to be it. It's got to be based upon just, it's like a meritocracy. Like, how much did you contribute versus how much did you, you know, lose and everything? With Japan kind of, although they did, you know, join in on the side of the allied powers, they were kind of in a position where they were isolated. And so they were able to do a few token things that would, you know, help out the allies. I think we touched on them attacking a German port or German fleet in China. but I don't know what they really expected to receive out of it based upon what their contribution to the war was. Also, not a lot of places over there that were going to get carved up. Yeah, we weren't handing out parts of China. China helped us.

Yeah, China helped us. And then you also have places that were already spoken for. Yeah, already spoken for down like, you know, you had Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, all that stuff had kind of already been spoken for or had already been kind of snatched up as a result. Yeah, they were, the reason that Germany went over and attacked them is because they were holdings of the empires that Germany was fighting against. So it kind of, I don't know, we're not going to just hand them some shit that we won because they helped us win in a certain respect. But either way, they felt a little disrespectful by that. Something else that kind of hit them the wrong way was the Washington Naval Treaty that was signed in 1922. and it was sort of to prevent this naval arms race

that they were concerned that we were going to get into with other countries after the war because we kind of saw that a strong navy makes a pretty tough competitor. Well, especially if your country has an ocean on each side of it. You might want to have a standing navy on both sides so you're not having to send them back and forth.

Just like land being carved up, this one gets carved up in an interesting way. for every five ships that the United States and Great Britain could build. Japan was allowed to build three, and France and Italy were allowed to build one and three quarters. So I don't know how you're allowed to, if you only build five ships, they just have like three quarters of a ship over there. They just have to make it.

It has to be 25% or whatever smaller than what anybody else's ship was. It's like a pocket battleship. So in that respect, when you look at that situation, Great Britain, yes, an island, very close to France, who hasn't always been kind to them, but at the same time we're allies coming out of this. They're a lot closer to the mainland than Japan is. Japan's problems with China date all the way back to parts of our samurai episode. I mean, that's where we first see these interactions happening in those islands.

So you already know that you don't really have a buddy next to you across that water. If you are an island, you're probably going to want to be. a lot of boats to protect yourself because we have oceans on two sides of us. They have oceans everywhere. And a lot of land between that. Japan, not so much. No. So it's a situation where they could probably get a sour taste in their mouth from that.

Japan's economy went through the same thing that it seems like every economy in the world did. We were just that much of an international economy at that point that when the Great Depression hits, a resource poor nation such as Japan isn't going to be able to sustain the way that a large factory powerhouse industrialized nation would because they just don't have the land and they don't have the space for farming there's not a lot of natural resources well in all these countries that have these huge empires you know the ones that fell apart during world war one and then also some of the countries that came out of it you have them having these

colonized areas where they're just pulling natural resources out like britain itself isn't really a rich country just on the island itself. But at the same time, due to all of their exports they have from all of their different territories throughout the entire world, that's what made them such a powerful empire. You don't have that option. If you're Japan, you have all this land that you can see across. China's huge and has all of these natural resources, but you, that's not yours. You're on this island with, you know, a lot of limitations.

You're going to be met with probably cannon fire at that point. Japan had already introduced itself onto the international stage before World War I even. The Russo-Japanese War, I believe, was fought in the early 19-auts. I think it was like 1904, somewhere around there.

We also date back to the late 19th century when Matthew Perry showed up in his steamship to Japan and wanted to open them up to international trade from America. So they're already kind of dipping their teeth. toes into we have some allies here.

Then they run into Russia who started to encroach, probably making some landings on Japan. Japan's like, we don't really like you guys. We're going to push you back. But they beat Russia in a war. And Russia's huge back then still. And Japan's only

that size. It was, a lot of it was in naval. It was a couple big naval battles that Japan was able to pull off to where Russia just kind of, I think, capitulated. It wasn't, the juice wasn't worth to squeeze. It was going to take a lot more. And I think that's sort of a feather in Japan's cap as far as you might be able to beat them,

but goddamn, they're going to drag you through hell to get that way in. Well, I think the other thing, too, is that might have given them almost a false sense of how things were going to go against a larger, more resource-rich and industrialized, you know, foe. Yeah. That they were able to kind of be a punch way above their, you know, their weight. when you get a great depression, you're so relying on imports, but you don't have the money to pay for those imports or people are going to suffer. So 1931, Japan invades Manchuria,

and they just go there basically to start seeking raw materials for the mainland because they also want to keep up, just like Chris said, they were fighting naval battles in the early 19-aughts. So if you're already doing that, you have an industrialized nation enough to where you need shit to be able to make more ships, to feed your people, just a ton of things that you need. Manchuria provided probably the least defended place

that they could move on to the mainland, you think? I would think it would be strategic in that sense. Either the most resource rich, the least protected, the one that's in the most state of governmental or leadership flux, that they could come in and kind of take advantage of that. But yeah, they basically got a foothold. And after, you know, fully securing Manchurias,

by 1937. This was basically the start of what's called the second Sino-Japanese War. And that kind of got kicked off, I think, in July of 1937. But like Adam was saying, the hostilities went all the way back to 1931. So it took six years of shit for them to finally be like, no, fuck it. We're actually going to an actual war at this point. Yeah, we have Manchuria. Manchuria doesn't have everything that we need.

So we're going to just go ahead and get on. China. We're going to move south. We're going to start making a movement on their installations. And that kicks off something where I kind of wonder a little bit. There has to still be a fairly decent amount of hostility between Japan and China. Like forever, right? Because it seems like when China does something, I guess it's more North Korea that like fires rockets and shit over Japan or close to Japan. But being a communist country that close to Japan has to not feel great for them. There seems to just be a lot of tension and animosity. I'm not. sure exactly to what levels it is or anything like that, but it definitely seems like there's a lot of,

but it's just the thick, the tension is thick. You got your neighbor next door that Moses lawned in short jean shorts and a white tank top, and you don't really feel great about it, but you don't. Well, it's the same thing with Austria-Hungary and having Serbia and everything and kind of it's just your, it's a difference in culture. Well, after, you know, kind of moving both into Manchuria and then also, since they're now going to war with China, they're using that as an opportunity

to try to take even more territory. The League of Nations was like, hey, hey, don't do this. And basically Japan was like, okay, we're leaving the league. So Japan just ends up bouncing out of the League of Nations. What's that like? What's it like when a member of the League of Nations

starts a war like that? Because they're showing up to the meetings. Like, they're doing all the shit. With the honorable delegate from, Japan like to to provide explanation for this act of aggression, we're at war I, this is the first time

hearing of it, but I'm going to get to the bottom of this and I'm going to get you guys answers. I've been here. I've been here with you guys. You guys know that I've been here. I don't know. As he leaves and then has a note delivered, literally a day later that's like, so we're out of the League of Nations. I just need to be able to leave the room without getting arrested or

taking prisoner or something. They must have been feeling pretty good about what they were doing because, and, you know, making headway, because they started to actually move into Russia. In 1939, they tried to actually invade the East Soviet Union, and the Russians were able to basically kind of halt them and kind of stop that, that advance, kind of teamed up with, I think, the Mongolians, right? Yeah. Well, I'm sure the Mongolians weren't too pumped about Japan coming into Manchuria because that was kind of an area I think that they roamed around in.

Did you read what actually was the tipping point to them actually declaring war for the Sino-Japanese War? It was this thing called the Marco Polo Bridge incident and basically it was like a soldier who had gone AWOL from his post from one army or something like that from like the Chinese side or the Japanese side

and went over and was hanging out and was like a dereliction of duty. And they wanted permission to come into the Chinese held area and search for that prisoner. And they're like, no, we're just not going to give you access to just come in and start tossing homes and everything. They're like, war. So they use that as a kickoff to war.

Which sounds like a very rational thing to be like, no, you guys can't come in here. How do we know that one of your guys escaped across? Like, is this just you coming in here? No. There's no chance. And keep in mind at this point, Europe is, you know, know, at this point with Britain, France, Germany, they're all in pretty much full-scale war.

Yeah. At this point. We got some shit kicking off to the West that's making this seem like maybe it's not as big of a deal, which I think ultimately benefited Japan at this point because the world was sort of focused, I think, on what Hitler was doing. Well, even the people that it was fighting in its territory, China, were even unfocused solely on Japan. So China's in a civil war at this point as well. And you have, I think it was the communist and the nationalist, right?

Yep. So you have the communists and the nationalists that are essentially buying for control in China, and Japan presents such a threat that China basically is just like, hey, do you want to call our civil war just on hold for a little bit? We can deal with China, and the other side was like, yeah, cool, let's do that, or we're not going to have a China to fight over. So as they were able to kind of put their civil war on hold, they were able to consolidate forces and maybe kind of organized a little bit to actually halt their advances at that point as well. And then that's what kind of forced them when China started getting their shit together to be like, well, we could just pop into Russia for a little bit. And they're like, oh, nope, Russia doesn't work either. So this ends up leading to the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact, which was signed on April 13th and 41. So you hear that initial little pop-off during the war where Japan tries to invade Soviet or Russia.

Yeah. And then after that, nothing is happening there. Well, and then that treaty goes to hell. I don't know what fighting Japan and Russia did in World War II once they chose their sides, but there had to have been some interaction. No, this was a pact signed after it had already been. So, like, you weren't obligated to fight. This wasn't a situation where you were obligated to go to war with everybody that someone else was going to war with, apparently.

So Japan and the Soviet Union never declared war on each other? Nope. Not until the very, very end is when Russia finally decided to come back in. Wild. Yeah. I did not know that. Yep. Huh.

Well, when you can't go north, you are still looking for land, so what's the other option? Exactly. Got to go south. France had a lot on their plate at this point. They had been taken over by the Germans. We had something that we talked about, not really at length, but kind of explained the Vichy government, just like the one little bit of France that Germany allowed to continue being France, but only. German friendly France is basically what it was. German puppet state France is kind of what it was.

So the Vichy aren't really in a position to defend anything. French Indochina is just sitting there with its pants down, just waiting for Japan to come swoop in there. French Indochina is very important because there's so many natural resources. I think this is, is this where the oil comes from, or is that the Dutch East Indies? Dutch East Indies, I know, was really rich in oil, but I'm sure they're getting anything and everything out of these places they can.

They're all not too far away. from each other so they could all be doing that kind of stuff. So boom, once that happens, Japan has taken another jewel. They have another landhold. And I think, quote me if I'm wrong, I don't know if you know this, but I heard this. I think it was on either a podcast or a documentary. At one point, during World War II, Japan has claimed to one eighth of the world, including water and all that

but like one eighth of the world is in the sphere of Japanese influence there might have been that because it was the area that it encompassed was basically if you take Japan and then you carve into China a little bit and you start then coming to carving down the entire coast go back

into Thailand Burma even into India so you're getting a portion of India in there all the islands in there not including Australia, but like New Guinea, um, the falcon, or not the Falcon Islands, Philippines,

all of that area. And then everything what they would also consider, because there's so many archipelagos and like little islands out there in the Pacific, it was just be a defensive perimeter around there, encompassing all of that ocean area as well. So yeah, an eighth would probably sounds about,

so much. Yeah. But it all starts with moving down or moving into Manchuria, moving through China, going gun into French Indochina now and they're just collecting stuff. So I assume at that point it's probably not a terrible idea

because you know you're pissing enough people off that on September 27th, Japan signs the Triple Alliance. So they form the axis with Italy and Germany. They've teamed up with a former ally in Italy and World War I against the adversary of World War I. And I don't know really if it's a political thing. I sort of feel like with the political structures that Hitler and Mussolini brought into Germany and Italy, that wasn't exactly Japan, but Japan also sort of had a little bit of that with the emperor system and kind of the way that they ran their country.

There might have been some commonalities between them, you think? I think Hitler looked at the way that he ran that was like, if I, you know, I could probably pick a few things off of them. Yeah. Plus it would also, I think he saw the strategic portion of it, is that it would have to divert British resources down to defend Australia. And then if something did happen where the United States was drawn into the war, it would have the United States fighting a two-front war, which Germany knew all about and knew that that wasn't a positive to have to fight a two-front war. They didn't win that last one. But also, yeah, probably a buffer zone from the Pacific end because you're fighting on the Atlantic, you don't want to. wanted to come in and catch you from behind.

Yeah. So probably better that way. Well, around this time, very early on in joining the Axis, the Japanese adopt, the military adopts the three all's policy, which is a kill-all, burn-all, and loot-all of their captured territory. This is pretty fucking hardcore and kind of sets the stage for a lot of the atrocities that will just touch on but not really go into details because again we can't just gloss over that a lot of these are so both horrible but also take place over such a long period of time that they each need their own episode to really do you know do them justice um they they instantly

start when they're invading china they're instantly you know committing war crimes over in china forcing the populace into like slave labor type situations, pretty much taking out what I consider to be like their aggression and their not inferiority, but what's the opposite of an inferiority complex? Superiority? Yeah, basically are coming in just basically saying, you know, we are the superior Asiatic race and we're meant to rule over you. did kind of feel like there was a little bit of that

and the whole time that they're in World War II they're still fucking with China Yeah China's China's still bearing the brunt of a lot of what happens When they take Burma 1941-42

Part of the reason that they took Burma Was they were trying to choke off All the resources heading into China Which I don't really know what you're going to get China is big enough that they have enough farmland They can support themselves with food I guess if you're killing all, burning all, and looting all, maybe not so much. Well, and because Burma was part of essentially the British Empire at that point,

now you're having to pull resources to go ahead and try to recapture or defend Burma. Is it worth it, or can you just go try to recapture it later? I mean, there's a lot of those things that we'll talk about where because this Pacific theater opened up last, I would say, yeah? Yeah, it was the... Before the North African, probably? Oh, North Africa and like the Mediterranean and all. that were going off, like, as World War I commenced, like, as soon as, or sorry, World War II commenced, because Italy was in it from the jump.

That's true. Didn't think about that. Yeah. So, if you're, oh, God, I lost it. Well, I was going to say that, you know, having to, kind of, kind of setting forth the Japanese mission statement in this is basically their goal is complete and total independence from like a resource standpoint. They don't have to rely on anybody.

They also want to rule over what they call the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere is what they call this. Basically, it's the area in which they're going to encompassing a large portion of the Pacific, and then also that area into China, and then also most everything south of Japan and China all the way down to Australia,

not including Australia. And that's basically going to include Japan, Korea, portions of China, the Philippines, Manchuria, French Indochina, British Malaya, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, New Guinea. Penang, Hong Kong, Solomon Islands, Guam, Marianas Islands, Wake Island. Yep. So, I mean, there's a lot of area, this is an entirely different feel from the European theater because there's so much. many different locations here that have to be reached by boat. It's not just marching your soldiers. Like you have to be, from a logistic standpoint, you have to be having a very specific resource of

these ships to be able to move your soldiers into a position to then move to the next island and move to the next island to try to take this territory back. It's a completely new set of challenges than I guess any other form or like any other war has been fought. And they were, the Pacific was being hamstrung or the United States in the Pacific was being hamstrung because we were so focused on the war in Europe and that was the mentality is that let's handle the European menace first and then we'll go over and handle Japan. So we're only going to divert when you're starting to gear up to maybe have to fight Japan over in the Pacific. They're only getting I think 10 to 15% of the war materials.

Yeah. The rest of it is going over across the Atlantic to fight the war in Europe. Well, and I think all the way through this, and somehow it kind of ended that way, too. But this Germany First policy just affects everything as far as troop numbers that they're getting from other allies. Like, for as much as the United States takes credit for what happened in the European theater during World War II, I feel like they sort of make up for it in the Pacific because they're doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the Pacific by themselves. Oh, yeah. And that's not even, we're talking about they didn't have army soldiers in the Pacific.

They had Marines. So they weren't even, all the army soldiers were going over into the European theater. They're like, well, we'll just create this race of like super soldiers and call them Marines. You're going to have less of them, but they're really, really good. Yeah. We're going to call Marines because they basically operate. They're fucking coming out of the water. Yeah.

Oh, shit. Is that why they're called Marines? I think so. Huh. I never dawned on me. Marine water. Are they a part of the Navy? Yeah, they're like this naval special force, or that's the Navy SEALs. They're their own thing.

The Marines are their own thing, but I think they were born out of this type of like, they were seaborne invasion force, seaborne fighting force. So along with that, if that's all you're getting man-wise, like you say, 10% of the resources, 10% of the guns, 10% of the armor, 10% of the helmets, 10% of everything is going to you. The planes, the food, the raw materials, all that. I think they said at 1.2 early on, they were showing up with World War I rifles. And part of it was because they liked them.

The guy said that they shot really where there were bolt action rifles. They weren't semi-automatics yet. Said that they could fire off enough shots to where they felt like they were good and they felt like they were really, really accurate, which, if, if, you were. you haven't touched the new shit, how are you going to know what's good? You're just trying to put lipstick on the pig. Yeah. They're trying to make it, just make it sound better.

All of this was basically in response when Japan first started kind of messing around in China. The U.S. froze their assets after several warnings, basically froze their assets and stopped the flow of oil to Japan. Now, Japan, I think, was getting like 80% of its oil from the United States at this point. And so doing that completely would devastate their ability to essentially move around. Again, they're an island. So everything is via shipping. And that all takes oil to go ahead and power their Navy and all their merchant shipping. So they had enough to last essentially between six months and two years once that ban began.

