HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was doing some research because a listener sent me a bit of information about FDR's final days.
BEN KISSEL
Is that what you call masturbating now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But apparently FDR at the time, he had suffered from hypertension like I do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Presidential disease.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Same level of stress.
BEN KISSEL
The way that you say it, it sounds like a superpower. Hypertension!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do feel cool but it's not Tron. Cause it kinda feels like I'm the guy from Tron but I'm not because it's just a sleeping illness.
BEN KISSEL
You could hang out with Jeff Bridges.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could. But he won't answer my letters.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that weird?
MARCUS PARKS
But we can all make our disorders sound super cool, like bipolar!
BEN KISSEL
Attention deficit hyper disorder!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, cool, okay.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Why you always late? Do you stack things weird?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh, that's a hyper disorder you have there, sir. But FDR, for a while they thought hypertension, like blood pressure, they thought if you had high blood pressure that it was like healthy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah because it meant you were more of a man.
BEN KISSEL
I love that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It meant that more blood was shooting around in a thicker way and I guess America, they're all like production is excellent.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Vigor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Vigor.
BEN KISSEL
So you're telling me they made a nuclear bomb but at the same time they're like high blood pressure? That guy's gonna live forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Basically.
BEN KISSEL
All right, fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But apparently at his death, which you won't let me use the word mistress' house-
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because she was very complicated-
BEN KISSEL
Apparently.
MARCUS PARKS
It's much more complicated than a mistress relationship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it says right here it was his right hand woman, he could have used a two leg woman, someone who could help him down the stairs.
BEN KISSEL
All right, wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Got him!
BEN KISSEL
You really nailed him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody's safe.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Leave Missy LeHand out of this.
BEN KISSEL
Roast mode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, Missy LeFeet is what FDR was doing.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. You've really done it now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But if you look, his blood pressure apparently at the very end of his life was 350/195.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. I wonder why he was so stressed. Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't that crazy?
MARCUS PARKS
That's insane!
BEN KISSEL
Ben, hanging out with Henry and Marcus. And Henry, you better reverse this trend of getting your blood pressure down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. Pump it up!
BEN KISSEL
We need you in office.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, man. My goal is that by next year my blood pressure will be so high that the whites of my eyes are gonna be crimson.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wouldn't it be?
BEN KISSEL
You don't even have to tattoo them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Today's episode is gonna be rough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Well let's get into it, the Manhattan Project Part 5, it's reading like a horror film.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very much so.
MARCUS PARKS
This is Hiroshima, we're here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're here. Can you really, finally, ah, Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
Ah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What a good place.
BEN KISSEL
Wonderful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As you could tell, we covered the episode of This Is Our Life from the 1950s that covers Hiroshima-
MARCUS PARKS
This Is Your Life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This Is Your Life. They definitely cover just what a beautiful morning it was.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's not nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Now if you're American, it's almost certain that when or if you were taught about the end of WWII, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was framed as a necessary evil perpetrated to prevent the deaths of millions of lives both American and Japanese.
BEN KISSEL
I don't remember it being framed as evil at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
I remember it being framed as if plumes of liberation went over to the people of Nagasaki.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's technically a holiday.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. They're like and then they knelt down and thanked us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're like thank god, we needed to be spanked.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to bolster this argument, atomic apologists often point towards domestic Japanese programs like the Tonarigumi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you've listened to Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East, he really does talk quite a bit about the fervor within the country and how so from that perspective, you can kind of see like oh they were an intense bunch.
MARCUS PARKS
They were a very intense bunch.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Just like everybody else, only more so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dan, call us.
MARCUS PARKS
Please call us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think he has a rotary phone.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We wanna Get into contact with him but I think I have to attach a message to a pony and send it out.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's in Michigan somewhere?
MARCUS PARKS
Nah, nah, he's got a PO Box somewhere in Washington state.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. All right, well maybe we don't wanna bother him.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Tonarigumi were mandatory groups of 10-15 domestic Japanese households that were responsible for ration allocation, government bond distribution, propaganda distribution, and civil defense.
BEN KISSEL
Guys, here me out, I think I should be in charge of the rations, okay. Two for me, one for you, two for me, one for you. We'll play the two for me, one for you game.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're the fattest man in town.
BEN KISSEL
How?
MARCUS PARKS
Well additionally by the end of the war, these Tonarigumi units had received military training to observe enemy planes and boats. Most frightening to the alarmists though was the fact that the Japanese imperial government intended to draft the Tonarigumi as private militias in case of an enemy invasion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I think it was probably met with mixed results of some. I do imagine a good chunk of them were like yeah, can't wait, yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Oh sure!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll kill, I'm fine!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Absolutely. And this does sound intimidating. It's almost frightening when one took into account the tenacity and ferocity of the average Japanese soldier. Of course propaganda had made the Japanese a terrifying people to the Americans. Put simply, Japan was seen by America as a nation of zealots that were determined to fight to the last man, woman, and child for the glory of the emperor, all because he told them to.
BEN KISSEL
If we only had a cartoon bunny to take down these goddamn Japanese individuals.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get to that here in a second. But here's the thing about the Tonarigumi, their duties and responsibilities were almost exactly the duties and responsibilities thrust upon the American public during WWII.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's actually even more so the giant systemic version of pumping out multiple different versions of the Navy and the Air force and the Army and again and again and again. We didn't mobilize our homes, we turned our entire industrial network into a war-making machine. It almost seems like that's a level of zealotry as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What is that constitutional amendment, is it 2, 3? You can't harbor the soldiers, you don't gotta harbor soldiers?
MARCUS PARKS
I think it's 3 or 4.
BEN KISSEL
But if you make everyone soldiers, then I guess you're not harboring soldiers anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's the reason why eventually, what AirBnB is trying to do right now-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Make it illegal for you to even go to an AirBnB because we are all soldiers of light in the army of Christ.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, you're on militarized AirBnB also? Really fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in this context, we're talking more about the people than the industry. For example, America had the Office of Civilian Defense to help with domestic war efforts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's where we had girls in short skirts playing softball, right?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they're washing each other in a brook.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like you got the two riveters scissoring.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the OCD. Absolutely, yeah. That's what it's all about.
BEN KISSEL
It's international Police Academy with nuclear weapons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that's kinda fun in a way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. In America, rationing was an everyday part of life. And towns across America ran constant drives to sell war bonds to help with the war effort. And when it came to propaganda, ours ran so deep that Donald Duck was in charge when it came to beating the Nazis while Bugs Bunny fought the Japanese in a cartoon that had an actual racial slur in the title.
BEN KISSEL
I think that Bugs Bunny...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He should have walked away from that cartoon first of all.
BEN KISSEL
Well yeah, if he cared.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If Bugs Bunny was this so-called American idol, he would have understood what this would apply to in history and he would have walked away. So in that case, Bugs Bunny is canceled.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I actually think they could have used Elmer against the Nazis. Elmer Fudd.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Except he did dress as a lady very similar to Harry Styles. Uncanceled.
BEN KISSEL
Uncanceled, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that racist title, that's in addition to some incredibly harsh racial slurs used in the cartoon when Bugs Bunny hands out grenade filled ice cream bars to Japanese soldiers who are all portrayed as barefoot, subhuman savages. And also Bugs Bunny weirdly gets laid at the end of the cartoon.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, he's in the army.
BEN KISSEL
You can't eat that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
BEN KISSEL
Grenade ice cream.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also just now imagine a bunch of Japanese men pushing a little rabbit down and fucking it in the field.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah. It would have been I spit on your grave times 1000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't it also weirder the idea of a little actual rabbit dressed in a human lady's clothes-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Being made love to by POWs from WWII.
BEN KISSEL
And this war has been directed by John Waters, interesting enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now that's a riveting Rosie.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
But what scared Americans most about Japan were the militias. It seemed otherworldly to some Americans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We were invented by militias!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I don't even wanna-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We created militias!
BEN KISSEL
We're not even gonna talk about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We did it all to get this!
MARCUS PARKS
It's in our fucking constitution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're supposed to have them!
BEN KISSEL
You know I heard those savages get together with firearms and talk about overthrowing the government. Anyway, what are we doing? Oh, get together with some firearms and overthrow the government.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This might not be a good episode for July 4th weekend. It's July 4th weekend.
MARCUS PARKS
I forgot about this.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But really this is all about cultural differences. The cultural difference between us and the Japanese is that the Japanese formed and ran their Tonarigumi units with complete obedience, which was such a foreign concept for many Americans that it sort of freaked us out. Where the Japanese followed orders, most Americans had to be dragged kicking and screaming into any effort towards the greater good. And they saw anything to the contrary as un-American. Put another way, an American man in the 1940s might say yeah, I'll kill as many people as you fucking want.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll shoot them, I'll blow them up, I'll burn them to death. I'll do whatever the fuck you want.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But I'll be goddamn if you're gonna tell me that I can only eat two potatoes a day instead of three, because it's my god given right as a fucking American to eat as many goddamn potatoes as I fucking want to!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Somebody's saying my language.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, they are actually correct. And Marcus, it seems to me as if you call this the greater good. Seems like, what's that on your tongue? A little bit of leather from licking all those boots?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, the greater good, the nuclear bombs!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
His lips are brown.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
By the wax upon the shoe.
BEN KISSEL
Intriguing.
MARCUS PARKS
I believe we hit upon a little bit of the old patented Ben Kissel contrarianism on purpose. A little bit of the old misunderstanding something on purpose.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes I guess his politician nature is showing itself.
BEN KISSEL
I've been swift voted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's interesting though because this is how propaganda serves its purpose.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we have alienated these people in our minds.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have now as an American people, we're saying oh my god, this pack of relentless maniacs, we're never gonna be able to beat these guys. We have to stomp them out, we're gonna have to kill every last one of them. When don't you think that maybe some of them felt the same exact way that we felt-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When they were forced by gun to go and sign up for these various things? They talk about that within the kamikaze community too. Like yeah, a lot of them felt duty bound but it was that duty bound that made them go do it, they were men of honor that wanted to honor this oath that they took to the army. But a lot of them were not hyper enthusiastic.
BEN KISSEL
Can you have a kamikaze community? Wouldn't they all sort of slowly be like where's Darrell? He had to go kamikaze.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like there he is right now.
MARCUS PARKS
It's about adding new members constantly.
BEN KISSEL
You would have to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's a big turnover on membership. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
High turnover rate>
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, cause some of them were like trained to go and then didn't go. So you had guys that were all ready to go-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And didn't get to go and in all of the letters a lot of them are like gee, wish I didn't have to do this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, I would imagine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But if I don't do this, I go to military jail.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But yeah, perfect propaganda, from cartoons to military to newsreels, everyone's getting hit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And it goes even further than that. I mean eventually most Americans when it came to rationing and so on and so forth, most Americans fell in line after America brought in a daddy named Leon Henderson. Leon Henderson-
BEN KISSEL
Leon?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Leon Henderson pissed off people so bad in being very, very strict about rationing that in retaliation, a large number of solid greater good New Deal programs were repealed and never brought back. If you ever ask like what happened to all that cool New Deal shit?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This. Leon Henderson, he pissed off people by being really hardcore with rationing, pissed off a bunch of people. The Democrats went out of power.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And so all of that New Deal shit got repealed in the midst of WWII and and the aftermath of WWII.
BEN KISSEL
Well Marcus, now that you love rationing so much, you'll be happy to know that certain members of our government are going to stop school lunches for free. So there you go, we're gonna ration, the kids are gonna have to ration a little bit.
MARCUS PARKS
You are purposefully-
BEN KISSEL
No, no, no!
MARCUS PARKS
You are absolutely misunderstanding it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is.
MARCUS PARKS
You are misunderstanding it.
BEN KISSEL
Marcus for prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think Marcus is-
MARCUS PARKS
Purposefully misunderstanding.
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The only thing Marcus likes about prison is the ability to read uninterrupted.
BEN KISSEL
Actually ironically enough-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be the only thing that would be nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Unfortunately I have a hard time concentrating when I am in a constant state of terror.
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You would be in a constant state of loneliness because you'd probably have to be because you're sensitive. Constantly with all the extra... With the Fogels, the Jared Fogles of the world. So you would have time to read, you'd be alone in a cell.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thing is that's the problem. Because people like us, because I would also probably be isolated immediately. Because I'd be like get me outta here! Get me outta here! I'll fucking kill myself! So they would probably have to put me in isolation but then who are we spending our time with? Just a guy being like I made a thousand angels, you wanna see my angel collection?
BEN KISSEL
You better say yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you have to go like yes, yeah, absolutely. And he's just got his tapestry of come that he has turned into a spiderweb and you have to go like oh wow, oh.
