No Surrender

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a transformative figure in American history.

“He steers the country out of the depression and away from isolationism.”

In the summer of 1944, Allied forces are battling across France, and heavy bombers are striking the Japanese home islands, but forcing the Axis powers to submit to FDR's demand. Unconditional surrender still requires enormous effort from America and its allies. This is World War II with Tom Hanks.

Episode 17, No Surrender. Summer, 1944.

While American forces combat Germany and Europe and Japan the Asia Pacific,

in the United States, it's an election year. Even though his nation is at war, the commander in chief,

“the most powerful man in the world, must seek the approval of voters.”

Franklin Roosevelt is trying to do something no Americans ever done, which is be elected to a fourth term as president. And the country is not ready to turn Franklin Roosevelt out, but they're not thrilled about rehiring him either. Roosevelt wasn't in robust health when he first ran for president in 1932.

He's a polio victim as a young man. He's in a wheelchair.

Those who've known him before the war always come away a bit shocked at how dramatically he seemed to age.

The stress of the war has ground him down. So he's got to demonstrate to the American people that he is still firmly in command in this war and can bring it to a successful close. Roosevelt decides to sail over to Hawaii to hold a wartime conference with his top leaders by being on a warship at the site where the war started for the Americans.

He has the ability to project an image of continued vitality and strength. The primary purpose of the Pearl Harbor Conference is to determine American strategy against Japan in the Pacific. Roosevelt looks at Japan and sees a country that's infected with a kind of militarism. A desire to conquer its neighbors, a notion of racial superiority over all the other people's in Asia.

To prevent another Pearl Harbor, he's going to have the stick to the policy he declared in 1943. Unconditional surrender. The United States controls most of the Pacific, including New Guinea and the recently captured Mariana Islands. The Navy wants to push on and take for Mosa, modern day Taiwan, as a prelude to invading Japan. General Douglas MacArthur has other ideas.

Douglas MacArthur is one of the most famous American generals in history. Also, one of the most controversial. He's got an ego that is unbelievable. In Hawaii, when he shows up late, he keeps the president waiting on purpose and then rolls in in this leather jacket decidedly casual in complete contrast in the navy, which is all turned out in their dress-wise.

“MacArthur believes he's more important to the country than the president.”

In fact, he believes he is the country that his will and his desires in some way embody the will and desire of the American people. MacArthur insists American forces must return to the Philippines for reasons both strategic and personal. Douglas MacArthur had a long standing affiliation with the Philippines.

He had a real affinity for the Filipino people. He had lived there before the war and then in 1941 and 1942, he was the commander-in-chief of that garrison when it was attacked by the Japanese at the very beginning of the war. When Japanese forces overran the Philippines in 1942, Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur to evacuate to Australia. He understood MacArthur's personal value to the morale of the American public.

After months of bitter fighting, American and Filipino troops surrendered to the Japanese. In the cruelest conditions they were marched off the Batan Peninsula and into captivity. The Batan Death March. During the Japanese occupation, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos are killed.

Entire villages are destroyed in mass executions.

“As he is about to leave, MacArthur makes this famous pronouncement.”

I shall return. It's not we shall return, it's I shall return. This is a vow that becomes really a rallying cry for Americans not only in the Philippines, uh, who are captured, but also for Americans back home. At Pearl Harbor, MacArthur presses the president to strike Japan through the Philippines instead of

Formosa. The problem with the Philippines is it's not just an island, it's an archipelago, and there is a very large Japanese army on these islands, hundreds of thousands of troops.

That could lead to protracted fighting with the Japanese.

But MacArthur has some arguments on his side as well. The Philippines are an American possession, they're a commonwealth,

“to simply bypass the Philippines and go to Taiwan.”

We'll make America look like a very inconstant partner. Not to mention abandoning the survivors of the Batan Death March. Roosevelt leaves the conference without making a decision. A week later, though, he sends a letter to General MacArthur agreeing to his plan. On October 20th, over 100,000 U.S. troops backed by the 7th and 3rd U.S.

fleets, land on Leite, a central island of the Philippines with a protected gulf. MacArthur's campaign to retake the country has begun. He had the army single corps of engineers go ahead on the beach ahead of him, so by the time he got there, he gives his radio address. People of the Philippines, I have returned.

