♪ ♪ (theme music playing) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

And today I'm gonna be in conversation with Ian Toll who is the author of "Twilight of the Gods", the third part of his trilogy on the Pacific War that the United States fought with Japan in World War II area, and we're coming to you today from the Robert H. Smith Auditorium of the New York Historical Society.

So let's start with, uh, Pearl Harbor.

Uh, it's widely thought by some people that President Roosevelt knew in advance that there was gonna be, uh, an attack on Pearl Harbor and he didn't want to do anything about it because he really wanted an excuse to get the Americans into the war.

Is there any truth to that?

TOLL: No.

Uh, that conspiracy theory has been discredited.

Unfortunately, John Toland, who was a, um, a very influential author in the 1970s wrote a book advancing that conspiracy theory.

Uh, the wrinkle is that we did know that the Japanese were likely to launch a war, uh, in the Pacific.

RUBENSTEIN: Why?

What, what were they upset about?

TOLL: We were.

They were upset about, uh, well, a number of things, but, um, the, the real, uh, crux of the matter was our oil embargo.

We had cut off our oil exports to them.

Japan then as now, is a, a country, uh, impoverished in natural resources with little or no domestic oil production.

They needed our oil.

Uh, we had cut it off in the summer of 1941 and that's why they felt that they were forced to go to war.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, the Americans did know or believe that there might be an attack because the Japanese were upset.

TOLL: We expected them to launch a war.

Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: But where did we expect them?

The conventional wisdom they would launch it where?

TOLL: Well, we thought, uh, really just looking at what we thought their capabilities were, uh, we thought that they would attack in the Western Pacific.

So we expected an attack perhaps to fall in the Philippines, uh, on Guam, uh, and on the British and Dutch, uh, territories in Southeast Asia.

Uh, we did not expect them to strike at Pearl because I don't think frankly we believed they had the capability to do that.

Uh, it was an extraordinary operation at the time.

No one had dreamt that you could push a, a fleet of aircraft carriers halfway across the Pacific to launch a really enormous air strike, uh, involving hundreds of planes simultaneously.

So as, uh, Roosevelt said the day afterwards, when he asked for a Declaration of War, it was, uh, we should give the Japanese credit, uh, for a brilliant, uh, operation, which was brilliantly carried out.

He praised the Japanese.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, can you explain how the Japanese military worked?

Did the Navy and the army work together, or was it unified?

And how was, uh, the emperor involved?

TOLL: The, uh, army and the navy were largely independent, uh, and, um, they, they never really.

There was no, uh, single authority, uh, who could impose a coherent policy on both branches.

So really going all the way back to the Meiji restoration period, the army and the navy were independent coequal rivals.

Uh, Hirohito's, um, authority within the government was a, a, uh, a constitutionally debatable kind of thing.

Uh, the major constitution granted him great power to command the armed forces, and yet through a series of, uh, precedence, uh, he had come to, he had been told and he had come to believe that really his, uh, role was to approve the recommendations of, of the services when they were unanimous.

RUBENSTEIN: So how many, uh, ships did they send there to, um, have the attack and how many airplanes were there?

TOLL: Well, they, they had, uh, six, six aircraft carriers in Kido Butai, which was their carrier striking force.

Uh, there were about, uh, 12 to 14 other warships, and then they had a number of fleet oilers and logistical support vessels as well.

Uh, there were some 360 planes, I believe, uh, distributed across those carriers and, um, uh, they participated in, um, in both the rounds of the strikes on Pearl Harbor.

RUBENSTEIN: So how come our satellites didn't pick up the, that they were coming?

We didn't, we didn't know?

TOLL: We had our satellites pointed in the wrong direction.

RUBENSTEIN: So we had radar, but the radar didn't obviously go that far but didn't we have some ships that were kind of surrounding Pearl Harbor that would have picked up something, or are we just, we're completely radio silent about this.

TOLL: You know, we, we relied mostly on, um, uh, on patrol flights, uh, by PBYs, which were flying boats, uh, these very large planes that land on water.

And, um, and those, uh, planes had been, had been doing their, their patrol flights, uh, but, uh, they weren't doing them, they weren't doing as many of them as they really needed to be doing.

RUBENSTEIN: Now.