BEN KISSEL
All right, back at it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the point is is that what Leon Henderson did, it worked. Without rationing, without putting all the rubber and all the metal and all the scrap metal and all that shit and turning our entire industry into a war machine, without that, without being forced to do that, we would not have won WWII. We would not have been as effective of a force as we actually were.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And after the fact, the so-called greatest generation pretended that they'd all come together for the war effort immediately and without complaint in order to bring back our boys as soon as possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, Marcus-
MARCUS PARKS
They did not fucking do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
BEN KISSEL
You're donna diss the greatest generation right now?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Hold on a second. Yeah, Mr. Brokaw? Mr. Tom Brokaw?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's fucking out. He fucked up! He didn't do his job! Yeah, I'm coming for Tom Brokaw now.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just saying-
BEN KISSEL
We are heated today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just saying the greatest generation isn't as fucking great as they make themselves put to be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like this. I like being in a hot take zone. I like this. I can take the heat.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what I'm saying is-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got my fucking kevlar panties on.
MARCUS PARKS
Man, it's straight fucking propaganda that is still in effect today. It's one of the great myths of WWII.
BEN KISSEL
They are dying, Marcus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get them gone!
MARCUS PARKS
How many WWII vets are left, 12?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah and they're the ones-
BEN KISSEL
Well they don't matter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they were just kids literally putting one last screw into a jet at this point.
BEN KISSEL
Seriously.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Every WWII veterinarian in my family is fucking dead.
BEN KISSEL
It was my job as an 11 year old boy to kiss all the pilots before they left.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. No but it's true, it's another myth that we are still dealing with now, you can see the repercussions of now. It's just real difficult to get an entire island nation of individualists together to do something.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like to have all of America, this massive swathe, huge size, all different types of population, and having them all try to be both special starts that each one is their own, yes, you're your own god, you're your own master.
MARCUS PARKS
Your special little universe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Special little universe which I do believe in. But it's really hard to get them all to them agree to help each other.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they're naturally against it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Thank god a weapon of mass destruction was able to do just that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Brought us all together.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause the key word was mass.
BEN KISSEL
Mass.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I bring up all this propaganda for a reason, because it was America's sustained propaganda efforts that made both the dropping of the bomb and its later similarly mythical justification possible. In the most basic terms, the government framed the argument as a false dichotomy. If you are against the use of the atomic bomb, then you were for killing Americans. No middle ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how they do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's what they do.
MARCUS PARKS
And for many, this dichotomy only gained strength after the horrors of the atomic bomb became public in 1946. They doubled down. In fact, one poll said that a quarter of Americans wished that we would have dropped more bombs on Japan.
BEN KISSEL
The greatest generation. See Marcus? There was a lot of people on board!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(metal guitar riff) I think they just wanted to... I don't know!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They liked the clouds.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
They also saw it on TV.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
They're like I missed that one, can we get one with a better footage?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It was a little grainy.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean my entire point is that you don't need to mythologize older generations, older times, humans have been the same forever and always and we will continue to be the same forever and always. And it's not until we fucking accept that that we can truly make change in this world.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or maybe we were forced to be jammed together by AI. But it sounds like it is coming down the pipe whether we like it or not.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yes, indeed. You see that robot playing tennis?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well you remember in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you remember during the worst of the Iraq war, 'nuke the Middle East' became a popular refrain amongst many citizens. At least maybe that was just in Texas, I don't know if you got that in Wisconsin.
BEN KISSEL
That may have just been Texas. I definitely remember killing everyone that may be close to tan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna honestly say I was in 1969 in my mind during those years.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I wasn't really there for a lot of this conversation.
MARCUS PARKS
So you were fighting in Vietnam during Iraq.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, dude. But I was thankful for Vietnam because of all the groovy tunes that came out of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, man.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It'd be funny to see you with a hat on with a bunch of sticks in it in college. It's Vietnam! We're the Vietcong!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they loved me there.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they did.
MARCUS PARKS
But while many Americans knew that atomic warfare was quote unquote "bad" or at the very least distasteful-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my biggest takeaway.
MARCUS PARKS
The full scope of what exactly the bomb did to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it isn't common knowledge because it's just too goddamn horrifying for most people to handle. It's sort of like how everybody knows about the big serial killers, the big three, because you can kind of gloss over the details and it's still a good story. It's the reason why people don't know about the Chicago Rippers, because it's truly just pure horror and they don't want to hear it.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, they just released the transcript of the Toolbox Killers. They recorded one of their murders and you see the detail within it and it is extremely horrific. But it was like when we were going to do an episode on the Toolbox Killers-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We went to go into all the research for it and it was like there's nothing here, why can't I find anything? There's been no definitive real anything. And so then that thing came out and you're like oh it's because it destroys your soul.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like reading the content that happened.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh. I suppose-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It makes you half a human for an afternoon.
BEN KISSEL
We will cover that at some point I guess maybe? I don't know, it's fucking disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sadly, the Chicago Rippers is that story.
BEN KISSEL
Right, right. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But to the point of not being able to handle the truth, if the average American truly knew just how awful Hiroshima and Nagasaki really were, then our image of ourselves as the saviors of humanity after WWII, that gets greatly tarnished. And as we know, WWII is pretty much all we have to be proud of when it comes to military operations over the last 80 years, to the point where assholes are still wearing T-shirts to this day that say 'America: Back to Back World War Champs'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no one ever says that about like the White Sox. Didn't the White Sox win like two World Series like 50 years apart? Like we can't say-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But they would. If they did, there would be T-shirts about that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying-
MARCUS PARKS
You don't go back to the sports achievements of the 1940s.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
We aren't really holding onto that anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Lost four wars in a row to villagers with spikes.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't see that shirt, where's that?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, a lot of people taking credit for something they had no part of.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you don't go like four for four, South American coups.
BEN KISSEL
I mean technically we got the two wars-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do want that shirt. I fucking want that shirt. My CIA team, team CIA shirt, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Dude, yeah. They're working hard right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But yeah, we won the two, WWI, WWII, then Korean, that's just neutral, Vietnam you could say lost but we'll just say tied.
MARCUS PARKS
We lost.
BEN KISSEL
Iraq War I, message sent, so I'm gonna give that a victory. Iraq War II, that's gonna be-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's more of a, that's a slow rollout.
BEN KISSEL
That's a slow rollout. And then Afghanistan. Yeah, we're about two, one, and three.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're two, one, and three right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I would say one, two, and three.
BEN KISSEL
Dang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I ask though as a comedian-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I just ask this in the middle of this before we start? Cause obviously we're gonna get into some really heavy material here.
MARCUS PARKS
Extraordinarily heavy, this is gonna be some of the most intense shit we've ever talked about on the show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And I'm a silly guy. So I'm gonna try to make jokes but I do feel like in many ways, I feel like comedians should be treated like medics in the war.
BEN KISSEL
I don't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where we should be allowed, we should be able to wave a little flag that says I'm a comedian, this is legal, it's legal for me. Cause when I mess up I get an angry email.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you can still take shots. Because you don't think that a medic at some point, cause medics, you're not supposed to shoot them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't think a medic every once in a while didn't shoot a fucking Nazi in the back of the head?
MARCUS PARKS
Well yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'm sure they did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right?
MARCUS PARKS
Well once you got to a certain point in the war, yeah, the medics especially in Japan, like on the Pacific front-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's gotta be cool for them.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they were absolutely fucking horrified to do it. They did not want to do it at all because they became medics specifically so they wouldn't have to kill people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's sad.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I always get-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What a waste of all these bullets.
BEN KISSEL
I always get into medicine when I don't want to see a bunch of gore.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean yeah, we did take down the Germans from the west while the Russians took it from the east. We conquered the Italians, we stormed the beaches of Normandy, we liberated France.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not hard to conquer the Italians, you know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
You'd be surprised.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All you gotta do is show up at 3 PM.
BEN KISSEL
Well they're down.
MARCUS PARKS
The Italian front was actually... Cause you know why? Craggy. Real craggy land, real hard to take.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. That's where my grandfather was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But right at the end of WWII, when we could have come out clean, we not only committed war crimes, we invented entirely new war crimes when we really didn't have to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is the wartime equivalent of someone coming up to me saying, so what are you working on next?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, what you working on next? Above and beyond.
MARCUS PARKS
That's America.
BEN KISSEL
America.
MARCUS PARKS
And so without further ado, let's get into those war crimes with our return to the city of Hiroshima. Why are you laughing? They were fucking war crimes.
BEN KISSEL
They're war crimes, Henry. Why are you laughing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This episode of war crimes is brought to you by BetterHelp.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, BetterHelp. Have you had your Nestle this morning? When you're waking up and you want a good Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage, never forgot it was brought to you by war crimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then I saw the mushroom cloud.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it seems like you need a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit from Jimmy Dean.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we're rejoining this story just as the Little Boy bomb is slowly dropping by parachute on its way to change the course of human history.
BEN KISSEL
And the fact they put that spinny hat on it, I just thought that was rude. Okay, I'm done.
MARCUS PARKS
Now B-29 superfortress planes, the kind that drop nukes, they weren't an uncommon sight in the skies of Hiroshima. This area was often a rendezvous point for B-29s on their way to firebomb other cities. But even though Hiroshima hadn't been firebombed yet, the air raid siren still went off every time a B-29 was spotted, just in case they decided to firebomb this time. And by the morning of August 6, 1945 since so many cities have been firebombed over Japan over the previous week, the citizens of Hiroshima were fried because they'd been woken up every night for weeks by air raid warnings. But with every warning, the firebombing that had ravaged so many other Japanese cities hadn't come. So the people of Hiroshima began to think that maybe they'd be spared the fate of cities like Tokyo where over 100,000 people had been burned alive.
BEN KISSEL
Can I just say this? Let me sleep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, don't wake me up.
BEN KISSEL
Don't wake me up, just let me sleep. Let me die in my sleep, please don't wake me up. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Japanese intelligence had been tracking the movements of the plane carrying the atomic bomb bound for Hiroshima. And they knew enough about recent breakthroughs in nuclear research to surmise that just three planes grouped together rather than hundreds out there on a bomb run, that implied there might be a surprise in store.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And especially it had been kind of, how do you say, loosely floated-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That we are working on a brand new super weapon and it seems that oh whoa, the United States keeps building these giant Air Force bases right next to us impromptu and real quick. And then there's all these supply chains that are showing up and a bunch of new soldiers, all these other things. And so at first they're thinking oh, they're coming now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're gonna come do a full scale invasion, which is why originally they're starting to kind of like... They would hide in the mountains, they would send soldiers up into it and they would bury themselves in these sort of like kind of what they learned when we talked about Iwo Jima.
MARCUS PARKS
Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
Iwo Jima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where they would go and hide and then pop out and get you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right? Like once you were to past them. But that was not what was coming.
MARCUS PARKS
No. But even after intelligence informed the Imperial Japanese Army of the Enola Gay's trajectory-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh you know what we forgot that someone brought up to my attention? Benola Gay.
BEN KISSEL
Oh please! And there's nothing wrong with that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just forgot.
BEN KISSEL
You gimme a fucking dick, I'll bite it off right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the shirt, that's the merch.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the merch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's got Kissel in a B-29 dropping Bud Light Limes out of it. I just feel like we have to.
MARCUS PARKS
I feel like we have to do it now at this point.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, hear me out, hear me out. Kisselnacht.
MARCUS PARKS
Oof, wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly that's your tour. When you do your full stand up tour-
BEN KISSEL
It's the night of Kissel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. The night of long jokes. You know?
MARCUS PARKS
Well even after intelligence said hey, there's this bomb coming, the generals chose to not only keep their fighters on the ground, they decided to not warn Hiroshima in any way. And really we don't really know why.
BEN KISSEL
Were they complicit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was reading a thing-
MARCUS PARKS
Not complicit.
BEN KISSEL
No?
MARCUS PARKS
We just don't really know why. There was just some arbitrary decision was made.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is one of those many questions of history of like they did know that something was hyper unusual about this flyover of three planes and they had hours notice. They could have scrambled planes to intercept, they didn't. And this is kind of where I got into my little Dick Cheney, him laughing like imagining an American flag draped over a globe. Like I feel like there was a little bit of that, where they might have felt that we can further our position in life if we kind of take this one on the chin maybe. Like there's something to it or they just didn't want to acknowledge it. They just straight up were like we're gonna stick our heads in the sand.