The fact that MacArthur is able to return to fulfill that promise is a morale boost.

“But the theater of MacArthur saying I have returned does not translate”

into straightforward allied victory. The Japanese know that General MacArthur has promised to return. And so they anticipated the next decisive battle may be over the Philippines. The Philippines sit between Japan and the Dutch East Indies, Japan's primary source of oil.

So if the Philippines get captured, it will cut off the supply lines and the military runs out of oil. The Japanese already have a plan to defend the Philippines. Operation show go or victory. They will send all their warships to destroy the U.S. fleets in Leite Gulf, then trap General MacArthur's troops on the island.

The Japanese position is absolutely imperative to carry out this operation now. We've got oil, we've got warships, we better use them or lose them. This is almost like one last Bansai charge at sea that can have a material effect on the outcome of the war. That's the kind of spirit in which the Japanese are heading into this battle. The Allies are promised the Japanese that the wars are going to go on until unconditional

surrender of the Japanese Empire. But deep down aside, I'm not sure the Japanese believe that. They still think they can inflict enough casualties on the United States that eventually, despite all the talk of unconditional surrender, the Americans will be willing to talk.

As MacArthur and his troops land on Leite, the Japanese fleets move towards the Philippines. At this point in the war, the Japanese have suffered terrible losses in the Pacific from midway to Guadalcanal, but they still have a tremendously powerful fleet. They have these super battleships, the Musashi and the Yamato. These are the biggest battleships ever built.

And this has always been the U.S. Navy's fear.

If these massive Yamato class battleships get loose in amongst MacArthur's troop ships, the invasion support vessels, the devastation could be immense. Two Japanese fleets, a central fleet and a southern fleet, will converge on Leite Goff. While U.S. naval forces are protecting MacArthur's landing,

success depends on a third fleet moving towards the Gulf from the north. A decoy fleet. There's another aspect. There's essentially a carrier task force that sails towards Leite Goff from the north.

It's designed to try to lure American ships away from protecting MacArthur.

“And this is the brilliance of the Japanese move.”

They decide to use the carriers as bait. The entire Japanese strategy is to trap MacArthur, trap this famous general himself potentially. They're going to bring these two heavily armed and armored pincers against the American landing force,

while it is still unloading cargo and supplies and troops at Leite and annihilate it. General MacArthur has landed 130,000 troops on Leite.

The first step in the American liberation of the Philippines.

But as U.S. troops establish a secure beach head, the Japanese navy in X-Operation Show Go. The Japanese have to figure out how to sneak their forces close to landing beaches without being discovered.

“Because if they come under heavy air attack, they're in real trouble.”

So they plan to lure most of the American forces out of the fight. There are two American fleet supporting MacArthur's forces. The U.S. third fleet led by Admiral Bull Halsey and the seventh led by Admiral Thomas Kincaid. As the Japanese crossed the Sibuyan Sea, they're spotted by one of Halsey's scout planes.

The Americans attacked from the air, and they're by the focus on the large ships they say, which was a super battleship, Yamato Musashi. Musashi is an absolute giant. She has 18.1 inch naval guns, the largest naval guns ever mounted. The Japanese have even developed a special anti-aircraft shell for them as well,

which explodes in this enormous cloud and is supposed to destroy any American planes that are flying through it.

“But the attacks that are launched by these American planes,”

gradually start whittling away at her defensive capabilities. Torpedo after Torpedo streaks towards the Musashi, hitting and exploding below the waterline. 17 to 19 torpedoes, more than it doesn't bombs,

finally get her to go down.

The Musashi sinks, along with a thousand of her crew. The Japanese central fleet retreats. That night, Kincaid's fleet, including battleships that had been damaged at Pearl Harbor, decimates the Japanese southern fleet. But Halsey again spots Japanese warships north of Leitegoath,

including four aircraft carriers, the Japanese decoy fleet. In Halsey's mind, as a carrier commander himself, any enemy carrier fleet represents the most dire threat to his mission, which is protecting the invasion forces. So Halsey takes his entire fleet and goes charging off after it. And so Halsey's played into the Japanese hands exactly as they had hoped.

