American Warlords
Page 57
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Truman approved Stimson’s suggestion to create an advisory committee on the political and policy effects of the bomb. Stimson’s “Interim Committee” comprised himself, an assistant secretary of state, a Navy undersecretary, and Jimmy Byrnes, the incoming secretary of state. Stimson also invited four eminent scientists: J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos complex, and Nobel laureates Enrico Fermi of Columbia, Arthur Compton of Chicago, and Ernest Lawrence of the University of California. Sitting with them as invited guests were Generals Marshall and Groves.
Stimson’s committee met periodically throughout May and held its climactic discussion on the last day of the month. In his diary that night, an excited Stimson wrote, “I told them that [the Army] did not regard it as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe; that the project might even mean the doom of civilization or it might mean the perfection of civilization; that it might be a Frankenstein which would eat us up or it might be a project by which the peace of the world would be helped in becoming secure.”11
Deferring to the generals on military matters, the scientists joined in a discussion of the bomb’s effects. The gaunt Oppenheimer described his vision of the hellish blast. “The visual effect would be tremendous,” he promised. “It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet.” The radiation spewing from the blast “would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.”12
Stimson said he preferred to use the bomb with no advance warning, in an area sufficiently populated as to “make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” On this point there was little dissent. Oppenheimer went further, suggesting several simultaneous strikes, though Groves argued that each bombing would provide valuable information that could make subsequent attacks more effective.13
As Stimson recalled, the committee carefully considered alternatives such as the bomb’s use on an uninhabited area, or an advance warning. A specific warning, they feared, might prompt the Japanese Army to move American prisoners to the target. Moreover, some in the administration did not believe the bomb would work. Admiral Leahy, for one, called it “a professor’s pipe dream.”* It might stiffen Japanese resistance if the United States announced the use of a fantastic new weapon and the fantastic new weapon turned out to be a dud.14
On June 1 the Interim Committee submitted its recommendations to Truman. It proposed using the bomb against Japan as soon as possible, without warning, and against a target that would demonstrate its “devastating strength.” With some discussion and hand-wringing, the committee reaffirmed its recommendation “that the weapon be used against Japan at the earliest opportunity . . . on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage.”15
• • •
Thus, on June 18, when Truman called his warlords back into conference, he wanted to know what options the atomic bomb gave him. Jack McCloy had mentioned the prospect of a political solution—terms of surrender that would end the war without further bloodshed—but after a brief discussion of surrender formulas, politics were laid aside and the bomb’s use became the group’s focus. The American high command reached no final decision, but the implied consensus was that the bomb would be used unless something dramatic happened.16
In discussions over the next month, no responsible person in either the United States or Great Britain seriously considered invasion or indefinite blockade preferable to using the atomic bomb. As Churchill wrote afterward, “The decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”17
• • •
The question remained where to drop the bomb. According to Marshall, the basic idea was to drop one or two bombs on Japan’s mainland for shock value. If an invasion were still necessary, third and fourth bombs would be dropped behind the front lines to knock out supporting forces. Exactly where the weapon would be dropped was a question for the bombing experts.18
General Groves and his staff searched reconnaissance reports for suitable targets. The first criterion held that the target must be a military or industrial location not already pounded to rubble by LeMay’s Superforts. That eliminated Tokyo and many other large cities. Other criteria included the presence of surrounding hills to maximize the effect of the bomb blast, and a well-known location, so that news of the explosion would spread to the Japanese people regardless of government propaganda. That narrowed down the list to Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Niigata.19
Stimson found carpet bombing abhorrent, and he had been repelled when the Army Air Forces turned Dresden into a crematory. He understood why the strategy was more useful in Japan—Nippon’s war industries were scattered throughout residential areas—but he was still troubled enough to write Truman about indiscriminate destruction. “I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons,” he told his diary. “First, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready [for the atomic bomb] the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength. . . . [The President] laughed and said he understood.” 20
As he scanned the list of bomb targets, one name caught Stimson’s eye. He and Mabel had visited the city of Kyoto when he was governor-general of the Philippines. He had strolled its stone avenues and marveled at its Tokugawa castles and Shinto shrines. To General Groves, Kyoto was a city with a million square feet of factory floors, but to Stimson it was a place of beauty, humanity, religion, and culture—a treasure to the world as much as to the Japanese people. He ordered Arnold and Groves to strike Kyoto from their target list.21
On July 21, Stimson received another cable sent at Groves’s request. The message read, “Your local military advisors engaged in preparation definitely favor your pet city and would like to feel free to use it as first choice.”22