MARCUS PARKS
I think it was probably, I think most likely at this point the Japanese Air Force is running pretty low.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And the B-29s, like another name for the B-29 is the superfortress because these fuckers were intense. They weren't just made to drop bombs, they were made to fly through the air and kill everything in the air around them so they could drop bombs. So if you're sending out planes, you don't know what the fuck they're there for, you don't know what they're doing, they might just be on a reconnaissance mission. You don't have a whole lot of planes to spare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they also refused to believe that the Americans would be able to build the bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Additionally when the Enola Gay came into Hiroshima's sight from the ground, when someone eyeballed it, no air raid signal was given because the men responsible for giving the go ahead were at breakfast. Now this isn't quite the dereliction of duty that one might expect. I don't know this for sure but knowing what I know about American fire bomb raids on Japan, morning was probably a time of relief. Once the sun came up, the danger was gone because American firebombings always happened at night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's harder to fight back. And then when the smoke emerges, all that kind of stuff, it's harder to see the planes in the sky.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Cover of night.
MARCUS PARKS
As such, a 14 year old girl named Yoshie Oka spotted the Enola Gay but was forced by protocol to sit there with her finger on the air raid button waiting for the order to be given.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I see a man, his long flowing orange hair, his wide cardigan arms spread wide, and it does seem to be several cylinders of green coming from his gut. Oh what a sight to see.
BEN KISSEL
Come with me, little girl, if you wanna live.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That the plane garbled.
BEN KISSEL
Come here, little girl, if you wanna live.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I smell the smell of scotch and I see the indents of Playstation buttons on his thumbs.
BEN KISSEL
I've been playing with Jordan Love as a matter of fact.
MARCUS PARKS
That's nice.
BEN KISSEL
Also Diablo IV, surprisingly fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Are you getting into the grind?
BEN KISSEL
Really enjoying it. Really enjoying it.
MARCUS PARKS
I can see you getting into the grind.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm on the Final Fantasy XVI right now. It's a wonderful game.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd like to think of all of the victims of Hiroshima that couldn't play Diablo IV.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you, Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the fact that a 14 year old girl was in such a position tells you a lot about Hiroshima as a city. While the Americans were telling themselves and telling everyone else that Hiroshima was a pure military target and therefore fair game, the reality was far from it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Even though 23,000 children had mercifully been evacuated outside the city afew months earlier so they might escape a possible firebombing, there were only about 43,000 soldiers there., which is a lot, 43,000 is a bunch.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But as far as civilians, quarter million were in Hiroshima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
So the ratio for military personnel to civilians was quite low.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also you look at a country low in resources. What do I know from CIV VI? Is that when cities get bombing and then populations increases across the other cities, the resources for other cities go down. So you can only spread the people as far as where the food is. So if you don't have any food, it's gonna be hard for an extra 250,000 people to show up at your city.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's gonna be extremely difficult to house and feed them.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Even just those 23,000 children, like the stories that they tell us that they mostly starved out there in the country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They had very little rations, they were lucky to get like a ball of rice a day as far as what they could eat.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like everybody in Japan is fucking starving at this time.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by the time 14 year old Yoshie Oka finally heard the go-ahead buzzer to push the air raid button, it was 8:13 AM. This gave the city of Hiroshima two minutes to prepare before Little Boy detonated 1900 ft above the city center.
BEN KISSEL
Hold on, hold on, show me your tits really quick. I can't get hard, ah!
MARCUS PARKS
You know I really fucking wrote that like as a way, like I was really trying to get some sort of like tension-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The suspense.
BEN KISSEL
I was thinking about jerking off right before the bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
I worked on it for like a couple of hours.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that amazing? I can just do that, boom, gone. All the work.
MARCUS PARKS
Just all the work gone.
BEN KISSEL
This is gonna be fantastic. Oh Ben and Henry are gonna love not making jokes here.
MARCUS PARKS
Crafted, crafted.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was just really crafted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like if I had two minutes left I would just turn to any woman that was next to me and be like let me just see your boobs.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me just see your boobs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Sorry, buddy. US does have to be part of this.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe Mr. Carlin needs a co host. Maybe I should call him up.
BEN KISSEL
I think that you guys would fucking eviscerate each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ben and Henry were just two normal people, only more so.
BEN KISSEL
You guys would hate each other so fucking much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that they'd get along. I think he'd look at us, I think he might embrace some levity.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I think he would.
BEN KISSEL
I think Marcus and him would say 'well actually' a thousand times-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah well I would listen to Dan Carlin.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'd let Dan Carlin 'well actually' you all day long.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh absolutely. No, no, Dan Carlin is a far superior being to I, to me.
BEN KISSEL
Even when it comes to serial killers?
MARCUS PARKS
No, not when it comes to serial killers.
BEN KISSEL
So there you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll go get him drunk. We gotta go get him fucking hammered, see what he does.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Buy him wings.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, do it seriously. We can keep, but I won't make my joke.
MARCUS PARKS
All right, all right. This gave the city of Hiroshima less than two minutes to prepare before Little Boy detonated 1900 ft above the city center. Immediately upon the bomb's detonation, a tremendous flash of pure silent white energy blasted its way from the epicenter. In less than 1/10 of a second, 30% of Hiroshima's population, 80,000 people, were simply gone. A man sitting on the steps of a bank waiting for it to open was reduced to a dusty black outline on the granite and the skin on people even as far away as the suburbs was darkened several shades, save what parts of their bodies were shielded from the blast. For example, say you held your hand up to your face just by instinct, everything around the shadow of your hand would have been darkened but the skin shielded by your hand would stay its normal shade. These markings came to be called the mask of Hiroshima and they persisted for months afterward.
BEN KISSEL
So weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just sent like a chill up my spine.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the mask of Hiroshima does sound like an incredible spa but it's not good.
BEN KISSEL
That's true, that's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no. That's very bad.
BEN KISSEL
So the mask is the shadow outline-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of your hand.
MARCUS PARKS
Of your hand.
BEN KISSEL
But why didn't it erode the hand?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it does physically block the energy wave.
MARCUS PARKS
Remember this is the power of the sun.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
They have unlocked the power of the sun, they have basically opened up a sun in the middle of Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
So what we're talking about here, it's a sunburn but it's the most intense sunburn you could possibly-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
A sunburn that will darken your skin for five months instantly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Cook you. It's cooking you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then you'll see because they talked about it in the testing. They said that when they tried to... You couldn't block the light if you wanted to. Where it was like, I forget who said it, it was like they saw it and they saw it through the glass. And that was Richard Feynman.
MARCUS PARKS
It was Feynman, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That he saw it and he said that the only way to describe it like things went white and he's like I'll never see again. Obviously he thought he went completely blind. But he said the difference was instead of it being black is that it was white and that it burnt everything out of his way.
BEN KISSEL
That's crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like the the light was so all encompassing that it felt suffocating and like a nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well for those unlucky enough to have spotted the Enola Gay that day and were staring at the sky when the bomb went off, their retinas suffered third degree burns, rendering the central portion of their visual fields permanently blind. Those who didn't directly see the bomb go off at all however had their own terrors. A college girl who had been facing away from the bomb when it detonated said that she felt as though she'd been struck in the back by a large hammer and then was immediately doused with a pot of boiling oil. Now while some like the man on the bank steps were vaporized, most within a half mile of the blast were reduced to thousands of small piles of smoking black char. These were effectively melted bone, pure charred bone because all of the viscera in these bodies had been boiled away in a fraction of a second.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know if you saw but J. Crew is doing a July 4th sale this weekend.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's actually kind of great. It's like 25% off.
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So just so you know, just remember. I'll remind you before, at the end of the week.
BEN KISSEL
That's really fantastic. Thank you for that reminder.
MARCUS PARKS
After the flash however came the shockwave. At the speed of 7200 MPH, the shockwave traveled from the center with such force that it shattered windows 10 miles away and was felt at a distance of 37 miles away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because within the radius of the blast, a lot of them said they couldn't hear the sound of the explosion.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they said it was silent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was silent. But you could hear it like 1000 miles away. They said that fishermen saw it like up the side of the coast, they just saw this thing go and they heard the explosion.
BEN KISSEL
So it was like moving faster than the speed of sound.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So you just saw it explode but the sound has already passed you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The sound has already passed.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
In Hiroshima however, the shockwave demolished 2/3 of the city's buildings as if they had been cut down by an enormous scythe, shredding the people inside their homes with broken glass or ripping apart their bodies with the flying debris. Finally though came the fire. In less than a second, the bomb created a fireball that expanded to 900 ft and the resulting firestorm eventually destroyed everything within 4.4 miles of ground zero. The Enola Gay meanwhile was trying to get as far away from Hiroshima as fast as it possibly could. To avoid getting caught in the blast, pilot Paul Tibbets had to get clear within 43 seconds of the bomb's drop from the bomb bay. As soon as Little Boy was off, Tibbets turned 155 degrees and hit full throttle which tail gunner Bob Caron, unaware of what they'd just done, he described it as being quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Better than the cyclone at Coney Island!"
BEN KISSEL
It's good to have fun with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's so much within this story that like when you then hear it retold by 1940s and 1950s announcers that you're like you could really see why we just kind of sanitized it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's being like (old timey voice) and that bomb blast was the most incredible thing we've ever seen. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all just hyper positive all the time about all of this shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But then also a lot of people just didn't know either, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this guy had no idea that they dropped it. He just knew like hey, we got this big bomb and we're gonna drop.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
So he had no fucking clue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All he was being told by a couple of scientists he'd just met is that we're about to end the war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But once the bomb detonated, the resulting shockwave shook the plane with such force that the crew figured they were under fire from Japanese flack. But at that point, Tibbett circled back around and saw the mushroom cloud created by Little Boy. It had already risen to 30,000 ft in the air and was visible from almost 400 miles away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they saw Bob flying out of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Bob?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Twin Peaks season three.
BEN KISSEL
There you go. You got him good.
MARCUS PARKS
There you go. Yeah. Now I get it.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it's a Twin Peaks reference from season three.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Man, that was only 2018.
BEN KISSEL
It's a good season, it was a good season. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. After staring at the mushroom cloud in silence, the crew snapped back to reality and made the predictable WWII statements. The war is over! Holy Moses, what a mess! That was a direct quote from I think the bombardier. "Holy Moses, what a mess!" Tibbets meanwhile, he was beyond pleased with himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I knew we'd get them! I knew we'd do it!
MARCUS PARKS
But the copilot, Captain Robert Lewis, he seemed to be the only one who truly grasped what had just happened. In his log, he asked a simple and reasonable question. He wrote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"My god, what have we done?"
MARCUS PARKS
Not like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not like David Byrne?
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's more like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My god, what have we done?
MARCUS PARKS
That's it, that's what I wanted.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. My god!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goddamn Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god, what do we do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that is how David Byrne would say it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. My god! What have we done? Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. Log.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just getting ready for the holiday, he's so excited.
MARCUS PARKS
He really is. He really is very excited. July 4th.
BEN KISSEL
First poop of the day. First poop of the day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now that was a bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
That was a big bomb.
BEN KISSEL
That was an inside joke.
MARCUS PARKS
Now just after the bomb was dropped, one of the nuclear technicians who'd helped assemble the bomb in the air, he was already giving a lecture to the crew on nuclear fission.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you see what we have just done here is a thing called nuclear fiss-in. It is not fizh-in like some of the more dumb people would... And they're just getting their dick sucked by a woman that got shipped in from a factory.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Like they're in the air because these guys are just like everybody else in the Manhattan Project. They've spent years not being able to tell anybody about this shit and these guys couldn't even wait to get to the ground to tell someone about what they just accomplished. Likewise once the Enola Gay landed, the crew was met with cheers from military personnel, scientists, journalists, photographers. Paul Tibbets was given a medal upon exiting the plane.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had a medal ready for him and waiting.
MARCUS PARKS
Back in Hiroshima however the nightmare was just beginning. One writer said that after the shockwave there was a fearful silence all throughout the ruins which made it appear as if all the people, animals, trees, and vegetation were all dead. In fact it was so quiet and the devastation was so massive that the writers thoughts weren't towards a terrible new weapon but rather the end of the world itself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, like did this happen everywhere?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That sentiment however was more confined to the areas of the city that weren't immediately burning due to the massive firestorm created by the bomb. Soon most of the city was actively blazing as blue-green balls of fire drifted throughout the firestorm.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What everyone said too is that it was beautiful.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They said they were watching this moment of a living... Like a dragon. It looked like a giant living monster and it was moving and shimmering. One guy said it felt like as the radiation drifted down is that it felt like a laser light show.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just these beautiful cascading greens and pinks and oranges and it was like a mist of it and they were all like captivated by it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well people soon began to flee but the word flee suggests an urgency, a panic. It wasn't like that. Rather the people shuffled in silent shock, blankly staring straight ahead. Skin hung from the faces of some while others vomited as they walked. Most were wearing clothing that at best had been shredded by debris but a lot of them were fully naked. Those who were naked had experienced the full disintegration of their clothing. But on a few, their clothes had left patterns burned on their skin as they dissolved. On the men, you could see marks from their suspenders. But the more disturbing one was the women who were wearing Kimonos. Flower designs that were on their Kimonos had been burned into their skin and these pattern burns depended entirely on the color of the clothing. White clothes would repel the light, dark patterns though absorbed it. And those dark patterns caused deeper and deadlier burns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please don't bring up the lights and colors thing.
