Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - Show 63 - Supernova in the East II

Episode Date: January 12, 2019

Deep themes run through this show, with allegations of Japanese war crimes and atrocities in China at the start leading to eerily familiar, almost modern questions over how the world should respond. And then Dec 7, 1941 arrives...

Today's show is sponsored by Audible. Get your first audiobook free when you start a 30-day trial. Just visit audible.com slash carlin or text carlin to 500 500 to get started and listen for a change. What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part series on the wars in Asia and the Pacific involving the Imperial Japanese Empire and many other countries and powers. If you enjoy context and don't want to get too frustrated with me referring back to things we talked about earlier, please feel free to listen to part one and catch up.

If you don't care about those things, of course, or if you've already heard part one, well, please feel free to continue and hopefully enjoy part two of supernova in the east. This history, it's hardcore history. Why didn't Adolf Hitler and the Nazis broadcast news and updates of what they were doing as part of the final solution while it was going on? I mean, why didn't they announce to the world through the Joseph Goebbels propaganda ministry that we have set up these industrial killing facilities, but we'll work people to death first if they're strong and explain, listen, last month we killed 100,000 more of these

people and we won't stop till they're all gone. Why didn't they do that? Why didn't Stalin get up there and yell and shake his finger and threaten the gulags and then explain what the gulag archipelago, the whole system was? Starving to death, working to death as part of a reeducation campaign and all you have to do is leave the country and come back for us to be suspicious enough that you've been corrupted to send you away. I mean, why didn't he get up there and say, this is what's going to happen to you if you

don't stay in line? I mean, no one admitted it, right? Why didn't the Khmer Rouge take photographs as they wiped out the intellectual class of Cambodia because they thought people with glasses were intellectuals and that intellectuals were a threat to their new world that they were creating where everyone was going to go live back on the land again. Why aren't there photos of that? Go check out the killing fields and you know what you'll find?

Artwork. Why didn't they take photos, full color, blow them up and put them all around the town and send some to the foreign media outlets too? That's what an Assyrian king would have done back in the Iron Age. Get a guy like Sennacherib going to level a place like Babylon and then he's going to make sure everyone knows about it in detail. Now a good historian of that era will point out that a lot of what the Assyrians carved into stone, including, you know, their version of photos, right?

Artwork with commentary and statements by the king, a lot of that stuff was a court style after a while. In other words, it was what everyone would expect. It's why you still see Egyptian fashions in the New Kingdom that look, you're really familiar, you're like Egyptian fashions from the Old Kingdom. There's a style that becomes the style you use. But what does it say about you if the style you use is to announce the atrocities that you commit and as close as possible replicate them on the walls of your waiting room in

the embassies? While people wait to talk to the Assyrian ruler, I mean, Sennacherib destroyed Babylon and wrote about it. Here's what the scribes record the words of Sennacherib being again. This is a court style also, but what a style Sennacherib said of his leveling of one of the great cities, maybe the greatest city of all time. If you start at a top 100 list, Babylon, and he leveled Babylon in the 600s BCE, by the way, quote.

Like the oncoming of a storm, I broke loose and overwhelmed it like a hurricane. With their corpses, I filled the city squares. The city and its houses, from its foundations to its top, I destroyed. I devastated. I burned with fire. The wall and outer wall, temples and gods, temple towers of brick and earth, as many as there were, I raised and dumped them into the Eratu Canal. Through the midst of that city, I dug canals.

I flooded its site with water, and the very foundations thereof I destroyed. I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood. That in days to come on the site of that city, and its temples and its gods might not be remembered, I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow, end quote. All those later kings were probably trying to emulate the badass of them all, Asher Nasir Paul II, from a couple centuries before that time. Nonetheless, you got to appreciate the Assyrians for owning it and using it.

Their foreign policy was based on scaring the hell out of people. They didn't want you to rebel, and the best way to do that was to punish anyone who did rebel horribly. Now, that was more the style of the times in the Iron Age, though. One could see that not playing particularly well in the 20th century, but then let's ask why. If you were to make a list of all the genocides and attempted genocides, atrocities, war crimes, and all these things that would fall broadly under that heading and involve enough people

to sort of make a list of the 20th and 21st centuries. How many of the – let's just call them accused perpetrators of these acts – admit to it, own it. And if they do, how many of them do so in an unqualified way? Because sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming that even deniers can't figure out how to wiggle out of the facts, so they start rationalizing, and they'll say, well, the numbers are inflated, or there's mitigating circumstances, or what have you, and here's what makes life so complicated. Sometimes they're right.

If you look at the history of the 20th century, you will note that we start off relatively quickly with some of the more famous genocides or attempted genocides, or alleged attempted genocides in history, and we keep going from there. We have spent more than a hundred years now as a global society trying to codify rules and laws and courts of adjudication and systems and organizations to help create rules about atrocities and war and genocides and killings and crimes against humanity, right? You could create a timeline, I mean, you could start before the Hague conventions and things like that, but you go all the way through the League of Nations creation.

You can get to the United Nations creation. You can get to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. I mean, there's all these sorts of things, and now we have this extensive body in many of these global organizations created in large part in reaction to horrible atrocities and genocides and things that must never happen again, and yet let me ask you what you think would happen if it happened again. I mean, we've spent an enormous amount of time and human effort on a fantastic cause, right?

Let's never have a final solution, for example, happen again. But what if it happened tomorrow? And of course, if this is going to be some sort of analogy that works, we have to imagine it happens in a powerful state. If it happens in Albania, there'll be no problem. The bombing will start soon afterwards, and there'll be an invasion. If it involves, if this crime against humanity involves an important ethnic group that's in many countries, so that many countries have an interest in this, Jewish folks are

an example of that, then it's going to be a different kind of situation. If we're talking about a people that almost nobody really knows about in some faraway place and they're being persecuted by a powerful state, the ramifications of confronting would not be like Albania, you'd be committing to some major stuff, do you think we do anything different today if Holocaust number two starts tomorrow? If it's China or Russia, apologies to both those nations, but I mean, they're the obvious powerful choices if I'm not going to choose my own state. If they start killing a million or two million of some unpopular minority there that most

of us in the rest of the world don't know a lot about, don't have a whole lot of dog in that fight, how well are all these wonderful organizations that we have created over more than 100 years? How well is this mechanism going to click into place and function to stop something like that? The people at the time get quite a bit of blame for not doing more to stop the Holocaust or atrocities that happened all throughout the Second World War on many major fronts, but I think we sometimes forget how hard it is to do that.

We have many more mechanisms and tools at our disposal created in many cases specifically for this purpose that I still think and remember I'm not cautiously optimistic personality wise. I'm cautiously pessimistic. I'm not all hardcore, cynical and pessimistic, but I'm mildly both. And I think if the state is powerful enough, we could have the Uyghur version of the final solution happen over the next year and the world kind of sit around and look at each other most of the time going, you know, let's have some sanctions maybe.

I mean, what should we do? I bring that up because we're coming to a part in the story where it's, let's call it a milestone or a potential milestone on that timeline that begins maybe you could say in the 20th century and keeps going to now concerning these kinds of events. And I mean, look at your newspaper today. We still haven't figured out how to deal with this. We just had some problems in the Middle East where everybody was going, you know, how do we influence this humanitarian crisis?

We had it when the former Yugoslavia broke up. You had a genocide in Rwanda going on and everybody looking at each other thinking to themselves, well, what do we need to do here? Meanwhile, you know, the killings are every day and everybody's sort of deliberating and everybody's got to consider, you know, their own personal country, strategic interests and you know, realpolitik questions. It's all understandable, but it boils down to the same thing. If this is 1943 and this is how we're behaving, more Jewish people and Gypsies and homosexuals

and Polish people and priests are dying every day. And yet what's a responsible speed and what's a responsible level of force, we can expect nation states to employ in situations like this. So as we ask ourselves that question and realize that the people in the pre- Second World War era had less in the way of tools and less in the way of structure and probably less in the way of leverage. I mean, we're talking nuclear weapons now, which changed the game completely and they're confronted with a similar sort of situation.

And by the way, this is one we still deal with today and it is still controversial. And that's why I brought up the point about denial or minimization or rationalization when it comes to questions of atrocities. When last we spoke, we were talking about the Battle of Shanghai, a little known battle, by the way, in the West. But as participants liked to point out, by the time it's done and it went on like three months, something like that, you have as many dead on the Chinese side as either side kind of a little less, I think, but at the Battle of Verdun in the First World War, a historically

nasty battle that went on longer. The strategy at the Battle of Shanghai was influenced by global public opinion or a desire to influence global public opinion. Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese wanted to prove that the Chinese could put up a fight against the Japanese and they wanted to send a message to the world that we're here, we can resist. If you want to help us, it's a worthwhile investment and it's awful and you should help us.

There were photographs making it to the global media stories, accounts from Westerners, Shanghai had quite a lot of Westerners in it. And so the Chinese threw in all their best units, stuff that they had stockpiled for a long time. In other words, they were going to shoot off all of their fireworks at once to make the biggest bang they could make and see if they could attract global attention while they did so. The upside of this is they did.

The downside of this is when it's gone, it's gone. And when the Japanese, after several months of fighting, launch an amphibious invasion and open up another front on the city of Shanghai, that's the story in terms of resistance. And the Chinese resistance collapses, they've suffered a bazillion casualties, they're out of stuff, and they stream back, sort of routing and trying to get their act together towards the capital of Nanjing. The Japanese are close on their heels. And as they chase them, an atrocity begins to occur.

Now let me back up here because I was fascinated and yet I got pulled down the rabbit hole reading about the various points of view on what history calls, some people call it the rape of Nanjing, other people call it the Nanjing incident, the Nanjing atrocity. And the reason there are all these different names is because it's very controversial. In fact, it's about as controversial as all those other genocides, war crimes, and atrocities that you will see on your list if you made a timeline, as I said, from the start of the 20th century. You go to the people accused of the crime and ask them to admit it, or ask them to talk

about it. You'll find a percentage always that will, but most people reflexively get defensive. Let's understand this as a human thing, and let's understand just how widespread it is. Every now and then, but regularly, you will see a news story involving the Japanese education system. And the story is always the same. The Japanese textbooks, specifically the history textbooks, are not, are whitewashing is the way someone will always, whitewashing, downplaying, covering up Japanese atrocities during its

aggressive period in the Second World War and pre-Second World War era. Oftentimes, these complaints will come from people who suffered at the hands of Japanese aggression, China, the Philippines, the entire area around Malaysia. I mean, there's a bunch of places that were in the Japanese orbit for a time. And those are often the people that get angry when Japanese atrocities are downplayed. The people that are sometimes the most angry are the Americans who fought in that war, veterans from Australia, Canada, Great Britain. All these people want the Japanese to confront what they did.

But here's the way I want to portray it in human terms. We have similar textbook issues here in the United States and many other countries do too and they often revolve around history class for middle schoolers and junior high schoolers and high schoolers. The arguments are over how your own country's bad periods are portrayed. And in the United States, we often have these controversies because the nasty things that happened in the past are downplayed or sometimes excised altogether and the more patriotic good things are played up.

Now the Japanese will often come back with a similar sort of response. I don't mean to get political, but both of the right-wing extra-patriots sides of both countries actually have similar views about what they want portrayed in their textbooks. They want their people portrayed positively, creating a sense of citizenship pride in your heritage, all that kind of stuff and appreciation for the things that make your people special and yet I do find it sort of ironic that if you went to the people in my country that feel that way and asked them about Japanese textbooks, they would definitely want the Japanese in most cases to have to confront these sorts of things.

The real patriots in the United States are pretty aware of Japanese conduct in the Second World War against our troops and others and they want that shown. But if you then tried to put the shoe on the other foot and say, okay, in our own history books, when we're talking about the Vietnam War, how much full-color photography and witness account should we devote to something like the Milai Massacre? Those of you who don't know about the Milai Massacre, shame, 1968, Vietnam War, American soldiers went into a hamlet or village and when they came out, 300 to 550 villagers, women and children were dead, rapes occurred, I mean, it was very, very nasty, very disillusioning

for, I can speak from experience in the 10 years afterwards as Americans confronted the fact that we were actually just like everyone else. We were not this special lone ranger coming in to save the world in a couple of world wars, rebuild it afterwards with the Marshall Plan, defend it during the Cold War. I mean, we were all those things too, but if you had said to American people in the 30s or 40s that Americans would do a Milai type thing, I think they would find it hard to believe. I think what men in combat, although, you know, I've only read it, so take this with

a grain of salt, but I think what they would say is that in certain situations, things can become very unpredictable and when there is a lack of strong leadership in those situations, they can become deadly. I'd like to draw a distinction between two kinds of atrocities here. You saw both kinds in the Second World War, by the way, and trying to link the two of them not only twisted some of the post-war war crimes trials into knots, but affects us even today. The difference between a top-down atrocity of the sort, for example, that Hitler and

the Nazis were doing with the final solution, the kind an Assyrian king would do for a Babylonian final solution, a top-down order, and if you're the guy on the ground, you're killing people and executing people and committing an atrocity because you're ordered to, or the kind that happens of the sort, for example, that the ancient Roman slash Latin historian Tacitus says happened during a Roman civil war at a city called Cremona. This was a scandal, so he wrote about it, and he's almost a contemporary, and the story basically goes, it's a story about troops when they get their bloodlust up, and it reminds us that people can be venal, too, in large groups that can come out even in a more pronounced

way. And what made Cremona so terrible is it's a sacking of a city, which is what the destruction of Babylon was, and what the destruction of the city of Nanjing is going to be that would be Nanjing back in the Second World War, it's a sacking of a city. And Tacitus says that these soldiers wanted to sack the city, that they were worried that the city would surrender, and if it surrendered to their commander, the Roman general, well then he got the spoils, so the army, Tacitus says, and he was a veteran, by the way, really wanted the city to not surrender so they could loot it.

The city did surrender, it was a Roman city, by the way, and the citizens in it were Roman. The Roman army outside the city still wanted to loot the city, so they did, for several days. The account is one of the really wicked accounts in the ancient world, and it's funny, though, because if you took out the particulars, it would probably work as a reasonable description of 10,000 sackings of cities in human history. Tacitus wrote about the destruction of Cremona, a Roman city, by Roman soldiers, after surrendering, and he says, quote, 40,000 armed men forced their way into the city.

Under rank nor years saved the victims from an indiscriminate orgy in which rape alternated with murder and murder with rape. Gray beards and frail old women who had no value as loot were dragged off to raise a laugh, but any full-grown girl or good-looking lad who crossed their path was pulled this way and that in a violent tug of war between the would-be captors. A single looter trailing a horde of money or temple offerings of massive gold was often cut to pieces by others who were stronger. In their hands, they held firebrands, which once they got their spoil away, they wantonly

flung into empty houses and rifle temples. There was a diversity of wild desires, differing conceptions of what was lawful and nothing barred. Cremona lasted them four days, end quote. We would be mistaken thinking that this is something particularly Roman or particularly ancient. There's something that goes on in certain situations and you can reliably see it again and again.

In December 1937, you see it in Nanking. Nanking though is so much harder to deal with than something like a Cremona or the Iron Age destruction of Babylon because it's still a white hot, it's incandescent in terms of how passionate and upset and how visceral the arguments over it can get. People get death threats regularly. One of the books I bought for this subject and by the way, we post all of the research materials in the show notes on the website for the shows. Encourage you to buy these books, by the way, especially if you like this stuff.

Some of the Nanking stuff is positively Kennedy assassination-esque in terms of the minutia and detail on how big points can often revolve around small little things, you know, think magic bullet. A lot of people love that stuff and reading it, one of them, a great book, The Nanking atrocity in 1937-38, complicating the picture, has different scholars writing each chapter from a wide range of people and one of the things that the Japanese editor of the book said in the introduction is that several of the contributors had had their lives threatened, some of them face to face for their writings, research, teachings and lectures on this stuff.

Don't have a whole lot of people threatening to bash your head in because of your views on Cremona, do you? I'll give you an example of a problem that a history fanface is trying to talk about because if you wanted to make a graph of the range of opinions on what the death toll is in Nanking in December and onward for months, on one side of the spectrum you have the Japanese people who fall into the class that are known as the deniers who consider everything that we're going to talk about here to be an illusion caused by a combination of contemporary wartime propaganda and a lot of Marxist stuff, especially by leftist Japanese Marxist teachers who are

polluting the minds of their own children. I mean, it's a super-patriot point of view with a tinge of conspiracy that would probably resonate in a bunch of different countries with that same group of people there, probably all countries actually. We said in the earlier conversation that like the Jewish folks that this phrase was originally applied to, the Japanese are really intense, they're like everybody else only more so, or just like anybody else only more so, and I think you see it in the passions here too when people get so upset about, you know, besmirching the reputation of the Imperial

Japanese Army and the country, they get angry as patriots will do, especially if they don't think it's deserved. And the people on one side of the spectrum here will claim that maybe 45 people died in this Nanking thing and those may have been justified one way or another. Now on the far opposite end of the scale and the spectrum, you have Chinese historians in the Chinese official government line, they've actually carved a number, their number into a rock, I saw a picture of it, it's a little like, you know, proverbially carving it into stone, I guess that is what they're doing, and the attempt is to create, it's pretty

clear, a number that has the same sort of intellectual resonance with the global population that the 6 million number has for the Holocaust, I mean, everybody knows 6 million, okay, where'd you come up with that number? It could have been 6 million and one, I mean, nobody knows, right, 5 million, 7 million, but you come up with a nice round number and eventually people go, oh yeah, the Holocaust about 6 million people died there. The Chinese are trying to do this with the Nanking atrocity and the number that they've settled on is 300,000 dead, 300,000 dead.

And there are Chinese historians, and let's acknowledge here, maybe not operating with complete freedom in terms of being able to follow the historical evidence wherever it takes them, but there are Chinese historians that will bump that number up considerably. The 350,000 range is not unheard of at all. If you want to go to crazy town and find the very end of the spectrum, what's the largest number you've ever seen, what's the insane, 500,000, I saw a half million once, not credible, but that's what I saw. 45 is not credible either on the other end, but now on that scale are a bunch of different

gradients of peoples and their views on this subject. That's why it's really difficult to talk about because it's not just an it didn't happen, yes, it did thing, it's, well, sure it did, but it only happened here, or yes, it did, but it only happened to these people. I mean, just the lawyerly breakdown over the geographical boundaries where someone who dies in this quadrant counts as a Nanking atrocity casualty, and someone who dies outside that quadrant doesn't. I mean, it gets silly like that.

The Chinese historians point out, and supposedly this is why China didn't make a huge deal specifically over the Nanking situation in the first few decades after the war, was because this was more par for the course than not. And part of the way you get some of these really large number counts is the Chinese historians sometimes include these soldiers from the Battle of Shanghai who died in part because the Japanese troops who took their surrender or who captured them or who found them wounded on the battlefield executed them there. This is another part of the gradient in the discussion, right?

Who do you count if you're talking about soldiers? Do they count in the atrocity? Well, what if you killed them after they surrendered? As I said, a bunch of different people have different opinions along the spectrum. Now if you're looking for a mid range to try to get sort of a little ballast on this question, a lot of the mainstream, mainstream historians will range from like 100,000 dead to 250,000 dead, and that is a huge number, no matter which it is. The other question that always comes up in a case like this, and this is connected to

the Nazi situation in Europe, but is who's responsible? Where does the responsibility lie? Because you will often hear these situations and sometimes it's valid compared to the sacking of Cremona where you have troops, you know, a loss of institutional control, maybe on the part of the leaders, or a callous disregard for the plight of people, you know, that your lower level troops were despoiling, whatever it might be, you'll hear that. Some people will make the case that all of this is premeditated. It might as well have been Nazi stuff.

