Show 65 - Supernova in the East IV

4:02What 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. It's hardcore history. There 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

4:37of 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. And 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

5:08and 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. The 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?

5:42How 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? Not being able to prove it one way or the other. But it has to do with the question of morale. Morale, 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.

6:15And 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? To 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.

6:47Is it the most important thing on a strategic one? Does it apply to whole nation states? Can you break their morale? Morale? 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? Much of the justification for some of the bombing that's going to be done from the air on cities and

7:19populations 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, you 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

7:53to contradict that 180 degrees. The people in London and Britain weren't ready to give in because they were being bombed. They were pissed off. Now, 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.

8:23And 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, you 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. At 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.

8:55You 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. Now, 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

9:28angrier 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, are going to have to kill that spider before they can fall asleep with any peace and comfort?

10:01Because, you know, you never know. There have been Native American massacres predicated on little more than this idea, by the way. Years 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. About 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

10:32Pearl 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, maybe 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? And if you're the President of the United States, you have to bolster the morale of the

11:08nation, 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 that if his health, you know, hadn't failed, he'd still be president today at 147 years old

11:39or something. His 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. FDR 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.

12:09He'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.

12:43And 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

13:18were known as fireside chats where 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. One 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.

13:52He 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, fighting 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.

14:2460 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. He couches this entire affair this time as a report to the American people.

14:55And 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, the light is at the end of the tunnel and we're going to turn this

15:31around. 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, we 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.

16:05We 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. So 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

16:41job. 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? But 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

17:16side 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. Make sure to include every one of them, say every one of them's got their important place. That's masterful. But 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.

17:48He 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, but 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

18:22or Russian soldiers or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us. Let them repeat that now. Let 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. Now, while this broadcast is going on, a Japanese submarine, a huge submarine,

18:55by the way, the Japanese, like the French, built some very big ones, surfaces off the coast of California, over by Santa Barbara. It'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.

19:31This attack may have been timed to coincide with Roosevelt's speech as a way to put the lie to all of his fancy and 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

20:09of an attack against the morale of the enemy, intended to sow fear and a sense of vulnerability, right? Low 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.

20:44History 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, you 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. Anti-aircraft artillery on the California coast around Los Angeles opens up in the night sky after somebody thinks they

21:16see 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. Always felt he was cursed by being born in April 1906, something most people would probably consider to be a

21:47sweet 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. And 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

22:20up. 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. These 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.

22:51That'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. Civil 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

23:21propaganda 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. And 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

23:57who fear it to imitate it. I was doing some research on that quote, and I stumbled across a piece, a journal or something, that 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, was when

24:33he 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. Reminds me of some of the critiques of the U.S. founding fathers about war's danger to political and civil liberty.

25:06Wartime 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, you 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

25:40read 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 where 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.

26:14When 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. If 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.

26:45It 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 what 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.

27:18Gotcha. 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 was sent out of Alaska to qualify to be relocated, by the way. You know how much Japanese blood you had to have in you?

27:51One-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 after 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.

28:22Between 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 of 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

28:52military 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 to 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.

29:24And 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, he 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

30:00in 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, farms, 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

30:31100% 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 that 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

31:04hotel 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 in 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

31:38been 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, the 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, now quoting from a

32:14contemporary 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. Maybe I'm reaching here, but, you know, when you read why Hitler thought

32:45the 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. If 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.

33:17And 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 of 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

33:53it, 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 out 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.

34:28Makes 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 in 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. Now, I should point out that in terms of actual importance to the

34:59overall 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, so big deal. But my grandparents talked about that sub-attack for the rest of their lives, something most people don't even know about.

35:31It scared everybody on the West Coast. So 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 in killing

36:06that 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. But 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

36:37whatever 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 risked 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,

37:09case 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 to 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

37:45assets to 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 to say

38:18because 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, and there would be no way with this attack to do any meaningful

38:50damage, just like that sub didn't do any meaningful damage. It's symbolic damage meant to, you know, affect psychology and morale and all that. But the United States, in order to carry out this morale-boosting at home and morale-damaging, hopefully, a broad operation, they're going to risk two aircraft carriers at a time when they only have four in the Pacific Theater, at a time when aircraft carriers have unexpectedly, and as a surprise to everyone, have turned out to be the most important ship now going into the mid-20th century. Everybody thought it was going to be battleships, and now here we are,

39:24and you're stuck with what you built before you knew that it was going to be the most important system, and everybody's frantically working on more, but, you know, there's a two-year lag time or something on these things, so you want to be careful with them. And here, the United States, when the Japanese Navy is basically undefeated at this point in the war, very scary, surprised, I mean, it's, you do not want to have to face them, and we risk two carriers, we meaning the United States, to launch these 15 or 16 B-25 medium bombers over

39:56Japan. At the last minute, they have to launch much farther away from Japan than they thought because they get discovered again. How much, I mean, look what happened to the Repulse and the Prince of Wales not that long before, right? I mean, you could lose these things in an instant if the tide of war sweeps over you the wrong way, and in naval warfare, it often does. I mean, there'll be a hole in the clouds, the other side's reconnaissance aircraft sees you, and uh-oh. So, um, it's risky. These, uh, planes are supposed to land in bases on the other side.

40:30It's a one-way trip. They're not landing on those carriers. They're going to bomb Japan and keep going, and then land in China, hopefully, but a lot of China is run by Japan at this time period. Long story short, some of them make it home, some of them don't. None of the planes make it home. The aircraft carriers get away, which is the main thing from a U.S. perspective. Uh, there's a bump. First good news in the newspapers in the United States in a long time. Wonderful. How much is that worth? And there is a real sense, and after the war, you get memoirs and

41:05everything that confirms it, that this was very embarrassing to Japanese military leadership because, if nothing else, it put the emperor's physical safety in jeopardy, which is, you know, intolerable. So it had that effect. Again, what's that worth, though? From a cost-to-benefit ratio, it's worth one sub to me. I don't think it's worth two carriers in early 1942, especially since you're going to really, really, really need those carriers soon. Two other quick points worth making about the Doolittle Raid. The first is that there is another way of looking at this, and people who score more aggressively on the

41:38willing-to-take-risk military commander spectrum than I do will say that in addition to the, you know, everyone agrees upon morale and psychology boosts and effects, that there was a real-world goal in this whole thing and that it was achieved, and the real-world goal was the equivalent of what a boxer does when he feints an opponent in the ring. The Japanese flinched. They reacted to the blow by changing their strategy, moving their assets around, doing things differently, and perhaps deciding different places to strike and maneuver in order to prevent anything like this from happening again.

42:13So, in other words, a real-world military effect, something that's hard to measure in terms of how much of an effect and how much that helps, but something different from the psychological or morale side of things. I tend to think it's a little bit more like, you know, you spin the wheel of what happens when we bomb Japan and something good came up, but everybody's got a different opinion. Now, something that is not a question of opinion is the real-world effects of the Doolittle Raid on our allies,

42:47if you're in an allied country, the Chinese, because they were so obviously in on this plan. They were to provide the bases that the pilots and the plane crews landed at. But there's a harrowing personal experiences thing on the Chinese side that's little known in the United States. The Japanese took their anger out on the only allied people that they could get their hands on and take their anger out on. They punished the Chinese. And the numbers are incredible.

43:17Most people think that Chiang Kai-shek was exaggerating, but cut him in half if you want. Chiang says 250,000 Chinese civilians paid with their lives in reprisals for the Doolittle Raid. In his book, Hirohito's War, author Francis Pike puts it this way, quote, Chiang would later notify Roosevelt that in southern China, the Japanese army slaughtered 250,000 Chinese civilians in a campaign of vengeance, even allowing for some exaggeration on Chiang's part. The Doolittle Raid thus caused the death of more than twice the number of Chinese than the United

43:51States military suffered during the entire Pacific War, end quote. I'm fascinated by human experiences. It's part of the reason we focus so much of it in these conversations. And in the same way, I can't help but think about those B-25 crews that have just bombed Japan and whose planes are running out of fuel and now they're, you know, going to bail out. I can't help but wonder, oh my God, what is that like? And you think about that human experience. And that is one kind of human experience.

44:25But at the very opposite end of the scale, what Franklin Roosevelt experiences when his ally Chiang Kai-shek tells him that resulting from decisions that he made, 250,000 civilians are brutally killed, that's a different kind of human experience. How'd you like to be in Franklin Roosevelt's shoes right then? Now, disclaimer, there are well-known leaders of countries on both the Axis and Allied side who seem to have not a ton of sympathy for human suffering. One of them is alleged to have said that one death is a

44:58tragedy, a million a statistic. Another sets up human extermination camps that run like a factory operation. So let's not attribute this same sense of gut punch when you find out what results downstream sometimes from your decision-making to all of them. But I do not believe many people would think Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of those people. And yes, war results and terrible things happening, but in this case, Roosevelt is on record as saying what he was trying to do here with a raid that would not have killed tons of people anyway was

45:34bring the war home to the Japanese and show them what this was like. You know, here's what you bargained for. This is what's going to happen because you struck. You know, in other words, in his way, this was a measured sort of a response that sent a message. And yet, as a result of that decision, 250,000 civilians are killed. I cannot imagine that Roosevelt could have reacted to that well. I wonder what that night's attempt to sleep was like.

46:04That's not a human experience many people ever have to have either. Knowing that any decision you make could, in many cases, unforeseeably result in the deaths of huge numbers of human beings would paralyze most of us. But there's an alternative way of looking at this that's, I think it's almost like a DNA built-in outlook. It's just a different point of view, but enough of these people think this way, so it's a type and maybe it has to be the kind of type you have in a war leader.

46:38I had a friend who thought they were all sociopaths because they have to disregard human suffering, but I don't believe that. I think they have an alternative rationale, which is that this suffering that these decisions result in are the price you pay for a better long-term outcome, right? Lower casualties than you would have otherwise had, less suffering than you otherwise would have had, a better outcome than you otherwise would have had. And listen, not making a move sometimes because you don't want to do anything that

47:10could kill tons of people could end up killing more people in the long run. So there's not even a sort of a safe strategy to take here. Want to trade places with one of these war leaders in terms of responsibility? I don't mean to say, by the way, that Roosevelt has dictatorial-like powers in the Second World War. There's still a U.S. Congress. He's consulting all the time with military leaders, industrial leaders, so he's got a lot of influences working on him from every direction, but the Constitution gives the U.S.

47:44President a lot of war-fighting authority, and so to quote Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, when it comes to ultimate responsibility for things, the buck stops here, meaning the president's desk, and in the case of Roosevelt, you know, when weighing decisions versus outcomes, the buck stops there. But when you think about it, that's pretty common, isn't it? I mean, certainly in the Third Reich. The buck stops with Hitler, doesn't it? In the Soviet Union, it sure as heck stops with Stalin, doesn't it?

48:15He's the one with the responsibility. I think it's fair to say the buck stops with Churchill in the U.K., even though that's a Western democracy and they have a parliament. Who does the buck stop with, though, in Japan? Earlier, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the unique way that the Japanese system, its politics and its culture developed after, well, really, for more than a century before the Second World War and how the system itself would break down.

48:45In the war, this is one of the ways it breaks down. There is no place the buck stops when it comes to Japanese military responsibility. And if you're analyzing the Second World War from sort of the big picture level, this is one of the strangest things. the Japanese command and control, their leadership situation, none of this is anything like any of the other powers. We had said it's got a very sort of uniquely Japanese sort of feel to it. At the same time, this diffusion of responsibility is something that the other governments either did away with because they're

49:22totalitarian, they don't believe in diffusion of power anyway, or temporarily suspended a lot of it, like in the U.S. and the U.K. with their wartime governments. The Japanese kind of don't. And it's because they can't. There are certain elements that are built into the system, right? American propaganda used to always lump the Japanese in with the Germans and the Italians, right? It was always the big three, Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, as though they're all totalitarians, all fascists, all dictators, but

49:52Tojo wasn't. Might have liked to have been, Japan might have done better if he was. He was the most powerful prime minister, John L. McClain says, in a modern history of Japan, the most powerful prime minister Japan had ever had. Gobbled up a couple of other political offices, too. Seems to be consolidating his power. Still couldn't control his underlings. He's an army general who couldn't even totally control the army. Forget about the navy. We talked about the fact that the Japanese have the most hostile inner service rivalry problem

50:23I've ever seen. Army and the navy actively dislike each other, don't tell each other things. There really is nobody who can tell them what to do. When you hear the way sometimes Tojo is treated by his supposed underlings, well, that puts the lie to the idea that they're anything like Hitler or Stalin in terms of their power because Hitler would kill you. So would Stalin if a general walked in to the office, demanded that you overturn a decision and then called you a stupid fool to your face. James M. McLean tells a story in his book where that's exactly what

50:58happened to Tojo. Tells another story of another general who walks in, bursts into Tojo's office and demands that he either resign or shoot himself. Again, doesn't sound like the kind of government you're dealing with in the Soviet state or the Third Reich. What it means though is there's no one here who can override one side referee disputes. What do you do if the army and the navy have disagreements on how to fight the war and you can't make them agree with each other and unify and we're all on the same team here, right?

51:30What if they go their own way? What if they don't even tell you some of the things they're doing? The Japanese war effort throughout the entire conflict looks very strange in terms of when you're sitting there going, now what are they trying to do? And it's because they're not operating with one voice. Now the Japanese is obviously an extreme version of this, but the Axis has this problem across the board. The Allies are doing a great job working together, communicating. They'll eventually have whole conferences where all these guys, the leaders of the countries get together.

52:03The Axis isn't doing anything like this. Cooperation is rare. Communication is rare. Sharing of intelligence is rare. The Allies are doing a lot more of that, not so much the intelligence. But if you look at this command and control problem that we just talked about, you add it to the other very non-sexy things in this war that the Allies simply dominate in. Industrial production, possession of natural resources, I mean the Allies are swimming in oil, the Axis always seem down, especially after the midway point in the war, always seem down to like their last cans of gas.

52:36The logistics, the ability to get stuff to the people who are fighting, and the question of intelligence, knowing what your enemy is going to do and preventing them from knowing what you're going to do, these are areas where the Axis are dominated by the Allies. I mean as a war game player you can't help but notice how great, for example, German equipment is on the battlefield. They have great tanks, great anti-tank guns, great planes, all this kind of stuff, great quality. And so you wonder how did they win this war?

53:07They win this war with all the stuff that isn't that sort of sexy stuff. Take intelligence. The United States and the United Kingdom are the best code breakers and signals intelligence people in the world. They are very good at what they do and they're sharing their information. The Soviets are fantastic at the old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground kind of intelligence, human intelligence, spying. Hard to find a country that does a better job in their ideology which has this global appeal. You know, you're all comrades if you're a working person worldwide, tends to make it a little easier for them

53:41to recruit people to work in other countries for their cause than it would be if they were just saying, you know, we need people who agree with Russia and our national aims. It's another thing to say, you know, comrade, help us out as a fellow traveler for a giant world revolution. and it always seems like you could have even three people in the most top secret kind of get-together over something like an atomic bomb or something like that and one of them will be a Soviet mole. Now, I should say there's been a lot of argument amongst historians about the value of this intelligence and how

54:16you try to quantify how much of an advantage the allies had because of it. I mean, some people will say it shortened the war by a lot, others by a little. You can't argue with certain things though that you just have to look at as enormous and they're basically intelligence related things. The Soviet Union had a spy who was able to tell them that the Japanese were not going to attack the Soviet Union and help the Germans who were driving toward Moscow but were instead going to bomb Pearl Harbor and go that route. That allowed Stalin to free up 30 to 40 divisions in his east and

54:51send them west to help keep the Germans from taking Moscow. How do you put a value on that? There are researchers and scientists in Poland who years before the war had started to dissect some of the German cryptological equipment, cryptographical equipment. Then they worked with the French and then when the war started they transferred their information to the British. The British had something called an Enigma machine which is like a little coding typewriter that you had to have on both ends of a coded message to decode it and the Germans thought it was safe and the British

55:23had one. It's part of a program, part of a program called ULTRA and it was called ULTRA because it was ULTRA secret and the information from ULTRA did not become available till well really the mid-1970s which means if you look at a history of the Second World War before the mid-1970s and there is no word ULTRA in the back index, it shows you that their view of the war is going to be very different than ours because we know how much the Allies knew about the Axis capabilities and intentions. I mean, make something like the whole North Africa campaign look kind of different.

55:56Everybody thought and I read this in the book, everybody thought Montgomery was reading Rommel's mind and as one historian said he was instead reading his mail. In the Pacific, the United States had some idea of the Japanese coded messages and could read some of the stuff some of the time and you have to be so careful because you have to make sure they're not feeding you a load of bologna if they figured out that you're reading their messages. You also have to be careful about how you react to those messages because if you're too perfect

56:28and you react to everything you decode, they'll realize you've decoded their message. There's a book called Bodyguard of Lies which is all about the enigma and the ultra program and how they have to make trade-offs sometimes and let troops go to their deaths in a situation where they know they shouldn't be going into that situation but if they cancel it, the Germans will understand that the traffic's been compromised and they'll change the way they code things. So sometimes you make these hard choices to keep the information conduit open and save it for the really big decisive moments. Of course, let's not pretend that you can always know what's

57:03going to be decisive before it is. There are some obvious cases if you're going to have a huge battle throw a ton of your strength in for some you know war winning or war losing objective you don't have to be Nostradamus to see that that's going to be decisive and you should burn all your intelligence bridges or whatever it takes to give yourself an edge right? But as all of us with an even cursory knowledge of war knows it is famously serendipitous and often involves luck and chance and all these things that's why you have

57:34things like dice in wargaming that's what you're simulating there the random factors that are often out of one's control. I mean I like the most stark examples those stories of ancient battles where the wind whips up unexpectedly and blows sand in the face of only one side and so they lose. Something that would probably be seen as the gods making a choice in a battle like that right? The problem with the wind whipping up though is you think well how do you take advantage of that? How do you use that ahead of time and know and make that decisive?

