Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  And this was the man who would decide whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

  They called it Truman’s Little White House, this grimy yellow-and-red lakeside villa in Babelsberg, between bomb-blasted Berlin and the site of the Potsdam Conference. Yesterday, after a week at sea on the Augusta, the president had docked at Antwerp, Belgium, then flown in for his first showdown with Joseph Stalin. As luck would have it, Stalin was delayed for a day, so Truman and James Byrnes, his secretary of state, toured Berlin, sightseeing instead of strong-arming. That night, after they’d returned to the villa for drinks and dinner, Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, arrived with a coded telegram. A subsequent cable carried much the same message:

  To Secretary of War from Harrison. Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams here to my farm.

  “Big brother” was the world’s first atomic device. It had been exploded that pre-dawn at Alamogordo Bombing Range, two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, in New Mexico’s desert.

  “Little boy” was code for the uranium bomb to be dropped on Japan.

  “Highhold” was Stimson’s home near Washington.

  “My farm” was the Virginia spread of Stimson’s assistant, George Harrison.

  The medical terms in the telegram bamboozled those who manned the Potsdam communications center.

  They thought that the secretary of war—who was seventy-seven years old—had just become a dad.

  From the moment Truman assumed his role as U.S. commander in chief, after the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, his focus was on Russia. On April 13, the day after he was sworn in, Truman was advised that Churchill was upset with the Russians. They weren’t living up to their agreements in Europe, and hadn’t been since the Yalta Conference.

  Now it was time for the president to meet Generalissimo Stalin in conquered Germany. The location chosen was Potsdam’s Cecilienhof Palace, the estate of the former kaiser. Before leaving, Truman told the world what he hoped to achieve: “We’ve got to teach [the Russians] how to behave.”

  To that end, the Americans had made the conference coincide with their first test of the atomic bomb. With the test a success, Truman had an ace up his sleeve for his negotiations with Stalin. The time was nigh for a little atomic diplomacy. As Truman liked to say, whenever he had the upper hand, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

  Behind the scenes, however, another man called the shots: the “assistant president,” Jimmy Byrnes. Byrnes had spent thirty years in the House and the Senate, and sat on the Supreme Court, and served Roosevelt as director of war mobilization, and seemed to be the man to step into FDR’s shoes ... until he lost the vice-presidency to Truman at the Democratic Party’s 1944 Chicago convention. In fact, when the “old Missouri farmer”—as Truman liked to call himself—had first arrived in the Senate in 1935, it was Byrnes who took him under his more experienced wing.

  Truman looked up to Byrnes, and Byrnes looked down on Truman. He regarded his new president as a political nonentity with no abilities to speak of and no knowledge of how to conduct foreign policy—or much else, it appeared. Byrnes saw Truman as an accident of history, and not a good accident. So of course, Truman made Byrnes not only his secretary of state, but also his chief adviser on the question of whether to drop the bomb.

  And now it was “bull bat time.”

  Bull bat time was a phrase politicians used for a night of drinking, playing poker, and discussing matters of state. So after Stimson brought news of the explosion of the bomb, Truman and Byrnes filled their glasses with Jimmy’s best bourbon and took a congratulatory stroll to see the moon and the stars reflect off Griebnitz Lake.

  “We did it,” Truman said.

  “We sure did,” Byrnes agreed.

  The men clinked glasses and downed a slug of whiskey as a toast to the bomb.

  “So how should I play this with Uncle Joe tomorrow?” asked Truman.

  “Hard ball,” Byrnes replied. “When you sent Hopkins to Moscow, what’d you tell him?”

  “I told him to use a baseball bat, if he thought that was the proper approach to Stalin. Just crack him over the head.”

  “That’s good advice,” said Byrnes. “We’ve got blue chips on the table. The Russians are planning world conquest. Force is the only thing they understand. The atomic bomb will make Stalin more manageable in Europe. It’ll bully him. A combat display against the Japs will impress the Russkies with Uncle Sam’s military might. We’ll be able to dictate our own terms at the end of the war. There’s only one way to play this. Give ’em hell, Harry.”

  July 17, 1945

  “That SOB!” Truman fumed over drinks the following night. “Did you see how he tried to push me around, Jimmy?”

  “You stood your own, Harry. You bossed the meeting.”

  “When we had pictures taken, did you see how Stalin stood on the step above me? The balls of that guy! And they call me the ‘little man.’ Hell, I’m five-feet-eight. Stalin’s got to be five-five. Five-six, tops. He thinks he’s the ‘big I am’? Well, I’ve got news for Uncle Joe. In time, he’ll see how big I am.”

  July 18, 1945

  Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for lunch to compare notes on Stalin. The president wrote in his diary: “P.M. & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.”

  July 20, 1945

  Fortified by the muscular success of the atomic bomb, Truman stood up to the Russians—as Churchill saw it—“in a most emphatic and decisive manner.”

