American Warlords
Page 58
FIFTY-FIVE
“THIS IS A PEACE WARNING”
ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, HARRY TRUMAN WAS CROSSING THE ATLANTIC aboard King’s old flagship, the cruiser Augusta. As the ship plowed gracefully through the Atlantic’s swells early in the noon watch, teletype machines in the ship’s communications center clacked out a “Top Secret” message for the president.
The message, when decoded, went to Captain Frank H. Graham, the Map Room officer on duty. Graham handed the message to the president, who was eating lunch with the crew in the ship’s mess hall.
It read:
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’s face brightened. Like a man whose horse has just won by two lengths, he looked at Graham and beamed with joy. “This is the greatest thing in history!” he said, pumping the bewildered captain’s hand. Then he stood up and called for the crew’s attention.
“Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make,” he said in his crisp Missouri accent. “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!”
The mess hall erupted into cheers. Truman, exuberant as any midshipman, left to spread the gospel of America’s new power.1
•
On Wednesday the eighth, Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was ushered into the office of Foreign Minister Molotov. The purpose of Satō’s visit was to enlist Soviet assistance in mediating the war against the Allies. To Satō’s shock, Molotov brusquely informed him that as of the following day, the Soviet Union would consider itself at war with the Empire of Japan.
On the far side of the globe, Stimson met in Washington with Truman and Byrnes to refine the surrender terms. He argued, once again, that the war would end sooner if the terms were not so punitive as to stiffen the resolve of Tokyo hard-liners. “When you punish your dog you don’t keep souring on him all day after the punishment is over,” he said.2
But Japan had not surrendered, and the punishment was not over. Over two days following the Hiroshima bombing, 550 of Enola Gay’s sisters dropped thousands of tons of conventional bombs on the beleaguered island of Honshu. Then, on the morning of August 9, three silver emissaries flew over the port city of Nagasaki, a city of a quarter million souls and the setting of Puccini’s tragic opera Madame Butterfly. The trailing bomber, named Bockscar, opened its bay doors and dropped what, from the ground, appeared to be a small dot.
Forty-three seconds later, another yellow-orange ball lit up the morning sky, and seventy thousand more lives were blotted out.3
•
On Friday morning, August 10, Stimson was about to leave Washington for a short vacation when Colonel McCarthy, Marshall’s aide, called to say that Radio Tokyo had announced that the Japanese government accepted the Potsdam surrender terms. The capitulation, it said, was subject to the very point Stimson had raised in Potsdam and Washington: the Emperor must retain his title as sovereign of Japan.
Stimson rushed to the White House, where he and Leahy haggled with Truman and Byrnes over a formula acceptable to the United States, the Allies, and Japan. Stimson and Leahy urged Truman to accept the condition and call it “unconditional surrender” anyway. Leahy thought the Emperor’s tenure a ridiculous point to stand on if the war could be ended immediately. Agreeing with Leahy, Stimson pointed out that the United States would need the Emperor’s help to maintain order in occupied Japan. Besides, he said, there were millions of Hirohito’s soldiers spread out across Asia. Having the Emperor issue surrender orders, drafted by the Allies, would prevent “a score of bloody Iwo Jimas and Okinawas all over China and the New Netherlands.”
Byrnes, as usual, worried about American public reaction to the Emperor’s retention. Stimson grumbled to his diary, “There has been a good deal of uninformed agitation against the Emperor in this country, mostly by people who know no more about Japan than has been given them by Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado,’ and I found today that curiously enough it had gotten deeply embedded in the minds of influential people in the State Department.”4
By lunchtime, Stimson and Byrnes had worked out a compromise. The Emperor would retain his title, subject to orders of Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur. Byrnes asked Stimson to draft the instruments of surrender, and Stimson, McCloy, and Marshall began working on a document that would, in time, make its way to the quarterdeck of USS Missouri.
•
While Admiral King had gone along with the plan to invade Kyushu, he had never been persuaded of the wisdom of invading Honshu. The bomb, however, headed off another fight with the Army, and when he learned of the Tokyo announcement, he cabled Nimitz, “THIS IS A PEACE WARNING. TOKYO HAS INDICATED IN ULTRA CHANNELS THAT JAPAN WISHES TO BRING ABOUT PEACE IMMEDIATELY.”
On Tuesday morning, August 14, Radio Tokyo announced that Japan accepted the Allied terms of surrender. The war in the Pacific was over. King’s final wartime message to Nimitz read: “SUSPEND ALL OFFENSIVE HOSTILE ACTION. REMAIN ALERT.”5
• • •
Hostile action against Japan was suspended, but there was one last battle the admiral would fight. As arrangements were being made for the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, to take place aboard USS Missouri, King learned that a planning committee chaired by the State Department intended to recommend that General MacArthur represent the United States. The Navy had won the Pacific war, but MacArthur’s signature would rest on the instrument of surrender for all posterity to see.
King wasn’t about to let MacArthur elbow in for all the credit. He ordered the pugnacious Savvy Cooke to ensure that the Navy was not shoved off its own battleship while the Empire of Japan surrendered to MacArthur.
