by A. J. Baime
Later that night, at his villa, Truman received Secretary of War Stimson, who came bearing another cryptic communication from Washington regarding the atomic bomb test in New Mexico.
Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy [the bomb being ready for use against Japan] is as husky as his big brother [the Trinity test shot]. The light in his eyes discernible from here [Washington DC] to Highhold [Stimson’s private estate on Long Island] and could have heard his screams from here to my farm.
Numerous accounts of Potsdam describe Truman in moments of pensive repose at his villa. He was worried. All three delegations understood that, even before the conference began, powerful forces were at work, undermining its success. The Big Three were emerging from the war as victors, but they were entrenched in economic and political instabilities that set their best interests in conflict. Historians would forever debate the cause and effect of these instabilities, and while certain circumstances seem self-evident today, they were not at the time.
The Americans saw themselves as world policemen and moral arbiters. But did their capitalist interests and their suspicion of the Soviets subjugate objective reasoning? Would the inexperience of their new president come into play? Britain—the Gilded Age’s greatest power—was a fading flame. Even as the Potsdam Conference began, the Big Three was being called the Big Two and a Half. The Soviets were the most vexing. While their objectives at the negotiating table seemed relatively clear, their motivations were far from it. These motivations would only become more understood through time. The world’s only communist nation saw itself as an island in a sea boiling with predators. The story of Russia had been a story of invasions. Through the years, Russia had been attacked by everyone from the Mongols to Napoleon. For centuries, marauding tribes had plundered the land now known as the USSR. In more recent times Russia had fought two wars against invading German armies and had lost a war with Japan, in 1904–1905. Only now after all these generations had the country emerged as a major global power. Stalin saw in every neighboring state a chance to influence the future and create security for the USSR through control of these neighboring governments via secret police, authority over the press, and puppet regimes.
Herein lay the reason why Stalin had committed so much blood to the war and was willing to sacrifice more in the fight with Japan. Stalin would see some twenty-four million of his subjects, military and civilian, die as a result of World War II, millions more than had died from any other nation. (China was second with roughly 20 million military and civilian deaths, while the United States lost about 418,500.) Now the Soviets intended to capitalize on this investment in blood; they believed that this bloodletting entitled them to power and expansion. This thinking informed Stalin’s every statement at Potsdam.
Only one thing felt certain: the United States and the Soviet Union were going to enter the second half of the twentieth century as global superpowers of unprecedented strength. George Kennan of the Moscow embassy defined the USSR at this time: “Two hundred million people, united under the strong and purposeful leadership of Moscow and inhabiting one of the major industrial countries of the world, constitute a single force far greater than any other that will be left on the European continent when this war is over; and it would be folly to underestimate their potential—for good or evil.”
The negotiations were at hand. Populations and borders had shifted or disappeared during the war, so vast frontiers, such as those along the edges of Poland, the USSR, and Germany, needed to be remapped and millions of peoples potentially moved. New governments in many nations had to be agreed upon, according to principles of government that were themselves not agreed upon. Meanwhile, millions in Europe were starving, the Pacific war was raging, and the Americans had a secret that had the potential to change everything.
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On the morning after the first Potsdam plenary session, Truman breakfasted with his nephew Sergeant Harry Truman—the son of the president’s brother, Vivian. Sergeant Truman had been aboard the Queen Elizabeth ready to sail home for America when army officials plucked him up and delivered him to Babelsberg. “They gave him the choice of sailing or coming to see his uncle,” Truman wrote Bess. “The nicest looking soldier you can imagine.”
At 1:15 p.m. Truman walked the few blocks to Churchill’s villa, accompanied by a half dozen officials including Charlie Ross and Harry Vaughan. The president lunched with Churchill alone, however. The prime minister expressed melancholy over the state of the British empire. Britain was deeply scarred by Nazi bombing, and the country was emerging from the European war with a debt of ₤3 billion. Truman was sympathetic, implying that there would be future economic aid. The United States owed Britain for giving so much to defeating the Third Reich. Truman said, “If you had gone down like France, we might be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time. This justifies us in regarding these matters as above the purely financial plane.”
Truman brought up the Trinity test, of which Churchill had been informed the day before during a meeting with Secretary of War Stimson. (“The experiment in the New Mexican desert has come off,” Stimson had said. “The atomic bomb is a reality.”) Churchill referred to Trinity as “world shaking news,” though it was not unexpected. Since the early days of the Manhattan Project, Churchill had been a coconspirator with Franklin Roosevelt.* As the bomb became more and more of an American phenomenon, there was certainly jealousy on the part of Churchill. Now FDR was gone, and Truman must have felt to the prime minister like an interloper. Nevertheless, Churchill was thrilled with the news of Trinity, and he had come to immediate conclusions, which he shared with Truman. Churchill was deeply disturbed by the idea of an invasion of Japan. It could cost a million American lives and another half million British, he believed. With the bomb, there was an alternative.