And so they had to kind of decide, hey, what's the best way to go about securing our future with resources? and then at the same time, they have to decide if it's going to get to the point where they have to, you know, strike out against the United States to allow themselves to accomplish their goals. And we've got to do it in a hurry, too, because six months to two years,

like battle-wise, that's a pretty fast turnaround. Especially if you have to ratchet up, how much you're using, and how many ships you're sending out. So, what do you do? You got to figure out how to devise a plan and this is where we get

I think he was I don't remember his title Oh commander Isikoru Yamamoto Yamamoto we talked about in Pearl Harbor studied in America Understood the American Machine the American military

machine pretty well He pretty much knew from the jump that this wasn't really going to end up well I think at one point there's a lot of Yamamoto quotes That they say really probably weren't shit that he said But they just attribute to him And one of the things was he said, we would have to go into, or he goes, we couldn't go into Hawaii, we couldn't go into San Francisco, we couldn't go across the country to make them surrender. The only way we could ever make them surrender is if we were standing in the president's office with the terms of surrender.

So Yamamoto knew that no matter where they hit the United States, there wasn't going to be, like they were never going to take the United States. one thing too i think that he was aware of because he had that experience of knowing what our potential would be for industrial manufacturing for ships and things like that he knew that basically their strategy was not to win a war they knew that long term they couldn't get into a long term winning conflict with the united states just because of our ability to produce so much war materials the goal was essentially to strike so hard and so fast and gather up all these territories that by the time the United States and all the other allies were able to essentially be in a position to then retaliate or counterattack with new ships that you know to replace the ones that were sunk they would already have such a foothold and a defensive position in this East Asia Coast prosperity sphere that it would basically be like okay well let's discuss

terms for potentially like a truce, we've already got this territory and you guys are going to get a lot of people killed trying to retake this territory because we've got to defend it so well. So that was their strategy. It was basically like capture, hold, defend and then just basically like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What if we give the little bit back that we've got? Maybe just as kind of a couple token things, but then keep the majority of it. They knew that they weren't able to go ahead and, you know, fight a protracted fight. So basically it was with, you know, know, this big operation that Yamamoto wanted to do, he knew that they had to strike the United States Pacific Fleet. He knew they had to do it in one fell swoop to where essentially it would take away their ability to make war and to project their power out in the Pacific. Again, having these ships because, you know, Hawaii is essentially the halfway point, right, between United States and

Japan. Yeah. If you're having to launch everything off Hawaii, there's no plane in existence that has the range to hit the Japanese homeland. But by having those ships there, and especially the aircraft carriers, that allows you to then project that air power out further into Pacific and allows you to defend territories and essentially mess up the Japanese plans. So the plans for the Western War began in April and May of 1941. And kind of the coup de grace of Yamamoto's plan was going to be the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he wasn't just going to do that.

That's the one that gets the shine, and that's what everyone knows December 7th for, was for the attack on Pearl Harbor, because it was so devastating, it was such an unexpected thing, and frankly, it was actually kind of the closest one that happened to the Continental United States. But so many other things happened with this,

which really explains why the attack in the Pacific left everyone's scrambling so much. Well, Pearl Harbor was just the opening, to like a water blitzkrig of sorts. Because looking at it from America's side, they understood or the United States side, they understood that

Japan was going to be a problem. That's why the embargo happened. That's why all that was going on. They knew that they needed oil. The first place that they thought they were going to strike would be the Philippines. So in order to get to the Philippines faster because that was an American area,

some guy named me, MacArthur was on there getting fanned and hanging out with the local women. But they knew that if they were going to strike for oil or any natural resources, it was going to be a United States held territory. And the closer that you can get there to defend that territory, the better. So instead of keeping them, was it in San Diego or San Francisco? I believe it was San Diego. San Diego?

Yeah. Okay. I know there were places all along the eastern or, sorry, all along the West. Western seaboard that ships could go. There was a naval yard in the Puget Sound where some aircraft carriers and ships were sent for repairs when damage was taken in the Pacific Theater. I think they could also send them to San Francisco and also send them to San Diego. So there was constantly places that were cranking out or repairing these ships.

But the fleet was probably hanging out around like Kedling Island down there off of San Diego with that Navy base. I think just in general, yeah, the San Diego, the San Diego Naval base. It was far enough away from anything to be protected. So, yeah, if you're going to make it to the Philippines, San Diego is not going to get you there in time to say the Philippines. So the next closest American asset is going to be Hawaii. And that was where they decided to park

because they knew that the Philippines were going to be overrun eventually. You want to hear something crazy? Hawaii wasn't a state until 1959. What? Yeah. So it wasn't a United States state. It wasn't a state in our country that was attacked. It was just a territory?

It was a territory in which we had permission to have our naval base. So it was our naval base and Americans that were attacked. And it wasn't technically America that was attacked. I don't know if Hawaii was a protectorate. No, it wasn't officially a state until 1959. That's not that long ago. No, it's not. But it's also, fuck, it's still like 10 plus years after World War II.

My parents were born before Hawaii was a state. Yeah. That's gross. Oh, we also forgot to mention, I think, around this time, Japan felt a little bit of pressure from the United States because Russia had just sold them Alaska. Oh, yeah, that's true. So you had the Aleutian Islands, which are fairly close to Japan somehow, looking at a globe.

I can't explain it to you because I just look at flat maps, but the Aleutian islands in Alaska are sort of close to Japan. Yeah, close enough to potentially, you know, launch some bombing rates. So, yeah, my mom. Momoto's got to figure something out. Pearl Harbor becomes the tip of the spear for this little movement they're going to make. I don't know why the best idea they thought

was to go bitch-slapp America first instead of trying to make that move first. But we run into December 7th, 1941, when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. Thank Allah that not all the ships were docked that day. Yes. There were some that were out with a trawler? So it was, the whole point was trying to catch

the American fleeted its most vulnerable. And at this point, naval doctrine, especially kind of worldwide, was that capital ships still kind of rule the ruse. So big battleships, big guns. That's what won you naval superiority. What was the last fight we just fought? World War I.

What was the main thing that we used to? Yeah, it was battleships. Exactly. Aircraft carriers were still a relatively new thing, but they were gaining popularity. There were some countries that did go ahead and use them better than others. The United States was one that kind of got in on the ground floor for aircraft carriers. Japan definitely was in on that.

They knew that because they were an island, they had to have the ability to project air power out farther than the island and then also be able to then transport planes to other areas that they would then taken. So they had a few different carriers. carriers in the biggest carrier group, the Quito Butai, was the one sent to Pearl Harbor. I think it was four fleet carriers and then all of their accompanying ships. Concurrently, at the same time, you also had attacks on the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong. So even if anybody wanted to try to assist, not only could any forces in the Philippines or British held or French held areas or even, you know, not only could they not assist because now they were also under attack. Us being attacked at Pearl made it to where we couldn't assist the Philippines at the same time. Now thankfully, like Adam was saying, our aircraft carriers, I think there were two or three of them

were actually out of the harbor at the time on like training exercises. Most of our battleships were actually in the harbor, though. One thing that was really cool about actually seeing the harbor itself was getting a feel for, I kind of was telling you, how small the area were battleship, row was where all of that was taking place, but then how big the entirety of the rest of the harbor is with all of like the support structures and like the dry docks and everything like that and how large the scope of this, you know, air raid must have happened. But then also how like the channel that the battleships were parked in was narrow. So there were only a certain,

certain way that the Japanese torpedo bombers could have to come over low and drop those. it was just, you know, it was kind of surreal. Also kind of seen the oil leaking out of the, the Arizona. Still? Yeah. I sent you the pictures. You could see the oil slicks on it.

They call it the tears of the Arizona. Oh, that was that picture. Yeah. So. Holy shit, dude. Yeah. It's still got oil in it? Wow.

Yeah, they carried that much fuel oil. I forgot to ask you, still an active base? Yes. Really? To a degree, yes. Not like Fort Island in the middle or anything like that, but the areas around it still have all of a lot of support and like dry docks and like repair shops and

resupply airfield still um yeah not on the island but other ones do have yeah there are a couple airfields on the island um and after this all occurs now is when japan decides to go ahead and declare war yeah well and the the declaration was in the mail apparently i think we talk about that in the episode where they had they were like waiting for a from America or they had sent over something and the bombing happened and then it, yeah, I think it just showed up via some source of like, oh, hey, last, last and final offer. See, it's post-dated since before this date. We definitely posted this. Yeah, like you say, they hit us. Next day, we declare war on them.

They had gotten us so good that just after December 7th, like you had talked about, Thailand falls to Japan December 21st. That's 14 days. That's two weeks. Then British control Pyongyang or Penang Hong Kong falls December 25th January 1942. They moved on the Dutch East Indies.

They moved on New Guinea and they moved on the Solomon Islands. So we're talking less than a month. They have taken what one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different places in the span of a month. And they're just picking these islands off left and right. How did they move that fast in naval ships? Well, because that area over there is just a series of islands, what they call, I think that area is what they call like Oceana. Okay.

Yeah. It's all just like, think of it like in a larger scope, but like the East Coast. How do you get from fucking New York to fucking Pittsburgh and Washington, New York. so fucking Philadelphia so quickly. Everything is so much closer. But for us to be able to get anything over there, we got across the entire fucking ocean, or at least from Hawaii.

So them being able to do that shows not only all of their coordination, but also their ability to just move a ton of men around to be doing this while still actively engaged in China. And we're there. None of those places that they hit are going to have standing armies, so they're not sending in

battleships to do battle. They're just docking. Yeah, there's all. active wars in Europe where the majority of like the Australian forces were up fighting in like the Mediterranean and South Africa. Yeah. So I guess that does, they're sort of walking into those places. And I think up until we run into the Philippines, which we're coming up on fairly quickly,

the Philippines, I think, is the first time that they probably had a fight on their hands. Yeah. Well, and here's the thing too is even though they didn't get the carriers of Pearl Harbor, they had four battleships that were sunk, four battleships that were damaged, I think 13 light cruisers damaged, a ton of aircraft that were destroyed. So although you still have your carriers, all of the support craft you need for these carrier groups, like the ship supporting them and screening them from bomber attacks and from torpedo attacks, you've lost a lot of that power as well. So although you didn't lose the aircraft carriers, you lost all the things that you have to send out to protect them. So you're having to wait till you can essentially kind of create these carrier task force again before even going out. And I mean, like you're saying, they're not wasting any time.

December 10th, the HMS repulse and the battleship HMS Prince of Wales were both sunk in Malaya. So really quickly, any type of allied like sea power in that area is being taken off the board. They kind of had shooters out there. They kind of had shooters out there that were stationed close enough to these other places. Because the Kito Boutai didn't do that, did they? No, but they had other carriers that they were sending down and like what they consider their task force and everything. Also, as soon as they're taking these areas and forcing the allies off them or capturing them, they're then converting things to airfields. So now they have all of these, instead of having actual aircraft carriers, you know have all of these permanent land-based aircraft fields all over this.

entire area to where you're able to protect and support any and all of these other islands. Not only that, but all of these islands and these countries that you've invaded and taken over, you now have complete and total protection for all of your shipping and merchant stuff to go down and start pulling resources back to Japan because you've created this defensive perimeter where they can just sail through the islands and up those straits to get back to the home island. So, I mean, they've really set themselves up well at this point. and pretty much like we were talking about, their whole point was to make a mad scramble and dash

to gather up as much as they could and set themselves up into such a strong position that when we finally did get our footing, it was like, well, fuck. They already kind of got this squared away, like how do we want to approach this? Before we actually get into when the actual, you know, retaliation and everything starts happening,

and let's take a bathroom break. Oh my God, Adam. What is that up in the sky? It's a bird. It's a plane. It's socials! Oh my God. It's faster than Instagram.

That's historically high pod on Instagram. More powerful than X? It's historically high, historically H.I. on X? Able to leap tall threads in a single bound. Back to historically high pod on threads. And, I mean, I guess there's still Gmail, right? We got that too. That is historically high.

Podcast at gmail.com. All right, guys, back to the show. All right. So at this point, and for a little bit longer, it's going to be all Japan. It's really going to be a one-sided affair at this point with everyone else just kind of scrambling to fucking get their feet under them. Well, and this is where I give the United States credit. I don't know if the United States has ever felt like they would enter a war

that they didn't have what they believed was a, like advantage. Mm-hmm. And at this point in time, even though Japan slapped us in the face with Pearl Harbor, America, the United States didn't have a

strong Navy to the standards of Japan's Navy. Yeah. And most of our resources, naval-wise, were in the Atlantic shipping ship back and forth to the Allies. We weren't fighting an active war

and we really hadn't planned on maybe in the same timeline that it happened. Maybe we thought that, yeah, once Europe is done, then like you said, the priority, then we'll go over and deal with Japan, so we'll just kind of let them do their thing over there. We weren't expecting to be pulled into it, but we got pulled into it pretty fast.

Well, and also everything in the Atlantic, there's no aircraft carriers in the Atlantic, right? Oh, no, there were. Oh. The British would use some of them. Like, the British used one to sink the Bismarck, actually. Okay, so it wasn't just us over there. like guiding ships and

But it wasn't even to, I don't even know if America had any, we might have had some escort carriers over there. Yeah, that's what I was saying. But because everything was so close and it was more of a landlocked war, it wasn't as useful for us, especially with all of the U-boats over there. It didn't make sense to send carriers over there when the U-boats were such a threat,

especially because all of the range of our aircraft could get over the English Channel, go bomb any targets you really needed. Whereas over in the Pacific at this point, the only really friendly territory we have now is, well, still the Philippines up to this point, but also then Australia. Anything closer than that, though,

you've got to have an aircraft over there in operation. Well, and that's, what I was saying is, we didn't go into this with the strategic advantage. And that's why the losing happens so quickly and for so long is because we're trying to play catch up. Japan started at like the 10 yard line and we started at the goal line and we're trying to chase him down. And there comes a time when the tipping point happens and when America figures out how to fight a naval war because again, up until now, we hadn't really been pressed. I know we hadn't been pressed on our coastline unless it was by our own people.

Yeah. But beyond that, fighting a naval war is a million times different than fighting anything else. Oh, yeah, definitely. You're not just sending over people or supplies and then having a place for them to sit. literally sending people over and having to transport them over and then get them back. And until they get over somewhere safe, they're fucking vulnerable on these ships. It's completely different thing. One big advantage that the Japanese had, especially early on.

So you have with their war with China that they had been fighting prior to, you know, World War II, they were getting a lot of experience off of carrier decks about launching planes, recovering planes, their combat air patrols, to protect the carriers, all of these pilots, and more importantly, the flight crews that would work on these planes for refueling, maintenance work on them, ordinance, putting, you know, different bombs and different ordinance on the planes, recovering them onto the aircraft carriers. They were just getting down to a well-oiled machine. They knew how to do this shit, which is why Pearl Harbor was so devastating while they were able to put up so many planes.

We don't have this type of capability yet. We don't, we're not dialed in. like this, but the thing is, is this also, I think, kind of gives a false sense of confidence and eventually leads to Japan's downfall is that because they are so successful in the beginning with these attacks, they're never looking in a situation where they need to start replacing or have a plan to replace their losses. Whereas America gets hit and the first thing we do is we instantly go into like production mode, like war product mode, where we start building additional ships. even at the point where we have just the three American carriers in the Pacific, we're already in the process of building additional carriers.

We know kind of what the future is going to be as far as naval warfare. It's going to be the additional range that combat aircraft off of carrier provide you. Japan at this point, because there's no one really there to threaten them down on that side, they pretty much rule the air. And as part of like terror tactics and just to keep everyone on their toes, on February 19th of 1942, they actually bombed Darwin in Australia. Now, you're like, okay, well, they bombed Australia.

What this showed basically was that they had the potential to continue bombing Australia, and when someone continually bombs you like that, usually what that leads to is an invasion. They're bombing you up to take away your defenses, to soften you up to then go ahead and invade you. So the fear here is that Australia, who has most of its main army fighting,

already up in the Mediterranean for the British Empire is now under the threat of invasion at this point. Well, and they just right before that, February 15th, when the Japanese took Singapore,

they took 130,000 allied prisoners of war. So they're rounding up a very fair amount, and then four days later, they start bombing Darwin, which I want to say it turned into just a little

bit more of a hazing, like trying to break Australia. It was a cycle. It was a cycle. I think 350. Oh, not even that. Maybe. 250 died. Okay. But they had, I want to say it was somewhere around like a hundred different bombings where Japan bombed Australia. It was just enough sporadically to keep them on their toes in a state of just constant fear. Like at any point they can keep bombing us. That's crazy how many times that would have to happen. Well, and I mean, they're doing this also because you know, as they're wanting to gain territory and everything, if they can kind of cause these terror tactics,

it's going to make Australia think twice about being like, well, shit, should we try to send our forces out? Because if they're able to reach us here, we might want to hold our guys back and just allow them to keep taking more land. Are they trying to draw us out at this point? What are we doing? And like you said, like, how many, 100, do you say 170,000? 130,000.

Okay, 130,000. How many fucking active troops do you have over there? Could you have over there at this point? When you're not in an active war situation, yeah, how many guys do you have to pull this pool from? That seems like a pretty good chunk of who you have over there to fight. Well, and there were allies, and I think Singapore was held by Britain. Yeah. So there was a fair amount of, it was basically probably the whole contingency to defend Singapore.

