Two Bombs | Part 2

The Cold War: Prelude To The Present

The Daily Wire

Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

After the defeat of Germany, Joseph Stalin looked at the pieces laid out on the board in front of him with satisfaction that bordered on glee. His Red Army, consisting of millions of battle-hardened troops, thousands of tanks and an equal number of artillery pieces had come to a halt — temporarily, thought Stalin — where they had encountered the British and American forces attacking from the West. Those forces, he knew, were no match for the sheer mass his Soviet Union had mustered, and he was certain that the Western Democracies did not have the stomach for another long and bloody war. Soon all of Europe would be his, and his communist ideology fulfilled. But all of that changed when the Americans had conjured two brilliant flashes of light over Japan and brought a sudden end to the Second World War. Would American atomic wizardry be enough of a deterrent to prevent the Third? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	A B-29 was overhearoshima carrying an atomic bomb.
0:04.3	At 8.15 in the morning of August 6, Japanese time, the first atomic bomb struck an enemy target.
0:19.9	The only reason I'm alive to tell this tale of what we saw is because of the existence
0:24.8	of nuclear weapons.
0:27.3	It's not hyperbole.
0:29.3	In 1945, my father was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the US Army.
0:34.1	I have a photo of him in his graduating class.
0:37.2	On the back, he'd gotten most of his classmates to write a sentence about what they expected
0:41.0	to be doing in ten years.
0:43.2	More than half had the same answers, my father.
0:45.6	My dad wrote, in pencil, quote, I expect to be killed fighting for my country.
0:50.2	They all expected to be killed fighting for their country.
0:54.1	Now, I don't know the history of any of the other men in that photograph, but if I had to guess,
0:58.4	I think it would be likely that none of them would end up being killed fighting for their country.
1:03.2	Now, if they'd been marine butterflies, well, that would have been an entirely different story.
1:08.8	My father arrived in Germany in late April of 1945.
1:12.6	By that time, just two weeks before V.E. Day victory in Europe Day,
1:17.0	the Soviet Red Army still had a lot of fighting and bleeding left to do on the way to the Führer bunker.
1:23.0	But the Americans who could have beat the Soviets handily to the German capital
1:26.7	had been halted dead in their tracks, not by SS Panzer divisions,
1:30.4	but rather by a direct order directly from Schaeff, Supreme Headquarters allied expeditionary forces.
1:37.7	That order to leave Berlin to the Soviets came from the same Supreme Commander
	...

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