Brian Klaas
speaker
544 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Feb
Brian Klaas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it turned out that Pittman had seen Chilton's signature literally thousands of times before the war broke out. So he happens to be the one person in the Union Army who can look at the signature and say, yes, that's actually the right guy. This is a real set of orders and so on. And so he conveys this information. The Union Army changes its mind and moves and meets at the Battle of Antietam.
Again, this huge showdown. Now, the Battle of Antietam is not a decisive Union victory, but it stops the Confederate momentum. It's a critical moment in the war. And because of it, a lot of historians will argue that Antietam is sort of the thing that was the catalyst for the Emancipation Proclamation, that Lincoln felt, you know, more emboldened to do this. But more, even more critically...
There's a relatively good argument you can make that the Confederates were about to get recognized or that the British government was thinking about recognizing the Confederacy because of the momentum they had in the war. And it sort of gave the British government pause. Right.
They said, let's wait and see, because this battle seems to suggest that this is not going to be a decisive Confederate victory in the war. Of course, they wanted the cotton and so on.
So it's one of those aspects where when you think about this, it's this critical moment where if Antietam or something like it had been another really decisive Confederate victory, you know, how different the world could be. I mean, imagine that this had led to a cascade in which the Confederates actually won. It's not impossible to imagine that.
And of course, everything about history would differ. Because you'd have two countries. I mean, there's so many things that would be different. I mean, World War I would maybe not have happened the same way. World War II would not have happened the same way. So you start to think about this stuff and it's really seductive.
Yes. Yeah. And it all pivots on these three cigars and the guy taking a rest at just the right time. I mean, it's an amazing, amazing story.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those stories that I think it really makes clear that when we tell history, we always focus on the sort of obvious factors. And this one is really not obvious. So Henry Stimson goes on vacation. He's a U.S. government official at the time. He goes on vacation, basically, in this tour of Asia to Kyoto, Japan in 1926.
And some some incredible historians have done this work to track down. They went to the Miyako Hotel near the rail yards of Kyoto and they found the room number and everything. I mean, they went to the records because the Miyako Hotel still exists and they found, you know, the actual ledger where he stayed.
And the reason they did this is because 19 years later, Henry Stimson ends up as America's Secretary of War. And he's sort of the chief civilian in charge of the targeting decision for the first atomic bomb. And the generals and the scientists and the civilians sort of are together on what's called the Target Committee. And they come up with a list of recommendations for where to drop this bomb.
And they agree that Kyoto is the best pick. And the reason they argue this is it's got an airplane factory. It's a historic capital. It's got propaganda value. It hasn't been destroyed that much during the war. So it sort of will demonstrate the destructive power of the first atomic bomb. And Stimson, fortunately for the residents of Kyoto, liked Kyoto.
He sort of was seduced by the city and the sort of beauty of it, the history of it. And he also didn't want to have, you know, this destruction of this cultural heritage site. So the generals start to call it his pet city because he starts talking so much about how they can't bomb it. They must not bomb it. And he twice meets with President Truman to convince him to take Kyoto off the list.
And eventually Truman relents. And so the first bomb goes to Hiroshima instead of Kyoto because of this vacation that was taken 19 years earlier. And the second bomb is supposed to go to Kokura. That's the primary target on August 9th, 1945. And because of a passing cloud where they basically couldn't see the target site, they end up going to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki, of course.
And, you know, there's a sort of element where when you look at the Miyako Hotel on the target plans, they drew up bombing sort of target maps and so on. And the bullseye for where they plan to drop it is the rail yards right next to where the Miyako Hotel still is today. And so you sort of wonder, you know, the psychology of this moment where Stimson is looking at these maps.
He's remembering this trip with his wife 19 years earlier. He chooses to act. And so we don't know what would have happened differently if they had bombed Kyoto and Kokura instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But one thing that we do know is it would have changed the fate of science.
And I didn't put this in fluke, but it's an interesting aspect of it, is that if you've ever heard of, for example, the F scale for tornadoes, that's named after Ted Fujita. And he was in the bombing site that was supposed to be dropped yesterday. at the time, likely been incinerated. So, I mean, there's all these ripple effects, right?
The science of tornadoes and one of the main figures of modern meteorology probably would have been incinerated. Of course, we don't know who was incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that might have changed the course of the 20th century. And so that's the sort of great what ifs is that Japanese history would have been different. Of course, the U.S. probably would have won the war either way.
But the course of Japanese history and the ripple effects, when you swap 180,000 people out for a different 180,000 people, it changes the future. And all of it can be traced back to this one tourist couple's decision and a passing cloud on August 9th, 1945.
What's interesting is there are some potential references to the idea that this was viewed as an upside in the target committee's thinking because they knew that the scholars who survived and the sort of educated population would instantly know that this bomb was different and would convey it to the rest of the country and say, look, you know, you have to surrender.
So whether that was fanciful thinking or not, but all these little details, I mean, they're fascinating to ponder tragedies, of course, but they're ones where Just when you have such consequential moments, the little tiny aspects of human history are written in the margins.
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