those during the question-and-answer sessions which will conclude tonight's program and now to introduce the moderator, is my pleasure to pass this program over to doctor robson tino. >> thank you, jeremy. and the historian at the national world war ii museum and dutiful new orleans louisiana give a special guest with us tonight, a friend of the museum, my friend and wonderful writer and author, and toll. welcome. >> thank you, rob. >> he is one of those people who doesn't need an introduction as we like to say and you all know what that means, introduction should be long. he's an extremely accomplished scholar and writer and is the author of six to get the epic history of the founding of the u.s. navy as well as a trilogy called the pacific war, the third volume of which has just been released called twilight of the gods, war of the western pacific 1944-1945 and one the samuel eliot morison award from the naval order of the united states and he is one the william e military writers award and won the other eliot morison award given by the u.s. constitution museum. kidding you, ian and if there are any awards out there i fully expect to to win one and that not too distant future but thank you so much for agreeing to spend time with us and talk with us about "twilight of the gods". >> my pleasure and my honor. >> i'm struck by the book, ian, i'm struck by how an author chooses to open the story. it's a big story, war on the western pacific 44-45 biggest naval battles all time. packed with valor and heroism of every sort but to begin this book in an interesting way and the rome of politics. i thought it was nicely done. you look at fdr and douglas macarthur. why open the book that way? i will even expand on my question. it's a bit of a risk. you have to know people are opening up and ian told book and they want to know they get the lay of the take so what was the survey of the political -- spirit 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 have to wait until the third almost 100 pages into the book. it is an unconventional way to begin a worker military history but i think my thought was i had a little latitude because it is the third volume of the trilogy and the people reading it had already read the first two so they are either committed to read it or not but, you know, basically my observation was looking at the pacific war was that there was a lot of literature on fdr, a lot about macarthur and i would 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 so these are the two most fascinating figures in the 20th century american history and biographers love them for obvious reasons. the story of the pacific command conference which took place in the island of hawaii who in hawaii in july 1944 that story has been told over and over again because of how frequently new biographies were coming out of both fdr and macarthur and that's a featured incident. that was a dramatic meeting that took place first time they met in seven years and as i said to the most colorful figures in that time of american history. for that reason, and i think it started during the war in the way the press covered this event, we have tended to look at that meeting through the prism of american politics, immediately before leaving on his trip took them to hawaii and 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 his way to the west coast. the way the press observed essentially the way the country saw this trip to hawaii was that it was a campaign stop and a publicity event. in fact, it was much more than that but a very substantive command conference and fdr was doing something which, i think, we would we would have expected any commander-in-chief to do which is to visit the pacific theater. it was the only time he did it. and for the millions of men and women who were fighting under our flag in the pacific that visit told them they not been forgotten and i think that was important. so, why begin with that long account of the press and that visit and i think it was important to try to unite what had become these two very separate kind of strands of this biographical, political kind of view of this meeting between macarthur and fdr and what was a very substantive and historically important military planning conference that involved fdr, macarthur and nimitz and admiral leigh he was almost always forgotten but this was the chairman of the joint chief of staff and a very low profile figure that was immensely important in this time of american history. >> wrote some of the greatest memoirs of our time. >> i agree. >> let's get to the strategic talk but before we move away from the politics tell us about macarthur in 1944. there was moved to macon president and how badly did he want to get to the oval office in 1944? >> macarthur flirted with the presidency many times throughout his career beginning in 1920, his name had been floated in republican circles and as you say in 1944 he allowed his supporters in the states, powerful members of congress and in the republican party, certain conservative media owners and various other figures on the american right who so macarthur is potentially their only chance to defeat fdr in a wartime election and so they essentially started this dark horse campaign with macarthur's implicit connivance and did not lead anywhere and reason for that is essentially because the governor of new york tom dewey locked up the nomination in the primary process but yes, the question has been asked and historians and biographers have debated did macarthur actually want to run for president and would he have like to become president or was