School of War - Ep 137: Richard Frank on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and World War II’s Endgame

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Richard Frank, historian and author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire and Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942, joins the show to talk about the controversial legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ▪️ Times      •      02:05 Introduction      •      02:15 Soldier/Lawyer/Historian     •      09:19 Early controversy      •      14:55 Counting all the dead         •      21:54 Contemplating invasion     •      30:10 1:1 ratio, recipe for a bloodbath     •      38:03 Why unconditional surrender?      •      40:48 Two steps to end the war     •      46:54 A combination of forces      •      51:08 How many bombs?     •      54:01 Thinking as your enemy does Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

On August 6, 1945, 79 years ago today, the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, we dropped another very similar bomb, this time on Nagasaki. The destruction was tremendous, as was the suffering. Shortly thereafter, the war ended, and a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands was averted. The debate, however, was only beginning, as was a whole new era of strategy and warfare. One persistent dimension of the debate over nuclear weapons has been whether or not they actually contributed to the ending of the war at all, or whether their use was gratuitous, inhumane, and about signaling strength to the Soviet Union. We're going to talk today with the great Richard Frank on the legacy of the first two bombs and how to

think about their role in ending the war. I can think a few questions that are more important. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. In infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Richard Frank. He is a historian of what he calls the Asia Pacific War, the War in the Pacific Indonesia and the Second World War, to be clear. He's the author of numerous books, famously Downfall, about the end of the war with Japan. He is at

work on a trilogy covering the entire Asia Pacific War, the first volume of which was Tower of Skulls. He served in the Army in the 101st Airborne as a platoon leader in Vietnam. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. Richard, thank you so much for joining the show. Well, I'm glad to be here. Can we start, before we get to World War II? Can we start with your background? How did you grow up? Where did you grow up? How did you end up leading a platoon in Vietnam? Well, I was an early baby boomer. All the males, adult males I knew at that time, my father, my uncles, and all of them had served in World War II. And of course, when I was growing up, World War II was a very popular subject for radio and television, play television. I remember distinctly

seeing Victory at Sea when it originally came out. When I wasn't playing baseball, I was reading. I did an awful lot of reading as a kid. By the time I was 10, I'd been very interested in the 30s and 40s. I read Churchill's memoirs. My father guided me to Samuel Morrison's Naval Histories, which for a kid from Kansas was a very mesmerizing vision of far distant, exciting places. And I actually wanted to go to Annapolis, but the fellows there decided that my eyesight was not adequate for their purposes. I would note that I settled my accounts with Annapolis as my first book about Guadacanau, which has a very mixed record of the achievement by Annapolis projects. I graduated from University of Missouri.

At that time, everyone in my age group I thought expected to serve in the service, and I had gone to ROTC, got a commission, ended up in Vietnam. When it appeared, as though they were going to send me, I told them they should send me because I thought we'd come to a big moral divide from my generation. Surged about four months with 101st as a platoon leader. with an air cavalry troop, where I was the only officer in the troop that was not a pilot. You can imagine what that sort of service was like. Gave me first that experience of things like fog of war, making decisions when you don't have all

information in front of you. You've got to make a decision. All kinds of things like that have informed what I've done ever since. I came out, went to law school, and that also was extremely informative because I dealt with both in learning of the law and also in practice law. I dealt with witnesses and documentary evidence, which is what historians do. And you get a definite framework of how to do that from going to law school and the practice, which I brought into my career as a historian.

And my first book was published in 1990, about Guadacanelle and second book, I had a downfall. And I haven't stopped learning about the way the war ended or the war intro. You're an interesting case because, as you know, and as most people know, historians, people who write books about history tend to fall into one of two buckets. There's the sort of serious archival work, which tends to be done by people with formal academic qualifications. And then there's more popular history, which tends to be done by people who don't have

those qualifications. And we have both kinds on the show. And both kinds of work lead to really interesting conversations and can teach readers a lot. Your work elegantly written as it is. And Downfall in particular is a fascinating read. an enjoyable read in terms of the actual experience of reading is a very serious journey into the archives and into the original evidence. Do you have many peers in this respect amongst those who are not in the academy?

Well, you know, I have several friends, historians, and those who had background in the law have also commented that sort of a seamless transition. In terms of archival work, I mean, when you're working up a case or you're dealing with an issue and you've got to do a lot of background work, it's like archival. route to dig up all the evidence and look at it. And one of the basic rules is first you dig up all the evidence and then you start analyzing it to reach conclusions. You don't go into, you should not go into a case thinking you know what the answer is and then try to arrange the evidence to fit that sort of a preconceived notion. How do you? Which is not sort of a problem I think we have

in this area, particularly the end of the Asian Pacific War, people already have in mind a conclusion before they began doing the war. Right. Well, we'll get to that in just a second because obviously today the subject is the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the ending of the war, which is sort of fraught with exactly that phenomenon. But one last question on, well, actually two more questions on practice before we get to the subject hand. The first is, how do you deal with languages? Where does the Japanese come from? How do you work with those materials? Okay. Well, I was aware that that was a critical issue. I worked with translators, the same individual Bonichi Hoska, who I was guided to by a former Enerima graduate over here.

