The Japanese population - you would think they would be thoroughly demoralized. What about the Japanese civilian population? There was a U.S. And kamikazes, for younger listeners who might not be so familiar with - they were pilots or people who would crash their airplane or other aircraft into enemy facilities or ships, dying in the process, but inflicting damage. They also had 7,000 kamikaze planes and all sorts of kamikaze swimmers and frogmen and divers waiting there to inflict bloody harm on the American invasion.ĭAVIES: Right. Many of them were in Asia, occupying China and Southeast Asia, but there were about a million of them collecting on the southern tip of Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island, waiting there for an invasion they knew was coming. Although we had fought this heavy campaign through the Pacific Islands, the Japanese still had millions of men in their army. THOMAS: Japanese armed forces were, by and large, intact. What was the state then of the Japanese armed forces? Germany, as we said, was defeated, and the Allies were focused on Japan, which was also clearly facing defeat. His latest is "Road To Surrender: Three Men And The Countdown To End World War II." Evan Thomas, welcome back to FRESH AIR.ĭAVIES: Let's go back to the summer of 1945. He wrote more than 100 cover stories and in 1999 won a national magazine award. Evan Thomas was a writer, correspondent and editor for 33 years at Time and Newsweek. It's a story of American leaders wrestling with the practical and moral dilemmas presented by the most terrifying weapon ever made and of determined Japanese leaders confronting the humiliating prospect of defeat and the removal of the country's emperor, who was seen by Japanese as a deity. military and government and in Japan's ruling elite. Our guest, writer Evan Thomas, has returned to that critical period with a new book that examines the thoughts and motivations of key players in the U.S. In the summer of 1945, Germany had surrendered to the Allies, while Japan, largely defeated, was defiant and still capable of inflicting horrific casualties on any force that might try and invade the Japanese mainland. Historians have long debated whether that carnage was necessary to compel Japan to surrender and end World War II. That was the United States, which dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in 1945, killing as many as 200,000 people. But in all those decades, only one country has used nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. For nearly 80 years, humankind has lived with the threat of nuclear weapons, now in the hands of nine countries.
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