The Day the World Went Nuclear

by Bill O'Reilly

  In recent decades, revisionist historians in Japan have repudiated the notion that the emperor is not divine, suggesting that the wording of Hirohito’s pronouncement was a vague gesture to placate the American occupiers. “The occupation forces tried to sever the bond between the emperor and the Japanese people,” reads a museum display at Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine. “They widely advertised the new year statement as the ‘emperor’s declaration of humanity,’ but in actuality the emperor had done no more than to announce a return to the principles stated in Emperor Meiji’s [1868] charter oath.”

  Hirohito made a point of boycotting the Yasukuni Shrine, in the heart of Tokyo, when he learned in 1978 that fourteen Japanese war criminals had secretly been added to the list of souls honored there. In the four decades between the war’s end and his death, Hirohito appeared regularly in public, greeting foreign heads of state during their visits to Tokyo and traveling abroad to meet with both Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom and U.S. President Gerald Ford. Emperor Hirohito died on January 7, 1989, at the age of eighty-seven, after reigning for sixty-two years.

  Joseph Stalin established communist governments in Eastern Europe and maintain control by imprisoning dissenters. The Soviet Union developed an atomic bomb and exploded it in a test August 29, 1949, becoming the second nuclear nation in the world. Stalin died on March 5, 1953, and his body was on view in a mausoleum in Red Square for eight years before it was buried.

  Robert Oppenheimer became world famous once the atomic bombs were dropped and details of the Manhattan Project were released to the public. He appeared on the cover of both Time and Life magazines as the intellectual face of the dawning nuclear age. Oppenheimer tried to return to the academic world, but realized that his passion for teaching had waned. He accepted a position as director of a think tank known as the Institute for Advanced Study.

  He became an advocate for nuclear arms control and opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, which was successfully tested in 1952. These new thermonuclear weapons explode with a force exponentially greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. They actually require an atomic reaction to trigger the greater thermonuclear detonation, leading to the saying, “All nuclear weapons are atomic, but not all atomic weapons are nuclear.”

  During the anticommunist era of the 1950s, Robert Oppenheimer was accused of being an agent for the Soviet Union, and his security clearance was suspended. After a hearing in 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission found no evidence of treason, but called him a security risk nonetheless and stripped him of his clearance altogether. A later examination of declassified files would show that Oppenheimer never betrayed the United States and had resisted several attempts by the Soviet KGB to recruit him as a spy. However, this revelation came long after Oppenheimer’s death from throat cancer on February 18, 1967, at the age of sixty-two.

  Albert Einstein was granted U.S. citizenship in 1940. Although his letter to FDR led to the formation of the Manhattan Project, he was not allowed to be involved. The FBI thought that Einstein’s status as an avowed pacifist with liberal sympathies made him too great a security risk. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover maintained a secret file on Einstein but was never able to prove that the physicist had communist ties. Many of Einstein’s friends took part in the project, and they made him well aware of its ongoing progress.

  In 1947, Einstein was working with the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, based in Princeton, New Jersey. As part of that group, he penned a letter that reads in part:

  “We scientists believe upon ample evidence that the time of decision is upon us—that what we do or fail to do within the next few years will determine the fate of our civilization.…

  “In the shadow of the atomic bomb, it has become apparent that all men are brothers. If we recognize this as truth and act upon this recognition, mankind may go forward to a higher plane of human development. If the angry passions of a nationalistic world engulf us further, we are doomed.”

  Albert Einstein died in 1955 from an aortic aneurysm at the age of seventy-six. His body was cremated, but only after his brain had been removed without permission by a Princeton Hospital pathologist so that it might be studied for science.

  Colonel Paul Tibbets was dogged by controversy about the Hiroshima bombing for the rest of his life. However, he never backed down from his belief that he had done the right thing. The Enola Gay itself became an unlikely lightning rod for controversy when the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., refurbished it after many years of neglect and planned to display it for the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end. Workers spent two decades and more than three hundred thousand man-hours restoring the plane to its original condition. The exhibit would have questioned the decision to use the bombs. Under pressure from veterans’ groups, the exhibit was altered to allow visitors to come up with their own interpretation of the ethics of dropping the bomb. The Enola Gay is now displayed at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

  Bockscar, which dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, has also been lavishly restored. It is currently on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.

  Both Colonel Tibbets of Enola Gay and Major Charles Sweeney of Bockscar were promoted to general during their long military careers. Tibbets stayed in the air force and proved instrumental in pioneering the transition to jet-powered bomber flight. Sweeney left active duty after the Second World War but continued to fly in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Sweeney died in Boston in 2004, at the age of eighty-four. Tibbets lived to be ninety-two years old and requested that he be cremated so that protesters might not make his grave site a rallying point for antinuclear demonstrations. His ashes were scattered over the English Channel, over which he had flown many times during World War II.

  On June 25, 1950, communist North Korea invaded U.S.-backed South Korea. Soon after, General Douglas MacArthur was named commander of the United Nations forces there, charged with repelling the communist advance. The general successfully launched one of history’s greatest amphibious invasions in September 1950, sending waves of troops ashore far behind enemy lines at Inchon and recapturing the South Korean capital of Seoul.