And you should understand that the Japanese prepared a 101 volume history of the Asian Pacific War, Japan's War, which is the Asia Pacific War, after the war, and it was based on original archival documents. It also was infused very greatly, unlike most Western historiographies with diary entries. The Japanese are great diary keepers. The diary entries give you that immediacy about what was being thought and done at the time, not the, sometimes the official record which repaired later, which might or might not be perfectly accurate. And that was extremely important in informing what I did because I was, I just don't think you can tell the story without having an accurate grasp of what the Japanese actually were thinking at the time. It's one of the biggest issues with

respect to the end of the war. It's a very few historians, in my view, have a real grasp what the Japanese really like and what they were really thinking. My last question for you in terms of practice and background is you mentioned how your months in combat informed you about things like fog of war and so forth. In your work on the history of the Second World War, you know, is there a particular episode or moment or a thing that you've been trying to unravel where your personal experiences really played a significant role?

Well, I wouldn't single out one particular moment, but I tell you one thing that does inform it. I mean, knowing what it's like to be on the spot to have to make a decision right now without having a full grasp of the situation, which you damn well know you don't have, it has always made me leery about reaching rapidly to conclusions about individuals and commanders or whatever here. That's really a central tenant that informs my work. And the other thing is, you know, from having been there, I spent a lot of time with the dead. And I think about it a lot in my work and that the history should not be some sort of shiny plume restplate in military history. It should be fully cognizant of what the costs were all around. I was just on a trip that stopped in Normandy around sites of the bulge and then finished in Auschwitz-Burkenau. when I spent a fair amount of that trip sort of trying to ask myself, what are the dead trying to tell us?

It's not an easy question to answer. No. Well, let's get to it then. You said just a moment ago that one of the problems with history writing is that people come to it with their conclusions already somewhat worked out. The issue we're discussing today, the end of the war in the Pacific, is a very fine example of that. At least that's my impression as a non-professional, but somebody who, you know, is I think I'm familiar with the basics. basic contours of the debate. What are the basic contours of the debate about the end of the war? How did things get so fraught? Help us understand why it's so controversial.

Well, interestingly, there was some controversy immediately towards the end right after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that died away. And we really didn't have a really major internal argument about how the war ended in the U.S. until into the 60s. That's the actual history. and which was also coinciding with the time when a lot of archival material became available, but not, as it turned out, the most important archival material, which it turned out to be radio intelligence material

and material related to radio intelligence, which gave us a whole new insight into what was going on and the decision-making process on the U.S. side. So if you don't understand that that's sort of the pathway we follow to get to here, then you may think that this was a, a full-fledged controversy right from 1945 when it was not.

And the basic structure of it, let me, let me try this out. And you correct me where I get the details or even the mainstrokes wrong, is there is a mainstream sort of standard view, which is that the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been, at best, a catastrophically bloody affair for all involved to include obviously American troops, and that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of a war that otherwise would not have ended so quickly and almost certainly would not have ended with, as relatively speaking, obviously there was tremendous loss of life, but with as little loss of life as there was relatively.

And then the contrary view, what you call the critical view, you reject the term revisionist, is that the dropping of the bombs was, in a word, gratuitous, that Japan was already on a path to some kind of surrender and that other factors were sufficient. Most importantly, the Russian invasion of Manchuria and entry into the war in Pacific, rendering the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki essentially ineffective. There's a sort of subplot of this view that actually what we were doing with Nagasaki in particular was we were signaling to the Soviets that we meant business. And so it was sort of doubly immoral as a consequence.

Do I get like a B-B-minus on that? How did I do? You get a very solid B. I mean, that's SGS and seven. And the other thing I would add to this framework is that insofar as the debate is unfolded, there's a tendency to see the end of the war or the causes of the end of the war as being one of only two possibilities, A, the bombs, and B, Soviet intervention. And as you said, Soviet intervention is also tied into lots of other issues.

Let me sort of take us a little bit different path and start with a story. A good colleague of mine who's on the Presidential Counselors at the National World War II Museum teaches the University of Virginia teaches the chorus in World War II. You just done a semester, and they just done the session on it covered Hiroshima Nagasaki. And after the session, this woman walks up to him, and she's from the People's Republic of China. And she says to him, Professor, you know, we teach about Hiroshima and Nagasaki differently in my country. When a septic is brought up, the whole class stands up and applauds. And for a lot of Americans, that sounds like an extraordinarily jarring story.

But in reality, based on all the work I've done over these many decades now, I would say the two principles that would really guide us to understanding and judging what happened, or first of all, to count all the dead, and second, to treat all the dead as sharing a common humanity. And further, what I've done beyond what I did with downfall and what I'm now engaged in in the trilogy, is that I think these principles also take us to realize that we've had a very major problem with our historography since 1945, where we've referred to the war with Japan as the Pacific War, which is defined as a war between December 41 and August of 45. It foregrounds the conflict between the U.S. and Japan.

Japan had about 70 million people. The U.S. had about 132 million people. And then it only recognizes to any significant degree a further set of actors, the Filipinos, the Australians, the Pacific Islanders, the New Zealanders. When you aggregate those populations, you get about 228 million people. But in point of fact, the population of what I call the Ark of Asia,

which starts with India on the west and goes east across Burma, China, to Japan, the central and North Pacific, and then southeast towards what's now Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, South Pacific. That has a population or had a population at that time about a billion, 53 million people. And when Japan reached its apagy as an empire in about May of 42, there are about 516 million people within an empire. So this tells you right away that there's something basically wrong with calling it the Pacific War that involves much, much more than that narrow across the Pacific to U.S. and Japan conflict. Well, just to offer an observation in support of what you're saying, I think you say it in downfall, for perspective's sake, in the summer of 1945, something like 100,000 people in China are dying every month as a consequence of the war,

of the war that then ends in August September. And that's a body count that we might have expected to continue. Is that fair? Yeah. Well, on that casualty issue, let me preface everything else by saying that, you know, we're dealing with a problem that no one was actually keeping accurate count at the time. And what we're dealing with from most of these figures for this war, It was a reasonable approximation.

