What Japanese Commanders Finally Admitted About American Firepower — After It Was Too Late

[00:00:00]2,403 Americans died on the morning of December 7th, 1941.

[00:00:07]Most of their families would spend the rest of their lives believing that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because Japan believed she could win.

[00:00:16]That is not what happened. In a small room in Tokyo, 4 years later, in the cold November of 1945, a defeated Japanese general sat across from an American admiral and finally told the truth.

[00:00:30]Japan had known she would lose. Her best admiral had told her in writing in 1940.

[00:00:36]Her prime minister had known.

[00:00:39]Her generals had known. The man who planned Pearl Harbor had known. They attacked anyway. This is the story of what the Japanese general said after it was too late for the truth to matter.

[00:00:51]And it is not the story you were taught in school. The room was cold. Tokyo, November 30th, 1945.

[00:01:00]3 months after the surrender, 3 months after the aircraft had stopped coming, a wooden desk, two chairs, a stenographer in the corner, her pencil already resting on paper.

[00:01:12]And across from an American Rear Admiral named Ralph Ofstie, sat a small, tired man in a plain civilian suit.

[00:01:20]His name was Torashiro Kawabe. He was 55 years old. 6 months earlier, he had been the Deputy Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff.

[00:01:30]One of the last men in the empire with direct access to the throne.

[00:01:35]One of the men who had signed the orders for the final defense of the home islands.

[00:01:40]The last defense, the one that would have killed millions. Now, he was a witness. The folder in front of Ofstie was stamped in careful black type.

[00:01:50]Nav 98, Japan's decision to go to war.

[00:01:54]The American leaned forward. His voice was soft, almost casual. General, when did you know Japan would lose? Kawabe did not answer. He looked at his hands.

[00:02:06]He looked at the window. He looked at the wall behind the American's head, where the paint was peeling from the smoke of a city that had burned for months.

[00:02:16]And in the silence, a story began.

[00:02:19]A story that had started 26 years earlier in a country neither of them had been born in.

[00:02:26]In a city on the other side of the world. The story that Kawabe was about to tell was not really his own.

[00:02:33]It belonged to a man who had been dead for 2 and 1/2 years. A man whose voice, even now, still echoed in the corridors of the Naval General Staff.

[00:02:43]A man who had warned them. His name was Isoroku Yamamoto. And to understand why Kawabe could not answer the American's question, you have to go back to a small room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1919.

[00:02:58]He walked slowly.

[00:03:00]The trees along the streets of Cambridge were turning red. The mornings were sharp with cold. He wore a wool coat that was too heavy for the walk from his boarding house to Harvard Yard, and he carried a leather satchel that contained an English dictionary, three notebooks, and a deck of playing cards.

[00:03:19]He was 35 years old. He had lost two fingers on his left hand 14 years earlier.

[00:03:25]May of 1905.

[00:03:27]A Russian shell had burst on the deck of the cruiser Nisshin at the Battle of Tsushima.

[00:03:33]When the smoke cleared, the young ensign named Isoroku had looked down at his hand and seen that his index and middle fingers on the left were simply gone.

[00:03:43]The scar tissue had healed pale and clean. He had come to America to study not the military, not warships, not the ranges of guns or the classifications of hulls, he had come to study America. He rode third-class trains across the continent.

[00:04:00]He saw Chicago in a snowstorm.

[00:04:03]He watched the Great Lakes freeze from the window of a passenger car. He walked the streets of small towns in Ohio and Indiana, listening to English he could barely understand, and he wrote in his notebooks every night.

[00:04:17]He noticed three things. First, the women. Young women, American women. They attended the universities as equals to the men.

[00:04:26]They sat in the same lecture halls. They read the same books. In a country where his mother had never learned to write her own name, this was not merely a curiosity.

[00:04:37]This was a signal. A society that educated its women was a society preparing to mobilize every mind it had.

[00:04:44]Second, the sugar. In Japan, sugar was scarce, ratios. In America, sugar was piled in bowls on the counters of ordinary diners.

[00:04:54]A working man ate more sugar in a morning than a Japanese family used in a week. It was a small thing.

[00:05:01]But Yamamoto understood small things.

[00:05:04]Abundance casually displayed is the surest measure of surplus.

[00:05:08]Third and last, the factories. He rode down to Detroit in the summer of '20.

[00:05:14]He stood on a mezzanine above the assembly floor of a plant that stretched further than he could see. Iron ore came in one end of the building.

[00:05:23]Automobiles came out the other.

[00:05:26]Men moved along the line in choreographed silence. A finished car rolled off the end every few minutes.

[00:05:33]Yamamoto did what a naval officer does when facing something he does not understand. He counted. He counted the windows.

[00:05:41]He counted the chimneys. He counted the rail sidings and the loading docks and the men he could see, he made estimates in his small notebook.

[00:05:51]He calculated production capacity. He compared it silently to the entire industrial output of the Empire of Japan. The numbers were not close.

[00:06:01]The numbers were not in the same century.

