This week on History Happy Hour: Eighty years ago, Japan surrendered to the Allies after three of the most devastating bombing attacks of the war – two nuclear weapons and the fire-bombing of Tokyo. What was the decision-making process in this endgame of World War II? Was it just the atomic bomb that brought about Japan’s surrender?

In this encore episode we’ll chat with Richard Overy, author of “Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan.”

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Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter, one of Britain's most distinguished historians and an internationally renowned scholar of World War II. (He’s also a History Happy Hour Alum!) He is the recipient of the Hessell-Tiltman Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. His many works include The Bombing War, Dictators and The Morbid Age.

This week on History Happy Hour: In 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis were killed. But very few appreciate that this was just one day in a two-and-a-half-year operation—the most ambitious attempt in history to rebuild a nation. Why and how did it go so wrong?

In this encore episode we explore this with fellow Stephen Ambrose Tours historian Jonathan Carroll, author of Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nation-Building, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995.

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Jonathan Carroll is an associate professor of military history at the British Army’s Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Dr. Carroll has taught courses on U.S. and European military history; leadership, combat, and command; air power in contemporary warfare; and U.S. social and political history from 1865 to the present. A major focus of his teaching is on the First and Second World Wars. A native of the Republic of Ireland, Dr. Carroll served in the Irish Army for 12 years. In 2023, he published his first book on contemporary Irish defense. He received his doctorate in military history from Texas A&M University in College Station.

This week on History Happy Hour: It was a marvel of 1930s engineering, a line of underground forts containing hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare. Yet they fell to the Germans in just a few weeks.

Kevin Passmore has written The Maginot Line – A New History. We’ll talk with him about the controversies of how it was built, the men who manned it, and what happened when the Germans showed up.

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Kevin Passmore is professor of modern European history at Cardiff University. He is the author of Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy, and From Liberalism to Fascism: The Right in a French Province, 1928–1939.