Even Teller convinced himself – by no means foolishly – that the best hope for the future of mankind lay in a live demonstration that would show the world the unspeakable horrors unleashed by the use of such weapons. The atomic enterprise had a momentum of its own, which only two developments might have checked. First, Truman could have shown extraordinary enlightenment, and decreed that the Bomb was too terrible to be employed; more plausibly, the Japanese might have offered their unconditional surrender. Yet through mid-summer 1945 intercepted secret cable traffic, as well as Tokyo’s public pronouncements, showed obdurate Japanese rejection of such a course.
Objectively, it was plain to the Allies that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, for both military and economic reasons, and thus that the use of atomic weapons was unnecessary. But the prospect of being obliged to continue addressing pockets of fanatical resistance all over Asia for months, if not years, was appalling. A belief persisted in Tokyo that stalwart defence of the home islands could yet preserve Japan from accepting absolute defeat. Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, chief of the Japanese general staff, fantasised in characteristically flatulent terms in a May newspaper article: ‘The sure path to victory in a decisive battle lies in uniting the resources of the Empire behind the war effort; and in mobilising the full strength of the nation, both physical and spiritual, to annihilate the American invaders. The establishment of a metaphysical spirit is the first essential for fighting the decisive battle. An energetic commitment to aggressive action should always be emphasised.’ Staff officer Major Yoshitaka Horie delivered a current-affairs talk to army cadets which precipitated a reprimand from an officer of the Army Education Directorate, who said: ‘Your lectures are so depressing that officers who hear them will start losing the will to fight. You must end on a high note, assuring them that the Imperial Army is still in fighting mood.’
Some of those who are today most critical of the use of the bombs ignore the fact that every day the war continued, prisoners and slaves of the Japanese empire in Asia continued to die in thousands. Perversely, the Allies might have done more to confound Japan’s militarists by publicly announcing that they did not intend to invade the mainland, but instead to continue starving and bombing the Japanese people until they surrendered, than by preparing for Olympic. Truman’s greatest mistake, in protecting his own reputation, was failure to deliver an explicit ultimatum before attacking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Western Allies’ Potsdam Declaration, issued on 26 July, threatened Japan with ‘prompt and utter destruction’ if it failed to surrender forthwith. This phrase was pregnant with significance for the Allied leaders, who knew that the first atomic bomb had just been successfully tested at Alamagordo. But to the Japanese, it merely heralded more of the same: fire-bombing and eventual invasion.
By the high summer of 1945, Japan’s rulers wished to end the war; but its generals, together with some politicians, were still bent upon securing ‘honourable’ terms, which included – for instance – retention of substantial parts of Japan’s empire in Manchuria, Korea and China, together with Allied agreement to spare the country from occupation or war crimes indictments. ‘No one person in Japan had authority remotely resembling that of an American president,’ observes Professor Akira Namamura of Dokkyo University, a modern Japanese historian. ‘The Emperor was obliged to act in accordance with the Japanese constitution, which meant that he was obliged to heed the wishes of the army, navy and civilian politicians. He was able to take the decision to end the war only when those forces had invited him to do so.’ Even if this assertion was open to the widest variety of interpretations, as it remains today, it was plain that Hirohito could move towards surrender only when a consensus had evolved within Japan’s leadership. This was narrowly achieved in mid-August 1945, but not a day before.
Many modern critics of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demand, in effect, that the United States should have accepted a moral responsibility for sparing the Japanese people from the consequences of their own leaders’ obduracy. No sane person would suggest that the use of the atomic bombs represented an absolute good, or was even a righteous act. But, in the course of the war, it had been necessary to do many terrible things to advance the cause of Allied victory, and to preside over enormous carnage. By August 1945, to Allied leaders the lives of their own people had come to seem very precious, those of their enemies very cheap. In those circumstances, it seems understandable that President Truman failed to halt the juggernaut which carried the atomic bombs to Tinian, and thence to Japan. Just as Hitler was the architect of Germany’s devastation, the Tokyo regime bore overwhelming responsibility for what took place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If Japan’s leaders had bowed to logic, as well as to the welfare of their own people, by quitting the war, the atomic bombs would not have been dropped.
