Hiroshima: Nagasaki

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The result of the feudal and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan.

The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry, and the method of life of the whole German people.

The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.

That was item three from the Potsdam Declaration.

Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland and Jim.

Today, we are going to try to get the war to end in Japan, aren't we?

We're going to do our best.

Yeah, but I fancy there's a few rogues out there in Tokyo desperate to make sure that it doesn't happen.

Exactly.

There are two.

One or two people have got something to say about that.

I mean, not contemporary rogues, I hasten to add, but ones back in 1945.

Just to add that code de sil to what we were just going to say.

But I think, I mean,

it is an an interesting point at the war, this.

You know, because we talked to Giles Milton quite recently about the Potsdam Declaration and what happens at about the Potsdam Conference and what happens at the conference and the various comings and goings of Allied leaders and the change at the top in America and Britain carrying on with its democracy despite everything and, you know, Attlee turning up.

But at the core of it, of course, Stalin, who's the...

immovable so you know object at the head of the irresistible force the red army the soviet union but the declaration is I think, is really striking because you get this basically, it's an ultimatum to the Japanese to give up that is made in the light of the successful Trinity test of the atomic bomb.

And, you know, when Potsdam, when they assemble for Potsdam, they don't know if the atomic bomb's going to work.

And by the time the conference is up and running, they do.

So you can write a declaration that says you better give up or you're facing the utter destruction of the Japanese homeland.

You can make that kind of threat.

What's really interesting, isn't it, is that in the tangle, the diplomatic tangle, that is absolutely clear in American, British minds that that's what's coming.

And that there is this awful business of getting the Japanese to take that seriously, isn't there?

Yeah, I mean, we've spoken so much this year when we've been talking about the end of the war, about delusion.

It seems that the closer these nations get to Armageddon, the more deluded they become.

Yeah.

You know, whether that be Hitler in his bunker, whether it be Dernitz after he's taken over control, or Wilhelm Keitel going through the, being driven through the damaged streets of Berlin on his way to sign the surrender at Karlshorst.

It's just astonishing.

The Japanese have got themselves into a lava as well.

They've created this death cult, which is effectively what it's become.

They've convinced themselves that just so long as they kind of sacrifice ever more young lives, then the Americans will parley.

By any reckoning, really, really extraordinary that they should think so.

I mean people say that those who are in a cult you can't talk to them they're so convinced you know it's people who like you know conspiracy theorists or whatever that their minds are not open to an alternative possibility and I think this is what what has happened to the Japanese leadership I mean look around you people

Yeah,

exactly.

Tokyo is destroyed.

You know, 90 cities have been destroyed.

8.5 million people have been displaced, etc., etc.

You know, you are on your knees.

The idea that the mightiest nation in the world is going to parley for greater terms for you, the defeated, is absurd.

Yeah, yeah.

Yet they have convinced themselves, haven't they?

And do they really believe this?

Or they must do.

They must absolutely believe this to be true.

And I think it's because they're in this bubble of grotesque self-deception that they can't extricate themselves from it until something forces them to do it.

Yeah, but they're pretty confident in their assessment that, you know, America hasn't got the stomach for a longer fight.

What they do know about America is, you know, they can read the newspapers.

And of course, because America's, you know, relatively speaking, open society, there are lots of letters pages with people complaining about their sons being away too long and what's the next phase of the draft going to be and all that stuff.

And, you know, the American government also is kind of pretty much convinced that this war's got another two years in it if they've got to fight on land in Japan in the wake of Okinawa.

So the Japanese leadership is wrong, but it kind of has a case, doesn't it?

Well, sort of, except that, you know, th th that's the whole point of Casablanca in January 1943 and the unconditional surrender.

You know, and the point of that is to have clarity about the end of the war.

It's to avoid compromise with despicable regimes.

Yeah.

It is also clearly, I suppose, to show the Soviet Union that they mean business as well.

And they're not going to do a, you know, a separate peace with Nazi Germany or anything like that.

And so far, they've completely carried through on that.

And if I was a Japanese, I would be thinking, hang on a minute, the nation's on its knees.

We haven't got anything.

We've got no money.

we've got no food, we've got no supplies of anything, you know, the nation is starving, over a million people have been killed, the economy is in death row, and we're completely surrounded.

Yeah, but I think part of it has to be that the thing that's making up people at the top's minds about what to do next, because they know they can pretty much

carry their population with them, they can certainly carry the army with them in whatever they want to do and the Imperial Navy.

There is the clause in the declaration that says there must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who've deceived and misled the people in Japan into embarking on world conquest.

