Show 63 - Supernova in the East II
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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. It's history. It's hardcore history. Why didn't Adolf Hitler and the Nazis...

to 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 set up these industrial killing facilities but we'll work people to death first if they're strong and and explain listen last month we killed a hundred thousand 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 i'm gonna starve you to death work you to death as part of a re-education 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 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, gonna level a place like Babylon, and then he's gonna 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. That's why you still see Egyptian fashions in the new kingdom that look eerily familiar, like Egyptian fashions from the old kingdom. There's a style that becomes the style you use today.

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 started 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.

End quote.

All those later kings were probably trying to emulate the badass of them all, Ashurnasirpal II, from, you know, 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, you know, 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 decades

More than 100 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 society.

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, you know, the League of Nations creation. You can get to the...

united nations creation you can get to the nuremberg and tokyo trials there's 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, you know, would not be like Albania. You'd be committing to some major stuff there.

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.

you know, tools at our disposal created in many cases specifically for this purpose that I still think, and remember, I'm not a, 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, I think if the state is powerful enough, we could have, you know, the Uyghur version of the final solution happen over the next year and,

And the world kind of sit around and look at each other most of the time going, you know, let's 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, 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 for

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 in the pre Second World War era had less in the way of tools and less in the way of structure and

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 at Nanking, now 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 Nanking other people call it the Nanking incident the Nanking 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. 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 is 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 – 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, Afghanistan.

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. And 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-patriot sides of both countries actually have similar views about what they want portrayed in their textbooks. They want their people portrayed as

positively creating a sense of citizenship, pride in your heritage, all that kind of stuff, an 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, you know, these sorts of things, right? 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, OK, in our own history books, when we're talking about the Vietnam War, how much full color photography and witness accounts should we devote to something like the My Lai Massacre?

Those of you who don't know about the My Lai Massacre, shame. 1968, Vietnam War, American soldiers went into a hamlet or village. And when they came out, 300 to 550 villagers, men, 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

that we were actually just like everyone else. We were not this special Lone Ranger come in and 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 My Lai 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, you know, 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 Nanking 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 spoil 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 and

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 people

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

Neither 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.

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 recently

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 minutiae and detail and how big points can often revolve around small little things. You know, think Magic Bullet. But a lot of people love that stuff. And reading it, one of them, a great book, The Nanking Atrocity, 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 fan face is trying to talk about this. 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 you know they're 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 and the Chinese official government line saying,

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 six million number has for the Holocaust. Right.

I mean, everybody knows six million. OK, where'd you come up with that number? Could have been six million and one. I mean, nobody knows. Right. Five million, seven million. But you come up with a nice round number and eventually people go, oh, yeah, the Holocaust, about six 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 large? 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 people's 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. It's I mean, just the lawyerly breakdown over the geographical boundaries where someone who dies in this

you know, 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 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 differently.

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 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 that a lot of opinion has shifted and said you know really 1937 this 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 and 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 who

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? And 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 chopping contest.

and 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 with 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, you know, I've seen you've seen war footage since that time that you really get a sense and the camera gives you a very good sense of

of a combination of things that must have been working on these people too. The fluidity of the situation, right? 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, you know, it's China, a large number of soldiers, some of them green, some of them old and reservists, some of them from the battle that just was over in Shanghai. And they're, you know, 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 most of the westerners ran away as soon as the japanese army came but 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 him, 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 since.

And maybe he has a little bit more pull 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 pull. So this guy gets the gig and the movie, I saw the tagline, you know, of the of the preview. And I think it said something like, you know, he saved two hundred and fifty thousand 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 Rabe and all these people who make up letters

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 Robb 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, right? 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 Yangtze 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 happening.

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, uh,

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, 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. It seems woefully out of place in 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 Wharf 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.

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, um,

16th Division Commander Nakajima Kasago's diary writes, quote, we see prisoners everywhere, so many that there's no way we can deal with them. The general policy is accept 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 Itoichi 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 2 p.m. 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 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, Nanking. 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

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 Nanking. General Nakajima's 16th Division, in just its first day in the capital, killed approximately 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war and fleeing soldiers."

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 a Western perspective, the killing of surrendering or captured POWs, because after all, you go look at the Soviet Union and

And the number of prisoners that fell into German hands after the June 1941 invasion there. And, you know, they would have these giant Kesselschlacht, these cauldron battles, and they'd capture 250,000 people at a time. And you have these photographs of huge crowds of people or long columns stretching off into the distance, kicking up tons of dust and them trying to figure out how do we how do we barbed 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 a hundred thousand 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 hundred and fifty thousand 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 are dressed as 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 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 blotter account to another because it gives you a real time in a way sense of what's going on all over the 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 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 there.

