by Dick Cheney
Island fighting in the Pacific had been brutal. Japanese soldiers were fighting to the death and taking thousands of our men with them. A captain in military intelligence, Charlton Ogburn Jr., recounted the fighting for historian David McCullough: “We had only too abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos. 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.” Not one Japanese unit had ever surrendered, and we weren’t yet fighting on the home islands.
The experience weighing most heavily on the minds of President Truman and General Marshall as they planned for the invasion of Japan was the battle on Okinawa. It had taken three months of heavy combat for the Americans to defeat the Japanese forces on the island. We had lost 12,000 American service members killed and 38,000 wounded or missing. On the Japanese side, the casualties were much higher, with more than 100,000 killed.
Plans for an invasion of the Japanese home islands called for an amphibious landing of 766,700 troops in the fall of 1945 on the island of Kyushu. Using casualty rates on Okinawa as a guide, planners anticipated we would lose more than 250,000 men on Kyushu alone. American planners knew that the fall of Kyushu was unlikely to lead to the surrender of Japan. In light of the fierce Japanese determination to fight on, their ongoing efforts to mobilize the entire population, and the fanatic desire of their generals to confront and defeat the U.S. force on the homeland, American planners knew that, after taking Kyushu, we would have to invade the mainland. “General Marshall told me,” President Truman wrote of this prospect, “that it might cost half a million American lives to force the enemy’s surrender on his home grounds.”
The use of the atomic bombs saved not only American lives, but hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, as well. Even after the devastation wrought at Hiroshima, the Japanese war council was deadlocked as to whether they should surrender. The war minister, General Korechika Anami, urged that the Japanese fight on. “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” the general asked. Then word came that a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki and the war council was adjourned. The decision was left to Emperor Hirohito, who was not willing to sacrifice the nation.
At 7:35 A.M. on Friday, August 10, 1945, Radio Tokyo began broadcasting the message. Time reported “it was picked up by listening monitors on the Pacific Coast and teletyped to Washington.” Harry Truman was in the White House residence when he received a dispatch from the War Department. “In obedience to the gracious command of His Majesty the Emperor,” the message read, “. . . the Japanese Government are ready to accept the terms enumerated at Potsdam on July 26, 1945,” provided the emperor remained on his throne. Twenty-seven hours after our stations first heard the Tokyo transmission, we sent one back:
From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the supreme commander of the Allied powers, who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender. . . . The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. The armed forces of the Allied powers will remain in Japan until the purposes set forth in the Potsdam Declaration are achieved.
It took seventeen hours for the American response to reach Japan, through official diplomatic channels. And then the world waited. Finally, three days later, at 7 P.M. on Tuesday, August 14, 1945, President Truman called reporters into the Oval Office:
I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese Government in reply to the message forwarded to that Government by the Secretary of State on August 11. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.
The assembled White House reporters broke into cheers.
Those who argue America was wrong to use the atomic bombs must explain how President Truman, in the aftermath of the carnage that would have resulted from an invasion of the Japanese mainland, could have explained to the American people that we had a weapon that would have ended the war and he had failed to use it. The men responsible for the development of the atomic weapons and the decision to use them were fully aware of the gravity of the choices they were making. Writing in 1947, former secretary of war Stimson explained it this way:
My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us, I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.
ALBERT HALL IN LONDON was hung with American flags, the flags of all forty-eight states, and, over the stage, a huge portrait of Abraham Lincoln. A spotlight shone on an American eagle. It was Thanksgiving Day, 1944, months before the Allied victory, and yet the tide of the struggle had turned. The torch of leadership of the free world had passed. High representatives from the British and American governments were in the audience. American ambassador John Winant’s speech was scheduled to be the last. But suddenly, Time reported, “a stubby, balding figure, known to all, marched down the center aisle.” To roaring applause, Churchill took the stage and addressed his American allies:
It is your day of thanksgiving and when we feel the truth of the facts that are before us—that in three or four years, the peaceful, peace-loving people of the United States, with all the variety and freedom of their life, in such contrast to the iron discipline which has governed other, many other communities, that in three or four years the United States has in sober fact become the greatest military, naval and air power in the world, that—I say to you—in this time of war is in itself a subject for profound thanksgiving.