When nineteen-year-old Superfortress gunner Joseph Majeski saw the B-29 Enola Gay arrive on Tinian, specially modified to carry only tail armament, and fitted with reversible-pitch propellers and other special equipment, he strolled over and asked one of its crew what they had come for. The man answered flippantly, ‘We’re here to win the war,’ and of course the young airman did not believe him. A few days later, on 6 August 1945, the plane dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. Its detonation generated the power of 12,500 tons of conventional explosive, created injuries of a kind never before experienced by humankind, and killed at least 70,000 people. Around the world, many people at first found the notion of what had taken place beyond the compass of their imaginations. Lt. Cmdr. Michael Blois-Brooke of the British assault ship Sefton, preparing to invade Malaya, said: ‘We heard about some wonder bomb that had been dropped on Japan and which was going to stop the war. We really took no notice, thinking that one single bomb wasn’t going to alter the course of history.’
Three days later ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki, matching the explosive power of 22,000 tons of TNT, and killing at least 30,000 people. In the early hours of that day, the first of 1.5 million Soviet troops crossed the border into Manchuria, supported by 5,500 tanks and self-propelled guns. They swept across the region, overwhelming the hopelessly outgunned Japanese. In some places the defenders fought to the last, sustaining resistance for ten days after the war officially ended. But by 20 August the Russians had secured most of Manchuria and northern Korea. The brief campaign cost them 12,000 dead, more than the British Army lost in France in 1940, while something close to 80,000 Japanese soldiers perished.
Most of the young men bombing Japan had long since acquired a carapace of callousness about their business, matched by that which armoured their commanders. Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold, the USAAF’s commander, wished to conclude the Superfortress offensive with a ‘grand finale’ by a thousand fire-raising aircraft; Spaatz, now his Pacific C-in-C, preferred the idea of dropping a third atomic bomb on Tokyo. In the event, on 14 August eight hundred B-29s attacked Isesaki urban area with incendiaries without losing a single plane, creating a last post-Nagasaki storm of destruction. One of the pilots, Col. Carl Storrie, said next morning of his own role: ‘We played alarm clock. All the rest of the aircraft carried fire bombs, but we had 4,000-pounders and went in to wake up the population of Kumugaya … We were at 16,000 [feet] and could feel the concussion. It was a dirty trick. We figured the Japs would think it was another atomic bomb.’
The Emperor Hirohito summoned a gathering of his country’s military and political leaders and informed them of his determination to end the war, declared to his nation in a radio broadcast a few hours later. Not all his subjects even then accepted his conclusion. Fighter pilot Cmdr. Haryushi Iki said: ‘I never allowed myself to think about the possibility of losing the war. When the Russians invaded Manchuria, I felt terribly depressed – but even then I could not accept that we had lost.’ Some senior figures, including the war minister and a number of generals and admirals, committed ritual suicide, an example followed by several hundred humbler folk. ‘There was a clear division of opinion in the army about whether to end the w
ar,’ said General Staff intelligence officer Major Shoji Takahashi. ‘Many of our people in China and South-East Asia favoured fighting on. Most of those in Japan accepted that we could not continue. I was sure that, once the Emperor had spoken, we must give up.’
This view prevailed. At 1900 on the evening of 14 August Washington time – already the 15th in Japan – Harry Truman read the announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender to a dense throng of politicians and journalists at the White House. The president then ordered the cessation of all offensive operations against the enemy. In Tokyo Bay on 1 September, Japanese and Allied representatives headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur signed the surrender document on the deck of the battleship Missouri. The Second World War was officially ended.
Victors and Vanquished
Goethe wrote in the early nineteenth century: ‘Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.’ So it almost was in 1945. The war ended abruptly in Europe: sullenly or thankfully, millions of German troops surrendered, tossing away their weapons before joining vast columns of prisoners shuffling towards improvised cages, while only a small number in the east attempted to continue resistance against the Russians. The vanquished emerged in some unlikely places and guises: a U-boat flying a white flag sailed up New Hampshire’s Piscataqua river, where bewildered state police received its captain and crew. Irish prime minister Éamon de Valera, flaunting to the end his loathing of his British neighbours, paid a formal call upon the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences on the death of the Reich’s head of state.
