The Battle of Okinawa

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The last great battle of the Second World War was fought on the island of Okinawa. After 83 blood-soaked days, almost a quarter of a million people lost their lives. The death toll included thousands of civilians lost to mass suicide - convinced to do so by Japanese propaganda. I invited Saul David on the podcast to tell me about this shocking - often overlooked - chapter of the Second World War. A chapter which was central to Truman’s decision to use the atomic bombs in August 1945.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello,
0:00.5	folks, Dan Snow here.
0:01.6	I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit.
0:06.1	I'd love for you to be there.
0:07.5	Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London,
0:10.4	in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years.
0:14.1	You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes.
0:17.6	Look forward to seeing you there.
0:26.1	Hi, Ron, welcome to Dan Snow's history. I've got a good podcast for you. I got Saul David back on the pod. You heard him earlier this year talking
0:30.1	about the Anglo-Zulu wall. Well, he is a man of many talents. He can dash between periods. He's been
0:35.5	on the pod talking about Operation Thunderbolt, the raid on
0:37.8	Entebbe, airport in Uganda in 1976, but this time he is back because he's got a new book out
0:43.8	about a battle that was raging 80 years ago now. It's called the Crucible of Hell. It's about the
0:49.7	battle of Okinawa. It's the last great battle of the Second World War, but it was a battle that
0:54.8	fundamentally shaped the decision of the American government about whether or not to drop a nuclear
0:59.5	bomb, and it is a harrowing, extraordinary tale of vicious fighting. Saul and I met up, just
1:06.3	for the lockdown, to talk about this, and as ever, he's one of the best in the business.
1:10.2	He's incredibly engaging and tells an extraordinary story with the flair of a novelist
1:15.7	but the integrity of a professor he's a professor of military history at the
1:21.0	University of Buckingham as well if you're looking for history content during this
1:25.7	lockdown please go to history hit.tv.
1:27.8	It's our history channel. All the back episodes of the podcast are on there exclusively. You can get hundreds of history documentaries on there as well as being more and more added all the time. I'm just really proud of one we've added recently on some of the greatest speeches in history of the House of Commons. And you can get the whole thing pretty much for free. use the code Pod 1, POD1. You get a month for free, and then you get the first month, which is one pound, euro or dollar. That'll take you through to June. And goodness knows, we might be out of this nightmare by then. So please go and check that out. You can also go and check out History Lit Live on the Timeline YouTube channel. Just Google Down Snow History Hit Live
	...

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