TRIGGERnometry - October 13, 2024


The War in the Pacific： How WWII Changed the World Forever - Dr Robert Lyman


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 8 minutes

Words per Minute

175.3535

Word Count

12,087

Sentence Count

832

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

94


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk to Rob Lyman, an expert on the Pacific War and the Far East, about the impact of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the impact it had on the American response to it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.840 The war in the Pacific began, of course, on the 7th of December 1941 with the Japanese
00:00:04.960 attack on Pearl Harbor.
00:00:06.040 Well, that's what we all think, but actually that's only a very small part of the story,
00:00:09.920 because the Japanese have been fighting this war since 1931.
00:00:14.840 Pearl Harbor was a tiny part, it was a consequence of this great Japanese invasion to create
00:00:21.280 an empire.
00:00:22.520 The purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was to bring the war
00:00:27.560 to an end.
00:00:28.560 Most disastrous for the lives that are lost was salvation for the lives that were preserved.
00:00:34.560 Rob Lyman, it's great to have you on the show.
00:00:37.560 It's always such a pleasure for us to have historians on because not only are we both fascinated
00:00:42.320 by history, but there's so many parallels between what has happened in the past and some of the
00:00:46.880 things that are happening today, and we're going to get into those parallels later on.
00:00:51.380 But the first thing we wanted to talk about, obviously, one of your big areas of expertise
00:00:54.760 is the war in the Pacific.
00:00:58.760 It seems to me that both here in the West, and actually in much of the world, we are completely
00:01:03.760 ignorant of that part of that conflict.
00:01:06.760 The first thing that's probably worth asking is, you know, in most people's minds, the
00:01:11.760 war in the Pacific starts with the attack on Pearl Harbor.
00:01:15.760 Why did that even happen?
00:01:16.760 Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me on.
00:01:19.760 Historians love to have the opportunity of talking to intelligent customers, and you're
00:01:24.760 that.
00:01:25.760 And it's really exciting to be able to talk about stuff that drives us.
00:01:28.760 Well, the first thing about the Pacific War and the war in the Far East, let's just get
00:01:32.760 all this right.
00:01:33.760 There's the Pacific War, and then there's war in what we call the Far East, which is essentially
00:01:37.760 everything that happened on land in China and Burma and India.
00:01:40.760 The Americans call it the China-Burma-India theater.
00:01:43.760 We in Britain call it the Far East, but it's fundamentally the same thing.
00:01:46.760 If you lump the two together, then yes, you can talk about the war in the Pacific.
00:01:50.760 The war in the Pacific began, of course, on the 7th of December 1941 with the Japanese attack
00:01:55.760 on Pearl Harbor.
00:01:56.760 Well, that's what we all think, but actually that's only a very small part of the story,
00:02:00.760 because on that precise day, the Japanese actually invaded Malaya and the Philippines.
00:02:05.760 And the war, the strike against Pearl Harbor, which was the temporary home of the American
00:02:10.760 Pacific Fleet, usually sat in San Diego, but had been in Hawaii since 1940 because the Americans
00:02:17.760 sent it out as a forward defense of America, given the war drums that were beating from Japan
00:02:24.760 from Japan at the time, was not a feint, but it was an attempt to stop the Americans getting
00:02:30.760 involved in what was the primary Japanese war aim, which is the invasion of Southeast Asia.
00:02:35.760 And 1941 is a very interesting year because actually I argue, and I think all the evidence
00:02:40.760 suggests that 1941 was the aperture.
00:02:42.760 It was the height of Japanese power.
00:02:44.760 It wasn't the start of their war.
00:02:46.760 It was the end of their war because the Japanese have been fighting this war since 1931.
00:02:54.760 And we get the sense because, and particularly in America, you get the idea that the war for
00:02:59.760 America began in 1941.
00:03:00.760 In a great, a real sense it did because America was dragged in for the first time.
00:03:05.760 America had been deeply isolationist.
00:03:07.760 Not in a negative sense, but it had developed through the 1920s and 30s, the idea that actually
00:03:14.760 the troublemakers of this world lived in Europe and places outside of America.
00:03:20.760 America was peaceful, benign.
00:03:22.760 It wanted to pursue wealth, health and happiness and money.
00:03:27.760 It didn't want to get involved in other people's squabbles.
00:03:31.760 And Europe was the source and the cause of war, as it often is.
00:03:36.760 But Japan unwittingly dragged America into the war in 1941.
00:03:42.760 And there was a dramatic transformation from that point, from December 1941, of American
00:03:49.760 attitudes to war.
00:03:51.760 So the sleeping lion, frankly, had been pricked with a very big stick.
00:03:56.760 And they decided, America decided, almost with one voice, to take the war to Japan.
00:04:01.760 But the really interesting thing here is that Japan need not have attacked Pearl Harbor.
00:04:08.760 Japan, in my view, could quite easily have achieved all of its political and military
00:04:13.760 goals without prodding the American lion.
00:04:16.760 And it was a really serious own goal.
00:04:20.760 And this is fundamentally because Japan had lost control of the war by 1941.
00:04:24.760 Now, this is an interesting narrative because we all get the sense that, actually, Japan
00:04:28.760 was at the height of its military powers.
00:04:30.760 It was a very strong country.
00:04:32.760 It really had the West on the ropes.
00:04:34.760 But none of that actually is true.
00:04:36.760 Japan went to war because it was weak.
00:04:39.760 Japan went to war because it had suffered 10 years of sort of cataclysmic losses in China.
00:04:45.760 It was and had been unable to achieve its great political ambitions in China.
00:04:50.760 All the while, America had been supporting China through the back door called the Burma Road
00:04:54.760 through Rangoon.
00:04:55.760 And Japan got increasingly angry at American involvement in the attempts by Japan to create
00:05:05.760 an empire.
00:05:06.760 And this is what it's all about.
00:05:07.760 Japan was trying to increase its power base, increase its hegemony over Asia by force.
00:05:17.760 They wanted to create an empire by conquest.
00:05:20.760 And America, this dastardly Yanks, were preventing it from doing so.
00:05:23.760 So actually, this whole Pearl Harbor thing was a lash out by the Japanese against America,
00:05:29.760 who had become the enemy in the Japanese political mind, because it was America that was preventing
00:05:36.760 it from being successful in China.
00:05:38.760 And it's interesting that you say that the Japanese provoked America unwittingly, because
00:05:44.760 I've read that partly because of some of the racial superiority ideas that the Japanese had,
00:05:51.760 they thought, well, if we attack these Hawaiian islands, no one in America really is going
00:05:55.760 to care about this.
00:05:56.760 That's exactly right.
00:05:57.760 That's exactly right.
00:05:58.760 And you've summed up the Japanese attitude very well.
00:06:00.760 Japan at the time was deeply racially antagonistic to anyone who wasn't Japanese.
00:06:06.760 So it was exceptionalist.
00:06:08.760 It had this idea that the Japanese race was exceptional.
00:06:11.760 It was higher and better and greater than anyone else in the region.
00:06:15.760 It sounds kind of like the Nazis.
00:06:17.760 It was very, very, I would describe it, certainly fascistic, definitely fascistic.
00:06:22.760 And resonances of that exceptionalism, I have to be very careful about the words we use,
00:06:28.760 but exceptional tribes believe they're greater and better than others.
00:06:32.760 And elements of that remain in Japan to this day.
00:06:36.760 By the way, in their defense, if you go to Japan, you sort of go, these guys are a bit superior,
00:06:41.760 because like everything is amazing in Japan and their culture is incredible.
00:06:44.760 It's a very, very united, homogenous culture.
00:06:49.760 And that's good and it's bad.
00:06:50.760 It's bad in the sense that it's very easy for militaristic ideas to take form and to dominate.
00:06:57.760 And history plays a really significant part in the transformation of Japan from the Meiji
00:07:02.760 Empire in the 1880s, because Japan very rapidly tried to become, and did become, a modern industrial
00:07:09.760 state.
00:07:10.760 But you don't become a modern industrial state.
00:07:11.760 You don't go through the industrial revolution in a matter of 20 or 25 years.
00:07:15.760 It takes much longer than that, because you've got to take people and culture with you.
00:07:19.760 And in Japan it didn't, because at the same time that this industrial state was being created,
00:07:24.760 it also became quite totalitarian.
00:07:26.760 It became very militaristic, and the dominant political voices in Japan became military voices.
00:07:32.760 And the two great parties in Japan that were exercising influence, political influence, not military influence, but political influence, were actually military parties.
00:07:41.760 The army and the navy being two great examples of this.
00:07:45.760 So then you had a great drive to modernization.
00:07:48.760 You have a fundamentally a feudal culture in Japan.
00:07:51.760 That's really important to understand.
00:07:53.760 Barons and serfs.
00:07:54.760 That's a good way of sort of describing late 19th century, early 20th century Japan.
00:07:59.760 And a good way of understanding why it was that the Japanese army was so disciplined and so ferociously able at a tactical level,
00:08:08.760 in the battlefield level, when war came into China against the Western European and American colonial powers in the Pacific in 1941.
00:08:20.760 It was a big shock to us to see how united, homogenous, and ferocious the Japanese could be.
00:08:25.760 And that's a product of this barren serf thing.
00:08:28.760 And during all this, the Japanese had to create a culture of exceptionalism.
00:08:33.760 They actually built it.
