by A. J. Baime
“The situation today is, in my opinion, grave,” Davies concluded. “But it is not without hope.”
Two days later, after his regular press conference, Truman held another meeting on the Soviet situation with Averell Harriman and other officials. These men were recommending the opposite approach from the one Joseph Davies had urged. According to the meeting’s minutes, “Ambassador Harriman said that the problem with our relations with Russia is the number one problem affecting the future of the world and . . . at present moment we were getting farther and farther apart.”
Harriman believed a hard line was now the last-ditch approach, the only one that the Soviets would understand. Navy secretary Forrestal described Harriman’s position in his diary: “He said that their [the Russians’] conduct would be based upon the principle of power politics in its crudest and most primitive form. He said we must face our diplomatic decisions from here on with the consciousness that half and maybe all of Europe might be communistic by the end of next winter.”
What was the best approach: the hard line that Harriman (the current Moscow ambassador) urged, or the soft line that Davies (a previous Moscow ambassador) advocated?
At noon the following day—Wednesday, May 16—the secretary of war came to the Oval Office to suggest yet another path. Stimson was deeply concerned about the power vacuum forming in Europe following the Third Reich’s collapse.
“All agree,” he informed the president in a memo he delivered during this meeting, “as to the probability of pestilence and famine in central Europe next winter. This is likely to be followed by political revolution and Communist infiltration.”
Stimson believed a primary focus in gaining global political stabilization, particularly regarding the Soviets, should be the reconstruction of Germany. Only a strong Germany would be able to resist the spread of communism, and the German nation anchored the very center of Europe. Stimson argued intensely against the Morgenthau Plan—Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau’s idea to reduce Germany to an agrarian nation, without the industrial capacity to build a military. It was in the United States’ best interest to help rebuild Germany, Stimson argued. If Germany did not have a sound economy, with citizens whose basic needs of life were met, the country would become easy prey to Soviet infiltration. “A solution must be found for [Germany’s] future peaceful existence and it is to the interest of the whole world that they should not be driven by stress of hardship into a non-democratic and necessarily predatory habit of life,” Stimson argued.
“All of this is a tough problem requiring coordination between the Anglo-American allies and Russia,” Stimson concluded.
During Truman’s meeting with Harriman, the ambassador to the Soviet Union had warned the president of frightening consequences if he did not move up the timeline of the proposed Big Three meeting: “The longer the meeting [is] delayed, the worse the situation would get.” Stimson believed otherwise. In two months’ time, the United States was likely to have more power to bargain with. In a direct reference to the atomic bomb, Stimson informed Truman, “We shall probably hold more cards in our hands later than now.” Truman concurred: it was best to wait.
Stimson believed the bomb could be the key to solving some of these conundrums. “It may be necessary to have it out with Russia . . .” he had written in his diary a day before his meeting with Truman, “Over any such tangled wave of problems, the S-1 secret [the atomic bomb] would be dominant.” Regarding the upcoming tripartite meeting, “it seems a terrible thing to gamble with such big stakes in diplomacy without having your master card in your hand.”
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“It seems to me that the need for our triple meeting at the earliest moment is very great,” Churchill cabled Truman on May 21, expressing deep anxiety over “the grave discussions on which the immediate future of the world depends.” The longer it took to work out acceptable agreements with Stalin, Churchill argued, the more difficult it would be.
Truman did not want this meeting to occur until after the first atomic bomb test, but the secret nature of the bomb made this delay impossible to explain, even to Churchill.* Something had to be done in the meantime. An idea came from Harriman and Chip Bohlen in the State Department.
On May 19, at 11 a.m., Truman summoned Harry Hopkins to the White House. Hopkins, Truman said, was going to embark on a mission of unparalleled importance.