And once again, we get divided into separating soldiers from civilians, but there's an interesting little bridge between the two. And that's soldiers who dress up as civilians. Now before we get into this story, you're entitled to know how I come to my thinking and if anything, my own bias. To me, my normal approach is to put myself in other people's viewpoints to try to see their perspective. But trying to see the perspective of the side that thinks there's 45 or 100 or 200 deaths

here and they're explain-awayable feels like trying to be a defender of a Holocaust denier. It's a really difficult position for me to put myself in. I think you should point it out. I had to have a very hard time putting myself, even if you were in debating class and they said, you have to take this perspective and defend it. I am usually open-minded enough to keep a lot of doubt open, though, depending on the other circumstances involved. For example, if this was a very unusual incident in the Second Sino-Japanese War or the Second

World War, I think I'd be inclined to say, listen, wartime propaganda, I mean, those people might have a point. The problem is, is that the Japanese Army and Navy to a degree, but the Army certainly is a repeat offender in this war, both the Sino-Japanese one and the Second World War. By the way, by 1937, a lot of people think the Second World War has started, so it depends. A lot of people, when I was a kid, always started it with the invasion of Poland. But since then, a lot of opinion has shifted and said, you know, really, 1937, the Japanese are in World War II, the other powers just aren't in yet themselves.

The Chinese and the Japanese are starting the Second World War. In this case, the Japanese will behave toward the Chinese atrociously and you have to really write off a ton of evidence, including your own soldiers and commanders diaries, if you want to explain it away. You also have to deal with the, you know, remembrances of combat veterans from pretty much every power that fought the Japanese in the Second World War, where atrocious behavior and a certain brutal level of conduct was always remarked upon. And that's after you factor out racism and hatred of the enemy who killed your buddies

and all that other stuff. I mean, there's a ton of evidence. And the questions over why and what's going on here have been ongoing. And they sort of, in a smaller way, parallel the ones going on after the Second World War with the Nazis, where you had things like the Milgram experiment and all these other things where people were trying to figure out, listen, you know, how do you get people to turn off their moral compass? Could we all be Nazis?

You know, it was trying to figure out motivations and how you do that. I mean, in the Second World War and afterwards, and let's remember, the Japanese public knew very little of this stuff, although some of the stuff that they did know and sort of celebrate is once again a little weird by Western standards. For example, there's a famous incident in Nanking where two soldiers were having, supposedly, this is in the Japanese news media, a contest, a Chinese head shopping contest. The tally was being kept score regularly in the newspaper. You know, this guy is up to 75 now, oh, but three heads today by the other guy and he

takes the lead. And it was always used as evidence of, you know, you're looking for a sign that this brutality happened. Well, my goodness, they were celebrating in Japan's newspapers. Turns out, most mainstream, excuse me, but you know what I mean, historians that I've been reading suggest that that never happened and that it was a figment of the press's desire to whip up an interesting story that got people reading, which it did. It does, of course, beg the question about an audience who thought that that was worth

celebrating. But there have been speculations forever and the early ones during the war were always, you know, racist and cultural where this is just how the Japanese are. Since then, there have been a lot of interesting ones, including ones from Japan, and just to give you an idea of one of them, they'll talk about the brutality in the Japanese army, where apparently being punched in the face hard with a closed fist by your superior was not uncommon. And there's plenty of reports about people having to commit executions or the killing

of POWs as part of a sort of blooding you. It's a very old fashioned idea. Once again, a lot of the things the Japanese were going to be in trouble for in the Second World War are things that people didn't even bat an eyelash 500 years ago about. In fact, 500 years ago, they wouldn't have known it ever happened outside of a very close geographical area. That's another thing that's different about Nanking. There's telegraphs there.

There's embassies. There's Westerners. There's U.S. and British boats, ships in the Yangtze River. The real world outside this area is going to hear about what's happening inside Nanking, and they're going to hear about it while it's going on. It's a thoroughly modern situation that we have seen over and over again since, where there will be some terrible atrocity, crisis, humanitarian disaster, genocide, war crime going on somewhere in the world and unfolding in real time, and all the great powers are

kind of under the gun at that point when everybody says, my goodness, something has to be done or more people will die, but the world global geopolitical powers rarely react at speed on these kind of things, but it's been a little bit of an unsolvable problem. You see it in Nanking for sure because what's going to happen there will unfold over a period of weeks, and the world will be put into a moral quandary over what to do. So, picking up the story, after the Battle of Shanghai, the Chinese forces retreat toward the capital, Nanjing, Nanking, I think it's like 140, 150 miles west of Shanghai, and during the retreat, the Japanese lead elements are trying to surround the Chinese.

So this is a flight with the Japanese in hot pursuit. There are also civilians along the path, there are aircraft strafing and bombing the roads. You get this sense of chaos and bedlam and claustrophobia and panic, and I've seen war footage since that time that you really get a sense, and the camera gives you a very good sense, of a combination of things that must have been working on these people too. The fluidity of the situation, everything is moving quickly and you're in the middle of it, and also a complete lack of knowledge about what's going on outside your field of vision or whatever the person next to you can say, the combination of those two things

is panic inducing. So imagine a sort of a bedlam as this line of humanity pursued by the Japanese runs toward Nanking, the Japanese arrive close on their heels and mostly surround the city, and on December 9th, they're outside this walled city of Nanking, it looks like a sort of a European medieval city, demanding its surrender. There is a Chinese general in command of a hastily thrown together, but relatively, it's China, a large number of soldiers, some of them green, some of them old and reservist, some of them from the battle that just was over in Shanghai and they're not fed, they

don't have their weapons, they're maybe defeatist, I mean it's a bit of a motley crew, but they're going to defend the city. So for four days, they hold out before that general orders a retreat. He leaves, the government leaves, and you have now a city with hundreds of thousands of people, including refugees, that's being bombed and no governmental services or anyone in charge, the Japanese have yet to take over, and it's one of the great stories by the way of this city's plight, and that's that there were a group of westerners in the city, most of the westerners ran away as soon as the Japanese army came, but a bunch of different

people, businessmen and others, humanitarians, doctors stayed, and they weren't there to take care of all these people, but when that fell into their lap, they stepped up to do it. There's a little ironic twist to the story too, and they recently made a movie out of basically almost playing on that twist, and it's that the guy that was sort of elected by this ad hoc group to be the leader was a Nazi, an ardent Nazi as the sources describe, I'm a businessman, John Rabbe, and part of the reason he gets the gig is because the Japanese government and the Nazi German government have been moving closer together, and maybe

he has a little bit more pole with the Japanese that are just about to take over the city than maybe a British or American or I think there was a Danish guy. Maybe they don't have as much pole, so this guy gets the gig, and the movie, I saw the tagline of the preview, and I think it said something like he saved 250,000 lives, and you see scenes of him with huddled Chinese refugees, and he hides them from aircraft under a giant swastika flag, so there's sort of that playing with the idea that here you have the evil Nazis, and yet there's a good person mixed in, it's a juxtaposition that you can hang a whole movie theme on.

I don't know about 250,000 lives in terms of the number, I do know that this is 20 or 30 people, there's women in the group, doctors, ministers, businessmen, and they save a ton of people, and it's in large part because of the documents that they sent or the information that they kept track of that we have a lot of these accounts, and when I wanted to spend three hours on it, I was going to go through all of the letters, let me encourage you to get another book if you're interested in this, and it's one of the few I've ever read that should be dry as a bone, but it's actually in its own way terrifying because it's chronological primary source documents, so the cables and the telegrams and the letters and the pleas

from these people, John Rabbe and all these people who make up the Nanking International Safety Zone folks, as it's called, and you can read every day these letters get more beseeching, more terrified, more outraged as the situation descends into monstrous chaos. On December 13th, the Japanese enter Nanking. There's a letter from John Rabbe saying, thank you so much for not shelling our little international safety zone that we've created, which by the way is nothing more than a part of the city blocked off and on the sides of the streets where the border is, they put international flags.

I think it was December 1st that the Nanking mayor before fleeing the city tells all the civilians to run into the safety zone because they'll be safe there, which allows the Japanese to then say that anybody who's not in the safety zone is ipso facto a bad guy. And what begins to happen right away is the Japanese start searching for Chinese soldiers because there's, as we said, a lot of them there. Another part of the atrocity here is if you are a defender, basically, of the Japanese army in this case, do you count the killing of Chinese soldiers as a war crime? I mean, officially, there's no question, but that allows some people to diverge here and

say, well, we admit that these people who died were soldiers, but I deny the civilian side of this. In this case, what happens is there's a river, it's the Yangtzee that runs behind Nanking. And if you look at it, in order for Chinese troops to get out of Nanking and get away from the oncoming Japanese, they would have to cross the river, sort of go over to the more Chinese side and keep going. Normally, not a problem, but of course, you know, they were trying to create a defensive zone to thwart the Japanese, so they've been blowing up the bridges and everything that

would allow the Chinese to get away too, and now they have to. So there are these harrowing stories of Chinese troops just at the riverbank waiting, you know, thousands and thousands of people waiting for one little boat that could carry three people like a canoe across the river, and the Japanese are on the way. And if there's one group of people that knows that the Japanese are not taking Chinese prisoners, it's Chinese soldiers. So this sense of panic is palpable. And let me turn to some of the sources now, and I have a wide mix of them.

And my apologies, as I said, I'd like to do three hours and I'd like to just read the documents to you because there are several that are like police blotter reports where they're trying to tell the Japanese commander at this hour, this woman was raped over here and the Japanese soldier spilled her sugar. I mean, it's literally like police reports, but it's all I could think of when I was reading it is how unusual it was to have something like this. And if you could have had a similar document, it would apply equally well to the sack of Carthage by the Romans, you know, in ancient times, I mean, this is a modern day account

of something you just don't get a whole lot of, but that's happened a lot of times in history seems woefully out of place and time, though. Here's the way Fujiwara Akira contributor to the Nanking atrocity complicating the picture said that the attack on Nanking was out of control from the start with all sorts of units that were glory hungry and wanting to be the first inside the city. And there's a sense of out of control troops such as the Battle of Cremona with that psychology going on. So here we get another gradient in the responsibility spectrum that we've been talking about.

Do you blame Japan for what's about to happen here? No, it was a bunch of out of control troops and in some ways it was Akira writes about the Japanese units finding out on December 13th that the Chinese were retreating and leaving and trying to get away and he writes quote Japanese units learned of this retreat on the morning of the 13th skirmishes broke out in many areas as small groups of Chinese troops outside the city now lacking a chain of command desperately tried to slip past advancing Japanese forces. Then the surrendering began.

Most of the Chinese troops still inside Nanking rushed to escape Helter Skelter through the Pachang Gate which led to the Shaquan Warf area. From Shaquan they hoped to cross the Yangtze by boat, by raft or by clinging desperately to scraps of lumber where they madly ran up and down the riverbank only to encounter Japanese forces sent to cut them off. Huge numbers of Chinese troops became prisoners of war on the 13th and 14th at Shaquan, Mufushan, Changtung Gate and the Xiaohua Gate with no avenue of escape Chinese soldiers lost all will to fight despite trying to surrender in droves.

Most were killed in the palmel of battle. End quote. He then quotes from the Diaries from December 13th 1937 of two Japanese commanders 16th Division Commander and 30th Brigade Commander these are primary source documents and 16th Division Commander Nakajima Kisago's Diary writes quote. We see prisoners everywhere so many that there's no way we can deal with them. The general policy is except no prisoners so we ended up having to take care of them lot stock and barrel but they came in hordes in units of thousands or five thousands so

we couldn't even disarm them. Later I heard that the Sasaki unit alone disposed of about 1500. A company commander guarding Taiping Gate took care of another 1300. Another 7000 to 8000 clustered at the Shinho Gate are still surrendering. We need a really huge ditch to handle those 7000 to 8000 but we can't find one so someone suggested this plan now quoting someone else's plan divide them up into groups of 100 to 200 and then lure them to some suitable spot for finishing off end quote 30th Brigade Commander Major General Sasaki Tohichi wrote in his diary on the 13th of December quote.

The number of abandoned enemy bodies in our area today was 10,000 plus thousands more. If we include those Chinese whose escape rafts or boats on the Yangtze were sunk by fire from our armored cars plus POWs killed by our units our detachment alone must have taken care of over 20,000 we finished the mop up and secured our rear area at about 2pm. While regrouping we advanced to the Hoping Gate. Later the enemy surrendered in the thousands frenzied troops rebuffing efforts by superiors to restrain them finished off those POWs one after another even if they aren't soldiers for example medics or priests men would yell kill the whole damn lot after recalling the

past 10 days of bloody fighting in which so many buddies had shed so much blood end quote. So right there you see another one of those lines that some people take which is the superiors tried to restrain them but you know their buddies were killed and they were understandably upset enough to commit atrocities. There's also a ton of evidence though that there was a take no prisoners policy historian Herbert P. Bix in his book on Hirohito his Pulitzer Prize winning book on Hirohito writes this quote. There were no orders to rape in quotes Nan King nor did imperial headquarters ever order

the total extermination of the enemy as the ultimate goal of the Nanking encirclement campaign standing orders to take no prisoners did exist however and once Nanking fell Japanese soldiers began to execute en masse military prisoners of war and unarmed deserters who had surrendered they also went on an unprecedented and unplanned rampage of arson pillage murder and rape the resulting slaughter continued in the city and its six adjacent rural villages for three months and far exceeded earlier atrocities committed during the battle of Shanghai and along the escape routes to Nan King general Nakajima 16th division in just its first day in the capital killed approximately 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war and fleeing soldiers

end quote there are charges that these orders to kill all prisoners come from the highest up on the scene which by the 13th I believe is the emperor Hirohito's uncle there will be an execution or two after the war for what goes on in this city but trying to figure out who's responsible for it has been an ongoing part of the debate how high up the food chain do you blame this what it really seems to be is this combination of two things a ordered war crime from you know Western perspective the killing of surrendering or captured POWs because after all you go look at the Soviet Union and the number of prisoners that fell into German hands after the June 1941 invasion there and you know they would

have these giant Kessel schlacht these cauldron battles and they capture 250,000 people at a time and you have these photographs of huge crowds of people are long columns stretching off into the distance kicking up tons of dust and them trying to figure out how do we how do we barb wire these people in a pen and keep them and then how do we feed them you didn't see any of that in this part of the war between China and Japan because they're not taking prisoners and nobody knows that better than the Chinese troops so this sense of panic that's going on in the city I was trying to think of an analogy it's a little like you know getting 100,000 or more people in a soccer stadium and then having somebody

tell you over the public address speaker that the doors out have been barred and armed gunmen are coming in to kill all hundred or 150,000 people in the stadium I mean what is the mood like then well if it's panic stricken that would be understandable and this is when incidents begin happening in the story that become a sort of a hinge moment if we were talking about communicable diseases or an epidemic this is when it jumps species from merely affecting the soldiers and now affecting the civilians because in their panic and quite understandably so a lot of these Chinese troops an undetermined number of these Chinese troops are going to throw off their uniforms and throw their weapons away and dress in any civilian

clothing they can find they may be aided in this by the population because after all this is a Chinese city and these are Chinese troops but the Japanese start looking for Chinese troops that have thrown away their uniforms and addressed to civilians and they start picking people out of crowds many of whom are civilians and executing them and then you have the part of the story that just takes this to unbelievable crazy levels which is what starts to happen to the civilians and this is where it looks like Cremona because you have and it starts if you read the primary source materials it starts on the 13th and you start to get these these requests can you please put more military police officers

out on the streets because the soldiers are out of control the main thing they're out of control with although there's a lot of looting is rape and it's crazy to read as I said I wanted to do three hours on this and just go go from one police plotter account to another because it gives you a real time in a way sense of what's going on all over the you know Nanking international safety zone where they were getting more than a thousand reports of rapes a night and as one of the Humanitarians working there said the Japanese have turned the international safety zone into a public house meaning a whorehouse and they were often killing the women that they raped it's it's worth giving an account from

the victims here the Chinese side and in one of the books that I have Nanking 1937 memory and healing they have a Chinese historian who's giving what is I guess it's the recognized Chinese view of this thing and he pulls no punches he wants you to know how nasty it got and a person who says they were only 45 people who died in this whole incident would call the Chinese a liar or their government a bunch of people just wanting to to hold this over Japan's head but here's what Chinese historian Sun Xiawei says happened in Nanking quote in general the massacre itself can be divided into two types of killings mass killings and sporadic killing incidents of mass killing ranged from the murder of 10 to 20 to the

slaughter of tens of thousands of people with the greatest number in any one incident reaching more than 50,000 sporadic killing included varying numbers of three to eight people among the mass killings in addition to those who died by the sword and firing squad others were burned buried alive or drowned several after being soaked with gasoline were set on fire by gunshot causing the wounded person to lie covered in flames rolling and writhing on the ground until finally dying a miserable death individual sporadic acts of torture and killing included splitting gutting slicing piercing alive and dog biting some were even burned with acid and then left burning all over others were tortured to death two Japanese

lieutenants amuse themselves by having a killing contest the first one to reach a hundred killed one the game then they raise the limit to a hundred and fifty in addition to killing he writes the Nanking massacre also involved rape arson theft and other violent crimes the Japanese troops who attacked Nanking raped tens of thousands of Chinese women many of whom were then murdered end quote any time I find myself thinking that those numbers that the Chinese historians give are way too large I recall that according to Tacitus the Roman legionaries completely picked Cremona clean in four days Nanking is going to continue for months how much evil can you do in a time frame like that and admittedly they're not

ripping Nanking apart with quite the efficiency or rapacity as the Romans were ripping Cremona apart but if you've got months to do it I imagine it's going to be pretty thorough now if you say that we have spent too much time focusing on a single atrocity when we're talking about a conflict that's going to go on to 1945 I would agree with you except that we're not going to spend a lot of time necessarily on all the atrocities between now and the end of the war that deserve attention what's more you look at the raw death totals that the Chinese are going to suffer between 1937 and 1945 alone and if you include the indirect causes of death because of the war things like famine and disease your numbers get to

the 15 and 20 million people levels if you want to go just with directly caused by violence it gets down to maybe 12 million in a lot of sources 12 million two-thirds of which by the way are civilian where are their stories most of those people die individually or suffering anonymity or are killed in small out of the way villages or hamlets who speaks for them let's let the relatively and comparatively well attested to situation in Nanking allegations if you're a denier but still well attested to allegations in the worst case scenario let's let those speak for all those other people whose stories didn't make it into the history books the second reason to focus perhaps inordinately on the atrocity like Nanking is

that it's one of a bunch of pre-war atrocities and these will continue by the way during the conflict as well that seem to set up you know this era where you have these brutal totalitarian type armies at least the way the western liberal democracies look at these things that seem to be on the march and they seem to be the bad guys in the story now bad guys is an interesting thing to ponder because in most wars especially all the recent ones where you can get into the newspaper accounts and stuff like that pretty common to portray one's adversary in almost apocalyptically evil terms in the first world war the Germans were called the Huns because Huns were about the nastiest thing British propaganda and

others could think of in terms of slapping the label on them and they helped out all they could on the German side by doing things that have been named the rape of Belgium and stuff at the time shocking the genteel 19th century sensibilities of the age let the record show how exponential that can grow in a mere generation because the outrage over the rape of Belgium involved about 6000 people killed directly maybe those are the modern numbers and we've already talked about what the numbers are in China it's worth pointing out that if you take standard numbers for both world wars and compare them look at the difference in the ratio of civilian to military casualties in the first world war standard number you