Halsey's taken all the major firepower north with him. And that puts MacArthur's invasion at risk. Halsey moves north, but the Japanese central fleet under Admiral Takayou Carrita returns to Leitegoath. From the battleship Yamato, Carrita sees that only a portion of the seventh fleet is left to protect MacArthur's invasion. For Carrita, this is a heaven-scent opportunity. The dawn breaks.

And now there is an American fleet sitting directly under his guns. All he has to do is to sink them. The American vessels that are still around Leite, primarily, provide support for the landing force that's going ashore. So there's only a token force of light escort carriers and destroyers.

escort carriers are a small, extremely vulnerable. They can carry 25 to 30 aircraft, Macs. They're designed for ground support for the troops ashore. That's their role. It is not to get themselves into stand-up fights against large enemy warships.

The escort carriers launch their planes against Carrita's much larger fleet. And then these escort carriers, most of what they do, is turn around and run. Because they are not designed to fight a threat like this.

The only force that can match the Japanese, Admiral Halsey's third fleet,

requests his location.

Halsey receives a message from Nimitz, where, repeat where, is Task Force 34, the world wonders.

Traditionally, naval messages begin and end with sort of a nonsense phrase to confuse codebreakers. The nonsense phrase they've used in this message, though, is the world wonders. And the world wonders line should have been removed by his cipher officer, but wasn't.

“I've always wondered if Admiral Nimitz was also sticking a little barbe in Halsey as to what are you doing up there?”

And the result is that Halsey just goes into connections. He throws his cap on the floor, swearing up and down. His chief of staff has to tell him to get a grip on this situation. Halsey realizes the danger. He sends his fastest battleships back to L.J. Golf. Then continues after the Japanese carriers.

Now, what the Americans don't know is that the Japanese carriers lying to Halsey's north don't have many planes on them. In fact, most of the planes have been offloaded already in flown to the island of Luzon for what is about to come.

“Because the new and terrifying weapon emerges from this battle,”

the Kamikaze. Sometimes his torque events suck, but what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History that doesn't suck is a chart-topping history telling podcast, chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade from the 18th century to the 20th, original music and immersive sound design accompanying us on our storytelling journey.

Listen to and follow history that doesn't suck. An Odyssey podcast, available mail, an Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. At an airfield on Luzon, Japanese pilots are assembled for a unique mission.

“Japanese pilots at the beginning of the war were the cream of the crop elite hands-selected and”

carefully trained. But by this point in the war, Japan just doesn't have the time or the resources to train its pilots. The Japanese military leadership has to make a tough decision to make a cost-efficient way of destroying American enemy ships. And one way to do it is to undertake one way flight that will end with the crashing of plane.

This new unit of 24 pilots led by 23-year-old Lieutenant Yukiyo Seki is Japan's first

organized special attack unit. They will soon become known as Kamakaze, the Divine Wind. So the Kamakaze in some ways represents a perversion of traditional Japanese bushido doctrine. The samurai code, this idea of sacrificing one's life for Japan and for the emperor. It's hard to generalize about their motivations. You find some of them saying, "I'm doing this for the emperor." Other pilots talk about their village. They talk about families,

and they say, "I'm doing this for you." For the Japanese, what they're doing was not regarded as suicide. It's a death in combat. So it's this sense that these young men are becoming something really special, that almost to give this level of self-sacrifice makes you a samurai. In late takeoff, the American escort carriers of the US-7th fleet confront a new and lethal threat from the air. Stopping a Kamakaze plane is almost impossible. The American carriers can only do two things.

One is maneuver away, and the second is put up a huge curtain of flack.

