A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Bennie and his crew of approximately thirty-five officers and men averaged only five to six hours of sleep a night and they were constantly on the move in the B-25s assigned to them for transport. The airfields they had to arrange to rebuild were invariably in ruins—captured Japanese bases with bomb-cratered runways and gutted buildings or former American fields occupied by the Japanese in their initial onslaught and blasted and burned in the retaking. To get a jump start, they would arrange to fly in immediately after the assault troops had cleared the places. Usually there was still plenty of shooting going on as the infantry cleaned out the last of the Japanese snipers and stragglers. In October 1944 it was Tacloban on Leyte, after MacArthur again fooled the Japanese by bypassing Mindanao, the southernmost island in the Philippines chain, and striking at Leyte in the center. In December it was the airstrips on Mindoro, just south of Luzon, the main island at the other end of the Philippines. At the end of February 1945 it was Luzon itself and Nichols Field on the edge of a devastated Manila, where the international airport now stands. One of Schriever’s men was killed there by a Japanese straggler hiding in the remnants of a building. In June 1945 it was Naha on Okinawa. The Marines were using flamethrowers to incinerate the Japanese holed up in caves in the hills around the field.

  Improvisation was always at a premium. Bennie was ordered to turn Nichols into a new headquarters for the Far East Air Service Command and an air logistics base to support the expected invasion of the Japanese home islands. He lacked cement. He had managed to corner a lot of toilets, which he kept as potential trade goods. The Japanese naval troops who had held Manila to the death, slaughtering 100,000 Filipino civilians in a frenzy at their own defeat and impending end, had also, for some bizarre reason, smashed the toilets in every building still wholly or partially standing. Schriever managed to obtain quite a bit of cement through toilet swapping, but he still did not have enough. He persuaded Major General Leif “Jack” Sverdrup, MacArthur’s chief engineer, to give him carte blanche to haul up what cement he wanted from a prewar plant that was still functioning on the island of Cebu, next to Leyte. Sverdrup assumed Bennie would be transporting the cement in C-47s and thus wouldn’t be able to take that much. Schriever didn’t tell Sverdrup he had rounded up four small ships capable of carrying thousands of tons of cement. But he got too greedy. He loaded so much cement on one of the ships that it could not get across the reef at the outer edge of the harbor and he had to partially unload it to float the ship loose. Sverdrup discovered Schriever’s larceny. In later years, after Sverdrup had returned to civilian life, the major St. Louis engineering firm of Sverdrup & Parcel, which he headed, was involved in a number of Air Force construction projects. Whenever he had to introduce Bennie at some public function, he would always amuse the gathering by needling him about the overloaded cement hauler getting stuck on the reef.

  About three weeks after the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, Bennie flew a B-17 from Nichols Field at Manila to Atsugi near Yokohama just south of Tokyo, the only usable airfield in the area, ferrying a general and his staff who were to take over all air service and supply functions in occupied Japan. As he came in over Tokyo Bay he was astounded at the destruction Curtis LeMay’s B-29s had wrought on one of the great cities of the world. “There was nothing; it was just wasteland,” he said later. What was still intact—the moated island of the Imperial Palace grounds and across from it the six-story Dai Ichi Insurance Building, which MacArthur would turn into his headquarters (the name of the building was appropriate for the man who would now rule Japan, as “Dai Ichi” means “number one”) and the nearby Hotel Imperial—appeared like a little oasis in the middle of a desert. But he felt no pity. The behavior of the Japanese enemy he had fought had deadened him to any compassion for them and their people. Before flying back to Manila, he stayed for a few days at the Imperial, poking about out of curiosity, and noticed that American officers were already ceasing to carry sidearms. It was obvious there was going to be no resistance from this race, so fierce and fanatic only weeks before. For the Japanese, now that they had lost the war, it was over.

  In September, shortly before flying home from Manila, he went to see Kenney to say goodbye. That March the general had arranged for him to be awarded a Legion of Merit for his accomplishments as chief of staff of the Service Command. He did not know it yet, but at Whitehead’s insistence and with Kenney’s assent, his name had also been submitted for a Distinguished Service Medal, the highest noncombat award an officer can receive, for his singular performance commanding the Advance Echelon. Once Schriever had completed the long leave to which he was entitled with his family and was ready for duty again in the United States, Kenney would make sure that he came into his reward. “You look around and tell me what assignment you’d like to have and I’ll see that you get it,” Kenney said.

  He flew from Manila to Hawaii and there caught a ride on one of the newer four-engine C-54 transports for the final leg home. They took off in the afternoon and it was a long, cold flight through the night because the plane’s heater failed. They approached San Francisco just as the sun was rising over the Golden Gate on the clear California morning of September 24, 1945. Schriever wept at the sight and tears came into his eyes again as he recalled it nearly fifty years later. In the fall of 1943, he and a team of other officers had flown back to Patterson Field at Dayton for a couple of weeks to meet with the Air Service Command representatives there and try to alleviate the supply problems Kenney was having. He had stolen one of those weeks to be with Dora and his son and daughter and to fly over to San Antonio to see his mother. Except for those two weeks, he had been at war in the Pacific for three years and three months.