get for soldiers killed about 10 million people about 7 million civilians in that war it's estimated in the second world war more like 20 to 25 million military deaths and more like 35 to 60 million civilian deaths so several times more civilian deaths in the second world war less civilian deaths in the first and that's the part that by the standards of most war crimes or just individual perception makes the second world war so much more atrocious a lot of people are willing to forgive all sorts of nastiness if it's done to soldiers women children old people the infirm the sick the non-combatants it's much more harrowing and shocking when they're killed and here's the problem with the good and evil narrative

do you think that the Japanese textbooks are teaching their kids that they were on the evil side of this war the way the western democratic textbooks tend to frame the Japanese side of this obviously the Germans are sauron but the Japanese are one of the powers that work with sauron the Haradrim the Easterners one of those people one of the reasons that countries like China have problems with Japan's textbook is in their minds they're not confirmed to be confronting this fact that wait a minute let's acknowledge you were the evil side of this war good and evil is a strange thing though isn't it I had to think about this for a while because who says a particular behavior is evil you go talk to Genghis Khan

about good and evil in the 13th century from the Mongol point of view and he may have I'm going to guess he has a different interpretation of what constitutes one or the other right this is a perception thing if the Nazis had somehow won the war and we were all having our concepts of good and evil framed under that regime how different do conduct for example that the Wehrmacht carried out on Hitler's orders in the east after they invaded the Soviet Union and it was this you know no holds barred all laws thrown out the window kind of conflict how different does that look you think the Germans or the Nazis because it might be a pan Nordic sort of empire do you think they frame that in good and evil terms

and if they do do you think they're framing their side as evil the perception thing is hard to get past isn't it because from the perspective of someone who grew up in what the post-war history books always called the great liberal democracies the Western democracies you have concentration camps that are being used as genocide factory assembly lines you pretty much by our value system staked out where you are on the good evil side of the divide pretty clearly the Japanese had something that reminds you of some of the Nazi medical science I put that in parentheses or quotes they had a unit 731 it was called in Manchuria in northern China that conducted experiments on humans and vivisections and you know infected

fleas with bubonic plague and then dropped them by air over Chinese cities and recorded the data evil stuff like that from our Western liberal Enlightenment era based value system that's unrepentantly evil now if you take yourself out of those shoes though I went and read the arguments as anyone should that the people who defend other points of view on this make usually if they don't just deny the information outright is that deniers of the Nanking atrocity or of the Holocaust do they will say yes but yes we did these things and people are terrible but you did terrible things too things that are often not admitted to or accepted by the liberal democratic post enlightenment side of this thing for example

strategic bombing you talk to people in Japan or in Germany who lived the reality of their cities being bombed by sometimes hundreds of aircraft sometimes multiple times sometimes with atomic bombs and they have an interesting perspective on it I'll never forget one of them saying to me if the same result had been achieved the old fashioned way if you'd come in here and done with bayonets the functional equivalent of what you did with bombs from a distance how does it look then hard to get over the idea it looks a little like Nanking doesn't it here's the thing you go to someone on the British end of things though that were on the receiving end of the blitz the Luftwaffe's bombing of London and Britain instead of saying

yes that's how we felt you'll often hear them say you know tough you started it what you got back was reaping what you sowed and that's an interesting argument and kind of understandable in human terms here's the problem there's always been an implication that the people that are being bombed somehow deserve it and I always try to remind myself if my country ever got into a war with someone else and I got bombed by them would I somehow think I deserved it because of the role I played in supporting my country's policies or supporting my country or would I think that I was just a person caught in the gears of history that I had little control over what really happened and that there's really no good excuse for

these bombs to fall on me the other argument you will sometimes get sometimes from other Asian people sometimes other Asian people who were also victims of the Japanese is they will bring in the question of colonialism and they will say something like sure the Western democracies were on their good behavior and did relatively well in terms of controlling the troops and behaving well militarily speaking during this conflict but look at the situation after the conflict and more importantly look at the situation beforehand with centuries of colonialism add up all that stuff and all those evils and put them on the balance scale to sure the Japanese were terrible but let's not pretend that we're only talking about

the second world war here when we're adding up who's been terrible to whom when this is about walking a mile and the other person's moccasins and it's important to consider those points it is worth pointing out and many here in the west would that the terrible things done as part of the effort to win the second world war comes after these sorts of incidents that we're discussing here and maybe are necessary because of the kind of incidents we're talking about here that's why we spent so much time on this Nanking atrocity because it's hardly the only thing going on this would be an appropriate time to zoom out of the story here keep one part of your peripheral vision always on China though because the Japanese biggest fear of

getting bogged down in an endless war in China is going to come true we compared it to an addiction earlier they're fully addicted they don't know how to get out and the more they conquer the worse their troubles are when the atomic bombs are dropped at the end of the war the Japanese are still bogged down in China I have this weird upside down backwards mirror image fun house sort of view of the strategic situation facing the Japanese in China it's like this weird turnaround of the United States strategic dilemma in the Vietnam war I mean there you had this giant continental power the US bogged down and unable to extricate itself with any sort of peace terms they can live with in a place what would you say roughly

just real vaguely the size of something like California the Japanese in the Chinese version of this they're more like the size of California and they're bogged down in a guerrilla war and not always a guerrilla war in a continental land mass the size of the US the first thing I'm thinking about if I'm in the Japanese leadership is I don't want any more trouble with anyone else I'm busy and the Japanese will continue to conquer city after city after city they will control the railway lines to connect these cities the roads to connect these cities and the Chinese can just keep moving their capital as far away as they need to go to be out of the Japanese in a range of the bombs although they do fall on the

Chinese capital from time to time and the countryside is infested with nationalist armies communist armies guerrillas insurgents warlord troops bandits and there will be hundreds of thousands usually close to a million Japanese troops some of their best forces to all requiring supplies all the time in this theater for the entire war now as we said we have to zoom out at this point in the story because events elsewhere in the world are going to have more of an effect on what happens in this part of the world than anything that's happening in this part of the world I mean for example as as the Europeans begin to slide toward the second world war the Japanese are watching and as that war breaks out and gets underway

they're paying attention to the results and reacting accordingly in other words like mini powers they're trying to read the lay of the land and as the second world war will break out the lay of the land is going to change quickly tough to know which horse to bet on when things are so fluid the 1930s as we should point out and it is important to understand the context is a pretty crappy decade for most countries it is in the great depths of the great depression and it is hard to exaggerate what that means I mean people think of economic hard times but it opens the door to all sorts of political instability and problems on every front and so people like Franklin Roosevelt in the United States and leaders everywhere

had their hands full trying to pull out of this economic nosedive nobody was prepared to spend a lot of money or a lot of political capital or asked the country to give some great sacrifice for some cause around the world when you hardly could handle the problems that you know put people in soup lines in the streets of your major cities 1938 is the key year where things really spiral out of control although it's not always apparent that that's what's happening many people have suggested that it would have been very easy to imagine the second world war breaking out in 1938 I mean you have a lot of things happening you have the Anschluss where Germany annexes Austria you have the huge situation over Czechoslovakia

and the Sudetenland and all that stuff you have the peace in our time Munich agreement and I should point out something because it's and I'll try not to get on my soapbox here but it drives me crazy the Munich agreement of course is where the prime minister of Britain who had gone to a conference with Herr Hitler comes back gets off a plane and I've seen this unit you can go see it in the museums and over in Britain waves this document with his signature and Hitler's signature on it and declare is basically that this is peace in our time and people applaud Chamberlain is a reviled figure to most people today he's seen as a weak appeaser that should have confronted Hitler I mean there's a million

things we throw at all these people these these weak need pre-second world war political leaders totally forgetting two major things and about a thousand minor things let's go into the two major things the first one is these people had already lived through the worst war that they could ever imagine 20 years ago before the first world war nobody really knew what they were getting into in the 1930s everybody knows what they're getting they're getting the first world war only worse again and too many of these people they thought they saw their civilization nearly knocked out in that war if you're gonna have another one and it's gonna be worse and you're starting it from a the Great Depression levels of

economic health what's the likelihood you're gonna survive this time what's the proper price to pay to avoid that outcome now what about the public support for any policy like that this is the other thing that is widely forgotten in a place like the United States especially people who we laud for being ahead of the power curve on this guys like Winston Churchill who foresee all this sort of an an an a screaming for confrontation and and more a more bellicose policy to ward off all this stuff that's that's his rationale right we'll avoid this war if we're tougher now the guy is like in the political wilderness in this period and he's derided by many as a war monger so he's sort of out of steps

with the attitude of the times as we all know this war is going to break out in 1939 a month after it breaks out a month after it breaks out there's a public opinion poll of Americans on the issue of the war it's quoted by Francis Pike in Hirohito's war I think it's a Gallup poll but I'm not sure the poll taken had 84% of respondents saying that they wanted Britain and France to win the war only 2% wanted the Germans to win but 95% 95% wanted to stay out of the war well first of all this is more reflective of the America of that time period much less interventionist throughout its entire history than now but when you think of those kind of overwhelming numbers in a system where the political leaders are elected what is

it responsible to expect them to do how many people are going to go against that kind of supermajority what's more in a philosophical sense in a system where the people are supposed to sort of broadly decide the course of the nation if 95% of them wants to take a left turn at the fork in the road where's the moral justice and the political leaders making a right instead so I think we judge these people harshly and assume you know that they had more ability to do what we want them to do than they did and of course let's remember the most important part whenever you do something like the Monday morning quarterbacking in history we know how things turn out they don't now that having been said famously the Munich

agreement falls through Poland is invaded September 1st 1939 Poland had been given a guarantee by Britain and France because they'd finally had enough of Hitler's I don't want any more territory don't worry and when the Nazis refused to leave Poland after it's demanded of them the war is on in Europe and the Japanese are watching now as we know Poland is overrun quickly the post war propaganda calls it blitzkrieg what it really looks like is just the first world war tactics and strategy and philosophy developed over 20 years then there's this period that's sometimes called the phony war where nothing much is going on and then in April 1940 Germany invades Denmark and Norway and conquers them pretty

quickly and then a month later not even a month later I don't think you know in May 1940 a bunch of things happen not necessarily in this order Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Britain so now we have one of the major players in this story ensconced in power a decision-maker famously pit bull like in his bellicosity and yet at the same time seemingly the right man for the job because I mean if if Churchill was a bit of an antagonist and a fighter that was a little bit embarrassing and more peaceful times he's exactly what you need now that the war is going isn't he but may is also the month where the phony war ends on the western front the Germans blow through a couple of neutral countries

and then into France now we should point out another reality during the time period that's often forgotten now France is widely considered to be the strongest land power in the world at this time period many international calculations are based on this assumption this assumption will prove to be false quickly France will be defeated in a mere six weeks to put that in perspective and to understand how incredibly shocking that is for this time period you're talking about a country here that only 20 years previously had spent more than a million of their soldiers lives holding off arguably the greatest army of the age the first world war German army for more than four years and remember not only is France defeated here

but the Dutch are defeated as part of the Germans blowing through this area and the British look like they're five minutes away from succumbing as well if you're making calculations based on world events in Japan all of a sudden all of these valuable areas in your neck of the woods that are controlled by the Dutch and the French and the British don't seem so formidably defended anymore and remember if you're Japan you might not even be looking at those places if you could just hold on to China and conquer it and use its resources that's all they need really I mean it wouldn't give you everything you wanted but I mean if Japan's looking to be a great power and they think they have to

suck up China to do it everything in their policy is based on being able to maintain that addiction they only start looking towards some of these other tempting areas like French Indochina modern-day Vietnam Laos and Cambodia because some of the more obvious avenues towards supplying your war machine are being squeezed by other powers if you go look at the economic side of the Second World War which is a very popular way to look at it lately and I find it very valuable in terms of understanding some of the deeper motivations all of the Axis powers were concerned with self-sufficiency autarchy is what it's called and this is actually playing into the global trade situation and involves economics in a way that kind

of explains war motivation very well but the reason that countries like Germany for example wanted self-sufficiency was in part because they had been starved to death in the First World War when their shipping and trade was cut off by the British Navy these countries wanted the flexibility to be relatively immune to other countries economic pressure the Japanese wanted to do what they wanted to do in China and wanted to be able to flip the middle finger to countries that told them to stop unfortunately in this time period they depended on other countries too much historian James L. McClain writes in a modern history of Japan quote to the regret of many Japanese economic planners in the late 1930s Japan still depended upon

the United States for nearly one third of its imports from cotton to scrap iron and oil and matters seem to be growing worse between 1929 and 1932 Japan purchased from the United States 36% of its scrap iron used to manufacture steel for munitions and ships by 1938 American sources were supplying 74% of Japan's scrap similarly in 1938 Japan received more than 60% of its imported machine tools and nearly all sophisticated alloys such as vanadium and molybdenum from the United States traditionally self-sufficient in copper Japan in 1939 extracted 90,000 tons of that metal from its mines but industry was gobbling up so much for detonators and shell casings that the nation that year had to import 105,000

tons of copper 93% of it from the United States the situation for oil the most critical of all commodities in the estimation of military planners was extremely desperate Japan relied on America for almost 80% of its fuel and for special distillates dependent stood at more than 90% in the eyes of economic and military strategists by the summer of 1940 Western colonies in Southeast Asia had come to represent a treasure trove of raw materials whose possession would allow Japan to vault into the ranks of the economic haves to recall one of their prime minister's phrases and thus to free itself from dependence upon an increasingly hostile West end quote.

You can see why a concept like national self-sufficiency might be attractive to someone like the Japanese who are dependent on these outside powers to sell them what they need especially what they need to keep the war machine running. So what happens if the people who sell you the stuff you need to keep the more machine running stop selling you the stuff you need. And that becomes kind of the crux of this story. I know many of you are as fascinated as I am by how wars get started. And there is no template.

I mean they're all different and the variables are never the same. But you can see you know similar patterns in this particular case you see the pattern of a sort of inertia developing. You saw this in the first World War two I believe I described it like someone pulling the pin out of a hand grenade but you could also think about it like a fuse being lit. It's when events start to move towards collision and at a certain point it almost becomes easier to run into each other and have a conflict than to break out of the pattern. In this case it's going to be a question of feeding the Japanese war machine that gets

this dynamic going. And I was trying to get into all the tit for tat things and it got very complicated because there's so many players and as we said earlier and it's important to remember that in the Japanese government just like the Western democracies there is no hive mind at work. There are lots of different ideas over what the best foreign policy directions are to go and different factions favoring different things and based on events some factions are exalted and others are in decline. So there's no concerted foreign policy effort that is without fits and starts and a certain

level of chaos. But in the case of the Japanese and we talked about this earlier in the story their governmental design is already not wonderful in terms of accountability and the lines of command and all these things. When we start getting to a moment where the stress level and the need for efficiency and clear thinking and clear lines of authority become really important this government's going to break down in such a way that if you were a Japanese citizen you'd have every right to accuse them of some kind of criminal negligence.

Because look what the Japanese are you know right around the time France falls where they have a major war and commitment going on in China they're already rationing luxury goods and fuel at home the people are already grumbling. And then what 18 months later when you add to that burden a war against the United States Great Britain France all their former colonial dominions and commonwealth nations mean how the hell does that happen? Well, in a broad sense it happens because of a decision to stop the Japanese war machine. If you look at it objectively that becomes the issue where there's no give and this is

very controversial because everybody's argued forever what the cause of the Pacific war was and who's at fault. But if you look at it it becomes pretty simple that the Japanese priorities and the Americans and British the Anglo Americans maybe we can call them priorities clash and the priorities have to do with what it is the Japanese are addicted to China. The whole reason I liked the addiction analogy was because of where we're coming to now. There's going to be the global equivalent of an intervention here and the Japanese are going to be told that they have to stop inflating themselves on the steroids that are the Chinese

resources and landmass and all that. And if they don't stop they're going to get the means to that cut off the means are things like oil. Now worth pointing out because it's interesting from a military history standpoint. The second world war is really the first big war where oil is this super important resource a war winning or war losing resource at a certain point. We all understand most wars throughout history not all wars of course but most wars have a component of resources involved some way or another.

Now what's interesting is over the air is often the important resource that you need to have changes right during the late Bronze Age having the monopoly on the making of iron and stuff like that. That's a national security thing. Well iron is still important in the 20th century but something that wasn't all that important at all petroleum in the Bronze Age is critical in this era. I mean think about the need to have it for your air force if nothing else but also you know since the first world war and really before the first world war they started changing

over from coal to oil for the fuel for all of their ships all the major powers. Well gee that creates a dependency you didn't have before and countries like Japan which didn't have a lot of oil to begin with let's just say almost none a little in the Sackling Islands up north but almost none are in a bind if the people you normally buy oil from decide to squeeze you. This is an interesting thing to look at because I remember as a kid growing up I lived through something that if you look in your history books now is a known historical event with long term huge ramifications that we still live with today.

