TRIGGERnometry - The War in the Pacific: How WWII Changed the World Forever - Dr Robert Lyman

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Robert Lyman MBE is a British military historian. A former Major in the British Army, he has published over 16 books on the Second World War in Europe, North Africa and Asia. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, regularly appearing on TV and radio, lectures at organisations such as the National Army Museum, and is a battlefield guide. Notable works: A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain: 1941–45: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1472847156/ Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918–40: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1472860845/ Sponsors: Mint Mobile: to get your new 3-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to https://mintmobile.com/TRIGGER Start earning A Yield on Silver, Paid in Silver with Monetary Metals. Click here to find out more: https://bit.ly/3Rs8Rv2 Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. The war in the Pacific began, of course, on 7th of December 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Well, that's what we all think.

But actually, that's only a very small part of the story. Because the Japanese have been fighting this war since 1931. Pearl Harbor was a tiny part. It was a consequence of this great Japanese invasion to create an empire. The purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was to bring the war to an end. Whilst disastrous for the lives that are lost was salvation for the lives that were preserved. Rob Lime, it's great to have you on the show. It's always such a pleasure for us to have historians on because not only are we both fascinated by history, but there's so many parallels.

between what has happened in the past and some of the things that are happening today. And we're going to get into those parallels later on. But the first thing we wanted to talk about, obviously one of your big areas of expertise is the war in the Pacific. And it seems to me that both here and the West, and actually in much of the world, we are completely ignorant of that part of that conflict. So the first thing that's probably worth asking is,

you know, in most people's minds, the war in the Pacific starts with the attack on Pearl Har, Why did that even happen? Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me on. Historians love to have the opportunity of talking to intelligent customers and you're that. And it's really exciting to be able to talk about stuff that drives us. Well, the first thing about the Pacific War and the War on the Far East, let's just get all this right.

There's Pacific War and then there's War in what we call the Far East, which is essentially everything that happened on land in China and Burma and India. The Americans call it the China-Burma-India Theatre, we in Britain call it the Far East, but it's fundamentally the same thing. If you lump the two together, then yes, you can talk about the war in the Pacific. The war in the Pacific began, of course, on the 7th of December 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Well, that's what we all think. But actually, that's only a very small part of the story, because on that precise day,

the Japanese actually invaded Malaya and the Philippines. And the strike against Pearl Harbor, which was the temporary home of the American Pacific Fleet, usually sat in San Diego, but it had been in Hawaii since 1940 because the American centered out as a forward defense of America, given the war drums that were beating from Japan at the time, was a not a faint, but it was an attempt to stop the Americans getting involved in what was the primary Japanese war aim, which is the invasion of Southeast Asia. And 1941 is a very interesting year because actually I argue, and I think all the evidence suggest that 1941 was the apathy. It was the height of Japanese power. It wasn't the start

of their war. It was the end of their war because the Japanese have been fighting this war since 1931. And we get the sense because, and particularly in America, you get the idea that the war for America began in 1941, in a great, a real sense, it did because America was dragged in for the first time. America had been deeply isolationist. Not in a negative sense, but it had developed through the 1920s and 30s the idea that actually the trouble makers of this world lived in Europe and places outside of America. America was peaceful, benign, it wanted to pursue wealth, health and happiness and money. It didn't want to get involved in other people's squabbles. And Europe was the source and the cause of war, as it often is. But Japan unwittingly

dragged America into the war in 1941. And there was a dramatic transformation from that point, from December 1941, of American attitudes to war. So, you know, this sleeping line, frankly, had been pricked with a very big stick. And they decided, America decided almost with one voice to take the war to Japan. But the really interesting thing here is that Japan need not have attacked Pearl Harbor. Japan, in my view, could quite easily have achieved all of its political and military goals without prodding the American lion.

And it was a really serious own goal. And this is fundamentally because Japan had lost control of the war by 1941. Now, this is an interesting narrative because we all get the sense that actually Japan was at the height of its military powers. It was a very strong country. It really had the West on the ropes. But none of that actually is true. Japan went to war because it was weak.

Japan went to war because it had suffered 10 years of sort of cataclysmic losses in China. It was and had been unable to achieve its great political ambitions in China. All the while, America had been supporting China through the back door called the Burma Road through Rangoon. And Japan got increasingly angry at American involvement in the attempts by Japan to create an empire. This is what it's all about. Japan was trying to increase its power base, increase its hegemony over Asia by force. It wanted to create an empire by conquest and America. His dastardly, the Yanks were preventing it from doing so.

So actually, this whole Pearl Harbor thing was a lash out by the Japanese against America who had become the enemy in the Japanese political mind because it was America that was preventing it from being successful in China. And it's interesting that you say that the Japanese provoked America unwittingly, because I've read that partly because of some of the racial superiority ideas that the Japanese had, they thought, well, if we attack these Hawaiian islands,

no one in America really is going to care about this. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And you've summed up the Japanese attitude very well. Japan at the time was deeply racially antagonistic to anyone who wasn't Japanese, So it was exceptionalist. It had this idea that the Japanese race was exceptional.

It was higher and better and greater than anyone else in the region. It sounds kind of like the Nazis. It was very, very, I would describe it, certainly fascistic, definitely fascistic. And resonances of that exceptionalism, have to be very careful about the words we use, but exceptional tribes believe they're greater and better than others. And elements of that remain in Japan. to this day. By the way, in their defense, if you go to Japan, you sort of go, these guys are a bit superior because like everything is amazing in Japan and their culture is incredible.

It's a very, very united, homogenous culture. And that's good and it's bad. It's bad in the sense that it's very easy for militaristic ideas to take form and to dominate. And history plays a really significant part in the transformation of Japan from the Meiji Empire in the 1880s because Japan very very rapidly tried to become and did become a modern industrial state, but you don't become a modern industrial state. You don't go through the industrial revolution in a matter of 20 or 25 years. It takes much longer than that because you've got to take people and culture with you. And in Japan, it didn't, because at the same time that this industrial state was being created, it also became quite totalitarian. It became very militaristic, and the dominant political

voices in Japan became military voices. And the two great parties in Japan, that are that that were exercising influence, political influence, not military influence, but political influence, were actually military parties, the army and the Navy being two great examples of this. So you then had a great drive to modernisation. You have a fundamentally a feudal culture in Japan. That's really important to understand barons and serfs. That's a good way of sort of describing late 19th century, early 20th century, Japan, and a good way of understanding why it was the Japanese army was so disciplined and so ferocious able at a tactical level, in the battlefield level, when war came into China and against

the Western European and American colonial powers in the Pacific in 1941. It was a big shock to us to see how united, homogenous and ferocious the Japanese could be. And that's a product of this Barren-Serve thing. And during all this, the Japanese had to create a culture of exceptionalism. They actually built it. a self-built culture of exceptionalism. And a lot of this was built around, certainly when it comes to the military view of things, around the idea of the samurai.