And I've worked at a long time, and I can give you numbers from now until the cows come home that have come up over the years. But quite basically, the figure I tried out, yeah, it basically works out for China if you assume as Professor Ronan Miller, who is Oxford now at Harvard in his great book, Forgotten Ally, says that reasonable range for Chinese losses alone.

It's like 14 to 20 million. And the 14 million figure is 2 million military and 12 million civilian. 12 million civilian over the course of the war that China was involved in from July of 37 to August 45. That's 4,000 a day. It's actually about 120,000 per month every month for 95 months. And you can do these figures in different ways. And beyond China, the next two greatest tolls are in Indonesia and what's should. and now Vietnam.

Indonesia, there's about 1.4 million Indonesians who were starting to death in 1944-45. It's better than 100,000 per month. Vietnamese have about a million deaths in 1945. The chief historian on that, Greg Huff was also of Oxford. And since they lost that Megan figure in about five months, that's about 200,000 per month. The figures are just astonishing in terms of the deaths.

And when we get to the Japanese, we have what I think are reasonable figures. And there's about 2 million military and about a million. 2 million civilians, about 3.2 million total total. And I think the total losses in the Asia-Pacific War are probably about 26 million. About 6 million are military. About 19 million are civilians. About a million of those civilians are Japanese. 18 million are not Japanese.

I mean, that's the disparity between. the number of people that Japan's war were killed and the number of Japanese who died in that war is just astonishing. It is stunning. I mean, it's easy enough to sort of say those numbers, it's easy enough to sort of sit here and listen to them, but to actually reflect on them and understand them. I'm not sure it's possible. I mean, you've obviously spent a long time trying to do just that. Well, you're on exactly, I mean, the human mind simply boggles when we start talking about millions of deaths. I mean, how do you, how do you connect to those people? I'll give you a couple of examples. I used to sort of flesh this out, right? If 12 million Chinese died and 3 million of them, 25% of them were children, that's 3 million. In other words, for every Japanese military or civilian who died in the war, one Chinese child died. With Indonesia and Vietnam, you get a total of about 3.4 million civilians dying.

A quarter of them is 8,000 children who died. And the other thing that is quite astonishing to me is that Japan's war caused tens of billions of Chinese to become refugees to flee the Japanese occupation. And one of the sidelines of that covered by an American correspondent, Frida Utley, in the wartime capital, Chongqing, was she noticed the families that arrived there, arrived with the parents and a few children. And after questioning these people, they found that in the course of the truck, those people had to take. The grandparents and great-grandparents, they died. And then the parents were in such an exhumary. They began abandoning children. So you're talking how many thousands of Chinese children to get abandoned and flying from the Japanese,

just to put some flesh on those sterile numbers. Yeah. I guess maybe one of the kinder things one could say about the critical narrative or the revisionists or whatever we want to call them, is that there is a sort of a deeply held conviction on their end that the kind of weapon used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is going to cause more tragedy, more human tragedy, with numbers, you know, at least in the same neighborhood

as the ones you just outlined. And so it's important to demonstrate, important to demonstrate somehow that these weapons can't do you any good. They shouldn't exist. They shouldn't be used, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I think... Maybe I'm being too generous.

No, no. No, I think I have to emphasize it in approaching this. One of the things I attempted to do in Downfall was, you know, when I say Cat All the Dead, I very much mean the Japanese. And if you've read Downfall, you see the opening chapters are very graphic searing account of the fire rate on Tokyo in March, 1945. I have a very graphic account of what it was like to be in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In fact, one of the volumes in this, when I call this critical literature, Hiroshima's shadow,

when it came to actually describing what a hell it was in Hiroshima on the 6th of August, they used my narrative to describe it, capture exactly how horrific it is. The whole narrative, which is used in this critical literature, would make you think that the only civilians who are dying horrific deaths are Japanese. And I say that, yes, we need to acknowledge that. I think triumphant about that. But my God, when you think about all these other people, and like that story I told the beginning of that, you wonder why people from China or Indonesia or Vietnam or whatever here,

if you dealt with them on this issue, you will realize that they bristle with the knowledge that the only victims are Japanese. Well, with the 45 minutes or so we've got here, let's try to establish your latest thinking on what actually happened. and I'll propose that we start with the Americans. Something your work does really helpful, at least for me. There are maybe others who have read these things elsewhere, but for me, I get it from

you, but the way in which American conduct of the war flows from interwar planning and how there's a sort of Navy Army debate that develops in 1945 where the Navy is very preoccupied with convictions that acquired pre-war. In some ways, convictions that go back to Mahan, and Mahan's thinking about maritime strategy, in America's role in the world, that an invasion of Japan really should be avoided, kind of at all costs, which is not a view held by Marshall and MacArthur. Maybe just take us through that, if you would. What is the status, you know, Okinawa is falling in the spring, right, May of 45.

