War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its size,

and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history

through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Music James Early. Welcome back to Key Battles of the Pacific Theater of World War II.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And I'm sure you recall, if you listened to our last episode, which was episode 33, we began our two-part epilogue series.

Now, normally in our past series, we have one episode, which is an epilogue, but there were so many interesting leaders that we wanted to discuss what happened to them after the war.

We just had way too many to fit into a single episode, so we decided to discuss what happened to them after the war.

We just had way too many to fit into a single episode,

so we decided to break it into two parts.

In our last episode, we discussed the after-war careers of the U.S. Army commanders and the Navy commanders.

So if you recall, or if you haven't, you might want to go back and listen to it.

But we talked about what happened to people like Admiral Nimitz, Admiral Halsey, Admiral Spruents, General MacArthur, General Marshall, and even people like General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel, who were obviously the failed, failed, I guess, leaders of Pearl Harbor.

It's hard to see anything else about them.

They definitely paid for their mistakes.

But anyway, in this episode,

what we want to do now is talk about a few more Americans,

and then we're going to get into the Japanese leader.

...