EP15 The Supernova Coda

What this episode is about

The content explores the phenomenon of receiving post-series opportunities to engage with experts related to recently covered historical topics, specifically focusing on a forthcoming book compilation by author Ian W. Toll that examines the Pacific War during World War II. The discussion highlights the challenges of timing these conversations with audience expectations while emphasizing the exciting insights gained from engaging with knowledgeable figures in the field.

Key takeaways

• Americans often see WWII through the lens of land battles, missing the Pacific's naval and aerial warfare complexities.
• The Pacific theater's vastness and interconnected conflicts often overshadow the spotlight on iconic land battles like Iwo Jima.
• As the U.S. retracts from overseas conflicts, understanding the Pacific War becomes vital to grasping modern geopolitical dynamics.
• Many Americans know little of Asia’s land conflicts in WWII, highlighting a gap in historical comprehension and education.
• The legacy of the Pacific War extends into the Korean War, showing its enduring impact on East Asian dynamics.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 43 min speaking
• Ian W. Toll (Guest) · 29 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible, Twilight of the Gods, Precious Anne Frank
2. 30:00 – 40:00: Douglas MacArthur
3. 40:00 – 50:00: Douglas MacArthur
4. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Bataan Death March
5. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: Moneyball, Pacific Crucible, Twilight of the Gods

Notable quotes from "EP15 The Supernova Coda"

• 2021 is probably a safe bet for it at some point though and so we were holding on to this so that we could release this and have it coincide with the new offering but what that…

  about Ian W. Toll · at 1:00

• Pacific crucible followed by the conquering tide followed by twilight of the gods any one of these of course can be bought separately but with a three-book compilation coming out we assume in november ian w tells.

  about Pacific Crucible · at 1:56

• War back in the center of the story of asia and the pacific and my colleague richard frank is writing another trilogy about the asia pacific wars he calls it in which he's he's trying to rectify that bias and so i commend.

  about Precious Anne Frank · at 6:40

• You know i remembered it but i really didn't remember it until you started diving into douglas macarthur's paranoid fantasies about the navy and all this stuff can you talk a…

  about Douglas MacArthur · at 36:35

• Of backdrops do allow for some of the more wonderful human moments to come out i'm reminded there was a i think it was in john tolen's book there was a scene during the bataan…

  about Bataan Death March · at 53:42

• Problem in a systematic way using the data that baseball provides and all of that has changed michael lewis's money ball is probably the best account of this revolution in…

  about Moneyball · at 1:05:04

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Ian W. Toll — Person · Main guest · 3 mentions · first at 1:03
  Interview subject and historian/author whose Pacific War trilogy is discussed as a key narrative framework for understanding WWII in the Asia-Pacific.
• Douglas MacArthur — Person · Referenced commander / institutional rival · 3 mentions · first at 36:38
  Used to illustrate U.S. inter-service rivalry and command structure in the Pacific, plus political influence and postwar occupation considerations (including stance on Hirohito).
• Precious Anne Frank — Person · Referenced expert / peer historian · 1 mention · first at 6:48
  Cited as a colleague writing a trilogy intended to re-center the Sino-Japanese/Asia land war within the broader Asia-Pacific WWII narrative.

Books & papers

• Pacific Crucible — Book · Primary recommendation · 2 mentions · first at 1:56
  First book in Ian W. Toll's trilogy about the Pacific War, covering events from Pearl Harbor onwards.
• Twilight of the Gods — Book · Primary recommendation · 2 mentions · first at 1:59
  Final book in Ian W. Toll's trilogy, concluding the story of the Pacific War.
  Pacific crucible followed by the conquering tide followed by twilight of the gods any one of these of course can be bought separately but with a three-book compilation coming out we assume in november ian w tells.
• Moneyball — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at 1:05:20
  Mentioned in the context of discussing strategic analysis and decision-making.

Places & events

• Bataan Death March — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at 53:53
  Mentioned as an example of the brutality of the Pacific War.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history there's an interesting sort of phenomenon i guess you could call it that happens after we get a hardcore history series finished you begin to hear from people that are connected with the subject matter and you get opportunities for example to talk to them or to interview them and the upside is um they're usually people that you would really like to talk to the downside is you've just finished up usually a lot of work and a lot of conversation and a lot of the audience's time on the subject matter so everybody's usually ready for something new but then you get all these opportunities that are too good to turn down that are on the bit of subject matter you've just covered uh extensively and that's the case today now actually we've held on to this show for several months the author has a that we're going to talk to has a new three set book compilation coming out and it's been delayed i imagine november

1:00 2021 is probably a safe bet for it at some point though and so we were holding on to this so that we could release this and have it coincide with the um the new offering but what that means is i've actually got another show ready to come out real soon right after this it's going to be another interview with another author and this one won't be about the subject we've recently talked about so um one way or another we should have a couple of things for you in quick succession which is good because because we held on to this we didn't have anything coming out a couple months ago as we planned so you're due a couple of shows in quick succession this one's with an author whose work i enjoyed so much and and some of my favorite little things that we included these little hits by a a little quote by an author some of my favorite ones were by ian w toll and uh he has multiple books besides these

1:49 three but these three from start to finish cover the pacific war in the second world war from about pearl harbor to the end pacific crucible followed by the conquering tide followed by twilight of the gods any one of these of course can be bought separately but with a three-book compilation coming out we assume in november uh ian w tells um you know his combined work on on this specific theater in the second world war will be complete and available and he's wonderful and so when his people called uh right after we finished the six part series on the war in the asia pacific theater and said would you like to talk to e w toll i said what you would expect me to say even though we've talked about this subject a lot recently i said yes please so without further ado our conversation with author ian w toll obviously you know that i've done 27 hours recently on this subject and i'm sure the audience is going to groan when

2:51 they see i have more of it but what i'd like to do maybe as you know and i i consider the conversation maybe to be going now we're recording anyway but but um with a guy who has lived this like you've lived it uh you know not just the writing of the books and the research but the speeches that you have to give and everything else um i imagine that you have all kinds of ideas in your head of things that have happened that make this conflict wild and crazy is there something that you wish the general public and i feel like my audience now has 27 hours of this so what can we tell them about this war that is unusual or interesting or if you could say that you wish the general public knew something about this war that you know what would it be well i mean there's a couple i mean there's there's just so many things i could i could say an answer to that question but uh um why don't we why don't we say this um