It's time to think about the end. How are the Americans thinking about the end? What are the contours of that discussion? Yeah. President Roosevelt set the overarching goal, this commander-in-chief, was unconditional surrender of Japan. The Army and the Navy began seriously grappling with the issue of how the war with Japan was going to be ended in mid-1944, and I would characterize their conclusions as an unstable compromise between these two views between the Army and the Navy. The Army was frankly skeptical about whether an organized capitulation of Japan could be attained,

It's led by a general of the Army George Marshall. And the Army view and the Navy view really are separated by what's really a political issue. And that's from each side they're viewing, what is the factor most likely to undermine the will of the American people to see the war through unconditional surrender? And the Army thinks the critical issue is taught that the American people are not tolerant of prolonged war. And the Army's view is that, well, that dictates that we attempt to go and invade the Japanese home islands to end the war as quickly as possible, or to deal with the

situation if there's no organized capitulation. The Navy, as you touched upon, the Navy studied war with Japan since 1906, you know, and very intently between World War I and World War II. And one of the most fundamental premises that the Navy reaches in this examination is that invading Japan is a path of folly because he will produce politically unacceptable casualties. And the Navy believes that the only sane strategy to follow to end a war with Japan is bombardment by air and by sea and blockade. And blockade takes on a very special connotation in this interwar period because blockades have been used by naval powers for centuries, but under the rules of the war or customs of war in which you weren't supposed to blockade food for civilians. Well, the Germans and the British overthrow that restriction in what we want. And the Navy intends to follow that against Japan.

And basically what the Navy's strategy of blockade is really all about is they're going to threaten to kill or kill millions of Japanese from starvation to end the war. And that's the Navy's view of how to end the war. And they reached this unstable compromise in April 45 in which they are going to add to what's an ongoing campaign of blockade in Mount Burmint, a two-phase invasion of Japan. beginning in November, Operation Olympic, going into Southern Kyushu and then following on in March of 45 at Cornette. Admiral King, who, of course, is the leader of the U.S. Navy, he is a brilliant strategist, but he's not the most articulate of individuals. And he's also very parsimonious with the written word, but he takes time to write a memo to his colleagues on the Joint Chief of Stafford. Look, I'm only agreeing that we have to issue an order for the preparation for invasion. will come back and decide whether we're actually going to do it in August or September.

And that's because he believes that by then he'll get the evidence on his side to win an argument at that point now, President Truman, to make sure there's going to be no invasion of Japan. Now, let's turn it around and look at the Japanese side. At about the same time, the beginning of 1945, the Japanese, they've lost their Navy. There's only remnants left. They have douses of aircraft, but their air crews are very low quality compared to where they were in the war. The economy is spinning down to a collapse. There are lots of other factors indicating that the situation is very dire. The Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy will look around, and they decide that one thing that they still have is this spiritual stamina that they don't think the Americans have.

And they believe that basically if they can get the Americans to attempt to invade Japan, they can either defeat that initial invasion or inflict enormous casualties, they'll break American will to kill. carry the war through to unconditional unconditional surrender. And they'll obtain a negotiated peace, which is to their satisfaction. And when they come to making the operational and tactical decisions to implement that strategy, they figure that the Americans

always launch their invasions within fighter plane range of their nearest bases. They figure we're going to take Okinawa in the middle of 1945. So they get out to dividers, and they see where the fighter planes will go from Okinawa. And they come up with southern Kyushu. And now we come to sort of

the quiz part of my presentation. They know the Americans are coming for air bases to support the operation there and then later and to haunch you. And so the question is, if you're a Japanese staff officer, where would those Americans put their air bases? A, on mountaintops,

or B, on level ground. Well, if you can answer that question and you can look at a topographical map of Kyushu, you know exactly where the invasion is going to take place and they correctly identify where we're going to land and they conduct this huge build up on Kyushu and sit back, and this is the conviction of the leaders of the Japanese army

and Navy, that they've got a winning strategy, at least one in terms of preserving the old order in Japan, what they call Operation Ketsugo, Operation Decisive. And they're locked into that, and they hold on to that literally until the country atomic locks. I just want to ask you to spell this out a bit. So, you know, what you've just described in some respects, at least, is not totally dissimilar from, you know, Hitler's hopes at the end of the war in Europe that some sort of negotiated settlement with the West is possible. I mean, he believes this long after it's sort of transparent madness.

Nevertheless, they are fighting up until the bitter end. And they fail. And the Americans and the allies, the Soviets defeat them. Why is it considering the success we are having in Europe by May of 1945, why is there such trepidation for doing essentially the same thing in Japan on the part of the U.S. Navy and such confidence on the part of the Japanese that they'll be able to do what Hitler could not? Well, the Japanese alliance with the Germans was very much arm's length throughout the war. There was no serious coordination. They didn't steer by what the Germans wanted or the German experience, really. So Japanese strategy was simply based upon the fact that they taught about a war with the U.S., and that was one of their fundamental conclusions was that, you know,

Japanese spirit would triumph over whatever the material disparity might be. And is there, I mean, from the American perspective, I guess they're looking at things like the casualty numbers in Saipan and Okinawa, suicides, civilian suicides, things like that that lead them to believe that fighting in places like Honshu and Kyushu is just going to be different than fighting in Germany? Oh, yeah. Well, that's one of the fundamental things that is identified as early as Saipan, based upon the resistance of the Japanese population there. The phrase that begins to be used is this fanatically hostile population. That going into Japan is going to involve not merely dealing with the Japanese armed forces, but dealing with this, quote, fanatically hostile population. And the Japanese moved to make that a reality in March of 1945. They conduct what effectively this. enormous mobilization of what had otherwise been the civilian population, where they declared that every male age 15 to 60, every female age 17 to 40, I'd be part of this national militia.

