* King continued to refer to air service as the “Army Air Corps” long after its redesignation as the “United States Army Air Forces,” and even after it was reorganized by Congress as a separate service named the “United States Air Force.”
* By “Bolero,” Stimson probably meant OVERLORD. It was another instance of the code names for the buildup (BOLERO) and the invasion (OVERLORD) tripping up the men who approved them.
* The admiral, Sir James Somerville, was one of the few men who stood up to King to his face, and King respected him for it. After the meeting, King approached Somerville and told him, “James, if ever you wish to see me about something, the latch is always on the door.” One astonished aide remarked, “Admiral King had never been stood up to quite like that before and it worked like a miracle.”
* Actually, three directions. Klaus Fuchs, a British scientist, was a communist spy who would secretly forward to Moscow thousands of pages of documents describing Allied atomic bomb research.
* Cynical Pentagon staffers claimed “SEAC” stood for “Save England’s Asian Colonies.”
* OSS China hands derisively nicknamed the nationalist leader “Cash My-Check.”
* In early 1942 Roosevelt’s beloved Houston would be sunk, this time physically, by a Japanese squadron at the Battle of the Java Sea.
* It was the only U.S. battleship of its day to boast a bathtub. The presidential yacht Potomac, a commissioned vessel, also had one.
* The incident’s cause, originally ascribed to an electrical short, was more likely carelessness in leaving the torpedo system armed during the tracking exercise.
* The venom between Brooke and King is, like all other heated disagreements, nowhere hinted at in the meeting’s sanitized official minutes. Lord Ismay later remarked, “One can read the official minutes of these meetings without suspecting that a single harsh word had been exchanged.” Secretaries, including Generals Smith and Handy, were not above editing quotes before committing them to paper, partly as a matter of sound office politics. “If you will always quote people with what they should have said, you will have no trouble,” Handy explained after the war.
* When Stalin left one of his doodles on the table at the end of a meeting, King made a beeline for the souvenir. On his way, Roosevelt intercepted him with a question, and while King was answering the president, out of the corner of his eye he saw a British staffer get to the sketch and make off with it.
* Like Eisenhower and Marshall, Roosevelt refused to sack Patton over the “slapping incidents.” When asked about Patton on his return from Tehran, FDR worked into his answer an apocryphal story of Lincoln and Grant: “If you want to write a piece, stick in there the story of a former president who had a good deal of trouble finding a successful commander for the armies of the United States. And one of them turned up one day and he was very successful. And some very good citizens went to the president and protested: ‘You can’t keep him. He drinks.’ ‘It must be a good brand of liquor,’ was the answer.”
* There were, of course, millions of victims in other groups slaughtered during the Holocaust in Europe—Poles, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, Catholics, Gypsies, German dissidents, and the insane, to name a few—and perhaps a comparable number of Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Australians, Indonesians, Vietnamese, and Burmese murdered in the Holocaust in Asia.
* Jack McCloy contradicted himself on whether he laid the proposal to bomb German death camps before Roosevelt. In his early postwar years, he denied having done so. Then, at age ninety-three, he told historian Michael Bechloss that he took the proposal to Roosevelt, who nixed the idea as futile and objected that the administration would be accused of slaughtering innocent prisoners.
* Ernie King told his confidants that Marshall rarely swore, but when his name was mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, “He really showed what he could do when he was roused.”
* On June 8, Dr. McIntire would tell press correspondents that the president was “in better physical condition than the average man of his age—in better shape today than he had been at any time for a year.”
* “Go ahead and wage war with your false money.”
* Churchill deleted this last sentence from his memoir Triumph and Tragedy, published in 1953.
* To keep MacArthur or Chiang from monopolizing the new weapon, Arnold concentrated all B-29s into one group, the Twentieth Air Force. Like King’s Tenth Fleet, Arnold kept those bombers under his personal command.
* As MacArthur’s staff informed the Joint Chiefs, the Japanese were actually still holding Leyte. Japan’s 16th Division defended the island at the time of the invasion, and before the monthlong battle was over, Japan would feed more than 45,000 troops into the fight.
