President Harry Truman

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war.

Kirk Saduski

8:15 AM, August 6th. A white flash races across the sky. The bombing of Hiroshima prompts a meeting of Japan's leaders, the Big Six, just as a second atomic bomb devastates Nagasaki three days later. Emperor Hirohito makes a decision. The war must end. The surrender of Japan is announced on August 15th, and formally signed on September 2nd.

Archival

We take you now from the White House in Washington to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific, General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur.

Douglas MacArthur

My fellow countrymen, today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death, the seas bear only commerce. Men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight.

Kirk Saduski

Don, let's talk about these first few days in August and what happens both militarily and diplomatically.

Donald Miller

So, what happens to the war the day after or the afternoon after Hiroshima? It goes on as before. We don't stop, negotiate this thing, or is there a cease fire. Of course there isn't. And I think you have to very briefly give a sense of what horrible shape Japan was in militarily. First of all, you know, the population is beginning to starve.

Kirk Saduski

We have to keep in mind, as you're suggesting, the war keeps going.

Donald Miller

Oh yeah.

Kirk Saduski

In other words, there wasn't, "Hey, we have this bomb. We don't know what's gonna happen. Let's wait. Let's just call a halt, drop the bomb, see how they respond, see how it works." It didn't work that way at all.

Donald Miller

You have to go back to what they knew at the time. Well, there were two U.S. Air Force B-29 outfits on Tinian, okay? There is the conventional bombing that wiped out Tokyo, 100,000 people in one night, and they're still hitting Tokyo. And then there is the special Composite Group, as it's called. That's Tibbets and his gang. They're gonna fly the atomic missions. They're separated from everybody else. The guys down here, you know, nothing. Who are those guys? They don't go on missions. They're not flying against Tokyo. Why aren't they flying? Okay, well, they're dropping these things that look like gigantic pumpkins, practice bombs the size of the atomic bomb, that weigh 8 to 10,000 pounds, and they're particularly practicing. When you can't fly straight over a target with an atomic bomb and drop it below you, your plane will explode. It'll be caught in the firestorm. As it was, one of the planes, the Artiste almost got pulled into the cloud. The navigator, the tail gunner screamed out, "The cloud's coming our way," So they have to bank real sharply, so sharply that the wings could break off. And Tibbets practiced this with his plane, the Enola Gay, again and again and again, and that was a great worry. So, everybody, the other bomber pilots are wondering, "What the hell are they doing?" the word "atomic" maybe floating in the air or something like that. So while we're running the atomic raids, we're still bombing conventionally. We don't stop the conventional bombing. They sent a mission up the day Hiroshima was done. They sent a mission up the day Nagasaki was bombed.

Kirk Saduski

Well, and the embargo continues.

Donald Miller

The embargo continues.

Kirk Saduski

And as you said, they're dropping mines in the harbor, so this is all happening simultaneously.

Donald Miller

And the subs have cut off all supplies coming in. So this is complete defeat.

Kirk Saduski

So, the first bomb has dropped on August 6th. The next bomb is dropped a few days later, as you said, on Nagasaki. In between, a big event happens, though. In between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets declare war on Japan, and send their forces, as you alluded to earlier, streaming into Manchuria, and that's a whole other thing, and obviously all of these things working in conjunction.

