David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  He was on the Queen Elizabeth at Glasgow, ready to sail [for New York]. I told them to give him the choice of coming to the conference or going home. He elected to come and see me. I gave him a pass to Berlin signed by Stalin and by me. Will send him home by plane and he’ll get there almost as soon as if he’d gone on the Elizabeth. He sure is a fine looking soldier, stands up, dresses the part and I’m proud of him.

  About mid-morning, Henry Stimson came in looking extremely excited. A second cable from George Harrison had arrived during the night:

  Doctor had just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm.

  The decoding officer at the Army message center had been amazed, assuming that the elderly Secretary of War had become a new father. Stimson explained the cable to Truman. The flash at Alamogordo had been visible for 250 miles (the distance from Washington to Highhold, Stimson’s estate on Long Island), the sound carrying 50 miles (the distance to Harrison’s farm in Virginia). Truman appeared extremely pleased and at lunch with Churchill, at Churchill’s house, Number 23 Ringstrasse, he showed him the two telegrams. Stalin ought to be told, Truman offered. Churchill agreed that Stalin should know “the Great New Fact,” but none of “the particulars.” Better to tell him sooner than later, Churchill suggested. But how? In writing or by word of mouth? At a special meeting or informally?

  Truman thought it best just to tell him after one of the meetings. He would wait for the right moment, Truman said.

  They were dining alone. Churchill lamented the melancholy state of Great Britain, with its staggering debt and declining influence in the world. Truman said the United States owed Britain much for having “held the fort” at the beginning of the war. “If you had gone down like France,” Truman told Churchill, “we might be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time.”

  They talked of the war in the Pacific and Churchill pondered whether new wording might be devised so that the Japanese could surrender and yet salvage some sense of their military honor. Truman countered by saying he did not think the Japanese had any military honor, not after Pearl Harbor. Churchill said that “at any rate they had something for which they were ready to face certain death in very large numbers, and this might not be so important to us as it was to them.” At this Truman turned “quite sympathetic,” as Churchill recounted, and began talking of “the terrible responsibilities upon him in regard to unlimited effusion of American blood.”

  “He invited personal friendship and comradeship,” Churchill wrote. “He seems a man of exceptional character….”

  From the Churchill lunch Truman went to pay a return call on Stalin, accompanied now by Byrnes and Bohlen, and to his surprise found a second lunch waiting, an elaborate meal in his honor, which in Russian fashion called for numerous toasts.

  Stalin told Truman of the secret Japanese peace feeler and passed the Sato message across the table. It might be best, said Stalin, to “lull the Japanese to sleep,” to say their request for a visit by Prince Konoye was too vague to answer. Truman said nothing to indicate he already knew of the Japanese overtures. He would leave the answer up to Stalin, he said.

  Bohlen would remember Stalin’s disclosure of the Japanese proposal making a very great impression on Truman, as a sign the Russians might be ready after all to deal openly with them. To his delight Truman also discovered that Stalin, the supreme Soviet strong-man, was substituting white wine for what was supposedly vodka in his glass. The Generalissimo must visit the United States, Truman said. If Stalin would come, Truman promised, he would send the battleship Missouri for him.

  He said he wanted to cooperate with U.S. in peace as we had cooperated in war but it would be harder [Truman recorded later]. Said he was grossly misunderstood in U.S. and I was misunderstood in Russia. I told him that we each could remedy that situation in our home countries and that I intended to try with all I had to do my part at home. He gave me a most cordial smile and said he would do as much in Russia.

  As the conference resumed that afternoon Churchill again grew extremely long-winded, and though an outward show of friendship continued around the table, an edge of tension could also be felt. In an exchange with Truman, in a single sentence, Stalin hit on the hard reality underlying nearly every issue before them, the crux of so much of the frustration and divisiveness to come:

  “We cannot get away from the results of the war,” said Stalin.

  The formal business was to be Germany and Truman had suggested they begin at once. Churchill insisted on defining what was meant by Germany. If it meant Germany as geographically constituted before the war, then he agreed to discussion—his obvious point being that the Germany of the moment was one with eastern boundaries being determined by the position of the Red Army.

  STALIN: Germany is what has become of her after the war. No other Germany exists….

  TRUMAN: Why not say the Germany of 1937?

  STALIN: Minus what she has lost. Let us for the time being regard Germany as a geographical section.

  TRUMAN: But what geographical section?

  STALIN: We cannot get away from the results of the war.

  TRUMAN: But we must have a starting point.

  Stalin agreed. Churchill agreed. “So it is agreed that the Germany of 1937 should be the starting point,” said Truman, as if they had made a major step forward.

  They turned to Poland, a subject that moved Churchill to talk longer even than usual, and so went the remainder of the session.

  Truman was exasperated. He could “deal” with Stalin, as he said, but Churchill was another matter. “I’m not going to stay around this terrible place all summer just to listen to speeches,” he wrote that night. To Bess, earlier in the day, he had said Stalin’s agreement to join in defeating Japan was what he came for. Now, his patience low at day’s end, he wrote in his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [the Manhattan Project, S-1] appears over their homeland.”

