Authors: David McCullough
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political, #Historical
Okinawa was on Stimson’s mind—Okinawa was on all their minds. An attack on the American armada by hundreds of Japanese suicide planes, the
kamikaze,
had had devastating effect—thirty ships sunk, more than three hundred damaged, including carriers and battleships. Once American troops were ashore on the island, the enemy fought from caves and pillboxes with fanatic ferocity, even after ten days of heavy sea and air bombardment. The battle on Okinawa still raged. In the end more than 12,000 Americans would be killed, 36,000 wounded. Japanese losses were ten times worse—110,000 Japanese killed—and, as later studies show, civilian deaths on the island may have been as high as 150,000, or a third of the population.
“We regarded the matter of dropping the bomb as exceedingly important,” General Marshall later explained.
We had just been through a bitter experience at Okinawa. This had been preceded by a number of similar experiences in other Pacific islands. [The first day of the invasion of Iwo Jima had been more costly than D-Day at Normandy.]…The Japanese had demonstrated in each case they would not surrender and they fight to the death…. It was to be expected that resistance in Japan, with their home ties, could be even more severe. We had had one hundred thousand people killed in Tokyo in one night of bombs, and it had seemingly no effect whatsoever. It destroyed the Japanese cities, yes, but their morale was affected, so far as we could tell, not at all. So it seemed quite necessary, if we could, to shock them into action…. We had to end the war; we had to save American lives.
Among some scientists connected with the project, but not party to the committee’s discussions, there was sharp disagreement with such reasoning.
In early April, Leo Szilard of the University of Chicago, the brilliant Hungarian-born physicist who, with Einstein, had helped persuade Roosevelt to initiate the project in the first place, wrote a long memorandum addressed to Roosevelt saying that use of an atomic bomb against Japan would start an atomic arms race with Russia and questioning whether avoiding that might be more important than the short-term goal of knocking Japan out of the war. Because of Roosevelt’s death, the memorandum was not sent. Instead, Szilard set about arranging an appointment with Truman through a friend and colleague at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, a mathematician named Albert Cahn, who came from Kansas City and had once, to pay his way through graduate school, worked for Tom Pendergast. A date was made for Szilard to see Matt Connelly, the new appointments secretary, and Szilard went to the White House. Connelly, having read Szilard’s memorandum, agreed it was a serious matter. (“At first I was a little suspicious,” he also said, “because the appointment came through Kansas City.”) He told Szilard it was the President’s wish that he see Jimmy Byrnes, and Szilard, who was unaware of Byrnes’s role on the Interim Committee or that Byrnes was soon to become Secretary of State, took an overnight train to Spartanburg, accompanied by a University of Chicago dean, Walter Bartky, and another noted physicist, Harold Urey.
The three men saw Byrnes on May 27, just days before the crucial, last meeting of the Interim Committee. Reading the memorandum, Byrnes was at once annoyed by its tone. The true situation, it said, could be evaluated “only by men who have firsthand knowledge of the facts involved, that is, by the small group of scientists who are actively engaged in this work.” Byrnes was put off also by Szilard himself, a notably eccentric man of expansive ego. “His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy making made an unfavorable impression on me,” Byrnes later wrote.
According to Szilard, Byrnes said he understood from General Groves that Russia had no uranium and that through possession of the bomb America could “render the Russians more manageable.” Szilard felt certain it would have precisely the opposite effect.
According to Byrnes, what Szilard, Bartky, and Urey told him about the power of the bomb did nothing to decrease his fears of “the terrible weapon they had assisted in creating.”
Szilard left Spartanburg determined to draw up a petition to the President opposing on “purely moral grounds” any use of atomic bombs on Japan. Stopping again in Washington en route to Chicago, he saw Oppenheimer.
Like Stimson, like so many, Oppenheimer by this time was worn out, his nerves on edge. There were problems at Los Alamos. Detonators were not firing as they should, the work was falling behind schedule. Oppenheimer looked a wreck. He had been stricken with chicken pox and lost 30 pounds. Though over six feet tall, he weighed all of 115 pounds.