[00:06:04]Later that summer, he traveled south. He stood on the black soil of Texas and watched the derricks pump crude oil from horizon to horizon.

[00:06:13]He wrote in his notebook that a single Texas field produced more oil in a week than the Imperial Japanese Navy could store in its entire strategic reserve.

[00:06:24]He returned to Japan in 1921. He filed a report. The report was archived. Seven years later, he came back to America.

[00:06:33]Naval attaché, Washington. He toured factories again. He toured the steel mills of Pittsburgh. He watched rivers of molten metal pour from furnaces that burned 24 hours a day.

[00:06:46]He played poker with American officers and businessmen and learned that Americans do not fold when they are losing. Americans double the bet.

[00:06:56]He returned to Japan in 1928 and rose through the ranks of the Imperial Navy. He championed naval aviation when his colleagues still believed the battleship would decide the next war.

[00:07:09]He argued against the alliance with Germany. He argued against the war with China. He argued against a war with America that anyone with eyes could see coming.

[00:07:20]And in September of 1940, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe summoned him for a private conversation. Konoe was 48 years old.

[00:07:30]An aristocrat descended from the ancient Fujiwara line, elegant, cultured, indecisive, a man being pulled toward war by forces he could not name and could not stop.

[00:07:41]Japan had just signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy 3 days earlier. The road to Washington was now a road with no exits.

[00:07:51]Konoe asked one question.

[00:07:53]If Japan fought the United States, what would happen? Yamamoto's answer has been preserved. It has been quoted, paraphrased, translated, and misquoted for 80 years.

[00:08:04]The exact phrasing shifts between sources. The meaning does not. He said that for the first 6 months or perhaps a year, he could run wild.

[00:08:14]He could win victory upon victory. He could hurl the American fleet back across the Pacific. Then he stopped. And then, more quietly, he said that beyond that year, he had absolutely no confidence in what would happen.

[00:08:28]He asked the Prime Minister to make every effort to avoid war with America.

[00:08:33]The Prime Minister listened. The Prime Minister did not act.

[00:08:38]Now, there is a famous line often attributed to Yamamoto in the days after Pearl Harbor. A line about waking a sleeping giant and filling him with a terrible resolve.

[00:08:49]You have probably heard it. Yamamoto never said it. There is no record of him saying it. Not in any letter.

[00:08:57]Not in any diary. Not in any of the meticulously kept staff records of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The line first appears in a Hollywood screenplay in 1970.

[00:09:08]A film called Tora! Tora! Tora! A screenwriter wrote it. An actor said it.

[00:09:13]And for the next 50 years, the world remembered it as history.

[00:09:18]The truth is quieter and in some ways worse. [music] What Yamamoto actually said in that room with Konoe in the autumn of 1940 was that Japan would have 6 months.

[00:09:29]Maybe a year. And then whatever came would not be a fair fight, but a slow crushing under a weight no island empire could bear.

[00:09:38]He was not being poetic. He was doing arithmetic. He had seen the arithmetic.

[00:09:43]He had walked through it. He had written it down in his notebook in 1920 and again in 1927.

[00:09:51]And now in 1940, he was reading it aloud to a man who could still stop the war.

[00:09:57]And the man did not stop the war.

[00:10:00]14 months later, on the morning of the 7th of December, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft crossed the northern coast of Oahu.

[00:10:11]The first wave arrived at 7:55 in the morning, Hawaiian time. American sailors were at breakfast. American soldiers were sleeping in their barracks.

[00:10:22]American aircraft on the ground at Hickam and Wheeler Field sat wingtip to wingtip, lined up neatly as protection against sabotage, which made them perfect targets for strafing runs.

[00:10:35]Above the harbor, in the lead bomber, a 39-year-old commander named Mitsuo Fuchida, watched the American fleet come into view below him.

[00:10:45]Battleship Row. Eight capital ships tied to their moorings in the still water. He raised his radio microphone. He gave the signal.

[00:10:54]Tora! Tora! Tora! The code word confirming that complete surprise had been achieved. The first torpedoes struck the water at 7:58.

[00:11:04]The USS Oklahoma took three torpedoes in the first minutes and began to capsize almost immediately, trapping hundreds of men below her decks.

[00:11:14]The USS West Virginia was struck by seven torpedoes and two bombs and settled slowly into the mud of the harbor.

[00:11:22]The USS California took two torpedoes and began to burn. At 8:10, an armor-piercing bomb dropped from a Japanese high-altitude bomber penetrated the forward deck of the USS Arizona.

[00:11:35]It fell through five decks of steel. It detonated in the ship's forward powder magazine. The Arizona exploded. 1,177 men died in seconds.

[00:11:47]The bow of the ship lifted out of the water and then broke away from the rest of the hull.

[00:11:53]A column of smoke rose over Pearl Harbor that would still be visible from 10 mi at sea by nightfall.

[00:12:01]18 American ships were sunk or damaged.

[00:12:04]188 American aircraft were destroyed on the ground. 2,403 Americans died.

[00:12:13]In Tokyo, when the news arrived, the celebration began. Church bells did not ring. Japan did not have church bells.