3:44 that i as a continental nation we americans uh we tend to think of of war as war on land before anything else and and naval operations are a supporting feature of war so supporting operation and um in the second world war i mean that certainly was true the war in europe uh i think you could say naval operations were uh a supporting uh aspect of the of the campaign and then you need to invert your understanding when you come to the pacific you really need to just look at the map of the pacific and you you see this is a sea war and an air war first and uh land operations these island um island fights were played a sort of supporting role in in the larger scheme and so you know just from the very beginning i think you need to invert your understanding in that way and once you do that uh the this this vast conflict the pacific war becomes much easier to understand you know as an american uh one of the

4:45 things that we really didn't get much of i mean i have a life goes to war book that probably came out in 1950 and if you leap through the pages the vast vast majority of this work is about the pacific theater the battles that americans uh who follow the exploits of the marines or macarthur are very familiar with the terroirs the pelelius the iwo jimas but the whole asia side of this conflict is enormous once you delve into it once you start to realize how many people are involved um why is and you know also i didn't even think about this but i mean five years later we're in a war in korea we have chinese troops entering the war after a certain point i mean that's all directly connected to the fallout uh from this asia-pacific war um why don't americans know more and this includes yours truly why don't we know more about the the giant you know you mentioned the naval war which it is to the united

5:37 states but there was a giant land war in asia also right well you know i mean the simplest way to to answer that is just that you know we weren't involved in that war in a big way and and americans like most people we we tend to be most interested in the aspects of a conflict in which our boys were directly involved so i think that goes part of the way to explaining that um i think it's also true that uh because mao's china communists won the civil war after uh the end of the second world war um china became for many years and many ways still is somewhat of a black box from the outside uh and so the the telling of the of the story the history of that war uh was something that was controlled directly by mao's regime and um and there was just a limited um access to that country in order to try to tell that story i i think that there are good efforts now to try to rectify this to place the sino-japanese

6:40 war back in the center of the story of asia and the pacific uh and my colleague richard frank is is writing another trilogy about the asia pacific wars he calls it in which he's he's trying to rectify that bias and and so i commend uh that work the first of his three volumes is out you know when you look at the amount of the amount of resources we would say gdp today all the things that japan a small island nation had to uh set aside and devote for naval construction you know over the 20s and the 30s and into the 40s modern aircraft development and and millions of men on the ground who need to be supported in asia you look at this and you just think to yourself and i think we said in the podcast i mean the japanese were already trying to eat an elephant in terms of of the task that they had set for themselves before they even attacked pearl harbor then to attack the strongest western nations on top of that

7:39 i read an account of one historian who had said that a japanese i'm trying to quote from memory here a japanese poet had described the war as like a snow a slow-motion natural disaster suggesting that the japanese felt like they were almost like pulled into it like a riptide um when you look at something like this does it look like the japanese hadn't i mean i feel like they had no chance from the get-go uh how does this look to you when you i mean you've examined uh all of the records you've looked at this um how do you i guess they were optimists certainly but i mean you guys have guys like the whole naval staff everybody was so pessimistic about that how do you think this um i guess what i'm saying is do you see it as a one-sided affair from the get-go or did the japanese have a chance to do something really unexpected here you know when i consider the counter-factual stand i find it very

8:26 hard to imagine any scenario where the japanese could have escaped this conflict uh with um in in a better situation than they were on december 6 1941 the day before they attacked pearl harbor it's almost impossible to imagine a scenario where uh the war ends up working out for them and uh really what what the pacific war was from the japanese perspective was it was an enormous bet that uh that hitler was going to dominate europe and um and and that by dominating europe he was essentially going to keep the united states forever on the defensive worried about the security of our own hemisphere of south america and that in that situation we just would not uh be able to fight a prolonged bloody war uh in the pacific now of course that was a very bad bet and it was a bet that was made you know right at the moment when the german army was being stopped outside the gates of moscow you know a lot about

9:25 this i know you did like a six-parter on the uh on the war in the eastern front and um and and one of the leaders of the japanese regime i forget who in being interrogated after the war said you know if um if if we had made this decision just two weeks later we might have looked at what was happening in uh in russia and and uh perceived that this was not going to be a walk over for the germans the way it appeared that it was going to be in the in the early months and that might have caused us to think twice about attacking the americans uh in pearl harbor and so with that in mind when i when i go through the counter factuals i think the one thing that could have really tipped the balance uh throughout the world really but also in the pacific would be a russian collapse um and and some form of a truce on the russian front uh stalin had essentially repeated what the bolsheviks had done in 1917 and

10:21 cut a deal uh to end that war allowing hitler to redeploy uh his forces uh against england you know that i think um could have have really changed the entire complexion of the global conflict in a way that uh led us to to think let's try to cut our losses in the pacific and and not devote the kind of enormous effort that it will require to conquer japan at a time when we really do have to worry about our atlantic flank you know i'm going to piggyback off what you said because i think it's fascinating uh i spoke to a german once who had said that essentially i'm paraphrasing here but that we blew it in the east that we were welcomed by some of the population there uh as liberators and our actions turned those very people against us and made our job that much tougher i think about the pacific and the east a the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere and and this this idea that it's asia for the asians and the tying in of the

11:21 pan-asianism and the japanese uh portraying themselves as the tip of the asian spear to sort of free uh the asian people from the colonial western powers um you know and when i was growing up we were taught that that was just a a fig leaf covering uh you know rampant imperialism and certainly some of the japanese leadership thought that way but the more you read especially the more modern works the more this seems like something a lot of people really bought into and believed um could you say that the japanese are in a similar position to what that german guy was in when i mean did they blow it here by the way they treated the populations that they liberated could this have gone a different way had they lived up to the hype a little bit on the marketing message well i mean you know certainly the japanese would have done done themselves a huge favor if they had just treated the asian peoples that they had

12:10 conquered um more in line with with their ideology of this sort of pan-asian liberation movement and and i think that there's you know there's a lot to be said for that traditional view that you were taught growing up which is that the japanese were fundamentally out uh as an imperialist power to try to aggrandize themselves their empire uh to raise their standard of living to plunder asia um that said there was this this kind of messianic and idealistic strain of of japanese imperialism and certainly among many and of those in the regime who were shaping this this message uh there was this idea that um uh the europeans have had their way in asia for long enough and we're gonna we're the only asian country that's strong enough uh to put an end to this and we're gonna do that and we're gonna we're gonna uh take great sacrifices in order to do that and i think that there were many japanese who genuinely believed that

13:10 whether or not their military forces were able to live up to it and in fact that view really persists among particularly on the right in japan today uh you often hear it said by right-wing politicians and and uh writers and historians uh that uh japan's um defeat uh in the pacific war was in a sense a kind of long-term sacrifice for the rest of asia because it did lead uh indirectly and directly in some cases to the decolonization of so many of those nations uh and um and the you know the the situation in asia today where you you really don't have any european colonies left uh in indonesia and that amplification it probably sped up the process certainly throwing out places like france from indochina for several years and then having them try to re-establish themselves definitely changes the equation um and you know and great britain was was simply exhausted by the war more the war in europe than