Donald Miller

Conjunction, and while this is happening, put yourself in the mind of the Composite Group that's gonna drop the bomb. Now, they wanna drop more bombs. Groves told them they'll have another one ready by the end of August, probably three more in September. They do know that, okay? They're gonna fly more missions, more atomic missions. People forget that these missions are accident-prone. Well, the first inclination of how dangerous it is, is they could see, and Rich has been there, they could see how actually short the runway was. It was only a mile long. That sounds like a Herculean runway, you know, in terms of length, but you just made it, generally. You achieved altitude when you were just over the water. They didn't think they were gonna make it. Lewis, the copilot, you know, yelled to Tibbets. Lewis kept a notebook. "Too heavy, too heavy," and telling him to abort. Tibbets said nothing. He just flew off. They called him the bull. He was like that. He was bullheaded. And he just took off, and they're off. They had a cigarette and off they went. The second mission, I'm not gonna go into a long dissertation on this, but the second mission flown by a guy named Sweeney, who did fly with Tibbets on the first mission, he gets the lead for the second mission. The weaponeer is in charge of the bomb. There's a guy named Ashworth in this case. He had worked at Los Alamos. He knew a lot about it, and when things went wrong with it, he knew it. So he crawls down into the bomb bay to check on the bomb. They're sitting down in there. They see that the red lights are blinking, which means it's gonna blow up any second, and nobody knew how to turn 'em off, turn the switches off. So they're looking all over the plane for the blueprints, and they can't find them, and finally Ashworth finds the blueprints and disengages them, and puts the right plugs on, and off they went. Sweeney misses his rendezvous with the weather plane. They're supposed to meet. He has gasoline problems, and it's likely he's gonna run out of gasoline. He's told that he could only bomb visually, so he goes over the main target, Kokura, and he circles and circles, and his navigator can't find the target visually. So he asks, "Can we get back to Okinawa? Do we have enough to get home?" And they told him, "Probably not." But if you go to another target, their secondary target is Nagasaki. They go to Nagasaki, and LeMay had bombed, the same day, a city to the north, and all that wastage in the clouds, all the smoke and stuff drifted over Nagasaki and they couldn't see the target. So they called down to the bombardier, and he said, "I can't see this sucker." So Sweeney says, "Ashworth," who's in charge of the bomb, who was in the back of the plane, "you gotta get his permission." Sweeney asked Ashworth if he can bomb radar, and Ashworth says "No." Well he said, "I'm gonna do it anyway, because I'm not gonna drop this sucker in the sea of Japan. I'm not going back with the bomb, and I'm not gonna land with that sucker, 'cause it's already armed." Sweeney said, "Well, I'm going in."

Kirk Saduski

But it's a combination of things, as we've said.

Donald Miller

I'm just trying to get a sense of like how fast they had to act. They had to get to Nagasaki. People say, "Why Nagasaki?" They had to get that thing operational and have them see that we have another one so they could believe in the third one.

Kirk Saduski

I believe the third one was scheduled to be dropped within a week.

Donald Miller

It was.

Kirk Saduski

Yeah. Right. Rich, what do you think?

Richard Frank

Yeah, I think that this really gets to the issue of, you know, we talk about what prompted the Japanese to surrender, ultimately. The emperor, in his famous recorded speech broadcast on the 15th of August talks about three things. He talks about the fact that he'd lost faith in the counter-invasion battle, which, that was like a gut shot to the Imperial Army, 'cause they believed that that was the option that was gonna give Japan something better than unconditional surrender. And he said he was also the conventional, and the atomic bombing. And then he used a third term. He called it the domestic situation, and what this is was a typical Japanese euphemism, and what it really amounted to was the fact that the leadership, particularly the emperor and several other tiers of the leadership down through the Big Six, like Admiral Yonai, they believed that the food situation in particular, and the general privations of the Japanese population were reaching such a critical point that even the typically, you know, unbelievably loyal Japanese populace was gonna go into revolt, 'cause they were starving to death in mass numbers. And that issue was becoming more and more critical in their thinking at that time, and that's what the emperor talks about. And, in fact, he comes back to that issue as being the basic underpinnings of why he decides to surrender.

Kirk Saduski

In between the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. Taken as a whole, this was what really put the complete pressure, right, on the Japanese and the emperor to finally surrender.

Richard Frank

You know, I think we have a very fundamental problem that the Japanese leadership, after having been basically frozen in its devotion to Ketsu-Go for months and months and months, then has to make a decision in just a couple of days based upon what they know. And the key thing, I think, in this is that I think you understand the emperor is a critical person in this because he starts the entire process. If he does not start it, we're not gonna get to a surrender. And on the 8th of August, he meets with the Foreign Minister Togo, and he tells Togo at that time that he wants the war to end right now. Now, that is after Hiroshima, before Soviet intervention, before Nagasaki. And for a while I was skeptical about that because of the source material. Later we found there was in fact, as was typical when the emperor would meet someone in his chambers, there was a witness present, and a witness provided a statement describing and verifying the version that Togo gave, that that's what the emperor said. The emperor said, "We must end the war right now," on August 8th. That starts the whole process. The other problem we had was initially the Japanese militarists did not believe from Hiroshima that that meant we had more than one bomb. Specifically the Imperial Navy said that expressly when they were talking about it for the first time. "Okay, the Americans may have one bomb, but they can't have that many. They may not be that powerful. Maybe they'll be dissuaded by international pressure from using them." So they're still not acknowledging that we have actually not merely one bomb, but an arsenal. And that's what Nagasaki does. Nagasaki is the card that tells the Japanese we have, or we imply to the Japanese we have an arsenal of atomic weapons.

