by A. J. Baime
Davies left the United Kingdom with quite an impression of Churchill: “A great man, but first, last, and all the time, a great Englishman for Britain and the Empire, first, last, and all the time, with even Peace a second consideration.”
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Nine days later, on June 13, Harry Hopkins arrived at the White House, returning from Moscow. Servants had set a breakfast table on a portico that offered a rare view of the capital city: the Washington Monument poking at a humid sky, and—behind it, on the banks of the Potomac—the Jefferson Memorial (completed two years earlier). Along with Truman, Joseph Davies and Admiral Leahy sat down at the breakfast table to hear Hopkins’s account of his mission to Moscow.
Truman told Hopkins that he was looking spry. The president admitted that when he sent Hopkins off to Moscow, he feared Hopkins might not make it back alive. In truth, Hopkins was concealing a 102-degree fever on this morning. He had lost so much weight, his seersucker suit dangled from his shoulder bones. Hopkins had kept Truman up to date on his discussions with Stalin through long cables from the Moscow embassy, so Truman knew the basic story. The meetings had spread out over twelve days, in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. The Russians were most obsequious in their attempts to impress the visiting Americans, taking a particular liking to Mrs. Hopkins—a former editor for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar— who had accompanied her husband to supervise his health. (“[She] had an extraordinary effect on the Soviet marshals,” translator Chip Bohlen recalled. The Soviet military men crowded around her, “practically rendering her invisible.”)
From the start, Hopkins laid out the situation for Stalin. “Two months ago,” Hopkins began, according to meeting minutes, “there had been overwhelming sympathy among the American people for the Soviet Union and complete support for President Roosevelt’s politics which the Marshal [Stalin] knew so well.” Since then, the American citizens “were seriously disturbed about their relations with Russia. In fact, in the last six weeks deterioration of public opinion had been so serious as to affect adversely the relations between the two nations.”
Stalin countered. In the Soviet Union, influential circles “felt a certain alarm in regard to the attitude of the United States Government,” he said. “It was their impression that the American attitude towards the Soviet Union had perceptibly cooled once it became obvious that Germany was defeated.” The Soviets believed that, with Hitler out of the picture, the Americans no longer needed their friends in Moscow. Herein lay the reason why Truman’s cancellation of Lend-Lease had such a stinging impact in the Kremlin.
When Hopkins steered the conversation to the Far East, the gimlet-eyed Soviet had some surprises for the Americans. For the first time, Stalin committed to a date on which the Soviets would join the war against Japan: August 8. On that day the Red Army would be “properly deployed” to attack Japanese forces occupying the Manchuria region of China. Stalin explained that the Russian people “must have a good reason for going to war.” Truman wanted the Soviets to join the war against Japan because he knew this would save American lives. However, it would also mean the blood of Soviet soldiers, and Stalin was not about to give this away for free. In exchange for Soviet participation in the Far East, on top of the demands he was making of China, Stalin had other trophies in mind. According to excerpts of Hopkins’s report, Stalin had come to the following conclusions regarding Japan:
Japan is doomed and the Japanese know it.
Peace feelers are being put out by certain elements in Japan . . .
a. The Soviet Union prefers to go through with unconditional surrender and destroy once and for all the military might and forces of Japan . . . [If the Japanese were not forced into unconditional surrender] they will start at once to plan a war of revenge.
b. However, he [Stalin] feels that if we stick to unconditional surrender the Japs will not give up and we will have to destroy them as we did Germany.
Then Stalin uttered what appeared to be his main prize. According to Hopkins’s report: “The Marshal expects that Russia will share in the actual occupation of Japan and wants an agreement with the British and us as to occupation zones.”
This was a red flag. Truman had no interest in having the Soviets occupy any part of Japan.
Stalin promised that, when his troops poured over the Chinese border into Manchuria to push out the Japanese occupying forces, he would have no designs on Chinese territory itself. “He stated categorically that he had no territorial claims against China and mentioned specifically Manchuria and Sinkiang and that in all areas his troops entered to fight the Japanese he would respect Chinese sovereignty,” Hopkins informed Truman.
The question was, should the Americans trust that Stalin would keep his word? Or would Soviet influence move deep into China, on the coattails of the Red Army? And then into Japan itself? The American government would have to respond to Stalin’s demands, which put the president in an extraordinary position. If he agreed to Soviet demands, Stalin’s influence would push into the East. If Truman did not, the United States would fight Japan without Soviet assistance, and more American soldiers would die.
Truman informed Hopkins and Davies that their missions were important moments in the context of this war, and the American people deserved to know about them. In the United States the free press warranted information, and they would get it. The group moved down to the Oval Office, where doors were then flung open for the press. At that moment, “a battery of photographers greeted us,” recalled Davies. Hopkins and Davies answered questions from newspaper reporters and smiled for newsreel cameras. As Harry Hopkins’s biographer (and FDR speech writer) Robert Sherwood later wrote, “This was an extraordinary moment in Hopkins’s life, for he now found himself in the thoroughly unfamiliar position of enjoying a very good press. He was even, for a few days, something of a national hero.”
