8/8: 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)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Surrender-Three-Countdown-World/dp/0399589252
1941 PEARL HARBOR BURNING
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 CBSI on the World. I'm John Batson with the author. The Distinguished author, Evan Thomas. His new book is Road to Surrender, three men in the countdown to the end of World War II. The three men we focused on, Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, who resigns on a 78th birthday, good for Henry, September of |
| 0:22.2 | 1945, a foreign minister togo, who is sentenced to 20 years in prison, not hanged, sentenced to 20 |
| 0:29.9 | years in prison, and then Tuist Spots, Carl Spotsk, who becomes briefly chief of staff of the |
| 0:37.3 | Air Force. We'll begin with Henry Stimson. |
| 0:39.8 | It is your measure that Stimson, who opposed mass murder, did not believe in precision bombing, |
| 0:47.6 | had great regrets about supervising a machine that turned out the two atomic weapons, |
| 0:57.4 | came to change his mind, at least about the Soviets, |
| 1:02.8 | if not about the Japanese. Is that correct, Evan? Yes, he went back and forth on the Soviets. |
| 1:07.6 | He wanted to trust them there. When he first gets out, when he first retires, he goes to Truman and says we need to trust them and share the weapon. About a year later, |
| 1:11.5 | as the Cold War is now building up and Stalin is just impossible and gobbling up Eastern Europe, |
| 1:19.1 | Simpson ruefully, regretfully, says you can't trust the Russians. And I'm afraid the arms buildup |
| 1:24.6 | is going to have to go up until they mend their own ways or the Soviet Union falls. |
| 1:29.8 | We mentioned that was a very long wait. |
| 1:32.3 | It happened, but it was a long wait. |
| 1:34.8 | And he's, you know, he's discouraged. |
| 1:36.6 | He has feel some guilt that they were unable to end the war without a diplomatic solution. |
| 1:43.1 | And they ended up with nuclear bombs. |
| 1:45.2 | He feels guilty about that. |
| 1:46.6 | He writes a vigorous defense of the decision, which is published after, first of all, |
| 1:52.1 | there's an article in New Yorker book called Hiroshima by John Hersey. |
| 1:56.0 | And it affects the country because it makes vivid through human example how terrible the atom bomb is. |
| 2:03.5 | And people who have been for the bombs, because they ended World War II, suddenly go, |
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