Kirk Saduski

When, in fact, we did not.

Richard Frank

In fact it was a big bluff. Now, having said that, that starts the train down. There is, you know, in this matter, you still have the issue of will the armed forces comply, all the armed forces, including the armed forces overseas, and I think the Soviets deserve credit for implying their pressure on the Asian continent is gonna be important in getting the forces in China, and by implication the forces elsewhere in Southeast Asia. So, it's not as though I'm saying the Soviets had no influence on the surrender or the compliance with the surrender. The process of getting to surrender, however, that was triggered by basically blockade bombardment and the atomic bombs.

Kirk Saduski

So, it's a confluence of things, that it's now we've dropped two and we're going to drop a third atomic bomb, the blockade is choking Japan, and the extraordinary pressure put on the Japanese Imperial System and the emperor himself. Talk a little bit about that, and because there's real internal dissension within the Japanese higher command, what to do, both the Foreign Minister Togo, Emperor Hirohito, and the so-called Big Six. There's still debate, and there's actually even with all this pressure, there's not consensus to surrender.

Donald Miller

If the emperor goes, the military goes. They'll go together, and there goes the whole system. As one general said, "Rather we all get exterminated than have that happen. Rather complete annihilation."

Kirk Saduski

Well, talk about, because there actually was an attempted coup at this time. In August, was it? Gimme the exact...

Richard Frank

Right. It takes... The emperor makes this decision on the 14th. He's going to make the final decision that the government accepts is on the 14th by the emperor. Then they go into how do they announce this. Well, the emperor, a speech is written up for the emperor to deliver. It's recorded on a record to be broadcast on the 15th. During that night, some radical middle-grade officers in the Imperial Army put together a coup d'etat attempt at the Imperial Palace. They kill one senior general. They occupy the palace grounds looking for this recording, and it's been hidden away, and fortunately they don't find it. And the emperor, we know now, actually observed part of this through the armored shades of the room that he was in at that time. So the next morning, the broadcast is made. However, what's been lost in this story is that we are intercepting their communications, and we find out that after the emperor's broadcast, two of the most senior Japanese commanders overseas, the fellow in China and the fellow in what they call the Southern Area, which is mainly Southeast Asia, they both immediately replied, in the American vernacular, "Hell, no. We won't go." They don't agree to surrender. And as the Navy Minister Yonai would say later that for about four days after the emperor's announcement, it was the most tense period that he knew of the entire period, because they were on pins and needles as to whether the armed forces, or at least large parts of them, would agree to surrender.

Donald Miller

Well, there were rumblings that there were dissenters at various bases throughout the globe, throughout the Pacific, and they sent messages to them, yeah.

Richard Frank

Exactly. And there was an air base near Tokyo, Atsugi, where the rebels literally took off in planes towing signs, you know, urging people to continue resistance. They eventually sent some troops in there to seize the air base and take the propellers off the planes so that, first of all, they couldn't keep doing it, and secondly, so they couldn't crash the Missouri as it sailed into Tokyo Bay.

Kirk Saduski

So, these were real dead-enders.

Richard Frank

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

I mean, how pervasive was that attitude?

Richard Frank

Well, my view is that it was an extraordinarily contingent moment. If you can imagine, like all these senior officers are lined up in a rank, right, and everyone out of the corner of their eye is looking right and left to see who will be the person who will revolt against the surrender. Will anyone step forward? And if one person stepped forward or one significant person stepped forward, we might've been in a hell of a lot of trouble at that point. And, of course, initially everyone is extraordinarily wary about how this is gonna go. Are they actually gonna surrender, because people had profound doubts about that. And very quickly it becomes clear that apparently we are gonna get compliance with the surrender. And then MacArthur arrives, and he's been appointed as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers for the occupation of Japan.

Kirk Saduski

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 150,000 people. In the book, "Hiroshima," author John Hersey describes how Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor's widow, was watching a neighbor from her kitchen window at the moment of blast on August 6th.

Patricia Clarkson

As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door. The reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step when something picked her up, and she seemed to fly into the next room. Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pummeled her. Everything became dark, for she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, "Mother, help me." And she saw her youngest, Miyako, the five-year-old, buried up to her breast and unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.

Kirk Saduski

As World War II finally comes to a close, mankind is faced with a new, even existential moral challenge. In history, there's all these, the questions and contingencies, and I've asked, when you get into these discussions, what if the bomb had been ready a year earlier? Would we have dropped it on Germany?