00:08:34.760 It's a self-built culture of exceptionalism.
00:08:36.760 And a lot of this was built around, certainly when it comes to the military view of things, around the idea of the samurai.
00:08:43.760 Now the samurai were the ancient knights, of course, in Japan.
00:08:46.760 They were almost mythical, spiritual, a little bit like the Knights of the Round Table, very Arthurian.
00:08:52.760 And this whole idea that you could become a samurai, that your Japanese exceptionalism could be expressed through martial valour,
00:09:02.760 became a very, very important part of the Japanese idea of themselves.
00:09:06.760 So if the highest point of cultural value in society is your ability to fight a war, you need war in order to be able to exercise or express that.
00:09:20.760 And this is a real problem.
00:09:21.760 If you have militaristic societies, the only way you can create value in that society is by going to war.
00:09:27.760 It's a real problem.
00:09:28.760 So don't try and whip up militaristic ideas in society because the only way you're going to be able to express that is war.
00:09:35.760 And this is the problem with Japan.
00:09:37.760 So we had a deeply militaristic society being developed.
00:09:41.760 It was quite totalitarian.
00:09:42.760 It was a very homogenous culture in Japan.
00:09:46.760 And they started trying to express that by war and conquest.
00:09:51.760 And it started really in 1904 with the war against Tsarist Russia.
00:09:56.760 And then, of course, many of your listeners may know that the Japanese basically conquered Korea in 1905
00:10:06.760 and then occupied in the years following Chinese Manchuria, which they are then called Manchuco and incorporated as part of the Empire in 1931 and 1932.
00:10:17.760 Robert, I'm just going to stop you there because we've used good names like Malay and Chinese Manchuria.
00:10:22.760 And there's going to be a lot of people.
00:10:24.760 And by people, I mean me.
00:10:25.760 He was like, Malay, I think is probably Malaysia.
00:10:27.760 Chinese Manchuria, I'm lost.
00:10:29.760 Yeah.
00:10:30.760 Okay.
00:10:31.760 So let's leap forward to 1941.
00:10:32.760 Let's just bring it back to the Second World War.
00:10:34.760 So we had the Japanese try to create an empire by force.
00:10:39.760 And hopefully we'll come back to this.
00:10:42.760 Why did they attack Southeast Asia?
00:10:44.760 Was it because they wanted oil, rubber, tungsten, rice and all this sort of stuff?
00:10:49.760 No, it's because they wanted to create an empire.
00:10:51.760 They wanted to express their exceptionalism via imperialism.
00:10:56.760 The only way they could do it was by force.
00:10:58.760 And remember, 1941, as I said, they had been fighting a war in China to create this empire
00:11:03.760 for the last 10 years.
00:11:04.760 So all of a sudden, 1941, the only threat against them they thought was America.
00:11:10.760 And so when they attacked Malaya, which is now Malaysia, the Malay Peninsula, they attacked
00:11:17.760 the northeast coast of Malaya.
00:11:18.760 A big amphibious invasion took place at a place called Kota Baru.
00:11:22.760 And a quite exceptional Japanese general called Yamashita landed with his army, swept down the
00:11:27.760 Malay Peninsula, captured Singapore on the 15th of February 1942.
00:11:31.760 And, you know, a great totemic bastion of British colonialism collapsed in a heap.
00:11:38.760 It was quite an extraordinarily profound popping of the British imperial bubble because what
00:11:44.760 the British Empire never really did was protect his empire.
00:11:47.760 It was, I would argue, a benign empire.
00:11:50.760 I never thought anyone would attack it and no one would be foolish enough to attack it.
00:11:56.760 And it failed.
00:11:57.760 The British Empire failed its first duty, which is to protect itself.
00:12:00.760 Anyway, so the Japanese attacked Malaya and Singapore.
00:12:05.760 At the same time, they attacked the Philippines and Borneo.
00:12:08.760 So Borneo is that very, very large island that's now Sabah, Brunei, Kalimantan and Sarawak.
00:12:16.760 Pardon.
00:12:17.760 You know where all those are.
00:12:19.760 Yeah, I love Kalimantan.
00:12:21.760 Kalimantan is a great name.
00:12:22.760 It's part of Indonesia.
00:12:23.760 Home of the Komodo dragon, actually.
00:12:25.760 Yes.
00:12:26.760 There you go.
00:12:27.760 My job really didn't pay off.
00:12:30.760 I come off as the ignorant one now.
00:12:32.760 It's quite extraordinary because I think when certainly in America we talk about the war,
00:12:37.760 people think about Pearl Harbor.
00:12:38.760 But Pearl Harbor was a tiny part.
00:12:40.760 It was a consequence of this great Japanese invasion to create an empire.
00:12:45.760 They wanted to create an empire.
00:12:46.760 Well, I think the really extraordinary thing about this, well, there are a number of extraordinary
00:12:50.760 things.
00:12:51.760 One is that, of course, Pearl Harbor dragged America in.
00:12:53.760 Overnight, American attitudes to these bad guys who lived outside America and didn't understand
00:12:59.760 the need to create a peaceful society and to go to work and to raise kids and to create
00:13:05.760 some money and make a good future for everyone.
00:13:08.760 You know, the Japanese, what on earth were they doing?
00:13:11.760 And they needed to be slapped around and put down.
00:13:14.760 The same with the Germans, for goodness sake.
00:13:16.760 And the Germans very shortly thereafter declared war on America.
00:13:21.760 America didn't declare war on Nazi Germany until Hitler did at first.
00:13:26.760 Why did he do that?
00:13:27.760 He was very foolish.
00:13:28.760 I mean, his own party didn't know.
00:13:29.760 He went into the Reichstag one day.
00:13:31.760 I don't think he even knew.
00:13:32.760 I think it was the 11th of December.
00:13:35.760 So the Japanese invasion of the Far East on the 7th of December.
00:13:40.760 Actually, for us Brits, it was the 8th because the international dateline comes down.
00:13:43.760 So a lot of Americans get confused about this.
00:13:45.760 It didn't happen on sequential days.
00:13:47.760 Everything happened on the same morning.
00:13:49.760 Pearl Harbor happened on the same morning.
00:13:50.760 The big invasion took place in the Far East.
00:13:52.760 A couple of days later, Hitler went into the Reichstag and started ranting as he did.
00:13:57.760 And he said, oh, these jolly Americans, they deserve everything again.
00:14:00.760 By the way, we're going to declare war on them as well.
00:14:02.760 And everyone was completely by surprise because it hadn't been rehearsed.
00:14:05.760 I mean, it was just Hitler at his strategic worst or strategic best.
00:14:09.760 He didn't have a strategic mind.
00:14:11.760 And he gave Roosevelt the absolute excuse.
00:14:14.760 The thing that Roosevelt had wanted for a long time.
00:14:17.760 Roosevelt, of course, had been balancing for at least a couple of years on a knife edge.
00:14:21.760 How to support and be the industrial, how to be the factory for Britain in its defense against Nazism
00:14:28.760 without actually taking Americans to the war.
00:14:30.760 He was a very astute political operator.
00:14:33.760 Roosevelt did a very, very good job.
00:14:34.760 He couldn't declare war.
00:14:35.760 He couldn't declare openly that America was going to be the bastion of Western democracy
00:14:42.760 and support Britain against the Nazis because he would have lost all political credibility as a Democrat in America.
00:14:49.760 Americans said, no, we don't want to get involved in yet another destructive war.
00:14:52.760 Let these Europeans fight it out.
00:14:54.760 Americans had no idea about the existential nature of Nazism.
00:14:58.760 That's the real challenge in 1940.
00:15:00.760 They, goodness gracious me, didn't take them long to realize it.
00:15:03.760 And they certainly, well, actually, I think maybe that's wrong.
00:15:09.760 The army realized that when they got to Europe and started seeing the death camps.
00:15:13.760 But by 1946, 1947, they had certainly picked it up.
00:15:17.760 And as a consequence, when Americans started thinking about this new threat from international communism,
00:15:23.760 which they had decided was being stirred up from Moscow, wasn't always the case, but that's where the American mind was.
00:15:32.760 It was a very easy jump for them to say, well, the Nazis were doing this in the 1930s.
00:15:36.760 It's now the commies.
00:15:37.760 The commies are the bad guys.
00:15:38.760 So this big crusade against the Nazis suddenly became a big crusade against the commies.
00:15:43.760 So I've leapt around a little bit, but let's just go back to 1941.
00:15:46.760 It's really important to understand the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia primarily because of their need for an empire.
00:15:55.760 What about the Wall embargo?
00:15:57.760 Sorry?
00:15:58.760 What about the idea, I hear a lot of people talking about that they invaded because Americans were preventing them from getting the oil they need.
00:16:05.760 Oh, I see.
00:16:06.760 Okay.
00:16:07.760 Well, it's partly true.
00:16:08.760 It's partly, I describe it as a lash out because the Japanese were angry.
00:16:12.760 They were very angry that actually the Americans were denying them the fruits of victory in China by placing an oil embargo on Japan
00:16:20.760 and denying them their ability to achieve their own statehood and nationhood and to create their empire.
00:16:27.760 And you can understand this.
00:16:28.760 I mean, Japan wasn't able to produce much oil itself.
00:16:32.760 It needed to be able to have access to foreign markets for almost everything.
