Bill O’Reilly - Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan

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This book is dedicated to all World War II veterans. Freedom rings because of you.

The legendary Killing team made it happen once again: literary agent to the stars Eric Simonoff, astute and insightful publisher Steve Rubin, and Gillian Blake, the quiet editorial genius. My TV boss Roger Ailes deserves a big thank you, as does Makeda Wubneh, my imperturbable assistant of twenty years. Thanks, guys!

B ILL OR EILLY

Thanks for the friendship and professional inspiration of Eric Simonoff, Gillian Blake, and Steve Rubin. To Makeda Wubneh. To Devin, Connor, and Liam. To my wife, Calene, who is singularly awesome. And, of course, to the intrepid Bill OReilly.

M ARTIN D UGARD

The land of the rising sun

A NCIENT C HINESE DESCRIPTION OF J APAN ,
REFERRING TO THE MORNING SUN S REACHING
THE ISLANDS OF J APAN BEFORE THE A SIAN MAINLAND

On September 16, 2001, five days after the savage attack launched by Al Qaeda terrorists on the United States, Barack Obamas longtime Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., delivered a stunning anti-American diatribe in his church. Listing what he believed to be atrocities America had committed in the past that would explain or perhaps justify the 9/11 mass murder, Wright got around to condemning his country for dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945.

We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon. Americas chickens are coming home to roost.

Seven years later, Wrights explosive statements were uncovered by the media. Senator Obama, then campaigning to become president, quickly repudiated his pastors assessment, distancing himself from the militant minister who officiated at his wedding and with whom he had a close relationship for about twenty years.

It is safe to say that many people around the world had little or no idea what Wright was talking about. Sure, most folks know that A-bombs were dropped and the carnage caused was catastrophic. But, sad to say, the events leading up to the end of World War II are not that widely known anymore. Thus, statements like the one Wright made sometimes go unchallenged.

Every person on this planet lives with a common threat: nuclear annihilation. The nuclear weapons of today dwarf the first A-bombs in destructive power. Currently, the Iranian nuclear treaty has raised awareness of the threat, but still, the nuclear bombs origins and the brutal world of the mid-1940s are no longer common knowledge.

Enter this book. It comes with a warning: the following pages contain some extremely troubling material. The violence the world witnessed in 1945 is unprecedented in history and will be chronicled on the following pages in detail.

What Martin Dugard and I are about to tell you is true and stark. The way the United States defeated the Japanese empire is vital to understand because the issues of that war are still being processed throughout the world today.

Killing the Rising Sun is the sixth in our series of history books. We believe you will know far more about America by the books end. We also believe you will be very able to put the comments of people like Reverend Wright in their proper context.

We live in a time of spin and deception. It is important to know the truth.

Here it is.

B ILL OR EILLY

Long Island, New York

March 2016

O VAL O FFICE , T HE W HITE H OUSE

W ASHINGTON , DC

O CTOBER 12, 1939

10:00 A . M .

The age of mass destruction is about to dawn.

What bright idea do you have now? an upbeat Franklin Delano Roosevelt asks Wall Street financier Alexander Sachs, one of his key advisers on the New Deal that lifted America out of the Great Depression. The forty-six-year-old economist sits on the opposite side of the presidents massive wooden desk. FDR was up past midnight, as is his custom. The deep circles under his eyes and his pale skin, resulting from constant exhaustion and too little time spent outdoors, make the president look far older than his fifty-seven years. His health is not enhanced by the Camel cigarette he now holds, one of the more than twenty he will smoke today.

Sachs chooses his reply carefully. This meeting is so top secret that it will not appear in the official daily log of presidential appointments. Sachs can only hope that it will go better than the hour he spent with Roosevelt yesterday, when he labored unsuccessfully to find the right words to describe what could possibly be the greatest single threat to mankind.

It has been six weeks since Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning what will become known as the Second World War. One month prior, on August 2, theoretical physicist Albert Einstein wrote an urgent letter to President Roosevelt warning that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.

Einstein is a longtime friend of Roosevelts, but he felt that sending Alexander Sachs to deliver the letter in person would be the most effective way of getting his point across. Yet when Sachs finally managed to get an audience with Roosevelt yesterday morning, the pompous financier was unable to articulate his case.

Rather than simply reading Einsteins two-page letter aloud, he appeared in the Oval Office with a stack of technical papers detailing Americas uranium output and then read from an eight-hundred-word summary he had written. Sachs never mentioned that Einstein and other top American scientists believe that the new bombs could obliterate entire citiesor that Nazi Germany is currently racing to build such weapons. Roosevelt grew bored as Sachs droned on. With pressing business to address, the president dismissed Sachs, telling him to come back the next day.

That time is now. Realizing his mistake, Sachs gets right down to business. As Roosevelt listens attentively, the Wall Street leader reads Einsteins letter aloud. The president may not have appeared to be listening yesterday, but some of the discussion seems to have sunk in. Roosevelt probes Sachs with questions about uranium, the Nazis, and this new bomb. Einsteins letter makes it clear that the Germans have already taken control of a key uranium mine in Czechoslovakia and that scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin are attempting to use this uranium to set up a nuclear chain reaction that could lead to the most lethal bomb in history.

Roosevelt has finally heard enough. Alex, he summarizes for the financier, what you are after is to see that the Nazis dont blow us up.

Precisely, a relieved Sachs answers.

Roosevelt immediately summons his personal secretary, retired US Army general Edwin Pa Watson, into the Oval Office.

Pa, Roosevelt orders, this requires action.

P ELELIU , C AROLINE I SLANDS

P ACIFIC O CEAN

S EPTEMBER 15, 1944

0832 H OURS

Destruction is near for the empire.