this just a way of exerting pressure on the president and joint chiefs to do what he wanted to do in the pacific which essentially involved setting more military assets to macarthur's command, the city was divided and the northern half was essentially under the control of the navy and nimitz was the theater commander and then in the southwest pacific you had macarthur. this division of the pacific and the two semi autonomous theater commands was controversial and was regarded as essentially a way of settling the rivalry between the army and the navy and satisfying macarthur and leaving the macarthur in charge of the naval war. this question of would macarthur have gained a supreme command of the pacific which was his goal and second could he ensure that the route back to tokyo and that he would get the green light to liberate the philippines, critically the northern islands. those were his goals and its dark horse campaign for president may simply have been away with pressure to fulfill those goals. >> you write marvelously early on that the war has changed them and this is the happy war so this press conference used to be one for the ages earlier in his presidency and he would be joshing with the reporters and knew whose birthday it was, whose children were having a birthday that day and making jokes back and forth but that is not really fdr in this point of the war, is it? >> of course this was the longest presidency in american history and often i remember at the outset of our current president's administration i believe it was in washington post it was about fdr's relationship with the press and was about how clever he was in using the sort of charm tactics that he was famous for to get the press on his side and that is an accurate depiction of how fdr dealt with the press. this was in his first term in office but by his third term 9041 he had essentially had it with the press and 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 he was actually out on the campaign trail attacking the press constantly and that was an important part of the perspective and i want to get into the way the different military services developed their publicity and policies in the army and the navy and macarthur and nimitz had their different approaches to this but i thought it was an important way to introduce the larger dimension of what was happening in the pacific and the environment in which military leaders had to make their decisions and do their jobs during this bloodied war. >> you mentioned again at the a wahoo 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 and there was a big decision that had to be made and i guess you could break it down that they simply lose on versus formosa. could you break that down for our participants there? >> to make a long story short, by june 1944 certainly july 1944 we had taken the marion islands and taken saipan and about to take warm and that day the islands were in within bombing distance of the japanese industrial heartland of tokyo with the b-29 bomber and the japanese striking arm where the fleet had been annihilated and the accompanying naval battle that took place during that campaign so essentially the japanese were finished in terms of any hope they might've had of winning this war those were gone and this last stage of the war was how do you force the japanese to capitulate? it was going to be unconditional surrender that was our policy and the right policy that we would occupy and disarm japan and supervise the reconstruction of a democratic japan and of course, the japanese regime was far away from that so the question became in the last year how do you force them to surrender and macarthur had the philippines as the centerpiece of his conception and many said he wanted to liberate the philippians more even winning the war and the navy in many of the powerful internal planners of the joint chiefs of staff organization in washington saw a major role for china in the last stage and they wanted a foothold on the coast of china and wanted that for the base for the b-29s and the potential to draw upon chinese industry -- infantry manpower if it were to take place and the destruction of the japanese army on the china mainland so that was formosa soap by mid 1944 i think it is fair to say that we were going to take one of those two islands first, either the northern island of the philippines or the capital city of manila or formosa and today we call it taiwan, one of these two. that was the immediate decision of the fdr in its military chief space in mid 1944. beyond that there was question of can we force the japanese to surround without invading their homelands and that played very much into the same thing that they were performing at this time as well. >> let me try to pin you down to a what if. we love what if's, don't we? i think our viewers and listeners know that there was no choice so how might the asia-pacific war, how might it have been different if we landed up a gigantic force on formosa and turned into a major base, air base, base for b-29 and maybe it intervened in the fighting in the mainland of course there is the civil war about to break out at the end of this war and i just wonder, any thoughts on that? >> i think if we had landed in for most of it would be a good bet we would still have troops there today and so the nature of the conflict between today the independent nation of taiwan and china would be that much more intense with a major american military presence there. of course, that is somewhat speculative and it is a what if, as you say. the really interesting and enormous question