Show 65 - Supernova in the East IV

0:00What you're about to hear is part four of a multi-part series on the war in Asia and the Pacific area between about 1931 and 1945. If you like your stories in some sort of linear order and you haven't heard the earlier segments, you might want to catch up by checking those out first. If you don't care or you heard those already, well, then this is Supernova in the East, part four. It's history.

0:33It's hardcore history.

0:42There is a very wonderful and squishy question in play in both World Wars, especially. I can hear some people in the back of my head saying it's always been in place since the beginning of time, but certainly because of maybe the increase in the pace of change and whatnot. You see it in stark relief in both World Wars. But it has to do with the difference between quantifiable war elements versus unquantifiable war elements.

1:12And this is not to say that one is more important than the other, but one is much more subject to proof and testing than the other. We had said earlier that the early parts of this conflict are the acid test of combat. The rubber meets the road moment for a lot of the pre-war promises about these ships and these aircraft and all these land-based systems and ideas, both tactics and strategy and equipment, where we get to see if all the hype before conflict breaks out lives up to it once conflict does.

1:46The good news about something like that is that is quantifiable evidence. If that airplane sucks and doesn't live up to the potential and the promise, you'll know it quickly. And you'll be able to use what doesn't work to help make something that does later. But the other side to the conflict and its goals, much harder to measure. And if you can't measure it, how do you know if it's working or not? How do you know if you should keep doing it or not? If somebody really wants to keep doing it and really believes in it, that might be a plus, right?

2:17Not being able to prove it one way or the other. But it has to do with the question of morale.

2:24Morale, of course, is a psychological state, isn't it? So right now we're in the realm of harder to pin down and harder to say that what applies to person A will apply to person B necessarily. But morale is one of those things that on a tactical level, on a battlefield level, is undeniably huge. And they've been writing about it, military strategists, since the Bronze Age. The idea is not to kill everybody on a battlefield. Traditionally, it's to kill enough people to break their will to continue fighting, right?

2:55To destroy their morale. Killing is a means to an end. Nobody denies this. What is interesting, though, is to try to extrapolate what applies and that is, if not provable, then demonstrable, right? You might not be able to prove it in a laboratory, but it's been shown to be true enough times you could say reliably, right? Morale is the most important thing on a tactical battlefield. Is it the most important thing on a strategic one? Does it apply to whole nation states? Can you break their morale?

3:25Morale? This is an open question in the Second World War. Some people say you can. Some people say you can't. Some people say you can, but only if you do it this way. Some people say you can, but only if you do it that way. What breaks a nation's morale? And what proof do you have that that's something that even occurs?

3:42Much of the justification for some of the bombing that's going to be done from the air on cities and populations in cities is based on this idea that you will get them to, you know, petition their governments and say, we must have peace now. We can't be bombed anymore. These are, you know, we've done whole multi-hour discussions on this in the past, but this is part of the inner war years of aerial development and theory on how aircraft are going to be these great peacemakers sometimes, because very quickly the populations will tell their governments, you know,

4:12you better get a peace deal going right now. We're not going to put up with this. And then the Germans bomb places like London, and the evidence seems to contradict that 180 degrees.

4:23The people in London and Britain weren't ready to give in because they were being bombed. They were pissed off.

4:30Now, does this mean that it doesn't work? No, it means that the jury is still out, right? We're not bombing enough. We're not bombing with the right kinds of bombs, the right kinds of planes. Now, the technology hasn't caught up with theory yet. I mean, there are still people that think once we use these nuclear weapons, we can finally get that morale question working at the grand strategy level the way designed. And by the way, when Germany at the end of the war was bombed to rubble, they finally saw something more akin to numbness creeping into the population rather than a sense that,

5:01you know, they wanted the war to end, you know, at all costs or that they were ready to give in, that it made you more likely to surrender.

5:09At the very, very end, I think they may have seen some of that. But by that point, you already destroyed all the industry in Germany. So why did it? I mean, you didn't bomb them for morale reasons then. You just leveled them. And if you want to say it worked, OK, but let's be honest about why. The problem is, is that because we know morale is important at some level, and in this war, because you could make up anything you want about how it's important at a giant level, how much effort do you put into it? One thing you can say is that morale has a connection to fear.

