HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, reading all this fucking hullabaloo.
BEN KISSEL
Hullabaloo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Manhattan Project this, Robert Oppenheimer that. I kept thinking, being like if this was the Queens Project, that'd be nice.
BEN KISSEL
What do you mean? What's the Queens Project?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh you mean like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they would just be trying to make the ultimate non greasy zeppole. The idea of like a zeppole that has the powdered sugar on it, sure, but it doesn't always go up into your beard in your mouth.
BEN KISSEL
Wait. You talking about the British royalty, the queen?
MARCUS PARKS
Nah, he's talking about like LeFrak City.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, my town.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You're talking about Queens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Woodhaven.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, LeFrak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'm talking about Ozone Park.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I see what you're saying. So this is a pun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am just saying... No, I don't know if it's a pun. I actually don't know.
BEN KISSEL
It is. The Manhattan Project but you wanna call it the Queens Project. And now you're gonna talk about how Queens people are fat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think-
BEN KISSEL
Is that it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, we're Italian-American.
BEN KISSEL
I know but-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then Haitian-American. I mean it's a real melting pot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just the idea of going of going to a zeppole... Have you ever had a zeppole? A good zeppole?
MARCUS PARKS
Never.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've never?
BEN KISSEL
You have, Marcus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've never had a zeppole.
MARCUS PARKS
Is it a funnel cake? Is it just a funnel cake by a different name?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no. It's a zeppole.
BEN KISSEL
I'm sure you've had it. You got a sweet tooth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you ever had sausage and peppers from like a proper stand?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you ever been to like a San Gennaro's, remember the San Gennaro's festival?
BEN KISSEL
Are you hungry?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm starving.
BEN KISSEL
What's happening?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm starving.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I remember San Gennaro's festival, I've been. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Queens used to do that.
BEN KISSEL
Let's hop right into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every fucking week we used to go, we used to have a bouncy castle for all the fat men to go stare and watch the kids. They'd smoke cigars and be like don't break your fucking leg.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's all they'd do.
MARCUS PARKS
Wrap it up. Wrap it up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh you want me to wrap it up?
BEN KISSEL
What does it have to do with the Manhattan Project?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the Queens Project.
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone. Ben hanging out with Marcus and hungry, hungry, Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sitting here. All I do is read. All I do is read!
BEN KISSEL
Hungry, hungry Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry.
BEN KISSEL
That's all right. Not a problem. Okay, we are on to part four of the Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't worry, this one's just as long as the last three.
BEN KISSEL
And if it was the Queens Project, I mean, yeah. All right. I just thought you were talking about the queen. Here we go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just needed to center my thoughts on a single bit.
BEN KISSEL
We've got it.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left the Manhattan Project, the espionage wing had successfully captured every member of the German team that had failed to produce an atomic bomb for the Nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The pokay mensch.
MARCUS PARKS
These men were the infamous Uranium Club. And American forces have been successful in keeping them all out of Soviet hands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good work, boys!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Nice job.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it comes to the science wing of the Manhattan Project, the main show, we've gotta turn the hands on our WWII clock back about 6 months before the official defeat of the Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're talking about a clock that reflects years instead of the daily time though.
BEN KISSEL
Well months.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you mean more like, I do think a calendar.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a calendar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll set the calendar pages back. I wanna make sure I'm sandbagging the show this week.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To make sure we really get to the center of our analogies.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Turn the pages back on the calendar 6 months.
BEN KISSEL
You'll really understand how difficult it is to sandbag a whole show.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we not only have to turn back the calendar, we gotta leave Europe altogether.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And refocus our series on Los Alamos in New Mexico where the bomb was being built and the Pacific theater of WWII where the path for the bomb was being paved, so to speak. Now if you'll remember, the Manhattan Project had two sites producing fuel for two different types of atomic bombs because General Leslie Groves had gone with a scattershot approach to make sure we hit our target of developing a bomb before the Nazis did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or maybe it was because he knew, according to some sources I have collected-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That he knew that the trigger bomb would never work and they had to find a new way to fake a bomb and work all the way up to a fake testing site in order to fake the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's so much easier to fake a giant international incident of war that changes the face of the planet.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the history than to just do it.
BEN KISSEL
Big if true. Big if true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I read a book that I'm deeply triggered by.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, sounds like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well out of the site at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, you had uranium. The stuff enriched there had taken a long road from the uranium mines of the Belgian Congo to Nazi Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And was it like a road trip? Was it fun?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was a road trip. A dog licked some peanut butter off of somebody's genitals on the way. It was really fun.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! What kind of road trips have you been on? My goodness gracious. I was thinking more a skinny guy had sex with a larger lady and everyone laughed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember. They're like they won't be together, that's an odd couple, they'd never choose. But sometimes they do.
BEN KISSEL
That's strange. Yeah, sometimes they do.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this is the uranium that Boris Pash had stolen from the Soviets immediately after Germany's surrender. And that uranium would be used and the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of crazy that I'm both Little Boy and Fat Man.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that nice? That's why you're an actor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I'm the Thin Man, which is the prototype bomb. What's Ben?
BEN KISSEL
I'm just the plane, baby. Yes indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ben 29.
MARCUS PARKS
Ben, aka Enola Gay, that's you.
BEN KISSEL
Enola Gay?
MARCUS PARKS
That was the name of the plane.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Only during Mardi Gras.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Hanford site in Washington State though, that was producing plutonium, straight up American stuff that would be used in a bomb called Fat Man that would annihilate the city of Nagasaki.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, making of the atomic bomb, I forgot just how fucking huge the Hanford site was and what they did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They built, it's like the size of the Empire State Building but it's on its side and it's a uranium/plutonium enriching factory. It was insane.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I have no problem with what the bomb did, killing all those people. Okay. But let's get correct here, it's a person of weight. A person pre gout. A person who has diabetes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the stuff from the Hanford site, that would also be the stuff used in the very first nuclear explosion in history, the Trinity test. Now by March of 1944, both sites had produced enough nuclear material for three bombs, two to drop and one to test.
BEN KISSEL
Which is one to lick. That's my bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
The scientists at Los Alamos had also produced two mechanisms for detonating the different materials, the gun method and the implosion method, both of which are far too complicated for us to explain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here, I'll try.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The gun method is all about slapping shit together.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's slapping... Sometimes I'll have one piece of roast beef and I'm like that's not enough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Want more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I put another slice on there, right. Because I like to just eat it free hand.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't spend time making sandwiches.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right?
BEN KISSEL
Technically that's what bodybuilders do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look at me. All I'm doing is building my body.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's how you do it, you slap them together, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You shoot one bead of uranium and another one and it makes a boom-boom, right?
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the other one is simultaneously a circle of explosions around a piece of whatever it is, that built up plutonium, whatever it is-
MARCUS PARKS
Uranium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh. Ooh man. All right.
BEN KISSEL
Uranium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I shouldn't be trying to do this.
BEN KISSEL
No, you got it. You got it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it explodes-
BEN KISSEL
Three sentences. Around-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It explodes in a circle, in a perfect dodecahedron.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is also the symbolic actual entity of the 3D version of the universe which is why when J. Robert Oppenheimer blew up the second bomb that used the implosion technique, that's what ripped open the fucking veil that allowed the aliens to come through and look at us.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it was a symbolic gesture. So Aleister Crowley gets in there as well.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. Well very powerful.
MARCUS PARKS
I see. Well you are correct in that it was a plutonium bomb, now that I'm thinking about it. The implosion method was the plutonium method.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
However the second bomb dropped was a uranium bomb that was used with the trigger method. So therefore your argument is null and void, sir.
BEN KISSEL
Well isn't that exciting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't even... I'm trying to understand the science!
BEN KISSEL
You're doing great. It's kind of like a species reveal for the aliens as well. Isn't that nice?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the explosions are in the bomb cradle, it squishes the material, then it blows up.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. (squish) Like that.
BEN KISSEL
Perfect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh ah.
BEN KISSEL
Nailed it.
MARCUS PARKS
But incredibly the gamble of General Groves, the scattershot gamble, it paid off double. As it turned out, both plutonium and uranium were viable for weaponization.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay.
BEN KISSEL
It's like they want us to kill the Japanese!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was like they wanted us to kill the Nazis but then they finished up too quick.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'm sorry to my wife for that as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Additionally, the gun method for detonation that used uranium was almost guaranteed to work to the point where they felt like testing it was a waste of precious uranium-235.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And if you're the author that wrote an entire book trying to debunk the fact that there was a bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you just have to understand they did test it to see if it could work. It was already there.
MARCUS PARKS
Smaller but-
BEN KISSEL
You're fighting with shadows, buddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They already knew.
BEN KISSEL
You're fighting with shadows. No one knew that that book existed. I don't think that is still alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
However the implosion method using plutonium, that was far more complicated and plutonium was easier to produce. So a full scale test was planned to see if the Manhattan Project could go two for two.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the name chosen for the test, Trinity, that was a deliberate choice made by Robert Oppenheimer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So nerdy.
MARCUS PARKS
It was very nerdy. It was inspired by a poem about death by WWI poet John Donne. Beautiful writer by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
But this poem contemplated the idea that while dying leads to death, it might also lead to resurrection. This was tied to the false hope that Manhattan Project scientists like Niels Bohr held onto in order to justify developing an atomic weapon, reasoning that nuclear weapons were so destructive that they could end all wars. Unfortunately Niels Bohr had not been familiar with the concept of a proxy war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Danish accent) I was trying to say that we should name it Gunther because that's my wife's name and she's a fucking bitch.
BEN KISSEL
Your wife's name is Gunther? That's a weird one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Danish accent) Yeah, she's a masculine wife.
BEN KISSEL
I understand why you spend so much time working in science.
MARCUS PARKS
Nos before the bomb was even tested, B-29 bombers were already training themselves to drop these massive 7 ton weapons on specific targets.
BEN KISSEL
What do you gotta train? You drop the fucking thing. Isn't it mostly gravity that does the work in this case?
MARCUS PARKS
A lot goes into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I really want to send you... Because truly, Kissel-
BEN KISSEL
You hit the button, drop the thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a part of me that was just like truly, like it's the same as any bombing run. They had to completely refigure the planes, they had to develop a whole delivery mechanism.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had to train because the way of dropping this style of bombs was completely different than any other type of bomb.
BEN KISSEL
They gotta do a pirouette? What are they up to?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they have to get away from it as fast as possible.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's how you drop it. It had to be dropped and detonated at a certain height. And also the actual payloads are much heavier than any other type of bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then also they were talking about the fail safe shit. It's crazy. There's a lot of shit. Because a lot of stuff like what if the bomb doesn't work? What if the bomb doesn't release? All of a sudden you're flying, you've got this thing that is now set to explode. You're supposed to disengage it. Like the implosion bomb they said would actually survive. They thought that maybe if it fell out of a plane and it landed and it was a dud it would be fine and the center of it would hold. But the trigger one was so vulnerable that if it fell and didn't break, if it fell and didn't go off, it could break open and then just create a thousand years of radiation poisoning in a place that exists. So they then would have to crawl inside of the gun mechanism, inside of the bomb, pull the gun mechanism out of it, and then release whatever's left. It's very scary.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well you just gotta have someone, you gotta have a little bitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, there was a guy that was that guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was not pleased.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
No, I'm sure not.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll talk about him later.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I think we did actually accidentally... Remember there's that story, I guess it had to have been an implosion bomb that was accidentally dropped in like North Carolina?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot about that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's just happened relatively recently.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now for the mission to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, the Manhattan Project tapped a 29 year old pilot named Paul Tibbets. Tibbets had survived countless bombing missions over Germany and had a year's experience flying the relatively new B-29s. He was given a 45 minute long briefing that explained what the bomb was just a little bit, insofar as the scientist briefing him asked Tibbets, hey, do you know what an atom is?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He said Adam is my brother Steve's friend.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, absolutely. I got a 45 minute training video via hip hop lyrics when I worked at Wendy's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Tibbet said yeah, I know what I know what an atom is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And the scientist said good, that's all you need to know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no, I need to know more than that.
BEN KISSEL
That's all he needs to know.
MARCUS PARKS
Then supposedly the scientist wrapped up the conversation in a particularly 1940s cinematic fashion. He said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"You've got a lot of responsibility. If you use it wrong or if you fail, I can see you winding up in prison. Otherwise you might be a hero."
