Exceptional (5 page)

He'd been vice president for eighty-nine days, and in that time he'd met with President Roosevelt three times, once when they were being inaugurated on January 20 and twice in the Oval Office with members of the
congressional leadership. Truman had no office in the West Wing and rarely used the vice president's ceremonial office in the Capitol building, preferring instead to continue working out of his Senate office in Room 240 of the
Senate Office Building. Of his time as vice president, Truman said, “I enjoyed my new position as Vice-President, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for ten years
as a senator.” Indeed, Truman had lost virtually all his power—he could no longer vote in the Senate, and he had no role in Roosevelt's White House.

The nation was in the midst of the largest war in history. America had, in Truman's words, “created military forces so enormous as
to defy description.” Yet there was no question but that we would have a peaceful passing of the control of this mighty force from one civilian
to another. In fact, Truman noted, “When the nation's greatest leader in that war lay dead and a simple ceremony was about to acknowledge the presence of his successor in the nation's greatest office, only two uniforms were present. . . . This passed unnoticed at the time, and the very fact that no thought was given to it demonstrates convincingly how firmly the concept of the supremacy of the civil authority is
accepted in our land.”

Forty-six hundred miles east, the American generals commanding the Allied forces in
Europe despaired. Earlier that day, Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley had come face-to-face with evil when they visited the Nazi concentration camp Ohrdruf-Nord, the first camp to be liberated
by the Americans. Eisenhower wrote to General Marshall upon his return from the camp:

The things I saw beggar description. . . . The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were overpowering. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations
merely to propaganda.

Now the three generals learned their commander in chief was dead. The man replacing him, a virtual unknown, would have responsibility for waging a global war on two fronts, a more massive military effort than any before in history. His generals did not know whether he would be up to the task.

Twelve days after Roosevelt's death, the new president learned of a project under way in the New Mexico desert that would ultimately bring an end to the war: the Manhattan Project, an effort to develop an atomic weapon. On Tuesday, April 24, Truman received a note from Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “I think it is very important
that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter.” The subject was of such import, Stimson wrote, “that I think you ought to know about it without further delay.” At the bottom of the note, Truman wrote, “Put on list tomorrow,
Wed. 25. HST.”

Secretary Stimson and General Leslie R. Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project, briefed Truman at the White House at noon on April 25, 1945. Stimson had prepared a memorandum for the president that began, “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy
a whole city.” Stimson wanted to ensure that Truman was fully briefed on every aspect of the program, its current status, possible implications of the use of the weapon, and safeguards for its oversight
in the future. Truman agreed to his request that a committee be established to provide recommendations on these and other issues relating to an atomic bomb.

On June 1, 1945, the committee, after meeting with members of its scientific advisory panel, including Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, issued three recommendations:

1. The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible.

2. It should be used on a dual target—that is, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to houses and other buildings most susceptible to damage, and

3. It should be used without prior warning [of the
nature of the weapon].

In the years since America dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a number of arguments have been made concerning
alternative courses of action. Some have said, for example, that the United States should have alerted the Japanese that we had a devastating new weapon and then conducted a test for them to see. What if we had announced a test and then it had failed? The damage to Allied morale and the consequent improvement in Japanese morale would likely have extended the war. What if we had alerted the Japanese to the location of the test and they had moved American POWs there? The Japanese had not surrendered following the massive firebombing of their cities with death tolls in the tens of thousands. Nor did they surrender after an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The argument that a test firing would have convinced them to surrender ignores historical fact.

Others have argued that the loss of life caused by the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was simply too great, and, therefore, the United States was wrong to deploy this devastating new weapon. This line of thinking ignores the reality of the much greater loss of life that would have occurred had the United States not used the bombs and instead been forced to invade the Japanese home islands.

Island fighting in the Pacific had been brutal. Japanese soldiers were fighting to the death and taking thousands of our men with them. A captain in military intelligence, Charlton Ogburn Jr., recounted the fighting for historian David McCullough: “We had only too abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos. Thousands of our Marines and soldiers had died rooting Japanese from their foxholes and bunkers when they were perfectly aware that their
situation was hopeless.” Not one Japanese unit
had ever surrendered, and we weren't yet fighting on the home islands.

The experience weighing most heavily on the minds of President
Truman and General Marshall as they planned for the invasion of Japan was the battle on Okinawa. It had taken three months of heavy combat for the Americans to defeat the Japanese forces on the island. We had lost
12,000 American service members killed and 38,000 wounded or missing. On the Japanese side, the casualties were much higher, with
more than 100,000 killed.

Plans for an invasion of the Japanese home islands called for an amphibious landing of 766,700 troops in the fall of 1945 on the island of Kyushu. Using casualty rates on Okinawa as a guide, planners anticipated we would lose more than 250,000 men
on Kyushu alone. American planners knew that the fall of Kyushu was unlikely to lead to the surrender of Japan. In light of the fierce Japanese determination to fight on, their ongoing efforts to mobilize the entire population, and the fanatic desire of their generals to confront and defeat the U.S. force on the homeland, American planners knew that, after taking Kyushu, we would have to invade the mainland. “General Marshall told me,” President Truman wrote of this prospect, “that it might cost half a million American lives to force the enemy's surrender
on his home grounds.”

