THE RAGE OF AMERICA, 1941-1945: 4/8: 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
🗓️ 15 October 2023
⏱️ 8 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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I On The World. I'm John Bats with Evan Thomas. His new book is Road to |
| 0:09.2 | Surrender. Three men in the countdown to the end of World War II. The US Army Air Force |
| 0:15.0 | it wasn't a separate service yet. A Bob Lovett who is the deputy assistant secretary |
| 0:20.4 | of war working for Mr. Simpson. Imagine the future in which the Air Force will be its |
| 0:24.8 | own service. But right now it is subordinate to George Marshall, the commander of the |
| 0:30.2 | US Army. But we need to meet several personalities because they're going to get involved in this |
| 0:35.5 | question of the atomic bomb and mass murder and ending the war and precision bombing all these |
| 0:42.9 | euphemisms that are important to understand. Evan first will meet the man, two e-spots who is |
| 0:50.8 | deputy to Hap Arnold, the commander of the US Army Air Force. Initially, spots is given the job |
| 0:57.2 | of bombing Germany and then he's given the job of bombing Japan. Let's start with Germany |
| 1:02.8 | because spots is troubled by bombing civilians, the British called it de-housing and yet the |
| 1:14.2 | war in Germany as I understand it was all about bombing the cities and then using the euphemism |
| 1:22.2 | of precision bombing. What was spots's opinion right before Dresden? Did he have one? |
| 1:28.4 | Spots was a member of the so-called bomber mafia that believed that bombing could actually spare |
| 1:35.4 | the world from intense trench warfare. A few bombs here strategically placed and the work |
| 1:42.1 | quickly. That didn't work. Although we had a Norden bombsite, we had American technology, |
| 1:47.7 | we had a B-17, good plane. In the skies over Germany, it's cloudy, the Luftwaffe is shooting at you, |
| 1:56.3 | there's flak. We dropped our bombs in the wrong place, most of them missed and we ended up |
| 2:03.2 | bombing cities, bombing civilians and spots adhered to this ideology of precision bombing and |
| 2:10.2 | called it precision bombing. But he knew that it wasn't, that it missed and that we ended up killing |
| 2:16.7 | civilians. The British were doing this openly. The British were doing area bombing. They made no |
| 2:20.8 | bones about it. The Germans had bombed their cities. The British were going to bomb the German |
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