The president makes this abundantly clear to Samuel McCrea Cavert of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, who has demanded that the president justify the dropping of atomic bombs.
A telegram from Cavert to the president reads, “Their use sets extremely dangerous precedent for future of mankind.” The cable goes on to urge that “ample opportunity be given Japan to reconsider her ultimatum before any further devastation by atomic bomb is visited upon her people.” Cavert’s message angers Truman; the clergyman actually threatens the president by saying his group will soon make a public statement condemning the bomb.
But Truman will not be cowed. He would not normally respond to such a threat, particularly at a time when he is immersed in the high-stakes decisions of warcraft. But the president is a man who loves a good game of poker.2 This is not a time for bluffing. Truman dictates a direct response.
“Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and the murder of our prisoners of war,” Truman writes.
“The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.”
* * *
In Tokyo, the leader of the beast, Emperor Hirohito, rises to speak in his underground bunker. It is 2:00 a.m., and Hirohito wears a full-dress military uniform. The weariness of yet another day and night of ruination is etched upon his face. Witnesses to this moment will remember the emperor being disheveled, his face flushed, his hair unkempt.
The emperor has entertained the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War and their assorted secretaries and assistants in the underground conference room for almost three hours. The thick wooden door is closed and the air-conditioning is not working, causing every man to sweat from the extreme humidity in the chamber that is no bigger than a large bedroom. Even the lacquered wall panels bead with perspiration.
The subject of this midnight meeting is unconditional surrender. It is the continuation of a long day of high-level war discussions, following close on the heels of the Soviet invasion and the Nagasaki bombing. Every man is exhausted. Each individual in this room has a personal stake in the discussion, for not only would surrender mean the end of the Japanese empire but, just yesterday, the United States and England formalized a treaty stipulating the proper punishment of war criminals. The first men to be tried will be the Nazis; their trials will convene in the German city of Nuremberg starting this November.
If they surrender, the men in this overheated room will be next—and they know it.
All associated with the war realize they will most likely be tried and found guilty, even the emperor. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, War Minister Korechika Anami, Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, Navy Chief of Staff Teijiro Toyoda, and Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijiro Umezu recognize that whether they committed atrocities or not doesn’t matter—they directed the soldiers and sailors who did.
Of course, Hirohito was the ultimate authority.
Throughout the war, the members of the Supreme Council chortled with delight as a dozen English-speaking Japanese women—among them American citizen Iva Ikuko Toguri, a twenty-nine-year-old Los Angeles native stranded in Japan when the war began—broadcast taunting propaganda attacks to American soldiers and sailors. These women, collectively known as “Tokyo Rose,” told lonely Americans throughout the Pacific that their girlfriends back home were sleeping with other men, among hundreds of other lies designed to sap morale.
But radio broadcasts that many Americans dismissed as laughable are the least of the Supreme Council’s indiscretions.
The men in this bunker handed over power to the ruthless Hideki Tojo, the psychopathic architect of the Japanese war effort who had served as prime minister from October 1941 until July 1944. It was the unassuming but manipulative Tojo who convinced Hirohito that war was necessary “to establish a new, stable order in East Asia.”
Tojo, viewed worldwide as the Hitler of Japan, oversaw the surprise attacks throughout the Pacific that began this brutal war—a conflict that has now claimed twenty-four million lives in the Pacific and Asia alone. And it was Tojo who not only started the war but also authorized the inhumane policies that will define the Japanese war effort far longer than any moment of strategic brilliance.
But the men in this bunker allowed it all to happen.3
* * *
Soon the rest of the world will discover that the Japanese leadership not only brutalizes captured soldiers but has also sanctioned the use of women in conquered territories as prostitutes for the gratification of Japanese troops. These innocent civilians are forced into sexual slavery and have become known as comfort women. Some two hundred thousand of these victims have been abducted or sold to brothels favored by Japanese troops. The penalty for becoming pregnant is often death or disembowelment, for fear of diluting the purity of the Japanese race with the blood of a mixed-race child.
The Japanese military carefully regulates the “comfort stations” in which these women are forced to work, controlling security to make sure the victims do not escape and regularly checking them for sexually transmitted diseases. The practice began after the invasion of China and continued to other nations as Japan took control of the Pacific. Women from Taiwan, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, Burma, and Holland have been taken captive and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers.
“Sometimes twelve soldiers would force me to have sex with them and then they would allow me to rest for a while, then about twelve soldiers would have sex with me again,” a Filipino woman will recount almost fifty years later. “You cannot say no as they will definitely kill you. During the mornings, you have a guard. You are free to roam around the garrison, but you cannot get out.”
The ratio of soldiers to comfort women could range as high as 150 to 1, depending upon the region. The Japanese war leadership actually incorporated forced prostitution into its war plan, believing that it elevated troop morale.