TOLL: And the Japanese came in and launched under cover of darkness.

RUBENSTEIN: The attack is on the morning of December the 7th.

TOLL: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, how many Americans were killed in that attack?

TOLL: It's about 2,800 who were killed.

RUBENSTEIN: And how many ships were sunk?

TOLL: Uh, um, well, we lost, uh, I think nine, uh, total.

RUBENSTEIN: Nine?

And how many, uh, Japanese were killed in the attack?

TOLL: Well, virtually none.

Uh, they lost, uh, 30 planes, I think.

Um, so bare... And none of their ships were scratched at all.

So they got away pretty much scot-free.

RUBENSTEIN: In planning for the attack, what did the Japanese think would be our response to say, "Okay, you, you got us and we're, we don't wanna fight, or," What, what was their planned response?

TOLL: They had, um, uh... Yamamoto, for example, had said, "Uh, our chance here is to essentially actually cripple their, uh, navy so that they don't have the opportunity to interfere with what we're going to do, which is to go south and take these territories in the South Pacific that we need, uh, for oil and other raw materials."

Um, he also hoped that by striking this blow, uh, he would demoralize us, uh, and perhaps even bring about a political situation in which the American people were demanding, uh, that, uh, we, uh, sign some sort of a truce.

RUBENSTEIN: But in hindsight, they would admit that they miscalculated how severe our counterattack would be.

TOLL: It was.

RUBENSTEIN: Is that right?

TOLL: It was one of the, one of the the worst miscalculations in history, I think.

Uh, it was certainly one of the worst decisions ever made by a nation, I think.

The Japanese attacked, uh, the United States and Great Britain, um, nations, which potentially had the power to, to field much more significant military forces than they were capable of doing and they solved, uh, FDR's greatest problem, which was that the American people were divided.

Uh, the Isolationist Movement was very strong.

It collapsed overnight, literally.

RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, did the Germans declare war on us as well?

TOLL: They did, three days later.

RUBENSTEIN: Why, why would they declare war on us?

TOLL: You know, there's a lot of scholarship on this.

I'm not a, a historian of the Third Reich.

Uh, but, um, it, it's a good question.

Why did Hitler make that decision, uh, when he had the capacity to, to do nothing, to wait and see, or at least to demand that the Japanese, mobilize to, to strike, uh, the Soviet Union, which is what, what the Germans after all wanted to do.

They wanted another front for the Soviets on, in the, in, in the east.

Uh, and yet he, uh, declared war on Thursday, again, solving another big political problem for FDR.

RUBENSTEIN: All right.

So the war is going forward, we're in the war and it doesn't go so well in the beginning, um, and you talk about that in your first two books, but I wanna to go through three key parts of your third part of your, of your trilogy.

And I'll just start with, the Iwo Jima, uh, invasion and, uh, that battle there.

How many men were lost in Iwo Jima by Americans?

TOLL: Uh, combat losses in Iwo Jima were, uh, I think, close to 20,000 total of whom about 6,000 and change were killed.

RUBENSTEIN: And Japanese lost.

TOLL: Their whole garrison minus maybe two or 300 people.

So, 24,000.

RUBENSTEIN: 24,000.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: So.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Between both sides, over 40,000.

TOLL: Uh, yes.

Yeah.

Well, 30, more than 30,000 killed.

Yeah, and, and, um, and more than 40,000 killed or wounded.

Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Why was, uh, Iwo Jima is so important.

It's a little spec of land.

It's barely, you know, enough to land anything on.

Why was it so important?

TOLL: Well, I, I mean, I think it, it has, um, lived large in, in our collective memory for a number of reasons.

Uh, the, um, the famous photograph of the marines raising the flag on Suribachi, I think has left an imprint on our historical memory.

Um, it, uh, was e, e, emblematic of this, this kind of warfare that we were capable of toward the end.

So I, Iwo Jima was in 1945, it's toward the end of the war where we could assemble these enormous, uh, Naval amphibious fleets and go attack, uh, essentially what would, which, wa, was a fortress.

Iwo Jima was a fortress.

Uh, the entire island was a fortress.

We could, uh, land troops and, um, and, and take that island.

RUBENSTEIN: But why did we care?