For we insist the new order of peace, security, and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world.

So that's basically saying to the government, to the people making decisions, you lot are going straight to the gallows, right?

When this comes to it, you know, they're going to come for those who visited cruelties upon our prisoners.

This is what's really interesting, though, isn't it?

Is that you can see, in a way, the sort of things that the tiny cracks in the rock that the government, the Japanese government, are clinging to by their fingertips to justify carrying on.

As the Americans, as the Allies ratchet up the pressure on them with the atomic bomb, they then pivot to another crack and

grip onto that to try and hang on.

Because essentially, what they're trying to do is force the Americans into a sort of suicide pact, aren't they?

That will all go down in flames.

End of July 1945.

Is there any circumstance in which this is going to end well for you?

Well, no, but even if the Americans do parley, part of the parleying is going to be your heads on the, you know, going in the knees.

I mean, there is nothing to be gained by continuing this.

Nothing at all.

No, no, of course.

Of course not.

3.4 million Japanese dead out of a nation of, what, 60 billion?

Yeah, unbelievable.

Or maybe even, no, it's not even that, is it?

It's more like...

No, it's not even that.

And I think what's also really interesting is, I mean, we've often talked about how by this stage of the war, the Japanese economy is, it's 88% is being spent on defense or something.

But the economy is shrinking so rapidly that even that may sound like a lot, but it's not much.

Yes, their priority is entirely defense, but the economy is titchy.

In 1943, they're making 8 million tons of steel.

And there's that, it's the argument that Adam Toos makes that in 1941, you know, the Japanese economy is bigger than the Soviet economy, in effect.

By 1945, by the end of the war, they're only producing thousands of tons of steel.

Yes, their entire economy is turned over to fighting.

But the entire economy is nothing.

It's evaporated.

These decisions, these deliberations of Imperial General Headquarters is taking place in Tokyo.

Just to remind people, on the night of the 9th, 10th of March, 1945 is Operation Meeting House.

334 B29s, we've talked about this already, results in the deaths of at least 100,000 civilians, could easily be double that.

It destroys 267,171 buildings and 16 square miles, displacing a million people, crippling its industrial output.

The interesting thing about the Second World War is it doesn't conform to the usual norms of conflict.

No.

It is truly global.

It's on a scale, you know, which has never been seen before.

But it is really worth reiterating that in the past, people surrender because they've run out of money and they're not going to win.

So you think, okay, what's the alternative?

Maybe I'll see for peace.

Neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan follow that particular trend in terms of ending wars.

That the Italians do.

The Italians, the minute they realise it's not worth it anymore, that government folds, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly, creating all sorts of complications for itself in the process, but not getting as many people killed, which is what this comes down to.

Because the Americans aren't just firebombing.

I mean, one of the things that's worth pointing out is because the Japanese have this sort of workshop industrial culture where people are making stuff

in their houses, in tiny workshops, where you know, you'll be making cogs, the guy next door will be making threaded components.

That when you do destroy an inner city area and kill 100,000 civilians, you're destroying the factories as well as the workers in one fell swoop.

Alongside this, LeMay is mining the Japanese waters, and

that that is having an incredible effect on choking their ability to bring raw materials in.

And there's Operation Starvation that the US Navy is running.

I mean, which for once with an allied operational name does what it says on the tin.

Japan is being comprehensively throttled and you're right.

I mean, if you do negotiate, what is it you're going to get out of the Americans if you do make them play a high blood price?

I don't know.

Our Okinawa series recently, we talked about the scale of the bloodshed there and that bloodshed is the way the Japanese are going to bring the Americans to the the table.

Because you rather piffily said peace could only be secured with more bloodshed, which is a brilliant line.

It absolutely sums it up.

Yeah.

You know, but I suppose one of the big problems is also they've been hoisted by their empath because they've created this sort of version of the sort of Bushido code, kind of, you know, which is sort of inherited from the old shogunate.

This idea of honor and sacrifice and that, you know, you know, to surrender is to dishonor one's family as well as oneself and nation and all this kind of stuff.

It's it's a warped, ultra-nationalistic version of the Bushido Code.

It's not the Bushido Code of the 1600s that's dominated military culture.

It's a bastardized version, a kind of warped version, which is folded around a new concept of growth and expansion and racism, to put not too fine a point on it.

Combined with modern military equipment, if you're able to defend to last ditch with a machine gun, the Bushido Code is far more deadly for both sides, isn't it?

Because after all, the old model is a day's clash on a battlefield, isn't it?

