Get the Ricochet app

Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Become a member.

Tired of the toxicity of social media? Why not join Ricochet for just $5/month? Think of it as an online bar. Come in, have a drink, hang out, say whatever you want. But don’t badger, bully, or berate the other drinkers. That's our only rule.

From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: Two Historians on How America Fought and Won The Pacific in WWII

Peter Robinson
@PeterRobinson
Join to bookmark13likesJoin to like3comments

August 15th, 2025 is the 80th anniversary of the surrender of the Japanese to Allied Forces in the Pacific, ending World War II. To mark the occasion, Peter Robinson sits down with Jonathan Horn and Ian Toll to examine the most contested decision of World War II: the use of atomic weapons against Japan. Building from the brutal endgame—Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Curtis LeMay’s incendiary raids—the conversation explores what leaders actually faced in mid-1945: a fanatical no-surrender ethos, mass civilian suffering across Asia, Allied casualty forecasts for an invasion, and the timing of the Soviet entry into the war. Horn and Toll probe the evidence and the arguments on both sides: claims that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the quickest way to stop the killing versus the case for alternatives (continued blockade, demonstration blasts, waiting for Moscow’s shock) and the later misgivings voiced by senior U.S. commanders. Along the way, they revisit MacArthur’s return to the Philippines, the devastation of Manila, and Midway’s pivotal shift from Japanese “fighting spirit” to American industrial might—context that frames the bomb debate not as a tidy thought experiment, but as a wartime choice among terrible options. The discussion concludes by contemplating how to teach this history—through people, decisions, and consequences—to generations for whom WWII is fast fading from living memory.

Recorded on June 5th, 2025

This post was promoted to the Main Feed by an editor.

Discussion (3)

  • colleenb@colleenb

    Fantastic discussion. Perhaps having been born in Japan (during the American occupation), I am pro-atomic bomb. Do I wish it could have been just one bomb or in less populated areas or any of a number of decisions that could have been different? Yes. But so many people were saved - Americans and Japanese - and the war did come to an end, that it is the only decision that could have been made.

  • J Ro@JRo

    That was an informative and wide ranging discussion covering important controversies and triggering many memories of travel in the war zone.

    Years ago I was chatting with a former professor at Stanford and Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Dr. Claude Buss. I said that I knew he was a China Hand in the ‘30s but it wasn’t clear to me when and how he’d also become a Japan expert. He replied, “You know that time in the caves of Corregidor when MacArthur turned to General Wainwright and told him, ‘You’ve got it, I’m out of here!’ Well my boss turned to me and said the same thing.” For just a couple of months he had been the executive assistant to the US High Commissioner who departed along with MacArthur. So, early during the Japanese occupation, he was the top US diplomat in the Philippines.

    It’s too bad he passed before Peter had a chance to interview him. But I’m sure his books and oral history are in the archives.