Truman’s diary entry of July 25 remains an inexplicable curiosity. Perhaps he felt sudden qualms, and soothed them with therapeutic delusions. He might have sensed that future historians and biographers were reading over his shoulder, and hoped to be commended as a man of delicate conscience. If so, the entry was a feckless gesture, serving only to leave the impression that the diary was not a faithful record of Truman’s inner thoughts. His famous homespun motto—“The buck stops here”—was printed on a sign featured prominently on his desk in the Oval Office. After the first atomic bomb detonated over the center of the seventh largest city in Japan, the non-buck-passing commander in chief would identify Hiroshima as an “important Japanese Army base,” which was true in the same sense that San Diego was an important American naval base. In his memoirs, published in 1955, Truman took responsibility for the decision to use the atomic bombs—but even then, in retirement, a decade after the fact, he could not bring himself to acknowledge that cities had been targeted. Reproducing in full the July 25, 1945, directive signed by General Handy, Truman added: “With this order, the wheels were set in motion for the first use of an atomic weapon against a military target. I had made the decision. I also instructed Stimson that the order would stand unless I notified him that the Japanese reply to our ultimatum was acceptable.”106
ON JULY 26, THE POTSDAM DECLARATION was released to the global press by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China. It demanded the immediate and unconditional surrender of Japanese armed forces, and warned that refusal would result in the “utter devastation” of the Japanese homeland: “Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.”107 Japan would never again be permitted to embark on a career of foreign conquest. The influence of the militarist caste would be completely and permanently eliminated. War crimes would be prosecuted in international tribunals. All foreign territories would be given up, and Japanese sovereignty would be forever limited to the home islands. Its forces overseas would be disarmed and permitted to return home in peace. The Allies would occupy “points in Japanese territory” for as long as necessary to ensure that the “self-willed militaristic advisers” were ousted and the military demobilized. Industry would be permitted to recover, and the economy would have access to international trade. Contrary to the propaganda disseminated by the Japanese regime, said the statement, “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation,” and a peaceful and responsible government would be instituted “in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”
The declaration was received in Tokyo shortly after dawn on July 27, via shortwave radio broadcast from San Francisco. As the text of this “Three-Party Statement” was translated and circulated through the ministry offices, Japanese leaders fixated on the fact that it was signed by the U.S., British, and Chinese leaders, but not by Stalin. Upon this thin reed they placed great hopes. They knew Stalin and Molotov were in Potsdam, in close touch with the Americans and British, and yet the USSR had not backed the ultimatum. Did that mean the Soviets were willing to step in as a mediator?
Foreign Minister Togo acted quickly to head off a preemptive rejection of the declaration. In a private meeting with the emperor, he said that the statement “leaves room for further study of the concrete terms,” and “we plan to find out what these concrete terms are through the Soviet Union.”108 In an emergency meeting of the SWDC later that morning, Togo told his colleagues that the declaration could be interpreted as a softening of prior demands, and might plausibly be represented as a face-saving “conditional” surrender. Although it contained no reference to the Imperial House, the reference to the “freely expressed will of the Japanese people” gave hope that the emperor could be retained. He warned that rejecting the declaration outright might bring catastrophic consequences, and recommended withholding any official reaction until his diplomats could sound out the Russians. Further discussion produced a shaky accord. While awaiting the Russian response to Japan’s prior entreaties, the government would express no view on the Potsdam Declaration. The newspapers would be directed to downplay it.
The following afternoon, at four o’clock on July 28, the aged Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki held a press conference carried over the radio. It was no easy task to explain the temporizing policy negotiated by the two factions of the Big Six. Suzuki could say nothing of the overtures in Moscow, which were secret; and he could not imply that the declaration provided an opening for peace talks, because the hardliners would rise up in protest. In an apparently off-the-cuff remark, he told the press that the government intended to “mokusatsu” the Potsdam Declaration. This idiomatic Japanese expression translated literally as “to kill with silence,” but could also be translated as to “ignore,” “reject,” or “take no notice of.” Under the circumstances, “mokusatsu” might be seen as an attempt to steer a middle course between accepting and rejecting the ultimatum—in other words, “no comment.”
If that was Suzuki’s purpose, he failed badly. The phrase was ambiguous even in Japanese, let alone in English translation. Without clear contrary guidance from the government, the Japanese press reported that the prime minister had rejected the declaration with a contemptuous flourish. On the twenty-ninth, the Yomiuri Shinbun led with the headline: “Laughable Surrender Conditions to Japan.”109 By then it was too late for Suzuki to walk his comments back. In a subsequent meeting of the SWDC, the three hardliners agreed that it was unacceptable for the government to take an equivocal position on the Potsdam Declaration. Peacemakers Togo and Yonai argued that nothing more should be said, but the prime minister agreed to issue a clarification. At a press conference that morning, Suzuki said: “I think that the joint statement is a rehash of the Cairo declaration. The government does not think that it has serious value. We can only ignore it. We will do our utmost to complete the war to the bitter end.”110
At first the American translators had puzzled over “mokusatsu” and debated the possible shades of meaning or emphasis. But this second statement sent a much clearer signal. Truman offered his own pungent translation: “They told me to go to hell, words to that effect.”111 The old Japan hands in Washington noted that Suzuki had carefully avoided rejecting the ultimatum outright. They inferred that he was talking to potential insurrectionists in the army, rather than to the governments that had issued the ultimatum. In the following days, radio eavesdroppers picked up army and diplomatic communications suggesting that some in Tokyo were ready to surrender on the basis of the Potsdam Declaration. But those intelligence tidbits only confirmed what American leaders already knew—that the Japanese ruling group was deadlocked, and the hardline “fight on” faction remained strong enough to arrest any move toward surrender.