[00:12:21]But newspapers printed extras within the hour.

[00:12:24]Radio broadcasts interrupted their scheduled programs. School children were given the afternoon off.

[00:12:31]In the streets of Tokyo, of Osaka, of Nagoya, people gathered around loudspeakers and listened to the announcer read the same words over and over.

[00:12:41]Great victory. Great victory. Great victory. 1,400 mi to the south aboard the battleship Nagato, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto received the reports one by one.

[00:12:53]He did not celebrate. The officers who were with him that day recorded his mood in careful, respectful language. He was quiet.

[00:13:02]He was subdued. He asked specific questions and received specific answers.

[00:13:07]And then he sat alone in his sea cabin for a long time.

[00:13:11]Because Yamamoto knew three things his colleagues in Tokyo did not want to know. First, the American aircraft carriers had not been in port.

[00:13:21]Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga were all at sea on the morning of the attack.

[00:13:26]The battleships that had been sunk were old ships, ships from another war, ships that would soon be replaced by faster, more powerful vessels already under construction in American shipyards.

[00:13:40]The ships that would actually decide the Pacific war had not been touched.

[00:13:44]Second, the fuel tank farms above the harbor had not been attacked.

[00:13:50]The dry docks had not been attacked. The submarine base had not been attacked.

[00:13:55]Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commanding the strike force from the carrier Akagi, had elected not to launch a third wave.

[00:14:03]He had achieved his mission. His aircraft had suffered losses. He turned north and sailed for home.

[00:14:10]The infrastructure that would rebuild the Pacific Fleet was untouched.

[00:14:15]And third, the Americans would not surrender after this. They would do the opposite. Yamamoto had lived among Americans. He had played poker with them.

[00:14:25]He knew that a surprise attack on a Sunday morning against a nation that was not officially at war would not produce negotiation.

[00:14:35]It would produce fury, a cold, patient, industrialized fury that would build ships and planes and armies and would not stop building them until Tokyo Bay was full of American warships.

[00:14:47]That night, according to accounts from his staff officers, Yamamoto was subdued. He did not celebrate.

[00:14:54]He asked specific questions and received specific answers, and then he sat alone in his sea cabin for a long time.

[00:15:02]He did not speak of triumph. He spoke of debt. He had, by his own reckoning, 6 months, perhaps a year.

[00:15:09]The tactical victory of his career was, at the same moment, the strategic catastrophe of his empire.

[00:15:16]And no one in Tokyo on the morning of the 8th of December, 1941, was capable of hearing it.

[00:15:23]The six months had begun. Back in the interrogation room, November of 1945, Kawabe was still looking at the wall.

[00:15:32]The stenographer waited. The American waited. The question hung in the air between them. When did you know Japan would lose?

[00:15:41]And what Kawabe was going to answer, in careful and formal Japanese, over the next several hours, was that he had not known in 1945.

[00:15:51]He had not known in 1944. He had not known at Midway, or at Guadalcanal, or at Saipan. He had known, if he was honest with himself, on the 9th of December, 1941.

[00:16:03]Because on that morning, in the quiet after the celebrations, he had read the same reports Yamamoto had read. He had understood, on that morning, what Yamamoto had understood.

[00:16:15]And he had understood what an angry America was about to do. He had known, and he had not spoken.

[00:16:22]None of them had spoken.

[00:16:24]Because in the empire that had built itself on obedience and honor, and the sacred person of the emperor, the men who knew the truth had chosen not to say it.

[00:16:34]They had let the war they knew they could not win begin and continue and burn cities cities and drown fleets and starve islands and end at last aboard an American battleship in Tokyo Bay under 900 American aircraft passing overhead in an unbroken drone that would not stop for hours.

[00:16:53]The general, in the plain civilian suit, lifted his head at last. He looked at the American across the desk.

[00:17:01]And in a quiet voice, he began to answer the question. Six months. That was Yamamoto's number, not a prophecy.

[00:17:09]Not a boast. An estimate delivered by an admiral who had counted the smokestacks of Detroit and the derricks of Texas, and on the arithmetic.

[00:17:19]The first month seemed to prove him right.

[00:17:21]Wake Island fell on the 23rd of December, 1941.

[00:17:26]Hong Kong on Christmas Day.

[00:17:29]Manila was declared an open city on the 26th of December. Singapore, the great fortress of the British Empire, held for 70 days, and then surrendered on the 15th of February, 1942.

[00:17:43]80,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers walked into Japanese captivity that day.

[00:17:49]The general who broke Singapore was named Tomoyuki Yamashita.

[00:17:54]He would be called the tiger of Malaya in the newspapers.

[00:17:58]3 years and 11 months later, he would be hanged in the Philippines.

[00:18:03]But we are not there yet. By May of 1942, the rising sun flew from the Aleutians in the north to the Solomons in the south.

[00:18:12]From Burma in the west to the Marshall Islands in the east, 400 million people lived under Japanese occupation.

[00:18:21]The resources Japan had gone to war to obtain, the oil, the tin, the rubber, the rice, were pouring into her holds.

