A Flawed Peace

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Aktung, Aktung.

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

The three amigos.

Can we still say amigo in America, John?

I don't know.

I think we're allowed for now, Al.

I don't know.

It's maybe pending, but for now, we're good, I think.

Okay, great.

well we've john we've just done we've just done a sort of um uh eight part although the eighth part of the eight parts was three parts because we couldn't do the we couldn't get it all there's just too many surrenders it's just too many surrenders

keep track of them all yeah we couldn't get we couldn't get all the all the meat in the sausage or the lid down on the pie there's too much to too many ingredients um so what we thought we'd do today is kind of wash up the end of the war talk about the end talk about the the end of the war secession of hostilities in northwest Europe, really.

I mean, and also, because there's a thing Jim and I have been talking about a lot lately, because we've been promoting our book, Victory 45.

We've been talking about the fact that America is facing in two directions at this point in the war, kind of even more keenly than before, because they know one's about to end and they think they're kind of halfway through the other one.

So

let's talk about that, shall we?

That's what we're going to do, isn't it, Jim?

Yeah, it is.

I'm also, you know, as you know, I've been doing quite a lot on the vision that Roosevelt had in the 30s and 40s about the post-war settlement and what the, you know, the new war that was going to emerge out of war, what that was going to look like.

And I'd be quite interested to hear your take on it, to be perfectly honest.

I think I'd be really interested.

So I'm talking about the good neighbor policy of the 1930s, treating Latin America and Mexico with friendship rather than aggressively.

The four freedoms announced on his inauguration speech in March

1941, rather, on his third term, which obviously then morphs into the eight points for the Atlantic Charter of August 1941.

Then Bretton Woods and this idea of a sort of, you know, a global economy based on free trade, load tariffs, Bretton Woods, all the rest of it.

And then, of course, the Marshall Plan.

I kind of think all of that is really, really interesting.

And we talked about that a little bit with Anti Scaramucci the other day, but I'd be really interested to hear your take on it.

And this notion that America during the war has a post-war vision.

Does it or doesn't it?

And what is that post-war vision?

Oh, it does.

I mean, and so

FDR really has been heavily influenced by

Wilsonianism.

I mean, he was part of the Wilson administration, and he sees that kind of America, an internationalist America.

It's what he envisions for the future.

He likes free trade, but he also has to be a little careful because he's very pro-labor union.

And at that time, labor unions would have been a little bit more into protectionist policies because they're a little worried about the competition from Trump and the premier conversation.

All that said, he envisions a post-war world in which the United States will act in league with the Soviet Union to basically adjudicate disputes around the globe.

He's very idealistic.

And, you know, Jim, you mentioned the good neighbor policy.

Yeah, so that's one way he's different than Wilson, who had kind of the traditional kind of coercive policy.

You know, he occupies a portion of Mexico in 1914, and that really exacerbates some conflict along the border, as you might imagine.

Roosevelt, one of the reasons why the Allies are in as good a shape as they're in is the Roosevelt administration in the late 1930s was forging very good relations with several South American countries and Central American countries so that we kept basing rights and we were negating the Nazi influence there and the ethnic German communities and all that.

So he envisioned a future in which we would get beyond the old dollar diplomacy and the kind of coercive Monroe Doctrine-oriented policy to where we'd have like an interlocking network of, I guess you could say, you know, Western hemispheric states that looked out for one another's security.

In the broader world, he envisioned a U.S.-Soviet partnership.

And in that sense, sense, he was, of course, far too idealistic.

I mean, I suppose that's why when, you know, France falls in 1940 and there's the prospect of the French Navy falling into German hands, that will disrupt that entire picture in the Americas.

So it's about his grand scheme as much as it is about American, immediate American security, isn't it?

Yeah, well, it is.

And also, looking beyond that, the concern that Britain might fall too later that summer and that, you know, that Hitler get his hands on the British fleet, and then we'd have serious problems.

Yeah, yeah.

And for all the sort of distaste for the British Empire, I think lots of British listeners will think, well, hold on a minute.

You know, a lot of this is sort of a direction of travel is flavoured by a distaste for the British Empire.

You know, the war presents an opportunity to break British global trade, which is that America's great competitor is that there is another global trading, there is a global trading hegemon, and it's an opportunity to bring that to an end, or at least damage it.

And the fact that the world ends up on the dollar at the end of the Second World War, you know, and we wave goodbye to the pound, I think, speaks to the, you know, I mean, in a way, it's part of Roosevelt's genius, isn't it?

He gets both things at once.

So sell it to the anti-imperialists

within American politics, because that's what they're getting.