58:07Well the easy answer is you can't of course I think about like a Julius Caesar who might have gone to the battlefield days in advance interviewed the locals said does the wind ever blow through these mountains you know what time of day does that happen? Is it happening this time of year and does it hit the side of the river that's on the east or the west? I mean you could kind of maybe take advantage of it. It's a double-edged sword though because sometimes having information in advance forces you to do something and if you do

58:38something and it turns out wrong you might have been better off not doing anything at all. I love that Herodotus story about the king of Lydia that goes to the oracle and says should I attack the empire of Cyrus the Great and the oracle says if you attack Cyrus the Great you will destroy a great empire so he does and loses destroying his own great empire so you got to be careful in mid-April 1942 Admiral Chester Nimitz U.S. Admiral Chester Nimitz I believe his command is the U.S. Central Pacific area or the Central Pacific and he gets information transmitted to him up the sort of military food

59:14chain emanating originally from some of the crypto analysts like Joseph Roquefort fabulously interesting guys in their own right and the information is like the water of Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings when the hobbits could look down in that water and they see what might be the future but it also might be something that's a trick but it also might be something that they want to see it's intelligence right it's stuff from the crypto analysts that put some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces together in a way that allows them to say with some confidence

59:45they think or they wouldn't have brought it to Nimitz what the Japanese are going to do in about two weeks so it's a little glimpse into the not-too-distant future now the problem a guy like Nimitz has with something like this is what do you do with it do you act on it well what if the crypto analysts have it wrong or worse yet what if the Japanese have figured out that some of their codes are broken and deliberately gave false information out there to trap you Nimitz brings it to other admirals they're of mixed opinions

1:00:17some agree with him that this is actionable intelligence that we should take advantage of others much less sure saying there's a lot of guesswork going on here eventually Nimitz gets approval though because he seems to buy it to take advantage of this actionable intelligence by taking an action his problem is he doesn't have all that much to work with as we said earlier American aircraft carrier strength in the Pacific and aircraft carriers have turned out to be the important weapon system although that's not totally confirmed at this point in the war yet but people are

1:00:49starting to think ahead American aircraft carrier strength in the Pacific is for the Japanese if you count like carriers have more than twice as many and when Nimitz has this two weeks notice with which to take advantage of the intelligence he may not have all four of them because two of them are off conducting the do little raid sort of near Japan he'll send him if he can but he's not in charge of the timetable here the Japanese are they're launching what they believe is a surprise attack on the island of New Guinea the second

1:01:20largest island on the planet that's what Nimitz gets information about what's more the crypto analysts think it's going to be at Port Mosby which if so is extra scary for the allies because Port Mosby's on the Australian side of New Guinea allows the Japanese to avoid having to traipse over the mountain range in the middle of New Guinea which is the whole thing actually is just wicked we talked about it earlier in the story depending on your personal fears and things that make you squirm New Guinea might be for you the worst place in the

1:01:52world to fight some of you who really hate the cold probably wouldn't want to be on the eastern front there's a lot of bad theaters but for a lot of people New Guinea would make the top of the list the Japanese are going to go around the side of the island to the far side the Australian side at Port Mosby and avoid that whole mountain range and they're going to do it by by ship they're going to have some transports to carry the troops they're going to have some escort ships to keep an eye on

1:02:23them and in this case going to have a couple of aircraft carriers two big ones and a light aircraft carrier nearby it's all part of a big Japanese move into that area not just New Guinea but some of the Solomon Islands like Tulagi and if the Japanese can establish air bases there they're going to cause a lot of trouble there'll be about a hundred miles 200 miles something like that off the Australian northern coast that means not just bombers will be able to reach it but you'll be able to have Japanese fighter planes in that

1:02:54whole northern Australia area there was an Australian prime minister who a generation before this time said that New Guinea and some of the Solomons comprise like a fortress guarding the northern approaches to Australia what happens if the northern approaches are no longer guarded but instead are held by the Japanese if you're an American imagine having having the Japanese 100 or 200 miles off the coast intolerable right well Australia is one of those let's call them if you want to call them intolerable I like to call them geographic firewalls for the allies in this war places

1:03:25where the Japanese advance has to stop lines in the in the sand places like India on one side of the Japanese perimeter and they're advancing in that direction through Burma what's now Myanmar fighting not just forces from the United Kingdom and involving Burmese and Indian troops but also the Chinese troops linking up over there and it's key because if the Japanese get to India they'll cut off supplies to China all that kind of stuff but they can't get farther than India now it's hard to see them getting farther than India that's something all these geographic

1:03:56firewalls have encountered right they're hard to imagine them falling they're even hard to imagine communications getting cut off significantly but like all firewalls if somehow the firewall fails if somehow the Japanese were able either directly through some sort of military endeavor or because the anti-colonial forces in a place like India were somehow exploited by Japanese propaganda if somehow the the India firewall failed well then every fantasy that the Axis dreamers have could possibly be in play then maybe you could have this linking up of Japanese forces and Axis Italian German Hungarian Romanian forces somewhere in

1:04:27the Middle Eastern oil fields right that's a dream for all these Axis propagandists but if that happened all all bets are off right in the West on the opposite side of the Japanese defense perimeter you have the other firewall the Hawaiian Islands some would argue it also includes the islands that guard Hawaii so like Midway Johnson those islands it's hard to imagine the Japanese taking those islands it's a little less hard but still hard to imagine them completely and significantly cutting off communications between those islands and the continental US but if they did all hell

1:04:58breaks loose so that's the geographic firewall in that direction north well that's the Soviet Union and if the Japanese wanted to attack the Soviet Union they already could have now they don't want to now that that whole Moscow advance looked like it stalled on the on the Eastern Front might might have made the good decision there not to mess with the Soviets so that's a direction they can't expand in the the Japanese supernova begins to run into firewalls in every direction in the south it's Australia and as we said maybe these these places like New

1:05:29Guinea and the Solomons guarding the approaches from the north the Japanese get them it creates problems huge problems this is also we should point out part of the effort in the plans for the conk reconquest of this area MacArthur plans on using New Guinea so to have the Japanese all entrenched there with air bases and everything else well that's that's preventing that is worth losing a couple of aircraft carriers for I think you could make a case Nimitz does make a case he gets approval to to risk these carriers and of course the reason they're

1:06:01a risk is anytime you want to go out there and strike a blow you risk what you're using to strike with it's the same thing where if you throw a punch in boxing you're opening yourself up to a counterpunch and at this time the loss of two aircraft carriers half your force in the Pacific so soon after Pearl Harbor with all the other things that have happened it's a big risk it's also a hell of an opportunity it is the chance for a change to surprise the Japanese when up till this point in the war

1:06:34it's been the Japanese who've been doing all the surprising and wrong footing the allies and once they have them off balance keeping them that way this is the era by the way and this is debatable amongst experts but but this is the era where the Japanese some of the writers especially from Japan after the war would talk about the problem with victory disease or other phrases that denoted a level of hubris that might have been creeping into some in the Japanese military be it army navy upper command or whatnot they still have a bunch of

1:07:08people that think that they're doomed fighting the allies but you know so far so good right maybe you get a little complacent and what the allies are about to do here is ambush a surprise attack they're launching a surprise attack against a surprise attack it's a counter surprise attack and if a surprise attack is a force multiplier one would have to think a counter surprise attack is like a force multiplier plus so if you're a guy like Admiral Nimitz trying to figure out you know what do I use my assets for what do I risk

1:07:42what are you waiting for this is as good as it's going to get and the reason you care is because the intelligence shows that there's going to be a couple of Japanese aircraft carriers here two and a half let's call it Shokaku Zouikaku two fleet carriers and the Shoho light carrier if you have a chance because you have all the advantages in your favor to take those out that would be a nice little whittling down of Japanese aircraft carrier strength wouldn't it so Nimitz gathers what aircraft carrier strength he has and he sends it out

1:08:16to the Coral Sea which washes up against both Australia and New Guinea it's the place where you have to be to make this interception of this Japanese amphibious assault he'll have the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier there he'll have the Lexington there and their supporting ships and they will try to ambush the Japanese but as we said the US may have this intelligence advantage but the Japanese control the timeline and on or around May 1st 1942 they strike in the Solomons launching amphibious assaults in places like the island of Tulagi all part of the really early

1:08:50moves in this expansion of the defense perimeter you know southward a couple of days after that Admiral Fletcher on board the Yorktown in response to the Tulagi invasion launches an airstrike maybe hoping to catch all those transports still on the beaches and everybody vulnerable but it's really after things are done and so the airstrike roars in and sinks a transport and a couple of patrol boats and a destroyer it's not really a real big haul for that amount of effort expended and for what you essentially are doing also which is announcing with a giant bullhorn

1:09:24that there must be an American carrier at least one nearby because we just got hit with American carrier aircraft right so the Japanese carriers that are not there but not too distant begin to show up on the scene because obviously they're going to be needed more than they thought there's at least a carrier nearby the Americans begin positioning themselves to try to ambush this invasion force and what's going to unfold is what I read one Admiral called it the most complex naval engagement in all history I'm not an expert but I'd beg to differ just

1:09:58in my own personal accounts because they there's about a hundred of them that look this complicated to me but that's just because I'm not that smart it's very complicated stuff though so in a simplistic sense the best way to to look at it though maybe is that it's going to be one of the last battles you're going to see especially once you get satellites forget it it's all over except for the submarines but but it's going to be one of the last battles where you really get a chance to get that feel that goes back

1:10:31to naval battles when people were in canoes an element that's always been present in naval warfare because of the obvious you know it's land warfare it's a it's a factor too but the ocean completely makes it a different ballgame you're forever looking for the other side where are they you're like two people boxing in a fog go watch a film like sink the Bismarck about the sinking of the German battleship if you watch it it seems to me like three-fourths of that film is all like a spy versus spy thing you know he's he we're

1:11:04tailing him oh he gets lost in the fog oh we've picked up his scent over here it should be called find the Bismarck not sink the Bismarck but that dynamic is the ever-present naval dynamic that's been around since the beginning of time right fleets even large ones get swallowed up easily in the vastness of the ocean then there's the atmospheric conditions in the ocean you got your fog you got your squalls you got your dark I mean there's a million things that just make it sometimes hard sometimes impossible even for fleets that want to find

1:11:37each other to find each other if one side actively wants to get away it's very difficult what's more in this era where you finally have something like aircraft carriers which extends the eyesight of the fleet doesn't it far distant because you can scout ahead with all those planes right in the old days like right before this period until back to the canoe era you could see as far as the tallest crow's nest you know in the highest mast with your little spyglass as you could see and that was pretty much it the radar is going

1:12:10to get pretty darn good on the American side it's already pretty good pretty darn good though later in the war start changing the characteristics of naval warfare that have always been present the Japanese are significantly behind in radar technology and the deployment of radar you know to things like fleets yet even with the relatively rudimentary radar on the US side even with the submarines out there scouting supposedly even with the air reconnaissance out there scouring the skies even with the guys in the crow's nest on the highest mast looking for everyone these fleets get frightfully

1:12:42close to each other and don't even know it at one point they'll be 70 miles apart and not know it how do you have all those aircraft out there sky I mean it boggles the mind but it's the ocean baby you don't know it's always been that way there's something comforting though in the way things have always been and what's about to happen in this encounter is going to change the way things have always been and begin turning them into the way things still are now you go look at modern naval warfare and you will

1:13:15be struck by the speed at which it all happens right it's bewildering it's disorienting it's hard to follow and if you're there it's deadly it's it's quick and deadly the period at which that sort of speed acceleration happens is this period that we're talking about right now and it's not hard to see why it's going to be the aircraft when you have lots of fast-moving dangerous objects in the sky things are going to be chaotic and they're going to be going fast I mean think of Star Wars and you have the big giant ships but

1:13:48they're besieged by hundreds of the little teeny fighters if nothing else it's fast these admirals that are heading to an encounter here are both working without any actual hard data of what it's like when two aircraft carrier armed fleets face each other this is the first time that's ever happened the Japanese about a month before this time period sank an old antiquated British light carrier in the Indian Ocean but it wasn't a combat this is full-on combat and both admirals are sort of winging it if you'll pardon the pun but they're going to learn a

1:14:21lot if you actually get granular though and study what's involved in carrier warfare with the timetables involved in launching and bringing back planes and and having to you know the time involved in rearming them or changing their armament these aren't just details they're going to be the really crucial details and for a bunch of admirals who are surface fleet commanders or submarine commanders guys who are from a different world entirely they're all learning on the job here and the American crews and pilots and everybody especially this is it's not so much a baptism of fire

1:14:54because these aircraft carriers have been involved in little strikes here and there but this is real this is not like little raids this is the full-blown thing the Japanese are much more experienced in that regard and they have been fighting with each other a lot longer it's more of a smooth running machine but they haven't had to fight aircraft carriers either both sides had conducted exercises and war games before the war and certainly continuing you know even after the war trying to replicate what might happen when these kinds of fleets ran into each other and

1:15:27I was reading something on the US exercises a little while ago that was saying that the evidence seemed to show that you had to as as the Americans you had to find the Japanese carriers before they found you and you had to launch a strike with almost everything you had immediately upon finding it in the hopes that you could knock out their carriers before they could launch a strike at you think of two gunfighters trying to be quicker on the draw not only do you have to kill the other gunfighter but you have to make

1:16:00sure you kill them before they loose off a shot at you because it could be like striking beyond the grave if the American aircraft are able to sink the Japanese carrier but not before the Japanese carrier unleashes their planes that then knock out you know the very carrier that killed them it's like the two fighters killing each other at the same time sounds very Japanese samurai-ish right there doesn't it or King Arthur-ish but what this does is it puts a real emphasis on you know like a nail-biting emphasis on finding the enemy and then immediately

1:16:33crippling them it gives you an itchy trigger finger if we can continue the gunfight analogy here and both sides have it and it contributes to how things play out because on May 7th both sides are looking for each other I read I've read two things I've read that that neither side knows where the other is I've read that both sides kind of think that they know where the other is but on May 7th both sides think they find each other and the Japanese get an early report in the early part of the morning that they

1:17:06found at least one aircraft carrier so the Japanese doing what you should do based on what evidence you know the studies seem to show Raiko get them before they can get you launches a full strike and the full strike arrives on the scene to find not an aircraft carrier but an oiler a refueling ship and a destroyer the problem with throwing a punch like that you know all the right common sense reasons right take them out before they take you out but while you're taking them out you're totally defenseless that's something else the pre-war war

1:17:39game showed with all you're basically a floating gasoline and munitions vehicle without protection and even those small groups of fighters you keep back known as CAP or combat air patrol they're going to prove to be less than a hundred percent effective at least for the early part of the war so to launch a strike to take out the enemy carriers who could hurt you and realize that the Japanese reconnaissance guy had given you the wrong information is potentially devastating the Americans have a similar problem happened to them a couple hours later though when one of

1:18:12their reconnaissance planes accurately identifies some Japanese cruisers that they find but somehow muffles the communications back with the fleet and the Admiral and what should say cruisers instead reads on the other side of the message in Admiral Fletcher's hands carriers so Admiral Fletcher does exactly what the pre-war evidence would seem to indicate you should do go get them and launches a full strike those two reconnaissance pilots who muffled the message exchange then have to land and

1:18:44run into Admiral Fletcher in his book Hirohito's War author Francis Pike talks about that so first he talks about how the the strike gets going and then he talks about Admiral Fletcher realizing that he's just launched his entire strike force against a few cruisers Pike writes quote by 9 26 a.m Yorktown's entire strike force of 93 planes had been spotted meaning fueled and armed on deck on deck and Fletcher came onto the bridge wing with a

1:19:17bullhorn and ordered them to get that goddamn carrier 45 minutes later the strike force was on its way Nielsen and Straub those are the two aircraft reconnaissance guys now returned to the Yorktown dropping a bean bag with an attached note that confirmed the location of the Japanese force Fletcher was horrified to see that the note mentioned two cruisers and four destroyers not a word about carriers as a result of the miscommunication Fletcher had launched his entire

1:19:49strike force against a small cruiser force leaving his own carriers bare to attack from Japan's carriers when Nielsen landed Fletcher asked him what about the carriers the shocked Admiral according to one witness told Nielsen young man do you know what you have done you have just cost the United States two carriers end quote the Americans got lucky another reconnaissance plane spotted not one of the big fleet carriers but the light carrier Shoho steaming about 20 or

1:20:2230 miles away radioed that information back Fletcher was able to break radio silence and vector the attack which was of course going toward those insignificant cruisers to change course and hit the Japanese light carrier the Shoho got to be an early example of exactly why these admirals had every reason to be frightened to death of what these aircraft could do she was blown right out of the water the um after action reports of fighter pilots and

1:20:54combat pilots and bomber pilots of all kinds are wildly and notoriously and historically in every culture in the world that has them optimistic they're an optimistic lot I think in the Battle of Britain they actually had a formula to weed out the natural optimism of fighter pilots so take these numbers with a grain of salt Craig L. Simon says that pilots from the Lexington claimed to hit the Shoho with five bombs and nine torpedoes the Yorktown

1:21:27crews claimed 14 bomb hits and 10 torpedo hits 700 crew members or something and they pulled a little over 200 out of the water scratch one flat top was the famous American message back to let the commanders of the fleet know that they'd gotten a carrier May 7th is kind of the appetizer for May 8th and here's how historian naval historian Craig L. Simons describes the next day he writes quote the air attacks of May 7th

1:22:00were only the preliminary skirmish the next day scout planes from each side finally sighted the other's carriers and at almost the same moment the Americans and the Japanese launched full deck loads of attack planes toward the other's position the planes even passed one another in route to their targets arriving first the Americans encountered ferocious opposition from Japanese zeros flying CAP that's combat air patrol the defense of the fighters of their own aircraft carriers an American pilot

1:22:30recalled now quoting the pilot quote it was an incredible scramble people yelling over the radio mixed up and you never knew who was on top of whom amidst the chaos Simons writes and harassed by the zeros the torpedo planes scored no hits the dive bombers however plunging almost straight down from 14,000 feet put three 1,000 pound bombs onto the Shokaku utterly wrecking her flight deck though she managed to stay afloat the Zwikaku obscured by dense cloud cover escaped entirely end quote it's worth a tiny moment aside here because it's part of those weird sort of

1:23:06tragedies of war we talked earlier about things that will fail in the acid test of combat right you don't know till it happens one of those things is going to be the American torpedo sounds like a small thing to bring up doesn't it but the American torpedo in the early part of the war is probably the worst torpedo of all the major powers it's dysfunctional and unreliable often didn't explode often ran too deep all kinds of problems it's been a scandal amongst some and they've been writing since I was a kid blaming all kinds of