“When the soldiers came back from the battlefields, as many as twenty men would come to my room from early morning,” another comfort woman will one day recount. “They rounded up little girls still in school. Their genitals were still underdeveloped, so they became torn and infected. There was no medicine except something to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and Mercurochrome. They got sick, their sores became septic, but there was no treatment.”
Not all the “comfort stations” are buildings.
“The soldiers made Chinese laborers lay straw in the trenches and the girls were put in there,” one woman will remember. “There was no bedding … underneath was earth. There was no electricity at that time, only oil lamps, but they weren’t even given a lamp. They cried in the dark, ‘Mummy, it hurts!’”
* * *
The leaders of Japan also know they have honored soldiers who beheaded, set ablaze, enslaved, and even cannibalized prisoners of war. The majority of the estimated 150,000 American, British, and Dutch citizens held as slave labor in Japanese POW camps are denied food, medical treatment, and clothing and are subjected to squalid living conditions. Escape is all but impossible.
In the jungle, the POWs sleep in hundred-man bamboo barracks with mud floors that are often covered with excrement as a result of the high dysentery rate. Officers and enlisted men alike quickly learn that the Japanese do not honor the Geneva Conventions. POWs are slaves; they work in coal mines, factories, and shipyards and on tropical plantations. More than 12,000 American, British, and Dutch prisoners and 150,000 civilian slaves have died of exhaustion and disease while constructing the Burma-Siam Railway alone.4
Prime Minister Tojo went so far as to issue a mandate that all POWs were expendable and even instituted a “Kill All the Prisoners” policy.
One document obtained by the US government puts this mandate in specifi
c terms: “Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of the prisoners as the situation dictates. In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.”
In one infamous massacre, the Japanese attempt to slaughter 150 Americans in a prisoner-of-war camp on the island of Palawan rather than let them be rescued by advancing Allied troops. While the Americans take refuge in an air-raid shelter, their captors fill the shelter with gasoline and set it on fire. Prisoners attempting to escape from the bunker are mowed down by machine-gun fire. Nevertheless, though 139 men die, 11 lucky men live to tell the tale.
Of the estimated 27,465 Americans held in POW camps, more than 11,000 will die. By stark comparison, of the 93,941 Americans taken captive by the Germans, 92,820 survived the war.5
* * *
Hirohito himself approved one of the war’s most heinous depredations, Unit 731. This medical group performed tests on human subjects in the name of pathological research, amputating arms and legs without anesthetic, replacing blood with antifreeze, splitting a man’s body down the middle from top to bottom and then pickling him in a six-foot-tall glass jar of formaldehyde, and injecting diseases such as bubonic plague and cholera into healthy human beings.
It was through Unit 731 that many Japanese battlefield doctors prepared for war—alive and conscious victims were shot with a rifle or machine gun, then surgeons operated on their wounds without anesthetic to rehearse emergency battlefield procedures. Thousands of non-Japanese Asian citizens and Allied prisoners of war were murdered as a result of Unit 731 procedures.
Even as the war has turned against Japan, the atrocities have continued. On May 5, 1945, an American B-29 crashed on the island of Kyushu. The pilot was taken away for interrogation while ten members of the crew were bundled off to a secret laboratory in the city of Fukuoka and subjected to the amputations and vivisections endured by Unit 731’s other human guinea pigs.
Each man died a grisly death.
All approved by the divine emperor.6
* * *
Hirohito is at last ready to offer his opinion to the Supreme Council. Every man in the room rises and bows to his ruler. As they take their seats, the emperor is momentarily overcome by what he is about to say. But he gathers himself and proceeds. “Thinking about the world situation and the internal Japanese situation … to continue the war now means that cruelty and bloodshed will still continue in the world and that the Japanese nation will suffer severe damage.”
The emperor’s voice is high. He speaks in staccato sentences with rounded vowels. His quiet words come from a man not known for graceful speech. As Hirohito’s emotions get the best of him, he begins to cry. Many in the room are also overcome; they hurl themselves forward onto their communal tables and begin to sob.
Hirohito continues: “When I think about my obedient soldiers abroad, and of those who died or were wounded in battle, about those who have lost their property or lives by bombing in the homeland—when I think of all those sacrifices I cannot help but feel sad.
“I cannot stand the disarming of loyal and gallant troops and punishment of those responsible for war …
“It is now necessary to bear the unbearable.”7
* * *
It is 6:30 a.m. on August 10 when President Truman receives the Japanese surrender letter in his private quarters at the White House. In the absence of a Japanese embassy in Washington, which has not existed since the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hirohito has sent the communiqué to the embassy of neutral Switzerland, which then passed it on to the War Department.
“In obedience to the gracious command of His Majesty the Emperor,” the document begins, “the Japanese Government are [sic] ready to accept the terms enumerated in the joint declaration which was issued at Potsdam on July 26th, 1945, by the heads of the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China, and later subscribed to by the Soviet Government.”