Savvy ordered Rear Admiral Robert Dennison, a member of the Joint War Plans Committee, to set the surrender ceremony committee straight. Dennison protested that he had no connection to the committee; he wasn’t a member and had no authority to represent the Navy in such matters.
“That doesn’t make any difference,” Savvy told the admiral. “Just go down there and tell them that you’re a member, and then get in there and get this thing changed.”
Dennison obediently showed up at the next meeting, where the chaos of peace had tossed the surrender protocol into a tepid pot of indifference. “I did carry out my instructions and I stepped on a lot of toes doing it,” recalled Dennison afterward. “I had the backing of the people in the Navy, and the other people could not have cared less. Nobody really knew who the hell I was, and they probably didn’t care.”6
They didn’t care, so they gave way to King’s man. The committee recommended that at the surrender ceremony Admiral Nimitz would represent the United States of America, while General MacArthur would represent the supreme commander for the Allied powers. That is to say, MacArthur would represent himself.
• • •
America’s war ended, as it began, on a battleship. On September 2, 1945, the enemy came dressed in worn black top hats and pressed coats with long tails. They came not as conquerors, but as supplicants.
After the actors took their places on the stage, and performed their roles for the final scene of mankind’s great tragedy, MacArthur, as usual, had the last soliloquy. “Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always,” he declared in his benediction.
Facing his new subjects, the ministers of Japan, he announced, “These proceedings are closed.”7
EPILOGUE
ROOSEVELT AND HIS WARLORDS HAD DONE SOMETHING THOUGHT IMPOSsible in a democracy. Four men fundamentally different in personality, background, and training had weathered storms of defeat, recrimination, professional bias, personality difference, and political division. They came t
ogether to defeat two of history’s most murderous empires and changed the face of their world. And they did it without suspending the freewheeling, adversarial, often stupefying system that has characterized American democracy since the founding of the Republic.
The genius in Roosevelt’s approach—a uniquely American method of war leadership—was finding a group of headstrong fighters, meddling when he needed to meddle, and letting them do their jobs when he didn’t. That these men could “get along,” as King and Marshall put it in 1942, was both a testament to their patriotism and a sign of how dark were the storms clouds that hung over the nation from May 1940 to November 1942. That they could preserve their artificial unity through the victories of Midway, Normandy, Saipan, and beyond was a near miracle.
• • •
When the guns fell silent, the time came for the American warlords to exit the stage and make way for younger men who would lead America through a new and uncertain era. Henry Stimson remained in Washington until his seventy-eighth birthday, September 21, 1945, nineteen days after V-J Day. He held a perfunctory press conference, said farewell to his Pentagon staff, then rode to the White House, where a smiling President Truman presented the lifelong Republican with the Distinguished Service Medal. Stimson’s last act as secretary of war was to lead a cabinet discussion about future controls of nuclear weapons.
Stimson and Mabel took a car to National Airport for their final return to Highhold. There the old soldier was nearly brought to tears by a double-line formation of every general and senior staffer in Washington. Nineteen howitzers boomed as he and Mabel took the long walk past saluting officers to the plane’s stairway. An Army band played “Happy Birthday” for Stimson, followed by “Auld Lang Syne.”
Fighting “an emotional and coronary breakdown,” Stimson shook hands with George Marshall, his partner in so many struggles on the winding road to victory. Then he followed Mabel up the steps of the waiting plane, waved good-bye, and was gone.1
As the silver DC-3 set him down at his beloved Highhold, a new and vibrant America was awakening. Fifteen million Americans had left their homes for jobs in industrial centers that supplied Stimson’s Army. Twelve million more had been inducted into the Army and Air Forces. America’s gross national product had more than doubled, and the G.I. Bill had thrown open the doors of the middle class to men and women who served under Stimson, Marshall, and King.2
America, at the height of its global dominance, sauntered into a world of opportunities and dangers without Henry Stimson’s guiding hand. The establishment Republican who left his mark serving a liberal Democrat died at Highhold five years later with Mabel at his bedside.3
He left the “youngsters” to figure out what it all meant.
•
With Truman’s appointment of General Eisenhower as Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall went into retirement on November 26, 1945. His retirement lasted less than a day. As he carried his bags into Dodona Manor, home of his beloved gardens, President Truman phoned to ask him to go to China as his special envoy. Unable to resist the call to service, Marshall agreed, and the gardens would wait another six years.
After China, Marshall served as Truman’s secretary of state, then as chairman of the American Red Cross, then as secretary of defense. He became the only professional soldier to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he earned for his role in promoting the phenomenally successful European Recovery Program—an economic lightning bolt that he refused to call by its popular name: the Marshall Plan.4
As the years went by, Marshall was fondly remembered by statesmen and generals as the giant of their era. He and Katherine were regular guests at the Eisenhower White House, and in his free hours he enjoyed shooting, riding, and, of course, tending his flower beds. The fears of the past—defense of the Americas, the Army’s budget, fights with the Navy, the catastrophes of Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Kasserine Pass, and the Bulge—faded into distant memories. The strategic plans he now made were the defense of his marigolds from marauding blackbirds, and staying out of Walter Reed Hospital.5
With growing frequency, Marshall’s reunions with old friends were held beside flag-draped coffins: Hap Arnold died in 1950, Jonathan Wainwright in 1953, Brehon Somervell in 1955. Occasionally these reunions would take place in Walter Reed’s presidential suite.