1:23:41things from the underperformance of the U.S. submarine service early in the war to the PT boats to the torpedo planes blaming this weapon system that did not pass the acid test of combat now the Japanese on the other side of the coin have by far and it's not even close the best torpedoes in the war so that's an area where I mean the United States has the radar the Japanese have the torpedoes I take the radar over the torpedoes but the torpedoes are not insignificant especially now when they are supposed to be the main ship

1:24:16killing weapon in these naval arsenals there's a sort of doomed heroism to the torpedo planes on the American side here because they don't know it but even if they manage to make this horrifically scary run right torpedo planes have to go at almost wave height they have to line up you know with the ship and go straight and level for a long time which makes you a wonderful sitting duck for both the ship's anti-aircraft and the combat air patrol that's out to get you like a bunch of dragonflies amongst gnats and you got this heavy

1:24:51torpedo underneath you which makes you lumbering and slow all right but it's worth it right if you can get a ship the problem is is that these torpedoes so often fail to explode or run deep or well it's amazing how often early in the war these planes will despite saying that they scored hits it's going to be the dive bombers that take the toll on the Japanese but the dive bombers have their way opened up by the torpedo planes the torpedo planes are kind of like the lead blockers if if the lead blockers had to

1:25:26sometimes take a bullet for the running back because the torpedo planes as I said operating at low level well that's where the fighters who are defending the fleet go get them low level when these dive bombers come in from like 14 000 feet you can't just as a fighter climb from ground level to 14 000 feet quickly take some time and by then the bombs have dropped so in a sense these torpedo planes which get massacred in the early battles here are are taking up the attention of the dragonflies so the bombers have a clear

1:26:02you know running lane to drop their bombs on the shokaku and um send her careening away on fire the Americans do not escape unscathed though either and the Japanese find them they launch an anvil attack Simon says which means they're coming in from opposite angles this shows you their professionalism how often they've worked together they may not have attacked carriers like this before but they've got a lot of experience sinking big ships and they do it so that no matter which way you turn somebody's going to get you the Yorktown and the Lexington the aircraft

1:26:35carriers are enormous the Lexington is one of the largest non-nuclear warships ever built i remembered how long it was because it's easy it's 888 feet long uh try nimbly turning that monster uh that having been said the Yorktown's not much shorter and yet she is able to nimbly escape i guess like 8 torpedoes and the Japanese torpedoes as i said those are not dysfunctional in any way they are deadly and a couple of them hit the Lexington so do a couple of bombs the problem on all these carriers this will never get solved in the

1:27:06whole war although they'll get better as the newer carriers come online incorporating what these early battles teach them these things are i mean they're bombs and fuel right torpedoes bombs and fuel that's what they carry in planes uh lots of flammable explosive types of things and so when a fire starts on them it's extremely dangerous and that's what these bombs really do they blow holes in flight decks and they start fires this is where another non-sexy side of war is going to come into play when i was a kid they were still they remembered these

1:27:36folk and they still remembered the cbs the uh combat engineers uh who build stuff uh that were also uh always credited with a lot of you know sort of under the radar importance in the war effort um the combat crews and the damage control crews uh on u.s ships are going to turn out to be one of their their real strong points their ability to um put out fires prevent ships from listing their ability to get ships that are out of commission especially uh flight decks and flight operations going again will be uh make it

1:28:07or break it stuff at several important points and not just the crews on board the ability of the crews back at places like pearl harbor to get ships up and running quickly are going to be absolutely crucial to the war effort in a way that you could never if you were back in japan 15 years before the war going you know we really have to invest in policies for um people to quickly turn around ships if they're injured in wartime because the shokaku is going to go back to japan and it's going to take some

1:28:38time to get her back in action and the other ship the zuikaku is also going to go back to japan because it lost so many pilots in this encounter uh which is going to turn out to be another one of those problems so both of those things are going to be out of commission for a while the lexington's going to be out of commission forever uh because these um damage control crews do heroic efforts to basically you know get the fires under control get the list under control the lexington almost makes it out of there

1:29:08and then internal explosions start uh and the ship's doomed and they actually are able to like their soul i remember the stories of they would say that the crew was they knew had so much time they could go down and and get whole helmet fulls of ice cream you know from from the restaurant at the ship and then take it down uh you know as they're getting off the ship they took their shoes off i mean it was a sort of a orderly getting off of the doomed vessel they sent in a u.s destroyer that

1:29:39torpedoed it with five torpedoes at least some of which obviously were functional and sent it to the bottom um both sides kind of contemplated striking again the japanese actually thinking about looking for a night battle but the end result was both sides sort of pulled away now you never want to trade a fleet carrier like the lexington for a light carrier like the shoho so it's often been portrayed this battle of the coral sea as a tactical victory for the japanese and by the way all sides claimed victory exaggerated the enemy's losses and all that

1:30:10kind of stuff in the media and the propaganda but from a strategic standpoint the japanese at least for now called off their invasion of port mosby the first time in this whole supernova era that the japanese have been thwarted in one of their designs and this also keeps safe that firewall on the south that line in that direction that the japanese must not be allowed to cross but in a month they're going to test another one of the firewalls this one the americans firewall in the central pacific the dead center of the pacific kind of

1:30:40about halfway between north america and asia maybe that's why it's called midway in my mind you know one of the reasons i disagree with that admiral who said coral seas may be the most complicated battle ever because midway to me looks just as complicated if not more complicated it's very hard to follow and i feel like it actually makes more sense if you simplify it to me midway this famous legendary battle in the second world war one of the really great naval battles um you know if the suffering and violence and death and everything involved

1:31:11can be called great um to me it looks like round two of the same fight the coral sea is round one and then midway's round two they're only a month apart from each other and the time spent apart reminds me of what a boxer does when they go back to their corner and they get sponged down and stitched up and and you you go and break down what okay here's what the other guy's been doing to you and and and then they they clash again this is again the non-sexy stuff but the york town which

1:31:42is damaged at coral sea and is supposed to be out for months uh goes back to pearl harbor they do the equivalent of calling on scotty for impulse power we need it and they send the york town within 48 hours with welders still working on it to war to meet up with the force that's going to ambush the japanese again at midway the same way they did at coral sea there's an interesting line in one of the history books i read that said that it's intriguing that the japanese high command never really wondered at least

1:32:12and i haven't found anything that said they did about what the heck the american carriers were doing at just the right place in coral sea uh because the americans are going to do the same thing at midway they're going to have the same people it's going to be the same crypto analysts like rochefort he's going to be one of these guys again who tells them he even does a ruse to try to make sure he knows what they're talking about and he tells the high command they're going to attack midway midway island which um if

1:32:43you actually look at it on a satellite map calling it an island is a gross exaggeration it is two small little spits of reef right next to each other one of them is a little more than 1100 acres i think the other is more like 350 the two current airfields on the two atolls take up more than half the atoll space these are islands that are important because of where they are and the fact that they're big enough to put airfields on or airfield on each one so the japanese are going to take it what

1:33:14does this do well a bunch of things and the japanese are sort of divided as to what they want here once again the buck doesn't seem to stop anywhere and strategies often decided at these liaison conferences where the army leaders and the navy leaders and the emperor and there's haggling and it's a strange way they cobble together something here um there's going to be apparently the largest i think this is the largest japanese naval effort up until this time ever in multiple columns including an attack on aleutian islands atu and kiska i think it is

1:33:44and that may be a concession to the army who wanted the defense perimeter out here going to attack the island of midway in order to extend some of these people in japan want the defense perimeter expanded this is where fans of the do little raid will point out that this is because of the do little raid nobody wants to see japan bombed again hence we will move the defense perimeter farther away giving us more space between us and the americans more room to detect their attacks more space to launch um you know countermeasures right so

1:34:15you have a good argument for expanding the defense perimeter in that direction even if it extends our lines of communication even farther it looks like admiral yamamoto the mastermind of pearl harbor as he's always known it looks like he may have had another idea here and he may have had to work out deals in the haggling with the liaison conference and the army and all this sort of stuff and even with the within his own service to get his way maybe even a little prima donna activity there threatened to resign but like a lot of

1:34:48aggressive admirals out there especially guys who uh who who happen to favor the decisive battle school of naval thinking and there are many of those in many different navies around the world uh the idea of just sitting back and creating a defensive corridor to protect yourself from things like american aircraft carrier attacks seems like the wrong way to go about it why don't you just go get those american carriers and solve the problem right there you already knocked out the battleship fleet at pearl harbor why not just sink those aircraft carriers somewhere where the water

1:35:25is nice and deep and you won't recover them the way the u.s is trying to raise some of those battleships at pearl harbor the histories paint yamamoto as a guy who sees midway just like we explained new guinea a firewall something the americans would think was a line in the sand and that if he threatened or took it they would come out and fight for it and then he could sink those carriers in deep water you know he's got a mathematical equation going on in his head he understands yamamoto a lot of the navy guys

1:36:01did really understands the american industrial capability he knows the japanese are currently building one new aircraft carrier and remember they take a couple of years the japanese take longer than the americans to build these things so they got one in the pipeline they won't actually get a new purpose-built aircraft carrier instead of a conversion until 1944 the americans by the end of 1942 are going to be working on like five of them at the same time so if you're yamamoto you have a superiority in aircraft carrier numbers right now you want to mow the lawn

1:36:38or cut the grass you want to whittle american strength down now while you're superior maybe cut their carrier force here by three-fourths or get lucky and sink all of them and then continue to sink the american carriers in battles as they come off the assembly lines it's the only way to maintain your superiority even if you could just mow the lawn once in this case you would buy the japanese uh unbelievably important time time to consolidate uh this defense perimeter you know at air bases stock with i mean it would just be why get the

1:37:14resource chain going that you've just conquered the japanese had been planning this since before the coral sea battle that had taken place in may and to lose the services of your two newest and most modern fleet carriers the ones that were damaged or who lost planes the zuikaku and the shokaku to lose their participation in what's about to come is going to turn out to be one of those things you look back on and go wow that might have made a difference but they they should take their place behind all of the other things that

1:37:51might have made a difference this battle is going to be uncharacteristically sloppy on both yamamoto and the japanese side unexpected you look at how they conducted themselves in the first phase of this whole supernova in the east you know uh initial expansion and every the pearl harbor attacks i mean those are those are intricately planned wonderful clever elegant military uh things the training i mean everything this is going to be much more haphazard and um masanori ito in um his book from the 1950s uh the end of the imperial japanese navies the american title had

1:38:27said that uh every estimate was bad every guess wrong i think that's his way of saying what's about to happen is going to be a perfect example one of the good military examples although there's a million of them of murphy's law right whatever can go wrong will go wrong it helps if you don't plan for certain things and you're not flexible this japanese assault and assault it is it's going to be an invasion of midway island right those small little atolls it's going to involve a fleet that is is huge involves uh four aircraft carriers

1:39:01four main fleet aircraft carriers then battleships and another one they're going to be divided into into columns so they're separated so think about different fleets they're really five or six of them and they're going to be stretched out over a huge length the ones in the far north are going to be landing on alaskan islands atu kiska you know things like that that's a weird part of this whole thing too when i was growing up we used to we were taught that these were diversions nowadays it's thought that this is maybe a concession to the

1:39:34army and this is going to be the northern wing of the defense perimeter whatever it is it's been criticized by military historians ever since as a as a needless diversion of force and again weirdly enough the japanese columns here these different fleets are too far away from one another to be of much help the basics of the plan are that there's going to be an invasion of these atolls the midway island atolls by land troops there are going to be american defenders on the island there air there's an air field so you got to take

1:40:07those things out so the aircraft carriers the four aircraft carriers that are part of the main strike force the fleet carriers are going to go in there and bomb the heck out of it their orders are to to prepare the way for the land invasion so that that can succeed but they have another order and that is to sink any american carriers that they find which order takes precedence well they're still debating this while they're approaching the destination this is how strange the whole thing seems um and there's going to be a lot of problems

1:40:40with the japanese plan they're going to be over complexifying if you'll pardon the misuse of the language over complexifying the whole thing which is a problem they have their their plans when they work out look like pocket watches in terms of the precision and the interlocking mechanisms all coming into place at the same time and that's how the first phase of of the supernova part of the war went their problem is in inflexibility when something doesn't go according to plan and in a bunch of times in this operation something's going to be for example late

1:41:13and when it's late if it turns out to be a very important part of the operation this will jeopardize the operation unless the operation accounts for this we're going to change the plans a little bit that submarine's not at the rendezvous point to to use reconnaissance efforts you know and make sure the american fleet's not coming if you don't change your plans things get a little ragged if several of these things happen and you don't change your plans things can get very ragged the worst part of course from the japanese standpoint is they're walking into

1:41:47another trap the second one in like a month first you don't succeed try try again uh we mentioned earlier that the yorktown the aircraft carrier damaged at coral sea by a herculean effort with welders still on board steams to the rendezvous point the rendezvous point is a place where in the war games the japanese war gamer who would put the he was playing the americans he put the fleet there uh in the war game and the the judge who works for admiral yamamoto apparently said sorry you can't put a fleet there that's unrealistic it's one

1:42:20of those things where you go what you mean they war game it's if you want to get granular on this people have debated every little moment of this encounter um you know ad nauseum but it does kind of suck to you in it's fascinating this is a moment by moment kind of conflict that's about to happen here because it's the you know we'd mentioned how how naval warfare nowadays is so quick and so deadly welcome to modern naval warfare you got a taste of it at the coral sea you're going to get more than you

1:42:52can stomach here especially if you're japanese personally uh while there's a lot of errors you can attribute to the japanese let's not not notice that this is a pretty beautiful little plan here from a military standpoint the intelligence puts the u.s in a position where they can hide three fleet carriers sort of behind and above if you're looking at it on a map the island of midway use the midway reconnaissance to find the japanese carriers and sort of keep their carriers out of range of the japanese scout planes that's kind of nifty eventually you're going

1:43:24to have to get within range but for a while you're you're more invisible to them than they are to you and as we had said earlier the whole carrier thing at this point and confirmed by the coral sea battle a month before seems to be find them before they find you find them before they can launch their own strike force right that's a nifty part of the plan as is being able to use midway as another aircraft carrier if you've got three fleet carriers for this battle which the americans do and the japanese have four

1:43:55fleet carriers where you can use midway to make up for one of those so the odds are then even midway is not maneuverable like a carrier but it can't be sunk either so maybe those things even out but what the americans are doing is they've used the intelligence to set a trap and they're lying in wait for the japanese who think once again that they're the ones ambushing someone on june 4th nagumo launches an airstrike first thing in the morning at midway island the airstrike's job is to take out as we said the ability for

1:44:27the island to launch planes to take out defensive stuff so that the amphibious assault force can land he's got about half his planes though in reserve he doesn't send those he arms them with torpedoes which are specifically ship killing ordinance whereas these planes going after the island in midway are mostly armed with high explosive bombs right different ordinance for different targets and when nagumo's strike force carrier aircraft in a huge wave of aircraft uh get to midway instead of finding the americans with their planes parked on the runway you know unprepared they find the american

1:44:58air assets in the air waiting for them john tolan in the rising sun was talking about what an open secret it was amongst americans that the intelligence had perhaps been compromised and that this was a trap and that they were part of setting it he talks about the scuttlebutt on the u.s aircraft carriers amongst the sailors were saying that then he quotes admiral spruance as saying that he thought that the next day this day june 4th would be the most important in u.s naval history the japanese strike force does a significant amount of damage to

1:45:30midway but doesn't seem to have inhibited the aircraft capability among other things and nagumo gets the message from his aircraft strike leader that he recommends another strike on the island this puts nagumo on the horns of a dilemma from which he will not escape because his job is twofold right to do to knock out this island and to sink any american carriers he's got half his aircraft sitting around doing nothing with torpedoes just in case he runs into some american carriers but he hadn't found any yet so what do you do i feel for nagumo

1:46:02at this point this is where you realize that the speed of the battle is going to be naval warfare has always been kind of quick and deadly it's always been thought of that way if you go back they never thought it was slow and easy um but nagumo is 55 years old when this stuff starts cascading on him quickly i love the way in shattered sword they they look at all the like i said they get granular on this but they point out that hit the bridge on the ship that he commands they give the

1:46:33dimensions the size dimensions of it they talk about how many people would have been in the room with him in other words the whole point of getting into it is this guy's got no physical space in which to think so not only does he not have time he's got no no sense where he can just let me think for a minute let me think for a minute and everything's going to happen so amazingly quickly i just think about how disorienting it would have been his problem starts though with arming the planes and if you're in

1:47:03a nut about midway this is the big deal right uh what are the planes armed with and what what do we change to right so uh here's the way a naval historian craig l simons describes part of this dilemma and the real problem starts not when he has to decide do i go after this island or do i not go after this island again because that's all predicated on well there's no american fleet so so what's the problem when they find the american fleet another one of these wonderful little serendipitous moments in the battle of midway um the the american fleet is spotted by a reconnaissance plane from the japanese cruiser tone this plane took

1:47:39off 30 minutes late now you think to yourself hey no big deal it probably wasn't going to be the plane that sighted the american carriers on its search route right what are the odds well but it was and when it sighted the american carriers sighted them about 30 minutes later than it otherwise would have that's kind of a big deal what's more instead of the pilot radioing back we found the american carriers quick launch everything he said we found a bunch of american ships to which nagumo then had to go ships what kind of ships i mean what are we talking about here so ask him what kind of ships asks him what kind of

1:48:15ships the message comes back and then he finds out at least one aircraft carrier naval historian craig l simons picks up the story from there and what a bombshell that must have been quote that changed everything and nagumo now had to decide what to do with this startling information he could order the anti-ship ordinance put back on the planes and prepare an immediate attack on this american carrier that after all was his primary mission the problem was that by now tomonanga's planes that's the man who just struck midway with the strike force tomonanga's planes were returning from the strike on midway and they needed to land so too did the zeros that had been flying