5:44Now, fear doesn't necessarily mean you don't want to fight. And if you bomb my city, I might not be willing to give in to you because I might be angrier than I was before at you, but I might be afraid, although sometimes, you know, scared people are the most dangerous thing you can ever run into. You can have a very benign coin-sized spider in your hotel room up in the corner, and you can know that this is not a venomous spider that can hurt you. But what percentage of people, if you can't get that spider peacefully out of your hotel room,

6:18are going to have to kill that spider before they can fall asleep with any peace and comfort? Because, you know, you never know. There have been Native American massacres predicated on little more than this idea, by the way.

6:31Years before the Second World War, when American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for president during the Great Depression, he had a slogan, We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.

6:48About ten years later, in the middle of the Second World War, when the U.S. has been involved for three months, not the kind of phrase you could probably get away with saying, not after Pearl Harbor, and a drumbeat of losses initially that are as bad or worse than I've seen Americans have to absorb in their history. I'm not sure there's a comparable time. Maybe sometime in the Civil War,

7:19maybe sometime in the Revolutionary War. But, you know, Pearl Harbor is 9-11 from a psychological and morale standpoint and from a sense of injustice standpoint. But at the same time, it's also a military disaster that cripples your ability to respond to the perpetrators of the attack, right?

7:37And if you're the President of the United States, you have to bolster the morale of the nation, you have to dampen its fear, and you have to rally it towards the cause. Franklin Roosevelt is a controversial figure to some Americans because some Americans don't like his policies even today. But as a war leader, he was inspirational. And as a politician, he was masterful. There's a reason that there's a law now saying you can only be president for two terms because some of Roosevelt's detractors worried

8:10that if his health, you know, hadn't failed, he'd still be president today at 147 years old or something.

8:18His style was different than someone like Churchill's. Churchill was a guy who you thought was ready to take off his coat and get in the mud and wrestle with Hitler. He's a bulldog. He's a come and get it, you know, that kind of... I mean, different politicians have different personas and ways that they present themselves.

8:36FDR couldn't do that. I mean, this is a man in a wheelchair. He's not going to give you that alpha male, tough guy sort of routine.

8:44He's got a different feel to him. If I had to describe it, he reminds me kind of a like... You know, Woodrow Wilson was a little this way too, but you get a feeling like Roosevelt would be a little bit more physical even in a wheelchair than Woodrow Wilson. But it's this sort of preacher, Yankee preacher looking down his nose and scolding while he hands... you know, shakes the Bible at you. Just almost like a moral indignation and a righteous anger. You will get your, sir. Something like that. It's very effective, though.

9:14And it also sounds like you're definitely coming from the higher plane in terms of morality. It's a presentation that in its own way works. And you rarely saw... You know, Roosevelt had this wonderful way about him where he seems calm and sometimes funny and everything. But he doesn't have to change that tone and add much anger at all for him to sound absolutely livid. You can see how effective Roosevelt is at this, by the way. If you listen to some of the addresses that he did to the American people, he had these things that were known as fireside chats

9:47where he would speak on the new technology of radio directly to the American people as though they were in... He was in the home with them. He's the first president to have been able to use mass communication in any way, shape, or form like that. It would be as if the president today had his own Twitter account and could communicate with Americans directly.

10:09One of the most important ones that he ever gave was delivered on February 23, 1942. This is six weeks or so before Bataan Falls. But Roosevelt knows it's going to. He knows the American people have already been through the worst series of bad news events that they've probably ever been through. And he knows the worst is yet to come, maybe. I mean, it'll be one of the biggest surrenders in U.S. history. How do you get out in front of an issue, as they say in Washington, or be proactive about something like that while still bolstering morale,

10:41fighting spirit, and all that kind of stuff? And how do you whip the people back up into a frenzy? I mean, there's a lot at stake in that speech. 60 million people, by the way, or more will hear it during an era where the American population was half of what it is now. So these are basically Super Bowl-type numbers tuning in. And if you go listen to it, it's not like a short little thing. It's like 35 minutes of Roosevelt talking to you. And like I said, like he's in your home, he'll say, please get out your maps and follow along, you know.