for the world is had we taken formosa in 1944 would we then or would that have led to a larger involvement in american troops on the asian mainland and might that have led to a different result in the civil war. it is so speculative and it's hard to make persuasive arguments are not an expert on what happened in the chinese civil war but 1949, four years after the end of the second world war, and now had taken control of china and the significance of that event for world history, including today is just incalculable. ernest king who was the chief of naval operations and senior leader of the officer of the navy during the second world war in 1949 looking back he raised this question that if we had done what i wanted to do, he said, take formosa and bypass saigon and it might have led to a different result and perhaps mao would not have gotten the upper hand in china and that would have diverted the of asian and world history. >> fascinating. that is one of the fascinating what if's, the pacific war is so large and any change you make and it changes the course of our own historical timeline, you might say. dramatic changes across the board. >> it is true in europe as well for it that is of the reasons the second world war is so unique and important and fascinating that it really has shaped the post world war in both asia and europe and you know choices that were made by the generals and animals and how to prosecute the war, though some major downstream implications for the post world war that were living with today. >> let me switch gears on you. so much of your book and i would describe your book as an expertly written operation manual and is my bread-and-butter to read operational history and this is good as it gets. >> you know what you are talking about so i appreciate that. >> thank you. but much of what you deal with here is something else i think is necessary and operational and the personalities of the u.s. commanders and there are some unforgettable folk here. let me read you, if you don't mind, a quote from the book by vice admiral mark mitchell talking about carrier warfare in the pacific and i would like you to comment on it. there is just so many japanese planes on any island. we will go in and take it on the tent and swap punches with them. i know i will have losses but i'm stronger than they are. i don't give a damn if they do spy, i can go anywhere and no one can stop me. if i go destroy their aircraft their damn island is no good to them anyhow. how does that stand up and today in your eyes and in the analysis of the pacific war in 1944-1935? >> it was certainly an accurate statement of the capability of our carrier task forces in 44. in the first year of the war which i covered in pacific principal you had these carrier tools we had battles between small carrier task forces involving maybe three or four carriers at most and in which it was the question of hit-and-run trying to attack and get your planes over your enemy fleet first and hide your ships and weather fronts if you can and if you are and tacking an airbase on the island you get in with complete surprise and attack and recover your planes and avert your carriers and get the hell out of there before the land-based can counterattack the fleet. by 1944 the size of our carrier task force in the pacific so this was task force 58 and i think they had 38 when halsey added and you know, you're talking about 12-16 aircraft carriers, heavy classic carriers and white later independent carriers but these are free carriers and operating in semi- autonomous task groups which are operating within shouting distance of each other and they were launching 1000-1200 planes in a single integrated strike that is descending on the japanese airbase in 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 than them just destroying on the grounds and 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 a major japanese airbase and essentially just 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. he's been one of my favorite characters precisely because he's not so colorful but more of the organization man. every commander, he said, must be a gambler but he wanted to be one of the professional variety and that's his own quote. he wanted his all the odds he could get stacked in my favor. different than richards take or not? >> he was a black shoe and navy parler which meant he's a surface naval war, not a navy aviator or skippered a carrier and was this very or had this very much style like as you say organization man in the kind of guy you could see being a ceo of a major company today. a cool character, cerebral, very, very smart by everyone's account. but really didn't believe in the kind of blood and thunder sort of style command and so he's often contrasted to both halls lee for that reason. he had ascended to the top seagoing command in the u.s. navy with a series of accidents and had been thrust into the position of commanding one of the task forces at the battle of midway and credited for winning that a mortal battle and then he had been recalled to shore duty as nimitz chief of staff so he became very, very close with limits professionally and personally and essentially limits set i trust this guy to take the fleet out to make the same decisions that i would, if i was commanding at sea. not nimitz never commanded at sea during the second world war but was in the shore bound headquarters for the entire war. that's his guy to take the fleet to see. 1944 i think what he's getting and the quote is we have overwhelming naval superiority and we will win this war so let's not take