Few more enigmatic figures could be found on the Washington scene in 1945 than Harry Hopkins. Nearing his fifty-fifth birthday, the Iowa-born former social worker had been, arguably, Roosevelt’s best friend. During the war years, Hopkins had actually lived in the White House with the Roosevelts, and FDR bestowed upon him extraordinary power. Hopkins had no real job in the State Department, no particularly impressive education, nor any distinctive background that would suggest a career in diplomacy. But Roosevelt trusted him as he did no other. “When he’s talking to some foreign dignitary,” Roosevelt said of Hopkins, “he knows how to slump back in his chair and put his feet up on the conference table and say, ‘Oh, yeah?’” One observer described Hopkins as having “the purity of St. Francis of Assisi combined with the shrewdness of a race track tout.” He dressed in poorly fitting suits, the shoulders frequently flaked with dandruff, and his face often showed frustration, as if his eyes were searching for something they would never find.
By the time Hopkins arrived in Truman’s office, one glance was enough to know that Hopkins was dying. He had been hospitalized for cancer seven years earlier, and doctors had removed more than half of his stomach. Ever since, he had struggled with his health, with hospital stays, a bout of jaundice, difficulty walking, one ailment after another. Hopkins had lost his youngest son in the war, eighteen-year-old Stephen, a marine killed in action in the Marshall Islands. The horror of losing Stephen had done his health no good. At Roosevelt’s funeral service, five weeks before his meeting with Truman, Hopkins “looked like death,” according to Robert Sherwood, one of Roosevelt’s chief speech writers. “The skin of his face [was] a dreadful cold white with apparently no flesh left under it. I believed that he now [at the time of the funeral] had nothing left to live for, that his life had ended with Roosevelt’s.”
The new president had one final mission for Hopkins. It would not be an easy one.
“I asked him to go to Stalin,” Truman wrote in notes of this meeting, “provided his health permitted, and tell [Stalin] just exactly what we intended to have in the way of carrying out the agreements purported to have been made at Yalta—that I was anxious to have a fair understanding with the Russian Government.” Truman told Hopkins to “make it clear to Uncle Joe Stalin that I knew what I wanted—and that I intended to get—peace for the world for at least 90 years.” Truman told Hopkins he could use “diplomatic language or a baseball bat.”
Truman must have known that a Moscow mission could kill Hopkins. But the president had reason to believe that Hopkins could get results, for Hopkins knew Stalin personally. Roosevelt had sent Hopkins to meet Stalin shortly after the Nazis invaded Russia, in 1941. As put by Ambassador Harriman: “Hopkins was the first Western visitor to Moscow after the German attack, when things were going pretty badly. Stalin evidently saw in Hopkins a man who, in spite of ill health, had made that long, exhausting and hazardous journey to bring help. It was an example of courage and determination that impressed Stalin deeply. He had not forgotten.”
Wisely, Truman concluded that he would upset Churchill by sending Hopkins to meet with Stalin, that the prime minister would seize on the absence of Britain’s presence in these meetings. So Truman sent for Joseph Davies, who arrived at the White House at 9 p.m. on May 21. “He wanted me to go to London,” Davies recorded. “He wanted me to explore matters of possible differences with Churchill and get his ideas.” Truman also wanted Davies to stall for time. He revealed to Davies why he could not move up a tripartite meeting, that it could not take place before July. “He told me then of the atomic bomb experiment,” Davies wrote in his diary. “The
test was set for June, but had been postponed until July.” Truman wanted to know whether or not he had an ace in the hole before he sat down at the table with Churchill and Stalin.
On May 23, Harry Hopkins flew to Paris with his wife, Ambassador Harriman, and interpreter Chip Bohlen, en route to Moscow. That same day, Davies took off for London. “Hopkins and Davies left simultaneously and will arrive in London and Moscow about the same time,” Truman wrote in his notes. “[They] will be back in less than ten days and we will see what the result is.”
24
IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF MAY 24, under the cover of darkness in Tokyo, air-raid sirens signaled oncoming waves of American B-29 Superfortresses. From the ground, the bombers could be heard before they could be seen, thousands of 2,200-horsepower engines roaring. Then the ships appeared against the moonlit sky, gliding through moving columns of searchlights casting from the ground. One person in Tokyo described the vision of these bomber aircraft: “unreal, light as fantastic glass dragonflies . . . their long, glinting wings, sharp as blades.” Major General Curtis LeMay had dispatched 550 Superfortresses from bases in the Marianas. The attack wave swept low, under 10,000 feet, the planes slicing through Tokyo’s sky before sunrise and releasing canisters that ignited the city.
