1/8: FOR KYIV 2025, AS FOR TOKYO 1945, NEGOTIATION IS MORE PERILOUS THAN WAR-FIGHTING: Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II by Evan Thomas (Author

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🗓️ 16 March 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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1/8: FOR KYIV 2025, AS FOR TOKYO 1945, NEGOTIATION IS MORE PERILOUS THAN WAR-FIGHTING: Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II by Evan Thomas (Author)

1940 HEADUARTERS IMPERIAL JAPAN NAVY, TOKYO

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Surrender-Three-Countdown-World/dp/0399589252

At 9:20 a.m. on the morning of May 30, General Groves receives a message to report to the office of the secretary of war “at once.” Stimson is waiting for him. He wants to know: has Groves selected the targets yet?

So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America’s decision to drop the atomic bomb—and Japan’s decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who had overall responsibility for decisions about the atom bomb; Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, the only one in Emperor Hirohito’s Supreme War Council who believed even before the bombs were dropped that Japan should surrender.

Henry Stimson had served in the administrations of five presidents, but as the U.S. nuclear program progressed, he found himself tasked with the unimaginable decision of determining whether to deploy the bomb. The new president, Harry S. Truman, thus far a peripheral figure in the momentous decision, accepted Stimson’s recommendation to drop the bomb. Army Air Force Commander Gen. Spaatz ordered the planes to take off. Like Stimson, Spaatz agonized over the command even as he recognized it would end the war. After the bombs were dropped, Foreign Minister Togo was finally able to convince the emperor to surrender.

To bring these critical events to vivid life, bestselling author Evan Thomas draws on the diaries of Stimson, Togo and Spaatz, contemplating the immense weight of their historic decision. In Road to Surrender, an immersive, surprising, moving account, Thomas lays out the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of three people who changed history.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.
0:09.9	Here's John Batchelor.
0:12.8	It is March, late winter, early spring of 1945.
0:18.9	And a flight of B-29s goes out from the islands in the Pacific towards Tokyo.
0:25.8	The ambition is to burn Tokyo, the night of the March 9th into the 10th. That is an expression
0:32.7	of the power of the American U.S. Army Air Force late in the war. Germany is still in the contest, but Japan is
0:41.6	burning. A man who learns about this mission within hours of its success, the burning of
0:50.1	Tokyo, is Henry Lewis Stimson, the Secretary of War. Henry Lewis Stimson, the Secretary of War.
0:55.2	Henry Lewis Stimson forms the point of view, the moral high ground point of view in a new
1:00.9	book, The Road to Surrender, Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.
1:05.9	I welcome the distinguished author Evan Thomas to comment on who Henry Stimson is at this point in
1:13.9	his life. He has served several presidents, most importantly, Franklin Roosevelt, but at this point,
1:23.3	he's also weighed down by the demands of his office and his own health issues. Evan,
1:30.4	congratulations and good evening. What do we understand about Henry Stimson at this point at his
1:35.4	life, the least of which being that he's a Victorian gentleman? Good evening to you, Evan.
1:40.6	Good evening to you, John. Henry Simpson is a morally upright person. He sees himself that way. He calls himself a Christian gentleman. And he is. You know, he goes to church on Sunday. He has a moral vision. He believes in what he calls the law of moral progress. He believes that the United States is the country best suited, really, in the history of the world, to achieve this moral perfection, if you will.
2:06.7	But at the same time, and this is crucial, Henry Simpson is a realist. He's a power guy. He was a prosecutor. He was a New York lawyer. He's been Secretary of State, Secretary
2:19.3	of Defense. He wanted the United States to stand up to fascism in the 1930s, when nobody else did.
2:26.9	He's been an interventionist all the way. So he is both a moralist who believes in a fairly
2:33.7	benign Christian God, and at the same time, he is a guy who
2:39.0	believes in the use of power, the necessity of power, he's comfortable with power. Now, why is this
2:46.4	relevant? He's at a juncture in history, the end of World War II, where we're about to finish off
	...

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