The mission to Moscow was the last for fifty-four-year-old Harry Hopkins. He was soon back in the hospital, and he died less than eight months later—January 29, 1946.
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BY THE END OF TRUMAN’S SECOND WEEK alone in the White House, he began to feel like a haunted man.
“I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches,” he wrote Bess on June 12, “all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy [Andrew Jackson, presumably] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt] . . . The din is almost unbearable.” Truman was now two months into his presidency. “Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice President,” he wrote Bess. “Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems real.” Three days later Truman wrote Bess again, following a phone call: “It was nice to talk with you last night. I was so tired and so lonesome I did not know what to do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt attended a luncheon at the White House around this time, and she described Truman in these terms: “His family is gone, the house is bare & stiff & he’s the loneliest man I ever saw. He’s not accustomed to night work . . . and he doesn’t like it. He’s not at ease & no one else is. I am so sorry for him & he tries so hard.”
In his first two months as president, Truman had devoted a majority of his time to foreign affairs, but domestic issues were becoming increasingly critical. He submitted his first military budget to Congress on Monday, June 11. (The total program for the new fiscal year would run $39,019,790,474—a 25 percent cut in military spending from the year earlier, reflecting the end of hostilities in Europe.) There were labor strikes that required executive orders from the president, so the federal government could take over factories, coal mines, and railroads, all critical to the war effort. Truman called on farmers across the nation to increase food production in every possible way: “The supply lines to feed our troops and the millions fighting and working with them are the longest in the histo
ry of warfare.”
He was still searching for advisors he could trust with respect to the home front. He confided in his press secretary, Charlie Ross, his federal loan administrator, John Snyder, and White House special counsel/speech writer Sam Rosenman that they were his three most trusted confidants with respect to domestic policy. “Took Ross, Snyder and Rosenman to the ‘House’ for lunch,” Truman wrote in a diary entry. “Gave them a libation before we went to the daily dining room for lunch. Told the three of them that they were most in my confidence and that I wanted frank and unadulterated statements of fact to me from them—and that when they couldn’t treat me on that basis, they’d be of no use to me.”
Regarding his politics, he “has answered by actions the question on every lip at the time of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” noted a Chicago Tribune columnist. “What kind of President will Truman make?” He had proven a Jeffersonian Democrat, as he defined the term. He was out for the little guy, the common man, workers and farmers, for all those who fell easy prey to the greed and manipulation of the powerful forces that capitalism sometimes fostered. His liberalism raised some eyebrows on Capitol Hill even among some right-leaning Democrats, but Truman was prepared to dig in and fight on domestic issues, as Americans would soon find out. As he once said, “The President has to look out for the interests of the 150 million people who can’t afford lobbyists in Washington.” He would fight for the kind of man he had once been but was no more—an ordinary American.
Still, as a wartime president, he had to focus primarily on the global emergency. June 18 would prove to be a critical day, for the Truman administration and the war.
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At 3:30 p.m. on June 18, Truman called a meeting to order of his Joint Chiefs of Staff and his top civilian cabinet advisors from the War Department. The brain trust of the American military gathered. Here sat General George Marshall, Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Lieutenant General I. C. Eaker of the army air forces (representing General Arnold, recovering from a heart attack), and the chief of the president’s staff, Fleet Admiral Leahy. Secretary of War Stimson was in the room, as were Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. The president wanted to know from each an opinion on the most efficient means of forcing Japan to surrender unconditionally, and to bring the war to an end.
General Marshall spoke first, reiterating arguments he had already posed but now with more detail. The situation in Japan was “practically identical” to the situation in Europe before the Normandy invasion, Marshall said. He believed that “the only course to pursue” with respect to Japan was the course that had brought the Nazis to their knees: a ground invasion. He had chosen the island of Kyushu at the southern end of Japan’s mainland for the landing, and he set D-day at November 1—four and a half months’ time.
Marshall listed the reasons for the timing: “Our estimates are that our air action will have smashed practically every industrial target worth hitting in Japan as well as destroying huge areas in Jap cities,” he said. “The Japanese Navy, if any still exists, will be completely powerless. Our sea action and air power will have cut Jap reinforcement capabilities from the mainland to negligible proportions.” Any delay past November 1 could force a further delay of up to six months due to winter weather, he explained.
The general then discussed what could be expected in casualties. The United States had suffered roughly 20,000 casualties (killed, wounded, missing) in the invasion of Iwo Jima, against an estimated 25,000 Japanese (killed and taken prisoner, for there was no way to even guess how many were wounded). In Okinawa—the fiercest fought ground battle of the Far East war, and one in which the U.S. forces were on the brink of declaring victory—the Americans had suffered 34,000 army and 7,700 navy casualties, against 81,000 Japanese (the latter number being “not a complete count,” according to the military statisticians). U.S. casualties in the first thirty days of the Normandy invasion had been 42,000. There was no way to estimate the number of casualties expected in the invasion of mainland Japan, but Marshall did say this: “It is a grim fact that there is not an easy, bloodless way to victory in war and it is the thankless task of the leaders to maintain their firm outward front which holds the resolution of their subordinates.”
