Counterterrorism magazine published my Q&A with James M. Scott, the author of Empire of Ashes.
You can read the interview
via the pages above and below or the following text:
The IACSP Q&A With James M. Scott, the Author of “Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito and The Descent Into Total War.
A Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestseller, James M. Scott is a noted military historian and the author “Black Snow,” “Rampage,” “Target Tokyo,” “The War Below,” and “The Attack on the Liberty,” and co-author, with Jack Carr, of “Targeted: Beirut.”
His most recent book is “Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Decent Into Total War.”
Jame M. Scott, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, is also a sought-after public speaker who leads battlefield tours and lectures at institutions around the world. He lives with his wife and two children in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is the Scholar in Residence at The Citadel.
James M. Scott was interviewed by Paul Davis
IACSP: I enjoyed your book very much, particularly from the Japanese side, which I hadn't read much about the Japanese side of the equation, and I found that quite interesting.
Scott: It was always something missing in the historic accounts, and now we have access to Japanese sources. Now we have survivors, such as people who were children then, and Japanese archival sources. So, it's important and readers expect that. They want to know all 360 degrees of the perspectives of what it was like. I've got a lot of great contacts over there and I go back pretty much yearly for tours. So, it's not as difficult these days to get access to the sources. I think it's an important part of the story.
IACSP: I served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, and we did an R&R visit to Japan in 1971. After a couple of days in Sasebo, I took a train ride to Nagasaki and visited the atomic bomb museum. There were a lot of elderly Japanese crying. It was fascinating, yet sad and horrible. But in my view, dropping the atomic bombs was quite necessary. Would you please tell us about your career and background as a historian and an author?
Scott: For my first job out of college when I graduated in 1997, I was a public-school teacher in Japan. So, I went over there. I had no background studies in Japanese, but Japan has a program where they bring in about the 2,400 each in the public schools system. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time, but I had some friends who done it and really enjoyed it. I thought, well you know what I'm going to spend the abroad again and so what's Japan for a year and it was a really transformative experience for me. And it opened my eyes so much about World War II histories and planted a seed that subsequently blossomed into my career. I went to Hiroshima and weeks later, I flew to Hawaii to meet my parents. My father was a retired naval officer, so in a span of about two weeks, I saw the bookends of the America's experience and something just kind of clicked.
I got really interested in it, and I began reading everything I could get my hands on and when I finished up in Japan, I ultimately ended up as a journalist. I wanted to write and I wanted to do something creative and that was about the only job that would pay me to do that. I was a newspaper reporter for about eight years and when I was about 30, I did a Nieman fellowship at Harvard. We did a lot that year in the journalism program and I saw what was going to happen to journalism and I realized that I was going to be struggling, so I realized I needed to probably change gears. So, I switched and started writing books. That was 20 years ago.
I’ve written eight books and I was able to rekindle my interest in World War II, focusing on the war in the Pacific. I went back to school, and I got my master’s in military history and I’m wrapping up my PhD right now. So, I've gone from a circuitous route falling into academia the backway. I've been really lucky. I've focused on the battle of Manila, the Doolittle Raid, the firebombing of Japan, and the atomic bombing. I also lead tours of the National War Museum and the cultural experience in the UK. I spent a lot of time taking tourists to the Philippines and Japan and leading a tour for the 85th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
IACSP: I’ve read about Harry Truman and that side, although you have details I didn't know, but how did you research the book especially to find details about the Japanese emperor and his cabinet?
Scott: I spent a lot of time at the Truman Library, going through the personal papers of people like Henry Simpson on that side, and I've been in Japan where I did interviews with the survivors of the atomic bomb. I spent an entire weekend with a survivor and his wife. Japan has some amazing artifacts, such as the gramophone record that the emperor made in the NHK museum, so I spent time in Japan looking at these artifacts and kind of pulling it all together.
IACSP: Do you speak Japanese?
Scott: No, but having visited there many times I know phrases and whatnot, but I been really lucky that I’ve met some great folks over the years that have helped me out like translators, fixers, and things like. I can get Japanese books and use translation apps for research.
IACSP: How does the Pacific War differ from the European War?
Scott: I always like to say that the Pacific War is a more American experience, and by that, I mean that the war in Europe is an allied fight. We were fighting alongside our allies, but the Pacific War is a uniquely American theater. It's so dominated by the Americans, and every single service branch played a unique and vital role in that war. Naval aviation really came into its zenith at that time, the Battle of the Coral Sea being an example. It’s the first time two opposing navies fight the entire battle without ever actually seeing one another. They fought entirely with planes in the sky. The submarines also played a critical role in strangling Japan's economy, as well as the rise of the of amphibious warfare and how they figured out how to take Japanese-held islands and adapt their hardware. You go from the tragedy of Tarawa to the success of Saipan. And you have strategic bombings by the air service. On top of all that, add in the logistics, think of what it takes to fight a war on the opposite side of the ocean. The Nazis capture the imagination more than the Japanese. I think people just love Nazis.
