The Long Way Back to Ourselves

7.7

The Second World War and the Bomb

This episode follows the global scope of the Second World War, starting in China in 1937 rather than Europe in 1939, where the war alone cost an estimated fifteen to twenty million lives. You hear how colonial troops, including over two and a half million soldiers from British India, were written out of the victory narrative, partly through a practice known as "blanchiment." The episode tests the claim that the atomic bombings alone forced Japan's surrender against the competing weight of the Soviet declaration of war on August 8. It also traces how the cited figure of a million American casualties from a planned invasion originated from a 1947 public justification rather than 1945 planning documents.