Truman (75 page)

There was no trace of tension at the lavish party given by Stalin that night, in honor of his Western Allies. Truman had the best time of his entire stay at Potsdam. Stalin’s affair was a “wow,” he reported to his mother and sister.

To Bess he reported that the evening had meant more progress in his relations with Stalin and said again that he already had what he wanted, the promise of Russian support against Japan. Possibly Stalin may also have told him that a million Russian troops were now massed along the Manchurian border.

“He talked to me confidently at the dinner, and I believe things will be all right in most instances. Some things we won’t and can’t agree on, but I already have what I came for.”

Churchill, who cared little for music, told Truman he was bored to tears and going home. Truman said he would stay until the party was over. So Churchill stalked off to a corner, where, with Leahy for another half hour—until the music ended—he “glowered, growled, and grumbled,” as a delighted Truman would tell the story.

Two nights later, when it was his turn as host, Churchill had his revenge. He summoned a Royal Air Force band and instructed them to play as loud as possible all through dinner and afterward.

Possibly the hardest judge of character in the whole American delegation was Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, whose strong mind and long experience had made him invaluable to Roosevelt. A poised, impressive-looking man, King had played a part in every major conference of the war, beginning with the shipboard meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill that produced the Atlantic Charter in the summer of 1941. On the night of Stalin’s dinner at Potsdam, King had leaned over to whisper to Lord Moran.

“Watch the President,” he said, “This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job, not only for the United States but for the whole world.”

Bohlen, who had been at Roosevelt’s side as interpreter at Teheran and Yalta, later described his amazement at Truman’s natural self-possession, his ease with people, the way he “moved through the conference with the poise of a leader of much greater experience.”

The President’s physical well-being impressed nearly everyone. “Churchill and Stalin were given to late hours, while I was an early riser,” Truman would later comment. “This made my days extra long….” Yet he seemed above fatigue. He was out of bed and dressed by 5:30 or 6:00 regularly every morning and needed no alarm clock or anyone to wake him. Subordinates found him invariably cheerful and positive. He was never known to make a rude or inconsiderate remark, or to berate anyone, or to appear the least out of sorts, no matter how much stress he was under. From first to last, he remained entirely himself. “There was no pretense whatever about him,” recalled the naval aide, Lieutenant Rigdon, who was charged with keeping the daily log. The great thing about the President, said Floyd Boring, one of the Secret Service men, was that he never got “swagly.” “He never came on as being superior…. He could talk to
anyone!
He could talk to the lowly peasant. He could talk to the King of England…. And that was, I think, his secret…. He never got swellheaded—never got, you know, swagly.”

In Berlin the black market—trade in cigarettes, watches, whiskey—and prostitution were rampant. One evening at the end of an arduous session at the palace, a young Army public relations officer, seeing that Truman was about to leave alone in his car, stuck his head in the window and asked if he might hitch a ride. Truman told him to get in and Floyd Boring, who was driving, could not help overhearing the conversation as they headed off. The officer said that if there was anything the President wanted, anything at all he needed, he had only to say the word. “Anything, you know, like women.”

“Listen, son, I married my sweetheart,” Truman said. “She doesn’t run around on me, and I don’t run around on her. I want that understood. Don’t ever mention that kind of stuff to me again.”

“By the time we were home,” Boring remembered, “he got out of the car and never even said goodbye to that guy.”

Another member of the delegation, a State Department official named Emilio Collado, would recall a scene at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse on the afternoon of Saturday the 21st. Arriving with a document for the President to sign, Collado was shown into a large empty room overlooking the lake, where he saw seated at a grand piano “an alert small man in shirt sleeves with a drink on the corner of the piano.” Gathered beside him, singing, were Byrnes and Leahy, both with their jackets off.

With the start of his second week at Potsdam, Truman knew that decisions on the bomb could wait no longer.

At 10:00 Sunday morning, July 22, he attended Protestant services led by a chaplain from the 2nd Armored Division. Then later in the morning he went to a Catholic mass conducted by his old friend Father Curtis Tiernan, the chaplain of Battery D, who was serving as Chief of Army Chaplains in Europe and had been flown to Berlin at Truman’s request.

“I’m going to mass at 11:30 presided over by him,” Truman wrote to Bess at mid-morning. “I've already been to a Protestant service so I guess I should stand in good with the Almighty for the coming week—and my how I'll need it.”

Stimson had appeared at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse shortly after breakfast, with messages from Washington saying all was about ready for the “final operation” and that a decision on the target cities was needed. Stimson wanted Kyoto removed from the list, and having heard the reasons, Truman agreed. Kyoto would be spared. “Although it was a target of considerable military importance,” Stimson would write, “it had been the capital of Japan and was a shrine of Japanese art and culture….” First on the list of approved targets was Hiroshima, southern headquarters and depot for Japan’s homeland army.

