How the US Tricked Japan With Only 2 Nuclear Bombs When Japan Thought America Had Hundreds

How many bombs did the U.S. have at that time? Two. And so it's a psychological gamble in a lot of ways that you're playing there with the Japanese. It's exactly like poker and it worked and it convinces the Japanese, hey the Americans could have 20 of these things, 30 of these things. It's not the first bomb is dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th. That one bomb does not actually convince the Japanese to surrender. It is then that the America drops that second bomb plays a very significant role in changing the dynamic inside Japanese politics. Few decisions in modern history remain as fiercely debated as the choice to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 9th at the end of World War II. Was it a necessary act that ended the deadliest war in human history or a moral line the world should have never crossed? But they were joined by James Scott Pulitzer Prize finalist and best-selling historian of the Pacific War to explore the final brutal months of World War II, the pressures facing a brand new American president, the questions his new book Empire of Ashes raises about the decisions 81 years later today and how it directly relates to today's world events. This is Bay Area Innovators and I'm your host Steve Esposito. James welcome to Bay Area Innovators. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be with you. Awesome to have you here. So World War II, there's been so much written about it, so many movies, so much discussion. You have this new book Empire of Ashes that talks about the last few months of the World War II and what transpired and of course the major decision which was to drop atomic bombs in Japan. Why are we talking about this now? It's been almost 81 years ago that this happened. Why are you bringing this up right now? It's incredibly relevant. We are for the first time really in a long period having to have a national and global discussion about nuclear weapons. I mean with the war going on in Ukraine, Russia's been threatening the use of them. We're at war with Iran trying to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. So pretty much everywhere in today's society that discussion is being had and so it's an incredibly topical opportunity to sort of take a look back and say okay let's look at when they were actually used. Let's look at the decision making that went involved, the circumstances that went involved, the outcomes that were associated with it and what can we sort of take away from the end of World War II that is applicable today with everything going on in today's global conflicts. Well we look forward to a nice lesson in history on this. Now you start your book with a vivid description of FDR's last days and he's such an amazing president. He was elected four times and of course this is before the constitutional amendment that would limit two terms. You quote some amazing things which I was familiar with. The U.S. military was ranked 19th in the world in 1933 in the middle of the Great Depression of course and you mention in your book between Bulgaria and Portugal and he ends up making the U.S. the you know the greatest military power in the world in just a few years. Tell us more about how did you get all this information and you know how did you plan this in your beginning of the book? Absolutely you know I mean so much as this book really looks at the last 125 days of World War II and it's an incredibly pivotal moment in history and what's also so amazing about that is it really ultimately is going to turn on a neophyte Harry Truman and as you noted I mean the book begins on the day that FDR dies and it's important for audiences to remember what an effect FDR had on American society. I mean he was president for over 4,000 days. If you were in middle school in 1945 you knew no other president except FDR and of course as you noted he came into power in 1933 during the banking crisis. He steered the nation through the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the outbreak of World War I, the militarization of the United States, the build-up, the fighting of the war all the way up until the very end. He's the one that's in charge and so in Truman in contrast you know he's not college educated. He's from a small town out in Missouri. He's a product of rural America. He spends the first decade of his adulthood working on his family farm. He goes on as a failed businessman in many ways and he goes off to war I mean he's a really a unique candidate to follow FDR and that and it's a big surprise for America when he takes over. He's you know he not only is the death of FDR after 12 years such a shock but Truman is a relative nobody for the American public and one of my favorite lines is you know Admiral William Leahy who was the de facto chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Truman is ultimately picked to be FDR's running mate he exclaims well who the heck is Harry Truman and that kind of sums up if you got the you know the chair of the Joint Chiefs doesn't know who he is how can you expect the average American to really have any understanding and of course to Harry Truman falls this massive responsibility of like how do I end this war? How do I secure the peace? How do I prevent an outbreak in the future of another type conflict Yes tell us more about the pressure that Harry Truman faced I know in your book you describe how he's being informed of the death of FDR he didn't even know you know what that might be he thought maybe it's some some news that has to do with the war but tell us about the pressures that he was facing at the time. Absolutely you know and what adds to that pressure is the fact that is that FDR didn't really