by A. J. Baime
Just before 7:30 p.m. eastern time, Truman walked into the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, where Roosevelt had delivered his fireside chats over radio to the nation. Radio equipment was all set up, microphones with cords snaking along the floor. Truman sat at a desk with a speech spread out before him. His address would be broadcast directly into the Opera House in San Francisco, where already the delegations had hushed to silence in anticipation, and over radio at home and abroad. His comments were brief and to the point. Invoking the “great humanitarian” Roosevelt, Truman told the gathering in the Opera House: “You members of this Conference are to be the architects of the better world. In your hands rests our future . . .
“The world has experienced a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice,” Truman said. “At no time in history has there been a more important Conference, nor a more necessary meeting, than this one in San Francisco, which you are opening today.”
San Francisco had become a litmus test for American-Soviet tension. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who would do much of the negotiating by Stettinius’s side as a key figure in the American delegation, wrote bluntly of his disillusion in his diary: “It would be a relatively simple matter to dynamite the new Peace League . . . What would that do for Poland? It would simply leave Russia in complete possession of everything she wants . . . There would be no hope for justice except through World War Number Three immediately.”
This was not the first time the international community had attempted to create a global peace league. Truman could recall as a young man reading avidly of Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to convince Congress to embrace the treaty of the League of Nations, after World War I. The League of Nations would save the world from future wars, Wilson argued. But Wilson failed in his mission to get Congress on board, and the League of Nations failed, as a result. The league’s collapse crushed Wilson physically (he suffered a stroke) and—many believed—had a great deal to do with the war now being fought all over the world.
Truman could only hope that this time the new peace league would survive, and that it would fulfill its role: to prevent war. After his meeting about the atomic bomb earlier in the day, he knew that the stakes in global affairs were rising fast, beyond anything that Woodrow Wilson had ever confronted.
One can only surmise as to his conversation with Bess when he returned to the Blair House that night. It had been a long day. He had been fully briefed on the war’s greatest secret for the first time. He had spoken to Winston Churchill for the first time, regarding the imminent collapse of the Third Reich. He had addressed the United Nations Conference and the world via radio. He could only imagine what kind of surprises tomorrow would bring.
20
ON THE SAME DAY Truman first learned the detailed story of the bomb, outside Torgau, a war-ravaged village twenty-eight miles northeast of Leipzig in Germany, an American officer named William Robertson of Los Angeles stepped over a fallen girder from a destroyed bridge at the Elbe River and introduced himself to a Russian soldier, patting the Russian on the back. The local time was 4:45 p.m. Second Lieutenant Robertson, from General Courtney Hodges’s U.S. First Army, reached out his hand to shake the Russian’s.
“Put it there,” the American said.
It was the handshake heard around the world.
Minutes later a Russian voice came over the radio in the Americans’ encampment: “This is the Red Army. This is the Red Army calling the American Army. We are calling to establish radio contact.”
Eisenhower’s armies and the Soviet forces had met. They had cut Nazi Germany in two, joining the eastern and western fronts.
Also on this same day, some sixty miles eastward, Russian troops began to storm neighborhoods of Berlin, which had been reduced to piles of rubble by the Allied bombing campaigns. The city “looked more like a giant junk heap today than the heart of the Capitol of the Third Reich,” wrote one embedded American war correspondent. The Germans continued to return fire, but it was now clear in short time that the Russians would capture Berlin. Somewhere within the city, Hitler was hiding.
Truman, Stalin, and Churchill had already agreed on a statement each government would issue upon news that the Russian and Anglo-American armies had joined at the Elbe River. From Washington, Truman released the statement on April 27. Stalin did the same in Moscow, where residents’ ears were soon assaulted by twenty-four salvos of ceremonial gunfire, the shots punctuating the jingle of thousands of bells ringing all over the city. In London, Churchill made the announcement simultaneously, and Londoners poured from their homes to gather in the streets.
“The last faint, desperate hope of Hitler and his gangster Government has been extinguished,” Truman’s statement read. Then: “This is not the hour of final victory in Europe, but the hour draws near, the hour for which all the American people, all the British people and all the Soviet people have toiled and prayed so long.”
Over the next few days events moved swiftly. On April 28, the day after Truman released his Elbe Day statement, German officials appeared at Allied headquarters in Italy, where they were handed paperwork documenting the surrender terms for the Nazis in that country. Representatives of the American, British, and Russian armies were present. On this same day, at Giulino di Mezzegra near Lake Como, Italian partisans shot to death former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini along with his young mistress, Clara Petacci, and seventeen other Fascist followers. Mussolini—who had aligned himself with Hitler and the Axis powers and had hurled Italy into the war with all the resources he could muster—had been caught trying to flee into Switzerland. His last words before execution were, reportedly, “No! No!” The partisani took his corpse to Milan, and there he was left on display in a city square. Locals lined up to spit on Mussolini’s bullet-pierced head. One reporter described the scene: “The brains which took Fascist Italy into the war oozed onto the filth of a dirt plot in the center of Milan.”On April 29, one day after the Mussolini execution, German military officials—wearing civilian clothes—signed the surrender orders at Allied headquarters in Caserta, and the war in Italy ended. Truman gave a statement that Japan as well as Germany should “understand the meaning of these events.”