And he can also sell it the other direction, right?

Oh, no, there's no question.

And it's his main point of tension with Churchill.

who, of course, we all know is an imperialist and FDR is an ardent anti-imperialist who wants the end of not just the British Empire, but other colonial empires, including, by the way, our own.

You know, he fully intends to follow through on independence for the Philippines, which of course happens, you know, even though he dies.

And yeah, so, but he's also got this, this basically,

this dollar structure that'll be in place of Bretton Woods, which is, I mean, from an economic historian's point of view, this is just terrifically consequential and important, that from 1944 onward, the entire world monetary system is going to be structured around the dollar.

And yet, interesting, the pound remains stronger to this day, you know, in terms of value.

So, I mean, score one for Britain on that sense, but in that sense, but yeah, I just

think it's a very interesting moment.

Yeah.

Just to rewind a moment, because what I think is really interesting is when he's talking about the four freedoms and when he's talking about the eight freedoms that he outlines in the Atlantic Charter of August 41, there is an assumption there.

America and the Allies are going to win the war, and this is what's going to happen after the war.

So there's no real doubt about it.

I would argue that there isn't really much doubt about it, actually, as it happens.

By the time that America gets in the war, I don't think the outcome is in too much doubt, the eventual outcome.

I mean, you know, how it all plays out and how long it takes and all the rest of it.

But do you think Roosevelt is convinced when America enters a war in December 1941 that America will be end up on the winning side?

I think he...

If we got him in a frank moment, he would say the probability is such that we will win.

But I think he's way too involved in the nettling details at that moment and the crises that he has to manage, especially that first six months or so.

He's very worried about public morale.

And I think it's easy to look back now and say, well, yeah, I I mean, of course, they were going to win.

But in the moment, when you just had Pearl Harbor, you know, knockkered and then you've had Singapore happen and then you've got the Philippines on top of it, I think there's a concern that the American people will kind of lose heart and say, I don't know about this.

And there's always concern for that.

that will you know in a I guess what we'll call a democracy it's not really quite that it's a representative republic and there were as we know a lot of people within it who are kind of frozen out of participating on the base of race or whatever whatever but you know for the most part public opinion does matter roosevelt has to worry about that but i do think he's also he's the kind of person who always has that big picture in mind and and he's working towards something and what he wants in the post-war world because and i think this is really important to understand you know he's experienced the whole debacle with wilson uh over the league of nations over the 14 points um you know the the really the disillusionment that set in after our involvement in World War I.

He doesn't want to see that happen after World War II because he feels we just Well, should we just very briefly explain that for people who don't know?

So Roosevelt goes over with these 14 points.

He goes over with this idea for a League of Nations.

Wilson goes to a global system.

Yeah, Wilson.

What did I just say?

Roosevelt.

Roosevelt.

Okay.

Yeah, Wilson.

President Wilson.

This is at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

And he goes over there as, I think, as Assistant Secretary of State of the Navy.

The FDR does, yes.

Yes, exactly.

FDR does.

And Wilson gets lukewarm response from his European partners and zero response from Congress back home.

And American part in the League of Nations just sort of dwindles.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, there's a tremendous disengagement and disillusionment.

So there's a lot of layers to this.

The 14 points seemed to stand for an international world of free trade, the end of these kind of hardcore power broker kind of backroom diplomatic alliances and deals.

It seemed to stand for self-determination that any peoples who wanted their own independence were going to get it.

And yes, this happens for Poland, but in part because the Polish people are able to fight for it.

You know, so when we see what happens with the Treaty of Versailles, this idea of punishing Germany, the reparations,

Germany losing so much land and territory and its colonies and all that.

And then we see who benefits from that, mainly Britain and France.

So this is, there's a lot of cynicism that sets in over this because Wilson had gone over there thinking, well, my gosh, you know, the U.S.

played a key role in the outcome and winning of this war.

I ought to get exactly what I want.

And also, too, this is unprecedented in American history for a sitting president to leave this country and to travel to Europe.

I mean, now it happens all the time, but in those days, it was a very big deal.

So, here we are, from the sort of narrow American perspective, it's here we are reaching out in the goodness of our magnanimous hearts to pull the Allied chestnuts out of the fire to help win this war.

And then we're rebuffed.

And so, there's this kind of you know what the hell with you kind of uh response.

The U.S.

pulls out of a mutual defense pact with France and Britain, which has terrible consequences for the future.

The country basically goes, what's all the fun called isolationist, really means more like non-intervention because we're heavily involved in world affairs.

It just depends what we're talking about.

We're just disgusted with Europe.

