and now to introduce the moderator. it is my pleasure to process program over to doctor rob. >> thank you, jeremy. i'm the senior historian at the national world war ii museum in beautiful new orleans, louisiana. we have a special guest with us tonight, a friend of the museum, my friend and wonderful writer and author, ian toll. ian, welcome. >> thank you. >> and probably is one of those people who doesn't need an introduction as we like to say and you all know what that means, the introduction should be long. he's an extremely accomplished scholar and writer. he is the author of six brigades the epic history of the founding of the u.s. navy as well as a trilogy called the pacific war, third volume of which has just been released called "twilight of the gods", war in the western pacific 1945 and he's one of the fabulous elliot morrison ward from the naval order of the united states and he has won the william e military writers award and has one the other elliott morrison award given by the u.s. of the constitution museum. but katie knew, and, if there's any more samuel ellison morrison awards i expect you to win one not in the distant future. thank you for spending time talking with us about twilight of the gods. >> my pleasure and my honor. >> one i'm struck by the book and, i'm always struck by how an author will open the story and this is a big story more on the western pacific 44, 45 biggest naval battles of all time. jampacked with action and valor and heroism of every sort but you begin this book in an interesting way, in the realm of politics and i thought it was really nicely done. look especially at fdr and douglas macarthur. kawai open the book that way? i will even expand on my question. it is a bit of a risk where you have to know people are opening up and ian toll book and they want to get so why open it with a survey of the u.s. political view. >> military history there is an expectation that there will be led in the air at least by the second chapter and in this case you really have to wait until the third, almost 100 pages into the book. it is an unconventional way to begin a work of military history. my thought was i had latitude in this case because it was the third volume of the trilogy and people were reading it and they had read the first two so they are either committed to read it or not but basically my observation was looking at the pacific war was that there was a a lot of literature with fdr and a lot about macarthur and i like to say there's a pickup truck full of fdr biographies and i don't think that's an exaggeration. there is a large wheelbarrow full of macarthur biographies and two of the most fascinating figures in the 20th century american history. biographers love them for obvious reasons. this story of the pacific command conference which took place in a wahoo, island of wahoo in hawaii in july 1944 that story has been told over and over again because of how frequently new biographies are coming out of both fdr and macarthur and of course that is a feature incident and any biography or either of those two because there was a traumatic meeting that took place. it was the first time they met in seven years and and two of the most colorful figures in that time of american history. for that reason and i think this started during the war and the press covered this event but we have tended to look at that meeting through the prism of american politics immediately before leaving on his trip it took him to hawaii fdr had announced to nobody's surprise that he was going to run for an unprecedented fourth term of office as president and had visited the democratic national convention on its way to the west coast sold the way the press observed especially the way the country saw this trip to hawaii was that it was a campaign stop in a publicity event. in fact, it was much more than that but a very substantive command conference and fdr was doing some thing which i think he we would have expected any commander-in-chief to do which it was to visit the pacific theater, it is the only time he did it. for the millions of men and women who were fighting under our flag in the pacific that visit told them they had not been forgotten and i think that was important. why begin it with that long account of press and visit, i think it was important to try to unite what had become these two separate kind of strands in this biographical, political kind of view of this meeting between macarthur and fdr and what was a very substantive yet historically important military planning conference that involved fdr, macarthur and also admiral leahy who was almost forgotten but this was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a very low profile figure who was immensely important in this time of american history. >> wrote some of the greatest memoirs of the pacific war and the roosevelt presidency as well. >> i agree. >> we will get to the strategic talk but before we move away from the politics tell us about macarthur in 1944. there was a move to make an president so how much did he want to be in the oval office in 1944? >> yeah, macarthur flirted with the presidency many times throughout his career beginning in the 1920s with his name had been floated in circles and as you say in 1944 he allowed his supporters in the states, powerful members of congress and the republican party, certain conservative media owners and various other figures on the american right who saw macarthur's potentially their only chance to defeat fdr in a wartime election and so they essentially started this dark horse campaign with macarthur implicit connivance and it did not lead anywhere and the reasons for that was essentially because the governor of new york law blocked up -- locked up the nomination early in the process but the question has been asked and historians have argued did he want to run for president and would he have like to become president and or was this just a way of exerting pressure on a president and joint