Donald Miller

Yeah, yeah. I've talked to scientists, people involved with the project. It was designed to be dropped on Germany, and they were eager to drop it on Germany. There was disappointment when the Germans do surrender. The scientists, many revolt at Los Alamos. A lot of them wanted to call the project off. "We've accomplished what we came to Los Alamos to do. This was designed for the fascists, for the Nazis." And that's why they were there.

Kirk Saduski

One of the things that's brought up quite often, and it was discussed at the time, why not a demonstration of the bomb?

Donald Miller

I asked Morrison that, the physicist. He said, "What the hell are you talking about? The demonstration was Hiroshima." That shows you what they would've done.

Richard Frank

Yeah, well, I think that gets back, if you understand the significance of the sequence of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you realize that what would've happened with a single demonstration of bomb is the Japanese, certainly the militarists' response would've been very interesting. "Let's see you do three in a row." You know, that the whole issue was not that we had one bomb, which, because of their own atomic bomb program... That was sort of the irony of the Japanese atomic bomb program. It didn't give them a bomb, but it gave insight, up to the highest levels of the government, of how incredibly difficult it was to make fissionable material. That's why, after they get the American announcement that Hiroshima has been hit by an atomic bomb, they don't convene a set of experts to tell them what is this thing, this atomic bomb. It's known right at the top levels of the government. They know that an atomic bomb is theoretically feasible, but they still know also from their own failed efforts that making fissionable material is really, really difficult, and does one bomb prove that the Americans have a whole arsenal of them? No, it doesn't. They're going to insist on further proof, and Nagasaki is the further proof.

Kirk Saduski

There's inevitably, because of this new weapon, this new technology, we didn't quite know they didn't quite know exactly the impact, the effect, but certainly suspected. In fact, there were some pretty horrific suspicions. Talk about a little bit, what was the internal discussion in terms of the morality of this and the moral efficacy of using this bomb that no one really quite knew what was going to happen.

Richard Frank

I think the critical element in the context for this decision is that we had gone through this basic removal of every moral barrier to the use of massive aerial firepower against urban areas. About the only taboo that was still honored on the American side by 1945 was no first use of biological or chemical weapons, and that was it. Everything else was basically on the table. The other problems that, about the issue of a moral considerations at this time, Truman, in my view, you know, one of the things about his position, when he became president, he said, and was very sincere at saying, "My job is execute the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt," who started the atomic bomb program. And then as you get to 1945, can anyone tell Harry Truman that Franklin Roosevelt would not have authorized the use of those weapons? Nobody. It's very instructive that Truman calls a meeting to talk with his advisors about the invasion. He never calls a specific meeting to talk about the use of atomic weapons. And beyond that, there's another element to this story that gets overlooked, which was that the scientists who developed the bomb, and some of whom developed these qualms in '45 about whether to use it or not, they had conveyed to the policymakers that a bomb was primarily heat and blast. The radiation component, they knew it was there, but they had convinced themselves that basically anyone who would be killed by radiation exposure would already have been killed by heat or blast. So, in my view, had the scientists explained that there was this radiation component that might produce these lingering effects and deaths, which would be like poison gas or biological weapons, Mr. Truman and Mr. Stimson, in my view, would clearly have paused to think about using the weapon, but I cannot say that they would not have used the weapon.

Kirk Saduski

I've read that also that there were others who had questions, and there was some ambivalence. I know General Marshall, apparently General Eisenhower, you mentioned Secretary Stimson, and others, even Admiral King. It wasn't clear-cut. They understood the moral ambivalence of this question.

Richard Frank

To a degree. Actually, in my view, after the war was over and the bombs had been used, then suddenly people came out of the woodwork, saying that they had had reservations or oppositions.

Donald Miller

That was Eisenhower.

Richard Frank

Yeah, yeah.

Donald Miller

He did not raise his voice.

Richard Frank

No.

Kirk Saduski

So it was afterwards.

Richard Frank

Yeah, yeah.

Kirk Saduski

It's in his memoirs.

Donald Miller

You're right.

And the scientists have spoken about it. I had a long interview with Philip Morrison, who was one of the key guys on the project, when he was in retirement at MIT, and the whole interview was about the morality of the thing and was there a debate about this sort of thing. And he said, "There were debates in the evenings, informal debates. We never put anything to paper." He said, "To me," it's just what you said, Rich, before, "there's no difference between this and what we were already doing. We'd crossed the moral thresholds." He said, "Everybody understood that. We did it with Germany. We took out 64 Japanese cities and 64 German cities."

