- 38 minutes ago
A captured American pilot’s desperate atomic bomb bluff reached Japan’s war cabinet and helped shape the final days of World War II. After being shot down over Osaka, First Lieutenant Marcus McDilda was interrogated by the Kempeitai and forced to answer questions he could not possibly know, so he invented a story about the bomb on the spot.
This military history narrative follows how that false account moved from one interrogation room to the highest levels of the Japanese government, where officers were already reeling from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Soviet declaration of war, and the growing fear of more B-29 raids. It also shows why the bluff sounded believable enough to matter, even after a scientist exposed it as nonsense.
Packed with WWII storytelling, prisoner-of-war history, and the final days of Japan’s surrender crisis, it is a gripping listen for fans of war stories, historical analysis, and narrated military history. The episode also fits searches for World War 2 stories, atomic bomb history, Pacific War history, and dramatic wartime true events.
SEO: For listeners looking for WW2 stories, military history narration, Pacific War history, and World War 2 documentary-style storytelling, this episode explores Marcus McDilda, the atomic bomb bluff, and the fear that spread through Japan’s leadership. It is ideal for history fans, wartime storytime, and anyone searching for narrated WWII stories, prisoner of war accounts, and atomic bomb history.
This military history narrative follows how that false account moved from one interrogation room to the highest levels of the Japanese government, where officers were already reeling from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Soviet declaration of war, and the growing fear of more B-29 raids. It also shows why the bluff sounded believable enough to matter, even after a scientist exposed it as nonsense.
Packed with WWII storytelling, prisoner-of-war history, and the final days of Japan’s surrender crisis, it is a gripping listen for fans of war stories, historical analysis, and narrated military history. The episode also fits searches for World War 2 stories, atomic bomb history, Pacific War history, and dramatic wartime true events.
SEO: For listeners looking for WW2 stories, military history narration, Pacific War history, and World War 2 documentary-style storytelling, this episode explores Marcus McDilda, the atomic bomb bluff, and the fear that spread through Japan’s leadership. It is ideal for history fans, wartime storytime, and anyone searching for narrated WWII stories, prisoner of war accounts, and atomic bomb history.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00August 8th, 1945. The sky over Osaka, Japan.
00:05The fighters came in from the sea, low and fast.
00:08Silver P-51 Mustangs, more than 700 miles from the airstrips on Iwo Jima where they had taken off that
00:14morning.
00:15Two fighter groups, the 21st and the 414th, sent to strike the airfields around the second-largest city in Japan.
00:23The round trip meant seven or eight hours in a cramped cockpit, most of it over open ocean.
00:28One engine, one man, following a B-29 that did the navigating for them.
00:35Here is a detail that tells you what that summer looked like from the Japanese side.
00:39When the official mission summary was typed up afterward, one line read,
00:44No enemy aircraft sighted in the air.
00:47American single-engine fighters were working over the edge of Osaka in broad daylight, and nothing came up to meet
00:53them.
00:54What came up was flak.
00:57At strafing height, every gun pit on every airfield could reach a Mustang.
01:01Three of the fighters lost that day went down to fire from the ground.
01:05One of the Mustangs that did not come home belonged to 1st Lt. Marcus McDilda of the 46th Fighter Squadron.
01:12He was 23, from Dunelan, a small town on the Withlacoochee River in central Florida.
01:18He got out alive.
01:20And within hours, he was a prisoner in a city that B-29s had been burning since March.
01:25A city that had just heard about something far worse than fire.
01:30Now, I want you to hold on to one fact from this moment to the very end of this story,
01:34because everything turns on it.
01:37Marcus McDilda knew nothing about the atomic bomb.
01:41Not how it worked, not where it was built, not how many existed.
01:47Like nearly every American in uniform, he had first heard the words two days earlier.
01:52That ignorance should have been his death sentence.
01:55Instead, it became Japan's problem.
01:59Because the men who were about to question him did not care much about his squadron,
02:03his airfield, or his call sign.
02:05They wanted a number.
02:06How many of these bombs did the Americans have?
02:09And where would the next one fall?
02:11He gave them an answer.
02:12He invented it on the spot, with a sword at his face.
02:15And it was false from the first word to the last.
02:19And yet, within about a day,
02:21the heart of that invention was being repeated inside the highest rooms of the Japanese government.
02:25Think about how strange that is.
02:27Senior officers of an army sworn to fight to the last man
02:31took seriously the words of a beaten, bleeding lieutenant
02:34who had to reach back to high school chemistry
02:36to describe the weapon he was supposedly an expert on.
02:39Why?
02:40That is the question this video is going to answer.
02:42And the answer is not the one most people expect.
02:45If you want to see how one American pilot's lie reached Japan's war cabinet,
02:50give this video a like and subscribe.
02:52It helps the story of the American airmen over Japan reach more people.
02:56To understand why that lie landed the way it did,
02:59you have to see the world as it looked from Tokyo on the morning MacDylda took off.
03:04On August 6th, a single B-29 had destroyed Hiroshima.
03:10Sixteen hours later, a statement from President Truman went out from Washington.
03:14It named the weapon an atomic bomb.
03:18It called it a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.
03:23And it warned Japan's leaders that if they did not accept American terms,
03:28they could expect a rain of ruin from the air,
03:32the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
03:36Notice what that statement did not say.
03:38It did not say how many.
03:42In Tokyo, the army's first move was to avoid the word entirely.
03:47Official announcements spoke of a new type bomb.
03:51The army was not ready to admit that the United States had built the weapon physicists had talked about for
03:56years.
03:57And it had reasons to doubt it.
04:00Japan had run its own atomic research.
04:03Yoshio Nishina, the country's leading nuclear physicist,
04:06had chaired a committee that studied the question for the Navy back in 1942 and 43.
04:12The view Japanese scientists took away from that work
04:15was that it would be difficult even for the United States
04:19to put atomic energy to use in time to decide this war.
04:23Remember that judgment.
04:25It is going to come back.
04:26And when it does, it will cut the other way.
04:29On August 8th, the same day MacDilda's Mustang went down,
04:34Nishina walked into what was left of Hiroshima
04:36with an investigation team sent by Imperial Army Headquarters.
04:40His task was to answer one question.
04:43Was this really an atomic bomb?
04:46But even a yes would not answer the question that mattered.
04:50One atomic bomb was a catastrophe.
04:52Twenty of them was the end of the nation.
04:55And there was no laboratory, no spy, no diplomat anywhere
04:59that could tell the men in Tokyo which of those two worlds they were living in.
05:03Into that blank space dropped a 23-year-old fighter pilot from Florida.
05:08In Osaka, MacDilda was led through the streets,
05:11bound and blindfolded, and civilians beat him as he passed.
05:15Then he was handed to the Kempeitai, Japan's military police,
05:19and taken to an interrogation room.