But oftentimes, the Kamakaze can break through that flack curtain. You could fire every anti-aircraft gun in the world, but unless you get something like a direct hit that kills the pilot, that plane's going to hit your ship. There's a psychological effect as well. Japanese Kamakaze are giving up their lives into his violent ways possible simply to kill Americans. This is something that is difficult

from Americans understand that this is a human being who has chosen to do this, to you,

Lieutenant-Seky crashes his plane into the flight deck of an American escort carrier,

“the US-San law. It's the first ship to be sunk by Kamakaze attack.”

Six other vessels are struck and barely stay afloat. But Admiral Carita's central fleet also faces an aerial attack. Despite the pounding the Americans have taken, it is actually Carita who is under a major disadvantage here. He is up against 350 American planes, and because Carita is being constantly attacked by American aircraft, he becomes increasingly paranoid that he is now surrounded by American

carriers. So after these moments of tension where Carita could have potentially wreaked havoc on the American fleet in late April, he actually withdraws. Carita retreats ahead of Admiral

Halsey's returning warships, but the Japanese have lost a third of their navy.

“It's the largest naval battle in human history, more than 200,000 combatants involved.”

And the American victory really knocks the Japanese imperial navy out of the war the Pacific. But without a doubt, the Japanese are not going to surrender this perversion of the buxido code. It has manifested self on islands throughout this war, and now it's manifesting self in the sea and in the air. So it's starting to get in the mind of the allies about how costly that it will be to achieve that unconditional surrender of Japan.

Over two months of fighting in dense jungle terrain, against fierce Japanese resistance, general MacArthur's troops retake latex. Luzon is next. Luzon in particular is going to be a very tough nut to crack, because not only is it a large island with mountain chains the Japanese

can fortify, but there's also this enormous capital of Manila with about a million people sitting

in the middle of the island. And if the American forces get involved in urban combat, they're the casualties are likely to be very, very heavy. 12 days after the victory at Leitegoff, it's election night in the United States. And I, far, a victorious president, reached town's people on election night. Franklin D. Roosevelt wins an unprecedented fourth term.

The unconditional surrender of Japan and Germany remains his highest priority. On January 9, 1945, MacArthur's troops land on Luzon in the Philippines. Quickly, special operation forces trek inland to liberate Japanese POW camps. At the end of two years of captivity in Japanese hands, these men are in terrible condition. A third of them have already died. There are also a number of American civilian detainees

that are in camps that are near Manila. So there's a ticking clock here as far as MacArthur is concerned. It needs to liberate these camps as rapidly as possible. In early February, American forces surround the capital of Manila. Most Japanese troops have retreated north to create an extensive defensive line. But one group stays with orders to fight to the last man.

The real problem of urban warfare in the modern era is that the city is a gigantic

sponge. You can have a million-man army. And suddenly it split up all over the place.

So the Americans find themselves having to fight street by street, building by building, and it really turns Manila into a stalling grad of the Pacific. MacArthur's men are supported by Filipino resistance fighters, who provide intel, disrupt Japanese

“supply lines, and helps secure key routes into the city.”

There have been active groups of Filipino guerrillas in existence since 1942. And those guerrillas have been carrying on a very successful campaign of resistance against the Japanese occupiers. The Japanese response, like the Nazis in Europe, was to use guerrilla activity as an excuse to murder civilians. So whether it's a school, the hospital, homes, Filipino people are being bandetted,

they're being shot, beheaded, sometimes burned alive, corpses left to rob.

The Japanese will ultimately take the lives of a hundred thousand Filipino civilians.

“The battle of Manila in a lot of ways is a harbinger of what's to come.”

Roosevelt and his top military advisors are aware of the increasingly dire implications of a longer war with Japan, but the American people are very focused on what's going on in Europe, and they think the war is now winding down. President Roosevelt's just been reelected. He's looking at the horrors, the brutality of the fighting and the Philippines, and he's been peppered with letters from the moms of America saying,

"Where is my boy? What is he doing? What God forsaken Island is he fighting on this time?"

He needs to find a way to strengthen the will and resolve the American people,

because he knows things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Roosevelt meets with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Malta, to discuss the strategy for ending the war in Europe and in the Pacific. The question is, if we have an enemy willing to sacrifice young men in Kamikaze attacks,

“an enemy that seems willing to fight on beyond reason, how are we going to bring this to an end?”