Richard Frank

When you talk about the morality of it, you know, one of the arguments that particularly irritates me is about Soviet intervention. And what's wrong with that argument is not that it's an alternative that should have been considered. It's presented as though there's no moral element to that, whereas Soviet intervention, we know killed literally hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, 340, 440,000 if you use some of the numbers that are out there.

Kirk Saduski

Remind us of the timeframe of that.

Richard Frank

The timeframe?

Donald Miller

'45.

Richard Frank

That's in '45. This is what happens in the...

Kirk Saduski

But a very short period of 1945.

Donald Miller

A couple months.

Richard Frank

Well, end of the first part of '46, or it's that winter that kills a lot of them. But, you know, it's not like... The problem is not that a lot of people are going to die to end the war. The question is who should it be. In 1945, the cabinet secretary, a fellow named Sakomizu, made a very interesting observation about the effects of the bombs, particularly the two bombs. He said that the supreme conceit of the Japanese military and naval leadership was that Japanese spirit was superior to all other nations' peoples, races, and the notion that someone had superior spirit was virtually unthinkable, particularly that those mongrel Americans had superior spirit was particularly something they wouldn't accept. But he said, "When you use the bombs, you suddenly had harnessed supernatural forces." And now these people could turn around and say, "We were never overcome by superior spirit by any other human beings. We were overcome by supernatural forces."

Kirk Saduski

Well, you know what, I realize we're talking a lot about Japan. We haven't spoken really about Germany. How did the first few months of the postwar work in Germany?

Donald Miller

In Germany, we have great documentation. We have the letters of the occupation forces, and most importantly, we have the letters of the American soldiers who are conquering, have crossed the Rhine, and are dealing with Germans who are still resisting and how they felt about them. And it's wild hatred. It really is, almost uncontrollable hatred.

Kirk Saduski

For the GIs against the Germans?

Donald Miller

Yeah, yeah.

And that's what Martha Gellhorn and the reporters were saying. Yet, when it came to the Germans, I mean, there was no holds barred. Gellhorn wrote one piece where she said, "I'm sick of hearing it, I'm sick of hearing it. I hear it in every village. 'There were no Jews here.'" There were Jews here. There were Jews here. Lee Miller just hated the Nazis. She would have to leave the room if she heard German spoken. Because they're coming into dead-enders, Germans who fight to the last, and who wants to be the last soldier killed in World War II?

Kirk Saduski

Can we talk about the so-called Werewolves?

Donald Miller

Yeah, there were Werewolves, small Werewolf groups. The consensus among most German historians is their strength was exaggerated as an organized group, but there were pockets of resistance depending on the towns. Dresden had large Werewolf gangs. I interviewed a guy named John Morris. He was an Air Force gunner. And I said, "John, why did you guys bomb Dresden so close to the end of the war?" He said, "How the hell did we know it was the end of the war? I mean, we have all this bombing going on. Did it work?"

Kirk Saduski

Did it work, Don?

Donald Miller

Yes and no. It didn't work at first. We didn't have enough planes, we didn't have enough pilots, we didn't have good enough guidance system. We couldn't pinpoint bomb, so whatever we bombed, we bombed inaccurately, and we killed a lot of innocent people. And we didn't even get the targets, but we got better at it. There isn't a nation in World War II that could win anywhere without air support. No one. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. Too often, I think, historians divide into factions. "Eh, he's a bomber guy or he's an infantry guy," you know? Well, no, you know, they're working together.

Kirk Saduski

There's bomber guys, there's infantry guys. What is, Don, what kind of guy is Don Miller?

Donald Miller

Peace.

Kirk Saduski

He's a peace guy.