Now, the samurai were the ancient knights, of course, in Japan. They were almost mythical, spiritual, a little bit like the Knights of the Roundtable, very Arthurian. And this whole idea that you could become a samurai, that your Japanese exceptionalism could be expressed through martial valor, became a very, very important part of the Japanese idea of themselves. So if the highest point of cultural value in society is your ability to fight a war, you need war in order to be able to exercise or express that. And this is a real problem. If you have militaristic societies, the only way you can create value in that society is by going to war.

It's a real problem. So don't try and whip up militaristic ideas in society because the only way you're going to be able to express that. That is war. And this is the problem with Japan. So we had a deeply militaristic society being developed. It was quite totalitarian. It was very homogenous culture in Japan. And they started trying to express that by war and conquest. And it started really in 1904 with the war against Saras, Russia.

And then of course, many of your listeners may know that the Japanese basically conquered Korea in 2005, and then occupied in the years following Chinese Manchuria, which they then called Manchuko and incorporated as part of the empire in 1931 and 1932. Robert, I'm just going to stop you there because we've used names like Malay and Chinese Manchuria, and there's going to be a lot of people, and by people, I mean me, he was like, Malay, I think is probably Malaysia, Chinese Manchuria are lost. Yeah, okay. So, well, let's leap forward to 1941.

Let's just bring it back to the Second World War. So we had the Japanese tried to create an empire by force. And hopefully we'll come back to this. Why do they attack Southeast Asia? Was it because they wanted oil, rubber, tungsten, rice and all this sort of stuff? No, it's because they wanted to create an empire. They wanted to express their exceptionalism via imperialism. The only way they could do it was by force.

And remember, 1941, as I said, they'd been fighting a war in China to create this empire for the last 10 years. So all of a sudden, in 1941, the only threat against them, they thought, was America. And so when they attacked Malaya, which is now Malaysia, the Malay Peninsula, they attacked the northeast coast of Malaya. Big amphibious invasion took place as a place called Kota-Baru, and a quite exceptional Japanese general called Yamashda, landed with his army, swept down the Malay Peninsula,

captured Singapore on 15th of February, 1942. to, and, you know, a great totemic bastion of British colonialism collapsed in a heap. It was quite an extraordinarily profound popping of the British imperial bubble, because what the British Empire never really did was protect his empire. It was, I would argue, a benign empire. I never thought anyone would attack it, and no one would be foolish enough to attack it. And it failed, the British Empire failed its first duty, which is to protect itself. Anyway, so the Japanese attacked Malaya and Singapore.

At the same time, they attacked the Philippines and Borneo. So Borneo's that very, very large island that's now, Sabah, Brunei, Kalamantan and Sarawak. Pardon? You know where all those are. Yeah, yeah, Matt. Yeah, a lot of Kalimantan. Kalamand is a great name. That's part of Indonesia. Home of the Komodo Dragon, actually.

Yes. There you go. And that's done as much. My character really didn't pay off. come off as the ignorant one now. It's quite extraordinary because I think when certainly in America we talk about the war, people think about Pearl Harbor. But Pearl Harbor was a tiny part.

It was a consequence of this great Japanese invasion to create an empire. They wanted to create an empire. I think the really extraordinary thing about this, well, there are a number of extraordinary things. One is that, of course, Pearl Harbor dragged America around overnight. American attitudes to these bad guys who lived outside America and didn't understand the need to create a peaceful society and to go to work and to raise kids and to create some money and make a good future for everyone. You know, these, you know, the Japanese, what on earth were they doing?

And they needed to be slapped around and put down. And the same with the Germans, you know, for goodness sake. And the Germans, very shortly thereafter, declared war in America. America didn't declare war on Nazi Germany until Hitler did it first. Why did he do that? He was very foolish. I mean, his own party didn't know. He went into the Reichstag one day.

I didn't think he even knew. I think it was the 11th of December. So the Japanese invasion of Far East on the 7th of December. Actually, for us, Brits, it was the 8th because the international date line comes down. So a lot of Americans get confused about this. It didn't happen on sequential days. Everything happened on the same morning. Pearl Harbor happened on the same morning.

The big invasion took place in the Far East. A couple of days later, Hitler went into the Reichstag and started ranting as he did. And he said, oh, these jolly Americans, they deserve everything. they're getting, by the way, we're going to declare war on them as well. And everyone was completely by surprise because it hadn't been rehearsed. I mean, it was just Hitler at his strategic worst, or strategic best. He didn't have a strategic mind. And he gave Roosevelt the absolute excuse. The thing that Roosevelt had wandered for a long time, Roosevelt, of course, had been balancing for at least a couple of years on a knife edge, how to support and be the industry, how to be

the factory for Britain in its defense against Nazism without actually taking America. Americans, the wars, he was a very astute political operator. Roosevelt did a very, very good job. He couldn't declare war. He couldn't declare openly that America is going to be the bastion of Western democracy and support Britain against the Nazis because he would have lost all political credibility as a Democrat in America. Americans said, no, we don't want to get involved in yet another destructive war.

Let these Europeans fight it out. Americans had no idea about the existential nature of Nazism. That's the real challenge in 1940. They, goodness gracious me, didn't take them long to realize it. And they certainly, well, actually I think maybe that's wrong. They took an, the army realized that when they got to Europe and started seeing the death camps. But by 1946, 1947, they had certainly picked it up. And as a consequence, when Americans started thinking about this new threat from international

communism, which they had decided was being stirred up from Moscow. It wasn't always the case, but that's where the American mind was. It was a very easy jump for them to say, well, the Nazis were doing this in the 1930s. It's now the commies, the commies are the bad guys. So this big crusade against the Nazis suddenly became a big crusade against the commies. So I've left around a little bit, but let's just go back to 1941. It's really important to understand the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia, primarily because of their need for an empire.

What about the Ollambago? So, sorry? What about the idea, I hear a lot of people talking about, they say, invaded because Americans were preventing them. Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. Well, it's partly true.

It's partly, I describe it as a lash out because the Japanese were angry. They were very angry that actually the Americans were denying them the fruits of victory in China by placing an oil embargo on Japan and denying them their ability to achieve their own statehood and nationalhood and to create their empire. And you can understand this. I mean, Japan wasn't able to produce much oil itself. It needed to be able to have access to foreign markets for almost everything. They produced a lot of rice, produce a lot of coal, a lot of tin and steel.

