The fact was Stalin already knew more than any of the Americans or British imagined. Soviet nuclear research had begun in 1942, and as would be learned later, a German-born physicist at Los Alamos, a naturalized British citizen named Klaus Fuchs, had been supplying the Russians with atomic secrets for some time, information that in Moscow was judged “extremely excellent and very valuable.” Stalin had understood perfectly what Truman said. Later, in the privacy of their Babelsberg quarters, according to Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Stalin instructed Molotov to “tell Kurchatov [of the Soviet atomic project] to hurry up the work.” (Also, according to the Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin went even further that evening when he cabled Lavrenti Beria, who had overall supervision of the project, to put on the pressure.)
In years to come Truman often said that having made his decision about the bomb, he went to bed and slept soundly. He would be pictured retiring for the night at the White House, his mind clear that he had done the right thing. But in the strange “nightmare” house at Babelsberg, in the unremitting heat of the German summer, he was sleeping rather poorly and in considerably more turmoil than his later claims ever suggested.
“No one who played a part in the development of the bomb or in our decision to use it felt happy about it,” recalled Jimmy Byrnes, who was quartered downstairs.
“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” Truman wrote in his diary on Wednesday, July 25, the day the general military order was issued to the Air Force to proceed with the plan, and “terrible” was the word he would keep coming back to. He wondered if the bomb might be “the fire of destruction” prophesied in the Bible. As if to convince himself, he wrote of how it would be used on military targets only, which he knew to be only partly true.
This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo, where the Imperial Palace had been spared thus far].
He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them a chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made useful.
Whether this final thought—that it could be made useful—was his irrepressible, native optimism and faith in progress coming to the fore, or yet another way of trying to convince himself, or both of these, or merely means useful to end the war, is open to question.
V
It would be the thesis of some historians that the atomic bomb figured importantly at Potsdam as Truman’s way of putting pressure on the Russians. But except for his private show of bolstered confidence after hearing Groves’s report, Truman neither said nor did anything of consequence to support this theory and the whole idea would be vigorously denied by those who were present and witness to events. Once, sometime before the test at Alamogordo, Truman reportedly remarked to some of his aides that if the bomb worked, he would “certainly have the hammer on those boys,” but whether by this he meant the Russians or the Japanese was unclear, and there was no intimation ever of a “hammer,” no flaunting of power, in his dealings with Stalin. “The idea of using the bomb as a form of pressure on the Russians never entered the discussions at Potsdam,” wrote Harriman. “That wasn’t the President’s mood at all. The mood was to treat Stalin as an ally—a difficult ally, admittedly—in the hope that he would behave like one.”
At the conference session preceding Truman’s disclosure to Stalin of the bomb secret, the Generalissimo had been as “difficult” as at any time thus far. Truman was firm in his positions, yet never belligerent or reproachful. He had no intention to make reflection upon Stalin or his government, he stressed. The sharp exchanges were between Churchill and Stalin—Churchill having at last recovered much of his old spirit.
The topic on the agenda was the admission to the United Nations of Italy and the Balkan states formerly allied with Germany, the so-called “satellite countries.” It was the American and British position that Italy should be admitted but that Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary (all now firmly in Russian control) should not, until democratic governments were established. Stalin observed that since no democratic elections had been held in Italy either, he failed to understand this benevolent attitude toward Italy. The difference, said Truman, was that everyone had free access to Italy, while for the Western Allies there was no free access to the Balkan countries. (It was a point that Byrnes, too, had been making in meetings of the foreign ministers.)
“We are asking for the reorganization of the satellite governments along democratic lines as agreed upon at Yalta,” Truman said.
Stalin’s calm rejoinder was very simple: “If a government is not fascist, a government is democratic,” he said.
Churchill pointed out that Italy was an open society with a free press, where diplomatic missions could go freely about their business. At Bucharest, by contrast, the British mission was penned up as if under arrest. An iron fence had descended, said Churchill darkly.
“All fairy tales!” exclaimed Stalin.
“Statesmen may call one another’s statements fairy tales if they wish,” answered Churchill.
As Bohlen was to write, no moment at the conference so revealed the gulf between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies.
Taking Churchill’s side, Truman said that difficulties encountered by the American missions in Romania and Bulgaria had also been cause for concern. (That night Churchill would go on at length to Lord Moran about his admiration for Truman’s plain, direct way with Stalin. “The President is not going to be content to feed out of anyone’s hand; he intends to get to the bottom of things,” Churchill would say, rubbing his eyes as if to remind himself he was not dreaming. “If only this had happened at Yalta.” But then after a pause, he added sadly, “It is too late now.”)