05:21The questions all circled the same subject.
05:24The bomb.
05:26How many?
05:27Which cities?
05:29When?
05:30He told them the truth.
05:32He did not know.
05:34He was a fighter pilot.
05:36Nobody had told him anything.
05:38They did not believe him.
05:41A pilot, two days after Hiroshima,
05:44flying over a Japanese city.
05:46Of course he knew.
05:48The beating went on.
05:50The questions came back in the same order,
05:53again and again.
05:54And his answer did not change,
05:56because it was the only answer he had.
06:00Here is what makes this moment so dangerous.
06:03To the Kempeitai,
06:04the truth sounded like a lie.
06:06And they had no way to tell the difference.
06:09That, as it turns out,
06:10was the same problem the entire Japanese government was about to have.
06:15Then the door opened,
06:16and a Japanese general walked into the room.
06:19What MacDilda said in the next few minutes kept him alive.
06:23But the thing that made Japanese officers take it seriously
06:26was not in that room at all.
06:28It happened at two minutes past eleven the next morning,
06:31more than three hundred miles away.
06:34The general's name does not survive in the accounts that tell this story.
06:38What does survive is what he did.
06:42He drew his sword.
06:44He pressed the blade against MacDilda's lip until it drew blood.
06:48And he told the American that unless he explained
06:50everything he knew about the atomic bomb,
06:53he would be beheaded.
06:56Now put yourself in that chair for a moment.
06:59You are twenty-three.
07:00Your face is bleeding.
07:02You have already told the truth more times than you can count.
07:06And the truth has only made things worse.
07:09The man in front of you is holding the instrument that will kill you.
07:12And he is waiting.
07:15MacDilda made a decision that probably saved his life.
07:19He decided to become the expert they wanted.
07:23What he gave them was assembled out of whatever he could remember from high school chemistry.
07:28As the story was later told, it went roughly like this.
07:32When atoms are split, he said, you get a great many pluses and minuses.
07:36The Americans had collected them in a huge container and kept them apart with a lead shield.
07:42When the container was dropped from a plane, the shield melted.
07:45The pluses and the minuses rushed together.
07:48The result was an enormous bolt of lightning that shoved the air above the city aside.
07:52And when the air came rushing back, it brought a thunderclap that knocked down everything beneath it.
07:59Listen to that again, and you will hear what it really is.
08:03It is not a description of a nuclear weapon.
08:05It is a frightened young man describing a thunderstorm.
08:10And yet, to the men listening, parts of it would not have sounded absurd at all.
08:15A blinding flash.
08:16A blast that flattened everything.
08:20Survivors coming out of Hiroshima were describing exactly that.
08:24The Kempeitai in Osaka were not physicists.
08:27To them, this was what a man looked like when he finally broke.
08:32Then came the questions that mattered more than the mechanics.
08:36Where would the next bombs fall?
08:38MacDylda named the only two cities in Japan he could think of.
08:42Tokyo, he said.
08:43And Kyoto.
08:45When?
08:46In the next few days.
08:49And then they asked him the question they had been circling from the beginning.
08:53How many?
08:54He gave them a number.
08:57Hold on to that, because we are going to hear it again.
09:00Spoken out loud in a room where it could change the course of the war.
09:05Here is the strange part.
09:06Without knowing it, MacDylda had told his captors one thing that was true.
09:12More bombs were coming.
09:15That night, about 1,500 miles to the south, Americans were getting ready to prove it.
09:20At 3.47 in the morning, Tinian time, on August 9th, a B-29 named Boxcar lifted off with a
09:29plutonium bomb in its bomb bay.
09:31The pilot was Major Charles Sweeney, 25, from Massachusetts.
09:36It came close to disaster.
09:39Before takeoff, the crew found that a fuel transfer pump had failed.
09:44Six hundred and forty gallons in a reserve tank could not be reached.
09:48They went anyway.
09:50Off the coast of Japan, the second B-29 they were supposed to meet never showed up at the rendezvous.
09:57Sweeney circled for about 40 minutes, waiting for it, far longer than his orders allowed.
10:02Then the primary target, Kokura.
10:05Smoke drifting from a firebombing raid the day before, along with haze and black smoke from the nearby steelworks, covered
10:12most of the city.
10:13Their orders said visual drop only.
10:17Sweeney made one run.
10:18Then a second.
10:20Then a third.
10:22Fifty minutes over a Japanese city, the flack getting closer by the third pass, the fuel falling.
10:29Think about what that crew was carrying in that moment.
10:32A weapon that could end the war, and not enough fuel to bring it home.
10:37Sweeney turned for the secondary target, Nagasaki.
10:41Nagasaki was under cloud two.
10:43Then, almost at the last moment, the bombardier, Captain Kermit Behan, found a gap.
10:49It was his 27th birthday.
10:52He sighted the target with his own eyes, and at one minute past 11, the bomb fell away.
10:57Forty-seven seconds later, at two minutes past 11, a second Japanese city was torn apart.
11:04Boxcar did not have the fuel to reach Iwo Jima.
11:07Sweeney nursed it to Okinawa, with enough for a single approach.
11:11One engine quit from fuel starvation on final.
11:14Another died after they were on the ground.
11:16Two cities in three days.
11:18And the crews who did it flew from Tinian, an island the Marines had taken almost exactly a year earlier,
11:24and which was now home to the busiest airfield on Earth.
11:29From the Japanese side, that was the real terror of the morning.
11:32Not the bomb alone.
11:33The machine behind it, which could put a second one over Japan three days after the first.
11:39Now cut north, to Tokyo.
11:43That same morning, at 10.30, Japan's six most powerful men had sat down as the supreme council for the
11:50direction of the war.
11:51They were already facing one catastrophe.
11:54During the night, the Soviet Union had declared war, and Soviet armies were pouring into Manchuria.
12:00Prime Minister Suzuki told the others that continuing the war was impossible.
12:05Before that meeting was over, the news arrived.
12:08A second atomic bomb.
12:10Nagasaki.
12:12Now go back to the question we started with.
12:15Since Hiroshima, the war minister had refused even to admit that the weapon was atomic.
12:21Now there were two, three days apart.
12:25And two is not a number you stop at.
12:28Two is the start of a series.
12:31Nobody at that table could say where the series ended.
12:35The council split down the middle, three against three.
12:38The prime minister, the foreign minister, and the navy minister
12:42wanted to accept the allied terms with a single condition.
12:46That the emperor be preserved.
12:49The war minister, General Korechika Anami,
12:52and the two chiefs of staff held out for three more conditions.
12:56Terms the allies were all but certain to refuse.
13:01Remember the question the Kempeitai kept asking in Osaka?
13:04It was the same question now being asked at the very top.
13:08At half past two that afternoon, the full cabinet sat down.
13:12And Anami, the man in Tokyo most determined to keep fighting,
13:16brought them something new.