Of war all over the world, and things are settled basically by the evening.

There's none of that on offer here because he's under that enormous cultural pressure to do so.

What I think is really interesting is that whilst so many leading Nazis prepared to just discard the ideology of Nazism the moment that they were sort of threatened by the hangman's noose, the same is not the case in Japan, where people have persuaded themselves that, you know, to surrender is dishonourable and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they're, and they're going to stick with it.

That is in sharp contrast to the, you know, to the end of the Third Reich.

Whether it's Peleli, which is basically sort of, you know, hardly anyone, I think, is taken prisoner at all.

You know, on Iwo Jima, it's 216 prisoners out of the best part of 20,000.

On Okinawa, you've got civilians hurling themselves off the cliffs rather than be taken.

Again, hardly any prisoners taken at all.

It's just bizarre to Western minds, but I suppose also, you know, this means that when you're confronting complete and total defeat, you still can't accept it, which is one of the problems that the Imperial Japanese command gets into at the end of July, beginning of August.

Yeah, I think what's interesting is how unrealistic they are.

The sort of the feelers they send out are to the Soviets.

Maybe there's a way through this with the Soviet Union, who after all, they have a neutrality pact in place from April 1941 after Kalkin Gol, where the Soviets have, you know, fought them two years previously in 1939 and absolutely did for the Japanese.

You know, this is one of the interesting things.

It's part of the continuity of the Japanese war, is this encounter they have with the Soviets in the East, where they lose and conclude a neutrality pact with the Japanese.

And obviously that's then kept ticking over by during Barbarossas.

The Soviets know that the Japanese aren't going to interrupt them from behind, as it were, when the Germans invade.

You know, the Japanese think, well, what we'll do is we'll send out feelers to the Soviets and see if they're going to stay out still, because them coming in would make our lives very difficult as things proceed, even though, as we've already pointed out, Japan is on its knees.

It's being destroyed.

There they are, absolutely on their knees.

They're completely destroyed.

cities in ruins surrounded you know besieged you know no hope of getting supplies in they go gosh life would be difficult if the soviet union came in against us

could you have a more uh blatant expression of delusion than that i mean yeah

Sure, you would.

It would make things worse.

You're absolutely right.

I mean, but what's interesting is, of course, the Americans have, they've broken the Japanese purple side for the diplomatic code.

So they know that this is what the Japanese are up to.

And also, you know, Truman writes in his diary at Potsdam, brilliant.

Uncle Joe's in.

UJ is in for the war against Japan.

And Stalin makes a promise that in 90 days he will have turned things around.

And he sends Zhukov east, gets it all together, and he absolutely delivers to the day on that promise.

90 days later is when the Soviet offensive starts.

But yes, I mean, you're absolutely right.

Well, don't forget it's the Soviets that liberate Matthew Wainwright.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But the Emperor is at the top of this deck of cards, and that is where the Bushido buck stops.

And there is, though, a shift in the leadership, isn't there, by this time?

It's not just Imperial General Headquarters.

There is the Gunji Sangin,

the Big Six.

The Supreme Council for the Direction of the War.

They're a relatively recent configuration that they've been put together in, I think, in April.

Because Tojo's gone.

Tojo's gone.

Yeah, exactly.

There's been a lot of musical chairs.

And obviously, you know, the history of Japan during the 20s and 30s is of Praetorian Guard coups, essentially, uprisings in the army to get what they want.

and the state trying to accommodate that.

And the idea of the polity, which is called the kokutai, which is this idea that the emperor is supreme, there's no one in higher authority than him.

You do get that this thing in absolutist countries where people are doing things for the sake of the emperor and to preserve his divine will or whatever, when they're possibly acting not in his interests.

But in this kind of society, in this kind of political setup, people are open to interpreting what the will of the emperor might be, particularly when he doesn't say much.

And what's striking about this is, and we'll come to it, is this a moment where the emperor actually expresses openly a firm opinion and picks a side in an argument, which is kind of not really been his style.

He's really been going along with everything up to this point, which I think is that when you're trying to locate responsibility in all this, and I think your comparison with Nazi Germany is quite interesting, because had the emperor, you know, removed himself from this process, perhaps the way Hitler had done, you'd have a completely different thing going on here, I think, because there would have been a, you know, a reset at the very top.

And what's the will of the successor?

They'd have made it maybe undergone a similar kind of convulsion in that regard.

But anyway, the big six is the Prime Minister, who's a retired admiral, Kantaro Suzuki, and he's 77.

He was Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet in the 20s.

So these are all absolutely paid up, invested services people.