Early on Monday, Stimson came again to Truman’s second-floor office. A warning message to Japan, an ultimatum, was nearly ready, the document to be known as the Potsdam Declaration. Stimson thought it unwise at this point to insist on unconditional surrender, a term the Japanese would take to mean they could not keep their Emperor. He urged a revision to read that the Allies would “prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist.” But Byrnes had vehemently opposed any such change. Unconditional surrender was an objective too long established, too often proclaimed; it had been too great a rallying cry from the time of Pearl Harbor to abandon now, Byrnes insisted. Truman had reaffirmed it as policy in his first speech to Congress on April 16. It was what the Nazis had been made to accept, and its renunciation with the Japanese at this late date, after so much bloodshed, the acceptance of anything less with victory so near, would seem like appeasement. Politically it would be disastrous, Byrnes was also sure. To most Americans, Hirohito was the villainous symbol of Japan’s fanatical military clique. A Gallup Poll in June had shown that a mere fraction of Americans, only 7 percent, thought he should be retained after the war, even as a puppet, while a full third of the people thought he should be executed as a war criminal. Like others who had been advising Truman, Byrnes considered any negotiations with Japan over terms a waste of time and felt that if Hirohito were to remain in place, then the war had been pointless. Though Truman listened carefully, Stimson failed to convince him otherwise.

Tuesday, July 24, was almost certainly the fateful day.

At 9:20
A.M.
Stimson again climbed the stairs to Truman’s office, where he found the President seated behind the heavy carved desk, “alone with his work.” Stimson had brought another message:

Truman “said that was just what he wanted,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “that he was highly delighted….”

Later, Truman wrote of a consensus at Potsdam, among Byrnes, Stimson, Leahy, Marshall, and General Arnold, that the bomb should be used. He recalled that Marshall again stressed the number of lives that would be saved. “I asked General Marshall what it would cost in lives to land on the Tokyo plain and other places in Japan. It was his opinion that such an invasion would cost at a minimum a quarter of a million American casualties….” He himself reached his own conclusion only “after long and careful thought,” he wrote, adding, “I did not like the weapon.”

Very possibly there was no one, clearcut moment when he made up his mind, or announced that he had. Most likely, he never seriously considered not using the bomb. Indeed, to have said no at this point and called everything off would have been so drastic a break with the whole history of the project, not to say the terrific momentum of events that summer, as to have been almost inconceivable.

Some critics and historians in years to come would argue that Japan was already finished by this time, just as Eisenhower had said and as several intelligence reports indicated. Japan’s defeat, however, was not the issue. It was Japan’s surrender that was so desperately wanted, since every day Japan did not surrender meant the killing continued. In theory, Japan had been defeated well before Truman became President. (Studies by the Japanese themselves had determined a year and a half before, by January 1944, that Japan had lost the war.) Yet in the three months since Truman took office, American battle casualties in the Pacific were nearly half the total from three years of war in the Pacific. The nearer victory came, the heavier the price in blood. And whatever the projected toll in American lives in an invasion, it was too high if it could be avoided.

“We had only too abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos,” remembered a captain in Military Intelligence, Charlton Ogburn, Jr. “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.” During the whole war, not a single Japanese unit had surrendered.

While intelligence reports indicated that Japan was beaten, they also forecast that the Japanese would hold out for months longer, meanwhile issuing intermittent peace feelers, both to bring the war to what they would regard as an acceptable conclusion, and “to weaken the determination of the United States to fight to the bitter end….”

Nor, it must be stressed, was there ever anything hypothetical about preparations for the invasion—on both sides—a point sometimes overlooked in later years.

Truman had earlier authorized the Chiefs of Staff to move more than 1 million troops for a final attack on Japan. Thirty divisions were on the way to the Pacific from the European theater, from one end of the world to the other, something never done before. Supplies in tremendous quantity were piling up on Saipan. Japan had some 2.5 million regular troops on the home islands, but every male between the ages of fifteen and sixty, every female from seventeen to forty-five, was being conscripted and armed with everything from ancient brass cannon to bamboo spears, taught to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks. One woman would remember being given a carpenter’s awl and instructed that killing just one American would do. “You must aim at the abdomen,” she was told. “Understand? The abdomen.” The general in charge of defense plans told other senior officers, “By pouring 20 divisions into the battle within two weeks of the enemy’s landing, we will annihilate him entirely and insure a Japanese victory.” Thousands of planes were ready to serve as
kamikazes.

To no one with the American and Allied forces in the Pacific did it look as though the Japanese were about to quit. On July 15,
The New York
Times
reported that twenty-five war-front correspondents from the United States and Australia had compared notes and their guess was the war would not end for nearly a year, not until June 1946. At the Pentagon, a long-remembered poster in the halls showed the face of a combat-hardened infantryman looking with grim determination at a map of the Japanese home islands, while across the top in bold letters was slashed the single word “Next!” There was no talk at the Pentagon of an early end to the war. The great concern was the likelihood of huge Japanese forces in China and Southeast Asia fighting on even if the government in Tokyo were to give up.