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Ep. 144 The Manhattan Project: How the US Became the "Destroyer of Worlds" With the WWII Atomic Bombings of Japan

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 144

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Consider this the third and final installment of my war with Japan triptych. In this episode, we'll discuss the top secret "Manhattan Project" led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer that led to the development of the first atomic bomb. We'll uncover the motives behind creating such a dangerous weapon and for using it on two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to civilian casualties of up to 300,000 people. We'll also consider the question, what now? What does this mean for us today and for future generations going forward? 

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August 6, 1945 began as a normal day in Hiroshima, Japan. I mean, kind of. Of course the country was embroiled in a deadly World War and enemy forces, the United States specifically, had been bombing cities for months, unleashing firestorms that had already claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. But, if you could time travel to a Hiroshima sidewalk on the morning of August 6, 1945, it would seem at least a little bit normal. At 8 am that morning, the city was alive with the usual activity, the hustle and bustle of school drop off, businessmen arriving for work at their respective office buildings. People walked their dogs, pushed their babies in strollers, hailed taxis, a somewhat normal city sidewalk. At 8:15, all of that would change in the blink of an eye. Suddenly that bustling Hiroshima street was engulfed in a blinding explosion that destroyed 5 square miles of the city, instantly killing an estimated 70 to 80,000 people, a number that would eventually near double due to exposure to radiation poisoning. That’s around 40 percent of Hiroshima’s population killed with the pressing of a single button. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan the morning of August 6th marked the first of two times that atomic bombs have been used as weapons in the history of our world, both times by the United States. But how did we get to that point, and why? These weren’t soldiers. These weren’t the men who bombed Pearl Harbor. These weren’t the men who were raping and killing hundreds of thousands across China. These were innocent Japanese civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly. So, why? Let’s fix that. 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and that the new year is treating you right so far, all 4 days of it, 2 days if you’re listening on Patreon. I very much enjoyed my week off last week and I thank you sincerely to all those who delved into the bonus content on Patreon in my absence, there’s always so much there to hold you over. I’m back on Japan this week. This turned into an unintended three partner I think . You know, back in early December, December 7th actually, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, we talked about that attack with help from expert Quin Cho and how it got the US involved in World War II. And then that naturally led to an episode about Japanese American internment camps during the war. So we sort of talked about how it started, how it went, I feel like I’d be leaving you hanging if we don’t talk about how it ended. So today’s episode is about that ending and it, it went out with a bang for sure. A bang that has raised many many moral and ethical questions ever since. A bang that still very much looms over us today and going forward into the future. So, seems a very worthy topic. 

To really understand what happened in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, we have to get a little bit sciencey. I touched on some of this already in a mini fix I did, mini fix number 17 about Marie Curie, you can listen to that on Patreon, always linked in the description. That would be a great accoutrement to this episode. But basically, atomic bombs work because of nuclear fission which is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom, hence the term atomic. So, you split the nucleus of an atom of an unstable element like uranium or plutonium and once that nucleus splits, it releases neutrons that cause the other neighboring nuclei to split. So, it triggers a chain reaction. All of these nuclei splitting release an immense amount of energy, heat, pressure, radiation, in the form of an explosion. The discovery of it all began with a German scientist named Martin Klaproth in 1789, he’s the one who discovered uranium. Lot’s of nerds in this episode, get ready for the names of lots of nerds and, if you know me, you know “nerd” is a term of endearment. I want like baseball cards but with these guys on them, that’s how cool they are to me. Much later, in 1896, over a hundred years later, a French physicist named Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium gave off radiation. This discovery piqued the interest of Marie Curie, who was a Polish physicist and chemist working in France and it was Marie who actually coined the term radioactive. She studied uranium extensively and actually, along with her husband Pierre, discovered additional radioactive elements in the process, polonium and radium. She’s one of, if not the most badass female scientists the world has ever seen y’all, mini fix number 17. So, what does radioactive mean though? It means that the atoms are unstable, they come apart, they disintegrate, and they release electromagnetic particles. Marie Curie’s work with radioactivity changed everything we thought we knew about atoms which means it changed everything we thought we knew about physics which is literally everything. It led to our understanding of atoms as a nucleus, right, protons and neutrons in the middle, surrounded by electrons. Before this, we thought atoms were a single thing, indivisible particles, we didn’t know they were made of even smaller parts, subatomic particles that could be separated out causing things to happen. Marie Curie gave us that knowledge. 