It was like fortress Singapore is what they called it. Just rounded everything up. things just really continued to go bad December 8th was when the Philippines campaign started and it started up the bombing of American airfields that were on Luzon By December 13th, every major U.S. airfield had been destroyed which don't have any airfields, can't send any planes up in the air. You got zero air power.

The troop landings that Luzon took place on December 22nd and 24th, and this is where General MacArthur, Supreme Commander eventually, MacArthur, I feel like we overtalked him too much. I feel like we kind of drew him up to be a bigger person on my head, or maybe that's what history has taught me. I think that's what kind of history has taught you to a degree. With that attack, you know, they had to have known

already based upon the attacks, because again, this is, oh, no, this is also on this. December 7th is when they get attacked as well. This is happening concurrently. Yeah, December 8th, it was the next day. Correct. So not even having enough time to basically be like, what the fuck happened at Pearl Harbor and get everything on high alert for the Philippines? Within that first initial strike, half of the United States air strength in the Philippines was lost instantly. You're already outnumbered against the Japanese just for the fact that you don't have that many troops and resources on the island and you lose half of your air strength already. Any of the unprotected ship, if they had any type of escort carriers, battleships, any large ships like that, were sent to Java or Australia with just very few. Like ones that they were able to spare or potentially lose as a holding, kind of a holding pattern, were left to defend. And on December 22nd, it didn't take them long, man,

from December 8th or December 7th or 8th when they started attacking to the 22nd. So what, little like two weeks later, Japan lands. and as they land, they are basically just forcing the allies and MacArthur to basically just continually withdraw all the way to the other end of the island, correct? All the way to Baton. That's right. The Baton Peninsula was supposed to be where they were able to. It was a narrow point that they thought that they could go ahead and defend. But what are you thinking when the fact that the Japanese Navy is just going to be the ones behind you?

Yeah. What's your plan there? Yeah, you can't run. to the other side of the island because guess who's waiting for you on the other side of the island. Yeah. There's just, there's no way to get out of it. MacArthur was a very blustering man. He made a lot of different promises.

But I think that he believed that they were going to be able to hold off the Japanese. And then once the landings happened and they realized that they were just didn't have anything to go against Japan, he immediately was like, yep, let's retreat. Let's go back to the Baton Peninsula. Again, not too long after that. I mean, a couple, longer than things have been moving. March 11th, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to withdraw and to withdraw to Australia. I don't really know how tough it was to get MacArthur to withdraw at that point because Baton is not a nice place to be.

Oh, you know, I think he also had some of his family with him. Yeah. Did you hear the story about him when they sent the initial plane to pick him up? He saw it, looked at the plane. He's like, I'm not getting in that rickety piece of shit. He's like, I want you to send me three of the newer bombers to pick us up. Fuck. And then he went over and lived the high life in Australia.

Well, everybody was in Baton doing a little something called the Baton Death March. Yeah, didn't. But Arthur was safe. Part of his withdrawal wasn't withdrawing essentially, what was it, like, 70,000? Yeah, 76,000. 76,000 Americans were also left to defend Baton when it was really indefensible at that point. But good old Douglas ended up getting out of there. They gave him the name, was it Dougout, Doug?

Because he never came out of his base or his foxhole. Yeah, he didn't ingrati himself very well and had a really poor reputation with any of the Americans that actually survived from the Philippines during that initial invasion. But he made the Filipino people a promise before he left. I don't know if it was him or if it was for them or if it was for the soldiers that he was leaving there as well. I don't think he wanted to fulfill it. it. Like, had things continued to go south, I don't think he would have wanted to fulfill that promise. I think he would have been okay with it. I think when he tries to fulfill the promise, we're in a strategic enough position to know that... So what was the promise?

I shall return. I shall return. As he's getting on this fucking bomber and is like, later. Schwarzenegger said it better. I'll be back. It's way better. Had he said I'll be back, I would have given him more credit just because he would have said it before Schwarzenegger. But even then in an Austrian accent, does it not sound as good? Like, I'll be back. What if that's the polar turn? What if when they're writing Terminator, they're like, oh, I'll be back. MacArthur said that. This is the Terminator.

He's a robot. What do we got? I shall return. A shall return. So basically, January 7th, Japan ends up attacking Baton. This is after, or I'm sorry, this is just prior to March 11th when President Roosevelt orders him to withdraw to Australia. Baton actually falls on April 9th, like we were talking about.

76,000 U.S. and Filipino prisoners are led on the Baton death march. 66 mile or 66 mile walk into the desert? Is that what it was? Through the jungles. Oh, through the jungle? Through the jungles. It was back essentially the way that they came. They were trying to take them back the way that they had come to then be able to ship them back to POW camps

or take them other places to probably serve in, you know, manual labor rules. And unfortunately, not a lot of people made that 66 mile journey. No. A lot of death. A lot of poor treatment. They could just basically kill a POW at will. And they did. Something that I didn't know about this was, what are the rules of war?

It's just the rules of engagement, I think. But there's like a certain thing. Geneva Convention. Oh, yeah. Japan had never signed the Geneva Convention. So that meant that war with Japan didn't have to follow any guidelines. So you could get away with doing whatever you wanted. Kind of a bad technicality.

Yeah. Somehow, I don't know what the Geneva Convention would have done to Japan had they signed it and then done some of these atrocities. But I'm not really sure that that would have mattered to the Japanese. But, yeah, like you were talking about, they'd be marching them. And if somebody had mouthed off, if you fell while you were marching, they wouldn't pick you up or give you water or anything like that. they would just disembow you and leave you there for everybody else that has to march by a fallen friend or soldier on the way to...

Just demoralize you. Yeah. Break you body and soul. The Japanese aggression on Australia, on Australia ramps up. Almost 100 air attacks. I think we touched on that earlier over the following 19 months. It doesn't sound like a lot, but if you're consistently just in fear of that happening, it keeps you on your toes and probably keeps some of your men back there. I mean, 19 months, 100 airstri.

even if you're getting it once a month, that's 52 airstraights. That's almost twice a month that you're having to deal with one of these. Yeah. That fucking sucks. I know like I'm saying, it's just there to fuck with you. One thing that also Australia did at this point is they reached out to America for help. They weren't reaching out to Great Britain anymore. They said something about like, they sent this and they're like, we're speaking directly to America to provide us assistance.

And at that point, Japan was kind of kicking. around the ideas if they were going to invade Australia or kind of what the best tactical strategy would be for that and it was just to actually choke off Australia that they could actually just close them off to any type of shipping or support from the United States and it would basically just neutralize Australia

without them having to commit any resources and be able to continue kind of what they were doing around that area. That and then I bet they probably had met some Australian people were like we're not going to be able to really They're like, invasion doesn't sound good. They fucking kill people with these weird bendy sticks. And they got these giant fucking rats that can like kick people.

But so they decided to go with the blockade there. Well, once MacArthur got back to Australia, he ends up head at quarterings in Melbourne. And by March of 1942, American troops start to mass in Australia. So we're using that as our staging ground in the Pacific from the kind of from the jumping off point. sucks. Not the fact of being in Australia, because I'm sure that that's awesome. But Australia's atmosphere is not going to be able to replicate what you're going to be seeing on some of these islands. Yeah.

I think they said, it might be closer. Closer, but they said a lot of the marine training would happen in like Florida, in areas where they would try to simulate jungle, but you can't really simulate jungle. Like, it's over there, it's something completely different. You can't simulate malaria in the United States. So Australia being better, but you're still not, you don't have boots on the ground where you're going to be fighting these wars still. You're not training in an area to where you're going to be able to understand that all these little creatures that are walking through the forest can bite you and give you malaria, leprosy, anything like that. Like, seeing how scary the Japanese were fighting in the jungles, almost pales in comparison.

to me to thinking about like just seeing a Gila monster or something like that just strolling through the wood or strolling through the jungle. Yeah it doesn't have a fucking knife attached to its fucking rifle chasing yet and you're going, ah! Yeah. This kind of kicks off the second phase of

Japan's plans, which was defense in depth. So basically, if you're going to get anywhere close to the home islands or try to invade, you're going to be, they were going to make you pay for it every step or every island that you tried to take. So to also cut off or slow down that allied shipping, they took over New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa.

So basically, you know, the Allies are having to keep making these different shipping lanes to try to dip down low enough to not have to worry about fucking getting airstriked or like running into like surface attack groups. Yeah. Luckily, I think we kind of started to get our shit together though. After they kind of regrouped and figured some shit out, Japanese or the Japanese started to. go after the holdings in new guinea they were trying to get new guinea to try to again push that sphere of influence out and the allied force raids that happened actually repelled them being able to take more land in new guinea yeah i think that was like 19 that was march of nineteen um that was the first time that american carrier aircraft i think were like involved in pushing back and like delaying the invasion cool yeah that's exciting man yeah it's fun finally like this is like watching a child walk was watching america try to figure out how to fight a naval war so like that's the first thing and then what are you going to do to really get a big

hard pump on to really get excited for the next part you got to try to strike japan right in their heart um you got to do you got to do something to get the people fired up back home yeah even if it's not a a a full-on strategic you know um a strategic uh strategic uh strategic win or you're not doing a ton of damage, if you can show a hole in the armor, if you can show that someone is beatable, despite all the losses, you'll show that ray of sunshine,

that the victory is attainable. So, December 18th, 1942, we conduct a little something called the do little raids. And this to me was so fascinating as to how it all happened, because they used the USS Hornet. That was the aircraft carrier that sent it off. You're going to have to help me

on the planes on this one. Were they B-25s? Yeah, so the Dooliterate 16 B-25s, which are a light bomber. Basically, they would normally have a crew of, let's see, pilot, co-pilot, person in the front as the gunner and bombardier, probably a guy, two guys in the back, maybe like a crew of seven, usually, with also like a tail gunner, and had to create, basically make these bombers that were full-blown, like, had to take off on a runway on land and modified them to take off of a fucking aircraft carrier.

Oh, and they never tested it to see how far it would take them on land before they threw them on the carrier. They just knew how long the carrier runway was. Like, we just have to make it so it takes off from there. They basically taped it off on an actual runway, and by the time they were all able to take off and get up before hitting that end of the tape. Yeah. And everything, they figured, okay, well, we can fucking do it.

Also, at the same time, If you can do it that way, you can definitely do it off a carrier because a carrier can turn into the wind and be giving you more uplift. So when carriers, yeah, so when carriers would go to launch aircraft, they would even if they were like turning and they were heading toward a target, they would steam toward a target to try to close the gap. And then if the wind was, they were going with the wind, they would turn the ship into the wind and launch all their planes. So their planes could get altitude and could take off easier. That's so smart. Yeah. Huh

Uh, yeah, so Great idea for them to be able to fit them to be able to fly off this carrier But there was a drawback Because the Doolittle Rades were launched And there were some Japanese patrol ships that had spotted the Hornet And were headed to go in form on them So they decided to launch the Doolittle Rades early The problem with the B-25s was their,

fuel tank, they didn't know if launching early was going to be able to get them back to the ships. Oh, no, no, no. There was no plan of getting back to the ships, buddy. It was never any. It was going over and then into mainland China. There was no way that they were going to get them back to the ships because what happened is the ships got them as close as they possibly could. Then they saw the guard Harrison.

And because they, the Japanese had such, you know, parody or like, we weren't on parity with them as far as like carriers or anything like that yet. We couldn't even remotely try to keep them. There were two carriers, I think, that went with us on that. And as soon as they launched the planes, they fucking turned ass and hauled back for Hawaii. So the plan was just to launch them over the top. They were going to fly over Japan, bomb their targets, fly over the sea of Japan into China, and hopefully get far enough into China that they would be landing in unoccupied.

Allied China and not the Japanese occupied parts of China. So these guys ended up taking off from this ship. Some of them hit their targets in Tokyo. There were a couple other targets for some like industrial centers. Didn't do a ton of damage. I mean, they weren't carrying huge payloads. These bombers were more of the light bomber variety, especially having to be taken off from a fucking aircraft carrier.

But it was basically a psychological win because all of a sudden Japan, who had been getting win after win after win, had this invincibility to it, all of a sudden found out that we can get hit right in the heart of our country. Technically, those bombers could have gone over the Imperial Palace

and all just dropped their bombs on the Imperial Palace without them even thinking. They didn't think it was possible for them to be touched. So it was a real wake-up call, and I think what that also did was that kind of showed them that maybe they needed to keep stuff a little closer to home and focus on that defense a little bit more.

So psychologically, I think it may be lightened up the workload further out for the other allies. Also very cool. named the Doolittle raids because the guy who came up with the plan was Doolittle. He was a Jimmy Doolittle. What was he? Was he a, like a major or something like that?

He ended up getting promoted after that. He was really famous after this. He was the first guy off the ship. He was the first guy in the plane to head out. Well, that's awesome. And he was also one of the guys to return. Yeah.

That was a big thing is a lot of these guys landed in occupied China, were taken prisoner. Some guys spent a huge chunk of, of the Pacific War trying to be like ferried around China to try to get back to somewhere friendly. You know, if you're thinking about it, you would have to get into China and get into a friendly enough situation to get there. Also, there was a plane that landed in Vladivostok, Russia, I believe, that was really close to Japan. And because of the Russian-Japanese neutrality agreement, they didn't turn over the American pilots, but they weren't allowed to release them. So the American pilots basically

They had to leave the plane They weren't allowed to take the plane Because they didn't want to violate The Russians didn't want to violate that But then I believe that in some roundabout way They were able to actually get Like escape And I'm doing quotes here

And get back to over to like Europe Maybe some Russian or some Soviet guards That weren't paying great attention Yeah So maybe And help them find their way to a train Yep And then get themselves over to another

area worse it was a little bit friendlier maybe a delicious borsh was served to them for lunch and they forgot to lock up the cell this is uh this is the same month in april when yamamoto basically wants to have this big naval crescendo um the belief at this point an old naval doctrine is that these wars are essentially decided by these giant naval battles like these big all-encompassing war determining naval battles and that it would take one of these essentially to basically determine the victor and so yamamoto wants to attack midway and take over midway which is if you've listened to the midway episode go back listen to it it's basically just two tiny little islands halfway between japan and hawaii and it has i think two airstrips on it some facilities to go ahead and park

planes to refuel. I think at one point there was a submarine resupply depot there. But this allowed us to essentially have more of a foothold for protection for Hawaii. Because any planes coming in that could be picked up on radar there could have, you know, fighters sent up to try to prevent them from coming and doing any more damage to Hawaii. Well, you take this island, now you're in bombing range of Hawaii and are able to launch attacks against Hawaii and if you can then somehow take that out of commission the only base that then America has at that point

is along our west coast. It pretty much takes us completely out of the Pacific. You got a shitload more breathing room. So Yamamoto in order to finally get his way on this has to, is this where he threatens to resign? Uh, and then has to become- Is this diva time? Yeah, and then

he has to come to a compromise where not only where will midway happen, but also he has to, has to take place, I believe, in the invasion of or support the invasion of like New Guinea or something like that. They wanted Port Moresby. That's right.

Port Moresby was in New Guinea. They also wanted Tugali in the Solomon Islands. And so before they could go to Midway, they wanted to strengthen their position in the South Pacific to get a hold of Port Moresby in New Guinea and then, yeah, Tegali in the Solomon Islands. So to paint you guys a picture real quick. So along, you know, all of these islands moving down, You have right to the north of basically the most northern point of Australia. That's where you have Papua, New Guinea, and then Papua, it looks like.

And Port Moresby is essentially just due north of a ton of the cities along the, like, Port Douglas. What's the track that runs through there from north to south? The Tokyo Express? No. We'll talk about it. a little bit later. But it's basically on the side of New Guinea that allows them direct access

across that little bit of water separating them to launch nothing but raids and as a staging ground for an invasion of Australia if they plan to do that. So in order to basically defend Port Moresby, they have to pour in, the allies have to end up pouring in a huge group

to get in there and kind of like stop the advance. I mean, this is the brilliance of America. This is the, when we really started to shine, because what happened in the intelligence tents in Pearl Harbor? Oh, the decryption of the Japanese, the IGN code? Yeah.

Yeah. So once those codebreakers had decrypted the code, the United States codebreakers had picked up the message that they were going to be headed down to Port Moseby, try to take it over. America's like, well, we can't have that. So since we pick this off, they're not going to expect us to be there waiting for them

when they try to show up down there. And this is where we get something called the Battle of the Coral Sea. Battle of the Coral Sea is fucking cool to me, and it also doesn't make any sense because this took place from May 4th to May 8th, 1942. It was the first naval battle, or, wow, fuck. The first naval battle were neither flea.

was spotted or fired upon each other. Yeah. This is exactly where you get the evolution of what new warfare is going to be, and it's all going to be about carriers and carrier-based aircraft trying to find these groups to take them out. You get what was previously the thought of naval doctrine about having the battleships take out on the other capital ships. Now you have most of these ships serving as like a screening force and protection for these aircraft carriers. and because the American codebreakers had intercepted this, they kind of knew the position of where they're going to be coming in at.