11:13He couches this entire affair this time as a report to the American people. And he goes after conspiracy theories that say that the government's been hiding the real losses in everything from you. So he literally lays out, you know, we have this many dead. It was an interesting speech to listen to. But what he also has to do, like we said, get out in front of this issue. So first he basically says, things are not as bad as you've heard. We're giving better than we're getting. But he has to acknowledge losses and at the same time turn it around into something where, you know,

11:45the light is at the end of the tunnel and we're going to turn this around. And he does so in that speech on February 23rd, 1942. Here's a sample of it. We have most certainly suffered losses from Hitler's U-boats in the Atlantic as well as from the Japanese in the Pacific. And we shall suffer more of them before the turn of the tide. But speaking for the United States of America, let me say once and for all to the people of the world,

12:15we Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it. We and the other United Nations are committed to the destruction of the militarism of Japan and Germany. We are daily increasing our strength. Soon we and not our enemies will have the offensive. We, not they, will win the final battles. And we, not they, will make the final peace.

12:49So that's inspirational on one level and he's setting the stage for, you know, there's going to be bad things still to come. And then he gets into the question of, you know, how you motivate the American people. What are the right buttons to push? And the button he decides to push, it's not the Rambo button. It's not lead from the front like a Churchill where, you know, give us the tools and we'll finish the job. Make sure you take a German with you, all that kind of stuff. It's, they think we're weak. He's pushing that schoolyard button almost, right?

13:21But then at the end, he ends with something that you can almost hear in today's audience, everybody going, USA, USA, with that crazy chant. I will say this though, ever the master politician and always with his eyes on the prize, Roosevelt, right after the cut we're going to do, incorporates the rest of the United Nations, right? All the other countries of the world. He portrays this as a battle between like a hundred countries on one side and six or seven on the other. And everyone has their role to play. In other words, the great politician makes sure not to make it sound like it's an all American show.

13:52Make sure to include every one of them, say every one of them's got their important place. That's masterful.

13:58But he basically says, you know, Japan's calling us a bunch of weaklings. Are you going to take that? We'll show them and we already have. He says this. Ever since this nation became the arsenal of democracy, ever since enactment of Lend-Lease, there has been one persistent theme through all axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power,

14:31but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo, we have been described as a nation of weaklings, playboys, who would hire British soldiers or Russian soldiers or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us. Let them repeat that now.

15:05Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men. Let them tell that to the sailors who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific. Let them tell that to the boys in the flying fortresses. Let them tell that to the Marines.

15:31Now, while this broadcast is going on, a Japanese submarine, a huge submarine, by the way, the Japanese, like the French, built some very big ones, surfaces off the coast of California, over by Santa Barbara.

15:49It's about 7, 7.15 p.m. Pacific time, so it's gloomy or it's dark. And with a 140-millimeter deck gun, they shell some refinery installations on the coast. This is a legendary incident where I come from in the era where I grew up with. Everybody still talked about it. Most of the rest of the country doesn't know anything about it. This attack may have been timed to coincide with Roosevelt's speech as a way to put the lie to all of his fancy

16:21and inspirational, you know, talk, right? Oh, sure, you know, you're going to get, you can't even keep us from shelling your coastline while you're giving the speech. I mean, it's a gesture that involves one finger in the United States and two in Great Britain. Regardless of the intention of this Japanese sub as it related to the Roosevelt speech, it's a pretty classic sort of an attack against the morale of the enemy, intended to sow fear and a sense of vulnerability, right?

16:52Low risk, high reward sort of endeavor. Worst case scenario, you lose a sub. Best case scenario, who knows, right? Just free money, let's gamble with that. I don't think the sub did anything to damage morale, but it sure already added a few more sticks of kindling to the fire that was burning on the West Coast in terms of fear. History books have labeled this the West Coast war scare or the West Coast war panic during this time period and having a Japanese sub open fire off,

17:23you know, right on the coast there. I mean, that panicked people. Exhibit A, that it had some effect, is the very next evening, February 24th, 25th, 1942.

17:35Anti-aircraft artillery on the California coast around Los Angeles opens up in the night sky after somebody thinks they see Japanese aircraft. It was probably a weather balloon or the moon reflecting off the clouds, but 14 or 1,500 shells later, four or five people dead from car accidents and heart attacks, property damage, things quiet down. But it was apparent that once somebody opened fire, everybody opened fire. My grandfather was one of those people, by the way.

18:07Always felt he was cursed by being born in April 1906, something most people would probably consider to be a sweet spot in the 20th century. Too young for the First World War to serve, too old for the Second, where he had two kids. He wanted to be there, though. He was a chain-smoking, red-haired, Irish-American, adrenaline-junkie Batman kind of guy.