By the 1930s other nerds were experimenting with this concept of separating subatomic particles. What happens if we take a neutron [pop] out of the middle of the atom. What happens? One of these guys was a Hungarian-German physicist named Leo Szilard. Szilard came up with the concept, the theory, the idea of nuclear fission reactions, where one neutron splits off and then causes this chain reaction of neutrons splitting. He came up with that idea in 1933. The next year, an Italian physicist named Enrico Fermi accidentally pulled this off. He unknowingly split uranium neutrons while conducting some experiments. So then, piggybacking off all that, the theory and the accidental execution, Austrian-Swedish female physicist, woot woot, Lise Meitner together with German chemist Otto Hahn actually did this whole nuclear fission thing successfully on purpose.

Now you may be thinking, okay we got German nerds, French nerds, Polish nerds, Italian nerds, Hungarian nerds, Austrian-Swedish nerds, this is like a joint effort here. But all of this is happening in Europe. These are all European nationalities. How did it get to the United States? How was the US the one to actually make use of this new discovery? Well, around this same time, in the 1930s, things were really ramping up in Nazi Germany. Antisemitism was growing in Germany and also in Italy as fascist regimes gained power. This began to force some of these scientists out of those countries, specifically Leo Szilard who was Jewish and living in Germany and Enrico Fermi whose wife, Laura Capon, was Jewish and living in Italy. Szilard and Fermi both fled their respective countries to the United States. Lise Meitner was also Jewish and fled Austria but he went to Sweden, not the US. Now, Otto Hahn, who worked with Meitner to actually pull off nuclear fission, he stayed in Germany. We’ll come back to that. But a lot of these other guys were fleeing these antisemetic fascist regimes. 

Over in the US, Szilard teams up with a guy named Walter Zinn. They recreate Meitner and Hahn’s nuclear fission experiment. Of that moment, that successful experiment, Szilard said quote “That night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief,” end quote. He gets together with Fermi, these two refugees really, they team up and they start building a nuclear reactor at Columbia University. And just the irony of that you guys. These scientists, these brilliant groundbreaking scientists have been forced out of their countries by governments who see themselves as the superior race, who are prepared to annihilate them in mass genocide, the “final solution.” Meanwhile, these guys, these refugees hold the knowledge, the power to literally destroy the entire world. Underestimation is an understatement here. Another refugee, a Jewish German theoretical physicist had also fled Europe and was living on Long Island, New York. You’ve heard of him, Albert Einstein. Szilard goes to Einstein and they talk about nuclear fission and its devastating potential. Together, they write a letter to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR on August 2, 1939. In it they say quote “This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed,” end quote. This is a warning to the leader of this country that has taken them in. They’re saying basically “hey we’re kind of in this niche group of nerds who know about this, but we think you should know that we’ve developed a technology that could obliterate everything. Just thought you might want to know that.” 

And this is a problem because, remember Otto Hahn, the first guy to actually pull off nuclear fission along with Meitner? He’s still in Germany. He has this knowledge and he’s German, he’s chilling in his lab over in Nazi Germany just sitting on this world destroying bit of knowledge with an actual madman running the country. So yeah, FDR was interested. He forms the Advisory Committee on Uranium in October of 1939. As anything science or really education related tends to do, this committee moved slowly at first. It wasn’t until after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941, so over two years later, that they started to get serious. The US was officially in World War II, we gotta get this whole uranium, nuclear fission, new type of bomb thing figured out before someone else does. 