00:16:37.760 It produced a lot of rice, produced a lot of coal, a lot of tin and steel.
00:16:41.760 But like all countries, particularly countries that are as rocky and mountainous as Japan, you needed to be able to exercise effective markets.
00:16:50.760 The Japanese, though, had produced in their mind this idea that markets are created by power, not influence or money.
00:16:59.760 And there's a fundamental difference, of course, between the capitalist approach to empire, which is basically how I describe the rise of the British Empire,
00:17:07.760 and an empire that's created by force or violence or conflict, which is effectively the way that Stalin decided he was going to create his empire.
00:17:16.760 It was how definitely Hitler decided he was going to create his empire, which he called Grosser Deutschland, this idea that wherever there is German blood, that is my empire,
00:17:25.760 regardless of any states that might exist and regardless of any sovereignty that might previously exist, because that's all irrelevant.
00:17:31.760 The most important thing is Grace of Deutschland, German blood in a greater Germany.
00:17:36.760 And the Japanese had the same idea.
00:17:38.760 They had this idea that they were primus inter pares in Asia.
00:17:43.760 They were the country, the single country that could provide leadership in Asia, because they looked at empire and they said,
00:17:50.760 the reason why all the states in Asia have fallen prey to colonialism is because they're not strong enough intellectually, mentally, culturally.
00:18:00.760 We are.
00:18:01.760 We can take the place of these foreign empires.
00:18:04.760 We can get rid of the Europeans and we can have an Asia for the Asiatics, which is what they argued.
00:18:09.760 The real interesting thing about Japan for me is that there wasn't much intellectual planning or idea in Tokyo around what the economic co-prosperity sphere might look like.
00:18:21.760 And if you go to Japan and look at the archives and look at the evidence for this great creation of an economic co-prosperity sphere, look at the arguments for it,
00:18:31.760 look at the suggestions that actually what we might be able to do is ship lots of rice from Burma, that doesn't really exist.
00:18:37.760 That's all actually arguments that were developed in the 1950s and 60s by rational American historians who said,
00:18:44.760 well, the Japanese must have attacked for a reason.
00:18:47.760 Well, we know they wanted oil, so they invaded Borneo to get oil.
00:18:52.760 We know they wanted rice, so they invaded Burma to get rice.
00:18:55.760 Well, that's just not true.
00:18:57.760 We know they wanted rubber, so that's why they invaded Malaya.
00:18:59.760 We've got to start with this basic proposition about who do we think we are as a country?
00:19:03.760 What do we want?
00:19:04.760 How do we want to express our nationhood?
00:19:06.760 How do we create our empire?
00:19:07.760 Let's do it by force.
00:19:08.760 We are a military country.
00:19:10.760 We are a militaristic society.
00:19:12.760 The fundamental ethos of our country is Bushido, this idea of martial sacrifice.
00:19:19.760 It's exercised through war.
00:19:21.760 We've been doing it for the last 10 years in China.
00:19:24.760 We haven't been doing it very well.
00:19:25.760 The Chinese have been keeping us under.
00:19:27.760 We haven't managed to capture China, which is a real embarrassment.
00:19:30.760 It's a real shame.
00:19:31.760 The Navy accused the army of being inept in China because the army wasn't achieving Japan's
00:19:37.760 imperial ambitions.
00:19:38.760 I mean, it's completely confusing.
00:19:41.760 The reality is that the idea that all this stuff that Japan needed was the primary drive
00:19:48.760 for war is just not true.
00:19:50.760 There's no evidence for it.
00:19:51.760 It's a subset of what the Japanese are trying to do.
00:19:54.760 Of course, if we create an empire, then we'll get all this lovely stuff.
00:19:57.760 But if you look at shipping requests and requirements for bringing oil back, there's very, very little
00:20:03.760 planned by the Japanese even to bring oil back from Borneo.
00:20:06.760 They did it.
00:20:07.760 I think there were only about three or four shipments of oil from Borneo before the Americans
00:20:11.760 started sinking the ship.
00:20:12.760 So this idea that they created an empire in order to be able to garner all this stuff
00:20:17.760 is absolutely nonsense.
00:20:19.760 Do you think, is that partly because, and I'm completely ignorant when it comes to this,
00:20:24.760 so correct me, is it because the emperor was in charge and he was basically going,
00:20:31.760 look, this is what I want and you boys are going to do that?
00:20:34.760 I think it's the opposite.
00:20:35.760 I think the emperor wasn't in charge.
00:20:37.760 I think this is a real challenge, actually, because Hirohito was the sun god.
00:20:42.760 He was deified by many in Japan.
00:20:44.760 Even if people didn't really believe he was a god, they treated him as such.
00:20:48.760 He was, frankly, a political pawn in the arms of the militaristic political parties
00:20:55.760 who were actually urging war.
00:20:58.760 And his challenge, his real mistake was not standing up to them.
00:21:03.760 Well, one might say, how could he?
00:21:04.760 He wouldn't have been emperor otherwise.
00:21:06.760 He wanted to be able to remain the spiritual head and the ethnic head and all that meant to be the emperor of Japan,
00:21:18.760 but keep in check the militarist elements.
00:21:21.760 Now, I need also to add that he was a bit of a militarist himself.
00:21:25.760 So, whilst I wouldn't go so far as saying that he was the reason for war,
00:21:31.760 he certainly didn't stop it and he certainly encouraged many aspects of it.
00:21:35.760 It's quite hard, actually, to get behind Hirohito's motivations now,
00:21:41.760 because after 1945, an enormous amount of protection was built around Hirohito by the Americans,
00:21:50.760 MacArthur in particular, who wanted to keep Hirohito as the titular head of Japan,
00:21:55.760 the person to whom the Japanese could coalesce around and not feel that they were completely defeated.
00:22:03.760 And this protection actually has hid an enormous amount of culpability,
00:22:07.760 because Hirohito, in my view, was culpable for the war.
00:22:10.760 He could have stopped it.
00:22:12.760 It would have been difficult for him to stop it.
00:22:13.760 But my personal view is that Hirohito didn't have the moral courage to stand up to his generals,
00:22:18.760 General Tojo in particular.
00:22:20.760 And the generals had won.
00:22:23.760 The anarchy of the generals had won in 1941.
00:22:27.760 And there was debate amongst the generals themselves and the admirals about the effect of the war,
00:22:33.760 the attack on Pearl Harbor in particular.
00:22:36.760 One in particular, Yamamoto, said,
00:22:38.760 OK, if we attack Pearl Harbor, it's the end of us.
00:22:41.760 We might win the battle, but we'll never win the war.
00:22:43.760 But he was sheltered down and ignored.
00:22:46.760 And the real challenge in militaristic society is hubris.
00:22:50.760 Well, you've got this combination of we can only be militaristic.
00:22:53.760 We can only receive the value of our martial identities if we go to war.
00:23:00.760 So we need to go to war.
00:23:02.760 And the consequences of war are very, very rarely considered in detail.
00:23:12.760 Because if you're a soldier and you're charging ahead in war, hubris is a really, really significant problem.
00:23:18.760 I mean, it's not just a problem for the Japanese.
00:23:20.760 It's a problem actually for Americans.
00:23:22.760 MacArthur, during the Korean War, hubris was his second name, frankly.
00:23:27.760 And this is something that democratic societies are much better at managing,
00:23:31.760 because you've got a much more integrated relationship between the soldiers and the politicians.
00:23:36.760 And hopefully, more often than not, the politicians are in charge of what the soldiers do.
00:23:41.760 If you get it the other way around, then you've generally got problems.
00:23:44.760 But I would describe Japan in 1941 as a country out of control.
00:23:50.760 It lashes out at the world. It lashes out to create its empire.
00:23:54.760 But it does so ignorantly, because it does so from a position of weakness.
00:23:58.760 And Japan in 1941, far from being at the height of its powers, is actually at the bottom of them.
00:24:04.760 And it only gets worse.
00:24:05.760 1942, Battle of Midway.
00:24:07.760 We're basically in the southern part of the Pacific there.
00:24:10.760 Navy is destroyed, which gives the ability of the Americans then to start the island hopping campaign,
00:24:15.760 beginning actually in Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands in September 1942.
00:24:19.760 And then very progressively further north.
00:24:23.760 And the island hopping campaign by MacArthur is a very intelligent campaign, because he basically says,
00:24:28.760 what are the islands I need to get to, to get to Japan?
00:24:31.760 Let's ignore all the other ones. Let them wither on the vine.
00:24:34.760 Let's ignore them.
00:24:35.760 And I'm going to go for my island, the island, the stepping stones to Japan.
00:24:39.760 Whilst at the same time, in 1944, in the north, very, very simply, we've got a massive, quite an extraordinarily large amphibious campaign
00:24:49.760 based around aircraft carriers that just basically clears the Japanese out of the northern Pacific completely.
00:24:55.760 And this is really remarkable, actually, because Yamamoto saw this in 1941.
00:25:00.760 He saw, if you're going to take on America, you need to be really careful about what you're trying to do,
00:25:06.760 because America was even then the industrial powerhouse of the world.
00:25:10.760 And the important thing about America in 1941 was not just what it was able to produce.
00:25:16.760 It was its potential.
00:25:18.760 Just to give you some examples, I'll try and get my facts right.
00:25:21.760 But I think in 1942, the Americans had two aircraft carriers in the northern Pacific.
00:25:27.760 In 1944, early 1944, they had 17.