  At session three the day after, there was sharp talk across the table, much of it from Truman. When the subject of the German Navy was raised again, he said he agreed to dividing the ships three ways, but only after the surrender of Japan. Merchant ships especially were needed. “We will need every bomb and every ton of food.” On the future of Franco Spain, a sore subject with Stalin, Truman said he had no love for Franco, nor had he any wish to take part in another civil war in Spain. “There have been enough wars in Europe.” When the Yalta Declaration came up, Stalin insisted such matters be put off until another time.

  Truman was impatient for progress of almost any kind. He was homesick, “sick of the whole business,” he confided to Bess.

  The day was saved only by the party he gave that night, a banquet for Churchill and Stalin at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse with music provided by a twenty-seven-year-old American concert pianist, Sergeant Eugene List, who was accompanied on the violin by Private First Class Stuart Canin. Stalin was charmed. To the Americans present it would remain the most memorable evening of the conference.

  The two musicians, both in uniform, had been flown in from Paris at Truman’s request. The grand piano had been moved onto the back porch overlooking the lake, where, after dinner, in the lingering light of the summer evening, the whole party gathered. At one point Truman himself played Paderewski’s Minuet in G, the piece Paderewski had demonstrated for him in Kansas City forty-five years earlier. But the highlight was Sergeant List’s performance of the Chopin Waltz in A Minor, Opus 42, which Truman had asked for specifically. List had not known the piece nor had there been time to learn it. Later, in a letter to his wife, he described what happened when he asked if someone in the audience would be good enough to turn the pages of the music for him.

  A young captain in the party started toward the piano mumbling something about not knowing how to read music b
ut that he would take a stab at it if I would tell him when to turn. Whereupon…the President waved him aside with a sweeping gesture and volunteered to do the job himself! Just imagine! Well, you could have knocked me over with a toothpick!

  Thank goodness I was able to get through the waltz in creditable, if not sensational, manner, despite the general excitement and the completely unexpected appearance of President Truman in the role of page-turner. Imagine having the President of the United States turn pages for you!…But that’s the kind of man the President is.

  Truman was delighted to see Stalin so obviously enjoying himself. “The old man loves music,” he told Bess. “Our boy was good.”

  By Friday the 20th, the week nearly over, there was still no further word on the test explosion in New Mexico. But when Truman invited Generals Eisenhower and Omar Bradley to lunch, the talk, according to Bradley’s later account, focused on strategy in the Pacific and use of the atomic bomb.

  Bradley, a fellow Missourian, had never met Truman until now and liked what he saw. “He was direct, unpretentious, clear-thinking and forceful.” To Bradley it seemed that Truman had already made up his mind to use the new weapon. Though neither Bradley nor Eisenhower was asked for an opinion, Eisenhower said he opposed use of the bomb. He thought Japan was already defeated. To Stimson earlier he had expressed the hope that the United States would not be the first to deploy a weapon so horrible. In time, however, Eisenhower would concede that his reaction was personal and based on no analysis of the subject.

  Eisenhower also advised Truman not to beg the Russians to come into the war with Japan, though he acknowledged that “no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.”

  If Truman, as implied in his diary, truly believed that “Manhattan” would bring such victory instantly, this would have been the time for him to have said so. But he did not, which suggests either that he was still less than sure about the bomb, or that, contrary to Bradley’s impression, he had still to make up his mind.

  “But all of us wanted Russia in the war,” he would tell his daughter some years later. “Had we known what the bomb would do we’d never have wanted the Bear in the picture.”

  Lunch over, accompanied by the two generals, Truman went again to Berlin, to the American sector this time, to speak at the raising of the flag that had flown over the Capitol in Washington the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. The ceremony took place in a small cobbled square in glaring sunshine. Stimson and General Patton were present, the tall, theatrical Patton resplendent in buckled riding boots, jodhpurs, and a lacquered four-star helmet. Patton seemed to glow from head to foot. There were stars on his shoulders, stars on his sleeves, more stars than Truman had ever seen on one human being. He counted twenty-eight.

  Truman spoke without notes and with obvious emotion, choosing his words carefully, as he stood shoulders braced, thumbs hooked in the side pockets of his double-breasted suit, his eyes shadowed by his very un-military western-style Stetson. It was his own kind of speech—exactly what his address to the United Nations was not—and the first public pronouncement by any of the Big Three since arriving in Germany:

  We are here today to raise the flag of victory over the capital of our greatest adversary…we must remember that…we are raising it in the name of the people of the United States, who are looking forward to a better world, a peaceful world, a world in which all the people will have an opportunity to enjoy the good things of life, and not just a few at the top.

  Let us not forget that we are fighting for peace, and for the welfare of mankind. We are not fighting for conquest. There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war.