chiefs to do what he wanted to do in the pacific which was essentially evolved sending more military to macarthur's command and that it was divided in the northern half was essentially under the control of the navy and then in the southwest pacific you had macarthur and this division of the pacific and the two semi autonomous theater commands was very controversial and regarded as essentially a way of settling the rivalry between the army and the navy and satisfying macarthur but leaving the navy in charge of the naval war. and so, this question of what did macarthur eventually gained supreme command of the pacific which was his goal and second, could he ensure that our route back to tokyo went through the philippines and that he would get the green light to liberate the philippines including critical the northern island? these were his goals. this dark horse campaign for president may simply have been a way of exerting pressure in order to fill those goals. >> what about fdr? you write marvelously early on in the book of the war has changed him so is this press conferences used to be one for the ages earlier in his presidency and he would be joshing with reporters and knew whose birthday it was then whose children were having a birthday that day and make joking back and forth but that's not fdr by this point in the war, is it? >> no, fdr of course this was the longest presidency in american history and often i remember at the outset of our current president's administration there was a story i believe it was in "the washington post" but it was about fdr's relationship with the press and about how clever he was that essentially using the charm tactics that he was famous for to get the press on his side. that is an accurate depiction of how fdr dealt with the press. in his first term in office by his third term, 1941, he essentially had it with the press and he really was deeply offended, i think, in general at the way the press was covering politics and a number of his bitterest enemies were major media owners and his twice-weekly press conferences were pretty cantankerous and you really it was added on the campaign trail attacking the press constantly. i thought that was an important part of the perspective and i wanted to get into the way the different military services also develop their propensity policies of how the army and the navy and arthur nimitz said there are different approaches and i thought that was just an important way to introduce the larger dimension of what was happening in the pacific and the kinds of environment in which military leaders have to make their decisions and do their jobs during this bloodied war. >> so you mention again at the oahu conference big strategic decisions had to be made and i guess the way you write it as i read your chapter on it, we come to a fork in the road that there was a big decision that had to be made and i guess we could break it down if they simply lose on versus formosa. could you break that down for the participants there? >> to make a long story short by june 1944 certainly july 1944 we had taken the islands and had taken in saipan and about to take guam and that gave us islands that were within bombing distance of the japanese industrial heartland in tokyo with the bomber and the japanese striving arm where the japanese fleet had been annihilated and that accompanied naval battle that took place during that campaign so essentially the japanese were finished and in terms of any hopes they might have had of winning this war those were gone and so this last stage of the war was how do you force the japanese to capitulate and you know it was going to be unconditional surrender and there was our policy i believe and that was the right policy to say that we would occupy and disarm japan and supervise the reconstruction of a democratic japan and of course, the japanese regime was very far away from that so the question became in the last year how do you force them to surrender and macarthur really had the philippines as the centerpiece of his conception and many said he wanted to liberate the philippines more and the navy with the powerful internal planners with the staff and organization in washington so a major role for china in this last stage of the campaign but they wanted a foothold on the coast of china and they wanted that basis for the b-29 and also wanted the potential to draw upon chinese infantry manpower in the invasion of japan and the destruction of japanese armies on the mainland so that pointed to formosa. by mid 1934 i think is fair to say that we were going to take one of those two islands first either northern island of the philippines where the capital city of manila or what we call today taiwan, one of these two islands. that was the immediate decision that fdr and his military chiefs faced in mid 9044. beyond that there was a question of kindly forced japanese japanese to surrender without invading their homeland and that played much into the same thing that they were confronting at this time as well. >> let me try to pin you down to a what if because i think our listeners know and viewers know that of course it was a choice but how might the pacific war, the asia-pacific war, how might it have been different if we landed a big gigantic force on her most and turned it into a air base, base for b-29s and maybe fighting in the mainland of course there's the war about to break out at the end of this war so i'm just wondering any thoughts on that? >> well, i think if we had landed in formosa it would be a good bet that we would still have troops there today. so the nature of the conflict between today, independent nation of taiwan and china would be that much more intense with the major american military presence there. of course, that is somewhat speculative and it is a what if as you say so the interesting and enormous question for the world is had we taken formosa in 1944 would we then have, would that have led to a larger involvement of american