tell him anything I mean FDR was it was notorious for kind of keeping all of the information close he ran the government you know he didn't he didn't really tell Harry Truman anything he basically told Truman just go back to the Senate do what you're comfortable with I've got it from here and so when Truman takes over you know he comes in the Battle of Okinawa is raging in the Pacific which is going to be the worst fight of the Pacific for American forces Germany is about to collapse he's got the Manhattan Project which he doesn't know anything about is about to come online he's got you know to deal with negotiations with the British with the Russians the Chinese I mean he's just got this massive massive learning curve that he's got to figure out how to master in an extraordinarily short period of time. How did Truman find out about the details of the bomb? Well you know Truman kind of brushed up against the atomic bomb during his days in the Senate and during his time in the Senate he kind of the one area he had sort of been a standout and while a lawmaker was that he had run what was called the Truman Commission and that was a committee that was designed to sort of look for any waste in war expenditures and it was during that time that some of his investigators actually paid a visit to Hanford Washington which was the top secret atomic city where plutonium was manufactured and of course his investigators were turned away and so Henry Stimson who is the war secretary subsequently reaches out to Truman and he basically tells he said I can't tell you what's going out there it's part of a secret project that only a handful of people know about but I can assure you it is being managed properly and you don't need to worry and Truman takes him at his word he says look if you that's what you tell me I will trust you you know your honorable man war secretary whatnot we will move on and this is not until he's this is when Truman was a senator yes this is when he was a senator since about 1943 1944 or earlier on but then that so what happens then is the night Truman is sworn in Stimson pulls him aside and he says you and I need to get together after you sort of get your feet on the ground and I need to kind of bring you up to speed on a new project we've got going on that is going to be pretty transformative potentially for the war but of course Truman at that he's he's just you know he's swear it being sworn in as president that night he's dealing with the press he's dealing with his family he's dealing with all the chaos of it so Stimson allows you know about 10 or 12 days to pass before he reaches back out to Truman he says he sends him a note he says about that thing I mentioned to you it's time we get together Truman then agrees to meet they meet the next day and they meet it's it is Truman it is Stimson and it is General Leslie Groves and General Leslie Groves may probably be best known to most folks as Matt Damon in the film Oppenheimer and that's of course Leslie Groves was the general in charge of the Manhattan Project and he is the doer so to speak and if you look at the Manhattan Project you really think Henry Stimson was kind of the chairman of the board and Leslie Groves was the CEO so he really ran the day-to-day operations and whatnot it was just I mean a hundred percent versed in all the nuts and bolts of that very complex large project and so the two of them get together with Truman for about an hour and they brief they walk him through exactly what's going on not only the development of the bomb what the bomb entails but also the post-war concerns that this might spark an arms race you know all these kind of things that have been debated inside the Manhattan Project of what would happen once you unleash an atomic weapon on the world and so he has basically an hour to absorb all this information and and of course it's a huge issue at that point it's a huge topic the bomb is not yet ready it is not going to be tested for uh for several more months still but it is coming to that point it is rapidly approaching the time when America is going to know one way or the other whether this bomb how aware were they of the uh of the destruction that the bomb can can do and and and how many lives would be lost and and just of the raw destruction were they aware of it they were I mean but you have to remember at this point it's all theoretical and so they have they know that this is going to be a massive explosion they know that it's going to be it uh it is going to lead to significant civilian lives just how big of an explosion it's going to be really still remains a theory and it's not going to be until they actually test the bomb in July of 1945 that they're going to sort of begin to wrap their their head around just how destructive it is and start to make sort of extrapolations about what we could expect from the first couple of bombs that are going to be ready in August um and so but yeah they had an idea this we weren't going to spend that kind of money and move heaven and earth to build these projects if we didn't think that they were going to be potentially game changers in the war now we're going to take a look at the situation in Japan so of course Germany surrendered Russian troops and American troops and French and English they they you know they they control Europe however Japan is not surrendering and it seems like there would be a large loss of life on the American side in order to to occupy Japan right yeah yeah and I spent a lot of time looking at what's going on in Japan I think that's something that's missing from a lot of contemporary uh American accounts and histories is sort of what is happening in Japan not just from a political level but also from a societal level and what has happened in Japan of