And so, of course, this then has great consequence for the future because we're largely disengaged

in the 20s and 30s when things go bad with the economy and Germany rises and all that.

And there's a sense that we've been tricked into World War I, mainly by the British, and that we're not going to let that happen again.

And so there's this profound reluctance.

The other thing, too, there's a recession that follows World War I for about two years or so.

And so because it's like, how are we going to reincorporate all these veterans back into the economy?

How do we demobilize?

And so there's that.

And then there's this enormous regression in rights because the government had been telling African Americans, participate in the war and there'll be more equality.

It'll be the end of Jim Crow.

And whites were basically saying, forget that.

The Tulsa race riot.

There's racial pogroms in Chicago and East St.

Louis, all over the country, really.

So it's this enormous retreat.

And this is the time of the Ku Klux Klan and all that.

The Klan rises dramatically in the 1920s.

Here's a stat that'll blow your mind.

Per capita, Klan membership was highest in the state of Indiana.

At the height of it, one out of every four adult white males was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

In Indiana.

In Indiana, a state that was on the Union side, the U.S.

side in the Civil War.

So

it kind of tells you something, doesn't it?

Well, the thing that I always find amazing is that there was a lynching in Florida in 1934, which was attended by 20,000 people.

Yep.

1934.

1930, yeah, and it went on.

It continued on.

The NAACP headquarters in New York used to basically have a display each day.

They'd say someone was lynched today in Alabama.

The head of the NAACP was a guy named Walter White, incredible guy.

He had mixed race.

What's the NAACP?

National National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had been established earlier in the 20th century for that purpose, obviously, to push back against Jim Crow.

And so Walter White, really interesting guy, because he, quote, looked white, so he could pass off as a white man, but he identified as a black person.

And so he would travel in the South to these places where lynchings had happened, and he would talk to people like passing himself off as white.

And he'd gather all this information and he'd be kind of one step ahead of them before they figured out who he was.

And they could have killed him.

And then he would go back to New York and he would publicize all this.

And so it's one of the reasons why we even know anything about this because the perpetrators usually didn't want it that well known in the long run.

But anyway, FDR wanted to avoid all of that kind of toxic backlash in the aftermath of World War II.

And he felt very strongly that the United States had to be involved internationally, otherwise horrible things would happen.

And I think there was a great evidence to show that in terms of what happened with World War II, especially in Europe.

Yeah, Roosevelt's solution, as you say, you go through the Atlantic Charter, we end up on unconditional surrender, which I think is really, really interesting because it doesn't offer anyone points of disagreement, does it?

You can't argue with it.

You can't engage with it as the disgruntled party, can you?

As the defeated party.

Because after all, the problem with the 14 with Wilson's 14 points is they offer all sorts of points of disagreement, points to position yourself politically against, points of friction.

After all, in Britain, what happens is, because it's the Liberal government that ratifies Versailles, essentially, in oppositional politics in this country, the Conservatives are against it, essentially, because they need a political position, don't they?

And we have an oppositional system here.

That added to the idea that Germany's been hard done by, which is an idea that people find almost irresistible, I think it's fair to say.

You know, then feeds into the to and fro of British oppositional politics.

And then you end up with the Conservative government in charge because, after all, they're usually in charge.

The Liberal Party collapses and dies after the First World War.

And so the people in charge are people who don't like Versailles.

In Britain, the people in charge in Britain are the people who don't like Versailles.

And that then can only muddy the water in how you then deal with Germany while Hitler's saying, all I'm trying to do is straighten out the Versailles Treaty.

I'm just trying to bring about national self-determination, you know, self-determination of peoples for my people who can possibly object.

And I think what's really clever about Roosevelt just goes, no, it's unconditional surrender.

And also, what he's offering is points of principle rather than detail.

And so you have a principled piece to come rather than one that goes and by the way that bit of al-sess lorraine belongs to him and that bit of poland belongs you know what stalin's unequivocal isn't it that's unequivocal and stalin's going to do that stalin in the east is going to rearrange the deck chairs isn't he that he's going to you know in fact become probably europe's most ardent nationalist as a as a consequence because he says he decides who poles are he decides where germans live and you know creates these sort of monoethnic states where previously that bit of Middle Europa had been like a, you know, a fruitcake with lots of different people in the recipe.

And so Roosevelt didn't want those loose ends hanging around, like a Treaty of Versailles kind of thing.

He wanted absolutism.

And I understand why he did.

And also, he invested great hopes in the United Nations because the League of Nations had been a real terrible and profound disappointment.

And one of the reasons why is the United States would not join as a full member because of this disillusionment that happens after World War I.