IACSP: Yeah, Nazis make good cinematic villains. But the Imperial Japanese were equally evil in my view, and equally brutal.
Scott: It was a different type of brutality. Germans were industrializing on how they killed people using gas champers and bulldozers. The Japanese fought using bayonets and swords. Look at the battle of Manila. It’s a blood-soaked kind of barbarian all across Asia.
IACSP: I think you did a fine job of portraying Harry Truman as well as Japanese Emperor Hirohrito. Truman is clearly well known to Americans, but Hirohito is not. How would you briefly describe the two world leaders?
Scott: You could not have two more opposite figures. Probably the only thing that's the two men shared in common was the mutual love of history. Truman grew up reading about Alexander the Great and Hirohito had a bust of Abraham Lincoln and read Carl Sandberg’s biography of Lincoln. Other than being really interested in history, these guys came from completely different backgrounds. Truman was a product of poverty in rural America, and Hirohito was this lonely, isolated monarch. He’s not particularly bright or brilliant, just like Truman wasn't.
Truman was really a hard-working
individual, and Hirohito was isolated not just family but also culture. He was
not a dominant personality. Truman had a much stronger personality. Hirohito was
nervous and twitchy, although he kind of comes into his own during World War II,
as he recognized the perilous path of the army. He is facing a very
militaristic society, and his monarchy has come up alongside the rising power
of the military in their efforts to eliminate democratic guardrails powers.
IACSP: You write in detail about the Manhattan Project. How would you describe the two main participants in the project, General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer, and was the film “Oppenheimer” accurate?
Scott: I love General Groves. He reminds me of Curtis Lemay. I wrote a previous book about LeMay. These two are hard-charging guys with engineering backgrounds. Groves was a very difficult man to work for, and Oppenheimer gets all the attention as he’s morally conflicted. Nobody wants to watch a movie about a really good engineer. At the end of the day, Leslie Groves is like “Bob the Builder.” He just gets stuff done.
“Oppenheimer” is a really accurate movie. They cut some Hollywood corners, such as stating that Henry Simpson spared Kyoto because he honeymooned there. That comes up all the time. Even Japanese tour guide talk about it. He honeymooned in New Hampshire. He had gone to Kyoto in his capacity while working in the Philippines for the American Governor General. Henry Simpson had a much bigger view than that as he understood what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Bombing Kyoto would forever damage U.S. relations and a post-war world would need Japan in our camp.
IACSP: My late father, Edward M. Davis, was a Navy Chief Petty Officer and Underwater Demolition Team frogman in the Pacific during World War II. Before he died, I recall him telling me that he attended an intelligence briefing in 1945 in which the UDT frogmen were told they would suffer 90% fatalities when the U.S. invaded Japan, so I'm certainly thankful that Truman dropped the two atomic bombs and avoidance the mass killings of both American and Japanese.
If Japan had not surrendered what would the invasion of Japan look like and how would the US have invaded Japan and how would the Japanese have defended themselves?
Scott: Japanese battle tactics changed dramatically in the last year of the war. They switched over to more of a traditional warfare and the idea is that they wanted to extract the maximum effort to save the emperor and not have war crimes trials against their people. They had a whole list of demands, and they thought, well, if they could make this war as bloody as possible for the American public, they hoped the Americans would give up on the demand for unconditional surrender.
The Japanese army still had five million troops under arms. They were still a very potent enemy. Not only did they have that many troops, but they were also enlisting all their civilians, middle schoolers, grandparents, and they were teaching them how to fight. The idea was that meeting the Americans would be a bloodletting.
IACSP: How did Truman come to make this faithful decision, especially considering that he knew nothing about the involvement of the Manhattan Project prior to becoming president?
Scott: There isn't one pivotal meeting where that happened. What ultimately happens is he's in Potsdam and up until the 10th of July they don't know for certain that the bomb's going to work. When that test proves that they have a workable weapon, they rush Leslie Groves’ report over to Berlin. Truman holds a series of meetings with George Marshall and Churchill, and he kind of gets all the feedback from people, and then he finally records that decision in his diary on July 25th. Hopefully, this will bring about an end to the war. The decision is made over several days as he's talking to different people and coming to grips with it all. He uses a phrase frequently, stating he wanted to prevent another Okinawa. Okinawa becomes synonymous to him, as it's just a horror of war. As a battle veteran of WWI, he was desperate to try and prevent that from happening again. The firebombing campaign against Japan, which I wrote a book about, is far more destructive in the long run. Japanese cities were burned out. Think of the force that came before the atomic bombs were even used, so it's really the ability to shock the Japanese leaders into surrender.
IACSP: Thank you for speaking to us.
Paul Davis, a Navy veteran, having served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, and a retired Defense Department civilian employee, is a longtime contributor to the Journal. He also writes the online Threatcon column.