A secure cable from the “Little White House” instructed General Groves to launch the first atomic bombing mission no sooner than August 2, 1945, the final day of the Potsdam Conference. Truman wanted to be away and at sea when the first nuclear weapon was dropped.112
That same week, the conventional bombing assault on the Japanese homeland was reaching an unprecedented scale. The results on the ground went far beyond anything that had been done in Europe—or indeed, anywhere else in the history of warfare. In the heart of major cities, one could gaze to the horizon in any direction and see nothing but fields of ash and hillocks of rubble, with a few blackened chimneys or steel girders standing here and there. The largest air raid of the war occurred on August 1, 1945, when 853 B-29s dropped more 6,486 tons of incendiaries, precision bombs, and aerial mines on cities and waterways throughout western Japan. By that date, the Japanese civilian death toll had probably run well into the hundreds of thousands.
If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. Hundreds of bombers and fighters of all types, U.S. and British, were redeploying from Europe; at the same
time, new airplanes were being turned out of American aviation plants, and freshly trained aircrews were flying them into newly constructed airfields on nearby Okinawa. At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan.113 According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo Plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.114 The rain of devastation would cripple the nation’s internal transportation infrastructure, shutting down the economy and leading to mass famine in urban regions. “Another six months and Japan would have been beaten back into the dark ages,” said Curtis LeMay, “which practically was the case anyhow.”115
In those last weeks of the war, the Twentieth Air Force began waging a new and devastating form of psychological warfare. The Superforts began “calling their shots”—that is, dropping leaflets over cities to be hit, warning the population to evacuate, and then returning one or two days later to destroy them. On July 27, for example—the same day the Potsdam Declaration was received in Japan—60,000 warning leaflets were dropped on eleven cities. Six of those eleven were hit the following day. The ploy was repeated again on August 1 and a third time on August 4. In each case, the warnings were made good. The Japanese government and news media attempted to suppress the warnings, but the news spread widely by word of mouth, and panic swept through the leafleted cities. Refugees clogged the roads and trains as entire urban populations tried to flee to the country. Munitions industries were paralyzed for lack of workers. After the war, the USSBS concluded that the “shot-calling” leaflets had been “one of the most spectacular moves in psychological warfare.”116 They had dramatized the powerlessness of Japan’s military and air forces, convincing many ordinary Japanese that defeat was inevitable. The USSBS concluded that approximately half the Japanese population had either seen one of the leaflets or had heard about their contents by word of mouth.
At the same time, the warnings were appreciated by many Japanese as gestures of consideration and sympathy. A woman in Nagaoka credited the leaflets with saving her life. Her own government had refused to pass on the vital news that the city had been listed as a target, she said—but “I believed the Americans were honest and good people in letting us know in advance of impending raids.” She fled, and three days later Nagaoka was firebombed. A factory worker in Akita shared the sentiment. “They were not barbarians,” he said of the men flying the great silver bombers overhead. “They gave us notice. They said to evacuate.”117
* Future CIA director Allen Dulles, posted to Bern, Switzerland as an agent of the OSS, was in indirect contact with representatives of the Japanese government. The fascinating details were declassified in 1993. See “OSS Memoranda for the President, January–July, 1945,” accessed September 7, 2018, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence. When queried directly by JCS chairman William Leahy, Dulles denied knowledge of any such contacts. Leahy, I Was There, p. 384.
Chapter Sixteen
TINIAN, THE ONCE-VERDANT TROPICAL ISLAND SOUTH OF SAIPAN, WAS now the largest airbase in the world. Nearly half of its 39 square miles had been paved over to accommodate airfields for B-29s and fighters. North and West Fields included eight great runways for Superfortresses, each almost two miles long and the width of a ten-lane highway. They were connected to parking aprons, hardstands, and fuel storage farms by 11 miles of taxiways. Most of a long ridge had been leveled to supply the coral rock for this vastness of pavement and asphalt. From the air, a witness recounted, Tinian resembled “a giant aircraft carrier, its deck loaded with bombers.”1 Others were reminded of Manhattan, an island comparable in size, which was likewise paved over. Tinian’s road network, like that of Manhattan, was laid out in a grid pattern. Its two major north-south roads were called Broadway and Eighth Avenue; east-west “cross streets” included Wall Street, Forty-Second Street, and 110th Street. An undeveloped livestock reserve in the middle of the island was called “Central Park.”
