John McManus, author of To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945 and host of the We Have Ways of Making You Talk in the USA podcast, joins the show to talk about why the U.S. Army’s war in the Pacific during WWII merit deeper study and recognition.▪️Times • 02:12 Introduction • 03:57 Lessons to be learned • 05:32 The Army from Pearl to Tokyo • 08:50 Winds of change • 14:07 Europe first • 21:16 Taiwan or the Philippines? • 27:55 Battleground Manila • 30:48 Bleeding the Americans • 34:56 Failures in China • 40:33 Chiang Kai-shek • 45:07 Okinawa • 48:06 Operation Downfall • 52:24 Revisionist and reductionist history • 55:19 Required readingFollow along on InstagramFind a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack
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This podcast seeks to learn what war teaches. There has been a steady decline in the study of military history and its associated theoretical discipline, strategy.This podcast seeks to fill that gap through in-depth interviews on military and diplomatic history. Our guests have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and former China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher. We discuss the battlefield commanders, diplomats, strategists, policymakers, and statesmen who have had to make wartime decisions in the ancient and modern eras. The subject of an episode may be an historical battle, campaign, o...