BEN KISSEL
No this is actually plays right into my color scheme.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't wanna hear anymore.
BEN KISSEL
See white repelled it because white is everything but white.
MARCUS PARKS
But white.
BEN KISSEL
Black-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus, for the love of god-
BEN KISSEL
No, this is true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have been talking about this one useless fact that I do believe has been debunked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah and it's also scientific fact that this is what happened in Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
It's scientific proven-
BEN KISSEL
That's what it proves my point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's saying he's happy about Hiroshima because it proves his color ideas.
BEN KISSEL
No, I'm not happy. Everyone agrees with me on that. They do. But this is bad news. You definitely-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta make jokes here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
We have to, we have to. I hope I'm wearing my favorite shirt.
MARCUS PARKS
What's your favorite shirt? Oh cause it's on your body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll tell you what though, that cardigan is gonna stick to you like it's napalm.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it is.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'll wear my little Packers jersey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would have already been naked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Already.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As soon as the sirens, in that two minutes.
BEN KISSEL
Oh just start taking it off, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But while some tried helping, there was only so much they could do.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
A doctor named Michihiko Hachiya, these are difficult names so bear with me, he ran from his home with his wife before it collapsed. But the doctor fell over as he escaped to the streets. It was not however debris that had tripped him up-
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Rather the doctor had stumbled over a man's head that had been severed and thrown who knows how far away from its body as a result of the blast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is why we just gotta let them sniff butts.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If they're getting into the sniffing butts-
MARCUS PARKS
What?
BEN KISSEL
Sure, sure.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't understand what-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll talk about it.
BEN KISSEL
We'll talk about it.
MARCUS PARKS
I have no idea what you're talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We were talking about last week Kissel got into Japanese game shows-
BEN KISSEL
The game shows, the game shows.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh the game shows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Being overly into guys sniffing butts.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know if they're overly into it but they're into it.
MARCUS PARKS
I dunno how a man getting his head blown off by a nuclear blast has-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because trauma.
BEN KISSEL
Trauma.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh because he was traumatized.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The internalized generational trauma.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're allowed to do whatever they need to get-
MARCUS PARKS
Butt sniffing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, anything that allows them to smile.
MARCUS PARKS
So this is about no judgment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
This is about no judgment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No judgment zone.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
No judgment zone. Okay, all right.
BEN KISSEL
All right. So this guy is tripping over human skeletons, what a fucking nightmare.
MARCUS PARKS
Human heads.
BEN KISSEL
Human heads. Great.
MARCUS PARKS
After recovering from that horror, the doctor looked around to see people with skin blackened by burns, bald from head to toe because the thermal flash had disintegrated their hair. Dr. Hachiya said that even though these people were up and walking, their burns were so severe and their skin so black that he couldn't tell whether he was looking at these people from the front or the back.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, that is so fricking creepy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
These walking ghosts as the doctor called them, had been created by the twofold power of the atomic bomb. See while the thermal flash had instantly blistered, burned, and loosened their skin, the following shockwave had torn that blistered skin loose but had not ripped it from their bodies altogether. As such, the doctor saw a young girl who had been facing away from the blast who was walking with the skin from her back hanging down from her hips while the skin on her hands was hanging loose as if they were rubber gloves. Now most people tried saving only relatives and close friends on that first day because it was all they could handle, but most were too overwhelmed and shocked to pay any attention to the people screaming from underneath the rubble and wreckage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh but that was also for the sloughing fans.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that was for the sloughing fans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fan service for sloughing fans.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Oh my god. I don't even know what you would rather be, stuck under some rubble walking like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd be in the first wave.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, sleeping, vaporized. That would be great.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. From one recollection, a man said that his father had come across a stranger trapped by a large log that had fallen on her leg. The father shouted for help to lift the log up but no one came. He started screaming are you not Japanese? Will you not come help? No one helped. Everyone was in shock. So after losing patience, the father found a rusty saw and cut off the woman's leg and rescued her himself, carried her away. But of course that was in the section of the city that wasn't actively on fire. For much of the city of Hiroshima, the fire was inescapable on land. So people walked into one of Hiroshima's seven rivers to get away both from the fire and to find relief for their flash burns. Very few of those people however survived. As one witness put it, watching these people walk into the river was like watching a parade of ghosts being swept away like garbage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord.
BEN KISSEL
Well they are not garbage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, but it's just... Ugh god.
BEN KISSEL
You could probably see their skin would probably then get off of the body.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the skin-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the water brings the skin off real fast. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like we're in a Tom Waits song.
BEN KISSEL
I know. I don't like it. I do like Tom Waits but...
MARCUS PARKS
I think this is more Nick Cave territory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Those are musicians I don't want to be any part of their lyrics but I do like to listen to them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say before we get to new sidebar, have you seen Nick Cave enjoying Bruce Springsteen?
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You should look it up.
BEN KISSEL
I will.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry, Marcus. But Cave is a huge Bruce Springsteen fantastic.
BEN KISSEL
No we need that, we need them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He watched that scarecrow man dance like a 40 year old dad to Glory Days.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is one of the most enlightening things you could see because it's him as a ghoul, it's full Nick Cave just going (singing) glory days. Like it's just him dancing along, loving his life.
MARCUS PARKS
Nick Cave is his own man. If his love of Bruce Springsteen is what produced such wonderful songs as Henry Lee and the Ballad of Millhaven-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It didn't. Absolutely not. No, no. I think he was just on camera and knows Bruce Springsteen personally as a friend.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I'd dance if I saw Bruce.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's great.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Well those who did survive swimming in the river would have to push away dead bodies with their bare hands like so much driftwood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that inspired Nick Cave.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That may have, that may have.
MARCUS PARKS
That's actually very Nick Cave.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Those people however were the ones who still had the presence of mind to make the connection that a river would be the safest place in a firestorm. Many instead wandered aimlessly, trapped in an unspeakably painful horror show. One schoolgirl remembered seeing a man without feet walking on his ankles, while another saw a man whose eyes were swollen two inches out from the sockets. And this unrecognizable unfortunate soul horrified the witness by calling her by her name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Julia? From gym class?
BEN KISSEL
Ned? Ned Ryerson? Oh my god. That is so fucking horrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude. It's not good.
BEN KISSEL
No, it ain't good, it ain't good.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this man was only one of thousands who had begun to swell after the blast. Faces were especially susceptible, sometimes swelling so large that it was impossible to tell where the eyes and mouths were. As one woman horrifyingly put it, you can't imagine how big a human body can swell up.
BEN KISSEL
Can I make a joke about fat Chris Christie?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like you just asked-
BEN KISSEL
Can I do that? Am I allowed to make a joke now?
MARCUS PARKS
Please do, please do.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I've seen someone fucking blow up like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Chris Christie.
MARCUS PARKS
Chris Christie.
BEN KISSEL
Chris Christie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He must have been attacked by an atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. You ever seen John Pinette?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's dead.
BEN KISSEL
RIP.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he lost weight before he died.
BEN KISSEL
He did. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I think it's important to mention-
BEN KISSEL
Who else is big and an asshole? Name insert, you all know someone who's a big asshole in your own lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, put it in there.
BEN KISSEL
Like that guy from Electronics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, put that person in there. Create a punchline around that person who would make sense, attach they must have been at Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's your joke.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I think it's important to mention that this is only the first few hours after the bombs fell and that all of these people that I've mentioned, they're all still alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, you'd be surprised. That was the other thing after the fact where they thought, we'll get into the aftermath, I don't want to spoil it, we'll get into the aftermath.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, next episode.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we're gonna get into the aftermath. But you're gonna find out like they were kind of surprised that they all didn't die.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I would be pretty surprised.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause we were fed this line that it was just gonna vaporize them, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That it's clean, boom. Yes, there's gonna be radiation fallout. But we made sure that there was measures to control all these aspects and stuff. But no, they thought that everyone would be dead. And so when they showed up and they were like oh people lived, that was when the actual kind of cover up. That's kind of where the war crimes truly come in because they just thought it would be empty.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They thought it would be a city of rubble.
BEN KISSEL
No, this is Clive Barker. That's what it reminds me of, Clive Barker. Very Hellraiser-esque.
MARCUS PARKS
And things only got worse from there.
BEN KISSEL
Well now, there you go.
MARCUS PARKS
About an hour or two after the bomb fell it began to rain in Hiroshima. But while this may seem like a relief, the fires had seeded the clouds above the city with ash, so the rain fell as a blackened mixture of ash and radioactive fallout in abnormally large drops.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what these guys are complaining about, free chemo is incredible.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. That's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's so expensive.
BEN KISSEL
What a day to be a weatherman.
MARCUS PARKS
Now that the victims were covered in black sludge, the walking ghosts of Hiroshima took on a new level of horror. From the recollection of one man, he saw a woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth, wandering north and trying to call for help in the black rain.
BEN KISSEL
Well I just can't... I don't even think you have to, you don't even have to say that you need help at that point because we all know. We all actually would know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just think America needs to know honestly, you can be relieved because we won't even get to this in the Oppenheimer movie. But at the time all this is happening in the Oppenheimer movie timeline-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're watching Barbie.
BEN KISSEL
You're already watching Barbie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? You're watching Barbie.
MARCUS PARKS
You're already watching Barbie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Talking about melting like wax.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. It's supposed to be funny. Margot Robbie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It'd be kinda cool though if they did at the end of the Barbie movie, they just drop the Nagasaki bomb. That's like they drop the second bomb at the end of that and kill all of them. And then the last five minutes of that is Margot Robbie walking around with her face melted. Cause that would be cool.
MARCUS PARKS
That'd be cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they're not risky filmmakers like I would be.
BEN KISSEL
No, they had the Hiroshima playset, I'm surprised they didn't include that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Probably not gonna be any...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not selling well.
BEN KISSEL
No, I don't... No. They might cut out when Barbie got a little Bit more diversity, that was nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't even understand what you're saying. It's a numbers game. Comedy is a numbers game!
BEN KISSEL
No, I'm saying if Barbie was real she wouldn't be able to stand up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know.
BEN KISSEL
She's not an ideal body type.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, we know.
BEN KISSEL
But she's a doll, so... I'm also not a Ninja Turtle and I liked to play with those.
MARCUS PARKS
Well soon-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's not a Ninja Turtle.
MARCUS PARKS
He's not a Ninja Turtle.
BEN KISSEL
I am not.
MARCUS PARKS
Well soon most of the survivors became covered in this almost tar-like rain. And those without any real presence of mind left didn't bother or didn't know that they should wash it off. In one terrifying example, a woman named Keiko, who was a small girl during the bombing, said that she and her four sisters had been left alone at home on August 6th.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm scared of you.
MARCUS PARKS
Their mother-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm scared.
BEN KISSEL
Marcus is scary.
MARCUS PARKS
Their mother had been out running errands when the bomb hit, so the five girls spent the next 24 hours huddled together in fear. Suddenly a black creature crawling on all fours charged into the house, making terrible noises. The thing assumed by the girls to be a dying dog soon collapsed and died. But upon further inspection, these girls found that the blackened creature had in fact been their own mother who had instinctively crawled back to her home to die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Julie? From gym class?
BEN KISSEL
Whoa. Ned? Ned Ryerson?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus fucking Christ.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the only way we can cope.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know how to do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
It's like you're sitting there and then all of a sudden the door's open and you're like hey, look at that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here's some nice news. Did you know that halfway through the current Japanese Nippon professional baseball season, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, which is real, they're only 1.5 games out of first place.
BEN KISSEL
Well isn't that something? Well good for them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. They're coming back.
BEN KISSEL
Bull Durham. That has something to do with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile the few people that were relatively uninjured spent the next few days trying to save others, although most were too far gone to save.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
One who tried anyway was the reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who tried ferrying people across a river away from the raging fires. Floating down a river that night, Reverend Tanimoto came across a group of about 20 people crying for help from the water. They were too weak to lift themselves up into the boat but when the reverend reached out to take a woman's hand, her skin slipped off in huge glove-like pieces. After taking a moment to himself to briefly process one of the worst things a human being can see.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. It's bad. Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Your brain is just like we're gonna note that. Noted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, mark.