They're going to do combat support and eventually combat rule, which was previewed on Okinawa. And the Japanese official history series that I used, one of the, they have a section where they talk about the mobilization of the population. I mean, they take one province on Kyushu, I'd say, oh, by the way, let's see, by the time we get done, we've got a million people just in this one province in this category of these males 15 to 60 females 17 to 40 to add to the garrison. And we've built up on key issue, which by that time is like 700 to 900,000 people. So you're talking about a million of these erstwhile auxiliary combatants just in one province. And you figure this can be about four provinces or so in which the main fighting is going to take place. I mean, it's just nightmarish to think about it.

And roughly how many troops are we thinking of sending into Kyushu? The total invasion force, when they first set it forth, it's about 776,000 individuals. However, that is not just the combatants who are going to come in and seize Southern Kyushu. About half, or just close to half, are the people are going to come in, they're going to refurbish air bases, and set up logistical support to support. the follow-on operations heading up to Hanchu around Tokyo. So the actual combatant troops that are heading to Southern Kyushu are maybe about 380,000 individuals. And as you and I would understand, combatant troops,

you know, infantry, artillery armor, combat engineers, people like that, it's a very small fashion. That's when, you know, when radio intelligence from the night to July begins to reveal what we're getting into on Keeshoe, which is just an incredible, compared it sometimes to like, I've seen in a horror movie when the evil monster is dead

and the villagers are dancing around, and the next thing, you know, the monster rears up and, you know, there's this frightful recoil of horror about what's going on. Well, that's kind of what happens. And with last weeks of July and the first weeks of honesty, we're looking at this incredible stuff,

that what we thought we were, the bargain we thought we were getting with certain key issue was not remotely like what we thought. I guess this is a good time to go into this part of the thing. What happens we know now? And we didn't know this until literally about 1995 and thereafter. You're talking 40 or more years after war before the radio intelligence gets released. The radio intelligence then is also embargoed documents and papers that talk about radio intelligence. And so now we find that right when we get down towards the end of the war,

and the radio intelligence lays out this picture of what the Japanese, the order of battle the Japanese have on certain incooggi when they get most of it right. And it's just, it's horrified. One of the intelligence officers says, you know, we'll be going at a ratio one to one, which is not the recipe for victory. No, it is a recipe for a bloodbath. You get so bad that General Marshall looks at this and says, well, you know, he says a message to General McArthur, who is slated to command this operation. And he says specifically, you know, looking at the intelligence we have now,

do you really believe we still should go into Southern Key issue, Operation Olympic? And Joel McCarthy's reply is that he definitely believes the intelligence, and we should go ahead and do it. He makes a habit of that. Yeah. To be fair to McCarthy.

Later in Korea. Yeah, to be fair to MacArthur, John Marshall, I mean, he's so gobsmacked by this stuff. He says, well, have they figured out a way to fool us on our radio intelligence? Which we, of course, did. We did to the Germans just.

Right, exactly. So what happens then is Emerald King, you know, he's been waiting, biting his time, waiting for the moment to bring on the big showdown. Because up until this moment, he wasn't sure he had the cards in his hand to kill an invasion of Japan. And oh, by the way, as I like to say,

never play cards with sailors. Because Admiral Nimitz had initially supported going to key, to Kyushu early on in 45, but after Okinawa has been going on for two months, he sends a back channel message to Emerald King, I think I can no longer support any invasion of Japanese home islands. And King has this tucked into his sleeve, but he knows that the senior Navy office in the Pacific now is prepared to say, we aren't going to go to Kyush, we're not going to do an invasion of Japan, Japanese home islands.

Jamal King takes this back and forth between Marshall and MacArthur, and sent it to Admiral Nimitz and says, please provide your views with a copy to MacArthur. Now, this exchange takes place to MacArthur. Marshall MacArthur is on the 9th of August. Later that same day, Washington time, that's when King sends his message. Literally, the very next message that King sends to Nimitz is,

this is a pith morning, because it's the next day, August 10th, which is when we get the first real indication that Japanese government might be prepared to surrender. And after I had this evidence, I'm looking and saying, okay, well, what did Nimitz respond? And I looked and I looked and I looked, I don't even want to tell you all the places I looked in the archivists, I enlisted to, and what eventually I came to conclusion was that Nimitz, being no idiot, knew that if he responded immediately and said, hell no, I won't go

to invade Japan, he would ignite this enormous inter-service conflict between the Army and the Navy. So he decided, I'll wait and see what happens. And of course, the Japanese surrender, and we never hear anything about this for 40-plus years because we don't know about the radio intelligence and everything related to that. And oh, by the way, at the same time, we know that the senior Army Air Force officer in the Pacific, General Spatz, has writing his diary on the 11th of August, right? You know, I cannot possibly support any invasion of Japan at this part. So you have the Army Air Force and the Navy saying, hell no, we will.

won't go to invade the Japanese South Islands. So the whole thing about the invasion of Japan ultimately is not that people were not concerned about casualties. People were very concerned about casualties. And the kind of casualties we were looking at by August, 1945, were not remotely like what Truman was briefed on back in June. So, you know, it's just, it's just an incredible story. And one that was kept, you know, basically hidden from us for so many decades. And just to be clear for listeners who might reasonably not have boned up on their Japanese home island geography before listening to this episode about Kyosha, this whole controversy you've just outlined, is principally about the first phase of the invasion of the home islands, which is not the main event.