There's the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shigenori Togo.

He's got a wooden leg, hasn't he?

Yes.

He will turn up on the USS Missouri eventually.

There's a spoiler.

There's the Minister of the Army, Korechika Anami, 58, who is extremely motivated against a peace and very, very, very not keen on ceding

the term war hawk was made for him.

Any warhawk at this stage of the war when you're absolutely, you've lost completely.

Yeah, Minister of the Navy, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, who's 65.

Chief of the Army General Staff, General Yoshijiro Umetsu, who's 63, and Chief of the Naval General Staff, Admiral Soemo Toyoda, who's also 60 so they're all it's old guys but people who've been through all of the machinery yeah but what's interesting about them with the exception of toyoda they're not sort of pin-up figures poster boys you know recognized figures well i think they're from the the body of grey men that have had this whole thing ticking over that you you may have these standard bears exactly they're the exactly they're the japanese war blob

he said dismissively i mean quite right too

but four days after the potsdam declaration on the 30th of july the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, Nawatake Sato, he writes back to Tokyo and says, the only thing on offer is an unconditional surrender.

He's read the Potsdam Declaration.

He's seen how the Allies are behaving, and he knows that there's nothing on offer.

He's also spoken to the Soviets, and the Soviets have basically said, we're not going to extend the neutrality pact.

It isn't going to happen.

This is all they know beyond the Potsdam Declaration, all the diplomatic communication they've had.

And what's interesting is the Potsdam Declaration is, I think, one of those classic Allied documents where it's quite vague in the actual detail, but it's very, very solid on intent.

You know, the people who've harmed our prisoners, we're coming for the war criminals.

We're not going to destroy your economy unless you make us.

We're not interested in being vindictive towards the Japanese people.

It's vague.

There's no, you know, it doesn't say there will be a new foreign ministry and all the, you know, or whatever.

It doesn't bother with that.

However, by four votes to two, they reject the Potsdam Declaration, the big six.

They said, no, we're not going for it.

And what they do, and it's interesting, is they release to the public, however, the Japanese government releases a sort of tidied up, boundarized version of the Potsdam Declaration.

So the public don't know what terms are being offered, what the actual situation is.

And they leave out,

I mean, this is the really bad bit.

They leave out the threat of prompt and utter destruction from their version.

And then Suzuki, who's the prime minister, he says to reporters that, in light of the content of the declaration, which was in his view, nothing new, the government's response will be mokusatsu.

And this one word, mokusatsu.

And this is the word that, you you know, via all the ways that the allies are communicating with the Japanese, the Japanese communicate with allies via newspapers, via wireless broadcasts.

This is the word that then is sent across the world.

Now, what does Makusatsu mean?

Well, katakana, the letters, literally mean silent kill.

So silent kill, what does that mean?

Like kill with silence.

So ignore, right?

It could be no comment.

It could be piss off, right?

It could be makusatsu, mei.

Not interested.

There's a giant chunk of historiography arguing about how this word was translated by the allies at the time and whether they met whether the people translating it were leaning into the worst translation they could possibly get out of it to discredit the japanese government you when you when you go through the historiography when you shake it down it looks like actually they did really mean get knotted just not interested given their circumstances is really really

kind of amazing and they say you know when the naval minister yonai is asked why the prime minister has made this statement he says if one is first to issue a statement he is always at a disadvantage churchill has fallen america has been beginning to be isolated.

The government, therefore, will ignore it.

There is no need to rush.

Wow.

I know.

It's quite amazing, isn't it?

It is absolutely amazing.

And that said, Potsdam Declaration says they will brook no delay in Japan's prompts and utter destruction.

It's wild.

Absolutely wild.

This is the same cabinet who've said, if this costs us 20 million people to carry on the war, fine.

You know, a beautiful flower will be broken in the process, but whatever.

It's just astonishing, isn't it?

Yeah.

So that's the state of play and the attitude of the Japanese government before something comes that even they cannot ignore.

We'll see you after the break.

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Welcome back to We have Ways to Make You Talk with me, Alma, and James Holland.

And we've laid out clearly the attitude of the big six, the men at the top of the Japanese government.

We've looked at this in some, you know, while we were doing Victory 45 and stuff, and you particularly.

But just going back over it again, it's just hard to get your head around how

absolutely bonkers they were.

Yeah.

And, you know,

what follows is also is just as crazy.

By the way, we have a podcast with Ian McGregor talking about this in particular.

But just after 8 o'clock on the 6th of August, 1945, Enola Gay appears over the city of Hiroshima and at 8.15, following its six-minute bomb ram at 30,000 feet, drops the four and a half tonne weapon, Little Boy.

