In some instances Stalin did not get what he wanted—Soviet trusteeship over Italy’s former colonies in Africa, a naval base on the Bosporus, four-power control over Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley. But it was the Western leaders who made the big concessions, because they had little choice—Russian occupation of Eastern Europe was indeed a fait accompli, as Leahy said—and because they hoped to achieve harmony with Stalin. It was never possible to get all you wanted in such situations, Truman would explain to the American people, trying to put a good face on the situation. “It is a question of give and take—of being willing to meet your neighbor halfway.”
To such experienced Soviet specialists as Harriman and George Kennan, it was foolishness in the extreme to imagine the Russians ever keeping faith with such words as “democratic” and “justice.” Or to see the arrangement agreed to for Germany as anything other than unreal and unworkable. Kennan, who was not present at Potsdam, would later despair over Truman’s naivete. Harriman, who was present throughout, found himself so shut out of serious discussions by Byrnes that he decided it was time for him to resign.
Truman’s waterways proposal got nowhere. On the next to final day of the conference, August 1, he made one last try, asking only that it at least be mentioned in the final communiqué. Attlee said this was agreeable with him, but again Stalin refused. Truman pointed out that the proposal had been discussed and that he was pressing only this one issue. “Marshal Stalin, I have accepted a number of compromises during this conference to confirm with your views,” he said, “and I make a personal request now that you yield on this point…”
Stalin broke in even before his interpreter had finished with the President’s statement.
“Nyet!” said Stalin. Then, with emphasis, and in English for the first time, he repeated, “No, I say no!”
It was an embarrassing, difficult moment. Truman turned red. “I cannot understand that man!” he was heard to say. He turned to Byrnes. “Jimmy, do you realize we have been here seventeen whole days? Why, in seventeen days you can decide anything!”
In a letter to his mother, Truman called the Russians the most pigheaded people he had ever encountered. He knew them now to be relentless bargainers—“forever pressing for every advantage for themselves,” as he later said—and in his diary he left no doubt that he understood the reality of the Stalin regime. It was “police government pure and simple,” he wrote. “A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” Later he would tell John Snyder of an unsettling exchange with Stalin about the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940. When Truman asked what had happened to the Polish officers, Stalin answered coldly, “They went away.”
Still—still—Truman liked him. “I like Stalin. He is straightforward,” he wrote to Bess near the windup of the conference. Stalin could be depended upon to keep his word, he would later tell his White House staff. “The President,” wrote Eben Ayers, “seemed to have been favorably impressed with him and to like him.” Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing, Truman would tell Henry Wallace. Furthermore, Truman was pretty sure Stalin liked him. To Jonathan Daniels, Truman would say he had been reminded of Tom Pendergast. “Stalin is as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know.”
Not for a long time, not for a dozen years, would Truman concede that he had been naive at Potsdam—“an innocent idealist,” in his words—and refer to Stalin as the “unconscionable Russian Dictator.” Yet even then he added, “And I liked the little son-of-a-bitch.”
As Truman would later tell the American people, no secret agreements or commitments were made at Potsdam, other than “military arrangements.” However, one secret agreement concerning “military operations in Southeast Asia” was to have far-reaching consequences. He, Churchill, and their combined Chiefs of Staff decided that Vietnam, or Indochina, would, “for operational purposes,” be divided, with China in charge north of the 16th parallel and British forces in the southern half, leaving little chance for the unification or independence of Vietnam and ample opportunity for the return of the French. Truman so informed the American ambassador in China, Patrick J. Hurley, by secret cable the last day of the conference, August 1. At the time, given the other decisions he faced, both military and political, it did not seem overly important.
The thirteenth and concluding session at the Cecilienhof Palace that evening was devoted almost exclusively to the wording of the final communiqué and did not break up until past midnight. The struggle had come down to fine points. Molotov suggested an amendment in a paragraph that described Poland’s western frontier as running from the Baltic through the town of Swinemünde. He wished to substitute the words “west of” for “through,” Molotov said.
“How far west?” asked Byrnes.
“Immediately west,” suggested Bevin.
“Immediately west will satisfy us,” Stalin affirmed.
“That is all right,” said Truman.
“Agreed,” said Attlee.
Truman, in announcing that the business of the conference was ended, said in all sincerity that he hoped the next meeting would be in Washington.
“God willing,” exclaimed Stalin, invoking the deity for the first and only time. Then, in a conspicuously unusual tribute, Stalin commended Byrnes “who had worked harder perhaps than any of us…and worked very well.”
There was much hand shaking around the table and wishes for good health and safe journey. As it turned out, Truman and Stalin were never to meet again. Potsdam was their first and only big power conference.
In his private assessment, Stalin later told Nikita Khrushchev Truman was worthless.