And Wilson, of course, loses his health over this campaigning for membership in the League of Nations, for Senate ratification.

It doesn't happen.

And so FDR is really concerned that you could see a repeat of that scenario.

And Al, you're right.

I mean, he has these large governing principles, like, you know, the four freedoms and whatever else.

And so he sees that as what's going to be our guidepost as we create the actual details.

And here's where I think he was, you know, somewhat naive, feeling that the Soviet Union would ever, ever, on any level, represent those four freedoms or anything like it.

But he believed that he could have a relationship with Joseph Stalin that would lead to good deal-making as fellow anti-colonialists.

What he didn't quite grasp is Joseph Stalin was an imperialist of a different stripe.

I mean, you know,

so

he was sort of blinded by ideology, I guess you could say.

I mean,

why did Roosevelt not read Stalin or the Soviet Union for what it was?

I mean, there's been so many arguments over this among historians for so many years.

I doubt I can bring much new insight beyond just, I think, he, you know, I don't know if you ever had this time where you're almost kind of fooling yourself and saying, okay, I can get along with this guy because I have to.

I have to.

There's no really alternative.

I can't imagine the horrible consequence.

But I mean, he'd also kind of done that from the start because he had recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 without much in return and allowed them then, in a way, to get away with terrible things in the 30s, including on our own citizens, many of whom had voluntarily moved there out of ideology or because of the depression or jobs and end up in the gulags.

But do you think when they're where you know when the Soviet Union was on its knees in the sort of second half of 1941 and so very dependent on Allied supplies, and particularly U.S.

supplies, do you think he thinks, well, it's different now because we've materially helped them out.

We've helped them out in this moment of crisis.

They know we're on the same side.

We can work together despite our differences in a global order of which there's two types of his view, which is the sort of liberal democracy and free trade and all the rest of it.

And then there's the Soviet authoritarian one, but actually they can coexist, maybe.

Oh, there's no question.

I think he thinks in the sort of negotiating dynamic, Glenn Lees will give us a lot of cachet with them and a lot of influence with them.

I think he also feels his personal rapport with Joseph Stalin will help him do that too.

And that was a little bit of a kind of affectation of the political left in this country

because those who were being honest with themselves knew what a monster the Soviet Union truly was, but not that many were being honest with themselves.

And I think they were looking for ways to kind of justify this and to say, you know what, either if things would go that bad, it's not because of Uncle Joe.

He's got the right things in mind and we have a rapport.

How far do you think Avril Harriman and George Kennan are key to this change of thinking?

So Avril Harriman is

a U.S.

ambassador to Moscow.

Kennan is, I think, the attaché.

He's a senior kind of diplomat.

He's a Sovietologist, too.

Really?

Yeah, he's a Sovietologist.

And he's got the measure of the Soviet Union and Stalin in particular, right from the word go in a way that arguably someone like Harry Hopkins, who is Roosevelt's best mate and is kind of sort of right-hand man.

And he's a man who Roosevelt sends off on missions around the world because he can't, because of his illness and his polio and all the rest of it.

And Harry Hopkins is this incredibly charming, very, very clever.

He's a diplomat, isn't he?

He's like a diplomat with no portfolio, but the kind of sort of Roosevelt's romance.

So he has this very kind kind of sort of interesting and unique position.

But you have all these other people that are sort of going off and doing all this stuff and sort of personal envoy of the president, et cetera.

Harriman, although he is this sort of scion of this sort of very well-to-do kind of East Coast family and is very wealthy in his own right and, you know, tall and good looking and urbane and suave and all the rest of it, he gets a little bit shut out in the first part of the war.

And it's only in the kind of second part of the war, once the kind of tide seems to have turned and the relationship with the Soviet Union that his voice starts to be heard a bit more.

But a lot of that comes down to Kennan, doesn't it?

Absolutely.

So yeah, let's deconstruct all three of these guys.

Harry Hopkins was profoundly influential on FDR.

So if you think of it this way, Harry Hopkins was to FDR what Henry Kissinger is to Nixon.

The key person in a lot of different roles throughout the long administration.

So Harry Hopkins had headed up the Works Progress Administration, which was a centerpiece New Deal program in the mid to late 1930s.

And then, you know, during World War II, like you said, Jim, he becomes FDR's key envoy and especially to the Soviet Union.

Harry Hopkins is very, very much a left-wing guy.

And there's some people today who argue that he's almost like a Soviet asset or whatever.

I, you know, I can't necessarily confirm or deny.

I don't know enough about that, but I can say that certainly he is in league with FDR's view that we can forge a relationship with Joe Stalin, that we can look the other way at their excesses, and that we can have a post-war world together.

