#PRESIDENTS WEEKEND: HARRY TRUMAN: 2/8: 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
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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.
1895 Sino-Japanese military
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is |
| 0:27.0 | this is CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Evan Thomas. His new book is Road to Surrender, |
| 0:29.0 | three men in the countdown at the end of World War II. |
| 0:32.0 | Roosevelt is dead. He dies in early April. Harry Truman is now |
| 0:36.6 | in office. It is late May, 1945. The Germans have surrendered. Hitler is dead. |
| 0:44.0 | The men in Europe are waiting to either come home, |
| 0:47.0 | either to come home or to be reassigned to the operations in the Pacific, |
| 0:52.0 | whatever is coming, to end the war with Japan. |
| 0:55.0 | Two committees gather in Washington. They're both critical to the |
| 1:01.0 | A-bomb, the atomic weapon, which has not yet been tested. That won't be |
| 1:05.6 | till July, the Trinity test. But in any event, it's been assembled at great cost and Henry Simpson |
| 1:12.1 | feels the burden of it as he says at one point I spent |
| 1:15.8 | two billion and he's very pleased to hear that it works in Trinity but in any event they're |
| 1:21.5 | not quite sure what it can do as these committees meet. |
| 1:25.8 | The first committee is called the Target Committee, and it is the genius and extension of |
| 1:31.2 | a man named Groves, General Groves, in charge of Trinity and before |
| 1:36.0 | that taking part in the Manhattan Project. Evan, what is the target committee and |
| 1:41.8 | what is their decision making? |
| 1:44.6 | The target committee is choosing the target for this new weapon for S1. |
| 1:49.7 | And they are military men and scientists, but mostly military men who focuses on showing off how terrible this weapon is. |
| 2:00.3 | And you know in 1945 bombing was not the most accurate thing in the world. |
| 2:06.6 | They were not not reliably accurate. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.