course at this point is that they're quite frankly they're losing the war I mean Japan had had had built this empire that literally encompassed about a quarter of the globe and from 1942 on to 1945 that has increasingly been shrinking down and down and down all the way back now till uh there the Japanese homeland is now within reach of American bombers and what happened starting in March of 1945 is America begins a pretty dramatic firebombing campaign against the Japanese home islands this is going to be run out of the Mariana Islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian by General Curtis LeMay and uh and these are extraordinarily successful and violent uh raids and so much so that by August of 1945 literally 64 Japanese cities are going to have about 170 square miles burned out of them but the firebombings are only one part of the pressure that is on Japanese leaders at that point. America's also been running a very successful submarine blockade of Japan for many many years at this point and Japan is an island nation it's about 85% mountainous so it is self-sufficient in only a handful of natural resources things like sulfur and fish oil which quite frankly are not things you need in abundance uh so they are dependent upon imports for everything including food fuel and raw materials to feed their war industries so what's happened with the submarine blockade is it's increasingly cut off Japan's abilities to get those supplies that's having a huge impact on the war Japan simply can't get enough fuel to be able to power its warships and its planes that's going to lead to kamikazes they can't get enough food for the population which is going to lead to malnourishment a thriving black market the beginning of the breakdown of the social fabric there in fact by the end of the war the average Japanese person is going to be living on about 1600 calories a day and that's of course that's too few to be able to survive and function average Japanese person's also going to be spending about five hours each day figuring out where their next meal is coming from you're going to see a rise in infant mortality rates a rise in children developing rickets new mothers are going to be so malnourished they can't produce milk Japan's literally going to experiment with giving newborns radish and turnip juice which just sounds terrible to me but you have to do what you have to do to survive and so what you're seeing is sort of a struggle at every level of Japanese society and yet despite all that Japan is committed to fighting on why is that well a couple reasons number one yes their navy has largely been destroyed yes their air force has pretty much been destroyed as well and what's left of it is being converted to kamikaze attacks planes but Japan still has a very sizable army about five million men under arms and the army has not yet been defeated on a battlefield they still had five they still had five million at that time five million yeah and Japan's more militarist leaders are arguing that we haven't been defeated yet in fact we haven't even really tangled one-on-one on any real large scale with the American army so we're not ready to surrender and of course the Americans at this point are demanding unconditional surrender of course that has become one of the most popular slogans of the war everybody in America knows it it's been preached for years now and what does unconditional surrender mean well it means that the Americans are going to come into Germany after the war they're going to come into Japan after the war they're going to remake these societies because world war ii grows out of the embers of world war one they don't want that to happen we don't want to have to re-litigate these wars every two decades and so the idea is if the allies can remake these societies change the government change the laws you know prosecute the offenders then you can you can eliminate this from happening and prevent this well that actually answers partly some of one of my other questions which was why wasn't the United States thinking of settling in a more neutral way the Japanese situation something like what happened in in Korea in the in the Korean war not that there was a good outcome necessarily but was there thinking in there well the challenge that Truman faces at this point is that so much the American public is now wedded to this idea it's become such a popular slogan it's become such a uh it's it's in the media everybody knows it that to change would be a pretty significant public public relations issue for them effectively and quite frankly you would also be sending a message uh this was the fear of George Marshall's that we'd be sending the message that the Japanese were being successful in their war against us we'd be we'd be sending the wrong message which is you know that we're not going soft but that we are not willing to prosecute the war all the way to the end and that was a real concern for George Marshall and particularly because Germany does collapse and we do get that kind of surrender from the Germans and we were really adamant that we had to have the same against Japan now there were voices inside the U.S. government that said hey you know what wait a second um we maybe we don't have to fight this war all the way to a huge bloody conclusion uh one of the big points that the Japanese militaries really want is they want to be able to protect the emperor and the monarchy and you know what maybe that's not a bad idea maybe Hirohito could be a tool for us in bringing about peace because he is this one central figure in Japanese cultural and Japanese life and if we preserve him and we get him to help order everybody to sort of lay down arms and whatnot we might be able to prevent a huge bloody guerrilla war after