  Then Truman wrote to his wife, Bess: “We had a tough meeting yesterday. I reared up on my hind legs and told ’em where to get off and they got off. I have to make it perfectly plain to them”—Stalin’s Russians and Great Britain—“at least once a day that so far as this President is concerned Santa Claus is dead and that my first interest is U.S.A., then I want the Jap War won and I want ’em both in it … They are beginning to awake to the fact that I mean business.”

  July 24, 1945

  Late in the day, at the end of the Big Three session, Truman walked around to Stalin’s chair and, aided by his interpreter, said casually, “You may be interested to know that we have developed a powerful new weapon of unusual destructive force.”

  Stalin smiled blandly and showed no special interest.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” the Russian said. “I hope you make good use of it against the Japanese.”

  Later, as they were waiting for their cars, Churchill asked Truman, “How did it go?”

  “He never asked a question,” the president replied.

  “Ike’s against dropping the bomb.”

  “Why, Harry?” Byrnes asked, topping up his bourbon.

  “According to what he told Stimson, the Japs are already defeated. At the moment, they’re seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face. Ike has grave misgivings about shocking world opinion by using a devastating weapon that’s no longer mandatory to save American lives.”

  “The Pacific isn’t Eisenhower’s theater. He’s supreme commander in western Europe.”

  “That’s another problem. MacArthur’s supreme commander in the Pacific, and he also thinks the bomb’s unnecessary from a military point of view. Know what he told his staff when he learned that the Japs had asked Russia to negotiate surrender with us? ‘This is it. The war is over.’”

  “I don’t see MacArthur here at Potsdam to make the decision. And we won’t consult him.”

  “He’ll be livid, Jimmy.”

  “There’s much more at stake here than Japan, Harry. We’ve got to stop the Russkies from gobbling up the glob
e. What’s that story you told me about your granddad and the Injuns?”

  “Solomon Young ran a wagon train from Independence, Missouri, to San Francisco. The redskins bothered the other trainmasters, but they didn’t bother him. He scared ’em. My granddad let the Indians know that he had the guns and the ammunition, and that he’d shoot them if they gave him any trouble.”

  Byrnes raised his glass. “You gotta let your enemy know you got the guns. The Russkies have to see the bomb explode in Japan. They’ll know there’s an ominous bulge in our pocket after that. And any time we want to use atomic diplomacy, I can say to Molotov—or to Stalin—‘You don’t know Southerners. We carry our artillery in our hip pocket. If you don’t cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I’m gonna pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.’ In all future disputes with the Reds, we can stand by our guns.”

  “In eastern Europe.”

  “And Asia. Stalin says Russia will enter the war against the Japs on August 8. If they do, he’ll demand concessions in the East. Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea will gradually slip into Russia’s orbit, then China and, eventually, Japan. But drop the bomb before that and we won’t need the Commies. They’ll have no bargaining chips.”

  “That’s a lot of lives,” said Truman.

  “Jap lives, Harry. Think of the American lives we’ll save.”

  “The joint chiefs say invading Japan will cost forty thousand U.S. dead. It’s not like Okinawa. The geography’s different. And before long, there won’t be a Jap city standing.”

  “That’s all the more reason to strike now. If we’re gonna scare the Russians, the bomb needs a virgin background against which to show its strength.”

  “That’s a lot of lives,” Truman repeated.

  “How many American lives does General Marshall think invading Japan will cost?”

  “He says half a million.”

  “Well, there you go. That’s the figure we’ll use.”

  “We’d better warn the Japs.”

  Byrnes shook his head. “They had Pearl Harbor. This will be our surprise attack. If we warn the Japs the bomb will be dropped on a given city, they’ll bring in our prisoners of war and use them as shields.”

  “Should we give ’em a demonstration? Let the Jap military see our guns?”

  “What if the bomb’s a dud and fails to explode? That’ll play into the hands of Jap hard-liners, and we’ll look like fools. Plus, gone will be the element of surprise.”

  Truman swirled his whiskey and downed a slug.

  “So that decides it?” said the president.

  “Tomorrow we give the order.”

  “Okay, Jimmy. The bomb drops unless the Japs fold and negotiate surrender.”

  “Negotiate? That doesn’t sound like ‘unconditional’ surrender to me, Harry.”

  July 25, 1945

  Today, the order went out:

  TO: General Carl Spaatz

  Commanding General

  United States Army Strategic Air Forces

  1. The 509 Composite Group, 20th Air Force will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki ...

  2. Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff ...

  Truman recorded in his diary: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th.”

  July 26, 1945

  In the end, it all came down to the emperor. That was the only condition Japan tried to negotiate.

  “Unconditional surrender” was a slogan that Truman had inherited from Roosevelt. At a press conference in Casablanca after FDR met with Churchill in January 1943, the American president told reporters, “Some of you Britishers know the old story. We had a general called U.S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the prime minister’s, early days, he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means their unconditional surrender.”