unnecessary chances that may allow the enterprising japanese to get in and score a lucky victory against us but let's play by the numbers and i think that was the correct approach in that late stage of the war and that certainly has generally been the judgment of historians who have rated him as the best of the wartime fleet command in the pacific. >> you referenced bull halsey and a lot of this volume is about bull halsey. it's all over the action in this time of the pacific war so how would you rate him? let me ask you that in two ways. first, his ability as an operational commander and then say something about his seamanship because the question is just asked itself and this was a man who let his fleet into not one but two horrible typhoons and definitely a black mark in his career. as operational commander, how would you rate him? and then what about some of the problems he ran into. >> halsey made a series of significant errors in the last year of the pacific war and the two typhoons have often been mentioned by a number of influential subordinates in the test group commanders and these were the general animals who served under him and were harshly critical of his major decisions and that the battle of the golf there were probably will most infamous command errors in naval history and which could have led to disaster but didn't because the japanese commander retreated at the critical moment. so, you know, a list of indictments against bull halsey simply in terms of his management of the fleet in the last year is pretty long and pretty damning. more broadly looking at bull halsey he was the senior task force commander in the pacific when the japanese hit pearl harbor in 1941. in the carriers that were at sea and that was fortunate because they weren't important when the japanese attacked and so halsey really was the carrier admiral and was the commander at sea and you had what was left of the navy striking capability and in the first months of the war and that was a time in which essentially our forces had not been ready for war and had to very quickly get up to speed and learn to fight by fighting essentially. halsey was the leader in this critical, early months of the war. i think he gets a lot of credit for that. he had a colorful style the blood and thunder style which i mentioned earlier and that was his style and he had a very foot forward approach to publicity and talking to the forces under his command through the media and of course because he's talking through the media he also ends up talking to the american people and becomes famous in some ways the face of the u.s. navy during the war and is often compared to general patton in europe. it's an apt comparison on many counts. in the middle year of the war he's the south pacific theater commander shore bound at headquarters in new caledonia. he loses touch with the day-to-day kind of job of running the fleet and when he is brought back to take over the fleet in 1944 it's a totally different animal he is commanding and has not kept up and insists on bringing his long serving loyal staff officers would all then on that shore bound south pacific headquarters for two years with him and they were not upped to speech. we essentially had a large organization coming in to take over the fifth fleet which became the third fleet when halsey had it and they weren't really ready to do that and so it was, i think, a mistake you can attribute up the chain of command to admiral king and admiral nimitz and maybe that was not a good choice to put halsey in 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 it's the batter of the gulf and there's so much going on and it requires a depth that make up an account the reader can follow and you do that marvelously. you refer to battle is virtually a naval bonsai charge by the japanese. what were their chances of winning in any real sense the battle of this golf? >> by that time the japanese were desperate. they were losing the war on all fronts and essentially they realized the problem was that if the americans took the philippines they would be cut off from their fuel supply which was in the dutch east indies so the japanese to backup had launched the war in the first place primarily because they wanted their own source of oil and the most productive oil fields in asia at that point were in indonesia, borneo and sumatra what was on east indies so they wanted those oilfields and they went and took them in the first month of the war but then they had to bring that oil back to japan and tinkerers which were vulnerable so they essentially foresaw that critical artery of the japanese empire was about to be cut and once it was cut, there fleet might not even be able to get into position for battle and might be immobilized for lack of fuel. and so the decision to throw their entire remaining fleet against us in the battle of the golf 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. the driving motive there was to just be sure that the fleet did put up a fight and that it didn't end the war springing in anger or to be destroyed by carrier planes and port and it had to go out with a bang rather than a whimper and the japanese gets on the significant difference vantages they had and they came up with a very good plan in their plan was to lure the main striking force of the american carriers virtually away from the beachhead to allow two japanese surface fleets to get at this vulnerable amphibious state that lay off the beachhead in a very nearly succeeded in doing that. it was an extraordinary sort of series of deceptions that put them in position and the