Summary
A riveting, immersive account of the agonizing decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan--a crucial turning point in World War II and geopolitical history--with you-are-there immediacy by the New York Times bestselling author of Ike's Bluff and Sea of Thunder .
"As Christopher Nolan's movie Oppenheimer shows, the shockwaves reverberate still. The veteran biographer Evan Thomas now enters the debate."-- The Wall Street Journal
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
At 9:20 a.m. on the morning of May 30, General Groves receives a message to report to the office of the secretary of war "at once." Stimson is waiting for him. He wants to know: has Groves selected the targets yet?
So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America's decision to drop the atomic bomb--and Japan's decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson , the American Secretary of War, who oversaw J. Robert Oppenheimer under the Manhattan Project; Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz , head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo , the only one in Emperor Hirohito's Supreme War Council who believed even before the bombs were dropped that Japan should surrender.
Henry Stimson had served in the administrations of five presidents, but as Oppenheimer's work progressed, he found himself tasked with the unimaginable decision of determining whether to deploy the bomb. The new president, Harry S. Truman, thus far a peripheral figure in the momentous decision, accepted Stimson's recommendation to drop the bomb. Army Air Force Commander Gen. Spaatz ordered the planes to take off. Like Stimson, Spaatz agonized over the command even as he recognized it would end the war. After the bombs were dropped, Foreign Minister Togo was finally able to convince the emperor to surrender.
To bring these critical events to vivid life, bestselling author Evan Thomas draws on the diaries of Stimson, Togo and Spaatz, contemplating the immense weight of their historic decision. In Road to Surrender, an immersive, surprising, moving account, Thomas lays out the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of three people who changed history.
Author Notes
Evan Thomas is the author of bestselling books including First: Sandra Day O'Connor , Being Nixon , John Paul Jones , and Sea of Thunder . Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor at Time and Newsweek and has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this riveting chronicle, historian Thomas (Sea of Thunder) traces the agonizing decisions of three men "who faced nearly impossible dilemmas in the summer of 1945"--U.S. war secretary Henry Stimson, U.S. Air Force commander Carl Spaatz, and Japanese foreign minister Shigenori Togo. Stimson oversaw the production of the atomic bombs and had final say over the locations targeted; Spaatz led the American bombing campaign on Japan; and Togo persuaded Emperor Hirohito to make an unprecedented personal decision to end the war, overriding Japan's Supreme War Council. Together, these "three unlikely partners averted a cataclysm of death beyond anything the world had seen," writes Thomas, asserting that millions of lives would have been lost in a U.S. invasion of Japan, and that the Japanese war hawks could not have been outmaneuvered by Togo without the bomb as a manifest threat. Drawing on unpublished diary entries and interviews with family members of the three men, Thomas's suspenseful narrative dwells on the existential angst that defined their actions. (Stimson had a heart attack the day he showed President Truman photos of an incinerated Hiroshima; toward the end of his life, Spaatz was full of regret and plagued by sleeplessness.) Regardless of whether the reader is convinced by Thomas's moral argument in favor of the bomb, this transfixes. (May)
Kirkus Review
An exploration of the moral quandaries that surrounded the atomic bombing of Japan. Japan had barely surrendered, recounts Thomas, when Americans of goodwill began to question whether the nuclear destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been necessary. At the end of his life, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, one of Thomas' subjects, spoke of "the wrongness and folly of using nuclear weapons." Gen. Carl Spaatz, another of those subjects, reckoned that the campaign of firebombing Japanese targets would be better mounted with precision bombing of rail lines to prevent foods from reaching the heavily populated Kanto Plain, reducing Japan by famine and what was sure to be a resulting civil war. Yet, Thomas writes, despite the quiet workings of Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to maneuver his nation toward surrender, key Japanese military leaders had no intention of doing so. This leads Thomas to revisit, throughout his narrative, the old question of whether the atomic bomb was necessary, which, with a nuanced argument that's still likely to stir up controversy, he answers in the affirmative. Apart from averting a projected 1 million American casualties in an invasion of the homeland, he argues, "the atomic bombs not only saved many thousands and possibly millions of Japanese lives, they saved the lives of even more Asians beyond Japan." Even after the atomic bombings, hawkish military and government factions threatened a coup against the emperor in order to continue the war. The author's argument is well taken even though it does nothing to lessen the moral anguish that his principals--to say nothing of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and even Truman as well as generations after them--felt over the decision to unleash nuclear terror on their enemy. In addition, notes Thomas, there was another bomb waiting in the event of continued war, this one destined for Tokyo. A thoughtful study of nuclear war, its early discontents, and alternate scenarios that might have been worse. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Best-selling author and historian Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) presents a nuanced look at the key events leading to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thomas analyzes the actions and decisions of three top-level leaders involved in the decision to use the bomb: Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Carl Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, who was carefully leading the Japanese government toward surrender. Thomas's meticulous examination outlines how President Truman eventually agreed with Stimson's recommendation to drop the bomb. The author draws upon Stimson's, Spaatz's, and Togo's previously unavailable personal diaries, revealing their agonized thoughts as they struggled with the historic decision. Even with countless volumes about this event filling the shelves, Thomas's exhaustive research into the private thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of these three people who changed history adds crucial new information that will be of tremendous value to World War II historians. Award-winning narrator Robert Fass brings his impressive skills to bear, offering an engaging and perfectly paced performance of this vital work. VERDICT Share with readers of Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb or Kai Bird's American Prometheus. Essential for all audio history collections.--Dale Farris
