James M. Scott on Empire of Ashes
The bomb ended the war in one sentence. The real story took five months and a president three weeks into the job.Everybody thinks they know this ending: two cities, two bombs, one date, case closed. James M. Scott has spent twenty years proving otherwise. He's a Pulitzer Prize finalist, New York Times bestseller, and the author of Black Snow, Rampage, Target Tokyo, The War Below, and The Attack on the Liberty (plus Targeted: Beirut, co-written with Jack Carr). He teaches as scholar in residence at the Citadel, leads battlefield tours, and somehow still finds time to write books that make eighty-year-old history feel like it happened last Tuesday.His latest, Empire of Ashes (W. W. Norton), picks up where his last book, Black Snow, left off — and goes looking for the part of the story everybody skips.Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was March 9, 1945: the single deadliest air raid of World War II, deadlier than Dresden by a factor of four, and somehow the raid history forgot. Scott explains why Japanese cities burned the way German cities never could, and how one Time magazine headline and some peer pressure from the British helped talk America into a new level of warfare.We also cover:Scott’s take on the “othering” argument for why the bombs got dropped — and what he found in Curtis LeMay’s and Leslie Groves’s own papers insteadHow Scott tracked down survivor accounts from Hiroshima’s archive that had never been published in English, and what it’s like sitting in a survivor’s living room Harry Truman’s letters home from the trenches of World War I, written decades before he’d need every bit of that experience to make the hardest decision of his presidencyWhat Oppenheimer got wrong about Truman’s personality (spoiler: the “crybaby” scene did some heavy lifting for the movie that the historical record doesn’t fully back up)The end of Dad Books?The Truman Presidential LibraryHistoric Missouri (chock full of Truman!)This is also just a great conversation about how a career gets built by accident — Scott went to Japan in the '90s expecting a gap year and came home with a life's work, one classroom conversation about firebombing at a time.WATCH the video edition — with archival photos from James M. Scott's own research, plus material from the Truman Presidential Library, Wikipedia, and other fair-use sources — is up now for paid supporters of Alex's Substack, All the Fits That's News. Hearing about the Tokyo fire raids is one thing. Seeing the photographs while Scott talks about them is another. It will be up free soon, so subscribe NOW to see it NOW!Find James M. Scott: JamesMScott.com — books, tours, and everything else.Empire of Ashes is out now from W. W. Norton, wherever you buy books.Mysterious Goings On is celebrating its 11th year of author interviews, craft talk, and the occasional trip somewhere you legally can't go. New episodes drop weekly — subscribe wherever you listen, and catch the video extras at All the Fits That's News.CONNECT with ALEX:All the Fits That's News on Substack (Free or Paid)Alex's Author Website Buy a Book!Going to Killing City...Alex's True Crime PodcastBook J. Alexander Greenwood for keynotes, panels, podcasts, and live conversations:Speaking & Media FAQMysterious Goings On Podcast episode was recorded and mixed at Green Shebeen Studios in Kansas City, Missouri. Copyright 2026 all rights reserved. No reproduction, excerpting, or other use without written permission.