[00:18:29]The newspapers in Tokyo printed maps.

[00:18:31]The maps were red. The red covered a third of the globe, and Yamamoto counted the days.

[00:18:37]And because the man who had walked through the Ford plant knew what was happening on the other side of the Pacific.

[00:18:45]He knew that in San Francisco and San Diego and Norfolk and Newport News, in shipyards from Maine to Oregon, welders were working three shifts.

[00:18:55]Steel was being poured, keels were being laid, and somewhere in the American interior, thousands of 18-year-old boys were beginning the first weeks of the training that would eventually put them in the cockpits of aircraft not yet designed, on the decks of carriers not yet launched, in the ranks of divisions not yet formed.

[00:19:17]The 6 months were ending. On the 4th of June, 1942, Japanese and American carrier forces met near a small atoll in the Central Pacific.

[00:19:28]Midway. Yamamoto had planned it as the decisive battle. He brought four fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu. He brought two light carriers, 11 battleships, and over 250 aircraft.

[00:19:42]It was the most powerful naval force Japan had ever sent to sea for a single operation. He commanded from the battleship Yamato, the largest warship in the world, 72,000 tons of steel, positioned 300 miles behind the carrier strike force.

[00:20:00]Facing him, Admiral Chester Nimitz had three carriers, Enterprise, Hornet, Yorktown. The Yorktown should not have been there. She had been salvaged 1 month earlier at the Battle of the Coral Sea.

[00:20:13]Her flight deck holed by bombs, her internal structure fractured. Japanese intelligence had reported her sunk. The Imperial Naval General Staff had crossed her name off the American order of battle.

[00:20:27]American repair crews at Pearl Harbor pulled her into dry dock on the 27th of May. Under normal circumstances, the repairs would have taken 90 days.

[00:20:38]Working around the clock in three shifts, welders and pipe fitters and electricians patched her flight deck, restored her boilers, repaired her fuel lines, and returned her to sea in less than 72 hours.

[00:20:52]Three days. That was the difference Yamamoto had tried to explain to Kono in 1940.

[00:20:59]That was the arithmetic he had done in his notebook 20 years earlier.

[00:21:04]It was not just quantity, it was speed.

[00:21:07]American industry could not only build, it could rebuild, it could put a wounded ship back into the fight while the enemy still believed her dead.

[00:21:16]The Yorktown sailed for Midway on the 30th of May. American code breakers, working in a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor under a commander named Joseph Rochefort, had broken enough of the Japanese naval code to know where Yamamoto was going.

[00:21:33]Nimitz positioned his three carriers northeast of the atoll and waited. The battle began at dawn on the 4th of June.

[00:21:42]Japanese aircraft attacked Midway itself in the first strike. The strike succeeded in destroying most of the American aircraft on the island.

[00:21:52]But the strike commander radioed back that a second attack would be necessary.

[00:21:57]Nagumo, commanding again from the Akagi, ordered his reserve aircraft rearmed with bombs for a ground attack.

[00:22:05]That was when the American torpedo bombers appeared over the Japanese fleet.

[00:22:09]They came in low, slow, unescorted, waves of them.

[00:22:14]Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet lost 15 out of 15 aircraft. Torpedo Squadron 6 from the Enterprise lost 10 out of 14.

[00:22:24]Not a single torpedo hit its target.

[00:22:27]While the Japanese fighters were down at wave top height, slaughtering the torpedo bombers, American dive bombers from the Enterprise and the Yorktown arrived above the Japanese fleet at 18,000 ft.

[00:22:40]The Japanese carriers were fully exposed. Their flight decks were crowded with aircraft being refueled and rearmed. Bombs and torpedoes were stacked in the open on the hangar decks.

[00:22:53]Aviation gasoline was pumping through hoses across the deck plates. They were floating ammunition dumps with the lids off.

[00:23:01]Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, commanding the Enterprise dive bombers, had been searching for the Japanese fleet for over an hour.

[00:23:10]He was running out of fuel. He spotted a lone Japanese destroyer heading northeast and made a decision that a lesser officer might not have made.

[00:23:20]He followed it. The destroyer, the Arashi, was returning to the main fleet after depth-charging an American submarine. McClusky's gamble ended the war for Japanese naval aviation.

[00:23:33]In 5 minutes, three of Japan's four fleet carriers were burning wrecks. The Akagi took one bomb that ignited the aircraft on her flight deck.

[00:23:43]The Kaga took four bombs. The Soryu took three, gasoline exploded. Bombs cooked off in racks, men burned alive in the passageways.

[00:23:52]All three carriers were abandoned before the day was out.

[00:23:56]The Hiryu escaped the first attack and launched a counter strike that afternoon that found the Yorktown and put three bombs and two torpedoes into her.

[00:24:06]The Yorktown, the ship that should not have been there, would sink two days later.

[00:24:12]But before she went down, her dive bombers found the Hiryu.

[00:24:16]Four hits. The fourth carrier burned through the night and was scuttled at dawn. In one day, Japan lost four fleet carriers, 248 aircraft, and over 3,000 men.