The Japanese had 60 ships, two of them being aircraft carriers and like 250 planes during the Battle of the Coral Sea. I think that was between May 4th and May 8th, correct? Yep, it was Coral C. Coral C was sort of a American. God, I don't know why I keep doing that. The United States didn't really win. Japan definitely hurt the United States more. The Lexington was sunk, which the Lexington is coolest shit to me, and I didn't

even know this about the Lexington, but the Japanese called it the blue ship. They thought it was a ghost ship, because after they had sunk the Lexington, we were so close to bringing in another carrier that was just being consistent. instructed that they actually named that the Lexington also so when the Lexington showed up to another battle the Japanese were like no no no no we sank that we saw that go under the same class or something like that so it looked the exact like they painted it the exact same the name was in the exact same area so they sunk the Lexington and they knew that they had done it but then a matter of weeks later the Lexington is just back up in battle again so they thought

that it was a ghost ship that had just kept respawning itself. That's got to be a real mind fuck. Kind of just a quick order of the battle for that because it does, you know, all of these battles that we mentioned, we have to go into a little bit on them because they do determine what happens next and it kind of sets up

the stage for how bad someone is down and like, you know, how much an advantage someone else has. So with this, you have the Lexington and the Yorktown, which are the two American carriers. You have the, I believe it is... The Shukaku and the Zakiro?

The Shukaku and the Zuikaku. Zuikaku. So on the fourth, United States carrier aircraft go out and basically when they're first trying to kind of approach United States carrier aircraft or trying to search around, can't find anyone. On the seventh, Japanese aircraft

actually spot a ship and send out their, you know, their anti-ship, you know, their bombers and their torpedo bombers, and find the oiler Niosho, one ship along with a, I think, a small, like, support ship with it, and, like, all of these ships commit the resources to taking this thing down. The Niosho was a United States ship. Yes, the name. Correct, yes, it was an oiler, basically.

On this day, the Americans actually find in sync one of the Japanese light carriers. The difference between a fleet carrier and a light carrier is basically, fleet or light carriers are kind of like what the United States would call our escort carrier. they're basically not as fast, not as well equipped and not as well built as what are considered the fleet carriers,

kind of the centerpieces. They're more of like support ships. They use them a lot for transporting planes, like to distant airfields and stuff like that. They'll use them in support roles. They'll use them to support like the merchant

merchant trains that are coming down from like attack because they can launch a couple of planes and fight off fighters. And so getting one of those does help, but you're wanting to get your big fleet carriers taken down. Well, on the 8th, the Japanese come back, and they end up sinking the Lexington

and damaging the Yorktown. Now... Didn't the Yorktown get damaged in Pearl Harbor, too? It wasn't there. Oh, that was one that was out with... Okay. I think we're going to get to what you're thinking about. Okay.

So Yorktown gets damaged and then gets damaged enough to where they actually believe that the Yorktown is either sinking, or is going to have to get scuttle. It's not recoverable. Again, this is all the way down in the coral sea next to New Guinea. So the Americans end up damaging the Shokaku and then the Zui Kaku is fine. So one light carrier, one damage to one of their main ones, then one of their other ones is fine. We have one sunk and one that is damaged enough that the Japanese believe it to be sunk. So yeah, definitely a loss on our side, especially because we really can't be affording to lose these carriers that we don't have a ton of in the Pacific at this point. But the silver lining

Japan didn't take Moresby Correct This was the first time that we ever met Navy to Navy I guess not inside of each other But we repelled them We said no We bopped them on the nose And we said you will not be taking any more of this

You might have beat us But we just showed that The juggernaut of a Navy that you guys have We can sort of push you back We don't only show that, but we showed the fact that, like, you guys weren't expecting us to show up here. Yeah. So we could be everywhere. Like, do you know how we're finding out about all this stuff?

Another big thing it had was those carriers, because they had participated in the battle, you can't just move a carrier after it's had a battle and just move it to someplace else. It has to go back. It has to rearm. It has to have maintenance on its planes. The ship itself has to refuel, has to possibly repair any damage that it took. a time period in which it takes to refit these ships and get them going. So those three ships that they'd actually sent down there for Port Moresby were unable to participate in Midway. Well, the Yorktown haul's ass as fast as it can back to Pearl Harbor and gets back and put into Dry Dock.

And in three days, it's ready to go enough again to where they can load it up with a complement of planes, crews, pilots. I think they said the only reason that they were able to really send it out is that its flight deck was in order and its elevators weren't damaged. So it was able to perform aircraft operations. And that was one of the things that Japan screwed up in Pearl Harbor was they didn't bomb the dry dogs, right? Correct. Okay. Maybe that was where I was. So the Yorktown is able to, on June 4th, or a little bit before June 4th, this is when the operation of Midway is going to occur. So because the Yorktown was ready in three days, it's able to participate in the Battle of Midway with, I think, two other American carrier or one other American carrier.

And because they also had Midway, it was essentially like the Americans having three carriers against what the Japanese was sending were four of their fleet carriers, part of the Kita Bhutai, the fleet and the carriers that were there to bomb Pearl Harbor. this does not go the way the Japanese are hoping it's going to go. So basically what happens is with Midway, and if you guys have listened to the Midway episode, Bravo for you, if you haven't, go back and listen to that one, maybe after this episode. But spoiler alert,

because we had cracked the Japanese naval code, we knew that there was this target. I want to say the acronym was like AH or something. I can't remember what the exact acronym was, that the Japanese were saying there's going to be this big operative. at AH or something like that. So we were trying to figure out what this coded location was going to be. So this guy named Layton, who was part of the crypto analysis team at Pearl Harbor,

is one of the ones that ends up cracking the code and determines that AH is actually Midway by using an underwater secured cable for communication. They communicate with Midway, and they're like, hey, we need you to report back to us unencrypted, that you guys are like having a problem with your freshwater purification or something like that. So they go ahead and send out a report over the air, Japanese intercept it, find out Midway is running short of water, and the intercepted message from the Japanese side that they're sending out is, AH is out of fresh water or is running out of fresh water. So bingo, we know exactly where that's going to be.

We know what the dates and what the makeup of the enemy forces are going to be. So that's why we try to match them in parity to give us a chance for this fight. What do you think is going through the Japanese minds when they keep showing up in America? Or, God, fucking. The United States is already like there. So they, they of course had no idea that the U.S. Navy is going to be there. They have the understanding. The whole point of this plan is Yamamoto is going to send an aircraft, soften up all the defenses,

take out all the planes on the ground of Midway. Once that's all been done, probably doing naval bombardment of it, softened up more in any of the defenses, and then they were going to put 5,000 troops ashore to take over. Once word got back, the Midway was under attack, the plan that Yomoto thought was going to happen is that the Pacific Fleet and the carriers were going to get out of Pearl Harbor as fast as they could to try to come help. At that point, they would already have like a trap set up for, you know, the Pacific Fleet, have the carrier groups in different locations, and then swarm them and have that big pivotal naval battle that would give Japan naval supremac. MSE and be able to kind of shore up any of the questions on if they would be ruling the Pacific.

So they end up launching an attack or launching a strike on Midway. And at the same time, they're launching a land attack. Planes are taking off for Midway to go search for them. You have all these planes in the air that are trying to essentially spot the Japanese fleet because they know that's who they're looking for. Long story short, the day ends with all four of the Japanese carrier sunk. Boom. Through a combination of just fucking grit and some luck and great fucking timing.

And one American carrier, four to one? Was that what it was? Yeah. So what ends up happening is after three, two or three of the Japanese carriers are hit, they launched another wave of attack because they now know that there are American carriers out there. They can identify it by the types of planes that they're going against. And out of the recovered planes that were based on like other aircraft carriers, they now have to land on the ones that are still actually floating.

They're getting groups together to send them back out. During one attack, they actually hit the Yorktown a couple times, peel back to go refuel and rearm, and in the time frame it takes another wave of the Japanese planes to get there. They've repaired the Yorktown enough to move under her own power and put out all the fires to where she doesn't look like she's damaged, and she ends up taking another round of attacks from the Japanese thinking that she's completely active undamaged carrier.

So in a way, she actually kind of takes the brunt of the hits. But ends up sparing the other carrier that's with them from any damage. Sacrifice. Yeah. Unfortunately, while they're trying to tow it back, the Yorktown actually gets sunk by a submarine while it's sitting next to like a repair ship and ends up going down. She did her job. She did her job.

And here's the big kicker here. So not only does Japan lose a huge. portion of its carrier fleet. The more important thing that it loses here is because all four of these carriers end up going down means a lot of the crew on these carriers all go down as well, which means a lot of the pilots that are in these planes and no longer have somewhere to land also end up going down. Japan didn't have the type of resources or, I guess, foresight, to be actively continually training pilots to replace the ones that they've lost, because they haven't really lost them in these large numbers,

nor have they lost the carrier. So they're not, you know, from a raw material standpoint, maybe they don't have that yet, but they're not cranking out ships in anywhere near the capacity that the United States is at this point. So losing these resources, these experienced pilots, not only that, but I think it's kind of, when I was walking through the Missouri doing the tour,

it gave me a respect of what we were talking about, about how well you would have to know your job and know the ship, to be effective in battle and how hard it would be for someone just stepping into that role on a new ship to be anywhere near as effective as you are. Also from a resource standpoint, like, man, standing on that thing and trying to understand the time and resources that went into making, not an aircraft carrier, but just like a battleship and feeling the weight and the thickness of the metal and feeling like you're just on something that shouldn't really be floating that it's so solid and waste so much. much that it doesn't even move in the water. It's just completely stationary. And I'm sure once it gets out onto the open ocean, it's got waves, it's less than that,

but you're just on this fucking floating tank. And to lose one of these things or to lose an aircraft carrier, building these things takes time and resources that the Japanese just didn't have to spare. And also didn't have the manpower of people skilled enough to be these air crews that can fix these planes, reload these planes, get them on and off the decks. that's something that weakens them almost even more than losing the carriers themselves. I want to say that the beginning forces, the beginning pilots for the Japanese that flew the zeros, their training consisted of five to six hundred hours of flight time.

And also like engagement over China and a real world practice of landing and taking off and those crews on those aircraft carriers getting it down to be like, we can have a bomb and have this thing to refueled in five minutes and have you back up in the air. And to go from what May to June was the difference between Coral Sea and Midway? Complete 180. Midway. Well, I don't think they lost a whole ton of pilots in the Coral Sea, but if you lose 14, 20 pilots that you don't have for Midway, 14 to 20 pilots can make a difference. It's a strength that you have that if you're throwing new people in that seat

that have trained for 100 hours but have never been up and actually fought in the air, they never had a dogfight, anything like that. It totally changes the perspective of how those battalions are going to go out and fly. Because if you have guys that don't know what they're doing, they're going to get picked off quicker. If that guy was supposed to be watching your six, watching your tail, whatever, if he's gone, then you're up there exposed and you don't have that same safety net

that you would have with more experienced pilots. Well, fuck, man, not only that, but like the thing that you're flying as well. Like, if that gets damaged and you park it and the guy that's performing maintenance is like two weeks out of a rushed fucking position of trying to teach them how to repair this plane. Yeah.

How the fuck do they know what they're doing and how can you trust the once that thing gets back up in the air, it's not going to crap out on you. Yeah, it's very true. Like, the Japanese ended up losing like over 3,000 men during that, the United States lost 362. Pretty good.

Yeah. And I mean, 248 carrier aircraft, all of them were lost. It's just insane that like, that's pilots and their crews and that's just completely irreplaceable. And at this point, too, the Americans are bringing in new replacement pilots

that have been training. They now have surviving pilots. that are getting experience under their belts in these crews that are finding how to fight on par with the Japanese. I think it is the most pivotal turning point. I think I mentioned this during the Midway episode. I do think that's the exact moment. This battle is the exact moment where Japan went from moving forward and getting ready to throw a punch to just having to step back and try to defend itself.

Yeah, but I definitely think that it was a turning point. I think we're going to talk about it here in a second. I think that this coming up is what really changed the way that the Japanese looked at the Americans. Because before this, I struggle with where this all comes from. The Japanese had a real great disdain for the Americans. They believed that the Americans were fat, lazy, didn't want it, which I guess is a little bit more indicative of America now. On the nose. Yeah.

but they believed that they weren't like true combatants. They didn't think that they were able to fight the way that the Japanese were. Most instances, we weren't. And we're going to see later on the Japanese believe that what America or what the military would do would be to try to draw them back into the area to where they can bring in their weapons and their machinery and their artillery to try to fight their battles. But that's strategy of war. Like, that's, it's not necessarily a bad thing to say that that's how the United States kills people.

Yeah. Like, I get the Bushido code. I get the way of the samurai. I understand that these guys are trained in hand-to-hand combat and can really go at each other. But all that matters is that you win. Yeah. It doesn't really matter how it works. September, the Japanese forces suffered their first land defeat.

They were attacking a, um, Royal Australian Air Force Base that was in New Guinea. They used something called the Kokota track, and it was a 60-mile single-file thoroughfare from Papua New Guinea from the north that ended up down at Port Moresby. They were able to move inland really, really well through this. But if you're trying to take over places now, if you're losing naval battles, you're like, well, let's just go back to landing on islands and trying to take

over bases and trying to take land that way. And then you're getting repelled there. All of a sudden, everything that you were doing that's working is not working anymore. Yeah. And that slowly, I think, really starts to scare the Japanese. Well, what's crazy is it took this long for them to get handed their first defeat. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

But they just got handed one from a naval standpoint at Midway. And now it's starting to see like, okay, these guys aren't invincible. Like, there's ways to beat these guys. I think they've thrown at this point, they've thrown their best punches. And this is the nightmare scenario. Well, it's going to be one of two nightmare scenarios for Yamamoto here coming up. Yep.

But this was his exact nightmare scenario of saying this thing had to be quick because now we're to the point where the industrial might of America and maybe a couple lucky wins and just our decryption, everything like that has now put us on par. And we're only going up while Japan is only going down at this point. Um, like you said, the, the Cicota Trail to Port Mosby is where we handed them the first defeat from the Aussies. So good day to you guys. August 7th, this is where we start getting into the battles that people probably have heard about more. And we get into Guadalcanal. 16,000 Marines land on Guadalcanal and Tulagi. This is my, this is where America shows that this is what they're going to do. Like Midway was the turning point. Guadalcanal is, the United States being like, we're here and there's nothing you can do about it. Well, here's the thing. It didn't start out very well for this campaign because the two days after they land, you get what's called the Battle of Savo Island, which is a small island, I think, off Guadalcanal. And you get four Allied heavy cruisers that are sunk to zero Japanese ships. And, man, like, I don't know how I can stress this. When the biggest thing when I was

walking around that ship and like touching shit is just like trying to understand the resources that would go into this and even a smaller version like a heavy cruiser and being like when you just look at something sinking like on a on pictures and a tv show you're just like oh we must have just replacements for that there is so much technologically that it takes to build that ship um this is kind of off topic but just from like a survivability standpoint on these shifts which is I didn't even think about. So I walk into the bridge. Remember I told you the bridge is smaller

than I thought it would be like. Moody seemed to make the bridge a bigger stage to be able to have more people there to make it look like stuff is going on. So the bridge was relatively small. Probably from honestly, maybe like 15 feet wide and hardly maybe three or four feet deep.

Oh, really? Behind the windows and where the captain would be sitting off to the right is the thickest, fucking steel cylinder. And I'm going to show you a picture, but I'll describe it while I'm doing it. What this is, is this is the fucking wheelhouse. This is where the navigate, or the guy that's steering the boat actually sits.

And he has these tiny little slits. Here, you'll look at that. And then flip to, flip the other direction. So it's probably a one foot to a foot and a half thick steel door. And the walls of this cylinder are probably about a foot and a half thick with just little peep slats that are in the center to the right and left, maybe like at 10 and 11 o'clock and 1 and 2 o'clock. So he can just barely see out the windows that are on the bridge. And all it has in there is the steering wheel for the ship and some navigation stuff. The captain sits outside of this and can talk to him and

give him commands. This is in case anything like a shell comes through and destroys the bridge. it doesn't lose the ability to steer itself out of danger that that person is protected and can then get the ship and still steer it if everyone else on the bridge is dead. That's the biggest door hinge that I've ever seen. Yeah. Oh my God.

I never knew just based on movies that that would be something but you walk in there and you look at the bridge and it's like, of course. This is like literally the thing that keeps the ship on course and stirring it you would want this thing protected above all else. And we don't want it super big and easy to hit.

Yeah, exactly. Because they're already aiming for the bridge. bridge trying to take out the command structure. Don't want to make it easier on them. See, I lost my train of thought since I went into battleship shit. Guadal Canal, we lost those

four cruisers. So we've been looking at that, the amount of materials that it took just to make those four heavy cruisers, and especially for the fact that we have to be sending all these ships over from the United States, everything we lose here, every little loss, even little ones, it's you can't really afford

to do that. Well, and that's where we get something called the Iron Bottom Sound. The Iron Bottom Sound is the single most impressive amount of sunk ships in a small area that I could ever imagine. So the Iron Bottom Sound was where this Savo Island battle takes place. And it's called Iron Bottom Sound because there's so many ships that are sunk from either taking artillery, being fired upon from the air, anything like that, that you have to, uh, not drive. Navigate?

Yeah, navigate through this sound so slowly because you're going to drag your bottom along a sunk ship. Mm-hmm. So Guadalcanal is crazy. So not only is there a land component, but there's this huge sea component like Adam is talking about. So initially during that campaign for Guadalcanal, the end of, you know, landing the Marines and everything.

