Narrator: On an October day in 1939, six weeks after Germany invaded Poland, a Wall Street financier named Alexander Sachs sat in the Oval Office with a letter that could alter the course of human history. The letter, penned by Albert Einstein, warned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of a terrifying new possibility: the creation of "extremely powerful bombs" through a nuclear chain reaction. But as Sachs launched into a lengthy, technical explanation, he saw the President’s eyes glaze over. He had failed. The most important message of his life was lost in a boring monologue. Given a second chance the next day, Sachs tried a different approach. He told a story. He spoke not of physics, but of Napoleon, who had dismissed an American inventor’s idea for steam-powered ships, thereby losing a chance to conquer England. The story worked. Roosevelt finally grasped the stakes. "Alex," he said, "what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up." With the simple command, "this requires action," the race for the atomic bomb began.

This pivotal moment is just one of many explored in Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard's gripping account, Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan. The book provides a stark, unflinching look at the final, brutal year of the war in the Pacific, detailing the savage fighting, strategic gambles, and world-altering decisions that led to the atomic age and the ultimate defeat of Japan.

Narrator: Before any discussion of the atomic bomb, the book establishes the brutal reality of the war in the Pacific. The fighting was not a conventional war of territory gained and lost; it was a war of annihilation. This is vividly illustrated by the Battle of Peleliu in September 1944. American commanders predicted a "hard fought ‘quickie’" that would last four days. Instead, it became a two-month-long nightmare. The Japanese commander, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, had abandoned traditional beach defenses. He ordered his men to retreat into a network of five hundred interconnected caves in the island's highlands, a strategy designed not to win, but to "bleed them white." The result was hell on earth. Marines faced temperatures over 100 degrees and a hidden, fanatical enemy. The Japanese soldiers, bound by the Senjinkun military code, were forbidden to surrender, believing it brought shame. They fought to the death, a mindset that led to extraordinary acts of sacrifice on both sides. One such act was that of Corporal Lewis Bausell, who, upon seeing a Japanese soldier toss a grenade into his foxhole, unhesitatingly threw himself on top of it, absorbing the blast to save his comrades. The battle for Peleliu, and later the even bloodier fight for Okinawa, created a grim calculus for American war planners. If a tiny, strategically questionable island cost so much in blood, what would an invasion of the Japanese mainland, defended by millions of soldiers and civilians armed with bamboo spears, look like?

Narrator: While the war raged in the Pacific, a political drama was unfolding in Washington. Harry Truman, a plainspoken former farmer and haberdasher from Missouri, was Roosevelt's new Vice President. He was largely seen as a political lightweight, a "political eunuch" in his own words, kept out of the loop on the war's most crucial secrets. While Roosevelt was negotiating the fate of the post-war world with Stalin and Churchill at the Yalta Conference, Truman was back home, famously playing piano at the National Press Club while actress Lauren Bacall draped herself over the instrument. He was a man on the periphery of power.

That all changed on April 12, 1945. Summoned urgently to the White House, Truman was met by Eleanor Roosevelt, who put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Harry, the president is dead." In that moment, Truman was thrust into the presidency, inheriting a world at war and a secret so profound it would define his legacy. He was soon briefed on the Manhattan Project, a weapon capable of destroying an entire city. The man who had been an afterthought was now faced with one of the most consequential decisions in human history.

Narrator: The secret Truman inherited was being brought to life in the remote desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the leadership of the brilliant and enigmatic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Despite a history of depression and communist associations, Oppenheimer was chosen to lead the Manhattan Project because of his genius and his ability to unite the world's top scientific minds. On July 16, 1945, their work culminated in the Trinity test. As a violent thunderstorm raged, Oppenheimer and the military head of the project, General Leslie Groves, anxiously debated whether to proceed. With President Truman waiting for news at the Potsdam Conference, the pressure was immense.

At 5:30 a.m., the storm subsided, and the bomb was detonated. The explosion was unlike anything ever seen, a light "ten times more brilliant than the sun" that vaporized the steel tower and melted the desert sand into green glass. The test was a terrifying success. In the aftermath, a mix of relief and dread washed over the observers. Oppenheimer, gaunt and weary, famously recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." The nuclear age had begun.

Narrator: Despite the relentless American advance, Japan remained defiant. The nation was led by Emperor Hirohito, a figure revered as a living god, a direct descendant of the sun goddess. This divine status fueled a nationalistic fervor that made surrender unthinkable. Even as American B-29s, under the command of General Curtis LeMay, began a campaign of devastating firebombing—with one raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killing an estimated 100,000 people—the Japanese leadership refused to yield. They dismissed the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded unconditional surrender, as an "atrocity campaign." The military enacted a plan called Ketsu-Go, or "Decisive Operation," which called for the entire population, from soldiers to schoolchildren, to fight an invasion to the death. This absolute refusal to surrender, rooted in a culture of honor and emperor worship, convinced American leaders that only a shock of unimaginable force could break the stalemate and avoid a catastrophic ground invasion.

Narrator: In a tragic and horrifying coda to the delivery of the atomic bomb, the story of the USS Indianapolis reveals the brutal chaos of war. After successfully delivering the core components of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian Island, the heavy cruiser was sailing unescorted to the Philippines. Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, it was struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58. The ship sank in just twelve minutes, throwing nearly 900 men into the shark-infested Pacific. Due to a series of communication blunders and bureaucratic errors, no one knew the Indianapolis was missing. For nearly four days, the survivors floated in the open ocean, battling dehydration, exposure, and relentless shark attacks. Men went mad from drinking saltwater, and groups were picked off by sharks in what became the worst naval disaster in U.S. history. By the time a patrol plane accidentally spotted the survivors, only 316 men were left alive. The story is a harrowing reminder that even as the war's end was in sight, its capacity for random, horrific tragedy remained undiminished.

Narrator: On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped the first atomic bomb, "Little Boy," on Hiroshima. The city was vaporized in an instant. Three days later, after Japan still refused to surrender and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, a second bomb, "Fat Man," was dropped on Nagasaki. The devastation was absolute. Faced with this "rain of ruin" and the new threat of a Soviet invasion, Emperor Hirohito made an unprecedented decision. On August 15, he addressed the nation by radio—the first time the Japanese people had ever heard their emperor's voice. In formal, archaic language, he announced that Japan must "endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable" and accept the Allies' terms. The war was over. The announcement stunned the nation. While some military hardliners attempted a coup to stop the broadcast, most Japanese citizens collapsed in shock and grief. The voice of their god had told them to surrender, and the Rising Sun had finally set.

Narrator: Killing the Rising Sun presents a powerful and often disturbing narrative, arguing that the atomic bomb, for all its horror, was a grim necessity. The book's central takeaway is that the decision to use the bomb was not made in a vacuum. It was the culmination of a war defined by fanatical resistance, escalating brutality, and the haunting projection of over a million casualties in a potential invasion of Japan. The authors force the reader to confront the brutal calculus of war, where leaders, faced with two catastrophic options, chose the one they believed would end the suffering more quickly.

The book leaves us with a challenging legacy. It asks us to look beyond the simple condemnation of the bomb and understand the context of its creation and use. In a world that still possesses thousands of nuclear weapons, the story of the final days of World War II is not just history; it is a chilling reminder of the destructive power humanity unleashed, and a question that still echoes today: In the face of absolute evil, what is the price of peace?