This is a fissile atomic weapon, as Ian will explain in that podcast.

The uranium-based, I mean, interestingly, it misses its intended target, even though they've got Paul Tibbetts Jr., who's the best precision bomber in the entire US Army Air Force.

You know, he's the king of precision bombing.

That's why he's been selected.

He's, you know, he's got his best people.

He's hand-picked his crews and all that.

They still miss, but really, it doesn't matter.

It's completely academic.

Little Boy has the explosive power of about 15,000 tons of TNT, and the US bombing survey, which is conducted after the war, says its duration was probably less than one-tenth of a second and its intensity sufficient to cause nearby flammable objects to burst into flame and to char poles as far as 4,000 yards away from the hypercenter.

At 600 to 700 yards, it was sufficient to chip and roughen granite.

The heat also produced bubbling of tile to about 13,000 yards.

Untold power.

And tens of thousands of people were just vaporized, weren't they?

Just vaporized.

And of course, we don't know.

We'll never know because the Japanese population at this point, you know, there's loads of displaced people fleeing the cities that have been bombed.

And pretty much everywhere's been bombed.

And of course, one of the reasons Hiroshima is selected is it hasn't been bombed so they can actually have a proper look at what the bomb will do when it goes off.

You know, it's a blank slate.

But basically, there's just no, no way to know how many people were killed in that first explosion.

And the survey...

says, you know, the dead were killed, as it were, several times over by each lethal agent separately.

It's the radiation, it's the heat intense heat it's the firestorm it's the winds in the firestorm it's the blast wave it's everything all at once if you're near the center and they witnesses speak of a single plane flash of light clothes simply catching fire and the people who are vaporized left burn shadows on the ground yeah but it's also worth pointing out that that hiroshima was one of 66 cities that hadn't yet been destroyed.

Yeah.

Not bombed, destroyed.

Yeah.

And the US, the Army Air Force, makes a a film about Hiroshima.

If you fancy a grim view,

seek it out.

It's out there on the internet.

Four square miles in the center of the city contained three quarters of the total inhabitants.

Here, the population density per square mile was slightly greater than Brooklyn, New York.

There were numerous one-to-five man workshops in the commercial and residential districts.

These provided a fourth of the city's total industrial production.

So, matter of fact...

We're killing people on a scale that people can relate.

I think it's very interesting that they put, again, they put Brooklyn into it.

You can relate, if you're an American city, you can relate to the destruction here.

See what it is.

Truman has convinced himself it's a purely military target.

But given what the war is with Japan, everything's a military target by this stage of the war, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he writes in his diary on the 25th of July, 1945.

And it's really important to say this.

His first responsibility are to the people of the United States of America.

Yeah.

He does have an internationalist global view.

He wants global prosperity and peace and all the rest of it.

But it's Americans he's got to look after.

And he has got to end the war as quickly as possible.

And this he realizes is his means of doing however awful it might be, however much that, you know, once he's opened across that particular Rubicon, it changed the world forever.

But he writes in his diary on the 25th of July, 1945: The target will be a purely military one.

The weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th.

I have told the Secretary of War, Mr.

Stimson, to use it so the military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.

Even if the chaps are savage, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.

Yes, but it is going on the city centre.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, if you're the president of the United States and ultimately it rests with you.

How else can you justify it apart from a little bit of self-deception?

My own view is I think that's understandable.

Now, of course, the Japanese reaction to Hiroshima is mixed, so they don't know what it is to start with.

Reports are coming into Tokyo of what's happened, but they just don't know.

They don't know what it is.

And bear in mind, they have been firebombed.

It's the single plane that's the sort of thing that's the mystery.

There's disbelief on the technical side.

So the people who know this stuff.

So there's a fellow called Yoshio Nishina, Japan's leading atomic scientist.

He studied under Ernest Rutherford, like everybody involved in sort of atomic weapon thinking, and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.

In 1942, he joins the Army's atomic weapon program, and they name it after him.

He's so central to it in 1943, it's called Nigo after him.

But as we've said, you know, the Japanese economy is being throttled, is driven backwards by the American naval effort in particular.

And in April, his building, Building 49, Nigo's building, is destroyed in an air raid.

And he reports on the 28th of June to the army, no, no, Dice, I'm giving up on this.

It can't be done.

And more than that, in his report, he says the Americans are facing, will be facing the same difficulties that we are.

And so it's impossible.

So they're never going to build it.