sniffing and commander which we talked about earlier by admiral halsey. >> i am struck by a fleet and the military establishment that was so outclassed in terms of numbers and power by october 19 pretty five and yet still manages to come close to landing a major hurt on a u.s. amphibious landing by that point in the war. it was a great german military philosopher who says war is the domain of chance. it's the domain of fog. you never quite sure what will happen and i thank you bring us home really well in your discussion and it's a classic example. >> thank you. thank you. >> lets talk, if you don't mind for a little moment, let's go to the japanese home islands. by now and by now i mean late 1944 it might have been clear te that the war has been lost and that the war was all but over and there was no real position japan could defend and no position that the united states cannot take if it was willing to accept the losses. you write, for example, of the japanese economy which there were six principled concrete in the entire country so any time the u.s. army air force wished that they could destroy the concrete industry and put it out of business and they did this repeatedly in the course of the war with almost no redundancy. what cap japan or maybe the japanese people going through this incredible level of devastation? >> well, i think an interesting book yet to be written and maybe you could write it yourself would be to take the nazi propaganda techniques and the terms of how they controlled information going to their own public and compare and contrast it to what the japanese did. each case i think you'll find the access nations like the totalitarian countries throughout history have had or attempted to have total control over what their own public actually knows about what is happening outside and in the world beyond. probably a no country has that ever been done as thoroughly as it was done in japan during the second world war. the regime had total control over the japanese media and told the newspapers exactly what to write and what to tell the japanese people about what was happening and so the average japanese person really had very limited understanding of what was happening. as you say, by this late stage in the war you start to see b29 coming in and the japanese people were more or less is a rated verging on starvation, famine was a very real danger and in the last year if the war had gone on for a few months longer i think famine would have actually hit japan in major regions of japan in a big way but 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 and we are throwing in the towel and i tried to weave into these three books and appreciation of what life was like for the japanese man or woman on the street. and to try to present, you know through their eyes what they saw with the limited information 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 in the philippines in great detail and frankly i came away very glad the fighting in the philippines was horrible but it climaxed in a particular horrific way in the battle for the capital of the philippines, manila. you describe manila as demonstrated in quote the worth pathologies of japan's military culture and ideologically g. could you -- what do you mean by that? >> the japanese army in particular had essentially infiltrated this idea that you can never surrender under any circumstances and to fight to the death. or if necessary take your own life rather than be captured. i don't think this was generally been well understood but this was a new and radical idea and japanese military culture. this had not been something that it come down through the samurai tradition written in the samurai era of warfare in japan the japanese warrior had fought only his fellow japanese and of a battle or 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 thought wrong traditionally and japanese culture. this was something that the japanese army really just in the time after the russell japanese war in 1905 that 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 probably maybe the single best example of it but 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 and take their own lives if necessary that puts pressure on them and the results can be pretty severe and so the fact that manila, i think, is in part an outgrowth of this kind of distortion of what the japanese military traditions and cultures were and it was, you know, one of the darkest chapters of the pacific war which is, of course, one of the darkest wars in our history. >> hitler regularly claimed the horrible things he told the germans to do were historic german traditions the based fact four, five, 600 years and it's similar with the new radicalization of warfare being touted is dating all the way back to the 14 or 1300s and i found those portions of the book extremely enlightening. there is another issue of course that you have have to deal 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 impossible to fathom the phenomenon of the kamikaze? by which i mean can we who are alive today ever hope to understand what is going through the mind of young japanese pilot, more or less strapped into their plane and told to hurtle themselves into the aircraft carriers? >> we can certainly try and it helps that so many of the kamikaze left diaries and other letters and many of these have been published and there was a whole literary genre, the last writing of the kamikaze in these books sell 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 that were dedicated to giving their lives in battle. of course, there was a recent