On August 4, according to the official log, the President was up and strolling the decks at five in the morning, looking “completely rested from the strain of the long and tiring conference discussions.” After an early breakfast, he spent the day studying conference reports and working on an address to the country. On Sunday, August 5, he attended church services, then returned to his work. Merriman Smith remembered the day as extremely tense and Truman looking worried. Smith and the other reporters tried to talk of other things. “The secret was so big and terrifying that we could not discuss it with each other.” The ship, meantime, was boiling along at a full speed of 26.5 knots.
On the morning of Monday, August 6, the fourth day at sea, the President and several of his party spent time on deck enjoying the sun and listening to a concert by the ship’s band. The ship had entered the Gulf Stream, south of Newfoundland. The sun was out, the weather considerably warmer. The crew had changed now to white uniforms that looked sparkling in the sunshine.
At noon the ship’s position was latitude 39-55 N, longitude 61-32 W. The sea was calm.
Shortly before noon, Truman and Byrnes had decided to have lunch with some of the crew below deck in the after mess. Truman was seated with six enlisted men and just beginning his meal when Captain Graham, one of the Map Room officers, hurried in and handed him a map of Japan and a decoded message from the Secretary of War.
Hiroshima had been bombed four hours earlier. “Results clear-cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test,” Truman read. On the map Captain Graham had circled the city with a red pencil.
Suddenly excited, Truman grabbed Graham by the hand and said, “This is the greatest thing in history,” then told him to show the message to Byrnes, who was at another table. It was just after noon. Minutes later a second message was brought in:
Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 P.M. Washington-time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.
Truman jumped to his feet now and called to Byrnes, “It’s time for us to get home!” Like the scientists at Alamogordo at the moment of the first test, Truman was exuberant. Tapping on a glass with a fork, he called for the crew’s attention. “Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!”
With the crew cheering, he rushed out to spread the news. “He was not actually laughing,” wrote Merriman Smith, “but there was a broad smile on his face. In the small dispatch which he waved at the men of the ship, he saw the quick end of the war written between the lines.” At the officers’ ward, telling the men to stay seated, he repeated what he had said in the mess, then added, “We won the gamble.” He said he had never been happier about any announcement he had ever made.
All this happened very fast, and as George Elsey was to recall, the President’s response seemed in no way inappropriate. “We were all excited. Everyone was cheering.” Within minutes, the ship’s radio was carrying news bulletins from Washington about the bomb. Then came the broadcast of the President’s message, the text of which had been released at the White House only moments before, at 11:00 A.M. Washington time.
Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima…. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe…. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war…. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth….
Not in this or any of the broadcasts was there mention of how much damage had been done at Hiroshima, since no details were yet known in Washington.
Excitement, feelings of relief swept the country—and especially among families with sons or husbands in the service. Surely the war would be over any day.
To the millions of men serving in the Pacific, and those in Europe preparing to be shipped to the Pacific, the news came as a joyous reprieve. One of them was the writer Paul Fussell, then a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant with an infantry platoon in France who was scheduled to take part in the invasion of Honshu, despite wounds in the leg and back so severe that he had been judged 40 percent disabled. “But even if my legs buckled whenever I jumped out of the back of the truck, my condition was held to be satisfactory for whatever lay ahead.” After Hiroshima, he remembered, after the realization “that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”
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.
Let us carry the war to them until they beg us to accept unconditional surrender. The foul attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into the war, and I am unable to see any valid reason why we should be so much more considerate and lenient in dealing with Japan than with Germany…. If we do not have available a sufficient number of atomic bombs with which to finish the job immediately, let us carry on with TNT and fire bombs until we can produce them…. This was total war as long as our enemies held all the cards. Why should we change the rule now, after the blood, treasure and enterprise of the American people have given us the upper hand?…
Truman sent Russell a heartfelt answer written that same day, August 9:
I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner.
For myself I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the “pigheadedness” of the leaders of a nation, and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into the war the Japanese will very shortly fold up.
My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a human feeling for the women and children of Japan.
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.
Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it….
We won the race of discovery against the Germans.
Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.
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 th
ere 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.
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