18:30And so he made sure he was on the coast, serving in the volunteer, the civilian role, where you're manning the anti-aircraft guns on the coast. And he witnessed the whole thing. It was a family story for a long time. Didn't know it had an official name until I looked it up. The Battle of Los Angeles. But the Battle of Los Angeles is evidence of panic, in part set off by a sub attack on the coast. Really, only, I mean, it would have taken only a couple of hours for a sub to get from Santa Barbara down to L.A. It might not have even taken that long.

19:00These days, you find out we have a good-sized great white shark prowling off the coast, and people will panic. Imagine how we do with active submarines.

19:10That's why keeping the fear down is important, because if the fear takes off, it will devour lots of things that you'll be sorry about later. Case in point, some civil rights.

19:22Civil rights and wartime are two things that we all understand are sort of at odds with each other. It's tough to maintain peacetime levels of civil rights in wartime, especially total war. But the problem is, in this conflict in the Second World War, this is something that the framework exists, the propaganda is geared toward, and people understand it as a war between people who believe in things like what we would call civil rights and people who don't.

19:54And so there's an irony attached to it that in order to beat the people who don't believe in civil rights, you have to do things that reduce the amount of civil rights in the countries that are fighting for that. There's a quote from, I think it's from Mein Kampf, it's a famous Hitler quote, where he said that the great strength of a totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it. I was doing some research on that quote, and I stumbled across a piece, a journal or something,

20:24that was quoting from a debate between George Orwell, who wrote 1984, and weird, wild, wonderful scientist Alex Comfort. And they were talking about this same thing, and neither of those guys fit into the American standard political spectrum anyway, especially not Comfort. But Comfort played off of that Hitler quote, and basically said he's right, and we're falling for it, and he wrote, quote, Hitler's greatest and irretrievable victory over here, meaning Britain,

20:55was when he persuaded the English people that the only way to lick fascism was to imitate it. He puts us in a dilemma which cannot be practically rebutted, only broken away from. Now speaking in Hitler's voice, if I win, you have political fascism victorious. If you want to beat me, you must assimilate as much of its philosophy as you can, so that I am bound to win either way. End quote.

21:25Reminds me of some of the critiques of the U.S. founding fathers about war's danger to political and civil liberty. Wartime exalts the power of the state over the individual for obvious and understandable reasons. But that's why the fascist states like war and praise war, because it dovetails into something they already believe in, the power of the state. In the Western democracies that are supposed to have these civil protections that tend to get steamrolled in wartime, well, it works against the basic,

21:56you know, framework of the system as it's at least advertised. If you want a practical example, I would only cite Executive Order 9066, which is infamous, but if you read it, it doesn't sound like it should be. This is an executive order signed by President Roosevelt about a week before that speech, that fireside chat we just took an excerpt from. And it, along with several subsequent sorts of orders and directives ends up creating a situation

22:27where you get 110 to 120,000 people of Japanese birth or descent. The majority of them, by the way, you know, 60 or 70% of them American-born citizens sent to what we used to call, and it sounded better then, relocation camps. When I was a teenager, got changed to the more ominous internment camps. And now it's common to see the much more ominous, but not Nazi death camp equivalent of concentration camps.

23:03If you actually go read Executive Order 9066, it sounds short, it sounds vague, and it sounds something that's sort of commonsensical. I mean, if you look at it, you just think, well, I'd be mad at a president, it would be a dereliction of duty if he didn't do something like this. It sounds like an anti-sabotage and anti-espionage thing. We're going to have these really sensitive national security areas. We're going to put a military leader in charge of this whole regions of the country, right? One guy for the West, one guy for the East, you know, South. And they're going to decide

23:33what these, you know, zones are, and it could be off-limits to anybody, but especially enemies. It doesn't say Japanese this or that. And you think, oh, yeah, an airfield, an army base, a port. Gotcha. Everybody can agree with that. Who knew that the guy that's in charge of the West, who did not like Japanese people clearly anyway, and pretty openly, who knew he was going to say that these little national security areas that are going to be off-limits are going to be California, Oregon, and Washington, and states to be added later. I mean, every Japanese person