So by the time the Americans have successfully tested the plutonium weapon at Trinity, the Japanese have talked themselves out of being able to build one.

I think what's also remarkable, though, is he's also on the Navy, the Japanese Navy's atomic bomb committee.

He's chairing their committee because after midway, they start thinking, shit, we need something, some good weapons, and they try commissioning a death ray.

The scientific community says, death ray probably won't work.

They said, what about this atom bomb thing we've read about?

And Nishinara is chairing the Japanese Navy's atomic weapons thing and doesn't tell them that the army are building one.

I mean, of course he doesn't.

Secret.

He's siloed.

It's secret.

Never the Twain.

Nothing like working together.

Exactly.

So the only that actually, who the Japanese learned that it's atomic weapon from is Truman.

Who announces it in his broadcast day after that date, doesn't he?

Yeah.

And I think it's, you know, extraordinary, isn't it?

Because it's so secret right up to the point you use it.

And then you've got to say, oh, we built one in secret.

It's the greatest effort of all time, industrially and technologically.

And it's an atomic bomb.

Again, he restates the threat, you know, and the Japanese are intercepting all this, but the domain news company.

1 a.m.

on the 7th of August, he restates this threat at the heart of the Potsdam Declaration and how unhappy is with Mokusatsu.

He says, we are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.

Let there be no mistake, we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.

It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam.

Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum.

They do not now accept our terms.

They may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.

Pretty unequivocal, isn't it?

I know.

Then they leaflet the Japanese population extensively, tell them what's been going on.

In the meantime, that Nishina is sent to go to Hiroshima, even though

the Japanese army are trying to downplay what the bomb might be.

And there's a survey led by General Seitzo Aritsu, who's from the General Staff Headquarters, 2nd Division.

When he arrives at the airport, Nishina's held up.

When he arrives at the airport, he's greeted by a Japanese soldier with half his face burned off.

It's absolutely unbelievable.

And Nishina writes to a friend saying, if Truman's broadcast turns out to be true, then then I think the time for all of us related to NIGO, the atomic program, to literally cut our stomachs has come.

That's one way around it.

It's extraordinary.

But I love the story of Flight Lieutenant Marcus MacDilda, which is just extraordinary, isn't it?

I mean, the sources of information the Japanese have.

He's limited, to say the least.

President Truman.

Well, President Truman, Nishina's gut instinct.

And then this fellow, Marcus MacDilda, who's a flight lieutenant, he's shot down in his Mustang over Osaka on the 8th, and he's passed on to the Kempeitahu, the Imperial Japanese Army basically Japanese Gestapo they have been handling prisoners of war as well so and 350,000 are brought to Japan to work as slave labor essentially these are bad people they're involved in unit 731 in China the biological warfare establishment oh yeah this is a vivisection place isn't it exactly and Macdild has been beaten up by civilians when he's paraded through Osaka and he immediately is being pumped for information about what this bomb might be, what this thing might be.

And he doesn't know because why would he?

Because it's been secret and it's this absolutely amazing moment in his interrogation so they hold it literally hold a sword to his lips and he tells the Kemputai that the Americans have a hundred of these things the next targets Tokyo and Kyoto but what he tells them is this as you know when atoms are split there are a lot of pluses and minuses released well we've taken these and put them in a huge container and separated them from each other with a lead shield when the shield is dropped out of a plane we melt the lead shield and the pluses and minuses come together.

When that happens, it causes a tremendous bolt of lightning and all the atmosphere over the city is pushed back.

Then when the atmosphere rolls back, it brings about a tremendous thunderclap which knocks down everything beneath it, right?

Pull the other one.

I respect his ability to improvise under great pressure there.

Let's put it on.

Oh, me too.

That's just masterclass.

Secret policeman doesn't know any physics, doesn't know any of this, so they send him to Tokyo straight away.

He might be telling the truth.

Yeah, exactly.

50 prisoners of war in Osaka are then murdered shortly after by by the Kimbertai.

So it saves his life.

And what's absolutely amazing is on the 9th of August, the chief of the Navy staff, Toyoda, he still doubts their atomic bombs.

I just don't believe it.

I don't believe it, he says.

And

because the Japanese have not responded to Truman's reiteration of the Potsdam Declaration and his threat to reign destruction from the air, they obviously, and because of Makusatsu, this sort of intensification of Japanese stonewalling, they drop the second atomic bomb on the 19th century.

This time a plutonium one.

I think this is the bomb that changes the world because it shows the Americans are prepared to do it again.

I think do it once, you know, offers no continuity of policy or of diplomatic intent, right?