I mean, why don't we fly over?

Why did we, what was so important about Iwo Jima, to begin with?

TOLL: It was really driven by the B-29 campaign.

Uh, so we had taken the, um, the Mariana's Islands to the south, uh, earlier in, uh, 1944.

And we had launched this enormous air campaign using this new airplane, the B-29, to fly some 1,500 miles north to bomb Tokyo and the Japanese, uh, industrial heartland.

And we were losing a lot of these planes, uh, because they would either run outta fuel or they were hit by flack and they would go down at sea.

And so we needed, uh, another airfield that was closer.

Iwo Jima was about 600 miles closer, uh, to Japan.

RUBENSTEIN: So the Japanese, knowing that this was an important, uh, place for us to be able to refuel, they armed the place, but how did they do it?

They didn't just put soldiers there and said, "Let's just wait or dig trenches."

What did they do that was fairly unique, at least Americans thought it was unique.

TOLL: Yeah, what they really did was they built an extraordinarily large and complicated, um, uh, network of tunnels and bunkers.

And so essentially they took this entire garrison, almost 24,000 troops, and they put them all underground.

Uh, it was, one of our planners, uh, said, uh, the Japanese were not on Iwo Jima.

They were in Iwo Jima.

Uh, so it was, uh, perhaps the most heavily fortified eight, eight square miles in the world.

RUBENSTEIN: And they were there for months before we attacked?

TOLL: They were, yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And so when we attacked, uh, they just stayed in their, uh, caves or their bunkers, and didn't really fight back so much.

TOLL: They fought back, but they also stayed in their bunkers.

Uh, so it was artillery and mortars that did a lot of the damage.

Uh, and then they would sally out, uh, in, with small unit attacks.

They didn't, they didn't do these waves, these human waves, these Bonzai attacks, uh, which had been tactically ruinous for them on, in other islands.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So winning Mt.

Suribachi is nice and you got the flag and you got the photo.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: But there was the rest of the island they had to go get.

TOLL: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: And how long did it take to cap, capture the rest of the island?

TOLL: Another, almost another month.

RUBENSTEIN: A month?

TOLL: Yeah.

I mean, this was, this was part of the reason that Iwo Jima was such a destructive battle, is that our forces were continuing to take heavy casualties into the second, third, and even the fourth week of the battle.

RUBENSTEIN: So when we're still trying to capture, um, Iwo Jima.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: In the end, the Japanese, did they come out surrendering, or did they commit suicide?

TOLL: Many of them took their own lives.

Um, and, uh, there was a, in the final stage, there was a party of Japanese who came out, something like 500 of them, uh, came out, snuck down along the coast and then, uh, surprised a, a bivouac in one of the rear areas.

And there was a, a firefight that went on for several hours and they were all killed.

RUBENSTEIN: But the senior officers, many of them felt.

TOLL: Kuribayashi.

RUBENSTEIN: They, they would, they had to kill themselves because it was dishonorable to surrender.

TOLL: Yeah.

I mean, that, that was, uh, an injunction, which was strictly enforced, uh, that, uh, you were not to give yourself up.

You were, if necessary, to kill yourself.

And that, that was a, a, dir, a direct order, uh, throughout the entire Japanese military, uh, during the Second World War.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's talk about the atomic weapon.

TOLL: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, where did the idea for building an atomic weapon come from?

There's a famous story that Albert Einstein wrote a letter to FDR saying, "I think in effect we better do something 'cause the Germans are gonna do something and are creating their own atomic weapon."

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Is that true?

TOLL: That is true.

RUBENSTEIN: Did he actually write that letter?

TOLL: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And did he actually?

TOLL: Einstein was asked to write the letter by some of his colleagues because he was the most prominent, uh, scientist in the world.

RUBENSTEIN: It turned out that the Germans were, were not developing an atomic weapon.

Is that right?

TOLL: No.

They had a program.

Uh, they didn't get very far.

Uh, Werner Heisenberg was in charge of their program, actually.

RUBENSTEIN: But it, it didn't really get to the point where they actually had a nuclear weapon.