Donald Miller

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

Well, and this unfortunately sometimes is the way to secure peace. We're joined once again by Doris Kearns Goodwin to discuss how America and the world changed in the wake of World War II. We've talked about the unprecedented nature in what Harry Truman or President Truman faced, and maybe nobody other than FDR himself or Abraham Lincoln had faced anything like the enormous pressures and problems he faced, but something he faced that no other American president faced. Talk about how the world changed after the Manhattan Project produced an atomic bomb.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Yeah, it's hard to imagine that it was one of those moments in time when everything changed, and I'm not sure people fully knew that at the moment that it happened, but this weapon that was then unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would change the whole nature of warfare. And the comment he made was, "The Japanese began the war at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid manyfold." I mean, that's just a very plain statement that shows a certain sense of this was right and just that this had to happen, even though it was an extraordinary thing to happen, and has obviously been questioned and requestioned in all the years since. Was it necessary? Could they have done an experimental look somewhere else? Could they have ended the war without the million casualties? But still, I don't know if he fully understood what it meant to the whole world later. I mean, you wouldn't know that that was as big a dividing line as it we know it as in history that this new weapon that was fundamentally different from the weapons we'd used before had come onto the world scene and changed the way we thought about warfare.

Kirk Saduski

Again, help us understand. Now it really is over, right? After VE Day, or on VE Day, there was still the war against Japan. But now with VJ Day and the surrender on September 2nd on the deck of the Missouri, the war is over. Doris, what could that have been like around the world?

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Oh, how I would've loved to be in New York on those days. You know, I was just a couple years old, so I wouldn't have been able to absorb it, I don't think, but the memories that when you see those pictures of the crowds in the streets and the ticker-tape parades, and that iconic picture of the sailor kissing his girl is sort of a metaphor for husbands coming home, families being restored, but obviously the whole thing was much more complex than that, because there were millions who didn't come home. You know, there were millions of civilians who were killed. So that moment of exultation, you know, now as we look back on it, is also tinged with enormous sadness of the enormous price that had to be paid, which had to be paid. I mean, I have no doubt as an historian, some wars may not have to have been fought, but this one had to be fought or Western civilization and everything we knew about democracy would've been undone if Hitler had achieved what he wanted to achieve. So those memories, they're real, to be able to wish you'd been part of it, but a lot of other things happened at the same time that are more sad, in addition to the families who never got restored. I think about the women who were working in the factories in America, and they were told the day after Japan surrendered, "You're no longer needed. You can go home now." You know, they were needed before, and now they're suddenly no longer needed. The childcare centers that had set up in all of these factories and shipyards were closed down. They were no longer needed, 'cause the women weren't gonna be there. I mean, in the end, the women really did stay at work, many of them, and they knew what it was like to have a job and to feel that sense of mastery, but then on the other hand, there's so many extraordinary things that happened after World War II. A giant middle class is born because of the G.I. Bill of Rights, in part, where working class kids got a chance to go to college for the first time. They were the best students ever seen in these colleges, 'cause they're mature, and they changed their life story. Migrations took place during this time from the South to the North and the East to the West. People had traveled in ways they never had before, so the country emerged as a completely different country as a result of World War II, and for a period of time, a country that had more economic opportunity and more social justice than for... These are the forgotten years of the Civil Rights Revolution as well. So much happened to Black and with Black Americans fighting during that period of time that the country changed fundamentally as a result of the war, and in many ways, a better change.

Kirk Saduski

One of the aspects of the war that we just haven't paid enough attention to. We talk a lot about, you just mentioned the casualties, 50 million, 65 million fatalities, but another casualty that isn't talked about is the mothers and fathers throughout the war. Talk about just the cost, what it must have cost to mothers and fathers across the world.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Oh, it's hard to imagine, you know, just the daily knowledge that casualty lists would come. They'd be posted up sometimes in the villages. You would hear from a telegram every time somebody came to your door. I've heard parents say they were afraid that it might be the news that something had happened to their child, so they lived with that daily fear, and for many of them, that fear was realized when they heard that the son was gone, or when they, later, they knew that the child was gonna come home with deep, deep injuries. But for all of them, I think at that moment, if the people did come home safe and sound, even though it was still, they were safe, but they may not have been sound, they'd had been through something terrible, all of them, at least the victory allowed them to feel a sense of camaraderie in a way that later wars like Vietnam didn't even allow that to happen when the soldiers came home. In this case, there was great rejoicing, but it's still, it's just shadowed by the memory of having been through something really quite terrible, a terrible price that had to be paid. But it had to be paid, just as, I think, a terrible price had to be paid by the Civil War, but it had to be paid. I mean, I think about 1945 and I think about 1865 as those two marking points in our country's history where democracy was in peril, in great sense in both places. And in 1861, when that war started, by 1865, the Union was restored, emancipation was secured. The original sin of our country was removed by emancipation. Slavery was gone. And by 1945, what Hitler might've done, or what the fascists might've done to not only Western Europe, but had they succeeded in that, who knows what would've happened where else. The world was in danger because of the fascists and because of Hitler and Japanese at that time, and the fact that the Allies were able to win that war, which wasn't clear at all in the early years of the war, meant that not only democracy, but Western civilization was saved as we know it.

