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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.
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the coverTokyo
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...
Reviews-
June 19, 2023 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.
Starred review from August 1, 2023
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
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
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