But like all countries, particularly countries that are as rocky and mountainous as Japan, you needed to be able to exercise effective markets. The Japanese, though, had produced in their mind this idea that markets are created by power. are not influence or money. And there's a fundamental difference, of course, between the capitalist approach to empire, which is basically how I described the rise of the British Empire, and an empire that's created by force or violence or conflict,

which is effectively the way that Sarlane decided he was going to create his empire. It was how definitely Hitler decided he was going to create his empire, which he called Grosser-Deutschland, this idea that wherever there is German blood, that is my empire, regardless of any states that might exist and regardless of any sovereignty that might previous exist because that's all irrelevant

and the most important thing is Grace of Doeuton, German blood integrated Germany. And the Japanese had the same idea. They had this idea that they were primus interparees in Asia. They were the single country that could provide leadership in Asia

because they looked at empire and they said, the reason why all the states in Asia have fall and prey to colonialism is because they're not strong enough intellectually, mentally, culturally. We are. We can take the place of these foreign empires. We can get rid of the Europeans and we can have an Asia for the Asiatic, which is what they argued. The real interesting thing about Japan for me is that there wasn't much intellectual planning or idea in Tokyo around what the

economic co-prosperity sphere might look like. And if you go to Japan and look at the archives and look at the evidence for this great creation of an economic copacperity sphere, look at the arguments for it, look at the suggestions that actually what we might be able to do is ship lots of rice from Burma. That doesn't really exist. That's all actually arguments that were developed in the 1950s and 60s by rational American historians who said, well, the Japanese must have attacked for a reason. Well, we know they wanted oil. So they invaded Borneo to get oil. We know they wanted rice. They invaded Burma to get rice.

Well, that's just not true. We know they wanted rubber, so that's why they invaded Malay. We've got to start with this basic proposition about who do we think we are as a country, what do we want, how do we want to express our nationhood, how do we create our empire? Let's do it by force. We are a military country. We are a militaristic society. The fundamental ethos of our country is Bushido, this idea of martial sacrifice,

it's exercised through war. We've been doing it for the last 10 years in China. We haven't been doing it very well. The Chinese have been keeping us under. We haven't managed to capture China, which is a real embarrassment. It's a real shame. The Navy accused the army of being inept in China because the army wasn't achieving Japan's imperial ambitions.

I mean, it's completely confusing. The reality is that the idea that all of this stuff that Japan needed was the primary drive for war is just not true. There's no evidence for it. a subset of what the Japanese are trying to do. They said, of course, if we create an empire, then we'll get all this lovely stuff. But if you look at shipping requests and requirements for bringing oil back, there's very, very little planned by the Japanese, even to bring oil back from Borneo. They did it. I think there were only about three or four shipments of oil

from Borneo before the American started sinking the ship. So this idea that they created an empire in order to be able to garner all this stuff is absolutely nonsense. Do you think, is that partly because, and I'm completely ignorant when it comes to this, so correct me, is it because the emperor was in charge and he was basically going, look, this is what I want and you boys are going to do that? I think it's the opposite. I think the emperor wasn't in charge. I think this is a real challenge actually, because Hirohito was, you know, the son God. He was deified by many in Japan. even if people didn't really believe he was a god they treated him as such he was frankly a political pawn in the arms of the of the militaristic political parties who were actually urging war and his challenge

his real mistake was not standing up to them and well one might say how could he and he wouldn't have been emperor otherwise he wanted to be able to remain the the spiritual head and the ethnic head and all that it meant to be the emperor of Japan, but keep in check the militarist elements. Now, I need also to add that he was a bit of a militarist himself. So whilst I wouldn't go so far as saying that he was the reason for war,

he certainly didn't stop it, and he certainly encouraged many aspects of it. It's quite hard actually to get behind Hirohito's motivations now, because after 1945, an enormous amount of protection was built around Hirohito by the Americans, MacArthur in particular, who wanted to keep Hurahito as the titular head of Japan, the person to whom the Japanese could coalesce around and not feel that they're completely defeated. And this protection actually is hidden enormous amount of culpability, because Hirohito, in my view, was culpable for the war.

He could have stopped it. It would have been difficult from to stop it, but I, my personal view is that Hirohito didn't have the moral courage to stand up to his generals, General Tojo in particular. And the generals had won. The anarchy of the generals had won in 1941. And there was debate amongst the generals themselves and the admirals about the effect of the war, the attack on Pearl Harbor in particular. One in particular, Yamamoto said, okay, if we attack Pearl Harbor, it's the end of us, we

You might win the battle, but we will never win the war, but he was sheltered down and ignored. And the real challenge in militaristic society is hubris. Well, you've got this combination of we can only be militaristic. We can only receive the value of our martial identities if we go to war. So we need to go to war. And the consequences of war are very, very rarely considered. in detail, because if you're a soldier and you're charging ahead in war, hubris is a really, really significant problem.

I mean, it's not just a problem for the Japanese. It's a problem actually for Americans. MacArthur during the Korean War, hubris was, you know, was his second name, frankly. And this is something that democratic societies are much better at managing because you've got a much more integrated relationship between the soldiers and the politicians. And hopefully, more often than not, the politicians are in charge of what the soldiers do. the other way around, then you've generally got problems. But we've got a, we've got to, I would describe Japan in 1941 as a country out of control. It lashes out at the world, it lashes out to

create its empire, but it does so ignorantly because it does so from a position of weakness. And Japan in 1941, far from being at the height of its powers, is actually at the bottom of them, and it only gets worse. 1942, Battle of Midway, we're basically in the southern part of the Pacific there. The Navy is destroyed, which gives the ability of the Americans then to start the island hopping campaign, beginning actually in Guadal-Cunel and the Solomon Islands in December 1944, and then very progressively further north. And the island hopping campaign by MacArthur is a very intelligent campaign because he basically says, what are the islands I need to get to to get to Japan?

Let's ignore all the other ones. Let them wither on the vine. Let's ignore them. And I'm going to go for the island, the stepping stones to Japan. Whilst at the same time in 1944 in the north, very, very simply, we've got a massive, quite an extraordinarily large amphibious campaign based around aircraft carriers that just basically clears the Japanese out of the northern Pacific completely. And this is really remarkable, actually, because Yamamoto saw this in 1941.

He saw, if you're going to take on America, you need to be really careful about what you're trying to do, because America was the industry, even then the industrial powerhouse of the world, And the important thing about America in 1941 was not just the, what it was able to produce. It was its potential. Just give you some examples. I try and get my facts right, but I think in 1942, the Americans had two aircraft carriers than the North Pacific. By 1944, early 1944, they had 17.