Kirk Saduski

Doris Kearns Goodwin, thank you so much. What an honor and a pleasure. I will talk to you soon, my friend.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

I know so. Thank you so much. What a pleasure to be with you, Kirk.

Kirk Saduski

John McManus joins us to explore how veterans faced and often struggled to adjust to a new post-war life. So we've talked about the trauma the guys had when they came across the unimaginable, but how was it after? How did they come home from the unimaginable? And not just this particular, but how did they come home, both in European Theater and from the Pacific Theater, how did they come home? Don and I, several years ago helped produce a documentary for HBO called "He Has Seen War," and we were asked to make something that combined "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific." What did we do? What could we do? And we decided very quickly, how did they come home from the war? Because there's the notion of it was the Good War, and they came home to ticker-tape parades, the G.I. Bill, and "Happy Days are Here Again." Of course, it's much more complex. That's what one of the things we tried to explore in that film. You guys, talk about it, Don. We did so much work on this and you were so great on it. What was the reality? How did the men come home from the Pacific? How did they come home for the North Atlantic? How did they come home from the ETO?

Donald Miller

One of the worst experiences was coming home for a leave, a short leave, and you come from a horrific battle where you've seen 25 of your friends' faces blown off and things like that, and you walk into a Christmas celebration in a big department store, and people are consuming, and singing, and celebrating the holidays, and meeting with folks, and nobody's talking about the war. Anger, a lot of anger, alienation and anger and things like that. And then there's the disillusionment, you know, Guarnere, Bill Guarnere, he's told, "Okay, soldier, when you go home, you can claim your job. Reclaim your job. It's yours." He worked at Baldwin Locomotive. He went in, they said, "Yeah, that's part of the contract, but, Bill, you only have one leg. You can't work here." He just spun into a real deep depression.

John McManus

Who could blame him? I mean, you've lost a leg for this country, and then your job isn't waiting for you.

Donald Miller

Yeah, Bob Leckie comes home, and he's in Jersey, and he had been a reporter before the war. He got his job back, but the first series of articles he did was on the prejudice against the GIs in housing. They didn't want young guys who'd been trained to handle guns and could maybe be hell raisers and things like that. A lot of the guys couldn't find sites for reunions. Nobody would accept them.

John McManus

You know, in the larger context, I mean, you got millions of guys coming home and transitioning, and most are not, you know, on the right end of parades and whatever. Most of it is pretty anonymous and difficult and alienating, and you don't even have to be a combat veteran to have a disconnect with the society you've protected. And you're trying to transition, figure out what you're gonna do. You're restless in many cases. And, you know, there's another element to this, too, that I think we still don't come face to face with enough. If you're African-American, you know, you're coming home to the same old, same old in many places. Isaac Woodard, what happens with him, you know, this is a guy who's just honorably discharged, going home on a bus and needs to use the restroom, and then gets into an altercation with a bus driver who calls in police officers who batter Isaac and blind him. You know, and it becomes this massive national story that really helps lead to changes in civil rights. But you may be denied your veterans benefits, or who knows what. So the adjustments, depending on who you are and where you are, I think, you know, who knows, but it's not really easy.

Kirk Saduski

Yeah, I know that even something like the G.I. Bill was not equitably distributed. Can you talk about that a little bit?

John McManus

Absolutely. So the G.I. Bill obviously is a federal program, but it's dispersed through the states. So if you happen to be an African-American veteran in Mississippi, that's a state that decides, "We're not gonna give you your G.I. benefits." And so they're either gonna hope that you don't know about it, which is true in many cases. You're talking millions of people. Is they're really that good of an educational system through the VA and whatever to help you know this? But also they're just going to outright deny the benefits. And this is a calculated thing to kind of erase or whitewash the African-American contribution so that you don't have the dismantling of Jim Crow, because it means things politically, and it's really quite similar to the aftermath of the Civil War in that sense. So that's one challenge you would have if you happened to be a Black Southerner. You could be denied your benefits on that basis. It depended on where you were from. You know, if you happened to be Mexican-American, if you happen to be a woman, a female veteran too, I mean, all of this, it's not necessarily equitable, and in some cases it takes years to redress those inequities. But, you know, even for the vast majority of white veterans too, you know, most are moving on with their lives and they don't necessarily have a good sense of what benefits are available to them, and, you know, so... They're doing their thing, and sometimes for people, it's a really tough adjustment no matter what advantages or lack thereof that you have. And so I think that all these years later we have a kind of gauzy recollection of the Greatest Generation and the Good War. I think that's an oxymoron of a term, in my opinion. And, "Oh, they just came home and they got on with their lives, and they were a tough generation." And not that they weren't, all due respect to them. They're like any other generation experiencing war. They have difficulties. And there were a lot of people who were really struggling for those first few years after the war.