14:08 the war in the pacific but but because of the war sort of brought um england and and the uk down in the world it became clear within a matter of about two decades that they no longer had the economic wherewithal to maintain this empire so that indirectly you could say uh led to the the independence of places like malaya and those places of course were some of the places that had oil and one of the things i think about with this war now more than i did as a kid and i think you know having my life straddles the the early oil crises era in the united states in the early 1970s and i think americans had a much better understanding of things like resources and whatnot around the world after the oil crisis and so when i look back now and i read the stuff about how the war happened especially with the embargoes and everything else the idea of oil comes into it so much more than it used to like i look at the war now and i go

15:04 could this have been classified as the first major global war for something like oil um how do you see sort of our our modern um what would we say we protect our interests overseas we have global supply chains i mean in a sense could we say that you see the early stages of this in the second world war yeah i think so i mean it was it was clearly from japan's point of view the immediate crisis that they that they had to address that led them to their decision to attack the united states and great britain in december 1941 was this oil problem uh they had and have uh today negligible domestic oil production so they really had to import uh oil both for their domestic economy and just to run their military run their navy and so um uh this was sort of the cynic of the entire japanese imperialist project is how do you assure that you have a steady oil supply so when we embargoed uh oil exports to japan

16:05 uh essentially we we started a clock ticking they had stockpiled a certain amount of oil um and uh and perhaps enough for about a year to run both their domestic economy and their military operations and they had to solve that problem either by coming to some sort of a diplomatic settlement with us uh or if not by going and getting their own oil uh which is what they did by uh taking the east indies borneo and sumatra and so um the the immediate cause of the decision to attack pearl harbor uh was this this need to solve this oil problem and so yeah oil was was definitely at the very heart of this conflict from the beginning you know it's funny because if i look at the two circumstances europe versus the asia pacific area in europe the criticism of the western powers was that there was an appeasement of hitler and he wasn't confronted strongly enough and hence you get a war what did churchill

17:00 say he called it the unnecessary war right it didn't have to happen the funny thing is though is maybe you could make a case that in the asia pacific theater roosevelt did exactly what the people who want to confront these dictators did i mean he didn't appease them he basically told them you're going to change your foreign policy or we're going to take your oil away and yet you got war anyway what do you think about the united states is um you know because there's always been a lot of controversy about the way the secretary of state played these things was this something that the united states was kind of hoping would happen i mean because certainly i think the u.s must have had enough politicians who realized that the japanese can't easily back down from their entire foreign policy goals of the last 15 years um did we stumble into this or was this sort of manipulated in a way that turned out the

17:47 way the u.s wanted you know i i mean you know it's a it's a controversial question it's one that's gotten a lot of attention i i tend to think that we stumbled into it more than we intended uh for for this to happen that said it was clear uh in the weeks before leading up to the attack on pearl harbor it was clear to our leaders that the japanese were preparing to make some sort of a move uh in the pacific um we did not anticipate the the uh raid on on pearl harbor despite all the many conspiracy theories that have been spun in that respect and yet uh we did expect war uh to begin perhaps on that same day december 7th war warnings had gone out um and and i think what's clear is that we had by that time uh we've been reading the diplomatic mail this is a really important achievement of our our cryptanalyst program is that we were able to essentially break the codes that the japanese uh foreign ministry used to communicate

18:45 with its embassies overseas we continued to read that mail right through the end of the second world war and so we uh we knew that um that they were essentially preparing uh some sort of a military move to try to solve their oil problem and um uh you know i i think it's it's clear that that uh roosevelt was okay with that roosevelt in in his um his his cabinet uh understood that the japanese were likely to uh break off negotiations and and attack probably the british and the dutch but not us directly and that uh that might uh lead us to you know to to solve the political problem which which fdr had at home which was that he simply didn't have the american people united behind this prospect of joining the second world war something that he saw by that time was going to be necessary and so uh i i think it's it's you know it was a it was a story of of stumbling a bit in terms of the way that the

19:46 embargo the various measures were taken throughout 1941. there are several instances in in which it was not clear that uh that the specific steps that were taken uh to ratchet up these these economic measures uh were completely in line with the way fdr wanted them to occur and yet overall it you know we had um we had had regarded japanese aggression in asia as a fundamental threat to the global peace and uh and is essentially wrong in itself and fdr's rhetoric had been crystal clear about that uh that this kind of aggression against other nations was was dangerous uh and it was a contagion which had to be had to be stopped and so um certainly we were not going to continue to export oil from west texas uh to japan to allow them to carry on this this war of aggression against their neighbors and if uh if that was going to lead to an outbreak of war in the pacific then so be it i think our

20:48 leaders were ready for that so then that makes me wonder about the other side's ability then to respond or be flexible um i think this is maybe why everyone spends so much time diagramming the way the japanese government is set up to show you the dysfunction in it or the you know that the period right before the second world war in the 20s and 30s was sometimes referred to as a government by assassination where you have these these lower level officer types having an outsize influence on overall policy and it seems like in a sense i mean i was always moved by the fact that a bunch of the japanese leaders at the end of the second world war who are running the country have bullets still in their body you know from assassination attempts so so you get this sense of how much leeway did any of these particular leaders or or influential people in the japanese uh um governmental system because you know

21:40 they have those higher up sort of the elder statesman types too um how much did that government have the ability i just feel like they were almost paralyzed sometimes uh in terms of their ability to break this log jam that whether it was the army or radical politicians or whatever i mean it's almost like they got pulled to the extremes and no one had the ability to do anything about that yeah no absolutely i i wouldn't say it was almost they were almost paralyzed i would say that it was a paralytic form of government the meiji constitution which was the the form of government that uh hirohito's grandfather had essentially given to the japanese people as a gift that's the way it was presented it was a a document which reserved quite a bit of power for the emperor particularly to command the armed forces directly and yet it was it was ambiguous in many ways and uh what had happened really was

22:30 that after meiji died his successors including hirohito were not strong enough personalities to continue to assert uh the considerable power that that that they had uh over the state and over the military in particular under that that document and through a series of legal precedents um it had the system that had evolved by the 1930s essentially put the the um emperor in a very constrained role where in particular if his advisors his military advisers and his cabinet presented him with a consensus recommendation he essentially was required to approve of that and so the military which had really taken control of the government every aspect of the government not just foreign policy but domestic policy as well the army and the navy who are constantly at each other's throats in a struggle for power for control of resources for control of directing the foreign policy of the country they realized that as long as they could