13:18It had come up the line from an interrogation room in Osaka.
13:22It was a number.
13:23The number McDilda had invented with a sword at his lip.
13:28And here is the part worth sitting with.
13:31Not one man at that table had any way to prove it was false.
13:37Half past two in the afternoon, August 9th, the full cabinet of Japan.
13:43When General Korechika Anami addressed his fellow ministers,
13:47the room already knew about Nagasaki.
13:49It already knew about the Soviet armies pouring into Manchuria.
13:53What it did not know was what came next.
13:56As the historian Robert Maddox reconstructs it,
14:00the war minister told them that the Americans appeared to have 100 atomic bombs,
14:04that they could drop three a day,
14:07and that the next target might well be Tokyo.
14:11There it is, the number I asked you to hold on to.
14:16100. Tokyo.
14:17If those words sound familiar, they should.
14:21They are the words a bleeding American lieutenant
14:23had pulled out of thin air in Osaka the night before.
14:27At least one historian who traced Anami's briefing, Jerome Hagen,
14:31concluded that it rested in part on what the Kempeitai had extracted from Marcus McDilda.
14:37For three days, this same war minister had refused even to admit that the Hiroshima weapon was atomic.
14:43Within a few hours of Nagasaki, he went from no atomic bomb at all to a hundred of them.
14:50Do the arithmetic the way the men at that table would have.
14:53At three a day, a hundred bombs is a little over a month.
14:57Japan had been at war in China for eight years, since 1937,
15:02and here was a number that put the end of the country on a calendar,
15:05one city at a time, in about 33 days.
15:10What did it do?
15:12Here is the honest answer, and it matters for the rest of this story.
15:15On the record, it changed nobody's vote.
15:20The cabinet argued from half past two until half past five, broke, and met again at six.
15:27Decisions had to be unanimous.
15:29By ten o'clock that night, there was still no decision.
15:33The historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who has studied these meetings as closely as anyone,
15:38writes that Anami's startling claim did not seem to have any effect on the positions each camp already held.
15:45So what exactly did this lie shake?
15:48To answer that, you need to hear the other number at the top of the Japanese command.
15:53Admiral Soemu Toyoda, chief of the naval general staff, had made his own estimate.
15:59In his judgment, the Americans could have no more than one or two more bombs ready.
16:05And the conclusion that followed was blunt.
16:08There would be more destruction, but the war would go on.
16:12So picture it.
16:13Two numbers inside the same high command.
16:16In the same week.
16:18One or two.
16:20And one hundred.
16:22Between them lay the difference between a war Japan could keep fighting,
16:26and a war that would erase it.
16:29And here is what nobody in Tokyo could escape.
16:32Neither number was a fact.
16:35Both were guesses about the same thing.
16:38The size of the American industrial machine.
16:41Now remember the judgment I asked you to hold on to at the very beginning,
16:45from Japan's own scientists.
16:47That even the United States would struggle to build such a weapon in time for this war.
16:52That judgment had now been wrong twice in three days.
16:56That is the first layer of the answer.
16:58MacDilda's lie did not shake those officers because they trusted him.
17:02It shook them because Japan's best estimate of American capability had already failed,
17:08and nobody could say by how much.
17:10Just before midnight, Prime Minister Suzuki did something without precedent.
17:15He brought the deadlock to the emperor himself.
17:18At about two in the morning on August 10th,
17:21Hirohito gave what became known as his sacred decision.
17:25Accept the allied terms.
17:27With one condition concerning his own prerogatives.
17:31From an Osaka interrogation room to the emperor's decision.
17:35About thirty hours.
17:37I am not telling you MacDilda's lie caused that decision.
17:41The record does not support that.
17:43But it was one of the things those men had heard on the day they made it.
17:48There is one more detail in the lie, and it is almost too strange to believe.
17:53MacDilda named Kyoto because it was one of the very few Japanese cities he had ever heard of.
17:59He could not have known that Kyoto was the city American planners had deliberately struck off the atomic target list.
18:06On July 25th, another city had been written in where Kyoto used to be.
18:11Its name was Nagasaki.
18:14And where was the man who had started all of this?
18:17The morning after his interrogation, MacDilda was put aboard a plane and flown to Tokyo.
18:22Think about how far he had traveled.
18:25On the morning of August 8th, he was one Mustang pilot among many over Osaka.
18:30By the next morning, his captors were treating him as a very important prisoner.
18:34A man who held the secrets of the atomic bomb.
18:38He had told the Kempeitai the truth and been beaten for it.
18:42He had told them a story about lead shields and lightning and been put on an airplane.
18:47It was the strangest kind of protection.
18:50Every hour the story held, it kept him alive.
18:54And every hour it held, it carried him closer to the one kind of person who could break it.
19:00Someone who actually understood what an atom was.
19:03A few hours after the emperor spoke, the president of the United States went on the radio.
19:08On the evening of August 9th, Washington time, late morning of the 10th in Tokyo,
19:14Harry Truman reported to the American people on the Potsdam Conference.
19:18Near the end, he turned to the bomb.
19:21Having found the bomb, we have used it, he said.
19:24We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war.
19:30Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.
19:33In the same passage, he said the bomb had been used against those who had
19:37starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war.
19:42At that moment, one of those beaten prisoners was in Tokyo,
19:46and his life depended on the Japanese believing exactly what that speech implied.
19:51Once again, an American statement left the number blank.
19:54And once again, the blank did the work.
19:57But in Tokyo, the person who could break MacDill this story was already waiting for him.
20:02A civilian scientist who had studied in the United States,
20:06a graduate of the City College of New York.
20:08It would take him only a few minutes to see straight through the American.
20:12And what the Japanese would do, with a prisoner caught lying about the bomb,
20:16is the question this story turns to next.
20:18The scientist did not need a sword.
20:20We do not have a record of the questions he asked.
20:23We have the result.
20:24Within a few minutes, the man from the City College of New York
20:28saw what the Kempeitai in Osaka had missed.
20:31The American in front of him knew nothing about nuclear fission.
20:35The pluses and minuses, the lead shield, the lightning, the thunderclap.
20:40None of it described anything real.
20:43It had taken the Kempeitai a sword to get the story.
20:47It took a man who understood physics a few minutes to take it apart.
20:53MacDilda explained what had happened in Osaka.
20:55He had told them he knew nothing, and they had refused to believe him.
20:59So, in his words, he had to tell the lie to stay alive.
21:04Stop and consider his position at that moment.
21:06In Osaka, the truth had nearly gotten him killed.
21:10Now the lie had been exposed by a man who knew exactly what it was.
21:15He was an enemy airman who had fed the Imperial Army a fairy tale
21:19about the most important weapon of the war,
21:22a fairy tale that had already traveled all the way to the war minister.
21:27He was taken to a cell.
21:29He was fed.