Now, he wasn't a well man either.

He's in rotten shape physically, and he's physically.

Yeah, he's had half his guts cut out, hasn't he?

Exactly.

It's amazing.

He lived as long as he did.

Yeah.

And you look at pictures of him.

I mean, he just looks like hell.

He's thin and sickly and hollow eyes and all that kind of stuff.

He looks like a wicked man.

But he's very funny, isn't he?

He's an amusing guy.

Oh, he's church.

Everyone loves him.

Churchill loves him.

All the British establishment love him.

Exactly.

I mean, so, and I think he's, I think he's a patriot, too.

I mean, he's look what he's doing for his country, traveling

as he does.

And it's stressful.

But Harriman and Cannon are cut from a different cloth.

Harriman and Kennan have no scales before their eyes.

They understand what the Soviet Union is.

They understand who Joseph Stalin is, especially Kennan, who is really the leading Sovietologist in the State Department.

And so they, like you said, I mean, they're getting more influence as we see we've had more problems with these guys by 1945.

And they're going to then soon have a president who is much more in league with them, Harry Truman, who has no illusions either.

And April Harriman actually is going to come back to Washington and he's going to brief Truman.

This is like the spring of 1945.

What he does on something like the 19th of April, literally just before Molotov turns up.

Right, exactly.

And so what he tells, he literally tells Truman, what you're looking at here, and he's talking about the Red Army, you know, coming into Europe.

You're looking at a barbarian invasion of Europe.

That's what he says.

And that's kind of what Truman wants to hear.

And then Cannon famously, this is early 1946, sends us misdirections.

Sounds usive, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, and that really is quite influential for what becomes the containment policy.

And Cannon envisions containment as not really quite military because he's a diplomat.

So he's eventually an opponent of the Vietnam War, for instance, about a generation later.

But he believes that we must stand up to the Soviets economically, politically, diplomatically, at every turn, that they will test, they will prod, they will bully.

And

he's proven right.

We have to stand up to bullies.

Everyone knows that.

You do.

Absolutely.

That's the formula.

And that's kind of what he's saying.

But as a diplomat, I've always thought, and this is only my opinion, as a diplomat, he doesn't quite grasp what that eventually sometimes means, which is military conflict and war, if you're really going to take it seriously.

And so, but, you know, if I'm being kind to him as well, I'd say that he would argue in Vietnam that it's not in our best interest to be there, that we can have containment without Vietnam.

That's what he would argue at the time.

Debatable, of course.

But yeah, so those two voices are becoming more influential towards the end of the war.

And Harriman, like you said, he's really connected.

He's very connected in Democratic Party circles.

You know, he's going to be governor in New York.

He will later, speaking of Vietnam, be the Johnson administration's key envoy in the peace talks in 1968.

So he has a long career.

Wow.

Well, today we should do, we should take a quick break.

And then when we come back, let's talk about how the American military establishment are thinking about Japan, even as the war is ending in Europe, because it's a thing Jim and I have been talking about a lot.

And I think very, very interesting.

Anyway, we'll see you in a tick.

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Welcome back to Wear Voice of Making Talk USA with me, Al Murray, James Holland, and John McManus.

I enticingly offered to listener the way that Japan looms over things in 945.

And I think this is something I think is something that kind of often gets overlooked because the war in the Pacific ends in August anyway, which isn't very long after May.

Even in, you know, Trump's latest thing, he calls VE Day Vitch Day, and he seems to have forgotten about the war against Japan in his

latest outburst.

So, but the fact is, if you're the Pentagon, if you're George Marshall, you think that the war is two years, three years to go, right, in the Pacific?

That's a real possibility.

Yes.

It's the classic example.

And we talk about this a lot, don't we?

How you have to put yourself back at the time.

We know how it turns out.

And so we tend to kind of breeze over and say, well, the war is going to end in three months.

And, you know, then we're all going to be back home.

And it's going to be wonderful.

Actually, if it's May 1945, I mean, we're in the middle of just horrifying battles with the Japanese at that point.

The Battle of Luzon is ongoing.

Eichelberger's incredible amphibious campaign to liberate much of the Philippines is happening.

Okinawa is right at the sort of height of the battle.

I mean, and then much less what's happening with our naval blockade of Japan, the fire bombings of Japan.

And we don't know what the end game is going to be.

And there's a lot of ways this could turn out.

And this is another byproduct of something that I've tried to emphasize, especially this last year or so, that there's really no country that is fighting a global war on the scale that the U.S.

is at that point before or since.

It's kind of a one-off in a way.