At the time we just called it the oil crisis when I was a kid in 1973. Long story short a cartel of oil producing nations who wanted to get the United States and friends to change their foreign policy priorities as they related to Israel because there was a war in the Middle East going on decided to squeeze the United States and friends oil supply to get the price to rise to sort of coerce might not be a strong enough word Petro blackmail is a word they sometimes use to get the United States to change its foreign policy. The attitude that the US government had was completely understandable and predictably

attitude they have is no great power is going to let anybody dictate what their foreign policy priority should be and there were a few people in the Nixon administration that were basically talking about you know listen if you don't sell the oil at a decent price we're going to come and take the oil you can't monopolize a world resource that everybody depends on like this. So you can understand the idea of no great power is going to let another country dictate what its priority should be but during this period in time that's exactly what the Anglo-American nations are going to do to the Japanese and in the same way it's hard to imagine the United

States knuckling under to the demands of an oil cartel and changing its foreign policy it's hard to imagine the Japanese publicly with their tail between their legs completely altering more than a decade's worth of foreign policy and doing what the great power tells them to do otherwise they won't get any oil which they really needed to run the war machine in China which they wouldn't be in anymore. But because it is so obviously something that might lead directly to war there has always been one side of the debate in the United States and elsewhere about how much what we're going to talk about now these economic embargoes and sanctions and asset freezes and those

kinds of things how much that was a nonviolent way to express the moral outrage of the public at the Japanese treatment of the Chinese and all this kind of stuff versus a shove in a direction that the people in the know understood would lead directly to war that's why we're going to deal with a couple different sides of the debate here because this is not settled stuff unless of course you're a very hard ideologue and believe what you believe but there are a number of different ways to look at it there's a place where power politics and moral outrage intersect and power politics you know realpolitik and moral outrage from a country like the United States or Great Britain or any of these western democracies

these things are usually at odds with each other I mean a lot of times you have people like a national security advisor Henry Kissinger who was Nixon's national security advisor lamented the idea that he should be constrained by the public sort of weepy attitudes towards nation states when he's trying to you know create treaties that keep nuclear war from breaking out when let's keep our eyes on the prize here you know nations have interests right and yet at the same time how do you expect a public who's reading all this terrible stuff coming out of the war in China and babies being bombed and you know people being beheaded and rapes of cities about to happen any minute now in the story how do you tell that public

that they should just sit idly by and do nothing what's more what if your country is providing the means necessary for these events to even take place well it's certainly understandable that people might react in fact you might worry about a country's population that didn't in this case with a nation so against going to war what are the options that a president has in a situation like this right well this begins to become clear in October 1937 in a famous speech that the president of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt gives this is about a month or two before the Nanking massacre happens but it's on the horizon in the battle of Shanghai all that's happened and Roosevelt gives this speech where he talks

about aggressor nations and he talks about their conduct being like a contagion like a disease that will spread and he compares it to what you do when people have diseases you quarantine them right and he's suggesting that that's what should be done to these aggressor states here's a sample of the 1937 quarantine speech by president Franklin Delano Roosevelt it seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading and mark this well when an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease it is my determination to pursue a policy of peace

that is my determination to adopt every practicable measure to avoid involvement in war it ought to be inconceivable that in this modern era and in the face of experience any nation could be so foolish and ruthless as to run the risk of plunging the whole world into war by invading and violating in contravention of solemn treaties the territory of other nations that have done them no real harm and which are too weak to protect themselves adequately yet the peace of the world and the welfare and security of every nation including our own is today being threatened by that very thing now if this seems like a rather weak speech in terms of specifics and whatnot you wouldn't be the only person that said so and Francis Pike

seems to indicate that Roosevelt kind of weak on all this stuff for a while he said that this speech was just you know Roosevelt sort of testing the waters but we gave some polling information earlier that gives you an idea about the attitude of the American electorate during this time period if the president of the United States thinks that there's a very important direction that the country needs to go but the country doesn't want to go there what should the president of the United States do it's worth examining this enigma that is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a minute because he's a key part of this story he's unlike any other US president in history he was elected to twice as many terms as any

other president in US history and they changed the constitution after he left the scene so that that would never happen again but it gave him an unparalleled amount of actual practical hands-on experience with the levers of government nobody ever moved them any better than Franklin Roosevelt did Roosevelt and unusually hard to figure out US president you would think a guy that was on the scene as long as he was would have all sorts of information attached to you know his feelings about things but he died in office early into the fourth term by the way which meant we didn't get the normal run of presidential memoirs and all that stuff afterwards because even if it's a pack of lies or self-serving justifications historians have

a way of using that to really flesh things out and compare them to other events and what not triangulate but you don't even get that from Roosevelt and he was a hard to read guy anyway almost by in his very nature he still elicits extremely strong emotions in many directions i mean at the time there was a euphemism for him that people who hated his guts used they wouldn't mention his name they call him that man in the white house conservative americans often saw roosevelt as damn near socialist a man who exploded the size of the american government put it in all sorts of areas where it had never stuck its nose in before transferred money from the wealthier classes to the poorer classes set up all kinds of agencies

appeared to be doing all kinds of things spending all kinds of money but were there really any results changing america fundamentally there is a before franklin roosevelt and after franklin roosevelt america he's arguably the most transformative president that's ever been again part of it being how long he served but also because when you serve during such major events as the great depression followed by the second world war you're going to be around when all kinds of things are transformed and you're going to be trying to ride the storm you know as the captain of maybe maybe the most powerful ship in the world to a lot of americans liberals certainly but a lot of poor destitute americans in the great depression roosevelt was a hero

if he wasn't achieving things it wasn't for lack of trying he was literally doing you know programs where people did all kinds of things that weren't even necessary and the government would hand them out a paycheck although they also did a ton of things that we still benefit from today all kinds of you know conservation cores and all these things it would put people to work simply to put them to work try to prime the pump of the american economic engine and get things going again there were a lot of americans who had food on the table because of franklin roosevelt that'll make you pretty popular might even get you elected four times defenders would argue that if roosevelt put in a lot of programs that conservatives thought of as socialist things like social security by the

way or a roosevelt new deal program he was up against competition from other forms of government like bolshevism and fascism that took over in countries where political instability had taken hold due to horrible economic situations in part defenders would argue that roosevelt managed to steer the united states away from either one of those extremes and as one of my professors put it gave the country a little socialism to avoid having them demand a lot views on roosevelt run the gamut frances pike in his book about the pacific war hero he does war talks about roosevelt and points out that the guy is a hard man to figure out he writes quote at the best of times franklin delano roosevelt was a difficult man to read henry wallace his former vice president said of him

now wallace speaking he doesn't know any man and no man knows him even his own family doesn't know anything about him now quoting roosevelt i am like a cat he said about himself i make a stroke and then i relax pike says quote loved and respected as a leader seemingly happiest in the company of women he was an enigma detached enigmatic and ruthless while flying over kyro roosevelt glanced out the window and said ah my friend the sphinx end quote former time editor-in-chief headley donovan who had met like seven presidents personally knew roosevelt was roosevelt was the first of the presidents that he knew and he then wrote a book about all these presidents and in it he said about roosevelt quote f dr could brilliantly oversimplify his best remembered single statement the only thing

we have to fear is fear itself is patently absurd and was probably excellent tonic for a country whose banking system had collapsed but in the early and middle stages of decision making before it was time to simplify and oversimplify roosevelt could be impenetrable rexford tugwell one of the early new deal brain trusters wrote now quoting tugwell no one could tell what he was thinking to say nothing of what he was feeling donovan continues he clearly relished being hard to figure out he liked secrets and had a few he was often devious for good reason but could also be devious just for the fun of it general douglas macarthur who despised him said roosevelt quoting macarthur now would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well donovan

continues quote this was considerable slander but f dr unquestionably did enjoy manipulation and maneuver for their own sake all part of the great game of politics and power but then he says he was also a man of deep convictions and dedication and unquenchable idealism he was firm and serene in his religious faith and had a decent sense of privacy about it it is impossible to imagine him at a congressional prayer breakfast he was impatient with the abstract or theoretical in no sense profound but spacious in vision for america and ultimately all the nations he believed if not in the perfect ability of man in a rather spectacular improvement in man's behavior worldwide end quote this impenetrability of roosevelt's though has kind of worked against

him in terms of his place in history because it leaves a lot of room for people to speculate about his motives and oftentimes it gets wrapped up with people's politics ideologies worldviews and even conspiracy theories roosevelt's everything from a well-meaning moral crusader desperately trying to avoid war with japan while still getting them to change their evil ways to on the very far side of the other spectrum often conspiracy land roosevelt is a man who engineers this war years in advance organizes it pushes the japanese into it knows about it in advance and then luckily orders the carriers out of pearl harbor just in time so they don't get hurt because he's also where the carriers are going to be you know the new battleships in the modern age which of course

you know nobody quite knew yet but nonetheless runs the gamut so who is this franklin roosevelt guy right sneaky conniving but let's remember he was elected originally way back in 1932 to deal with the depression the things he did to deal with the depression were really effective at the time at least in making people feel like somebody was finally doing something he left behind a lot of legacies that people in the united states argue over everything from you know a bunch of different government departments to things like social security roosevelt looks to me like one of those people who has the reality distortion field ability that was something steve jobs was supposed to have to supposedly a guy like jobs or maybe

roosevelt could convince you that a job that was really hard to imagine anybody doing anything about was totally possible and we're on the way maybe elon musk has that ability to but uh i i read that andy herzfeld was the one who said that the reality distortion field was a combination of charm bravado charisma hyperbole marketing appeasement and persistence and that really sounds like a pretty good description of roosevelt to me i always thought one of the best examples of the fact that roosevelt possessed this ability was that while never not admitting and being open about the information he sort of made the country just forget that he was paralyzed below the waist he got polio as an adult he was confined to a wheelchair he didn't see pictures of that the

pictures usually show him at a lectern or seated with other world leaders fully appearing completely able body he didn't but he didn't hide it really i mean uh there was talk of it everybody knew but he could just make you forget nowadays it would be something that was celebrated and exalted and used as an example right of the possibilities don't let anything hold you back the president himself or herself uses a wheelchair right but i mean that's just roosevelt was an interesting had an interesting sort of a Steve jobs ish is not a bad description of him but if he didn't like his policies the reality distortion field almost seems nefarious doesn't it now some of the people who thought roosevelt most nefarious are the people who wanted to see the united states

stay clear of this new world war that had broken out in europe you know by 1940 as we said you have the german army blowing through france and occupying western europe and by the way the story is coming out from that what a harsh occupation how horrible it is is something that moves public opinion yet again it should be pointed out because it probably played into it in a major way that 1940 is a presidential election year in the united states and roosevelt is running for an unprecedented third term i read one history that put it this way when they said that roosevelt and his republican opponent were vying to outdo each other with their promises that they would keep the country out of the european war in other words there was no opponent running that said

that they would get them in the war it was a competition to see who could be most passionate about saying they would stay out of it and when republican hopeful wendell wilkie charges that the president is secretly trying to get the us into the war or doing things that would get the us into the war roosevelt issues a denial and then it becomes one of these big planks they put it in the democratic party platform and roosevelt on the stumps as it over and over again i mean this is from a campaign speech not long before the election given in october 1940 where roosevelt references all the other times that he said it he says quote i have said this before but i shall say it again and again and again your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars and quote

now can you write that off as a campaign promise if he breaks it is this like you know i won't raise your taxes oh well i guess i have to after he wins there's a problem with this in the american system too because there's precious few ways for the public to weigh in on foreign policy in the country um the presidents or people who want to be the presidents often make promises about foreign policy if they break those promises what does that mean for the ability of the population to influence the country's foreign policy for example some of the people most upset with where roosevelt is going are people that think that they can see through his lies they see them as lies right when he says i'm not trying to get the country into war they're looking at what's

actually happening and roosevelt is mimicking many of the same things that democratic president woodrow wilson did the year before the u.s got into the first world war wilson also promising by the way that he won't get our boys you know to give their blood in a european war what is it five months after he wins the election they're there and roosevelt won't be the last president in the 20th century to do it there was a very interesting argument though that i read by historian cambell craig and i hope i i get it right the spirit of it anyway but he was talking about american historian charles austin beard who had his reputation destroyed when after the second world war he wrote a book that treated roosevelt a little like a criminal in a docket and he was the

prosecuting attorney and what he was trying to prove was that roosevelt was involved in a conspiracy to take the country into the european war against the will of the country and craig had a very interesting argument he said that some historians are mad at charles austin beard for saying that there was a conspiracy and craig says but there are conspiracies in the u.s government all the time and he lists them he says the conspiracy is not the problem and the reason that beard was discredited beard was discredited because roosevelt turned out to have done what the american people afterwards decided they approved of so maybe you could compare him to the way we talked about churchel in the era where churchel was out of power his bellicose nature was out of touch with

the tenor of those times could roosevelt be said to be more far-seeing than the american public they may 95 of them say they don't want to get involved in this european war but maybe roosevelt knows better and if i read camo craig correctly he's saying that the public opinion polls after the war and the approval rating the people had for that and the fact that a guy who didn't want to be in that war charles austin beard would have the public turn on him because it's such an unpopular attitude maybe the argument is fdr was right sometimes you have to lead from the front right and if the american public aren't ready yet i'm ahead of the curve they will agree with me when we get there although as we said it was an election year and if you want to read the polls a certain

way you could argue that roosevelt was doing exactly what the polling data seemed to want him to do right you have an overwhelming majority that do not want to send our boys over there to fight but you also have an overwhelming majority that want to see britain and france prevail so if those are the parameters what sort of room for maneuver do you have well many of the same things woodrow wilson did in the first world war for example you can help the allies that's a bit of a problem when you're portraying yourself as a neutral country which is officially what the u.s was portraying itself in the first world war has to a neutral country and you get arguments again general marine corps general smeadly butler i think he's still the most decorated american

soldier could be wrong about that but i think so wrote a whole book small book but a whole book talking about how we were following the same pattern again and we're just going to run into the same kind of problems and that the people in power know this already charles austin beard himself eight years before the war predicted it would come from an incident or a provocation and then there you go well when you have german submarines torpedoing british merchant ships five seconds after they leave the eastern seaboard's ports maybe with some americans on them isn't that just setting up a provocation isn't that exactly like what happened in the first world war i think there's a life magazine photograph i think i remember showing the explosion of

a tanker or something heading for britain right off the us shore and you can see the lights of like new jersey's boardwalk or something in the distance at night you got to be crazy to think that that's not going to lead to something that sucks a country into the war what's more roosevelt's got an undeclared sort of war going and it's understandable why you would sending us destroyers out to stalk those german submarines right the neutral country but roosevelt could argue and a lot of americans would agree hey hey hey we can't have you know submarines torpedoing people so close to us an argument can be made that roosevelt was sort of following he said he was pushing it to the limits of the law but you can make an argument just like you can

that he wanted the country into war that he every step of the way was doing the next logical step in a progression and hoping it didn't go any farther certainly you can make a better argument for that in asia and the pacific roosevelt is quoted in a couple of my history books saying that he didn't want war in the pacific because he only has one navy and the implication is he's going to need it in the atlantic against the nazis but let's be honest with a guy like this that doesn't mean anything he's much more nuanced and layered than that some of the modern histories i've read on this have a very interesting viewpoint that i hadn't considered which shows you the blind spot and the kind of histories we used to read the more modern histories point out things from the

other side that make clear things that we've forgotten and one of them is that debating whether or not roosevelt wanted a war against japan and the pacific ignores the fact that he already has one it just doesn't involve us troops authors like franco david macri and others essentially refer to the war in china as a proxy war not just for the united states but for great britain who's doing much of the same stuff and the soviet union all of whom have an interest in keeping japan bogged down so all of them are at one time or another providing arms resources supplies some of the histories make a case that this becomes a wonderful thing that japanese commanders who've been promising great victories and are failing can blame things on and you do once again see

the similarities in the vietnam war era where all of a sudden it all became about the ho chi men trail and if we can just shut down that network of uh resupply roads uh down the outside powers like china and the soviet union who are supplying the north vietnamese won't be able to get their stuff to them and will win in this case the japanese become obsessed with shutting off the many i mean leaking like a sieve because it's about the geographical size of the us as we said the many resupply points that the chinese have they have the soviets in the north the british are leaking stuff over from hong kong the bermorow there's stuff coming over from uh french indochina and the us is uh in fits and starts doing stuff too and they sell at below cost all kinds of things at one point

so the soviets will deliver like 800 planes and the advisors to teach you how to fly them if you are the japanese and you need a nice victory in china to free up you know this this is a food eating contest and the japanese sat down to a giant plate of pancakes and they're halfway through the pancakes now and they're starting to realize holy cow i'm not going to make it through this meanwhile other people are secretly the soviet union great britain the united states piling more pancakes on the table when you're not looking and every time you turn around there's more pancakes you're already almost full by 1939 the japanese want out of china it's like they're addicted to it but they got too much there was an old comic book episode

once about that that you know you're going to steal superman's power and you want it but then you couldn't you couldn't handle it all and you just overdosed on it well the japanese are looking to figure out a way to have their cake and eat it too in china what that means is how do we get out but leave it in a circumstances where we control it right puppet governments things like that they want to replicate what they did in manchuria you know now called manchukuo because it's a japanese puppet state just like korea is a lot harder to do that in a place the size of china especially when you haven't defeated china yet and in 1939 the chinese win a couple of battles against the japanese boom they weren't ready for that what's more the japanese who always amongst the army had a huge

contingent of officers that really wanted to attack the soviet union got their wish unfortunately and a couple of things that were called incidents or clashes happened between the red army and the japanese army up there the guantung army and the japanese got their nose severely bloodied 17 000 casualties in one of these led to some reforms in the japanese army by the way but also blunted the enthusiasm that had been running in japanese leadership circles for a crusade against the soviet union which also turned japanese eyes into other directions where things might be gained at less of a cost this is what's known by the way as the north south debate during this time period in japanese politics do we go north against the soviet union do we go south against those

possessions they're not so well defended now by the colonial masters the japanese sources invariably focus on two things that we in the west don't focus on as much uh china and communism saburu iyanaga years ago was pointing out you know keep your eye on the prize the japanese are this is all about china to them all these other things that happen including the war with the united states and all of this is an attempt to figure out how to solve their china war situation to their satisfaction and communism is the other thing that they focus on inordinately and we in the west forget that too that it's fair i think to call japan the most fervently large anti-communist country in the world during this time period and that's really saying something in the age

where nazi germany exists but the japanese hate communism and they portray and they tell themselves and they use it in propaganda with their public and maybe there's even some truth to it that this war in china is in large part of war against communism they have their own version of what the west will have 10 or 20 years after this period where the west will be worried about the domino effect where communism spreads one country to another you know like dominoes the japanese had their same sort of an attitude here that's going to move through china and then it's going to come to japan so they're going to stop it over there before it comes over to the homeland meanwhile they're telling themselves that they're paying all this money sacrificing all these lives in an effort

to keep and protect the chinese people who haven't fallen under communism sway free and even to roll back communism and free chinese people who are the slaves of the bolshevik and leninist thinkers you go talk to a japanese parent who's lost a son in that fighting you're likely to hear some sort of rationale like that after all isn't that what you would like to think your son died for other people's freedoms it's a pretty high-minded cause a lot of people's sons on all sides and a lot of wars have died for things like that now china of course is going to become as we said like an intervention the big sticking point that it's hard to see anyone overcoming because the japanese in their minds have to get some sort of deal in china just like the u.s had to get some sort of deal in

vietnam where it gets the boxes ticked off that it needs to get so it can leave in japan's case those boxes really are control of china's resources this is not something that the western powers are prepared to let them have so how do you how do you get around that well we had said that japan was basically being confronted with an intervention by the anglo-american powers they pull if you want to look at it this way something more like a kobayashi maru from star trek you know like a third way you didn't know i had a third option right give up the drugs or we're going to cut off your money so you can't buy drugs well maybe i have friends after the germans blow through western europe in 1940 right around the same time the japanese sign an alliance with them it's called

the tripartite pact i think it was late september 1940 creates something called the axis and the axis powers because italy will join in some other fascist leaning countries smaller countries to be named later this is a unification of the outside countries in terms of the club all these countries want some sort of autarky self-sufficiency and unfortunately for all of them none of them have oil when romania leans that way that'll help a little but the japanese joining the axis powers is one of the fatal missteps and terrible moves that leads to tragedy for everyone in asia and it's often pointed out that it should have been avoided had you had a different kind of government with a different system of making decisions you might have avoided the way things went because

if you actually look at what people felt like including the emperor there were tons of people in the japanese power structure that wanted nothing to do with a conflict with the united states and britain avoid that at all costs so how do you end up there well there's a ton of missteps and miscommunication and misinterpretation and mistranslations how about the misread that happens when the japanese foreign minister who signs this deal this axis agreement how about his misread of how the united states would react this guy's name by the way is matsuoka and he is prominently portrayed in all the history books his importance and influence is sometimes debated but this is a guy who on his resume essentially calls himself the american expert he graduated

from the university of oregon he worked in the united states then goes back to japan and he's the guy who thinks signing an agreement with nazi germany is going to help give you leverage against the united states that that's how they're going to react japan was hoping for someone who would even up the scales a little bit in terms of its negotiating power against the west i mean when you read what they were hoping for including what the prime minister was hoping for they felt like they needed somebody on their side otherwise you couldn't negotiate with the americans from any sort of position of parity much less strength and i think you kind of have to call it about 50 percent effective when examining the results because it kind of did scare the americans and get

their attention and force a response the 50 percent of the deal though that was not successful is it wasn't the response the japanese were thinking they were going to get it didn't make the americans back off and think maybe they'd better be more cautious here because otherwise maybe we'll be fighting the luft wafa in the pacific and the wehrmacht will be defending some of these japanese defense perimeter islands and well i mean the japanese were certainly hoping that that might be the case and if you look at some of the promises the nazis were making to the japanese when trying to convince them to sign this agreement which they tried to do the year before apparently too they were sort of hinting that that's how it would be right i mean if you get into a war with the