21:30And he waited to learn what they would do with him.
21:33Hold that image, because we will come back to that cell,
21:36and to the reason he walked out of it alive,
21:39when other American airmen, held in Japan that August, did not.
21:45But here is the turn that makes this story worth telling.
21:48The scientist had exposed the liar.
21:51He had not caught the lie.
21:53By the time anyone in Tokyo knew MacDilda was a fraud,
21:57his story was no longer his.
22:00It had already been spoken in the cabinet.
22:02It was already moving through the government,
22:04from officer to officer, and ministry to ministry,
22:08the way rumors move in a capital that is waiting to be destroyed.
22:12A correction made in one interrogation room
22:15had no way of catching up with it.
22:17How do we know?
22:18Because the Americans themselves found it.
22:21After the war.
22:22In the autumn of 1945,
22:25the United States Strategic Bombing Survey
22:27sent its teams into a defeated Japan.
22:29Its vice chairman,
22:31a 38-year-old investment banker
22:33named Paul Nitsa,
22:35drove much of the work.
22:36And the final report bore his stamp.
22:39The teams interrogated more than 700 Japanese military,
22:43government, and industrial officials.
22:45Their report on how Japan's leaders had decided to surrender
22:49came out on July 1, 1946,
22:52under the title
22:53Japan's Struggle to End the War.
22:56Buried in its conclusions
22:58is a single sentence that belongs to this story.
23:01The survey's analysts recorded a rumor,
23:04derived from the interrogation of an American prisoner,
23:07that an atom bomb attack on Tokyo
23:09was scheduled for August 12.
23:12Together with Hiroshima, they wrote,
23:14that rumor
23:15introduced urgency in the minds of the government.
23:19Read that again.
23:20Part of the urgency inside the Japanese government,
23:23in the survey's judgment,
23:25came not from a bomb at all,
23:26but from a story about one that did not exist.
23:30One detail does not match.
23:32The survey called the prisoner a B-29 pilot.
23:37McDilda flew a Mustang.
23:39Whether the story was garbled as it passed from mouth to mouth,
23:42or whether more than one captured American
23:45was pressed with the same questions
23:46and gave the same kind of answer,
23:48the record does not say.
23:50What it does say
23:51is that a prisoner's answer about Tokyo
23:53reached the people deciding Japan's future,
23:56and that it pushed them.
23:58When the newspapers picked up the survey's finding
24:01in July of 1946,
24:02the Associated Press asked the 20th Air Force
24:05about the pilot.
24:06The Air Force would not name him.
24:09Officials would not say
24:10whether there had ever been a plan to bomb Tokyo.
24:13And they noted, a little uneasily,
24:16that the story raised the question
24:17of whether an American flyer
24:19had given information to the enemy.
24:21Information was the one thing
24:23that prisoner had not given them.
24:25He had given them a fear with a date on it.
24:28That is the second layer of the answer.
24:31The bluff shook those officers
24:33not because it was believed,
24:34but because it could not be safely disbelieved.
24:37A government split three against three
24:40cannot bet its capital city on a guess.
24:43Now follow that date
24:44through the days that came next.
24:46On the morning of August 10th,
24:48Japan sent its offer
24:49through neutral Switzerland and Sweden.
24:51It would accept the Potsdam terms,
24:54provided the emperor's prerogatives
24:55were preserved.
24:57On the very same day,
24:58a proclamation went out
25:00to the army in Anami's name.
25:01It told the troops to fight on,
25:04even if they had to chew grass,
25:06eat earth, and sleep in the fields.
25:09Two voices from the same government
25:11on the same day.
25:13One asking for peace,
25:15one promising a war to the last soldier.
25:19Those are the officers this story is about.
25:21Men pulled in two directions at once
25:24with no idea how much time they had left.
25:26That was exactly the question
25:28the rumor answered for them.
25:30Not much.
25:31Tokyo, the 12th.
25:34At about four in the morning on August 12th,
25:37the American answer to Japan's offer arrived,
25:40drafted by Secretary of State James Burns
25:42and picked up from a radio broadcast
25:44out of San Francisco.
25:46It did not promise to keep the emperor.
25:49It said his authority would be subject
25:51to the supreme commander of the Allied powers.
25:54To the army, that was unacceptable.
25:57The cabinet split again.
26:00And all through that day,
26:02the 12th of August,
26:03the day the rumor had marked for Tokyo,
26:05the men in that government argued
26:07under the shadow of a bomb
26:09that some of them feared
26:10might already be on its way.
26:13Was it?
26:15Was there anything at all behind MacDilda's hundred bombs?
26:19There was an answer to that question,
26:21and it was sitting in Washington.
26:24Two days before the date in the rumor,
26:26the general who ran the Manhattan Project
26:28had put on paper exactly when the next bomb
26:31would be ready,
26:31and the president had made a decision about it
26:34that no one in Tokyo knew anything about.
26:36August 10th, 1945, Washington.
26:41That day, the American government
26:43was reading Japan's offer to surrender,
26:45and General Leslie Groves,
26:47the man who ran the Manhattan Project,
26:49put his name to a short memorandum
26:51for the Army Chief of Staff,
26:53General George Marshall.
26:55Groves had overseen the building of the Pentagon
26:57before he was handed the bomb.
26:59This memo's subject was the next one.
27:02Read what it actually says,
27:04because this is the closest thing we have
27:06to an answer to MacDilda's hundred.
27:09The next implosion bomb, Groves wrote,
27:12had been scheduled for the first good weather
27:14after August 24th.
27:16The work had been pushed.
27:19We have gained four days in manufacture.
27:22Barring unforeseen difficulties,
27:24the bomb should be ready for delivery
27:27on the first suitable weather
27:28after 17 or 18 August.
27:32Pause on that.
27:3417 or 18 August.
27:36Not the 12th.
27:38Not the next few days.
27:40And not one of a hundred.
27:43One.
27:43The earliest it could fall
27:45was nearly a week after the date in the rumor,
27:47and only if the president said yes.
27:51Marshall read it and wrote across it in his own hand.
27:54It is not to be released over Japan
27:56without express authority from the president.
27:59That afternoon, Harry Truman met his cabinet.
28:02Henry Wallace, the secretary of commerce,
28:05recorded in his diary what the president told them.
28:08Truman had given orders to stop atomic bombing.
28:12The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people,
28:14he said, was too horrible.
28:17He didn't like the idea of killing,
28:19in his words,
28:20all those kids.
28:23Now put the two capitals side by side.
28:26In Tokyo that week,
28:27men at the top of the government
28:29were living with a rumor
28:30of an atomic bomb on Tokyo within days.
28:33In Washington,
28:35the American president had just ordered
28:37that no bomb would fall
28:38without his personal word.
28:41Neither side could see the other.
28:42And it was the Japanese side
28:45that was living by a date
28:46no American had ever set.