00:25:31.760 Wow.
00:25:32.760 Now, these were all laid down in 1941.
00:25:34.760 So, 17 aircraft carriers.
00:25:37.760 I mean, it's just the size of the American fleet.
00:25:41.760 1944 created the American fleet that it is today.
00:25:45.760 It is still a product of this massive, massive enlargement to defeat the Japanese.
00:25:49.760 The Americans recognized that they needed to have mobile aircraft carriers, mobile air bases,
00:25:54.760 all over the Pacific, in order to be able to attack the Japanese, who were stuck on their islands.
00:25:59.760 Now, if you're stuck on an island, that's a real problem, because you can't sustain yourself.
00:26:04.760 You'd simply become a garrison.
00:26:05.760 You'd just fight from foxholes.
00:26:07.760 You're not fighting as an army.
00:26:09.760 Eventually, you're going to get bludgeoned.
00:26:11.760 And the Japanese were bludgeoned, and they decided they would fight to the death,
00:26:15.760 which is one of the reasons why there was such slaughter on the islands through the Pacific campaign.
00:26:20.760 Absolutely terrible campaign.
00:26:22.760 You're fighting as America primarily leading the charge in the Pacific.
00:26:28.760 Australians, of course, we mustn't forget the Australians fighting an amazing campaign in Papua,
00:26:34.760 and mainly New Guinea, immediately north of Australia, starting at Port Moresby and going over.
00:26:41.760 It was really quite an extraordinary campaign.
00:26:43.760 And we, the British, and the Indian armies actually, incidentally, learnt an enormous amount
00:26:48.760 from what the Australians were learning against fighting the Japanese in New Guinea.
00:26:51.760 It's an entirely forgotten campaign, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere.
00:26:54.760 If you live in Australia, then, of course, it's the only campaign that's important.
00:26:57.760 And it's good.
00:26:58.760 It's really, really good.
00:26:59.760 And the Australians did an incredible job in New Guinea.
00:27:02.760 Anyway, that's just a little bit of an aside.
00:27:04.760 We mustn't forget the Australians there when we talk about the Pacific.
00:27:06.760 And of course, Australia was the launch pad for MacArthur and his amphibious forces, going
00:27:12.760 to Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, and then charging up north towards Japan.
00:27:17.760 But this is, it's quite extraordinary because the size of the American operations were unbelievable.
00:27:25.760 And I can't ever overemphasize this.
00:27:28.760 It's as though you, America switched on, Japan switched on America's light bulb in 1941 with
00:27:35.760 Pearl Harbor.
00:27:36.760 And America just coalesced around this need to defeat these bad guys.
00:27:40.760 We're going to, going to defeat the NIPS because they had the temerity to attack Americans,
00:27:44.760 innocent Americans sitting on their ships in Pearl Harbor.
00:27:48.760 And this egregious attack was the most outrageous thing that had ever happened to America since
00:27:53.760 the British colonialists in 1776.
00:27:56.760 So that idea very, very quickly gained traction.
00:28:00.760 But the potential of American power was just staggering.
00:28:05.760 And as I said, there were a number of Japanese who realized the potential of American power,
00:28:09.760 but had no real sense about how extraordinary it was.
00:28:12.760 There's lots of examples of this extraordinary potential, not least the aircraft carriers, but also
00:28:17.760 the B-29.
00:28:18.760 So we, most people will have watched the Masters of the Air, this fantastic program about the bomber
00:28:24.760 offensive in Europe with the B-17.
00:28:27.760 Compared to the B-17, the B-29 was a complete giant.
00:28:31.760 It was amazing.
00:28:32.760 It was four or five times the size.
00:28:34.760 It's absolutely enormous bomber that the Americans started building in 1942, I think it was.
00:28:40.760 By 1944, they were flying hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of these massive aircraft
00:28:47.760 all the way from the Pacific Islands to Japan.
00:28:50.760 And of course, it was the B-29, which eventually dropped the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
00:28:57.760 Robert, can I just pause you there?
00:29:00.760 Because we've been talking a lot about the Americans and the B-40, and it's all been fascinating.
00:29:05.760 It's been wonderful to listen to.
00:29:07.760 But my mind was going to...
00:29:09.760 So where are the Brits in all of this?
00:29:11.760 Okay.
00:29:12.760 Well, the Brits were caught with...
00:29:15.760 What about me?
00:29:16.760 Yeah, exactly.
00:29:17.760 Look, how did we save the world?
00:29:19.760 Well, I'm going to tell you a really funny story here.
00:29:22.760 So the Brits were caught with their pants down.
00:29:24.760 There's no doubt about that.
00:29:25.760 Doesn't sound like us, mate.
00:29:28.760 The Brits, and it's a great British phrase, caught with your pants down.
00:29:31.760 And I'm afraid we were in 1941 because there had been no view.
00:29:37.760 I mean, Japan had been regarded as a potential enemy, but no one had realized that it would
00:29:41.760 come to what it came to with the Japanese actually invading Malaya and attacking Singapore
00:29:46.760 from the north and being so dramatically successful.
00:29:48.760 Because Britain had stuck its head in the sand for many, many years and had believed that...
00:29:55.760 They had failed to imagine the possibility of war.
00:29:57.760 This is a really important phrase that I use quite a lot.
00:30:01.760 You need to be able to imagine what war might be like in order to be able to think about
00:30:05.760 countering it.
00:30:06.760 We can't counter war by preparing for it unless you can imagine what it's like.
00:30:10.760 And through the 1920s and 30s, the subject of a book by General Lord Downers and myself,
00:30:15.760 a little shameless plug here called Victory to Defeat, we look at why it was that Britain
00:30:19.760 was so badly prepared in 1940.
00:30:21.760 And it's precisely this, that we had forgotten how to imagine the possibility of war.
00:30:26.760 That's exactly where we are today, by the way.
00:30:28.760 We're going to relate that to modern times.
00:30:30.760 We have forgotten as a country and as a West generally, what war entails and what is required
00:30:37.760 to prevent war.
00:30:39.760 Imagining the possibility of war is the first step.
00:30:42.760 Anyway, 1941, we had failed to imagine the possibility of war against the Japanese.
00:30:47.760 We had regarded them as an oriental enemy.
00:30:50.760 They were a second class enemy.
00:30:52.760 We regarded ourselves as a first class army, which wasn't true.
00:30:55.760 And, of course, we were focused on defeating the Germans.
00:30:58.760 We were fighting, of course, in North Africa primarily because we'd been thrown out of
00:31:03.760 Europe after Dunkirk.
00:31:04.760 We were fighting in North Africa.
00:31:06.760 We were also fighting in the Middle East, Iraq, Iran.
00:31:09.760 We invaded Iran, by the way, in 1941.
00:31:11.760 Interesting fact, very few people know.
00:31:13.760 And we were fighting war against the Vichy French in Syria.
00:31:16.760 So in 1941, that's where we were focused.
00:31:18.760 We weren't focused on Japan.
00:31:19.760 The idea that when the Japanese arrived, this was cataclysmic.
00:31:23.760 I mean, this was terribly, terribly damaging to British morale.
00:31:27.760 British morale was pretty low anyway by 1941.
00:31:31.760 We'd been fighting the war for two years and Germany was rampant in Europe.
00:31:35.760 There didn't seem to be much chance.
00:31:38.760 People would imagine the future of Britain ever recovering.
00:31:42.760 Of course, America joined in December 1941.
00:31:45.760 So we had America on our side.
00:31:46.760 But by early 1942, it was still pretty dismal.
00:31:49.760 Britain really didn't have a victory against the enemy of whoever it was.
00:31:55.760 Germans, Italians or Japanese.
00:31:59.760 I'm exaggerating a little bit.
00:32:01.760 Talal Alamein in November 1942.
00:32:03.760 So we were caught with our pants down.
00:32:05.760 We weren't preparing at all to defend our imperial possessions.
00:32:10.760 The funny story is a film called Objective Burma, which was a – I love telling the story because it says a lot about who we think we were as Brits.
00:32:23.760 Because it was shown for the first time, I think, in January 1945, a Hollywood blockbuster with Errol Flynn, who was a Brit living in America, but he's still a Brit, dressed as an American.
00:32:33.760 And this film was released in Leicester Square in January 1945.
00:32:39.760 And the crowd in the cinema, who were there for the first showing, were very excited about this film.
00:32:46.760 And he was a Brit.
00:32:48.760 Although he was wearing an American helmet, that was quite unusual.
00:32:50.760 He had a Tommy gun on the picture.
00:32:52.760 Anyway, within 10 or 15 minutes, most of the audience had stood up and walked out of the film.
00:32:57.760 And it was empty.
00:32:58.760 By about half an hour, there was no one left in the cinema.
00:33:00.760 Why was that?
00:33:01.760 Because the Brits who were watching this film were horrified to think that the Americans were taking the glory of the war in Burma to themselves.
00:33:09.760 And this was classic American exceptionalism itself.
00:33:12.760 It was American imperialism.
00:33:13.760 They were saying that the war in Burma was not being fought by Brits, it was being fought by Americans.
00:33:19.760 Now, actually, the film's very good.
00:33:21.760 And the film doesn't say that at all.
00:33:23.760 It just touches on the reality of perceptions of the time.
00:33:25.760 Because, actually, America was deeply involved in the CBI theatre, the Far Eastern theatre, the theatre that we as Brits think was ours.