BEN KISSEL
Hell yeah, man. This is gonna be great. I'm gonna have a parade!
MARCUS PARKS
And so starting in December of 1944, Tibbets began flying missions over Japan in B-29s loaded with so-called pumpkin bombs that were roughly the same size and weight of an atomic bomb. Much like the Fat Man bomb, each pumpkin bomb was about 10 ft long, 5 ft in circumference, and it weighed about 5 tons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man.
BEN KISSEL
That's a hell of pumpkin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I definitely would get super nervous as I'm sitting in the rolling hills of Japan watching them drop these giant like obviously fake bombs, right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like these fake bombs are landing and you're like oh, that looks like a pretty big bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's like oh, they're practicing for... What are they practicing?
BEN KISSEL
Very large scale, sort of Green Goblin approach.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very similar.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they must have been like what are they up to?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's not good.
BEN KISSEL
It can't be good.
MARCUS PARKS
Well some of them were inert, some though were filled with explosives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just for fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, just for fun, just to see what would happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we're already bombing them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the main point of a pumpkin bomb was to make sure that the pilot didn't drop a $2 billion weapon on the outskirts of the target, or worse from a funding perspective, in the middle of the ocean.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Think of the funding, Kissel.
BEN KISSEL
Of course, you always have to. How is Epstein going to give us more money after this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. Come on my face.
MARCUS PARKS
As such, 49 training missions were flown with a variety of B-29s, all with colorful names that were sometimes a bit too conspicuous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You had Strange Cargo.
BEN KISSEL
That sounds like a fun movie with Humphrey Bogart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These all sound like the super tough condoms they sell at like various very shady sex stores.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, the ones where it's like a rough rider. And I'm like I'm not DMX, I don't think I need that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. It's like Ryu having sex with Chun-Li but all you see is Ryu's ass and it's weird.
BEN KISSEL
Oh hello.
MARCUS PARKS
Another plane, Top Secret.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh what's in that?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That is ridiculous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't ask, don't tell.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic 80s spoof spy movie though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. You had one called Big Stink.
BEN KISSEL
That is just an insult.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's an insult to everyone on that fucking plane.
MARCUS PARKS
One called The Great Artiste.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, all right.
BEN KISSEL
It's interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
You had Necessary Evil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, now we're getting on the fucking nose.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, all right. Exactly. What is this, a football movie?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And most conspicuously, Up And At 'Em.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the dumbest-
BEN KISSEL
I'm gonna shoot you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They know it's coming.
BEN KISSEL
If you kill me, if you do deliver a pun before you shoot me in the fucking head, I'm gonna be so pissed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But one of the problems with dropping a big horribly expensive bomb on Japan was that there was still one island with a very active Japanese airstrip between the American air base of Saipan and the Japanese mainland.
BEN KISSEL
I thought you were gonna say one problem might be the death of all the innocent people. But no, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Funding, Kissel. Think of the funding.
MARCUS PARKS
Think of the funding.
BEN KISSEL
Think of the funding.
MARCUS PARKS
Think of the practicalities.
BEN KISSEL
I do think that we can all... That is the Pentagon. Every meeting, think of the funding!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's every meeting, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That island where the airstrip was located, that became the site of the deadliest day in Marine Corps history. It became a byword for victory at high cost, perseverance whilst wading through the blood of your comrades, and most of all the savagery of warfare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
War is hell!
BEN KISSEL
Are we getting into the sloughing now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, soon.
BEN KISSEL
Sloughing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You wait, soon.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
That island was none other than Iwo Jima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the only way you could say it too. I've tried to say Iwo Jima in any other way but I can't, History Channel voice is in there, I can't get rid of it. Because again, if your grandpa is still alive, he's about 90 at this point-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You wanna get him going, just go two words: Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
One thing that was staged was that goddamn picture that went viral even before the internet.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Of the flag. That was actually a staged picture.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, they all were, they had to. Because that was them winning and then they would go and make an official winning thing.
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't winning, it was like on the third day of battle. Like they just arrived.
BEN KISSEL
They did the Super Bowl Shuffle. And if the Bears didn't win the Superbowl, they would be laughing stocks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally it's pre-shooting all the stuff from New Years Eve.
BEN KISSEL
It really did.
MARCUS PARKS
Although while it was staged, the Johnny Cash song The ballad of Ira Hayes was very real. That was about one of the guys who did raise the flag on Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
Anything Johnny, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Ira Hayes.
BEN KISSEL
(singing) Call him drunken Ira Hayes-
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) He won't answer anymore-
BEN KISSEL
(singing) He's a drunken... Or something.
MARCUS PARKS
No-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I left all my buddies on the beach of Iwo Jima!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, something about that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Now Iwo Jima was a hideous place covered in relatively soft volcanic rock.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not to offend all the people in Iwo Jima.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course not.
BEN KISSEL
Sid a lot of people live there?
MARCUS PARKS
Very few.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But some did.
BEN KISSEL
Pretty kind of farmland I thought.
MARCUS PARKS
But in strategic terms, Iwo Jima was incredibly important to the Pacific theater of the war because it was dead center between Tokyo and the island of Saipan, which we talked about at the end of episode two. Saipan, all the Mariana Islands, where the largest airport in the world existed at this time.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Saipan was the one where all the people jumped off the cliffs when we were coming because they thought we were gonna go whole hog.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then that was where we would launch the Enola Gay from.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Tinian was the cute one that was shaped like the island of Manhattan and they named all the streets after streets in New York City.
BEN KISSEL
That's real fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is really fun.
BEN KISSEL
That is fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Iwo Jima therefore became an essential location to take if American forces wanted to stop Japanese air attacks, not to mention the fact that Iwo Jima was a perfect base for damaged bombers and rescue missions. Now while the Manhattan Project was not the sole reason for the battle of Iwo Jima, the battle was certainly essential to the Manhattan Project's success. And since it is a fascinating and brutal struggle, let's get into what the Marine Corps and the Japanese Imperial Army both went through during that long month in the winter of 1945.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're really in Marcus' history happy place here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
This is good, I would use super glue on the tarmac. I'd glue all their planes down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jello. You're going sticky, I'm going slippery.
BEN KISSEL
But that's gonna cancel each other out and now they're just able to fly again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Japanese general in charge of defending Iwo Jima, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, he came from a long line of men who would all serve the emperor. But where Kuribayashi was a general, the four generations before him, and this tells you where Japan was in their history, the four generations before him had been fucking samurai.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man.
BEN KISSEL
Also every time Marcus, you say his name, you look up like you want an applause break. I will say that just millions of people say that name every day.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're still making someone extremely mad no matter what.
MARCUS PARKS
Tadamichi Kuribayashi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kuribayashi.
BEN KISSEL
It's Cillian.
MARCUS PARKS
Interestingly though, Kuribayashi had studied in the United States at Harvard as a military attaché in his youth. A lot of guys studied in America. When he wasn't at Harvard though, Kuribayashi road tripped across the country and took a special interest in Detroit. As a military man, Kuribayashi immediately saw that the industrial mechanisms of America could be turned into a massive unstoppable war machine with, in his words, the push of a button.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I don't want my weapons made at a Ford plant, Fix Or Repair Daily.
MARCUS PARKS
The Ford plant's many, many, many, many of our war machines.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Fix Or Repair Daily.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but they paid attention to those.
BEN KISSEL
Not because Henry Ford didn't love the Nazis though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thing is that he loved them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he did. Well in this, Kuribayashi was absolutely correct. And when he learned that his people plan to attack Pearl Harbor, he privately told his family that America was the last country in the world that Japan should fight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And all it took was one trip to Motown! That's all you do.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You go down there because you know what he should have brought back was a goddamn trumpet.
BEN KISSEL
Seriously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He should have saw Motown and been like damn it, you know what we need? You know what Japan needs? Some soul.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know, I'm not sure if Motown was really swinging yet out there in Detroit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think so.
MARCUS PARKS
In the 20s? No, Motown-
BEN KISSEL
I thought it was more of a 50s, 60s thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Motown was the 60s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't that when scat was invented? Not the shit.
BEN KISSEL
Oh buddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(scatting) What Kim Cattrall invented.
BEN KISSEL
Kim Cattrall?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You ever seen the video of Kim Cattrall scatting?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
Another reference to Kim Cattrall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll send you that video.
BEN KISSEL
Very interesting. But I was think the deep dish pizza, and I'm not sure if that was invented.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's Chicago. They have Detroit-style pizza.
BEN KISSEL
No, the Detroit-style is also deep dish. But we're gonna move on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fry bottom, fry bottom. It's got a cornmeal bottom.
BEN KISSEL
We're gonna move on. Push it, moving on.
MARCUS PARKS
What this tells us is that some of the Japanese generals knew even before December 7th, 1941 that a war against America was unwinnable. And as it turned out, Kuribayashi would be forced to lead the defense against American invasion in one of the last major land battles of WWII.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Now General Kuribayashi knew that while his men could hold Iwo Jima for a time at enormous cost to the Marines, defeat both at Iwo Jima and in the war at large was inevitable. Therefore the last thing he wrote to his wife Yoshi before he left was do not plan for my return.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There we go.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow. And then-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That pussy's out the cage.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't worry, man. She was already cheating.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. She had a big cherry with her tongue and moved on.
MARCUS PARKS
But even with impossible odds, Kuribayashi was determined to make the United States pay heavily for every inch of Iwo Jima and pay heavily we did. First Kuribayashi emptied the island of civilians and brought in enslaved Korean laborers to turn most of the island itself into an elaborate death trap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait till you see what I do with my home when I'm selling it.
BEN KISSEL
I'm excited.
MARCUS PARKS
Over the course of 9 months, the enslaved Koreans had built a massive system of intricate tunnels, some as deep as 75 ft below ground and all of them were wired with electricity.
BEN KISSEL
Hey Larry, what do you think happens if I step right over here? Ah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goddamn Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
War is hell.
MARCUS PARKS
They also built caves, pillboxes, command posts, gun emplacements, and all of it was dug directly into the island's soft volcanic rock.
BEN KISSEL
It's interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's incredible.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it also just shows you, because we're spending billions and billions of dollars and we got shovel, a couple of pieces of feces, couple of hammers and nails, and we're gonna do pretty good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They did it all with hand tools.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. That's amazing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goddamn.
MARCUS PARKS
But they were also doing it with enslaved people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well of course. But we gotta audit the Pentagon.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's the thing is that using the enslaved people, that tends to cut down on a lot of the costs and a lot of time and all that.
BEN KISSEL
I mean yes. Obviously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does, it really does. You'd be surprised.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ask Tom Cruise. It was crazy how fast he got Mission Impossible 9 going during COVID.
MARCUS PARKS
Brings the overhead way down.
BEN KISSEL
But I think if you're in war too, the civilians are probably fighting for free also.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the civilians in this case were taken out completely.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because at this time Korea was a Japanese quote unquote "colony". So a lot of them were working against their will for the Japanese.
BEN KISSEL
And this is still the united Korea. Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
But as such, the Japanese were able to utilize such terrifying tactics as the infamous spider traps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(metal guitar riff) These are fucking kind of cool.
BEN KISSEL
These are fucking nasty.
MARCUS PARKS
These trap doors were littered around the island. This is pretty much how they worked. A Marine would be walking forward, forward, forward. He'd be there with all of his buddies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wonder if Jane will ever write back. I wrote her about 7 months ago. Yeah, we're definitely still married.
BEN KISSEL
They were so romantic back then.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And he's thinking they've advanced into the island.
BEN KISSEL
We're good.
MARCUS PARKS
Nothing's behind him, everything's in front of him. All he has to worry about is what's right in front of him. When all of a sudden behind him a fucking trap door opens-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a-me!
MARCUS PARKS
A Japanese sniper pops up and just starts picking off Marines.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
And then by the time they figure out what's going on, that sniper is gone and just fucking running down the tunnel to the next position.
BEN KISSEL
That's crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as General Kuribayashi put it in a document issued to his troops, each man would make it his duty to kill 10 of the enemy before dying. And until they were all destroyed to the last man, each Japanese soldier was duty bound to harass the enemy with guerilla tactics. And this was actually different from how most Japanese generals handled land battles. A lot of them used Banzai tactics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The suicide attacks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, where they'd like jump on them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With like grenades and shit, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Well they'd just usually do it at night and they would just run towards the enemy and try to kill as many as they possibly could before the enemy killed them.