1:48:51combat air patrol all morning and were running low on fuel nagumo could not recover and launch planes at the same time he had to choose because he did not like doing things by halves he decided to recover to recover tomonanga's planes as well as the circling zeros then refuel and rearm all of them for a coordinated strike on the american carrier or perhaps carriers all that would take time of course but nagumo believed he had time enough he didn't end quote when i grew up there was a blockbuster hollywood film about midway with big stars and there's been another one since i think the japanese have a film on it it's one of these sorts

1:49:27of events that uh as a kid growing up you get a sort of a sense of a rhythm for and looking on it now with the the good history books that have been written since and whatnot i have a different feel for it it doesn't feel anymore like it felt when the movies were telling the story to me and i have a sense of maybe that being something the screenwriters needed or the filmmakers needed to set pacing and to and to provide breaks when there could be dialogue and drama between characters i get it but it screwed up my sense of the timing and if you go look at a timeline of this from say

1:50:03a japanese sailor's perspective and i went and looked at a bunch of them and and they all they can be a little different from each other but the general tone is the same it doesn't look like there really was a lot of break once the attacks started maybe maybe a little time here or there but when you consider the chaos any of these attacks would have created and the adrenaline and the cleanup or the casualties or whatever it might be um i don't think any of these had casualties but you don't know that until you survive it i don't think you would have felt like there was much of a break i think every the

1:50:39prevailing attitude on the japanese sailors part would have been something more akin to uh oh no here they come again right just when you think you you can relax and have a cigarette oh no more planes in the distance so check out this timeline and tell me if it doesn't feel a little like that too um the japanese by the way will be found the strike force will be found by an american reconnaissance pilot who will break through the clouds see the strike force of like four fleet carriers two battleships two heavy cruisers one light

1:51:09cruiser 12 destroyers 250 combat planes and it's just one of the many different fleets that are part of this overall japanese offensive stretching all the way to those alaskan islands and he said it was like the curtain rising on the biggest show on earth so he goes and radios back found the japanese fleet basically and within an hour and a half or hour and 35 minutes uh the japanese are facing their first american aircraft right so so as soon as they could get up and out there they were on them and the americans will at

1:51:40almost no time in this combat uh develop a giant swarm of aircraft all at once and then launch it all at the enemy the japanese prefer to do it that way uh the americans might prefer to do it that way but there are many decisions made commander wise in this combat uh admiral spruance will make a couple of them one will be launching from too far away and just taking his chances right not waiting for an optimal time trying to get a jump time wise on the enemy uh the other will be sending his planes

1:52:11uh in small groups as they get going right don't wait around to concentrate the americans took a lot longer to launch than the very efficient and experienced japanese uh carriers did but don't wait 45 minutes till we're all up in the air in one swarm you know as you as you launch you should concentrate in a small group and go and they did which means that the americans were arriving all morning long and and they would get lost some of these uh planes the problem with this story is if you want to tell it best

1:52:41and most accurately you need to this is a war between beehives and you need to follow small groups of bees you need to be in luke skywalker's playing red leader one red leader four you know um because that's what's going on here but it makes the story unbelievably complex and turns it into a bunch of a bunch of vignettes when really if you're the japanese sailor uh at 7 10 a.m the first american planes from the island of midway show up and you're under almost constant attack uh the rhythm i feel now is not like

1:53:12the movie rhythm the rhythm i feel now is like the americans are trying to strike a match and the japanese are trying to blow the match out and you get strike strike strike strike strike and eventually it lights 7 10 a.m uh the japanese are struck by american aircraft from midway uh the japanese basically take no damage from these planes but their zeros get up there they're fighting they're using fuel they're they're taking damage so these attacks all count the ships are all doing evasive maneuvers everybody's adrenaline is up everybody's uh you know wide-eyed and

1:53:43aware so 7 10 you get your first attack 7 55 45 minutes later another one from the island of midway these are all you know 15 16 12 numbers of planes a lot of them are high-level bombers too all different kinds so 7 10 your first 7 55 your second 8 10 15 minutes later another one 8 20 10 minutes after that another one 9 25 so an hour get a little break get a chance to have a cigarette um talk about what just happened hour and five minutes later boom first carrier planes show up

1:54:13torpedo bombers right the ones that are real ship killers now neither the americans nor the japanese realize uh that these torpedo bombers are really not going to do anything um you can't play it that way and you might be able to argue that the reason the american torpedo planes didn't do anything was because of all the japanese countermeasures right um but the first torpedo planes show up at 9 25 a.m five minutes later torpedo planes from another american carrier show up 10 o'clock half hour after that more torpedo planes from yet another american carrier show

1:54:44up 10 25 25 minutes after that the dive bombers show up almost serendipitously at the same time from multiple directions and the war changes the moments before the u.s dive bombers which were unquestionably the best american carrier planes that they had going at this time better than the fighters much much much better than the torpedo planes before the american dive bombers showed up this was looking a bit like a japanese victory here i have difficulty finding a more consequential 15 minutes in military history anywhere than what happens from 10 25 a.m for the next 5

1:55:2010 15 minutes of time historian craig l simons talks about the japanese before the dive bombers show up and how they've been ripping apart all the american aircraft and the torpedo planes most of all he writes quote only minutes later the torpedo bombers from enterprise in yorktown arrived and they too were overwhelmed by the zeros of 41 torpedo bombers launched by the american carriers that morning only four made it back to their ships and despite that horrific sacrifice none of them managed to hit an enemy ship with a torpedo counting the bombers from midway the

1:55:56americans had now sent 94 airplanes to attack the japanese all but a handful had been shot down and none of them had managed to land either a bomb or a torpedo on any japanese ship at 10 20 in the morning on june 4th 1942 nagumo had reason to believe he was winning the battle to complete the victory he needed to finish the transfer of ordnance down on the hangar deck bring his planes up to the flight deck and send them off to destroy the american carriers none of nagumo's vessels had radar he writes so it

1:56:33was one of the many lookouts on board the flagship akagi who pointed skyward at 10 22 a.m and screamed out i believe it is kuyukoka which means dive bombers end quote simon's book i love his writing um that moment when the dive bombers are spotted is famous there were eyewitnesses who survived the war and wrote about it one of the things that some of the modern histories prove is once again you can't always trust an eyewitness just because they were there they they misremember things they romanticize things they you know it happens there's nothing new

1:57:09about any of this right this is what historians spend a lot of time doing isn't it taking the most precious things they have to work with primary sources and if you're super lucky eyewitness accounts and then trying to figure out how much of it you can trust and how much is real and how you filter out the biases now even the biases might teach you something but you got to have something to plug in for x to get the whole calculation going you got to love the primary sources there's a bunch of interesting survivors from

1:57:45this event on the japanese side one of them is the guy who actually led the first raid of planes into pearl harbor about seven months before this time the flight leader mitsuo fuchida is his name i think we mentioned him earlier we should have if we didn't he's on board uh one of these carriers when the strike happens and he gives you an eyewitness account an eyewitness account that becomes something that was originally transmitted as as accurate to 100 i mean there's an eyewitness he saw everything that happened now it's been used and and torn

1:58:22apart and re-put together i mean it's been analyzed nine ways to sunday and a bunch of the specifics that he talks about aren't true but it doesn't matter if you plug your little tube into the back of his head and suck out some of those memories it's the fire and explosions and and what happens to him in the sense of disbelief where that's what stays with you and the emotions on the other side are shocking too because we're not in war anymore and you forget how much there's hate involved here and a sense of almost

1:58:58tears running down your face revenge right you're getting what you have coming um the japanese have been throwing all the punches as we said in this war uh at coral sea the americans had given them their first loss of a ship larger than a destroyer that they'd suffered in the whole war but they've still come off relatively unscathed they've been doing great damage there's a lot of anger i mean uh eugene sledge later in the war i heard him say once he's a marine uh that there was a crying screaming japanese wounded soldier outside his

1:59:34marine's position and the group wanted to finish him off just so they could get some mental peace and another person in the group said forget that let him keep screaming they killed my brother at pearl harbor i like the sound of that and you forget about that but when you hear about the account from the person who dropped the first of these bombs on these japanese carriers that's what he was thinking about he was thinking about payback it's the most natural thing in the world isn't it these are the ships that hit pearl harbor these

2:00:09are the pilots on these ships that did the the act to the americans of this time period this for them is the equivalent of me would have felt like getting osama bin laden right there is a sense of rich of payback of all paybacks here what's going to happen and um this narrative by the way picks up after the last of the torpedo planes uh have been uh eliminated i think it's about two to three minutes the timelines all differ like i said between the last of the torpedo attacks that i think started at 10

2:00:45a.m officially are done and the beginning of the dive bomber attacks that's where the story picks up uh and fuchita the guy who led the first wave into pearl harbor watched it from an absolutely target's eye view mitsu fuchita remembered quote visibility was good clouds were gathering at about 3 000 meters however and though there were occasional breaks they afforded good concealment for approaching enemy planes at 10 24 the order to start launching came from the bridge by voice tube he means of his aircraft carriers own planes by the way that's what he's talking about

2:01:21there he continues the air officer flapped a white flag and the first zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed off the deck at that instant a lookout screamed hell divers those are american planes i looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting towards our ship some of our machine guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them but it was too late the plump silhouettes of the american dauntless dive bombers quickly grew larger and then a number of black objects suddenly floated eerily from their wings bombs down they came straight towards me i fell

2:01:57instinctively to the deck and crawled behind a command post mantlet the terrifying scream of the dive bombers reached me first followed by the crashing explosion of a direct hit there was a blinding flash and then a second explosion much louder than the first i was shaken by a weird blast of warm air there was still another shock but less severe apparently a near miss then followed a startling quiet as the barking of the gun suddenly ceased i got up and looked at the sky the enemy planes were already out of sight end quote think of

2:02:33how quickly something like that just happened he continues by the way to give you a sense of uh the situation on board and this has been roundly broken down by experts right how much of how much of these things happen the way the eyewitnesses said they did um but let's understand that what's going to happen on all these ships um it's going to all seem a little bit like this fuchita says quote i was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds there was a huge hole in the flight deck

2:03:09just behind the midship elevator the elevator itself twisted like molten glass was drooping into the hangar deck plates reeled upward in grotesque configurations planes stood tail up belching livid flame and jet black smoke reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks as i watched the fire spread and i was terrified at the prospect of induced explosions which would surely doom the ship end quote again to the americans this would have been an exultant moment and john toland in

2:03:39the rising sun describes um the feelings of one of these dive bombers who went in there and delivered this damage this by the way is the remembrance of lieutenant wilmer earl gallagher as recounted in toland's the rising sun and gallagher is one of the first guys comes in there sees carriers goes for it from almost a straight down dive according to eyewitnesses a perfect pro maneuver type dive bomber this didn't look like the coral sea where

2:04:10things were these were professionals the people on board the japanese ships thought and toland writes quote gallagher aimed at a huge rising sun about 50 feet across painted in blood red on the flight deck ever since the day he saw arizona lie smashed and smoldering in pearl harbor he had vowed to go after an enemy carrier at about 1800 feet he released his bomb then pulled up into a steep climb into a steep climb and kicked

2:04:40the dauntless around he kept watching his bomb something he had warned his pilots never to do tumble closer and closer to the target it exploded on the after part of the flight deck and he thought exultantly arizona i remember you end quote as i said to the americans at this time period it would have seemed like this was the most exquisitely sweet sort of justice you surprise attacked us you did all these nasty things in the

2:05:10far east you've had it your way the whole time this is our wrestler analogy our professional wrestler analogy where the little guy at pearl harbor went after the big guy the popular hero when his back was turned before the bell was rung and there's always the turning point in that storyline as you probably know when all of a sudden the big guy shakes the cobwebs out turns around and issues a big match turning blow or two

2:05:41on the little guy and now everything's going to be different these american dive bombers come in here and within a few minutes i'll have three of these japanese carriers on fire and burning two of them out of control infernos it is stunning i just compared this to an osama bin laden 9-11 moment if you live through that and you can remember it you remember the sense of disbelief in something happening this quickly that was this substantial

2:06:11you couldn't really get your mind around it and of these four japanese aircraft carriers the one that avoids getting hit here to hear you um in shattered sword the remembrances of that captain are recounted at this moment where he just couldn't believe what his eyes were seeing and we have to imagine that these carriers were a couple miles apart from each other but you can see them like torches on the uh naval horizon i like the

2:06:41way in in in it's a great book but you really have to want to know a lot about midway it's called shattered sword we referenced it earlier i believe jonathan parshall and anthony tully you know break the whole thing down like a kennedy assassination investigation from shattered sword quote to the north on here use bridge there were collective moans as kaga burst into flames and began smoking heavily here you had tried to warn her but it had all been for nothing her navigator commander cho later remarked quote now quoting commander cho it was like a

2:07:17horrible dream in slow motion to see such a great carrier done in this easily end quote jonathan parshall and anthony tully continue almost immediately though the lookout started screaming in a loud voice that soryu and akagi were under attack as well afraid that the man's near hysterical demeanor would be bad for morale cho snapped at him to quiet down and use a lower voice he could see though that the man was right cho tried to stay focused on driving here you out of danger as the torpedo plane attack was still coming in but it was

2:07:52useless everyone on the bridge was stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of the attack end quote one of the things i like about the granular approach like shattered sword earlier they described the size of the thinking space that the japanese admiral would have in this situation the 55 year old guy who's watching all this unfold this quickly um then they talk about the things like how flammable these ships are the quote uh that stood out was they said world war ii era warships were marvelously flammable and then went down the list of why and they

2:08:27were talking about all warships in general initially and then they specifically started talking about aircraft carriers in the pacific the british have armored flight decks but the americans and the japanese have wood ones beautiful wood ones that burn wonderfully they also have of course lots of aircraft fuel they have bombs they have torpedoes these japanese warships are carrying on average about 80 000 pounds of torpedoes bombs and stuff like that so any fires on any of these ships is a huge huge and imminent issue it sounds like the situation on two of the japanese carriers

2:09:02uh was bad instantly i mean the kaga has its sides blown out um because of the everything just exploding there are there's talk of uh of cascading like rivers of burning aircraft fuel tumbling off one level of the ship down into a hole and i mean these are infernos again the number of people that are that are dying on these warships and burning it's a disaster and as we said with this commander cho line that we just used there's a sense of shock how do you respond to this the speed at which this occurred will

2:09:37change i mean this is what you're watching here is one of the great revolutions in military affairs demonstrated in real time in front of everyone everyone had started to have an inkling we mentioned earlier when the first two battleships were sunk the the repulse and the prince of wales by japanese aircraft in december and then you get coral sea now you get this this is the exclamation point that says nobody needs to build battleships ever again nobody needs to worry about big guns on their ships maybe ever again that's not how war is going to

2:10:12ever be fought again this is going to be done with swarms of bees from a distance where these fleets can't even see each other and you better have radar or you are going to be at a huge disadvantage i said earlier it's hard to imagine anything short of an atomic weapons use in a war that was undecided where things could be so radically altered in such a short period of time and people argue it used to be the myth used to be that within five minutes the whole thing the whole war was changed and this

2:10:47was in large part because of what eyewitnesses said again later historians have broken certain things down and figured out that certain myths existed i mean what kills poor nagumo here and we talked about it earlier is he gets caught with his planes in transition instead of having attack planes up and ready to go get these carriers we talked about he's divided between okay do i attack the island or do i do rearm with torpedoes or do you need armor piercing bombs or do i need high explosive i mean it's famous now in the old days

2:11:19it was assumed that that it was just like a lucky five minute window there where he was vulnerable and that's when the americans showed up in more modern things they say that this window was probably more like 45 minutes and that explains why the american admiral uh spruance who was pushing this whole thing decided to launch when he did he was hoping to catch the japanese sort of in mid transition right landing some refueling rearming but not up there waiting for him that's exactly what happened and instead of being able to mow the lawn so that the japanese could maintain a naval superiority over a quickly building united states navy they ended up being the

2:11:54ones whose grass was cut because the first five or ten minutes of this battle of midway strike that we just recounted is so famous and so consequential people have been talking about it forever we may have said but let's repeat it now just in case that this is kennedy assassination-esque in its level of detail and vitriol and and the many viewpoints and and continuing controversies over this whole thing and i'm not qualified to weigh in on it i mean was there a magic five minutes or was it more like 45 minutes right i've always thought it didn't make a whole lot of sense for admiral spruance to take any other chances and launch a strike

2:12:29early in the hopes of catching the japanese in transition if that transition window was so dang narrow right you need like three quarters of an hour to even have a chance i would think but i could have my timing wrong on that also then there's the question of where the japanese planes this is what i grew up with by the way where the japanese planes on all these flight decks crowding you know every little bit of space just about ready to take off for the american carriers fully armed with weapons to take them down but just to make it better um with the ordinance they were previously armed with stacked right nearby because they're changing

2:13:05all the time that was part of the the whole thing here and they didn't have time to take it below deck so it's right there too so you go from having a bomb situation to a double bomb situation and then of you know just to make matters worse it's an aircraft carrier with lots of gasoline hoses everywhere and spilled gasoline and they're basically you know fuel air bombs waiting to go off and then just as luck would have it in that five minute window when the only time it could do this the american dive bombers appear and set the things on fire again seems a little too good and too hollywood to be true but

2:13:40there are eyewitness accounts that say it is so i'm not going to weigh in on that except to say uh that count me as a believer that world war ii era warships are marvelously flammable and aircraft carriers triply so they always are a bit like torches ready to be lit and so when these dive bombers show up whenever these dive bombers show up um it's a big deal and the two carriers uh the kaga and the soryu the soryu may have had like planes ready i mean it it's bad at the soryu right away the kaga we said the sides blow out but i think that happens after a little while uh but the fires

2:14:15that get going are unstoppable and in the akagi which is the flagship the uh carrier with nagumo on it right i mean it's one thing to be commander cho going what the hell's going on it's another thing to be nagumo the guy who's in charge in his little teeny cabin too small to think crammed with people 55 years old this unfolding uh it's five ten minutes folks from beginning to end once the dive bombers are involved and it never really stopped from the torpedo planes to the dive bomber so this guy has been uh mentally buffeted uh quite a bit and all these ships are uh taking evasive maneuvers so it's this crazy situation trying

