by A. J. Baime
While the Potsdam Declaration did not use the words atomic bomb, it did spell out that “utter destruction” was imminent. It concluded: “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
Moments after the document was sent to the Chinese for approval, Stimson came to the Little White House for a 10:20 a.m. meeting with Truman. Stimson said that he thought it was a mistake to demand unconditional surrender, but that it was now too late. The conversation turned to the Manhattan Project. Truman said that he planned to tell Stalin about the atomic bomb after the plenary meeting later in the day. Stimson then showed Truman the latest top-secret cable revealing dates when the bomb was expected to be ready.
Stimson’s visit with Truman on July 24 lasted not longer than an hour. But it was a critical hour for humankind. No piece of paper documents Truman’s official decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. However, the following day, Truman described this meeting with Stimson in the following words, in his diary:
The weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capital [of Japan] Kyoto or the new [Tokyo]. He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them a chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.
At eleven thirty that morning—a short time after Stimson left Truman’s villa—Churchill and the British military leaders arrived for a conference of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The elite British and American military officials offered the prime minister and the president a document spelling out the final strategy to bring the war to an end.
The ground invasion was still considered “the supreme operations in the war against Japan.” Although so many officials close to Truman had stated, or would later do so, that the Russians were no longer needed, the final decision of the Combined Chiefs of Staff was to “encourage Russian entry into the war against Japan.” The reason was certainly the incertitude of the bomb. Even at this late date, these officials could not be sure the bomb was going to go off. “All of us wanted Russia in the Japanese War,” Truman later said. “Had we known what the atomic bomb would do, we’d have never wanted the Bear in the picture.” The Combined Chiefs set a goal of ending the war on November 15, 1946—almost sixteen more months, during which casualties were predicted to be heavy.
Hours later, at 5:15 p.m., Truman called the next plenary session to order, and the bitterest debate yet befell Potsdam. On the agenda: the governments of eastern Europe and the borders of Poland. Stalin pressed to have the governments of Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Finland be regarded the same as Italy. He wanted these governments officially recognized by London and Washington. Truman and Churchill did not view Italy as Soviet-influenced, and thus they were prepared to welcome Italy into the community of nations. The other countries were clearly being governed by Soviet puppet regimes, operating behind the Iron Curtain.
CHURCHILL: “We have been unable to get information, or to have free access to the satellite states [Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania]. As soon as we have proper access to them, and proper governments are set up, we will recognize them—not sooner.”
STALIN: “But you have recognized Italy.”
TRUMAN: “The other satellite states will be recognized when they meet the same conditions as Italy has met . . . We are asking reorganization of these governments along democratic lines.” (All at the table understood what Truman was really saying: that Truman and Churchill would refuse to recognize any government they believed to be Sovietized.)
STALIN: “The other satellites have democratic governments closer to the people than does Italy.”
TRUMAN: “I have made clear we will not recognize these governments until they are reorganized.”
Churchill raised Romania as an example. “Our mission in Bucharest has been practically confined,” Churchill said. “I am sure the Marshal [Stalin] would be amazed to read the long list of incidents which have occurred.”
Stalin responded with rage. “They are all fairy tale[s].”
There would be no agreement. Soviet influence was creeping deep into eastern Europe, and Truman and Churchill could not stop it, unless they chose to use military force.
After the session adjourned, Truman made his move. He instructed his interpreter, Bohlen, not to follow him, then he walked slowly around the conference table toward Stalin and engaged the Soviet leader in a quiet conversation. The time was 7:30 p.m. The Russian interpreter, Pavlov, translated.
“I casually mentioned to Stalin,” Truman later wrote, “that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’” From across the room, Bohlen watched Stalin’s face closely. “So offhand was Stalin’s response,” noted Bohlen, “that there was some question in my mind whether the president’s message had got through.”
Afterward, Churchill approached Truman and asked, “How did it go?”
“He never asked a question,” Truman responded.
The deed was done. The Americans and British all assumed that Stalin had no knowledge of the existence of atomic science. As Bohlen later noted, “I should have known better than to underrate the dictator.”
As evidence would later show, not only were the Russians avidly spying on the Americans’ work in the atomic energy field, they were already working on their own bomb. After the meeting, one of the Russian delegation, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, recalled Stalin and Molotov discussing Truman’s admission that night, in hushed tones. Molotov told Stalin it was time to “speed things up.” “I realized they were talking about research on the atomic bomb,” Zhukov later recalled.
There can be no exact date when the Cold War started. However, as historian Charles L. Mee Jr. has pointed out, the nuclear arms race is a different story: “The Twentieth Century’s nuclear arms race began at the Cecilienhof Palace at 7:30 p.m., on July 24, 1945.”