Truman tried to salvage the afternoon with progress in another direction. The previous day he had formally introduced his plan to internationalize the world’s inland waterways, rivers, and canals, including the Danube, the Rhine, the Dardanelles, the Kiel Canal, the Suez and Panama canals. All nations, including Russia, were to have access to all the seas of the world. “I do not want to fight another war in twenty years because of a quarrel on the Danube,” he had said. “We want a prosperous, self-supporting Europe. A bankrupt Europe is of no advantage to any country, or to the peace of the world.” Stalin had said he wanted time to consider. So now Truman brought it up again, hoping for the best. Clearly it was important to him.
Stalin cut him off, declaring, “The question is not ripe for discussion.”
On Wednesday, July 25, the conference was put on hold. Churchill was about to leave for London to face the final results of the general election. Anthony Eden and others of the British delegation were also to depart, as well as Churchill’s opponent in the election, the quiet, mousy Clement Attlee, who dressed in a three-piece suit, despite the summer heat, and who seemed as convinced as everyone else that Churchill was certain to win and would return in a matter of days.
Churchill, privately, was full of foreboding. He had had a dream in which he saw himself lying dead beneath a white sheet in an empty room. He knew who it was, he told Moran, because he recognized the protruding feet.
“What a pity,” Stalin said at the close of that morning’s session, when Churchill announced he had no more to say.
Outside afterward, by the front door of the palace, Churchill, Stalin, and Truman posed for a final portrait. Truman, looking very much the American politician, stood in the middle with crossed arms, shaking hands wi
th both men at once, smiling first at one, then the other, as a battery of photographers and newsreel cameramen recorded the moment. Even Stalin broke into a grin.
The next day from London came the stunning news that the Labor Party had won, Churchill was defeated, Clement Attlee was the new prime minister. Hardly anyone could believe it, but the Russians seemed most upset of all. How could this possibly be, Molotov kept demanding. How could they not have known the outcome in advance? Stalin postponed the conference for another few days and was seen by no one.
First Roosevelt, now Churchill, Truman noted privately. The old order was passing. Uneasily he wondered what might happen if Stalin were suddenly to “cash in” and a power struggle convulsed the Soviet Union. “It isn’t customary for dictators to train leaders to follow them in power. I’ve seen no one at this Conference in the Russian lineup who can do the job.” His feelings about Churchill were mixed, as much as he liked him. It was too bad about Churchill, he wrote to his mother and sister, but then he added that “it may turn out to be all right for the world,” suggesting that this way, without Churchill around, he might make better progress with Stalin.
That same day, July 26, at the island of Tinian in the Pacific, the cruiser Indianapolis delivered the U-235 portion of an atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy.” That evening, Byrnes and Truman decided to release the Potsdam Declaration.
Phrased as a joint statement by Truman, Attlee, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, it assured the Japanese people humane treatment. They would not be “enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation.” Once freedom of speech and religion were established, once Japan’s warmaking power had been eliminated and a responsible, “peacefully inclined” government freely elected, occupation forces would be withdrawn.
The words “unconditional surrender” appeared only once, in the final paragraph, and then specified only the unconditional surrender of the armed forces, not the Japanese nation. The alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.”
The fate of Emperor Hirohito was left ambiguous. He was not mentioned. Nor was there any explanation of what form the “prompt and utter destruction” might take.
The declaration was picked up by Japanese radio monitors at six in the morning, July 27, Tokyo time, and Prime Minister Kautaro Suzuki and the Cabinet went into an all-day meeting. Meanwhile, over Tokyo and ten other Japanese cities, American planes were dropping millions of leaflets with a printed translation of the declaration.
Suzuki’s decision was to ignore the matter. The declaration, he said at a press conference, was nothing but a rehash of old proposals and as such, beneath contempt. He would “kill [it] with silence,” he said.
Clement Attlee and his new foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, arrived at Babelsberg the night of Saturday the 28th and Truman was impressed with neither—a couple of “sourpusses,” he decided. Bevin looked as though he weighed 250 pounds.
Mr. Attlee is not so keen as old fat Winston and Mr. Bevin looks rather rotund to be a Foreign Minister [Truman wrote to Margaret]. Seems Bevin is sort of the John L. Lewis type. Eden was a perfect striped pants boy. I wasn’t fond of Eden—he is a much overrated man; and he didn’t play fair with his boss. I did like old Churchill. He was as windy as Langer [Senator William Langer of North Dakota], but he knew his English language and after he’d talked half an hour there’d be at least one gem of a sentence and two thoughts maybe which could have been expressed in four minutes. But if we ever got him on record, which was seldom, he stayed put. Anyway he is a likeable person and these other two are sourpusses. Attlee is an Oxford graduate and talks with that deep throated swallowing enunciation same as Eden does. But I understand him reasonably well. Bevin is a tough guy. He doesn’t know of course that your dad has been dealing with that sort all his life, from building trades to coal mines. So he won’t be new.