MARCUS PARKS
Reverend Tanimoto lowered himself into the water to gently lift every person into the boat all while their skin and flesh, yes, sloughed off in red and yellow chunks.
BEN KISSEL
Well there you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He said it.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, he said it. Wow. Fun.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that nice?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, make it merch.
BEN KISSEL
I mean this guy is a real hero though honestly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is. He's an extreme hero. Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once they were all on the boat, the Reverend had to remind himself over and over again that these were in fact human beings being ferried because they did not in any way resemble people in sight or smell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this guy is a fucking baller in and of himself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because what I find interesting, I read a little bit about him, that he was educated in America, he went to I guess it was some theological school in America in Atlanta, Georgia. He was dressed in American style often and he could speak perfect English. And so a lot of people thought he was a spy. So the people he saved were also a group of people that had been calling him and making his life hell in Hiroshima this whole time.
MARCUS PARKS
Man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dogging him, telling him that he's a spy for America. And he's just like no, I just... We all went to school there. Like a lot of people went to school in America and came back to Japan.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so it was just wild.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He had a crazy story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It was a war for everyone. So I'm sure speaking English wasn't seen as like cool in Japan at the time.
MARCUS PARKS
No. And Hiroshima also historically was not kind to Christians. At one point I think in like the late 18th century a bunch of Christian missionaries were crucified. I think like 25 were crucified within the city limits by the emperor at the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this actually just came, I saw this today, it killed something like 66% of the Christian population in Japan.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just those two bombs basically wiped out Christianity.
BEN KISSEL
That's interesting. That's very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's nuts. Now Reverend Tanimoto became a minor celebrity in America after the publication of a book about the aftermath of Hiroshima by John Hershey that we'll discuss further in the next episode. Reverend Tanimoto was one of six survivors to tell their tale in detail and he therefore became the human face of Hiroshima for many Americans, mostly because he spoke English. 10 years after Hiroshima, the Reverend traveled to America with a group of 25 girls dubbed the Hiroshima Maidens, so named because they'd all been schoolgirls seriously disfigured by the thermal flash of the atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now they'd just be on the VMAs or something, you know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
They'd have a TLC show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh they would!
BEN KISSEL
They would have a TLC show.
MARCUS PARKS
They'd definitely have an Instagram where they danced and yeah, there would be a lot of that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Yes, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah and it would be interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean if you have the same Instagram algorithm as I do, they'd definitely be on Instagram dancing around.
BEN KISSEL
Well as you guys know, my current Instagram is rating Pizza Hut pizzas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's true, I just saw.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just saw Kissel looking like he was reading his stocks, like the stocks app. And then it was just a man making a Pizza Hut pizza and he's like I can't even believe that this is Pizza Hut pizza. He was like judging-
BEN KISSEL
No, he was showing the Pizza Hut pizza and I said ooh, that looks good. But then he actually demonized the Pizza Hut pizza cause he said it was too much crust.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of us did. And then Rob, who's new in the studio, just moved here from New York, I'm sorry this is your first episode, but he's back and he said immediately too much bread. We all said too much bread.
MARCUS PARKS
Too much bread.
BEN KISSEL
It's full of cheese so it's actually cheesy bread.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But yeah, stuffed crust is just not really pizza.
BEN KISSEL
To be honest with you, to be frank the idea of cheesy bread doesn't even turn me on right now. I don't wanna see anything peeling, I don't wanna see...
MARCUS PARKS
Oh I see, I see.
BEN KISSEL
I don't want melted cheese anywhere near me right now.
MARCUS PARKS
No cheese. Gotcha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Today, you know what I'm doing? Cold sandwiches.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cold sandwiches.
MARCUS PARKS
Cold sandwiches.
BEN KISSEL
Cold sandwiches today.
MARCUS PARKS
That's good.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the Hiroshima Maidens were seeking reconstructive surgeries to fix such conditions as hands that had permanently reverted to bent claws, because of the burns all their fingers had fused together. And they had facial scarring so extensive that it was considered too extreme to be seen on television at the time. And I bring up television for a point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen ladies, listen ladies, listen. I hear your cries honestly and I'm with it, and I'm feeling you. I'm having trouble looking at you but I'm with you, right. We wanna fix you up. The thing is, faces, hands, real difficult. We get you all a couple of double Ds. Right?
BEN KISSEL
You're gonna go with breast implants. You think these women need breast implants.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Each one, listen. I might just be a CEO of a television network-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It does sound honestly-
MARCUS PARKS
I may be just a big Hollywood plastic surgeon here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe that's just me.
BEN KISSEL
Not that far off of Extreme Makeover: Human Edition.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Which lasted for two or three seasons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Ugly Duckling, I remember that show.
BEN KISSEL
Was it called The Ugly Duckling?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was, a British version was called The Ugly Duckling.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
Well if you're wondering why I mentioned television specifically, it's because Reverend Tanimoto upon his arrival in America was a guest on an episode of a television show called This Is Your Life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
If you've never heard of it, and why would you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Meh.
MARCUS PARKS
This Is Your Life was a show where regular people were surprised on live television without warning by a retrospective of their life as told by colleagues, relatives, and friends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it would be kind of across the board. You know what I mean? I wanna say they had like Helen Keller and they mostly had her feel textures.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she'd be like concrete!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There was a bunch of celebrities on this. I remember this show.
MARCUS PARKS
They also had regular people too.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I don't remember it, but I've seen it on YouTube.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember they did the last living Civil War guy. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had a couple of those guys and they'd show up and be like and this is the slave you beat! And they're just like whoa! They had stuff Like that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this one was a real gotcha one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, this was an extreme gotcha.
BEN KISSEL
And this isn't the one where they had to guess which ones they were, right?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
There was just one person.
MARCUS PARKS
It's one person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is the Groucho Marx show.
BEN KISSEL
That was fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I forget what it was called.
MARCUS PARKS
You Bet Your Life?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You Bet Your Life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this is the one where they just shove a dude or a woman into a television station, say hey, you're on television now and a bunch of people are gonna tell you about your life. And they did this to Reverend Tanimoto 10 years after Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
That sucks. I'd be like I don't wanna... I wanna forget. Forget your life. Just give me a bunch of other people that pretend that they knew me but it was a much different story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just they really thought they had something here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And after hearing from various people such as two Hiroshima Maidens who of course had to be hidden behind a screen so as to not defend the American audience-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so much creepier.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To show people what's happening. But they didn't want to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's also look at what we did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look at what we did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Finally the producers brought out a guest that was at best in bad taste and at worst extraordinarily ghoulish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they prepped, the whole beginning of this is it's the character for Ren & Stimpy, the broadcaster character, it is that guy. He was like hey there, ladies and gentlemen, brought to you, you might even see that little name right now, that is our advertiser Mr. Tanimoto. Yes, you might not know. But we have a special guest here today. So first of all I want to know what was Hiroshima like the day we dropped the bomb? And he makes him go through the day.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Meanwhile the man is like trying to say matter of factly but basically also like it's harrowing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's him describing the morning of the bomb dropping and what his day was like, what he used to be like, what his life was like.
BEN KISSEL
Well they used to do ingrained marketing into the show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what it was.
BEN KISSEL
So then he's just gotta look the camera and be like Clorox.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know if I want to hear about Clorox right now, I think they were responsible for half of this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And so they had person after person come up and then finally you saw the silhouette of a man behind a curtain who's reading something off a piece of paper and you hear him say:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"My god, what have I done?"
MARCUS PARKS
It's Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Brings him on live camera.
MARCUS PARKS
They brought him out-
BEN KISSEL
This is the worst thing-
MARCUS PARKS
Completely by surprise to shake Reverend Tanimoto's hand and tell the reverend what his experience was when he dropped the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta tell you, we were so scared up there because a lot of these planes didn't have seat belts.
BEN KISSEL
That is scary. This is fucking Hanukkah with the Klan on Springer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
This is horrible. What was his reaction?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I watched it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We went and watched it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The look on his face... Because it's very similar to, I will put it that the pilot when he was there, he was like rubbing the back of his head and he looked extraordinarily not happy to be there as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Haunted would be the word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Who booked the show?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The State Department.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally the host says thanks for all the help from the State Department for making this all possible.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they came, he looked very upset, very mournful. But the look on Tanimoto's face, the only way to describe it is that he looked like he was seeing a ghost.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was wide eyed, like who is this man?
BEN KISSEL
I'd be fucking-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This man who killed everyone I know. Like I know he was just the end-
BEN KISSEL
He's a cog in the machine, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was the end of the machine.
MARCUS PARKS
Still he was in the plane. I mean it was like he was looking at a demon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
At an Oni. Like it was pure abject terror.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He looked like he'd just... Again, awkward.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like the most awkward thing I have ever seen.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What you're gonna like here, sir, is this is actually an autographed copy of a book I wrote about dropping the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was before those guys made money. He looked extremely fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it sounds like an absolutely dreadful thing. But to be honest, to the producers credit, fascinating. We're talking about it in 2023.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it is.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean but it also shows you that American television has always been ghoulish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's always been like this.
MARCUS PARKS
Always.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. Always.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as horrendous as the Reverend Tanimoto's experiences were both in Hiroshima and on television, they paled in comparison to what was experienced by those who staffed the remaining hospitals in the city. Out of 150 doctors in Hiroshima, 65 were killed in the initial blast instantly. Out of 1780 nurses, 1654 were dead or too badly injured to work. The largest hospital that wasn't completely destroyed was the Red Cross and while 6 out of their 30 doctors were able to somewhat work with injuries, there was only one doctor doctor who came out of the initial blast unscathed. That man was Terufumi Sasaki, one doctor for the entire city of Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
Where was he?
MARCUS PARKS
He was in the hospital.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
When the bomb detonated, he was just one step beyond an open window. He was carrying a blood sample from a patient who had come into the hospital freaked out because he thought he had syphilis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh god.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's the least of your worries now.
MARCUS PARKS
He just happened to be in just the right spot in the building. After the blast ripped through Dr. Sasaki's hospital, blood was everywhere, medical instruments were all over the place, broken glass covered the floors. A lot of the patients died when the ceiling fans in their rooms fell and crushed them in their beds.
BEN KISSEL
That is horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Dr. Sasaki meanwhile had only lost his glasses but quickly replaced them with a pair that was far below his prescription from a critically injured nurse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, this is just all gonna be my new anxiety dream.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Not being able to see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not being able to see, everybody's bleeding and dying, the city's falling apart.
MARCUS PARKS
And only you can save them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm the only person who knows how veins work.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah. But then you get to wake up next to your two dogs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's nice.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that nice? You fucking American bitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm lucky.
BEN KISSEL
You get to wake up to your two dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Comedians should be free.
MARCUS PARKS
Dr. Sasaki then began what was a near uninterrupted three day shift trying to help the people of Hiroshima. Now at first, Dr. Sasaki thought that the hospital had been the sole target of a bomb. So he got to work bandaging the thousands of injured people inside the hospital. But soon thousands more began wandering through the doors and before long the injured and dying citizens filled every hallway, laboratory, staircase, driveway, courtyard. Eventually a veritable sea of people filled the surrounding blocks of the hospital, all of whom were clinging to the faint hope that someone would come out to help.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And to think that just hours before they were running from Godzilla. That was the only thing that-
MARCUS PARKS
Godzilla was many years later. Godzilla was a result of the atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Unbelievable.
MARCUS PARKS
I can't believe you would make such a stupid, simple mistake.
BEN KISSEL
It really is actually quite pathetic the mistake that you made. Everybody knows that Godzilla along with King Kong were probably babies at this time. And in no way would they even be there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have been thoroughly dressed down by my co hosts.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe Godzilla could have saved... Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I will somehow continue.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to put it into perspective, it's estimated that 10,000 survivors made their way to Dr. Sasaki's hospital while only 600 beds were available. And remember one doctor. Faced with the increasing enormity of his task, Dr. Sasaki decided that the only thing he could truly do was to keep people from bleeding to death. He became what he described as an automation of a doctor, wiping, dabbing, bandaging, wiping, dabbing, bandaging.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Over and over again for three days straight. Making things worse, the floors were covered in blood, vomit, sloughed off skin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that would make it worse.
BEN KISSEL
It totally makes it worse. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And eventually decompositional fluids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's so much worse that way.
MARCUS PARKS
Remember it's August and it was a particularly hot August and people were dying in the hospital by the thousands. There was nowhere to take these bodies and more importantly, there was no one to carry them off. So the dead decomposed and liquefied next to the living. By the end of it, Dr. Sasaki only took one hour of sleep during those first three days. And once he was finally forced to go home, he slept for 17 hours straight.