It's not this, Kyushu is like if you're picturing a, you know, an ankle and a foot pointing down into the left, it's the knuckles and the toes. It's the tip of the foot. It's not even the main event onto Hanchu where Tokyo is and sort of the Japanese. about the heartland of the Japanese home islands. So the, you know, in the one-to-one ratio, am I right? The one-to-one ratio that they fear they are walking into, obviously not a great ratio. This is just troops.

So this is not even getting into Japanese civilians? Yeah, right. That's not even getting into civilians at that time. No. No. And in terms of geography, you know, backtrack slightly. The plan that's initialed in April of 1945 looks to go to Japan, the home islands in two states.

two steps. And once again, it's controlled by a fighter plane range. So they can't get to Hanchu. Well, they could get to Hanchu from Iwo Jima, but Yuidima is too small to support major air assets. So the place that they're going to go to base targeting of Kyushu is based upon going to Okinawa first. But Kyushu is then going to serve as the Okinawa for going to Hansu, and that's how that's going to take place. So yeah, that's the main event. And that's also obviously where, you know, Hansu has about 75% of the total population of Japan. Okay, so let's step back a bit then. That's a very compelling outline of why there's this hesitation to do this invasion. Let's step all the way back to ultimate strategic goals.

You see criticism from time to time in discussions of the end of the war about the demand for an unconditional surrender. Interestingly, you know, if you see this pop up on the right from time to time, But actually, it was unreasonable and immoral for Roosevelt to set that as the goal and Truman to maintain it. Why was that the goal? What can be said on behalf of that? What can be said in criticism of it? Let me pause first to say that you're absolutely right, that the criticism of unconditional

surrender was not just something that came up, but from the 1960s from the left. It came up originally in 1945, basically from the right president to whoever wrote about that. you have to fool back. President Roosevelt, who basically I think very kindly of, although not always, he makes mistakes like any human being does. He recognized, based on the experience of World War I, this is what they were all channeling, was it, here's Germany, we just beat them in World War I, and here they are back on the March again 20 years later, even more threatening than they were the first time. And so that's the template that they all have in their mental geography about statecraft at that time. is that it's not going to be enough to simply drive Germany and Japan back across their original borders.

We're going to have to go in and fundamentally reorder their societies. And that's what unconditional surrender is. It's about doing things in terms of internal change of those governments as the ordinary laws of military occupation would not permit you to do. In fact, there's a staff paper that's prepared that says, you know, well, what does, what does, unconditional surrender permit us to do. And the answer is, well, there really isn't any limit. We can't identify any final limit as to how far you can go, except that clearly you can go a hell a lot further than we've ever gone before in terms of the international law of military occupation. So, as it turns out, I mean, that's really what's necessary. I mean, Japan is very fundamentally

reordered. It is totally dominated by its military in 1945. And you can, you can, find contemporary references by Japanese military people saying, okay, you know, okay, we may have to surrender now, but, you know, we'll just, we'll come back and we'll try again harder next time or whatever. They're Japanese leaders who are actually thinking that in 1945, but of course, the occupation makes sure that that's not going to happen. So we've got Americans debating internally at the highest levels, whether or not to proceed with an invasion. We have Japanese at the highest levels, seeking to use an invasion to stalemate the Americans into some kind of positional, attritional warfare that they believe, not without reason, will lose political support in the

United States and will allow them to negotiate terms. Let's talk about bombing. How does the strategic air campaign, the assembling elements of a blockade play into all of this, and how does the decision to drop the first bomb come about? Let me take a little different path here because we're running down in time and I want to get to some key points here. When you look at the ultimate decision in Japan to end the war and the decision has to be made in Japan, it's not, can't be made somewhere else. The Japanese have to decide that they're going to surrender.

And it's really two steps. Someone with legitimate authority has to decide that Japan is a nation state will surrender. And then the Japanese armed forces have to comply with that. surrender. It takes both of those steps to actually end the war, end the fighting, whatever here. Your critical figure, it turns out, is Emperor Hirohito. And that's because the legal government in Japan is in the hands of this inner cabinet called the Big Six, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Army, the Army, the Army, the Navy Minister, the Navy, the Navy, and the Navy. And this Big Six is instituted in 1944. And it gives Japan the most dysfunctional

political and military decision-making apparatus of all the combatants of World War II, because the big six can only decide when they're incomplete unanimity. All six must agree. Five of the fixed members, either current or prior serving Imperial Army or Imperial Navy flag officers, admirals or generals, only the foreign minister is a civilian. And they are locked into Ketsuco, this counter-invasion battle. And they never budge from that. They're not disturbed originally by Hiroshima because they have their own bomb program and has taught them that to making an atomic bomb,

visual material is so difficult that they don't believe the Americans have an arsenal of such weapons. The man who actually is going to actually break the deadlock is the emperor because the big six do deadlock. And that gives him his opportunity to intervene. And up to this point, Harohito has been a presider, not a decider. It's almost 20 years he's been emperor. he's intervened to actually command the government to do something only once in February 46 against an internal coup attempt that strikes into his personal staff, kills members, and then he puts on his uniform and goes down to where it's the government to act.

He's never never intervened. And this gives him a chance to do so. So what makes him intervene? He gives three reasons at the time, the first of which is he's lost face than Ketsuco, because he's told the preparations are not adequate. But ironically, it's mainly the preparations about Tokyo not to use you. Secondly, he talks about aerial attacks, both conventional and nuclear. And thirdly, he talks about what he calls the domestic situation.