“Oppenheimer didn’t share my views,” Szilard recalled. “He surprised me by saying, ‘The atomic bomb is shit…a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon that is useful in war.’ ”
To what extent Byrnes discussed Szilard with Truman, if at all, is not recorded. But in his discussions about the atomic bomb, Admiral Leahy had been assuring Truman that “the damn thing” would never work. To Leahy it was “all the biggest bunk in the world.”
On Saturday, June 2, after less than a month in residence, Bess, her mother, and Margaret had packed and left Washington by train to spend a long summer in Independence. Madge Wallace was not happy with life in the White House, nor was Bess. “We are on our way
home,
underlined, four exclamation points,” wrote Margaret, who, to her father, seemed in a very unsatisfactory humor. “I hope—sincerely hope,” he wrote privately, “that this situation (my being President) is not going to affect her adversely.”
At home, the old house at 219 North Delaware was being patched up and repainted after years of neglect. It would be gray no more, but white now, with “Kentucky green” trim at the windows, as befitting the “summer White House.”
After only a few nights alone, Truman began feeling desolate and more than a little sorry for himself. The first Sunday, giving no advance notice, he walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church and slipped into a back pew unnoticed by most of the congregation. It was where Lincoln had sometimes worshiped, he knew. “Don’t think over six people recognized me,” he wrote in his diary.
One evening Admiral Leahy stayed over for dinner and afterward he and Truman played hosts at a reception for White House employees and their families. But most nights were taken up with work in the upstairs Oval Study, where the long windows stood open to the mild spring air.
From sounds in the night, Truman became convinced the house was haunted and tried to imagine which former residents might be involved:
June 12, 1945
Dear Bess:
Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice President. Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems real.
I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches—all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show the din is almost unbearable….
General Eisenhower made a triumphal return to the city, spoke to a joint session of Congress, and Truman gave a stag dinner for him at the White House, which everyone thought a big success. “He’s a nice fellow and a good man,” Truman reported to Bess. “He’s done a whale of a job.” There was talk everywhere of running Eisenhower for President, which, Truman told her, was perfectly fine by him. “I’d turn it over to him now if I could.”
Alone in the old house he would poke about in the closets, adjust the clocks. He hated being by himself, hated having breakfast alone, or even going through the motions of dressing for the day. “I’m always so lonesome when the family leaves. I have no one to raise a fuss over my neckties and my haircuts, my shoes and my clothes generally,” he lamented in his diary. “I usually put on a terrible tie not even Bob Hannegan or Ed McKim would wear just to get a loud protest from Bess and Margie. When they are gone I have to put on the right ones and it’s no fun.”
Yet the truth seemed to be that things were going exceedingly, inexplicably well for him. His popularity was beyond imagining. A Gallup Poll reported that 87 percent of the people approved his conduct of the presidency, which was a higher rating even than Roosevelt had ever received. Nor was the woeful man of the evening letters the one who turned up in the office each day. “And as usual, he is in good humor,” Eben Ayers noted one Monday morning. Truman was pleased with his popularity on the Hill, pleased with his press conferences, his staff. He loved having Charlie Ross on duty. Most heartening was the “good progress” made by Hopkins, who returned from Moscow on June 12 and, with Joseph Davies, came for breakfast the next morning. Davies was back from a mission to London to see Churchill.
In long cables from Moscow Hopkins had given full account of his every conversation with Stalin. Though greatly offended by the manner in which Lend-Lease had been shut off, Stalin seemed willing to let the matter pass. He had agreed even to the American position on voting procedure in the United Nations Security Council, which in effect meant the San Francisco Conference was saved.