On this same day United States forces liberated the Nazi death camp at Dachau. Among their findings there were more than thirty railroad cars containing decomposing corpses. More than thirty thousand prisoners were living at Dachau at the time of liberation.
The following day, April 30, an unconfirmed report came over BBC Radio in Britain, claiming that “Hitler died at noon today in his underground headquarters in the Tiergarten in Berlin with [propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels at his bedside.” One day later, radio stations within Germany also reported that Hitler was dead. While no officials were confirming any reports, Truman received word from army intelligence that the story was true. At the time he was informed, he was lying on a table in his bathing suit getting a massage in the White House, surrounded by chatting aides, when a messenger delivered the news in a memorandum on a yellow piece of paper. Truman read the memo, and the group discussed the news, their language surely peppered with epithets. “The words were the comments of men in a bathhouse,” recalled one man present.
During Truman’s regular press conference on May 2, a reporter put forward the question: “Mr. President, would you care to comment on the death of Adolf Hitler reported, or Mussolini?”
“Well, of course, the two principal war criminals will not have to come to trial,” Truman said, the room jammed as usual. “And I am very happy they are out of the way.”
“Well, does that mean, sir, that we know officially that Hitler is dead?”
“Yes . . . We have the best—on the best authority possible to obtain at this time that Hitler is dead. But how he died we are not—we are not familiar with the details as yet.”
(The facts were as follows: Hitler’s wife, Eva Braun, whom he had married on April 29 in a private ceremony in his secret Berlin bunker, comm
itted suicide by swallowing prussic acid, on April 30. With her slumped body to his left, Hitler shot himself in his right temple with his 7.65-millimeter Walther. He was ten days past his fifty-sixth birthday. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels followed the next day, shooting his wife and then himself. The Goebbels’s six children were poisoned. While the bodies of Hitler, Goebbels, and their spouses were burned, the Goebbels children were found laid next to one another unblemished, as if asleep in a bed. All were wearing white.)
On the same day that Truman acknowledged Hitler’s death, Stalin announced officially that Berlin had fallen. The Red Army had taken the German capital. Also on May 2, Eisenhower cabled the combined chiefs of staff (the top military leaders in both Washington and London) from Allied headquarters in Reims, France, advising that General Blumentritt, a German group commander, had made contact, promising to surrender his group the following day. Eisenhower noted that he would make sure Russian general Susloparov would be informed and invited to the proceeding.
Over the next days Truman received reports, sometimes hourly, on the collapse of the Third Reich. The Americans feared what the Nazis would do to U.S. war prisoners still being held. Truman gave a statement on the matter, and this statement was later dropped in massive numbers of leaflets from airplanes over Germany: “Any person guilty of maltreating or allowing any Allied prisoners of war, internees or deported citizens to be maltreated, whether in battle zone, on lines of communication, in a camp, hospital, prison or elsewhere, will be ruthlessly pursued and brought to punishment.” Eisenhower reported that German soldiers and commanders had begun surrendering en masse to the Americans and British to be taken prisoner, because they feared torture and execution if they were taken prisoner by the Russians. “All resistance collapsed,” Eisenhower recorded. “Swarms of Germans . . . began giving themselves up to the Anglo-American armies. American troops standing on the Elbe daily received these prisoners by the thousands.”
All that remained before the war in Europe would end was the formalities of the final unconditional surrender—still a week away.
In the wake of the Third Reich’s collapse, Europe was left annihilated, and American officials were just beginning to understand the depths of the despair. In France, according to the nation’s Ministry of Public Health, more than 50 percent of children in industrial areas had rickets, while 70 to 80 percent suffered diminished growth due to malnutrition. A third of children in Belgium were tubercular. Truman called on Herbert Hoover—the only living former American president—to report on Europe’s food problem. Hoover had made similar studies during World War I, and so he set to work again. Among his reports, he made the following conclusion: “It is now 11:59 on the clock of starvation.” White House special counsel Judge Sam Rosenman had gone on a fact-finding mission in Europe, and his report landed with a thud on half the desks in Washington.
“The needs of the liberated countries of Northwest Europe are grave,” Rosenman wrote. It would fall to the United States to feed the world’s hungry, and quickly. “It is the established policy of this Government to accept this responsibility as far as it is possible to do so.”
Soon the four powers—the United States, Britain, Russia, France—would move into their respective zones within Germany. Only now this occupation plan seemed fraught with danger. When it was made, the Russians appeared a trusted ally, with expectations of friendship and postwar collaboration. Now a different image of Stalin and his Red Army had come into focus. The Soviets had pushed Axis forces over a thousand miles across the continent in a campaign of savage fighting; rumors of these Red Army soldiers’ behavior had reached the West, stories of pillage and rape reminiscent of conquering armies from medieval times.