suicide attacks across much of the islamic world and the psychology i think is fascinating in many of the kamikaze pilots particularly in the later stages of the war in the okinawa campaign which was the largest campaign of the war you had young man who had been recruited into fights training without being told that they might be asked to give their lives and then there were pressured essentially to quote unquote volunteer and many of them were deeply reluctant and they made that clear in their writings and indeed often they would take off from their base and then turned back saying they had engine problems and were not able to find the fleet. from the americans point of view seen hundreds, literally hundreds and hundreds of enemy planes come in essentially behaving like man guided missiles 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 and we probably contributed to the context of these strategic bombing and ultimately the atomic bombs as well. >> good i read this right? kamikaze hit the bunker hill and moved to the enterprise and then i got hit by kamikaze and then they hit [inaudible] new mexico all in the same time. [laughter] >> yeah, that all happened in the space of about three days. >> you write about the wartime conferences and of course lots damn where they were warmed of prompt and utter destruction if they did not agree to unconditional surrender and i would haunted by this passage of the japanese prime minister response and he used 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 thing we interpret it one way but he may have meant something different by that and is that possible? >> what is happening there was that the japanese ruling circle this tiny circle of military leaders around hirohito 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 their homeland being totally destroyed and yet you had the hard liner faction in the japanese army in particular that were determined to fight to the end or lease to try to fight off invasion of the japanese homeland before any discussion of a truce. the prime minister in that case they received the pots damn declaration warning what would happen in general terms and the prime minister is trying to essentially articulate a vague enough policy that would satisfy both of these elements in the regime and so what do you do? we see politicians today if you can't articulate a clear policy you try to use vague language to satisfy both sides and so really what he's doing is talking to the hard-liners in his own regime saying essentially using we will simply ignore this and it will be no comment we will not respond at all to the potsdam declaration or rejected and we will not accept it and simply will not we will pretend it does not exist. when our translators get a hold of that we are trying to understand what it means and essentially the conclusion that our government makes is that the japanese have rejected the potsdam declaration so it was a case in which perhaps the language barrier may have contributed not necessarily to a misunderstanding but contributed to the confusion crowded into those last weeks of the pacific war. >> it is shocking to meet the need for precision and diplomatic interplay and communication and one has to be careful of what one says. you say something very interesting at the end and let me say to folks out there if i may do with one or two more because there are a lot of questions because people want to ask you stuff. you have an interesting analysis at the end of the book that if the pacific war had been a game of chess you right there would have been no endgame. you mean that when you are playing chess it's pretty clear when one side has gotten the upper hand in no reason to play it through. if you have taken my queen, you know, let's just try again and 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 thought on that? >> i think the best estimates are 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 wars 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, firebombing and the atomic bombs and you've got something like 800,000 japanese civilians giving their lives in last year of the war as well. with that chess metaphor it was so clear that looking at the situation from the top levels of the japanese government beginning in mid 1944 they saw this the way this was going. they realize that they had lost the war and that they were going to lose control of all their overseas resources and run out of oil and would have no source of oil or they would be cut off from their armies overseas and be completely blockaded and there was going to be nothing coming into japan, nothing going out and their economy was going to seize up and their cities would be burned down and they foresaw all of that and yet the conditions in japan, political addition conditions in japan simply did not allow for any sort of concerted bid for peace and is a great tragedy because there were elements within the japanese leadership who foresaw that this would happen and yet they were unable essentially to establish the baseline consensus that was needed to say we've got to acknowledge that we lost this war and try to cut the best deal that we can. and so we had this horror show which was the last year of the pacific war? similarly 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 then trickle down into nothing but burned itself out in a flare in both the major theaters. and, on that note i have so many good questions here from our folks out there and as you can imagine if they read your book their highly informed audience so let's see what we can take from our friends out