“Now all this nightmare picture had vanished,” Churchill later wrote, due to this “supernatural weapon.” “In its place was the vision—fair and bright indeed it seemed—of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks.” From the point of view of both Truman and Churchill, the genius of the bomb was that it could save lives by putting an end to the fighting and giving the Japanese a reason to surrender. “By using this new agency,” Churchill believed, “we might not merely destroy cities, but save the lives alike of friend and foe.”
Churchill also believed that the Russians were no longer needed in the war against Japan, a question that Byrnes and Stimson and the American chiefs of Staff were now examining from every angle. With the bomb, Churchill believed Stalin’s bargaining power with the Japanese war was now gone. But, the prime minister added, the employment of the atomic bomb—without Stalin’s knowledge of its existence—would be construed by him as a shocking betrayal. Truman made no commitment on whether the United States favored having the Soviets in the Japanese war, but the president did agree: the time was near to reveal this secret to Stalin.
“I think,” Truman told Churchill, “I had best just tell him after one of our meetings that we have an entirely novel form of bomb, something quite out of the ordinary, which we think will have decisive effects upon the Japanese will to continue the war.”
Churchill agreed.
In his diary, Truman wrote on this day, “Believe Japs will fold before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.”
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Minutes after 3 p.m., Truman and Byrnes paid a visit to Stalin’s villa, with the translator Chip Bohlen in tow. Inside, the Soviets presented the Americans with yet another buffet of delicacies, then Stalin led Truman out onto a balcony overlooking Lake Griebnitz. Toasts were made and diplomatic language was exchanged. There were serious misunderstandings about each leader in the opposing nation, both agreed. Truman suggested Stalin visit the United States, as a means of changing public opinion, in both countries. Stalin made no commitment, but he did admit that it was going to be harder for the Soviets to cooperate with the Uni
ted States in peacetime, as they had in war.
Stalin brought up a peace feeler from Japan that had arrived via an emissary in Moscow. Chip Bohlen was taking notes of the conversation in Stalin’s villa, and he later formulated the following depiction of this moment: “Stalin said that the Soviet Union had received a communication from the Japanese, and he handed to the president a copy of a note from Sato, the Japanese ambassador at Moscow, with a message from the [Japanese] Emperor . . . Stalin inquired of the president whether it was worth while [to] answer this communication. The President replied that he had no respect for the good faith of the Japanese.”
Truman, Stalin, Byrnes, and Molotov talked over the issue, concluding that news of this Japanese peace feeler was so vague, it deserved no serious response. Surely, leaders in Tokyo were becoming aware of the Red Army forces amassing along the border of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, and they feared what the Russians were about to do next. If Emperor Hirohito wanted peace, he would make a more formal approach. This discussion was cut short, however. Truman left Stalin’s villa with Byrnes and Bohlen, and less than an hour later the delegations were back at the negotiating table.
Truman was in terrific form at the second plenary session, which was called to order minutes after 4 p.m. on July 18. His style was different from his predecessor’s. Roosevelt improvised, while Truman stuck to the script. Roosevelt’s discourse rambled, but Truman was “crisp and to the point,” according to Bohlen, who served as Russian translator to both presidents. “Where Roosevelt was warmly friendly with Churchill and Stalin,” Bohlen noted, “Truman was pleasantly distant.” At one point during the conversation, Truman scribbled on a piece of paper—“Joe, how am I doing?”—and passed it across the table to Joseph Davies, who wrote back, “You are batting 1000 percent. You are holding your own with the best at this table.”
Churchill was not himself, on the other hand. He appeared ill prepared, to the dismay of his delegation, who assumed he had become distracted by the current election count, which could end his term of office in a matter of a few days. This second meeting’s major topics were control of Germany and Poland’s government. Churchill seized on questions posed and deconstructed them by asking more questions. “What is the meaning of reference to submission of the United Nations?” “What do we mean by Germany?” “Are we going to have uniform control or different practices in the four [occupation] zones?” Truman grew frustrated by the prime minister’s verbosity. The president wrote in a diary on this day: “I’m not going to stay around this terrible place all summer just to listen to speeches. I’ll go home to the Senate for that.”
Stalin, on the other hand, was laconic, friendly, and fiercely protective of his interests. Of all the poker faces Truman had ever stared down, none beat the Man of Steel. “Stalin,” Truman concluded, “is as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know.”
Meanwhile, outside the negotiating chamber, the scene at Potsdam had become a beehive of rumor and intrigue. “This whole environment at Berlin is somehow beyond words,” Stimson wrote in a letter to his wife. The Russian sector was closed and closely guarded. Stimson described his impression of the Soviets: “There was evident . . . palpable and omnipresent, the atmosphere of dictatorial repression. Nothing in [my] life matched this experience . . . What manner of men were these with whom to build a peace in the atomic age?”
In the American and British sections, the experience was different. “The general atmosphere at Babelsberg between the British and American sectors was that of a community compound,” noted one member of the British group, “where people lived in self-contained working units, invited each other to their houses, [and] greeted each other in the street. Absolutely everyone was there. It was the last great beano of the war.”