this and that was a big concern Japan has that many troops who've not yet been defeated on the battlefield it's not so much that you have to win but you have to prevent it you know you have to secure the peace on top of winning the war and the big fear was if you have all these Japanese soldiers and they end up in a guerrilla war then the U.S. has a disaster on its hands and so that's sort of the rise in the power of the emperor in the eyes of many folks inside the state department for example now what um is there an estimate of what would have been the loss of American life if uh Japan was to be invaded the same as Normandy in France absolutely and it's important remember at this point by the time we use the atomic weapons in August Truman has already greenlit the first part of that invasion now operation downfall was what the invasion of the Japanese home islands was called and it was a two-pronged assault the first part was going to be the island of Kyushu in November of 1945 the second part was going to be the main island of Honshu in March of 1946 now Truman on June 18th gives approval for the invasion of Kyushu now what's happening at this point is as I noted Japan has a whole lot of troops and they are they can see where the Americans are going next if you look at a map of the Pacific it's like we're just climbing up this ladder towards the Japanese home islands and they can see that after Okinawa Kyushu is where we're headed next and so they start rushing reinforcements down to the southern island there uh so much so that what we initially think is going to be a three to one uh ratio when Americans come ashore which is three American troops for every one Japanese suddenly gets knocked down to two to one and then down to one to one and at that point we're literally looking at about 900,000 Japanese troops on Kyushu by the time of the invasion and that is a recipe for disaster and what we've seen increasingly in the last year of the war is that Japanese battlefield tactics have changed Japan is no longer committed towards you know an outright victory it's really now more about attrition and a bloodletting of the American forces if in Japan's view is if they can create such a grind and a casualty count for the Americans that the Americans will give up on unconditional surrender and let Japan keep the emperor maybe not let maybe not have an occupation that's another thing that the Japanese leaders don't want they also don't want to have their troops put on trial by allied war commission uh so a war tribunal so that's kind of the hope there and so not only are we facing an invasion now we're facing what's going to be a really bloody invasion because the way Japan has changed its tactics and on top of all that Japan's now recruiting average civilians as part of this national civilian army so grandparents all the way down to middle schoolers are being trained to fight with spears and whatnot to defend the home islands so America is facing a horrific invasion now one pentagon estimate as you asked in summer of 1945 saying that a merit that an invasion could cost America 1.7 to 4 million casualties the Japanese in contrast would be 5 to 10 million so again these are projections fortunately we never had to go through with that invasion but it gives you a sense of kind of where analysts were in the summer of 1945 and anticipating just how awful this invasion also clearly looking at those numbers the the numbers that were lost because of the bomb are much smaller now tell us a bit about emperor hirohito's role in in all of this and the dynamics in the Japanese society and that's such an important part as you know from the subtitle of the book it's truman and hirohito and because you know hirohito in a lot of ways is sort of truman's counterpart on the opposite side of the pacific and and by by saying that however i mean there's really no similarity between these two guys other than that they both appreciate history i think uh you know hirohito of course is a monarch you know he grows up sort of in and you know cut off from Japanese society part of an imperial family uh you know he is um he is at the center of Japanese cultural political spiritual life uh but he is not like a commander-in-chief like how we have in the united states i mean he does give his blessing over things that happen but when you think about sort of a wartime leader emperor hirohito is not going to be the image that jumps in your mind he is not napoleon bonaparte he is not julius caesar or alexander the great he is quite frankly more of an absent-minded professor in a lot of ways he is a slender figure he's got stooped shoulders he's very introverted he's a high-pitched voice he has a habit of talking to himself when he gets nervous uh he's quite frankly he's he's he's more cerebral he's interested in marine biology he collected starfish uh he is interested in history he's very fascinated by abraham lincoln uh but he is not a gregarious outgoing uh commanding presence was he in charge of the of the military yes he is in effectively yes uh in name if nothing else and he does have to give his blessing but what has happened is as hirohito ascends the throne in the 1920s and japanese culture particularly during the 1920s 1930s is is changing its political culture is is going through a dramatic change at that period and what you're seeing then is the consolidation of power by the japanese military and uh and so even though japan is in theory a democracy and whatnot what you're really seeing is an erosion of democratic values in institutions during that time period as the military goes they go after the press you know they they start cutting down all these newspapers and shrinking them down and in its place is going to go domai which is sort of a wire service