BEN KISSEL
Dang.
MARCUS PARKS
But General Kuribayashi, he thought this was futile, he thought this was a waste.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
He was like Banzai, kamikaze. It's fucking stupid. Why are you doing this? It's a waste of human life.
BEN KISSEL
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
When we could just go and hide and come out and kill them with guerilla tactics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what we're trying to do.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
It worked better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They viewed it as kind of ungentlemanly or against Bushidō, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like that concept of gentleman warfare.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're supposed to see the guy, you're supposed to set up a time when you arrive and fight. When they realized like no, we're not gonna do this, I'm already being tasked with an impossible thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
My grandfather Herb from the American side, he used to rail against snipers, saying that they were cowards because they did not look at the enemy in the eye. And to surprise somebody and kill them, it was considered trashy. It literally was trashy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you're just saying they were like the Snookis of WWII?
BEN KISSEL
He was in the Korean War but yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Korean War is different. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I'm going to say? I'm pro our sniper community. And I just wanna say I don't mean any sort, to both cameras, I just wanna say straight up to our sniper community, we're cool. I love what you do, good work, keep doing it. Stay silent.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know, that's what I thought with the Chris Kyle thing, American Sniper. Yeah, he killed a bunch of people but I mean...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's extraordinarily difficult to be a sniper.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have to be in the top 10th percentile. That's pretty cool.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very difficult. It's extremely difficult.
BEN KISSEL
The weapons have gotten pretty good. That's all I'll say.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Seriously again, Ben Kissel is also the biggest target.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, easy
BEN KISSEL
No I'm not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's the easiest target. Of the three of us?
MARCUS PARKS
Of the three of us, yeah, absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause I switch up my fucking ways-
BEN KISSEL
Up, down, up, down, side, side, side, right, left, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I know how to move.
MARCUS PARKS
You've got a much larger center of gravity. I'd be the hardest one to hit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that my meat actually would... I'd catch a bullet that was less lethal.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah and then you'd just pretend like you're dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well sadly...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Continue.
MARCUS PARKS
Well on Iwo Jima, a lot of those guys, actually a lot of the soldiers ignored the order and went in Banzai anyway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well regardless, considering how the Japanese Imperial Army of WWII is considered to be one of the most tenacious armies in world history-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The men took Kuribayashi's directive to heart, which meant that the Marines were in for a long haul.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goddamn Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
It's difficult to go Banzai. You gotta climb up to the second rope, you gotta have the guy lying there, you gotta stun him first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah. You gotta get the manager looking over there because you got your girlfriend. You know what I mean? Like he's fighting with the ref.
BEN KISSEL
Yokozuna, Banzai indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He also shat on Bret Hart's chest once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I heard.
BEN KISSEL
Or did Bret Hart shit? Either way, somebody shat.
MARCUS PARKS
And Yokozuna was involved.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know that's not true.
BEN KISSEL
RIP.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at this point, I'd like to say to our combat veteran listeners, specifically our Marines, that we are going to get deep into what actually happened on Iwo Jima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So turn up that hearing aid and really try to remember. Do you remember how you were traumatized by Saving Private Ryan? Are you ready to do it with come jokes?
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I'm gonna say if you ain't up for combat today, feel free to skip ahead about 15 minutes or so.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So at 9 AM on February 19th, 1945-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need some American music, we need to come in with that silent, like whatever that early morning... You know how they do in The Pacific, in the show?
MARCUS PARKS
(trumpeting)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tap slightly playing.
BEN KISSEL
And I'm mighty proud of that ragged old flag.
MARCUS PARKS
So maybe I can give this first paragraph a little bit of a different voice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Some gravitas.
MARCUS PARKS
(trumpeting plays) At 9 AM on February 19th, 1945, two divisions of Marines arrived at the beaches of Iwo Jima to no resistance. In less than an hour, 9000 men were ashore, awash in what they all described as an eerie silence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Marines had been told that they were gonna land on a beautiful beach, no resistance. But what they found instead was a 15 ft high slope of soft volcanic ash that slowed them down considerably.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they do march.
MARCUS PARKS
Well what the Japanese had done is when they dug out those tunnels, what they had dug out they had thrown on the beaches and that gummed up the works entirely. And this is a big problem because the plan was for the Marines to land on a clear beach in waves and each group was supposed to be much further inland when the next group arrived. But because of the ash, the Marines were slowed down considerably and they got bunched up on the beach.
BEN KISSEL
I mean they really should have sent the memo out to the Japanese telling them we're coming, could you please not do that? It would make it more difficult for us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, let's think about this. Always send a text.
BEN KISSEL
Always.
MARCUS PARKS
And once General Kuribayashi felt that there were enough Marines ashore to make it worthwhile, the shelling and machine gun fire began.
BEN KISSEL
So nothing, this is easier than they said it was gonna be, huh? No problems here.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what they thought.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
And that happened quite a bit. I mean it also happened like in Okinawa too where they just don't know that there is a tactic-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Being played upon them.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very smart.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. (machine gun sounds) From the recesses of the caves up above dug into the volcanic rock, Japanese machine gunners opened fire from the darkness. Marines attempted to return fire but they only had brief muzzle flashes to ascertain the machine gunners' position. Besides that, the constant shelling of artillery made it difficult to line up a shot. Soon the machine gunners and the artillery had filled the beach with dead bodies. And since they were bunched up in such a relatively small area, each shell blew the corpses into smaller and smaller pieces, sending them flying into the air. The beach was soon littered with limbs and torsos that were continually taken out and back in by the tide. And strewn amongst the gore were dozens if not hundreds of Valentine's Day cards that had been delivered to the dead and dying Marines just days before.
BEN KISSEL
And I actually have to say, I did get an early screener of Oppenheimer and when they played It's Raining Men over this scene...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could not believe-
BEN KISSEL
That was so rude.
MARCUS PARKS
Rude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The distaste that they would show.
BEN KISSEL
Are you trying to bring some levity to this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't believe-
BEN KISSEL
Are you serious? You're gonna bring levity to this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But honestly I do appreciate because then it's a segue to (singing slowly) it's raining men.
BEN KISSEL
It was a different version.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a rendition. The rendition was much nicer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was acoustic, yeah. Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. What a bold decision.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Disgusting.
BEN KISSEL
Rude!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pete Davidson just shows up.
BEN KISSEL
Unbelievable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like a magic crab or something.
BEN KISSEL
He'd be great at that. He'd be great at that too.
MARCUS PARKS
Well on that first day, out of the 30,000 Marines who landed, 2420 died. As was written in 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', men tripped over 15 ft long strings of intestines as they tried to avoid bodies that had been cut in half at the waist by machine gun fire. Due to the artillery shells, legs, arms, and heads bearing only necks lay 50 ft from the closest torso, which may or may not have been once enjoined to those limbs. But despite the gore and horror, the Marines pushed through.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Godforsaken Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
That is so... I might just say can we go back now? Are we done now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're such a good soldier, your intestines are fighting.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. It really is the beginning of Suicide Squad.
MARCUS PARKS
And this is day one. Behind those 30,000 Marines who'd stormed the beach at Iwo Jima, a further 40,000 joined them in the following days for a brutal battle that would last well over a month, making it the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
On the second day of battle, one soldier remembered seeing a fellow Marine receive a direct hit to the face from a Japanese shell. It blew away his jaw, exposing his teeth while also blowing open his skull. Lying atop the Marine's right ear was a ball of gray matter that used to be his brains but incredibly he was still alive. All the Marine could do was make motion with his right hand, asking one of his corpsmen to finish the job. And quite swiftly, one of his fellow Marines obliged the request. (gunshot)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I tell you what, yeah, yeah, when I saw that, yeah, that was a lot. But now I'm fine!
BEN KISSEL
You're fine?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm absolutely fine.
BEN KISSEL
That's good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The only thing I have really learned from that truly, honestly one of the biggest things I learned from Iwo Jima, wear sunscreen.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you're gonna want some sunscreen there. If you could apply it to your brain somehow, that might work too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, just the idea of a guy just going (gurgling noises).
BEN KISSEL
But you know what? Don't worry about it. In 20 years, we're gonna have the microwave. You're gonna love the microwave.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually I think the microwave is only about like 10 years at this point.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen, 40, 50 years from now you might get to see Scarlett Johansson naked in Under The Skin. Just remember that.
BEN KISSEL
There you go. Another reference, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, by 1955, like yeah, you're gonna be screaming all night long and keeping your wife awake and she's gonna be terrified of you.
BEN KISSEL
Ah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah!
MARCUS PARKS
Your children are gonna be terrified of you. But guess what, your wife is not going to have to worry about slaving over a hot oven all day long because she's gonna have a brand new invention called the microwave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The microwave.
BEN KISSEL
The microwave. Also popcorn that works on the stove.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Easy. Easy life.
BEN KISSEL
Jiffy Pop.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by the fifth day, the Marines had come upon a-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That actually was that young Marine's last name.
BEN KISSEL
Was Jiffy Pop?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Alexander Jiffy. That's where it came from.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by the fifth day, the Marines had come upon a plateau that was home to four defensive positions that came to be known respectively as hill 282, Minami village, the amphitheater, and Turkey Knob.
BEN KISSEL
Turkey Knob. Okay. Who named that one?
MARCUS PARKS
I would imagine some good old boy from the mountains of Tennessee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's hungry. Yeah, man.
BEN KISSEL
Turkey Knob.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's looking for some smoked turkey. I miss it.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
These collective defenses made up the most impenetrable fortress on Iwo Jima and it therefore came to be known as the meat grinder.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like that. If you could send me not into that part of war.
MARCUS PARKS
However the Japanese could only hold out for so long. Not only were the men on the island running out of supplies, but Japan itself had very little to give. The only resupply came when three Japanese planes tried parachuting medical supplies, food, and ammunition. All three were shot down and only a small amount of relief fell within Japanese territory. This was the only attempt to resupply the Japanese during the battle of Iwo Jima because that's all they had.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
The Marines meanwhile were not only one hell of a fighting force but they were also blessed with, if you look at it in a relative sense, infinite supplies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because we had built a whole chain of supplies like up to this point, it's all right there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We've taken the Philippines, we're fucking in it, like we're there. And of course that is owed to the incredible industrial power that General Kuribayashi she had seen for himself decades earlier. He was seeing himself proven right. Therefore the Marines slowly took Iwo Jima inch by inch.
BEN KISSEL
Yikes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good Dan Carlin voice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Inch by inch. Now when it came to the terrifying weapon-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, what are we talking about here, guys? Guys, what are we talking about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Iwo Jima.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when it came to the terrifying weapons of WWII, the one that soldiers and especially the Japanese tended to fear most was the flamethrower.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That makes sense. That checks out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's definitely top three.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when one thinks of a flame thrower-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you seen the dick ripper?
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yikes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when one thinks of the flame thrower, you usually have an image of a guy with a big tank on his back standing 10 ft from another soldier letting loose a stream of drippy flame that immediately engulfs the target.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, you wanna cast me? Oh, you wanna cast me?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think about it all the time.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course, of course.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, of course.
MARCUS PARKS
And indeed some men did die like this. A flame thrower jet burns at over 2000 degrees fahrenheit, just a hair hotter than the temperature inside a crematory. While death does come relatively quick, it is preceded by instant agony and terror as the thickened fuel clings to the skin and clothes, making stop, drop, and roll a nonstarter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean yeah, you're so fucking dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
At that point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of times it doesn't happen with easy access to a pool.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's unfortunate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's never really like an AirBnB, you're never like hit with one at a Vegas resort.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I feel like even at a pool, because it sticks to you...
MARCUS PARKS
Think of it as a flame coat.
BEN KISSEL
It's a flame coat, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
BEN KISSEL
A whole bodysuit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, think of that.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man, it's horrible.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it came to field battle, flamethrowers weren't always great weapons, as many flamethrower operators learned on D-Day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I think they're carrying a pack of gasoline.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I learned it from my last play through a Wolfenstein.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just shoot it and it explodes. It's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. A single bullet to a flame thrower tank usually caused the operator to explode in a ball of napalm and flame.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he has to go ah!