Now these were all laid down in 1941. So 17 aircraft carriers. I mean, it's just the size of the American fleet. The 1984 created the American fleet that it is today. It is still a product of this massive, massive enlargement to defeat the Japanese. The Americans recognize that they needed to have mobile aircraft carriers, mobile air bases all over the Pacific in order to be able to attack the Japanese who were stuck on their islands. Now, if you're stuck on an island, that's a real problem because you can't sustain yourself. You'd simply become a garrison.

You just fight from foxholes. You're not fighting as an army. it's, you know, you're eventually going to get bludgeoned, and the Japanese were bludgeoned, and they decided they, you know, they would fight to the death, which is one of the reasons why there was such slaughter on the islands through the Pacific campaign. Absolutely terrible campaign. You're fighting, you know, as a, as America primarily leading the charge in the Pacific. Australians, of course, we mustn't forget the Australians fighting an amazing campaign in Papua and, well, mainly New Guinea, immediately north of, um,

Australia, starting at Port Mawalsby and going over. It was really quite an extraordinary campaign. And we, the British and the Indian armies, actually incidentally, learned an enormous amount from what the Australians were learning against fighting the Japanese and New Guinea. Entirely forgotten campaign, certainly in the northern hemisphere. If you live in Australia, then, of course, it's the only campaign that's important. And it's good.

It's really, really, really when the Australians did an incredible job in New Guinea. Anyway, that's just a little bit of an aside. We mustn't forget the Australians there when you talk about the Pacific. And of course, Australia was the launch pad for MacArthur and his amphibious forces, going to Guadal and the Solomon Islands and then charging up north towards Japan. But this is, it's quite extraordinary because the size of the American operations were unbelievable. And I can't ever overemphasize this. It's as though America switched on, Japan switched on America's light bulb in 1941 with Pearl Harbor. and America just coalesced around this need to defeat these bad guys.

We're going to defeat the NIPs because they had the temerity to attack Americans, innocent Americans sitting on their ships in Pearl Harbor. And this egregious attack was the most outrageous thing that had ever happened to America since the British colonialists in 1776. So that idea very quickly gained traction. But the potential of American power was just staggering. And as I said, there were a number of Japanese who realized the potential of American power but had no real sense about how extraordinary it was.

There's lots of examples of this extraordinary potential, not least the aircraft carriers, but also the B-29. So most people will have watched the Masters of the Air, this fantastic program about the bomber offensive in Europe with the B-17. Compared to the B-17, B-29 was a complete giant. It was amazing. It was four or five times the size. It's absolutely enormous bomb. that the Americans started building in 1942, I think it was. By 1944, they were flying

hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of these massive aircraft all away from Pacific Islands to Japan. And of course, it was the B-29, which eventually dropped the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki in Hiroshima. Robert, can I just pause you there? Because we've been talking a lot about the Americans and the B-40, and it's all been fascinating. It's been wonderful to listen to. But my mind was going to, so where are the Brits in all of this? Okay. Well, the Brits were caught with him. What about me? Yeah, exactly. Look, how did we save the world? Well, I'm going to tell you a really funny story here. So the Brits were caught with their pants down. There's no doubt about that. Doesn't sound like us, mate.

The Brits, and it's a great British phrase, caught with your pants down. And I'm afraid we were in 1941 because there had been no view. I mean, Japan had been regarded as a potential enemy, but no one had realized that it would come to what it came to with the Japanese actually invading Malaya and attacking Singapore from the north and being so dramatically successful because Britain had stuck its head in the sand for many, many years

and had believed that they had failed to imagine the possibility of war. This is a really important phrase that I use quite a lot. You need to be able to imagine what war might be like in order to be able to think about countering it. We can't counter war by preparing for it unless you can imagine what it's like. And through the 1920s and 30s, the subject of a book by General Lord Danor to myself, a little shameless plug here called Victory to Defeet, we look at why it was that Britain was so badly prepared in 1940,

and it's precisely this, that we had forgotten how to imagine the possibility of war. That's exactly where we are today, by the way. We're going to relate that to modern times. we have forgotten as a country and as a West generally what war entails and what is what is required to prevent war. Imagining the possibility of war is the first step. Anyway, 1941, we had failed to imagine the possibility of war against the Japanese. We had regarded them as an oriental enemy. They were a second-class enemy. We regarded ourselves as a first-class army, which wasn't true. and of course we were focused on defeating the Germans. We were fighting, of course, in North Africa primarily

because we've been thrown out of Europe after Dunkirk. We were fighting in North Africa. We were also fighting in the Middle East, Iraq, Iran. We invaded Iran, by the way, in 1941. And in fact, very few people know. And we were fighting war against the Vichy, French, in Syria. So in 1941, that's where we were focused. So we weren't focus on Japan.

The idea that the Japanese, when the Japanese arrived, this was cataclysmic. I mean, this was terribly, terribly damaging to British morale. British morale was pretty low anyway by 1941. We'd been fighting the war for two years, and Germany was rampant in Europe. There didn't seem to be much chance. People imagined the future of Britain ever recovering. Of course, America joined in December 1941.

So we had America on our side. But by early 1942, it was still pretty dismal. Britain really didn't have a victory against the enemy. of whoever it was, Germans, Italians or Japanese, I'm exaggerating a little bit, T'allal Alamein in November 1942. So we were caught with our pants down. We weren't preparing at all to defend our imperial possessions. The funny story is a film called Objective Burma, which was a – I love telling the story

because it says a lot about who we think we were as Brits. because it was shown for the first time, I think, in January 1945, a Hollywood blockbuster with Errol Flynn, who was a Brit, living in America, but he's still a Brit, dressed as an American. And this film was released in Leicester Square in January 1945. And the crowd on the cinema, who were there for the first showing, were very excited about this film. He was a Brit.

Although he was wearing an American helmet, that was quite unusual. He had a Tommy gun on the picture. And anyway, within 10 or 15 minutes, most of the audience had stood up and walked out of the film. And it was empty. By about half an hour, there was no one left in the cinema. Why was that? Because the Brits who were listening, watching this film, were horrified to think that the Americans were taking the glory of the war in Burma to themselves. And this was classic American exceptionalism itself.

It was American imperialism. They were saying that the war in Burma was not being fought by Brits, who was being fought by Americans. Now, actually, the film was very good. And the film doesn't say that at all. It just touches on the reality of perceptions at the time. Because actually, America was deeply involved in the CBI theatre, the far eastern theatre. The theatre that we as Brits think was ours. I just start by explaining that in 1945, the Southeast Asian Command, which is basically running the war on the Far East.

So China, Burma and India, and all parts in between, comprised 1.3 million men. This was essentially a British campaign. think. And it was headed by Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander Southeast Asia. He had an American deputy by end in 1944. But prior to that, it was General Vinegarjo still well, then it was General Viedemeyer. So it was a mixed force, but it's a British campaign. You know, we were fighting in Burma. Well, actually, if I tell people that there were nearly three times as many Americans fighting in Southeast Asia Command as they were Brits, there were 277,000 Americans fighting in Southeast Asia Command and only 100,000 Prits.