“The sheer number of the bombs was incredible,” recalled a French journalist who was living in Tokyo, Robert Guillain. “The carpet [of bombs] unrolled with pitiless regularity, spreading its mat of fire over the flat districts between the port and the hills . . . As soon as they touched the ground, the cylinders spewed fire that leaped, the newspapers said, ‘like bounding tigers.’”
All the next day, Tokyo’s fire crews worked to put out the flames. The following night LeMay’s bombers roared again, and they faced little opposition. This time the Superfortresses struck the grounds of the emperor’s palace. Emperor Hirohito was safe, hiding in a concrete-enforced underground shelter. Firefighters abandoned whole neighborhoods to the flames to save the palace, leaving vast sections of Tokyo to burn. Search crews would collect the bodies from the ashes many hours later. Wrote Guillain: “The last of old Tokyo’s architectural treasures—the ones that had survived the 1923 Earthquake—were burned to the ground: the Shiba pagoda; the Yoyogi temple where ‘the ashes of the true Buddha,’ given to Great Japan in 1942, were kept; the black-and-gold-lacquered tombs of the Tokugawa shoguns; all these perished in the tragic forty-eight hours from May 24 to 26.”
At operational headquarters on Guam, LeMay paced all night during these attacks while chewing on his ever-present cigar. He was all-consumed by the war, and by the idea that his command could end it. Nothing else seemed to exist for him. Of this new attack wave, LeMay later wrote in his memoirs: “We plastered the as-yet-unburned areas of Tokyo with nearly nine thousand tons of incendiaries on the 23rd and 25th.” (The planes took off on those dates and reached their targets after midnight, on the 24th and 26th.) LeMay had recently written to his superiors in the Pentagon: “I feel that the destruction of Japan’s ability to wage war lies within the capability of this command, provided its maximum capacity is exerted unstintingly during the next six months, which is considered to be the critical period.”
American newspapers reported the May 24 firebombing on their front pages. No outrage came from the American public. All the critics who had hurled calumny at the British for their willingness to bomb civilian population centers in Nazi Germany now remained silent. In fact, popular American opinion now seemed to embrace this form of warfare. Newspaper articles ran long columns with pictures of the factories where the firebombs were built. FILLING “GOOP BOMBS” THAT ARE FRYING JAPAN LIKE MIXING CAKE DOUGH, stated a Boston Daily Globe headline. “The M-69s [firebombs] become miniature flamethrowers,” reported Time magazine, “that hurl cheesecloth socks full of furiously flaming goo [napalm] for 100 yards. Anything these socks hit is enveloped by clinging, fiery pancakes.”
Only Secretary of War Stimson urged an end to the indiscriminate killing. Stimson went to see the president. “I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “First, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.”
Why had the rules changed—from precision bombing to the firebombing of civilian neighborhoods? What about the Japanese was different, in the eyes of America, from the Third Reich?
Historians have made much of the inherent racism in America against the Japanese during the war, and the fact that the War Relocation Authority had gathered up approximately 120,000 “individuals of Japanese ancestry” and interred them in camps located around the West Coast, under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. The mainstream press printed cartoons of “Japs” as apes swinging from vines with machine guns in their paws. They were “yellow bastards,” “yellow monkeys,” and vermin-infested “louseous Japanicas.” But American feelings toward the Japanese went beyond racism. A hatred had sunk deep into the American consciousness following Pearl Harbor, a hatred that did not come into play in the European war, even toward the Nazis.