* While not agreeing that conquered Germans should be neutered, Morgenthau suggested to Stimson that German children might be taken from their parents and made “wards of the state, and have ex-US Army officers, English Army officers and Russian Army officers run these schools and have these children learn the true spirit of democracy.” He did not explain how Red Army officers would teach the true spirit of democracy.
* Morgenthau told Stimson afterward, “He was even more angry [at me] than you, Harry.”
* Dewey’s belief that Roosevelt had read Japanese transmissions was accurate, but only to a point. By December 7, 1941, MAGIC cryptographers were decoding Japanese diplomatic messages as fast as Ambassador Nomura’s staffers. But they made little headway against the more complex Japanese naval code, designated JN-25, and those naval operational codes were the keys to predicting specific military targets.
* After the war’s end, King recanted his judgment on the Hawaiian commanders. Admiral Kimmel and General Short, he concluded, had been “sold down the river.”
* Competition was heaviest to get into the prestigious Marine Corps, which soon reached its authorized quota. Early recruiting was so successful that in February 1942 Admiral King advised FDR, “Unless the strength of the Marine Corps is increased, it will be necessary to stop recruiting entirely within a few days.”
* In Italy and France, soldiers of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed largely of Nisei, earned 21 Medals of Honor, 7 Presidential Unit Citations, 53 Distinguished Service Crosses, 560 Silver Stars, 4,000 Bronze Stars, 9,486 Purple Hearts, and 18,000 other individual citations, making the regiment, man for man, one of the most decorated units in U.S. history.
* Of course, Joseph Heller’s Major Major Major, who bore a striking resemblance to Henry Fonda, was born to mediocrity, whereas Marshall was not.
* The Navy reached an impasse over whom to nominate for its fourth slot. Forrestal favored Halsey, while to King it was a horse race between Halsey and Spruance. Ultimately Halsey won the fourth slot. After the war, Omar Bradley received his fifth star, becoming America’s last five-star general. In 1976 Congress posthumously promoted Lieutenant General George Washington to “General of the Armies of the United States,” a rank it decreed would be higher than any other Army rank, past or present. General Washington will always stand as America’s highest-ranking soldier.
* Arnold was at Walter Reed recovering from his fourth heart attack of the war.
* King was more circumspect than either Marshall or Eisenhower about Montgomery’s prima donna attitude. “Of course [Montgomery] was a show-off (beret), like MacArthur (cap) or Patton (two pistols) and many other people (like Halsey or Ingram, etc.) and ‘W.C.’ and ‘F.D.R.,’” he wrote years later.
* In October 1944, Chiang finally managed to rid himself of Stilwell. As Vinegar Joe was being shipped off for Washington—under Marshall’s injunction to say nothing to the press—Chiang offered him China’s highest military decoration. “Told him to stick it up his arse,” Stilwell told his diary.
* Stalin was right. The next day, MacArthur announced that his forces had ente
red Manila and were rapidly clearing the city. Fighting there continued for nearly another month, but the city was pacified before Berlin was breached.
* An astonished Gromyko wrote, “Despite his basic harshness of character, Stalin did just occasionally give way to positive human emotions.”
* Truman told one White House staffer that Morgenthau “didn’t know shit from apple butter.”
* Der Führer’s resignation followed by two days the death of his collaborator, Benito Mussolini—of similar causes, though unlike Hitler’s, Il Duce’s pills were not self-administered.
* MacArthur frequently referred to himself as “MacArthur.”
* The following month, at Potsdam, General Arnold bet Pug Ismay two dollars that the war with Japan would last into 1946. “Odd that he didn’t figure in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Ismay mused years later.
* After the war, Leahy declared his opposition to the “barbarous” weapon, though the only objection voiced to Truman at the time was that the bomb might not work.
* A news service article, ascribing the explosion to an accident at an Army arsenal, was planted to let authorized persons at Potsdam know the test had been a success.
* He had. Stalin’s spies had kept him informed of the Manhattan Project’s progress since 1943, and he had learned of the scheduled test date in New Mexico earlier in the month.
* The USSR would not declare war on Japan until August 9, so it would not be a party to the declaration.
* The bomb fell at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima time.
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