28:49Then came August 13th.
28:51The plutonium core for the third bomb
28:54had been cast,
28:55but it was still being pressed and coded
28:57in New Mexico,
28:58work that would run until the 16th.
29:01That day,
29:02Groves could not reach either Marshall
29:04or the Secretary of War.
29:06So, on his own authority,
29:08he ordered that the core not be shipped.
29:10The core Groves held back
29:13never left New Mexico.
29:15It stayed at Los Alamos for experiments.
29:18On August 21st,
29:20six days after Japan's surrender was announced,
29:22a 24-year-old physicist
29:24named Harry Daglian
29:26was working with it alone,
29:27at night,
29:28when a heavy brick slipped from his hand
29:30onto the assembly.
29:32He died 25 days later.
29:35The core meant for the third bomb on Japan
29:37killed an American instead.
29:40The same day Groves held the core,
29:43General John Hull of the Army's Operations Division
29:45picked up the phone to Colonel L. E. Seaman,
29:48one of Groves' officers.
29:51Hull wanted to know exactly
29:52what the Army could count on.
29:54The transcript of that call survives.
29:57Seaman told him
29:57one bomb was ready to ship.
30:00Thursday would be its readiness,
30:01he said.
30:02The 19th,
30:04it would be dropped.
30:05Then Hull asked about the months ahead,
30:08and they ran the arithmetic together.
30:10Three definite,
30:12possibly four by the end of September,
30:14possibly three more
30:16by the end of October.
30:18You have a possibility of seven,
30:20Seaman told him,
30:21with a good chance of using them
30:22prior to the 31st of October.
30:25So here are the real numbers.
30:28Not a hundred.
30:29Not three a day.
30:31One more by the 19th of August.
30:34Perhaps seven by the end of October.
30:37Hold MacDilda's story up against that.
30:39He was wrong about the count
30:41by more than ten times.
30:43He was wrong about the timing.
30:45Wrong about the target.
30:47Wrong about the physics.
30:49Even Admiral Toyota,
30:50with his one or two more bombs,
30:52was closer to the truth for August
30:54than the lieutenant was.
30:56By October,
30:58the admiral would have been badly wrong too.
31:01And that is the third layer of the answer.
31:03What frightened those officers
31:05was never really the number.
31:06It was the direction.
31:09Before July 16th, 1945,
31:11no atomic bomb had ever been exploded
31:14anywhere on Earth.
31:15Four weeks later,
31:17the Americans had used two,
31:19had a third on the bench,
31:20and were planning around seven.
31:23MacDilda knew none of this.
31:25But his lie,
31:27crude as it was,
31:28described something the Japanese
31:29could already see for themselves.
31:31An enemy whose output
31:33only ever went one way.
31:36Think back to that line
31:37in the mission summary over Osaka.
31:39No enemy aircraft sighted in the air.
31:43American fighters
31:44700 miles from their base
31:46and nothing rising to meet them.
31:49A country that could do that
31:51could be believed about almost anything.
31:54That was the soil the lie fell on.
31:58Seaman offered one more judgment
31:59in that phone call,
32:00and it bears directly on our question.
32:03He doubted a third bomb
32:05would add much to the pressure
32:06on Japan to capitulate.
32:07The psychological effect, he said,
32:09was lost so far as the next one
32:11was concerned.
32:12He was thinking about bombs.
32:15He had no way of knowing
32:16that in Tokyo,
32:17a rumor had already been doing
32:19part of the work
32:20he believed a third bomb
32:21could no longer do.
32:23Think about that for a moment.
32:25The officer who worked on the bombs
32:27believed their power to frighten
32:29was used up.
32:30The pilot, who had never seen one,
32:33had already frightened a government.
32:35And that pilot was still sitting
32:37in a Tokyo cell
32:38with no idea
32:39that any of this was happening.
32:42August 12th,
32:43the day the rumor had marked
32:45for Tokyo,
32:46came and went.
32:48No bomb fell.
32:49The cabinet was still deadlocked
32:51over the American reply.
32:53The chiefs of staff
32:54were still holding out.
32:56And every day the deadlock lasted,
32:58the army's younger officers
32:59were talking more openly
33:01about stopping the surrender
33:02by force.
33:04Then, as August 13th
33:06turned into the 14th,
33:07American B-29s
33:09came back over Tokyo.
33:11What fell from their bomb bays
33:13was not an atomic bomb.
33:15It was paper.
33:16And within a few hours,
33:18that paper had done something
33:20neither atomic bomb
33:21had managed to do on its own.
33:22August 13th, 1945.
33:25The Sky Over Tokyo
33:27For most of that day,
33:29American B-29s
33:30flew over the Japanese capital
33:32and opened their bomb bays.
33:34What came out
33:35were leaflets.
33:37The crews dropping them
33:39were the same crews
33:40who had been burning
33:40Japanese cities for months.
33:43Printed on the paper,
33:44in Japanese,
33:45were two documents
33:46the Japanese people
33:47had never been told about.
33:49The text of their own
33:50government's offer to surrender
33:52and the American reply.
33:55Some of those leaflets
33:56came down on the grounds
33:57of the Imperial Palace
33:58while the emperor
33:59and his advisors
34:00were meeting inside.
34:02Now think about
34:03what that paper meant
34:04to the men in charge.
34:06Ever since August 10th,
34:08the government
34:09had been negotiating
34:10in secret.
34:11The army was being told
34:12to fight on,
34:13to chew grass
34:14and sleep in the fields.
34:16The public had heard
34:17nothing about an offer.
34:19And now,
34:20the Americans
34:20were simply telling everyone.
34:23One man understood
34:24the danger immediately.
34:26Marquis Koichi Kido,
34:27Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal,
34:29had been at the emperor's side
34:31for five years.
34:32He read one of the leaflets.
34:35His fear,
34:36as historians have reconstructed it,
34:38was not the Americans.
34:40It was the Japanese army.
34:43If soldiers read that their government
34:44was about to surrender,
34:46the younger officers might rise
34:48and the country could slide into a coup,
34:50or worse.
34:52On the morning of August 14th,
34:54Kido went to the emperor.
34:56Within hours,
34:57the emperor had summoned
34:58his ministers
34:59and his military chiefs.
35:01According to the American
35:02Bombing Survey's reconstruction,
35:05he told them simply,
35:06The American answer
35:08seems to me acceptable.
35:10And he asked the government
35:12to draft an imperial rescript
35:13to end the war.
35:15Pause and look at
35:16what has happened here.
35:17Over five days,
35:19the men at the top of Japan
35:20had been pushed by things
35:22that were not bombs.
35:23A rumor from a prisoner.
35:25A broadcast from a president.
35:28And now,
35:29paper falling on the palace lawn.
35:31Remember where all of this started?
35:33A fighter pilot
35:34with a bleeding lip,
35:35inventing lightning.