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On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Truman was stunned to learn that Ambassador Hurley in Chungking had not yet received the draft of the Japanese ultimatum. Byrnes ordered an immediate investigation; this communication breakdown was going to get somebody fired. As it turned out, Map Room officials at the White House had apparently handed the document to the navy to send, and unaware of the document’s importance, naval officers failed to shoot it out for five hours. Then they sent it through Honolulu, where it was further delayed.
Truman and Byrnes were furious. Any delay with the Potsdam Declaration would delay the use of the bomb and thus the end of the war.
Ambassador Hurley finally cabled Truman and Byrnes that the ultimatum had reached him at 8:35 p.m. Chungking time on July 25, the day after the ultimatum was originally sent from Truman’s villa. Hurley cabled Truman, “The translation was not finished until after midnight.” When the ambassador tried to deliver the ultimatum to Chiang Kai-shek for his approval, the Chinese generalissimo was not at his palace but rather across the Yangtze River in the mountains. Hurley had to go hunting for a ferry to cross the river in the middle of the night.
Later that day, at the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, the Big Three once again sparred at the negotiating table. At the end of this ninth plenary meeting, cameramen charged into the chamber to capture a moment of pat
hos. Winston Churchill and his political opponent, Clement Attlee, would be leaving Germany for Britain, where they would learn the results of the election. Churchill and Attlee gathered for formalities with Truman and Stalin. Truman said to the two Britons, “I must say good luck to you both.”
“What a pity,” Stalin said.
“I hope to be back,” Churchill replied.
Stalin looked over at Churchill’s opponent, Attlee. Judging from the look on Attlee’s face, Stalin said aloud that Attlee appeared in no hurry to fill Churchill’s shoes.
As Churchill turned for the exit, Joseph Davies watched him go. “There was a glint of a tear in his eyes,” Davies recorded, “but his step was firm and his chin thrust out. He seemed to sense that he had reached the end of the road.”
The prime minister was leaving at a low point for the conference. Negotiations had not gone smoothly on this day. The Big Three had clashed once again over eastern Europe, with no progress made. As Truman put it in a letter to Bess, “There are some things we can’t agree to. Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused. We have unalterably opposed the recognition of police governments in the Germany Axis countries [Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary]. I told Stalin that until we had free access to those countries and our nationals had their property rights restored, so far as we were concerned, there’d never be recognition.”
Now Churchill was leaving, and anything major had yet to be accomplished at Potsdam.
After good-byes and formal photographs, Truman motored back to his villa with Joseph Davies. In the car, Truman appeared exhausted. The Potsdam Conference was not going as planned. The gulf between the Soviets and the Americans was growing more vast and ominous. Soon Truman was going to have to return to the United States and face the nation. He would be held accountable, and it was hard to fathom now, motoring in a car from the Cecilienhof Palace, how Congress would react to the Potsdam proceedings. According to Davies’s recollections, Truman said during this short car ride that he was thinking of resigning the presidency “if, now, the president is not supported by the Senate and Congress.” A keen student of history, Truman was well aware what this would mean to his legacy; no American president had ever resigned.
It was a startling revelation and a window into the president’s consciousness at this pivotal moment. Davies replied that this would “bear thinking over.”
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Truman awoke customarily early on July 26. With the British leaders absent, there would be no negotiations. At 8 a.m. he boarded the Sacred Cow for a flight to Frankfurt. Among others, he had Harry Vaughan and Fred Canfil with him. Another plane carried Jimmy Byrnes and his staff, while a third flew members of the press covering the president’s trip. General Eisenhower greeted Truman at the U.S. Army airfield in Frankfurt, along with an honor guard from the 508th Parachute Infantry.
Army units lined the roadways for thirty straight miles. Truman rode in Eisenhower’s armored car with the general, inspecting the troops. At one point he asked a private for his name. “It scared him so badly he couldn’t answer,” Truman recalled, “but I finally coaxed it out of him.” The office of the presidency was a powerful thing indeed. Eisenhower’s car steered deeper into the countryside, through quaint villages that had not been bombed. These communities were a reminder that not all Germans were Nazis. There were plenty of Germans who had lived reluctantly through this war and had lost so much—family members, businesses, their very way of life. Eisenhower later remembered a poignant moment from this ride.
“Now, in the car,” Eisenhower recalled, “he suddenly turned toward me and said: ‘General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.’”
Eisenhower laughed aloud. “Mr. President,” he said with sincerity, “I don’t know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I.”
The group ended up at the Frankfurt headquarters where Eisenhower had organized the military government of the American-occupied zone in Germany. The offices were housed in the building formerly owned by I. G. Farben, the giant chemical company that had mixed many of the poisons used to gas victims in the Nazi death camps.