united states we'll be right there unfortunately for the japanese that's a worst case scenario for the americans too and a situation that maybe they could have looked the other way for a while and focused on europe when it was just japan which had a limited amount of ability to really threaten the united states looked a lot more like something that had to be dealt with right away when it's the eastern wing of the axis alliance and the tentacles are now stretching out over the pacific and the us is facing a war on both fronts you don't walk away with your tail between your legs when that's the situation you take it with an amount of deadly seriousness the amount of diplomatic flexibility the japanese are gonna have after signing this agreement with the nazis is severely

limited compared to what it was before they they weren't ready for this fact that they were going to be lumped in now with people who had some of the worst press you can get in the western democracies i mean the japanese pr uh wasn't good already we talked about the life magazine photos of the babies being bombed in china and all these kinds of things and the rape and nan king well now you hook yourselves up in the minds of the american public with people who are diametrically opposed to the western values that are trumpeted and celebrated you know you can flip a coin who's more opposed the stalinists in the soviet union or the nazis in germany nonetheless i mean these people are book burners they persecute minorities and have government sanctioned pogroms like crystal

knocks they're against freedom of thought freedom of speech freedom of religion they don't have any due process they don't believe in equality under the law they have a harsh occupation they believe in collective punishment they i mean the list goes on and on and the japanese have now thrown in their lot in the eyes of the americans with that crowd how much less willing to come to sort of an accommodation with the imperial japanese government are the american people going to be now and how on earth did a guy who graduated from the university of oregon and worked in the united states get that one so wrong to be fair another aspect of this that we in the west don't always think about is the fact that the way the second world war looks to us is not necessarily the way

it looked to a bunch of the rest of the world especially places like asia in the west we see this as good versus evil in asia in a lot of these countries that were under colonial rule at this time it's a lot more questionable if it's a good guy bad guy thing it might be two bad guys from their point of view historian john toland in a book that was written way back in 1970 but still has some value inside it despite being outdated in other respects including what we know about the emperor but i mean he has a whole part admittedly trying to look at this from the asian perspective that points out that you know if you don't see the western democracies is all that good and a lot of asia had bought into the promises the high-minded sentiments from the first world war

about self-determination and all these things that we fight for and people getting to have you know their own states and i mean all that stuff was kind of believed in as several of the freedom fighters in these countries had pointed out a lot of the locals had died for those causes only to find out after the war that it didn't apply to them it was a racial thing and even in this conflict there's going to be exceptions for colonial peoples when the high-minded sentiments are trotted out again is the reason why we fight in this case as tolan points out there were a lot of people in countries in asia who were darn happy to see anybody punching their colonial masters in the face even if they didn't like those people so much if you wanted to look at this

as a strategic war gamer you know the way i like to do these things and you try to figure out if you're japan how you ever win i mean the victory conditions for japan i mean only italy of the major players seems harder to me but they hook their wagon to nazi germany japan's a long way away from anybody the only way they can win is to roll like a double zero on the percentile dice but a double zero is this weird possibility that the you know what they're calling the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere that that actually works even though a lot of the cynical people behind it you know don't even want it to work but in in this eye imagine if you could somehow free asia and be sort of the boss people of it well all of a sudden you open up all kinds of possibilities

that aren't there otherwise but this is why throughout this situation even when the japanese are undercutting this message of asia for the asians by raping and pillaging and doing all kinds of horrible things to other asians the idea has a lot of appeal and sometimes you will run into quotes from famous people uh ghandi is one of the mohondis ghandi that make him look like a nazi sympathizer you know it's taken out of context the context that needs to be added back for to make some sense is this idea that oh yeah the nazis are bad but we didn't see the colonial oppressor as all that great either and the really bad guy was doing something that weakened our local bad guy and that was a good you know the enemy of my enemy is my friend the point is is that there are other

ways to look at this and if you're trying to look at it from a grand strategy point of view it's like what was always said about the great mistake and the inability of the nazis to capitalize on some of these peoples that they took over eventually when war would break out in the soviet union because they could have come in there as liberators and they were welcomed by the locals as liberators they could have been the great freers of the people under communist domination but because of their racial theories and their harshness and whatnot they ended up turning a lot of those people against them the japanese didn't have those theories theoretically standing in the way they could they could have freed asia and what would that have allowed them to do their problem of course

is that they sort of wanted to take asia while freeing it burn down the village in order to save it keep china while somehow getting rid of the responsibility of fighting in it and policing it and expand into other territories even though we are totally tied down in china once again it boggles the mind looking at it from the perspective of somebody sitting on the sidelines now but japan obviously has its hands full and yet the real debate for it in 1940 is uh can we get something else and as we said all of a sudden the soviet union seems like a little bit too steep of a hill to climb right now so after they ally with the nazis are really right around the same time they're able to arm twist is a good way to put it lean on is another way the puppet french

government that the germans have put into place after they conquered france and move militarily into what's now northern vietnam a piece of french indochina this is kind of the spark that starts the dynamic that leads now kind of very clearly and straightforwardly to war it's a chicken and an egg thing because you will get the japanese folk who will say two things one this is just an attempt to shut down another one of these leaky areas where support is coming in for the chinese and everybody wants us to wind up this war in china well we can't do that if these supplies keep coming in right we're just trying to do what you want us to do the other thing though is that if they're going to have their raw materials cut off they're looking for ways to

supplement that and one of the ways is to take the ones that are nearby and unlike you know anything that might be up in the soviet union these are hardly well defended at all and simply by using bullying diplomacy the japanese occupy the northern part of french indochina the reaction on the u.s and britain and the netherlands part is to ratchet up the sanctions now the next big thing that happens that really influences this story is that just about a little bit over a year from when the world is turned upside down and the germans take france and western europe the germans turn the world upside down again and in an even more shocking fashion in june 1941 the axis powers in europe launch a surprise attack against the soviet union to say that sounds ridiculous

because when you're launching an attack that is several times the size of napoleon's invasion of russia in the early 1800s with the grand army i think it was 500 000 guys in the grand army multiple nations several times that and on a front that stretches from like the width of a continent how the hell does that stay secret well there were plenty of warnings but one way or another it had the same effect as a surprise attack and initially and very quickly the wehrmacht especially but the axis armies in general appear to be having the same kind of success that the germans had blowing through france the year before again and they are surrounding and annihilating not red army units but red armies and once again the rest of the world

is looking on in shock and trying to reassess what the heck this means this is the last trend of japanese foreign policy we have to weave into this story because if you're a conservatively oriented person like i am and like many of the japanese leaders were too they're looking just like i would be looking to thinking they have their hands full with china yet there's this impetus to not miss the bus as one of the sayings of the time where don't miss the bus a golden opportunity is the way another person put it that these changes in the global balance of power offer there's a decent case to be made the japanese foreign policy since they rejoin the rest of the world in the latter part of the 19th century has always had a keen eye for opportunity i mean you never do any better than

they did in the first world war that they gained so much for almost nothing but they were very opportunistic they were allied with the british and the allies remember and they gained mightily but they're trying to figure out what the opportunistic play is here and they have a couple of different competing things going on competing thing number one we already mentioned there's quite a few people in the japanese power structure that want no trouble at all with britain and the united states traditionally it's the navy that is most credited and church will often you know would almost sympathetically say the navy didn't want this well the navy didn't want it because the navy was going to have to be the one fighting it and they knew that the british and the american

fleets were the two largest fleets in the world and you'd be fighting them combined in a war the army could puff out its chest and make all sorts of brave statements all it wanted to they weren't going to be handling a lot of the shooting action the navy was but there's also the two other elements that we mentioned earlier that need to be pointed out are still in play here and it's crazy the first one is the mid-level military officers are still having an impact these kernels and people of these sorts of rank who don't have any of the responsibility you know of having to live with the ramifications of the decisions they push they can just in an aggressive and almost pugnacious manner aggressively push forward with their

policies and for some reason their superiors tend to be a little bit lenient or lax or tend to defer it puts a lot of pressure though towards aggressive stances that shouldn't otherwise be there the other thing of course that's exerting an influence in that direction and it must play into the head of anybody that thinks wait a minute we need to back down now this is going in a very negative direction is the fact that recent japanese history demonstrates that you're likely to get somebody killing you if you try and move like that didn't we say it was only a few years before some historians were describing the japanese government as a government by assassination that's still a problem and if you're too well let's just say non-super patriot you could find

yourself shot or your head cut or any number of other things that were happening during this period and there weren't certainly lots of threats and being anything other than a super patriot at this time period is to open yourself up to suspicion and maybe imprisonment so let's remember the climate these people are operating in but even the prime minister of japan during this time period you know he aggressively sometimes makes public statements but he does not want a war with britain and the united states and france and the emperor apparently doesn't want that either so how do you get it again well this golden opportunity this don't miss the bus moment that this change in the global situation seems to have influenced now that the wehrmacht is cutting through the western

regions of the soviet union is to maybe take the rest of french indochina and start making a few public statements to the effect that you know maybe some deal is going to have to be reached for the supplies we need or we might have to you know maybe move south some more and so right around the time the germans attack the soviet union the japanese again not quite bloodlessly but mostly bloodlessly sort of move into the rest of french indochina laos cambodia vietnam and this is the line in the sand for places like the united states not just because they had been trying to get the japanese to move in the other direction and it's like a slap in the face when they go the opposite way but also because as more modern historians have pointed out the raw materials that they're

actually getting their hands on in this area are raw materials that places like the us need as well so now it's not just about cutting japan off it's about japan cutting the united states off from things they need this is a heavy duty rubber area for example so this is when the serious sanctions start and it's funny because the negotiating position originally starts somewhere in the area of you need to get out of french indochina which is something that's kind of possible but eventually it will move into the area of no you need to tell us when you're getting out of china entirely and it's got to be relatively soon this sounds like a nuanced position but it's pretty easy to explain once again if you go back to our vietnam war analogy and imagine the together the soviet union

and china during that period the two other powers that might be considered to be great powers that could counterbalance us strength if they had said to the united states in 1967 you know when the vietnam war is going i mean it's a long long slog towards even defeat at that point if they'd said listen you got to get out of here give us a timetable for when you're getting out and the timetable can't be like forever maybe a year right if the united states leaves vietnam in 1968 it's the same as saying you're giving up and losing the war because the war is far from over the american position on china is we need a timetable for withdrawal and it's got to be soon doesn't have to be in five minutes we understand the practical limitations but it's got to be soon

it's it may be designed to be too soon for the japanese to do anything that they would consider to be winning and then go home this is the intervention right get out of china or we're going to cut off your ability to do what you're doing anymore this is the fuse being lit now you know winston churchell i like to quote churchell for this story because he's a participant in the story he has his own way of viewing things and he's he's not unbiased by any stretch of the imagination but he's interesting on the japanese because he kind of likes the japanese and he admires their martial culture and when churchells was sort of in his formative stages the british and the japanese were allies also as a colonialist himself

as a empire guy himself he can understand the desire and the feel uh the colonies are not inherently an evil thing when he talks about the japanese and of course he dictated or um recorded into a machine these histories that he wrote about the conflict so they sound like him they sound like churchell talking to you but he sort of encapsulates what happens here in his own way uh with a little sympathy for the japanese winston churchell writes quote the drastic application of economic sanctions in july 1941 brought to a head the internal crisis in japanese politics conservative elements were shocked and the moderate leaders scared the domestic prestige of the japanese army is a constitutional factor in shaping japanese policy was already involved

hitherto the navy had exerted its restraining force but the embargoes which the united states britain and holland had enforced cut off from japan all supplies of oil on which the navy and indeed the whole war power of japan depended the japanese navy was at once forced to live on its oil reserves and at the outbreak of the pacific war had in fact consumed four out of eighteen months supply it was evident that this was a stranglehold and that the choice before them was either for japan to reach an agreement with the united states or go to war the american requirements involved japanese withdrawal not only from their new aggression in indochina but from china itself where they had already been fighting at heavy expense for so long

this was he writes a rightful but a hard demand in these circumstances the navy associated itself with the army in the policy of war if an acceptable diplomatic agreement could not be obtained end quote he puts forward the old idea by the way that the navy doesn't want the war but because of the sanctions and the cutting off of fuel supplies slowly but surely well maybe not even that slowly the navy begins to move toward the army position on these things a more hard line anti anglo-american position one admiral points out to the government that the fleet is burning 400 tons of oil an hour the overall military need is something like 12 000 tons a day another official or admiral it's disputed is supposed to have told the government

that this is like a patient who's going to die without surgery now he still may die even with the surgery but if you don't give him the surgery his death is certain so in other words now showing the position that some of the japanese now think they find themselves in one of certain death unless risky and still you know potentially fatal countermeasures to taken now i should point out that while some people say and uh frances pike is pretty vociferous that every one of these roosevelt people knew that once you put oil uh on the chopping block that this basically meant the japanese were going to go to war but in his um a modern history of japan historian james mclean says that secretary of state cordell hull didn't see it that way he really thought you could get

the japanese to see reason through something like this in other words if true this was the peaceful attempt right the between the two world wars attitude sort of attempt to get another country to do the right thing and not just the right thing for you but in the long run the right thing for them mclean says quote as the situation in china worsened after 1937 secretary of state hull became the primary proponent of waging an economic cold war against japan in his view japan's reliance on the american market for strategic goods made the smaller nation particularly vulnerable to economic sanctions and the systematic application of ever greater amounts of pressure would at some point he believed bring the japanese to their senses the secretary of state realized

that he had to be careful about his calibrations he did not wish to push japan into a shooting war with the united states but he did mean to convince the country's leaders about the folly of playing a high stakes game in which the united states could continually up the economic ante at some point hull hoped moderates would return to power in tokyo japan would fold its hand and peace would be possible end quote this is why we had brought up though the history of japan from before this era to sort of set up the context and let's just call it the national psyche of japan during this time period and of course i don't pretend to know about it it's something that everybody talks about about the fact that the japanese have what did we call it a rain man like laundry list of grievances

places where they think they've been shafted by the rest of the international community where they feel like they've been treated second class and that some of this is racially oriented and in the minds of a lot of those people this just looks like the biggest baddest example of the same thing over again what are you supposed to do about that and certainly asking the japanese to give up more than in any of these previous cases because this war in china has already cost something like a hundred thousand japanese lives untold amounts of money effort the intense work of a generation of japanese statesmen what's the likelihood in reality of japan choosing anything other than war in this situation that's why so many people have suggested that it's

an ultimatum by the time the united states is talking about get out of china or we're cutting off your raw materials and oil the japanese certainly saw it that way um history marius b jensen though was interesting he pointed out that it's not true and it's not true because all of the ideas that made this look like an ultimatum were part of a of a japanese construct they created this artificial time deadline that put them behind the eight ball if you ignore the time deadline you could have months maybe even longer to negotiate but because you want to keep the option of going to war open there's as much of an artificial deadline limiting the time negotiators have to solve this problem some other way as they had in the first world war and the first

world war is all about you know mobilization timetables and war plans that required precise you know troop movements and people getting on schedule to places otherwise the whole war could go down so you know that limited the time people had to do anything other than carry out the plans in this conflict it's the fact that the japanese fleet is burning 400 tons of oil an hour and the fleet isn't the only part of the japanese military or the larger japanese society that needs fuel it's worse than that though and it's easy to forget francis pike describes something that sounds benign you know we can all understand the oil question but what about the the financial squeezing that's involved here and what does that mean he writes quote on the evening

of 25th july 1941 roosevelt signed executive order number 8832 which subjected all of japanese monetary assets held in the united states to control by license the white house press release stated that quote this measure in effect brings all financial and import and export trade transactions in which japanese interests are involved under the control of the government and imposes criminal penalties for violation of the order end quote the order pike writes extended to japanese colonies including manchukuo and china to protect them from looting by japan's puppet government installed in nan king all assets owned 25 percent or more by japanese interests were frozen when wall street opened for business on monday 28th july the foreign exchange market for yen the

japanese currency simply disappeared japanese dollar bonds crashed to 20 to 30 of their par value the yokohama silk exchange closed the new york commodity exchange suspended silk futures in effect the entire japanese international payment system seized up japan's gold held in america became immovable and unusable in south america modest amounts of gold and foreign exchange were similarly immobilized by governments that followed roosevelt's lead cargoes destined for america remain stuck on japanese wards when great britain and holland followed america's lead the yen could only be used and traded within japan's own empire end quote another way to put that is catastrophic the japanese are also well aware that this imbalance between the united

states and japan is growing every day not just because japan's getting weaker every day but because the us is getting stronger every day in 1940 the us essentially starts its rearmament efforts and starts gearing up for war initiates the first peacetime draft in the country's history begins tripling budgets and spending all kinds of money that just the year before congress would have laughed at the idea of appropriating you know with the germans taking over western europe and being so dominant has a way of shocking congress sometimes into making up for lost time the american system throughout most of its history just for clarification purposes has been one that's been somewhat suspicious of standing armies and the lesson that the people who designed the constitutional

framework of the us believed that standing armies stood in opposition to long-term liberty and so while the us navy has always been something that's um been paid attention to obviously when you have two giant moats surrounding your hemisphere makes sense to pay attention to something that you have to spend some time in advance building you can't just say oh we have a war let's build a navy usually you don't have the navy in time to use if that's the case whereas armies in the old say roman legion style of the republic you can sort of build from a hardcore of veterans and that's what the us military the army was traditionally like this these long service professionals but not very many of them that whenever war was going to happen all of a sudden you found yourself with all sorts of

volunteers and davie crocket types and rough riders and maybe even some french pirates from time to time whatever you needed to get the job done there are always enough americans looking for a little action that you could raise enough troops without any sort of draft or whatever and of course when the war was over they all went home and liberty is safe it should be pointed out that even though the united states' industrial capability had been hinted at in the first world war the us was still gearing up by the time the war ended and it was a us that was nowhere near as industrialized as the second world war us was when hitler and his you know staff people were given briefings on what this is a famous story by the way we're

given briefings on the industrial capabilities of the us you know if and when it ramped up the numbers that they were given turned out to be low but they laughed at them figuring they were fabrications so when you put yourself in the other side shoes and you say you know why the heck did they think they could pull off anything like this let's remember that they didn't quite understand and maybe even americans didn't either the capabilities of the united states once fully mobilized for war and 1940 is the year the mobilization begins in earnest and it's a catch-up effort because the us is very far behind the powers that have been at war now for years in the case of japan remember this chinese incident started in 1937 the other chinese

affairs started in 1931 i mean their troops had been on the ground fighting for a long time and they've developed a lot of practical experience the us army is a green force if there ever was one that's not to say that the us doesn't have some advantages in its back pocket take for example the fact that in many cases the us is reading the japanese secret messages they continually despite the japanese belief that this is impossible they continually break japanese codes from you know the 1930s all the way into the war years they don't always have all the codes broken so it's hard to understand why if they knew about a why didn't they know about b but for example they're reading a lot of the diplomatic codes during this period so while the japanese

are negotiating with the americans the americans are often able to read the messages the japanese send to each other and the ones they send over to the germans and kind of gives you a little bit of an advantage in the negotiations doesn't it by the summer of 1941 negotiations are not going well at all positions seem to be hardened and you begin to see this dynamic that we talked about earlier this sliding towards war i always think about it like a car accident i once had on a sheet of ice in colorado i was parked i released the emergency brake and i watched my car just slowly slide down hill picking up speed as it went until it smashed into another parked car i watched it in slow motion but i could do nothing to stop it i was powerless and in some of the histories that's

the way it looks like even the japanese leadership feel in this situation right there's there's not many raw raw people about the possibility of doing this and you wonder to yourself if there's such a sense of gloom and foreboding why on earth aren't they stopping it it's one of those questions that always comes into play about the emperor we mentioned it earlier the emperor supposedly has the power to stop a war like this before it starts i mean he stopped the war eventually if he can do it then why can't he stop it before it starts these were questions after the war that he was put to in this case the guy who's the prime minister's perhaps the next best person to look at and say why didn't you do more well at this time period all of a sudden he decides to and it's a little bit