  In response to this success, MacArthur was authorized to conduct limited operations in North Korea. A confident MacArthur, however, sent half his army north, expanding the conflict in an effort to reunify the Korean peninsula and eliminate the communists. China intervened, beating the American-led U.N. forces back south, but again MacArthur drove into North Korea. By spring of 1951, while President Truman was preparing to negotiate peace, MacArthur was campaigning to expand the war into China.

  Truman decided MacArthur had to go. By this time, MacArthur’s immense popularity made the decision to fire him a political liability, but Truman was unfazed. Calling a meeting of his top advisers on April 6, he broached the topic of dismissing the vaunted general. At stake was the question of whether or not civilian authorities had a say in military policy. It was clear that MacArthur planned to fight the war in Korea and China on his terms, without heed to the authority of the president of the United States.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff soon weighed in, favoring the dismissal of MacArthur for insubordination. On April 7, Truman wrote in his journal of the Joint Chiefs that “it is the unanimous opinion of all that MacArthur be relieved. All four so advise.”

  On April 11, 1951, when Truman formally announced that he was relieving MacArthur of command, there was an enormous public outcry of support for the general. Truman’s public opinion rating once again tanked. Nevertheless, at 8:00 P.M. Washington time on April 11, MacArthur was sacked. Truman had authorized his secretary of the army, Frank Pace Jr., to deliver the news, but Pace did not receive the order. Instead, MacArthur heard about his firing on the radio while eating lunch with his wife in Tokyo.

  This marked the end of Douglas MacArthur’s military ca
reer. He returned home a hero, feted by a ticker-tape parade in New York City viewed by seven million people. More than three thousand tons of paper were dropped from windows, balconies, and rooftops.

  Douglas MacArthur lived out the rest of his life in luxury, with his wife and son in a penthouse atop the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. In 1962, he gave his legendary “Duty, Honor, Country” speech at West Point, concluding with the words:

  “The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps. I bid you farewell.”

  Douglas MacArthur died on April 5, 1964. He was eighty-four years old. Before burial, his body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., where an estimated 150,000 people waited in line to pay their respects.

  Harry Truman did not run for a third term in office. He returned to his beloved Independence, Missouri, and became Mr. Citizen. He read, lectured, took long walks, and visited with guests and neighbors. Truman died on December 26, 1972, at the age of eighty-eight; his wife, Bess, died ten years later. Both are buried at his presidential library in Independence, Missouri.

  TIME LINE

  September 18, 1931: Japan invades Manchuria.

  July 12, 1937: Conflict between China and Japan escalates into an undeclared war.

  September 1, 1939: Germany invades Poland, beginning World War II.

  October 11, 1939: President Roosevelt receives Albert Einstein’s letter about the bomb.

  October 18, 1941: Hideki Tojo becomes Japanese prime minister after Fumimaro Konoe resigns.

  December 7, 1941: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and attacks the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, Thailand, Shanghai, and Midway.

  December 8, 1941: The United States and England declare war on Japan. Japan invades the Philippines.

  December 9, 1941: China declares war on Japan.

  December 23, 1941: General Douglas MacArthur initiates a withdrawal from Manila to Bataan.

  December 27, 1941: Japan bombs Manila.

  February 19, 1942: FDR signs Executive Order 9066 allowing the roundup and incarceration of Japanese American citizens.

  February 22, 1942: General MacArthur is ordered to evacuate to Australia.

  March 18, 1942: FDR appoints General MacArthur Allied commander of the Southwest Pacific Area.

  April 9, 1942: The remaining U.S. and Filipino troops in the Philippines surrender and are forcibly marched sixty-five miles to a prison camp. The march becomes known as the Bataan Death March.

  June 4–7, 1942: The United States defeats Japan at the Battle of Midway.

  August 7, 1942: U.S. troops begin their assault at Guadalcanal.

  December 1, 1942: U.S. government acquires the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico.

  December 31, 1942: Emperor Hirohito gives permission for his troops to evacuate Guadalcanal.

  Oct. 5–6, 1943: The United States bombs Japanese positions on Wake Island.

  October 7, 1943: The Japanese execute ninety-eight American civilian contractors on Wake Island.

  July 24, 1944: U.S. Marines invade Tinian Island.

  September 15–November 27, 1944: U.S. Marines suffer sixty-five hundred casualties in capturing Peleliu.

  October 20, 1944: General MacArthur wades ashore on Leyte Island, leading the U.S. Sixth Army invasion to recapture the Philippines.

  October 23–26, 1944: The U.S. Navy scores a decisive victory in the Leyte Gulf.

  October 25, 1944: First Japanese kamikaze attack.

  February 3, 1945: Allied troops begin the fight for Manila.

  February 4–11, 1945: Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin meet at Yalta to discuss postwar Europe and the Soviet Union’s entry into war in the Pacific.

  February 19–March 26, 1945: U.S. Marines capture Iowa Jima; nearly seven thousand Americans are killed in the battle.