Marshall was convinced that “every individual moving to the Pacific should be indoctrinated with a firm determination to see [the invasion] through.” He put the number of troops required for the operation at 766,700. The invasion plan was as follows: (1) to have the Russians attack the Japanese occupying Manchuria in China; (2) to “vitalize the Chinese” with air support and supplies so they could handle the Japanese occupying other parts of their country; and (3) all of which would allow the Americans—with British aid—to go after mainland Japan.
Truman went around the room and heard not a single dissent. Lieutenant General Eaker of the air forces noted that he had a fresh cable from his boss, General Arnold, saying he too agreed the invasion should move forward. Stimson went along with the plan, with reservations. He had visited Japan years earlier when he had served as governor-general of the Philippines, under President Coolidge, and he had followed the politics of Japan for longer than anyone else at the table. He felt he knew the Japanese more personally. He believed that there were a lot of Japanese citizens not interested in fighting this war, but if this “submerged class” was attacked on their homeland, they would fight savagely. It would be a terrifying, bloody ordeal. Truman also wondered aloud if the invasion by the white man would further impel the Japanese to combat with religious zeal.
Leahy brought up unconditional surrender. He feared that an insistence on unconditional surrender “would result only in making the Japanese desperate and thereby increase our casualties.” Leahy believed unconditional surrender was unnecessary, that the United States could agree to softer terms in exchange for fewer lives lost. For example, the United States could allow the Japanese emperor to remain in power. Might not the enemy surrender, if the enemy was told it could retain its monarchy?
Truman was increasingly wary of this argument. The shock of Pearl Harbor was still fresh in the American consciousness. Would a conditional surrender be construed as a failure on the part of the Truman administration? Even a stab in the back of the deceased former president, FDR? This whole war was a result, many believed, of the failure of the United States to force complete unconditional surrender on the enemy in the last war. If the Americans had truly accomplished that after World War I, the argument went, there was no way Pearl Harbor or the rise of Hitler could have occurred. As Eleanor Roosevelt had written in June 1944: “We gave up unconditional surrender the last time . . . and now we have sacrificed thousands of lives because we did not do a thorough job.”
The pressure was on Truman to not make that mistake again.
The Soviets had promised to join the war on August 8. Truman asked if the decision on the invasion should be delayed, as the declaration of war by the USSR could be enough to push the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. All agreed, this matter was of major importance.
When the president asked one final time if there was unanimous opinion in the room regarding plans for a ground invasion, all agreed, it should be a go. Leahy remembered watching Truman at this meeting. “Truman was always a good listener,” Leahy recalled, “and I could not gauge exactly what his own feeling was. He did indicate in our discussion that he was completely favorable toward defeating our Far Eastern enemy with the smallest possible loss of American lives.”
At the end of this meeting, Truman turned to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who had not yet spoken.
“McCloy, you didn’t express yourself,” Truman said (according to McCloy’s recollections), “and nobody gets out of this room without standing up and being counted. Do you think I have any reasonable alternative to the decision [on the invasion] which has just been made?”
McCloy turned to his boss, Stimson, who said, “Say what you feel about it.”
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sp; “Well, I do think you’ve got an alternative,” McCloy said. “And I think it’s an alternative that ought to be explored and that, really, we ought to have our heads examined if we don’t explore some other method by which we can terminate this war than just by another conventional attack and landing.”
McCloy began by saying that he agreed that the Japanese might surrender if they were given word that they could retain their monarch, Emperor Hirohito. Then McCloy brought up the bomb. “Well as soon as I mentioned the word ‘bomb’—the atomic bomb—even in that select circle, it was sort of a shock,” he recalled. “You didn’t mention the bomb out loud; it was like mentioning Skull and Bones in polite society at Yale. It just wasn’t done.”
McCloy argued that the United States should tell the enemy of the bomb, and if Japan did not surrender, it would be used. He said, “I think our moral position would be better if we gave them a specific warning of the bomb.”
The response, as McCloy remembered the conversation: “We don’t know that it will go off; suppose it doesn’t go off; our prestige will be greatly marred.”
“All the scientists have told us that the thing will go,” McCloy said. “It's just a matter of testing it out now, but they’re quite certain from reports I’ve seen that this bomb is a success . . .”
Truman said the group should “explore this,” but decisions with regard to the bomb could not be made until it was tested successfully. Truman ordered the Joint Chiefs to move ahead with plans for a ground invasion of Japan, an order that would begin the process of putting more than three quarters of a million Americans in harm’s way.
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