Of course, there's a huge Japanese presence on the island as well. So they're, you know, fighting is pretty fierce, but they're able to take what's called Henderson Field. If anyone has ever watched the HBO, the Pacific, it's like the Pacific version of Band of Brothers. One of the episodes kind of focuses on this for Henderson Field. And having this little airstrip is so strategically important because if you can land planes and you can start sending, you know, bombers and also even fighters armed with like missiles and stuff like that, you can then pinpoint these little defensive positions on the other parts of the island and take them out. You also have the advantage of being able to put planes on there

that can then go out and try to bomb the enemy ships around there. So apparently the Americans, because they were able to take Henderson Field, they had this huge daytime advantage. So during the day is when they would be resupplying, sending ships in, because they would have air cover. So you're not going to get enemy battleships or anything like that coming in because they're just going to be bombed and sunk. Nighttime, the Japanese fucking owned it. Their way of fighting in at night, they were able to like pinpoint target. It was something that they trained to do and apparently that the American Navy didn't train that much because they weren't very good. So that would be when the Japanese essentially would resupply all their troops, bring in fresh guys.

And there was a thing called the Tokyo Express that was basically, what the Americans or the Allies had named this supply line from Japan down to all these different islands that kept just bringing in more and more soldiers and materials to keep this fight going. The tricky thing about Guadalcanal was they took

what they then named Henderson Air Force Base, and it was named Henderson after, I think it was a star in Midway, somebody that had a pretty good run at Midway. But they took Henderson Air Force Base like basically unopposed. Yeah. Because the Japanese had actually sunk themselves

further into the island to defend. And I'm sure it had to be the eeriest feeling to roll up and maybe have a little bit of gunfire or a little bit of artillery going like just for cover. Yeah. And then you show up and there's just an abandoned airfield. You got to imagine that almost, it would almost be worse to have it be completely silent

and have the anticipation of waiting for fucking artillery or machine guns to open up on you and just have the same thing. sounds of the jungle than not to be in an active firefight and actually know you're being shot at or know that you know where the enemy's at yeah that to me seems so scary to just be able to roll up on there um something pretty fun the way that they had figured out that guadalcanal would be a place that they needed to be was there were actually these things called coast watchers um they were natives that lived on the islands that the i believe it was the australia

had given radios to. And if anything looked fishy, if there were any imperial boats down there doing anything, these coastal watchers would get on the radio and be like, hey, there's something going on here. So they were actually spotted by civilians starting to build this air force or this airfield on Guadal Canal. It was like not army people that were living out there

that spotted them. It wasn't the Navy or anything that found. them. It was just these guys living in shacks off these islands living off the land that probably had to fire up the generator that was given to them. Fire up the genie. Yeah, with the radio to call these things. They're inviting. So everybody didn't want Japan down there. Like it wasn't just us trying to keep them out of there. Everybody was like, uh, these guys probably mean business. Well, we get to this thing called the Battle of Santa Cruz on October 26th that's around here. And it's pretty big Japanese W. So

even though we're trying to turn the tide a little bit, they're still doing some work down here in these islands. They end up sinking the USS Hornet, which is one of our carriers. The Enterprise is heavily damaged. Now, a little bit before this, back in September, another one of our carriers called the Wasp was torpedoed three times, and then I believe she sunk. And then also the Saratoga, which was another one of our carriers, was torpedoed in September and was damaged. at this point during the Battle of Santa Cruz, the only operational aircraft carrier that the Americans had anywhere in the Pacific

was the Enterprise. That's a... God damn. That's skinnier teeth. That's one left. Was this also the stretch of time when we accidentally fired a torpedo and hit the Australian cruiser that was down there?

I'm not sure. Okay, because I know that there was an Australian cruiser that took some friendly fire that then we ultimately ended up having to sink ourselves because they had already evacuated the ship. And we couldn't keep it. Yeah, we couldn't keep it above water. So we'll send another one out. So this is, just someone's clear, this is your second torpedo that you're hitting us with.

They said they fired, I think it was 340 artillery shells to sink this thing. Yeah. So we just wasted 340 artillery shells just a sink of the doors. It's a drop in a fucking bucket, I think. There was so much going on around, around Wall Canal, not only on the island, but just around the islands for these naval battles. Part of the naval battle also during November 12th through the 15th was only one of two times in the Pacific

that battleships actually fought each other. And this is kind of where one of the battles that contributed to the Iron Bottom Sound, from what it sounds like, man, when looking at the battles that they had within here, this is the one that they would have like sneaking in at night. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, like, you would pass within like a, few thousand yards of another ship where it was almost so close that your guns couldn't even

get down to do a full broadside and they would just be unloading on each other from like point blank range from naval warfare standpoint and so just a ton of these ships just going down it's got to be crazy there if you're able to like fucking scuba dive oh i'm sure they said that they were i don't remember if it was specifically in this iron bottom but they said that they've gone down and dove down there and there's still ships that have airplanes like fully intact in the hangers yeah yeah like still pristinely or pristinely um preserved even though it's salt water it's cold enough that they're still down there yeah it's just like scuba diving to a museum my bit that's gonna be fucking crazy yeah um in result of that again when we're kind of going over here like

guadalcanal is going to get its own episode so that's why we're not focusing on it too much just kind of letting you guys know what the progression of events is. Japan evacuates Guadalcanal in February of 1943. So it does take them a while after 20,000 dead. That's not 20,000 casualties. We know what a casualty is. Casualties mean dead or wounded. But this is actually 20,000 dead.

Just to give you a little understanding of what that meant, 60,000 Allied ground forces compared to 36,000 Japanese forces. And how many of them were dead? 20,000. So we just wiped out almost two-thirds of the Japanese that were on that island. Yeah. 7,100 Allied deaths, 7,789 wounded. Like Chris said, 20,000 dead, 1,000 were captured.

The total ship losses, this is where the numbers blow my mind. And this is where I think you put it in perspective really well earlier. The Allies lost 29 ships. The Japanese lost 38 ships. ships. That number sounds extremely high to me, but just like you were explaining earlier, there's so many different classifications and so many different smaller ships that accompany the big ones. You could be thinking of, they're going to record any ship that's not, that could be destroyers, that could be cruisers, that could technically be support or

ships that are with them for like rearmaments and stuff like that. It could be fueling ships with them. They have torpedo boats that are smaller boats that are able to be a lot more maneuverable, that just have like two torpedo launchers on the outside. But they're really vulnerable. They're like made of wood usually. But anytime those get sunk. But still, the simple fact that you're talking about,

you know, almost 60 ships or more, actually like closer to 70 ships that were lost during just kind of this campaign, it's pretty staggering. Well, and that's when you were talking about just the amount that goes into every one of those ships

and even smaller ones. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they could figure out the tonnage to how much weight is, down there and steel, but it just has to be millions of pounds of steel. Yeah. And how much money? Yeah.

Just for all those ships to be sitting on the bottom there. And just in one small sound, just in one area. This isn't like spread out across the ocean. This is in one concentrated spot. Well, here's the thing, too, is like this is where it starts to kind of dawn me that kind of like Germany, except to a much more, more of a variety. Japan is like fighting on 50 fronts here. Yeah.

True, they're only fighting, you know, a couple different opponents. They're fighting the United States for the majority. They are fighting some British that are down there, Australians. Also, you get some of the British India forces when we're talking about like Burma and everything. But, and also the Chinese. So Japan is fighting in so many different areas here. They have so many people allocated. It's just the number of people that are able to field for their military is kind of staggering.

Yeah, the, I listen to a podcast. from, he was an Australian guy that went back up, he fought in the war um, either he fought in the war as dad did. I don't remember that part. But he'd gone back up to Japan and he was actually interviewing former Japanese soldiers and just sort of like

how they felt about their service time. And the devotion to fighting for the emperor, I think is unmatched. I understand that Pearl Harbor was a pretty big deal and it was pretty good for Army recruitment I think this belief that you were going to be able to go and fight for the emperor and die for the cause and that this was the most noble outcome

that your life could ever have was dying in battle was so strong that their resupply of people was just... Never ran out. There was always someone willing to... It was an honor to be able to be able to step into that role. Well, and it was even an honor to die in that role.

So if you're not afraid of death because you feel like that's going to honor your family, anybody's going to be stepping up into that. Yeah. Well, we're getting to a point where so many things are happening at different points in the world that we may kind of be jumping back and forth and just touching on that and stuff kind of lightly. We get what's known as the Burma campaign, and that takes place between 1942 and 1943. this is basically Japan versus British India and not going to go into really a lot of details just know that there's fighting in Burma but something that comes of this

is you get this famine in Bengal where it ends up leaving 3 million people dead you never fucking hear about no I know we get the Holocaust 6 million everything I'm not at all you know trying to make light of that or anything like that but you think you would also hear as part of just learning about the Pacific theater that there was this famine caused by the war,

exacerbated by it that left three million people dead. Yeah. Yeah. I think that I hope that the belief in mentioning it less and not really ever mentioning it is the fact that the famine was sort of caused by the war, but it wasn't like directly a part of it. Yeah.

That maybe they can try to justify not saying that. But any time... They didn't die by bullets. It's famine. You can't chalk that up to war casualties. Anytime three months. million people die, we should probably hear about it. Like that, that seems like it should be a footnote in history and probably most history books,

just to kind of let people know the mass atrocities that get committed during war. So as we're kind of at the halfway point here, we're sitting kind of in 43. Just to kind of make a comparison to let you know what America has ramped up. So December 7th, 1941, this is where we stood. We had 17 battleships. we had seven fleet carriers and we had one escort carrier. By the end of May 1945, we have 23 battleships.

So we haven't done a lot. We've built a couple new ones. I think probably just retrofitted and kind of refloated the ones that they got damaged. Yeah, exactly. Why keep building more of them? 28 fleet carriers and 71 escort carriers. So as soon as we figured out in this war

that it's all about air power, that's exactly what we send the resources into. So you can imagine, although this is the numbers in 45, kind of just cut those in half and find out, we're already replacing these things as quickly as possible. Not only are we replacing them, but as they're being built, we have air crews training to go ahead and be put onto these carriers as soon as they're ready to go, so you're getting the training in there as well.

Japan is running through that issue that we were talking about before. They're just, they may be winning, but the losses that they're taking are much harder to replace those. They're hitting them much harder despite the losses being. essentially less severe from a number standpoint, from like naval battles. Well, and they're not even, they're still scoring some victories in the naval field,

but they just lost Guadalcanal. They just lost a very, very big war. And now, we now have a point where we can now launch attacks onto the next island. Well, and yeah, that's exactly what I was about to say, was we got a new strategy. We figured some shit out,

and that was island hopping. And this is where we start from Guadalcanal, Allen start working away through the Solomon's in New Guinea with this idea of all these, I don't fucking know. It's not subterranean. What's the word where you land on the beach? Oh, amphibious landings. Yeah.

We figured out that instead of flying back to the ships and going ahead and doing a couple other things and then flying out to hit them, if we can do these amphibious landings and just jump from island to island to island, we can clear these fuckers out all the way. Instead of having to take one, go back, regroup. Take two, go back, regroup. It even left you the option, too. Ribal, I think was on this island called New Britain. It was kind of part of New Guinea, I think it was.

It was like their South Pacific capital. Exactly. And so Ribal was taken over by the Japanese and was this insane fortress. And it was basically in a very advantageous position. But we just looked at it. And as we were taking these islands that were even further north between Rabal and Japan, we're just like, we don't need to put resources into this. As soon as we take these other islands, no one in Rabal is going to be resupplied.

Yeah. They're not going to do anything. We'll blockade them and they'll just, we won't have to waste the resources on it, and they'll be completely useless. So we were making strategic points like that as well. God, I'm glad you just mentioned Rabal. Why? Well, I think we're ready to talk about Mr. Yamamoto again.

Okay. Um, Admiral Yamamoto had decided that he needed a little, uh, he needed the troops to see his face. He wanted to go on like a tour of the South Pacific. You'd press the flesh. Yeah. Yeah, you got to show up there.

You got to kiss a few, uh, younger troops and shake some hands. Um, and those good old code breakers showed back up again. And those codebreakers intercepted the flight plan for Yamamoto to go down and survey the South Pacific. So, and just a brilliant move. April 1943, we intercepted the transmissions and intercepted his flight plans, his flight leaving Rubul that was going down to a place called Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. Bougainville sounds like a wild place. we go ahead and send 16 P-38s to intercept his flight. They ended up shooting down his T1-323,

and it crashed into the jungle. Upon further review, when they pulled his body out of the wreckage, he had four or five bullet wounds in him. So we didn't just shoot down the plane. He was definitely dying as he crashed down into the jungle. The P-38s are badass man. P-38 lightning. it's playing that basically kind of remember the one Howard Hughes crashed in

with the twin boom out the back and the two propellers on each side of the golf course into the house he was going to crash onto the golf course but then he was in for and then he hit into the houses so it was a version of the P38 he did someone else designed it and these things were fast they were meant for longer range because they could carry more fuel and because the props weren't in front of the nose in the cockpit all the armaments were just right out in front of the pilot had like 20mm cannon, a bunch of like 50 caliber. I don't know if it had any 30 calibers,

but basically sending 16 of these things, they weren't going to miss. I can't even imagine these things just shown up and seeing even if they were split up and you only had two or three of them, you know you weren't fucking getting away. And this brings up a very tough thing for the United States. So is to not tip off the Japanese

that we had broken their code. We just shot down the architect of the plan on Pearl Harbor and kind of this whole entire idea. But we can't say that we know that that was Yamamoto that we shot down. This has to just be a normal thing that happens in the air. We ran across some planes and ended up shooting them down. I think at that point, the concern of,

is this going to let them know we broke the code versus are we going to take out the architect of not only Pearl Harbor, Midway, you know, the attempts like that, but also someone that could potentially prolong this war? Well, they did, but at the same time, the United States couldn't say that they had done it. They had to wait until Japan had announced that Yamamoto had died for them to be like, oh, he was up there, we didn't know. Oh, gotcha, okay. So it took them. Then it make it seem like they had just caught a plane during patrol and they'd shot it. it down. Exactly.

We didn't know it was his. How are you not traveling with a fighter escort? They said what they did. Oh. Those P38s tore through the escort and everything. Okay. It wasn't, I mean, it was a bloodbath up there that the escort, 16 of those things. I mean, that's a lot.

So they said that it had taken Japan a number of weeks to announce that Yamamoto had died. And it was like the hardest secret to try to keep in the United States to not say that they had taken out Yamamoto. We got them. We killed. Well, and they had, before Coral C happened, they had an issue because they picked that one up through the code breakers as well.

And fucking MacArthur is talking to the media. And MacArthur says that he can't say what's going on, but there's something big that's about to happen. They're like, dude, we told you that because you're, you should know that shit. You're the Supreme

Commander of the South Pacific Fleet. We told that to keep in confidence. Let's not say anything. Let's not spoil this. So to sit on this, to sit on Yamamoto being taken out and like them going down and finding his body. They had to go send someone down to MacArthur. Yeah. And being like, you're fucking sequestered for an entire week until the news actually comes out. Just any reporter that comes up to the embassy wherever he is, they just fucking slap the phone out of the hand. Like, no, no comment. November 22nd of 43, we get what's called the Cairo Conference. Whereas we had the conference between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Casablanca, correct?

This one takes place between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Generalissimo. Is it Kenpai Czech? How do you say it? Changai Czech? Shanghai, Czech. Shanghai check. I think I just said it three different ways, but Shanghai, Czech. There you go.

That's what it is. Okay. So they all meet in Cairo to discuss kind of the... the plan for focusing and kind of sorting out the thing with Japan. They end up coming up basically with kind of terms, I guess, of what they would present, like kind of the outline of terms, what they would present to Japan to be at surrender. And just basically get together to let people know, hey, we're all talking, we have this Japan thing, we're trying to figure out, nobody worry.

One thing that's not really touched on a lot in the Pacific Theater is like, submarine warfare. Crazy. And it's crazy that it's not touched upon more because you do. Here's the thing. Like submarine warfare in the Pacific or in the Atlantic because you have the U-boats and everything, that gets a lot of shine. But the European theater was these big land battles, whereas the big events that happened, usually the people really paid attention to in the Pacific were these big sea battles. And with submarines.

Warfare, these guys were not supposed to be on the front page. These were, you know, used to harass, just like the Germans had done, basically to kind of blockade and starve out by taking out merchant shipping the island of Japan. And American submarines over the course of the war were responsible for 56% of merchant vessels sunk. So over half aren't due to American warships or surface ships. it's due to submarines. They also are responsible for for 28% of the warships. So almost a third of the actual warships

that were sunk in the Pacific were sunk by United States submarines. It only makes sense, too, because if you see it working so well on merchant ships, why are we not using these in battles? And it's such a, it's a larger area that you're going to be hunting. And one thing that, so at the Pearl Harbor Memorial, they had the USS Bofin, which was the submarine. And it was known as the Avenger Pearl Harbor because I think it was commissioned right after Pearl Harbor, but it ended up sinking 40 ships.

