Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  July 15 brought a new milestone in the war: the first naval bombardment of the enemy’s homeland. A battleship-cruiser-destroyer force maneuvered into the offing near Kamaishi, site of a major steelworks, and opened fire at dawn. For two hours, 16-inch shells fired by the South Dakota, Indiana, and Massachusetts laid waste to the foundry and coke ovens. The following day, another surface force hit the Nihon Steel Company and the Wanishi Ironworks at Muroran, Hokkaido. The Missouri joined the bombardment group off Muroran, giving Halsey a front-row seat to a “magnificent spectacle.”47 Fires spread into nearby Kushiro, burning about twenty city blocks to the ground. According to Mick Carney, they saw no enemy aircraft at all, and counterfire from shore batteries was weak and intermittent. He concluded that the Japanese must be nearly finished: “We moved the battleships right in there to bombardment range any place along the coast that we felt like it, and there was no ability to resist effectively. So it was pretty apparent that we were flogging a dead horse.”48

  In those last weeks of the war, the Japanese were doing little or no offshore scouting. U.S. submarines and carrier planes had sunk most of their coastal picket vessels. They had few remaining patrol planes or pilots. “They would send out one airplane to scout the fleet, and we would shoot him down,” recalled Arthur R. Hawkins, a Hellcat pilot with VF-31 on the Belleau Wood. “Then they would do it again the next day. They sent him out; if he didn’t come back, they knew the fleet was out there.”49 Finding that they could operate with impunity even within sight of the Japanese coast, the Americans did not bother to conceal their location. “There just wasn’t anything to shoot at,” said Hawkins. “They weren’t in the air. We were on bombing strikes, and we would go in, drop our bombs, and just sit around and shoot them on the ground.”50

  On the sixteenth, Task Force 38 withdrew to the east and rendezvoused with its fueling and logistics group. Sidling up alongside the fleet oilers, the great fleet drank 379,157 barrels of fuel. Simultaneously, 6,369 tons of ammunition and 1,635 tons of supplies and provisions were transferred from the storeships into the fleet’s storerooms and magazines. The entire process was completed in about eighteen hours. Admiral Radford did not exaggerate when he called it “the greatest logistic feat ever performed on the high seas.”51

  Charging back toward Honshu on July 17, Task Force 38 planes swooped down on Tokyo Bay and the naval base at Yokosuka. They ganged up on the battleship Nagato, at anchor in the bay. At the outset of the war, and during the attack on Pearl Harbor, she had been the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Now she was reduced to a blackened, smoking, listing wreck. Other U.S. planes strafed and bombed airfields throughout the region, destroying would-be future kamikazes on the ground. Battleships and cruisers moved in close to the shoreline to bombard the Mito-Hitachi area. Falling in with the British Pacific Fleet under Vice Admiral Bernard Rawlings, the whole enormous force launched coordinated airstrikes against major ports in the eastern part of the Inland Sea. They paid special attention to the remaining units of the Japanese fleet anchored off Kure Naval Base.

  The Japanese navy was immobilized, and no longer presented a threat to the Allies, but the airmen were determined to pay off this final installment of a forty-four-month-old debt. “Remember Pearl Harbor” was chalked on the fleet’s ready room blackboards. “Call this what you will,” said Mick Carney, “it was a deep-seated feeling in the minds of all of us, that the ignominy of Pearl Harbor would never be wiped off the slate until they had been repaid in full, and until they were utterly destroyed.”52 In a coup de grâce on July 26, carrier planes pulverized two dozen Japanese warships riding at anchor, effectively wiping out the last remnants of Japanese naval power. “By sunset that evening,” wrote Halsey, “the Japanese navy had ceased to exist.”53

  During those late-war operations, Halsey regularly spoke to war correspondents assigned to ride with the Third Fleet, serving up his familiar threats to impose a vengeful peace on the Japanese. Asked about conditions for a Japanese surrender, he said that Hirohito should “pay for impersonating God.”54 He pledged to seize the emperor’s white horse as a trophy of war. In an interview for Collier’s magazine, Halsey said that Japan was “not fit to live in a civilized world,” and suggested that one Japanese officer should be executed for every American prisoner of war who died in captivity.55 On July 23, his catchphrase “Kill More Japs” appeared under his face on the cover of Time magazine.56 Halsey was annoyed by the prohibition against bombing the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The Third Fleet commander, according to Carney, had little time for the “pantywaist idea” that Hirohito might be useful to the Allies in a postwar role: “The thing to do, as we saw it, was to go get him, get Number 1 and knock him off.”57