  March 3, 1945: U.S. and Filipino troops take Manila.

  March 10, 1945: Two hundred seventy-nine U.S. B-29s drop 1,665 tons of napalm bombs on Tokyo.

  April 1–June 23, 1945: More than twelve thousand Americans are killed and fifty thousand are wounded in the Battle of Okinawa; an estimated 150,000 Japanese die, including civilians.

  April 12, 1945: President Franklin Roosevelt dies. Harry Truman becomes president.

  May 7, 1945: Germany surrenders, ending the war in Europe.

  May 8, 1945: Victory in Europe Day.

  July 5, 1945: General MacArthur declares the Philippines liberated.

  July 16, 1945: Trinity test is successful in New Mexico.

  July 17, 1945: Truman, Churchill, and Stalin meet in Potsdam, Germany, to continue Yalta discussions on reconstruction of Europe and the further prosecution of war against Japan.

  July 26, 1945: The Potsdam Declaration defining the terms of Japanese surrender is issued. Parts for the bomb Little Boy are unloaded on Tinian Island.

  July 25, 1945: General Dwight Eisenhower is informed of the Trinity test.

  August 1, 1945: General MacArthur is briefed about the planned bombings.

  August 6, 1945: The first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.

  August 9, 1945: The second atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.

  August 14, 1945: Japan accepts unconditional surrender.

  September 2, 1945: Formal surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

  THE AUTHOR RECOMMENDS

  Recommended Reading

  Ambrose, Stephen E. The Good Fight: How World War II Was Won. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2001.

  Black, Wallace. Island Hopping in the Pacific. New York: Crestwood House, 1992.

  Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston. Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

  Marrin, Albert. The Airman’s War: World War II in the Sky. New York: Atheneum, 1982.

  Perl, Lila. Behind Barbed Wire. New York: Benchmark Books, 2003.

  Sandler, Martin. Why Did the Whole World Go to War? And Other Questions About World War II. New York: Sterling Children’s Books, 2013.

  Sheinkin, Steve. Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2012.

  Stanley, Jerry. I Am an American: A True Story of Japanese Internment. New York: Crown Publishers, 1994.

  Stein, R. Conrad. World War II in the Pacific. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2002.

  World Book. World War II in the Pacific. Chicago: World Book, 2011.

  Recommended Viewing

  PLEASE NOTE: Watching the events that took place at the end of World War II in the Pacific may be much harder than reading about them. Sensitive viewers should watch with an adult or ask an adult to preview the news clips.

  Most of the strategic events of May through September 1945 were recorded live. A YouTube search for these key terms will lead you to the film clips. As always, watch the clips that are presented by trustworthy institutions such as the U.S. War Department, PBS, the BBC, and the Naval History and Heritage Command (navy.mil).

  •  Enola Gay

  •  Hiroshima

  •  “Remembering the Tragic Aftermath of the Hiroshima Bomb”

  •  “President Truman announces the bombing of Hiroshima 1945”

 
•  Robert Oppenheimer

  •  Douglas MacArthur

  AUTHOR’S SOURCE NOTES

  A GREAT DEAL OF THE joy in writing a work of history comes from the detective investigation required to flesh out an episode or a subject and make it rise up off the page. Travel, archival searches, governmental databases, websites, and the works of other authors are just a few of the resources that we rely upon. The author wishes to thank James Zobel at the MacArthur Memorial Foundation in Norfolk, Virginia, for his tireless help in tracking down obscure documents pertaining to the general and his life. Visitors to Norfolk are encouraged to pay this underappreciated museum a visit, for it offers an abundance of information about MacArthur’s life as well as a vast number of his personal effects.

  Head Archivist Dara Baker at the Naval War College was most helpful in tracking down the movements of Admiral Nimitz through the document known as the Nimitz Graybook. David Clark at the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum in Independence, Missouri, was also very helpful in finding some of the more obscure details of the late president’s life. As with all presidential libraries, the Truman Library’s website offers exhaustive detail about his presidency and lifelong habit of letter writing. The papers of a great number of lesser Truman administration officials can also be found there. Visit www.trumanlibrary.org to have a look.

  The U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, should be a required stop for anyone with even a passing interest in history, showcasing the United States Navy—and so much more. The exhibits visitors can view include the spur belonging to John Wilkes Booth that caught on patriotic bunting as he leaped from the presidential box after shooting President Abraham Lincoln, and the tomb of the legendary John Paul Jones. For this book, we were interested in the displays detailing the navy’s impact on the Pacific war as well as a large number of artifacts, including the pen Admiral Chester Nimitz used to sign the Japanese surrender documents and a sword surrendered by the Japanese delegation to the Allies on the morning of September 2, 1945. Also on display at the Naval Academy Museum are a number of flags that have played prominent roles in American naval history, including the Stars and Stripes flown by Commodore Matthew Perry when he sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and later displayed on board the USS Missouri on the morning of the Japanese surrender. The USNA Museum is also in possession of the other American flag that flew aboard the Missouri, but it is not currently on display. Thank you to archivist Jim Cheevers for his assistance.