24:05was sent out of Alaska to qualify to be relocated, by the way. You know how much Japanese blood you had to have in you? One-sixteenth. If we applied that same standard to Italian-Americans or German-Americans and sent them all to relocation camps, how many Americans would you, whoa, the Irish-Americans would rule the day, wouldn't they? Probably. Scandinavian-Americans. I mean, it'd be a small group

24:36after a while, wouldn't it? And that is not to say that the Italian-Americans and German-Americans did not feel these civil rights violations. They did. Like 10,000 or 11,000 German-born nationals or descendants of Germans were put in similar situations to the Japanese. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Italian-born or Italian-Americans were as well. For some reason, that's probably not hard to figure out, the Japanese-Americans were affected at 10 times the number

25:07of German-Americans. in order to avoid the normal criticism these days that people can brush aside this kind of talk because it's part of the post-modernist overemphasis on race that's so popular now. I picked a ton of people's favorite book if you're my age, the 1985 published Eagle Against the Sun by military historian Richard H. Spector so that we could avoid any suggestions that this was tainted by the sort of modernist climate today that allows people to not think about this stuff. And I should also point out that what happened

25:37to the Japanese-Americans has been apologized by multiple U.S. presidents. I think Ronald Reagan gave the most open and long-winded kind of thing apology. I mean, we paid indemnities. Carter, Ford, Reagan, the elder Bush. I mean, these are all presidents who brought it up. And this is something we feel terrible about. My cynical way of looking at it, though, is I'm not sure we wouldn't do it again in the same circumstances, which is why I'm always leery of blaming the people at the time. Ronald H. Spector doesn't seem to have that kind of problem. Writing in 1985,

26:08he says, quote, Early in the war, in what one authority has called the most blatant violation of civil liberties in American history, American citizens of Japanese descent and Japanese resident aliens, most of whom had lived in the U.S. for many years, were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and evacuated to large internment camps in the desolate interior of California, Nevada, and Utah. All were forced to abandon their homes,

26:39farms, and businesses to the doubtful care of the Federal Reserve Bank or to liquidate their property at a severe loss. End quote. I should point out that this fear that these people were going to be a problem turned out to be 100% completely unfounded in terms of espionage and sabotage in the war. I mean, there's no rationale for this, but we need to understand the fear involved. This is the sort of things we've talked about before

27:10that leeches away from the history books that makes it impossible for us to understand people from other eras because we're not scared like they were. We don't have the emotions anymore. And, you know, we had talked about this analogy of the spider in your hotel room. It's going to be hard enough to go to sleep knowing that spider's there. If everybody is assuring you that it's not dangerous at all, what if everybody is doing the exact opposite? The human beings, the Americans in this story are not operating

27:42in a neutral informational environment, something Ronald H. Spector in 1984 also emphasizes. What's the climate like that all this is happening in? He says, quote, The citizenry of California and the other West Coast states whose bigotry toward the Japanese had long been part of their way of life saw their fears and suspicions amply reinforced by the nervous and indecisive leadership of Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt,

28:13the head of the Western Defense Command. California newspapers, he writes, carried headlines such as, not quoting the headlines, Jap boats flash messages ashore and Jap and camera held in Bay City and even caps on Japanese tomato plants point to air base, he continues. At a meeting of California law enforcement officials in January 1942, the Los Angeles District Attorney,

28:43now quoting from a contemporary source, asserted that the U.S. Supreme Court was packed with leftists and other extreme advocates of civil liberty and that it was time for the people of California to disregard the law if necessary to secure their protection. Later in the source, it says, one high official was heard to state that he favored shooting on sight all Japanese residents of the state. End quote.

29:12Maybe I'm reaching here, but, you know, when you read why Hitler thought the United States was weak, it was always because we were a mongrel, polygot nation. We didn't have this racial unity that kept us together and we were liable to be pulled apart. I mean, you know, ex-slaves, all these immigrants.