but it's a propaganda arm they're going to go after academics and sort of attacks on sort of liberal institutions trade unions uh they're going to go after they're going to change the curriculum in schools to emphasize nationalism and the monarchy they're going to put military leaders inside schools to teach children about training and fitness and so they're also going to start organizing japanese society down into neighborhood associations with monitors that and the idea is that it's really oh it's not so much a monitor but it's somebody who can pass out information from the government to you know every 20 households but it's really kind of a way to keep tabs and of course they're going to create a thought police they're going to create laws to to to ban you know organized uh protests and whatnot so you're going to see these guardrails that sort of protect public rights begin to fall off on top of all this you're going to see a huge rise in political violence political violence was very common in japanese culture at that point assassinations uh in fact admiral suzuki who was the prime minister at the end of the war had barely survived an assassination attempt in the 1930s in fact he still had a bullet lodged inside him uh and so and of course these threats the emperor was not immune to them there have been threats against the emperor's life and so over hirohito always and over every japanese leader hangs this threat of political violence either toe the line or watch out and so hirohito knows that and so at the outbreak of the war he's not really so much in favor of the attack on pearl harbor in the outbreak of the war in fact he hymns and haws for the better part of about a month before he ultimately gets his blessing uh and because he you know he's it's it's like peer pressure to sort of you know to follow what the military wants to do even though his heart's not in it he's going to go along with that for much of the war it's not until 1945 when japan's fortunes become crystal clear that it is losing the war and that it's likely going to lose the war that hirohito starts realizing i've got to sort of insert myself more in this political process i've got to sort of pressure and push our our government in a way to find out find a solution to the war before it ends up being a bloody invasion and a huge catastrophe for the japanese public so in your opinion was the use of the bomb justified yeah and that's it you know that's a it's it's one of the things it's a tough question you know do you and i and people always ask you know was the bomb necessary were there other options and things like that and over the years people have thrown out ideas like why didn't um why didn't they do a test of the bomb why didn't they do uh an example things like that and it's important remember that a lot of those arguments that are made today were actually debated in 1945 and for instance you hear the the common thing well why wasn't a test of this done well you know one of the big concerns doing a test was what if the bomb doesn't work uh and that was a real fear you know that the and of course the bomb's value to japan was as a political weapon i mean you have to remember after firebombing 64 japanese cities after destroying 56 square miles of tokyo even though the atomic bomb is a powerful weapon it's not that powerful and so the bomb was needed as a way to shock the japanese political system and so if you tell the japanese we've got this bomb and we're going to give you an example and we drop this test bomb it doesn't work you've lost that whole shock value the other idea the other fear was that okay well let's say we do that we tell japan we're going to drop it on this one place in japanese culture you know japanese island or whatnot beach well what if they take all the american pw's that they have or allied pw's what if they could put them there and we ultimately drop a bomb and kill all of our own people and then and then really in the end it kind of came down to the question of what was the bomb really about and it fell back on that shock value and so if you're going to really shock the japanese leaders you just can't tell them you got it and so that ultimately is kind of the fallback of like we can't do that now that those debates about how best to use the bomb were widely held inside the manhattan project not only amongst the scientists but also amongst political leaders before that decision was made now i think when it comes to whether or not the bomb was necessary or not all you have to do is really look at the historical record from the japanese side to understand that it was that japan had been committed to fight to the end it's not the first bomb is dropped on hiroshima on august 6th that one bomb does not actually convince the japanese to surrender in fact that they don't need the japan's war council doesn't even get together right away after that but the second bomb plays a very significant role in changing the dynamic inside japanese politics at that point and one of the arguments that was advanced by japan's militarists after the first bomb was dropped because as soon as it's dropped america announces we've dropped this new weapon it's an atomic bomb people have to remember atomic bombs japan had a program they were trying to develop one the germans were the russians were atomic energy was a very big topic in the 1930s and 1940s it was the equivalent of ai today so everybody knew about it so america's the first one there so when america drops the bomb we announce we have dropped an atomic bomb now inside japanese uh political debates one of the arguments advanced was atomic bombs are new they're expensive there's you know there's there's no way the americans have more than one of these things uh and so therefore our