And this is, I think, one of the most important points about this whole history that's missed in this critical literature. Domestic situations were referenced the fact that Hirohito and other senior Japanese leaders are really fearful that the Japanese people primarily due to the blockade and aerial attacks are reaching a revolutionary state. They're going to revolt. And it's probably going to come in the fall when the rice crop, which they know he's going to fail. And so that's what the emperor talks about. But the triggering event is Hiroshima. We know now that he meets with the foreign minister, Togo, on August 8th, which is before Nagasaki and before the Soviet intervention. And he tells him at that interview, now is the time. The war must end right now. So we know that he was motivated by Hiroshima to start down the path to surrender.

And he will have to struggle with the government to make that stick. They send their first note on the 10th of August, as they referred to. That contains a poison part in it, which it says that we surrender, except you'll have to recognize the prerogatives of the emperor as a sovereign leader, which basically means that we want the emperor to be supreme over the occupation commander and have a veto power over the occupation reforms. Rinds-Bahle was what's called the Byrne's note, which says that the emperor will be subordinate to the occupation commander from the time the occupation begins. What's really interesting, a historian named Enrico Cabo Muro, looking at the diary of the emperor's principal

aid, Kito, noted that on the 13th of August, while this is back and forth, is still going on in Tokyo, the effort tells Kito, you know, even if the Americans want to keep me or keep the imperial institution, if the Japanese people don't support it, it will not be preserved. And therefore, I'm prepared to submit the continuation of this imperial institution and my seat on the throne to the will of the Japanese people. As I pointed out to Dr. Kilimanbrough, he's basically saying that the Burns Note, which provided exactly that, that the ultimate form of government will be chosen by the Japanese people, he's saying that's okay.

19 days after what's called the Burns-Snowton and that punch stand proclamation demand in Japan surrender. So that's how we get to the decision to surrender. It's the emperor intervenes. Then you have the armed forces complying. And basically what the bombs do is they kick the stuffings out of Ketchiko. They say that the Americans will not have to come and invade. There will not be this final decisive battle.

And therefore, the military can only offer national suicide is its alternative. And that, in a nutshell, is the most basic points about how the war ends. So I just want to make sure I understand your argument. So let me try something. And then you tell me if I get it right or if I go wrong. So the standard critical account is something like Hiroshima gets bombed on what, August 6th, then, you know, amidst the broader strategic air campaign, you know, yes, it's bad, but there's been lots of bad stuff.

So it doesn't necessarily move the needle. And then the Soviets intervene on the 8th, which does. get everyone's attention. And yes, we bomb Nagasaki right after that, what on the ninth, right? But the decision to surrender is more motivated by the Soviets than the bombs. And it's just overstating the case to say that it's the bombs that drive it. What you're saying is amongst other pieces of evidence, you have the emperor saying in the aftermath of Hiroshima, but prior to the Soviets and to Nagasaki that he's done. That's exactly right. That's what happens. And I think, Ultimately, maybe the most single telling piece of evidence on this, I think, is from Admiral Yonet.

He's the Navy minister. He's a former prime minister of Japan. And on the 13th of August, while they still haven't finally decided in Japan to surrender, they're about to. And Yonai says to one of his aides, he says, and I'm paraphrasing here, he says, this may be inappropriate, he says. But in a strange way, the atomic bombs and Soviet intervention are gifts from the gods, because now we don't have to, admit that the real reason we're going to surrender is the domestic situation, the sphere of

internal revolt. And I think that's sort of where I'm split apart from either the conventional view or the revisionist view or critical view. I think it's a combination of the blockade, the bombardment, the atomic bombs, and the sphere of internal revolt that are driving forces that moves the emperor and eventually convince the military, you know, there's not going to be Ketsugo. There's not going to be this final invasion battle. I think Soviet intervention may play a peripheral role in terms of surrender of some of these Japanese forces overseas in China. I think it does have some role in that. But the main driving force does the heavy lifting on getting the surrender or the bombs,

the fear of internal revolt and this, you know, this fear that the Japanese people are reaching the end of their tether, which is an extraordinarily difficult thing for the Japanese leaders to admit at that time that somehow the Japanese people won't go on to the end to total self-extinction if necessary, which is what some of them literally talk about. And Nagasaki's significance then amidst all of this is even if it is somewhat of a bluff, considering America's actual nuclear arsenal at the time, it communicates to the Japanese that there's more of this to come, and thus there won't be an invasion. It'll just be more of this, is what, even though the emperor has already decided, it's what's required to get.

Right. And you're right there. And that's, it's a very interesting point because, you know, the big sacks, when they get word of Hiroshima, they don't have to convene a panel of experts to tell them what, what is this thing, this atomic bomb is? They had their own nuclear program. It didn't give them a bomb, but it gave them knowledge that making visible material, which is what makes an atomic bomb in a top bomb is an incredibly time-consuming, costly process. So when they get news of the first bomb, and the leader of the Imperial Navy in the operations, like Toyota, says flatly, says, well, maybe the Americans have a bomb, one atomic bomb. They can't have that many.