In January 1959, a medical corpsman stationed outside Marshall’s bedroom heard choking gasps. Bursting into the room, he found Marshall writhing in the throes of a stroke. Bedridden at home, the old general suffered a second stroke a month later.
Army doctors moved him from Dodona Manor to Walter Reed, where Truman and Eisenhower, now political enemies, separately visited him from time to time. On his last visit, President Eisenhower brought with him an eighty-five-year-old Winston Churchill, who stood in the doorway of Marshall’s suite but did not enter. Tears welled in Churchill’s eyes as he watched the faded general taking life’s last, slow march.
As the months wore on, Marshall gradually withdrew from the world he helped shape. His speech, sight, and hearing faded, and eventually he lapsed into a coma, suspended between this life and the next. The end came on October 16, 1959.
In keeping with Marshall’s request, there was no state funeral. President Eisenhower ordered the nation’s flags to fly at half-mast, and the general’s body lay for twenty-four hours at the National Cathedral, guarded by a squad of cadets from his alma mater, Virginia Military Institute. His funeral service was conducted at the small post chapel at Fort Myer.
George Catlett Marshall was committed to the earth at Arlington National Cemetery on October 20, not far from the resting place of his wartime friend and collaborator Sir John Dill. Eisenhower and Truman sat side by side, sharing memories of a man of no politics, a general who bridged a gulf that divided Democrat and Republican. The burial ceremony ended with a straightforward coda for a straightforward soldier: nineteen guns, a rifle volley, and “Taps.”6
•
While Ernie King loved history, there was one story from ancient times that may have escaped his notice. As a boy, the Greek admiral Themistocles was said to have been taken by his father to a deserted beach, where his father showed him the carcasses of old war galleys lying sun-baked, prostrate, and neglected. That, his father told him, is how a democracy treats its leaders when they no longer have use for them.
King had once objected to a wartime pay raise for soldiers, sailors, and officers. When the shooting stopped, he said, a grateful nation would distribute just rewards to the men who had brought them safely through the fire. When asked if he would write a book about the war, King replied that while he would do it, the book would have only two words: “We won.”7
The admiral who shaved with a blowtorch had given no thought to life after the war. Like Patton, Grant, Sherman, and other men who stare transfixed into the bonfires of Mars, King settled into the realization that on the day Japan’s emissaries signed the surrender documents, he had accomplished his life’s work.
“King was a lost soul when the war was over,” said one friend. “He had served his purpose. He had done what he had set out to do. He had won his part of the war.”8
There would be a massive demobilization as the Navy returned its men to civilian life. The Pearl Harbor inquiry would become public, Congress would slash the Navy’s budget, and old salts like himself would be put out to pasture, to make way for younger admirals.
With Forrestal as navy secretary, King knew retirement would follow quickly. He had gotten along with Knox only because the Chicago newsman knew nothing about the Navy, admitted it, and stayed out of King’s way. Forrestal would not. During the war, King had cursed Forrestal out in the halls of the Navy Department, and had browbeaten him into staying out of naval operations. “I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me,” King said.9
After the war, King heard that Forrestal had told a senator, “King had the brains, all right, b
ut I hated his guts.”
King replied, “I hated his guts, too.”10
As King’s tenure as COMINCH-CNO drew to a close, he requested a relief date of January 15, 1946, to give the incoming chief of naval operations, Admiral Nimitz, a well-deserved rest before taking on his new assignment. At a minimum, King wanted to hang on to his job until December 17, the fourth anniversary of his promotion to COMINCH.
Forrestal was too sour to keep King at Main Navy a day longer than necessary. “Mr. Forrestal got ‘mad’ about the matter and ordered the change of command moved up to December 15th,” King remarked with some bitterness. On that day, King’s flag secretary recalled, the old admiral’s hands trembled as he accepted the orders for his relief.11
Five-star officers do not retire; they remain on active duty for as long as they draw breath. But unlike Marshall, King’s government service had drawn to an irrevocable close. Retirement in all but name would bring banquets, honorary degrees, medals, reminiscences, and, to his sadness, the ghosts of Pearl Harbor. Newspaper headlines in November 1948 read: “Admiral King Would Clear Stark, Kimmel: Withdraws Condemnation of Two Officers Made in Report on Pearl Harbor.”
King had concluded that Admirals Stark and Kimmel were no more to blame for the disaster than Generals Marshall and Short. “I’ll never forgive the Army for not taking at least part of the blame for Pearl Harbor,” the flinty admiral told his biographer, Commander Walter Muir Whitehall. “That was why I didn’t like Stimson.”12
• • •
King’s oaken hull began to split in 1947, when he suffered a stroke. His mind remained alert, but his iron-plated timbers began to creak and sag. He moved into a suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital for full-time care, and at one point he shared a floor with the acutely depressed James Forrestal, who ended his life by jumping from his sixteenth-floor window in 1949.13