00:33:33.760 I'll just start by explaining that in 1945, the Southeast Asian Command, which is basically running the war in the Far East, so China, Burma, and India, and all parts in between, comprised 1.3 million men.
00:33:47.760 This was essentially a British campaign, we think.
00:33:51.760 And it was headed by Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of Southeast Asia.
00:33:55.760 He had an American deputy by the end of 1944.
00:33:59.760 But prior to that, it was General Vinegarjoe, Stilwell, and then it was General Weidemeyer.
00:34:03.760 So it was a mixed force.
00:34:06.760 But it's a British campaign.
00:34:07.760 You know, we were fighting in Burma.
00:34:09.760 Well, actually, if I tell people that there were nearly three times as many Americans fighting in Southeast Asia Command as there were Brits, there were 277,000 Americans fighting in Southeast Asia Command, and only 100,000 Brits.
00:34:23.760 So actually, the film was completely correct.
00:34:25.760 The film, incidentally, was of a part of the Burma campaign, the northeastern part of Burma called the Hawken Valley, fighting down from the new road that was being built to replace the road that had been lost to the Japanese in 1942, the Burma Road, known as the Stillwell Road or the Lido Road, coming down through the mountains.
00:34:48.760 Quite an extraordinary engineering achievement to a place called Michener.
00:34:51.760 And that was being run initially by the Americans under General Vinegarjoe, Jay Stillwell, and about 30,000 Chinese troops.
00:34:58.760 And the film was about those guys only.
00:35:00.760 And the great thing about the film is that it was always fantastically accurate, great story.
00:35:05.760 It just didn't mention the fact that on the left-hand side of Burma, the Brits were trying to fight to throw the Japanese out.
00:35:10.760 But that wasn't the purpose of the film.
00:35:11.760 This is an American film made in Hollywood for American audience, telling a true story.
00:35:15.760 And the great thing about the film is there's a lot of really good combat cinematography in it from American cinematographers embedded in the troops taking film of real fighting.
00:35:26.760 It's absolutely amazing stuff.
00:35:27.760 But, of course, our perception back home in London was that Burma was a British campaign and there were the same number of African troops, East and West African colonial troops, fighting in Burma against the Japanese as there were white Brits.
00:35:42.760 The entire size of the fighting forces, without confusing it with the numbers, think about the 1.3 million men and a few women fighting against the Japanese by 1945.
00:35:52.760 Of that, 606,000 were fighting troops, people with bayonets and rifles and grenades and so on.
00:35:59.760 Of that number, 87% were, do you know what nationality they were?
00:36:05.760 Indian.
00:36:06.760 They were men of the Indian Army who had volunteered.
00:36:11.760 India produced the largest volunteer army in the history of humankind during the Second World War.
00:36:16.760 2.5 million men and some women, about 30,000 women, volunteered to join the Indian Army during the Second World War.
00:36:24.760 Most of them joined to fight the Japanese.
00:36:27.760 Now, this is a very, very fascinating subject in its own right.
00:36:30.760 They weren't dragooned.
00:36:31.760 There was no conscription.
00:36:32.760 They weren't forced by poverty or any other form of force to join up.
00:36:38.760 They joined up in the main to fight the Japanese because Japan was an existential threat to India.
00:36:45.760 They didn't join up to fight for the Raj.
00:36:48.760 They didn't fight for the British Empire.
00:36:50.760 They didn't fight because Britain asked them to.
00:36:52.760 They joined in the main to fight against Japan.
00:36:55.760 The first Indian veteran I ever interviewed way back in 1997 said to me, after about an hour of me trying to get questions, trying to ask him questions.
00:37:04.760 And I had a very, I had a typical Western framework of understanding as I was approaching him.
00:37:10.760 And that framework was the product of my education, which basically said that colonial enterprise was an oppressive one where people did as they were told.
00:37:19.760 If Britain told them to go to war, they went to war because they were unthinking.
00:37:22.760 These people had agency.
00:37:25.760 They were able to make their own minds up.
00:37:27.760 They were able to make their own decisions.
00:37:29.760 After about an hour of me fooling around with this guy, he said, Rob, let's just stop this conversation.
00:37:33.760 He spoke better English than I did.
00:37:35.760 He lived in a little town called Gahati on the Brahmaputra River.
00:37:38.760 And he said to me, let me just stop.
00:37:40.760 When I left school in 1942, age 18, I was terrified of the Japanese.
00:37:45.760 Why?
00:37:46.760 I could read the newspapers.
00:37:47.760 We knew all about Nanking in 1937.
00:37:49.760 The last thing I wanted, and he incidentally said, I never met a white man at that stage.
00:37:54.760 You know, this idea that the empire was serfs and slaves is a nonsense.
00:37:59.760 We did not want, me and my mates at school, we did not want the Japanese in India because
00:38:05.760 we were terrified that we'd have another Nanking.
00:38:08.760 We didn't see the Japanese as our friends.
00:38:11.760 We saw them as their enemy.
00:38:12.760 That's why he joined the Indian Air Force and ended up in 1945 flying hurricanes against
00:38:17.760 the Japanese.
00:38:18.760 Quite an extraordinary story.
00:38:19.760 But all the Japanese, all the Indian veterans that I have ever interviewed, all described
00:38:25.760 that sort of sense that India was under threat.
00:38:28.760 And they wanted to defend India.
00:38:30.760 They wanted to create an India for themselves.
00:38:32.760 They wanted to defend India that was.
00:38:34.760 And they wanted to.
00:38:35.760 They were all nationalists.
00:38:36.760 Of course they were.
00:38:37.760 We're all complicated, complex individuals.
00:38:39.760 We can hold competing notions in our minds.
00:38:41.760 General Auckland, who was the commander in chief India at the time, said, I expect all
00:38:45.760 my Indian soldiers to be nationalists.
00:38:47.760 Of course you have to want to defend your country.
00:38:50.760 You want to be able to create a country of your own in the future.
00:38:53.760 The idea that, this crazy idea that we're told nowadays that Indian soldiers joined because
00:38:58.760 they were poor.
00:38:59.760 Complete nonsense.
00:39:00.760 Because they needed food.
00:39:01.760 Because they were told to.
00:39:02.760 Because they were forced to fight.
00:39:04.760 It is a complete nonsense.
00:39:05.760 But there's a huge story here about India that we can get onto as well.
00:39:10.760 So I'm just still trying very slowly.
00:39:12.760 In a long-winded historian's way to answer this question, Britain was completely surprised.
00:39:17.760 We had our pants down.
00:39:18.760 We were focused on the Germans and the Italians.
00:39:20.760 We weren't focused on the Japanese.
00:39:21.760 It was a big shock.
00:39:23.760 We lost a lot of troops, about 100,000 troops in Singapore in 1942.
00:39:27.760 But very, very quickly, India and Britain energised itself to go on the offensive against
00:39:36.760 the Japanese.
00:39:37.760 By 1944, the Japanese invasion of India at a place called Imphalan Kehima was decisively
00:39:43.760 stopped and destroyed by a fantastic army, the 14th Army commanded by General Bill Slim,
00:39:48.760 Uncle Bill Slim, most of whom, as I've said, were Indian soldiers.
00:39:53.760 The defeat of the Japanese army there in 1944 then opened the door to the reconquest of
00:40:00.760 Burma in 1945, and the Japanese were smashed in Burma.
00:40:03.760 Again, by the 14th Army, and largely an Indian army in 1945.
00:40:08.760 So I've talked earlier about the potential of America.
00:40:12.760 What Japan never really failed to understand was American industrial potential.
00:40:18.760 What they could never also understand was the cohesive and collusive potential of the
00:40:24.760 British Empire.
00:40:25.760 Because they had built up in their minds, a lot like many of the academics in the Western
00:40:30.760 Academy today, the idea that the British Empire was oppressive and it was a matter of London
00:40:39.760 pulling the puppeteer strings of poor, benighted people across the Empire who had no agency of
00:40:47.760 their own.
00:40:48.760 I'm exaggerating for effect here, of course.
00:40:50.760 What the Second World War demonstrated was the fundamental untruth of that proposition.
00:40:56.760 People decided voluntarily, and of their own volition, to fight against what they saw to
00:41:01.760 be a threat to India.
00:41:03.760 And indeed, if you look at, and there's a lot of evidence for this as well, if you look
00:41:07.760 at the rationale for many soldiers in Africa, Western East Africa, so men from Sierra Leone,
00:41:14.760 Gambia, the Gold Coast in 1940, 41, the rationale for many of them joining the colonial forces,
00:41:23.760 and thereafter going to war, was to protect their countries from the Italians and the fascists
00:41:30.760 and the Germans.
00:41:31.760 And again, many of these people were also, they were intelligent, they were able to read
00:41:35.760 the newspapers, they were able to make judgements for themselves about what was important
00:41:39.760 for them and their countries.
00:41:40.760 It's so interesting what you're saying, Robert, because what you're really talking
00:41:44.760 about here, and what I'm, it's been fascinating to listen to you talk about the Indians and
00:41:48.760 the Africans, is what you're really talking about here is this is a truly global war in
00:41:55.760 the way that the war in Europe wasn't.
00:41:59.760 And I think because when we talk about World War II, we tend to think of, you know, the
00:42:04.760 British, the Americans, the Soviets versus the Nazis.