  We want peace and prosperity for the world as a whole. [Here the thumbs came out of the coat pockets, his freed hands chopped the air in unison, the familiar gesture, as he stressed each word, “peace and prosperity for the world as a whole.”] We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war.

  If we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind. That is what we propose to do.

  It was not what Abraham Lincoln might have said, or what Robert Sherwood might have written for Franklin Roosevelt, but it was deeply moving, even for hard-shelled reporters and old soldiers. “What might easily have been made a routine patriotic display,” wrote Raymond Daniell of The New York Times,“and hardly a day passes without one in Berlin, was turned into a historic occasion by the President’s simple, homely declaration of the faith that had sent millions of American boys into battle far from home for a belief few of them could express.” As no one had anticipated, Truman made it a moment “of lasting inspiration to all of us who were there,” recorded General Lucius D. Clay. “While the soldier is schooled against emotion,” Clay wrote years later, “I have never forgotten that short ceremony as our flag rose to the staff.”

  On the ride back, Truman was in a generous mood. Turning to Eisenhower he said out of the blue, “General, there is nothing you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”

  Bradley remembered trying to keep a straight face. Eisenhower looked flabbergasted. “Mr. President,” he replied, “I don’t know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I.”

  That night, recording his thoughts on the day’s session at the conference table, Truman said only that “Uncle Joe looked tired and drawn today and the P.M. seemed lost.” The main topic had been Italy. Little was accomplished.

  Before noon on Saturday, July 21, Henry Stimson received by special courier the eagerly awaited report from General Groves, the first description of the first nuclear explosion and, as Stimson said, an “immensely powerful document.” By early afternoon he and General Marshall had reviewed it together, and at 3:30 Stimson brought it to the President. Byrnes was summoned, the doors were closed. Stimson began to read aloud in his scratchy old man’s voice.

  The test had been “successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone.” The test bomb had not been dropped from a plane but exploded on top of a 100-foot steel tower. The “energy generated” was estimated to be the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT.

  For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion…. For a brief period there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds. This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over ten thousand feet before it dimmed. The light from the explosion was seen clearly at Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, El Paso and other points generally to about 180 miles away. The sound was heard to the same distance in a few instances but generally to about 100 miles. Only few windows were broken although one was some 125 miles away. A massive cloud was formed which surged and billowed upward with tremendous power, reaching the substratosphere at an elevation of 41,000 feet, 36,000 feet above the ground, in about five minutes, breaking without interruption through a temperature inversion at 17,000 feet which most of the scientists thought would stop it. Two supplementary explosions occurred in the cloud shortly after the main explosion. The cloud contained several thousand tons of dust picked up from the ground and a considerable amount of iron in the gaseous form. Our present thought is that this iron ignited when it mixed with the oxygen in the air to cause these supplementary explosions. Huge concentrations of highly radioactive materials resulted from the fission and were contained in this cloud.

  The report described how the steel from the tower had evaporated, and the greenish cast of the pulverized dirt in a crater more than 1,000 feet in diameter.

  One-half mile from the explosion there was a massive steel test cylinder weighing 220 tons. The base of the cylinder was solidly encased in concrete. Surrounding the cylinder was a s
trong steel tower 70 feet high, anchored to concrete foundations. This tower is comparable to a steel building bay that would be found in a typical 15 to 20 story skyscraper or in warehouse construction. Forty tons of steel were used to fabricate the tower which was…the height of a six story building. The cross bracing was much stronger than that normally used in ordinary steel construction. The absence of the solid walls of a building gave the blast a much less effective surface to push against. The blast tore the tower from its foundations, twisted it, ripped it apart and left it flat on the ground. The effects on the tower indicate that, at that distance, unshielded permanent steel and masonry buildings would have been destroyed…. None of us had expected it to be damaged.

  Groves also included the impressions of his deputy, General Thomas F. Farrell, who was with Oppenheimer at the control shelter.

  “Everyone in that room knew the awful potentialities of the thing that they thought was about to happen,” reported Farrell, who wrote of the explosion’s “searing light” and a “roar which warned of doomsday,” and described how, when it was over,

  Dr. Kistiakowsky…threw his arms around Dr. Oppenheimer and embraced him with shouts of glee. Others were equally enthusiastic. All the pent-up emotions were released in those few minutes and all seemed to sense immediately that the explosion had far exceeded the most optimistic expectations and wildest hopes of the scientists. All seemed to feel that they had been present at the birth of a new age….

  In his conclusion, Groves wrote, “We are all fully conscious that our real goal is still before us. The battle test is what counts….”

  To read it all took Stimson nearly an hour. Whether Truman or Byrnes interrupted with questions or comments is unknown. But when Stimson stopped reading, Truman and Byrnes both looked immensely pleased. The President, in particular, was “tremendously pepped up,” wrote Stimson. “He said it gave him an entirely new confidence and he thanked me for having come to the Conference and being present to help him this way.”