Or strategic intent, but do it twice and you're making it very clear that might mean you do it a third time, right?

Yeah.

And the news of it of its dropping does reach the big six.

Yeah.

Who are already in deep deliberation, aren't they?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

About what to do.

So they're already having a kind of, is it time to call it quits kind of discussion?

Yeah.

And they're deadlocked, aren't they?

There's an impasse.

Exactly.

So the Prime Minister, Suzuki, Foreign Minister Togo, and the Minister of the Navy, Yonai, they want to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.

But they have a condition.

The condition they've come up with themselves is that the Emperor remains in place.

And everyone else, so Chief of the Army, General Staff, Umetsu, Toyoda, Anami, they are not interested.

They want conditions added.

quite incredibly that are they remain in government they're safe from the possibility of being tried for war crimes and that japan remains armed and able able to carry on its, you know, its imperial ambitions, in effect.

You know, at the same time in the background is the plan Ketsugo, which is the plan for defending the Japanese home islands that they seem to think is actually their option and atomic bombs or not.

These meetings, they intensify, they get really, really heated.

And at midnight, the Emperor, he's asked his opinion.

by Suzuki, by the Prime Minister, which is an extraordinary thing.

So that, you know, they're all having this argument with him sat there listening to it.

And their other problem, and we did talk about this, how they, you know, they're holding on hope that the Soviets will stay out.

Their other problem is that that hope has also been dashed because the Red Army have come into Manchukuo, Manchuria.

That's on the same day.

I think what's really interesting here is you have a Red Army that's super well practiced in, you know, in mobilized, mechanized, deep war, you know, and a Japanese infantry army in China that's basically been used to fighting Chinese peasants, essentially.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And is screwed anyway.

Yeah, and is screwed anyway.

And they are totally overwhelmed it's suddenly confronted by nearly 1.6 million men five and a half thousand tanks and self-propelled guns and 27 000 artillery pieces you know what it might be time to call it quits yeah and what's interesting is so that's the army been ignoring the reality of the atomic bomb but here they are losing on a battlefield i mean they were absolutely crushed weren't they yeah yeah yeah yeah they just rolled up so they've got this news as well the pro-peace faction as it were which is the prime minister and so on they think that they're getting through to the emperor army minister and army he then introduces flight lieutenant macdilda's intelligence about the lightning weapon to try and say it's not an atomic weapon and that tokyo's next or something he's trying anything to keep the war going and this means the emperor then leans forward and says then i will express my opinion despite protests from an army This is Suzuki's suggestion.

The Emperor says he can't bear to see his people suffer anymore.

Moreover, he's not sure Ketsugo is going to work.

The defense of the home island is going to work.

He doesn't think the preparations are ready.

And he sides with the Suzuki faction, saying that they will accept the Potsdam Declaration, but only if he remains in power.

And this is a, you know, a sacred decision.

And they move to ratify this.

And he says, obviously, it's unbearable my subjects are suffering, and it's terrible that his loyal ministers will also now be in the frame for what has befallen Japan.

But he must swallow his tears and accept the Suzuki faction's proposal.

It's very magnanimous of him, isn't it?

It is very, very big of him, I think.

And they then say to him, the disgruntled say, well, you're going to have to answer to your ancestors for what you've done.

And he's still like, well, you know, there it is.

I'll live with that and I'll live with that until I'm 89 years old.

Leave that to me.

Thanks very much.

And immediately, obviously, because then everyone tells their ADCs, essentially, and word spreads very, very quickly.

You know, the war ministry, again, led by it's an Ami who's really, really up to his neck in this.

They want to fight on.

They want to fight to the end.

He's fought in New Guinea and Almahera.

And he's invested in the war as a soldier.

And from the moment the Emperor has made a decision, Anami becomes the focus of what will happen.

You then get, I mean, it's extraordinary, this convulsion within the army, where obviously what they want is the Emperor to remain supreme.

They want to carry on the war, but they can't square those two off against each other.

This starts to run towards a coup and they try and stop news getting out to the Allies that the Japanese government, the Big Six, have accepted this accommodation with the Potsdam Declaration.

And the staff at the Dome News Network decide that they need to transmit this message to the outside world.

So in Morse code on the shortwave, they send out a message that says Japan accepts Potsdam Proclamation.

Moggled out effectively, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's spotted and shut down.

And luckily, a United Press in the US hear this.

and take that piece of news to Truman in Washington at 7.33 a.m.

on the 11th of August, which is the evening in Tokyo on the 10th, rather than the message that the general staff have drawn up, who they've drawn up are like, we're not happy about this message.