BEN KISSEL
Ah! Great stuntman work.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's what these wars have provided for the past almost 100 years of cinema. Wonderful work for stuntmen.
MARCUS PARKS
Well therefore flamethrowers were mostly used in battles like Iwo Jima to clear out caves and bunkers, they weren't frontline guys.
BEN KISSEL
Makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS
During a push at the meat grinder for example, the entrance to a cave was first saturated with fuel, then the flamethrower was brought in to flush them out. Those who didn't asphyxiate in the cave when they tried running further in to escape the flames, those guys were set on fire and they ran out of the cave as burning torches.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
According to the Marines, the flamethrowers were the only weapons that the Japanese truly feared. But the flames were only half the point. While a flame thrower does indeed produce death and destruction, you've also got to be fucking insane to use a flamethrower.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think so.
MARCUS PARKS
And that sort of psychological edge was important in battles like Iwo Jima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
it's intimidating. It's an intimidating look.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's X factors.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What Dan Carlin brings up all the time, those things that are a part of history that you are like just no one wants to be hit with one.
BEN KISSEL
I don't wanna be hit with one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And as soon as the flamethrowers get broken out, everyone's like oh man.
BEN KISSEL
Oh shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We already called this place the meat grinder which I thought was fairly unpleasant enough.
BEN KISSEL
It is unpleasant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I thought it would discourage people coming here.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But apparently the flamethrowers are really going to make this sort of a hot meat grinder.
BEN KISSEL
I guess, yeah. I mean I suppose the meat grinder does make you think that there's some weapon that just grinds up human bone as you approach people. But I don't think that's really practical.
MARCUS PARKS
It took them a week to take the meat grinder and they called it the meat grinder just because it was waves after... They couldn't figure it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, everyone was just dying in there.
MARCUS PARKS
They just couldn't figure out how to fucking... They knew they could figure it out eventually but it took a lot of lives.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. And in honor of pride of course, make sure to go for two for ones between 4-7 at Meet Grindr. M-E-E-T Grindr right here in beautiful Burbank, California.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after a month of fighting on Iwo Jima, almost 7000 Marines had been killed while almost 22,000 had been wounded. The Japanese meanwhile had lost 20,000 men, only 216 were taken prisoner.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And out of those 216, most were only captured because they'd been knocked unconscious and had just been found lying on the ground.
BEN KISSEL
That's what I would do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I'd be asleep.
BEN KISSEL
I'd just take a bonk to the head, sleep through it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't want me to be in any... You don't want me to have military secrets, I'm gonna fold.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna go right to the other team. I'm just gonna go run.
BEN KISSEL
These people didn't even have any secrets, they were slaves. So they were just told to run out there probably, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Well these are Japanese soldiers that I'm talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh these are soldiers now?
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, that's the thing.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
You didn't put the laborers in battle.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they were all highly trained.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, these are extraordinarily well trained, vicious, vicious soldiers. Now included in the dead was General Kuribayashi, who felt that it was his duty to die defending the island. It was thought that Kuribayashi was the only high ranking Japanese general to die in the war while personally leading his men in battle. But while you may think that the high Marine death toll would make him an object of hatred, he was instead respected. And the man in charge of operations at Iwo Jima actually requested that the general's body be found so he could be given a proper burial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Back in Iwo Jima there were rules!
BEN KISSEL
It doesn't seem like there were many rules but that seems like one.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I remember that there was actually a quote like after the second or third day with all the sand and all that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The general in charge said I don't know who's in charge over there but he's one smart son of a bitch.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Look at that. What a great day to chew on a stogie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
They were more polite than what happened in Vietnam.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a whole thing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a whole different can of worms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Back when men were men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know why they keep selling these cans of worms. Who's buying them?
BEN KISSEL
Well fishermen probably.
MARCUS PARKS
There were however holdouts on Iwo Jima. At least 3000 Japanese soldiers waged a three month long guerilla campaign against the garrison force at Iwo Jima after the battle was won. And more incredible were the two machine gunners who held out until January of 1949.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
3.5 years after the Japanese surrender.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well those guys, they hid, right? They were lost and then they just kept thinking the war never ended.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they didn't know, so they aired on the side of the war ain't over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they killed Amelia Earhart.
BEN KISSEL
That's possible. We don't know it's not true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Amelia Earhart arrived, maybe seduce them all in a sort of sexy version of Gilligan's Island kind of scenario.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Gilligan's Island was sexy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was the horniest lost woman since the Virgin Mary.
BEN KISSEL
The last one, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause Virgin Mary, she never did get plugged.
BEN KISSEL
Well she did.
MARCUS PARKS
I think she got plugged after. They never talked about what happened after the virgin-
BEN KISSEL
I think she cheated on Joseph.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. She got her shit popped by the lord, it's a long list trying to get up in that. Get them seconds.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's fun though. That must have actually been a fun three years, thinking the war is still going on but then there isn't a war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it might've been stressful.
BEN KISSEL
You get to do all the latent homosexual acts with your buddies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's different in war!
BEN KISSEL
Because it's war.
MARCUS PARKS
It's war.
BEN KISSEL
It's different in war. It's lonely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing slowly) It's raining men, hallelujah, it's raining men.
BEN KISSEL
I can't believe they put that in that movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Now to this point, Iwo Jima was a bit of a microcosm of the attitudes the Japanese military had towards the war. Some like the general knew that it was futile to keep fighting but did so anyway out of honor, while others fanatically kept going because they either didn't want to surrender or they didn't believe that Japan would ever do so. In other words, battles like Iwo Jima went a long way towards the necessary evil argument when it came to dropping two atomic bombs on Japan.
BEN KISSEL
Well I'm just gonna tell you one thing Barry, I'm having the time of my life!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do feel like there is a little bit of that. And also because this is a very specific battle but they used that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's the thing, why they dropped the bomb, it's so hazy, it's so hazy. It's a long historical discussion.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they would use these, they would cherry pick. Because they're bringing shit to the president to kind of pitch why we need to use the bomb. And this is like one of those ways they did it, they framed this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Number one, cool. It's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cool. It's big.
BEN KISSEL
Cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Make a big noise.
BEN KISSEL
It make a big noise.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not just that but these battles are being shown in news reels all across America all the time, like after every single battle, the newsreels come back, everyone goes to the movie theater. And they're fucking brutal, these newsreels.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
They are absolutely brutal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(old timey voice) You can see here, just because of the invention of all these bombs, these body parts are ripping together. Can you see, Colonel Stevens, can we give him a hand?
BEN KISSEL
And then what movie would play after that? I'm trying to think, 1940s cinema?
MARCUS PARKS
1944
BEN KISSEL
Who the fuck knows?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Casablanca.
BEN KISSEL
Actually a newsreel before Casablanca is a great preview.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it is.
BEN KISSEL
Cause that movie is historic in some ways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Now with Iwo Jima taken, there were no significant obstacles in the way of a steady stream of fire bombers that absolutely ravaged the cities of Japan prior to the dropping of the atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like the fire bombs were like just as bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Just as bad.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well almost.
BEN KISSEL
Not quite.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd say almost as bad because the fires went out pretty fast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And then it was over at least.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, isn't that sad? Are you guys talking about your marriages? Still single.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know, man. What?
BEN KISSEL
Don't tell Jerry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah. I know a couple of dogs that would be pretty mad to hear that.
MARCUS PARKS
But while the targets were meant to mostly be industrial and military, most times residential areas were burned in the process, just as it had been in Germany. As one spokesman for the Air Force put it, the entire population of Japan was a proper military target, no matter who it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Basically because of Pearl Harbor.
MARCUS PARKS
Because of Pearl Harbor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Once they hit us, that's what he's basically-
MARCUS PARKS
And we had a lot of civilians die in Pearl Harbor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And so we're like they decided to do that. They definitely didn't need to do that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? And then they did that.
MARCUS PARKS
And they did that, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it was bad.
BEN KISSEL
It was revenge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it was.
MARCUS PARKS
So on March 10th, 1945, bombers dropped gel bombs ranging from 6-1000 lbs on the residential district of Shitamachi in Tokyo, which was then home to 750,000 people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shitamachi, that's a lot of bombs.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a lot of bombs.
BEN KISSEL
There you go. You did it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shitamachi, man! I can't believe!
BEN KISSEL
There we go.
MARCUS PARKS
See many structures in Japan at the time were built of highly flammable paper and wood. And during the firebombing of Tokyo, the wind was blowing hard enough and the buildings were burning fast enough that the fire actually got ahead of the bombers. But they dropped fire bombs on the fires anyway.
BEN KISSEL
They were just like hold on, fire. This fire is really aggressive. They really wanna fight today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The description in 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is harrowing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
About how it's a town of fuel and they knew it. And they dropped it on it and they watched it form into this fucking literal like fire hurricane.
BEN KISSEL
Like a tunnel.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That became this spire. The bombers had to lift up, they had to put oxygen masks on. The planes were getting hot.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I would believe it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was fucking scary.
MARCUS PARKS
And the planes were 6000 ft up and they still had to put on oxygen masks.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
The only thing that stopped the fire after it destroyed 15.9 square miles of Tokyo was a river. And by the end of it, at least 100,000 people were burned alive. Additionally over a million had been injured and a million were homeless. But even though they were faced with this horror, even though we knew exactly what happened and what it looked like, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who earned such nicknames as Old Iron Pants, Bombs Away LeMay-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And most chillingly The Demon-
BEN KISSEL
Well that one's a little on the nose.
MARCUS PARKS
He ordered more. LeMay also did some pretty controversial stuff in Vietnam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, hello. Hey, it's me, General LeMay. I just want to say first of all, yeah, I know we dropped a lot of fire bombs already. Everybody's kind of up in arms about that.
BEN KISSEL
I know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I figured what I could do is, why not instead we'll send a wave of water and ice bombs? Funny little joke. Let's really burn it up. I actually would to see it-
BEN KISSEL
We already burned it quite a bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. Can I go burn one?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can somebody bring me a Japanese person so I can set him personally on fire? Thank you.
BEN KISSEL
Seems like you have blood lust.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, they call me The Demon for some reason.
BEN KISSEL
The Demon.
MARCUS PARKS
Well over the next six days, the Air Force fire bombed four more cities until they ran out of fire bombs. And in all, they burned over 32 square miles of Japanese cities at the conservative estimated cost of 150,000 lives. That number by the way beats the lowest estimate of deaths attributed to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by about 40,000.
BEN KISSEL
See?
MARCUS PARKS
That means that technically-
BEN KISSEL
See?
MARCUS PARKS
Technically to the point of pure slaughter, fire bombing was more effective and less expensive than an atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay.
BEN KISSEL
Well here you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we did it with one.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing, in the end it's all about that big mushroom cloud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really is.
BEN KISSEL
You wanna see the mushroom cloud. You do wanna see it, don't you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Apparently it was beautiful.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll get into that next episode.
BEN KISSEL
Well we've all seen it, haven't we?
MARCUS PARKS
We've seen some.
BEN KISSEL
The mushroom cloud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No-
MARCUS PARKS
We've seen mushroom clouds. There's only one picture of the mushroom cloud at Hiroshima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Next week I'll go into more detail of the horrific beauty of the mushroom cloud.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. I'm happy it wasn't a broccoli cloud. You ever smell one of those? Ugh. (gagging) Yuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's get right into it.
BEN KISSEL
Yuck. Buddy, you been eating some broccoli? Yeah, I'm trying not to die from diabetes. (gagging)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Feel like it'd be better if you did.
MARCUS PARKS
And so-
BEN KISSEL
I'm part of the Broccoli Brigade. All right everyone, turn around and march backwards. And fart and fart and fart and fart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's our general Captain Marcus Parks.
MARCUS PARKS
Goddamnit, I'm here to win the war.
BEN KISSEL
I ate 5 lbs of broccoli today, Captain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(trumpeting)
BEN KISSEL
You really fart bombed that place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
And so you may be asking while America was burning hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians alive in their homes over the course of a few days, what were the boys over at the Manhattan Project up to when it came to figuring out how to vaporize almost as many people in just an instant?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They put up a production of Arsenic and Old Lace. That is real.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's completely legit. They held protests. They were developing a little family. It felt like a camp atmosphere.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were all working out there. A whole generation of babies were born there.