2:14:51to scatter and avoid the air attacks and there is no time to react and nagumo seems in shock we didn't even get into that i mean the cabins burning around him because akagi gets on fire and they fight the fires for hours and they just lose uh but but the flames at one point are are leaping around the enclosure in the bridge and they're trying to get nagumo off uh here's what um john tolan in the rising sun writes about this moment quote akagi was helpless flames licked the glass window of the bridge above the

2:15:23din this is one of the uh commanders and top officers kusaka shouted to nagumo we must move to another ship nagumo refused kusaka said the ship could no longer steer and had no communications nagumo kept saying we're all right over and over again thousands of gallons of burning fuel cascaded into the lower decks and torpedoes stored in the hangars began detonating blasts of fire shot through the sides of the ship like a huge blowtorch nagumo still refused to leave his position at the compass end quote there are a lot of uh stories about japanese commanders

2:15:59on these ships and higher officers deliberately choosing to go down with the ship or having to be wrestled away uh one of them is holding up a sword and singing the japanese national anthem and he won't leave the bridge some of these guys tie themselves you know to things on the bridge they go down there's another story that reminds you of sort of the the cherry blossom sublime japanese um idea of of the beauty of death when you know at least in a you know american b-movie version interpretation of it when uh one of these

2:16:34commanders or officers puts his armor on another one who's decided to die with him and says something to the effect of you know it's a beautiful moon out tonight shall we watch it go down together or something to that i mean where where you're trying to sort of uh i mean there's there's just that interesting japanese idea of death that comes forward and it's both foreign to non-japanese people in some respects but touches a deeper human part of your soul when you think about human beings in that position and how would you behave you certainly

2:17:09would probably want a little revenge wouldn't you and if there's anything worse than losing three aircraft carriers in 10 minutes or however long it was uh losing four would seem to qualify because there are four fleet carriers that the japanese have outside of midway and one of them's undamaged the here you and again within 15 minutes to a half hour the here you has launched let's call it a revenge strike against american carriers wherever they may be we'd said earlier that this is like a fight at the okay corral between gunfighters and even if you

2:17:45shoot the other one as they're falling into the dust they can loose a bullet off at you and sort of avenge um their brethren from almost beyond the grave here the here you launches an attack that that that i think i think the story is it homes its way back following one of the very planes that bombed it from the yorktown how revenge like is that right you're going to get the exact carrier that did this to this famous this historically famous japanese fleet right the kido butai the the mobile strike force the ones that

2:18:20hit pearl harbor the ones that had done all these great deeds so far in japanese history and these pilots who would have been getting altitude off the flight deck of the here you would have had an amazing historical literally bird's eye view of history wouldn't they looking out and seeing three smoking carriers out of four and knowing that you know people especially pilots on those carriers pilots who are going to have nowhere to land especially if something happens to the here you the akagi's burning uh it there are hopes that it can get underway and

2:18:56it does for a few minutes and and get going again and right but you know fires take that over so these pilots who are heading towards what'll turn out to be the one ship that busted its rear end after fighting in the coral sea still damaged workmen still on board just to make it here and add some strength to the undamaged carriers is the one the japanese find the yorktown and get to take out their feelings of anger on that carrier there are according to francis pike in hirohito's war sailors on the yorktown who see

2:19:31these japanese planes and these pilots who are attacking the yorktown are shaking their fists at them from the cockpit there's a you know we had said earlier there was this moment for the american pilot you know arizona i remember you right this this sense of wonderfully appropriate revenge almost tears in your eyes level revenge it's a feeling most people don't feel very often if ever it's interesting to note the japanese could be doing the same thing right now you can imagine their pilots instead of saying arizona i remember you saying kaga i remember you or

2:20:07soar you the sister ship by the way of the hear you i remember you or some pilot that they knew personally i remember you when the first wave of the hear you's retaliatory strike comes upon the yorktown it finds that the yorktown is waiting for it it's on board radar has given it advance notice and it's had time to get its own screen of fighters a defensive screen into the sky it's had time to get everyone manning the anti-aircraft guns it's had time to batten down the hatches so to speak when it comes to flammable

2:20:43things on deck you know pushing over giant barrels of fuel and everything and it's had time non-sexy stuff here to pump carbon dioxide gas into all its fuel lines it's not armor won't stop you from getting hit but it might stop a hit from turning into a critical hit in like five seconds these are all the sorts of precautions the japanese wish they could have taken that same morning right they didn't have the advance notice so when the japanese first wave shows up timelines bedeviling me a little bit you know between maybe 2 and 2

2:21:2030 in the afternoon 18 dive bombers 6 0 fighters the americans are up in the sky and they're waiting and here once again though the japanese pilots i've been raving about will show just why they're so good i mean the zeros expertly occupy the american fighters so the dive bombers could go get the american aircraft carrier and they do in another nifty piece of flying they put three bombs on her bam the yorktown is belching smoke the boilers are damaged as far as the japanese pilots are concerned the yorktown looks just like three out of

2:21:56four their carriers do and that's what they tell uh the people on the hear you and got an american carrier it's burning basically meaning it's done in one of the ironies of this whole battle the damage control people on the yorktown who are not only good but after coral sea they've had real experience and they've got those extra workers from pearl harbor still on board they managed to patch up the damage there's a hole in the flight deck and they patch it and they've got they've got air operations going again they get their speed back

2:22:32up it's crazy but they're kind of a victim of their own success because after the japanese knock out that carrier they're not looking to find the same carrier again they're looking for an undamaged carrier so when the second wave arrives from the hear you and it's a couple hours later they find what they think is an undamaged carrier and go after it it's not an undamaged carrier it's a carrier that's been so well repaired by its damage control crew that the japanese torpedo planes can't tell it's damaged i mean how great and remember that's a

2:23:08carrier that was damaged already when it showed up in this battle it's a weird twist of history that had they not been as good at their job and a little smoke had been pouring out of the top of the yorktown she might have been spared instead she takes two torpedoes one blows a huge hole on her side the ship starts to list something like 26 degrees or something they just figure you know these things have a big old heavy flight deck on top capsize seems imminent they take everybody off and she still doesn't sink so

2:23:42i think it's the next day june 5th uh they they tow her they start taking her back to pearl harbor she's like the ship that you know you can't kill gonna have this interesting reputation of fix her up send her back out to sea sell a lot of war bonds right instead uh the ending is anticlimactic as a japanese submarine weaves its way through the destroyer screen and put several torpedoes into the yorktown and that's the end of that the ship that you couldn't kill almost seems like it was destined one way or another not

2:24:15to survive this battle because they it kept finding itself in the way of the enemy in the thick of everything the battle's not done though because at the end of the day somewhere around like the five o'clock hour when afternoon late afternoon transitions into early evening the americans find the last japanese carrier the hear you and they essentially do to the hear you what had been done to all the other japanese carriers and turn it into a a torch a burning wreck and it is somewhat interesting that these aircraft carriers proved to be a little

2:24:49difficult to sink sometimes but not difficult at all to light on fire and i think that the japanese actually are the ones ultimately responsible for sinking all four of these carriers i think they have to torpedo them eventually the hear you at one point is just sort of like smoking and drifting there are some postscript activities to the midway battle and the japanese will lose a cruiser and yamamoto will try to force a night attack none of it matters as far as history is concerned the damage has been done once they hear you is uh

2:25:23for all intents and purposes taken out of the war and four japanese carriers are lost in a day um there's no recovering from that and there's so many elements you know you don't think about i had to of course for this delve into it and they're all things that when they're pointed out to you you go oh yeah sure that would be a big deal but they don't occur to you i mean people have been talking for years about all the pilots you lose and that's easy for most people to go oh sure the pilots

2:25:57would be a big deal but this is the cutting edge of mid-20th century naval technology and the engineers the technicians and all the specialists on these ships are well these are special people in in their own right and you know i don't think about this either you think about an aircraft carrier as a weapon but you forget that it's all of them working together that creates a weapon system and this kito butai this mobile strike force of the japanese was a weapon system and all these ships had people on board who knew the proper ways

2:26:30to work together they acted as components and once you took those people out you just cannot first of all there it's hard enough to replace individuals who go away but you can't replace the institutional memory and everything involved um you can't recreate that without years of work it took 14 years to build this thing they lost it in a day this mobile strike force britain's prime minister winston churchill whose forces are stretched all over the globe way too thinly and who's fighting uh major battles and dealing with problems in north africa supplying the soviet union

2:27:04it's for them trying to contend with these problems in the far east has been a nightmare and it's been at the very low uh end of their priority list simply because things are so grave in so many other places and churchill's response he being a naval guy himself by the way to this american victory at midway as written in his um history of the second world war quote this memorable american victory was of cardinal importance not only to the united states but to the whole allied cause the moral effect was tremendous and instantaneous at one

2:27:38stroke the dominant position of japan in the pacific was reversed the glaring ascendancy of the enemy which had frustrated our combined endeavors throughout the far east for six months was gone forever from this moment all our thoughts turned with sober confidence to the offensive no longer did we think in terms of where the enemy might strike the next blow but where we could best strike at him to win back the vast territories that he had overrun in his headlong rush the road would be long and hard hard and massive preparations were still needed to win

2:28:13victory in the east but the issue was not in doubt nor need the demands from the pacific bear too heavily on the great effort the united states was preparing to exert in europe end quote from a war perspective an overall war perspective the reason people care about this is it flips the initiative changes what the japanese can do the second world war has a different feel as i've said many times in the first world war different rhythm both of them involved grinding at a certain stage grinding each other down but in the first world war

2:28:47either side could have taken out the other till a very late time period it was an undecided fight the the second world war is much more one side has its way and then there's a huge shift in momentum and the other side has its way and it's not so much grinding until about midway and once the grinding part starts that's when the fragility of things like the axis economies and resource base and population size and industrial capability that's when they're just exposed because that's what they don't have the strong foundations they've got a wonderful cutting

2:29:22edge but once you dull that edge and it becomes something where it is how much industrial power you have and all that stuff then it becomes a rear guard action and a question of how long can the axis side hold out but holding out is not the same as losing it depends on what your victory conditions are doesn't it it had always been part of the japanese plan if we recall they were going to conquer these resources that they needed then a bunch of territory to surround them as a defense perimeter fortify it link it

2:29:56with aircraft and hold out for the inevitable allied counter-attack right and then the combination of things like interior lines of supply the wicked terrain the japanese yamato spirit and the decadent weakness of the american westerners would create a situation where they were paying such large numbers of lives that the people back home in the united states who could neither pronounce these places names or find them on a map would eventually go why are we fighting over these places again and japan wins in a negotiated settlement which after all is the way every one of japan's

2:30:31conflicts since she so-called opened up in the middle 19th century have gone they have every reason to believe that's how this will end after all you know the idea of unconditional surrender which won't be announced until january 1943 by the way that was not the normal way countries did things so they had every reason to expect that some way or another this is going to end with an agreement and here's the thing even if you start losing if you're in a strong position you have a lot to bargain with i mean look at the way

2:31:06it is in europe i mean they're obviously fighting a war of annihilation with the soviet union a giant racial thing hitler does not have a negotiated settlement in his plan b file but hitler doesn't necessarily have to be around i mean there's a lot of people want to see hitler gone and if you ask hitler he'd say plots are ongoing all the time so uh if all of a sudden the german leadership were replaced uh in 1942 something like that 1943 they have so much territory conquered continental europe basically uh you can if this is

2:31:38a hundred years previously and we're not in a total war that's a hell of a negotiating hand right there right you give some agent who negotiates for basketball players or nfl football players or big entertainers that kind of leverage can you imagine and i have this weird twisted brain for some reason that keeps playing a comedic something like a bad saturday night lives vignette in my head where i can't stop thinking about a tv stereotype of a sleazy kind of lounge lizard sports agent the new representative of germany after hitler is being toppled sliding into

2:32:09the oval office to give his initial pitch to president roosevelt and it's it's both comedic and instructive though i mean you can imagine somebody walking in there going mr president big fan can i call you frank listen frank i just want you to know i have come from lunch with the new german leadership and all i have to say is wow where have those guys been all my life i mean uh they are big fans of yours by the way frank and they want you to know that they would have done this whole coup thing

2:32:41sooner if they could have it's a difficult job to pull off though and it's not a free country as you well know frank but it could be a lot more free soon these new leaders recognize things have gone way too far they want to dial it all back and they feel bad about the whole thing they know they're gonna have to make amends and they are prepared to deal and i have in my briefcase here frank a deal to end all deals i mean this would make you the greatest peacemaker in the history of the

2:33:12planet and all you have to do is sign it i mean we're talking about something where they are promising get this now hold on to your hats promising to give up half of everything they've taken over the last several years half this is going to save you a minimum frank five years and 15 million lives think about the suffering that doesn't have to happen if you just sign this piece of paper here and i gotta tell you frank this looks like a war-winning deal to me i mean you can spin this any way you want

2:33:43to i mean this is victory and you can walk away clean from this whole thing i just want to warn you as a patriotic american uh they took me back to one of their secret factories showed me some of these wonder weapons they have and while i'm under a non-disclosure agreement i just want to say uh this thing's not in the bag i'd sign this now and walk away a winner frank um and as funny as that sounds ladies and gentlemen can you imagine if the president of the united states or the leader of great

2:34:14britain were offered a deal out of the war that would save them years of fighting and tens of millions of lives no matter what you think about unconditional surrender or the nastiness of the enemy or the state of things might be tough to sleep at night don't you think to turn a deal down like that and if the worst happened years later and you somehow lost the war it was a nightmarish and i mean you might feel like that would have been something the lesser of two evils i don't know kind of makes you never

2:34:45want to be in the position of one of these global world leaders doesn't it these are some tough choices to make of course part of what makes it seem so hard to imagine is it sort of runs against the grain of what you might expect from human behavior especially collective human behavior doesn't it if you're winning the war if you're kicking butt i mean the tendency is to let it roll isn't it not to sit there and go all right cash in my chips i'm walking away this is enough for me i mean you might

2:35:17decide that that's the plan before the war but once it's going so well i would think that there'd be an inertia that might be hard to uh struggle against right until you get a few socks in the jaw and things start looking bad it's it's hard to slow the train down when the conquests are ongoing i have a book called japanese destroyer captain the remembrances of captain tamichi hara and i believe we quoted him in a previous segment and he talks about running into people um after the war who were suggesting hey you know would

2:35:48have been good if we'd stopped right then and he points out that that wasn't the attitude at the time right it's easy to think about that after the war but people weren't thinking like that when the victories were rolling in and he writes quote after the war many of my countrymen said that japan should have concluded a peace in the spring of 1942 instead of waiting to swallow allied peace terms after japan had been bled white but in the early months of 1942 he writes there were no thoughts of suing for peace indeed many politicians

2:36:20and military leaders firmly believed that the occupation of southeast asia was assured as permanent and that japan with the immense resources of this great region would be invincible end quote if you pull out a map from mid-1942 that shows the extent of the japanese conquest in the asia-pacific theater you are looking at the maximum extent of the blast zone from the japanese supernova that's as big as it gets if you if you get out your ruler and you realize how many miles that is it looks darn big enough to be honest this is their as

2:36:52i believe we said this could easily be seen as the defense perimeter they always wanted now the allies do not have the luxury of assuming that this is all they want the japanese change their codes after midway so for a while the allies are in a little bit more darkness than they're used to and surprise again becomes something that's a realistic possibility but the allies go from underestimating the japanese capabilities before pearl harbor and the fall of singapore and all that stuff to almost the pendulum swinging the other way where even things that are really

2:37:23really improbable have to be taken as potential possibilities because i mean you know who knows what they might do the allies are worried about an invasion of australia as a significant um maybe not short term but not too far in the distant term japanese intention and the navy thought about it by the way but they had to ask the army for permission obviously and the army all but laughed at them maybe with a little bit of scorn after all they've been trying to eat the elephant that is china since like 1931 they keep a giant

2:37:55force available in northern manchuria just in case the soviet union attacks them since december 7th seven months ago they've been fighting all the allies in places like burma and the philippines and all the last thing they want to do is send 10 or 11 or 12 divisions across thousands of miles of ocean to a brand new continent to open up a giant new front now here's the thing though the allies do not have the luxury of assuming that this is the case and there are significant worries about an australian invasion they have to plan for

2:38:27it the truth is is if you look at the japanese perimeter though at this point they're still going to launch some offensives the days of the offensives are not over but their offensives are more like what the defensive side in the world war one battles would sometimes have to do you might be on the defensive but you might have to go on a limited offensive here or there maybe straighten out the lines in this one part of the front or maybe capture this strong point to anchor another part of the front and the place the

2:38:59japanese are going to take to make a giant strong point in their defense perimeter is a place they've already tried to take and they'll take multiple shots at trying to take during the war port mosby in new guinea what's more uh the solomon islands if you look at a map are so close to new guinea that really they kind of form one little theater there they ping off each other it's important to assume that both are involved in any planning or or operations if the japanese get new guinea they're going to be able to threaten

2:39:30the supply lines of australia the reason why is for everything we've just learned in the war so far the unbelievable power of aircraft against shipping now people weren't stupid before the war the japanese defense plan before the conflict even started assume that aircraft were going to play a big role in shutting down sea lanes didn't it but coral sea midway everything so far shown that the power of aircraft's far more intense than had been assumed and all of a sudden instead of beating a squadron of frigates like in the old days or a squadron of

2:40:03cruisers to shut down a key trade route or supply line or sea lane you could do it with aircraft you could put a few air bases around the perimeter of an entire island chain like the solomons and shut the entire area down to shipping so the japanese having these places would be key towards being able to damage the allies while having a huge strong point for yourself and protecting you know the edge of your defense perimeter down in that area the allies want it for the same reason go look at a map and you'll see

2:40:35that if the allies have new guinea and the solomon islands it's going to be like a giant bulge in the japanese defense perimeter like somebody just stabbed them with a sword this area is going to be like the black hole of the pacific theater for a while sucking in men playing ship supplies from both sides on the american allied side this is going to be a fascinating time to look at all of the things that influence the way the allies counter-attack here which is what what this is going to be the first great allied counter-attack

2:41:08in the pacific but it also involves the long-term strategy for how to win the war and this is where you begin to see the human element come into play again in a way that's fascinating if this were a war between vulcans and all they cared about was efficiency and logic and all that kind of stuff it would be fought very differently than the way it actually is fought because in this war we have the opposite of logical vulcans we have some divas with egos and it is worth pointing something out that a lot of people