troops on the asian mainland and might that have led to a different result in the chinese civil war. again, it speculative and hard to make persuasive arguments and i'm not an expert on what happened in the chinese civil war but 1949, four years after the end of the second world war now has taken control of china and significance of that event for world history, including today is just incalculable. it is, you know, ernest king who was the chief of naval operations, senior leader officer in the navy during the second world war and in 1939 looking back he raised this question. if we had done what i had wanted to do, he said, take formosa then this might have led to a different result and perhaps mao would not have gotten the upper hand in china and of course that would have debited the course of asian and world history. >> fascinating. that is one of the fascinating what if's if the pacific war is so large and then any change you make is changes the course of her own historical timeline, you might say, dramatically across-the-board. >> , it's true in europe as well. it's one of the reasons the second world war is so unique and so important and fascinating. it really has shaped the post world war in asia and choices that were being made by the generals and admirals and how to prosecute the war have downstream indications for the post war that we are living with today. >> let me switch gears on you, ian. so much of your book and i would describe your book as an expertly written operational manual. if my bread and butter to read operational history and this is as good as it gets. >> you know what you're talking about so i appreciate that the mac thank you. much of what you deal with is something i think is necessary in operation history and the personalities of the u.s. commanders. there are unforgettable folk here. let me redo, if you don't mind, a quote from the book i vice admiral mr. talking about carrier warfare in the pacific grid i would like you to comment on it. there are just so many japanese planes on any island. we will go in and take it on the chin and swap punches with them. i will know i have losses but i'm stronger than they are. i don't give a damn if they do spots me. i can go anywhere and no one can stop me. if i go in to destroy the aircraft their damn island is no good to them anyhow. how does that stand up today in your eyes in the pacific war in 1944, 45? >> that is certainly an accurate of our capabilities of our air force and in the first year of a war which i cover in the pacific crucible you have these carrier duels where you had battles between, you know, small carrier task forces involving three or four carriers at most in which really it was a question of hit-and-run, try to attack and get your planes over your enemies a fleet to first, hide your ships and weather fronts if you can and if you are attacking an airbase on the island, you get in with complete surprise and attack and recover your planes aboard your carriers and get the hell out of there before the land-based air can counterattack. by 1944 the size of our carrier task force in the pacific, so this was task force 58 and halsey had it and, you know, you're talking about 12-16 aircraft carriers, heavy and white later independence carriers but these are fleet carriers and operating in semi- autonomous task groups which are operating within shouting distance of each other and they are launching 1000, 1200 planes in a single integrated strike that is descending on, you know the japanese airbase on some island in the pacific, call it the [inaudible] for example. they are just wiping the skies clean of the japanese defending fighters and then going in there and bombing the living daylights out of their airbase and destroy their planes on the ground so what he is saying there is that the carriers had gotten powerful enough by this stage of the war that the hit-and-run approach was no longer necessary. you could simply bring your carrier task force into range of japanese airbase and essentially destroy it, overpower it with airpower and confidently fight off any counterstrike on the american fleet. that is how carrier warfare changed in the late stages of the war. >> let's move over to admiral. for some reason one of my favorite characters but it's precisely because he is not so colorful. he's more of the organization man. every commander, he said, must be a gambler but he wanted to be one of the professional variety. that is his own quote. all the odds i could get stacked in my favor. different than richard. >> spirits was a black shoe in navy which means he's a surface naval warfare, not a naval aviator or had a carrier and he wants this had this style in a very much, as you say, organization man but the kind of guy you could see being a ceo of a major company today and a cool character, cerebral and very, very smart by everyone's account. really did not believe in the kind of blood and thunder sort of style of command so he's often contrasted to bull halsey for that reason. sterling had a ascended to the top seagoing command in the u.s. navy but really series of accidents and had accidentally been thrust into the position of commanding one of the task forces at the bottle of midway and credited for winning that immortal battle and then had been recalled to shore duty with nimitz chief of staff so he and nimitz became very close professionally and personally and essentially limits that i trust this guy to take the fleet out and make the same decisions that i would if i was commanding in cebit nimitz never commanded at sea during the second world war he was a short bound headquarters for the entire war. he had to have pat sterling was his guy to take the fleet to see. by 1944 i think the quote is we have overwhelming naval superiority and we will win this war and let's not take chances that may allow the enterprising japanese to score a lucky victory and let's play by the numbers and i think that is the correct approach to say at the