Truman (79 page)

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 laboratories 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.”

Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., of Georgia, one of the most respected, influential figures in Washington, sent a telegram to Truman saying there must be no letup in the assault on the Japanese.

Truman sent Russell a heartfelt answer written that same day, August 9:

That night, in his radio address on Potsdam, he made a point of urging all Japanese civilians to leave the industrial cities immediately and save themselves.

“I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” he told the American people.

Reflecting on the future and “this new force,” he said with feeling: “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.”

On the morning Nagasaki was bombed, a crucial meeting of Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had been taking place in Prime Minister Suzuki’s bomb shelter outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The meeting was deadlocked, with three powerful military commanders (two generals and one admiral) arguing fervently against surrender. It was time now to “lure” the Americans ashore. General Anami, the war minister, called for one last great battle on Japanese soil—as demanded by the national honor, as demanded by the honor of the living and the dead. “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” he asked. But when news of Nagasaki was brought in, the meeting was adjourned to convene again with the Emperor that night in the Imperial Library. In the end, less than twenty-four hours after Nagasaki, it was Hirohito who decided. They must, he said, “bear the unbearable” and surrender.

The Japanese government would accept the Potsdam Declaration with the understanding that the Emperor would remain sovereign.

Truman had been up early as usual the morning of Friday, August 10, and was about to leave his private quarters when, at 6:30, a War Department messenger arrived with the radio dispatch. Byrnes, Stimson, Leahy, and Forrestal were summoned for a meeting at 9:00. “Could we continue the Emperor and yet expect to eliminate the warlike spirit in Japan?” Truman later wrote. “Could we even consider a message with so large a ‘but’ as the kind of unconditional surrender we had fought for?”

Stimson, as he had before, said the Emperor should be allowed to stay. He thought it the only prudent course. Leahy agreed. Byrnes was strongly opposed. He wanted nothing less than unconditional surrender, the policy Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, and he was certain the American people felt the same. The Big Three had called for unconditional surrender at Potsdam, he reminded them. He could not understand “why now we should go further than we were willing to go at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb and Russia was not in the war.” Truman asked to see the Potsdam statement.

Forrestal thought that perhaps with different wording the terms could be made acceptable and this appealed to Truman.

He decided against Byrnes. He decided, as he recorded in his diary, that if the Japanese wanted to keep their emperor, then “we’d tell ’em how to keep him.” The official reply, as worded by Byrnes, stated that the Emperor would remain but “subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.” If it was not unconditional surrender, it was something very close to it, exactly as Naotake Sato, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, had warned Tokyo it would be a month before.

At a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, Truman reported these developments in strictest confidence. The Allied governments were being notified. Meantime, he had ordered no further use of atomic bombs without his express permission. (One more bomb was available at the time.) The thought of wiping out another city was too horrible, he said. He hated the idea of killing “all those kids.”

To Henry Wallace afterward, Truman complained of dreadful headaches for days. “Physical or figurative?” Wallace asked. “Both,” Truman replied.

Attlee cabled his approval that evening, but the Australians were adamantly opposed. “The Emperor should have no immunity from responsibility for Japan’s acts of aggression…. Unless the system goes, the Japanese will remain unchanged and recrudescence of aggression in the Pacific will only be postponed to a later generation,” said the Australians, who had been excluded from Potsdam and who had fought long and suffered greatly in the war with Japan.

At the same time shattering news was released in Washington, reminding the country that the war continued. On the night of July 29, the U.S.S.
Indianapolis,
the ship that had delivered the core of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship sank in minutes, taking hundreds of its crew with it and leaving hundreds more drifting in the sea. They were there for days, many eaten by sharks. By the time rescue ships arrived, eight hundred lives had been lost.

Chiang Kai-shek cabled his agreement the next morning, Saturday, August 11, and so, reluctantly, did the Australians. The Soviets appeared to be stalling in the hope of having some say in the control of Japan and to drive farther into Manchuria, but eventually Stalin, too, agreed. A formal reply was transmitted to Tokyo. Then the wait began.

Bess Truman had arrived at the White House from Independence; after an absence of more than two months, a semblance of normal domestic life had resumed. On Sunday, Truman was at his desk writing a letter. It was his sister’s birthday. He would have written sooner, he told her, but he had been too busy. “Nearly every crisis seems to be the worst one, but after it’s over, it isn’t so bad….”

To reporters his composure was extraordinary. He took it all, “the drama and tenseness, the waiting and watching of war’s end,” in “cool stride markedly lacking in showmanship and striking for its matter-of-factness.” Secretary Byrnes, who kept coming and going from the somber old State Department Building next door, seemed “a little frantic” by contrast. Rumors were everywhere. Peace was imminent. Crowds had gathered outside, expecting an announcement any moment.

But Sunday passed without word from the Japanese. And so did Monday the 13th. Truman confided to his staff that he had ordered General Marshall to resume the B-29 raids. Late in the day Charlie Ross told reporters the staff would remain on duty until midnight.

The wait continued the next morning. “It began like the days that had preceded it…reporters and correspondents jamming the press room and lobby, some of them worn and tired after hours of waiting and from the tenseness of the waiting and uncertainty,” wrote Eben Ayers. The crowds outside grew noticeably larger by the hour. Across Pennsylvania Avenue thousands of people filled Lafayette Square, the majority of them servicemen and women in summer uniforms.

The answer reached the President at five minutes past four that afternoon, Tuesday, August 14. Japan had surrendered. At 6:10 the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington arrived at the State Department to present Secretary Byrnes with the Japanese text, which Byrnes carried at once to the White House.

(The document would have arrived ten minutes sooner but for the fact that a sixteen-year-old messenger, Thomas E. Jones, who picked it up at the RCA offices on Connecticut Avenue to deliver it to the Swiss legation, had been stopped by the police for making a U-turn on Connecticut.)