They can't be that powerful. Maybe I'll be dissuaded from news. And the Nagasaki bomb is to bluff that we have an arsenal of these weapons and we can keep using them. And if we have an arsenal, we keep using them. We won't have to invade, which is what kills the Ketsugo theory. It's interesting that,

What angers enormously in that is that they've captured this, a P-51 pilot, Marcus McDilda, an unsung hero of this whole story, who was told that he buttered spelt the beans on what the American atomic bomb program is or they're going to kill him. And he has this thick southern accent, and he decides he's going to be very creative and invent this story. And amazingly, this gets all the way up to the Army Minister. General General Enami, you know, who after the Emperor's most powerful man, starts, sprouting the story from Macbilda saying, the Americans have 100 atomic bombs. They can drop three a day and the next target is Tokyo, you know. Great country. You know, every state gets to put a statue in the capital. I've always thought that McDowellon should have a statue in the capital of them from Florida. Did the Americans, you know, whether we're talking about King or Marshall or maybe their differences amongst a group like that, what level of expectation was there that that these two bombs?

would lead to this result. I mean, the debates about the invasion that we were just discussing, they're happening all throughout this period, that the Jewish Gold are contemporaneous, essentially. That's same time. No, there's no absolute confidence that the bombs are going to end the war. In fact, we have documentary evidence of General Marshall, who sends one of his staff officers to talk to the Manhattan Project about the further use of atomic bombs after the first two. And this guy communicates what Marshall is thinking.

And he says, Joel Marshall believes that either the Japanese will surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two bombs on two cities, or no amount of bombing of Japanese cities will cause them to surrender. And therefore, this guy's mission is to inquire as to how many bombs do we have in the pipeline and that Marshall wants to use them as what we not call tactical weapons to support an invasion of the Japanese home islands. So now there's no expectation, no, no belief, no confidence, I should say, really, that the war is going to end because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is high hope that that's what's going to happen, but no confidence. And it's just, you know, this is my mentor, Martin Brinsey's living history forward, you know, you don't know how the story is going to come out at the time. And there's no confidence going forward that even two bombs are going to end the war. Yeah. It's fascinating to think that that's where Marshall's mind goes, that the tactical use in support of an invasion.

It's reminiscent of MacArthur in 1950, 51, thinking about using them up along the Yalu to deal with Chinese intervention into the Korean War. Yeah. Well, that gets back to the whole thing about we've, one of overarching things, you know, I'm talking about this trilogy. You know, we lost a sense of contingency about the war, you know. Well, we know the Japanese did surrender in August, September, 1945, you know, and so. This was the inevitable end. This is where everything was leading to what we will know, you know, and no when its time believed it.

And, you know, there was great trepidation that, you know, not only would the Japanese government not surrender, but the armed forces. In fact, right after Tokyo, the emperor broadcast saying, you know, did you ban surrender? The next thing, we intercept her communications from the senior Japanese officer in China, the senior Japanese officer in what they call the southern area, which is elsewhere in Asia Pacific.

And both of them saying, hell no, we won't go. We're not going to comply with this run. You know, so the feeling that, you know, we're not going to get this organized capitulation is very much alive right to the very end. Spending as much time as you have studying these things, you must think from time to time about issues in the Pacific today, prospect of a war with China over Taiwan,

prospect of war in the South China Sea over things like the second Thomas Scholl. What lessons, if any, should we draw from your work as we think about contemporary affairs in the region, or anywhere for that matter? Well, I mean, it's pretty basic. I mean, you have to really be able to put your feet in the shoes the people who are your adversaries. What do they really think, you know, and not imagine that they think exactly like you.

It seems to me that that's the most fundamental lesson from this whole thing because I think at the core of much of this critical literature is that they simply cannot. grapple with what the nature of Imperial Japan was like, what the Japanese militarists were prepared to inflict, what they believe they were prepared to endure, and the Japanese population should be prepared to endure. To me, that's the most obvious lesson from this. And that's at the core of the unconditional surrender conversation we were having a few minutes ago, right, is a conviction on the part of FDR, if not others, that this is not of the nature of some sort of 18th century conflict over a disputed province. And once we slap the other guy in

the face really hard, he'll knock it off, at least for a while, that this is something so serious. The nature of Nazi rule, the nature of imperial Japanese rule is so toxic and malign for the prospects of peace that it has to be fundamentally reordered. And that's exactly right. And what I'm working on now. One of the points that has been lost in the debate that narrowly focuses in on what happened in August, September, 1945. I mean, there's a huge backstory to this in terms of the American understanding of what was going on. And one of the most important aspects about that was they had watched what had been going on in China since July of 1937. And the American people by February of 1940, you know, one of the Gallup polls saying, you know, who do you favor in this

were from China and Japan, this distant war in the Far East. Who cares? Well, by that time, 77% of the people, you know, favored the Chinese and 2% to Japanese. And why? Because they've been getting these stories and graphic images coming out of China. All these horrifying things that have been going on in China, the tremendous death of Chinese non-combatants,

both immediately from, you know, being directly filled by the Japanese, by this tremendous bombing campaign the Japanese did in China. So Americans in 1945, you know, they fully understood that the war was not, as you say, over some little piece of ground or a province or whatever here. It was over, you know, just fundamental horrors. And they had to end. And we had the example from World War I, at least it seemed to be the example of World War I. Hey, you know, we won then. And here you are right, back at it again with the Germans 20 years, some years later.

You know, we're not going to do this a third time. I mean, this was, you know, the dominant view, I think. you see coming through. And by the way, Truman specifically said that he viewed his task as executing the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt. Employ a really big part of the legacy was unconditional surrender in what that meant in terms of what in a later generation would be called under the hood work that was going to be done in Japan and Germany to make sure that they never again went on a march of conquest. And that, thankfully, is what we ended up with. Richard Frank, a totally fascinating. fascinating conversation and an important one, I think, with really important implications for

thinking about the present. Author of Tower of Skulls, most recently in forthcoming volumes of this trilogy on the Asia-Pacific War, thank you so much for making the time. Well, thank you very much for having me, Aaron. It's going to delight. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.