BEN KISSEL
That's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they were loose cannons. Technically they were kind of having a lot of fun.
MARCUS PARKS
They were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was very stressful.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
The mushroom cloud babies.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by late 1944, Richard Feynman and Otto Frisch had conducted what they called the dragon experiment which proved that a chain reaction could be used to create a massive explosion in a military capacity. As a result, both types of bombs, plutonium and uranium, were on track to be completed by late summer of 1945. But on April 12th, just when the world was on the cusp of victory against Germany-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
President Franklin Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in the middle of having his portrait painted at his home in Hyde Park, New York, and he died that afternoon.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, stay still, stay still.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stay still.
BEN KISSEL
He's really still.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he is. He's still.
BEN KISSEL
He hasn't moved in like... I'm done with the painting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm done, he can go now.
BEN KISSEL
He can leave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly they painted him mid...
BEN KISSEL
Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Slam dunk competition. it was him vs Wilt Chamberlain's grandfather.
MARCUS PARKS
Grandpa.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is kinda crazy, the air he caught. But they did have to throw him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a guy who threw him.
BEN KISSEL
Man, I just watched Conan the Barbarian. Will Chamberlain is great.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
He's great. Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Always wonderful.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Replacing FDR was one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century when it came to setting the stage for the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And it could well be argued that had this man not been in charge, the dropping of the atomic bomb might have been handled differently.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck you! I know what I was doing!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think even he wanted it.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I don't-
BEN KISSEL
He is such a little bitch.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he wanted it. He absolutely wanted it.
BEN KISSEL
Cause everyone thought he was weak and he's like nah, not me.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not necessarily.
BEN KISSEL
He was tiny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was definitely a Cartman of presidents.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well instead of FDR, the man who had the power to make the decision of if, when, and how the bomb would be dropped was FDR's Vice President, Harry S. Truman. Now Truman had not been FDR's Vice President throughout his 13 year run in office, and Truman had in fact been placed on the ticket during FDR's fourth run specifically because it was seen as a near certainty that FDR would die in office that term. So if you were agreeing to be a vice president, you were agreeing to be president.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you knew it was coming.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And isn't history repeating?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that nice?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that nice?
MARCUS PARKS
See FDR's previous running mate, Henry Wallace, he had made a lot of enemies on the more conservative side of the Democratic Party because he opposed racial segregation and had a more Bernie Sanders approach to the economy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean FDR was technically left wing, right? But he did kind of try to appeal to a bunch of people. It's very complicated obviously. It's past me.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Wallace was very left wing. Wallace was left wing to the point where like he went to the Soviet Union and they showed him the gulags, but they showed him like a sanitized version of the gulags. They were like (Russian accent) yes, these are all volunteers. Look at all these good workers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Russian accent) Yes, the way we put it is it's like a home away from home.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Russian accent) You come here, you write your political creeds as many times, people sit and think.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
If I ever go to prison, I'm gonna get like a... What would be the opposite of live, laugh, love?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Home is where the farts are or something like that?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what you need.
BEN KISSEL
My home away from home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Wallace was great but Wallace was also very naïve when it came to the Soviet Union. And that's what people feared most, they feared that he openly favored heavy cooperation with the Soviet Union. And therefore Wallace was replaced at the 1944 convention with Harry S. Truman against Roosevelt's wishes, which of course resulted in the antagonistic and confrontational policies that led to the Cold War and arguably the dropping of the bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Henry, get over here. Okay, now staff member, pick up my leg, Harry bend over. Pick up my leg and kick him in the butt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I appreciate it, Mr. President.
MARCUS PARKS
Now incredibly Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, they only met once prior to FDR's death.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Who are you?
MARCUS PARKS
And it was for like 45 minutes. It was a quick lunch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they could see eye to eye while he was sitting down.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well naturally when he was sitting down.
MARCUS PARKS
Well partly this was due to the fact that FDR died only 82 days into his fourth term. Basically FDR was like I'll get around to it eventually.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's meet with him. And he also didn't have to campaign at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was trying to end the war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And he was like we'll get to Truman when we get to Truman.
BEN KISSEL
Meanwhile Truman is just out there peeping through all the paintings, just being like when's he gonna die? When does he die?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When's he gonna die?
BEN KISSEL
When am I president?
MARCUS PARKS
But tellingly when FDR died and Truman contacted Eleanor Roosevelt to ask if there was anything he could do for her, Eleanor basically said what do you mean is there anything you can do? You're the one who's fucked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. You just got placed with a very complicated series of decisions that you're gonna have to figure out and make that might affect history.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well one nice thing about complicated decisions is boom go big.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Boom go big.
BEN KISSEL
And isn't that easy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I like about complicated decisions? Sometimes you just make them simple.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just going like I don't wanna, I like that one.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like you'd be surprised how like so many huge decisions come down to some very important person going I like that one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's it.
MARCUS PARKS
That's it.
BEN KISSEL
For whatever reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's why he wants to do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's also why it was so incredibly complicated because the decision to put Truman on the ticket was made at the Democratic Party convention.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And FDR knew that we almost have the bomb, whoever is president next is gonna have the bomb. But he can't tell anybody that he's got the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He can't tell anybody.
MARCUS PARKS
He can't say that the person that comes up next is gonna have an incredible fucking responsibility.
BEN KISSEL
That's fucking trippy.
MARCUS PARKS
So he basically is like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He found out on day of. They're like hey, just so you know, you're president now. Yeah, I know all this stuff, he just died, blah, blah, blah, that's really, really intense. There's this thing called the atomic bomb, we're about to have it. Pause on this, we're gonna come right back to you. And Harry S. Truman is sitting there like what?
BEN KISSEL
What the fuck?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they had to tell him over several days.
BEN KISSEL
Man.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing-
BEN KISSEL
That's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Truman had seen the edges of the Manhattan Project because he was Chair of the Committee on Military Affairs. He had seen that there was this project that a lot of money was getting spent on. He's like what's that thing? And they're like meh, don't worry about it.
BEN KISSEL
Need to know basis and you don't need to know.
MARCUS PARKS
And when he became vice president, he was told like hey, there's this thing called the Manhattan Project. You'll find out about it one day.
BEN KISSEL
And he did a great bit about how if it was the Queens Project it would be more like a zeppole. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, because he was president they're all like incredible, that's the best bit I've ever heard. Make it a shirt.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's incredible.
BEN KISSEL
That's fun though when the conventions, before they were all a ruse.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And they would actually promote somebody new. Like that must have been like stunning.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that must have been fun.
BEN KISSEL
When they're Like Delaware goes for Truman! And then people were like whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When they were trying to like actually run the country.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it was kinda fun.
MARCUS PARKS
But just after FDR died, same day in fact, Truman was given the full scope of just what had been going on in the deserts of New Mexico for the last few years.
BEN KISSEL
He's literally just getting done bouncing in the President's chair, just being like la-la-la-la-la.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Thankfully on the same day that FDR died, Otto Frisch had given Oppenheimer a report on the success of the dragon experiment. So not only was Truman told of the Manhattan Project, he was told that holy fuck, this thing actually works. So if you want to destroy an entire city with one bomb, you can.
BEN KISSEL
This is the best day of my life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's incredible!
MARCUS PARKS
Actually they have released journal entries from Harry S. Truman, but him writing right after finding out about the Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And you can feel the terror that he has.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's a lot of responsibility.
MARCUS PARKS
In holding this responsibility.
BEN KISSEL
It's a lot of responsibility.
MARCUS PARKS
It was like you can feel the terror of like I wish I wouldn't have said yes to this. This is horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now after it became clear that the bomb was an inevitability, the scientists at Los Alamos, Niels Bohr chief among them, tried convincing the US officials that we needed to share what we knew about nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union so as to prevent a nuclear arms race and an eventual nuclear holocaust.
BEN KISSEL
And boy, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Oh wow.
BEN KISSEL
Really.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jumped on that, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the thing is, had Henry Wallace been president-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's somewhat likely that this might have happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, all of history would be very different.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But as it was, Bohr was waved off and told to come back later, while he and the rest of the scientists moved on to further calculations concerning how to maximize the destruction of the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Danish accent) Help, I've gotten my head stuck in a staircase! Help!
BEN KISSEL
Goddamnit, Bohr!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Danish accent) I just... Ah! But take my advice, we have to share.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah? All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Danish accent) Listen, if you just get the butter and put it on my ears-
BEN KISSEL
I'm gonna get the butter. I was gonna get the butter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Danish accent) Yes, I am very firmly jammed.
BEN KISSEL
We know you are.
MARCUS PARKS
Basically an atomic bomb doesn't work like a conventional bomb and it doesn't go boom when it hits the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because up to this point bombs are fairly an exact science.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like you really just blew shit up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. You just drop it, it goes (splat), and that's it.
BEN KISSEL
Well you got your ear burst, which is a very controversial Starburst flavor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, I don't like it.
BEN KISSEL
Land burst. There's a whole bunch of bursts.
MARCUS PARKS
Well instead of all that, the bomb had to be detonated manually. But if you detonate the bomb too soon after dropping it, it wastes its energy burning up oxygen in the sky. It's also going to blow up the plane. But you detonate it too low and you only create a radioactive crater in the ground.
BEN KISSEL
And that just really, I mean that just makes you die in like five years after a whole bunch of cancer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're wasting it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well what you wanted for maximum wow factor was to explode it at just the right height where the energy expended has a chance to travel as far out as possible and to send the resulting shockwave as far out as possible. This both vaporizes anything organic in the immediate blast, then it destroys anything in the shockwave radius.
BEN KISSEL
That is the sonic boom, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's the sonic boom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And remember you're saying that in a scientist's cadence of how exciting this would be.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it is crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause J. Robert Oppenheimer, for all of his, obviously his belief in human rights movements and all of the stuff that he worked on, there was this fascination.
MARCUS PARKS
There was a giddiness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a giddiness of like we want it to not only work but we want it to work in its best ability.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's the people that are creating AI right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
They're all like this is gonna be really bad. Let's get back to work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's get back to work. It's not done yet.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when FDR died, Germany was all but beat. So we knew we wouldn't be using the bomb on European soil. And besides that, to put it in as blunt as terms as possible, the idea of dropping the bomb on white people made everyone a little less gung ho about using it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, man.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was definitely, that was a part of the fact for certain.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So when it came to where it would be dropped, America switched focus to the enemy that we'd spent four years dehumanizing completely, the Japanese. And research began to decide which city or cities might be the best target.
BEN KISSEL
I'm looking at you, Bugs Bunny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it also happened outside of the president's purview. These things were already set in motion. The Manhattan Project was just rolling.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one gave a fuck, no one tried to stop anything. And so while Truman started the philosophizing of what are we gonna do with the bomb after and now and blah, blah, blah, they're already choosing targets and in the most like brutal way possible.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now in order for the bomb to have maximum psychological effect, General Groves wanted a city that was mostly military in nature but had not already been bombed to shit so as to show the full destructive potential of an atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They wanted the show, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually it came down to the ancient imperial city of Kyoto or the mostly industrial city of Hiroshima. Kyoto was fortunately spared at the insistence of Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
BEN KISSEL
I like to vacation there during the summertime. Have you been there in the summer?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kinda like that.
MARCUS PARKS
It's actually a lot like that. He said it's a beautiful city, it's full of history, it would be a crime against humanity to destroy Kyoto.
BEN KISSEL
See? Art does save lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does.
MARCUS PARKS
And I've been to Kyoto and I'm very-
BEN KISSEL
Have you?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No shit?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's right, after Australia last time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Kyoto-
BEN KISSEL
Gorgeous?
MARCUS PARKS
It is an incredible city. I've never seen anything like it.
BEN KISSEL
Were they scared of you when you came? When you arrived?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's been some time.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, good.
MARCUS PARKS
No, not at all. The people of Kyoto were actually wonderful.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wanna go.
BEN KISSEL
I heard I'm too big.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they'll all be like ride the dragon. Oh see, look at him, he comes from the mountain.
BEN KISSEL
I'm gonna be held captive and be forced to perform.
MARCUS PARKS
So the Secretary of War, he nixes Kyoto.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. It's too pretty.