[00:24:29]Including many of the finest pilots she had left. American losses were one carrier, one destroyer, 150 aircraft, and 307 men.

[00:24:40]Six months and three days after Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto's prediction had come true to the calendar. He received the news aboard the Yamato.

[00:24:50]Officers who were with him recorded no outburst, no collapse. He gave the order to withdraw. He turned the combined fleet around and sailed back to Japan.

[00:25:01]The tide had turned, not because the Americans were better, because the Americans were coming. Two months later, they arrived.

[00:25:10]On the 7th of August, 1942, United States Marines waded ashore at a place most Americans had never heard of.

[00:25:19]Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands.

[00:25:22]The Japanese had been building an airfield there. Its completion would have put Japanese bombers within range of the shipping lanes between America and Australia.

[00:25:32]The Marines seized the half-built airfield in the first hours of the landing.

[00:25:37]American engineers finished it in less than 2 weeks and named it Henderson Field after a Marine dive bomber pilot killed at Midway.

[00:25:46]Whoever held Henderson Field controlled the skies over Guadalcanal.

[00:25:51]For 6 months, the Japanese tried to take it back. They tried with infantry.

[00:25:56]A colonel named Kiyonao Ichiki led approximately 900 elite troops in a night assault across the Tenaru River on the 21st of August.

[00:26:07]Ichiki believed the Americans would break at the first pressure of a bayonet charge. Nearly 800 of his men died on the sandbar in the dark.

[00:26:17]Ichiki burned his regimental colors and put a pistol to his head. The Imperial General Staff did not believe the reports.

[00:26:26]They sent a stronger force. Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi led 6,000 men into the jungle in September. His men attacked Bloody Ridge over three nights.

[00:26:37]They were annihilated by Marine machine gunners and artillery. Fewer than half survived. They tried with the fleet.

[00:26:45]In the black waters off Savo Island on the night of the 8th of August, a Japanese cruiser force under Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, surprised the Allied ships guarding the landing beaches.

[00:26:57]In less than an hour, four heavy cruisers went to the bottom of what would later be called Ironbottom Sound.

[00:27:05]The Quincy, the Vincennes, the Astoria, the Australian Canberra. Over 1,000 Allied sailors died in the darkness.

[00:27:13]It was the worst surface defeat in the history of the United States Navy after Pearl Harbor itself.

[00:27:20]And it changed nothing because every American ship that sank could be replaced. Every Japanese ship that sank was gone forever.

[00:27:29]The Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal starved. Their supply line was called the Tokyo Express.

[00:27:35]Destroyers would race down the slot between the Solomon Islands at night, unload rice and ammunition, and race back before American aircraft from Henderson Field caught them at dawn.

[00:27:47]It delivered men. It rarely delivered food. Japanese officers wrote in their diaries that their soldiers were too weak to carry their rifles.

[00:27:57]They ate grass. They ate insects. They ate the roots of jungle plants that gave them dysentery. Malaria killed thousands.

[00:28:06]Beriberi killed thousands more.

[00:28:09]By February of 1943, when Japan finally evacuated the survivors, 20,000 of the 36,000 men sent to Guadalcanal were dead.

[00:28:19]Most had died of disease and starvation.

[00:28:22]American losses were 1,600 killed in combat. Emperor Hirohito, meeting with his military chiefs in the winter of 1942, asked why the Americans could build an airfield in a matter of days while Japanese engineers required a month or more.

[00:28:39]His officers explained that the Americans used machines to accomplish what Japanese forces did by hand.

[00:28:46]The emperor is said to have been silent for a long time.

[00:28:50]Because Hirohito, 41 years old, a marine biologist by inclination, a man who had studied the natural world all his life, understood what he had just been told.

[00:29:01]Japan was fighting a nation of machines.

[00:29:04]Japan was fighting with men. And on the 18th of April, 1943, on a tiny airstrip on a jungle island in the northern Solomons, the man who had tried to warn them all ran out of time.

[00:29:17]American code breakers had intercepted Yamamoto's itinerary for a morale-boosting inspection tour of Japanese bases at Bougainville.

[00:29:26]18 Army Air Force P-38 Lightnings launched at dawn from Guadalcanal.

[00:29:32]Two turned back with mechanical trouble.

[00:29:35]16 went on. They flew 400 miles at wave top height under radio silence.

[00:29:41]They arrived over the coast of Bougainville within 2 minutes of Yamamoto's aircraft. The escorting Zeros were caught above them.

[00:29:50]A pilot named Rex Barber, in an engagement historians would debate for the next 50 years before crediting him, closed on the lead Betty bomber and fired one long burst.

[00:30:02]The engine on the left wing began to trail smoke. The Betty banked slowly to the north and struck the jungle canopy at cruising speed.

[00:30:11]Yamamoto's body was found the next day, still strapped into his seat, still holding his ceremonial sword. He had been 59 years old.

[00:30:21]The man who had counted the derricks of Texas was dead.