like trying to atone for past sins he's an interesting character who gets a lot of criticism he's a prince his last name is kanoe and he was the prime minister twice earlier on he's this saber rattling pro-nazi guy as um historian herbert p bick says you know quote after the manchurian incident kanoe had been vociferously anti anglo-american and pro-german on january 21st 1941 he declared firmly before a secret session of the diet that quote germany will win end quote now he was just as sure that germany would lose and also sure that the senior officers of both services could not promise a japanese victory end quote this guy all of a sudden seems to have like a crisis of confidence and this is what brings the human element back into the story

if you see the slow motion car crash happening and it's going to kill lots of innocent people you know and you're the prime minister and you have half of a soul here what would you try to do japanese historian arihota describes a conversation he had with another sort of member of the aristocracy supposedly the only kind of people he could show his true self to and he creates one of these figures where you kind of feel bad for the guy even though a lot of this is sort of his fault kanoe is looking for a way out of this mess and he thinks if he can have a one-on-one conversation with president roosevelt maybe they can solve this maybe they can stop the cars slowly sliding into the other park vehicles right can you avoid disaster can you repair the damage you caused

and by the way she's talking about several of these japanese aristocracy people so when i give you some names that's who they are she writes quote at that time sayonji was preoccupied with helping kanoe arrange a meeting with roosevelt sayonji and many of his blue-blooded friends knew that a war with the west would be unwinnable matsumoto shigiharu the Yale educated journalist who was a direct descendant of another illustrious magie oligarch shared sayonji's concern quote i have made a big mistake on japan's relations with china and quote kanoe confided to him in a show of vulnerability displayed only to his social equals the prime minister went on to lament now quoting kanoe here the former you know pro fascist pro nazi guy quote i am so ashamed it

cannot face up to my ancestors i do not want to repeat such a mistake and i want to avoid war with the united states at all costs if at all possible i want to improve syno japanese relations as well i will give it my best shot so won't you help me end quote it's interesting to wonder about a guy in a position like that who sort of has a a moment where he wants to undo stuff maybe sees in a flash or maybe a slowly developing realization the ramifications of what's involved here hoda describes a japanese life insurance sale to its people right during this time period as a way to make money right because they're encircled by all the other powers and she brings it all home though when she talks about well let me have her explain it she writes

quote japan's leaders let the diplomatic crisis brew meanwhile its people remained ignorant of such developments in a sweeping national campaign to raise money citizens were urged to buy national life insurance in mid july it was announced with great fanfare that 50 million policies had been sold japan's population was about 73 million raising 10 billion yen almost 40 of the country's gross national product for 1941 most of that money she writes went to purchase government bonds to fund japan's war in china little did people know that their lives would become very cheap even worthless thanks to the government they so earnestly supported with their hard earned hard saved money end quote not just that but this is where the uber patriotism of the japanese

come into play here as we said earlier like everyone else only more so i still feel like there was a new york times article just before the war broke out it was quoted in john tolland's book the rising sun where someone over in asia is trying to explain to the american public you know not to downplay the japanese national spirit and what they're willing to do it's funny because if you think of many other countries in a situation where their government gets them in an unwinnable war where the costs will be everything to everyone they might overthrow that government rather than go to war the japanese people are different if you could have shown the leadership a crystal ball that only showed five years into the future they'd have given up anything you'd

have made any concessions in any sort of diplomatic deal but barring that they could count on the support of a people that takes patriotism to new levels literally the day before war breaks out there'll be a cable sent to the new york times by one of their people who is in japan and understands the situation there better his name is autotelicious and the cable says that the japanese people are refusing to believe that they're just about to get into a war with four nations simultaneously think about how many governments would be overthrown by their people if those governments got them in a situation that hopeless but the japanese are a different class of folk and this writer is trying to point out to the new york times readership exactly what things look like

from the other side and don't underestimate these people after saying that the japanese don't believe that they're about to face four nations simultaneously he continues by saying quote but their instinctive hopes are daily contradicted by the evidence of their senses they listen to alarming statements by the highest government officials about the greatest crisis japan has ever faced in her 2600 year history they are called to mass meetings to hear denunciations of the enemy and they read a steady war clamor in the press they see air shelters and water reservoirs being built everywhere in preparation for air raids they are being drilled in air raid defense especially in fighting fires the greatest dread of japanese cities finally they see taxes and

prices rising they know that all these things are not done for fun and that war real war which only a short time ago seemed so very far away is rapidly stretching out its fiery arms towards nippon land of the gods the cable continues quote the people do not want war but neither do they want to give up the fruits of the war that they have been fighting which has cost them such a lot of blood and treasure they have been told that this war is a war of self-defense to obtain elbow room for the japanese people crowded into a few small islands with few national resources and to liberate 1000 million of oriental peoples from exploitation by the white races it would be a great mistake the cable continues to assume that the japanese are so war weary that they would be reluctant to

fight if war really came to their land or that their war potential is as small or as straightened as the outward picture might suggest as members of a divine family state in which patriotism and religion merge they not merely say my country right or wrong but they're convinced with all the fervor of religious faith that their country is right whatever mistakes and tactics individual statesmen may take end quote by the way it's this fervor something that's sometimes wrapped up into something the japanese call the yamato spirit that those optimists who are hoping for a positive outcome in any conflict with the west are sort of basing their hopes on right um if you look at 20th century history by the way there is a lot of places that have tried to overcome industrial

and material imbalances by saying things like well we're tougher or our fighting spirits better or what have you and the japanese have no choice but to put their hopes in the same sort of rationales after all you know the government gets a meeting right around this time period where they're told that japanese industrial capabilities even with all the steroids of the chinese raw materials and everything else are 120th of the united states' abilities and by the way that number is a low projection as well so the prime minister prince kanoe puts his feelers forward and wants to have a meeting with roosevelt in an attempt to it sounds like you know use this intricate japanese governmental system in a way where he plays chess with the

military officials and uses the emperor the nuclear bomb piece on the chessboard to sort of checkmate this war that's coming in it he says he needs the agreement with roosevelt he needs to come back with something so he proposes this agreement with roosevelt roosevelt can't come right away because he's meeting secretly with winston churchell on some naval vessels in the atlantic and they'll come out of it with something that's known to history as the atlantic charter a template for the governance of the post-second world war world is the uh shorthand but there's a lot of high-minded woodrow wilson type stuff in it self-determination people should be able to elect their own governments a bunch of stuff that if you're the japanese looks like it's directed

squarely at you we celebrated in the united states and high school textbooks here and this is the kind of high-minded western democratic idealistic stuff that listen we we've lost a lot of human beings fighting wars for those kind of values but if you're the japanese and someone's saying that you know we're gonna go to war to shut down nations who won't let people choose their own governments well what does that say about china right they're not choosing the japanese to govern them so it sounds like it's directed at them what's more it looks very hypocritical especially to peoples in asia when the british are on board with this because the british are one of the great maybe the greatest of the colonial peoples and so are you saying that this atlantic charter

applies to you too are you signing on the dotted line and saying that you're going to let the people in india vote if they want to have the british government have the role the british government has in india in the 1930s for example and church will goes on to clarify like a month or two later no no no we're talking about a fascist and axis dominated lands here we're not talking about you know singapore once again though to the peoples in asia this looks a little like okay it's world war one all over again these high-minded sentiments don't apply to us and even though the japanese are raping china as they conquer it they may not look as bad to asians as they do to the people in the western democracies roosevelt is apparently open to the idea of a meeting with

the japanese prime minister when he hears about it but his advisors kind of shut it down the japanese have just rejected the latest diplomatic proposals and the um advisors say listen those need to be clarified before we meet now as we've just discussed though how long can you put this off when the fleet's burning 400 tons of fuel an hour right so this becomes another one of the problems and i'm not going to get into all the many things that happened in the last six months it's a great era to look at if you are a fan of diplomatic history the tit for tat things that go on but also the many mis assessments misinterpretations misreadings and the mistranslations that happen i mean in a famous case there'll be some christian missionaries in this story well meaning

folk who are trying to help everyone a verdict catastrophe here that the japanese think are working you know as a back channel for the u.s government but really aren't and this confuses matters for a while i mean it's one of these occasions where you wish you had what the soviet union and the united states had at one point the cold war the bat phone the red phone the hotlines you could just call up the emperor the head of the japanese government and talk to them directly with instant translation but you didn't have that but even if you did is there enough room on the core issues to compromise on any of this stuff one of the compromises that the prime minister had to make to even reach out to roosevelt was a deal apparently with the army

that if the diplomacy didn't work he'd set a timetable for war well the diplomacy didn't work apparently kanoye who bears a significant amount of responsibility for getting japan into this mess didn't want to sign off on you know the ramifications of it and have his john handcock on any war declarations or anything he didn't see any way out he said the emperor had basically gone over to the other side now um and so what's the point and uh resigns the emperor replaces him with one of the more hawkish figures out there the head of the war ministry former general in the guandong army a man whose nickname was the razor his name is hadeki tojo and now we have in place the entire leadership that you're normally dealing with when you talk about this conflict

tojo in the american war propaganda was simply turned into the figure that americans could hate in the same way that they had hitler and musilini he's the dictator of japan is the way it's portrayed and this continued for decades after the war because this became part of the propaganda that helped shield the emperor from war crimes charges and by the way several modern historians think the emperor might have been executed for war crimes had those charges been allowed to happen but if you say the emperor is a puppet with no power and you say he's a tool of the militarists and you say this general tojo is the head of the militarists well then you've just transferred all the emperor's wartime responsibility to this other figure and that's what the american

propaganda kind of did too tojo looks like your typical japanese hardliner general but not as far as some of those imperial wave faction people you can't really say he's like a hitler or musilini or a stallion because unlike them he has a boss a boss that it's likely that he saw as the living embodiment of a god that's a very different situation than someone like stallion or hitler for example it also means that he has to do what he's told there's a lot of theories on the emperor for all the reasons we've talked about but one of them is that this move to put this army general in control is not what most people think it is most people think this is a sign that they've given in they're going to go to war and if they're going to go to war they want a general in charge

but some people say that no this is actually the emperor's sneaky attempt to avoid war this is a minority point of view obviously but those who push this idea suggest that it's a a nixon goes to china kind of situation the old switcheroo the emperor appoints one of the really big noisy hawks to this position of prime minister he has all the respect of the other hawks and militarists and then you the emperor someone this person sees potentially as a living god orders this hawk to make peace somehow without war and then he'll cover your rear end with the other militarists right because he's got total credibility it's an interesting theory one thing that is for sure is that the emperor orders tojo to pursue diplomacy until the last

possible minute and he follows the emperor's orders but he's working with a deadline now and it's a deadline that changes a couple of times but eventually becomes a hard deadline where you have all over asia now preparations in place manner on the move shipping is being co-opted things are happening and preparations are underway unless something intervenes to stop now this momentum things are going to happen you know as will be said in the future automatically the inertia we've been talking about for a while now is becoming almost unstoppable and the final deadline now for some sort of diplomatic breakthrough is the end of november there's a lot of different interpretations about hideki tojo and the kind of guy he is

one thing you never read about him though is any sort of suggestions that he was insane and yet that's basically what winston churchill is saying that any japanese government that would allow their country to slip into a war with the anglo americans at this point is crazy suicidal is the way i think he puts it churchill writes you know right after the war quote it had seemed impossible that japan would court destruction by war with britain and the united states and probably russia in the end a declaration of war by japan could not be reconciled with reason i felt sure she would be ruined for a generation by such a plunge and this proved true but governments and peoples do not always take rational decisions sometimes they take mad decisions or one set of

people get control who compel all others to obey and aid them in folly i have not hesitated to record repeatedly he writes my disbelief that japan would go mad however sincerely we try to put ourselves in another person's position we cannot allow for processes of the human mind and imagination to which reason offers no key he sums up though by saying quote madness is however an affliction which in war carries with it the advantage of surprise end quote the word surprise is italicized in the original in order to get a little background on how any surprise might take place when you're talking about powers that are so far away from each other you got to go back to 1940 we're in 1941 late 1941 in this story go back to 1940 when as part of the demonstrations of resolve and the

public displays uh to sort of bolster diplomacy and what not the roosevelt administration did a couple of big moves one of them was to reactivate general douglas macarthur us general who was acting as field marshal of the philippine military i think at the time reactivate him in the philippines and let him sort of publicly start consolidating and preparing just in case sending a message to japan the other thing that was to demonstrate resolve and all that kind of stuff the roosevelt administration did was they took the pacific us pacific fleet which was normally based on the west coast of the united states and moved it to hawaii what is still a six hour jet plane ride towards asia from the u.s west coast based it in pearl harbor but you know one man's intimidation

move could be another man's opportunity but it takes a person who's almost a little bit crazy to see it that way sometimes that's what creative geniuses are sometimes it just requires somebody willing to gamble farther than most people are willing to go enter admiral is a ruku yamamoto into the story if the name's familiar he's famous and he's famous for both being a creative military genius and a crazy gambler if you met him in person you probably would not be very intimidated he stood about five foot three maybe five foot four was missing several major fingers from one hand and walked with a limp because an entire chunk of his leg had been torn off along with those fingers by the way in probably the most

famous naval battle in all japanese history the 1905 battle of sashima where the improbable almost near impossible happened when an asian fleet defeated a european fleet and i mean resoundingly the as we had talked about earlier japanese fleet destroyed the russian fleet and yamamoto was there as a young officer and badly wounded and almost lost his life that is one of the battles that will often be cited as an inspiration for yamamoto's idea here an idea that is so crazy and improbable and so much of a gamble that when he presents it to the other admirals you know on the big decision board they reject it and it's a sign of how brilliant he was and this was recognized by his peers that when he threatened to resign if they rejected it they changed their minds

they'd rather accept an idea they thought was crazy than lose the person who came up with it because they acknowledged what a creative military genius he is he didn't develop these plans by the way alone he had spent more than a year working with other notable people that are famous in this story but my favorite one of them is one historian described him as he's a military guy though but he's a ghandi-like figure who chainsmokes and leaves trails of ashes behind him seems like a you know a einstein slash archimedes slash sheldon cooper kind of figure doesn't bathe apparently or doesn't bathe very often locks himself in completely darkened rooms naked for inspiration and then when it comes writes things down really quickly on a pizza i mean he's this fascinating like wild

character who can come up with an idea that is so crazy that the other side definitely doesn't see it coming and is so unusual and unexpected that i find it hard to even blame them for not seeing it coming i've said about the 9-11 attacks before that even though there were warnings about them it just seems so improbable and seems so dwarfed by other potential bad things that you're also getting warnings about that seem much more likely that it's only with hindsight that you look back and go god why weren't we more vigilant why didn't we see this coming who would have seen a surprise attack on us territory that was coming from a power that was 4000 miles away remember this is an era before cruise missiles before even airplanes that could get you know

without a refueling stop from japan to a place like hawaii i don't think they could get all the way to certainly couldn't get to the west coast certainly couldn't go round trip so if you're in a place like hawaii how afraid are you that the japanese are going to strike you especially since you know you don't even have a war and the answer is not very afraid yama moto and friends are going to come up with an idea to win a war that he doesn't believe is winnable that's an interesting thing to task somebody with yama moto like a lot of these japanese leaders especially in the navy yama moto went to harvard for a little while i mean he has a famous line about you until you've seen the factories of detroit or the oil fields of texas you know

you don't know what you're talking about when you want to make war against a country like the us so famously uh is let's just call him extremely realistic like a lot of guys in the navy which is part of the reason the navy was more against fighting the anglo americans because as we said earlier they understand they're going to be doing most of the fighting historian aria hatha has him talking to another admiral and basically predicting the way the war is going to go yama moto tells admiral negano quote if i might add it is evident that a u.s japanese war is bound to be protracted the united states will not give up fighting as long as japan has the upper hand the war will last for several years in the meantime japan's resources will be depleted

battleships and weaponry will be damaged replenishing materials will be impossible japan will be impoverished he then famously concluded quote a war with so little chance of success should not be fought end quote but it was his job nonetheless to come up with a way to do it the plan has been i mean there's a lot of accounts it's famous some people you know say it's inspired by a famous samurai battle a long time ago some people say the battle of susheema that uh yama moto was at is the inspiration others point to something much more recent in 1940 a british task force in the Mediterranean with a single aircraft carrier and british aircraft carriers did not carry a lot of airplanes by pacific standards and their

airplanes are very outdated by pacific standards launched an attack against the italian fleet which was anchored in port at night these outdated biplanes and there were i think between 20 and 30 of them overall but i mean at times you had like six of them attacking did a large amount of damage and put a bunch of these ships out of commission for quite a while the japanese uh there was a japanese uh envoy or advisor or attache in berlin who i guess came down to look at the the effects at the harbor at toronto the 1940 battle of toronto it's called and and sent that back to japan so all of these things were studied and by january 1941 yama moto's got a like mock-up of pearl harbor in an out-of-the-way place and he's got people sort of just planning for this

and he's war gaming it and the challenges by the way are immense because the battlefield is immense this conflict which will be fought in the pacific but will instantly suck in all the asian warfare that's been going on now for several years already this is a battlefield so large you could drop whole continents into it with room all around the edges logistics you know getting the stuff that the armies and navies need to fight and operate where they need to be in the quantities you need to have them is going to be the sort of challenge that overhangs every operation and will in large part determine the success or failure of them for this entire conflict that's the overriding you know military challenge in this theater distance and to get an idea of the kind

of distance we're talking about you know for comparison purposes at this same time where we are in the story you know october november in 1941 over in well i was going to say europe but it's almost you know on the way to asia outside the doors of moscow the wehrmacht is fighting what they hope are going to be these climactic battles where the soviet union's capital is going to fall but they're facing all sorts of logistical trouble right their supply lines are famously stretched to the limit the germans are now relearning the lessons you could have asked earlier conquerors about napoleon could have explained the whole problem while he was trying to deal with supply issues when taking moscow heck you could go back to charles the 12th of sweden

before napoleon he could have told you the same story that when you get that far away from your base of operations it's hard to get the troops at the head of the snake you know as it's called what they need to fight i mean berlin to moscow is like a thousand miles about as the crow flies anyway a lot longer when you want you know go on those roads but for perspective tokyo to oahu which is the first you know not to downplay anybody but i mean the first significant us territory closest to japan you know guam there's some alaskan islands things like that but first significant ones of wahu that's four thousand miles away four times the distance from berlin to moscow so if they're having problems keeping the vermox supplied over by moscow think about what

it takes to to transport everything you need to keep an army put together across the pacific this is part of the war plans that the japanese have had now for more than a decade everyone knows right that major militaries have war plans in the back of their dusty files that cover almost any eventuality you can think of i mean you got to do something when you're not doing anything else and coming up with a plan for the united states to fight canada if the canadians get all uppity well you know that's just covering all your bases and by the way there was a plan like that i believe in 1940 in this case the japanese plan for dealing with the united states involves the philippines as sort of bait they were going to take the philippines and then when the united

state sent the fleet over to contest it they were going to have a trap set this trap was going to be aided by they envisioned aircraft and submarines that would use island bases farther out in the pacific and that could sort of like gnats or mosquitoes weakening the us all along the way you know have them in a condition not feeling so excited about fighting and then they walk into a trap if you look at the way the japanese navy is put together it's designed especially like their newer units it's designed for this trap situation anyone who is a fan of the japanese navy in the second world war knows that it was constrained by treaties and other things and not allowed to be as big as the british fleet or the us fleet so what do you do if you're the japanese