So actually the film was completely correct. The film, incidentally, was of a part of the Burma campaign, the north-western, sorry, the north-eastern part of Burma called the Hawken Valley, fighting down from the new road that was being built to replace the road that had been lost to the Japanese in 1944, the Burma road, known as the Stillwell Road or the Lido Road, coming down through the mountains, quite an extraordinary engineering achievement to a place called Michinard. And that was being run initially by the Americans under General Vinegarity, Joe Stilwell, and about 30,000 Chinese troops.

And the film was about those guys only. And the great thing about the film is that it was always fantastically accurate, great story. It just didn't mention the fact that on the left-hand side of Burma, the Brits were trying to fight to throw the Japanese out. But that wasn't the purpose of the film. This was an American film made in Hollywood for American audience, telling a true story.

And the great thing about the film is there's a lot of really good combat cinematography in it from American cinematographers, you know, embedded in the troops taking film of real fighting. It's absolutely amazing stuff. But of course, our perception back home in London was that Burma was a British campaign and we've, you know, there were the same number of African troops, East and West African colonial troops fighting in Burma against the Japanese as they were white Brits. The entire size of the fighting forces, without confusing over the numbers, Think about the 1.3 million men and a few women fighting against the Japanese by 1945. Of that, 606,000 were fighting troops.

The people with bayonets and rifles and grenades and so on. Of that number, 87% were, do you know what nationality they were? Indian. They were men of the Indian army who had volunteered. India produced the largest volunteer army in the history of humankind during the Second World War. 2.5 million men, and some women, about 30,000 women, volunteered to join the Indian Army during the Second World War. Most of them joined to fight the Japanese. Now, this is a very, very fascinating subject in its own right. They weren't dragoon. There was no conscription. They weren't forced

by poverty or any other form of force to join up. They joined up in the main to fight the Japanese because Japan was an existential threat to India. They didn't join up to fight. for the Raj. They didn't fight for the British Empire. They didn't fight because Britain asked them to. They joined in the main to fight against Japan. The first Indian veteran I ever interviewed way back in 1997 said to me, after about an hour of me trying to ask him questions, and I had a very, I had a typical Western framework of understanding as I was approaching him. And that framework was the product of my education, which basically said the colonial Enterprise was an oppressive one where people did as they were told and if Britain told them to go to war,

they went to war because they were underthinking. These people had agency. They were able to make their own minds up. They were able to make their own decisions. After about an hour of me falling around with this guy, he said, Rob, let's just stop this conversation. He spoke better English than I did. He lived in a little town called Gahati on the Brahmapritra River and he said to me, let me just stop. When I left school in 1942, age 18, I was terrified of the Japanese. I was terrified of the Japanese. Why? I could read the newspapers. We knew all about Nanking, 1937. The last thing I wanted, and he instantly said, I'd never met a white man to that stage. This idea that the empire was serfs and slaves is a nonsense. We did not want,

me and my mates at school, we did not want the Japanese in India because we were terrified, we were terrified that we'd have another Nang king. We didn't see the Japanese as our friends. We saw them as their enemy. That's why he joined the Indian Air Force. and ended up in 1945 flying hurricanes against the Japanese. Quite an extraordinary story. But all the Indian veterans that I have ever interviewed all described that sort of sense that India was under threat. And they wanted to defend India.

They wanted to create an India for themselves. They wanted to defend India that was. And they wanted to, they were all nationalists, of course they were. We were all complicated, complex individuals. We can hold competing notions in our minds. General Orkneck, who was the commander-in-chief India at the time, I expect all my Indian soldiers to be nationalists. Of course, you have to want to defend your country.

You want to be able to create a country of your own in the future. The idea that this crazy idea that we're told nowadays that Indian soldiers joined because they were poor, complete nonsense, because they needed food, because they were told to, because they were forced to fight. There's a complete nonsense. But there's a huge story here about India that we can get onto as well. So I'm just still trying very slowly,

in a long-winded historian's way, to answer this question. Britain was completely surprised. We had our pants down. We're focused on the Germans and the Italians. We weren't focused on the Japanese. It was a big shock. We lost a lot of troops,

about 100,000 troops in Singapore in 1942. But very, very quickly, India and Britain energized itself to go on the offensive against the Japanese. So that by 1944, the Japanese invasion of India at a place called Imphalenkahima was decisively stopped, destroyed by a fantastic army, the 14th Army commanded by General Bill Slim, Uncle Bill Slim, most of whom, as I've said, were Indian soldiers. And the defeat of the Japanese Army there in 1944, then opened the door to the reconquest of Burma,

and the Japanese were smashed in Burma, again by the 14th Army, largely an Indian army in 1945. So I've talked earlier about the potential of America, what Japan never really. really failed to understand was American industrial potential. What they could never also understand was the cohesive and collusive potential of the British Empire. Because they'd built up in their minds, a lot like many of the academics in the Western Academy today, the idea that the British Empire was oppressive and it was a matter of London pulling the puppet-haired strings of poor, benighted people across the empire who had no agency of their own. I'm exaggerating for effect here, of course. What the Second World War demonstrated was that was the fundamental untruth

of that proposition. People decided voluntarily and of their own volition to fight against what they saw to be a threat to India. And indeed, if you look at, and there's a lot of evidence for this as well, if you look at the rationale for many soldiers in Africa, Western East Africa, So men from Sierra Leone, Gambia, the Gold Coast in 1940, the rationale for many of them joining the colonial forces and thereafter going to war was to protect their countries from the Italians and the fascists and the Germans. And again, many of these people were also, they were intelligent, they were able to read the newspapers, they were able to make judgments for themselves

about what was important for them and their countries. It's so interesting what you're saying, Robert, because what you're really talking about here, and what it's been fascinating to listen to you talk about the Indians and the Africans is what you're really talking about here is this is a truly global war in the way that the war in Europe wasn't. And I think because when we talk about World War II, we tend to think of, you know, the British, the Americans, the Soviets versus the Nazis. But actually, the real global war happened in the people.

Pacific. It's a great way of describing it. It was a remarkable global war. And if I just go back and say, the reasons why I've explained quite some detail why the Japanese invade, they want to create an empire. They did it because the opportunity presented itself. And the opportunity presented itself because of the war in the East, the war in Europe. The world was unstable. The world was in chaos. They thought that there was an opportunity here to seize what they wanted because the Brits and the Americans were otherwise engaged. And they had no idea that Britain would respond in the way it did. They had no idea that the empire would rise up.