end of the war and that has generally been the judgment of historians who have rated and said the best of the wartime in the pacific. >> you reference to bull halsey and a lot of this volume is about both holy and he's all about action during this time of the pacific war. how would you rate him? let me ask you that in two ways. first his ability as a operational commander and then let say something about the seamanship because the question is asked itself and the man who wrote his fleet but into two horrible typhoons and deftly a black market so i want to do operational commander how would you rate him? and if you could say a word about some of the problems he ran into. >> bull halsey made a series of significant errors in the last year of the pacific war and the two typhoons have often been mentioned and a number of influential subordinates and the task group commanders were the junior admirals who served under him were harshly critical of his decisions and that the battle he made, one of the post most perhaps infamous command errors in naval history, which could have led to disaster but didn't because the japanese commander retreated at the critical moment. the list of indictments against bull halsey simply in terms of his management of the fleet and the last year was pretty long and pretty damning. more broadly looking at holy he was the senior test carrier force commander in the pacific when the japanese hit pearl harbor in 1941. he had the carriers that were at sea and that was fortunate because they weren't important when the japanese attacked. he really was the commander at sea who had what was left of the navy striking capability in the first months of the war and that was a time in which essentially are forces had not been ready for war and had to very quickly kind of get up to speed and learn to fight by fighting essentially and halsey was the leader in those critical early months of the war and i think he gets a lot of credit for that. he had a colorful style and the blood and thunder style which i mentioned earlier and that was halsey's style and he had a very foot forward approach to publicity and to talking to the forces under his command to the media and of course because he's talking to the media he also talks to the american people and becomes famous and in some ways the face of the u.s. navy during the war and he's often compared to general patton in europe and it's an apt comparison in many accounts but he's the south pacific theater commander and he really loses touch with the day-to-day job of running the fleet and when he is brought back to take over the fleet in 1944 it's a totally different animal and he hasn't really kept up but insists on bringing his long serving loyal staff officers would all then in that shore bound south pacific headquarters for two years with him and they were not up to speed and they essentially had a large organization coming to take over the fifth fleet which became the third fleet when halsey had it and they weren't really ready to do that. it was, i think, a mistake that you could attribute up the chain of command and admiral nimitz and maybe that is not a good choice to bring halsey back and put him into that role in 1944. >> you write beautifully about one of the most complex military actions in human history and i've pretty much read them all and that's the battle of [inaudible] and there is so much going on and it requires an account that the reader can follow you do that marvelously. refer to the battle as a naval bonsai charge on the part of the japanese. one of the japanese chancellors, were they not winning the battle in any real sense? >> by that time the japanese were desperate really. they were losing the war in all fronts and essentially they realized that the problem was that if the americans took the philippines they would be cut off from their fuel supply which was in the dust each in these. they launched the war primarily because they wanted their own source of oil in the most productive oil fields in asia at that point were in indonesia, borneo, sumatra and east indies. they wanted those oilfields and they went and took them in the first months of the war but then they had to bring that oil back to japan in tankers which were vulnerable so they potentially foresaw that critical ornery that the japanese would be cut and once it was cut their fleet might not make get into position to do battle and might be immobilized for lack of fuel. their decision to throw essentially their entire remaining fleet against us in the battle sprung from this awareness that they had, that this might be their only chance to fight a naval battle at all let alone win it and the driving motive there was to just be sure that the fleet did put up a fight but didn't end the war swinging at anchor or to be destroyed by carrier planes in port. it had to go out to the bank rather than a whimper and the japanese, given their significant disadvantages they had, they came up with a very good plan and their plan was to lure the main striking force of the american carriers, the third fleet away from the beachhead to allow to japanese service fleets to get that most vulnerable amphibious fleet that lay off the beachhead and they very nearly succeeded in doing that and it was an extraordinary sort of series of deceptions that put them in position and significant commander which we talked about earlier by admiral halsey. >> i am struck by a fleet in a military establishment that was so outclassed in terms of numbers and power by october 1935 and yet still manages to come close to landing on major hurt on a u.s. amphibious landing by that point in the war. there was a great german or prussian military philosopher who says what is the domain of chance and it's the domain of fog and you never quite sure what will happen and i thank you bring this home really well in your discussion and that might be a classic example. >> thank you. >> let's talk, if you don't mind for a moment ian, let's