Roosevelt's advisors are arguing that the Japanese will not give up. This war will not end until there is actually an invasion of the home islands. Churchill and Roosevelt are in Malta on the way to Yalta, early in 1945, and this is where Operation Downfall first crystallizes. An invasion of Japan. The sense is that after the war in Europe would be over and all of the resources, all the men, all the equipment that they could

muster, would be transferred into the Far East Theater for a massive, massive operation,

the kind of which history has never seen before. This would occur after a protracted strategic bombing

campaign, which has a early 1945, is beginning to take more and more effect. At first, the Marines were ordered to take Ewo Jima.

“Japan has an airfield on Ewo Jima, and as the B29 start operating out of Saipan and the Mariana's,”

they're using it to spot the B29 formations on their radar scopes. Ewo Jima becomes a logical place to first fall, remove something from the Japanese, control, second, don't allow them to have any Japanese fighter on their or early warning systems. And third, for all those B29s, they're making those long flights, over 1200 miles. It creates a place to land if they have the engine trouble if they run in any difficulties.

So Ewo Jima's got to go. That needs to be common American airfield. Now, American intelligence tells the Marines that there are about 13,000 Japanese defenders, but there are actually 23,000, nearly double what the intelligence estimates listed. As a result, you have an American invasion force that's going to be meeting a much tougher defense than it expected.

Japanese troops on Ewo Jima have been preparing for an American attack for over three months. The Japanese strategy is to make the battle last as long as possible. Each day that that battle lasts is a day where the people at the home islands are spared of an American invasion. So the commander of the Japanese on Ewo Jima, Kuri Biasi, says,

"We're going to prepare these defensive fortifications and wait, draw the Americans in and then attack them." The Japanese aren't on Ewo Jima, they're actually in Ewo Jima. They have miles and miles of tunnels that they have dug out of this soft volcanic terrain on the island. And they've also fortified that most prominent landmark on Ewo Jima, which is Mount Serabachi.

Looming over the Marines landing beaches, Mount Serabachi provides the Japanese with a perfect defensive position. It's going to be this defensive hive that the Americans will have to reduce cave, buy cave, bunker, buy bunker, one thing at a time. An Ewo Jima, Japanese soldiers are issued orders to kill 10 Americans before they die. We see very few Japanese who attempt to surrender.

There's a view that this is a great dishonor, not only to one's self and one's family, but to the emperor as well. If you look at the letters that Kuri Biasi writes home to his family,

from the Ewo Jima campaign. And he starts to issue these orders very clearly to his men,

“saying, "Fight to the death." But he doesn't want a bandside charge, he doesn't want pointless”

suicidal acts. He wants to show the Americans the cost to them of going as far as the Japanese home island. The Navy bombarded Japanese positions for three days. Now the Americans plan to land 60,000 men across Iwo Jima's southern beaches, push north, and take the island.

So in 859 on the 19th February, the first 10,000 men land, and it's quiet, but then at 10 o'clock in the

morning. Every Japanese soldier with a mortar machine gun or a piece of artillery will now start to shell the landing beach. In the face of weathering fire, the Marines struggle up dunes of 15 feet or more. Iwo Jima is not sand, it's volcanic ash. Your feet just sink

“up to your knees. It's like walking in coffee grounds. It's incredibly deadly to try and move”

forward. Bulldozers are called into clear a path through the dunes, allowing the Marines to continue their advance. As the Marines finally make their way off the beaches, they're getting attacked from everywhere. People coming out of tunnels, of mortars coming off of Mount Surabachi, of hidden artillery emplacements all over the place with snipers firing positions they can't even see. An individual soldier has to somehow get a close with a grenade that you can put through

a firing slit and kill the crew that's in there. Ultimately, one of the greatest weapons that

the Marines have is what they call Zipo tanks, which are tank-sized flame throwers. They can shoot

“long distances, and that becomes the weapon of choice from the Marines on Awe Jima. By the end”

of the first day, the Marines have secured an airfield and prepared to attack Mount Surabachi. On Iwo Jima, two strategies come into conflict. Once there's no surrender, that's the Japanese, and then unconditional surrender, and that's the American position. And on Surabachi, the Americans make a determined statement that it's going to be unconditional surrender. There is no position on planet earth held by the Japanese Army that American troops cannot take.