BEN KISSEL
But you guys will all be happy to know Winston Churchill did not miss one 3 PM nap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know that for a fact.
BEN KISSEL
Because he needs to be rested.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember that from the museum. I remember that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was a nice nap room too.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it was really nice, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you think that there's... You know what's gonna happen now is that there's gonna definitely be some commercial where they're gonna go through the hospital fields of Hiroshima and then you're gonna see one guy like half melting and stuff and he's just like hungry? Give him a Snickers.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you're not you when you're hungry.
MARCUS PARKS
Snickers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he's gonna turn to turn into Tom Papa or something, turn into some funny guy.
BEN KISSEL
That's funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Who's that shirtless guy?
BEN KISSEL
Tom Segura.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bert Kreischer.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
He could be in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bert Kreischer should go help people in Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
That would be nice. That would be nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he was of German descent.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing too is that if he's in Hiroshima, he's got a reason why he's not wearing a shirt cause it got blown off.
BEN KISSEL
Hey man, don't even worry about me, I'm Gen X's crazy guy.
MARCUS PARKS
It writes itself.
BEN KISSEL
It does write itself. There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God help us all.
BEN KISSEL
Also I suppose you could do a marketing for nurses shoes, the non stick.
MARCUS PARKS
Non slip. Non slip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Non slip ones there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Glen Borland.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, what a stupid idea that was, huh?
MARCUS PARKS
Now this is horror on a never before seen scale.
BEN KISSEL
Truly.
MARCUS PARKS
This is brand new to the planet earth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Billions and billions and billions of years. Maybe the dinosaurs saw something?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean technically the concentration camps were this but long.
MARCUS PARKS
This but on this scale with-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In one day?
MARCUS PARKS
In one day.
BEN KISSEL
It's just different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, that's how America does it. We get it done like that, one go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah. I remember that with our last 20 year war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
We went out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we don't really need to get into like what's worse, the bombing of Hiroshima or...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no. Nah, nah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just saying is that humanity had never seen this.
BEN KISSEL
I do think that's the spinning wheel from hell though. You get transported to like Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Having to watch Steve Harvey's final set. I don't know what it is but it does seem like just horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Got him!
BEN KISSEL
There we go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody is safe.
BEN KISSEL
I was trying to come up with a little bit of a joke there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And he landed on Steve Harvey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did, he did.
BEN KISSEL
I did. Technically it was a joke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's in there.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now one would think that the people in charge would at least have the presence of mind to treat the destruction of a city using the hellish power of the sun with some solemnity. Even if they are vaporized instantly, you still just killed 80,000 people.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
At the very least, you'd think they could keep their jubilation restrained because after all they believed that the war is now over, a very long four year war is over. Instead when Truman told the crew of the ship taking him back to a America after the Potsdam Conference that the atomic bomb had destroyed the city of Hiroshima, he was met with a resounding cheer and thunderous applause.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, far away from it, thousands of miles away from it. You have been watching all of these American ingenuity talking about how we've spent this long to end this war and that you've been fed this line that this is the way to do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is actually the humane way to do it. You don't really know. And then on Truman's part, I will vaguely say like he made a ghoulish decision but he was still not happy.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And at least there's that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like at least it was very complicated for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes it was.
BEN KISSEL
I guarantee you they did the hip hip hooray.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh definitely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
hip hip hooray!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because we won. We knew in that moment that we had won the war.
BEN KISSEL
But Henry, what did we win?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not good for nothing, that's for certain.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well one thing that he could have done is that, I mean... Well the thing is is that he set the tone, Truman set the tone for everybody else and the press set the tone and the tone was one of jubilation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
And that of course informed the way that America thought of the atomic bomb from then on. The next day the White House released a press statement to the world revealing that we dropped the biggest bomb in history on the city of Hiroshima, although the statement made a point to call Hiroshima a quote unquote "important army base". They didn't call it a city.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Furthermore, the onus for the dropping of the bomb was placed on Japan for bombing Pearl Harbor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
MARCUS PARKS
Because as I said in the first episode, America tends to excel at the act of overcorrecting, then telling the civilians they kill in the process that you made us do this.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's like that stupid slap competition but with like a little person who slaps like fricking Andre the Giant or something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah cause that was thing.
BEN KISSEL
And then Andre's like I'm gonna have to slap you back. And it's like one is bigger than the other.
MARCUS PARKS
But you don't have to slap him back, Andre.
BEN KISSEL
On Slap you do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On Slap you do. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Literally the name of the show is Slap. It is the dumbest goddamn thing of all time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we know that Pearl Harbor happened because FDR, we got the call that it was going to happen right before he was doing his hurdles practice.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's when it went out of his mind. So he was like ugh and then afterwards it was like oh yeah, that's right, I can't walk.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So stupid. Oh I see, another FDR joke. Even though we're with Harry Truman now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But still he's not letting it go.
BEN KISSEL
No, he's not letting it go. He's not letting it go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a running theme.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. And Harry Truman of course with the hurdles, he went under them because he's a stupid person.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody is safe!
BEN KISSEL
Nobody is safe! Gotchu, Truman! I wish Dewey would have won.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's not to say that Pearl Harbor wasn't bad. Of course, it was bad.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was bad!
BEN KISSEL
A lot of these things are bad! We are in a world of sloughing. Everything is bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But that's the thing is that you don't need to overcorrect and destroy two cities and murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as revenge. And you don't need to say you did this to yourself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hi, hello. Welcome to the International House of Sloughing. Do you want ears or do you want an eyeball gone?
BEN KISSEL
Man, I just really wish that you guys had ham steak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we do but it's baby.
BEN KISSEL
That is so bad. All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
White flag.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the statement then went on to reveal that this was indeed an atomic bomb and that we built it only because the Germans had been working on an atomic bomb of their own.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
We however had won the so-called battle of the laboratories just as we'd won battles on land, air, and sea. Finally the statement ended with a direct plea to the leadership in Japan. Either accept the unconditional surrender terms outlined in the Potsdam Declaration or expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is there a number three?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, is there another fricking option?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, there was. There was a number three, a number four, all the way up till probably number seven, there were a lot of different fucking options.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we said that we definitely had... Because then we're following it up immediately. And at this point we're telling them you know now that we know that one works, we can make seven of these a day.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now even a day later, the Japanese government wasn't entirely in agreement that an atomic bomb had in fact been dropped on Hiroshima. From what they thought, the Americans, they're fucking crazy, but they're not crazy enough to bring such an unstable weapon across the Pacific.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They would never do that!
MARCUS PARKS
They would never do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they would never bring it on a boat that would then crash and then everybody in that boat would then be fucking raped to death or fucking eaten by sharks.
BEN KISSEL
USS Indianapolis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
USS Indianapolis.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that they were only partly right on that because we didn't fully assemble the bomb until right before the bomb bay doors opened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We brought the uranium and the plutonium across the water.
BEN KISSEL
Right, right, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Showing further arrogance, Japan refused to acknowledge that America was advanced enough to actually build an atomic bomb, which again shows that even at the end of the fucking war, the Japanese government still completely misunderstood America. They misunderstood our ingenuity, our capacity for vengeance, our near unlimited resources. They just didn't fucking get it.
BEN KISSEL
Hey man, British local yokels can do a lot when they're left to their own devices.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I also feel they believe in the power of the empire.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were again, Supernova in the East really shows a little bit more about that mentality that there was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That they really did believe that no one could beat them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But at this point-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this can't be real because that would mean that they have unequivocally squashed us.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
I totally understand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's a shock.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a shock.
MARCUS PARKS
But at this point within the Japanese government, there is a huge tug of war going on between the people who do believe that-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And the reasonable human beings who are-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like we must figure this shit out right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that are just saying like hey, we were beat 6 months ago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We need to fucking do this shit. You need to enter the real world, the emperor is not a god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And that's why here on MTV's Real World, we've brought together a series of different people from Japan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let him go. I wanna see-
BEN KISSEL
Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And we brought the troops that dropped the bomb. When seven strangers live in a house and three of those strangers-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They stop being polite and start getting real.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Are they able to make a silk screen t-shirt business work on Venice Beach? We'll figure it out.
BEN KISSEL
You killed my family. Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Welcome to the house, you guys. We got all of you a job at the International House of Sloughing.
BEN KISSEL
I thought one of the grossest things that Tom did was eat his peanut butter with his fingers because his fingers are all burnt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus fucking Christ. Wave a white flag. Wave the comedian flag.
BEN KISSEL
I'm a comedian! I'll tell you what, that's the nice thing about wearing many hats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, put that one on. But after sending out their Navy and Army to investigate the ruins of Hiroshima, there was no doubt whatsoever that the United States had perfected the atomic bomb and had used it on the people of Japan. They could not argue.
BEN KISSEL
And we hadn't even perfected it then yet. Now it's fucking...
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so did the modern age begin!
BEN KISSEL
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
The very next day, that conclusion was confirmed worldwide when the atomic bomb and by extension the Manhattan Project was announced to the world on no less than the front page of the New York Times. The headline read:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"First atomic bomb dropped on Japan, missile is equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. Truman warns foe of reign of ruin!"
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There you go. Good unbiased reporting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. In the ensuing story, The Times spilled the guts of the entire Manhattan Project. They identified General Leslie Groves as the head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we got Leslie Groves, give it up! The Saturday Night Live like (trumpeting).
MARCUS PARKS
Leslie Groves, Richard Feynman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm the goofy one!
BEN KISSEL
I wonder if he liked that because he was a pretty quiet guy, wasn't he?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they wanted the credit man. Two years of work.
MARCUS PARKS
They loved it.
BEN KISSEL
So they were the ones giving all the info to the New York Times. Probably.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean they just had a statement ready to go.
BEN KISSEL
Gotchu, gotchu. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This is from the government telling the New York Times like tell everybody in the fucking world what we just accomplished because it's fucking awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we spent a fuckton of money.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we just killed 100,000 people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think there's a lot of it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because now it's the rush of we must prove that we are still the good guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, exactly.
BEN KISSEL
And what is unique is we dropped a bomb and it was still like we better get this to the printing press right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally. The American PR machine kicked in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But also it's old tech meets the new world in real time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Modern age begins.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very strange how it did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They put Oppenheimer up as the hero, the brains behind the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. I did a lot but I'm still sad about it. Where is my communist girlfriend?
BEN KISSEL
Oh, it's okay Oppenheimer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They revealed the cities of Hanford, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, these locations that had been kept top secret.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
They laid the entire thing out. However the story was not a full blowjob.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is back when reporters did things.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there were certainly quite a few Americans both public and private who saw the terror of the atomic bomb for what it was before even hearing about what really went down in Hiroshima. In the New York Times article, after they outlined the Trinity test, they asked whether the bomb might be either the salvation of mankind or the Frankenstein's monster of the world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was this like here where they asked like Humphrey Bogart that and he's just like I only know about slapping women and smoking.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. But did it not also lead to the hot pocket? The microwave.
MARCUS PARKS
I believe the microwave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Microwave, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It might be a different... You know what?
BEN KISSEL
We don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We do not know. We'll never know.
MARCUS PARKS
It sounds wrong but I don't know enough about microwaves to dispute you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the key. Called the gray area.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just living it, loving it.
BEN KISSEL
Both of those things are true though. Both of those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the Frankenstein's monster of the world.
BEN KISSEL
It's all real.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you remember part of this is was all-
MARCUS PARKS
I wouldn't say it's the salvation of mankind though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well no, the scientists were saying which is the truth which is like we could have first used this as a nuclear reactor and have made free energy and we could have made energy that could have fed the world in a mass quantity.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If we wanted to have done it like that.
BEN KISSEL
We still will. We will end up doing that because I think people are gonna realize electric is very difficult as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hope we do it on the goddamn moon!
MARCUS PARKS
Nuclear power?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Put nuclear reactors on the goddamn moon and then you bring the energy cells back and forth.
BEN KISSEL
That'd be fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it's fucking, what's the game that KB used to play?
MARCUS PARKS
StarCraft?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That would be fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that would be super fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fixed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah because then we could just fill the moon with all the nuclear waste.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's that easy.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, we take the nuclear waste and we shoot it away from the moon out into space.
MARCUS PARKS
See I feel like that's gonna backfire on us though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No way!
BEN KISSEL
No way. No way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've never seen countless movies and read countless books that have said that exact same subject.
BEN KISSEL
We gotta put in one of those black holes, they're saying there's a hum that's coming from two black holes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, think about it, we shoot into a black hole.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, perfect.