Many Germans believed themselves as much victims of Hitler as were the foreign nations he had conquered and enslaved. In Hamburg, old Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote broken-heartedly on 1 May: ‘We … mourn most deeply the fate of our poor Germany. It is as if the final bomb hit our very soul, killing the last vestige of joy and hope. Our beautiful and proud Germany has been crushed, ground into the earth and smashed into ruins, while millions sacrificed their lives and all our lovely towns and art treasures were destroyed. And all this because of one man who had a lunatic vision of being “chosen by God”.’
Among Germans in the summer of 1945 and afterwards, self-pity was a much more prevalent sensation than contrition: one in three of their male children born between 1915 and 1924 was dead, two in five of those born between 1920 and 1925. In the vast refugee migrations that preceded and followed VE-Day, over fourteen million ethnic Germans left homes in the east, or were driven from them. At least half a million – modern estimates vary widely – perished during their subsequent odysseys; the historic problem of Central Europe’s German minorities was solved in the most abrupt fashion, by ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile more millions of people of a dozen nationalities, enslaved by Hitler, entered a new dark tunnel of uncertainty in Displaced Persons camps administered by the Allies, where some remained for years. The least fortunate were summarily consigned to Russia, their homeland, where many were categorised by the NKVD as proven or putative traitors, and killed.
In Germany’s cities, half the housing stock had been destroyed, including 3.8 million of nineteen million apartments. Richard Johnston of the New York Times wrote from the ruins of Nuremberg: ‘Like timid ground creatures, a few Germans came up from their shelters, caves and cellars this morning to blink in strong sunlight and stare unbelieving at the awful mess that was their town … Nuremberg is a city of the dead.’ Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg were worse. The Thirty Years War, three centuries earlier, had inflicted greater proportionate loss on Germany’s population, but the physical devastation of 1945 was unparalleled in history: Europe’s great cities had been spared by the First World War, and even by the rampages of Napoleon.
For two years after VE-Day, the NKVD waged a bloody counter-insurgency campaign in Poland and Ukraine, to impose Stalin’s will upon peoples consumed with bitterness at exchanging Nazi tyranny for that of the Soviets. Exiled Poles in the West were dismayed to be denied a place in London’s victory parade, because the new British Labour government declined to upset the Russians. Gen. Władysław Anders wrote, ‘I felt as if I were peeping at a ballroom from behind the curtain of an entrance door through which I might not pass.’ Shortly before Labour took office in July, Anders encountered the US ambassador and British foreign secretary Anthony Eden at a banquet: ‘They greet me politely but without enthusiasm. Since our only crime is that we exist and thereby embarrass Allied policy, I do not consider myself obliged to hide or feel ashamed.’
His bitterness was justified: he and almost 150,000 of his compatriots had fought gallantly with the Allied forces, suffering heavy casualties in Italy and north-west Europe. ‘We, the Poles in uniform integrated into the British armed forces, became an ugly sore on the English conscience,’ wrote Pilot Officer B. Lvov. In 1945 such people found themselves pariahs, for the crime of rejecting a Stalinist puppet regime in their own country. The Poles ended the war as they began it, human sacrifices to the realities of power. Anders, Lvov and many of their comrades chose exile in the West rather than return home to Soviet subjection and probable execution. The Americans and British had delivered half Europe from one totalitarian tyranny, but lacked the political will and the military means to save ninety million people of the eastern nations from falling victim to a new, Soviet bondage that lasted almost half a century. The price of having joined with Stalin to destroy Hitler was high indeed.
In the victorious nations, simple people greeted the outcome of the struggle as a triumph of virtue over evil, heedless of the fashion in which liberation was blighted in many parts of the world. Painted high on the walls of several adjoining houses in housewife Edie Rutherford’s Sheffield street were the words GOD BLESS OUR LADS FOR THIS VICTORY. She and her friends spoke of Churchill: ‘Everyone agreed that we have been well blest in having such a leader. I felt once again great gratitude for being born British.’