Once this ramps up, the Army Corps of Engineers takes over the task of actually trying to make an atomic bomb. In August of 1942, they created the Manhattan Engineer District which was named after their offices in Manhattan in New York City. This is where the codename “Manhattan Project” would later be derived. A guy named Colonel Leslie R. Groves was put in charge of this project. Okay so Groves was an Army guy. He was a Brigadier General. He was not a scientist. He’s kind of like the project manager. But he needs an actual scientist if he’s going to build and test atomic bombs, right, that’s kind of a requirement. Nerds only please. Now, Szilard and Fermi are still hard at work on this. On December 2, 1942 they were able to produce a self-sustaining nuclear reaction strong enough to power a lightbulb. That seems minor but it was actually a really big deal because it was the first instance in history of a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, proof that that theory was even possible. And this was done, actually, beneath the squash courts at the University of Chicago according to the National World War II Museum. 

Later that month, later in December after Szilard and Fermi pulled this off, the Manhattan Project exploded into this massive undertaking. They had over 30 project sites all over the country and over 100,000 people working on this project at an eventual cost of around 2.2 billion dollars. A massive undertaking, but at the same time, top secret. They don’t want enemy countries finding out what they’re doing so this whole thing had to be a secret. Pretty terrifying that we’re able to pull off secret projects of this magnitude. 

So Szilard and Fermi are doing their thing but Groves still needs a head nerd. He needs a nerd in charge of all this if they’re actually going to successfully build a bomb. He selects a nerd by the name of J. Robert Oppenheimer to head the secret weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico which was like the center of operations. Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist and a physics professor at the University of California Berkeley. I love this, same thing I talked about in episode 25 about the Apollo 13 near disaster, when they call in the teachers. They’re literally like, middle of the night, they’re on the phone with these professors from all over like “help us, what do we do?” Who has the knowledge to save the world? To destroy the world? It’s the teachers. So Oppenheimer leaves his classroom at Berkeley and he goes to Los Alamos to build the first atomic bomb. 

They figure out, you can make bombs out of uranium and you can also make them out of plutonium which is another radioactive element but it isn’t naturally occurring, it’s a byproduct that comes from uranium reactions. It’s even more radioactive than uranium. So Oppenheimer decides to use plutonium for this first attempt at a bomb. He makes the bomb, he’s like “now we have to test it.” Groves doesn’t want to test it because plutonium is seriously expensive and rare but Oppenheimer insists and he’s the guy who knows so they move forward with plans to test the bomb. This was called the Trinity test. That name was inspired by the writing of a 17th century poet named John Donne. Oppenheimer had been reading Donne’s sonnets before the test and was struck by the line quote “batter my heart, three-person’d God.” So, he’s a bit of a poetic nerd. Anyway, this test took place at Alamogordo, New Mexico around 200 miles south of the research laboratory at Los Alamos. The bomb they were testing was nicknamed Gadget and it was made of some 13 pounds of plutonium. At 5:29 am on the morning of July 16, 1945 the Trinity Test began. They hoisted Gadget, the bomb, into the air using a steel tower and suspended it 100 feet above the ground. Then they used an implosion method to detonate it. The result was expected and yet unexpected. It exploded but on a much larger scale than they thought it would. Oppenheimer had been expecting an explosion equivalent to 300 tons of TNT. What they got instead was an explosion equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT. The bomb was 70 times stronger than they thought it would be. According to the National World War II museum quote “The flash from the bomb was so bright that it temporarily blinded observers standing 10,000 yards away. The heat from the bomb was so intense that it evaporated the steel tower, left a crater five feet deep by 30 feet wide, and melted the sand in the area, creating a mildly radioactive green glass called “trinitite.” Upon witnessing the blast, Oppenheimer famously uttered a line from the Bhagavad Gita, [quote within a quote] ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,’” end quote. Oppenheimer also said of that moment, quote “We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was entirely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent,” end quote. 