and you've got those kind of constraints well they decided to go quality instead right if we can only have so many battleships let's make them really good battleships just as wars about to break out here the japanese are finishing up the field trials of the most powerful battleship not just in the world the most powerful battleship that will ever be built it's famous it's the yamato the only other ship as powerful as the yamato that will ever be built is its sister ship the musashi that's only a little bit behind the yamato and then behind that is another one called the shanano all of these ships will outrange their american counterparts they have an unbelievable amount of armor they are enormous their guns are 18.1 inch the nearest naval competitor is 16 inch

guns an 18.1 inch gun just so you know and the yamato has nine of them can fire a car in terms of weight 26 miles and when those shells landed the destruction was enormous the best battleships of germany the bismarck and terpets the best battleships of the united states you know the Iowa class Missouri type battleships you write down the specs for them side by side with the yamato class and there's no comparison these super battleships as they're often termed were going to be the major hammers that would come down on the american fleet as it crossed the pacific you know weakened by submarines and aircraft the entire way across and during the ambush this is how they were going to be destroyed in this existing long-term japanese war plan then what's

interesting is the plan from that point on once you gain this big advantage over the american fleet is to hunker down and sort of wait for the armistice reminds you a little of how the ruso japanese war ended right the mistake in this thinking and it will be the mistake in the thinking in the second world war two is what if the other side refuses to do the armistice thing well admiral yamamoto is a typical aggressive commander there are very few commanders that like to allow the enemy to seize the initiative to choose the place of battle to attack at the time of their choice i mean these are all standard military things and yamamoto's argument about the whole existing plan of this trap is what if the americans don't take the bait what if they don't come across the pacific

when you want them to what if they stay home and build up their fleet which they're doing already till it's supercharged and then come over what if they go around your trap i mean it's a whole lot of really good arguments yamamoto is proposing something different this is the audaciousness that we spoke about earlier this gambler but at the same time somebody who's a visionary a visionary is someone who sees something ahead of the crowd yamamoto sees what there are other visionaries who also see by the way the potential of aircraft carriers now we in the modern world have a hard time not seeing the potential of aircraft carriers they're the capital ships of our era and having one or not having one sort of differentiates first class navies from other class navies but

remember it's going to be the second world war where these lessons are learned we should also point out that for the first more than two years of the war there's only one power that's really using aircraft carriers in combat so they're the only ones really learning and developing these techniques and that's the british by the way the germans and the italians their principal opponents during the two years before the japanese and the americans are in the war they don't have any aircraft carriers which means the british don't have to get into this um technological race where they have to respond to the innovations of the other side in carrier warfare because the other side doesn't have any carriers and the british being the quintessential battleship navy they see the use

of these carriers as something that increases it's a force multiplier for their naval task forces normally they'll put a carrier with a naval task force and then all of a sudden it has aerial capability which is of course awesome you can scout way ahead now the range of visibility now these ships is increased once they spot an enemy naval unit they can harass it and attack it and hopefully maybe you could cripple it or slow it down so that when the rest of the fleet catches them they can destroy the naval units of the enemy with naval gunfire and torpedoes which by the way can be aided by spotting from the airplanes too so that it's this role where they are something that fits into british naval doctrine pretty well the attack at toronto by the way is one of those

areas where the fleet air arm as it's called becomes extra useful because the rest of the navy can't reach the italian fleet and do damage with naval gunfire so what the heck you know it's a low risk venture send him in there and see what happens and everybody was astonished by how well the results turned out now a guy like yamamoto is one of those people that allows you to jump several steps in the normal linear technological development you know instead of the normal and this is pretty typical in military circles you don't want to take too many chances if you're doing one thing different than the last time they tried that's considered innovation a guy like yamamoto allows you to skip several steps here because he looks at the toronto situation and

basically says if they can do that with one carrier and 20 to 30 outmoded by planes what if instead of one carrier you had something like six aircraft carriers and what if instead of 20 or 30 outmoded by planes you had more than 400 of the most modern technologically sophisticated aerial attack mono planes also attacking by the way another fleet tied up in port yamamoto doesn't see aircraft carriers as something that aids the strike force yamamoto sees them as the strike force and instead of the naval gunfire being the setup to destroy the enemy ships which was part of the old japanese trapped plan too wasn't it he sees the planes from the carriers themselves as sinking the enemy ships it's hard not to see that as completely obvious with our modern mentality

but not only is this a revolutionary and controversial idea without the data to really back it up think of what a gamble it is and yamamoto says something at one point like if this plan fails we just need to give up well that shows you how much of a gamble it is and watching this whole thing take place it's like watching a guy play a card game where the odds of winning are low and he's bet his family's lives on the outcome in a lot of situations where you see big audacious gambles of the sort yamamoto's working with here it's because people are in relatively hopeless situations and it's better to take a chance because what's going to happen if you don't is worse in the case of like cities that are under siege your armies that are surrounded you know

you're just going to die anyway so why not try a gamble here what have you got to lose in the case of yamamoto the japanese government and the japanese nation state they have a lot to lose their people are for the most part speaking right now on a relative curve that your crystal ball would make clear if you could see five years in the future are safe relatively prosperous you want to talk about worst-case scenarios here it's not what the american sanctions could do to you it's not what the anglo-american demands that you retract your empire could do to you it's what losing in this metaphorical card game that yamamoto's playing could do to you because he's betting with the lives of his people let's be honest he's betting his cities is the way it's

going to work out so what does he have to do to win well this offensive attack against the us fleet in yamamoto's case is designed to do the same thing that the old trap was designed to do as we said get the fleet out of the way what's the fleet got to be out of the way for so that japan could take over a huge chunk of asia and the pacific and then hunker down and beat off any efforts by the anglo-americans to win it back and within this core surrounded by a defense perimeter that is you know on the largest battlefield in human history would be the resources that Japan needs for self-sufficiency so you grab the resources you need to continue being a first-class power to continue to support your war effort you create a huge perimeter a long distance around

that is defended and then you make the cost of taking it back higher than you think the other side is willing to pay this is where the rose colored glasses start coming into things and according to writer saburo yanaga he points out that in all the estimations that the military and government have to come up with here all the numbers that you're plugging in for the unknowables the x's and the y's are all sort of rose colored glasses best case scenarios how do you beat the anglo-americans will you take over all this territory and then the yamato spirit of the japanese warrior will outlast the soft westerners and they won't be willing to pay the price that you have to take to do this so they will negotiate and we will have some sort of an armistice in

japan will come out ahead especially if you demoralize the americans by decimating their fleet at the outset and get a advantage on them now the pearl harbor attacks that are going to come out of this americans have a tendency to tunnel of vision and i do this myself and forget that that is simply a means to an end the elimination of the american fleet which is the goal of the pearl harbor attacks is merely meant to cover the rising sun of japan going supernova and acquiring this defense perimeter and the raw materials resources and oil within it the scope of the plan for this is breathtaking in its hootspa when i keep running out of words to use audacity is the one i keep coming back to you i mean remember this is a country that is tied down heavily already on the asian mainland

but here's what historian ronald h specter describes as the plans here that are going to all kind of take place starting at the same time he writes quote the japanese plan to seize an occupy a vast area including all of southeast asia they did not already hold birma syam malaya the philippines and the dutch east indies japan would occupy the american island outposts of guam and wake she would also destroy or at least neutralize the pacific fleet at pearl harbor on the first day of the war the philippines and malaya were to be hit by air attacks followed soon after by invasion simultaneously he writes troops would occupy british borneo in hong kong once the philippines and the malay peninsula with its important fortress of singapore had been

taken the conquest of birma and the dutch east indies would follow end quote now you can't hide preparations for operations on that scale and the british and the americans figure out that something big is happening they see troopships moving they hear things in the codes that they broke and they're seeing the redeployment of forces it's a big thing and it takes months and months and they catch on to it ironically though it sort of attracts their attention in a way that diverts their attention from what's going on in the very northernmost islands of japan which sort of stretch up towards syberia in really frozen foggy you know rainy conditions that just sort of hide big warships by the latter part of november the japanese have quietly amassed the most powerful aircraft

carriers strike force in world history up until that time in these northern harbors six aircraft carriers together a couple of battle cruisers bunch of oil tankers for resupplies destroyers and support ships shrouded in the fog and mist up there in the north not coincidentally right around the same time that that time limits expiring on the diplomacy has to work soon or else timetable on december 1st it's or else time and in a famous meeting the japanese emperor in what some historians refer to as a meaningless ceremony to confirm something already done others infuse the event with some decision-making power nonetheless it's the official if the japanese were going to have an official public declaration of war this would have been it but

it's not public and nobody knows about it if you're not in on it but this is where the decisions made signed off on and by the time that happens that fleet that had been sort of hiding in the mists in the northern harbors with the six carriers has already departed and is out to see and is disappearing in the fog banks of a northern route which avoids normal shipping lanes and at this point interestingly enough american intelligence which monitors where all the japanese big ships are i found this fascinating before the second world war they already generally know the locations of the carriers and the battleships and all that through radio traffic they lose sight of them which leads to a famous pearl harbor related quote with one of the admirals um on the island

going do you mean the japanese fleet could be rounding diamond head right now and we wouldn't even know it but the americans new war was coming so did the british in fact there is no anticipation in terms of will it or won't it happen in the couple of weeks before it does because the question is what's going to happen when it breaks out the americans are pretty darn sure you're going to see moves to take over those resources we talked about that the japanese are going to strike in southeast asia maybe the dutch east indies probably the philippines what they don't see coming is an attack across four thousand miles of ocean at them it is very good book on pearl harbor called pearl harbor from infamy to greatness author craig nelson

quotes some of the wonderful pieces of dialogue that were extracted after the fact that look either prophetic or you know shows some sort of vulnerability that was exploited by the surprise attack and in one of these conversations he has the various admirals and military leaders in hawaii right this is late november talking about sending planes to some of these islands that they're worried about the japanese hitting and the air force commander on hawaii basically says don't send our planes away we have to defend hawaii which kind of stuns admiral kimmel who basically says are you worried about hawaii nelson writes quote the hawaiian air force's chief of staff james mollison returned to short's original point and he's saying now our mission is to protect oahu

and shipping out those army planes will lessen our capability to do so kimmel wanted details on his thinking why are you so worried about this do you think we are in danger of attack when mollison replied the japanese have such a capability the admiral argued capability yes but possibility the author continues quote kimmel then asked his naval war plans officer rear admiral charles mcmorris what do you think about the prospects of a japanese air attack mcmorris said none absolutely none end quote so it doesn't matter how often the america administration gets a warning that osama bin laden is bent on attacking the united states and is you know rumored to be thinking about using airplanes to run into buildings it doesn't seem real amongst all the other information

that's out there until it happens and then after it happens you can go back and pick out those points and they stand out like sore thumbs just like the you know do you mean to say they could be rounding diamond head right now well here's what we know they don't have to round diamond head because that strike force that is indeed approaching you know the area north of hawaii has aircraft carriers that can launch planes without ever getting that close to the hawaiian islands and on the morning of december 7th early they begin to do that by this time in the plans unfolding the attack on pearl harbor you would have to say that they had been very fortunate some of the wargaming that they had done prepping for this event had had the united states discover them on the way

and the japanese fleet having to fight its way within range of hawaii to make its attack but they managed to get 220 miles north of oahu without being detected the planes start launching in a really rough sea by the way at 5 50 a.m by like 6 15 6 20 they got the first wave up in the sky and that's a lot of aircraft by the way and the efficiency is going to be notably japanese this first wave by the way consists of 43 fighter planes 49 high-level bombers 51 dive bombers and 40 torpedo planes at 6 20 it heads towards oahu the japanese begin bringing up the next wave to go follow-up and this gamble this huge audacious plan by amriyama moto and company is underway ironically the commander of this operation a guy named nagumo not an audacious guy a much more sort of

conservative commander who doesn't seem like he's got a whole lot of faith in this plan it's interesting that you'd have the the creative thinker who's really the visionary come up with the idea and then put the implementation of it into the hands of somebody much less likely to well follow up in an aggressive way because it's not his nature but nonetheless those planes got off with great efficiency and when they're on their way to hawaii hawaii is sleeping there's a reason one of the most famous books ever written about the pearl harbor attacks was called at dawn we slept because not only is hawaii sleeping it's sunday morning everybody's sort of rousing a little bit late but it's a peaceful island and i don't just mean in an environmental sense i mean in a diplomatic

one as these aircraft are approaching you know what's going to be their attack targets the country they're going to attack isn't at war with them and there's a lot of controversy that has arisen ever since about whether it was supposed to be there seems little to no doubt that the attacks against british possessions in asia were to be carried on without warning those were to be surprise attacks whether or not that was supposed to be the same situation against the us there are different points of view and i'm not qualified to pick among them for a long time the official japanese point of view from their historians basically said it was a screw up on the part of their diplomatic people in washington dc who didn't get the material to the right place at the right time

and because of that what should have been there early enough to be sort of advanced warning didn't happen that way there's a there was a japanese writer a couple years ago that is part of a minority school that suggests that that's all a cover that was always intended to be in you know unofficially late by accident right wink wink i kind of like author craig nelson in his pearl harbor book i kind of like his point of view on it though because it really does sound like what probably happened which was there there was going to be a very short window right here here's a declaration of war five minutes later boom bombs dropped actually 30 minutes later seems to be about what they were after he writes quote oh and by the way plan z means the plan to attack pearl harbor quote

from the beginning imperial japanese army officers plan to invade singapore without giving prior notice to britain but the imperial japanese navy felt very differently about the united states and operation z after the imperial conference on december 1st in fact the emperor told prime minister hideki tojo repeatedly that he was not to attack the united states without warning naval attache yazuro sahimatsu explained the sense of honor that was a hallmark of japanese military history this is uh this officer explaining now quote japanese warriors never tried to assassinate a person who is sleeping when they tried to kill him they first kicked the pillow and woke him up and then killed him the same principle applied to the attack the required

time to wake america up would be approximately 30 minutes end quote now what nelson says that really makes sense is that that's a really fine line to walk 30 minutes it doesn't allow for any kind of screw-ups at all and there's a bunch of things that have to happen and go well and it didn't regardless of which point of view you adhere to uh it's clear that the people in hawaii didn't know this was coming and the american people didn't know this was coming and because of that their wrath for this entire war will be visceral i mean it it is interesting and one historian i read did this he said he said wouldn't it be interesting to imagine how different the mood might have been had the japanese said one day ahead of time we're at war and then struck interesting to speculate

isn't it at the same time though if it's a minor miracle that the japanese can get a strike force this close to hawaii in peacetime how much of a major miracle would they have needed to pull off the same thing in wartime you can make a case that yamamoto's plan really requires in order to be successful the kind of surprise that you only get in a diplomatic situation where war hasn't broken out yet you might need that for this plan to work and remember the stakes involved here are enormous so i always try to imagine um you know what they must have felt like both in tokyo the leadership the emperor all those people who know that this is about to happen you know looking at their watch wondering what's happening at this very moment to the leadership with the strike force and agumo and

his staff i think they're on the akagi the aircraft carrier um to the leadership of the first wave strike force itself it's led by a guy named fushita by the way and he's been involved in the planning for this for a long time he's fully aware of the stakes uh he understands that what yamamoto said is true which is if this attack doesn't do what we needed to do we might have to give up the war and he understands what breaks they have to get to have a chance of the attack working the first break he needs is surprise we have to achieve the surprise that we're after um there are a couple of famous things that happen on the morning of december 7th that could have blown the surprise out of the water and ruined the whole thing they famously didn't

they're much investigated as you might imagine uh after the events and after the war because they're seen as failures and probably rightly so the first one was in the early morning hours like three four a.m before the attack planes even take off midget submarines are discovered in pearl harbor these almost let's call them suicide missions because that's what they turned out to be several japanese midget submarines were part of this operation a couple were discovered an alert was sent and destroyers are sort of agitated now and in the early morning hours there's activity stirred up in pearl harbor that wouldn't have been stirred up if those midget submarines hadn't been part of the plan yamamoto was never for them by the way

and then closer to the actual time of the attack as the more than a hundred planes are making their way towards oahu they're picked up on hawaiian radar which is a new thing in this period had war already been declared it's hard to imagine that this would not have prompted a major response the fact that war isn't existing yet kind of helped things to go the japanese way also the fact that hawaii is like a giant aircraft carrier all by itself with planes incoming and outgoing all the time makes it easier for the radar operation people to rationalize the many many planes they all of a sudden see on their radar as something else for example they have some b-17s and big heavy bombers do in easy to confuse them with that maybe in hindsight it

should have been seen for what it was but it wasn't and that makes the japanese chances at pearl harbor at least now possible at about 7 40 a.m the first wave of the japanese attack planes break through the clouds over oahu they see pearl harbor and they don't see any anti-aircraft fire or anything like that they don't see much activity it's obvious that they have not been discovered and the surprise has been achieved what they don't see and this is the first piece of bad luck and the first bad break that the japanese got they don't see any aircraft carriers and a scout plane that had zoomed by here 10 15 20 minutes previously didn't see them either and no other navy on the planet would have understood the potential value of an aircraft carrier more than this one obviously

they probably would have traded a battleship for an aircraft carrier in terms of what they would have rather sunk but while they may not have any aircraft carriers they have a bunch of battleships just sitting there and fushita types out on his signal device the famous although there's some controversy about this now but whether it was meant the way it sounded and has been portrayed famously you know it'll be Torah Torah Torah which means tiger tiger tiger and this is supposed to be the message not just to the fleet but it's picked up all the way miraculously the signal in tokyo to telling everyone who's in the know that this is happening that surprise has been achieved i like the way it's described in that dawn we slept when you think about the the unbelievable

amount of tension someone like oh i don't know admiral nagumo with the strike force would have felt a conservative guy doesn't have much faith in this plan anyway but realizes as everyone does just like Yamamoto had said and i'm paraphrasing but if this plan doesn't work we'll have to end the war um this is the gamble for everything and this is the call moment in the poker game here's the way author gordon w praying describes it in at dawn we slept quote fushita's radio was still clicking when the first wave broke into its component parts fushita swung around barbara's point and sure beyond all possible doubt that they had indeed achieved maximum strategic surprise at 753 a.m he sang out torah torah torah tiger tiger tiger the code words

which told the entire japanese navy that they had caught the pacific fleet unawares aboard the aircraft carrier akagi kusaka was not in the least ashamed of the tears which coursed down his wind-burned cheeks impassive zen buddhist though he was admiral nagumo could not have uttered a word had life and honor depended on it incredibly miraculously they had brought off yamamoto's madcap venture with silent instinct each man stretched out his hand to the other and in their eyes were all the words they could not speak end quote all these planes begin to split up into their component parts this is all well rehearsed stuff everybody knows what they're supposed to do and many of these planes don't go anywhere near pearl harbor they go to air

fields all over the island and they knock out not just the airfields but any planes that they find and unfortunately americans were more concerned with sabotage during this period than something like this so they parked all the planes like wingtip to wingtip which just makes it easier to guard but makes them easy to shoot up from the air too so nagumo and the strike force of carriers the main worry that they have 200 and some miles north of hawaii is that they're going to get hit with a counterattack the only things hawaii can counterattack them with are ships and planes so the japanese attack takes both of those into account and there will be planes seen all over the island and in fact in an event witnessed by tens of thousands of people in one way or another