35:37The Americans were no longer
35:39only destroying cities.
35:41They were filling every room
35:42in Tokyo with information
35:43the Japanese leadership
35:45could not control
35:45and could not check.
35:48That is the fourth layer
35:49of the answer.
35:51MacDilda's bluff
35:51did not land alone.
35:53It landed in the middle
35:54of a torrent
35:55of American actions
35:56and American words.
35:57All of them real.
35:59And to the men
35:59on the receiving end,
36:01the one false thing
36:02looked exactly like the rest.
36:04And here is a detail
36:06that shows how close
36:07the false thing
36:08came to being true.
36:09On that same day,
36:11August 14th,
36:12while Washington was still
36:14waiting for Japan's
36:15final answer,
36:16Harry Truman remarked
36:17sadly to a British diplomat
36:19that he now had
36:19no alternative
36:20but to order an atomic bomb
36:22dropped on Tokyo.
36:24Tokyo.
36:25The city MacDilda had named,
36:27with a blade at his lip,
36:29six days earlier.
36:30Not Kokura.
36:31Not Niigata.
36:32Not Yokohama.
36:34The city's American planners
36:35had actually been weighing
36:36for a third bomb.
36:38Tokyo.
36:40Remember what we learned
36:41in the last chapter.
36:42The core for the next bomb
36:43was still in New Mexico
36:45and it never left.
36:47The Japanese acceptance
36:48arrived that same day
36:49so the question
36:50never had to be answered.
36:52But for a few hours
36:53on August 14th,
36:55the American president
36:56was speaking,
36:57in private,
36:57almost the very sentence
36:59a terrified lieutenant
37:00had invented in Osaka.
37:03On that same day,
37:05the Americans also gave Japan
37:06one last demonstration
37:07of the machine.
37:09More than 400 B-29s
37:11attacked in daylight
37:12on August 14th
37:13and more than 300 more
37:15that night.
37:17Counting the fighters,
37:18more than 1,000 American
37:20aircraft flew.
37:21Not one was lost.
37:24One of the targets
37:25was an oil refinery
37:26at Tsuchizaki
37:27in the far north of Honshu.
37:29Bombs were still falling
37:31on Japan
37:31while the emperor's
37:32surrender rescript
37:33was being drafted.
37:34For the American crews,
37:36it was another mission.
37:37For the officers in Tokyo,
37:39it was one more answer
37:41to the question
37:41they could never settle.
37:43How much more
37:44do the Americans have?
37:46That night,
37:47the officers
37:48who could not accept it
37:49moved.
37:50A group of young army officers
37:52led by Major Kenji Hatanaka
37:54set a coup in motion.
37:57Around 11,
37:58the emperor recorded
37:59his broadcast to the nation
38:00on a gramophone record
38:01and it was hidden
38:02inside the palace.
38:04When the commander
38:05of the Imperial Guards Division,
38:07Lieutenant General
38:08Takeshi Mori,
38:09refused to join the plot,
38:11Hatanaka killed him
38:12and used his seal
38:13to forge orders.
38:15Rebel troops
38:16searched the palace
38:17through the night
38:17for the recording.
38:18They never found it.
38:21By 8 the next morning,
38:22the rebellion was over.
38:24At that hour,
38:25it was 7 in the evening
38:27in Washington.
38:28Truman called reporters
38:30into his office
38:31and read a statement.
38:32He had received a message
38:33from the Japanese government,
38:34he said,
38:35and he deemed it
38:36a full acceptance
38:37of the Potsdam Declaration,
38:39which specifies
38:40the unconditional surrender
38:41of Japan.
38:43Outside the White House,
38:44the crowds were already gathering.
38:46In New York,
38:47Times Square filled.
38:49And across the Pacific,
38:50from Okinawa to Tinian,
38:52men who had been training
38:53for an invasion of Japan
38:55learned they would not
38:56have to make it.
38:58In those same hours,
38:59in Tokyo,
39:01General Korechika Anami,
39:03the war minister
39:03who had told the cabinet
39:04on August 9th
39:05about 100 atomic bombs,
39:07took his own life
39:08by ritual suicide.
39:10He left a note.
39:12I, with my death,
39:14humbly apologize
39:15to the emperor
39:16for the great crime.
39:18Of all the Japanese officers
39:20this story touches,
39:21he was the one
39:22who carried the lie
39:23to the top.
39:24He did not live
39:26to hear the emperor's voice.
39:28At noon on August 15th,
39:30that voice went out
39:31across Japan.
39:33In it,
39:34the emperor told his people
39:35that the enemy
39:36had begun to employ
39:37a new and most cruel bomb.
39:39And on that same afternoon,
39:41in the city of Fukuoka,
39:43Japanese officers
39:44took a group
39:44of captured American airmen
39:46out of their cells
39:47and killed them.
39:49Why was Marcus MacDilda
39:50not among the airmen
39:51who died that August?
39:53The answer goes back
39:54to the night he lied
39:55in Osaka
39:56and to what the army there
39:58had already been doing
39:59to the men it caught.
40:00On the night of March 16th,
40:011945,
40:03B-29s struck the port of Kobe
40:05next door to Osaka.
40:07Two of the Americans
40:08who came down that night
40:10survived the fall,
40:11Sergeant Algie Agunas
40:13and Second Lieutenant
40:14Robert Nelson.
40:16They were taken to Osaka,
40:17the same city where,
40:19five months later,
40:20Marcus MacDilda
40:21would be questioned.
40:22A hastily convened court
40:24found them guilty of
40:25indiscriminate bombing
40:27and sentenced them to death.
40:29The execution was botched.
40:32When the beheading failed,
40:34both men were shot in the head
40:35at point-blank range.
40:38Those two men
40:39were not an exception.
40:40The court that condemned them
40:42was working under a regulation
40:44Japan had issued
40:45in August of 1942,
40:47after the Doolittle raid.
40:49Allied airmen who struck
40:50the Japanese homeland
40:51could be tried as violators
40:53of the laws of war,
40:54and the penalty
40:55could be death.
40:56By one estimate,
40:58about 132 American airmen
41:00shot down
41:00in the last two years
41:01of the war
41:02were executed
41:03after summary trials
41:04or drumhead courts-martial.
41:07And as the war closed in,
41:09even the courts
41:09were sometimes skipped.
41:11One bomb group's history
41:13records that during
41:14July and August,
41:1538 more B-29 airmen
41:17were taken in groups
41:18to a maneuver area
41:20and rifle range
41:21near Osaka
41:21and executed,
41:23without, in its words,
41:25even the pretense
41:26of a trial.
41:27The same history warns
41:29that the records
41:29are fragmentary
41:30and conflicting.
41:32Now put McDilda
41:33back into that picture.