It was typical bullheaded Groves. Annoyed at the general’s persistence, Stimson went to Truman. Catching him between meetings, he told Truman if the Americans destroyed a cultural center like Kyoto, the world would never forgive them. He wanted Truman’s blessing to spare the city.23
Truman respected the old Republican, and he agreed to veto Kyoto. In triumph, Stimson cabled Groves back, “Give name of place or alternate places, always excluding the particular place against which I have decided. My decision has been confirmed by the highest authority.”24
Kyoto was safe. The new list of targets read: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. One of them would take Kyoto’s place as the sacrificial lamb.25
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FDR rarely brought his cabinet ministers to conferences with Allied leaders, for he liked to think that he was his own cabinet. When preparing for TERMINAL, the last Big Three conference of the war, Truman had not asked Stimson to attend, on account of his age. But when Stimson asked to come anyway, Truman, seeking all the help he could get, cordially invited Stimson to join him.26
Truman arrived at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, on July 15. He was lodged in a three-story stucco mansion at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse. The mansion was lately owned by the head of a German movie company, “who is now with a labor battalion somewhere in Russia,” as the president’s official log surmised. To ensure that the presidential staff caused no friction with their hosts, Truman called his people together and told them the Russians had gone to great trouble to fix up their accommodations. He wanted everything there when they arrived to be sitting there when they left. There might be hard talk at the negotiation tables, but there would be no souvenir hunting in the presidentia
l quarters.27
As at Yalta, political decisions crowded the agenda, and Stimson, Marshall and King, the military specialists, remained on the periphery of the big discussions. On the periphery, that is, until 7:30 p.m. on July 16, when a message from Washington arrived for Stimson by special courier. It read:
OPERATED ON THIS MORNING. DIAGNOSIS NOT COMPLETE BUT RESULTS SEEM SATISFACTORY AND ALREADY EXCEED EXPECTATIONS. . . . DR. GROVES PLEASED. HE RETURNS TOMORROW. I WILL KEEP YOU POSTED.28
The message, decrypted yet cryptic, told Stimson that the implosion-type plutonium bomb had been successfully tested in the New Mexico desert. Beaming at the news, Stimson rushed over to the “Little White House,” Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, to tell the president.29
Five days later, a more descriptive report arrived. The test bomb, Groves reported, had exceeded all expectations. An explosion the equivalent of fifteen to twenty thousand tons of TNT carved a crater into the desert nearly a quarter of a mile wide and 130 feet deep. The fireball could be seen in El Paso, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and points nearly 200 miles away; one witness, newspaper reports claimed, was a blind woman.*30
Stimson reviewed the report with Marshall, then presented it to Truman and Byrnes. Both were ecstatic at the result. “The President was tremendously pepped up by it and spoke to me of it again and again when I saw him,” wrote Stimson. “He said it gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence.”31
He would need that confidence to get through talks with Stalin. The United States and the Soviet Union had come a long way from the dark days of 1942, when they fought shoulder to shoulder—metaphorically, as the Russians reminded them—against the German peril. To Truman, Russia was becoming the world’s emerging problem. Stalin’s ministers demanded ports in China. They wanted influence in Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the Dardanelles, and of course Poland. They wanted reparations, they wanted bases in Manchuria and Turkey, and they wanted a trusteeship over Korea—potentially even sole control over that peninsula.32
Truman was not about to let Stalin face him down. With the Red Army, Stalin was holding a straight, but when the Los Alamos reports arrived, Truman held a royal flush. Between meetings, he told Stalin his army had developed a new, more powerful weapon than any other built to date. Then he waited for the dictator’s reaction.
It was not what he had expected. The news didn’t seem to register with Stalin. His expression never changed, and he continued the conversation in a lighthearted vein, merely replying that he hoped America would make “good use of it against the Japanese.” Stalin did not appear greatly interested in what Truman told him, and some wondered whether he even grasped the significance of Truman’s revelation.*33
• • •
Truman was a cagey poker player, and he had come to believe that most Soviet demands were sheer bluff. But he still needed the Russians to help him end the war with Japan. Or did he?
He asked Stimson to double-check with Marshall, and Stimson passed the question on: Did the United States need the Red Army to invade Manchuria in order to defeat Japan?
Marshall hedged. If the Americans invaded Japan, they probably needed the Red Army to pin down the fifty divisions of Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Even if Japan succumbed to an atomic bomb without invasion, the Russians could still march into Manchuria and take whatever they wanted. But the Joint Chiefs were shifting their views from the days of Tehran and Yalta, and were less inclined to beg for Stalin’s help.
Stimson inferred from Marshall’s answer that America could probably go it alone, now that the arsenal of democracy included nuclear weapons. To Stimson, it was not a clear answer, but in war most answers are not. He accepted that answer and informed Truman.34
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For Henry Stimson, there was one last battle to fight. As with Germany, this one placed the secretary of war in the odd position of opposing the secretary of state by favoring diplomacy over force.