get other [inaudible] and go to the japanese home island. by now, by late 1934, it must've been clear thinking japanese that the war had been lost and that the world was no real position and no real position like they cannot take if it was willing to accept the losses. you write for example of a japanese economy in which there were six principal concrete [inaudible] in the entire country so it was anytime like the army air forces wish they could destroy the japanese industry and put it out of business and they did this repeatedly in the course of the war with almost no redundancy. what kept japan and maybe the japanese people going through this incredible level of devastation? >> i think, interesting book yet to be written and maybe you could write it yourself was to take the nazi germany propaganda techniques as to how they controlled their information going to their public and compare that and contrasted to what the japanese did. in each case i think you'll find the access nations like totalitarian countries thought history have had or attempted to have total control over what their own public actually knows about what is happening outside and the world beyond. probably in no country has that ever been done as thoroughly as it was in japan and the second world war appeared the regime had total control over the japanese media until the newspapers exactly what to write and what to tell the japanese people about what was happening. the average japanese person really had very limited understanding of what was happening and, as you say by this late stage in the war, ucb nazi coming in and the japanese people were more or less, is rated verging on starvation famine was a real danger and the last year of the war and if the world war had gone on months longer i think famine would have actually hit major regions of japan in a big way. the japanese people certainly ordinary japanese people did not know just how dire things were until the emperor came on the radio and said this is it. we are throwing in the towel. i tried to weave in to these three books in appreciation of what life was like for the japanese, man or woman, on the street. i tried to present through their eyes what they saw the limited information that was available to them and just how thoroughly deceived they were by this malevolent regime that took control of japan during these years. >> you write about the fighting and the philippines in great detail here and i came away very glad and the fighting in the philippines was horrible but it climaxed in a particular horrific way in the battle for the e-uppercase-letter of lapine, manila preview described manila as the worst pathologies of japan's military capabilities for it and lighten us. what do you mean by that? >> the japanese army in particular essentially infiltrated this idea that you can never surrender under any circumstances. have to fight to the death or, if necessary, take your own life rather than be captured. i don't think this was a generally been well understood but this was a new and radical idea in japanese military culture and it not been something that had come down to the samurai tradition and in the samurai era of warfare in japan the japanese warrior had fought only his fellow japanese and if he had done his duty in the battle clearly turned against him he could lay down his arms and surrender with his honor intact. surrender was not traditional in japanese culture. this is something that the japanese army really just in the time after the japanese war in 1905 decided this will make us invincible if we order our soldiers never to surrender and this would make us a formidable army. again and again in the pacific and manila is arguably the single best example of it and when you tell an army of 18, 19, 20 -year-old farm boys that they will die no matter what and that they will have to fight to the death, take their own lives is necessary that puts pressure on them and the results can be pretty severe. the fact that manila, i think, is in part an outgrowth of this distortion of what the japanese military traditions and cultures were and it was one of the darkest chapters of the pacific war which is, of course, one of the darkest wars in our country. >> hitler regularly claimed that horrible things he told the germans to do or historic german traditions dating back four, five, 600 years and it strikes me as relatively similar of a new radicalization of warfare being touted dating all the way back to the 14 or 1300s. i found those portions of the book extremely enlightening. there is another issue of course that has to be dealt with in any book on this time and you certainly write about it in "twilight of the gods". writing about this 75 years later, is it possible to fathom the phenomenon of the, kazi? by which i mean, we who are alive today can we ever hope to understand what was going to the minds of young japanese pilot more or less strapping into the airplane and told to hurtle himself into the u.s. aircraft carrier. >> we can certainly try and it helps so many of these pilots left diaries and other writings and letters in many of these have gotten published and it's a whole literary genre and japan, the last writings of the kamikaze and books so like crazy so they keep coming out. they do have quite a bit even in english translations telling us about the psychology of these pilots were dedicated to give their lives in battle. of course, we have their more recent presidents of the suicide attacks across much of the islamic world and you know, the psychology is, i think fascinating. many of the kamikaze pilots particularly in later stages of the war during the okinawa campaign which was the largest kamikaze campaign of the war you had young men who had been recruited into flight training not being told they might be asked to give their lives and then they are pressured essentially to quote unquote volunteer and many of them were deeply reluctant and made that clear in their writings and