  Halsey’s pugnacious tirades played well in the American press, but they contradicted and undermined the themes of Allied propaganda. A week after Halsey’s return to the Pacific, an analysis published by the Office of War Information (OWI) warned:

  The downward trend in Japanese morale may take a long or a short time before it reaches a point that makes possible the termination of the war. The military pressure brought to bear will be the principal controlling factor, but of major significance will be the degree to which most of the Japanese continue to believe that the Allies intend:

  a. To kill, torture or enslave the Japanese people;

  b. To destroy the Japanese way of life with its Emperor and related values.58

  Throughout that summer, Halsey’s own carrier planes were dropping millions of leaflets over Japan. The documents encouraged Japanese civilians to look forward to a peaceful, prosperous, and just future after the war. “The United States do not want to hurt you or your families,” one such leaflet stated. “The United States do not want your country. What the United States wants is an end to aggression and peace throughout the world.”59

  With a coordinated effort by the State Department, the military, and the OWI, the Americans had finally crafted a coherent strategy for “Psyops,” or psychological operations against Japan. An OWI leaflet-producing operation on Guam employed hundreds of civilians and printing machinery on the scale of a major newspaper. Fresh from the presses, the documents were loaded into 500-pound casings that were triggered to open 4,000 feet above the ground. By these means, one leaflet “bomb” could cover an entire city. According to OWI’s estimates, 63 million leaflets were dropped on Japan in the last three months of the war.60

  A few major themes were emphasized in all propaganda leaflets: Japan’s military defeat was inevitable; the militarist regime was feckless, deceitful, and self-serving; peace would improve the lives of the Japanese people. A fundamental tenet of all Allied propaganda was to avoid mentioning the emperor at all, but to aim all criticism at the “military clique.” Nazi Germany, Japan’s major ally, had suffered total defeat. Now Japan was alone, and would bear the full brunt of Allied power. “Japan now faces a crisis, in which the full strength of the Allied nations will soon be concentrated against her,” a typical leaflet stated: “Does she not feel lonely?”61 The documents were often decorated with favorite Japanese motifs, such as Mount Fuji or cherry blossoms in bloom. The dialect used in early leaflets was rather stiff and formal—“too highbrow for practical effect,” as one analyst put it.62 But as Japanese-American nisei and other language experts brought their expertise to bear on the problem, the prose grew more fluid and straightforward. In some cases, Japanese prisoners of war assisted in drafting or editing the messages. Elmer Davis, the OWI chief, wrote that all propaganda messages repeated three overarching themes—“that we are coming, that we are going to win, and that in the long run everybody will be better off because we won.”63

  Added to the leaflet campaign were 100,000-watt shortwave radio transmissions from Hawaii and California, later amplified by a 50,000-watt clear channel radio tower erected on the northern coast of Saipan. The OWI broadcasts were repetitive, often echoing the same messages printed on the leaflets, and postwar research revealed that very few Japanese ha
d heard them at all. The most effective propaganda broadcasts were aimed directly at the Japanese leadership, most notably the “Zacharias broadcasts” of June and July 1945.