And I think we tend to breeze past that and everything that means all the pressures you have from this massive global war and a country that, let's be honest, by spring and summer 1945 really wants to retool back to a civilian economy.

It's tired of rationing already.

And I know that that elicits no sympathy

from you guys in Britain, right?

And it shouldn't.

But the American people are, they want their luxuries and they're kind of tired of this.

So Marshall is looking ahead and like, what's it going to take?

How are we going to have this end game here?

That's the stress mode.

And so many guys in Europe, too, who have fought in that war might have to be redeployed for maybe the invasion of Japan.

Well, there's two voices that completely influenced us, I think, Al.

One of them is Tammy Davis-Biddle, brilliant academic who's actually coming to We Have Waste Fest this year and who's written a lot about the air war, but is doing a sort of magnum opus on the whole war at the moment.

But she was the first one who, I think, in a conversation we had with her out was pointing out that you have to look at Fort Sheim and Würzburg and Dresden through the prism of the frustration the Allies have that the war is still ongoing when Germany is so clearly beaten and there's other business still to be done in the Far East and the Pacific.

And it's with, you know, just give up and we'll stop bombing.

You know, we don't want to be doing this, but we need to hurry up because we need to save manpower because we're going to need it in the Pacific.

So can you stop wasting everyone's time and just throw in the towel?

And obviously bombing and obliterating cities is another means of avoiding infantrymen and guys in tanks having to go to the front line, you know, and to the firing line.

So that is one has to kind of look at the air war through that prism.

And the second one is the book that you've been re-looking at again, which is Hell to Pay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which talks about the, you know, manpower shortages.

You know, they're a obviously armies always say they haven't got enough people.

That that's the default position of all militaries, isn't it?

We could do with another 100,000 guys if that's right.

But they're 800,000 people short or something at the turn of the year, 44 to 45.

You've got more people under arms than anyone else in the world, and you're still short because you're running these two gig.

I mean, I think the other thing to remember is how enormous the Pacific is.

Executing that war, how your logistic tale has to be that much more enormous because the distances involved has to be that much more peopled to get your point

of shot.

And time and everything.

And absolutely everything.

And I think what's also, I think, really, really interesting, and I think, again,

I think we kind of forget because it's that America is essentially an open society.

So the newspapers are full of people complaining about how they're,

when's their husband coming home?

When is their

and anyway,

we've heard that this tank is rubbish.

And so why are you sending our boys somewhere with dud equipment?

Which is, after all, like a modern media newspaper trope.

Newspapers love stories about dud weapons because it's a way of needling at the government.

It's a bottomless pit, as stories go i mean it's interesting because the japanese after all are banking on fighting this and some of this is tough talk but you how can you know that ever if we lose 20 million people then at least we'll have gone down in flames honorably and you know that that's the way that's a result that will satisfy us actually you you think what but how do you know that's just tough talk yeah are they going to follow through Are they going to follow through?

We don't know.

And it looks like they might because of the way they've been fighting recently.

And I think, you know, the Japanese, of course, do have enough access to American media, which is full of people saying when's this bloody war going to end why am i you know my husband's got kids why does he have to go and all this stuff relentlessly in the papers and a country that was isolationist five minutes ago

politically speaking i mean i think that's the that's dawning on me more and more and more um uh jim and i have been talking about ike a lot this week you know ike's posture i think is that he's well all right you've made us fight put us in a situation where we are going to have to finish this war for you but we didn't want to be here in the first place thanks very much And that's why we're going to exact such an exact such a definite victory.

And that's a product of isolationism, that attitude.

That's a product of a country going, all right, you sod it, we're going to have to get involved, aren't we?

And I think so much of that needs to be remembered.

You know, we're looking at it now.

Isolationism in America isn't some peculiar,

it's a very strong flavor in a lot of American politics.

And we can't just

pretend it comes and goes.

It's ever-present.

Because after all, if you live in in america you left europe your family or your your ancestors left europe at some point because they'd had enough of the bloody place right

and and the the wars there and the restrictions there and the and the way of life there you know so at this phase the amount you know they are looking at maybe two years maybe three years and it being a complete nightmare it being

bloody and disastrous and a suicide pact with Japan in a way.

Well, and as soon as you look at it through that prism, then you can understand the total impatience and frustration that they're experiencing combating the Germans in 1945.

You know, whether it be kind of bombing raids or whether it be, you know, Eisenhower's refusal to look at Yodel and the total disbelief at that kind of absolutely absurd speech that Jodel does after the signing.

Oh, God.

You know, where he talks about, you know, no one suffered more than us poor Germans and all this kind of stuff.