[00:30:25]The empire that had refused to listen to him would follow.

[00:30:29]Now, the American war machine began to run at full speed. The numbers become almost impossible to comprehend.

[00:30:37]American factories produced 300,000 military aircraft during the war.

[00:30:43]Japan produced 70,000. American shipyards launched over 150 aircraft carriers of all types. Japan launched 18.

[00:30:53]American arsenals turned out 41 billion rounds of small arms ammunition.

[00:30:58]At the Kaiser shipyard in Richmond, California, the workers built cargo ships called Liberty ships.

[00:31:05]Simple vessels, welded, not riveted, built for one purpose, to move American production across the ocean faster than German and Japanese submarines could sink them.

[00:31:17]The average construction time for a Liberty ship in 1941 was 244 days.

[00:31:24]By 1943, that had dropped to 42 days.

[00:31:28]On the 8th of November, 1942, in a publicity demonstration, the workers at Kaiser shipyard laid the keel of a Liberty ship called the SS Robert E.

[00:31:40]Peery at 12:01 in the morning, 4 days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes later, the SS Robert E.

[00:31:47]Peery sailed under her own power, not welded, complete, fitted out, ready for the Atlantic. There is something you should know about the atomic bomb.

[00:31:58]Japan had one, too. Not a completed weapon, not a tested device, but a program. Two of them, actually. The Nigo project at the Riken Institute in Tokyo under a physicist named Yoshio Nishina.

[00:32:10]And the F-Go project at Kyoto Imperial University under a physicist named Bunsaku Arakatsu. Both programs began before the war.

[00:32:20]Both had access to the same underlying physics that Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer were using in the deserts of New Mexico.

[00:32:29]Both had brilliant scientists. Both had the theoretical understanding required.

[00:32:34]Neither had a chance. In '43, Nishina calculated what it would take to enrich enough uranium for a single atomic bomb.

[00:32:43]His answer was that Japan would require approximately 10 years of dedicated effort and would need to consume roughly 10% of the electrical output of the entire Japanese Empire to do it.

[00:32:57]Japan did not have 10 years. Japan did not have 10% of its electricity to spare. The Ni-Go Laboratory, painstakingly assembled over 3 years of wartime effort, was destroyed in the American firebombing of Tokyo on the 13th of April, 1945.

[00:33:15]Nishina's papers burned. His thermal diffusion apparatus melted into slag.

[00:33:20]Japan had the scientists. Japan had the physics. Japan did not have the country.

[00:33:25]By the summer of 1944, the American advance had reached the Mariana Islands.

[00:33:31]From bases on Saipan and Tinian and Guam, B-29 bombers could reach Tokyo.

[00:33:37]On the 19th of June, the Japanese Navy attempted to reverse the tide. The Battle of the Philippine Sea. Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa brought nine carriers and approximately 450 aircraft against Admiral Marc Mitscher's Task Force 58.

[00:33:55]Mitscher had 15 carriers, including seven of the new Essex-class ships and 900 aircraft. Ozawa attacked first. He struck from beyond American attack range, exactly as Japanese doctrine had prescribed since before the war.

[00:34:11]But American radar detected the incoming strikes an hour away. American fighter direction officers vectored Hellcats onto the Japanese formations with mathematical precision.

[00:34:24]The Japanese pilots, most of them recent graduates with barely 80 hours of flight time, flew in rigid formations that made them easy targets.

[00:34:34]They died in the air by the hundreds.

[00:34:37]American pilots called it the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Over 350 Japanese aircraft were destroyed on the 19th of June alone.

[00:34:47]American losses were approximately 30 aircraft. Ozawa lost three carriers.

[00:34:52]Taiho, the newest and most advanced ship in the Imperial Navy, exploded from aviation gasoline fumes leaking from a torpedo hit.

[00:35:01]Shokaku, one of the veterans of Pearl Harbor, took four torpedoes and sank in the afternoon. Hiyo went down that evening.

[00:35:10]But the greater loss was in the air crews.

[00:35:12]Japan lost the last generation of pilots she had time to train.

[00:35:17]Saipan fell 3 weeks later.

[00:35:19]The B-29s began to come. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, the man who had led Japan into the war, resigned in disgrace on the 18th of July.

[00:35:29]And on the 14th of February, 1945, in a private audience deep inside the Imperial Palace, a former Prime Minister named Fumimaro Konoe knelt in front of Emperor Hirohito and delivered the most important document of the last 6 months of the Pacific War.

[00:35:47]It was called the Kono Memorial. It was not published. It was not shared with the cabinet. It was a personal communication from a nobleman of the ancient Fujiwara line to his sovereign.

[00:35:59]And its contents were as clear as anything a courtier had ever said to a Japanese emperor.

[00:36:06]The war was lost.

[00:36:07]The war had been lost for some time. The situation now was not whether Japan would be defeated, but whether Japan would be defeated in a way that preserved the Imperial institution, or in a way that swept it aside in a communist revolution driven by the misery of a starving population.

