Thank you for listening to We Have Ways of Making You Talk.

Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well.

Plus early access to all live show tickets. That's patreon.com slash we have ways.

Say hello to the next generation of Zendesk AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone.

Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI agents easily deploy in minutes to resolve 30% of

interactions instantly. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at Zendesk.com.

Akhtung, Akhtung, welcome to We have ways of making you talk USA with me, Al Murray, James

Holland and John McManus, of course. We're scattered to the four winds. If I sound a little different on your earphones, that's because I'm in a kitchen in France. Jim's actually for once at home in the Holland bunker. I've just got oil on my hands from cheap work. Perfect. John, is this your office at work or are your office at home? It's my office at home. Yeah, so it's a mess, you know, as you can tell. So this is my McManus bunker. God knows, hundreds of books in here, including Jim Holland and Elmurie. Well, very sweet of you, John. What we thought we talk about today, all these anniversaries of the end of the war upon us, is the USS Missouri and the signing of the Japanese surrender, which is what's good about this is that it's a self-contained event. It starts when they get up at 4.30 the morning and it ends. Once the signatures have done. The signatures are done and the Japanese are... Pop and Tails and all the rest of it. It is, however, and absolutely, it's an

extraordinary event as if you want to see people in a way at their best, in particular

MacArthur, actually, at their best, which may surprise some listeners that we would consider

that there was such a possibility. Then this is really the moment for it,

isn't it? John, you've written about this moment in particular, and James, you wrote about

an aspect of it. In our book, Victory 45, yep. There is a book called The Mighty Moe, if anyone's

very interested, which is a series of recollections of people who served in commandant on it,

because let's not forget this battleship was in operation of the Gulf War in 1992.

Yeah.

You know, which I think it's really interesting because one of the criticisms that people throw at the Royal Navy, for example, in the Second World War is, yeah, they had all the, you know, they had the world's largest Navy in 1939, but all their battlesuits were really out of date. they might have been laid down or created in the First World War,

but they certainly weren't out of date.

These are such huge investments that they're designed to last for decades. And what you do is you just upgrade the weapon system and the technology on it. But the ship remains a ship. It's got the same corridors. It's got the same walkways. It's got the same layout and all the rest of it. you just upgrade it because it's the creating the battleship that costs all the money.

Yeah. And Missouri is more or less brand new, having gotten into service the previous summer, you know, in 1944. Yeah. And you know, like you said, it's still going to be in service. Although it went into mothballs for a while in that interwar period, like 30 years or so.

They brought it back for the 1980s in the Gulf War, but, you know, upgraded the weapons platform.

But what I think is so appropriate for the U.S., the war begins with battleships in the sense

...