often they would take off in their bases and then turned back saying they had engine problems and they were not able to find the fleet. from the americans point of view we've seen hundreds and literally hundreds of enemy planes come in and essentially behaving like man guided missiles which was a unique sort of horror and something i think many of our forces never thought they would see and find it hard to understand and i think it contributed to the sense that many of our people on our side have that the japanese were fundamentally different and they were fanatics in a way that made it very difficult for us to understand. we probably contributed to the context of the strategic bombing and ultimately the atomic bombs as well. >> if i read this right from "twilight of the gods", kamikaze hit bunker hill and then moved to the enterprise and then i got hit by kamikaze and then they moved to new mexico. >> that happened and about the space of three days, that's right. >> fascinating story. you write about the wartime conferences of course, lots damn, where they were warned of utter destruction if they did not agree to unconditional surrender and i was haunted by this passage of the japanese prime minister response and he use the japanese word that can mean a lot of things in the word is [inaudible] and i'm no expert in japanese but it can mean a lot of things and we interpreted but he may have meant something different by that, is that possible? >> yeah, you know, what was happening there was the japanese ruling circle this tidying circle military leaders from around here who essentially hold the nation's fate in their hands were deeply divided at this point. part of the japanese regime was essentially ready to recognize the necessity of surrender and the germans had been defeated and they were on the verge of the homeland being totally destroyed and yet you had the hardliner faction in the japanese army in particular that was determined to fight to the end release to try to fight off an invasion of the japanese homeland for any discussion of a truce. the per minister in that case they received the declaration essentially demanding unconditional surrender wondering what would happen in general terms and the prime minister is trying to essentially sort of articulate a vague enough policy that it would satisfy both of these deadlocked elements within the regime and so what do you do? we see with politicians today if you can't articulate it a clear policy, you try to use vague language that might satisfy both sides. what he is doing is talking to the hard-liners in his own regime saying essentially using this term that means we will simply ignore this and will be no comment we will not respond at all to the declaration we will not rejected or accepted but we simply will not, we will pretend it does not exist. when our translators get a hold of that were trying to understand what it means and essentially the conclusion is that our government that the japanese have rejected the declaration so it was a case in which perhaps the language barrier may have contributed and not necessarily to a misunderstanding but contributed to the confusion that was crowded into those last weeks of the pacific war. >> it is shocking to me the need for the diplomatic interplay and diplomatic commissions, one has to be careful of what one says. you say something very interesting at the end enemy to say to folks out there, i will ask one or two more and then we will get to the questions because a lot of people want to ask. you had an interesting analysis at the end of the book, if the pacific war had been a game of chess, you write, there would have been no end game. you mean that when you are playing chess it's pretty clear when one side has got the upper hand and a reason to play it through and you've taken my queen then let's just try again and i will play again tomorrow but of course war isn't a chess game. because of this japanese decision to fight beyond the bitter end how many japanese military personnel would you estimate died in the last year of the war and civilians as well, i guess? any thoughts on that? >> i think the best estimates are that there were some 1.5 million japanese service men and civilians who died in the last year of the war. it represents close to one half of all japanese who died in the war of asia and pacific beginning with the china incident in 1937. and so, this was a ruinous year for the japanese both in terms of their fighting forces and, of course, with the strategic bombing of japanese cities in the atomic bombs. you've got something like 800,000 japanese civilians giving their lives in the last year of the war as well. with the chess metaphor, look, it was clear that looking at the situation from the top levels of the japanese government beginning in may 1944 they saw the way this was going and they realize they had lost this war and that they were going to lose control of all their overseas resources and run out of oil and have no source of oil and they were because off from their armies overseas and they would be completely blockaded and there was nothing coming into japan, nothing going out. their economy was going to seize up, their cities would be burned down and they foresaw all of that and yet the conditions in japan, political conditions, simply did not allow for any sort of concerted and for peace. it's a great tragedy because there were elements within the japanese leadership who foresaw that this was going to happen and they were unable, essentially to establish the baseline consensus that was needed to say, we've got to acknowledge that we've lost the war and try to cut the best deal we can. and so we have this horror show which was last year of the pacific war. >> i would add to what was going on in europe the last year of the war and the violence came to a roaring climax. world war ii did not reach a peak and dribble down into nothing but burned itself out in a flare with both of the major theaters. on