23:37 come to some kind of rough and ready consensus that hirohito would simply have to rubber stamp whatever they wanted to do and um and and this became a more and more costly feature of the japanese regime as the crisis approached in 1941 until finally it became it became necessary for uh the military leadership to to go ahead with this war that many of them really didn't believe in particularly in the navy because the alternative was going to be a complete breakdown of this sort of fragile uh consensus balance that had kept japan from descending into a civil war and so yes violence political violence assassinations uh that was always uh right beneath the surface it you know it was at its height in the 1930s a period where you just had you know one assassination after another one act of violence and intimidation coming up from the middle ranks of the army in particular aimed at the leadership uh and then that

24:35 settled down in during the war itself and and general tojo was given much of the credit for having essentially sort of imposed this this fragile peace in in this nascent civil war in japan and then as the as the end of the war approached and the decision the japanese confronted the necessity to essentially face up to their own defeat the threat of assassinations of civil disorder of violence once again that became a primary concern and so uh really in the complex series of events that finally led to the japanese decision to surrender after we had dropped two atomic bombs um was occurred against this backdrop of as you say this kind of constant uh threat of violence from in in in a military insurgency which could lead to a coup d'etat which in turn would lead to the destruction of japan because it would make it impossible for japan to surrender and so yes it was a real mess uh this this entire regime was essentially

25:38 entirely dysfunctional uh the dysfunction of the regime explains both the decision uh to go to war to to launch themselves into a war that many of their leaders even before the attack on pearl harbor recognized that they could not win and it also explained the long delay in acknowledging uh japan's defeat which their military leaders understood perfectly well even a year before the surrender they understood that they were defeated and that essentially surrender or some sort of negotiated settlement if they could get it which would amount to surrender that that was inevitable and the only the only possible future for japan you know when you get to 1945 and you see you'd mention how crazy it is by then it always strikes me that as we because we still have these debates today about a dropping of atomic bombs or or firebombings or or strategic bombing at all um and and how difficult it is from our

26:35 position i mean it's it's a stereotype almost a trope but how difficult it is from our position now in cold blood to try to assess the madness that's going on and and the destructive um uh you know there's a building of it right when you look at the bombing in 1939 versus the 1945 version of i mean you almost have to build up to something like that and then when you try to assess it 70 or 80 years later it looks relatively insane right it looks like the the analog version of the nuclear war where they're so that we're so scared about now how do you explain to people and you know you're an expert at this you do this how do you explain to people in cold blood today um the hot blood decisions to do things like fire bombing tokyo in a way that makes sense to them how do you take them into a crazy world yeah i mean i i think that i agree with you about that i think that the only way you really can do it is by

27:28 telling the entire story of the conflict from beginning to end uh that's the only way it makes sense the only way the firebombing of tokyo or the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki makes sense to me is if i go back to the chinese the japanese invasion of china in 1937 the extraordinarily awful massacres that went on the the barbarism of of the japanese army the way it uh behaved toward civilians in the areas that it occupied its behavior toward prisoners of war including our prisoners of war uh and you really have to tell the whole story uh you have to tell the story of how there was this no surrender ethic uh which had been inculcated into the japanese military and the way that they really observed that on one island after another essentially dying to the last man uh refusing to surrender uh the way on places like saipan uh the um you had mass suicides of japanese civilians uh rather than falling into the hands of

28:34 americans who were i think in good faith trying to save their lives um and when you saw this cult of death occurring then it became much easier to think in terms of well you know the japanese are essentially behaving their both their rhetoric and their behavior indicates that what they're saying is we're gonna have to kill all of them in order to end this war uh literally every last man woman and child in japan we don't want to do that but inevitably we're going to have to kill a lot of japanese until they come to their senses and um so you know you really had this kind of inversion of of what i would say were a traditional understanding of military ethics to the point where the the most important thing was to try to end the war quickly uh by any means necessary including um trespassing upon those traditional ideas of uh separating the the um uh civilian from the military target and uh and that occurred in in in

29:39 germany as well uh by the way and so uh again i i don't think it's it's it's hard to sort of sit down with someone who doesn't know the history and to lay it out uh without going back and really telling the entire story and so um that's that's what i set out to do in this uh three volume history and i don't think that the story can be told in any less than uh you know 1800 pages that i took to tell it do you think a land invasion of the home islands would have happened i do not think uh that we would have invaded japan um i i think that it was perhaps we we knew that we needed to have the option which is why we placed such enormous preparations for operation downfall the invasion first of kyushu and then honshu um but the target date for the first stage of that invasion the invasion of kyushu operation olympic was november 1st 1945.

30:37 we dropped the bomb on uh hiroshima in the first week of august that's almost three months and so the question really it becomes a counter factual what would have happened in those three months and um and i think for all we know about uh what was happening in tokyo uh i think it's very difficult to to imagine that the government would have uh continued to to want to fight that this this struggle that they were that they were undertaking to try to surrender um that that would not have succeeded in those three months particularly when you consider that the the conventional bombing campaign was really growing by leaps and bounds uh really week by week and so even in the absence of the atomic bombs um uh i i think it's very unlikely that we would have launched an invasion of japan you know we dance around these issues i think when we talk about it about how really different the japanese are

31:38 and how unique in so many ways i mean it makes me wonder about the challenges of historians who aren't japanese trying to you know like i would read there are some wonderful books we used for the show written about japan but many of them by western experts and i i think to myself um not only that that maybe you might have to be japanese to understand some of this stuff but that maybe even the modern day japanese aren't in a position to assess this because it was so different even in that country 70 or 80 years ago from i mean it's a transformed society um is it becoming you know i used to think when i was younger that because you would meet people who were veterans in the war and people who had been there they seemed like flesh and blood as i get older they almost seemed like trying to assess alexander the great or the mongols or i mean it's getting to be a society that's in the past does that

32:30 make sense when we write about this we're trying to get into the minds of people who aren't around anymore and as sort of a societal ethic i mean there are no more hero onodas or or or kamikaze pilots in japan i mean is this a this goes back maybe to why people deal with the opening in the 19th century so much or when i was growing up they used to talk about the japanese being a medieval society that had been brought into the modern world but they almost seemed culturally like an extreme manifestation of humanity by the second world war um how does the fact that the japanese are so different play into all this i mean i know my stepfather was overwhelmed by the kamikaze phenomenon when he was in the war um how much does that play a role in this they just seem like the most unusual people i mean that's an open-ended question but i'm sure you know what i'm talking about there's a fascination about the japanese