Although obviously the Americans don't have a third atomic weapon to make their point again.

What then follows is this extraordinary thing where the officers rise against the emperor while at the same time the emperor is trying to write up a what's called the re-script, you know, prepare his declaration.

And the Americans in the meantime, and it's Jimmy Burns who's who's given this job.

And it's run by the British because the British can cope with the idea of a constitutional monarchy.

He writes a thing saying, from the moment of surrender, the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the supreme commander of the allied powers, who will take such surrender as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.

So in other words, the emperor stays in place, but he is subordinate to whoever's in the allied chief is.

And this is the thing, if you're a die-hard army guy who doesn't want to surrender, they rally round this.

This is just seen as completely unacceptable.

Yeah.

it's shattering the cockotoi, the constitution.

And so, there's a race now on between the peace faction and the war faction, essentially, in Tokyo.

On the 13th, Hirohito gathers together the imperial household.

So, basically, all the princes and cousins and all this sort of thing.

It says, I've made this really difficult decision.

We're surrendering.

We're staying in place.

The Imperial family is staying in place.

And they all kind of go, Oh, that must have been really hard for you.

There's some tears.

Yeah, it was.

I was like, Yum, no, really, really hard.

What can I do?

I have to do this for the people.

What can I do?

The coup attempt is probably worth an episode in itself, so we won't get stuck into it.

But basically, there are all these sort of different factions within the army who try and, you know, are trying to take control of the situation.

And while the Emperor is preparing his speech and then recording his speech in a bunker in the Imperial Compound, there is basically a coup going on upstairs where they're trying to find him and stop him, which fails.

And Anami kills himself, but he sort of botches that and dies very slowly and horribly.

He has to be finished off by one of his aides.

Interestingly, there are lots of people.

He was riding around for three hours, wasn't he, with his guts hanging out?

Yeah, but it depends who you read, because there are different accounts where someone offs him immediately.

In other accounts, he kills himself in a clean go.

It's very interesting that the historiography around that is really muddled.

So it's quite hard to tell when, but he kills himself, basically.

And then the Emperor issues the rescript.

We talked about Mokusatsu earlier on, about the barrier to how Japan communicates.

Well, and he makes his speech, doesn't he, on the 2325?

assuming this is on the 13th is it 13th of august yes yeah yeah that's right yeah and what's really interesting about it is he uses a form of japanese kanbun kandoki tai which is not normal conversational japanese it's like using old english or something yeah and no one can understand it they've never heard his voice before it's a moment of divine revelation to hear his voice it's a very high-pitched voice he says the war situation has developed not necessarily to japan's advantage i mean talk about euphemisms talk about

i mean say it as it is, Emperor.

Yeah.

656 words doesn't say surrender, but nevertheless, the coup has failed.

The war cabinet has conceded in effect, the emperor remains in place, and we have ordered our government to communicate to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration.

And that marks the end for Japan's war.

It's absolutely amazing.

It comes into being on the 15th.

He makes it clear the thing that's made his mind up.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives.

Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

So we should all be grateful to the Emperor Hiroito for saving his own neck.

But it's that line, isn't it?

The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.

Right, one of the understatements of the history of the world, I would say, of all time.

Yeah.

So he'd surrendered without surrendering, had attached conditions to the unconditionals.

A war to conquer an empire of millions resulted in a surrender to save one man, the emperor.

Yeah.

Well, there we are.

Well, thanks, everyone, for listening.

Okay, can I just point out that we started this podcast in April 2019, and here we are.

It's ended.

You know, we're recording this on the 3rd of July, 2025, a mere two weeks or so before the end of the war 80 years ago.

Except it hasn't ended, has it, Jim?

No, it hasn't.

There's lots more to come.

There's, of course, our festival, the 12th to the 14th of September.

Please do buy tickets and come and join us for a weekend of exactly this kind of chat and tanks and planes and people hiding in woods.

We have Wayfest 5 Viva Victory.

Viva Victory.

Putting the fun into fun.

The special edition of Mastermind, Super Gehern Targ, all sorts of stuff for you to get your teeth into.

And of course, our Patreon, if you'd like to join that.

Jim and I spent a week looking at Battle of Britain stuff too.

And we're really getting into the Battle of Britain and we'll be returning to the Battle of Britain for the 85th anniversary.

That's something to look forward to.

Literally can't wait.

So thanks everyone for listening.

We will see you all again very soon.

Cheerio.

Goodbye.

Farewell.

Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci from The Restist Politics U.S.

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