WAR ENDINGS ARE THE WORST IMAGINABLE EVENTS: 3/8: 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
🗓️ 3 November 2024
⏱️ 12 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
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS. I on the World. I'm John Batchel with Evan Thomas. His new book is Road to Surrender. |
| 0:11.1 | Three men and the countdown to the end of World War II in the Pacific. It is now the spring of 1945. |
| 0:19.7 | We turn to the Japanese point of view with a man by the name of Togo, |
| 0:24.6 | Shiniginori Togo. What is most striking about him is that he was twice in the cabinet. |
| 0:31.4 | The first time during the raid on Pearl Harbor, he resigned eight months after Pearl Harbor and retreated into his philosophy. |
| 0:41.4 | The second time, he was called back by the emperor, and he is in place for these last days of the war before and after the atomic bomb. |
| 0:51.2 | Evan, what do we need to know about Togo? |
| 0:53.1 | Because we spend a great deal of time |
| 0:55.0 | inside his point of view in these last hours. Japan is run by something called the Supreme |
| 1:02.0 | War Council, six people, war minister, chief of staff, the Army and Navy, Prime Minister, they're all |
| 1:09.7 | military people. The one civilian is Shigunori Total. |
| 1:13.5 | He's the foreign minister. |
| 1:14.9 | And significantly, he's the only one who wants to surrender. |
| 1:19.8 | His goal, and he remains fixed on it, is to try to figure out how to get the emperor, |
| 1:25.9 | who is the nominal head of Japan, divine, but actually under the control, |
| 1:32.0 | pretty much of the military, his goal is to get the emperor to surrender. And that's why I focus |
| 1:37.7 | on him, because he's singular. He's the only one at the top who wants to do this. He succeeds, |
| 1:43.3 | but it is a close-run thing. |
| 1:45.4 | He's an unusual Japanese speaker you make the case because he's blunt. He's direct. |
| 1:51.5 | He doesn't spend a deal of time presenting what you'd have to say is ambiguous remarks. |
| 1:58.5 | And that is a strength or a weakness when he's dealing with the military? |
| 2:04.2 | Well, he's different. And it helps to have somebody who is blunt. But of course, the military |
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