After securing the beaches, U.S. Marines and Iwo Jima attack Mount Surabachi. The force that goes up there, fights off Japanese resistance, and upon reaching the summit, they find a water pipe that had been associated with a Japanese system. They attach a small American flag to that water pipe, and then they raise that flag. But they realize the flag's too small. We need a bare flag.

So what they're going to do is they're going to take a ship's flag, and they're going to send it up there, and about noon it gets up there. Six Marines plant the second American flag. Joe Rosenthal, an associated press photographer, captures the moment. All the ships offshore begin blowing their horns. Everyone on the island can see it. It's a snapshot in time. The composition's nearly

perfect, although he basically shoots it off his hip without even using his rangefinder as he did it. He can't see anybody's face, and so really it becomes everybody's picture. Two days later, Rosenthal's photograph is on the front page of newspapers across America. President Roosevelt immediately understands how inspirational this single image is.

FDR was always a frustrated journalist. He had been the editor of the Harvard news paper.

He understood visual imagery. It's American determination embodied in a single photograph. They're all working together, and so it tells a national story. It's not just those guys on top of the hill that raised the flag. It's a nation that put that flag on top of the hill. But it's striking that the flag isn't fully planted. It says if the struggle is still unfolding.

but we haven't gotten there yet. To FDR, these six marines are the perfect symbol of America's wartime effort. He calls the marines and says, "Find me these guys. I want to bring them to the Oval Office. I want to send them at a war bond drive." So the Marine Corps sends somebody to the island. But they find them three men who were in the photo were dead already. They died within

days of the photograph being taken. U.S. marines suffered 26,000 dead wounded and missing. Almost every Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima is killed.

“Could he bastion himself who never believed he was getting off of Iwo Jima alive?”

He retreats, and he takes his own life. It's the only battle in the Pacific where the Americans actually take more casualties than the Japanese take. So for American military planners, the less Iwo Jima seems pretty clear that if you're going to launch operation downfall, if you're actually going to invade the Japanese home islands, the cost is going to be immense. Because at this point in the war, most Americans have

included that Japan is never going to surrender.

After victory on Iwo Jima, the Marine Corps sends three surviving flag razors back to Washington. But they will not meet their president. Ladies and gentlemen, the tragic news of the president's death came to Washington today as a complete shot, except for very few people who knew of his condition. Franklin Roosevelt had loomed so large for so long. An entire generation of Americans

really only knew him as their president. Supposedly during the funeral procession, a man is so overcome by his emotions. And another man says, "Did you know the president?"

“And he says, "No." But he knew me. And that's how people felt about Franklin Roosevelt.”

Roosevelt had been a very, very active president of very, very powerful personality,

the kind of caretaker to the people. And he knew you can't fight an endless war if you want to maintain your democratic ideals. They also knew how difficult, unconditional surrender and be to put into actual practice. During years of fear and uncertainty, Roosevelt was uniquely able to lead America's colossal fight against fascism. Now this job will fall to his vice president, very Truman.

Mrs. Roosevelt summons Truman to the White House. He says, "Is there anything we can do for you?"

“And Mrs. Roosevelt says, "No, Harry, is there anything we can do for you?"”

For you or the one in trouble now. On assuming the presidency, Truman told reporters, "I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." Harry Truman of Missouri is now responsible for the successful conclusion of the largest conflict

in human history, including the final destruction of eight off Hitler's third life.

[Music] World War II with Tom Hanks is produced by A&E Factsual Studios, Neutopia Limited, Playtone Productions, and Backpocket Studios in association with Motion Entertainment for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd,

additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our Executive producers are Eli Lera and Live Fidler. For Playtone, Executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getsman. For Backpocket Studios, our Executive producer is Ben Dixon.