He wants you to know how nasty it got. And a person who says there 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 hold this over Japan's head. But here's what Chinese historian Sun Xiaowei 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 amused themselves by having a killing contest. The first one to reach 100 killed won the game.

Then they raised the limit to 150. 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. Quote, "'Anytime 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 people.

Where are their stories? Most of those people die individually or suffer in 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 an atrocity like Nanking is

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 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 a 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 6,000 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, a standard number you get for soldiers killed is 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 than

A lot of people are willing to forgive all sorts of nastiness if it's done to soldiers, women, children, old people, the infirmed, the sick, the noncombatants. 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 war?

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 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 fun

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

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've 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 had 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, as the 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

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. If 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 fell too, 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 their 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 too 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 in 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 funhouse 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 U.S., bogged down and unable to extricate itself from

with any sort of peace terms they can live with, in a place, what would you say, roughly, just 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 landmass the size of the U.S.?

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 that connect these cities, the roads that 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, you know, 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, too, 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 than

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 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 many 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 ask 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, which

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. You can go see it in the museums over in Britain, waves this document with his signature and Hitler's signature on it and declares 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 weak-kneed, 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 to many of these people, they thought they saw their civilization nearly knocked out in that war. If you're going to have another one and it's going to be worse and you're starting it from the Great Depression levels of economic health, what's the likelihood you're going to 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 screaming for confrontation 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 warmonger. 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 by

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 refuse 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 Churchill was a bit of an antagonist and a fighter that was a little bit embarrassing in 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 are

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. Autarky 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. McLean 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 seemed 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, dependence 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

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

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 war 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 II. 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 because

than to break out of the pattern. And 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 good.

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 where 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. I 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 and whatever.

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 China.

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 cutoff. 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.

And 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 eras, 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 changed

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, right?

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 Sakhalin 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 U.S. government had was completely understandable and predictable. The attitude they have is no great power is going to let anybody dictate what their foreign policy priorities 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

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

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 non-violent 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 National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon's National Security Advisor, lamented the idea that he should be constrained by the public's sort of weepy attitudes towards nation states when he's trying to create treaties that keep nuclear war from breaking out. Let's keep our eyes on the prize here. 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 why 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...

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. It 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. I mean, Francis Pike seems to indicate that Roosevelt kind of weak on all this stuff for a while. And 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

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 U.S. president in history. He was elected to twice as many terms as any other president in U.S. 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 u.s 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 whatnot 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 that 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, and

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 francis pike in his book about the pacific war here where 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 Cairo, Roosevelt glanced out the window and said, Ah, my friend the Sphinx, end quote.

Former Time editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan, who had met like seven presidents personally, knew Roosevelt. 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,

FDR 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 mcarthur who despised him said roosevelt quoting mcarthur now would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well donovan continues quote

This was considerable slander, but FDR 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 perfectibility 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 off in 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 aware that 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 too. 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 too. But I read that Andy Hertzfeld 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. You didn't see pictures of that. The pictures usually show him at a lectern or seated with other world leaders, fully appearing completely able-bodied. 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, Steve Jobs-ish is not a bad description of him. But if you 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 stories 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 U.S. into the war or doing things that would get the U.S. 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 stump says 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. End 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. The presidents or people who want to be the presidents often make promises about foreign policy. If they break those promises, they're

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 Campbell Craig. And I hope 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 some. 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 Churchill in the era where Churchill 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 campbell craig correctly he's saying that the public opinion polls after the war and the approval rating that 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 as, too, a neutral country. And you get arguments again. General, Marine Corps General Smedley 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

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, you

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 U.S. shore. And you can see the lights of like New Jersey's boardwalk or something in the distance at night.

You've 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 U.S. 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 as 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 in the Pacific ignores the fact that he already has one. It just doesn't involve U.S. 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, and

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 Minh Trail. And if we can just shut down that network of resupply roads 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 U.S., 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 Burma Road. There's stuff coming over from French Indochina and the U.S. is in fits and starts doing stuff too. And they sell at below cost, all kinds of things. At one point, 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 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 Guantan 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 that are 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, China and communism.