41:35He was a fighter pilot
41:36who had come down
41:37while strafing targets
41:38around Osaka,
41:40exactly the kind of airmen
41:41that regulation
41:42had been written for.
41:44He was held
41:45in the same city,
41:46in the same weeks,
41:47by the same army,
41:48at a time when that army
41:50was taking captured airmen
41:51out to a rifle range.
41:53No one can say for certain
41:55what would have happened
41:56to him
41:56if he had kept telling the truth,
41:57but you have seen
41:58what happened
41:59to the men around him.
42:01Here is the thing to notice.
42:03In Osaka,
42:04the truth,
42:05I don't know anything,
42:06had made him worthless.
42:08Worse than worthless.
42:10A prisoner with nothing
42:11to give
42:11was just another enemy airman.
42:14The lie changed
42:15what he was.
42:17Overnight,
42:17he became a prisoner
42:19who knew the secrets
42:20of the atomic bomb,
42:21and a man like that
42:22is put on a plane
42:23to Tokyo.
42:25That is exactly
42:26what happened.
42:27And the accounts
42:28of his case
42:29agree on the consequence.
42:30The move to Tokyo
42:32probably saved his life.
42:34By the time
42:35the scientists there
42:36exposed him,
42:37the war had only
42:38days left to run.
42:39He was put in a cell,
42:41fed,
42:42and left to wait.
42:43And the men
42:44who might have decided
42:45his fate
42:45were consumed
42:46by a surrender,
42:47a coup,
42:48and the end
42:49of their world.
42:51Meanwhile,
42:52at Fukuoka,
42:53shortly after the emperor's
42:54broadcast on August 15th,
42:5615 American airmen
42:58were beheaded.
42:59MacDilda was not there.
43:01He was in Tokyo,
43:02inside his own lie.
43:04After the war,
43:05American prosecutors
43:06at Yokohama
43:07brought Japanese officers
43:09to trial
43:09for the killing
43:10of captured airmen.
43:12Many of those
43:13who had staged
43:14mock trials
43:15and executions
43:16were found guilty.
43:18Listen again
43:19to the emperor's words
43:20from that broadcast.
43:22The enemy,
43:23he said,
43:24had begun to employ
43:25a new
43:25and most cruel bomb,
43:27the power of which
43:29to do damage
43:30is, indeed,
43:31incalculable.
43:34Incalculable.
43:35That one word
43:37holds the whole secret
43:38of MacDilda's bluff.
43:40For a week,
43:41nobody at the top
43:42of Japan's government
43:43had been able
43:44to put a number on it.
43:46So now we can finally
43:47answer the question
43:48this video began with.
43:50Why did one
43:51captured American's
43:52atomic bomb bluff
43:54shake Japanese officers?
43:56Let me be precise first
43:58about what it did not do.
44:01It did not end the war.
44:03It did not change
44:04a single recorded vote.
44:07The emperor's decision
44:08rested on far bigger things.
44:11Two atomic bombs,
44:13the Soviet declaration of war,
44:15and months of B-29 raids
44:17that had burned Japan's cities.
44:20A rumor did not outweigh
44:22any of that.
44:23What the lie did
44:24was narrower
44:24and stranger.
44:26It did not shake them
44:28because they trusted him.
44:29Most of the officers
44:30who repeated his story
44:31never set eyes on him.
44:33And the one expert
44:34who did
44:35saw through him
44:36in minutes.
44:37It shook them
44:38because of everything else
44:39you have seen
44:40in this story.
44:42Because Japan's
44:43own scientists
44:44had judged
44:44that even America
44:45would struggle
44:46to build the bomb
44:47in time for this war.
44:48and the Americans
44:50had dropped
44:50two in three days.
44:52Because a government
44:54split three against three
44:55could not afford
44:56to call a bluff
44:57about its own capital.
44:58Because the admiral
45:00who guessed
45:00one or two more
45:01and the lieutenant
45:03who said a hundred
45:04were both guessing
45:05about the same thing,
45:07the American industrial machine.
45:09And that summer,
45:11every Japanese guess
45:13about that machine
45:14had come in
45:15too low.
45:16And because the lie
45:17arrived in the middle
45:18of a flood
45:19of real American actions
45:21Nagasaki,
45:22a president's warning,
45:24a thousand aircraft
45:25over Japan
45:26in a single day,
45:27leaflets falling
45:28on the palace,
45:29so that the one
45:30false thing
45:31looked exactly
45:32like the rest.
45:33The lie was false
45:35in every detail,
45:36but it was false
45:37in the direction
45:38of the truth.
45:40Sit on the other side
45:41of that table
45:41one last time.
45:43You are Anami.
45:44You hear a number
45:46you cannot check
45:47from a prisoner
45:48you will never question
45:49about a weapon
45:50your own scientists
45:51doubted America
45:52could build
45:53in time for this war,
45:54and you hear it
45:56hours after
45:56the second one
45:57has fallen.
45:59What do you do
46:00with it?
46:01He passed it on.
46:02And here is the part
46:04that should stay
46:04with you.
46:05The same American power
46:07that made
46:08MacDilda's lie
46:09believable
46:09is also what saved him.
46:12Every day
46:12that power
46:13shortened the war,
46:14brought the end
46:15of his captivity
46:16closer.
46:16The B-29 crews
46:18over Kobe and Osaka,
46:19the Mustang pilots
46:21from Iwo Jima,
46:22the bomber crews
46:23from Tinian,
46:25they never knew
46:25his name.
46:27But they were the reason
46:28the Japanese believed him
46:30and the reason
46:31the war ended
46:32before anyone decided
46:33what to do with him.
46:35He was still
46:36in Japanese hands.
46:37The emperor
46:38had spoken,
46:39but in the prison camps
46:40around Tokyo,
46:41nobody yet knew
46:42who would come
46:43or when
46:44or whether the guards
46:46would let them go.
46:47For MacDilda,
46:49the answer came
46:50on August 29th,
46:51from the water.
46:53Who came for him?
46:55And what became
46:56of the man
46:56who had saved himself
46:57with a lie?
46:59August 29th, 1945,
47:01Tokyo Bay.
47:03The landing craft
47:04came in across the water
47:05toward a small,
47:06man-made island
47:07off the shore
47:07of the capital,
47:09Omori,
47:10a prison camp.
47:12They had come
47:12from the fast-transport
47:14Goslin,
47:14part of a naval task group
47:16sent in to pull
47:16allied prisoners
47:17out of the camps
47:18along the waterfront,
47:19with planes from the carrier
47:20cow pens overhead
47:21to guide them.
47:23Omori was the first camp
47:24they reached.
47:25On the shore,
47:26men were waving flags.
47:29American,
47:30British,
47:30Dutch.
47:32Some of them
47:32could not wait
47:33for the boats.
47:34They threw themselves
47:35into the bay
47:35and started swimming.
47:37Leading the boats
47:38was a Navy captain
47:39named Harold Stassen.