  BOOK II

  INHERITING

  A DIFFERENT

  WORLD

  11.

  ATOMIC DIPLOMACY

  While Bennie Schriever was still off in the Pacific in those heady days right after the defeat of Japan, the power relationships of the world in which he had grown up and fought a war were already in motion toward a profound transformation, as great in geopolitical terms as if the plates of the earth underpinning the continents had shifted in some gigantic tectonic movement. The multipolar world of his youth and early manhood was gone. Imperial Japan’s far-flung Asian empire was a memory. Japan itself was in cinders, some irradiated from the two atomic bombs the United States had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Germany’s cities had been made of brick and concrete, not the wooden buildings that would be soft prey to incendiaries from Curtis LeMay’s B-29s, but Germany too was in rubble. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had endured for twelve, the invincible führer hunkering in his bunker and blowing out his brains with his pistol amidst the flames and ruins of the Wagnerian funeral that was the final battle for Berlin.

  France was in moral and physical collapse from its defeat by Germany in 1940, from the shame of Nazi occupation and collaboration by the Vichy regime, and from the devastation wrought by Allied armies after they had invaded at Normandy in 1944 to liberate Western Europe. Great Britain was exhausted by the cost of the victory. The British had been at war since Hitler had invaded Poland in September 1939. They had been drained of a quarter of their national wealth and more than 400,000 lives, including civilians killed by German bombs, out of a population still suffering from the keen memory of the 908,371 men who were supposed to have bought peace with their lives in the trenches of the First World War, that earlier war to end all wars. India, the jeweled keystone of their vast and cherished empire, was about to spin off in independence, initiating an irreversible process of imperial fragmentation and dissolution.

  Only the United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from the war with their statures enhanced. Americans had every reason to feel pleased with themselves. With the exception of Honolulu, not a single enemy bomb had fallen on their cities. Their economy, prostrate during the Great Depression, had been turned into a colossus of productivity to arm and equip not only the U.S. forces but also t
hose of Great Britain and the Soviet Union through Lend-Lease. The war spending by the “Arsenal of Democracy” had brought jobs and prosperity to tens of millions. The sacrifice in lives had been large but not beyond proportion—292,131 battle deaths and 115,185 from disease and other causes in an armed forces of 16.3 million men. There was the consolation that all of them had died in the cause of humanity. In contrast to the disillusioning experiences of the Europeans, there had never been a “bad” war in American historical memory. All American wars, beginning with the Revolution to wrest independence from Britain for the Thirteen Colonies, had been unifying ventures, moral crusades in which manhood was proven and glory won. Even the losers in the American Civil War, those who had fought under the stars and bars flag of the Confederacy, had been honored men in their home communities, despite their defeat. Their cause might be a lost cause, but in the white American South it had remained a sacred cause. There had been deviations, of course. The war with Mexico in the 1840s had been a war of conquest and the United States had fought another war of conquest in the Philippines, the first American imperial possession in Asia, at the turn of the twentieth century. These, however, had been pushed out of the American historical consciousness. In this uniquely American perspective the war just concluded had been the ultimate in the long line of good wars, a triumph of American military and industrial genius over the most hideous of enemies. And there was the additional comforting thought that the United States alone had the atomic bomb.

  The new president, Harry Truman, who as vice president had succeeded to the office following the death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, was under the impression that the monopoly would last a good many years. Major General Leslie Groves, the Army engineer who had headed the Manhattan Project, the huge, top secret enterprise that created the bomb, predicted it would take the Soviet Union “ten, twenty, or even sixty years” to build one. In October 1947, he was a bit more precise—fifteen to twenty years. Other not so sanguine voices within the scientific community and the intelligence services said the Soviets would probably have a bomb by the early or mid-1950s. Truman paid less attention to them. He assumed that, for the foreseeable future, the United States alone would hold the great destroyer. He and his new secretary of state, James “Jimmie” Byrnes, had devised a scheme of “atomic diplomacy” to wield the bomb as a cudgel to keep the Soviet Union in line in the postwar years.

  Franklin Roosevelt, who died before the first mushroom cloud of the atomic era rose over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, in Trinity, the code name for the successful test of the implosion-type bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had hoped to perpetuate the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union into cooperation in the postwar years. In February 1945, he and Winston Churchill, the British wartime leader, had met with Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, at Yalta in the Crimea and ratified Soviet hegemony over Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the other nations of Eastern Europe in exchange for Stalin’s commitment to join the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany. While Stalin promised to hold free elections and foster democratic institutions, it was understood that these would be shaped to serve Soviet interests, that Eastern Europe would lie within the Soviet Union’s postwar sphere of influence. Roosevelt’s Republican opponents would later use Yalta to sully his memory by accusing him of having “given away” Eastern Europe, but Roosevelt could not give away what Stalin, in fact, already possessed. By the end of January 1945 the Red Army had driven Hitler’s Wehrmacht from almost all of Eastern Europe and had broken into Germany for the advance on Berlin, which fell on May 2. Short of now going to war with the Soviet Union to wrest Eastern Europe from Stalin, the most that could be done was to try to mitigate his treatment of its peoples.

