#PRESIDENTS WEEKEND: HARRY TRUMAN: 1/8: 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
🗓️ 19 February 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
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.
1888 Tokyo
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is |
| 0:05.0 | This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor. |
| 0:09.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.0 | 1945. |
| 0:14.0 | It is March, late winter, early spring of 1945. |
| 0:18.0 | And a flight of B29s goes out from the islands in the Pacific towards Tokyo. |
| 0:26.0 | The ambition is to burn Tokyo, the night of the March 9th into the 10th. |
| 0:31.8 | That is an expression of the power of the American Air Force, late in the war. |
| 0:38.7 | Germany is still in the contest, but Japan is burning. A man who learns about this mission within hours of its success, |
| 0:49.6 | the burning of Tokyo, is Henry Louis Stimson, the Secretary of War. Henry Louis Stimson forms the |
| 0:57.3 | point of view, the moral high ground point of view, in a new book, The Road to Surrender, three men and the countdown to the end of World War II, |
| 1:06.4 | I welcome the distinguished author, Evan Thomas, to comment on who Henry Stimson is at this point in his life. |
| 1:15.0 | He has served several presidents, most importantly Frank and Roosevelt, |
| 1:21.0 | but at this point he's also weighed down by the demands of his office and his own |
| 1:27.9 | health issues. Evan congratulations and good evening. |
| 1:32.5 | What do we understand about Henry Stimson at this point at his life, |
| 1:36.0 | the least of which being that he's a Victorian gentleman? |
| 1:39.0 | Good evening to you, Evan. |
| 1:40.8 | Good evening to you, John. Simpson is a morally upright person. |
| 1:46.4 | He sees himself that way. |
| 1:47.6 | He calls himself a Christian gentleman and he is. |
| 1:50.9 | You know he goes to church on Sunday. He has a a moral vision he believes in what he calls the |
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