Kirk Saduski

I think, and we've talked about it a lot. I know we've talked about it at Playtone a lot, 'cause of all the series we've done, "The Pacific," "Band of Brothers," now "Masters of the Air," there is the unasked question. How did they come home and what did they do? What did they do, as you mentioned Christmas morning, Don? It's 1953, and last time you remember December in Bastogne, and now you're at home in Peoria and you've got three kids. And how do you make that transition a millionfold? How did they do that? How do you get back to a normal life when you've seen what they've seen, when you have seen war?

Donald Miller

Yeah, Sledge couldn't stand April 1st, 'cause that was the opening day of Okinawa, and he didn't tell his wife for a long time. She tried to get him to go to church. He wasn't a church-going guy, but one time he did go to church and he broke down, and she said she'd never seen him break down. And he said, "Listen, sweetheart, that was the first day of Okinawa." And it wasn't rough, but it just brought back all the subsequent experiences in Okinawa.

Kirk Saduski

There was that phenomenon, and, again, we all have experienced it personally, where a lot of men, most of the men who came home from World War II wouldn't talk about it. And getting to know a number of those guys, I would ask, "Why didn't you?" It seemed unusual. We live in such a confessional age. And I got two responses. One is many guys said, "Listen, why would I come home and tell my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my next door neighbor about the worst things I've ever seen?" One guy said to me, we were at an event in Denver, and he said, "When you leave here tonight and you see a fatal accident in all its gory detail, will you go home and describe it to your wife?" Good point. But also, but even more common, and I heard this all the time, again, I know you guys have, "If you weren't there, you couldn't understand." I think that's the key to the Sledge book, Don, that finally, somebody wrote about it in a way that the men who had experienced could believe it, but it was so well done, it was so well written that the rest of us could begin to imagine.

John McManus

It spoke to the rest of us in a very human level, conveyed it to us in a way we could understand without having been there as much as possible, I guess. But, yeah, I think there's this weird kind of ambivalence. I think in the initial homecoming there is a tendency maybe to wanna discuss some of this, for instance, like the camp liberations of pictures and discuss it and whatever, and the reaction was not always very good from family members and friends, of saying, "Oh, you know, I don't want to..." you know, "Let's move on from that." One guy I knew who was either a liberator or a witness, he had experienced a concentration camp and he had pictures, and he found out one day, many years later, that his wife had destroyed the pictures, and she didn't want them in the house for the kids maybe to stumble upon. And he viewed that as a terrible, terrible betrayal, and it was very traumatic for him, and he clammed up. And so I think that there's a lot of weight invested in that first conversation or two after you come home, of whether your family member or whatever can have any base point of understanding, whether you're talking on the same level or talking past each other, and I think too many times it was the latter. And so I think that there's definitely the trauma thing and not wanting to talk about the gory details, but also let's move on with our lives, let's have our lives, and an idea that thinking back on the war will intrude upon my ability to be successful in a career or a family or whatever, and then that maybe becomes the mindset for the next 30, 40, 50 years for some people, I think.

Donald Miller

And what one guy said to me is, you know, we live in a world of expectations. We want to have a good day. You know, we want to have a good birthday party, even though we say we don't want to, you know? We are just expectant human beings. And then when you don't get the expected response, it's crushing, it's crushing. Someone, maybe it doesn't even, they think they're gonna hurt your feelings if they ask you to talk a little bit about it, but you do want to talk about it. So he was so confused. He said he couldn't hold conversations because he anticipated these kinds of reactions, and 50% of the time, they weren't the reaction he expected.

John McManus

Each time it had to have been so difficult for him. Each time is sort of traumatic in its own way, of not getting the reaction you wanted.

Kirk Saduski

Join us next time, the final episode of this podcast series. The world turns its attention to justice in Nuremberg and Tokyo.