Exactly when America became the world’s predominant power is the subject of some debate. On December 27, 1941, the Australian prime minister John Curtin signaled a shift when he said in an article in the Melbourne Herald:
Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom. . . . We shall exert all our energies to shaping a defense plan with the United States as its keystone.
Others point to the operations in North Africa as the key historic moment. Historian Rick Atkinson put it this way:
From a distance of sixty years, we can see that North Africa was a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act like a great power—militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically. Along with Stalingrad and Midway, North Africa is where the Axis enemy forever lost the initiative in World War II. It is where Great Britain slipped into the role of junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance, and where the United States first emerged as the dominant force it would remain into the next millennium.
William Manchester pointed to the year 1943—a year of Allied summits—as the period when “the torch of leadership passed from the British Prime Minister to the American President, and both men knew it.” America, by that time, “was putting more men and matériel into the conflict and American generals . . . would be commanding the combined forces in the great battles ahead.” From 1943 on, no one doubted FDR was “commander of the Allied Armies and Navies.”
Historian Andrew Roberts says that, although the truth was evident sooner, the moment when America was confirmed as the “leading power of the western Alliance” came on July 1, 1944. In the aftermath of the D-Day landings, the Americans favored invading the south of France on August 15, but the British wanted to “cross the River Po, advance on Trieste and push into the Balkans in September.” A deadlock ensued with Churchill finally appealing the British case to Roosevelt, who rejected it. �
�The baton had passed from hand to hand,” Roberts wrote, “reluctantly and not without bluster, but neither was it wrenched from Britain’s grasp. Churchill was to be the last British leader of the Free World.”
IN NOVEMBER 1944, AS the Allied forces pushed through Europe toward Berlin, Eisenhower reminded all Americans that peace and freedom come at a price. “To get peace,” he said, “we have to fight like hell.” And we did.
America had deployed the greatest military force the world has ever known to secure freedom and to defeat tyranny. We had transformed ourselves, in the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, “from a situation of appalling danger to unparalleled might in battle.” The armed forces George C. Marshall built fought, as Life described it, “along supply lines extending 56,000 miles around 360 degrees of longitude, and from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Arctic Sea.” We liberated millions and achieved the greatest victory in the history of mankind, for the good of all mankind. America—the exceptional nation—had become freedom’s defender.
TWO
Freedom Victorious
One of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east—to prevent their people from leaving.
—PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN, JUNE 8, 1982
Shortly before 10 P.M. on Tuesday, April 15, 1947, the motorcade passed under the sixteenth-century archways of the Kremlin. General George C. Marshall, architect of America’s victory in World War II and the new American secretary of state, was in Moscow for meetings with his fellow foreign ministers to decide the postwar fate of Germany and Austria. Faced with economic devastation across Europe, Marshall felt a sense of urgency. He’d been in Moscow for more than a month and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had stonewalled and blocked all attempts at agreement.
Marshall was taking his case directly to Stalin. As Marshall explained the dire situation to the Soviet leader, Stalin sat at his desk and slowly doodled pictures of wolves with a red pencil. When Marshall finished, Stalin responded that he really didn’t share Marshall’s alarm. If things weren’t resolved at this conference, he said, “We may agree the next time, or if not then, the time after that.” The Soviet leader was in no rush to rescue the peoples of Europe from economic despair. He knew desperation would provide a fertile ground for the spread of communist ideology. Marshall realized that the belligerence Soviet foreign minister Molotov displayed at the conference sessions was not just a reflection of Molotov’s personality. It was Soviet policy.
On his flight back to the United States, Marshall contemplated Stalin’s indifference to the crisis facing Europe. His advisor Charles Bohlen recalled:
[Marshall] came to the conclusion that Stalin, looking over Europe, saw the best way to advance Soviet interests was to let matters drift. Economic conditions were bad. Europe was recovering slowly from the war. Little had been done to rebuild damaged highways, railroads, and canals. Business alliances severed by years of hostilities were still shattered. Unemployment was widespread. Millions of people were on short rations. There was a danger of epidemics. This was the kind of crisis that Communism thrived on.