At the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 125th Street, near the isolated northern end of North Field, a guardhouse marked the entry gate to the 509th Composite Group, a mysterious and secretive B-29 unit whose compound was double-fenced and patrolled by armed sentries. The 509th was self-contained—meaning that it had its own separate ground support, logistics, communications, security, and administrative organizations. It did not interact at all with the 313th Bombardment Wing, to which it technically belonged. Bold red and black signs warned unauthorized personnel to stay away from the perimeter. Even the 313th Wing commander, Brigadier General James Davies, did not know the purpose of these enigmatic Superforts that ostensibly fell within his chain of command. When Davies tried to visit the compound, he was turned away at gunpoint.
The sole mission of the 509th Composite Group was to drop the atomic bombs. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel, led the group. Tibbets had been provided with virtually unlimited resources to fulfill his mission. He had the power to requisition materials, equipment, or personnel as he chose, and he built his team by lifting entire B-29 squadrons out of other air groups, without explanation. In December 1944, the 509th had set up shop at Wendover Army Airfield in Utah—a bleak, arid airbase wedged between the Utah salt flats and the Nevada border. The aircrews and ground support personnel were told that they must never breathe a word of what they were doing to anyone. Those who asked too many questions, even internally, would be sacked. All personnel were kept on a strict need-to-know basis, but the pilots and bombardiers were told that they must train to drop a 9,000-pound “special bomb,” which for the sake of security they called “the gadget.”2
An aircraft that dropped the new bomb was required to fly at least 8 miles away from the point at which the device was set to detonate. It would have forty seconds to complete the maneuver. That required a hard-banking 155-degree turn, during which the pilot would dive steeply to pick up speed. Tactical analysis of Japanese fighter defenses led Tibbets to conclude that they should remove most of the armament from the planes, and rely on speed and altitude to thwart interception. The 509th Composite Group would also have to oversee major alterations to the B-29, because the new bomb would not fit into the aircraft’s standard bomb bay. The group trained at Wendover using “pumpkin bombs,” which mimicked the size, weight, and ballistics profile of the uranium and plutonium weapons, named “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” respectively. In training runs, the B-29s aimed these dummy weapons at a 300-foot circle painted on the ground, and then executed the evasive maneuvers.
Immediately upon completion of the TRINITY test, the major components of the two bombs were transported to Tinian. Crates containing the “gun-type” trigger for Little Boy, and half of the bomb’s uranium U-235 core, were flown to San Francisco and loaded onto the cruiser Indianapolis. The ship made an uneventful passage to a pier in Tinian, arriving on July 26. The crates were transferred to an assembly building at the 509th compound, staffed by a specialized team of Manhattan Project scientists and technicians. The remaining portion of the uranium, packed in two crates, was flown across the Pacific in a C-54. By August 1, all of the bomb components were on Tinian and ready for assembly.
Having discharged her mysterious cargo, the Indianapolis sailed for Leyte Gulf. Her passage was cut short on July 30, when the ship was struck by two torpedoes fired by Japanese submarine I-58. She sank in twelve minutes. Her distress messages were not received, and her absence was not noted until three days later. A fourth day passed before rescue vessels arrived on the scene. About 900
of her crew of 1,200 had abandoned ship as she went down, but few lifeboats had been launched, so the men were left treading water or clinging to debris. During their four-day ordeal, adrift in the open sea, about six hundred perished as a result of exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, drowning, or shark attacks. Only 317 of the crew survived. The Indianapolis, Admiral Raymond Spruance’s former Fifth Fleet flagship, was the last major American warship lost in the Second World War.
Although B-29 operations had grown safer since the pioneering days of 1944, crashes on takeoff were still common. Fuel-laden planes were heavier on takeoff than at any other point in a mission. Burnt-out hulks of crashed Superforts lined the margins of the runways of the various Twentieth Air Force airfields. On August 4, two days before the Hiroshima mission, four B-29s crashed on takeoff at airfields throughout the Marianas. The accidents dramatized the necessity of leaving the atomic bombs unassembled until the planes carrying them were safely aloft. That meant sending assembly teams up with the aircrews.
Colonel Tibbets would pilot the B-29 that would drop the uranium bomb. Model number B-29–45-MO was better known as the Enola Gay; Tibbets had named the aircraft for his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. Two 509th Superforts would fly in company with the Enola Gay as observers, and would drop various measuring instruments. Three more would fly ahead to reconnoiter the weather over the target.
August 6 began with a midnight briefing in a heavily guarded Quonset hut, and a prayer by the chaplain. The aircrews of the Enola Gay and the other planes boarded canvas-covered trucks lined with benches to be driven to the airfield. They passed through numerous checkpoints en route. Arriving at the hardstand, the airmen found an unexpected scene. The Enola Gay was surrounded by a crowd numbering in the hundreds—VIPs, ground crews, soldiers, and a large deputation of the press. The big airplane was brightly lit by klieg lights. Motion picture cameras were mounted on portable risers. Lightbulbs flashed. Witnesses were reminded of a Broadway premiere or a Hollywood film opening.
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