that note, got so many good questions here from our folks out there and as you can imagine if they read your book they are highly informed audience but let's see what we can take from our friends out there. trent asks a great question. the newly released diary from general richardson, highest ranking army officer in the pacific, how did this affect the story that you told in your book but i would also ask would you expand? what other interesting sources that had not been touched before and i'm sure you ran across a bunch of them but if you could addressed general richardson's diary. >> general richardson, as the questioner says was the commanding general of army forces in the limit, nimitz was the army's top general in that theater. he left a very detailed and very insightful diary which is absolutely a essential source to particularly understanding service rivalries in the pacific and the struggle between the army and navy from someone who was in direct contact with nimitz on a day-to-day basis and knew what was happening. and so, richardson, general richardson left his diary to his descendents and said keep it private until the year 2015 when i'm sure everybody i know will be gone. i was fortunate enough to be contacted by the family in 2015 and said would you like the diary i said what i like the diary? [laughter] thank you so much. it's really an important news source. it provided a lot of insight in many different aspects of this narrative but most importantly in the returning to the first chapter the pacific strategy conference when fdr visited a oahu and macarthur came from australia. macarthur stayed with richardson in his house in port schachter on a oahu and he debriefed general richardson after each of these strategy conferences pretty told him exactly what he had told fdr. this was a vital news source because those conferences you had four guys in a room, leahy, macarthur and nimitz and there were no minutes kept, no official minutes, no staff were permitted to remain in the room and so historians have been forced to rely essentially on the first and second hand accounts of those four participants and macarthur left a vivid account in his memoir published in the mid- 1960s but many of the particulars he puts himself at length in many of the particulars i think had been called into question and so richardson's diary is something that gives us essentially a new anchor to understand exactly what was said. >> nothing quite like having someone contact you and say would you like to see a source that no one has ever looked at before and it makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it? >> once you've published a couple books and people read them some of that stuff starts coming in over the transom to use the old naval term because it didn't happen earlier in my career but there were a number of other and i could go through and it's a long list but there are number of these cases where people would reach out to me and say my father left a diary or my grandfather left a series of letters and he served with this fleet or this or that in this portion of this campaign so would you like to look at them and i would say absolutely, i would love to look at them. of course, as you know there is no shortage of these kinds of sources available in archives. the national archives has more than any one of us can read in a lifetime and yet when you get contacted by the family to say would you like to look at this thing that no one else has seen you have that extra sort of special experience of looking at an important historical source that you know has not been used by someone else so. >> fascinating. there was the question about waterloo so the question about the leadership but let me ask you indirectly, was that a mistake? >> i think hello lou to say that it was a mistake was a bit bold because of course the decision to go into pella lou was made without the hindsight that we have today. i would say looking back from the perspective we have now we should have bypassed pella lou. and not taken it. it's an island and it's remote even by pacific standards and it lay near the sea between macarthur and nimitz to respective command units and they had been ordered initially as a way to protect the northern flank as they returned to the philippines and as events developed it became clear that we could neutralize the airfield and on other islands all up and down the chain and it would not be necessary to take those islands but just make sure the airfields were essentially visited routinely by our bombers, air force bombers and carrier bombers. and then they wouldn't be a thorn in the side of macarthur advance but they could've canceled that operation and it was a bloodied battle, terrible battle that many marines gave their lives fighting and looking back it is clear that we could have bypassed peleliu without any loss of momentum in the campaign. >> as a result was a bloodbath of epic proportions for both the americans and the japanese and what -- could you comment on the leadership on peleliu where he received criticisms for being causing excessive casualties? was he pushing hard to his personal aggressive nature or following orders from his superiors who wanted to finish this peleliu invasion quickly? >> i think it was both of those. it did not have to be one or the other. was he to aggressive? perhaps. what's his order to aggressive? perhaps yes. what happened on peleliu for those who are not as familiar is the japanese have very cleverly decided that they would essentially develop the subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels in the high ground on peleliu and essentially a network of coral hills north of the airfield and so rather than sailing out in these bonsai charges that have been common in the earlier island battles of the south pacific they were using subterranean fortifications to neutralize american advantages in artillery and naval power and firepower offshore. the marine tradition