TOLL: They concluded, uh, they concluded that the industrial engineering, uh, required to build this weapon, uh, was beyond their capabilities, uh, while they were also fighting a two-front war, a conventional war.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

So President, uh, Roosevelt gets a letter from Albert Einstein, and then ultimately he tells somebody, "Well, maybe we should build a nuclear weapon."

Uh, who did he tell?

And what, how was it kept secret?

TOLL: He told Henry Stimson, uh, who was the Secretary of War, uh, to investigate this possibility, uh, to assemble whatever scientific, uh, advisors he needed to explore, to see whether this was a, a real threat, that the Third Reich would obtain this weapon and whether or not we ought to pursue a program to build it ourselves.

And they came back, uh, with the conclusion that it would, that it was within our power, and, um, uh, and then, uh, somewhat less than a year later, FDR signed another order saying, "Go."

RUBENSTEIN: So how many people were actually working on the so-called Manhattan Project?

Was it thousands of them?

TOLL: Certainly thousands, yeah.

I mean, I, um, I, I want to say probably something like 60,000 people working on the Manhattan Project.

RUBENSTEIN: 60,000 people could keep a secret?

TOLL: You know, very few of them knew what they were doing.

Uh, so at this, at the, at the isotope separation plants where we were enriching uranium and plutonium in, uh, Tennessee and Washington state, uh, virtually none of the people working in those facilities had any idea what they were doing.

RUBENSTEIN: So they tested this weapon in the, in, uh, New Mexico.

TOLL: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Is that where it was tested?

TOLL: The Trinity Test?

Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And did they know it was actually gonna work or they thought it would work?

How did the test go?

TOLL: Uh, well, the test was successful, uh, that was a plutonium bomb.

So, uh, not to get too far into the details, but the uranium and plutonium bombs were, were designed differently.

The plutonium bomb required a, uh, an implosion trigger, uh, which was a much more complicated device.

And so, uh, the real question, I think, in the minds of the scientists was would that trigger work?

They were confident that the uranium bomb would work.

And so we didn't even test them.

RUBENSTEIN: Did realize at the time when they'd watched the test that there would be radiation that would be as devastating as the blast itself?

TOLL: Uh, you know, there's been a lot of, uh, scholarly work on this.

I think there were clear indications, uh, that, uh, radiation was going to be harmful and that it would potentially have serious detrimental effects on human health, but they didn't have enough data to, to know exactly to what extent that would be true.

RUBENSTEIN: FDR presumably was kept informed.

He knew about it.

Uh, did he ever tell his Vice President anything about this?

TOLL: Uh, Truman really was not briefed at all on the atomic bomb until after he, he was sworn into office.

RUBENSTEIN: So at that point in the war after FDR dies, the decision has to be made.

Do we drop nuclear wa, bombs on Japan, or do we just do a land invasion?

And that debate went on for a while.

And the consensus was that it'd be better to drop a nuclear weapon or more than one because more American lives would presumably be saved.

Is that right?

TOLL: Uh, yeah.

I mean, uh, certainly saving American lives was part of it.

I think also finishing, finishing the war quickly.

There was a real sense in July, August 1945 that we needed to end the war quickly.

And there were a number of reasons, uh, for that.

Uh, one very important one was that Stalin was coming in.

Uh, the Russians were gonna join the war.

They had committed to join the war.

Uh, by that time we didn't trust them.

And, uh, and we thought that if the war...

If the Japanese held out for too long, uh, the red army then would be able to take territory throughout Asia.

From which we would not be able to dislodge 'em.

So there was a little bit of a race dynamic at the end.

RUBENSTEIN: The military makes a recommendation.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: That ultimately let's not do a land invasion of Japan.

Let's do a dropping of an atomic bomb.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Where is Truman when he's informed that that's the military's recommendation?

TOLL: There had been a series of meetings in June, July 1945.

Um, the, there were a series of formal recommendations.

I think June 20th, there was a meeting in the White House in which it was recommended that, uh, direct military use against, uh, Japanese cities would be the, um, best way to shock the Japanese, most likely to bring about, uh, uh, break the deadlock in Tokyo.

We were aware that the Japanese government was divided at this point.

And, um, and it's because we were reading their diplomatic traffic.

RUBENSTEIN: So he gave the order and the order was, uh, to drop one atomic bomb.

Why did they pick Hiroshima?