And sub-warfare didn't start out like this during World War II. Essentially, there was something that kind of took place halfway along where someone different was put in charge of like submarine command and instituted more aggressive tactics. They also had an issue where the torpedoes, and I think we discussed this actually during Midway or something about the American torpedoes being absolute shit. they wouldn't detonate A bunch of them would be duds and everything They kind of fix that And throughout the course of the war from 41 when we entered all the way up to 45

The amount of missions It started out where it was like we sent out 200 missions And we got 100 kills The next year it was like we sent out 200 missions And we got 200 kills Next one 300 missions 400 like so each year Subsequently they were doing more and more damage

Well Nate also figured out a strategy it's the skip I think it's the skip shot where instead of as far as dropping bombs instead of torpedoes they weren't as accurate dropping from high distances

so what they would do would they would drop lower to get flatter against the water and would actually drop early so as soon as the bomb hit the water it would run right into the side of the ship instead of trying just to drop it straight down. They were trying to hit it broadside

instead of trying to drop it from the top. Yeah. So once they had figured out that strategy as far as the airplanes hitting the ships, all of a sudden, we start seeing numbers rack up way quicker. And by the time we get to

where we're headed pretty soon, which some people refer to it as the Normandy landings of the Pacific in Saipan, there's one of the craziest air battle ass whippings that I've ever heard of in my entire life.

One thing before we get to that, there was a operation called Operation Halestone. I don't know why I think this is so cool, but at these places in the Pacific, they would find like these lagoes or these archipelagos little chains of islands that were like protected natural harbors, and they would just turn these things into like fortresses. They would build all of the support structure for all these ships, little airfields that could protect them and then they would have these little anchorage points to basically park these fleets. One of the ones that the Japanese used was called Truck Lagoon, and it's this massive huge natural lagoon out in the middle of this island chain. They were able to basically turn the entire shoreline

put into basically like barracks and like resupply places and then have like an airfield where they could protect it. And this Operation Hellstone or yeah, Hellstone was to attack this. So a bunch of carrier aircraft took off, and as they got over this, like just a few days before the Japanese had got wind of this that it might happen. And so they pulled out a big portion

of their active fleet, but they still ended up leaving a bunch of ships that they couldn't get out. And it was just a fucking field day. They completely took out all of these ships. They ended up using Truck Lagoon for a little while as like a staging area than for the American Pacific Fleet. One thing I thought was really cool is,

and something I didn't think about until we were touring the Missouri is like we were walking through like the bakery and stuff like that and my wife was looking everything I was like yeah I mean these things had to have kind of like comforts and had to basically be these little operational cities

here at this truck lagoon they had just a bakery ship a ship that only served as a bakery that just was cranking out fresh bread and pastries and everything like that and then would just shuttle them over to the mainland or to the land. They had a ship that was just strictly

like an ice cream one. So because this was basically so far away from Pearl Harbor and everything, any of these, this would also be where you would bring in like your mobile dry docks. So there were these massive, basically ships that could sink down in the

water, you would pull a warship into it and then it would re, you know, push all the water out of these big like a lock. Cavities, yeah, and then raise it up to where they could actually fix these on the go for more minor issues that they could just try to fix and get the ship battle ready again. And so you would have all of this stuff and you would have to have these ships around supporting kind of basically this little city that had sprung up. And then anyone that was like on leave or ships that were needing to be resupplied or taking a rest, these guys would come and be able to kind of have some R&R on this island and have some ice cream, some fucking donuts, whatever they needed.

Did you get to see the dry docks at Pearl Harbor? I saw one. So on the scale I saw a floating one and I saw a regular one On the scale of magnitude with a regular one Is it just like an impossibly big space Because just looking at the size of the ships That they would have to dry dock to work on

Or to build to construct It just seems like an impossibly large area It looks like they're digging a foundation For a very large building Yeah Because it's insanely deep But it's got to be long too No yeah it's insanely long too

some of them are really long because during the attack on Pearl Harbor, one of the battleships was in there with two ships parked in front of it. It's crazy how big those things have to be. I know. Huh. So after that there's also a Japanese offensive in India in March of 44, they're not done. They're pretty much finding that any time they run into like a stall in one direction,

they just kind of pivot and they're like let's see if we can take more land and resources over in this. So they're constantly trying to just kind of fight all these fronts at the same time. They had this operation called Z and it was operation to counter Americans basically on the outer perimeter. And because of things like Guadal Canal, things like New Guinea, they started to get the sense that they were being overextended. You're wanting to spread out your tendrils as far as you can. But at the same time, when you're manning all these little islands, these things can, get bypassed like we did with Rabul. Oh, yeah.

Or, you know, just have an insane amount of, like, forces be put on these islands and then take them away. So Japan was like, man, we kind of have to establish what's going to be our perimeter and just reinforce these positions because the way it's going right now, they're kind of taking these islands as they land on them. Yeah, they're taking losses, but we're taking heavier losses. And then that brings us to March of 44 later in March where we get the Mariana campaign. Yeah, this is a This is close to my heart The Marion Islands Were a pretty big move into Japanese territory

Because their defensive line This was like the first push Deep into their defensive line And this was going to give us access To be able to start launching planes And heading them towards the mainland Which is is something that we were very scared of ourselves.

Oh, yeah. It definitely a two-fold operation where not only are you able to stop any of the Japanese access to anything south of there, any of the air pipeline that they have to try to bring planes down there to establish or like kind of repopulate their airfields or even the shipping that's still trying to make it back to bring those raw materials back to Japan. Yeah. Every little bit you get closer, you're going to be able to kind of cut. that offer tighten the noose on that a little bit more. And then like you said, they have the new B-29s that have that range.

So establishing airfields there in the Marianas would allow them to essentially start actively bombing the Japanese home islands. Well, in the Marianas Islands, there were three islands that they consider of great importance. Guam, Saipan, and Tickenin. Yeah. What is it? Let's see. Tinian. Tinian. Okay. Saipan was kind of where this all starts, and that is the battle that starts on June 15, 1944. I personally have a pretty good connection to Saipan.

I grew up with a lot of Chamorro people, and those are the people that are from Saipan originally. The nicest people that you'll ever meet. just very, very cool, very late back, total Islander vibe, very loyal. They taught me a little bit of their Chamorro language. I learned Saddamu, which they told me meant, hello, how are you? Doesn't. And yes. Oh, it does?

No, no, in true eighth grade fashion, that was what they told me. And then we were at Luau, went up to one of their moms there, said, Saddamu, and she turned around and smacked me. And I said, what? And she goes, where'd you learn that? I turned around and I pointed at my buddy Vince and she walked right over and she slapped him too. She goes, we don't let a lot of white people in here. Let's not teach him bad things.

And just awesome, awesome people that have an awesome, awesome history. And this was the first time that the United States Army and the Allies had run into one of these islands where there's an actual population of citizens that are there. there was nobody there was no population living in guadal canal no wattle canal was a place that was full of all sorts of diseases and malaria and shit like that that was just kind of uninhabitable well here's the thing too is it makes sense because as you start getting closer to the japanese home islands you're going to have people to want to look closer to that and as that society there were okinawans there were this is a very strong fortification that the japanese had and then you had the chumoro people the fact that that like what was committed to this operation is pretty insane. You had 535 warships, 127,000 plus troops to go ahead and take this campaign. This is kind of where you get a sense of where the stories about the island fighting

and like the crazy shit that happens during these, you know, jungle hand-to-hand combat charges, things like that really come to light. June 15th or sorry, June 15th was when we, We invaded Saipan. So we're there for a little under a month. There was a night on June 6 to 7th where three to 4,000 Japanese soldiers performed a bonsai charge. And were essentially completely just wiped out. But this is the first taste of what we're starting to see where these people are literally just throwing their lives away just completely recklessly and are willing just to run strong.

into machine gun fire to try to protect what technically isn't even one of their home islands yet, but just one of the fucking territories that they took. Well, and Sipan is I don't know, man, it sucks.

It's like as we started doing more shit on land, there started to be more people dying, which definitely makes sense. Before the bonsai attack, basically what we wanted to do on land. We'll talk about the turkey shoot after because that's a good story to bring some some happiness back to this.

Yeah. Once the Marines hit, they started pushing up into Saipan. The high ground was the mountain that was in the middle of Saipan. I forgot what it was called. It's the Mount Surabachi of Saipan.

There's always a mountain on these fucking... No, Mount Surbachi was on. I think Yijima. Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, because that's what they put the flag. This is like a reoccurring theme. They find the high ground. which is strategically,

it's smart and everything, and they basically turn these fucking hills into these underground fortresses. Yeah. Once we get the high ground, they end up starting to get desperate. This is what Chris was talking about with these bonsai attacks.

There were points in time during war when the Japanese army would show up to fight the Marines and they would have women and children as human shields in front of them. And unfortunately, the Marines were wired in a way to where they weren't out to shoot and kill women and children, but when the Japanese start firing from behind them, they have to keep themselves alive.

So firing back in is not a real good outcome for anybody that's there. These bonsai attacks just went on and on and on. The Japanese ended up losing 25,000 people. 5,000 of them committed Sapuku, which is the ritual killer. the way of the samurai they disembowl themselves basically 8 to 10 civilians and this is the shit that fucking kills me

8 to 10 civilians died There were families that were killing their children 8 to 10,000 or 8 to 10,000 What did I say, million? You just said 8 to 10. Oh, more than 8 to 10. Yeah. 8 to 10,000 civilian deaths

and this is where I think the propaganda of World War II as far as on the Axis side the Germans did a great job of propaganda the Japanese had gone to all these islands and told them that the white devil was going to show up and instead of liberating them was going to torture them worse than what the Japanese were already doing to them. The Japanese weren't nice to these people. You think we're bad.

These white devils show up. You're going to see that we've actually been taking it easy on you guys. Yeah. Like, how do you get them that far down the rabbit hole? So can you please explain to me, sir, how they're going to chop our heads off more or differently, how it's going to be worse? Also, I think there was a little issue with the fact that one of the things that we started using on these islands to great effect, because when these Japanese people or the Japanese soldiers would push inward inland, they would go into bunkers. They would go into hiding spots. They would go into these pill boxes that they would have the natives help start to create them.

So we use a little something called the flamethrower. If someone is hiding in the jungle and you're having a problem finding these people hiding in the jungle, what can you remember? Move. The jungle. Let's just get rid of the jungle. And this is where we get fucking napalm and flame throwers being used. And the Zippo ones that are attached like the tanks. Strategically unsafe to go inside of a bunker or a cave with the Japanese man that's in there ready to kill you, right? If you fire the flamethrower in there, though, it'll get his ass out pretty quick.

I got a big problem with the flamethrower. You got a big fucking tank on your back. And I guarantee you the gauge of that steel of that tank is not thick enough to stop a bullet. Yeah. You always got to hope that everything's in front of you at all times Do you think because the flamethrower It's got to be exciting as shit Oh yeah

But do you think that that was something that the new guy had to do Or do you think that that was something that they had to draw straws and be like I want to do the flame throw I think they wanted to Really? I really do I don't want to wear that I don't all watch

I don't want to wear that fucking bombs strapped to my back No but I've used a weed burner before And I got to say even the power from a weed burner Just one time so you're saying one and done Yeah Okay. Yeah, you at least got to experience it. Like, you're not...

I think we're taking this a little lightly because we're talking about weeds where instead of roasting human beings. Yeah. Yeah. You kind of have to with some of these. A lot of the civilians that were lost actually threw themselves off the cliffs because they didn't want to be taken in by the Americans. And it's just so sad how deep the Japanese had their hooks in these people.

but they rebounded. It's a beautiful, beautiful island. And along with Saipan, we just basically wop their ass in Guam and took Guam over pretty quick. We'd actually installed guns and artillery on Saipan

that was actually able to reach Tinian. Tinian. So, we were firing artillery from one island to help take Tinian. That's fucking cool. Yeah. Just to think about it that way is so fun. One real quick story, and we'll talk about, we'll do an episode on Saipan.

But there were these guys that were called the 40 Thieves of Saipan. And it was a special Marine group. They were the elite scout sniper platoon. of the sixth Marine Regiment during World War II. And they actually made landfall on Saipan before any of the other troops had gotten there. And these guys were so outfitted with things that they weren't given boots.

They were given like shoes. So their prints wouldn't match up to what a normal soldier... Like a soft bottom shoe or something like a soft bottom shoe. Instead of metal helmets, they were giving cloth hats like they. had in World War I. So as they were... Like the raisin shit to not make noise or anything like that.

Exactly. They were called the 40 thieves because, again, they weren't given any supplies or anything like that. So they would just kind of go through and steal what they wanted to. And before they went into Saipan and occupied territory, the U.S. government actually gave them a booklet of how to interact with native people so is to not put them off and to give the Americans a bad name. Like it was actually like a little book

And be like say hello You're our ambassador Offer them chocolate Yeah They had something called laundry day Where they were They didn't want to Do their laundry

So what they would do is they'd take their old dirty uniform And they'd go out on the lines Where guys were drying their nice new clean shit And they would hang up their shit on the line And then steal clean clothes Just the wildest bunch of guys What was Roosevelt's wife's name? Eleanor

Google Eleanor Roosevelt's quote on Marines It's you got to read it It's fucking incredible So the fun story about these guys is there was one dude And his name was Marvin Strombo They really wanted to be a part of the Normandy landings They really wanted to be a part of the battle for Berlin

But they were never going to make it over there They were in the Pacific and they wanted something good So they wanted to take the capital of Saipan. It was still occupied by the Japanese. There weren't any movements for them to go into the city yet. But these 40 thieves were like, we want in there. We want to go in there first. On the way marching to the city,

they'd noticed that there was a group of Japanese soldiers that had been killed by a bombardment, something like that. And Marvin thinks that he sees a World War I cannon. So he walks over there, he's like, what is this? Just a mirage in his head. Standing over this dead general, and he looks down at him, and he's a 40 thief. So he starts going through his pockets and trying to see if there's anything that he can find. Well, when he's digging in there, he pulls out a picture.

And in the picture, it's the general's family. He has the exact same amount of sisters that Marvin had, the exact same amount of brothers that Marvin had. the picture was taken in this guy's home province and Marvin grew up in a place called Dixon Montana which is in the Rocky Mountains and the terrain looked exactly like his home so he's looking at the picture and he's like oh my god this guy's me

this could be me one day kind of shakes that off starts digging through and ends up pulling out what they call good luck flags and what good luck flags were they were like kind of handkerchiefs they were the Japanese flag and before you left all your family and friends would sign it and it was like

a sign of good luck that you always carried with you. And Marvin's like, oh, good luck. Maybe I can take this. And he thinks about it a little bit more. And he's like, probably bad juju. Like, there's still a little bit of honor among these guys out there. An honor amongst thieves. Yeah.

But in the end, he's like, well, I'm going to make a promise to this guy that I'm going to take this. And once the war is over, I'm going to take it back to his family. I'm going to give this back to his family. Flash forward to Marvin being a 93 year old man in 2017. He flies to Japan, goes to the province, meets with the man's grandchildren, and gives them back the flag. Just to close the loop on a promise that this dude made to a dead general in the middle of Saipan that he never met, he never knew, but he wanted to make sure to deliver that. There's got to be something that's not just the bond of brotherhood for the person. people that you're fighting with and fighting next to, but there's probably some type of crazy

shared connection of the same battle or war or place and everything that you know what you went through at that point and that place that you have to know what the struggle for that person going through, that there's got to be some type of honor about that. Yeah, just so cool that it was, I think it was 93 years old when he went and did it. So this is like 70 plus years later, maybe. He's like, I got to do this shit. Now I don't know much time I got left. Yeah, man. All right. Oh, did you get the quote? Yes. So the reason that Eleanor says this is the boys had gone back down to, I think it was after Guadalcanal.

They went back down to New Zealand for a little R&R to get rested up to head back out there. And there was some scuttlebutt that there was going to be a famous person that was coming down to visit them. And somehow among the Marines are like, oh shit, it's going to be Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth, the hot-ass chick that they're falling over in Shawshank Redemption is going to come down and see. It's like a USO tour or the star. So finally one day, the plane shows up and all the Marines are gathered around and they're like,

oh my God, it's going to be Rita Hayward. She's so fucking hot. This is going to be the coolest shit ever. Spinkink's going to be full. Yep. Yeah. Plane door opens up. And FDR's less than Rita Hayworth attractive wife,

Eleanor Roosevelt, gets off the plane. and they immediately start booing her. They booed the first lady of the United States because she wasn't Rita Hayworth. And this is the quote that Eleanor came out of about the Marines. Oh, this one doesn't sound like it's a knock against the Marines. This one sounds good.

No, yeah. Is it the Marines I have seen around? Yeah. Okay. The Marines I've seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morals, or morale, and the lowest morals of individuals. group of animals I've ever seen.

Thank God for the United States Marine Corps. She's woman got booed because she wasn't as hot as Rita Hayworth and she's the first lady and she's like, I fucking love these guys. I tried. I put on my nice earrings. They were just kind of animals and mongrels. She had said something else about she believed

that before the Marine should be let back into the United States after the war, they should have a year quarantine outside the U.S. before they came back. And the same Marvin guy that gave that lucky flag back was like, She's probably right. Yeah.

All right. So now we come to the Battle of the Philippine Sea. So we kind of move from the battles that are going on on land, now to the battles that are going on in the oceans surrounding these islands. Well, the Battle of Philippine Sea actually starts. After the Marines are dropped onto Saipan, all of those ships go ahead and take off because the Japanese are starting to approach their position.

Yeah. So all those Marines just got dropped on Saipan and turned around and all the ships are going the opposite direction. So you guys aren't hanging around? So the Battle of the Philippines Sea, June 19th, this is... What's the nickname? Huh? What's the nickname? The Great Mariana Turkey Shoot.