  Roosevelt believed that reason and restraint worked best with Stalin. His scrappy successor had a different attitude. Truman was, to begin with, much more militantly anti-Communist. The day after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Truman, then a senator from Missouri, had advocated keeping both German and Russian blood flowing: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word.” Henry Stimson, the elder statesman and holdover secretary of war from Roosevelt’s administration, warned him that atomic diplomacy would backfire, that attempting to negotiate with the Soviets with “this weapon ostentatiously on our hip” would only increase Stalin’s innate suspicion and distrust. Truman did not believe him. He was convinced that the way to handle the Soviets was with strong words made stronger by the shadow of the mushroom cloud behind them. “If you don’t cut out all of this stalling and let us get down to work,” Byrnes said to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, at the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in September 1945, the first major postwar conference, “I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.” The remark was phrased as a joke, but Molotov, and Stalin when it was relayed to him, understood the menace behind it.

  12.

  SPIES INSIDE THE BARBED WIRE

  Truman and Byrnes were living in a fool’s paradise. Their atomic diplomacy would only accelerate the postwar arms race Stalin had already initiated to catch up with the United States. On August 20, 1945, just five days after the surrender of Japan, Stalin had secretly ordered an all-out, no-expense-barred program to build a Soviet bomb. That July 24, at the last Big Three conference in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, Truman, exultant at Groves’s awesome description of the Trinity test, had approached Stalin with contrived casualness as the Soviet dictator was leaving the conference room. Truman had said that the United States “had a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin had simply nodded his thanks and left the room. Truman and Churchill decided that Stalin had not understood. They were wrong. Stalin was well briefed on the Manhattan Project. The latest yield of Soviet espionage, a memorandum he had apparently received a couple of weeks before, had informed him, among other things, that the Trinity test was imminent.

  Soviet intelligence had thoroughly penetrated the Manhattan Project. The gumshoes in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, fixated on the left-wing connections of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was in charge of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was built, and those of several other scientists, never suspected the real spies. At Los Alamos itself the Soviets had the ideal intelligence setup—two physicists in critical positions reporting independently, neither aware that the other was a spy. Stalin’s spymasters at Moscow Center in NKVD headquarters (the initials stand for the Russian words for People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) at the Lubyanka Prison could thus confirm what they received and pass it on to their own superiors, who in turn passed it to Soviet physicists, confident that the information was accurate. Both spies were “walk-ins,” volunteers who approached the Soviets on their own, and both spied out of idealism, not for pay.

  A third spy, George Koval, gained wide access to the industrial processes involved in nuclear armament by penetrating plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Dayton, Ohio, where bomb components were manufactured for shipment to Los Alamos. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, to a family that immigrated in 1932 at the height of the Depression to a secular Jewish colony established in the Soviet Union, Koval was recruited by the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence service, and slipped back into the United States as a mole in 1940. His story did not emerge until 2007, after he died in retirement in Moscow in his nineties and President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded him the highest post-Soviet decoration, Hero of the Russian Federation.

  One of the two spies at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, who had fled to England from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, is well known, because he confessed in 1950 after U.S. military code breakers had cracked enough of the Soviet wartime espionage cable traffic to lay suspicion on him. By then he was chief scientist at Bri
tain’s top secret Harwell nuclear center. He was tried and sentenced to fourteen years in prison, the maximum allowable under British law because the Soviet Union was an ally at the time of his spying. He was released after nine to spend the rest of his years, until his death in 1988, doing research unrelated to weaponry at a nuclear institute in East Germany. (Another well-known Soviet spy at Los Alamos was David Greenglass, the brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg, who recruited him. Rosenberg was himself engaged in industrial spying for the Soviets at war plants on the East Coast, stealing the secrets of such new weapons as the proximity fuse. Greenglass was an Army enlisted man, a machinist by trade, who worked in the conventional explosives division of the Los Alamos complex. He was a man of limited education and none in physics and his often garbled reports, while sufficient to put Julius and his sister, Ethel, in the electric chair, provided Moscow with as much confusion as they did information.)

  The second physicist spy for the Soviets at Los Alamos, Theodore Hall, has been little noted because he escaped prosecution and even the embarrassment of disclosure until 1995, when the first fruits of the code breaking, the so-called Venona documents (Venona was the code name of the code-cracking project), were made public. The rest followed in 1996. Hall was a mathematics and physics prodigy from New York who transferred to Harvard as a junior from Queens College at the age of sixteen, stood out among his peers, and became one of the youngest physicists to work at Los Alamos after he was recruited close to his eighteenth birthday. Hall’s case was particularly ironic because, while he aided and protected the Soviet Union by committing treason, his equally brilliant brother, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hall, devoted himself to threatening its existence as the U.S. Air Force’s leading engineer in the post-Second World War development of rocket engines. Edward Hall played a vital role in the creation of the first American intercontinental ballistic missile force after Schriever enlisted him as a member of his original ICBM team in 1954. He never knew of the treason of his brother, Theodore, until it was revealed forty-one years later when both men were in the evening of their lives.