33:22 in this war because they're singular aren't they yeah no they it's it's really true and it's um putting yourself into the mindset of the japanese and during during this war has been a tremendous challenge for everyone who's written about it um and i think there's something to what you say i mean that you know japanese of 2021 trying to understand the japanese of 1941 it's it's not easy there also have been very powerful taboos which still exist in japan that kind of govern the way people think about talk about write about the war um that said there has been uh quite a quite a burst of of scholarship both by western scholars of japan and by japanese scholars which has appeared in english translation in the past 25 years and i think there's a lot more to be done actually if you look across all of world war ii across uh the whole whole global landscape i think a lot of the most interesting

34:16 scholarship of the next uh several decades is going to be in in trying to get a better understanding of what precisely happened in japan in those years and just to get even more futuristic on you i think you know machine learning ai which is eventually going to eliminate language barriers in archives i think there's going to be a tremendous improvement in our understanding collectively of what happened there uh as those new new tools start to start to start to bear on the issue over the next few decades um but uh you know again it really comes down to kind of understanding this conflict and the way that our ancestors who fought it understood under understood and that's that's where there's a strong case to be made for narrative history something that i do something that you do as well as a podcaster trying to go back and and help um people understand what what was in the minds of those who were there at the

35:11 time making the decisions fighting these battles um the you know from the the guys in the in the trenches on the decks of the ships in the cockpits to those who are are in the headquarters uh making decisions from a military standpoint to the halls of power in washington and in tokyo understanding this entire conflict the way it unfolded week by week uh i think is is the really the best way to try to get closer to the way uh that it was understood by by those who were there there are parts too that fade into the background until you start reading about them and you go oh really this is hard to relate to for example and you touched upon it with the japanese but i'm fascinated with the american version of it too the inter-service rivalries and and because i think these days at least the general consensus among civilians is that all the services work well together in the united states and whatnot

36:04 to truly understand i mean i was reading um i was reading one book and they were talking about uh it was a scene uh on guadalcanal i think it was and there was a it was an army officer who was berating a marine and there was another marine in the distance who cocked his rifle or something it was portrayed as a scene where this marine was going to frag this army officer for yelling at another marine um the japanese inter-service rivalries literally decided you know the direction the war would take often but but people don't realize and this includes yours truly you know i remembered it but i really didn't remember it until you started diving into douglas macarthur's uh paranoid fantasies about the navy and all this stuff can you talk a little about the inner service rivalry and how it determined kind of the way things went yeah well you know our military um before and a lot of people don't know this

36:53 including a lot of people who've read a lot about world war ii um we did not have a joint chiefs of staff organization prior to the attack on pearl harbor uh there was a board which was sort of a liaison organization of generals and admirals who kind of loosely coordinated their planning but there was really no sustained attempt to blend the operations of the army the navy in what was emerging as these two other services under the umbrella of the army and navy the army air forces uh and in the case of the navy the marines um both sort of emerging as increasingly independent organizations within the army and the war and navy departments and so really we we had um we had a very sort of decentralized um poorly coordinated military prior to the war and it was really only under the pressure of the emergency of the attack on pearl harbor and then the first uh british uh summit which occurred literally just weeks after pearl harbor

37:56 when the churchill and his um military uh chiefs came to washington to sort of begin to plan how we were going to deal with this crisis and it was only under that pressure that our uh chiefs our chief of naval operations and our army chief of staff george marshall uh got together and said listen we've got to have some sort of way of organizing ourselves so why don't we just start meeting and they call themselves the joint chiefs all of that was ad hoc uh there was no legislative charter and um and essentially they just ran the war as this sort of informal committee and the joint chiefs of staff organization was not formally codified in our laws until uh 1947 with the national security act it created the the structure that exists today at the pentagon and so all of that is just a long-winded way of saying uh that our military really was not prepared to fight a global war which would require these

38:54 different services to work together and sustained an intricate cooperation they had to figure that out uh on essentially week by week as they were dealing with this military emergency in the pacific uh the problem was even greater than it was in europe certainly was an issue in europe as well but in the pacific you had as i said earlier looking at a map of the pacific you quickly grasped that the fundamental strategic problem is how do you deal with the rampaging japanese fleet you have to destroy japanese naval power before you can project your military forces across the pacific in a way that will force japan to surrender and so that's a job for your navy and also your air forces your air forces of course you have naval and army air forces they have to work together and then you have to take uh islands uh to as naval bases as air bases uh and to support the logistics drive across the pacific and to take islands you

39:52 essentially have to develop this this particularly specialized branch of warfare called amphibious warfare which the marines had really focused on and they were the organization that was best prepared had done the most training had developed the equipment for for um storming even heavily defended beaches that were in some cases thousands of miles away from any uh allied base and so uh the very nature of the pacific war was that you had to force these services which were not prepared to work together to work together and in in doing so of course uh that would expose all of the frictions the prejudices the biases the parochialism uh that was natural among military leaders who had grown up in these very siloed kinds of organizations and overlaid on top of that just to make the whole thing even more complex you had in douglas macarthur a sort of a singular figure really no one else like him in the

40:51 american military in any branch of the american military someone who became very very famous very quickly uh literally just in the week the two weeks after pearl harbor had skyrocketed to this kind of position of um being regarded almost as a kind of demigod by the american people because of the the lavish press coverage that his campaign in the pacific had deceived and he was a i think fair to say a kind of narcissistic figure who really wanted to place himself at the center of this conflict against japan uh was jealous of others who would receive attention and who uh you know very aggressively was willing to use his fame as political influence in order to try to force the war uh to be fought according to the ideas that that he had uh on how it should be fought which really meant returning to the philippines first uh and uh and essentially in order to accommodate macarthur's immense personality

41:52 the way the war was set up was we divided the pacific into two separate feeders and you had macarthur in australia command in the south pacific then you had the navy with nimitz as commander in chief in hawaii and his realm included essentially everything north of the equator and these two guys both reported to the joint chiefs in washington and and and they could talk to each other informally uh but any conflict between them would have to be resolved in washington and so you had that element laid atop uh what was already a pretty messy situation in the way that the services had to to work together and so when you when you look at all of those issues all of those problems uh all of all of those those frictions those inherent frictions um it's remarkable i think that our military was able to to kind of get itself together uh and win this war in less than four years well and you think about i mean you know

42:49 you talked about macarthur almost being a demigod but i feel like it's a pain you know when you look at all of the the august military figures from that day it's like a giant cast of stars with macarthur maybe as the as the superstar but i think about how overwhelming these people were in terms of force of personality and and the depth of their experience that when some guy like fdr who has been the ring master sort of who who for so many years is able to juggle all these enormous personalities and work them against each other and charm them all when he leaves the scene because he dies in office and leaves it to a guy who's been vice president for about two seconds and who doesn't necessarily remind one of some august super strong personality and you throw him into a room where he's got to make decisions between these people who may be of different opinions on things right um it makes me wonder how different the war