MARCUS PARKS
That's fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's no way that's gonna pop out somewhere else.
MARCUS PARKS
No, not at all.
BEN KISSEL
But it has led truly to some peace.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it just led to proxy wars.
BEN KISSEL
No but Israel and Iran would have killed each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But proxy wars are peaceful because they're not wars.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they're proxy wars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Cause that's the thing, it totally ended any and all land wars in Europe. We haven't had one of those since...
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Proxy wars are essentially the vaping to the real wars of smoking cigarettes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, basically, basically.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all the same. It's still gonna kill you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But yeah, land wars in Europe, we don't have those anymore, right?
BEN KISSEL
I would the US and Russia, the Soviet Union and the US would have had a land war without the bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
You think so?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, maybe.
BEN KISSEL
Without a doubt. What else would we do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know, I don't know. Technically that's when you send in Guy Fieri. He's the one.
BEN KISSEL
He saves it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he really does.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He brings them... They don't have chicken and waffles.
BEN KISSEL
Didn't Metallica say to secure peace you have to prepare for war?
MARCUS PARKS
That is what Metallica said.
BEN KISSEL
Or was that Megadeth?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was about group therapy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was about him and Lars.
BEN KISSEL
I just wish that they were different people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even before Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, the military had decided without President Truman's consent that the Fat Man plutonium bomb would be dropped on another city if the Japanese didn't immediately respond with an unconditional surrender. The way the military saw it, they'd been handed a new weapon and this new weapon is just like any other. Do I fucking call up the president when I want to drop another bomb? No, I don't. Why am I gonna consult him on this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it did.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was reading about this because I was talking about it with Eddie and he was like who ordered the second bombing? And I realized there was just a caveat in his order to release the first bomb that essentially if you don't immediately surrender, we're just gonna keep doing it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so everyone just went like well we got permission.
BEN KISSEL
Right. So do it as many times as you want.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now in a lame attempt to prevent the loss of more innocent life, the US War Office dropped him millions of leaflets all over Japan telling them that America was in possession of the most destructive weapon ever devised by man and that they should take steps to cease military resistance.
BEN KISSEL
So this is like an alcoholic father going out but before he goes out being like just so you know, you better be in bed before I get home, I'm coming home drunk as shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I would have appreciated a couple of those, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, just a little heads up, I'm gonna be really abusive tonight.
MARCUS PARKS
The problem with this though is that by Japanese law, citizens weren't allowed to read or discuss leaflets dropped from the sky and they faced arrest, serious penalties, if they didn't immediately hand these leaflets over to local police. And so on August 8th, just two days after Hiroshima, the Fat Man bomb was fully assembled with its plutonium core and was thereafter loaded into a far less famous B-29 called Boxcar at around 10 PM.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now I found a little article that was talking about the bombing of Nagasaki and there was this little thing that felt like so Dan Carlin-y in it's irony and then how it portrays itself to the rest of American history. Which was on the front of the Nagasaki bomb, on Fat Boy, what they did was they wrote an acronym on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So everybody signs a bomb. So when everybody puts it together, they all did like cheeky things-
BEN KISSEL
They signed the bomb, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like here's to you, a second kiss for Hirohito!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Weird like cheeky... And on the nose they had an acronym, JANCFU, which stood for Joint Army Navy Civilian Fuck Up. Which was on the front of this thing.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's interesting because it seems that that's kind of how we would treat the world from then on. You know? Like this idea of we spread it around everywhere now. Don't worry, now this little thing, this Fat Boy thing, it's a symbol for our foreign policy from now on.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. Definitely the era of interventionalism has begun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you make bus fuck you up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well at the very same time that fat man was being loaded into Boxcar's bomb bay, the Soviet Union, still an uneasy ally of America, they declared war on Japan and invaded the Japanese controlled region of China known as Manchuria. The Soviets however had their own motives for invading, which came more into focus during the Korean War. But we're not going to get into that.
BEN KISSEL
We should cover that. That's my grandfather's war. I also found out... My American grandfather.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The Korean War is extraordinarily complicated. I've been learning about it recently and there's a lot of ins and outs on that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, seems complicated.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you'll love it. You'll like to do that research.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'll like it.
MARCUS PARKS
But regardless of the future, Japan was well and truly fucked from all sides and they knew it, although they were still dragging their feet towards surrender. But because they didn't hop to it, another one of their cities would fall victim to the atomic bomb. That was the city of Nagasaki. Now one of the first things that we noticed upon starting research for this series was that while there are hundreds of resources concerning the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki is treated almost as a footnote.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's like and we did Nagasaki.
MARCUS PARKS
And Nagasaki, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's like the second dream team.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I remember.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Everyone remembers the '92 one, after that it's like yeah, we know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well partly I think this is due to the fact that it's more of the same. Sloughing, swelling, scorching. But I also think it's a little more complicated than that and the reasons are both Japanese and American. First of all, while the Nagasaki death toll is still incredibly high, the bombing itself was nowhere near as smooth and successful as the so-called perfect bombing of Hiroshima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a big one. And that's like the American thing of we don't want anybody to really see this kind of series of goof 'em ups that led to the Nagasaki bombing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, the Hiroshima bombing was like these boys are doing their job and they nailed it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They crushed it. Meanwhile this one is like they had a lot of fuck ups.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's like the curse of everyone that's done stand up comedy for 30 years because the first set they really did well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that's life.
BEN KISSEL
And then the next 29 and a half years is just miserable hell.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One day I'll get back on the stage and they'll love me.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Nagasaki wasn't the first choice for the second bomb. In fact, Nagasaki was the fourth choice, considered so lightly that in the list for potential targets for a second bomb, someone had written 'and Nagasaki' in the margins the day before the nuclear strike was finalized.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how I was picked for the baseball team.
BEN KISSEL
And Zebrowski.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Nagasaki had already been bombed five times times prior to August of 1945. It was bombed so often in fact that one student remembered that he'd been taught to plug his ears with his thumbs and cover his eyes with his fingers because a bomb's concussive force might burst his ear drums and pop his eyeballs out of his skull.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No trauma there at all.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
But because Nagasaki had already been bombed, it was not considered a high priority target for showing the bomb's full destructive force because remember that was the whole fucking point. Now the people of Nagasaki as well as the rest of Japan, they'd kind of sort of been told on August 8th what had happened in Hiroshima on August 7th. This announcement however was like none ever released by the Japanese government. While past releases might admit a defeat, those defeats were always soft pedaled. There were still plenty of people in Japan at this point that thought that Japan was winning the war. With Hiroshima though the Japanese government admitted that quote unquote "considerable damage" had been perpetrated by a new weapon and considerable damage was far more than any admission the Japanese government had made up till this point.
BEN KISSEL
It's always the people, it's always the people that suffer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
My god. Just stop this.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally, a well-respected figure in Nagasaki's medical establishment had passed through Hiroshima after the bombing on his way home from Tokyo. Immediately upon returning to the Nagasaki, this man got on the radio and told everyone about the burned bodies, the fire, the flash, everything. And he also said no air raid shelter is going to protect you from this, we need to leave. As a result, the local government ordered a meeting the next morning to discuss how they might be able to handle a citywide evacuation, because that's no small feat.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You can't just snap your fingers and say go. But tragically while that meeting was being planned, Fat Man was already on its way.
BEN KISSEL
Just huffing and puffing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly if you're a restaurateur, you're really happy.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean if a real fat man was coming to your restaurant.
MARCUS PARKS
If a real fat man was coming to your restaurant.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When me, Eddie, and Kissel roll up.
BEN KISSEL
They know it's about to be a $300 tab, that's for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And then you find out we have to eat light because we're forced to by a doctor now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's true.
BEN KISSEL
What's going on with all that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
BEN KISSEL
These doctors are ruining our lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just sit there with their stethoscope on.
BEN KISSEL
Stethoscope. They shouldn't have put that mustache on it though.
MARCUS PARKS
On the-
BEN KISSEL
The bomb, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
On the bomb, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No. In another tragedy-
BEN KISSEL
Name it the Wilford Brimley. Wilford Bombley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
BEN KISSEL
Wilford Bombley.
MARCUS PARKS
Because it's got a big mustache.
BEN KISSEL
And he's a fat boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Fat Man.
MARCUS PARKS
Big fat man. Yeah, diabeetus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wilford Brimley just lived poorly.
MARCUS PARKS
You have a toxoplasmosis-shirt with him on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but he just lived poorly, I don't call him fat.
MARCUS PARKS
He is a fat man.
BEN KISSEL
What are you talking about?
MARCUS PARKS
Wilford Brimley was absolutely-
BEN KISSEL
He was the face of diabetes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was character-
BEN KISSEL
You know what? I'm getting into my Arnie zone. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Your Arnie zone?
BEN KISSEL
Yes because when Henry says something so-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rhetoric.
BEN KISSEL
So he is the face of diabetes. Wilford Brimley is notoriously fat. And I don't wanna live in a world where you're gonna try to say that he was not.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He should have never went to Nagasaki.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm with you on the Arnold thing, Henry. But I'm with Ben on the Wilford Brimley thing.
BEN KISSEL
This is why it works.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the triangle of trust. It takes three.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in another tragedy, because of inorganization within the Air Force, the leaflets informing the people of Nagasaki about the impending bomb, the leaflets fell with the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just so you know, this is what's happening to you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Hey, what's all this? Oh shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally in the pre bomb tragedy realm, 9 residents of Nagasaki who had survived the bombing of Hiroshima had actually made their way back to Nagasaki before the second bomb fell.
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh man.
BEN KISSEL
It's like as a sports fantastic, you know the Knicks always lose and you wonder is it me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is just like the Knicks. This is Just like it.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
One man in particular had dug through the ruins of his Hiroshima home to retrieve the bones of his wife. And he was walking through the streets of Nagasaki carrying his wife's remains in a wash basin-
BEN KISSEL
Oh my fucking-
MARCUS PARKS
So he could give the remains to her parents when Fat Man detonated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just trying to make people sad now.
BEN KISSEL
It is sad!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what he's trying to do.
BEN KISSEL
Again, once in human history this story has happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even though Fat Man was a more powerful bomb, Little Boy killed twice the number of people and the destruction radius had been three times as large. This was because the hills surrounding Nagasaki absorbed the brunt of the bomb's blast, resulting in 40,000 instant deaths instead of 80,000. That was another reason why Nagasaki was a poor target, they knew that was gonna happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it had already been bombed a bunch.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they already like, it was kind of all jacked up. And we'll also see there was like also actual physical problems.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the entire operation had been troubled from the start. The original target had been the city of Kokura which was a site of a massive imperial army arsenal. Bad weather and miscommunication however dogged the crew of Boxcar at every turn, as well as equipment fuck ups, there was fuel pump problems.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well apparently I also heard that they got so used to air raids, one thing that they would do, one defensive maneuver is that the factories would pump out steam and they would do a cover.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they said when he got to Kokura there was a cover. And there's kind of talk about whether or not it was weather or whether or not they literally had like hid themselves.
MARCUS PARKS
Some of the guys who worked at the factory claimed that that's what they did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Claimed. But I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, the government shouldn't have given the contract to make that plane to OceanGate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Current.
MARCUS PARKS
OceanGate.
BEN KISSEL
Current.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Current.
BEN KISSEL
Pun.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't... I don't understand.
BEN KISSEL
This is why, Marcus, you are so unbelievably in history's asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the submarine. He's just saying-
BEN KISSEL
You don't know anything about... This is the strangest part where I do shine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The submarine that collapsed.
BEN KISSEL
You don't know?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is equating the problems of the B-29 delivering, Boxcar delivering it, to the problems of the OceanGate submarine and its fatal catastrophe.
MARCUS PARKS
It's called Titan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
OceanGate is the company. See he's doing the thing where like I always say anything's like a Coca-Cola. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh. OceanGate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very Midwest.
MARCUS PARKS
I thought there was like a political scandal involving the ocean and you were calling it OceanGate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that would be interesting. That's a whole other episode series about the corruption in the sponge world.
BEN KISSEL
Marcus, why don't you just give me the script? I'll take over from here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let him look at it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, let me just get, I'll do the reading from now on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been meaning to say this.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Boxcar was on its way to the city of Kokura but they had to land on the small island of Yakushima to wait for its observation plane, call sign Big Stink.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I got that big sticky plane.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh you need a big stinky plane? That's what I got. I rub shit on it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Big Stink. That's old Big Stink, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't like the name.
MARCUS PARKS
The pilot of Big Stink however was of a superior rank to Boxcar's pilot. So after getting indignant over an order that he didn't agree with, Big Stink just refused to show up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So Big Stink made a big stink.