Since the spring, Stimson had considered whether the war could be ended by giving Japan one concession: the retention of her emperor under a modified constitutional arrangement. It would mean altering the “unconditional surrender” formula laid down by FDR at Casablanca two years earlier, but Stimson thought it a reasonable concession. As he told Truman, “Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours. On the contrary, she has within the past century shown herself to possess extremely intelligent people. . . . I think the Japanese nation has the mental intelligence and versatile capacity in such a crisis to recognize the folly of a fight to the finish and to accept an offer of what will amount to an unconditional surrender.”35
Stimson spoke to Truman about terms permitting the Japanese to keep their emperor if the nation were purged of its militaristic influences. Truman listened but gave Stimson no answer.36
It was a harder question than it looked. In June, Truman had warned Japan of massive destruction if she refused to surrender, and Secretary Byrnes believed the principle of unconditional surrender had become too deeply ingrained with the American public to let it go now. Like Truman, Byrnes had been a respected senator before joining Roosevelt’s wartime team, and the new president put a lot of stock in the secretary’s political opinion. Besides, a June Gallup poll showed that a third of Americans wanted Hirohito to hang as a war criminal, and only 7 percent believed he should keep his throne.37
On July 12, messages between Tokyo and the Japanese embassy in Moscow, decrypted by MAGIC men in Washington, told a story of a nation on the brink of extinction, desperately seeking Soviet help in mediating an end to the war, yet unwilling to agree to unconditional surrender. Truman told his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.”38
• • •
At Stimson’s urging, Truman planned to issue an ultimatum to Japan, signed by himself, Churchill, and Chiang.* The message would demand Japan’s unconditional surrender, or it would face “prompt and utter destruction.” The draft statement declared that justice would be meted out to war criminals, and the leaders who had drawn Japan into war would be removed. As for the Emperor, Stimson included in his draft a proviso that the new government “may include a constitutional monarch under the present dynasty if it be shown to the complete satisfaction of the world that such a government never again will aspire to aggression.”39
The draft Truman approved was revised by Secretary Byrnes. It was close to Stimson’s version, but it eliminated any reference to the Emperor’s continued employment. That omission worried Stimson, because the document also called for the removal of Japan’s militarists. The Japanese were bound to think one of those intended militarists was their divine leader.
The next day Stimson met with Truman at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse. He stressed the importance of preserving Shōwa dynasty to induce Japan to agree to what was otherwise an unconditional surrender. He told his diary, “I had felt that the insertion of that in the formal warning was important and might be just the thing that would make or mar their acceptance.”40
But by the time Stimson pleaded his case to Truman, the president had approved the declaration without the “emperor provision” and sent it to Chiang for his signature. Circulation of the draft made any softening language impossible, so Stimson asked Truman to assure the Japanese through other, indirect channels that the Shōwa period would continue. “He said he had that in mind, and that he would take care of it,” Stimson wrote.41
With nothing left to do in Potsdam, Henry Stimson boarded a plane to Munich. There he saw his old friend General Patton, then flew home to Highhold for a long-overdue rest.42
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The Potsdam Declaration, broadcast over the radio and dropped in leaflet form over Japan, fell on deaf ears and blind eyes. Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō pointedly refused to respond, and while Japan made behind-the-scenes efforts to broker a truce
through Stalin, Harry Truman saw no reason to think Japan would surrender anytime soon.
He would leave the next move in the hands of his airmen.
• • •
The first bomb, “Little Boy,” had been transported to Tinian aboard the cruiser Indianapolis on July 26. Final assembly was completed on the island, down to the dark gray paint job, and rehearsal drops were completed by July 31. As Little Boy sat in his bomb pit, dark and surly, his cheery-looking brother, “Fat Man,” was painted a festive yellow. His bright nose was stenciled with the legend “JANCFU”—GI slang for “Joint Army-Navy Combined Fuck-Up”—and his side and fins bore the penciled signatures of technicians who had put the hellish device in weapon form. Fat Man was wheeled to his pit and lowered, there to await a big bomber to roll over the pit and open its bay doors.
Marshall ordered his acting chief of staff, General Handy, to draft an order directing the use of one or more atomic bombs as soon after August 3 as weather would permit. The order arrived in Potsdam on July 24 and was sent back to Washington by Marshall six hours later with the approval of Stimson and Truman. It listed four targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki.43
The flight of the Enola Gay, the B-29 assigned to usher the world into the nuclear age, was scheduled for the morning of August 4, Tokyo time. But the skies over Japan, critical to measuring the bomb’s effect, were overcast, so Enola Gay’s flight was delayed until the next day, and then the next.44
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Exhausted by his military and diplomatic whirlwind, a weary Henry Stimson relaxed at Highhold with Mabel. The president was at sea, returning from Potsdam. Marshall and King were in Washington. And high above the Pacific, death rode the wings of a silver bird.