Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II

In this riveting chronicle, historian Thomas (Sea of Thunder) traces the agonizing decisions of three men “who faced nearly impossible dilemmas in the summer of 1945”—U.S. war secretary Henry Stimson, U.S. Air Force commander Carl Spaatz, and Japanese foreign minister Shigenori Togo. Stimson oversaw the production of the atomic bombs and had final say over the locations targeted; Spaatz led the American bombing campaign on Japan; and Togo persuaded Emperor Hirohito to make an unprecedented personal decision to end the war, overriding Japan’s Supreme War Council. Together, these “three unlikely partners averted a cataclysm of death beyond anything the world had seen,” writes Thomas, asserting that millions of lives would have been lost in a U.S. invasion of Japan, and that the Japanese war hawks could not have been outmaneuvered by Togo without the bomb as a manifest threat. Drawing on unpublished diary entries and interviews with family members of the three men, Thomas’s suspenseful narrative dwells on the existential angst that defined their actions. (Stimson had a heart attack the day he showed President Truman photos of an incinerated Hiroshima; toward the end of his life, Spaatz was full of regret and plagued by sleeplessness.) Regardless of whether the reader is convinced by Thomas’s moral argument in favor of the bomb, this transfixes. (May)