MARCUS PARKS
Made a big stink.
BEN KISSEL
That's why we call you Big Stink.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly.
BEN KISSEL
Are you making a big stink again, Big Stink?
MARCUS PARKS
Therefore while Boxcar was waiting to take off, bad weather closed in over Kokura and Boxcar burned a lot of fuel circling the city waiting for a window in the clouds. Additionally, Japanese fighter planes were climbing towards Boxcar and anti-aircraft fire from the ground was getting heavy. So it was on to the next target, Nagasaki. And Nagasaki of course, remember it was fourth on the list, Nagasaki was where they could get to with as much... Because they had to do calculation.
BEN KISSEL
So it's just enough.
MARCUS PARKS
We have to have enough fuel to get to Nagasaki and then from Nagasaki back to base.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They said they had the bomber's journal and he wrote being like closing in on two hours of fuel, I wonder if the Pacific will be cold.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
These guys did not think they were gonna make it back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
They need Sully Sullenberger up there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They really did.
MARCUS PARKS
Nagasaki however was also covered in clouds, but Boxcar didn't have enough fuel to return to base with a 9000 lb bomb aboard. They had to drop it somewhere.
BEN KISSEL
It's all so human, isn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the Fat Man was safer to drop wild than the Little Boy was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they had a plan to ditch the Fat Man.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is literally drop it in the fucking ocean.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But just as the pilot decided to just drop Fat Man via radar on Nagasaki and come what may, the clouds broke and bombardier Captain Kermit Beahan let her rip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Names used to be names.
BEN KISSEL
They really did. Kermit. Old Kermy, there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kermit Beahan.
MARCUS PARKS
You know Teddy Roosevelt had a son named Kermit. He got killed in WWI.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that something?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. And Teddy was very happy about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got set on fire because he was completely made of felt.
BEN KISSEL
Aw, isn't that too bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Teddy was extraordinarily broken over the death of his son, Kermit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was like ah, ah! My boy!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He had a very high voice.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, he's never gonna marry that pig woman now. It's up to me to have sex with her. That's what I would do if I ever had a kid that died young. I'd be like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now you're wife, hello, hi. It's me.
BEN KISSEL
Now it's up to me to have sex with her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's me, the Benola Gay, I don't know if you remember me, I saved the war. Now you're my wife, you used to be my daughter.
BEN KISSEL
In law.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the Boxcar crew were 3/4 of a mile off target and that actually saved tens of thousands of lives. But again, 40,000 died in an instant and a lot of the same shit that happened in Hiroshima happened in Nagasaki, just not quite as bad.
BEN KISSEL
But horrible.
MARCUS PARKS
Horrible, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, horrible.
BEN KISSEL
Like if the Big Boy there was the only bomb dropped, people would think it was still horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We would be doing what we just did for Hiroshima, we would be doing that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But Boxcar made it back to Tinian. They landed with less than a minute's worth of fuel.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
Like if they would have been up there for a minute longer they would have crashed.
BEN KISSEL
That reminds me a Crash Bandicoot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Does it?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's very time based. Those time based games are stressful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they are very... I hate time based games.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Boxcar, when they landed they found absolutely no fanfare.
BEN KISSEL
What?
MARCUS PARKS
As opposed to the hero's welcome experienced by the crew of the ENola Gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Basically the news of the Hiroshima bombing made the whole world both, yes we celebrated, but immediately the whole world was like huh?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like what?
MARCUS PARKS
Fuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And at first we couldn't party too hard because now we have to show the unbearable responsibility of these weapons. But it took a day for that to change.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But now they're like, when they showed up it immediately was just like okay well good work guys, let's get back. But because Truman was not happy when he found out, I guess from the news.
BEN KISSEL
It really is a pretty big operation not to tell the president about.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it was a half ass job. That might partly be the reason why America doesn't talk about it a lot. And it's an embarrassment because President Truman did not order this, nor was he even aware of the bombing until after it happened. It was at this point that we put in the rule that says presidents have to authorize nuclear strikes.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that funny now how the president just go to war without Congress?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They can. We figured that out, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Well they chose to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they figured that out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even so, preparations were being taken on the island of Tinian for more nuclear strikes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
MARCUS PARKS
And the scientists at Los Alamos were hard at work producing another plutonium bomb that would be done by the end of August. In fact, it's believed that the only reason why Japan escaped a third atomic bomb was because we'd already dropped all the bombs we had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we dropped the full finished ones.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, we dropped the full finished ones. Even more ghoulish was the gung-ho spirit of Paul Tibbets, who had been the pilot that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He had volunteered to drop the next bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me do it!
MARCUS PARKS
And the next.
BEN KISSEL
He wants another medal.
MARCUS PARKS
And the next. He was prepared to drop as many bombs on Japan as it took to get them to surrender.
BEN KISSEL
There might be a couple of different nuances when he speaks that aren't currently allowed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I could see him being kind of bleeped or just like...
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Yeah. Now dropping a bunch of bombs on Japan was certainly a possibility because while Los Alamos was gonna take until the end of August for a third bomb, Fat Men 4-6 would be done by September.
BEN KISSEL
Well it's Fat Men.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's what I said. Fat Men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fat Men.
MARCUS PARKS
Fat Men 4-6. I guess it would be Fat Man 4-6.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fat Man 4-6.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would say that.
MARCUS PARKS
Because you don't say like Die Hards 4 and 5.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless you're my mother.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah you do.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
Die Hards 4 and 5.
MARCUS PARKS
No, you say Die Hard 4 and 5.
BEN KISSEL
It depends on how you want to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you either do proper English or you don't.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, it depends. If you're saying Die Hard's fourth film had better boobs than Die Hard one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone is just pulling their cars into oncoming traffic. Everybody is just slamming the laptop shut.
BEN KISSEL
If Die Hard-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally they're deleting the podcast. Hours of work, years of doing this show.
MARCUS PARKS
You would say the Die Hards franchise.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rob has just moved from New York to Los Angeles-
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To edit this episode.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps a bigger reason why neither America nor Japan is eager to discuss the bombing of Nagasaki is because while Hiroshima was entirely unnecessary, Nagasaki was even more so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it is definitely... How do I say this? I can put myself in history's shoes and talk about and think about Hiroshima and kind of vaguely understand the whys and the hows and how we got to this place. But Nagasaki is the thing of like this is where we entered into now we're a bully.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're just doing this to set the tone for the next war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean it was done with all of the gravitas of fuck it, let's do it again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thing. It was very corporate almost. It just went out the door.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Just as the Fat Man bomb was falling on Nagasaki, Japan's Supreme Council for the direction of the war, the so-called Big Six, they were arguing over the best way to surrender. In fact, the decision to seek peace had been made six weeks before Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
But the Big Six couldn't agree on conditions. But really the biggest tragedy here was that it wasn't necessarily the atomic bombs that made the Japanese surrender, or at least it wasn't the biggest reason. Now not every historian agrees on this theory but I do. It's thought by some that it was fear of a full Soviet invasion on the Japanese mainland and the eventual communist rule that drove the Japanese into the arms of the Americans. Truly it was the Soviet Union invading that really popped them out of their fucking dream. That means that Nagasaki had no effect whatsoever on Japan's decision to surrender and we reigned hell fire on tens of thousands of people for no reason at all.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it does just show you how unlikable the Russians are. Because they were like yeah, these guys bombed us twice but have you tried cheesecake?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. They're gonna invent video games.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
Well actually I think the Japanese-
MARCUS PARKS
The Japanese invented video games, yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Japanese really perfected it. But you know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
But we'll buy it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll buy it.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll buy it, yeah. Tetris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They literally were like they have Elvis Presley. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They like fun over there.
MARCUS PARKS
But either way, when the Japanese came with surrender terms, Secretary of War Henry Stimson agreed to leave the emperor on the throne just long enough for him to order the surrender of the Japanese armies. Because Stimson knew that Emperor Hirohito was going to be the only guy that those armies listened to. Stimson's reasoning was that it was in America's best interest to plant our flag on the Japanese homeland as soon as we could, we had to get there before the Soviets even came close because we wanted to avoid another power sharing situation like we had in Germany. And that's if we didn't lose Japan to the Soviets completely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then also we got the atomic bomb and we're in your backyard.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now we're here.
MARCUS PARKS
We're here. Yes. And so on August 15, 1945, Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration. Emperor Hirohito broadcasted an address telling the people of Japan and his armies to stand down because quote "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage".
BEN KISSEL
He's still a politician at the end of the day. Not necessarily.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I had a dream-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That maybe we might want to think about stopping this.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe.
MARCUS PARKS
A little over two weeks later, Emperor Hirohito signed the document surrendering to America. And on September 2, 1945, WWII officially ended.
BEN KISSEL
Yay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay.
MARCUS PARKS
That however is not where our story ends.
BEN KISSEL
Boo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's good, good.
BEN KISSEL
Yay.
MARCUS PARKS
For we shall return next week for the conclusion to our series on the Manhattan Project with the Long term effects of radiation poisoning, the moment in which atomic power becomes an object of fear for America rather than an object of wonder, and the eventual fate of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My girlfriend!
BEN KISSEL
Oh they'll cover it in the movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My girlfriend!
BEN KISSEL
Awesome. Well thank you all so much for listening. Let's see, do we have anything we want to announce?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have many, many, many things. We do.
BEN KISSEL
Can we talk about San Diego?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not San Diego.
BEN KISSEL
No? Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We can talk about the live streaming show that we are doing November 4th here in Los Angeles at The Palace. We are finally ending our Mamma Mia Here We Go Again tour.
BEN KISSEL
Here we go again!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're doing it in Los Angeles one last time.
MARCUS PARKS
We're going again for the last time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're going again for the last time! We're giving a live stream, just so you know that doesn't mean... Some people were like did you mean final show? No, we're gonna go on tour next year.
BEN KISSEL
There's no final fucking... We'll be dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
That'll be our final show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna die on stage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how we live our lives. But know that we're gonna do a live stream and then also remember for the shows that we're postponing in Australia and New Zealand to the 2024 dates, we're giving you guys a free show this year but we're going to figure out all over the next couple weeks. You're gonna receive an email from us.
MARCUS PARKS
It will be a stream show, not a free show in Australia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it'll be a stream show.
MARCUS PARKS
I would say it's more of a program than a show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a program.
BEN KISSEL
It's a program.
MARCUS PARKS
Program.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there'll be show aspects. But I am excited for this. I think that that will be, do you guys gonna get that? And we've got Henry Zebrowski, me, at Dad's Garage in Atlanta, July 7th and 8th.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me enjoying myself making improv. You gotta see me there. And then we got Kissel.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I'm doing a bunch of blabbing. So you guys can come out to San Diego on 7/9, that's July 9th. San Francisco July 16th, Las Vegas July 23rd, and Ontario, California, July 30th. So it'll be fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm excited for you.
BEN KISSEL
And the theme for all of that is sloughing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So feel free to come with your skin slightly hanging off your body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he will be doing his new Kisselnacht hour which will mostly involve... I mean honestly I'm scared.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well I'm horrified. All right. That's it.
MARCUS PARKS
That's all.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you all so much for supporting all the shows here. Thanks for listening to our Sirius shows and calling in. Y'all are wonderful. Hail yourselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein. And don't forget to watch our stream every Tuesday.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Last Stream on the Left. Become a Patreon supporter and you get to watch it live and see all the stuff that gets cut out for the YouTube stream because I showed a lot of stuff this week that is definitely gonna get cut out.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know if it will.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It immediately got cut out, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, the testicles definitely aren't going on YouTube.
BEN KISSEL
Oh the testicles will be cut out, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The testicles can't-
BEN KISSEL
Even though that's medical.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, YouTube is puritan.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Also use the information in this series for your July 4th barbecue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And have fun with it!
MARCUS PARKS
Mention this a lot, especially if you're going to a barbecue with a lot of conservative old people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With old people. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
If you've got a great grandpa, definitely make sure to talk to him about how Hiroshima was not necessary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well then why don't you just not frame it in a way where-
MARCUS PARKS
Frame it in a way where he feels bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
MARCUS PARKS
At the end of his life-
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
MARCUS PARKS
Frame it in a way where he feels like his entire life was a lie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's kinda fun.
MARCUS PARKS
And everything he thought was true about America isn't true.
BEN KISSEL
Spite. Spite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes you get a fifth adolescence in your 90s.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also what a great wrap up to Pride Month. Thank you so much for that too.
BEN KISSEL
All right, hail yourselves everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail me.
BEN KISSEL
Bye!