In an interview in 1956, Marshall said the Moscow meeting was a turning point for him. He had believed “the Soviets could be negotiated with,” he said, but “decided finally at Moscow, after the war, that they could not be.” Another of Marshall’s aides, Robert Murphy, put it this way: “It was the Moscow conference, I believe, that really rang down the Iron Curtain.”
THERE HAD BEEN EARLIER signs of trouble. On February 9, 1946, Stalin delivered a speech at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, in the midst of what Time called “the biggest most meaningless election on earth.” No opposition candidates were on the ballot. Stalin wound up with 100 percent of the vote in Moscow.
In his Bolshoi speech, Stalin explained that communism and capitalism were incompatible. World War II, he claimed, was caused by capitalism and, in particular, by the unequal distribution of wealth this economic system generated. He asserted that future wars would be inevitable so long as the capitalist system survived. It was, Time said, “the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day.”
In Washington, State Department official Paul Nitze read the speech with care. “We interpreted it as being a delayed declaration of war against the United States,” he later explained. “There wasn’t any doubt about it if you read the text carefully, what he was talking about.” A message was dispatched to George Kennan, the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, asking for an analysis of Stalin’s intentions and plans. Kennan sent his response in on February 22, 1946. Eight thousand words in length, the “Long Telegram” would lay the groundwork for an historic shift in American policy toward the Soviet Union.
The USSR, Kennan explained, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be broken if Soviet power is to be secure.” In other words, there could be no “permanent peaceful coexistence” between our two nations. This had nothing to do with any action taken by the United States, and there was nothing the United States could do to change the Soviet view of the situation. The United States should not expect concessions from the Soviets. What was needed was “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they showed signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.”
On February 21, 1947, the United States had to decide whether it would put such a policy of “firm containment” into action. The first secretary at the British embassy in Washington delivered two diplomatic messages to Loy Henderson, director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs at the U.S. State Department, notifying the United States that Britain would no longer be able to meet her obligations to provide assistance to Greece and Turkey. “The messages were shockers,” said Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. Aid to both countries would end in six weeks, on March 31, 1947.
Both nations were under threat from the Soviet Union. In Greece, a communist insurrection was under way, generating economic chaos and the potential of imminent collapse. Turkey, under pressure from Moscow to provide access to the Mediterranean for the Soviet fleet, lacked the resources to simultaneously modernize its economy and maintain the military necessary to defend against the Soviet threat. President Truman and his senior advisors quickly recognized that Greece and Turkey needed support to maintain their independence. Such assistance was something only America could provide—and it was vital for our security.
The following week, President Truman hosted a meeting of the congressional leadership to discuss possible U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey. Undersecretary of State Acheson described the situation America faced and explained what could happen if we failed to act:
Soviet pressure on the [Turkish] Straits, on Iran, and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to win all the possibilities. Even one or two offered immense gains. We and we alone were in a position to break up the play.
On Wednesday, March 12, 1947, President Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress to request $400 million in assistance for Greece and Turkey. Speaking from the ornate white marble rostrum, with the Speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate seated b
ehind him, Truman introduced what would become known as the Truman Doctrine. “At the present moment in world history,” he explained, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.” He then described the difference between the principles of freedom advocated by the United States, and the methods of oppression pursued by the Soviet Union:
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
“I believe,” the president said, that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own ways.”
Truman closed his remarks by explaining the link between economic devastation and the rise of communism:
The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own Nation.
Congress approved Truman’s Greek-Turkish Aid Act by large majorities in both houses. Truman signed it into law on May 22, 1947.
Secretary Marshall had returned from his meetings in Moscow seized with the importance of rebuilding Europe’s shattered economies. He tapped George Kennan to lead a new Policy Planning Office in the Department of State and instructed him to prepare a report outlining how America could most effectively assist the European recovery. Kennan delivered his report the day after President Truman signed the aid act. The Policy Planning staff advised, among other things, that the assistance should be based on a joint recovery plan prepared with direct involvement of the Europeans. It also suggested that the new assistance should not exclude the Soviets or Eastern Europe.