The use of the atomic bombs saved not only American lives, but hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, as well. Even after the devastation wrought at Hiroshima, the Japanese war council was deadlocked as to whether they should surrender. The war minister, General Korechika Anami, urged that the Japanese fight on. “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed
like a beautiful flower?” the general asked. Then word came that a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki and the war
council was adjourned. The decision was left to Emperor Hirohito, who was not willing to sacrifice the nation.

At 7:35
A.M.
on Friday, August 10, 1945, Radio Tokyo began broadcasting the message.
Time
reported “it was picked up by listening monitors on the Pacific Coast and
teletyped to Washington.”
Harry Truman was in the White House residence when he received a
dispatch from the War Department. “In obedience to the gracious command of His Majesty the Emperor,” the message read, “. . . the Japanese Government are ready to accept the terms enumerated at Potsdam on July 26, 1945,” provided the emperor
remained on his throne. Twenty-seven hours after our stations first heard the Tokyo transmission, we sent one back:

From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the supreme commander of the Allied powers, who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender. . . . The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. The armed forces of the Allied powers will remain in Japan until the purposes set forth in the Potsdam
Declaration are achieved.

It took seventeen hours for the American response to reach Japan, through official diplomatic channels. And then the world waited. Finally, three days later, at 7
P.M.
on Tuesday, August 14, 1945, President Truman called reporters into the Oval Office:

I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese Government in reply to the message forwarded to that Government by the Secretary of State on August 11. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional
surrender of Japan.

The assembled White House reporters
broke into cheers.

Those who argue America was wrong to use the atomic bombs
must explain how President Truman, in the aftermath of the carnage that would have resulted from an invasion of the Japanese mainland, could have explained to the American people that we had a weapon that would have ended the war and he had
failed to use it. The men responsible for the development of the atomic weapons and the decision to use them were fully aware of the gravity of the choices they were making. Writing in 1947, former secretary of war Stimson explained it this way:

My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us, I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his
countrymen in the face.

ALBERT HALL IN LONDON was hung with American flags, the flags of all forty-eight states, and, over the stage, a huge portrait of Abraham Lincoln. A
spotlight shone on an American eagle. It was Thanksgiving Day, 1944, months before the Allied victory, and yet the tide of the struggle had turned. The torch of leadership of the free world had passed. High representatives from the British and American governments were in the audience. American ambassador John Winant's speech was scheduled to be the last. But suddenly,
Time
reported, “a stubby, balding figure, known to all, marched down the center aisle.” To roaring applause, Churchill took the stage and addressed his American allies:

It is your day of thanksgiving and when we feel the truth of the facts that are before us—that in three or four years, the peaceful, peace-loving people of the United States, with all the variety and freedom of their life, in such contrast to the iron discipline which has governed other, many other communities, that in three or four years the United States has in sober fact become the greatest military, naval and air power in the world, that—I say to you—in this time of war is in itself a subject for profound thanksgiving.

Exactly when America became the world's predominant power is the subject of some debate. On December 27, 1941, the Australian prime minister John Curtin signaled a shift when he said in an article in the
Melbourne Herald
:

Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom. . . . We shall exert all our energies to shaping a defense plan with the United States
as its keystone.

Others point to the operations in North Africa as the key historic moment. Historian Rick Atkinson put it this way:

From a distance of sixty years, we can see that North Africa was a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act like a great power—militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically. Along with Stalingrad and Midway, North Africa is where the Axis enemy forever lost the initiative in World War II. It is where Great Britain slipped into the role of junior
partner in the Anglo-American alliance, and where the United States first emerged as the dominant force it would remain into
the next millennium.

William Manchester pointed to the year 1943—a year of Allied summits—as the period when “the torch of leadership passed from the British Prime Minister to the American President, and both men knew it.” America, by that time, “was putting more men and matériel into the conflict and American generals . . . would be commanding the combined forces in the great battles ahead.” From 1943 on, no one doubted FDR was “commander of the Allied
Armies and Navies.”

Historian Andrew Roberts says that, although the truth was evident sooner, the moment when America was confirmed as the “leading power of the western Alliance” came on July 1, 1944. In the aftermath of the D-Day landings, the Americans favored invading the south of France on August 15, but the British wanted to “cross the River Po, advance on Trieste and push into the Balkans in September.” A deadlock ensued with Churchill finally appealing the British case to Roosevelt, who rejected it. “The baton had passed from hand to hand,” Roberts wrote, “reluctantly and not without bluster, but neither was it wrenched from Britain's grasp. Churchill was to be the last British leader
of the Free World.”