#PRESIDENTS WEEKEND: HARRY TRUMAN: 8/8: 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
⏱️ 8 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.
1944 Imperial Japanese Navy Day
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | CBS Iron World. I'm John Babs with the author, |
| 0:08.0 | the distinguished author Evan Thomas. |
| 0:10.0 | His new book has wrote to surrender, three men in the countdown to the end of |
| 0:13.8 | World War II. The three men we focused on Henry Stimson Secretary of War who |
| 0:18.7 | resigns on a 78th birthday. Good for Henry, September of 1945. |
| 0:24.3 | Foreign Minister Togo, who is sentenced to 20 years in prison, |
| 0:28.6 | not hanged, sentenced to 20 years in prison. |
| 0:31.6 | And then Tui Spots, Carl Spots, who becomes briefly the chief of |
| 0:36.8 | staff of the Air Force. We'll begin with Henry Stimson. It is your measure |
| 0:40.8 | that Stimson who opposed mass murder did not believe in precision bombing |
| 0:47.7 | had great regrets about supervising a machine that turned out the two atomic weapons came to change his mind at least |
| 0:56.4 | about the Soviets, if not about the Japanese. |
| 0:59.5 | Is that correct, Evan? |
| 1:00.5 | Yes, he went back and forth on the Soviets. |
| 1:03.0 | He wanted to trust them there when he first gets out, when he first retires, he goes to |
| 1:07.0 | Truman and says we need to trust them to share the weapon. |
| 1:10.8 | About a year later, he has the Cold Wars now building up and this and Stalin is just |
| 1:15.3 | impossible and gobbling up Eastern Europe Simpson rooffully regretfully says you |
| 1:21.6 | can't trust the Russians and I'm afraid the arms |
| 1:24.2 | build-up is going to have to go up until they meant their own ways or the Soviet Union |
| 1:29.1 | falls. |
... |
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