Thus far, there is nothing in the language to deflate Truman’s hopes for an unconditional surrender. This unlikely man who was nominated for the vice presidency just one year ago and who assumed the mantle of president of the United States at a most pivotal moment in world history is just a few sentences away from ending the Second World War. The German surrender in May was inevitable; the Japanese situation has been much more tricky and has required Truman to show diplomatic steel to match America’s military might. He has made many difficult decisions, doing so with poise and focus. The slip of paper he now holds in his hand is the culmination of four agonizing months in office. Yet he reads on with trepidation, making sure that the entire document is in accord with the surrender terms put forth by the United States.
It is not. The Japanese are attaching one vital condition to their surrender: “the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”
Truman has been expecting this, and a small part of him may be willing to let Hirohito stay on the throne. Secretary of War Stimson has long argued that this is necessary to restore order in a postwar Japan. Certainly, General Douglas MacArthur has also made his conviction on this subject known.
But Truman is unsure: “Could we even consider a message with so large a ‘but’ as the kind of unconditional surrender we had fought for?” he will later write. It is a question that weighs heavily upon him.
The president is due to meet with his cabinet at 2:00 p.m. on this Friday, but he hastily convenes a more discreet meeting to discuss the Japanese terms. In attendance are Stimson, Secretary of State Byrnes, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, and Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to the commander in chief of the army and navy.
The room splits. Byrnes favors pushing for unconditional surrender; Stimson still maintains that the emperor is vital to Japan’s postwar rehabilitation. Truman, who has already decided that no further atomic bombs will be dropped without his specific orders, listens patiently to both sides. It is Forrestal who suggests there might be a loophole in the Potsdam terms that would allow the acceptance of Japan’s surrender offer.
President Truman informs reporters of Japan’s surrender from his desk in the Oval Office.
So it is that Truman orders that Japan be sent a counteroffer: Hirohito can remain, but he will not have immunity from war crimes prosecution.
“Ate lunch at my desk and discussed the Jap offer to surrender,” Truman writes in his journal that night. “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.”
The message is cabled to Switzerland, then on to Tokyo.
It reads: “With regard to the Japanese Government’s message accepting the terms of the Potsdam proclamation but containing the statement, ‘with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler,’ our position is as follows:
“From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.”
One day passes without word from the Japanese. Then another.
And still another.
Truman seethes.
26
MUTANCHIANG, CHINA
AUGUST 13, 1945
LATE AFTERNOON
The Imperial Japanese Army is cornered. Six hundred miles from Tokyo, in the low, forested hills above this provincial Chinese crossroads, the Fifth Army has assumed a defensive position for a last stand against the invading Soviet army. Odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the Russians: 290,000 soldiers to 60,000 for the Japanese. The Soviets possess four thousand artillery pieces and
rocket launchers, the IJA just slightly more than one hundred. A thousand Soviet Tiger tanks and Sherman tanks “on loan” from the Americans face absolutely no armor on the Japanese side.1
Making matters worse for the Japanese, their troops are on the verge of starvation; many are armed only with bayonets (often fashioned from pieces of scrap metal) because ammunition is scarce. The situation is so dire that the Japanese cannot even escape because of an absence of mechanized vehicles.
Fifteen hundred miles to the west, Soviet forces are also racing across the searing heat of Mongolia’s desert even as the center of the Russian advance travels through the rugged mile-high Greater Khingan mountain range. It is here, in eastern Manchuria, where victory will allow the Soviets unchallenged access to the Sea of Japan for their proposed invasion of the island nation.
Thus far, the Russian troops have been unstoppable. They are a combination of callow young recruits and hardened veterans of the war against Germany—robust men who looted Berlin just three months ago. The new soldiers, most of whom endured garrison duty in eastern Russia, are bone thin because nutritious food is scarce. Many of these “easterners” lack proper clothing and boots, instead wrapping their feet in fabric.
It doesn’t matter. The Russian army has opened a twenty-mile-wide front, pushing the Japanese forces ten miles back. The Soviets have used a relentless ground attack and unchallenged aerial bombardment to destroy the enemy; Russian paratroop forces are dropped far behind Japanese lines, successfully securing vital bridges and train tunnels. These attacks are accomplished with all possible stealth—some Japanese sentries have their throats slit without even realizing what is happening.
As usual, Russian troops leave behind scenes of gross violence.
The nauseating stench of war envelops the Chinese countryside. Craters pock the earth where Russian pilots have bombed and strafed the outmatched Imperial Japanese Army. The bloated corpses of the dead litter the forests and swamps of eastern Manchuria, their personal photographs and letters floating away on the wind, the smell of their rotting bodies mingling with that of their dead horses.
Killing the Rising Sun Page 19