Now for some context, so that happened July 16, 1945, they successfully tested the first atomic bomb. What’s happening with the war at this point? Well Germany had already surrendered back in May. The European front of World War II is over, has been over for a couple of months. Hitler is dead. FDR is also dead. Actually FDR died on April 12th of a cerebral hemorrhage, a type of stroke. He collapsed while sitting for a portrait, having his portrait made, and never regained consciousness. That portrait remains unfinished, you’re seeing it now if you’re watching the video version of this on YouTube or Patreon. So FDR died April 12th, Hitler committed suicide April 30th, then Germany surrendered May 9th, and the first atomic bomb was tested July 16th. Now you may be thinking, everybody’s dead, the war’s over, why are we even still messing with the bomb at this point? Well it’s not over in the Pacific. FDR died in office so his Vice President Harry S. Truman took over as President and inherited a war with Japan that was worse than ever and not going anywhere despite victory in Europe.

So, the Trinity test of this first atomic bomb was successful. Groves calls up President Truman and tells him, you know, “We did it. In fact, it’s even more powerful than we thought.” And the timing of this is really perfect because, when Truman gets this news, he’s already at the Potsdam Conference. This was a meeting between the US, the Soviet Union, and the UK, the three leading allied forces during the war, to try to figure out what to do next. Germany had surrendered but how do we move forward? And what about Japan? At this conference, the Potsdam Declaration was written. This called for Japan’s unconditional surrender. Truman basically goes, in a matter of words, he goes “surrender or we’ll destroy you. We have the technology and we will use it” “prompt and utter destruction” were his actual words. Japan refuses. 

Now let’s talk a little more about what’s been going on with Japan. Since about 1944, so like a year ago, it’s been pretty obvious that Japan cannot win this war. It’s just not going to happen. They don’t have the manpower. They don’t have the resources. It’s unwinnable for Japan. But, despite this, instead of giving up, they resolve to fight until the bitter end, to go down swinging. Between just April and July 1945, three months, Japanese forces killed so many allied troops that it was equal to roughly half of those who died throughout the last three whole years of war in the Pacific. So, they are really digging their heels in. And for what? It’s obvious they are going to lose so all of this loss of life is just pointless. But the allies cannot get Japan to surrender. They are forced to resort to extreme measures in the form of brutal attacks on Japanese civilians. When we think about the bombing of civilians during World War II we usually think about the Blitz, right German planes bombing London and it’s terrible, you know, why would they do that? These are innocent people. They’re killing children. But you guys, what the US did in Japan is wayyyy worse than what the Nazi’s did to London. I don’t think many people even know about this. I’m not talking about the atomic bombs, I know people know about that. I’m talking about all the bombing they did before they dropped the atomic bombs which was arguably worse than the atomic bombs.  

Okay so hear me out because this was news to me it might be news to you too. So the US was desperate to get Japan to surrender. They have to do something to force it to happen. In Europe, one of the strategies over there was the bombing of military and industrial sites, factories and what not to cripple the infrastructure. They try this in Japan too but it doesn’t work. It’s set up differently in Japan. There aren’t like big factories set off by themselves like in Europe. The industry is in the form of small workshops that are integrated into residential areas. So the focus shifts from bombing big factories set off by themselves like in Europe to just bombing the urban areas themselves. And this of course meant a whole lot more civilian casualties. The Blitz, when Germany bombed London between September of 1940 and May of 1941, killed an estimated 43,000 people over a period of 8 months. Japan was next level. One night of bombing Tokyo in March of 1945 killed 100,000 people and destroyed 16 square miles of the city. This is worse, as far as immediate casualties, than what the atomic bomb did to Hiroshima. And I don’t think anyone even really knows about it. The single deadliest air raid in history. 