“I fear terrible things have happened during the Russian advance through Germany to the Elbe,” Churchill cabled Truman. “The proposed withdrawal of the United States Army to the occupational lines which were arranged with the Russians and Americans . . . would mean the tide of Russian domination sweeping forward 120 miles on a front of 300 or 400 miles.” Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the frontier from the North Cape in Norway across the Baltic—all this territory could easily fall into the Soviets’ grasp. The Russian frontier “would include all the great capitals of Middle Europe, including Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia.” Churchill concluded: “This constitutes an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel.”
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Throughout the final days of April, as Truman received updates from Eisenhower’s headquarters in Europe, he was also receiving regular reports from the other side of the globe, in San Francisco. If the United Nations Conference was a litmus test of American-Soviet relations, the initial readings were frightening.
The Russians and the Americans could not agree on the first matter: who would chair the conference. As host, the American delegation should chair the meetings, Stettinius insisted. That was tradition for the hosting nation at international conferences. Molotov would not stand for it, arguing for four equal conference presidents, from the United States, Britain, Russia, and China. If the two countries could not agree on this simple matter, how were they going to come to agreement on a charter for a new world peace organization?
From the Fairmont Hotel, an exasperated Edward Stettinius called the president. He asked if he should “stick to my guns” and demand that, as host, he remain the conference’s presiding officer. “It is precedent,” Stettinius told Truman. “There never has been an international conference where the host is not presiding officer.”
“Stick to your guns,” said Truman.
The delegations faced so many disagreements in the opening days at San Francisco, it seemed the UN Conference was destined not to bring the world together but to push the major forces farther apart. The two powers quarreled over which countries should be recognized and invited to the conference, which should get votes in the UN Security Council, and whether or not a world peace organization should take precedence over already-established regional treaties. Still, Poland remained the crux of the problem. During the first days of May, a shocking news story further complicated the Polish situation. Sixteen members of the Polish underground had been invited to Moscow for negotiations; once they arrived, they were arrested and had since vanished. Their lives were presumed to be in grave danger. The American delegation in San Francisco was meeting in the penthouse suite at the Fairmont Hotel when the news arrived, via telephone call. “A serious shadow fell across the meeting,” Senator Vandenberg wrote in his diary. “This is bad business.”
And still, Molotov was demanding that the Soviet puppet regime in Poland be recognized and invited to the conference. Stettinius flatly refused. The only thing the delegations in San Francisco could agree on was how beautiful the city was.
One night early in the conference, Chip Bohlen of the State Department walked into the bar at the Fairmont and found Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister, sipping a whiskey and soda. “Bohlen,” Masaryk said, “what can one do with these Russians?” Without waiting for a response, Masaryk said, “Out of the clear blue sky I got a note from Molotov saying Czechoslovakia must vote for the Soviet proposition in regard to Poland, or else forfeit the friendship of the Soviet government. What kind of way is that to behave to a country that is trying to be friendly?” He paused. “You can be on your knees and this is not enough for the Russians.”
21
ON THE MORNING OF MAY 7 the Trumans moved into the White House—Harry, Bess, Margaret, and Bess’s mother, Mrs. Wallace. It had required twenty trucks to haul Eleanor Roosevelt’s possessions out of the executive mansion. The Trumans required one to move in, for they owned very little, and most of what they did own was in Missouri. Truman had never had the money to buy his own house. Now he was living in the most famous house in America.
The home smelled of fresh paint—Nile-green hallways, off-white rooms, with a cream color for the president’s second-floor bedroom and lavender-gray for th
e First Lady’s suite. (Harry and Bess would sleep in separate bedrooms, as was custom in the White House.) Getting the pianos (one for Harry, one for Margaret) into the house was a challenge; movers had to take off the legs and swing them through a second-story window. Bess had supervised the purchase of new furniture and other necessities with the help of a Kansas City decorator. A bill for $419.45 from the Washington department store Woodward & Lothrop—covering everything from eight shower curtains to a new mattress and box spring—was paid by the National Park Service, which was responsible for the White House. The National Gallery provided paintings on loan for the mansion’s walls.
There was much to learn. Edith Helm, the White House social secretary, was on hand to help. As was Mrs. Nesbitt, who ran the kitchen, and who, the Trumans would soon learn, had a habit of serving overcooked brussels sprouts with unfailing regularity. Tall and kind-faced, Alonzo Fields was the first African American to serve as head White House butler, having gotten the job under Herbert Hoover thirteen years earlier, just before the Roosevelts moved in. In the basement, the White House’s nervous chief of mails, Ira Smith, carefully inspected all incoming packages with a staff of twenty-two. “Cranks are just as likely to use the postal service as any other method of trying to get explosives into the president’s office,” Smith admitted.
The White House staff—housekeepers, servants, gardeners, carpenters, a total of thirty-two, with head usher Howell Crim ranking highest—was paid out of a $150,000 annual appropriation. The president was responsible for food, however, for his family and for the staff. For the first time in his life, Truman was making a lot of money; the president’s salary was $75,000, up from $15,000 as VP. But food for the staff and for personal guests could get expensive. Mr. Crim advised Truman to set aside $1,000 a month for food. That was half as much as the Roosevelts allowed, but as Crim told the president, surely the Trumans would not live on the grand scale that the Roosevelts did. Mrs. Roosevelt had left the kitchen well stocked, so Bess wrote her a check and a thank-you note.