43:43 would have gone had fdr managed to to ride it out health-wise until the end uh how much does a green harry truman change things or does it just sort of run on autopilot do you think um because of the you know you got you're not going to over overwhelm a macarthur who fdr once called as you know uh one of the two most dangerous men in the world along with huey long you're not gonna you're not gonna overwhelm him as a matter of fact we as we know that that will come to a head in the next war in korea where harry truman and douglas macarthur will bump heads but i mean it do does it run on autopilot or do you think truman put his his stamp on the way the war finished up at all well i think the war in europe was was virtually done um fdr died i think almost exactly a year before victory in europe day be day and so i would say that um the situation in europe at least the war in europe uh was on autopilot the negotiations with

44:40 stalin in particular were not uh and so um truman definitely had to step into some very large shoes there quickly the war in in the pacific there is a lot of counter-factual speculation that you can do in the scenario where fdr lived um you know so much of of our government's um uh thinking about how to end the war in the pacific turned on this idea of you know what does um this unconditional surrender formulation require of us fdr had set this thing out he it was a very personal decision that he made to make unconditional surrender uh the um the essentially the asking price uh for peace and uh you know he had gone back to to an inaccurate anecdote about how the american civil war had ended um but clearly what he had in mind was avoiding a reprise of the end of the first world war in europe in which the seeds of of the second world war had been planted and the rise of nazism after uh the treaty of versailles and so he he

45:49 wanted to to be sure that germany and japan were defeated utterly and critically that the people of those countries understand understood that they had been defeated utterly and so he had insisted upon this unconditional surrender formulation and then he dies and and our our leaders are kind of left with this question of well we have to we have to do justice to to what our dead chief wanted and for our own credibility we have to insist upon unconditional threat but what does that mean exactly unconditional surrender it seems simple but when you start to spin out all the possible permutations of how a surrender might occur uh it raises uh more questions than it answers and so uh truman steps into this situation in which we you know we do not have a very clear idea of what we expect from the japanese in terms of how this surrender will occur we do not want to invade those islands we have this new weapon the atomic bomb

46:48 truman by the way had not been briefed on the existence of the atomic bomb which seems like an extraordinary oversight um considering that fdr was in failing health his doctors knew he was in failing health uh and and yet uh truman was simply not prepared he had not been properly briefed uh and it seems like really an extraordinary failure of um just the principles of constitutional government and that's something that i think fdr has to his legacy has to has to be charged with that failure um but uh you know so so the the counterfactual questions are you know would we have used the atomic bombs in the way that we use them uh you know so often the question of the atomic bombs is kind of reduced to a binary should we or shouldn't we have used them i think the harder question is should we have used them in the way that we use them in particular should we have dropped them without any sort of

47:41 explicit prior warning and should we have dropped them on cities rather than on a military base at least the first one and um and it's you know you one can only speculate really because there is so little that fdr said there's so little in the historical record indicating what his thinking was particularly about the use of these weapons um and yet uh i think it's clear that he would have seen them as a weapon that should be used if there was a way to avoid invading japan um and yet would he have consented to drop them on cities rather than on military targets i think that's a hard question to ask i think certainly you could argue that fdr uh would have said we dropped the first one on a military target i'm the commander-in-chief i've i've said uh what we're doing and i'm not taking any backtalk from any of you guys was with uh gold braid and stars certainly he would not have felt any compunction about ruling directly on the

48:36 question in that respect uh in a way that truman i don't think was ready to do that that's the real counterfactual i think is would we have used the bombs and the way that we use them if fdr lived and you know as i said i think it's speculative but i think there are some good reasons to believe that we would not have used them in the way that we use them uh had uh fdr live through the end of the war you know when you look at the second world war um you know you read book books like neil ferguson's works for example and and you realize what a what a large role race played in the whole thing so in in europe you have the whole master race question involved in in nazi ideology in asia both sides can be called racist because the japanese have have a sort of a master race philosophy the americans and the and the british and the french and the western powers look upon the japanese the way they look upon a lot of

49:28 different non-white peoples um how much and there's been a lot of good works lately about the racial aspect but but if we were fighting and i don't want to say fighting scandinavians because basically everything we did to the japanese we did to the germans too in terms of bombing and everything else and the atomic bomb was developed to be dropped on germany so in that sense but but how much does do you think now if we had more of the i was going to say racial racial tolerance thinking of the sort we have today but some would argue about that but i think it would be a different war compared to the 1940s um views on race that weren't just something in the west but that most countries had a different view on uh skin color culture background uh stereotypes and all that kind of stuff talk to me a little bit about the the race idea in the pacific asia theater in the second world war yeah well you know clearly race race

50:20 hatred was was at the center of the propaganda of both the allies and the japanese and uh you know it was partly the way that the japanese had conducted themselves during the war i think aroused this peculiar race hatred many of those who would engage in the most awful sorts of rhetoric uh i mean i'm thinking of a a parade that occurred in fifth avenue manhattan in june 1942 is the same month as the battle of midway uh and it was essentially a parade to celebrate the city's participation mobilizing for war and they had these huge parade floats uh which were rats and wearing japanese army uniforms and you almost have to sort of rub your eyes when you see these things you realize it's not that long ago within living memory in new york city uh in in which really the most virulent sorts of metaphors were used to denounce an entire race of people um you know it was a it was a different time as a different war

51:26 uh many of those who engaged in in that that sort of uh you know racist uh rhetoric uh were also genuinely sympathetic to the chinese and saw the chinese as our allies and um and were moved by the suffering of the chinese at the hands of the japanese um so you know i i just think i one of the undertold stories just occurring to me now in in the pacific was the role of the nisei the japanese-americans we know well that one of the most decorated regiments in the army was a japanese american hawaiian regiment that fought in italy um but you had japanese americans from hawaii and california and the west coast uh who were serving as translators during these these battles in okinawa and saipan and the philippines and there were cases of extraordinary extraordinary heroism on the part of these americans many of whom had their families interned in camps back home who were would um you know there's a

52:32 there's a story of a uh you know one of these guys who's really just his job is just to be a translator but he grabs a grenade he goes he knocks on the hatch of a japanese tank he addresses them in japanese telling them that he has a message from the colonel they open the hatch he drops a grenade in you had japanese-american translators descending into caves in okinawa negotiating for the surrender face to face with people who could easily kill them volunteering to do this not because they were ordered to do it uh and and when you when you um realize that they were making these kinds of sacrifices you realize um you know just how perverse it was really for us to have allowed uh our own propaganda in many cases to use the kinds of um uh you know really repulsive racial stereotypes and hateful rhetoric that that we engaged in and you know i don't see myself as a prosecutor uh you know i i think you have to recognize