Millions of humble folk thought not of global issues, but of movingly personal causes for gratitude. On 7 September 1941, nineteen-year-old gunner Bob Grafton, an east Londoner, had written to his adored girlfriend Dot before embarkation for the Far East: ‘Darling I know that you will wait for me. Darling do you know this. I swear that as long as we are apart I will never never touch another woman either physically or mentally. I do mean that Dot an awful lot … Yours Ever, with Love and Devotion so deep that the fires burn even in sleep, Bob.’ Before Singapore fell, Grafton escaped by junk to Sumatra, then lived wild in the jungle until he was captured by the Japanese in March 1942. Having survived a bondage which included two years on the Burma railway, in September 1945 he wrote to Dot from a homeward-bound troopship: ‘This I know: that it was you of the two of us who had the more difficult task. For I am a man (perhaps prematurely) and men must fight and women must weep. So my share was no exception, yours was … Even if we have lost four years we’ll make life so that it is never regretted.’ Grafton’s story had a happy ending: he married his Dot, and they lived happily ever after.
Gunner David McCormick had been captured in North Africa in December 1941, and spent more than three years in Italian and German PoW camps. A few days after VE-Day his wife met him at Salisbury station. ‘He was very thin, very pale and had the most enormous bump on his forehead. I wore a blue dress with white spots and bows on it, for which I had given several clothing coupons. I can’t remember if we kissed. I don’t think so, not until a little later on when we stopped on the back way to Ditchinhampton. We were both very nervous. He apologised for the bump, explaining that on his first night of freedom some Belgians had entertained a whole bunch of prisoners rather too enthusiastically, and afterwards he had met up with an anti-tank trap. He talked a great deal … He so desperately wanted to get four years “in the bag” off his chest as quickly as possible.’
Many others, however, returned home to discover that old ties were shattered, former passions extinct; they were obliged to content themselves with their own survival. For more millions, there was no return at all
: the previous autumn Kay Kirby had become a presumed widow at twenty-one when her husband, a navigator in Bomber Command, was reported missing over Germany. In the absence of an identified corpse, she nonetheless clung to hope. ‘For years I expected George to turn up. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that he wasn’t coming back … Before George started his tour when he came back on leave unexpectedly, he used to knock on my window with a clothes prop. After George went missing, many times I went to the door because I thought I heard him knocking at my window. Of course there was no one there.’
Intellectuals reflected on the vast experience the world had undergone. Arthur Schlesinger wrote grudgingly: ‘It was, I suppose, a Good War. But like all wars, our war was accompanied by atrocity and sadism, by stupidities and lies, pomposity and chickenshit. War remains hell, but a few wars have been driven by decent purposes and produced beneficial results.’ Schlesinger’s fellow historian Forrest Pogue, who had crossed north-west Europe with the US Army, wrote: ‘The war, while giving me a chance to see more of the world and of all kinds of people, nevertheless confused me … I lived more thoroughly an ordinary life than ever before … I found how much man lives next to the animal … it made me tougher-minded and more tolerant and sympathetic of human frailty … [but also] sufficiently confused so that I have not yet been able to discover any answers.’
In Asia, though handfuls of Japanese soldiers remained in hiding and even sustained guerrilla activity in the Philippines and on remote Pacific islands for months or years, MacArthur and his occupying army were received in Japan with almost slavish obeisance. Many of Hirohito’s warriors who had professed themselves willing to die for their Emperor admitted relief that the sacrifice was not required. Captain Yoshiro Minamoto and thirty crewmen of a kaiten suicide-boat unit emerged from hiding on the island of Tokahishi, off Okinawa, on 23 August, in response to American loudspeaker appeals. ‘I wanted everything done properly,’ said Minamoto, ‘so I had everyone wash their fatigues and clean their weapons. I paraded the men, we bowed towards Tokyo and saluted, then I led a group with a white flag towards the American lines. They treated us very well. I felt happy to have survived.’
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