2:41:40already understand if you've watched uh anything like if you're old enough to remember the gulf war for example you get a chance to see how generals and people like that military leaders turn into like movie stars celebrities they attain a visibility and cachet during wartime that you just don't see elsewhere i mean if you want to think i remember reading a book once that compared uh churchill roosevelt hitler stalin all those guys to like the gods of war in the second world war pantheon if you will and below the gods of war though are these

2:42:13demigods these people who especially in their own theater and area of operations are often almost gods themselves i mean i think of a douglas mcarthur as a guy who's on the borderline between demigod and god and you can see some of those gods of war like roosevelt actively thinking what do i do if douglas mcarthur comes up here and runs against me in the next election or something he did call mcarthur one of the two most dangerous men in america right uh but it's not just mcarthur you have look look at all the military stars

2:42:45you have that are involved in the war on both sides you have your rommels you know you have your pattens uh i mean all these people mcarthur as we said probably the greatest of all right and we should recall that he was in the philippines and the philippines were going to fall and mcarthur was said he was prepared to die there said his wife and his little boy were both prepared to die there and the president and the american military ordered him out you know why well i was reading one book the other day that

2:43:18said something i'd never thought about and it was that they had this great fear that the japanese would take mcarthur up on his offer kill him and then exhibit the photos of the mangled body of the the almost godlike general and his wife and his little boy to the global media that's going to be good so they order him out he goes to australia and of course you know don't call it a comeback vows to return in australia he has to try to figure out how you do that right what does return mean how do

2:43:50you fight this war and you know if you gave a a scenario list to a bunch of generals and admirals about a war and then asked them how they would go about fighting it i bet you're going to get a lot of different answers because there are a lot of different ways to fight a war and it doesn't necessarily mean there's one right answer right a bunch of these people could be right but if you have a bunch of your top military demigods telling you how to fight a war and you're somebody like franklin roosevelt

2:44:22what do you do if they differ what if they have different ideas we've made a lot of hay haven't we in this conversation so far about the japanese governmental design and how their army and navy are sort of weird they don't like each other they sort of have to have these horse trading liaison sessions where they have to you know bargain to get anything done ha ha ha but we also said earlier uh co-opting a phrase that i've used for many different great peoples but the japanese are like everyone else only more so and you

2:44:55see the same dynamic in the united states military just maybe not dialed up to the same degree the guy who's running the united states navy by this time it's funny because if you wanted to have a well-oiled command structure and whatever franklin roosevelt has the power to put anybody in here he wants to he can say you're not a team player you're gone right if you're going to put mcarthur in control of this whole theater you can have people that can work well with mcarthur just they just have to say yes sir no sir and

2:45:27instead the guy who's running the navy is a guy who can't get along with people who are famously easy to get along with right the guy's name and he's famous he's maybe the most powerful u.s admiral that has ever been it's admiral ernest king a guy who's the this the line about him that even the president of the united states used to tease him with to try to get a smile out of the guy was that he shaved with a blowtorch i think it was his daughter that said that he was an even keeled guy

2:45:59you know he didn't have these uh these emotional highs and lows he was even keeled he woke up in a rage and he stayed that way he was disliked by a lot of people author robert lecky in his book challenge for the pacific writes about admiral ernest king quote the admiral was tall hard and humorless his face was of flint and his will was of adamant in the united states navy which he commanded it was sometimes said he's so tough he shaves with a blowtorch end quote the author continues later quote if levity was rare

2:46:32in admiral ernest king self-doubts or delusions were non-existent he was aware that he was respected rather than beloved by the navy and he knew that he was hated by roughly half the chiefs of the anglo-american alliance mr stimson the u.s secretary of war hated him so did winston churchill and field marshal sir alan brooke and admiral sir andrew cunningham end quote those are some of his british counterparts he had to work with i was looking at the index in eric bergerard's book touched with fire and he has an admiral king entry in his index and

2:47:04in it is it says admiral king and then it says um army hated by and many pages british hated by and many pages let me just go okay uh in his um fabulous book american warlords uh jonathan w jordan writes about king speaking by the way about general marshall here the head of the army and the counterpart of admiral king quote marshall staffers loathe the admiral in his diary lieutenant general joseph stillwell called him a quote high-powered rejecter who won't cooperate or listen or help end quote he then says eisenhower grouse to his diary quote

2:47:36one thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot king he is the antithesis of cooperation a deliberately rude person which means he's a mental bully of course stark uh king's predecessor admiral stark of course stark was just a nice old lady but this fellow is going to cause a blow-up sooner or later i'll bet a cookie end quote it would be unfair to let army people or foreigners uh had the last word on admiral king's personality but when you hear him quoted himself he sounds like a guy who just doesn't

2:48:08have any time for people he considers inferior and he considers most people inferior jordan has him saying about general marshall who was a famous i mean work together guy he's the glue he's the oil that that provides lubrication for all these divas to work together and he said that george marshall could be a very agreeable man when he wanted to be uh but that he didn't always want to be and then he's quoted as saying about george marshall quote sometimes i think he's stupid and other times very good king later mused quote his basic trouble

2:48:41is that like all army officers he knows nothing about sea power and very little about air power end quote jordan then writes quote king considered marshall the second smartest man among the joint chiefs after himself but that did not mean the two headstrong men would see eye to eye quote we had many fights he recalled sourly end quote but he liked the other generals even less and the air corps which was part of the army the the planes that flew at high altitude and bombed from high altitude were part of the army at this point

2:49:13and hap arnold was the guy who ran them quote and marshall in king's estimation was about the best the army had arnold the air corps commander king claimed didn't know what he was talking about king told his biographer that to form a sound strategy quote you have to use imagination and horse sense it always seemed to me that the navy was better equipped with strategical insight than the army the air corps didn't know a damn thing about it end quote admiral king reminds me of macarthur in a way macarthur's a hard to deal with guy

2:49:45king is a hard to deal with guy you think why are they putting up with these hard to deal with people well they're bringing something to the table right we have to assume that there's some real positives that that make the not able to work with side of these people something you can deal with something you'll put up with right you'll tolerate it because of what they bring to the table and king is a fascinating character first of all to be the way he is in in sort of his job versus the way he is

2:50:17outside his job i mean he was a drinker a womanizer he was the first one at the officer's club with a with something in his hand to drive i mean he's this interesting character right you didn't want to sit next to him because he would reach you know under the table at women i mean he's a party dude sometimes and then other times on his job he's like the floor manager at the restaurant that the boss hires because the whole staff is kind of slacking off a little getting a little lazy so he hires just

2:50:49some jerk who is on you for everything i'm paraphrasing here but king said something like you know no matter how good they are meaning the sailors or the officers you know you need a good kick in the ass every six weeks or you get lazy right so that guy who's the jerk floor manager that's just making your life miserable though sometimes they do actually do what they were hired to do and everybody gets a little bit more tense and nervous and on on job and and alert and worried about the little things remember in mid

2:51:211942 the u.s navy is still learning how to be a wartime navy and there's only been one for about six or seven months it's shaping up and guys like ernest king are part of the shaping up process because he's good at that and he's not going to be necessarily nice or liked for doing it he's also we should point out and this is important to franklin roosevelt apparently too he is a brawler he is a fighter he is aggressive i'm not being a homer here when i say that both the u.s army and u.s navy

2:51:54uh i i even grading on a on a non-curve i mean they are aggressive that is part of their doctrine for good or ill right and that works both ways on you sometimes but in i mean the navy is aggressive and king is an aggressive admiral and now he's in charge of things and his problem and macarthur's problems besides their personal things are now going to stem uh also from the services and the branches of the military you know which they're a part of as we've said before at length the japanese army and navy don't

2:52:29much like each other and find it difficult sometimes to work together the same is true for the american military these days what passes for inter-service rivalry is when the ribbing gets a little bit too mean after a very one-sided army navy football game but it used to be really severe it's gone up and down like a forest fire you know sometimes getting really hot and sometimes getting really low before the second world war these guys didn't like each other at all often and it's funny because it's at every level it's at the the level where

2:53:04you know the 20 year old uh private first class guys and the and the sailors and the marine recruits are at the bar drinking or whatever and somebody mouths off and everybody's had a few too many and they get into a brawl that's the kind of thing you imagine that older guys tell stories about when they're in their 50s and 60s reminiscing on their wild youth the problem is is that they don't seem to outgrow that and they feel the same way and it colors their ability to work with their counterparts in the other services

2:53:39here's the way ian w tole writes about the inter-service rivalry in the united states after saying that it colors the entire way that you know the entire strategy especially early in the war there's a dimension of inter-service rivalry and rancor in this he says in all of it so if it had been fought by vulcans you wouldn't have this but because it wasn't you do and the wars fought differently because of it and in the conquering tide ean w tole writes about the inter-service rivalry quote the acrimony was found at every rank vicious brawls erupted

2:54:13nightly between sailors marines and soldiers on the streets of san francisco and honolulu sailors and soldiers taunted one another as swabbies and dog faces and settled the issue with their fists infantry men begrudged sailors their hot meals and clean bunks amenities that seemed criminally lavish when compared to the squalor and privations of war on land end quote he then goes on to point out that the rivalry and animosity between the u.s marine corps and the u.s navy right you think of services that are really supposed to get along and work well together dates back to

2:54:48the revolutionary war and was notorious pointing out quote that on naval bases across the world guard houses and gates were manned by scowling marines whose customary hail to all sailors was where in the hell do you think you're going end quote so the army and the navy don't like each other the navy and the marines have their issues and of course just to be fair the army and the marines have their issues toll continues quote senior army officers regarded the entire marine corps as a plot hatched by the navy to usurp their rightful function and

2:55:23did their best to asphyxiate it or at least limit its deployments to units no larger than a regiment end quote now it gets even better there is no u.s air force at this time there is however an army air corps and navy flyers and they don't care for each other quote naval aviators grumbled that the army air forces handed out medals like after dinner mints pilots of different services took satisfaction in buzzing a rival's airfield and aircraft or went on the ground holding down their brakes while gunning their engines in order to blow clouds of

2:55:58dirt and dust onto their adversaries every major action early in the pacific war he writes involved a dimension of inter-service rancor end quote when you have douglas the situation mcarthur in australia an admiral earnest king running the united states navy i've heard it said that he's the most powerful admiral that has ever run the united states navy you're gonna have some sparks over you know questions of things like strategy mcarthur has a plan and while the carriers are still smoking after midway he cables it to washington dc in typical mcarthur fashion he's got his eyes

2:56:32on the prize he's seeing the whole war laid out in front of him like a vista the surrender of japan and everything first step's going to be the taking of new britain's famous harbor and airfields at rabaul which is part of the early stuff that happened in 1942 and he's going to do it in like three weeks he says which is insane but that's the plan and the way he's got the plan set up this should surprise nobody would set it up so that the army's taking the lead which of course means mcarthur would be

2:57:06running it and the navy would be in a subsidiary role but of course you know conditions here in the pacific with all the islands and water being what they are mcarthur told washington that he would need a division of troops trained in amphibious warfare that's a way of saying marines and two aircraft carriers at a time when the united states only has three in the pacific and as we all know within hours i think of the battle of midway about a month after the battle of the coral sea when the admirals of the united states

2:57:40navy are probably still in shock by how quickly you can go from having a nice set of carriers to having no carriers right a knife edge of like 15 minutes the idea of handing over those carriers to a guy like douglas mcarthur to whom they will be just one of the spinning plates or juggling balls that he's managing to keep in his mind as he you know sees his eyes on the prize of the eventual defeat of japan and the return to the philippines don't call it a comeback well to them that looks like handing

2:58:15a precious glass family heirloom over to the klutzy forgetful child or the ring of power gollum's precious over to somebody that if he somehow were to lose the ring of power his idea of what you do in that situation is ask the navy for another one and by the way ernest king had already had a plan for this region that he'd been telling the president about for months and his plan this should shock nobody was designed in a way that would mean the navy was running it and people like mcarthur and his army forces would

2:58:49be there to mop up and garrison things as the marines and the navy continue to jump forward seeing the entire pacific theater as their theater as admiral king pointed out over and over again we know we gave you the atlantic right you've got the european theater you go have your army fun over there this is a navy operation king is especially concerned with a japanese airfield for seaplanes that has been built on the island of tulagi and he wants to go take that back right away asap and his problem is the army is arguing with

2:59:23him over whether or not this is his decision to make and whether he would control it even if he did that this is the way um in his book guadalcanal author richard b frank describes the intensifying problems and we should point out there is a joint chiefs of staff with all of the heads of the military who are supposed to work together for the president just like there is now in the u.s military chain of command but in mid-1942 this entity had only existed for a matter of months and was very loosey-goosey and amorphous at

2:59:59one point i was reading franklin roosevelt was asked by the press a question about it and he just sort of shook his shoulders and said he hadn't the foggiest idea right they're working it out and when you see the actual histories it really appears like it's much more of a question of two men hashing it out the head of the army george marshall and the head of the navy earnest king and each one of them has

3:00:30their uh subsidiary entity in that location right in that zone of control in that theater for king and the navy it's admiral nimitz for marshall and the army it's our friend douglas macarthur and in um the book guadalcanal author richard frank writes quote on june 26th marshall presented the case for endowing command of the offensive in macarthur acknowledging that simple lines drawn on the map earlier that year were not absolutely controlling marshall argued that macarthur's position

3:01:01and knowledge would enable him best to coordinate allied efforts king replied in writing the same day he began by pointing out that in europe where the major forces engaged would be ground troops king had acceded to army command in phrases frank writes that became progressively less tactful king stated that naval and amphibious forces predominated in the pacific and command should therefore be navy in fact he asserted the operation quote could not be conducted any other way

3:01:32end quote frank continues in a further slap at the army and macarthur king promised to proceed quote even if no support of the army forces in the southwest pacific is made available end quote underlining this threat frank writes king directed nimitz on june 27th to prepare for operations on the premise that only navy and marine units would be available marshall restrained himself from a reply in kind to this provocative missive not so macarthur who threw one

3:02:03of his more remarkable tantrums of the war end quote i remember reading one description of macarthur that said at times he could be positively shakespearean this is the way ronald h specter and eagle against the sun describes this moment of disagreement between the two divas quote the argument over command rocked the joint chiefs of staff for almost a week at one point king warned marshall that he would direct nimitz to go ahead with the operation quote

3:02:34even if no support of army forces in the southwest pacific is made available end quote while macarthur specter writes declared that the navy's obstinacy was part of a long time plot to bring about quote this is macarthur talking the complete absorption of the national defense function by the navy the army being relegated to merely base training garrison and supply purposes end quote he claims to have been party to information back in the hoover administration that he

3:03:05gleaned info secret info on the fact that there was this plot to usurp the army and that this is part of another brick in the intolerable wall it's a little kooky at this level isn't it and yet you see it in so many militaries looks like the japanese kind of but other militaries do this too the solution turns out to be the same sort of thing you see in these other militaries the same kind of liaisons

3:03:36and haggling you see from the japanese trying to keep their army and navy in sync you see on the american side now george marshall ever the mensch comes up with a plan that gives both his little starlets their song in the musical and an equal number of lines everybody gets a piece of the action a moment in the sun in a multi-phased plan that puts each side in charge you know separately like first we're gonna have

3:04:06a first stage and that'll be a navy stage and then they get to run that then there'll be a second stage this will be an army stage and then macarthur and the army get to run that and you all play nicely together when it's not your turn the first stage is going to involve that operation that admiral king wants to do and wants to do asap he's going to send landing forces and naval assets to take over islands in the solomons tulagi had always been on the list but in july early july the japanese land

3:04:43on the island of guadalcanal right by tulagi and start building an air base there and this takes an already impatient admiral king worried about his golden opportunity here after midway closing and lights a fire under the rear end of a person who needs no fire lit under his rear end and he begins pushing everyone else we have to invade now now now he wants to invade the solomon islands in like three weeks and everybody's jaws just drop here's the way naval historian craig l simons in his book world war ii at sea puts it and

3:05:20it picks up right after the macarthur king you know crisis in command he writes quote having won the administrative battle for now king announced an accelerated timetable for the operation this is the um solomon islands operation the guadalcanal one once the japanese airfield on guadalcanal became operational it would give the mayor superiority over the invasion beaches to ensure that did not happen king set a target of august 1st 1942 only three weeks away for the invasion it was stunningly ambitious and in the eyes of many unrealistic all the components of a complex amphibious assault a

3:05:57landing force the ships to carry them other ships to escort them plus the fuel supplies and the ammunition to sustain them had to be found gathered organized and delivered in a shockingly short time this he writes would be daunting under any circumstances but especially so in mid-1942 due to the acute shortage of transports though the assault was endowed with the code name operation watchtower colloquially it came to be called operation shoestring end quote this is an understandable though military trade-off that is encountered all the time and there's no always right answer it kind of depends

3:06:34on conditions and reasonable and even unreasonable military minds can differ this is a question of do we attack now before we're ready maybe even in a half-assed way but catch the enemy off guard the japanese were not expecting any counter-attack until at least january 1943 that's six months from now so you would catch the enemy off guard or do you wait and delay this several months get your ducks in a row rehearse this thing stockpile supplies get all the different commanders on the same page with the same plan have zero hour coordinated at just the

3:07:11right time and you know go like it's june 6 1944 and you're landing on the beaches at normandy that does sound organized doesn't it the problem is is the delay gives your enemy time to organize as well and the likelihood is that by then they'll have operational airfields all in that area potentially hundreds of warplanes in the sky looking to sink your carriers and your transport ships it's a trade-off but if i tell you something's going to involve trade-offs the smart thing to do is then to ask some follow-up questions isn't it what sort of

3:07:48trade-offs are we talking about here what sort of disadvantages are my men if i'm the marine corps commander going to have to face as part of these trade-offs when the marines go into the south solomon islands they don't even have any good maps there's a few little aerial photos of little pieces of the of the field but i mean they interviewed people who lived there a decade ago and said now can you tell us a little bit about the layout of the land from memory and there are many famous stories one of my favorites involves