Churchill, in further cables, had been urging again that there be no withdrawal of American forces to the designated occupation zones in Europe. “Nothing really important has been settled yet,” he warned Truman, “and you and I will have to bear great responsibility for the future.” But Hopkins told Truman any delay in the withdrawal of American troops from the Soviet zone was “certain to be misunderstood by the Russians.” Reportedly General Eisenhower also thought it unwise to keep American forces in the Russian zone. Truman, determined still to do nothing in violation of Roosevelt’s agreements at Yalta, and believing this the best possible way to demonstrate America’s good faith to the Russians and to induce them to carry out their own obligations in return, informed Churchill on June 11 that, as agreed, American troops would pull back, which Churchill saw as a terrible mistake. A few years later, Truman would write:
We were about 150 miles east of the border of the occupation zone line agreed to at Yalta. I felt that agreements made in the war to keep Russia fighting should be kept and I kept them to the letter. Perhaps they should not have been adhered to so quickly….
Regarding Poland, Stalin had told Hopkins he was willing to talk. All of which meant the issue stood again where it was when Roosevelt came home from Yalta, except that now the place and time for such talk was settled. Truman had wanted to meet in Alaska. But as twice before—for both the Teheran and Yalta conferences—Stalin was granted his way. It would be Potsdam, a Berlin suburb in the zone held by the Red Army. The date chosen was July 15.
Truman was so pleased by what Hopkins had achieved, he even thought Hopkins, whose deathlike appearance stunned others at the White House, looked improved in health. The trip had done Hopkins good, Truman felt sure. The Russians, he wrote in his diary, had “always been our friends and I can’t see why they shouldn’t always be.”
By leaving his sickbed to go to Moscow, Hopkins had performed heroic service for his country. Truman was enormously grateful to him and thanked him. Hopkins, who had worked so long and closely with Roosevelt, later told Charlie Ross that it was the first time he had ever been thanked by a President.
The President was trying to understand what to do in the Pacific, trying to fathom MacArthur, whom he had never met, but didn’t like from what he had read and heard—“Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur,” Truman referred to him in the privacy of his diary. “Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.”
His mind was on plans for the invasion and a proposed Navy blockade designed to starve Japan into submission. In a memorandum stamped
URGENT
, Admiral Leahy noted the President wanted to know the number of men and ships needed:
He wants an estimate of the time required and an estimate of the losses in killed and wounded that will result from an invasion of Japan proper…. It is his intention to make his decision on the campaign with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible in the loss of American lives. Economy in the use of time and in money cost is comparatively unimportant.
“I have to decide Japanese strategy—shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade?” Truman pondered in his diary. “That is my hardest decision to date.” S-1 was not mentioned.
Nor was it mentioned at the extremely important White House meeting to review the invasion plans the afternoon of Monday, June 18, 1945, and this, as the hour passed, struck one of Stimson’s staff, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, as extremely odd. Things were proceeding, McCloy saw, as if the bomb did not exist.
The plan, as presented by General Marshall, was for a two-phase invasion, beginning in November with the southernmost of the Japanese islands, Kyushu, only 350 miles from Okinawa. The operation, said Marshall, would be as difficult as Normandy, but he thought it the only course to pursue. Casualties were hard to predict. He estimated that in the initial phase, the first 30 days only, losses would be similar to those on Luzon, which was about 31,000.
Admiral King said Okinawa would be a more realistic measure, and put the number at 41,000. Admiral Nimitz would forecast 49,000 casualties in the first 30 days, 7,000 more than at Normandy in an equal span of time. MacArthur’s staff estimated 50,000, though MacArthur, who was all for the invasion, considered that too high.
Another estimate at the Pentagon included the invasion of both southern and northern Kyushu, as well as Japan proper (“the decisive invasion”), and the cost of this plan came to 220,000 casualties, nearly a quarter of a million men. But a memorandum of June 4, 1945, written by General Thomas Handy of Marshall’s staff, in listing the advantages of making peace with Japan, said America would save no less than 500,000 to 1 million lives by avoiding the invasion altogether—which shows that figures of such magnitude were then in use at the highest levels. Stimson was certain the Japanese would fight as never before, soldiers and civilians alike, and that the cost of life on both sides would far exceed all other campaigns of the war. The number of American dead and wounded, Stimson feared, could reach a million.