Excerpts
Tokyo August 14-15, 1945 Lord Kido knows right away that the game is up. For the past several days, the people of Japan have been kept in the dark about their government's anguished internal debate over surrender. Now the silence is broken. The privy seal's sense of alarm only grows as he reads several other leaf lets that have drifted down onto the streets of Tokyo--and, he can be sure, many other cities as well. The American propaganda prints, in full, the text of Japan's August 10 offer to surrender with the sole condition of keeping the emperor, and Washington's response, received on August 11, that the emperor must be "subject to" the Supreme Allied commander. Kido knows that these incendiary pieces of paper could spark a coup by dissident army officers, which could erupt into civil war and anarchy. He hastens to seek an audience with the emperor. In consensus-minded Japan, and especially at the palace, little happens quickly, but Hirohito is aware that time has run out. The emperor has been vitalized by the desire to survive American atomic bombs and the suicidal fanatics in his own army, and he wants to save what is left of his country. He wants to convene the top leaders of government for a second seidan , at which he will accept Washington's surrender terms and finally, once and for all, end the war and preserve the nation. Prime Minister Suzuki proposes a meeting to begin in about four hours' time, at one p.m. No, says the emperor. Sooner. Right away. He does not want to give the military time to organize a coup. Hirohito has been hearing rumors, and they are all true. The plotters are planning to launch their coup at ten a.m.--to cut off the palace, isolate the emperor, arrest the "Badoglios," declare martial law, and fight to the end. There has been some wild talk of storming the obunku and killing everyone (except the emperor, who will be "protected") with machine guns before taking their own lives with hand grenades. But the calmer discussion still centers on recruiting War Minister Anami to the cause, in the expectation that the army high command will fall in behind him. Anami, at this moment, is finishing breakfast with Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, commander of the army for the defense of western Honshu and Kyushu. Hata has just returned from Hiroshima. He reports that white clothes serve perfectly well to protect people from atomic rays and that sweet potato roots are growing healthily just one inch beneath the blasted ground. Anami excitedly exclaims, "You must tell the emperor!" Reality intrudes when Anami returns to headquarters. His brother-in-law, Colonel Takeshita, and his fellow plotters are buzzing about, but they are suddenly silenced by General Umezu, the army chief of staff, who says, flatly, that he will not support a coup. Umezu tells Anami that launching a coup in defiance of the emperor would just split the army and start a civil war. Anami appears to accept this judgment from "the Iron Mask," an impassive operator known for his unflappability. That should be the end of it, since the coup cannot succeed without men who report directly to Umezu, including the commanders of the Eastern Army and the Imperial Guard. But then Umezu seems to soften. . . . He suggests he is not absolutely opposed to the coup. Or at least that is what Takeshita and his men choose to hear. It is hard to know. Anami himself remains opaque and cheerful. In makeshift government offices around the burned-out palace this morning, staff are witnessing the strange spectacle of cabinet ministers borrowing neckties, coats, and even pants from their aides in a scramble to don the appropriate formal wear for the hastily arranged audience with the emperor, now scheduled for ten-thirty a.m. Through the vaultlike gates of the obunku they go, two dozen once-proud, now-anxious men summoned to surrender an empire that has terrorized Asia and the Pacific for more than a decade. The obunku is the only steel-reinforced concrete building on the palace grounds, but its underground shelter might as well be a sauna. In the moist August heat, moisture drips from the walls. The emperor, dressed in his military uniform, enters; the ministers bow low. Premier Suzuki apologizes, yet again, for a failure to reach consensus. One last time the admirals and generals reprise their arguments to fight to the end, "even at the cost of a hundred million lives" ( ichioku gyokusai , "death in battle of the hundred million," a common patriotic slogan). The emperor grasps the hilt of his sword and speaks. "I have listened carefully," he says, "but my own opinion has not changed." Hirohito announces that he "agrees with Foreign Minister Togo" that the Allies will preserve Japan's imperial system. He feels sorry for the military, but the Japanese people must be saved. He quotes from his grandfather Emperor Meiji, who, a half century earlier, at the time of a far lesser humiliation--an intervention by Western powers that forced Japan to give up a peninsula in Manchuria--uttered the words, "We must bear the unbearable." Pointedly, Hirohito adds, "The War and Navy ministers have told me there is opposition within the Army and Navy; I desire that the services also be made to comprehend my wishes." And just to make sure they do not distort his words, he announces that he will go on the radio--unheard of!--to speak to the nation. The reaction in the room is convulsive. Two ministers slide from their seats onto the floor, gasping and keening. Most weep. As they leave, "each of us in his own thoughts wept again," Togo will recall in his memoirs. Afterward a lunch of whale meat and black bread is served. No one eats except for Prime Minister Suzuki, who seems surprisingly well rested and robust, despite his old age; Taoist passivity has been good for his constitution. Anami seems to be in a near-delusional state. He pulls aside his aide, Maj. Saburo Hayashi, into a bathroom and babbles excitedly that there is a U.S. Navy fleet with a huge landing force in Tokyo Bay. If we attack them with everything we have, says the war minister, we will get much better peace terms. Incredulous, Hayashi stares back at his superior. The U.S. Navy force is just rumor, he says. Anami returns to Ichigaya Heights, where the War Ministry is thronged with agitated officers. Colonel Takeshita is after him to resign from the Supreme War Council, thereby bringing down the whole government and creating a chaotic situation that can be resolved only by a military takeover. For a moment, Anami seems tempted. He says, "Bring me ink and a piece of paper." Then he thinks better of it. He is--perhaps always has been--committed to the emperor. "The emperor has spoken his decision, and we have no choice whatever to obey it," Anami tells the hotheads surrounding him. He straightens and glowers. "Anybody who disagrees," he says, "will have to do so over my dead body." The most fervent of the coup plotters, Anami's "pet" disciple Colonel Hatanaka, lets out a wail. Excerpted from Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II by Evan Thomas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