regime is still intact we can keep fighting uh it is then that the america drops that second bomb and dropping that second bomb 75 hours after the first sends a message to the japanese that the americans can drop these things back to back they may have an entire arsenal of them they may have a hundred of them so at that point in it they may never invade the americans may just sit offshore and continue to drop bombs every few days until there's nothing left of japan and that really becomes sort of the game-changing decision point for the japanese because at this point what the japanese military wants they want to get the americans on shore they want to then unleash all these troops that they have not only their troops but their citizen army create this bloodbath against the americans and convince the americans that unconditional surrender will never work and therefore they can have a better position at the bargaining table so it changes all that their whole mentality that their whole plan of continuing the war exactly yeah exactly their whole end game goes out the window and that gives hirohito the opening to say we got to get out of this war now how many bombs did the u.s have at that time two and i'll tell you that's one of the most fascinating moments i think of this thing is because what happens is the second bomb originally was not scheduled to be dropped until august 11th and you've got leslie groves and you've got curtis lemay and of course these guys are both you know they're army guys they understand the initiative and both of them say you know what that's too long you can't go august 6th to august 11th and so you've got to move heaven and earth to get this second bomb ready as fast as possible now these bombs are being prepped on the small island of tinian which is this amazing little island in the middle of the pacific i love going to tinian i visit there many times but it's on that island that they are assembling the parts of these these bombs and so and the manhattan scientists manhattan project scientists that are out there are under all this pressure to hurry up get that second bomb ready get that air crew ready get that bomb on japan because what they're trying to do is send that message to the japanese we've got a million of these things necessary you know we got we can do it day after day after day and so it's a psychological gamble in a lot of ways that you're playing there with the japanese yeah it's like a poker like a poker game it's exactly like poker and and it worked and it convinces the japanese hey the americans could have 20 of these things 30 of these things now the island you mentioned is that where the the enola gay airplane took off with the with the first bomb absolutely yeah it's the island of tinian and i'll tell you this i've got uh i've got right here this is a piece of the runway front that the enola get from the enola gay and if you'll see here it's made out of coral because it's a it's a it's a big coral island it's uh and so the u.s uh captured it in summer of 1944 and turned this island into a massive american air base and if you go visit tinian today those runways are still there although they're being repurposed now for uh future use so the air force is there now but all the roads around there are the original roads that were built by the seabees um over eight decades ago so it's a i love i take tourists out there and i love visiting it because there's just so much history the enola gate took off from there and boxcar which is the b29 that that bombs nagasaki both took off from runway able there now you know as interesting as it is historic historically uh after world war ii uh our friends kind of became our enemies and our enemies became our friends what is your thought going forward as far as uh we always think of china as a concern in in the pacific is in some way china replacing japan as far as uh the the you know the the concern there in the pacific absolutely no and you see that i'll tell you i go out to the pacific every spring and i do tours i go to the philippines i go to the mariana mariana islands i go out to the palau uh and you see like runway able which is the famous runway where the enola gate took off from the air force is redoing that runway right now uh repaving it uh bringing it back into use on the island of which of course was the one of the horrific battle in october 1944 in fall 1944 um the marines are redoing the airfield uh there as well in the philippines where we've left the philippines the 1990s at the behest of the philippine government at that point after the eruption of mount pinatubo destroyed clark air force base we are now building uh more airfields and bases there in the philippines and all of this is a direct result of the rise of china i mean the is there's a lot of tension there you see chinese uh warships pushing right up to the edge of the philippines you know uh all these pressures that are building and so this is a lot of the same places are in play it's just a different adversary this time i compare it to musical chairs it's like you know music stops playing everybody's kind of moving around and it's just but it's the same you know and the chairs are in the same places the same islands going back to the decision to use the bomb for a second do you think fdr would have made the same decision and pretty much the same dynamics as truman did yes absolutely uh fdr was really hands off in the day-to-day prosecution of the war he never objected to the fire raids against tokyo or any of japan's other cities so any of the kind of moral questions that sort of preceded the use of atomic weapons that would have arisen during the fire raids he doesn't make any qualm about those also truman is using the advisors that fdr had it's henry stempson it's