MARCUS PARKS
Hiroshima on the other hand was historically a military city. And in 1945 the second general army was stationed in Hiroshima for the defense of western Japan. When it came to civilians though, Hiroshima was also a center of education, second only to Tokyo.
BEN KISSEL
I mean Americans are like who gives a fuck?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly.
BEN KISSEL
We can blow that up.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a lot of students. Nevertheless, Hiroshima became target number one. But right around that time, just weeks after FDR died, Adolf Hitler committed suicide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Swish swish, quotation marks.
BEN KISSEL
I've seen some pictures of a man that looks just like him in Argentina.
MARCUS PARKS
And with that, the western theater of the war came to a close.
BEN KISSEL
It's over!
MARCUS PARKS
Europe's done! It's over!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We did it! Yay!
BEN KISSEL
Nazis, you ain't so good anymore but anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Anymore?
BEN KISSEL
That's good. Oh ever!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good. Excellent. We saw the gleam in his eyes.
BEN KISSEL
You know what? Let's just move on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a numbers game.
BEN KISSEL
It is a numbers game. Also I wish that they would have a little plaque for his burial, it's just underneath the goddamn-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's underneath-
BEN KISSEL
A parking lot.
MARCUS PARKS
No, there is a bit of a-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now they finally put a placard.
BEN KISSEL
Did they put a plaque there?
MARCUS PARKS
It's not a plaque, it's more of an info card.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Because people were going-
MARCUS PARKS
I saw it when we were in Berlin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were trying not to promote the site where his dead body was.
BEN KISSEL
I get it, I get it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then eventually so many people just go, they just put up a sign.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And it shows you a diagram of the bunker.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's like low income housing which has gotta be extremely depressing as you just drive past, being like the site of Hitler's suicide.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Each day you come back with milk.
BEN KISSEL
You guys were the ones in Dallas stopping traffic, pretending you were getting shot in the head like JFK.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. That was kinda fun.
MARCUS PARKS
But right adjacent to the Hitler suicide spot is a beautiful Holocaust memorial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
It's absolutely gorgeous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I walked that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I walked through that.
MARCUS PARKS
But even There is a, it's not a plaque. It's more of an info card because they were trying not to promote the site of where his dead body was. But then though the Germans had been the impetus for the Manhattan Project, their defeat hastened the speed of the bomb's construction even more. The motivation for this was both entirely understandable and extremely human. See the American people were quite simply done with war. While it was super cool that Hitler was dead, don't get me wrong, that's fucking awesome-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's cool. I'm just done with this season of war. I'm done with the show. Can we get a new cast?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can we just wrap this up?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Please.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the American people were being told over and over and over again that it was gonna take no less than a million lives over the course of a few years to fully defeat Japan because of the tenacity displayed in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we're already selling this to the people.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
We're selling it very, very hard to the American people.
BEN KISSEL
I really hope this season's final episode just has a big conclusion and we can just end it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just an explosive ending, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Like explosive, yeah. Like a Michael Bay ending.
MARCUS PARKS
Well and they're selling it at both ends. They're selling it in a way where like they've spent four years turning the Japanese into monsters, like absolute fucking demons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But they're also trying to hit it from a humanitarian angle of like well if we bomb Japan, then we're actually gonna be saving lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that was the thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Saving Japanese lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They said do you want us to kill Japanese people or do you want American people to die? That is kind of the crux that they put against it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And it was also do you want us to kill a million Japanese people in bombing or do you want us to kill 5 million Japanese people in hand to hand combat?
BEN KISSEL
Right. Let's just get it done, that's the strategy there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I say we just get them fat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what we should have said. Corn meal.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, yeah. Sugar substitutes, let's talk about that. Glucose, corn syrup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The real atomic weapon.
BEN KISSEL
It really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The hidden sugars in our food.
BEN KISSEL
They are killing us and there's no reason why we should eat different chocolate than they do in Europe.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
There's no reason why all of our candy sucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it does.
BEN KISSEL
I'm upset with the sugar.
MARCUS PARKS
The European stuff is incredible. But there was also-
BEN KISSEL
Thanks Chuck fucking Grassley, who's still not dead.
MARCUS PARKS
But there was also another human reason to finish work on the bomb, although this one was far less emotional. The Secretary of State put it simply, we spent $2 billion on this goddamn bomb and Congress is gonna want to see a big goddamn boom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
This is like when you show up to Disney World and it's raining and you got tickets and you're like we're going in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I spent $2500, we're gonna have fucking fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay? We're gonna have fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're smiling.
BEN KISSEL
Is your ice cream wet?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're blowing shit up.
BEN KISSEL
Your ice cream is wet? Why don't you eat that ice cream.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to that point, Robert Oppenheimer himself had interestingly come to the belief that the atomic bomb was, in his words, "shit". That was an exact quote.
BEN KISSEL
Shit.
MARCUS PARKS
The atomic bomb is shit because it had no military use beyond creating a very big bang that killed a lot of people all at once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Shit, maybe it's the night before you eat a bunch of Taco Bell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And here's like how this shithead who wrote the book that's saying that the Hiroshima bombings didn't happen, this is how he used that as another reason why the bombings didn't happen. "The man had devoted years of his life and his entire professional reputation to the project, how could he say it was shit? How could he doubt its military value? If he thought super weapons were shit, why sign on the project in the first place? Or if he really believed it was a super weapon that could never be used, surely a brain of his stature would grasp that even if never used, such an object would be of huge military value in the larger strategic sense of intimidation, deterrent, etc. If it were never used, so much the better. But we have it directly from arguably the greatest military mind of all time that it was shit."
BEN KISSEL
All right. And that book written by Casey Anthony. Casey Anthony. I'm happy she's getting into history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It is nice, it is nice.
BEN KISSEL
It is, isn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's looking thick these days. She's out there.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe she's stressed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There some pictures of her on mother's day. I'm not saying like bad pictures.
BEN KISSEL
There's pictures of her on mother's day?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, there was pictures of her out there.
BEN KISSEL
I thought that was she could take off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically she looks great.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's looking good on her.
MARCUS PARKS
Well really the only-
BEN KISSEL
Who's the father? No one's ever asked that.
MARCUS PARKS
Who's the father?
BEN KISSEL
Who the fuck is Caylee Anthony's father? We'll have to get into that at some point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that was answered.
BEN KISSEL
I have never asked that question once.
MARCUS PARKS
It was answered kinda.
BEN KISSEL
It's not the DJ.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It wasn't.
BEN KISSEL
Anyway, I'm sorry, we'll go back.
MARCUS PARKS
It was kinda sorta answered. I don't think anyone took responsibility for it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. And that's really the whole story, isn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Much like the atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Indeed. Thank you, Henry. We're back at it.
MARCUS PARKS
But really the only purpose that Robert Oppenheimer saw for the atomic bomb was to put the Russians on notice. But even though it was all but decided that America was going to use the bomb on the Japanese, the biggest debate was whether or not we were going to warn the Japanese before we used it.
BEN KISSEL
Just to be polite.
MARCUS PARKS
Well-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well just because it was weird, they really were like hey, just so you know, we're gonna come in there.
BEN KISSEL
Because also to that point, then they also kind of did know this is part of the performance, they called war a theater for a reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a performance.
BEN KISSEL
And they were like this is going to be a big message to them, to the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Well most of the Manhattan Project scientists and even some in government thought it was only fair and mostly most of all humane to warn the Japanese that we were in possession of a weapon of incredible power that we would definitely use if they didn't surrender. But from a military perspective, it was decided that the Japanese would not be informed of a killshot bomb. Because if we made a big stink about this new weapon and it ended up being a dud, it would weaken our military position worldwide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was about our rep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
There is a, it's not a plaque. It's more of an info card because they were trying not to promote the site of where his dead body was. But then though the Germans had been the impetus for the Manhattan Project, their defeat hastened the speed of the bomb's construction even more. The motivation for this was both entirely understandable and extremely human. See the American people were quite simply done with war. While it was super cool that Hitler was dead, don't get me wrong, that's fucking awesome-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Disturbingly veiny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And massive, militarily speaking of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Militarily speaking.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I do have that survey, our penises are 5.4 inches on average, which is 60th out of the 90 nations that they studied.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is militarily.
BEN KISSEL
We still beat the British.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, this is about mental penises.
MARCUS PARKS
Mental penises.
BEN KISSEL
I mean there's a reason all missiles look like big dicks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I think it's because that's how they fly correctly through the air.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's just the best way to fly. If they were to fly best as vaginas, they would be shaped like vaginas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That'd be cool!
BEN KISSEL
We call this one the Brett Favre, it goes slightly to the left.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do you think Hillary Clinton would have done? If she was president.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, she would've killed people with the vagina bombs. That's only fair. Women can kill too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We put the uranium in this upper area, I don't know what this is, this upper area under this hood, the little bump of uranium.
BEN KISSEL
That's an episode of South Park actually.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Put a bomb in her pussy.
MARCUS PARKS
Nice. Well as such, by June 1st, even before the first atomic bomb test was completed, Truman decided that the atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan and he would soon take steps to ensure that the Japanese would quote unquote "make him do it".
BEN KISSEL
He finished his peas and then he was like let me out of this high chair! I've got a decision to make.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me out of here! Let me out of this cage!
BEN KISSEL
Let me out of here.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when it came to testing the world's first atomic bomb, most accounts make it seem like Trinity was tested right outside of Los Alamos, but the actual site was 240 miles away in New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto Valley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Death's passage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Now initially Oppenheimer set the test for July 4th, 1945.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loves a moment.
MARCUS PARKS
He does. Didn't end up happening though. But when Oppenheimer's brother Frank showed up to help in May, he found hundreds of people furiously setting up an intricate testing site to detonate the bomb, all while the plutonium was en route from Hanford site in Washington State. Now perhaps to add some levity to a deadly serious endeavor, senior scientists placed bets on how powerful the atomic blast was gonna be. Because truthfully none of them had a firm idea of how big the boom was gonna be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they did not know. They really didn't. They tested other versions of it, of like a bomb. So they tried to build huge, huge bombs and try to kind of see like what's the biggest explosion we can make? And they did that and they're like okay, so what if that's like 1000 times like that? Then they try to conjecture. Because this invented a whole field of explosive radius tests and all this kind of shit.
BEN KISSEL
It's like when you got a really great bit and you're like this is gonna crush. But then you do it and it doesn't work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, people get all mad.
BEN KISSEL
Because you just don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You just don't know. Or you do it and it does very, very well and next thing you know you're Larry the Cable Guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's it.
BEN KISSEL
And now you're forced to be this guy who says 'get her done' all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really strange.
BEN KISSEL
And in reality, he was a vegan when he started that character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He never converted to Larry the Streamer Guy.
BEN KISSEL
No. Nope, he never did.
MARCUS PARKS
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
He never did. But he was a vegan before he created that character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I know.
BEN KISSEL
He created that character and now he east a bunch of meat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kayfabe, baby.
BEN KISSEL
All kayfabe.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Well one scientist picked the equivalent of 45,000 tons of TNT. Another picked 8000. Robert Oppenheimer, he went Price Is Right style, he said 300.
BEN KISSEL
He didn't say one? One!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One.
MARCUS PARKS
One technician went even further, saying that Trinity was gonna be a dud. Fuck you, it's not gonna work.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just being like I don't need this shit right now. Can't you see? I'm already rail thin! I've been crying over my communist girlfriend, she's sad.
BEN KISSEL
It is sad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's such a sad bitch.
BEN KISSEL
It's sad. Well technically that is The Price Is Right. He went dud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always go up.
BEN KISSEL
So that's the one, he's going low.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But you can't bet zero though.
BEN KISSEL
You can't bet zero.
MARCUS PARKS
You gotta bet at least one.
BEN KISSEL
I would say one would be equivalent to a dud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
No, one would be equivalent to a ton of TNT, that's still quite a large explosion.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but not-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But not enough.
BEN KISSEL
It's not on the cover of TIME Magazine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it came to place some bets, Enrico Fermi was apparently in a playful mood that day. In full earshot of guards and military personnel who barely knew what was going on, he started saying that he wanted to bet on whether or not the atmosphere itself was going to be ignited by the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, come on.
MARCUS PARKS
And if it did, would it just destroy New Mexico or the entire planet?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Italian accent) Think about it, how mad is the moon a-gonna be? When it gets shy it cannot a- show what it's like to be a pizza pie.