VI
Packing had been going on at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse for several days, everyone, and especially the President, extremely ready to leave.
At 6:45 Thursday morning, August 2, his motorcade was drawn up in the driveway. By 7:15 they were on their way to Gatow airfield, where, at Truman’s request, there were to be no ceremonies. At 8:05 The Sacred Cow was airborne, heading for Plymouth, England, to meet the U.S.S. Augusta. “That will save two days on the ocean because it takes so long to get out of the English Channel when we leave from Antwerp,” he explained in a letter to his mother and Mary Jane. He would be having lunch with the English King, he wrote.
The lunch with King George VI took place on board the British battle cruiser H.M.S. Renown, which, with the Augusta and Philadelphia, was anchored in Plymouth Roads. To his surprise, Truman found the King “very pleasant,” “a good man,” and extremely interested in hearing all about Potsdam.
We had a nice and appetizing lunch [Truman recorded]—soup, fish, lamb chops, peas, potatoes and ice cream with chocolate sauce. The King, myself, Lord Halifax [the British ambassador to Washington], a British Admiral, Adm. Leahy, [Alan] Lascelles [the King’s private secretary], the Secretary of State in that order around the table. Talked of most everything, and nothing…. There was much formality etc. in getting on and off the British ship.
That afternoon, returning the call, the King came aboard the Augusta, inspected the guard, “took a snort of Haig & Haig” (as Truman happily recorded), and asked Truman for three of his autographs, one each for his daughters and the Queen.
Fifteen minutes after the King’s departure, at 3:49, the Augusta was under way.
The following day, August 3, his first full day at sea, Truman called the few members of the press who were on board into his cabin. Seated at a small table covered with green felt, a looseleaf notebook open in front of him, he began telling them about the atomic bomb and its history. He spoke slowly, in measured tones. His emotions seemed divided. “He was happy and thankful that we had a weapon in our hands which would speed the end of the war,” remembered Merriman Smith of the United Press. “But he was apprehensive over the development of such a monstrous weapon of destruction.” How long the United States could remain the “exclusive producer,” Truman wasn’t sure. The material in the notebook was his sta
tement for the country, which had been prepared in advance, before he left for Potsdam.
The frustration of the reporters was extreme. “Here was the greatest news story since the invention of gunpowder,” wrote Smith. “And what could we do about it? Nothing. Just sit and wait.”
On August 4, according to the official log, the President was up and strolling the decks at five in the morning, looking “completely rested from the strain of the long and tiring conference discussions.” After an early breakfast, he spent the day studying conference reports and working on an address to the country. On Sunday, August 5, he attended church services, then returned to his work. Merriman Smith remembered the day as extremely tense and Truman looking worried. Smith and the other reporters tried to talk of other things. “The secret was so big and terrifying that we could not discuss it with each other.” The ship, meantime, was boiling along at a full speed of 26.5 knots.
On the morning of Monday, August 6, the fourth day at sea, the President and several of his party spent time on deck enjoying the sun and listening to a concert by the ship’s band. The ship had entered the Gulf Stream, south of Newfoundland. The sun was out, the weather considerably warmer. The crew had changed now to white uniforms that looked sparkling in the sunshine.
At noon the ship’s position was latitude 39-55 N, longitude 61-32 W. The sea was calm.
Shortly before noon, Truman and Byrnes had decided to have lunch with some of the crew below deck in the after mess. Truman was seated with six enlisted men and just beginning his meal when Captain Graham, one of the Map Room officers, hurried in and handed him a map of Japan and a decoded message from the Secretary of War.
Hiroshima had been bombed four hours earlier. “Results clear-cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test,” Truman read. On the map Captain Graham had circled the city with a red pencil.
Suddenly excited, Truman grabbed Graham by the hand and said, “This is the greatest thing in history,” then told him to show the message to Byrnes, who was at another table. It was just after noon. Minutes later a second message was brought in:
Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 P.M. Washington-time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.
Truman jumped to his feet now and called to Byrnes, “It’s time for us to get home!” Like the scientists at Alamogordo at the moment of the first test, Truman was exuberant. Tapping on a glass with a fork, he called for the crew’s attention. “Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!”
With the crew cheering, he rushed out to spread the news. “He was not actually laughing,” wrote Merriman Smith, “but there was a broad smile on his face. In the small dispatch which he waved at the men of the ship, he saw the quick end of the war written between the lines.” At the officers’ ward, telling the men to stay seated, he repeated what he had said in the mess, then added, “We won the gamble.” He said he had never been happier about any announcement he had ever made.
All this happened very fast, and as George Elsey was to recall, the President’s response seemed in no way inappropriate. “We were all excited. Everyone was cheering.” Within minutes, the ship’s radio was carrying news bulletins from Washington about the bomb. Then came the broadcast of the President’s message, the text of which had been released at the White House only moments before, at 11:00 A.M. Washington time.
Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima…. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe…. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war…. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth….
Not in this or any of the broadcasts was there mention of how much damage had been done at Hiroshima, since no details were yet known in Washington.
Excitement, feelings of relief swept the country—and especially among families with sons or husbands in the service. Surely the war would be over any day.
To the millions of men serving in the Pacific, and those in Europe preparing to be shipped to the Pacific, the news came as a joyous reprieve. One of them was the writer Paul Fussell, then a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant with an infantry platoon in France who was scheduled to take part in the invasion of Honshu, despite wounds in the leg and back so severe that he had been judged 40 percent disabled. “But even if my legs buckled whenever I jumped out of the back of the truck, my condition was held to be satisfactory for whatever lay ahead.” After Hiroshima, he remembered, after the realization “that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”
Yet, even so, news of the bomb brought feelings of ambiguity and terror of a kind never before experienced by Americans. Children in households that had been untouched by the war would remember parents looking strangely apprehensive and wondering aloud what unimaginable new kind of horror had been unleashed. Could the poor world ever possibly be the same again?
“Yesterday,” wrote Hanson Baldwin in The New York Times on August 7, “we clinched victory in the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind.”
Editorial speculation was extremely grave. “It is not impossible,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “that whole cities and all the people in them may be obliterated in a fraction of a second by a single bomb.” “We are dealing with an invention that could overwhelm civilization,” said the Kansas City Star, and in St. Louis the Post-Dispatch warned that possibly science had “signed the mammalian world’s death warrant and deeded an earth in ruins to the ants.” The Washington Post, in an editorial titled “The Haunted Wood,” said that with Truman’s revelations concerning the new bomb it was as if all the worst imaginary horrors of science fiction had come true.
The weather in Washington had turned abnormally cool for August, making ideal nights for sleeping, but, observed James Reston of The New York Times, thoughtful people were not sleeping so well.
“Some of our scientists say that the area [in Hiroshima] will be uninhabitable for many years because the bomb explosion had made the ground radioactive and destructive of animal life,” wrote Admiral Leahy, who had flown home ahead of the President. “The lethal possibilities of such atomic action in the future is frightening, and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.”
Robert Oppenheimer had predicted a death toll of perhaps 20,000. Early reports from Guam on August 8 indicated that 60 percent of Hiroshima had been leveled and that the number of killed and injured might reach as high as 200,000. In time, it would be estimated that 80,000 people were killed instantly and that another 50,000 to 60,000 died in the next several months. Of the total, perhaps 10,000 were Japanese soldiers.
Many thousands more suffered from hideous thermal burns, from shock, and from radioactive poisoning. Later also, there would be eyewitness accounts of people burned to a cinder while standing up, of birds igniting in midair, of women “whose skin hung from them like a kimono” plunging shrieking into rivers. “I do not know how many times I called begging that they cut off my burned arms and legs,” a fifth-grade girl would remember.
Anne O’Hare McCormick, who had described Truman, Churchill, and Stalin poking about the graveyard of Berlin, wrote now of the bomb as the “ultimatum to end all ultimatums” because it was only a small sample of what might lie in store in l
aboratories where scientists and soldiers joined forces.
No one as yet was blaming the scientists or the soldiers or the President of the United States.
On the afternoon of August 7, just before 5:00 P.M., the Augusta tied up at Norfolk. Truman left immediately by special train for Washington and by the morning of the 8th the country knew he was back at his desk. There was still no word from Japan, no appeal for mercy or sign of surrender. At the Pentagon, Stimson and Marshall worried privately that the bomb had failed to achieve the desired shock effect.
On August 9, the papers carried still more stupendous news. A million Russian troops had crossed into Manchuria—Russia was in the war against Japan—and a second atomic bomb had been dropped on the major Japanese seaport of Nagasaki.
No high-level meeting had been held concerning this second bomb. Truman had made no additional decision. There was no order issued beyond the military directive for the first bomb, which had been sent on July 25 by Marshall’s deputy, General Thomas T. Handy, to the responsible commander in the Pacific, General Carl A. Spaatz of the Twentieth Air Force. Paragraph 2 of that directive had stipulated: “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff….” A second bomb—a plutonium bomb nicknamed “Fat Man”—being ready, it was “delivered” from Tinian, and two days ahead of schedule, in view of weather conditions.
Later estimates were that seventy thousand died at Nagasaki, where the damage would have been worse had the bombardier not been off target by two miles.
“For the second time in four days Japan felt the stunning effect of the terrible weapon,” reported the Los Angeles Times, which like most papers implied that the end was very near. On Capitol Hill the typical reaction was, “It won’t be long now.”
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