3:08:19the so-called grassy knoll or the hill off the beach because that's what they've been told well there's a slight hill right off the beach and then when the marines land eventually they look and they see what appears to be an extinct volcano in the distance right doesn't match the the maps they had at all i can't imagine any u.s forces of any size at all going anywhere in the world today without tons of photos and satellite images and maps of all kinds imagine going in there blind that's a hell of a trade-off if you're a marine they are an interesting breed though uh i should just say that growing up and i've said this many

3:08:54times i feel like in this program but this show is one where i grew up in the fumes of this era and the era was so powerful that the fumes were too and there was a romancing quality to the marines when i was growing up still it was a very john wayne uh i mean when you saw it portrayed in the movies the marines had a certain swagger and cachet and as army guys never tired of saying the best pr you know management firm in the american military uh the army guys are quoted as saying uh that they could be involved in heavy duty combat somewhere and the newspapers never noticed but the marines get

3:09:30on a boat to go from one place to another and the media is all i mean they were media darlings and we should point out and we will many times in the future that the army will actually carry the lion's share of the weight of fighting in this theater eventually but it's generally the marines who land on the beaches not always but generally and guadalcanal is the first time they do it with the subsidiary islands of places like tulagi then there's another one called gavutu another one called tanambogo i believe and they're all part of this little teeny island chain with guadalcanal being the big one in that little group guadalcanal by the way about

3:10:0585 miles long about 30 miles wide um my stepfather and my father both served in the navy my stepfather was there at the end of the second world war he didn't see combat but he was sure he was going to talked about that story many times um so we were basically a navy family my dad's brother was in the navy in the second world war my uncle kim was in the marine corps aviators he was a marine corps pilot so he didn't have to go doing any of those horrible things that my stepfather and father continually warned me about they used different terms my dad was a lot more um um cool about it just

3:10:40vague about it but my stepfather said uh don't ever find yourself in the marines he said they're crazy it's a suicide squad he said and remember the navy guys are the ones who had to who had to take the marines to like the dumping off point on the island and let them off and then hightail it back to the ships while the marines have to keep going into the teeth of the defenses right and my stepfather said don't ever find yourself in the marines they'll you'll be dropped off a half mile from the shore hip deep in water you know on a coral reef and have to wade in under machine gun fire he said

3:11:16so don't ever get in a situation where you put yourself into that you're too smart for that which is a very navy thing to say isn't it look at what admiral king says about all the other services i've met tons of smart marines though over my lifetime and my uncle kim was brilliant went and worked for mcdonald douglas after his time out of the service i mean i think it's just a difference of opinion and my stepfather's attitude is you know we want you coming home after a war and if you're a marine your chances of that are lower because they're going to be right there in the middle of it some people join up

3:11:51for precisely that reason though they're a really interesting breed though much romanticized when i was a kid of course but some of this based on you know some truth i really like the way author richard b frank describes um the marines and and um and this mix that you get during this period between the old timers who were there you know long before this war was on the horizon to the newbies the guys who joined up you know when the big buildup began before pearl harbor and then this huge glut of people that come after

3:12:26pearl harbor these guys you know leave the uh basic training early sometimes because they're so needed and these are people who were told you know you join us if you want to be the first in line to actually come to grips in combat with the japanese and these are the people who said yes sign me up for that that sounds good i don't want to wait around cooling my heels i want to get to them right away mad about pearl harbor and then they join up with these people who are the opposite sometimes of these

3:13:03green young go-getters let's go get those they're much more like these cynical old timers who are just deadly and frank describes them this way oh and by the way when he says this other group he's talking about the old timers who were there already versus uh the newcomers who are just arriving the the volunteers who are called up and uh and are gung-ho and frank writes quote the other group was by contrast small in number but like a drop of dye in a gallon of water they gave the whole division an unmistakable hue and they

3:13:40stamped a nickname on the division the old breed one of their own officers lieutenant colonel samuel b griffith colorfully described them quote first sergeants yanked off planks in navy yards sergeants from recruiting duty gunnery sergeants who had fought in france perennial privates with disciplinary records a yard long these were the professionals the old breed of the united states marines many had fought cacos in haiti bandidos in nicaragua and french english italian and american soldiers and sailors in every bar in shanghai manila cing chow tiensin and peking they were inveterate gamblers he writes and accomplished scroungers

3:14:17who drank hair tonic in preference to post exchange beer which he says they called horse piss cursed with a wonderful fluency and never went to chapel he says they called that the god box unless forced to many dipped snuff smoked rank cigars or chewed tobacco cigarettes were for women and children they had little use for libraries or organized athletics they could live on jerked goat and the strong blacked coffee they called boiler compound and hash cooked in a tin hat many wore expert badges with bars for proficiency in rifle pistol machine gun hand grenade auto

3:14:54rifle mortar and bayonet they knew their weapons and they knew their tactics they knew they were tough and they knew they were good there were enough of them to leaven the division and to impart to the thousands of younger men a share of both the unique spirit which animated them and the skills they possessed end quote when marine corps general vandegrift 55 years old at this time and the guy who knows he's going to be commanding marines in combat at some point finds out that that at some point is in august 1942 he says he

3:15:30just couldn't believe it he'd been told by admiral king himself that his marines would not be seeing combat till at least january 1943 which coincidentally is the same intelligence that the japanese had instead on august 1st is the due date uh people just tell king it's impossible we can't do it he begrudgingly gives them another week so the new due date is august 7th 1942 there is a hastily thrown together rehearsal near fiji that does not go well and leads to a sense of foreboding about what's about to happen here in this disorganized mess the

3:16:07first or better described as the largest amphibious assault since the battle of gallipoli in 1915 and people will recall that didn't go exactly swimmingly by the end on july 27th only 11 days before the marines are scheduled to hit the beach a rather extraordinary meeting occurs on the uss saratoga the aircraft carrier it's the only get together between the commanders on the scene here that's going to happen before the attack the guy who is the operational head of the whole thing admiral gormley doesn't even attend he sends somebody else admiral fletcher will be there though

3:16:43um admiral turner will be there and marine corps general vandegrift will be there the reason it's extraordinary first of all people took notes is the animosity between fletcher and the other two men fletcher as you recall uh he's been at sea most of this year he's fought in both coral sea and midway and those were recent this is the way author robert leckie in challenge for the pacific describes it he says quote archer vandegrift the general who had once been startled to see the unruffled admiral gormley acting like a drill sergeant was now amazed to

3:17:20see that fletcher looked tired and nervous and he put it down to the admiral's recent battles of the coral sea and midway next he was surprised to learn that fletcher had neither knowledge of nor interest in the guadalcanal operation finally he was thunderstruck to hear him saying frankly that he would not succeed then admiral fletcher turned on admiral turner and angrily accused him of quote instigating end quote the solomons invasion unimpressed by turner's indignant denial fletcher interrupted him to ask how many days will it take to unload the troops five turner replied fletcher shook his

3:17:56head stubbornly two days he said were quite enough he would not risk his carriers any longer end quote it's worse than that on a personal level though fletcher basically says to turner that he doesn't have any combat experience and he's making all these plans from washington dc doesn't have any idea about this revolution in military affairs that admiral fletcher has seen up close and personal and recently not going to let this other a desk bound admiral a planner not going to let him use the precious aircraft carriers as part of his learning curve and vandegrift

3:18:33is stunned because he'll leave this meeting described as furious trying to explain to admiral fletcher that the 17 000 marines he's going to land within 24 hours of the initial assault need air cover and his plan is to capture the airfield that's on the island unfinished of course and finish it and then have his own aircraft and then the carriers can leave turner doesn't even have that kind of optimism admiral turner just wants the aircraft carriers to stick around long enough for heat for him to unload his transports but if his transports are going to

3:19:09take four days and fletcher only promises two well what are the other two days look like fletcher will eventually compromise and give him three so if you are the dad of one of these marines who's going to land on this island 11 days from now you just had a bad dress rehearsal over near the fiji islands and now you have this doesn't look too good does it on april 7 1942 uh the marines hit the beach in the south solomon islands the island of guadalcanal which is like 85 90 miles long something like that about

3:19:4630 miles wide and the subsidiary smaller islands places like tulagi and i think it's gavatu and a bunch of little ones the the really little ones are measured in yards by yards tulagi is like three and a half miles by a half mile and the marines land on all these different islands they have a big bombardment by the fleet first and this is going to become the standard script for the rest of the pacific wars island campaigns it will evolve it will change it will become more efficient they will learn a lot of lessons but

3:20:21the basic template and sort of style stays the same you have the offshore ships shooting first at the beachhead then you bring in the planes which they duly do who strafe and bomb the beach and drop colored smoke any place they think warrants a little extra attention still from the guns offshore and then the transports come in the precious transports there's never enough of them uh for any power any country uh the precious transports come in and drop the marines off on the beach the assumption is the marines are going to lose a lot of

3:20:54people in this first assault they fully expect uh you know the d-day june 6 1944 treatment they expect to run into machine gun nests and artillery i mean uh certainly mortar rounds dropping on the beach it might be mined there should be you would expect barbed wire maybe tank trap types of them they're expecting the worst and instead they're stunned when they roll up on this place and in a twilight zone level of eeriness there doesn't seem to be any enemy there the marines thought there might be as many as 5 000 japanese combat troops

3:21:27on this island and there still might be one of the nasty things about these islands which look like you're fighting at a resort in the tropics when you're looking at it from the air from like five miles away right gorgeous green jungle canopy that the water is an unbelievable blue but when you get down to ground level you realize the only thing you you can see is the the beach and the ocean you just came over the little strip of land between the water you know covered with sand and where the jungle begins and then

3:22:00well who knows it's a giant haunted house as far as the marines are concerned and there will be this juxtapositioning of the marines opening coconuts on the beach obviously this sense of relief that they weren't just machine gunned to death trying to take this uh landing beach but also the officers will come ashore and see that the marines are not too keen on exploring any farther because they think this must be a trap right they're just waiting for them to do something so let's just stay here uh there's a giant traffic jam trying to unload

3:22:33all the supplies it's as disorder and chaos filled as everybody predicted there will be uh all kinds of famous stories about how bad it was i mean marines would talk about how the transports were loaded in backwards sometimes and the important stuff you need right now like ammunition and explosives was loaded first and then a whole bunch of non-essentials was loaded after that so they're throwing stuff into the ocean to get to the the stuff at the very back of the of the hole that they need right now the situation will not be so easy

3:23:06on the subsidiary islands tulagi's about 20 miles off of um guadalcanal on that island and the smaller ones the marines run into japanese on tulagi a couple of what are called marine raider battalions land on the tiny little island and begin fanning out here's the way uh author robert leckie in challenge for the pacific describes it quote throughout the morning the raiders moved over rough jumbled ground working through rocks and trees keeping clear of the shore trails covered by enemy cliffs at noon they spilled into the former chinese settlement on the island's north coast and

3:23:39there the japanese struck back mortar shells began to fall marines toppled lieutenant samuel miles a physician rushed to help three badly wounded men and fell dead the first casualty of the campaign a company commander was wounded the marines moved more warily against these rickety chinese shacks and the tempo of their advance slowed end quote they also got a lesson in how good the japanese are at digging in they had taken these uh dugouts and dug them into the sides of hillsides crisscrossing little teeny depressions and and and what would be very very very small like

3:24:12valleys with machine gun fire and by the time the marines um figure out how they might handle this the sun's going down and they are going to have to fight at night and as we said earlier the japanese kind of pride themselves on and and look for a psychological advantage with their night fighting they do it very well at sea and they do it very well at land and uh the guy who's in charge of the raider battalion here his nickname is red mike because he's a redhead a ginger as you brits would say uh

3:24:43red mike edson lieutenant colonel um he knows a counter-attack is coming at night and it does the japanese come out um they try to infiltrate it it's it's a it's a very prolonged night sort of assault that is terrifying on a number of different levels for the marines one of these levels is the willingness of the japanese to fight long beyond any hope is left just to take some more marines with them there is a war correspondent who lands with the marines on guadalcanal and will be there for a while his name is richard tragoskis

3:25:15he writes a book wrote a book called guadalcanal diary and he published these writings uh where where the american people back home you know obviously with war censorship taking out stuff that the government doesn't want but this is how everyone's going to find out what it's like to fight the japanese through people like tragoskis and tragoskis is not on to loggy when this fighting happens but he arrives soon after words and he talks to lieutenant colonel red mike edson about what it was like to fight the japanese and edson you know again we're all if

3:25:47you know anything about the pacific war you're jaded by japanese conduct you kind of know i mean they're famous right they'll fight to the last mile but this was not something at the time that uh there were rumors but mike edson explains that that's just what they did and tragoskis quotes this lieutenant colonel and these numbers are numbers from the scene at the times they may be different now that the history books have checked and gotten records but but this is what the marine lieutenant colonel on to log at the time thought and pardon the

3:26:18language as we said earlier this is the zeitgeist of the times we're in a giant race war here on all sides and in all theaters to take this out would be somehow dishonest this is what um tragoskis writes quote colonel edson summarized the tulagi campaign now quoting red mike quote the japs had one battalion of about 450 men on the island they were all troops no laborers he continues later quote the japanese casualties were about 400 not a single one gave up one prisoner was taken he had been dazed by a close mortar burst when

3:26:50a man went into one of the holes to get the radio he found 17 dead japs end quote edson continues a minute later quote it was the same in all the dugouts we found that an officer was alive in one of them we sent an interpreter out to get him the interpreter came to the mouth of the cave and asked if the officer wanted to surrender the answer was a grenade end quote he talks about the counter-attack at night saying we suffered quite a few casualties but then analyzing for the war correspondent right afterwards this

3:27:22is how he described the japanese way of fighting and we should point out there's an old line that you never get a second chance to make a first impression but the japanese do in this war because the americans and the australians have both fought the japanese already right corregidor bataan malaya singapore all these places but those guys for the most part never came home they went on the bataan death march they ended up in prison camps so the knowledge that they gained was only only trickles of it made its way back to say boot camps

3:27:54and recruitment centers and and the high command so that experience kind of has to be relearned here and it is and it will never be forgotten again for the rest of the war but this is the japanese showing the marines for example what fighting the japanese are going to be like and we're jaded because we know that they're willing to commit suicide and all those things these people at the time had heard about this but it's one thing to read what you think might be in a wartime propaganda exaggeration and another thing to see it

3:28:27up close red mike says quote the japanese defense was apparently built around small groups in dugouts with no hope of escape they would stay in there as long as there was one live jap there was a radio for communication in nearly every one of these holes we pulled out 35 dead japs from one dugout in another we took out 30 some of these people had been dead for three days but others were still in their shooting in none of these places was there any water or food they had evidently made a dash for their dugouts

3:29:03when the naval bombardment came without stopping for provisions in one case he says there were three japs cornered they had one pistol they fired the pistol until they had three shots left then one jap shot the two others and killed himself end quote that's not only shocking for anyone but it is something that foreshadows how tough this is all going to be and if we recall that this is an element that's baked into the japanese grand strategy here this idea that they're willing it's like a giant game of chicken they're willing to suffer heavier casualties

3:29:38and the other side is for a bunch of places that are more important to the japanese than they are to the allies this is not american boys dying for some major super cause like you know that you can easily rationalize like landing on the beaches of normandy or a russian son dying to protect moscow or an allied soldier you know dying in the in the attempt to take berlin and end the european war these are americans dying for little islands nobody's ever heard of tulagi as i believe we may have said three and a half

3:30:14miles long and a half mile wide the american combat casualties for taking that tiny little place and a couple of other little islands that are measured in yards by yards well i've seen different numbers according to the u.s um west point atlas uh world war ii in the pacific 144 americans lose their lives taking these places in like 24 hours 144 dead is about the same number of uh dead due to enemy action that the entire coalition side suffered in the first gulf war the japanese by the way lose between eight and 900 men for

3:30:49these tiny little islands that's quite a game of geopolitical chicken right there isn't it and the numbers always look small in the pacific when you compare them to the eastern front or places like uh italy in 43 or western europe in 1944 but if we divide this by you know deaths per yard then the real cost becomes um you know manifest and you start to realize that these people are losing lives at an enormous clip for the size of the places they're taking and we have a lot of these places still left to take and

3:31:25the japanese grand strategy assumes that because of their willingness to fanatically defend these places and take as many of the enemy with them over and over and over again that eventually people will get tired of losing their sons for places that seem insignificant to them as you might imagine once the japanese hear about this uh landing on these islands in the south solomons they respond they have that base we told you about about 650 miles to the north ribaul air naval assets they send them both down to the area the ships take a little bit

3:32:00longer the planes arrive within a few hours and begin to go after the transports and there are battles between the anti-aircraft on the transport ships and the japanese aircraft there are battles between american fighters off those carriers of admiral fletcher's and the japanese planes both sides take their losses but the carrier strength is getting slowly whittled down and admiral fletcher thinks he's low on fuel apparently and so when a message comes from admiral turner saying all

3:32:31troops ashore um on the 8th of august uh fletcher decides well i've you know done my job apparently this is all controversial fletcher asks for permission from that admiral who's nowhere nearby gormley to leave about nine hours later he gets the word okay you can go and he decides to take off the problem of course is that admiral turner might have had all his troops ashore but he didn't have all their stuff ashore so who's going

3:33:05to protect him with the aircraft carriers gone historian craig l simons in world war ii at sea describes turner's reaction this way quote when turner received his copy of fletcher's request to withdraw he was furious he later characterized fletcher's departure as nothing less than desertion and he used even harsher words in private end quote before those carriers even get the approval to leave though the japanese ships come to respond to this invasion and they get there

3:33:38at night and the japanese are wonderful night fighters they've put a lot of effort and training and they have a lot of pride and surprise attacks by their navy's been a source of pride for them since at least the turn of the century japanese rear admiral gunichi mikawa is in charge of some cruisers that slip down into what's known as the slot it's an area between all these islands that forms a natural channel and at night

3:34:12they slide in and they run in on purpose to the american cruisers protecting the whole beachhead the first sign that anything is amiss is a message from a u.s destroyer i love it because it sounds like they've spotted aliens or sharks in the water at about 1 45 a.m in the very dark pacific waters between guadalcanal and savio island um the bridge the officers on the u.s cruiser the chicago get a message from the u.s destroyer