47:41Two years earlier,
47:42he had been governor
47:43of Minnesota
47:43and he had resigned
47:45to go to war.
47:46He had been sent
47:47to look over the camp
47:48and plan an evacuation.
47:50He took one look
47:51at the roughly
47:51600 men inside,
47:53most of them,
47:54by the accounts
47:55of those who were there,
47:56little more than
47:57walking skeletons,
47:58and decided
47:59there would be no plan.
48:00They were leaving now.
48:02Halsey agreed.
48:04A photographer
48:05serving with the Navy,
48:06John Swope,
48:07was in one of the first boats.
48:09He wrote to his wife afterward
48:10that the prisoners
48:11surrounded them,
48:13clasping hands and arms,
48:14and wept
48:15as they held on
48:15to the sailors.
48:17Some of the men
48:18coming out of Omori
48:19that day were famous.
48:20Major Gregory Pappy Boyington,
48:23the Marine fighter ace
48:24the country had given up
48:25for dead.
48:26Commander Richard O'Kane,
48:28captain of the submarine Tang,
48:30so weak
48:30that a doctor told
48:31the stretcher bearers
48:32to leave him.
48:33O'Kane whispered
48:35that he would make it.
48:36They carried him
48:37to the beach.
48:38And somewhere in that crowd
48:40was a 23-year-old
48:41Mustang pilot
48:42from Donnellan, Florida,
48:44whose name meant nothing
48:45to the sailors in the boats.
48:47Three weeks earlier,
48:48his words had reached
48:50the war minister of Japan.
48:52Given what we know
48:53of how Osaka treated
48:54captured airmen that summer,
48:55he had every reason
48:56not to expect this day.
48:58The first ship
48:59to take the rescued men
49:00aboard was the hospital
49:01ship Benevolence,
49:03anchored in the bay.
49:05Now, come back with me
49:06to where this story started.
49:08August 8th,
49:10Mustangs over Osaka,
49:11700 miles from their base,
49:13and a line in the mission summary
49:15that said,
49:16no enemy aircraft
49:18sighted in the air.
49:20One of those fighters
49:21did not come home.
49:23Its pilot spent the next
49:24three weeks in Japanese hands,
49:26beaten, cut, interrogated,
49:29exposed, and left to wait.
49:33And on August 29th,
49:35the same American reach
49:36that had carried him
49:37over Japan
49:38came back for him
49:39in landing craft.
49:41At the very start,
49:43I asked you to hold on
49:44to one fact.
49:45Marcus McDilda knew nothing
49:47about the atomic bomb.
49:49That fact is the whole story.
49:52A man who knew nothing
49:54shook a government
49:55that knew too little.
49:57And the gap between
49:59those two kinds of ignorance
50:00was filled,
50:01every day of that August,
50:03by what the Americans
50:04were actually doing.
50:07What became of the others?
50:09General Anami died
50:10by his own hand
50:11before the Emperor's voice
50:12was heard.
50:14Admiral Toyota,
50:15who had guessed
50:15one or two more bombs,
50:17was tried by an Allied tribunal
50:19after the war
50:20and acquitted.
50:22Yoshio Nishina,
50:23who walked into Hiroshima
50:25the day McDilda was shot down,
50:27died in 1951.
50:29Charles Sweeney,
50:30who brought boxcar down
50:32on Okinawa
50:33with almost nothing
50:34left in the tanks,
50:35went on to serve for years
50:36in the Massachusetts
50:37Air National Guard.
50:39Marcus McDilda
50:41went home to Florida.
50:42He received the
50:44Prisoner of War medal.
50:45He died in Donnellon,
50:47the town on the Withlacoochee
50:48where he had been born,
50:49on August 16, 1998,
50:52at the age of 76,
50:5553 years and 8 days
50:57after his Mustang
50:59went down over Osaka.
51:01He is buried there,
51:02in Rockwell Cemetery.
51:05When the bombing survey's
51:06finding reached
51:07American newspapers
51:08in July of 1946,
51:10the Associated Press story
51:12said a captured pilot's tail
51:13had helped hurry
51:14the surrender.
51:15The Air Force would not
51:16give the pilot's name.
51:18More than 20 years later,
51:20the historian William Craig
51:22in his book
51:22The Fall of Japan
51:24told McDilda's story
51:25by name.
51:27His story has had
51:28a strange afterlife.
51:30Today it is cited
51:31in arguments about
51:32interrogation
51:33as evidence that
51:34torture does not work.
51:36That a man
51:37in enough pain
51:38will say whatever
51:39his questioners
51:40want to hear.
51:42Think about what
51:43the Kempeitai
51:44actually got from him.
51:45Not a secret.
51:47A thunderstorm,
51:48a lead shield,
51:49and a number.
51:51They had the truth
51:52in front of them
51:53in the first hour,
51:54I don't know,
51:55and they beat it
51:56out of the room.
51:58And it is worth
51:59saying plainly
52:00what it took.
52:01He was 23,
52:03alone,
52:04bleeding,
52:05with a sword
52:06at his face,
52:07and he did not freeze.
52:09He found the one thing
52:11his captors wanted
52:12more than his life,
52:14and he built it
52:15out of a high school
52:16chemistry class.
52:18That is the act
52:19of a man
52:20who refused
52:21to stop thinking.
52:23So here is the answer,
52:25as simply as it can be put.
52:27McDilda's bluff
52:28shook Japan's officers
52:29because it was a lie
52:30about American power,
52:31and by August of 1945,
52:34every true thing
52:35they knew
52:35about American power
52:36made that lie
52:37impossible to dismiss.
52:39The lie belonged
52:41to one frightened lieutenant.
52:42What made it believable
52:44belonged to hundreds
52:45of thousands
52:46of Americans,
52:47the crews from Tinian,
52:49the pilots
52:49from Iwo Jima,
52:50the men and women
52:51who built the bombers,
52:52and the airmen
52:53who never came home
52:55from Kobe
52:55and Osaka.
52:57Marcus McDilda came home.
53:00Sergeant Algea Gunas
53:01and Lieutenant Robert Nelson
53:02did not.
53:04Remember all three.
53:06Thank you for staying
53:07with this story to the end.
53:09If it showed you something
53:11about August of 1945
53:12you hadn't heard before,
53:14please give the video a like.
53:16It genuinely helps stories
53:18like this reach more people.
53:19Subscribe and turn on the bell
53:20so you don't miss the next one.
53:22And tell us in the comments
53:23where you're watching from.
53:24If your father,
53:25grandfather,
53:27or uncle
53:27served with the American
53:28or Allied forces
53:29in the Second World War,
53:31we'd be honored
53:32if you shared his name
53:33and his unit.
53:34The American airmen
53:36in this story
53:36are worth remembering.
53:38And so is everyone
53:39who served beside them.