Hello and welcome to something's off with Andrew Heaton. I'm your host Andrew Heaton and if I'm ever

radiated a la Chernobyl or a Cormac McCarthy novel, I will find a way to make radiation elegant and natty.

So here's how the story goes.

We defeated the Nazis, go us, and thanks for nothing, Spain.

But World War II raged on in the Pacific Theater.

And even though the Japanese war effort was clearly doomed,

they just kept slugging it out,

island after bloody island.

And they would have kept doing so, drowning in an ocean of blood,

were it not for President Truman, dropping two nuclear weapons

of such unfathomable destruction that they had no choice but to surrender.

And despite the horrors of atomic warfare, it was still better than a longer, bloodier, conventional

war.

Now we definitely shouldn't underestimate that Japanese psychological pressure to keep fighting. Even though the war ended in 1945, a soldier named Hiro Unoda maintained his post until 1974. The soldier

he who knew what he was so convinced of American villainy and duplicitousness that he didn't believe

Japan had actually surrendered and there were other soldiers who had been assured that capture by Americans

meant horrible torture and death. He kept fighting for two decades after the

war concluded and he only surrendered when his commanding officer who who had long since retired, was now an aging bookseller,

personally flew to the Philippines, tracked him down to relieve him of duty.

That's how freaked out he was.

And there was another guy who lasted even longer.

So if you consider that, that immense pressure to keep fighting the war, to not admit defeat, to not let the Americans in,

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