BEN KISSEL
I really wish you didn't dress like Pinocchio during that.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this little anecdote has been twisted over the years to mean that the Manhattan Project scientists didn't know whether or not the Trinity test was gonna light the entire world on fire. But that's not true. The calculations had been done long before the Trinity test that showed that this doomsday scenario was effectively impossible. But the fact that they even had to do the calculations in the first place is indeed incredibly frightening.
BEN KISSEL
It's kind of fun to think about. It's kind of fun to think about.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when it came to who was most frightened by the success of the test, none of the site was more nervous than test leader Ken Bainbridge. He knew that if the bomb didn't go off, or worse if it hang fired, it would be his responsibility to drive out to the bomb by himself to see what had gone wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I elect Ken!
BEN KISSEL
All right guys, who's coming with me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Last hand up! Last hand up! You guys gotta go! Last hand up has gotta go!
BEN KISSEL
Oh goddamn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry, Ken.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Oppenheimer meanwhile was nervous as well because after all, this whole thing had been his baby. In the weeks leading up to the test, he'd been reading verses from a Hindu scripture called the Bhagavad Gita, which Oppenheimer had been using since college as a sort of calm down text.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've never been able to say that word. Bhagavad Gita. Bhagavad Gita.
MARCUS PARKS
Bhagavad Gita.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a very important book.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But once the kinks were worked out with the bomb and it seemed as if all was well, Oppenheimer's demeanor changed. There was a small delay because of weather, but when General Groves asked Oppenheimer if the weather was gonna hold out for the Trinity test, Oppenheimer said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"The weather is whimsical."
BEN KISSEL
No, it's not whimsical. The weather is fucking brutal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like rabbits can talk.
BEN KISSEL
Whimsical?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
You call the dust storms that happened in Texas whimsical?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I had a little creature told me to go and kiss my girlfriend.
BEN KISSEL
I hate Oppenheimer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's time! It's time!
BEN KISSEL
You know there's gonna be a movie about you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hope it's a musical.
MARCUS PARKS
And so at dawn on July 16th, 1945, all the top scientists of the Manhattan Project plus a select group of 10 guests, very select guest list-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Chuckle Hut!
BEN KISSEL
The Chuckle Hut. I'm just here for the shrimp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They huddled in trenches that were anywhere between five and 20 miles from ground zero. The Trinity bomb, still known as the gadget, was sitting atop a tower to maximize the blast radius. Then at 5:25 AM the countdown started. All present were told to lie down on the desert sand and turn their faces away while burying their heads in their arms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, head down, ass up.
BEN KISSEL
That's the way I like the bomb, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like how you're supposed to take that bomb, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Some complied but most didn't. Some just put on sunscreen.
BEN KISSEL
Have they not read the parable of Sodom and Gomorrah?
MARCUS PARKS
Richard Feynman just sat behind a fucking windshield.
BEN KISSEL
That is funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He's crazy, he's crazy.
BEN KISSEL
He's just hanging out, he didn't care.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally though-
BEN KISSEL
There just one guy gonna light a cigarette on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's gonna be fun as hell.
BEN KISSEL
It's gonna be great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he's just a flaming skeleton. Like my calculations were off.
BEN KISSEL
And the cigarette didn't light.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally though at 5:30 AM exactly, the first atomic bomb in history ignited.
BEN KISSEL
Yes! How am I supposed to feel? I was again here just for the shrimp.
MARCUS PARKS
A physicist present said that he saw an enormous flash of light, the brightest that he or anyone in history had ever seen. He said that it was a vision that was seen with more than the eye. It seemed to last forever to the point where you wished it would stop. And you know how long that flash lasted? Two seconds.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Just was burned into his brain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's pure energy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But it was soon followed by an enormous ball of fire that rolled as it grew up into the air in menacing yellow, scarlet, and green flashes. The physicist said that he felt as if a new thing had been born, a new control which man had acquired over nature!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(scary chanting) Meanwhile one guy is like where are the hot dogs?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, where are the hot dogs?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I eat these? Can I eat these shrimps?
BEN KISSEL
Are these still fresh? Nature still wins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, nature did win.
BEN KISSEL
I will take nature in general over anything that humans can create.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause radiation is kind of natural.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was reading about the building of polonium and stuff and all this kinda stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where like they pull this stuff out, technically that poison, we just kind of release it.
BEN KISSEL
And nature is like thank you, I'm gonna add this to the arsenal when we have our next tornadoes that roll through Kansas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Frank Oppenheimer described the cloud as brilliant purple, that was of course because it was glowing with radiation. And the thunder from the blast seemed to eternally echo through the canyon where the bomb was detonated. Now the legend is that upon the detonation of the bomb, Robert Oppenheimer cinematically uttered a chilling line from the Bhagavad Gita. But that's not exactly what happened. Oppenheimer later recalled that when the blast passed, he and the others solemnly walked out of their shelter into a changed world. Some people laughed, some people cried, but most were silent. As for Oppenheimer himself, he said he remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita in which the Hindu god Vishnu is trying to persuade a prince that he should do his duty. To make the argument, Vishnu takes on their multi-armed form-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(metal guitar riff)
MARCUS PARKS
And utters the line that has become so famous in the decades since. "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fucking cool, it's the darkest and fucking most intense a nerd's ever been.
BEN KISSEL
It's cool. It is cool.
MARCUS PARKS
But he just thought that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just thought that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He's not saying it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I can't wait to be in hospice and doing the thing in my mind, thinking I'm gonna say either those drapes go or I do. And then you die. But I know my last word is just gonna be like oh fuck! Oh it hurts!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm fucking shitting!
BEN KISSEL
No but you need to be able to change your drapes. It's your room, you pay a lot of money for that room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
But please, when the nurse comes in, put your pants on. We've got a lot of complaints, Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They call me David Copperfield.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as Oppenheimer put it, all those present at the Trinity test thought something like I am become death in one way or another.
BEN KISSEL
Sure. It sounds like they did, so yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Heavy situation.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as what he actually said, from what Oppenheimer's brother remembered, Oppenheimer's first words were, he just said it worked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It works.
BEN KISSEL
It works.
MARCUS PARKS
That's it.
BEN KISSEL
That's good.
MARCUS PARKS
However while Oppenheimer painted himself as a solemn individual contemplating his place in human history, a physicist named Isidor Rabi remembered that when Oppenheimer returned to the Los Alamos lab, he was strutting around like it was the end of high noon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! Somebody is the big swinging dick in this fucking room. Yep. Started as math, hen it went boom. And who did it? Old Oppy and his big swinging fucking dong.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So all y'all go fuck yourself. I'm gonna go read some Marx.
BEN KISSEL
It would be a moment of pride I suppose.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as who won the bet though, the blast was actually four times larger than what they thought it would be.
BEN KISSEL
Oh so whoever bet the highest actually also bet the lowest by Price is Right rules. They still won.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They won.
MARCUS PARKS
THat's right, yeah. Trinity turned the desert sand into a light green reflective glass that they ended up calling Trinitite.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
If you look up a picture of Trinitite, it looks like if scabs were made of boogers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cool looking.
BEN KISSEL
If scabs... Marcus, you're gross.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's what it looks like!
BEN KISSEL
If scabs were made of boogers?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Scabs are made out of boogers.
BEN KISSEL
That's so gross.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as the damage done goes, Trinity eviscerated jack rabbits 800 yards away, tore the doors loose from a farmhouse 3 miles away, caused temporary blindness 9 miles away, and it caused severe damage to eyeballs 5 miles away. At 1000 yards, pine boards set up to test destructive power were completely charred. And at even 1500 yards, exposed surfaces heated almost instantly to 750 F. In other words, the scientists knew exactly what dropping an atomic bomb in the middle of a city was gonna do immediately.
BEN KISSEL
It's gonna lead to a victory.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as how much they knew or how much they allowed themselves to know about what would happen a week, a month, a year, or a decade later, that's a little harder to sus out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But as Robert Oppenheimer says, it was not his job.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was not his job. His job was to make the bomb and deliver the bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Great. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But nevertheless once the Trinity test was a success, a 15 ft crate containing most of the Little Boy bomb assembly was loaded onto the ill fated USS Indianapolis on its way to Tinian Island.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow!
BEN KISSEL
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I forgot! I forgot!
BEN KISSEL
Oh no! That's a ghost ship, my friend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god! It's like a fucking cameo from another series.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like when Steve Urkel was on Step by Step.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I remember that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. For new listeners, you can find the full story of that harrowing tale in our archives as to what happened to the USS Indianapolis after they drop Little Boy off at the island of Tinian.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They brought the fucking uranium in a lead bucket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's where it goes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now on the same day at the Trinity Test, Harry Truman was present at another fateful event. He, Churchill, and Stalin were attending the Potsdam Conference to decide what was to be done with Germany now that the war in Europe was over.
BEN KISSEL
Do we tickle? Should we just tickle her feet?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was thinking of that, yeah. I just want to take pictures of all their feet obviously.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah of course, obviously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then honestly I want to see him pull taffy.
BEN KISSEL
Better idea, what if we just give them bunches and bunches of money so they can kind of rebuild?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think we're gonna have to.
BEN KISSEL
Perfect.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It was called the Marshall Plan.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. What a way to punish somebody for trying to take over the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Well actually if you want to know more about all that, our next series on No Dogs In Space is gonna go way into what happened to Germany after the war and the Marshall Plan and all that shit. And how it essentially created electronic music.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're just going to eventually completely cover every decade.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're just gonna eventually grow-
MARCUS PARKS
The network as a whole, by the time we're done with this shit, we will have covered the entirety of human history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think so.
MARCUS PARKS
At the very least we'll have covered the entirety of the 20th century. But for the purposes of this story, Potsdam was also a meeting to decide how the Allies were gonna finish off Japan. Now by this point in the war, Japan was standing alone. Italy had long since been finished off and Hitler's corpse was either ashes in a ditch or secreted away to some Soviet meat locker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Certainly not in Uruguay!
BEN KISSEL
Argentina.
MARCUS PARKS
But either way, Japan had no allies. And to put it simply, everyone around them, they were pretty pissed off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I think everyone was frustrated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody was mad.
MARCUS PARKS
China was a little miffed about the whole Rape of Nanking thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd be.
MARCUS PARKS
And everything that went along with it. Korea hadn't been too happy about all that enslavement business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's some of the worst business you can get involved in outside of the restaurant business. Extremely volatile.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. A lot of the times they go hand in hand.
MARCUS PARKS
Russia was ready to invade along with America, and since Japan had been the aggressors in this war, they had no moral standing internationally. No one was helping out Japan. That's not to mention the fact that Japan's Navy and Air Force was relatively non-existent and even if they did have ships and planes, they didn't have any oil or gas to put in the ships and planes.
BEN KISSEL
You're gonna want that.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's also not to mention the fact that the actual people of Japan were rapidly starving to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now this may sound like an extremely insensitive thing to say-
BEN KISSEL
Why are you pointing at me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they're perfect for an atomic bomb because they can't defend themselves. So that is the most brutal, fucked up way you can look at it where not only do we get to flex to the world what we can do and what we've created, but also they can't fuck it up on our way to go do it.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're sitting there waiting for it.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've been playing a lot of CIV VI.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When you finally get to the atomic era in CIV VI and you really do, because that's what I do, I save it. I always kind of built it, I've destroyed a bunch of other countries around me.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I always kind of know that there's a smaller country that I need to go wipe out of my way to a domination victory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And by that point, I'm weeks ahead of them.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I remember getting a little snack and I repour my drink. I put the atomic weapon on the plane, I fly it over.
MARCUS PARKS
It's really fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a really fun afternoon.
BEN KISSEL
Really classy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's really fun. What I like to do is play CIV VI as the Japanese and then have them drop the atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's much better to do it, it's fun to change things.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it is.
BEN KISSEL
It was a very racist policy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, it's not good.
BEN KISSEL
It's very racist.