53:30 that this was a very different time and very extreme circumstances and yet when you look at that uh certainly as an american you you sort of wish that we could have done some of those things differently you know it's funny though those sorts of backdrops do allow for uh some of the more wonderful human moments to come out i'm reminded there was a i think it was in john tolen's book there was a scene during the the bataan death march i think it was where some japanese officer i'm gonna get it wrong here but but sees like a class ring on one of the americans from like notre dame or usc or something and walks up and embraces them because they were there and said you know what class were you i mean those moments where because you're in such a hell those those human those little human connections seem to stand out so much more um and and you know i think about and you'd mention that the prisoners of war and

54:20 all that one of the things that when you talked and there very few of them left i guess but when you talk to veterans from the second world war did you ever notice the difference in the in the pacific veterans um remembrances or attitudes after the war and and the ones in the european theater in north africa or in italy uh it just seemed like there was a lot more lingering uh bitterness on the pacific veterans parts uh at least in my experience did you notice that as well oh absolutely yeah yeah i mean you know there were many many um uh american and and i i think also allied british canadian australian new zealand uh troops um who just never were able to to um overcome this kind of deeply felt hatred for all japanese and for the entire nation uh of the japanese interestingly um there is a real difference in the way that those troops who served in the occupation in japan after the war felt and and i don't

55:24 have any survey data i mean you know if there had been some survey data i think it would have borne this out because it's it's it was a fascinating pattern that i've seen in my interviews with hundreds and hundreds of world war ii veterans those who were in japan after the war serving with the occupation they tended to have a much more nuanced view of the japanese and even very warm feelings toward the japanese they grasp very quickly uh that the way that um the japanese army had conducted itself on the battlefield and the way that many of our prisoners had been treated was not a reflection of the japanese people overall but were those were specific crimes committed by specific people and that ordinary japanese people had been in a sense victims of the war as well that was a realization that came much more naturally in my experience speaking again just to many hundreds of veterans for those who had been served in japan

56:20 after the war uh as opposed to those who had never really set foot in japan and had just come straight home from the war yes well so just close contact always has the opportunity for people to get to know one another on a human level um so so and i i won't keep you very much longer but i'm curious about like how you filter through um the the cold war um um um opaqueness so for example when i was younger trying to figure out the role of the emperor in japan was always colored by uh the needs of the cold war and having japanese cooperation early on um you know you had talked also about records becoming available and it makes me think of chinese records now and former soviet records that the russians are releasing um in in in the sense of trying to rewrite the history of of the second world war based on um the the what's the word i'm looking for the the fact that there were i mean let's let's

57:18 start with hirohito's role um herbert p bicks wrote a whole book on hirohito and i remember being amazed how much it conflicted with uh the the hirohito as a puppet figure that i had been taught um what is your view on that how do you how do you work your way as a researcher through the deliberate um uh story of the cold war that maybe tries to hide some of hirohito's uh uh ability to influence some of these decisions yeah well i you know i was a boy in japan um dan i i was in japan from 1978 to 1981 i was agent oh i had no idea i was age 11 through 14. um my father was working for an international bank in japan and uh hirohito was the emperor then and uh that's right we would actually go to the uh we'd go to the imperial palace on his birthday we see him out there you know wave into the crowds he was a beloved figure we had a living a housekeeper who you know had a photo of him and who spoke of him as you know

58:19 almost like a personal father figure and so um you know all of that is is very sort of personal and you know sort of a visceral understanding of they really had this this he was more than a king really he was not no longer a god uh and i'm talking about the period when i was there as a boy um and yet there were still these deep feelings of affection that ordinary japanese had felt toward him and so you know clearly um the japanese needed uh i mean it was understood that the the continuation of the imperial house after the war was in our interests in order to ease the occupation um when there were calls for hirohito to be arrested as a war criminal potentially prosecuted along with the the other japanese war criminals at the tokyo war crimes trials uh um macarthur who opposed this uh said to washington listen if you want to do this i need at least 800 000 more troops and that quickly put an end to this talk

59:26 of arresting hirohito and so there were immediate contingent reasons why it was clearly the right thing to do in order to ease this occupation at the same time to kind of get japan back on its feet as a bulwark against communism because very quickly as you say our concern in asia and throughout the world shifted to toward holding the soviet union back and then of course china after the civil war there um and so for all of those reasons it just made sense to keep hirohito on his throne and to make him into a partner um and again for those same reasons it was not in our interest to expose precisely the degree to which uh he really had played an active role uh in um uh commanding his military forces uh at least after the attack on pearl harbor his role is sort of muddled it's ambiguous he resisted the drift toward war and then he supported it after it had seemed to go well uh and so uh it was really after his

1:00:23 death in 1989 that some of the documents that expose this this greater role that he had played that her bix uh outlined in his pulitzer prize-winning biography you mentioned uh in particular the document known as the soliloquy which was essentially a series of notes taken by hirohito's private secretary in which he had reminisced about different aspects of the war uh which showed really that he had played this much more active role um and uh and so you know i i think it's it's been a process since 1989 for the japanese to gradually uh come to understand uh that their emperor you know had not been the person who was presented to them in the mythology um and that's continuing and their role with their imperial houses today very ending this you've had an emperor who's actually advocated something that had not happened before and so um uh you know i i think that often in the west we you know we we tend to say

1:01:22 the japanese simply haven't faced up to their history i think that that's still true to a degree but but um it often misses the fact that there has been quite a bit of progress in japan uh in um beginning to to face up to a greater extent to the importance of this history and and um you know now that the eyes of the world are in tokyo as the olympics start um you know i just don't see any possibility that in their opening ceremony they would go back and try to explain their history uh at least that part of their history but there may a day may come when when the japanese or future generation of japanese may be more willing uh to sort of examine in a more public way uh what happened in their period of their dark valley the 1930s through the their defeat in 1945.