So this ends up being up at the time one of the largest engagements between two of the opposing navies. So with the U.S., you have 15 flea. carriers. So up to this point June 19th we have access to 15 of these fleet carriers so we are cranking these things out. Japanese were able to go ahead and muster together non-carriers we had 950 plus

carrier aircraft. I think the carriers for the Japanese had a complement of planes again but they've been losing so many air crews that these are also green air crews, green pilots, they're nowhere near as effective and then because of the area that they were in, they had access to 500 land-based planes, which is huge.

Doesn't matter. No, it doesn't matter. So one thing that was kind of some new advances, it seems like, is during the war, I kind of feel like the United States wasn't married to its naval doctrine, like the Japanese where the Japanese were super strict about procedure that had to be followed. If this happened, you had immediately, it was like one of those things where it's like, is your stomach sorry? Yes or no?

Yes. and it goes down, have you been eating this lately yesterday? You had to follow a very specific set of instructions, and if this applied, you had to go to this. The Americans constantly were learning from the ships that had been sunk, from creating new ones. They started putting, you know, we had a radar during this time frame to where we could spot incoming ships.

The Japanese didn't have this on their ships. One thing that was introduced as well was these things called Combat Information Center, CICs. And the Combat Information Center in the ship, ship would essentially be this area where they would be monitoring all the radar and one person would be calling out radar positions and having fighter groups intercept the bombers or the torpedo bombers or the enemy planes that were coming in toward the carriers in their fleet. Basically, this revolutionized the way that they were able to order and patrol because you weren't

just having to basically hope someone saw somebody else and had to go after that group or maybe two of them did and they both went after the same target and then someone else snuck in. It was very well organized and the combination of both this new strategy and also the fact that the Japanese pilots were very new. Dog shit. Un experienced against a bunch of both experienced not only pilots, but all of these ships and escort ships had just this breadth of battle experience about how to shoot down these planes and how to provide combat screening for the aircraft or aircraft carriers. So I'm trying to think of how to kind of describe it.

If you had the aircraft carrier sitting in the middle of a clock, you would have one ring around it at a distance that would be like your battleships, the ones that were essentially had the most armaments on it for like anti-aircraft machine guns. Out from that, you'd have your smaller ships and then out for that, you'd have like your picket of like destroyers that would be able to spot stuff but also start firing at it. So through all of these. advancement and experience, these Japanese planes aren't doing shit. They're not making it through. We also had submarines show back up to go ahead and make an impact where torpedoes actually

sunk two of the Japanese carriers. Again, they can't afford to be losing these. And quite frankly, they're sending them out there with like half of their aircraft. They're not able to fill these things. They're basically just out there to try to hope that some miracle happens. I want to drive this home too because I find this incredible This whole thing was so much of a belt to ass domination And I hope you have these two guys names If not we're doing them a terrible disservice By the first morning

Of dog fights The Americans came back with two aces By morning To become an ace you have to shoot down five planes Yep So these two guys, by the first morning of air attacks, had taken down 10 planes between the two of them. Let me find out who these two guys were. Keep going. But just to think about that whole thing that you don't have a good force of Japanese fighter pilots that are in these zeros that used to run circles around the American planes.

But the Americans had figured out how to use what they had. Their air superiority had grown. They had gotten better planes. Somehow planes feel like they were the most dispensable thing in war. It just with the way that certain things happen. Plain losses seem like a hell of a lot. And then you have to remember that you're also tied to multiple people being in that plane at once. But most of the fighters, it was really fucking cool, seeing these things up close.

Yeah. So the dauntless dive bombers, the ones that essentially started from up high and then dove down at the target had the holes in the wings, the speed breaks. Those would have the pilot. And then behind them would be kind of your navigator, what you called your engineer. And he would be the guy that would essentially have the machine gun to be firing out the back or to the sides. I think you had something similar on the torpedo bombers. They were just slow as fuck. Oh, they were firing torpedoes.

Well, they were hauling a 2,000-pound torpedo or more in the belly of the plane. they had to be low to the water to try to drop them off. They basically just got completely dominated. But they also had an engineer in the back as well. So even losing these planes, you're losing two guys. And I'm sure the zeros were pretty similar, right? Zeros are one pilot. Any of really of the fighter aircraft, not bombers or torpedo planes, would have one guy.

Okay. So they were losing one at a time when this is happening. Yeah. But I think during this whole engagement, the only losses that the allies had in the air were like 15 or 20 planes. The parody was insane. What actually happened was the big mistake that they had made was they had actually stretched too far in their flight. And they had launched their planes.

And then they had to get the carriers up close enough for them to be able to fly before they started to lose fuel. and they launched too early so the carriers weren't able to keep up to be able to get them safely and they had lost something I want to say it was in the range and don't quote me on this number but I think this is what I heard

it was like 140 planes that they had lost just coming back to land on the carriers because they were running out of fuel so when they hit they weren't able to engage anything on the plane and would just immediately crash onto the deck they were crashing onto the deck

onto the deck so frequently that they were just pushing planes off of the side of the carriers. To try to pull somebody on it, get the pilot out, get the rubber out, push them out, wait for the next one. They were ditching into the water, and they actually had to spend like an entire day just going and picking pilots up out of the water. Just because they had launched so soon that they had underestimated the speed that they would need to be able to catch up to them before they'd run out of anything. Yeah. So they had lost more people trying to get back. or they lost more planes, I guess. There were a few pilots that had died,

but for the most part, everybody came back alive. Well, shit, I mean, you've got to think of from the standpoint of, like, if I can stay up here a little bit longer and take a couple more planes out, and if I have to end up ditching in the fleet or something like that, I can ditch in the water next to the ship or, like, close to it. That was a big job of the submarines, too, is the submarines would find down pilots. Big people up, yeah.

And pick people up. Just to think about, no other point. In time during the war, I think, would they have been so hungry to stay up there and continue firing on planes? Yeah. Because this was so easy. They called it a turkey shoot. Yeah. It was so easy that I'm sure those guys were just up there trying to pump their numbers up.

Everybody was trying to get their first plane of the day. And then if they could keep adding on trying to get an ace, that's pretty cool. I would probably try to push my fuel reserves far enough doing that. Well, and if you're engaged, if the combat is so frequent, that as soon as you shoot someone, down another plane crosses your path you're probably not looking at that fuel gauge you're just like fuck it I'm going after this one and if I have gas after or if I have

to chase another plane I'll do that I'll glide in if I have to it'll be all right I can't find the two guys names that's crazy huh yeah seems like we should know that but I mean with this many of the planes that were shot down it's

fucking crazy so they said that over the first day of battle, the Japanese lost more than 350 planes, and only 30 American planes were lost. It was only 30 American planes? Yeah, on the first day. Oh, okay. But I mean, over the course of the next few days, I mean, I think what they say ends up happening is

somewhere between the Japanese, when all of a sudden done, 550 to 645 planes destroyed to the United States 123. 123. That's fucking incredible. So, we get Japan and Guam to very advantageous positions because that means mainland Japan is within range of the B29 bombers. Excuse me. Japan kept trying to fight to get them back. They were sending raids.

And during those times, American forces were like, well, if you're going to do this, we're going to go ahead and attack your mainland. Bombing raids ensued on Tokyo, Kobe. and a couple other of the towns that were pretty strategically important. Nagoya and Osaka. That's right. Okay. There's a place called Pali, Piliu. Palilu.

And Palau? Palau? Yeah, it could be Palau. It was invaded September 15th in that last until November 27th. It resulted in the highest casualty rates among U.S. amphibious operations. So again, we're kind of getting towards the point to where we know that we're going to be able to beat Japan. And unfortunately, most things after this for some reason were a pride thing. Because if we needed to do anything, we could do anything off at the jumping point of Saipan or Guam.

Well, yeah, the point on that and kind of like jumping back just a little bit. So with... I lost my place for it. I was looking, hold on, please. Well, shit, now I can't find it. Okay. Maybe it'll come back. It'll come back.

So, what should we just do? I mean, we just got to go back and attack Japan. That's the only thing that we can do. Unless you're goddamn MacArthur and unless you made this stupid-ass promise to the Philippines that you were going to come back someday. That's what it was. Sorry, just found it again.

So it was regarding, like you were saying, We're in range for the B-29s. But if something were to happen and the planes were to get damaged, because again, they're flying over Japan, which means they're not having combat air cover. There's no fighters with them to escort them. If they get damaged, they were having to get pilots and fish them out of the ocean. So they're like, well, if we can get ourselves a little bit closer,

like let's say, hell, halfway between, there's this little island called Iwojima, halfway between the Marianas in Japan, if we can get that way, one, well, then it's half the distance and we can get more of these B-29s back. So it was getting a little bit selfish, but it was still just an extension of that island hopping way of going about this. Once you start on something, it's kind of tough to stop. Yeah. And you kind of check, check, checklist all the way until you hit your main goal.

Yeah, so we got to, we got to get into MacArthur's selfishness here. Admiral Nimitz, he was an admiral, right? Yes. Chester Nimitz. Chester was put in right after Pearl Harbor. I believe so. Not a real popular name that you hear. Nimitz is a pretty cool last name, but not somebody that gets nearly as much shine as he should.

MacArthur was kind of a blusterous guy, boisterous, really spoke his mind, kind of a Neanderthal. But he grabs a lot of headlines. He's a guy that's in the news. I can think of somebody in recent history that kind of fits that. description and it really explains how the public or parts of the public could be endearing to someone who was just, well, he's just a no-nonsense, say it like it is type person. Well, yeah, it doesn't mean he's strategically brilliant. Yeah. And to the tune of a lot more American lives, instead of just doing the right thing and doing what Nimitz wanted to do, which was head straight into Japan and try to end this thing, McArthur has to fulfill that promise coming back to the Philippines. and when he comes back to the Philippines

shit gets real rough October 20th 1944 the US 6th Army landed on Leti, Liette There was major land and air battles that cut off the Japanese reinforcements and supplies There was a giant battle on Luzon That saw the US

Use more troops Than any this blew me away Thinking about the size of the Philippines and what I'm about to say. They used more U.S. troops than in northern Africa or Italy or France. That was how many U.S. troops landed

in the Philippines, dude. That's so many people in such a small I know. And again, this is still not them getting the lion's share of the resources. They're still getting just a portion of the resources and they're still expected to do all this. Yeah, dude, so many people.

Philippines campaign is going to get its own episode just because talking about both the capture of the Philippines and then also its reacquisition we got to do it justice with more than two or three minutes of talking time huge battles yeah it's the famous I have returned from MacArthur

a lot of it's discussing him as a person but just to give you kind of a taster how crazy shit gets during the Philippines campaign 320,000 dead on the Japanese side during the Philippines that's fucking dead

that's psalm type numbers man yeah to 13, a little over 13,000 Allied soldiers dead. In the Philippines, one million Filipino civilians dead. So again, just going back, it always

takes, it's, you know, the numbers are staggering as far as like the losses in battle and things like that, but it's always the losses from the civilian populace, which are the should be the real attention getters. Well, and the shittiest part about that was we lost the Philippines.

Had they not lost the Philippines in the beginning, we wouldn't have lost a million Filipino people in recapture. And then in Luzon for the Battle Luzon, 250,000 Japanese troops were killed during the Battle of Zon. It was 80% of the Japanese troops that were there were dead. This is also where, and I think you mentioned this before, this guy, Hiro Onoda, this was the guy in the Philippines that was holding out in the jungles. Oh! That eventually surrendered in March of 1974. he had to be sure. A fucking holdout for,

fuck, 40, almost 30 years until someone finally fucking convinced him. Could you imagine? He comes out, he's like, is the war still going on? And they're like,

not here. He's like, what do you mean not here? He's like, uh, they're in Vietnam fighting right now. He's like, it's still going on

and they moved to Vietnam. I'm like, no, no, no, dude, you're like three wars behind. You were in the jungle for a really long time. What year is it?

Um, can't miss, uh, talking about Laethegolf. Uh, battle of Laetad golf kind of takes place concurrently with the Philippines as part as the Philippines campaign. Remember, with this, with the Pacific, it's almost always an accompaniment of where you're, don't get this in Europe, of a land battle and a naval battle that's going around, you know, going on around the land battle. So this ends up becoming the largest naval battle in history. Even today. basically at this point with the Japanese these are kind of last-ditch efforts by Japan to try to inflict a ton of damage and to try to kind of discourage America and try to bring them maybe to the negotiating table. So the strategy is to use the remaining carriers as bait because they're effectively useless because they don't have air crews or planes. And then move in once they take the bait, move in with their battleships to engage the carrier and carrier.

groups with the battleships that are supposed to be doing the damage. Well, during this battle, the Japanese end up losing four of their carriers, three of the battleships, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and 11 destroyers. This is the greatest ever loss of ships and men in the Imperial Japanese Navy's history. Well, they couldn't lose any more after that. No shit. Well, and they still had more that they were holding back. But you got to understand, too, like to get to get it.

these ships down here to do all that, you're also using your fuel stores. Yeah. And the fuel and like, what are you going to have left if it comes back to having to defend the home islands? Basically, the whole thing that we started this war over was fuel. Yeah. And you're running low on it, trying to save yourself. So this, you know, the Philippines campaign in the Leite Gulf, this basically cuts off vital supplies from any of the Southeast Asian territories that Japan has taken. So the new, you know, the garden hose has been kinked and it's barely letting a dribble out. We get to June of 44. Another big name, we get to Iwo Jima.

And kind of like we mentioned before, Iwo Jima has looked at is basically being strategic for being halfway between the Mariana's chain and Japan. It's going to give a little bit more of an advantage for those B-29s. It's also going to give the advantage for providing the P-51s, which are the fighter planes. range enough to then escort the B-29s to Japan, which is going to make their missions a lot more successful and reduce the chance of them getting shot down by Japanese fighters, which at this point, too, you've got to wonder what the quality of those fighters is. Yeah, this just dawned on me.

I guess maybe you were right. Maybe it is more advantageous to go into Iwo Jima and to later on Okinawa. But these next two battles kind of solidified in the mind of the United States, and I don't know if FDR was still alive at this point. It might have been Truman. But the bloodshed that we're going to see in these next two battles sort of justifies why maybe we need to drop a bomb over putting people on the mainland. It's going to 100% influence the decisions that are going to be made.

So with Iwo Jima, again, this is going to get its own episode, but Iwojima was also recognized by Japan for a strategic value as well. So it was put in command by, I can't remember the guy's name, but he had taken command of the Iwo Jima Garrison like months before the actual battle was going to take place and basically fortify the entire island, tunnels, caves, bunkers, gun emplacements that were disguised to look like rocks. In some places, they said they would dig these like underground spaces that were like five stories, you know, five stories deep and everything to serve as like infirmaries and hospitals and storage for all the shit that they were going to do. need for defense of this island. And basically the battle itself from June of 44 is kind of when we've recognized it as a strategic target we want to go after. And starting in June is when we start bombarding it, both air and by sea. So we're bombarding this island for a solid six months to seven months. And during this time frame,

nothing is happening. They've designed this thing so fucking well and the defense is to where basically they can just like they have these shutters that they can open to fire these giant cannons out at the ships

and then close the shutters to not only protect the cannons but also then disguise where they're even at. So they're not able to pinpoint these targets so they're just firing at this mountain hoping that they've

and they can't tell if they're doing any damage or not. At a certain point the Japanese just kind of stop returning fire to make it. seem like they've kind of knocked out some of their defenses. And seeing that, basically we get the invasion on February 19th of 45 in the Battle of Iwojima, which takes place up until March 29th

of 45. So little over a month here. And Iwo Jima is where we get the famous picture on Mount Sarabachi of raising the flag, like the five or six guys that are tilting the flag up. It's probably one of the most iconic pictures, if not the most iconic picture from World War II. two. Yeah. And it actually happened twice the same day. Yeah. This is where we get a lot of our great.

There's a lot of very good films. Letters for Miwa Jima is a really, really good movie. Code Talkers about the Navajo Code Talker is sort of centered around this. Very cool in the way that we had done it. They had their Japanese Imperial Code. We just went ahead and used the Navao Code. Navajo people who spoke Navajo, who's a language that nobody in Japan would ever understand. And it's one of the most complex Native American languages that there is.

So to be able to use that and to shine a spotlight on Native American forces over fighting in the Pacific Theater is very, very cool. The less cool thing was, I believe, three of the six guys in the picture of raising the flag ended up dying like days after in war. Um, very, very bloody. It didn't, didn't really end in a good way. Um, five weeks. Some of the bloodiest fighting that happened. Um, we ended up in total losing 26,000 plus, why not losing, because casualties aren't all losses. There's deaths and then there's casualties, uh, 26,000 allied casualties, uh, or MIAs to 18,500

Japanese. Um, the fact that. that they were in these bunkers made extraction so difficult to try to get them out that you had to risk a lot of your safety

and get close enough to where these people can attack. I believe when did the kamikaze start really ramping up? Okinawa. Okinawa, okay. So that's, we're coming up onto that. But Iwo Jima

was a very, very interesting. I'm really excited for that episode because just seeing a couple of the movies and kind of understanding a little bit of the layout as far as just going over in this overview. It sounds pretty tragic, but it sounds kind of like it was more necessary than I thought it was. So at the same time that these island battles are going on, there are bombing campaigns going on over Germany. Well, there are bombing campaigns going on over Germany as well. But there's also, you know, bombing campaigns going against the Japanese home islands, other islands that are still occupied. And on March 9th, March 9th and 10th, there was an operation.