jimmy burns who's the secretary of state although under fdr burns was more of his uh they called him the assistant president he was more of a personal aid but it's all you know admiral lay he was the factory chairman of the joint chiefs of staff all of his advisors were the same advisors and of course truman they were all adamant to truman at the time that he needed to use the weapon their advice would have been the same to fdr do you do think truman was tougher on communism or on the soviet union than fdr was well i think at that time yes uh in 1945 and a great i've not studied the post-war period in the cold war period i mean there are a lot of scholars i've dug deep on that i would leave it to them to discuss that but during that brief period uh at the end of the war i definitely think so and fdr was used to sort of finessing other world leaders and so truman kind of comes in and he you know he's got a different style and he's got a learning curve and so he's pretty harsh with uh you know molotov who's their foreign minister and initially with stalin and some of the uh communications and demands uh but it's really i think a lot of that is him sort of feeling out the dynamic in the pacific he's never met stalin he's never met churchill in fact the first time he's ever going to meet them is going to be in uh in july of 1945 when he meets him in the battered suburbs of berlin so he's having to kind of grapple with all of this and of course this is a very transformative period i mean world war ii in europe is coming to an end in may you're going to start seeing the fall of the iron curtain you know truman's inbox is going to be filled with messages from churchill who's alarmed at sort of russian meddling in poland and other countries uh he's gonna you know he's gonna see that he doesn't take it as seriously initially as he's as he will later on and of course that's going to play a really big role in japan because as russia's influence is pushing across europe truman is going to realize hey we don't want that in japan and we need to keep the russians out of japan and japan is going to play a very important post-war role for the united states as a bulkhead against that rise of communism in asia and so truman wises up by august and realizes we need to end the war we need to keep russia out of japan the americans need to control the occupation yeah now maybe for me i'm biased i am originally from romania and of course fdr at the yalta conference when he met with churchill and stalin he made these concessions to the soviet union that soviet union would control eastern europe had he not done that i don't know if it would have been possible but then those eastern european countries would have been free of communism and free of the russian influence at the time uh do you think truman would have done differently uh at that conference that's a good question you know i've never thought about that um you know and i don't know if he necessarily would have i think fdr's gut instinct was you know he was giving concessions to the soviets in order to kind of keep them churning up the germans and uh you know because russia was such an important way to kind of grind down the german forces and uh and stalin was really mad that it took so long for the allies to come back to europe uh you know because they first they go into north africa and then they kind of come up you know through the mediterranean and it's not until you know the summer of 1944 that you see sort of the direct assault across the english channel that you know a lot of those concessions i think were done to kind of placate stalin so that he didn't make a separate piece with germany uh which would then free germany up to turn its attention west against uh so i don't know you know that's tough uh that's a good question i've never thought about that so uh you stumped me on that one steve but no but there i will the one thing i will add is i mean what happens in post-war europe is is what alarms truman for asia i mean he sees russia's influence growing he sees that and he takes it takes it seriously and it blocks causes him to block that in japan or to try to block that tell us why are you so interested in in writing and studying the pacific war versus of course the probably the the european theater the war was maybe 10 to 1 ratio of how many movies how much has been studied uh and not the pacific side tell us your interest about in that you know we need to change that steve we need more movies out of the pacific we need more pop culture references um you know i you know i um so i i spent my first year after college as a public school teacher in japan uh this was this was many many years ago back in the late 1990s and so my interest in the pacific war really grew out of my personal experience in the pacific of spending a year in japan at this point there were still uh you know there were still a lot of veterans there were a lot of civilians who survived uh my first learned about the fire raids for example by teaching a a class at my local community center a conversational english class and so i visited hiroshima for the first time uh in 1997 1998 so a lot of my interest grew out of that uh and so i started studying it and but for me i think what is so often lost is that everybody thinks that they love the european theater but america's role in the european theater is is part of an allied coalition it's largely the american army sort of fighting alongside the british and whatnot because the pacific theater is such a uniquely american experience i mean we control that theater and you see every service branch plays a a vital role a transformative role in a lot of ways i mean it's the marines who are having to figure out how to storm different beachheads and how to refine their