Even before the United States entered World War II, it became apparent that the war in the Far East was different from the one in Europe. Americans read about frenzies of killing by the Japanese, notably the Rape of Nanking in 1937. (“Japanese atrocities marked fall of Nanking,” the New York Times reported. “Nanking invaders executed 20,000.”) A cult of death among Japanese soldiers terrified the Allies and set these soldiers apart from the German forces fighting in Europe. Mass suicides among both civilians and warriors, the idea that death was a better choice for the Japanese soldier than to be captured as a POW—this form of warfare labeled the Eastern enemy as zealots willing to die for their emperor, whom they revered as a deity. Thus the popular press in the United States characterized the enemy in the East as a “racial menace” fighting a holy war.
Atrocities committed by the Japanese could not be characterized as anything more evil than the Nazi Final Solution. But the Nazis had not attacked Americans on American soil. And among high-level military ranks, there was more to the story. It was the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war that sparked hatred toward the Eastern foe among Pentagon operatives, who would have had access to information regarding treatment of American and British POWs. Allied intelligence had plenty of evidence of beheadings, torture, and executions.
American military officials felt it their duty to finish the Japanese off at the cost of as few of their own soldiers as possible. That meant crushing the enemy, using any and all tools at the military’s disposal, firebombs included. As Admiral Leahy wrote, “The best psychological warfare to use on those barbarians was bombs, and we used bombs vigorously.” General Hap Arnold, head of the army air forces, summed up what many military figures in America were thinking, in his diary during the days of the Tokyo firebombings:
“Apparently, the atrocities by the Japs have never been told in the US; babies thrown up in the air and caught on bayonets, autopsies on living people, burning prisoners to death by sprinkling them with gasoline and throwing in a hand grenade to start a fire . . . More and more of the stories, which can apparently be substantiated. Stories of men and boys being killed while all girls and women from ten years of age upward were raped by 1 Jap division retreating from this section of Manila. They are not pretty stories but they explain why the Japs can expect anything . . . There is no feeling of sparing any Japs here, men, women, or children; gas, fire, anything to exterminate the entire race exemplifies the feeling.”
Arnold admitted in his diary that these specific instances could not be entirely verified, but the torture and executions of POWs could be, and they explain much about the attitude of American military decision makers in 1945. The firebombing raids of Major General Curtis LeMay were t
he most clear example.
Still young in his presidency, Truman followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Roosevelt. He responded with no action following LeMay’s widely reported firebombings, leaving the conduct of the war to his trusted military commanders. Soon fate would thrust this decision making into his own hands.
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On May 25, in the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs met to formulate their final plans for the future of the war with Japan. They disagreed with Curtis LeMay, who believed firebombing alone could bring Japan to its knees. As they had earlier, the Joint Chiefs came to the conclusion that a ground invasion of the Japanese islands was imperative in forcing unconditional surrender. They laid out the strategy for victory in the East as follows, according to the meeting’s minutes:
A. Apply full and unremitting pressure against Japan by strategic bombing and carrier raids in order to reduce war-making capacity and to demoralize the country, in preparation for invasion.
B. Tighten blockade by means of air and sea patrols, and of air striking force and light naval forces to include blocking passages between Korea and Kyushu [the southernmost island of Japan’s mainland] and routes through the Yellow Sea.
C. Conduct only such contributory operations as are essential to establish the conditions prerequisite to invasion.
D. Invade Japan at the earliest practicable date.
E. Occupy such areas in the industrial complex of Japan as are necessary to bring about unconditional surrender and to establish absolute military control.
Three days after this Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew came to see Truman with a novel idea. Grew arrived at Truman’s office at 12:35 p.m. on May 28 with special counsel to the president Sam Rosenman, a man of gifted intelligence and thoroughly trusted by Truman. With Rosenman listening, Grew laid out a scenario. Even before Truman took over on April 12, Pentagon officials had decided that the invasion of Japan was a necessity. The aim in Japan was to defeat the enemy with the least possible loss of American lives. “The Japanese are a fanatical people,” Grew noted, “and are capable of fighting to the last ditch and the last man. If they do this, the cost in American lives will be unpredictable.” The Japanese worshipped their emperor like a god, Grew said, and Grew would know. He had served as ambassador to Japan for much of the 1930s, and at the time of Pearl Harbor. If the emperor’s fate was in the balance, Grew believed, the Japanese would never surrender.