In Berlin itself, thousands of journalists from around the globe lounged wherever they could, unable to get access to concrete facts, as they were forbidden from attending the conference. Warriors from three conquering armies rubbed elbows in the streets. Soldiers would describe a psychological darkness in Berlin; it was a city balanced on a razor’s edge. Chip Bohlen recalled his one night free at Potsdam, going to the only open nightclub in Berlin: “The hall was filled with soldiers of three armies, most of them intoxicated and all of them heavily armed.”
A black market thrived openly in Berlin’s streets, with goods and services readily traded. At one point all the eggs in the president’s villa disappeared, to the chagrin of Commander William Rigdon, in charge of the pantry. Rigdon inquired among secret service men, who could not solve the mystery but could provide this piece of information: a single egg on the Berlin black market could bring ten dollars. General Arnold wrote in his diary of Berlin’s black market: “Jewels, rings traded for bread but principally for canned meat. Trading posts in action with hundreds of people all day long.” Women, according to Arnold’s diary, were part of this black market’s trade. At one point, according to a story told by Truman’s driver, Floyd Boring, the president was getting into his car when an army colonel whispered to him: “Listen, I know you’re alone over here [without your wife] . . . If you need anything like, you know, I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.”
Truman responded furiously: “Hold it; don’t say anything more. I love my wife, and my wife is my sweetheart. I don’t want to do that kind of stuff . . . I don’t want you to ever say that again to me.”
Truman was all business at Potsdam. The night after the second plenary session, he described his view of the scene in a letter to Bess. He was handling himself all right, he told her.
“Admiral Leahy said he’d never seen an abler job and Byrnes and my fellows seemed to be walking on air. I was so scared I didn’t know whether things were going according to Hoyle or not [a reference meaning in accord with the rules]. Anyway, a start has been made and I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it . . . I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That is the important thing.”
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TRUMAN REACHED HIS BOILING POINT at the third Potsdam sit-down, which began at 4:05 p.m. on July 19. The Big Three leaders sparred over the fate of Franco’s government in Spain (Stalin wanted Franco out, while Truman could not allow the United States to get entangled). They argued over the regime in Yugoslavia (Truman and Churchill wanted democratic elections, while Stalin supported Tito’s dictatorship). The prime minister and the generalissimo even argued over whether Churchill’s jabs at the Soviets over Tito were “complaints” or “accusations.” Here is where Truman let loose.
“I am here to discuss world affairs with Soviet and Great Britain governments,” he said. “I am not here to sit as a court. That is the work of San Francisco. I want to discuss matters on which the three governments can come to agreement.”
Churchill responded, “I thought that this was a matter in which the United States was very interested, particularly in view of the Yalta papers.”
“That is true,” Truman said. “I want to see the Yalta papers carried out.”
Stalin insisted he was right; Tito would stay.
Truman: “Let us drop it.”
Churchill: “It is very important.”
Truman: “We are dropping it only for the day as we did with Franco.”
By the end of the session, Truman was exasperated. He had come to Potsdam to make decisions, but the three leaders could not agree on anything. “On a number of occasions,” he later wrote, “I felt like blowing the roof off the palace.”
The stakes were rising. Joseph Davies, sitting at the table, summed up the players. Churchill had found a footing and was performing magically. He “portrays the classic tradition and best of England,” Davies wrote. “His use of the spoken word is classic.” Stalin “has no such graciousness of manner, but he has a dignity and power which startles one every now and then . . . I watched him sitting in his chair, listening, with eyes almost closed. When he speaks, it is tersely. Each sentence is a na
ked idea, stated in as few words as possible. He clips off ideas like a machine gun.”
As for Truman, “He was thrown into this arena without much notice. Several of the delegates, both British and Soviet, have commented upon the quality of this forthright American from Independence, Missouri. They have been impressed by ‘his fine head,’ the honest look out of his eyes; and his direct simplicity in speaking his mind . . . He brings a refreshing atmosphere to this old Europe.”
At the end of this session—the first where “the fur flew,” as Davies put it—Churchill’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, declared that they had exhausted the agenda. Churchill said, “It has exhausted me.”
By the conference’s third day, two critical issues pressed upon the American delegation, behind the scenes. The first regarded the ultimatum to Japan. It was near time to finalize the language, and the future of the war appeared to hinge on a singular matter: whether or not to inform the Japanese that their emperor could remain in power. “The maintenance of the dynasty,” Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy wrote in a memo to his boss, Henry Stimson. “This point seems to be the most controversial one and one on which there is a split in opinion in the State Department.”
Using “Magic” deciphering equipment, American army intelligence had cracked codes and were reading secret Japanese communications. According to an “ultra top secret” memorandum, dated July 17, Japanese foreign minister Togo sent the following sentences in a memo to Ambassador Sato, who was in Moscow and was responsible for the Japanese peace feelers there. “We have been fully aware from the outset that it would be difficult under existing circumstances to strengthen the ties of friendship between Japan and Russia or to make effective use of Russia in ending the war,” Togo cabled Sato. “The present situation, however, is such that we have no recourse but to make efforts along those lines.”