there. trent asks a great question. he used a newly released diary from general richardson highest-ranking army officer in the central pacific. how did this affect the story that you told and your book but i would also ask if you could expand what other interesting sources have not been touched before? i'm sure you ran across a bunch of them but what about general richardson's diary? >> general richardson was the as the questioner says, commanding officer in the north half of the pacific under nimitz and richardson was the army's top general in that theater. he left a very detailed and very insightful diary which is absolutely an essential source to understanding particularly understanding service rivalry in the pacific the struggle between the army and navy from someone who was in direct contact with nimitz virtually on a day-to-day basis and knew what was happening. richardson or general richardson left his diary to his descendents and said you could keep it private until the year 2015 when i'm sure everyone i know will be gone and i was fortunate enough to be contacted by the family in 2015 and said what he liked the diary i said what i like the diary? thank you so much. it's a really important news source and it provided a lot of insight in many different aspects of this narrative but most importantly returning to the first chapter, pacific strategy conference when macarthur flew from australia and macarthur stayed with richardson in his house on port schachter in oahu and that he debriefed general richardson after each of the strategy conferences and 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, fdr 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 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 and many of the particulars i think have been called into question and so richardson's diary was 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 some source that no one has ever looked at before? it makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it? >> it helps that once you publish a couple books and people read them some of that stuff starts coming in over the transom to use the old naval term but that did not 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 a number of these cases where people would reach out to me and say my father left a diary, my grandfather left a series of letters and he served with the 13th and this and that or this portion of that campaign and 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 have more than anyone of us can read in a lifetime and yet when you get contacted by the families that say would you like to look at this thing that no one else has a scene he had 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 is a question about peleliu before i ask it it's a good question about the leadership on peleliu so let me ask you indirectly, was peleliu a mistake? >> i believe peleliu -- what to say it was a mistake is a bit bold because of course, the decision to go into peleliu was made without the hindsight we have today. i would say looking back from the perspective we have now that we should have bypassed peleliu. we should have bypassed it and not taken it. peleliu is an island and it's remote even by pacific standards and late near the scene between macarthur and nimitz respective command areas. it had been ordered initially as a way to essentially protect the northern flank as he returned to the philippines but as events developed and became we essentially could neutralize the airfield on peleliu 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's advance. so yes they could've canceled that operation and it was a bloodied battle, terrible battle in a battle that many moraines gave their lives fighting and looking back it is clear 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. could you comment on the leadership on peleliu where he received criticism for being overly aggressive in causing excessive casualties. was he pushing too hard due to his personal aggressive nature of following orders from superiors who wanted to finish the 24 -- peleliu evasion quickly? >> it was both of those. it did not have to be one or the other. was he too aggressive? perhaps? perhaps was his orders to aggressive? yes. what happened on peleliu for those of you are not as familiar of the japanese cleverly decided they would essentially develop the subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels in the high ground of peleliu and essentially be a network of coral hills north of the airfield and so rather than selling out in these bonsai charges which had become common in the early island battles of the south pacific they were using subterranean fortifications to neutralize american advantages and airpower and artillery and naval power and firepower offshore. the marine tradition and doctrine had been rapid attack, take territory quickly, take losses of 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, a gradual development, you know, sandbag embankments and essentially had to be something more akin to trench warfare. and so, [inaudible] was a great marine and that was a vicious battle in which he was asked to do something that any commander would have billed 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. >> mary huron has a good question. >> could do -- i lost the audio there for a moment? >> i'm sorry. mary huron has a good question for you. would you agree or disagree that hirohito was more than a figurehead but directly involved with the planning of the war in the pacific? his tyrus released in the 1980s had more information. >> yes, i think that is