there are so many stories about what happens on this day some of which are obviously misremembered and exaggerated but a ton of them are firsthand accounts of people who witnessed something that they never forgot because it was the most momentous thing of their lives when they watched this attack unfold i myself have a friend whose father as a kid was working on a um on a point that was higher up and a japanese plane flew right past him and he and the pilot made eye contact there's a lot of stories like that by the way about seeing the gold teeth of the pilot or the pilot smiling or waving in fact as the planes approach pearl harbour one of the workers at pearl harbour says he waved to the japanese pilot because the japanese pilot was waving to him and in a remarkable

coincidence that seems almost too hollywood movie making style to be even true these japanese attack planes swarm down on pearl harbour right as the flag raising ceremony that happens in the morning is happening and the bands like on the nevada they've got the nevada band and they're doing the star spangled banner it's like out of apocalypse now you have explosions starting but the band's playing on and by the way the nevada band would finish the star spangled banner even though they were being strafed while they were doing it and the flag was full of bullet holes if you want to talk how unprepared people were for a war with japan even after the bomb started falling american sailors especially are looking at this and thinking it's just a screw up there was no us air force at

this time so there was an army air corps and the navy people are looking at this thinking some army guy really screwed up and put real bombs on these planes because they've been watching army exercises for a long time and this just looks like a huge mistake although one of my favorite quotes that is in a lot of the history books is the one sailor who turns to his buddy even after the explosions have started and says quote this is the best goddamn drill the army's ever put on end quote don't know soon enough it's not a drill and when you look at the timeline from this encounter you'll notice that right after it starts the torpedo planes are honing in on the vulnerable battleships that are on the outside of some of these pairs that make up what's called battleship

row if you look at an actual diagram you'll notice that not all the battleships are in pairs but several of them are the ones that are in pairs means that the that one ship is on sort of the water side and the other ship is on the dock side so the ship that's on the dock side is protected by the outside ship those outside ships are going to take the brunt of the torpedoes and the torpedoes are ship killers they've got like 500 pounds of explosives they weigh over a thousand pounds they're 17 or 18 feet long a single plane will carry a single torpedo slung under it the plane will fly low real low to the water sometimes below the level of the height of the ship they're torpedoing drop the torpedo and then speed off these torpedoes by the way have been specially

designed for pearl harbor because normally they dive so deep when you drop them that they would just embed themselves in the mud of the harbor the problem is once again that the japanese designers here don't know if they're going to work so the very last major gamble of the entire operation here is do the ship killers work in this harbor because if they don't you're screwed in his book target pearl harbor author michael slackman describes the opening of this attack and it's pretty clear that the torpedoes work slackman writes quote as the attack began at 755 a.m. unbelieving americans watched as bombs rained down on hickam and ford island airfields while the low-flying kates those are planes released their torpedoes against the ships

on ford island's west side utah an old battleship that was a target ship now moored in the aircraft carrier enterprise as usual place and possibly mistaken for a carrier by an inexperienced japanese pilot took two torpedoes another struck the cruiser rally moored in line ahead both ships began to list and the target ship capsized at 812 while rally's crews saved the cruiser by heroic damage control efforts on the opposite shore of ford island he writes torpedoes struck nevada arizona west virginia oklahoma and california tennessee moored inboard of west virginia and maryland inboard of oklahoma escaped torpedo damage as did the fleet's flagship pennsylvania in dry dock one end quote the oklahoma is going to be hit with a couple of torpedoes

right when the attack begins at 756 she's going to be hit with another one four minutes later that penetrates where the first two already blew up and she'll start to roll over she'll get hit with two more while she's rolling over and within 12 minutes of being struck you can see her underside and men are scurrying as she tips over to try not to you know fall into the sea those are the lucky ones because at least 400 sailors are trapped below decks in the oklahoma with water pouring in shells giant shells are getting dislodged and crushing men and the lights are going out and these people are trying to get out before they drowned on the west virginia they're hit with something like six or seven torpedoes a couple of bombs on top of that to boot

and it's a nightmare over there one of the survivors described what it was like to be on the deck of one of these ships when it was hit by a torpedo and he says the torpedo throws up a mountain of water tons of liquid that goes up in the sky higher than the ship is tall that then crashes down on the deck slamming you and pinning you and making it difficult because the ship's decks are a wash and water for a bit afterwards to get off a ship that's just been hit by a torpedo and you know is is exploding and burning and all that kind of stuff making it even more difficult to deal with what amounts to most of these men on these ships with something more like a natural disaster or an explosion at sea that might not have anything to do with war there's very little

of the combat side of this going on there are heroic tales of men breaking into locked ammunition cabinets because everything is put away I mean the guns are sometimes on these planes for example still packed in the oil so this is more an intentionally caused disaster and then the story of all these human beings trying to make their way to safety all sorts of heroism by the way and let's give props where they're deserved a us navy that everyone noticed was behaving as well as you could possibly imagine under the circumstances there's not mass panic and screaming and yelling and people are even giving up their lives and dying in you know silence and resignation it's part of what makes everyone grit their teeth and get so angry about this afterwards if you're an

American right I mean this is such bravery I mean you want to avenge people who die in such terrible circumstances as this and make no mistake about it I mean look what's going to happen on the Arizona because after the torpedo planes are done income the high altitude bombers the dive bombers are striking the airfields all over the place the fighters and we haven't even talked about this are strafing all these ships with machine gun bullets and the zero fighters also have 220 millimeter cannons which are very nasty when I used to war game second world war naval battles we paid very little attention in the rules to the effects of strafing but it's clear from reading the survivor accounts that it was massively effective in terms of sweeping the

decks of human beings making it impossible to get stuff done creating chaos stopping people from getting off the ships or where they needed to go because what would happen is on these heavily armored warships there's still a bunch of stuff that's breakable and the bullets hit these ships creating tons of sparks and they ricochet everywhere and anything that's not nailed down or heavily armored goes flying the captain of I think it's the west virginia will have his stomach torn out by some of this shrapnel and they will try to get him off the ship into safety he'll die trying and commanding the ship by the way and telling everybody not to not to bother with him another one of those many heroic stories out of pearl harbor these high altitude bombers

though come in at 8000 to 14000 feet somewhere in there and these are not the best planes to attack ships with by the way it is very hard to hit a ship from that altitude obviously these are not moving ships so that helps and on battleship row where you have these ships moored side by side next to each other it's almost like you've doubled the width of the ship so it makes it an easier target nonetheless the hit ratio is nothing to be necessarily excited about but when one of these bombs from these high altitude bombers and some of them are converted 16 inch naval shells by the way when one of them does hit the amount of damage is overwhelming and one of them hits the Arizona and and once again this is all happening very quickly when the Arizona gets hit this shell it

is assumed it's difficult to conduct any sort of realistic recreation of the wounds to the Arizona because she's so damaged but it's thought that this thing some people used to think it went down the smokestack but it's thought that it it goes into the deck of the ship and penetrates and ignites the forward magazines where they keep all of the you know shells and ammunition and explosives michael slackman says the arizona's magazines contain 308 14 inch shells those are enormous and extremely heavy by the way uh 3500 five inch rounds those are standard land artillery size pieces right there nearly 5000 cans of powder and more than 100 000 rounds of machine gun and small arms ammunition when that ignites survivors and there aren't many but the people on the ships all around

the harbor saw it say it was less of a big boom but more a mighty whoosh they said another person described in slackman's books that it was an awful swish sort of sound he quotes semen artist here who saw the arizona he says explode while he was on the nearby nevada and says quote the ship he said seemed to jump at least 15 or 20 feet upward in the water and sort of break into end quote the explosion was so large that it blew out the flames on the ship next to the arizona which was burning like a concussion would blow out a match car engines on ford island stalled from the concussion it knocked everyone flat on some of the surrounding ships and the bomber that released the bomb felt the concussion shake the aircraft

the amount of debris that showered down on the ships next to the arizona the tennessee's right by it and gets hit with so much debris including body parts that it suffers more damage one author said from that than from the bombs that actually struck her the fuel oil that instantly goes out everywhere i mean all of these ships are gassed up and they carry hundreds of thousands close to half a million gallons of oil on them some of the more than half a million gallons oil and this stuff is heavy oil and it's it's instantly all in the water so as survivors jump in to try to escape the devastation in some places this is six inches thick of oil in the water the aftermath of the arizona explosion amid all this other destruction going on simultaneously is described by many

maybe the most visceral account i've read is craig nelson's he starts by quoting a west virginia sailor who described the scene quote ships on fire ships burning explosions going on all over the place i saw the arizona blow up and she just rained sailors and of course those were the ones that were fortunate enough to live the ones that were blown off the ship nelson continues quote burning arizona crewman ran aft or into the water thinking they would find relief instead they found six inch pools of fiery fuel oil covering the sea turning them into matchsticks clint westbrook said quote all the oil tanks on all the battle wagons had been ruptured most of them and you could just about almost get out and walk on it it was that thick and around those ships

that had fire on it it was on fire as well so a lot of these people jumping off the ships were jumping right into burning oil we had just loaded the day before because we were going back to the states for christmas the admiral had told us so we had filled the tank saturday end quote nelson quotes another witness who said quote these people were zombies they were burned completely white their skin was just as white as if you had taken a bucket of white wash and painted it white their hair was burned off their eyebrows were burned off the pitiful remains of their uniforms in their crotch was a charred remnant and the insoles of their shoes was about the only thing that was left on these bodies they were moving like robots their arms were out held away from

their bodies and they were stomping along the decks end quote he then quotes another sailor who said that the decks looked like a boneyard from all the body parts author walter lord in day of infamy describes the remembrances of a tenancy survivor who explained what it's like to look up and see a bomb coming down right at you and then what happens afterwards he wrote quote seaman jp berkholder looked out a porthole on the bridge just as one of the converted 16 inch shells crashed down on number two turret a few feet forward the porthole cover tore loose clobbered him on the head and sent him scurrying through the door outside he helped a wounded ensign but couldn't help one of his closest friends who was so far gone he only wanted berkholder to shoot him

another armor piercing bomb burst through number three turret farther aft seaman sf bowen station there was a powder karmann was just dogging the hatch when the bomb hit it wasn't a shattering crash at all just a ball of fire about the size of a basketball appeared overhead and seemed to melt down on everyone it seemed to run down on his skin and there was no way to stop it as he crawled down to the deck below he noticed that his shoestrings were still on fire end quote the tragedy is immeasurably made worse when the fuel oil that all these sailors struggling in the water against catches fire the combination of sailors being stuck under water and sailors burning is about as nasty as you can get i mean there are reports of sailors jumping off the arizona and sizzling

when they hit the water and then of course the water catches on fire it's a nightmare um is that worse than the people that are trapped below decks and the many many stories of trying to escape the water as it climbs up and these little pockets of air and people will be cut out of these things for weeks afterwards the very belt armor that is supposed to make these ships a protective place for their crews making it harder to cut into and there will also be people that don't get cut out of the ships in time and are found later sometimes much later dead entombed in their ships with calendars often marking each day that they were often in total darkness trapped under there to give you an idea of the speed of these attacks the big wigs in the

military on the island can kind of see the smoke they have these wonderful homes sometimes even overlooking the area around pearl harbor general walter short sees this admiral husband kimmel sees this and um get a chance to watch some of this unfold as it happens um there's a famous story general short sees the smoke while he's having sunday breakfast with his wife runs to his center to ask what's going on asked lieutenant colonel george bichnell what's going on out there and bichnell says i'm not sure general but i just saw two battleships sunk and then short screams that's ridiculous admiral kimmel's having a similar experience and he'll get blamed for a lot of this after the war didn't put out the torpedo nets all kinds of things he's the one that asked his

associate you know what the probability of a japanese air attack was and the guy said none absolutely none and now he's watching in disbelief in real time you know what's going on out there and it's it's almost heartbreaking unless of course you know you blame him for the whole thing author craig nelson in pearl harbor from infamy to greatness writes quote an officer phoned admiral husband kimmel at home with the news that japanese planes were attacking his fleet the admiral was still buttoning his white uniform as he ran out of the house and on to the neighboring lawn of the district's chief of staff captain john early which had a panoramic view of battleship row mrs. early said later that kimmel stood quote in utter disbelief

and completely stunned his face as white as the uniform he wore end quote now quoting kimmel quote the sky was full of the enemy kimmel said later he saw the arizona quote lift out of the water then sink back down way down end quote mrs. early he writes saw a battleship capsize and said looks like they've got the oklahoma yes i can see that they have the admiral numbly responded nelson writes other people encountered kimmel right around the same time kimmel and his associates send a message to the pacific fleet and back to washington saying you know pearl harbors under attack he orders that the enemy force be found and then one officer remembered and is quoted by nelson as saying quote i ran over to my offices and i happened to be standing

alongside the commander-in-chief himself admiral kimmel we were glumly watching the havoc the carnage that was going on and suddenly he reached up and tore off his four star shoulder boards which indicated his rank and title as commander-in-chief pacific fleet he stepped into his adjacent offices and realizing he was going to lose command dawned two star rear admiral shoulder boards end quote and then nelson relates his version of a famous story that's told a number of different ways but right around that exact moment a bullet ricochets into the house it's a spent 50 caliber shell is what i read somewhere which would probably indicate that it was an american bullet but it was so spent that it hit him in the chest and just bounced off and left a mark on his white

uniform and he's quoted as saying several things nelson has him saying i wish it had killed me but the variations are such that it's sort of a rueful dark joke that that would have been better than what he's going to face now being responsible for this immense carnage that is visible to him a carnage that is described over and over in its unbelievableness some of these people will come up from below decks on these ships that have settled into the mud of pearl harbor if they had been sunk by the way out at sea they would have been lost forever but a bunch of these ships just sort of settle there are heroic efforts by the crews to counter flood them and save them but there's a lot of people trapped below them and when they come up and they look around remember

the world that they last saw had blue skies and this marvelous glorious us pacific fleet and they come up from the water and there's bodies floating everywhere the ships are all falling apart and smoking and and and you can't even see the sky through all the black smoke as the oil burns off the ocean their world has been transformed they've gone from a pacific paradise to a naval version of Dante's inferno in a matter of minutes and all of this carnage and all this damage and all this destruction has been wrought by the first Japanese attack wave remember there's another attack wave not that far behind them and not long after the first wave departs the second one swoops in a couple of ships heroically a couple of destroyers the

battleship Nevada heroically have managed against all odds to start moving making it look like you know we're back already I mean already you know 30 minutes 35 minutes 45 minutes after a surprise attack the american fleet's on the move and it was inspirational to all who could see it those ships attracted the specific attention of the second wave who goes after them with vigor the Nevada will have to be beached in the sand to keep from sinking within 90 minutes it's all over from start to finish the planes fly off and Pearl Harbor is left a smoking devastation with dead and wounded everywhere more than 2400 people die in this 90 minutes more than a thousand are wounded almost 200 planes are destroyed on the ground more than 150 are damaged and the entire battleship

complement of the u.s. Pacific fleet is rendered useless four ships sunk the others burning and damaged the Japanese lose less than 30 planes there's no possible way if you are on the Japanese side to look at this and not see this as a huge victory when you measure it you know from a cost to benefit standpoint right less than 30 planes and we did all that damage although there were Japanese at the time who noticed you know a silver lining from the Americans viewpoint anyway and that's that the battleships may have been destroyed and put out of commission but the carriers of the u.s. Pacific fleet which had been at Pearl Harbor not that long ago weren't there when the attack happened and that means that the weapon system that few only the

visionaries had seen as the next big thing in naval warfare that means that right after the battle that just proved conclusively that aircraft carriers were the next big thing in naval warfare didn't get any of the enemy's aircraft carriers and the United States is carriers that managed to be away from Pearl Harbor on December 7th will be instrumental in avenging what was done there knocking out the battleship component of the Pacific fleet is a big blow the human lives are irreplaceable but let's be honest these battleships were not even cutting-edge battleships most of them dated back to the first world war some of them were even older than that useful at a bunch of things surely but if you're someone like Winston Churchill the most useful thing these

battleships maybe did in terms of helping win the war was exactly what they did do and he did not see the Pearl Harbor strike as a tragedy a better word might have been heroic a necessary sacrifice to get the United States to do something that from his point of view they should have already done it's probably not accurate it's probably a misquote but one of the lines attributed to Winston Churchill I always grew up hearing it was that you could always count on the Americans to do the right thing after all the other options had been exhausted in this case the attack on Pearl Harbor eliminated any other options it aroused a sleeping giant to a level of wrath that would carry it forward through any misfortunes to an ending that a guy like Winston Churchill

saw as inevitable the United States was shocked and saddened and emotionally upset by the Pearl Harbor attacks a guy like Winston Churchill was elated because to him December 7th 1941 was the day that the war was decided and Britain was going to be on the winning side after all he wrote after the war about his feelings at this moment and said quote no American will think it wrong of me if I proclaimed that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy I could not foretell the course of events I do not pretend to have measured accurately the Marshall might of Japan but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war up to the neck and into the death so we had won after all yes after

Dunkirk after the fall of France after the horrible episode of Iran after the threat of invasion when apart from the air and the navy we were an almost unarmed people after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war the first battle of the Atlantic gained by a hand's breath after 17 months of lonely fighting and 19 months of my own responsibility in dire stress we had won the war England would live Britain would live the Commonwealth of Nations and the empire would live how long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell no did I at this moment care once again in our long island history we should emerge however mauled or mutilated safe and victorious we should not be wiped out our history would not

come to an end we might not even have to die as individuals Hitler's fate was sealed Mussolini's fate was sealed as for the Japanese they would be ground to powder and quote we've been telling you about audible on this program for a long time and there's a reason that you hear us discuss them as often as we do and it's because this is not a program that relies on advertising we're a listener supported so we can afford to simply do advertising that conforms to the host's own radical beliefs on certain things for example reading I'm a voracious reader and I'm one of these weird people that thinks that we benefit from reading and that we all collectively as a society that the society benefits from having more readers and if you look at the strides over the amount of time

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way that you sort of put the story together and Nelson does a great job in uh in bringing these characters back to life and giving you a real sense and feel for it if it's interesting to you it's available on Audible right now if you go there and just uh you know repeat the code so go to audible.com slash carlin or text carlin to 500 500 and listen for a change uh you'll get your free trial started you could pick up Pearl Harbor and you can go into I know it's hard to believe after a four-hour podcast but you can go into even more depth on some of this stuff get granular as I like to say and really you know flesh out this story it's a big story there's lots of wonderful little eddies or horrible little eddies for you to travel down Pearl Harbor is one of them

Craig Nelson's book is great and Audible's a fantastic place to get it go to audible.com forward slash carlin or text carlin to 500 500 and listen for a change don't forget that all the older hardcore history shows are available for purchase from iTunes or dancarlin.com if you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar Dan and Ben would love to have it go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show for the latest news information and thoughts from Dan make sure to follow his history feed on Twitter the address is at hardcore history coming up while the Pearl Harbor attacks are going on pretty much simultaneously a Japanese Blitzkrieg is occurring in Asia and the Pacific the largest

battlefield in human history that will succeed in part because of the West's underestimation of Japanese capabilities and this is for all sorts of reasons including racial ones some of these colonial powers do not believe and maybe a lot of Americans don't either that in Asian they would have said oriental at the time people were capable of something like what the Japanese are about to pull off but there's a reason we call this series supernova in the east and this is where we see the Japanese rising sun explode and conquer territories over a wide area and the United States angered roused but groggy is in no position to do anything about it right away for those of you who've been missing the combat element of this story and let's remember for a

long time the histories of this story in the American history books started with Pearl Harbor we're eight hours into this series let the record show there's some context but this is the part of combat operations that most Pacific war fishinados are familiar with and that's coming up along with all the other stuff of course all that and more as we like to say in part three of supernova in the east do out in about 10 years given our current schedule but we try thanks for all the support