By empire, I really mean India here, in defense of what they regarded as their freedoms. Now, that's an interesting concept, isn't it? And isn't it amazing that Africans volunteered to join the colonial forces to go to Burma to fight the Jopani because they were standing up for their sense of freedom? And I think the one thing we forget in this global war, and it was a global war, a war of people more than anything else, of people deciding to stand up, was the sense that this was a righteous crusade against evil-doers. And it's really important. If you go back in interviews I have done, Africans and Indians and British veterans, you get a real sense that whatever our political differences at home, we were fighting evil. This is why many of them call it a crusade.

Many in India saw it as a crusade. As an aside, it's a great tragedy that Africa and India in particular have deliberately forgotten. Certainly in India, India has deliberately forgotten its role in defeating Japanese militarism for its own political purposes. The 1947 idea that anything after 1947 is Indian history, anything prior to 1947 as colonial history, it's a great tragedy that that was allowed to develop. I can see some changes in people that had used to the Second World War over the last five or ten years, certainly in India. But this was a People's Crusade. This is really important. There's some really good books by Jonathan Fanel in particular and Dan Todman, two great historians

who have described this as a People's Crusade. Large numbers of people from the Caribbean volunteered to come to the UK and fight. Large numbers of Americans before December 1941 traveled via Canada, the United States, to fight against the Nazis. It was a crusade against evil. And we've lost the concept of that, actually. In this, in this... Rob, let me interrupt you there because we're, it's been absolutely brilliant and we've got about three questions out of the way, which is, which is what we like. It's always great. But there's a couple of little bits that I want to get in before we wrap up, which is what you were talking about earlier and what you were starting to reference now, which is how we think about war now.

and I think there are some very, very interesting conversations to be had about the moral calculus of decisions in war. One of the things, obviously, there's been a topic of fierce debate is Israel's response in Gaza. And I think the dropping the bombs on Japan in particular is clearly something that must inform how we think about those things. Now, to be able to suggesting, we drop nukes on Gaza. But what I wanted to get out with you is it is now being talked about in the sense that, you know, bombing Germany in the way that the Allies did, you know, turning most of it into rubble, which, you know, in my opinion, we had to. And likewise, dropping the nuclear weapons on Japan. You know, the West did it because we like to destroy things and all of this. Of course, all that's absolute nonsense.

So it's very important that in the Second World War, a phrase was developed which said, this is a war we need to work. It's a moral crusade. We need to win it. Not only do we need to win it, so we need to win it unconditionally. We don't want to get to a point where we have to negotiate with the Nazis to surrender, which then leaves a rump Nazi state to continue their depredations over their own people. That's a really important point. They needed to be defeated unconditionally, and this had been agreed between Roosevelt and Churchill pretty early on. There were some debates. The idea that unconditional defeat of the enemy means that you have to fight all the way to. to the end. So it's quite a dramatic political decision to make. But actually, in the terms of the Second World War, it's absolutely essential to do it. Let me just quickly talk about Japan. The purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was to bring the war to an end, not to extend the war. The idea that we had, our blood was up and we simply wanted to destroy the Japanese

as a complete nonsense. There is no absolutely zero historical evidence for whatsoever. I'm a I look at the evidence. This was a war to be won. It needed to be undertaking quickly. We know that in July 1945, the Japanese basically mobilized their population to create a local defense volunteer, so basically the Dad's Army, in order to stop the American and the Allied invasion that they knew was coming in early 1946, which would have cost perhaps a million lives.

Just imagine that. Think about all the lives that were lost in the island hopping campaign. Japanese territory was sacred. The Japanese were going to defend their territory to the last person. And we needed a way to be able to bring them to the table metaphorically, to persuade Hirohito that actually the war was lost. If the war continued, the only victims would be more Japanese people. That's an important point.

The Japanese were very, very good at killing people. They killed more of their own people than we did. That's really important to understand. They killed their own troops in large numbers. When their military plans failed, They simply sent men into battle to die. Men died in very large numbers because of the failure of Japanese policy. Okay, I need to quickly talk about Curtis LeMay and the area bombing of Japanese cities

because this comes into it as well. Because we need to see the dropping of the bombs as part of this concept, which began in March 1945, of bringing Japan to its knees by area bombing. Until March 1945, high-level precision bombing by B-29 bombers over Japan. had failed. The evidence demonstrated that only about 4% of targets were destroyed by large, large sways. We're talking about hundreds of B-29s dropping bombs over Japan from August of the previous year when the first bombing bombardment groups were formed. So the idea that it started with duet in the 1920s that high-level, high-altitude, precision bombing of enemy targets would bring

a country to its knees had been disproven. And America was the great proponent of this idea, which is why they went for daylight precision bombing in northwest Europe, which also failed. So they then transited very, very quickly. Curtis LeMay almost did it by a sleight of hand in March 2045 to area bomb Japanese cities. And this wasn't because Curtis LeMay was a bad man. He wanted to bring Japan to its knees. He wanted to destroy its military potential. He wanted to persuade the Japanese to stop fighting.

So we need to understand that. It's really, really important. It's a series of military mechanism that whilst disastrous for the lives that are lost was salvation for the lives that were preserved. It's really important to realize that when you're fighting a total war, you have to make a judgment about what you do in battle to prevent, to achieve victory and prevent further loss. And that was a very, very important series of conversations that took place in 45. And as soon as we separate out the military decisions over Japan and their moral decisions, we try and treat them as two separate things, we lose, it loses its efficaciousness. I mean, you can't consider the moral question on its own without understanding the military

decisions that would be made. And too many people who take the moralistic line then apply bad faith judgments to the military actors. Oh, Curtis LeMay was a murderer. and he was as bad as Hitler and all the sort of nonsense, which you do here on the left of the spectrum on a regular basis. In terms of Israel and Gaza, the same principles apply. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East,

has a sovereign right to defend itself, and it must defend itself. In fact, its primary duties to defend its citizens. Now, in order to defend its citizens, it needs to take all measures in war on a proportional basis, and it's really, really important. that the war is to, the purpose of war for a democracy is to write a wrong. You need to write a wrong, but you need to do it proportionally. And Nigel Bigger, Fesson Nigel Bigger, does explain this brilliantly in a number of his books.

So if you keep those two things in mind, yes, you need to, war is justified if it writes a wrong. And Israel is fighting to reverse the wrong or to write the wrong that was initiated in October last year, Claver 2023, but it needs to do so on a proportional basis. And that's an entirely separate subject as to whether Israel has been doing that. My personal view is they've done it remarkably well in a remarkably proportional basis. If Israel was not acting proportionally, they would be aerial bombing the whole of Gaza now and Gaza would be a very different place to what it is. The military operation in Gaza, in my view, has been an exemplar of military proportionality.