MARCUS PARKS
It's fucking awful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's one of the worst crimes of humankind.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Additionally, contrary to popular belief, Secretary of War Henry Stimson knew that Japan was not a country of mad fanatics willing to fight to the last man, woman, and child. He openly said that they were an extremely intelligent people whose transition from an isolated country to a world power in just a few decades had been astonishing, even if that transition had been at times horrifically bloody and brutal. Therefore Stimson concluded that when it came to surrender terms, America should first warn Japan that a horrific bomb attack worse than even the firebombing of Tokyo was in the cards if they chose not to surrender. But if they did surrender, Stimson suggested very strongly that they should be given the option of keeping a constitutional monarchy, much like England.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now this was gonna be an issue, especially with Harry S. Truman.
BEN KISSEL
Sticky point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this was the basic equivalent of an unconditional surrender because at the end of the day, who really gives a shit if the emperor is quote unquote "in charge"? Does it really fucking matter if Queen Elizabeth is in charge or if King Charles is in charge? Nothing changed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, the only person I want is The Charles in charge. From television.
MARCUS PARKS
Scott Baio, controversial figure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Controversial figure.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
Problematic man. Very problematic man.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know enough about him. I haven't thought about him in a long time.
MARCUS PARKS
But in the end it's really all symbolic and that went double for the Japanese. Therefore it shouldn't have been a problem to keep a constitutional monarchy, it shouldn't have mattered. And the Soviet Union was ready to mediate a deal between the Japanese and the Americans.
BEN KISSEL
You know things are bad when the Soviets are like let's calm down, guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's all think about this.
BEN KISSEL
Come on, find a rational place here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And there were people within the Japanese government that were absolutely ready to go, the emperor was ready to go. But as I said earlier, Truman and the rest of his future Cold Warriors wanted to force Japan's hand and they knew just how to do it. They played harshly on the Japanese concept of honor by demanding a completely unconditional surrender, basically telling the Japanese to sniff our butts and like it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And sometimes you do but most of the times you don't.
BEN KISSEL
I mean ironically enough I think that's the number one game show in Japan right now. Sniff Our Butts and Like It. They do. They have a funny relationship with butts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do like butts.
MARCUS PARKS
They really do, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But I love butts.
MARCUS PARKS
And they love sniffing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do.
MARCUS PARKS
There's a lot of Japanese game show clips that I've seen that have a lot to do with smell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of smells.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And they wouldn't have those shows without us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, thankfully. That's the one good thing about the atomic bomb. But he said that basically, maybe I might be wrong, but I feel like Truman was trying to say part of this unconditional surrender is that your people have to vote for a new leadership. Like basically we're getting rid of the imperial family.
BEN KISSEL
They're spreading freedom, democracy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quote unquote, yes. Which is again the beginnings of this idea of we're gonna go and just replace your government as something, even if it hurts you, as long as it's pro-us, that's kind of what we get to do because we made the atomic bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Well at the very base level of it, what they did, the Japanese could not stand, what they couldn't say yes to was an unconditional surrender. They needed something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. They needed something.
MARCUS PARKS
They needed a shred of something to retain like a shred of honor.
BEN KISSEL
Dignity, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
A little bit of dignity. And Truman knew-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he wanted to push them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he knew that if we give an unconditional surrender, they're gonna say no, no matter what.
BEN KISSEL
They wanted to drop the bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
They wanted to drop it.
BEN KISSEL
That's all it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They wanted to do it.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
They want to drop the bomb and they knew this is how they could do it.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's what you said, they made him make them do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the declaration said the alternative to surrender was prompt and utter destruction. But they did not say what prompt and utter destruction meant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Is that like figuratively, like you're gonna read me to filth? Like are you gonna give 1 star to my podcast so it drops?
BEN KISSEL
That's horrible to do that.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Japanese rejected the terms of complete unconditional surrender just like everyone knew they would. And the American government therefore pretended like they didn't have any other choice but to drop the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've tied my hands.
BEN KISSEL
Yep. It's like when you sign up for fucking EA, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean love Sirius XM but they've been calling me and fucking calling me.
BEN KISSEL
Have they really?
MARCUS PARKS
They call me so much, they call all the time.
BEN KISSEL
Sirius XM does?
MARCUS PARKS
They call all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very similar.
BEN KISSEL
It's weird.
MARCUS PARKS
As the Americans put it, they were actually saving Japanese lives because the military were training every able bodied person on the mainland to fight with sharpened bamboo sticks to the death if an American land invasion came.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is where we inspired them to do a Toyotathon.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the idea is we just say they need to expand the prices right before but then you cut them right before, then you say you're saving money.
BEN KISSEL
Toyotathon. Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
And the thing is they were training the people to do this but it was more propaganda, it was more morale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There are videos of a bunch of women and children with these sharpened bamboo sticks, going through the motions.
BEN KISSEL
It's comical.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all shot in Los Angeles.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, it is very real but given the US artillery.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were defending themselves.
BEN KISSEL
It was not comparable.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm willing to bet that while some would have fought... But let's also not pretend like the Japanese are the good guys here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, they did fucked up shit. Everybody-
MARCUS PARKS
The Japanese did some really fucking horrible shit.
BEN KISSEL
It's WWII.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's WWII.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one got out clean.
BEN KISSEL
No one.
MARCUS PARKS
But at the end of the day, I'm willing to bet that while some of these people on the Japanese mainland would have fought to the death, it probably would have been closer to what the Germans got when they called up the Volkssturm, the People's Militia. A few people are gonna show up but not a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's gonna be old people and children.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's actually really fucked up for then our soldiers to go and shoot all of these people. Like none of them are trained.
BEN KISSEL
With any luck, you'll find a wife. And a family.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's certainly not enough to justify the horror show that was to come.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
But through propaganda and self justification, America gave the go-ahead to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Now the Air Force knew that the Manhattan Project wasn't going to be a secret after the bomb was dropped.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So General Groves actually invited photographers and journalists to the island of Tinian to record the takeoff for prosperity. The guys boarding the Enola Gay felt like celebrities, flash bulbs are going off.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
They're saluting, they're smiling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they're literally saying, it's like this this thing of like aren't we all happy with what we've all figured out?
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they all knew everything was going to be different the second the bomb was dropped.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And so after making their way through a crowd of reporters and photographers, the bomb crew boarded the Enola Gay which had been named after the pilot's mother. Her name was an Enola Gay.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you for clarifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Her name was Enola.
MARCUS PARKS
Her name was Enola Gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Gay was the bar she went to.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
Along with the crew though were three scientists who had the task of assembling the last bits of the bomb on the way to Hiroshima because they didn't want to assemble the thing on the island.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Yeah, that makes sense because it's a big explosion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the only people on board who knew they were dropping an atomic bomb were the pilot and the three technicians. In fact, one of the technicians had a handgun in case of capture, so he and the others could check themselves out to keep the Manhattan Project secrets out of enemy hands.
BEN KISSEL
That's why I fly with a gun every single time, just in case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He does. He does. And you'd be surprised, they'll thank you.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like thank you for doing this.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See I would have done it with my fingers crossed and been like yeah, sure, yeah, I'll do that.
MARCUS PARKS
And so at 3 AM, two of the nuclear radioed Tinian Tower and said "judge going to work".
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
That signaled that the assembly of the bomb was underway in the bomb bay, thousands of feet above the Pacific Ocean. It took 11 steps to assemble the bomb. But as one technician put it, only a suicidal maniac would have made the assembly dangerous. That being said, that same technician was indeed handling explosive gunpowder right next to a nuclear weapon.
BEN KISSEL
Well if you can survive-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was just made! You remember, this bomb is brand new.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they are just assembling it all together for the very first time on its way to go drop it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And if you can get through that with your partner, maybe you guys have a chance. Maybe you have a chance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly, Natalie and I were talking, we're like how do we come together?
BEN KISSEL
Get IKEA furniture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What we did was that we just put together a sample atomic bomb in our home.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And honestly it's incredible the bonding.
MARCUS PARKS
Rough patch over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rough patch over.
BEN KISSEL
Done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And our neighbors are afraid.
BEN KISSEL
That's great cause now-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we've just been fucking right on their front lawns. And just showing them.
BEN KISSEL
The power of the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause I was like you could sniff my butt and you could like it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by 6 AM, the Enola Gay flew over Iwo Jima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Iwo Jima.
MARCUS PARKS
And was joined from that airfield by two more aircraft who were working as observation and instrument readers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Must mean there are calculations.
MARCUS PARKS
An hour and a half later, Little Boy was armed. Tibbets climbed to bomb altitude and leveled off at 32,700 ft, going only by sight because none of them were allowed to bring maps. Once at bombing height, the technician told Tibbets that the bomb was in order. And five minutes later, Hiroshima came into sight. At 9:15 AM, the bomb bay doors opened and Little Boy dropped. And as Tibbets bolted the Enola Gay upward, he had one thought. Now it is in the lap of the gods. And that's where we'll pick back up!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, okay!
MARCUS PARKS
For Part 5 of our series on the Manhattan Project!
BEN KISSEL
Okay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Wow!
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Well you know god, if he was out there, could have like grabbed it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) The night that Chicago died.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't believe we're here, next week we're gonna get to the day of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, what kind of happened afterwards. And we're putting this, we're shipping out-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the end of the Manhattan Project next week. I can't believe how far we've come.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe. Maybe the end.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Well you know what? Let's just do-
MARCUS PARKS
We're just gonna have to see because I got-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god, Marcus. I can't.
BEN KISSEL
He wants to get into shovels.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've just been reading so much.
BEN KISSEL
Because now after the bomb, then they're gonna have to shovel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing, Henry. Now you can move on from the bomb itself. Oppenheimer is done, man. He's out of the picture. His story is over with. Now you can get to the sloughing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Not you can be-
BEN KISSEL
I think we can just end it after that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sloughing Magazine is so hard to find.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well and I mean now you can't take picture of those sloughs without their consent.
MARCUS PARKS
Now you can get to the big dripping black dog that the kids thought was a dog but it was really their mom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I can't wait.
MARCUS PARKS
Now you can get to the people melting as they were falling into the river. Now you can get into the goopy, goopy, goopy river.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Finally, for my pool reading!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You can get into what is quite possible the most horrific week that mankind has ever witnessed, it's gonna get fucking rough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, were you there when James Corden got his show?
BEN KISSEL
That was almost as bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Talk about a bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Talk about a Fat Boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guys-
BEN KISSEL
Is it Long Boy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Check me out.
BEN KISSEL
Fat Kid?
MARCUS PARKS
It's Fat Man and Little Boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fat Man and Little Boy.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's another one who has little boy legs, fat man top.
BEN KISSEL
Can you imagine? That's the thing, if you're a little overweight, you cannot be rude to waitstaff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You really can't.
MARCUS PARKS
You really can't.
BEN KISSEL
You cannot be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Especially not about eggs.
BEN KISSEL
You can't if you're skinny, but especially...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wanna make a little bit of an announcement. I am going to be doing a live show, I believe I'm allowed to announce this. I'm doing it anyway because they haven't but it's coming up. Dad's Garage in Atlanta, I will be there July 7th-9th, I will be headlining, doing some improv shit. Come check it out. Go just ask them where the fucking tickets are, I'm gonna put up a link on my socials very soon, I'm very excited to do those shows. I know Kissel's going out and he's gonna go and do some shows himself.
BEN KISSEL
Well I'm selling tickets now, so I gotta go do this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're selling these goddamn tickets! You sell the fucking tickets!
BEN KISSEL
So July 9th in San Diego, July 16th in San Francisco, July 23rd in Las Vegas for my birthday weekend which I don't usually celebrate but perhaps I will then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're in Vegas.
BEN KISSEL
And then July 30th Ontario, California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We can't wait, man. Can't wait to do some bullshit.
BEN KISSEL
Come on out. And then Henry and I are going to be doing something as well that we will tell you about in the near future.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we got shit. We gotta get that going. But guys, wow. Good work.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh thank you.
BEN KISSEL
Good job, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS
Same for all.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. All right everyone, thank you all so much for listening. Hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Hail me.
BEN KISSEL
Never drop another bomb. No need to drop another bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't drop a bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No man, instead of dropping bombs, you need to drop sandwiches. Drop love. You can drop hugs.
MARCUS PARKS
Ooh, drop hugs. I like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hug patrol is coming through.
BEN KISSEL
That is the worst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We were gonna bomb you but instead we've come to hug.
BEN KISSEL
Nah, just bomb me.
MARCUS PARKS
Drop some turds, stay regular.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Take a shit instead.
BEN KISSEL
That's a good call.