00:42:07.760 But actually, the real global war happened in the Pacific.
00:42:12.760 It's a great way of describing it.
00:42:14.760 It was a remarkable global war.
00:42:18.760 And if I just go back and say, the reasons why, I've explained in quite some detail why
00:42:23.760 the Japanese invaded.
00:42:24.760 They wanted to create an empire.
00:42:25.760 They did it because the opportunity presented itself.
00:42:28.760 And the opportunity presented itself because of the war in the East, the war in Europe.
00:42:33.760 And the war was, the world was unstable, the world was in chaos.
00:42:36.760 They thought that there was an opportunity here to seize what they wanted because the Brits
00:42:40.760 and the Americans were otherwise engaged.
00:42:43.760 And they had no idea that Britain would respond in the way it did.
00:42:46.760 They had no idea that the empire would rise up.
00:42:49.760 And by empire, I really mean India, in defense of what they regarded as their freedoms.
00:42:55.760 Now, that's an interesting concept, isn't it?
00:42:58.760 And isn't it amazing that Africans volunteered to join the colonial forces to go to Burma to
00:43:04.760 fight the Japani because they were standing up for their sense of freedom.
00:43:09.760 And I think the one thing we forget in this global war, and it was a global war, a war
00:43:14.760 of people more than anything else, of people deciding to stand up, was the sense that this
00:43:19.760 was a righteous crusade against evildoers.
00:43:22.760 And it's really important.
00:43:23.760 If you go back in interviews I have done, Africans and Indians and British veterans, you
00:43:29.760 get a real sense that whatever our political differences at home, we were fighting evil.
00:43:34.760 This is why many of them call it a crusade.
00:43:36.760 Many in India saw it as a crusade.
00:43:38.760 As an aside, it's a great tragedy that Africa and India in particular have deliberately forgotten.
00:43:45.760 Certainly in India, India has deliberately forgotten its role in defeating Japanese militarism
00:43:50.760 for its own political purposes.
00:43:52.760 The 1947 idea that anything after 1947 is Indian history, anything prior to 1947 is colonial history.
00:43:58.760 It's a great tragedy that was allowed to develop.
00:44:01.760 I can see some changes in people's attitudes of the Second World War over the last five
00:44:05.760 or ten years, certainly in India.
00:44:07.760 But this was a people's crusade.
00:44:09.760 This is really important.
00:44:10.760 There's some really good books by Jonathan Fennell in particular and Dan Todman, two great
00:44:16.760 historians, who have described this as a people's crusade.
00:44:19.760 Large numbers of people from the Caribbean volunteered to come to the UK and fight.
00:44:25.760 Large numbers of Americans before December 1941 travelled via Canada to the United States
00:44:30.760 to fight against the Nazis.
00:44:34.760 It was a crusade against evil.
00:44:36.760 And we've lost the concept of that, actually.
00:44:38.760 In this…
00:44:39.760 Rob, let me interrupt you there because it's been absolutely brilliant and we've got about
00:44:44.760 three questions out of the way, which is what we like.
00:44:47.760 It's always great.
00:44:48.760 But there's a couple of little bits that I want to get in before we wrap up, which is
00:44:54.760 what you were talking about earlier and what you were starting to reference now, which is
00:44:59.760 how we think about war now.
00:45:01.760 And I think there are some very, very interesting conversations to be had about the moral calculus
00:45:07.760 of decisions in war.
00:45:08.760 One of the things, obviously, that's been a topic of fierce debate is Israel's response
00:45:15.760 in Gaza.
00:45:16.760 Yeah.
00:45:17.760 And I think the dropping the bombs on Japan in particular is clearly something that must
00:45:24.760 inform how we think about those things.
00:45:26.760 Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting we drop nukes on Gaza.
00:45:29.760 But what I wanted to get at with you is it is now being talked about in the sense that,
00:45:36.760 you know, bombing Germany in the way that the Allies did, you know, turning most of it
00:45:42.760 into rubble, which, you know, in my opinion, we had to.
00:45:45.760 And likewise, dropping the nuclear weapons on Japan.
00:45:48.760 You know, the West did it because we like to destroy things and all of this.
00:45:52.760 Of course, all that's absolute nonsense.
00:45:53.760 So it's very important that in the Second World War, a phrase was developed which said,
00:45:57.760 this is a war we need to win.
00:45:59.760 It's a moral crusade.
00:46:00.760 We need to win it.
00:46:01.760 Not only do we need to win it, so we need to win it unconditionally.
00:46:04.760 We don't want to get to a point where we have to negotiate with the Nazis to surrender,
00:46:08.760 which then leaves a rump Nazi state to continue their depredations over their own people.
00:46:13.760 That's a really important point.
00:46:14.760 They needed to be defeated unconditionally.
00:46:16.760 And this had been agreed between Roosevelt and Churchill pretty early on.
00:46:20.760 There were some debates.
00:46:22.760 The idea that unconditional defeat of the enemy means that you have to fight all the way to the end.
00:46:29.760 So it's quite a dramatic political decision to make.
00:46:32.760 But actually, in the terms of the Second World War, it's absolutely essential to do it.
00:46:35.760 Let me just quickly talk about Japan.
00:46:37.760 The purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was to bring the war to an end, not to extend the war.
00:46:47.760 That our blood was up and we simply wanted to destroy the Japanese as a complete nonsense.
00:46:52.760 There is absolutely zero historical evidence whatsoever.
00:46:56.760 I'm a historian.
00:46:57.760 When I look at the evidence, this was a war to be won.
00:47:00.760 It needed to be undertaken quickly.
00:47:02.760 We know that in July 1945, the Japanese basically mobilized their population to create a local defense volunteer.
00:47:08.760 So basically the dad's army in order to stop the American and the allied invasion that they knew was coming in early 1946, which would have cost perhaps a million lives.
00:47:18.760 Just imagine that.
00:47:19.760 Think about all the lives that were lost in the island hopping campaign.
00:47:23.760 Japanese territory was sacred.
00:47:25.760 The Japanese were going to defend their territory to the last person.
00:47:30.760 And we needed a way to be able to bring them to the table metaphorically, to persuade Hirohito that actually the war was lost.
00:47:39.760 If the war continued, the only victims would be more Japanese people.
00:47:42.760 That's an important point.
00:47:43.760 The Japanese were very, very good at killing people.
00:47:46.760 They killed more of their own people than we did.
00:47:49.760 That's really important to understand.
00:47:51.760 They killed their own troops in large numbers.
00:47:53.760 When their military plans failed, they simply sent men into battle to die.
00:47:57.760 Men died in very large numbers because of the failure of Japanese policy.
00:48:01.760 Okay.
00:48:02.760 I need to quickly talk about Curtis LeMay and the area bombing of Japanese cities, because this comes into it as well.
00:48:08.760 Because we need to see the dropping of the bombs as part of this concept, which began in March 1945, of bringing Japan to its knees by area bombing.
00:48:19.760 Until March 1945, high level precision bombing by B-29 bombers over Japan had failed.
00:48:27.760 The evidence demonstrated that only about 4% of targets were destroyed by large, large swathes.
00:48:33.760 We're talking about hundreds of B-29s dropping bombs over Japan from August of the previous year when the first bombing bombardment groups were formed.
00:48:40.760 So the idea that it started with Duet in the 1920s that high level precision, high altitude precision bombing of enemy targets would bring a country to its knees had been disproven.
00:48:51.760 And America was the great proponent of this idea, which is why they went for daylight precision bombing in Northwest Europe, which also failed.
00:49:01.760 So they then transited very, very quickly.
00:49:03.760 Curtis LeMay almost did it by a slight of hand in March 1945 to area bomb Japanese cities.
00:49:09.760 And this wasn't because Curtis LeMay was a bad man.
00:49:12.760 He wanted to bring Japan to its knees.
00:49:15.760 He wanted to destroy its military potential.
00:49:17.760 He wanted to persuade the Japanese to stop fighting.
00:49:20.760 So we need to understand that.
00:49:21.760 It's really, really important.
00:49:22.760 It's a series of military mechanisms that, whilst disastrous for the lives that are lost, was salvation for the lives that were preserved.
00:49:31.760 It's really important to realize that when you're fighting a total war, you have to make a judgment about what you do in battle to achieve victory and prevent further loss.
00:49:43.760 And that was a very, very important series of conversations that took place in 1945.
00:49:47.760 And as soon as we separate out the military decisions over Japan and their moral decisions, we try and treat them as two separate things, it loses its efficaciousness.
00:49:58.760 I mean, you can't consider the moral question on its own without understanding the military decisions that were being made.
00:50:05.760 And too many people who take the moralistic line then apply bad faith judgments to the military actors.
00:50:13.760 Oh, Curtis de May was a murderer, and he was as bad as Hitler, and all this sort of nonsense, which you do here on the left of the spectrum on a regular basis.
00:50:21.760 In terms of Israel and Gaza, the same principles apply.
00:50:25.760 Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, has a sovereign right to defend itself, and it must defend itself.
00:50:32.760 In fact, its primary duty is to defend its citizens.
00:50:35.760 Now, in order to defend its citizens, it needs to take all measures in war on a proportional basis.
00:50:43.760 And it's really, really important that the purpose of war for a democracy is to right a wrong.
00:50:51.760 You need to right a wrong, but you need to do it proportionally.