  The term was a war slogan. The words were propaganda designed to stimulate support from other nations and to help energize the war effort at home. But as soon as Truman came to power, he embraced Roosevelt’s slogan as if it were gospel in a VE day speech to the American people. “Our blows will not cease until the Japanese military and naval forces lay down their arms in unconditional surrender,” he vowed.

  Now, as Japan tried to surrender, it was time to issue the Potsdam Declaration.

  Everyone knew that Japan would not agree to any deal that threatened the status of the emperor. To his people, Emperor Hirohito was a god, the soul of Japan made incarnate. The country would fight to the last man if he was jeopardized.

  At Potsdam, Churchill tried to reason with Truman.

  “It’s best to leave the Japanese some show of saving their military honor, and some assurance of their national existence,” the PM argued. “The emperor is something for which they’re ready to face certain death in very large numbers, and this might not be so important to us as it is to them.”

  “After Pearl Harbor,” Truman said, “I don’t think the Japs have military honor.”

  The secretary of war agreed with Churchill.

  Let Japan keep the emperor.

  “I heard from Byrnes,” Stimson said later, “that they”—Byrnes and the president—“preferred not to put it in.”

  Consequently, the Potsdam Declaration demanded unconditional surrender from the enemy. “The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

  Without an assurance regarding the emperor, the Japanese rejected the ultimatum.

  On August 6, Truman was sailing home on the Augusta with—in his words—“my conniving secretary of state” when they received word that Hiroshima, a target still undamaged by the conventional air war, had been obliterated by an A-bomb.

  Truman issued a statement. “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor,” he declared. “They have been repaid many fold ... If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

  On August 8, Russia declared war on Japan.

  On August 9, Nagasaki was devastated by an A-bomb.

  On August 10, Truman wrote in his diary: “Ate lunch at my desk and discussed the Jap offer to surrender which came in a couple of hours earlier. They wanted to make a condition precedent to the surrender. Our terms are ‘unconditional.’ They wanted to keep the Emperor. We told ’em we’d tell ’em how to keep him, but we’d make the terms.”

  On August 14, the day Japan surrendered but kept its emperor, the flag flying over the White House was the same Stars and Stripes that had flown in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Hickam’s flag.

  Time magazine named Harry Truman its “Man of the Year.” Alongside his cover photo, the magazine ran an image of a fist as mighty as the hand of God clenching lightning bolts in a mushroom cloud.

  That autumn, a new sign appeared on the president’s desk at the White House.

  One side read: “I’m from Missouri.”

  The statement on the other side referred to a practice common in Wild West poker games. A knife with a buckhorn handle marked the player whose turn it was to deal. If a player declined the deal, he’d pass the “buck” to another player.

  The expression on Truman’s sign meant, If there’s a decision to be made, I’m the man to make it.

  The sign read: “The buck stops here.”

  Yasukuni Shrine

  Vancouver

  October 31, Now

  Genjo Tokuda unsheathed Kamikaze and carried the sword out to the deck of the house at the top of the British Properties. There, he assumed the stance of a samurai warrior, just as his father had taught him to do so many decades ago in that Zen garden fronting his family’s Shinto shrine.

  “Banzai!” the old man cursed at the dark
, slicing the katana down as if to cleave the distant chaos on the hump of the Lions Gate Bridge. Then he slashed down again to bisect the still-smoking pier that had been torpedoed by the kamikaze plane.

  That felt good.

  The kumicho shivered.

  Through all those years, from 1945 to now, Tokuda had yearned to exact tonight’s revenge.

  First, the bridge.

  Then, the pier.

  And next, the Sushi Chef ...

  Back in 1945, Genjo Tokuda had seen out the war as a prisoner in a U.S. POW camp. Hospitalized for the burns and deep wounds he had suffered on Okinawa, he—unlike his commanders in that cataclysmic battle—had been denied the honorable death of a heroic samurai: hara-kiri.

  Instead, he was demeaned.

  Through a veil of morphine that quelled the agony racking his body, he glimpsed—through the half of his face that wasn’t a reddish scar—someone watching him from the foot of his hospital bed. The soldier—a muscular man with a shaved head and hateful eyes—was dressed in khaki from cap to boots.

  “Okinawans are hurling themselves off suicide cliffs,” snarled the Yank. “Know why?”

  His enemy’s body language conveyed what he meant, but Tokuda didn’t reply.

  “Because they think we rape and torture those we capture. Know why?”

  Again, no reply.

  “Because they were told by Nips like you that to join the Marines, a leatherneck like me has to kill his own mother.”

  Silence.

  “Know what?”

  The drugged samurai waited.

  “You fuckers are fucking right!” the jarhead said, and he spat on Tokuda’s bed.

  “Good morning, Monkey Man.”

  Tokuda forced open his eyes.