Saburo 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, 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 an age where Nazi Germany exists, but

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 a 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. It'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's 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 in a lot of wars have died for things like that. Now China, of course, is going to become, as we said, like an intervention in

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 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 and 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 access 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% 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 Luftwaffe 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 U.S. 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 going to have after signing this agreement with the Nazis is enormous.

limited compared to what it was before. 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 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 of Nan King. Well, now you hook yourselves up in the minds of the American public with

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 Kristallnacht. 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. 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 as 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. And 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 as the reason why we fight. In this case, as Toland 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 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 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. Gandhi is one of them, Mohandas Gandhi, 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 it 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 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 is,

in 1940 is, 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, or 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 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 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 to

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 strand of Japanese foreign policy we have to weave into this story because it's

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 were, 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 that Japanese foreign policy, since they rejoined 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 Churchill 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 colonels and people of these sorts of rank are

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 lacks 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 a 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 were 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

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 U.S. 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 China,

that together, the Soviet Union and China during that period, the two other powers that might be considered to be great powers that could counterbalance U.S. 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? 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. It doesn't have to be in five minutes. We understand the practical limitations, but it's got to be soon. 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 Churchill, I like to quote Churchill for this story because he's a participant in the story. He has his own way of viewing things and he's not unbiased by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever.

But he's interesting on the Japanese because he kind of likes the Japanese and he admires their martial culture. And when Churchill was sort of in his formative stages, the British and the Japanese were allies. Also, as a colonialist himself, as an empire guy himself, he can understand the desire and the feel that colonies are not inherently an evil thing when he talks about the Japanese. And, of course, he dictated or...

recorded into a machine these histories that he wrote about the conflict so they sound like him they sound like Churchill talking to you but he sort of encapsulates what happens here in his own way with a little sympathy for the Japanese Winston Churchill 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 as 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 18 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 hardline 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...

showing the position that some of the japanese now think they find themselves in one of certain death and less risky and still you know potentially fatal countermeasures are taken now i should point out that while some people say and uh francis 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."

This is why we had brought up, though, the history of Japan from before this era, to sort of set up the context in, 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. 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 100,000 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. His story, 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 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 was 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 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 No. 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 Nanking. All assets owned 25% 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 remained stuck on Japanese wharves. When Great Britain and Holland followed America's lead, the yen could only be used and traded within Japan's own empire."

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 U.S. is getting stronger every day. In 1940, the U.S. 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 U.S. believed that standing armies stood in opposition to long-term liberty. And so while the U.S. Navy has always been something that's...

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 u.s 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 davy crockett 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 U.S. was still gearing up by the time the war ended. And it was a U.S. that was nowhere near as industrialized as the Second World War U.S. was.

When Hitler and his staff people were given briefings on what, this is a famous story, by the way, were given briefings on the industrial capabilities of the U.S., 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's 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, that

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 u.s 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 and

The other Chinese affairs started in 1931. I mean, their troops have been on the ground fighting for a long time, and they've developed a lot of practical experience. The U.S. Army is a green force if there ever was one. That's not to say that the U.S. doesn't have some advantages in its back pocket. Take, for example, the fact that in many cases the U.S. is reading the Japanese secret messages.

They continually, despite the Japanese belief that this is impossible, they continually break Japanese codes for,

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 downhill, 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 not many rah-rah 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 is 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 historian Herbert P. Biggs 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 Ari Hota describes a conversation he had with another Japanese

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 parked 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,

Quote, I have made a big mistake on Japan's relations with China. End 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,

End quote. It's interesting to wonder about a guy in a position like that

who sort of has a moment where he wants to undo stuff and maybe sees in a flash or maybe a slowly developing realization the ramifications of what's involved here.

Hara 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 Toland's book, The Rising Sun, where someone over in Asia is trying to explain to the American public that

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 Otto Tolisius. 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 1,000 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

that those optimists who are hoping for a positive outcome in any conflict with the West are sort of basing their hopes on, right? If you look at 20th century history, by the way, there's a lot of places that have tried to overcome industrial and material imbalances by saying things like, well, we're tougher or our fighting spirit's better or what have you. And the Japanese have no choice but to put their hopes in the same sort of

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 one twentieth of the United States's abilities. And by the way, that number is a low projection as well. So the prime minister, Prince Kanoe, is

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 Russia.

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 churchill

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 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 celebrate it in the United States in high school textbooks here. This is the kind of high-minded Western democratic idealistic stuff that, listen, 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 going to 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?

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 Churchill goes on to clarify like a month or two later, no, no, no, we're talking about 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, OK, 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 advisers kind of shut it down.