And that's what we need to understand. We need to keep this in mind. Of course, the people who hate the idea of a sovereign Jewish nation, what do they attack most? They attack this point about proportionality. And they link proportionality with morality. And they infer that Israel is not a legitimate state. and therefore does not have a legitimate right to defend itself. You just follow the logic and all these things through.

You'll see where it's all going. If Israel as a Zionist colonial state is not legitimate, therefore has no legitimate need to defend itself. So all the arguments around Gaza need to be stripped back to look at what the intentions and the purposes of the people who are criticizing Israel are. And if you're able to reveal them, then you can get a sense of proportionality about the fighting as well.

Well, come back to Japan with me because you mentioned earlier that you thought the Hirohita, the emperor of Japan, could have stopped the war from breaking out and later. But wouldn't that be disproven by the fact that even after the first bomb was dropped, when he tried to say, guys, guys, maybe we should start thinking about it, there was a military coup against it. Yeah, he was very nearly assassinated. So I think my point is that he should have done what he could to prevent the war in the first place, but I don't think he had the balls, frankly, and I don't think he had the means. Real power didn't reside with Hirohito.

He wasn't a titular head of state. He was the head of state, but actually power resided elsewhere, and power resided with Tojo in particular and the military factions. And is that why the Americans dropped the second bomb, because they wouldn't surrender after the first one? Yes, yes. The only reason the second bomb was dropped was because there was absolutely no response from Tokyo whatsoever. The idea that Japan was preparing to surrender is just not true.

There's no evidence for whatsoever. What there is evidence for is lots of debate in Tokyo about what to do. And we know that Hirohito was keen to draw stumps. But that hadn't happened. And, you know, in war, you need to go through a few speed bumps before decisions made. And Nagasaki sadly was the second speed bump. Interesting aside about Nagasaki, of the 40,000, people who were killed in Nagasaki. About 10,000 of them were Korean slave laborers. Products of the

Japanese Empire working in Japan. Amazing, isn't it? It's really, really quite extraordinary. When you look at the numbers to see, actually Nagasaki, a largely Christian city, large numbers of Christians in Nagasaki, are being destroyed, and their empire collapsing at the same time as a consequence of what they had started. Was part of the reason that they didn't surrender? Is it because the idea of surrender was deeply dishonorable to them. Definitely, yes. And if I haven't got that impression over, then forgive me. It's absolutely right. The military code is basically, there's no such thing as surrender. So Bushido, if I describe it this way, when a soldier was, when a recruit joined the army and was trained, they would send home a little matchbox a piece of hair and a piece

of fingernail, denoting that actually their lives were now, the emperor's not their family. The family was saying, it was saying to their family, this is my body, bury it, I'm no longer yours, I'm a servant of the emperor. And what in a deeply militaristic society, deeply militaristic value-based system known as Beshido, the ultimate expression of your loyalty to your country, your family and your emperor is what? What do you think it might be? Death. Yes, you've got it in one. I've been watching Shogun. Okay, okay.

It's not obedience. It's not loyalty. It's not duty. It's death. And that's why so many, so many, the majority of Japanese casualties in battle, when a battle had gone against them, would actually kill themselves.

They would never surrender. And the entirety of the Burma campaign, out of the 105,000, in 1944, 105,000 Japanese soldiers who attacked into India, only 600 were taken prisoner. And they were two injured. and ill and starving to commit suicide. Ritual Haricari, officers had to commit the puku,

which is basically your ritual disemboweling. You had to stab yourself with a sword and start cutting yourself. If you were smart enough, you'd get your Batman to shoot you in the head after you had done the first act to demonstrate your valor and courage and, you know, all the sort of nonsense. Individual soldiers would commit suicide with hand grenades more often than not. But it's very important that this Bishido code was such that it was dishonorable for a Japanese officer to go into battle with anything other than a sword with his katana. And if he had a katana or just a fighting sword otherwise, because no Japanese soldier would ever commit to firing a bullet or from a rifle or a pistol.

That was just crazy. In order to be able to demonstrate their martial valor, they needed blood on their katanas. That speaks to the point that you made earlier, which I thought was an incredibly powerful one, which is that we rational, secular Westerners, we imagine that everybody thinks in the way that we think we do. I don't even know that we think the way we think we do, but let's set that aside for a second. And so we can't comprehend that maybe a country would invade another country, not because of rational reasons, but for reasons that we might consider irrational.

Yeah, war is irrational and war is often undertaken for irrational reasons. The idea that everything can be deduced or reduced to rationality is nonsense. I mean, human existence demonstrates that. We are deeply irrational people. And when you get tribes together that start beating war drums, and I said right at the start, the problem with a militaristic society is it only goes one way. Militistic societies end up with war. And actually, that's one of my arguments about Putin.

Well, let's talk about that right now because I think, I don't know whether Putin is the best example of it, but I think there is a lot of blindness now in the West, very generally speaking about we just, I heard of another historian, I think Sarah Payne, an American nation, she teaches, talk about how we play half-court tennis. We only know what happens on our half of the core. So what are we missing, Rob? If we look at the modern world, today, what are we not alive to? Well, we play half-court tennis because we can't imagine what's on the other side. And what we tend to do is we tend to mirror our own existence with the other side. So we assume that Putin is a good example in terms of rationality. And China is a very good example of rationality. If we assume that people behave in the sort of rational way that we do, then it's very easy to predict the future.

But we know that's not the case. We tried to deal with Hitler, of course, the 19th. 30s in a rational way without realizing that a lot of his motivations were intensely racial and therefore irrational. So what are we missing? The problem is that you've made the point that we don't treat our potential enemies with the respect they deserve in terms of understanding their motivations. And I think one of the extraordinary things, I've got a good friend Samantha Matra who talks

about this all the time. You know, we have cast, we're trying to understand Russia, we're trying to understand Putin. And what we do is we try and say, well, it's the imperial legacy. He's basically an imperialist, which of course is absolute nonsense, really. I mean, there are traces of that in Russia. But he's an autocrat. He's in charge. He's the man at the top of the mafia team in Moscow at the moment, and he's doing all he can

to stay there. And how do you stay there? What you do is you mobilize the masses behind you. Unfortunately, mobilizing the masses, you repress dissent, but you mobilize the masses. You create a culture and a myth around who you. are, we're creating a new myth about the modern Russians that's deeply linked to myths about Russia in the past. Doesn't matter that they were communist or Tsarist, doesn't matter, we still have to create

a myth. And he's on top of it. He's the man who's actually shaping this myth. And so he's not rational. So, I mean, Ukraine is a really good example of this because, unfortunately for Ukraine, it didn't have any secure defense deal or a mutual defense agreement with any country apart from Russia. And Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia had promised to protect the sovereignty of Ukraine. Then at a point where that became no use to Vladimir, he invaded. And he had persuaded himself,

well, there's a real danger here that in trying to create this new myth about yourself and about your identity, you fall into hubris. You fall into this delusion that part of this myth is true. And he had built up this idea. that Ukraine was the beating heart of the Soviet identity and needs to be brought back in the fold. The resonance with Russia and Ukraine with Hitler and Grace Deutschland is unbelievable. People now forget about Grace Deutschland. Grace Deutsche was the driving force of the Nazi party. The idea that the real Germany existed where German blood flowed through people's veins.