[00:36:25]Kono recommended immediate surrender. He was 53 years old. He had been Prime Minister three times. He had watched Japan slide into the war he had feared and had lacked the will to stop.

[00:36:39]Now he was telling the emperor that further resistance served no purpose except to destroy what was left. The emperor listened.

[00:36:48]The emperor did not act. That was the fifth of the great warnings. Yamamoto had warned in 1940. Yamamoto had died.

[00:36:56]Nagumo had known the truth on the deck of the Akagi and had not spoken.

[00:37:01]The emperor himself had understood at Guadalcanal and had said nothing.

[00:37:06]And now Konoe was warning in the emperor's private chambers six months before the atomic bomb that everything to come was already lost.

[00:37:16]Nothing was done.

[00:37:17]The reasons were complicated. They involved the army faction. They involved the fear of what surrender would look like.

[00:37:25]They involved a country that had built its identity around a war it could no longer win and could not admit it could not win.

[00:37:34]But the record is clear. Hirohito was warned in writing by a former Prime Minister on the 14th of February, 1945 six months before Hiroshima.

[00:37:45]He did not surrender. The cities kept burning. The men kept dying. The children in Okinawa kept jumping off the cliffs.

[00:37:54]And on a black island called Iwo Jima, a Japanese general who had once served as a military attaché in Washington was writing his last letters home.

[00:38:04]The general was 53 years old. His name was Tadamichi Kuribayashi.

[00:38:10]He had served as a deputy military attaché in Washington from 1928 to 1930.

[00:38:16]He had been stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas and at Fort Riley in Kansas. He had ridden American trains across the plains and had seen with his own eyes what Yamamoto had seen a few years earlier.

[00:38:30]He knew in the letters he wrote from Iwo Jima to his wife Yoshie and to his son Taro and to his youngest daughter Takako, he did not pretend.

[00:38:39]He told them the enemy was strong. He told them the island would fall. He told them he would not be coming home.

[00:38:47]His orders forbade banzai charges. He would not throw his men away in a single night of screaming.

[00:38:53]>> [music] >> He would kill Americans slowly.

[00:38:56]He would kill them in the ground. 22,000 men. 18 km of tunnels dug through volcanic rock. Hundreds of mutually supporting firing positions.

[00:39:08]On the 19th of February, 1945, three divisions of United States Marines waded ashore under Lieutenant General Holland Smith.

[00:39:18]The first day cost the Marines over 2,400 casualties. Kuribayashi held out for 36 days. His body was never identified.

[00:39:28]Meanwhile, in the mountains of Luzon, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, was fighting a war he could no longer control.

[00:39:38]His radios were destroyed. His vehicles were destroyed. His messengers could not reach his scattered units. American firepower had cut his command apart before the ground battle even began.

[00:39:51]He would surrender in September of 1945 and would be hanged in Manila 5 months later. And in the cities of the home islands, the burning continued.

[00:40:02]On the night of the 9th into the 10th of March, '45, 334 B-29 bombers took off from the Marianas under the command of Major General Curtis LeMay.

[00:40:15]279 of them reached Tokyo and dropped incendiary bombs on the working-class districts of the city.

[00:40:23]Approximately 100,000 people died in a single night.

[00:40:28]16 square miles of Tokyo burned. Over a million were left homeless. It was the deadliest air raid in human history.

[00:40:37]Then Osaka, then Nagoya, then Kobe, then Yokohama. City after city reduced to ash while the Japanese air defense system, which had been formidable in 1942, collapsed into irrelevance.

[00:40:50]On the 1st of April, 1945, American forces landed on Okinawa. 1,500 ships, 183,000 soldiers, sailors, and Marines in the initial assault.

[00:41:04]It was the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific War. The Japanese commander was Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, 57 years old.

[00:41:15]From Kagoshima.

[00:41:17]His chief of staff was Lieutenant General Isamu Cho, 51, an aggressive officer who had been implicated in the political killings of the 1930s.

[00:41:27]His senior operations officer was Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, 42, a cold and analytical mind who had studied the American landings at Peleliu.

[00:41:37]Yahara proposed a defense-in-depth.

[00:41:40]No banzai charges, counterattacks. Bleed the Americans slowly, as Kuribayashi had done at Iwo Jima.

[00:41:48]Cho demanded a general counteroffensive.

[00:41:51]On the 4th of May, over Yahara's objections, Ushijima ordered the counteroffensive. In several days of fighting, approximately 5,000 Japanese soldiers died in the open under American artillery and naval gunfire for no gain.

[00:42:06]Ushijima, according to Yahara's post-war memoir, turned to his operations officer and said, quietly, that Yahara had been right and that he, Ushijima, had been wrong.

[00:42:17]There is no independent witness to this exchange. We have only Yahara's word, written 27 years later.

[00:42:25]On the 22nd of June, 1945, inside a cave at Mabuni, on the southern tip of the island, Ushijima and Cho performed seppuku.

[00:42:35]Before he died, Ushijima gave Colonel Yahara one final order. He was not to die. He was to leave the cave.

[00:42:42]He was to allow himself to be captured.