and doctrine had been rapid attack, took territory quickly, fake losses if necessary to try to force your opponent back quickly and against those kinds of fortifications those were the wrong tactics and eventually both marines and the army which was brought in as well understood that what was needed there was more of a siege tactic approach, gradual development from, you know, sandbag and pigments and is essentially had to be something more akin to trench warfare. and so, you know, he was a great marine and that was a vicious battle in which he was asked to do something that any commander would have failed to do and i don't think it reflects poorly on him at all. i think it was just one of those things that was a terrible battle, terrible challenge that he was up against and did what he could. >> mary huron has a good question. >> i lost the audio there. >> i'm sorry. mary huron has a good question for you. would you agree or disagree and that hero he too was more than a figurehead but roughly involved in the planning of the war of the pacific? i'm referring to information in his diaries which were released in the late 1980s. >> yes, i think that is accurate. he was much more involved in as commander of military forces. he was against the war. he certainly will resisted the drift towards war. the constitutional arrangements were somewhat ambiguous exactly how much authority did he have is a disputed point even today and yet he certainly had tremendous intangible authority over his military leaders. when his military leaders were unanimous in recommending a course of action he always accepted their advice and so it really wasn't until the end of the war when they were hopelessly deadlocked and this was after the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki and his inner circle of leaders army, navy, civilian leaders came to him and said we need you to decide because we can't form a consensus and it was then that he intervened to say this war is over and we are surrendering. >> william sheppard would like to know i have your book in hand and see that you dedicated it to two animals. both of whom were delta and [inaudible] please expand upon this choice. >> animal campbell and general short were both the commanding officers in hawaii on december 71941 when the japanese were attacked and both were relieved of command and essentially spend the rest of the war answering to a series of investigations and the question of to what degree are they culpable for the clear lack of readiness which are military forces showed in being blindsided by the japanese during that attack and to what extent were they culpable and to what extent was our on readiness a essentially just a feature of a peacetime nation that did not recognize that japan had the capability to attack across a distance, such distances and to what extent were leaders in washington culpable? there was a lot of culpability to go around. excuse me. in my view. >> are you all right, ian? >> i had a waterfall over. >> got it. >> whatever you had to say about kimball in short and there command record it wasn't right to essentially make them bear a large share of the blame for something when blame really should have been more fairly distributed. i thought, you know, this was essentially the last year of the war was when we settled the score with the japanese in that this was the book that should have been dedicated to them in recognition of the fact that i think our country did them wrong. >> matt cannon is on facebook and would like to know about this, what do either of you think of the soviet invasion of manchuria and a greater impact on the japanese dissenter decision to surrender than the two atom bombs? they argue that the japanese would rather surrender to the pragmatic americans rather than the soviets? >> i would agree with the last part of that. we had here oshima on august 6, 19.5 and we hit nagasaki on august 9 and the soviet union suddenly dickered war on japan surprising japan also on august 9. essentially you had the red army charging to manchuria and this was a tremendous blow to the japanese, not only because of the immediate military emergency that it created but also because their sole remaining hope of a diplomatic exit to the war was to bring stalin to the mediator in arranging talks between the americans and the japanese and so the declaration of war they are essentially extinguished last hope of a diplomatic exit to the war so the question was what was the relative importance of the atomic bombs and the sudden russian attack in prompting the japanese to surrender? historians have debated this and i think it is difficult to say precisely what the relative importance of these things were because the timetable was so compressed and it was clear they were both really important and shocks coming together in a short time. in my view, it's impossible to state which was more important. they were both very important together in combination. ... exit. >> i think unfortunately we have come to the end of the hour together and as always when the conversation is so brilliant it flew by. the author, and the book is twilight of the god 1944, 1945. it's the third book in the trilogy so if you've come this far you must read the final. i'd like to thank you for spending this time with us. although normal conditions are a relative concept. good night to everyone from the world war ii museum. good evening. i have the privilege of serving as director of the roosevelt house, and on behalf of hunter college i want to welcome you to another online roosevelt house presentation. during this particularly dramatic period in our country it is especially troubling that we cannot gather in our historic house on 61st street to process recent events together in the roosevelt house tradition of civic engagement and discussion. in fact in the auditorium where we would have done this meeting, the images on the wall about the

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