The Japanese have just rejected the latest diplomatic proposals, and the advisers 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 problem.

era to look at if you are a fan of diplomatic history, the tit-for-tat things that go on, but also the many misassessments, 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 avert a catastrophe here that the Japanese think is

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 in 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, Kanoe, 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 Hancock 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. And so what's the point? And resigns. The emperor replaces him with one of the more hawkish figures out there, the head of the war ministry, former general in the Kwantung Army, a man whose nickname was the Razor,

His name is Hideki 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 Mussolini. 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 a Mussolini or a Stalin 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 Stalin 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 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 men are 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, 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 in the public displays to the

sort of bolster diplomacy and whatnot the roosevelt administration did a couple of big moves one of them was to reactivate general douglas mcarthur u.s 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, U.S. 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 Isoroku 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 Tsushima, where the improbable, almost near impossible, happened when an Asian fleet defeated a European fleet, and I mean resoundingly, 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 as

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 acknowledge 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 Gandhi-like figure who chain smokes 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 piece of I mean he's this fascinating like wild character who can come up with an idea that is so crazy that

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 and

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 U.S. territory that was coming from a power that was 4,000 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. Yamamoto and friends are going to come up with an idea that

to win a war that he doesn't believe is winnable. That's an interesting thing to task somebody with. Yamamoto, like a lot of these Japanese leaders, especially in the Navy, Yamamoto went to Harvard for a little while. I mean, he has a famous line about, you know, 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 U.S. So famously is Yamamoto

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 ariata has him talking to another admiral and basically predicting the way the war is going to go yamamoto tells admiral nagano 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 say it's inspired by a famous samurai battle a long time ago. Some people say the Battle of Tsushima that Yamamoto 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, there was a Japanese envoy or advisor or attache in Berlin who I guess came down to look at the effects at the harbor at Toronto, the 1940 Battle of Toronto it's called, and sent that back to Japan. So all of these things were studied and by January 1941, Yamamoto's got a

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 XII 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 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 U.S. territory closest to Japan, you know, Guam, there's some Alaskan islands, things like that. But first significant ones, Oahu, that's 4,000 miles away, four times the distance from Berlin to Moscow. So if they're having problems keeping the Wehrmacht supplied over by Moscow, think about what it takes 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 States 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 war is about to break out here, the Japanese are finishing up the field trials on

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 shinano all of these ships will outrange their american counterparts they

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 Tirpitz, 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 Ocean

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

The mistake in this thinking, and it will be the mistake in the thinking in the Second World War II, 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 attack.

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

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

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 of 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 military

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 biplanes, we're

What if instead of one carrier, you had something like six aircraft carriers? And what if instead of 20 or 30 outmoded biplanes, you had more than 400 of the most modern, technologically sophisticated aerial attack monoplanes? 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 trap plan too wasn't it he sees the planes from the carriers themselves as sinking the enemy ships and

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 is 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 or 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 U.S. 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 Japan.

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 for.

This is where the rose-colored glasses start coming into things. And according to writer Saburo Iyanaga, 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 Xs and the Ys, are all sort of rose-colored glasses, best-case scenarios. How do you beat the Anglo-Americans? Well, 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 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 chutzpah. I mean, I keep running out of words to use. Audacity is the one I keep coming back to. 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 planned to seize and occupy a vast area, including all of Southeast Asia they did not already hold.

Burma, Siam, 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 and Hong Kong.

Once the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, with its important fortress of Singapore, had been taken, the conquests of Burma 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 troop ships moving. They hear things in the codes that they've broken. 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 Siberia 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 carrier strike force in world history up until that time in these northern harbors. Six aircraft carriers together.

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 limit's 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, Japan,

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 sea 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 on the show.

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 knew war was coming. So did the British. In fact, there's no anticipation in terms of will it or won't it happen in the couple of weeks before it does. 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 4,000 miles of ocean at them.

In his 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, show some sort of vulnerability that was exploited before.

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 American 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 war gaming 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 Admiral Yamamoto 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 U.S., 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 was...

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 advance 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 was going to be a very short window, right? Here, here's a declaration of war. Five minutes later, boom, bombs drop. 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 planned 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 was 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. 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 is interesting. And one historian I read did this. 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 could 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, 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, Nagumo and his staff. I think they were on the Akagi, the aircraft carrier, and

um to the leadership of the first wave strike force itself it's led by a guy named fushida 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

There are a couple of famous things that happened 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, 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 3, 4 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, uh,

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 it's

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, right?