29:31If you're looking at the world through his lens, maybe you could see that Japanese sub-attack and all the other things that create things like a West Coast war scare as something that begins the process of pulling us apart a little bit. And lest we think that this is something that only our grandparents would do, I have to tell you, after the 9-11 attacks, the mood was already wobbly, I thought, and had there been an Al-Qaeda submarine that surfaced off the coast and sent dozens

30:02of shells into some facility there, I think we'd start to see some of the kind of editorials that you were seeing in the vast majority of West Coast newspapers that were in favor of taking their fellow citizens to internment camps. One of them had a great line, I thought, I went and read it, and it said, listen, you don't think they're letting Americans run around loose in Italy, Germany, and Japan, do you? And that's absolutely right. In Germany, the Gestapo will find you and they will take you down to a dungeon and they will torture the life

30:33out of you until you give the names of your compatriots who they will also torture and then they'll execute all of you. Want to do that in your Western democracy? Well, of course you don't. That's why you're fighting the war, right? To avoid a fate like that. You just have to be careful. You don't end up at that destination accidentally anyway because of the war. Makes you think of the Nietzsche line, doesn't it? That when you're fighting monsters you need to take care that you yourself don't become a monster. And the lesson of the experience of the minorities

31:04in the United States, mostly Japanese, but also German and Italian during the Second World War is not that it should never happen again to them, but that wartime opens the door to the breaking of protections that defend us all and that sort of experience could happen to any of us.

31:23Now, I should point out that in terms of actual importance to the overall Asia-Pacific theater and events that, you know, comprise a giant chunk of the globe, this sub-attack against Santa Barbara is nothing. I have overplayed its importance, but I did it for a reason. In Iowa, they would have glanced over the news story and hardly noticed it, gone right to the farming futures maybe in 1942. On the East Coast, they wouldn't have even, you know, raised an eyebrow. They'd been living with U-boats operating off their coastline for months,

31:54so big deal. But my grandparents talked about that sub-attack for the rest of their lives, something most people don't even know about. It scared everybody on the West Coast.

32:04So if you're going to have a West Coast war hysteria, those are the people you have to frighten, right? The question that's interesting to ask is, does a West Coast war hysteria actually help the Japanese? Does it make the United States weaker? You know, once again, we're into this unquantifiable, squishy area of national psychology and morale and all that kind of stuff. It's hard to measure. The accountants can really enjoy themselves on the other side of war, the part where, you know, you say, oh, we killed this many of the enemy and we lost this many men

32:35in killing that many of the enemy. You could start to make charts and comparisons and intelligent decisions based on the rational data, you know, that whole side of war.

32:43But this is the squishy side and you can't say that that Japanese sub-attack had no impact on everything that happened afterwards, but you can't say that it had all the impact. I mean, you don't know what to say. So the question that comes into play with these kinds of offensives against the squishy underbelly of the enemy's morale, how much are you willing to lose in order to potentially get whatever it is you get? In the case of the Japanese sub-attack, it was one submarine. If I'm war game in this and I'm the Japanese high command, I think one submarine

33:13risked to get a chance to spin the wheel of who knows what happens if we shell the United States coastlines worth it to me. The question gets a little bit more upsetting, though. If you begin to risk too much, I would think, I'm a conservative person, take that with a grain of salt, but if you risk too much in this war against the squishy side, for lack of a better phrase, case in point, and yes, this will finally bring us back up to where we last left off in the story. I told you all that stuff

33:44to tell you this stuff. Right after Bataan Falls and you have the Bataan Death March in early April 1942, which is where we left off. So once again, what FDR was prepping the American people for, the worst surrender or one of the worst surrenders in American military history coming right after all this other bad news. I mean, you know, the U.S. needed some good news. How much would you be willing to risk in terms of human lives or precious, in some cases, irreplaceable military assets

34:15to get that morale lifted home? Especially if you could at the same time damage the enemy's morale. One submarine, certainly nobody has a problem with that. But on April 18th, 1942, the United States will conduct an operation that is highly celebrated. It's mythical in the United States. But I think if you look at it logically, and again, I'm going to, I will totally cop to being wrong here. And I'm a conservative person, as I said. I can't see it as worth it in any way, shape, or form, which is a terrible thing

34:47to say because the brave people who went on it knew they were almost maybe on a suicide mission. It's called the Doolittle Raid. The reason that it's audacious is because it involves something that had never been done before and that I don't know that has been tried many times since. Flying land-based bombers, big bombers, off aircraft carriers. The reason the U.S. wants to do it is for a very similar reason the Japanese wanted that sub to attack the U.S. coastline. So the gains would be similar,

35:18and there would be no way with this attack to do any meaningful damage, just like that sub didn't do any meaningful damage. It's symbolic damage