3:34:45patterson warning warning strange ships entering harbor simon says that the only real indication that the admirals on these ships have that there's something amiss is when large caliber shells begin throwing up huge geysers around their ships the japanese launch their famous long lance torpedoes even before the guns open fire so as soon as the american and australian cruisers in the situation find out they're under attack there are torpedoes on the way shells landing spotlights illuminating the

3:35:19ships and mass confusion as you well know if you're on the receiving end of a spotlight your view is very different than if you're on the projecting end a torpedo blows off the bow of the chicago before they even figure out really what's going on they haven't even apparently had time to tell the other ships what's happening so as simons points out they all get to be surprised in turn the australian cruiser canberra takes 24 shell

3:35:52hits he says in less than four minutes making it a burning and sinking wreck and then says quote arriving amidst the northern group of cruisers mccowa lit up his searchlight and used it as a pointer like a bright white finger in the night it illuminated one american ship after another as if to say here fire on this ship the cruiser astoria was the first victim an early salvo started a fire in her airplane hangar and the

3:36:25bright flames in the dark night provided the japanese with a vivid target pounded by successive hits from aidan's shells she lost power and was dead in the water captain samuel moore's quincy was next caught in a deadly crossfire the quincy was shot to pieces before her main battery guns could be trained on the foe moore himself was an early victim when a shell hit the bridge leaving it quote a shambles of dead bodies end quote simons

3:36:57continues quote in his last order the mortally wounded moore told the helmsman to try to ground the crippled vessel on savoe island to prevent her from sinking that gambit failed and when a torpedo hit the quincy's magazine in the words of one survivor she literally leaped out of the ocean she sank at 235 end quote in a little over two hours in a night attack that was chaotic well at least for the people on the receiving

3:37:28end of it the americans and australians lose four cruisers and over a thousand lives the japanese losses are negligible this is considered to be by many the worst defeat in the history of the united states navy in a fair fight and it makes it very clear to admiral turner with his transports and cargo ships still unloading at guadalcanal and tulagi and all that that he's in great danger he just lost his aircraft covering force and now

3:37:59he just lost his heavy cruiser covering force so he leaves too with ships that still have cargo on them that the marines need and leaves 11,000 or so marines on guadalcanal itself but all in all in this in this area with tulagi and these other it's about 17,000 guys who are now marooned here in the south solomon islands with a counterattack on the way by the time the elements of the counterattack arrive the marines have been

3:38:30able to prepare a little bit they create a defense perimeter around this airfield that'll be called henderson field and that they will finish just in time and get some aircraft on it just in time for the counterattack they will create this zone around the airfield that will become the closest thing that guadalcanal has to anything you might call a front line in this island war this will be the area that's fought over they will have just

3:39:02enough time apparently to string a single strand and these silly little things sometimes become important a barbed wire in front of some of their positions about 30 yards in front of some of their positions so that when on august 21st after midnight the first of these japanese counterattacks arrive it is a slaughter the japanese had landed the first troops for a counterattack after midnight on august 19th and instead of waiting for reinforcements as had been the

3:39:33plan the commander has a bad case of what the japanese called victory disease or maybe he's just really confident and he moves right toward the marine positions instead the elite achiki detachment 900 men originally i think the 100 were left behind to guard the rear area or whatnot but these 800 men who show up who attacked thinking that they were facing a smaller force probably i mean the very fact that the marines were marooned may have

3:40:04misled the japanese intelligence people who were looking at the reconnaissance and thinking well if this was a large number of marines surely they would have you know transport ships and and and people resupplying them i mean it might have confused them in this battle you get to see a lot more of the hallmarks of these japanese opponents though because when you fight them half the time or more it looks like you're in the vietnam war and

3:40:35you can hardly see anything and it's this jungle war where everything's invisible and you almost never see the enemy but what you didn't have in that war that you have in the second world war against the japanese is sometimes they just launch full frontal attacks in in bunched up groups and that's what happens at the battle of the tenaru or the ilu river or alligator creek it's known as all three let the record show part of the nastiness of this area is that instead of alligators which would be benign compared to what they actually do

3:41:11have they have crocodiles and on that night when the japanese attack they're facing marines in foxholes on the opposite side of this water obstacle they've strung up a single line of barbed wire as i said they have two 37 millimeter cannons which are not all that big of a deal you would think and they've got canister rounds for them which are like shotgun shells but it will make a big deal in this battle they've got some artillery behind them and when the japanese attack in several different waves over the course of several hours they are

3:41:46torn to pieces eventually the marines will counter-attack light tanks will be involved later the likes of which people who saw them said afterwards they were just they had rolled over so many japanese that the treads of the tanks were completely bespatted with gore some 40 42 44 americans lose their lives between seven and 800 japanese lose theirs marine corps veteran tom jones is quoted in the book the things our fathers saw and he was at the battle of the tenoroo or alligator creek or what have you and he talks about this night encounter and he

3:42:22writes quote we've been able to string a single lane of barbed wire japanese barbed wire we had captured we were on one side of the tenoroo river and they were coming from the other side so they had to cross the tenoroo to get to us and for some reason or another i don't know the japanese attacked on a narrow front consequently their casualties in wounded and dead were more or less bunched they would throw up a flare and you could see a target boy we laid down a sheet of steel during the night i think

3:42:58i fired off a hundred rounds or better and the rifle was an o3 let me stop here he means the model 1903 springfield rifle which was the usual thing the marines were using i think the rifle was an o3 it kicks like a mining mule it's a very accurate rifle the next morning i had a jaw on me like i had the mumps that damn rifle kicking me well the next morning we counted something like 600 dead japs and we found out it was the ichiki battalion it was supposed to be the premier fighting group

3:43:34of the japanese and it had considerable success in the philippines and the orient and they were hastily sent on to guadalcanal and that was just the first battle end quote it's at the tenoroo though that everybody gets the same lesson that mike edson and his marine raiders had gotten on tulagi the japanese um wounded after a marine counterattack at that battle start killing themselves in full view of the marines in touched with fire the land war in the south pacific historian eric berger it writes quote crushed by marine defenses and a counterattack 800 japanese infantry

3:44:10perished the death throes of the ichiki detachment took place in daylight and hundreds of marines watched events unfold many wounded japanese took hand grenades armed them and then held them to their heads this type of behavior was incomprehensible to a marine but far worse he writes several of the wounded tried to kill marines who were attempting to take prisoners infantryman andy pollini was involved in the closing stage of the battle now bergerid quotes this guadalcanal veteran quote as we approached a pile of jap bodies up jumped three japs two of them were in good shape

3:44:44but the third was wounded they were carrying him as though they wanted to surrender but just as they got near us our sergeant jumped out in front of them and yelled cut him down cut him down he saw something we didn't as soon as he yelled the two unwounded japs reached in their shirts for grenades but they never got to use them end quote there was also a battle that really soured the marines it may have been a misunderstanding but the way it was explained to everybody was that the japanese had sent somebody to tell

3:45:17the marines that there was this detachment ready to surrender and when the marines went to take their surrender they ambushed the detachment instead and cut him up with swords marine corps general vandegrift who is a hard man already i mean this is the this is the old breed right here right he's quoted in richard frank's guadalcanal writing a letter just a couple days after witnessing the tenoroo that we just talked about and trying to explain to this other general what he'd seen and he wrote quote general i have never heard or read of this kind

3:45:50of fighting these people refuse to surrender the wounded wait until men come up to examine them and then blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade end quote remember though these are lessons that have been learned in the philippines and singapore and places like that and they were being relearned here another one of the lessons that's being relearned has to do with the atrocities which is one of these inexplicable things it's it's we had talked about it earlier it was heavily studied after the war not the not just the japanese version

3:46:22of it but the the nazi version of it in you i mean it's it's a fascinating part of the human condition is it a political thing a cultural thing a human thing but you see it again when the japanese restart their attack on new guinea which happens right around the same time admiral fletcher's trying to get his aircraft carriers out of guadalcanal part of the reason the japanese don't respond as well as maybe they could to this american attack at guadalcanal is their eyes are about 700 miles away on port mosby where they're launching an

3:46:55offensive remember they wanted port mosby earlier they wanted to take it at the battle of coral sea by sea but because of the way that battle turned out that scotched that attempt this time they're going to try to take it via the overland route they already have tiny little beach heads on northern new guinea right around the time the guadalcanal landings happen they land more and more troops they trickle them in and they start coming overland there's this thing called the kokoda track or the kokoda trail which is a trail over the owen stanley mountains

3:47:28from northern new guinea at the at the tail the the eastern tail of new guinea and at the other end of the kokoda track basically is port mosby so the japanese are going to come over this trail and take port mosby via land right away they start committing the same kind of atrocities that have become a trademark of theirs in this war and they are the sorts of things that poison their enemies against them and if you believe some of the evidence that seems to be out there you could make a case that this may

3:48:01have been by design and news of earlier japanese atrocities in places like singapore and elsewhere have filtered back in bits and pieces when the japanese start moving up from new guinea they famously will murder some religious folk and their families and there are accounts that are more vicious and terrible and emotional and heartbreaking than others you can only imagine this stuff though in the era of phone videos and viral sharing of the war porn type stuff but in Hirohito's war francis pike has a relatively low-key rundown after talking about how a couple of nuns or

3:48:34nurses are murdered famously he writes quote australian anglican priest father james benson was more fortunate he was taken prisoner and transported to rabal and miraculously survived the war in another incident at the anglican mission in sangara the reverend henry holland and reverend vivian headlich were beheaded along with co-workers showing a peculiar mercy a captured six-year-old boy who became distraught was shot in the head sasebo fifth snlf oh that's a a naval force troops according to the captured japanese diary of toshio seito beheaded seven australian men and women including a sixteen-year-old girl now quoting from the

3:49:10diary quote they held her down screaming and crying while they cut off her head end quote even to shio seito pike writes an interpreter working in buna was horrified records of murders and massacres by japanese troops were perfunctorily recorded first-class seaman shunji shin noted in his diary quote 14th august about 8 a.m decapitated or shot the nine prisoners end quote in the book japan at war and oral history haruko tayo cook and theodore f cook include the thoughts of a lot of different japanese folk from a lot of different perspectives but some of these perspectives

3:49:46are the kind of people that sound like allied propaganda caricatures in one chapter they have a guy and they go into depth these aren't little quotes but the guy says if i went more than two weeks without me taking a head i didn't feel right meaning decapitating people he talks about getting requests all the time from other officers do you have any prisoners in the jail we can use i want to test my new sword now normally these were chinese prisoners it's one of the reasons you mysteriously look and go now with all the chinese

3:50:23troops that fell into japanese hands they should have giant pow camps full of chinese prisoners shouldn't they one of the things and this is a famous samuel elliott morrison story that historian he talks about and i'm going from memory here but but it's one of those things that sears into your brain he talks about a couple of australians the japanese captured right during this this early advance up to kokoda and they had been he said bayoneted tied to a tree and bayoneted and then some japanese soldier who could speak and write english had put above

3:50:59his head on a placard hung by the the dead australian he took a long time to die and then of course they were found by australian troops you can only imagine what that does to those soldiers and how they feel australian soldier bill crooks is quoted in bergerid's touched with fire and he makes it sound like there's not really hate involved as much as well he says quote i don't know that we were indoctrinated with a hate for the jap we knew what they had done in nanking we knew that they had machine gunned our

3:51:36nurses on banka island we knew that they'd bayoneted australian prisoners after they captured rabal we knew they'd bayoneted hospital inmates in their advance down the malayan peninsula but we did not develop a hatred we just would kill every bastard soul of them the moment we came against them we knew their bushido bonsai code was to take no prisoners in battle and never surrender so we killed them end quote when we talked about this same kind of japanese atrocious behavior in singapore for example in malaya and asked where it came from we quoted japanese officers who

3:52:12would often make the excuse about a bunch of soldiers who were in the hot blood of combat who'd lost their buddies and it was understandable they get out of control maybe a little institutional laxity you know that kind of understandable you know boys will be boys kind of an excuse but the australians will capture japanese rarely but they will and there's an affidavit that was used in the war crimes trials after the war which are very much more sketchy in the pacific than they were in europe by the way but this is cataloged in lord

3:52:48russell of liverpool's book the knights of bushido and he quotes an australian officer who right around this same period he'll also found australian troops who've been mutilated and tortured by the japanese not the same australian samuel elliate morrison was talking about but other ones and not only did they luckily capture a japanese soldier but one who spoke english so they asked him about what's going on here right and and here's how the affidavit describes it captain kendall says quote and i hope i get some of these place name pronunciations correct quote on the track leading

3:53:21from waga waga to lilihi i saw the body of another australian soldier with his hands tied behind his back lying face downwards he was tied with a string he had a wound on his leg with a field dressing on it and he had the top of his head cut right off the top portion of the skull was lying forward as if it had been cut through with a heavy knife or sword and had been chopped from the rear he also had lacerations crisscrossing his back and shoulders they appeared to be knife or sword wounds and

3:53:55had cut right through the shirt into his flesh two days later a japanese soldier was captured at ahioma he spoke english and i showed him the bodies of the two australian soldiers whom i previously mentioned he told me that he was attached to the landing party and that the ill treatment and torturing of australian troops was done by the order of their officers so that the japanese soldiers would fight and not surrender because the same things would be done to them now that these atrocities had been committed on the australians end quote that's the very

3:54:29opposite isn't it of what the excuse was in the singapore situation in malaya this is the officers making the soldiers essentially participate in the atrocities as a way to keep any of them who might think about surrendering in the line most of them wouldn't right they're basically fanatical about their devotion here and they know what the society you know expects of them they don't want to come back home and put shame on their family and all that so they're going to do their duty but for any of you who are thinking maybe you just might

3:55:03surrender take the easy way out well now that we've forced you to commit these atrocities human beings being what they are what do you think those australians and americans will do to you might as well not surrender right there's a sort of an evil machiavellian but at the same time sort of that twisted genius of an understanding of how human nature works that maybe trap these japanese into this situation i mean again i always say you could be born in japan at the time period that would have made you old enough to be in the

3:55:37service at this time think about how this traps you if you're a good person and you don't want to have anything to do with something like that it was an evil war in so many ways wrath of the cons punic nightmares apache tears and of course ghost of the ostfront just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from dancarlin.com every true fan has heard these favorites hey they make great gifts too if you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar dan and ben would love to have it a buck a

3:56:11show it's all we ask go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show in his book touched with fire historian eric burger it writes quote u.s marines and australian infantry developed an odd affinity they never fought on the same battlefield but a mutual respect developed across theaters when the u.s first marine division was sent to recuperate in australia after guadal canal and later set up training camp there marines and aussies frequently crossed paths with a brawl or two punctuating the mutual admiration society marine donald fall expresses a common sentiment now quoting fall

3:56:44quote i fought with the first marine division from guadalcanal until i got too close to japanese mortar fire on pelelu i'm not bragging but i think we were the best period except for maybe the aussies if anyone could fight as well as the corps it was aussies if it was up to me they would have all been inducted into the marines then in there end quote australia is a country with seven million people around this time period the united states by the way 131 million somewhere in there and yet it will come to them to

3:57:16have this moment in new guinea of their own while guadalcanal is going on where they combat the japanese on the kokoda trail and it is a potential bar brawl especially for an american to start saying which is the more famous australian military history moment the landing and fighting at gallipoli in 1915 or the fighting on the kokoda trail but we'll find out how that goes in part five supernova in the east how far do you go in trying to recreate a negative human historical experience so that people can get a tiny little taste of it

3:57:48that was one of the fascinating questions we dealt with when trying to put together our we call it an immersive memory project war remains for those of you who don't know we we put together what what you would think of as virtual reality got the headsets on walk around but it also was a destination event so there was a real trench kind of built with barbed wire and rats and stuff you can touch and and it matched what you saw in your headset and that was we thought it was kind of cool but the number

3:58:20one complaint we had about it was how come it's not nearer to me or how come i can't get tickets or how come i can't go or what when's it coming around here and i couldn't answer those but now i can many of you said why don't you just make a home edition easier said than done as i'm sure you really understood but we did it and it's available now and if you were one of those people that said i want a home edition well here it comes bad news is you don't get trench included

3:58:53or people to set it up that part of the the experience from the live event is sacrificed there are compensating elements added instead the sound is still unbelievable that was done if you don't know by the guys at skywalker labs in northern california the lucas guys and they took to this with enthusiasm it was kind of a fun project for them and i liked watching them have a great time with it so the sound is awesome the graphics and the commitment to historical realism was fun to watch the guys over at flight school in texas

3:59:25took that on and they were fantastic and then madison wells media who put this whole thing together i mean they asked me over and over and over again the bottom line was always the same what do you want dan does this look good to you dan is this what you had in mind dan do you want to do you know i mean they didn't let me do a 250 million dollar two and a half hour movie like experience with the vr um but we'll get there you know baby steps um nonetheless the questions were fantastic

3:59:57including things like how badly do we hurt the people who go through and experience the process and of course people on the other side said what do you mean you don't hurt them at all i said well world war one would hurt them how loud do you make the shelling uh well if this is too loud it'll hurt their hearing well it hurt the veterans hearing half of them came back half deaf so those were kind of some fun interesting trade-offs i wanted to make it so that there was a knob or a button so

4:00:29you could like a hot sauce heat level of spice at your thai restaurant you could tell them oh i need mild or i need medium or i like it really hot so you can tell how much fun it was creating something that is not the first world war nor would any of us want it to be your claim it was nobody's losing the leg in this thing or worse but i think just you know speaking from an american who's who's viewed the american offerings out there there are ways in which it hits you and things

4:01:01that it leaves you with that um the written accounts don't some non-historians multi-part podcast doesn't um television portrayals don't and even movie portrayals don't they all have their strengths and they can touch different elements of you your psyche your emotion your mentality um your humanity but this is a new realm of media that allows us to do this in a different way i don't think you've ever seen anything like it um if you want to give it a try i should let you know it's four dollars and 99 cents which is the same as saying five dollars let's just call it what it is you can buy it on the steam oculus and the htc vive port storefronts and it can be experienced on the oculus rift the oculus rift s htc vive htc vive pro and you know if i have my way more eventually thank you so much for all the support kind words and everything else those of you who've already been through it have provided and for those of you who said why don't you get your act together and come out with a home version well there you go go to war remains.com if you need more