accurate. hirohito was much more involved as commander of military forces and he was against the war and resisted the drift toward war and the constitutional arrangements were somewhat ambiguous exactly about how much authority did hirohito have is a disputed point, even today. yet, he certainly had tremendous intangible authority over his military leaders and with his military were unanimous and 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 when 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 you dedicated it to add a role can vote and general of whom [inaudible] please expand upon this choice. >> kimbo in short of course as we all know where the commanding officers on or in hawaii on december 7, 1941 when the japanese attacked and both were relieved of command and essentially spent the rest of the war answering to a series of investigations and the question of to what degree are they culpable for the lack, clear lack of readiness which are military forces showed and being blindsided by the japanese during that attack. to what extent were they culpable and to what extent were or was our own readiness essentially just a feature of a peacetime nation that did not recognize that japan even had the capability to attack across the distance and such distances and to what extent were leaders in washington culpable and there was a lot of culpability to go around, excuse me. in my view. >> are you all right there, ian? >> i had a lamp fall over. [laughter] in my view whatever you had to say about kimbo a large share of the blame for something and when blame really should have been more fairly distributive and so i thought this was essentially this last year of the war was when we settled this war with the japanese and that, you know 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 and we will let you answer this question but what do either of you think of the soviet invasion of manchuria had a greater impact on the japanese surrender rather than the two atom bombs? he argue that they would rather surrender to the pragmatic americans rather than the soviet communists? >> i would agree with the last part of that. it was just the timeline that we had hiroshima on august 6, 94 to 5 and hit nagasaki on august 9. the soviet union suddenly declared war on japan surprising japan also on august 9. essentially you had the red army charging to manchuria with the largest ground attacks in history of war 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 kind of hope of a diplomatic exit to the war was to bring stoll and or as stalin as a mediator in arranging truce talks between the americans and the japanese and so the declaration of war they are essentially extinguished that last hope of a diplomatic exit to the war. the question is what was the relative importance of the atomic bombs in the sudden russian attack prompting the japanese surrender? historians have debated this and i think it's 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 with the shocks coming together in a short time were important and my view is it's impossible to say which was more important. they both were very important together in combination. ... >> directions suddenly declared one japanese. and distinguish that sort of diplomatic exit to the wharf. >> i think in virtually we have come to the end of our our right now together. as always, the conversation so brilliant . to buy. the author in and it the book is twilight of the gods, were in the western pacific 1944 - 1945 . there's the third book in the trilogy. so if you've come this far, you must read the final third volume. i would like to thank you for sending this hour with us. we have to get to back down here. when the conditions are the normal conditions reserve themselves. >> sue and i look forward to coming back . thank you for having us for unit. >> in from the national museum in new orleans, have a great night. we can isis monthly are featuring book tv programs is a preview of what is available every weekend on "c-span2". tonight, the major current affairs, first the new york times stuart reports on a girl scout troop which was started for girls and a homeless shelter in new york city. the canadian judy talks about free speech and censorship. later, samantha shares her thoughts on identity, body image and her writing style. this arsenate p.m. eastern, enjoy bikini this week and every weekend on "c-span2". book tv on c-span to the top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. saturday and 9:00 p.m. eastern, heritage foundation senior fellow, on his book, the change of america. it argues that identity politics is dividing america partied in on sunday, and 9:00 p.m. eastern, and afterwards, adam, deputy chief of staff for former democratic senator, harry reid of nevada party to talk about his book, kill switch. the rise of the modern senate and the crippling of american democracy. he is interviewed by wall street journal congressional reporter christine pederson . much book tv, this weekend on "c-span2". wednesday joe biden will be sworn in as the 45th president of the united states in our nation's capital. and in light of the attack on the capitol, the temporary closing of the national mall traditional inauguration has been modified. follow her life of the day unfolds. starting at 7:00 a.m. eastern . rc arrival at the capital. the soaring end of joe biden and kamala harris. in the inaugural address. inauguration of joe biden beginning at 7:00 a.m. eastern on wednesday, live coverage on c-span. and cspan.org. listen live in the c-span radio app.

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