TOLL: Uh, there had been four cities, uh, identified, uh, by a target selection committee, and, uh, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, and Niigata were the four.

Um, they had been chosen mainly because they had not been hit hard by conventional bombing, and, uh, they had the topographical, uh, characteristics that were thought to give the best expression to the bomb's power.

And so the order was to, to drop two bombs, uh, and, uh, to drop them on one of the, on, on two of those, uh, four cities, uh, as the local tactical commander chose.

RUBENSTEIN: And the pilots who were asked to drop the bomb, were they told what the bomb was?

TOLL: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Did they know exactly what the force of it would be, or.

TOLL: Yes, they did.

RUBENSTEIN: And what was the name of the plane?

TOLL: Well, the Enola Gay was the plane that dropped the Hirosho, Hiroshima bomb.

Bockscar dropped the Nagasaki bomb.

RUBENSTEIN: Where did the name Enola Gay come from?

TOLL: Uh, Paul Tibbets, who was the head of the, uh, the 509th Composite Group.

So he was the head, head pilot, um, of the entire group of planes, uh, that had been, uh, trained to drop the bomb.

Named the plane after his mother.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, all right.

So they get on the mission.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: They go to drop the bomb.

And after they dropped the bomb, they were told, "Get outta there quickly," right?

TOLL: Yes, uh, bank hard, 160 degrees, uh, and try to get at least eight miles away from the explosion.

RUBENSTEIN: And when they looked back, what did they see?

TOLL: You know, an enormous mushroom cloud coming up, they couldn't see the city at all.

RUBENSTEIN: They had no idea though that it was gonna be that devastating a bomb.

TOLL: I think that you know, it's clear from all of the direct accounts that, uh, they were deeply moved by what they saw.

RUBENSTEIN: And how many people ultimately were killed by the bomb in Hiroshima that we know about?

TOLL: I think it's, it's, um, fair to say that, uh, there were some 30 to 40,000 people killed initially.

RUBENSTEIN: Initially and.

TOLL: Initially.

RUBENSTEIN: And then radiation later.

TOLL: And then radiation later could have killed easily 50, 60,000 more.

But some people say it may be 200,000 in Hiroshima.

So the estimates vary widely.

RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, after the bomb is dropped, do the, are the Japanese people uniformly told about this bomb, and are they, and is the Japanese military saying, "Well, we ought to give up right now?"

Or what did they, what was their reaction?

TOLL: The, uh, uh, Japanese people were not told, uh.

There were, um, announcements that there was some sort of a special weapon, uh, that had been dropped on Hiroshima.

But three days later when we hit Nagasaki, the people in Nagasaki had not been informed that we had this weapon.

RUBENSTEIN: But after Hiroshima bombing.

TOLL: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, did the US say, "Well, let's wait a couple days before we do another bomb because we, maybe they'll just give up?"

Or how long did, did we wait?

TOLL: There was no second order given, uh, for Nagasaki.

So there was one order given, "Drop, both bombs, um, on or about this date."

Uh, and the date was set because they wanted, uh, Truman back at sea.

Uh, he, he had been in Germany and they wanted him at sea when the first one was dropped.

Uh, and they said, "Go ahead and drop these two bombs on two out of these four target cities as selected by the local commander."

RUBENSTEIN: The Nagasaki bomb was dropped how many days after the Hiroshima?

TOLL: Three days.

RUBENSTEIN: Three days.

So in the three-day period of time, the Japanese government didn't say, "By the way, give us some time, we might be surrendering?"

TOLL: No.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So they dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.

How many people were killed in that bomb?

TOLL: Uh, it's thought that fewer were killed, uh, partly because the topography of where the bomb, the bomb was a little bit off target and their, their, it's a hillier city, uh.

But, uh, perhaps 20,000 killed initially, perhaps more.

And, um... RUBENSTEIN: Why not drop.

TOLL: 40, 50,000.

RUBENSTEIN: Why not drop both or one of those bombs on Tokyo?

TOLL: Uh, well, Tokyo had been ruled out, um, for a couple of reasons.

One, because, uh, the government was there and we, it was thought that we needed the government.

We needed a, a, if we wanted an organized surrender, somebody would have to surrender.