Once the allies realized that the bombing of factories and military outposts wasn’t going to work like it had in Europe and they committed to the bombing of urban areas to try to force a surrender, it gets real bad. They actually built full scale replicas of Japanese homes out in the American west and then tested the best way to destroy them. Turned out, Japanese style houses burned very easily so the strategy became firebombing. This type of attack uses incendiary bombs which start fires. Richard Overy, author of Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan says in an article for History Extra quote “Within five months [they] destroyed 60 per cent of Japan’s urban area. They killed a quarter of a million Japanese people, [the] overwhelming majority women, children and old people. 10 million fled to the countryside but it became difficult to feed them,” end quote. But, despite all of this, 100,000 civilians killed in a single night, Japan will not surrender. Truman hits them up at the end of July after the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb was successful. He goes “will you surrender now? If not, we're going to do this thing.” They still won’t. So now what? We’re actually going to drop atomic bombs on Japan? 

This wasn’t a universally accepted idea of course. Many wanted to carry on with the firebombing that was already happening. General Douglas MacArthur proposed following that up with a massive invasion of Japan codenamed “Operation Downfall.” But when MacArthur told Truman the invasion would likely result in the deaths of up to one million US troops, Truman shut it down. And, honestly I can’t blame him. One million US soldiers dead? For what? Japan’s going to lose anyway. What are we still fighting for? It all seems like such a waste. So it’s just this really difficult desperate situation that they’re in. And, you know, desperate times call for desperate measures. Are we going to kill 100,000 Japanese civilians or are we going to let them kill a million US soldiers? That’s an impossible question. Many were morally opposed, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as many of the actual scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. In the end, it was determined that atomic bombing Japan was necessary. It would not only end the war for sure, it would also put the US in a dominant global position after the war. 

The city of Hiroshima was bombed first on August 6th. A 9,000 pound uranium bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” was dropped from a plane at about 8:15 in the morning and exploded 2,000 feet above the city with the force of 15,000 tons of explosives destroying 5 square miles and killing 70 to 80,000 people instantly. Amazingly, after this, Japan still did not surrender. And so, another bomb was dropped, this time on the city of Nagasaki at 11:02 am on August 9th, so three days later. This bomb was actually meant for a city called Kokura but there were thick clouds over Kokura that day and so the plane carried on to the next city instead, Nagasaki. This bomb was called “Fat Man” and it was a 10,000 pound plutonium bomb that should have had the power of 22,000 tons of explosives. So it was even more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at 15,000 tons. But, because of the topography of Nagasaki which is nestled in a valley between two mountains, it limited the damage of the bomb to just two and a half square miles and kept the initial deaths at about 40,000 so pretty much half as much damage as in Hiroshima despite being a stronger bomb. 

On August 15, six days later, Emperor Hirohito of Japan surrendered in a radio broadcast. And so, you know, their plan had worked but at what cost? According to History.com quote “Because of the extent of the devastation and chaos—including the fact that much of the two cities' infrastructure was wiped out—exact death tolls from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unknown. However, it's estimated roughly 70,000 to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation,” end quote. But, there was another type of cost too. There was the loss of life and some probably justified that by saying “well look it was still way less than the one million US troops who would have died if we had gone with the other plan,” but there was also the cost of unleashing that technology on the world, making it a thing. Now, atomic bombs are a possibility. That can happen. And for the next 40 some years we were absolutely crippled by the fear of this happening, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Just, the irony of creating this thing, unleashing this thing on the world and then trying to be like “oh but wait, wait, wait don’t use it on us.” Like, what did you think was going to happen? 

But, I stumbled upon a letter written from a father to his son that I think is very interesting. And it sheds some light on an alternate idea about what might happen after a bomb like this is unleashed. This letter was written by Luis Alvarez, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. So this guy helped to develop the bombs that were dropped on Japan. But, more than that even, he was sent along in one of three airplanes that dropped that first bomb on Hiroshima as a scientific observer. Cause, once again, we’re not trusting soldiers with this kind of advanced scientific technology, we gotta have at least one nerd there. Well Luis Alvarez was that nerd. He was in one of the planes when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and he wrote this letter to his 5 year old son Walter on the return flight quote: 

Dear Walter:

This is the first grown-up letter I have ever written to you, and it is really for you to read when you are older. During the last few hours I have been thinking of you and your mother and our little sister Jean. It was tough to take off on this flight, not knowing whether I would ever see any of you again. But lots of other fathers have been in the same spot many times before in this war, and I had a job to do, so I can't claim to be any sort of hero.