00:50:54.760 And Nigel Bigger, Professor Nigel Bigger, does explain this brilliantly in a number of his books.
00:50:59.760 So if you keep those two things in mind, yes, war is justified if it rights a wrong.
00:51:06.760 And Israel is fighting to reverse the wrong or to right the wrong that was initiated in October last year, October 2023.
00:51:15.760 But it needs to do so on a proportional basis.
00:51:18.760 And that's an entirely separate subject as to whether Israel has been doing that.
00:51:21.760 My personal view is that they've done it remarkably well on a remarkably proportional basis.
00:51:26.760 If Israel was not acting proportionally, there would be aerial bombing the whole of Gaza now.
00:51:33.760 And Gaza would be a very different place to what it is.
00:51:40.760 The military operation in Gaza, in my view, has been an exemplar of military proportionality.
00:51:46.760 And that's what we need to understand. We need to keep this in mind.
00:51:49.760 Of course, the people who hate the idea of a sovereign Jewish nation, what do they attack most?
00:51:58.760 They attack this point about proportionality.
00:52:01.760 And they link proportionality with morality.
00:52:04.760 And they infer that Israel is not a legitimate state and therefore does not have a legitimate right to defend itself.
00:52:13.760 If you just follow the logic in all these things through, you'll see where it's all going.
00:52:17.760 If Israel is a Zionist colonial state, it's not legitimate, therefore has no legitimate need to defend itself.
00:52:23.760 So all the arguments around Gaza need to be stripped back to look at what the intentions and the purposes of the people who are criticizing Israel are.
00:52:34.760 And if you're able to reveal them, then you can get a sense of proportionality about the fighting as well.
00:52:39.760 Well, come back to Japan with me, because you mentioned earlier that you thought the Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, could have stopped the war from breaking out later.
00:52:49.760 But wouldn't that be disproven by the fact that even after the first bomb was dropped, when he tried to say,
00:52:57.760 guys, guys, maybe we should start thinking about it, there was a military coup against it.
00:53:01.760 Yeah, he was very nearly assassinated.
00:53:03.760 So I think my point is that he should have done what he could to prevent the war in the first place, but I don't think he had the balls, frankly, and I don't think he had the means.
00:53:13.760 The real power didn't reside with Hirohito.
00:53:16.760 He wasn't a titular head of state, he was the head of state, but actually power resided elsewhere, and power resided with Tojo in particular and the military factions.
00:53:24.760 And is that why the Americans dropped the second bomb, because they wouldn't surrender after the first one?
00:53:29.760 Yes, yes.
00:53:31.760 The only reason the second bomb was dropped was because there was absolutely no response from Tokyo whatsoever.
00:53:36.760 The idea that Japan was preparing to surrender is just not true.
00:53:41.760 There's no evidence for whatsoever.
00:53:42.760 What there is evidence for is lots of debate in Tokyo about what to do.
00:53:47.760 And we know that Hirohito was keen to draw stumps, but that hadn't happened.
00:53:53.760 And, you know, in war, you need to go through a few speed bumps before a decision is made.
00:53:58.760 And Nagasaki, sadly, was the second speed bump.
00:54:02.760 Interesting aside about Nagasaki, of the 40,000 people who were killed in Nagasaki, about 10,000 of them were Korean slave laborers.
00:54:11.760 Products of the Japanese empire working in Japan.
00:54:15.760 Amazing, isn't it?
00:54:16.760 It's really, really quite extraordinary.
00:54:18.760 When you look at the numbers to see actually Nagasaki, a largely Christian city, large numbers of Christians in Nagasaki, are being destroyed and their empire collapsing at the same time as a consequence of what they had started.
00:54:31.760 Was part of the reason that they didn't surrender, is it because the idea of surrender was deeply dishonorable to them?
00:54:39.760 Oh, definitely, yes.
00:54:40.760 And if I haven't got that impression over, then forgive me.
00:54:43.760 It's absolutely right.
00:54:44.760 The military code is basically, there's no such thing as surrender.
00:54:48.760 So Bushido, if I describe it this way, when a soldier was, when a recruit joined the army and was trained, they would send home in a little matchbox a piece of hair and a piece of fingernail, denoting that actually their lives were now the emperors, not their families.
00:55:05.760 Their family was saying to their family, this is my body.
00:55:08.760 Bury it.
00:55:09.760 I'm no longer yours.
00:55:10.760 I'm a servant of the emperor.
00:55:12.760 And in a deeply militaristic society, a deeply militaristic value-based system known as Bushido, the ultimate expression of your loyalty to your country, your family and your emperor is what?
00:55:29.760 What do you think it might be?
00:55:30.760 Death.
00:55:31.760 Yes, you've got it in one.
00:55:32.760 I've been watching Shogun.
00:55:33.760 Okay, okay.
00:55:34.760 It's not obedience.
00:55:36.760 It's not loyalty.
00:55:37.760 It's not duty.
00:55:38.760 It's death.
00:55:39.760 And that's why so many, so many, the majority of Japanese casualties in battle, when a battle had gone against them, would actually kill themselves.
00:55:50.760 They would never surrender.
00:55:51.760 And the entirety of the Burma campaign, out of the 105,000, in 1944, 105,000 Japanese soldiers who attacked into India, only 600 were taken prisoner.
00:56:01.760 And they were too injured and ill and starving to commit suicide.
00:56:06.760 Ritual harikari.
00:56:09.760 Officers had to commit seppuku, which is basically your ritual disemboweling.
00:56:13.760 You had to stab yourself with a sword and start cutting yourself.
00:56:17.760 If you were smart enough, you'd get your batman to shoot you in the head after you had done the first act to demonstrate your valour and courage and all this sort of nonsense.
00:56:27.760 Individual soldiers would commit suicide with hand grenades more often than not.
00:56:33.760 But it's very important that this Bushido code was such that it was dishonourable for a Japanese officer to go into battle with anything other than a sword with his katana.
00:56:44.760 And if he had a katana or just a fighting sword otherwise, because no Japanese soldier would ever commit to firing a bullet from a rifle or pistol.
00:56:55.760 That was just crazy.
00:56:56.760 In order to be able to demonstrate their martial valour, they needed blood on their katanas.
00:57:02.760 That speaks to the point that you made earlier, which I thought was an incredibly powerful one, which is that we rational, secular Westerners, we imagine that everybody thinks in the way that we think we do.
00:57:15.760 I don't even know that we think the way we think we do, but let's set that aside for a second.
00:57:19.760 And so we can't comprehend that maybe a country would invade another country, not because of rational reasons, but for reasons that we might consider irrational.
00:57:32.760 And war is often undertaken for irrational reasons.
00:57:35.760 The idea that everything can be deduced or reduced to rational rationality is nonsense.
00:57:41.760 I mean, human existence demonstrates that.
00:57:43.760 We are deeply irrational people.
00:57:45.760 And when you get tribes together that start beating war drums, as I said right at the start, the problem with a militaristic society is it only goes one way.
00:57:54.760 Militaristic societies end up with war.
00:57:57.760 And actually, that's one of my arguments about Putin.
00:58:00.760 Well, let's talk about that right now, because I think, I don't know whether Putin is the best example of it, but I think there is a lot of blindness now in the West, very generally speaking about, we just, I heard of another historian, I think Sarah Payne, an American, she teaches, talk about how we play half court tennis.
00:58:23.760 We only know what happens on our half of the court.
00:58:27.760 So what are we missing, Rob?
00:58:29.760 If we look at the modern world today, what are we not alive to?
00:58:32.760 Well, we play half court tennis because we can't imagine what's on the other side.
00:58:36.760 And what we tend to do is we tend to mirror our own existence with the other side.
00:58:42.760 So we assume that Putin is a good example in terms of rationality.
00:58:47.760 And China is a very good example of rationality.
00:58:50.760 If we assume that people behave in the sort of rational way that we do, then it's very easy to predict the future.
00:58:56.760 But we know that's not the case.
00:58:58.760 We tried to deal with Hitler, of course, the 1930s in a rational way without realizing that a lot of his motivations were intensely racial and therefore irrational.
00:59:07.760 So what are we missing?
00:59:09.760 The problem is that you've made the point that we don't treat our potential enemies with the respect they deserve in terms of understanding their motivations.
00:59:21.760 And I think one of the extraordinary things, I've got a good friend, Samantha Maitre, who talks about this all the time.
00:59:26.760 You know, we have cast, we are trying to understand Russia.
00:59:29.760 We're trying to understand Putin.
00:59:30.760 And what we do is we try and say, well, it's the imperial legacy.
00:59:34.760 He's basically an imperialist, which, of course, is absolute nonsense, really.
00:59:38.760 I mean, there are traces of that in Russia.
00:59:41.760 But he's an autocrat.
00:59:43.760 He's in charge.
00:59:44.760 He's the man at the top of the mafia team in Moscow at the moment.
00:59:48.760 And he's doing all he can to stay there.
00:59:50.760 And how do you stay there?
00:59:51.760 What you do is you mobilize the masses behind you.
00:59:54.760 Unfortunately, in mobilizing the masses, you repress dissent, but you mobilize the masses.
00:59:58.760 You create a culture and a myth around who you are.
01:00:01.760 We're creating a new myth about the modern Russians that's deeply linked to myths about Russia in the past.
01:00:07.760 It doesn't matter that they were communists or czarists.
01:00:09.760 It doesn't matter.