But while they may not have any aircraft carriers, they have a bunch of battleships just sitting there.

And Fushida types out on his signal device the famous, although there's some controversy about this now, about whether it was meant the way it sounded and has been portrayed. Famously, you know, it'll be Tora, Tora, Tora, 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 2 telling everyone who's in the know that this is happening, that surprise has been achieved. I like the way...

it's described in At Dawn We Slept, when you think about 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. This is the gamble for everything, and this is the call moment in the poker game. Here's the way author Gordon W. Prang describes it in At Dawn We Slept, quote,

Fushida's radio was still clicking when the first wave broke into its component parts. Fushida swung around Barber's point, and sure beyond all possible doubt that they had indeed achieved maximum strategic surprise, at 7.53 a.m. he sang out, "'Tora, Tora, Tora! 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 airfields 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 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 himself.

smiling or waving in fact as the planes approach pearl harbor one of the workers at pearl harbor 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 Harbor 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 U.S. Air Force at this time. So there was an Army Air Corps and a Navy 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

and says, quote, this is the best goddamn drill the Army's ever put on, end quote. They'll 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 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 1,000 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 7.55 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's usual place and possibly mistaken for a carrier by an inexperienced Japanese pilot, took two torpedoes,

Another struck the cruiser Raleigh, moored in line ahead. Both ships began to list, and the target ship capsized at 8-12, while Raleigh's crew 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 awash in water for a bit afterwards to get off a ship that's just been hit by a torpedo. And, you know,

you know, 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, uh,

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. Um,

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 U.S. 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 in come 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 two 20-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 8,000 to 14,000 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 for

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 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 goes into the deck of the ship and penetrates and ignites the forward magazines where they keep all of the 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. 3,500 5-inch rounds.

those are standard land artillery size pieces right there nearly 5,000 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 book said it was an awful swish sort of sound. He quotes seaman 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 in two, 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 Tennessees 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 them more than half a million gallons of oil. And this stuff is heavy oil and 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 crewmen 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,

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 whitewash 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 stumping along the decks."

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 Tennessee 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 J.P. Burkholder looked out a porthole on the bridge just as one of the converted 16-inch shells crashed down on No. 2 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 Burkholder to shoot him.

another armor-piercing bomb burst through number three turret farther aft seaman s f bowen stationed there as a powder carman 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 today.

when the fuel oil that all these sailors struggling in the water against catches fire. The combination of sailors being stuck underwater 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.

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 bigwigs 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 get a chance to watch some of this unfold as it happens. 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, asks Lieutenant Colonel George Bicknell what's going on out there. And Bicknell 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 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 onto 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 Harbor is 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, donned 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 the

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. And

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 U.S. Pacific fleet. And they come up from the water and there's bodies floating everywhere. The ships are all falling apart and smoking. 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 2,400 people die in this 90 minutes. More than 1,000 are wounded. Almost 200 planes are destroyed on the ground. More than 150 are damaged and

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 weapons 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' 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

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 and

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 proclaim 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 martial 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 breadth. After 17 months of lonely fighting, and 19 months of my own responsibility and 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, nor 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. End 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 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 we've been telling you about Audible, that Audible has helped make reading something that fits into the modern world, the digital age and the lives of the next generation of Americans, you see that this is an advancement that keeps reading relevant. Right.

And the end result is, in my radical view, a better society. I mean, take, for example, what Audible does with their app. I mean, this is an app that allows people to not just, you know, enjoy the books because they're reading them, but to help tempt other people to enjoy books they may not be reading. I love the send this book feature where with the app, you share a book from your library with anyone. And if it's their first time accepting a book through this feature, they can listen for free.

You can share audio excerpts and clips from your favorite parts of your books to anyone. I mean, I love that stuff. You can also listen at different speeds. So if the host talks a lot slower than I do and you like my style, you can speed them up or, you know, conversely, if my style grates on you, you can slow them down. Audible's helped create the modern world when it comes to audiobooks. They have the largest selection and they have a great deal going on now. You get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial.

And if you just enjoyed the show you just heard, we used a couple of...

um i call them audio footnotes uh from the book pearl harbor from infamy to greatness that craig nelson did if you're looking for a modern up-to-date uh discussion about pearl harbor that's a great read the guy it's always in the 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. 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 an 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 called 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 book 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 aficionados 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. Due out in about 10 years, given our current schedule, but we try. Thanks for all the support.