RUBENSTEIN: After the Nagasaki bomb, did the Japanese military get together with the emperor and say, "You know, this is not good.

We really need to give up," and was it uniform that they would give up?

TOLL: It was not uniform.

Uh, there, essentially they were deadlocked.

So there was a council of, uh, six, uh, military and civilian advisors, uh, who, uh, were essentially, um, advising the the emperor at that point.

And they happened to be divided three to three.

So they were deadlocked with three on one side, three on the other.

And, um, and, and the way that the decision finally was made, uh, was that they went to the emperor and they said, "Uh, we can't resolve this deadlock.

And so we're going to allow you to, to make this decision.

We ask you to make this decision."

RUBENSTEIN: And what did he say?

TOLL: Surrender.

RUBENSTEIN: But I thought the Americans had said, "We want unconditional surrender."

TOLL: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: What did that mean, unconditional surrender?

TOLL: Well, that was, that was a, uh, a controversial point.

And, and critics of that, uh, doctrine that, uh, FDR had insisted upon, uh, uh, said that it was ambiguous and that this was, um, actually not in the allies interest, uh, to articulate a, uh, u, unconditional surrender doctrine.

But, uh, the way we explained it when we got to the end of the war was that it applied to the manner in which the military forces would surrender.

The military forces would've to lay down arms without any conditions.

So we didn't say that the Japanese government would have to accept, uh, unconditional surrender.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, before the Japanese actually surrendered, I thought they had one condition, which was an unusual condition, but they, the condition was that the emperor be allowed to continue to be the emperor.

Is that right?

TOLL: Yes, that was their bottom line.

RUBENSTEIN: Why was that the most important thing?

TOLL: You know, uh, the emperor was essentially a god.

Uh, he was a god in Japan.

And so, uh, um, they, their greatest concern was that, uh, we would take him into custody, kill him, humiliate him, hang him.

Uh, and, um, they wanted him at least to be, uh, left alone in his palace and allowed to continue as a, a sort of a constitutional monarch.

And we were amenable to that.

RUBENSTEIN: Why, why were we amenable to that?

Why didn't we want to just end the the leader of the, uh, the Japanese government as the man who was res, responsible for the war?

Why were we willing to agree to that?

TOLL: It was certainly controversial.

And in fact, the decision to keep Hirohito on, uh, after the war was unpopular with the American people.

Uh, many Americans felt that he should have been held to account, uh, and tried as a war criminal.

But why did we, why did we keep him?

MacArthur insisted, uh, that we keep him and, uh, it was thought that we needed him to essentially, uh, rule as a kind of vassal, uh, and to, uh, enforce, uh, cooperation, uh, during the, a period of occupation, which he did.

RUBENSTEIN: Part of the arrangement I guess, was that we would occupy Japan and we would send in American troops.

TOLL: That's right.

RUBENSTEIN: And was that controversial within Japan did Japan, uh, attack us when we came in, the American troops are coming in, they're now occupying, uh, Japan.

How was that received by the Japanese people?

TOLL: Yeah, I mean, it really was extraordinary what happened at the end of the war.

Uh, we poured our, um, military forces in, into that place.

Uh, they went ashore as if they were going, if, if they were invading and they literally landed with, uh, a full combat gear and, um, nowhere in the length and breadth of that populous, uh, country, was there a single attack on any allied soldier coming in after the war.

So the emperor said, uh, "Surrender," and, uh, the entire nation, uh, as one obeyed.

It was remarkable, really.

RUBENSTEIN: So any more trilogies in your future.

(laughter) TOLL: Well, they.

RUBENSTEIN: Or trilogies take too much time.

TOLL: They do take quite a bit of time, and eventually I will run outta years.

Um, thi, this one started out as a single volume, ended up as a trilogy.

I don't plan anymore, but, uh, uh, I'm gonna write a sequel to my first book, "Six Frigate."

Uh, so it'll be, be about the war of 1812 in the north in the borderlands between the US and Canada.

RUBENSTEIN: But if you do that, you've written one book and if there's a sequel, then you might have a trilogy down.

TOLL: One more.

You know, I hadn't thought of that, but that's a good idea.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

(laughs).

Thank you very much for an interesting conversation.

TOLL: Thank you very much.

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