When Truman arrived back at the Little White House at 7 p.m., two cables awaited him. One was from longtime United States ambassador to Britain John Winant, writing from London. Churchill had been defeated. The people of Great Britain had elected Clement Attlee their new prime minister. Members of the American delegation were stunned, but not nearly as stunned as Churchill himself. The second cable was from Ambassador Hurley in Chungking. Chiang Kai-shek had agreed to the wording of the ultimatum with one minor change.
At 9:20 p.m. Berlin time on July 26, Charlie Ross handed the Potsdam Declaration out to members of the press, whose job it would now be to spread this document all the way to Tokyo. It demanded “unconditional surrender” from Japan. “We, the president of the United States, the president of the National Government of the Republic of China, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, representing the hundreds of millions of our countrymen, have conferred and agree that Japan shall be given an opportunity to end this war,” it began.
“The time has come for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason.”
Ross cabled his assistant, Eben Ayers, in the White House: “The President’s wish is that OWI [the Office of War Information] begin getting message to Japanese people in every possible way.” Soon airplanes were flying over the mainland of Japan, dropping 600,000 leaflets out the windows. The ultimatum was soon being read over the radio, and news of it appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the globe, on the morning of July 27.
On the night of the twenty-sixth, Truman tried to relax on the porch of his villa. One member of the delegation saw him there and wrote in his diary: “He looked tired.” Truman knew that Stalin was going to be furious. Stalin had never been consulted on the ultimatum. But then the Soviets were not yet at war with Japan, and thus had no authority to make any official demands. Just as the ultimatum was released to the press, Truman had a special messenger walk the Potsdam Declaration over to Molotov in the Russian sector of Babelsberg. The president was sure he would be hearing from the Russians, the next day.
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VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV showed up at the Little White House for a one-on-one with James Byrnes at 6 p.m. on July 27. Even before Molotov arrived, the stage was set for high conflict. “Important day,” Byrnes’s assistant, Walter Brown, wrote in his notes. “Either Russia’s going to play ball and quit wanting so much or our relations will deteriorate . . . JFB [James F. Byrnes] and the president have been becoming more exasperated with the Russians every day.”
Byrnes and Molotov sat down with their interpreters, Bohlen and Pavlov. Molotov appeared furious. Why, he wanted to know, were the Soviets not consulted regarding this ultimatum to Japan? According to Bohlen’s minutes of the meeting, “The Secretary [Byrnes] said that we did not consult the Soviet Government since the latter was not at war with Japan and we did not wish to embarrass them. Mr. Molotov replied that he was not authorized to discuss this matter further. He left the implication that Marshal Stalin would revert to it at some time.”
The British delegation had not yet returned to Potsdam. Byrnes and Molotov attempted to negotiate alone one of the conference’s most bitter disagreements: reparations and the future of Germany. Justice and precedent demanded that the Germans pay the Allies damages. The USSR had suffered more death in this war than any other nation by far, and the Soviets expected to get the lion’s share of reparations in return. The money was critical to the Soviet plan for postwar expansion. At Yalta, Roosevelt had accepted a figure of $20 billion as a proposal—as “a basis for negotiations”—of wh
ich the USSR would receive half. Now, at Potsdam, the Soviets wanted the $10 billion from Germany. Byrnes tried to explain himself to Molotov. The $20 billion figure was set up as a basis for discussion.
“If you say I owe you a million dollars and I say I will discuss it with you,” Byrnes said, “that does not mean I am going to write you a check for a million dollars.”
“I see,” Molotov came back. But he did not; the idea was not sinking in. The Soviets wanted to get paid.
The Americans were wary of the reparations issue, for there was now ample evidence that the USSR had been looting territories that the Red Army had conquered, Germany in particular. The Soviets had been paying themselves already, at the Germans’ expense. Truman had appointed Edwin Pauley, a wealthy California oilman, as the U.S. representative on the Allied Reparations Committee. Pauley had been touring Germany and observing the Soviets, at times carrying a 16-millimeter camera surreptitiously. His stories were incredible. He wrote of Red Army men packing “woodworking machines, bakery ovens, textile looms, electric generators, transformers, telephone equipment—countless items, most of which could not be considered war potential, and assuredly not war booty. Yet there they were, moving before my eyes, on their way to the Soviet Union.”
Less than one week before the Byrnes-Molotov meeting, two of Pauley’s men had witnessed loading platforms in railroad stations in Berlin where “swarms of workmen, mostly men in Russian Army uniforms,” were moving “boxes, crates, sacs, bales, drums, boilers, partially-covered machine tools and large pieces of machinery” onto trains bound for the Soviet Union. “Electrical equipment, stamping mills, wood-working machinery, printing presses . . .”