tactics for amphibious warfare change their vehicles in order to get over reefs and whatnot so that what you see happening on places like tarawa with this huge violent bloody fight isn't going to be replicated by the time they get to saipan guam and tinian you're going to see the navy have massive leaps from you know going from surface warfare warfare to naval aviation you'll have the battle of the coral sea which is the first time two navies fought without ever even seeing one another i mean just fought completely in the heavens and you and of course the submarine warfare is is so pivotal you know the war beneath the seas is what ultimately strangles japan's economy and i find that to be in fact i wrote an entire book about the submarine war it's just it's an overlooked area as well uh then you have strategic bombing you see the rise that the development of the b29 which of course is the largest most powerful uh bomber built during world war ii capable of bridging these huge distances it's going to transform the air war it's going to lead to the rise of the independent air service of course you're going to also have the army's going to be fighting from everywhere from the philippines all the way down through new guinea and of course you have the manhattan project uh which is going to be the dawn of the nuclear age so i mean i think the pacific is just such a uniquely american experience uh that i think more people need to be reading about it more people need to be paying attention to it you know so and i'm biased but you know but i and i will also say you know there have been a thousand books written on d-day and so and when i wrote my book on the battle of manila it was the first american book done uh on it of any real scholarship ever so i mean there are so many great stories in the pacific that have not been told yet so much more that we can mine that we can do and as a historian i love that i love to have the opportunity to really plow these new fields and dig into this material but i do hope more and more people will continue to to pay attention to it read the books follow it because it is such an important part of our history now coming to the present day there's of course the race towards what we call singularity ai or in general ai development do you see any parallels between what we're now trying to innovate and develop with ai is like kind of dual technologies and the atomic weapons and the atomic technology that was developed in the past do you see parallels between those two yeah i mean warfare is changing dramatically right now there's no doubt about it uh and it's not just with ai i mean cyber warfare when i was doing my master's number years ago in military history cyber was all the big talk uh over at the citadel where i am uh cyber is a big program that we have there ai is a big part of that now as well um we're trying to kind of wrap our hands around how that's going to impact stuff uh drone warfare has been one of the biggest and most dramatic changes i've been following very closely what's been going on out of ukraine uh i mean you know now look at what you can do for very little money with drones versus what we spend on you know huge air defense systems and and whatnot i mean it's really unmanned systems are going to be the future as well so i mean we're really at this just transformational moment in warfare uh that is you know that that countries that the united states is figuring out other countries are i mean ukraine has been demonstrating just how to do it and we're smart to be paying very close attention to that i mean uh their their attacks on i mean look take a look at what's going on right now russia has lost how many how many warships now like 15 warships 20 warships ukraine doesn't have a navy yet they're doing all this with drones i mean it is i kept saying it is just we're at a pivotal moment in technology and warfare now last question uh james so you you be you lectured at top institutions at presidential libraries what is your biggest takeaway uh on on what you're talking about uh about the japanese war and and uh the world war ii you know i'll my biggest takeaway probably is you know it's it's it's hard for people to understand today the relationship that the united states had with japan back then i mean look i i have gone over i've been a public school teacher in japan i mean to think that these two countries were were once on this just you know horrific you know battle you know war against one another and yet suddenly now we're we're incredible allies i mean i've got great friends in japan and whatnot i think that's probably one of the most positive powerful things to come out of that war eight decades later is the great relationship that the united states now does enjoy with japan uh i do think the other thing i will say is one of the big takeaways that i see firsthand is just what is going on in the pacific i mean people do need to be paying attention i mean you are seeing a rapid re-militarization of that part of the world uh from airfields on foreign islands like tinian like petaloo to uh uh you know to everything that's going on out there i mean i would just encourage people pay attention i mean this is you know eight decades is a long time ago yes on one hand but it's not that long ago on the other and so uh so it's it's important that we continue to be vigilant james we thank you so much for your time appreciate sharing your amazing discoveries about the war in pacific and world war ii thank you thank you steve it's been a real pleasure thank you for watching another episode of bay area innovators if you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show please send us an email at sfbay at epochtimes.com we would love to hear from you thank you and see you next week