01:00:10.760 We still have to create a myth.
01:00:11.760 And he's on top of it.
01:00:13.760 He's the man who's actually shaping this myth.
01:00:15.760 And so he's not rational.
01:00:17.760 So, I mean, Ukraine is a really good example of this because, unfortunately for Ukraine,
01:00:23.760 it didn't have any secure defense deal or a mutual defense agreement with any country apart from Russia.
01:00:30.760 And Russia invaded Ukraine.
01:00:32.760 Russia had promised to protect the sovereignty of Ukraine.
01:00:36.760 Then at a point where that became no use to Vladimir, he invaded.
01:00:42.760 And he had persuaded himself that there's a real danger here that in trying to create this new myth about yourself and about your identity, you fall into hubris.
01:00:52.760 You fall into this delusion that part of this myth is true.
01:00:56.760 And he had built up this idea that Ukraine was the beating heart of the Soviet identity and needs to be brought back in the fold.
01:01:05.760 The resonance with Russia and Ukraine with Hitler and Grace Deutschland is unbelievable.
01:01:11.760 People now forget about Grace Deutschland.
01:01:13.760 Grace Deutschland was the driving force of the Nazi Party.
01:01:16.760 The idea that the real Germany existed where German blood flowed through people's veins.
01:01:21.760 That was the natural borders of Germany.
01:01:24.760 Russia's got the same idea.
01:01:25.760 It's this Russian identity you all know very well.
01:01:28.760 And what Putin has been trying to do is to give expression to it.
01:01:31.760 And it's very interesting when you ask the question, why did the Germans follow Hitler?
01:01:36.760 They followed Hitler because it graced Deutschland.
01:01:38.760 It's an incredibly powerful motivating force in society.
01:01:42.760 This unifying sense of one German culture.
01:01:45.760 Why are Russians following Putin?
01:01:47.760 Well, the forces against Russia have been repressed quite brutally.
01:01:53.760 But actually, people like the idea that there is a new sense of identity for this great Russian nation.
01:01:58.760 And it's very attractive.
01:02:00.760 It's very powerful.
01:02:01.760 So what are we not talking about?
01:02:03.760 We're not talking about actually what's really happening.
01:02:06.760 We're not talking about how we can draw the conflict and Ukraine to a close because there is a pretty easy way in my view to drawing it to a close.
01:02:15.760 Well, let's end on that.
01:02:16.760 What is the easy way?
01:02:17.760 Well, it's not by defeating Russia.
01:02:18.760 Russia is never going to be defeated.
01:02:19.760 That's just an absurd notion.
01:02:21.760 But it does mean Ukraine defeating Russia.
01:02:23.760 It doesn't mean the West defeating Russia.
01:02:25.760 It means drawing the fighting to a close and coming to a negotiated deal.
01:02:29.760 The day after, I'm not an Ostradamus, but the day after the invasion took place, I wrote a long article for the Murrow in which I said, this will be a bloody fight, but it will end in a negotiated settlement.
01:02:41.760 And there are going to be some trade offs required.
01:02:44.760 Look at Korea.
01:02:45.760 Korea was divided arbitrarily in 1945 in order to disarm the Japanese.
01:02:51.760 Joe Stalin created a puppet state in the North where he wanted to create a buffer series of states around Soviet Union, and North Korea was part of it.
01:03:01.760 And North Korea has never been united since.
01:03:04.760 There is a demarcation line between the two.
01:03:06.760 We are looking at the same in Ukraine.
01:03:08.760 The big question is how much of Donbass and Le Hance goes back to Ukraine, where the Crimea stays.
01:03:14.760 And interestingly enough, I use this example all the time.
01:03:17.760 People need to remember Korea.
01:03:18.760 It's a great example of, it's a great proto-Ukraine.
01:03:21.760 Korean War, 1950, 1953.
01:03:23.760 Syngman Rhee, the head of the Republic of Korea, president of the Republic of Korea, so South Korea, was desperate not to hand over any of his territory to the North, and desperate to unite the whole country under democratic, well, he wasn't really a Democrat, capitalist, democratic South.
01:03:42.760 And we have this challenge in Ukraine.
01:03:44.760 So I have utmost respect for President Zelensky.
01:03:47.760 But he needs to recognize, and Ukraine needs to recognize, that the war will end with a negotiated settlement that will not meet all their national imperatives.
01:03:57.760 But the first thing that needs to happen is, Russia needs to be persuaded to draw stumps.
01:04:04.760 And he's not going to be persuaded to draw stumps if we, in the West, don't actually enable Ukraine to defend itself as it ought to.
01:04:12.760 I don't think anyone in the West should be deluded in the sense that the West can defeat the Russians in battle.
01:04:20.760 It's never going to happen.
01:04:21.760 Russia is too big and too strong for that ever to happen, despite the embarrassment that they've suffered recently over the last few years.
01:04:30.760 Actually, the Russians have behaved extraordinarily militarily.
01:04:34.760 Their operations in Ukraine have been a complete choke, with the exception of the defensive buildup, the strategy that they've built up over the last few months, where they've prevented the Ukrainians from actually penetrating Donbass and Luhansk.
01:04:51.760 But actually, they're being whittled away.
01:04:53.760 But in the long term, Russia will survive the long war.
01:04:56.760 Ukraine won't.
01:04:57.760 So that needs to be brought to a close.
01:04:59.760 But there needs to be a decisive military breakthrough that forces Russia to the negotiating table.
01:05:05.760 Ukraine will almost certainly have to give up Crimea, and that's going to be a real challenge for Zelensky, because that's the big political problem for him.
01:05:14.760 And even leaving any of the territory along the Dnieper in Russian hands is going to be a political problem for him, but I suggest it's a necessity.
01:05:25.760 There are solutions to it.
01:05:27.760 Well, there are halfway solutions to it.
01:05:30.760 Possibly, you know, we have a DMZ patrolled by the United Nations or something in order to be able to separate the forces.
01:05:39.760 And actually, that's the situation in Cyprus since 1974.
01:05:44.760 So Cyprus and Korea are really good examples of the idea that ultimate victory can be achieved by either side is a nonsense.
01:05:51.760 We just need to stop that now.
01:05:53.760 We need to get to a point where both sides stop fighting and a negotiated settlement of some kind does lock peace into our political framework, because without that, we're going to have endless war.
01:06:08.760 Robert, thank you so very much for coming on.
01:06:10.760 It's been an absolute pleasure.
01:06:11.760 We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second.
01:06:15.760 But before actually, why don't you tell people which of your books they should read if they've found any of this conversation?
01:06:20.760 Brilliant.
01:06:21.760 Brilliant.
01:06:22.760 Well, thank you for that.
01:06:23.760 I think that's the story of this great clash between America, China, Japan, Britain, and India in the Second World War, 1942 to 1945, is my big book.
01:06:32.760 It's a book I've been working on for 35 years.
01:06:35.760 And it brings all these ideas together, really reminding people that war is a consequence of political determination.
01:06:41.760 And that political determination was Japan's desire to create an empire.
01:06:45.760 And it came up against empires that were differently constructed and were able to respond in better ways than the Japanese.
01:06:51.760 And it demonstrated that one empire is different to the other.
01:06:54.760 One might even say one empire is better than another, but you have to be very careful with that.
01:06:59.760 The other really big book I wrote with General Lord Dennett last year was called Victory to Defeat, which is really trying to understand the state of the world now in terms of the demilitarization of the West between the 1920s and 30s.
01:07:10.760 And the 1920s and 30s, the West disarmed itself completely and became very weak in the face of the dictator, the rise of the dictators in the 1930s.
01:07:18.760 So our question was, we actually argue in the book that the British Army in particular, and the Commonwealth armies, the Empire armies, were dramatically successful in 1918.
01:07:29.760 And they defeated the armies of Lutendorf.
01:07:31.760 And instead of the German armies being stabbed in the back, they were stabbed in the chest and defeated.
01:07:37.760 And that acts against the Nazi myth that the German armies were stabbed in the back and helped the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
01:07:46.760 And yet by 1940, we had completely lost the idea of how to fight.
01:07:49.760 And this is my point about imagining.
01:07:51.760 We lost the ability to imagine what modern war could look like and had disarmed ourselves to the state that actually we weren't really ready to fight against the enemy in the way that we should have done until about 1944.
01:08:06.760 Quite extraordinary.
01:08:08.760 Fortunately, Hitler gave us time.
01:08:10.760 He went east in 1941 and gave us time to prepare.
01:08:14.760 The Japanese did largely the same.
01:08:16.760 After their invasion of the Far East in 1942, they basically sat in their laurels, started getting eaten up by the Americans in the Pacific, sat in their laurels in Burma, and were smashed by a reinvigorated Indian army in 1944.
01:08:27.760 So those two books would be really helpful.
01:08:29.760 There are lots also out there as well that you could fill your boots with.
01:08:32.760 Fantastic.
01:08:33.760 Well, we'll make sure the links are in the description and we're going to ask you questions from our supporters.
01:08:37.760 Brilliant. Thank you.
01:08:38.760 Blame for the Bengal famine of 1943 is now laid by many people at the feet of Churchill.
01:08:46.760 To what extent is this a true and to what extent was Japan responsible for the famine?
01:08:51.760 Britain was not responsible for the Bengal famine. The Japanese were.
01:08:54.760 Britain was a Japanese one.