The

The Well, I'm going to start tonight the way I started last time by talking about your books, because I'm a lover of books, and I'm surrounded by them.

You know, my podcast with my partner, Seth Periden, The Unauthorized History of the Pacific War, that was a crass commercial announcement.

We, believe it or not, we recorded a two and a half hour episode today.

It was our third episode on the Battle of Okinawa and talked about Heartbreak Ridge and

Desmond Doss and a whole bunch of other things going on in that battle.

And, you know, of course, Admiral Spruens was the overall commander of that

theater during the time it was Fifth Fleet. And here I am, just like last time I told you,

I'm surrounded by books that are haunting me. You've got a couple of Spruence biographies,

which are really good. But then I noticed your MacArthur biographies

outnumber your spruence biographies, which I'm not happy about. Yeah. So we're pretty brutal in our

podcast. I should say we're decisively honest. And so when things are going well, we talk about it.

And we say good things about MacArthur, particularly as it pertains to the Philippines.

And we say some not so good things about MacArthur.

And same thing with Spruents and Nimitz and everybody else.

King got an episode that we call Admiral King was right about almost everything.

But the Spruance tie-in here, of course, is the Indianapolis.

Because the Indianapolis was Spruance's fifth fleet flagship.

Spruence wanted to use a cruiser and not a battleship, because the flagship sometimes has to depart the line for conferences,

meetings, stuff like that. And unlike Admiral Halsey, whose flagship was the New Jersey,

big guns, right? Spruents didn't want to take the big guns away from the fight. And the

Indianapolis, which we'll talk about in a little bit more detail, had the flag quarters and everything like that.

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