1:02:09 i think that's a human thing i think i think most countries in the world have parts of their population that have a hard time going back and analyzing painful periods when maybe the best decisions or the best actions weren't made uh before i let you go is there anything i didn't ask you about that you'd like to convey the the the the three book series is a triumph if you haven't read it folks um we used it extensively you have a wonderful way of finding the best historical anecdotes to to pepper the story with that just really really gives a great sense of the context is there anything uh that i didn't ask you about that's worth talking about before i let you go you know something i was just thinking i might as i was out walking this morning um you often in your podcast you often come up with these these kinds of metaphors that no historian would have thought of to make a point well for

1:02:56 their careers sake probably but often they kind of get to the heart of something and um you know i was just thinking in the pacific war we had um what i lay out in the book as being the cumulative versus the sequential strategies cumulative strategy is essentially the campaign across the pacific island by island battle by battle you can diagram it on the map with arrows it's the march across the pacific toward japan then you had the um what they called the cumulative strategies which were like the submarine war against japanese shipping or strategic bombing of japanese industries and cities and these are rather than discrete battles these are our military actions which have this kind of cumulative effect of undermining the japanese economy their ability to wage war and one of the fascinating questions sort of higher order strategic questions in the pacific was uh how do you allocate your resources to

1:03:53 these two different ways of fighting this war often your field commanders uh really are thinking only of the next battle um and and uh one of the things that i think our our military eventually did right although it took us a while to kind of get get the hang of it uh was to devote much more effort to this cumulative sort of attack on the on the um the cornerstones of the japanese economy and war effort and and so that that question you know how do you allocate resources between those two very different wars that are happening at the same time a metaphor i'm a baseball fan and a metaphor occurred to me which is you know how do you evaluate a baseball player who may be a great hitter and a lousy fielder or another uh another um player who is a great fielder and only an average hitter so what is the the value of fielding versus uh hitting in in baseball now this is something that for many many years in the game of

1:04:55 baseball uh the managers were not getting right because they didn't have the data analytics to go in and analyze that that problem in a systematic way using the data that baseball provides and all of that has changed michael lewis's money ball is probably the best account of of this revolution in baseball we had a bunch of data analysts who really knew nothing about baseball but were very very good at analyzing data there's a metaphor there in the way that our military forces at a high level had to confront this question of how should we use our forces should we dedicate them to the cumulative versus the operational uh the sequential strategies and um and and eventually the answer was we should be doing a lot more on the cumulative side uh and that became one of the important factors that led to a much earlier defeat of japan than we had anticipated at the beginning of the war that's fascinating i would that the

1:05:54 connection with moneyball and the second world war long-term overall strategy e w told your work is fantastic thank you so much for coming on the program and i look forward to what's next any any hints well i'm trying i'm trying my hand at fiction i'm sorry to say it's inevitable but i did promise my editor that i eventually would write a sequel to six frigates so that's on deck all right fantastic thank you so much for taking the time we really appreciate it thank you dan that was a ton of fun my thanks to ian told for coming on the program i don't know when you're going to get this but his three book boxed set will either be out by the time you hear me or um soon afterwards it includes pacific crucible the conquering tide and twilight of the gods and he has a lot of other books as well so check him out if you like what we do i bet you'll enjoy what he does as well just a reminder keep your eyes peeled we

1:06:52 should have a an interview with an author on a very different subject in the not too distant future come out two hits in quick succession to make up for the long delay between offerings thanks for your patience and as always thank you for everything folks support us with patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash dan carlin or go to our donate page at dan carlin dot com forward slash dc dash donate have you ever been on a battlefield tour you know what i'm talking about right you you go to a famous battlefield and you take the tour and there's a very knowledgeable tour guide and they they walk you around with the rest of the tour group and they show you the battlefield from you know a soldier's eye perspective show you the salient uh historical points of interest gives you a sense of what was going on on the ground back during the battle i mean they're really wonderful if you get a chance to do that you should

1:07:51 those of you who've been lucky enough to go on one of those things or maybe if you're really lucky two of those things will vouch for how helpful they are into really giving you a sense of what was going on that no book can really match for example well during the covid pandemic i was contacted by a group of people who do this they're battlefield tour guides and military historians and they take people uh around places like the first world war battlefields in france right well when the pandemic hit though like so many other businesses they were up a creek without a paddle weren't they what are you gonna do if you're a battlefield tour guide and there's no tourists because of the pandemic so like many other businesses around the world they took a look at their business and retooled it and restructured it and reimagined it and the way they reimagined it i'm tempted to say it's better than the

1:08:45 original although you know few things beat a good battlefield to her and they still do that on the ground live but now they do it virtually as well and it's so exciting because you know you may know i get involved with things like immersive experiences virtual reality and all these ways uh that i think are key sparks for people to get interested in history beyond the names beyond the dates appetizers right that's what i always say the podcast is to an appetizer to history well the folks over at battle guide virtual tours are doing this too they've turned their tours which they as i said still do live into virtual events combine on the ground footage with the expert you know the historian or the battlefield tour guide ad drone footage period footage the voices of veterans mixed in there archival film footage i mean a truly interactive and um fascinating sort of an affair and if you catch it live by the way

1:09:41 you get to ask questions as though you were actually there now if you're doing this in real life these are prohibitedly expensive things unless you live near the battlefield but because it's been turned into a virtual tour this becomes affordable for almost everybody and these guys are offering the tours in one-off choices i mean you can go look at their catalog and pick anyone you want just buy that or you could subscribe and for a lower price per episode get access to everything they have and everything they're continually adding i think it's really cool i love this as a way to sort of democratize for people all over the world this battlefield tour experience and think about it this way there are places that a lot of people get to i mean you know getting a trip to france is not all that unusual but there are battlefields in these guys archives or or soon to be that are in places that are very

1:10:32 difficult for most people to get to so a virtual tour may be the best choice for everyone check it out though they're offering a free one if you want to see what we're talking about here they're confident that you'll see it and want more right so just go to battleguide.co.ukforwardslashcarlinbattleguy.co.ukforwardslashcarlin

1:10:53 and you know add one of those battlefield tours to your shopping cart and then you'll get the discount you'll get to see it for free and then you can decide if you like it enough to buy more but i'll tell you something this is one of those things where i'm comfortable telling you about it because i i'm this is the kind of thing i'm all over right virtual tours of battlefields uh by experts usually utilizing all this technology and any cool thing that comes down the pike probably going to be added to these offerings too um check it out battle guide virtual tours everything from the napoleonic wars to the modern day stuff specialize in first and second world war history it's um well i think it's the future to be honest of battlefield tours and i hope you like what you see

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP15 The Supernova Coda"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Ian W. Toll (Guest).

What is "EP15 The Supernova Coda" about?

The content explores the phenomenon of receiving post-series opportunities to engage with experts related to recently covered historical topics, specifically focusing on a forthcoming book compilation by author Ian W. Toll that examines the Pacific War during World War II. The discussion highlights the challenges of timing these conversations with audience expectations while emphasizing the…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

7 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible, Twilight of the Gods, Douglas MacArthur, Precious Anne Frank, Bataan Death March. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP15 The Supernova Coda"?

The episode runs 1 h 12 min; the transcript is about 13,146 words in 76 timestamped sections.

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