I mean, so

I'm so disgusted with that.

Yeah.

So

it's a great point.

So in relation to the war in Europe, the attitude is certainly like you guys said with Eisenhower, but with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, we didn't want to be part of this mess, but now we're in it and it's a job to be done.

And once the job's done, we're going home.

So, like, note to you guys, we are going home.

We're getting out of here once it's done.

We've pulled your chestnuts out of the fire.

That's the mindset.

In relation to the war in Asia Pacific, it's, oh, you guys wanted to fight us.

You wanted to attack us.

Wow, are you going to get it now?

And we are going to do what we are going going to meet out to you whatever we possibly can because there's a racial component to that too yeah um to build on tammy's point i mean i think she's just dead on and i would say further it it that that lens that viewpoint comes from the fact that we are running out of manpower that we have immediately on hand in other words we have more but that's going to take a political dimension to say all right now we're going to draft the 35 year old with three kids to go send to go fight in the invasion of japan and like you said al you know the people complain, why does my husband have to go?

Why this?

Why that?

Or why isn't my husband come home?

All of that is building.

And so the Japanese really do have a lot to fight for in this last phase because it's possible there could have been something short of unconditional surrender that preserves part of their empire,

their presence in China.

I don't know.

A lot of things could happen.

So FDR is wanting to hedge against all that.

And it's one of the reasons why he wants the Soviets in the war to take care of the possibility that the Japanese could continue on the war from China.

And I know that seems weird, but we're concerned we could even take the home islands and there would just be this Japanese rump state continuing to fight in China.

So there's all these scenarios that are playing out.

It's very hard to manage it all to figure out what the end game is going to be.

And then on the margins, obviously, is this new weapon we have, the atomic bomb.

And how much of that is going to be?

Which goes to the margins to the forefront in many ways, doesn't it?

It will be by summer once we know it's quite feasible.

And that's Truman's problem more than FDR's, of course, famously.

But so all of that is in play with a very messy situation.

The other thing, too, like you said, too, Alba, great point, the vastness of it.

When you look at the

area of operations that comprise the war against Japan, that's a third of the world's surface of ocean, island, and continent.

A third.

Okay.

So, I mean, think of operating there.

All the shipping.

Oh, my gosh.

It's staggering.

So all of that has to be coordinated.

And that requires more people, which means a larger military.

So the Merchant Marine, after all is the is the biggest single slice isn't it i mean it is really difficult though isn't it because i mean one of the one of the things i think that's interesting is when people talk about the decision to say uh to to drop the atomic bomb what they're actually trying to do is re-litigate it i often think it's about arguing against it And usually so many of our arguments come through the prism of mutually assured destruction, come through the prism of the politics of the Cold War and the, you know, the war politics of the Cold War, you know, what that would be and the justifications for the deterrent and all this stuff, rather than necessarily going back and putting yourself, trying to put yourself in the White House, you know, after the Trinity test has been successful.

After all, you know, Truman comes away from Potsdam delighted that he's got an agreement from Stalin to enter the war in China.

You know, he writes this diary, isn't it?

I've got what I wanted from Uncle Joe.

Exactly.

Because we're worried about what will happen with Japan and China.

I mean, and it's very easy to come along later and criticize that because, of course, it doesn't work out that well.

But how are you going to know?

Oh, well, the war will end the second week of August, and you won't necessarily have to have them there.

And you've given them a gateway into Manchuria or whatever.

Okay, but look at the time.

And that's why I have pushed back for so long against this argument that dropping the atomic bomb was really about cowing the Soviets somehow or looking ahead to the.

Yeah, that's just nonsense.

It just doesn't really hold up evidentiary-wise.

But also,

they're not thinking, oh, we have this bomb now.

What's that going to mean for the Soviets?

There's going to be a Cold War in five years.

And they're thinking, how are we going to end this horrible war with Japan?

And the morality of whether we should use the weapon or not.

That's debatable, obviously.

But they're thinking about how they are going to win this war and end it at the least possible cost and in the quickest time.

And that's it.

That's when you really look at the record at the time, that's what obsesses them as it would.

They're living in the moment.

And after all, what they're then thinking is if this, you know, I mean, there is a very interesting sort of thing where

Marshall at one point is thinking about, well, maybe what we're going to have to do is use them as tactical weapons, the nuclear weapons, if we invade.

You know, and the idea that

they're going to nuke the battlefield, then you're into a completely different work global scenario that no one ever talks about imagining or as a possibly the events of 1945, do they?

I mean, we get so hung up.

I mean, I think

it's very hard to do this, to try and put yourself there as the days tick by and the events come at you as they were.