That was the natural borders of Germany. Russia's got the same idea. It's this Russian identity, you know very well. And what Putin has been trying to do is to give expression to it. And it's very interesting when you ask the question, why do the Germans follow Hitler? They followed Hitler because of Grace Deutschland. It's an incredibly powerful motivating force in society, this unifying sense of one German culture. Why are Russians following Putin?

Well, the forces against Russia have been repressed quite brutally, but actually people like the idea that there is a new sense of identity for this great Russian nation. And it's very attractive. It's very powerful. So what are we not talking about? We're not talking about actually what's really happening. We're not talking about how we can draw the conflict and Ukraine to a close because there is a pretty easy way, in my view, to drawing it to a close.

Well, let's end on that. What is the easy way? Well, it's not by defeating Russia. Russia is never going to be defeated. That's just an absurd notion. But it does mean Ukraine defeating Russia. It doesn't mean the way. defeating Russia, it means drawing the fighting to a close and coming to a negotiated deal.

The day after, I'm not an Ostradamus, but the day after the invasion took place, I wrote a long article for the mirror in which I said, this will be a bloody fight, but it will end in a negotiated settlement. And there are going to be some trade-offs required. Look at Korea. Korea was divided arbitrarily in 1945 in order to disarm the Japanese. Joe Stalin created a puppet state in the north, where where he wanted to create a buffer series of states around Soviet Union, and North Korea was part of it. And North Korea has never been united since. You know, there is a demarcation line between the two.

We are looking at the same in Ukraine. The big question is how much of Don Bass and Le Hans goes back to Ukraine, where the Crimea stays. Interesting enough, I use this example all the time. People need to remember, Corey. It's a great example of, it's a great proto-Ukraine. Korean War, 1950, 1953. Singh-Munri, the head of the... Republican Korea, President of Republic of Korea, so South Korea, was desperate not to hand

over any of his territory to the North and desperate to unite the whole country under Democratic, well, he wasn't really a Democrat, capitalist democratic South. And we have this challenge in Ukraine, so I have utmost respect for President Zelensky, but he needs to recognize and Ukraine needs to recognize that the war will end with a negotiated settlement that will not meet all their national imperatives. But the first thing that needs to happen is Russia needs to be persuaded to draw stumps. And he's not going to be persuaded to draw stumps if we in the West don't actually enable Ukraine to defend itself as it ought to.

I don't think anyone in the West should be deluded in the sense that the West can defeat the Russians in battle. It's never going to happen. Russia is too big and too strong for that ever to happen. Despite the embarrassment that they've suffered recently of the last few years, actually, the Russians have behaved extraordinarily. Militarily, their operations in Ukraine have been a complete joke. With the exception of the defense of buildup, the strategy they've built up over the last few months,

where they've prevented the Ukrainians from actually penetrating the Donbass and La Hansk. But actually, they're being whittled away. But in the long term, Russia will survive the long war. Ukraine won't. So that needs to be brought to a close, but there needs to be a decisive military breakthrough that forces Russia to the negotiating table. Ukraine will almost certainly have to give up Crimea, and that's going to be a real challenge for Zelensky because that's the big political problem for him.

And even leaving any of the territory long of the Denepe in Russian hands is going to be Russian hands is going to be a political problem for him, but I suggest it's a necessity. There are solutions to it. Well, there are halfway solutions to it. Possibly, you know, we get, we have a DMZ where, you know, patrolled by the United Nations or something in order to be able to separate the forces. And actually that's the situation in Cyprus since 1974. So Cyprus and Korea are really good examples of the idea that ultimate victory can be achieved by either

the side is a nonsense. We just need to stop that now. We need to get to a point where both sides stop fighting and a negotiated settlement of some kind does lock peace into our political framework, because without that, we're going to have endless war. Robert, thank you so very much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second. But before, actually, why don't you tell people which of your books they should read if they've found any of this conversation. Brilliant. Well, thank you for that.

A war of empires, which is the story of this great clash between America, China, Japan, Britain and India in the Second World War, 942 to 45, is my big book. It's a book I've been working on for 35 years, and it brings all these ideas together, really reminding people that war

is a consequence of political determination, and that political determination was Japan's desire to create an empire. And it came up against empires that were differently constructed and were able to respond in better ways than the Japanese, and it demonstrated that one empire is different to the other. One might even say one empire is better than another,

but I'd be very careful with that. The other really big book I wrote with General Lord Dunn at last year was called Victory to Defeet, which is really trying to understand the state of the world now in terms of the demilitarization of the West between the 1920s and 30s. And the 1920s and 30s, the West disarmed itself completely and became very weak in the face of the dictator,

the rise of the dictators in the 1930s. So our question was, we actually argue in the book that the British army in particular, and the Commonwealth armies, the Empire armies, were dramatically successful in 1918, and they defeated the armies of Lutendorf. And instead of the German armies being stabbed in the back, they were stabbed in the chest and defeated. And that acts against the Nazi myth that the German armies were stabbed in the back and helped the rise of Nazism in 1930s. And yet by 1940, we had completely,

lost the idea of how to fight. And this is my point about imagining. We lost the ability to imagine what war, modern war could look like and had disarmed ourselves to the state that actually we weren't really ready to fight against the enemy in the way that we wanted, we should have done until about 1944. Quite extraordinary. Fortunately, Hitler gave us time. He went east in 1941 and gave us time to prepare. The Japanese did largely the same. After their invasion of the Far East in They basically sat in their laurels, started getting eaten up by the Americans in the Pacific, set in their laurels in Burma, and were smashed by a reinvigorated Indian Army in 1944. So those two books would be really helpful.

There are lots also out there as well that you could fill your boots with. Fantastic. Well, we'll make sure the links are in the description, and we're going to ask you questions from our supporters. Brilliant. Thank you. Blame for the Bengal famine of 1943 is now laid by many people at the defeat of Churchill. To what extent is this a true and to what extent was Japan responsible for the family? Britain was not responsible of the Bengal famine, the Japanese were. Fox News is now streaming live on Fox One.

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