  Ellis Zacharias was a naval intelligence officer who had lived and studied in Japan in the 1920s, and spoke the language fluently. He was a friend and colleague of Edwin Layton, the Pacific Fleet intelligence officer, and Joseph Rochefort, who had led the code-breaking unit at Pearl Harbor that had won the Battle of Midway. Zacharias believed that the ruling group in Tokyo might be susceptible to a direct appeal to end the war. He proposed a series of broadcasts modifying or at least clarifying the meaning of the “unconditional surrender” doctrine. After many weeks of discussion, a series of broadcast scripts was approved by the State Department, the OWI, and the Joint Chiefs. Zacharias made his initial radio broadcast on May 8, 1945—VE-Day. They followed at weekly intervals, until the first week of August: fourteen broadcasts in all. In each, Zacharias repeated that “unconditional surrender” applied only to “the form in which hostilities are terminated,” and did not constitute an intention to subjugate or enslave Japan. He quoted other Allied statements, such as the Atlantic Charter and the Cairo Declaration, which guaranteed universal human rights and the principle of self-determination. Japan had come to a fork in the road, said Zacharias, and the nation faced a categorical choice: “One is the virtual destruction of Japan followed by a dictated peace. The other is unconditional surrender with its attendant benefits as laid down by the Atlantic Charter.”64

  Zacharias’s fourth broadcast brought forth a direct reply from Dr. Isamu Inouye, who identified himself as an official government spokesman. It came by way of a shortwave radio broadcast from Tokyo. The text was stilted, cagey, and noncommittal. But the tone was moderate, and it did not reject the suggestion of a peace settlement: “Japan would be ready to discuss peace terms,” said Inouye, “provided there were certain changes in the unconditional surrender formula.”65

  PHYSICISTS HAD KNOWN for four decades that vast stores of energy were locked up inside the atom. In the years immediately prior to the Second World War, experiments had shown that a rare isotope of uranium, U-235, had the property of being highly “fissionable,” meaning that its neutrons could penetrate the positive electrical barrier of the nucleus, a process that liberated “free” energy. Nuclear fission offered great promise as a source of cheap, limitless electrical power. But the momentous discovery also pointed to a more ominous scenario—that under certain conditions not found in nature, a mass of pure U-235 could be manipulated to trigger a chain reaction that would release a spectacular burst of energy, an explosion equivalent to about 20,000 tons of TNT. Nonscientists struggled to comprehend what the physicists were talking about, and most were instinctively skeptical. But an impressive consensus was found among leading scientists in the field. They warned that the theoretical basis for an atomic “superbomb” was sound, and the daunting challenges involved in building it could be overcome, probably within a few years, with a sufficient investment of funding, expertise, and industrial-scale engineering.

  Humanity would certainly be safer without possessing this terrible power, but no one trusted Adolf Hitler to agree. Germany was thought to possess the requisite scientific competence to build an atomic bomb, and Allied intelligence warned that the Nazis had taken steps to secure the needed materials. Through their conquests, the Germans controlled a “heavy water” plant in Norway, and had access to uranium ore deposits in Czechoslovakia and the Belgian Congo. If Hitler should obtain a nuclear weapon, there would be no effective countermeasure; the Nazi dictator could use it to impose his will on the world, even if his armies were vanquished in conventional military terms. The sole defense would be to possess the same monstrosity, with the credible threat to retaliate in kind.

  British research into the field they called “Tube Alloys” had advanced to a certain point in 1941, when the United States entered the war. Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to combine national efforts, and to carry on the work in the mainland United States. On December 28, 1942, FDR signed an order to commence major industrial construction. Colonel Leslie R. Groves, an army engineer who had overseen the completion of the Pentagon, was placed in charge of the secret project. It was assigned a first-priority AAA rating, which empowered Groves to lay claim to funds, resources, and personnel without having to explain to anyone what he was doing. If it was necessary to identify the program—to fill in a blank on a requisition form, for example—Groves instructed his clerks to write “Manhattan Engineer District,” a sleight of hand inspired by the fact that no part of the project was in New York.

  To fund this “Manhattan Project,” Stimson and Marshall began by raiding the accounts of various conventional weapons development programs. But when the time came to build huge and expensive isotope separation plants in Tennessee and Washington state, the secretary and the army chief of staff knew they needed congressional authority. They went up to Capitol Hill and sat down with House and Senate leaders. Stimson spoke vaguely about an abstruse science that he did not really understand—but neither did the congressmen, he added, so what was the point of going over the details? The War Department needed $600 million right away, and would need more soon. For the sake of secrecy, there should be no details on the appropriation line, and the rank-and-file members of Congress should be told nothing at all. As Marshall remembered it, Stimson told the legislators that they “would have to take his word for it and my word for it that it was of vital importance that we get this additional money and that it was of equally vital importance that not a word be breathed of what the thing really was.”66 They wanted a blank check for a project whose details were also left blank, and they got it. The total cost of the Manhattan Project eventually grew to $2 billion.

  Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer managed the project’s brain center, which gathered the specialists and scientists together in a remote and heavily guarded compound at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The site was an arid mesa between rocky canyons, nestled between the Jemez Mountains to the west and the Sangre de Cristo Range to the east. The roads, unpaved and muddy during the spring rains, were heavily traveled by jeeps and army trucks. Research and development work was conducted in the Technical Area, a fenced-in complex of offices and laboratories the size of four city blocks. In an outer perimeter was the residential district, a community of cookie-cutter prefabricated apartment houses, laundries, mess halls, schools, and a movie theater. Los Alamos grew steadily throughout the war, to a peak population of about 5,800—a mountain village of wayward and willful geniuses, whose scientists, mathematicians, and engineers included some of the most renowned figures in their respective fields. Despite the heavy security presence—fences, watchtowers, checkpoints, dogs on leashes, soldiers with fixed bayonets—Los Alamos was a young and vibrant civilian community, where pregnant wives pushed strollers along sidewalks and gangs of children roamed among the white clapboard buildings. Many residents had fled Europe to escape the rampaging armies of the Third Reich, giving their presence here a dimension of karmic justice.

  The first problem confronted by the designers was to separate the two main isotopes of uranium, acquiring a pure “critical mass” of the lighter and rarer isotope U-235. At the outset, no one could say precisely what that critical mass might be. Estimates ranged from a low of about one pound to a high of about 200 pounds. If the figure was at the lower end of that range, the bomb might be feasible; if at the higher, it might lie beyond the industrial engineering resources of any nation, at least within the expected duration of the war. In that sense, the Manhattan Project was undertaken with full knowledge that it might fail. The substance U-235 had never been isolated in pure form, except in submicroscopic quantities. There were several possible means of enriching larger amounts: the leading candidates were gaseous, chemical, and thermal diffusion. A fourth possibility, whose discovery was a major breakthrough, was to convert U-238 into plutonium, a new and extremely fissionable element which could t
hen be more easily separated from the residual uranium. In each case, however, there was no easy means to attain the weapons-grade purity needed for an atomic bomb. There were no shortcuts. All of the proposed enrichment processes required industrial engineering on a monumental scale.

  Having received a blank check from the U.S. taxpayer, the project directors decided to pursue all routes simultaneously. A complex of uranium enrichment plants was established on a 56,000-acre site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The site was chosen in part for its isolation, in part because the energy-hungry uranium “calutrons” could draw upon the power capacity of the nearby Tennessee Valley Authority. The plutonium operation was built at the Hanford Engineer Works near Richland, Washington. This was remote sagebrush country northwest of the Columbia River, which provided a plentiful supply of water to cool the reactors. The scale of the construction was gargantuan even by Manhattan Project standards; more than 1,200 buildings were built at the Hanford site, and during the construction phase the population of the secretive camp surpassed 60,000, making it the fourth most populous city in the state.67

  The second hurdle faced by the scientists at Los Alamos was to bring two separated portions of fissile material together almost instantaneously, forming a critical mass that would initiate a self-sustaining chain reaction. The two halves had to be slammed together at high velocity, or the chain reaction might sputter out before the entire mass was merged, producing a much smaller blast, or none at all. The trigger mechanism, with the fissile material, had to be housed in a metal casing small enough to be carried and dropped by an airplane. The original idea was to fire the subcritical halves at one another using conventional explosives in the form of a “double gun.” But in July 1944, the scientists discovered that plutonium was so spontaneously fissionable that a simple gun-type mechanism would produce a weak “fizzle” rather than a full-scale nuclear blast. The proposed solution was to create a symmetrical implosion shockwave using an intricate system of lenses. Work on this project lagged, and some of the scientists assigned to it actually despaired of solving the problem. After fits and starts, with theoretical contributions by the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann and the practical engineering work of Russian-born chemist George Kistiakowsky, a functional implosion trigger was made ready in the spring of 1945.