I'm trying to remember what it was called. I had it written down here somewhere, but now I can't find it. But basically 300 B-29s dropped over 1,600 hans of bombs, which were mostly incendiary on Tokyo. It ended up, I think, killing between 80 and 100,000 people. It destroyed 270,000 buildings and left over a million people homeless due to that attack. Over the next 10 days, they also actually bombed. I think it was the ones that we listed out before is when they decided that they were going to bomb.

Tokyo and Agoya, Kobe, and Osaka. And 31% of those cities were all destroyed in firebombing as well. A third of these fucking cities. I think they said that the amount of people that died in these bombings was more than that died in the two atomic bombs. Yeah, they called it Operation Meeting House. Finding that out. Yeah, man, I don't know. I get that we had to drop the atomic bombs to finally get them to sort of.

surrender. But if these bombings didn't make them surrender, I got to wonder what the thought process was. Like, we already threw a punch that's going to be potentially bigger than these atomic bombs. What, I mean, if they didn't bend the knee at this point, what do we do? Yeah. But I guess that's where the atomic bomb comes in because we can do that with one bomb, and then we can do it with another, and then we have 10 more lined up that's just going to keep multiplying. Yeah. Well, before we get to that faithful decision, we come to April 1st. of 1945. So, I mean, we're getting deep into the war at this point.

I'm trying to remember what victory in Europe Day was and when they decided to go ahead and... April. It was April, because the furor died April 18th, April 20th? So we're getting close to it. Yeah. Let's see. King Dickhead. Talk about a bad April Fool's Day in Okinawa.

April 1st is going to be... May 8th. Yeah, so we're about a month before that. So Battle of Okinawa, now Okinawa was 300 or is 350 miles from the home islands. It is basically when it comes to bombing raids and everything, it is a fucking stone's throw. Now, a both horrible and awesome nickname for the Battle of Okinawa is the typhoon of steel. And this is due to just the fucking ferocity. This is the bloodiest battle of the Pacific.

And the largest amphibious assault. And the largest amphibious assault. Was it in the war or in the Pacific? In the Pacific. In the Pacific. It's still got to be. So this is basically the D-Day of the Pacific. And there could have been another D-Day that happened, you know, had things gone differently.

This is where the bulk of the kamikaze and the well-known kamikaze attacks happened. 1,400-plus kamikaze attacks. And they sank or put out of action 30 warships. Now you're like, well, for 1,400 kamikazis, that doesn't seem like very many. Well, here's the deal. They also damage some ships as well, but you're also, the reason you're having to use kamikazis is because you're putting people up in these planes that don't know how to dogfight. They don't know the practice of bombing runs or anything like that. You're basically just teaching them the basic controls of how to work the plane, and you're telling them, here's what you're going to try to crash into. You just have to get the plane there. And by sheer force of numbers, they're hoping that enough will get through. to essentially cause the Americans to withdraw. And before you take off, we're going to put this 50-gallon drum of oil in the back

and some more other explosive things. So that way, once you hit and go boom, it's going to cause something bigger. I want to say they called it something like Operation Chrysanthemum or something fucking crazy or something super flowery. It kind of sounds like that would be, yeah. So, yeah, the typhoon of steel.

I don't even want to fucking imagine what that was like to be out there. you know, the fighting's going on on Okinawa itself, your ships are bombarding, and then you're just having to watch everywhere for these planes just actively trying to fly straight into your fucking ship. A lot of ships ended up getting hit. One thing that kind of was discovered during this is when these kamikazis were slamming down

into the decks of like an aircraft carrier. So you had at this point, because stuff was starting to kind of wind down in Europe, the Brits were able to send more resources, around essentially Africa through like the Suez Canal and everything to help out in the Pacific. So you did have some British aircraft carriers there. The British did armored flight decks where the Americans just did the wood teak flight decks. And they said they were wood?

Yeah. No way. Yeah. The Americans were just teak wood. Why? To save weight for repairs if stuff had to be replaced. The big difference on this. was someone used the analogy of when a, I think they said when a Yankee carrier gets hit,

it has to sail back to Pearl Harbor for three months. When a British carrier gets hit, they call out the sweepers to come and clear the deck. Assholes. Yeah. So they were definitely built. I mean, there were a lot more American ones and more well-known ones, but the British ones were built 100% for like survivability. Huh.

I had no idea. Just kind of a crazy, like, you know, your allies, but there is such a difference in like the tactics and the way like your countries are going to go about things. It's, it's kind of cool. Yeah. Um, when all was said and done, 241,000 dead from the fucking battle of Okinawa, one island. Well, 94% of Japanese troops were killed. Yeah, 94% of their troops. 94% of Japanese, it was, that number was 94% made up of both, um, Japanese soldiers and Okinawan natives. Jeez.

So you're in a situation where you're almost like bordering on like wiping out an entire group of people. Yeah. I mean, genocide's not really the word for it, but it's... I had to stop myself from using the term genocide.

It very much borders on. It's like an unintentional genocide that almost occurs. This again was, it was escalating. The casualties and the fighting was escalating. And it got to the point, now where we feel like we're close enough to the main home islands that we have to start kind of looking at options of thinking what's next the atomic bomb you know i'm not sure if at this

exact moment it was an option i'm trying to remember what the completion date of it but i'm pretty sure they had tested it at this point oh yeah um but they start kicking around the idea of operation downfall an operation downfall would essentially be the invasion of the japanese home islands Now, there were other ideas being kicked around, making them surrender through a naval blockade and air raids, which they had been doing. They haven't really established a naval blockade or been able to do that yet, but the air raids were definitely occurring.

At this point, too, half of all the industrial centers in 67 cities had been destroyed by firebombing. So their ability to make war had been completely crippled by that point. You think that there was a push because they had ended the war in Europe, that they just wanted to get this shit over with. Oh, 100%. Like maybe they were almost trying to wrap up prior to the E day, victory in Europe day. I think that's got to be a huge determining factor.

Also the fact that, like, and I'm not saying logistically, it's like a reason to drop the nukes or the atomic bombs. But at that point when victory in Europe had been attained, they started guys that didn't have what they called, there was a point system. So depending on which campaigns you served in, where you had served, which operations you'd served in,

you got a number of points for that. In order to go home, you had to reach a certain number of points. Kind of like the bombers had to get like 25 missions before they were sent stateside. Yeah. So guys that didn't have enough points were being reassigned to the Pacific.

Guys that had just got done fighting in Europe. Fuck that. And so I don't know if part of that was also like, hey, are we really going to go and bring all these guys back into the U.S. transfer them across the country, put them back on ships and send them to the Pacific. You know, that had to be a fucking nightmare for families being like, we just sent, they were just fighting for the last three or four years over in Europe.

Now you're going to send them over to fucking possibly die again, and they made it through to die again in the Pacific, possibly invading the fucking Japanese home islands. Yeah. And you know, based upon the, what happened in Saipan and what's happened in some of these other islands where Japanese propaganda's got their hooks in, if you make a mainland amphibious landing, you're not just fighting the soldiers.

No, it's the entire, it's the entire population. You're fighting the country. It's a hostile population for every single person on all end, because there were four islands. So you have to take all four of the islands as well. They were saying that during the operation, for just the initial landing and everything like that, because there would be so many,

it would be American, it would be British. At that point, they could probably rally French troops to come over and help out. It would be Chinese troops. All of them invading, they said that the initial invasion, they were looking at estimates of up to a million casualties within the first couple days. And to know what that would be from a prolonged period of time, looking at that option, and then someone looks over and is like,

or we have these new bombs that we could try to drop a couple of them on and see if maybe they want to just go ahead and give up. So that's the option you go with. You drop the atomic bombs. Two of them, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. After the first one, we give them the ultimatum, unconditional surrender. They don't reply. Second one.

Wild that they don't reply. We're talking August 6th. It dropped little boy on Hiroshima that directly killed, not what goes on afterwards, directly killed between 70,000 and 126,000 people. And then we're like, hey, you might be asking yourself, wow, Adam, that's a pretty big range of numbers. Yeah, well, when people get fucking vaporized to where there's nothing left of them, you kind of have to just base it off who was supposed to be in that town and who's missing.

Mm-hmm. But that wasn't enough. How is that not enough? Maybe they only have, oh, maybe they only have one of these. Maybe we can outlast them. Well, no, we don't just have one of them because August 9th. That's when Fatman was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 35 to 40,000 people directly.

And a total of 140 to 240,000 people died as a direct result. And that was cancer afterwards. Burns that didn't kill them initially radiation poisoning, all that kind of shit. One thing that also helped, I think, contribute, probably not in the major way. I think the bombs did a pretty good job of doing that. But also on August 9th,

the Soviets decide that that little new, neutrality pact, it's probably run its course. Yeah. So they decide to, looking at themselves, like, to maybe gather some additional territory, they enter Manchuria. So now Japan's looking at this and saying, we've just been severely bombed twice. Now the Soviets are moving into Manchuria.

We're going to have to be worrying about fighting them. Really only one option you can do. You think that they were helped push into the idea of, giving up before the Soviets got there because the Americans did like a leaflet drop of pictures of what the Russians were doing inside of Berlin. We're like, they show up.

This is what's going to happen to you guys. Are you saying, did you see that they did do that? No, I would imagine that that would help spur, be like, yeah, Soviet Union's coming down here in America, or the United States doesn't want them to show up. Do you think we're fucking demons? Yeah. Let us tell you, sit down, children,

let us tell you a tale of the Eastern Front atrocities. that you are just waiting to have happened to you. Once they entered Manchuria, days were pretty much numbered at that point. And there was a condition that they had issued to the United States government, to the allies, that would be the emperor would maintain his sovereignty. Is that correct? I believe so. He would retain his title and his sovereignty.

And the reply back to it was, the emperor will retain the sovereignty as long as it is like, okay with the occupying force. And at that point, Japan was just like, I think this is the best we're going to fucking get. Yeah. It was basically a letter saying like, if it fits our plans or it's not too much of an inconvenience, sure, your emperor can still be the

figurehead of your guys' leadership. But for all the intents and purposes, it's going to be the fucking occupation force, which just so happens to be the guy that actually accepts the surrender. And this was another cool thing I got fucking see. So the surrender itself was the 14th of August is when they announced

essentially the surrender. And when they announced the surrender to their people, they basically phrased it in the sense of if we were to continue this war, it would be met with not only the extinction of our way of life, but also the extinction of all mankind. So

probably not the case. When they say the extinction of your people in your way of life, that part was probably factual. But I don't know how you were going to retaliate to, they just had to make it seem like they were doing something noble. Yeah. They were saving the human race by surrendering.

Saving human race and saving face. Exactly. So the surrender itself is signed on September 2nd, and this holds a very recent special memory for me, because along with getting to tour the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor, I got to see the exact spot where, the surrender itself was signed by the Japanese to Douglas MacArthur on the deck of the USS Missouri while it was parked in Tokyo Bay. And it's just kind of cool, wow, what those guys must have felt having to stand on that spot, which is right next to the fucking main battery, just these fucking guns just looming over you.

Just a little table set up with MacArthur sitting on there that you had to walk up and had to sign the article. of surrender, basically these four fucking big ass pieces of paper that were laid out in front of you. And as you signed those, you knew that you were basically signing away. Tell me they were... In Japanese? Huh? Tell me they were in Japanese. No, they were in English.

They couldn't read what was going on. They couldn't read what they were signing. You lost. It's in our language. But, yeah, so I'll read you actually what's on the plaque that's set into the deck. So it says on this spot on the 2nd of September 1945, the instrument of formal surrender of Japan to the Allied powers was signed, thus bringing to a close the Second World War.

The ship at that time was at Anchor in Tokyo Bay. It's kind of cool. The way they have it set up at Pearl Harbor is the way they frame it, is you have the Missouri that is parked to the rear of the Arizona Memorial, where you have the ending of the war, standing guard over the start of the war. So you have the bookends. They're parked in the exact same spot. And I mean, at this point with the surrender of the Japanese, that effectively ends in all World War II because the European theater was over at that point. I mean, not for Hero Onoda, who still run around the Philippines until

74. But for the most part, for the vast majority of everybody, World War II is over at this point. Well, and they, even once the war is over, there's still troops out there that aren't accepting it. There's still troops that don't believe that that's what's going on. So there's still mop-up that has to happen. And there's certain things that podcast that was listening to about that guy that interviewed the old soldiers. They took it so seriously that the amount of disrespect that they had felt that happened once they had lost. it almost felt like they had lost their country like they had lost everything that they had wanted

but for some of them surrender wasn't an option and this felt like surrender it felt like the guy that they were willing to die for just surrendered sold them out yeah the one they'd entrusted to lead them to glorious victory or whatever they called it a new empire

you know had effectively signed their death warrant how many times do you think essentially keep them alive technically. Yeah, yeah. Saving the anti-death war. Yeah.

How many times do you think Japan kept waiting for that? What was it the majestic wind or? Divine wind. Divine wind. How many times do you think that they tried to reference that once things started going south? Wasn't that what Kamikaze was?

Divine wind. Uh-huh. Yeah. But that was also the divine wind was what helped them beat the Mongolians because that wind blew in and knocked their ships off and all that. They had to have been waiting for that

the entire time, just hoping that that was a real thing. You do a lot of losing when you're sitting around waiting for the past to try to come back and help you. Kind of by the numbers, American casualties during the Pacific Theater. 107, 9.0.103 battle deaths. Battle deaths are considered both killed in combat, but then also if you're taken prisoners at POW. So a lot of soldiers from America were taken prisoner. we're going to do an entire episode on war crimes,

both on the European theater and then also on the Pacific because there's too many on each side of those theaters to do in one episode. And we're going to get really in depth on some of the atrocities that occurred in the Pacific theater because I think they do outdo. The European theater and everything like that, that definitely gets the most headlines with the Holocaust and everything.

But, man, I think overall for the amount of what was done, I think it might be, it might go to the Pacific for the amount of like war crimes. Yeah, and what the fuck is that? So just going through... Unit 571? Mm-hmm. Unit 571? Is that the, kind of like the Japanese equivalent of what Mangler was doing for the journal?

Yeah, something like that. Like the biolog-they use biological weapons as well. Yeah. Unit 731. Unit 731. Yeah. That's going to be an... episode. Yeah, 208,33

American wounded. China, it's hard to get a figure for the deaths in China because they're very secretive about figures and everything. Kind of just ballpark, kind of the common number I saw kind of a meeting of that number was somewhere around 20 million. That's combination of both soldiers and civilians, which is still fucking bonkers. 20 million. I'm guessing a lot of those civilian deaths were also due to

things like famine, biological warfare, things like that. A lot of fucking torture. The Brits coming in at 235,000 casualties. I believe that does also include people fighting for the British Empire, which would be in India, Burma, those kind of areas. Singapore. Japan, 800,000 civilian deaths and 2 million plus soldier deaths in the Pacific Theater. Oh man I think World War I might have jaded me

On some of those numbers Yeah Like that it's a whole lot of people But that kind of goes Showing granted this is just the Pacific theater I know that all of World War II There's a ton more deaths But

It's We grew up Yeah Well you gotta think of the two We figured some shit out Because of all the advances that we had It's more spread out now Where World War I was taking places

In the trenches is a smaller section in Europe, you were a lot more condensed as far as you're fighting. It was more of a meat grinder where there was more bodies in a smaller space, so more casualties. This is where you're getting big chunks of casualties coming when you're killing 94% of the troops on this island,

or when you're taking out a carrier battleship that has 2,000 crewmen and everyone is going down with the ship. So you're getting these huge chunks of losses of life. And I mean, as far as just, It definitely surpasses, not just saying from a number standpoint, World War I, just because we have to sit here and talk about two theaters of the war, and we're not even done talking about the theaters within this war itself. We've covered the biggest two, Europe and the Pacific,

but the other two, North Africa, you know, Middle East, Mediterranean, all those areas are going to, you know, deserve their own shine. A lot of crazy shit was happening down there as well. But, I mean, you can't talk about World War or two without thinking about the Pacific. No, man, we're going to get so many episodes out of this. I know. Looking forward to it. Well, you got anything else that we didn't hit?

No, I'm just so proud of you. I'm so amazed that you can jump off the plane and do this. This stuff was all just waiting up in the filing cabinets, man. No, this stuff, and it was, I told you I wanted to do this while seeing the stuff, you know, in Pearl Harbor and kind of seeing the stuff the museum was still fresh. And I could kind of use that stuff as examples on a little snobes. if it's of information. But yeah, just another insanely fascinating topic. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I know you guys love it when we do a war episode. So we'll keep peppering those in as frequently as we can. But just remember, guys, rate, review, subscribe. Best thing you can do

for us right now is give us those five-star reviews. They help us gain more sponsors, get our a little more exposure for our podcast and reach more people. Yeah, absolutely. The algorithm likes it. The algorithm likes five-star reviews for sure. You got anything else? No, man. I think we've tapped this one dry. Yeah, it was fun. All right, guys. Well, thanks for joining us. I know it was a long one. Thanks for hanging with it.

We'll catch you on the next one. Thanks. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway, because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like. Please follow us on our social media.

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Thanks again. Peace.