[00:42:44]He was to survive. And someday, when the war was over and the anger had cooled and the shame had faded enough to be spoken aloud, he was to tell what had happened here.

[00:42:56]Yahara obeyed. He was taken prisoner within days. He was returned to Japan after the war. He lived until 1981.

[00:43:04]And in 1972, 27 years after his commander's death, he published a book called Okinawa Kessen, the battle for Okinawa.

[00:43:14]The last order of the 32nd Army was carried out.

[00:43:18]On the 6th of August, 1945, a single B-29 named the Enola Gay, flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy over the center of Hiroshima.

[00:43:31]The weapon detonated at 8:15 in the morning, at approximately 1,850 ft above the city. Approximately 80,000 people died in the first second.

[00:43:43]By the end of the year, the death toll would reach approximately 140,000.

[00:43:49]Two days later, on the 8th of August, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

[00:43:55]Over 1 and 1/2 million Red Army soldiers began pouring into Manchuria against the depleted Kwantung Army. The next day, on the 9th of August, a second atomic bomb, called Fat Man, destroyed Nagasaki.

[00:44:09]Approximately 40,000 died immediately.

[00:44:13]That night, in a bomb shelter beneath the Imperial Palace, the Supreme Council for the direction of the war met in emergency session.

[00:44:22]They deadlocked. The emperor was asked to break the tie. Hirohito, 44 years old, spoke quietly. He said that the situation could not continue.

[00:44:32]He said the unendurable must be endured.

[00:44:35]On the 15th of August, his recorded voice was broadcast to the Japanese people for the first time.

[00:44:42]The word surrender was not used. He said the situation had developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.

[00:44:49]On the 2nd of September, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the empire that had begun its war in the belief that American resolve would collapse under a single hard blow, signed the papers of its total defeat.

[00:45:03]300 Allied ships, 900 aircraft passing overhead in unbroken formation.

[00:45:10]The demonstration of what Yamamoto had counted in Detroit in the summer of 1920.

[00:45:16]The interrogations began within weeks.

[00:45:18]Admiral Soemu Toyoda came in on the 13th of November, 1945, 60 years old.

[00:45:25]He answered every question. He hid nothing. He said he had opposed the war from the beginning. Asked about Leyte Gulf, where he had sent Japan's last carriers out as bait, he said one line that would stand as an epitaph for the Imperial Japanese Navy.

[00:45:42]I did not have much confidence in being a lure, but there was no other way to try. Torashiro Kawabe was interrogated on the 30th of November.

[00:45:52]In November of 1949, 4 years later, an interviewer named Atsushi Oi asked him which had mattered more, the atomic bomb or the Soviet declaration of war?

[00:46:04]Kuwabara took a moment. He answered that when the bomb had fallen, he had felt it was terrible.

[00:46:10]And then when the Soviets had entered the war, he had felt that everything had become impossibly difficult all at once in rapid succession.

[00:46:19]He said he had felt as though he had been given a thorough beating. That answer would remain controversial for decades.

[00:46:28]The historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa would build an entire book around it in 2005.

[00:46:34]Richard Frank would argue the other way in 1999.

[00:46:38]The debate is not settled and may never be. What is certain is that the men in the room where the decision was made did not experience the atomic bomb as a single isolated event.

[00:46:50]They experienced it as one of two hammer blows that arrived within 72 hours of each other and they could not honestly say which one had ended the war.

[00:47:01]Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who had shouted Tora Tora Tora over Pearl Harbor, was interrogated as well. He told the Americans that Pearl Harbor had been a strategic mistake.

[00:47:13]That it had missed the carriers. That it had missed the fuel. That it had united a country Japan had needed to keep divided.

[00:47:22]Some of Fuchida's later recollections would be questioned by historians. On this point, he never wavered. Fumimaro Konoe swallowed potassium cyanide on the morning of the 16th of December, 1945.

[00:47:36]He was to have been arrested that day on charges of war crimes.

[00:47:40]Tomoyuki Yamashita was hanged at Los Banos on the 23rd of February, 1946.

[00:47:47]There is no simple lesson.

[00:47:49]The men who had warned Japan were not heroes. Yamamoto planned Pearl Harbor.

[00:47:55]Kuribayashi, Ushijima, and Yahara served an empire that committed the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the massacre of Manila, the horrors of Unit 731, and the forced suicides of Okinawan civilians.

[00:48:09]They knew. They said so in careful language in memoranda and private conversations, in letters to their wives. They were not listened to.

[00:48:18]And they went to their deaths, or they went to the interrogation rooms, or they went to the gallows, still knowing what they had known from the beginning.

[00:48:29]That is the truth the Japanese generals finally admitted after it was too late for the truth to matter. American firepower had been overwhelming.

[00:48:39]Yes, but American firepower was not the beginning of the story. The beginning was in Detroit in 1920 when a Japanese naval officer stood on a mezzanine above a factory floor and did the arithmetic.

[00:48:53]He wrote the answer in his notebook. He carried it back to Tokyo. He told his government. They heard him. They went to war anyway.