I think think it's very difficult to do that, but you've really got to try and do it, I think.

You do.

You do.

Otherwise, otherwise you just won't understand it.

You'll see it through the lens of now.

And

you're only going to get a very myopic view of it.

Yeah.

But ending the war as quickly as possible

for as few deaths on your side as you could possibly have.

That's what it's about.

Because of all the things that you've experienced before, because after all, we talk about the British steel-not flesh attitude, which is articulated as such by British generals.

That's as much to to do with the British state not wanting a revolution as anything else.

They've seen Germany caps and collapse, the Soviet Union collapse into revolution in the First World War, Germany collapse into revolution in the First World War.

They don't want one.

Thanks very much.

Of course not.

Yes, it's humanitarian, but it's also keyed to direct political interests of the ruling class, if you want to frame it like that.

But why not?

I find it very hard to criticize from

everybody's interests, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, it's good.

I think i think um anniversaries are useful though because they give us uh you know here we are we've just just had the 80th anniversary of the of the end of the war in europe we've still got the 80th anniversary of bj day but it does force you to kind of consider where we're at at the moment and the legacy of the war and the tentacles and there's that great line that robert harris said to us out all those years ago when we had him on and and he said you know what when people say to me why are you so obsessed with second world war he always says why wouldn't you be obsessed with the second world war obviously you know hardly agree with that yeah he's right but it is it is relevant it it is really important.

And the tentacles of the Second World War, 80 years on, are still being felt very, very strongly.

I would argue.

No question.

Weirdly, curiously, one of the lessons of history that we're talking about here, I think, is that events come at politicians, decision makers, leaders thick and fast.

And they have to parse them as the moment comes.

They aren't in the bound, you aren't in the bound volumes of a book that's being well argued by people many, many years later when you're living your life, are you?

And I think,

you know, we...

No, you're responding to what you see in front of you and what you think is going to happen in the future, but you don't know what's going to happen.

No, no, no, no, no, no, which is quite unlike what you'll read in a history book often enough.

Yes, it is.

Well, and you know, you know, the other thing they're worried about, too, in terms of like what's right in front of you, what's going to happen to our POWs?

How are we going to manage that?

We know they're being horribly mistreated.

Where are they?

How are we going to get them back?

I mean, that's just one thing that you'd have to worry about if you're FTR or Truman among many, much less how you're going to end this thing

on an unscrupulous enemy who will use them as bargaining and ship, bugging shit.

Yeah.

And so there's a lot of concern about that as we get into the summer of 45, that the Japanese are just going to simply kill all them and what that'll mean for our settlement with Japan if we have one at all.

And so that's a factor.

What's going to happen with

interned civilians too?

I mean, not just the military POWs.

I mean, there's just so many balls in the air.

And the other interesting dynamic, too, that we see on the American side, each of the services envisions an end came to the war through their own lens.

So the Navy through a blockade and bombardment.

The Army air forces, of course, through the firebombing and eventually atomic bombing of Japan.

So a strategic bombing campaign.

And of course, the ground forces with the invasion of Japan.

And it's going to kind of be all the above that's on that's on the docket.

So, and yet when none of us really wants to invade Japan, so how do we avoid that?

And in a way, the atomic bomb and the Soviets entering becomes our kind of way out of that nightmare scenario, which would have been worse for the Japanese than anybody, honestly, as terrible as it would have been.

Yeah.

Well, what a fabulous chat.

It's always, it's always good to do these wash-ups and chew the cub this way.

I absolutely love it.

Yeah, it's just fascinating.

Yeah, yeah.

Thanks so much, John, for joining us.

Yeah, we always need a bit of J-Mac on this.

We always need a bit of J-Mac.

And of course, John is coming to We Have Waste Festival in September, aren't you, John?

Yeah, I am.

Just try and keep me away.

Brilliant.

Absolutely.

I will be there.

Fantastic.

12th to 14th, September for exactly this kind of war waffle cub chewing.

We will see you all there, there, I'm sure.

What was very interesting, John, is we did a book event last night and we said, How many of you?

and there are about a hundred people there, how many of you listened to the podcast?

And so, we had to do it the other way, and how many don't?

So, you end up with you know, out of a hundred people, maybe a dozen hadn't listened to the podcast, but then only four of them had come to the festival.

And you think, Wow, there are so many more of these people

to be drawn, to be drawn like iron filings to our magnet.

Absolutely, our empire can grow.

Exciting!

That's interesting, Exactly.

Anyway, well, it's so good to see you.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

We will see you again soon.

Cheerio.

Cheerio.

See ya.