I wonder if you will remember the time in Albuquerque, when we climbed all through a B-29 Superfortress. Probably you will remember climbing thru the tunnel over the bombbay, as that really impressed you at the time. Well, I have been in this B-29 for eight hours so far, and we won't be back for another five or six.

The story of our mission will probably be well known to every-one by the time you read this, but at the moment only the crews of our three B-29s, and the unfortunate residents of the Hiroshima district in Japan are aware of what has happened to aerial warfare. Last week the 20th Air Force, stationed in the Marianas Islands, put over the biggest bombing raid in history, with 6000 tons of bombs (about 3000 tons of high explosive). Today, the lead plane of our little formation dropped a single bomb which probably exploded with the force of 15,000 tons of high explosive. That means that the days of large bombing raids, with several hundred planes, are finished. A single plane disguised as a friendly transport can now wipe out a city. That means to me that nations will have to get along together in a friendly fashion, or suffer the consequences of sudden sneak attacks which can cripple them overnight.

What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect, by making wars too terrible, but unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse that it may realize Nobel's dream,” 

I find it interesting that the first thing Alvarez does after witnessing the instantaneous deaths of at least 70,000 innocent people with the use of technology that he helped create, is to write a letter to his then 5 year old son. He wrote the letter in the airplane on the way back after dropping the bomb. That’s strange to me. There’s a lot to unpack there. He doesn’t write to the President of the United States. He doesn’t write to Oppenheimer or his colleagues who worked with him on the Manhattan project. He doesn’t write to his wife. He writes to his 5 year old son, to a child, who now has to live in a world forever changed. He writes a letter to the future and in it he convinces himself that what he’s done is for the best. That now the countries of the world will have to get along. Now, the consequences are too great. The mere threat of this bomb will keep people in line. But, he even admits, it’s the same thing Alfred Nobel thought when he invented high explosives, and he was wrong. “Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse that it may realize Nobel’s dream,” he wrote. There’s a lot hinging on that word may isn’t there? 

To date, the United States remains the only country to ever weaponize atomic bombs despite very real fears throughout the Cold War from 1947 to 1991. Because of his father’s work, little Walter Alvarez would’ve regularly practiced atomic bomb drills at school known as “duck and cover” drills where students got under their desks and covered their heads with their arms to shield themselves from the blast. I found a 10 minute long instructional video about the duck and cover drill that they used to show to school children. I’ll link it in the description. It’s pretty surreal. Here’s a little preview [insert audio from end of duck and cover video] This would have done absolutely nothing in the event of an actual atomic bomb of course. Fun side note, I stumbled upon this and can’t figure out how to work it in so I’m just going to interject real quick, Walter Alvarez grew up to be a scientist as well and he and his father Luis, the guy who wrote the letter, together they came up with the theory that the dinosaurs went extinct because of an asteroid impact which is still the widely held belief today. Unrelated but interesting. But, you know, while Walter’s growing up doing these duck and cover drills at school, there never were any atomic bombs dropped during the cold war. There were no bombs of any kind dropped actually, no large scale fighting at all. No actual fighting. That’s why it’s cold. And it seems that fear, fear of nuclear warfare was the deterrent that did indeed keep both sides in line. No one wanted to attack the other for fear of atomic bomb retribution. And so maybe Luis Alvarez was onto something. Maybe he wasn’t just rambling trying to make himself feel better about what he had done. Maybe the atomic bomb really did realize Nobel’s dream, there really was a level of war too horrible for us to cross into. We’ve never been back there and hopefully we never will. 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. As always, source material for this episode can be found in the show notes. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.