“We shall see what we shall see,” he wrote to Bess.
Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had only just arrived, found Truman in an optimistic mood concerning the Russians, in contrast to others in the delegation. Harriman was “very gloomy.” Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.”
All messages to the President from the War Department came in to Babelsberg a half block down the street from Number 2 Kaiserstrasse at the Army message center, where they were immediately decoded. From there they were taken to Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, to the officers on duty in the Map Room, who would give them to the President.
Late on Monday, July 30, another urgent top-secret cable to Truman was received and decoded, but held for delivery until morning in order not to disturb the President’s rest. It was from Harrison in Washington:
The time schedule on Groves’ project is progressing so rapidly that it is now essential that statement for release by you be available not later than Wednesday, 1 August….
The time had come for Truman to give the final go-ahead for the bomb. This was the moment, the decision only he could make.
The message was delivered at 7:48 A.M., Berlin time, Tuesday, July 31. Writing large and clear with a lead pencil on the back of the pink message, Truman gave his answer, which he handed to Lieutenant Elsey for transmission:
Suggestion approved. Release when ready but not sooner than August 2.
Elsey, a lanky, earnest, good-looking young officer, a Princeton graduate who had a master’s degree in history from Harvard, would not remember feeling that he was witness to one of history’s momentous turning points. “Everything seemed momentous in those days at Potsdam,” Elsey would recall. What impressed him was that Truman “didn’t want anything happening until he got away from Stalin, away from Potsdam.” All efforts now were to wind things up by August 2. Stimson was already back at the Pentagon. Marshall was to leave later that day.
The Potsdam Conference should have been a time of celebration. It should have been the most harmonious, most hopeful of the Big Three conferences, a watershed in history, marking the start of a new era of good feeling among the Allied powers now that the common foe, the detested Nazi, was destroyed. Such at least was the promise of Potsdam. But it wasn’t that way, nor in practicality had there ever been much chance it would be. At lunch the first day they met, Stalin had told Truman he wanted to cooperate with the United States in peace as in war, but in peace, he said, that would be more difficult. It was what they all knew, and the underlying tensions felt at the beginning remained to the end.
Truman had kept insisting on results, not talk, something in the bag at the end of every day, as Churchill observed—it was why he was there, Truman would say—and as impatient as he grew, he seems to have felt right to the end that he could succeed. “We have accomplished a very great deal in spite of all the talk…. So you see we have not wasted time,” he wrote to Bess just before Churchill departed. He wanted the future of Germany settled satisfactorily. Germany was the key, the overriding question. He wanted free elections in Poland, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. He wanted Russia to join in the assault on Japan as soon as possible. But only on this last item could he feel he had succeeded. For the rest he faced ambiguity, delays, and frustration, Stalin having no wish to accept any agreement that threatened the control he already had, wherever the Red Army stood. Try as he might, Truman could make little or no progress with Stalin.
Could Roosevelt have done better? It was a question Truman must have asked himself many times. Chip Bohlen thought Roosevelt would have been less successful, since, with his personal interest in earlier agreements with Stalin, Roosevelt would have acted more angrily than Truman when faced with Stalin’s intransigence. To Bohlen, Harriman, and others experienced in dealing with the Russians, Truman had acquitted himself well. “He was never defeated or made to look foolish or uninformed in debate,” Bohlen would write. And since neither Stalin nor Molotov ever tried any tricks or subtleties, but only held stubbornly to their own line, the President’s inexperience in diplomacy did not greatly matter after all. There was never any roo
m for maneuver.
“Pray for me and keep your fingers crossed too,” he wrote to Bess as the final week began.
We are at an impasse on Poland and its western boundary and on reparations [he wrote in his diary]. Russia and Poland have agreed on the Oder and West Neisse to the Czechoslovakian border…without so much as a by your leave. I don’t like it.
But the Red Army had pushed to the Oder River and the western Neisse River and so those rivers were agreed to as Poland’s western frontier. Further, Poland was given the southern portion of East Prussia, including the port of Danzig, while the Soviet Union was granted the northern portion. As for free elections in Poland, it was agreed only that they should be held “as soon as possible,” which in reality meant the Polish issue remained unresolved.
The future of Germany’s former allies in the war—Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania—was postponed, left to the Council of Foreign Ministers to resolve at some unspecified time in the future.
Germany, already portioned off into four zones of military occupation—American, British, Russian, and French—was in effect divided down the middle, between East and West. A complete demilitarization of the German state was agreed to. There was never an argument on that. Nazi war criminals were to be brought to justice. And there was no argument here either, not even over the place where the war crimes tribunal would sit—Nuremberg was the decision. And by a complicated formula for reparations the Soviet Union got the lion’s share—mainly in capital equipment—in view of the fact that the Soviet Union had suffered the greatest loss of life and property.
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