In the end the procedure chosen was this: Nothing was going to be put in writing. Instead, Truman said:
"I think 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 a decisive effect upon the Japanese will to continue the war."
Churchill agreed with this "procedure".
[Ibid., p. 554.]
And this is how it was done.
On July 24, after our plenary meeting had ended... I saw the President go up to
Stalin, and the two conversed alone, with only their interpreters. I was perhaps five yards away, and I watched with the closest attention their momentous talk. I knew what the President was going to do. What was vital to measure was its effect on
Stalin. I can see it all as if it were yesterday. He seemed to be delighted. A new bomb! Of extraordinary power!... What a bit of luck!... I was sure that he had no idea of the significance of what he was being told... If he had had the slightest idea...
his reactions would have been obvious... Nothing would have been easier than for
him to say:
"... May I send my experts to see your experts tomorrow morning?" But his face remained gay and genial...
"How did it go?" I asked (Truman). "He never asked a question," he replied.
[Churchill, op. cit., vol. VI, pp. 579-80. The suggestion that the Russians already knew all about the bomb from their own intelligence is not borne out by their behaviour after Potsdam.]
I must add here a very important historical point which dots the i's in Churchill's account to an extraordinary degree.
When, in 1946, I privately asked Molotov whether the Soviet Government had been
informed at Potsdam that an atom bomb would be dropped on Japan, he looked startled, thought for a moment, and then said: "It's a tricky subject, and the real answer to your question is both Yes and No. We were told of a 'superbomb', of a bomb 'the like of which had never been seen'; but the word atom was not used."
I often wondered afterwards whether Molotov's answer was strictly true, and I believe it was; had Truman really told Stalin that the new weapon was not just a "super-bomb", but an atom bomb, it is almost inconceivable that Stalin could have registered the news as calmly and cheerfully as Churchill said he did, and done nothing at all about it.
Certainly, there was nothing in the behaviour of either Stalin or any other Russians at Potsdam after they had been told about the new weapon to suggest that anything quite unusual had happened. Their plans about Japan were not changed one whit. The negotiations with the Chinese were resumed in Moscow after Stalin's and Molotov's
return from Potsdam. There was no suggestion of the Russians being more nervous than before.
If there was anything strange about these negotiations with the Chinese on something which had already been approved in advance by both Roosevelt and Churchill, it was the Chinese attempt to draw out the discussions. What was behind these delaying tactics has since been explained by Mr Byrnes: "If Stalin and Chiang were still negotiating, it might delay Soviet entrance and the Japanese might surrender.
[J. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime (New York, 1958), pp. 291-9.]
And to drag out the Moscow discussions was precisely what on July 23 Chiang Kai-shek had been asked by Washington to do.
On the face of it, these Soviet-Chinese talks, which went on for a fortnight (from June 30
to July 14) before Potsdam, and for another week (August 7 to 14) after Potsdam, should have been little more than a formality. True, the Yalta Agreement said that "the agreement concerning Outer Mongolia and ports and railroads ... will require concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek"; but it also said:
The President [Roosevelt] will take measures to obtain this concurrence. .. The
Heads of the three Great Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated.
Yet the talks on the above questions and on the Friendship and Alliance Pact with China, also provided for in the Yalta Agreement, were not concluded—as they were expected to be—before the Soviet Union entered the war on August 8, i.e. two days after the
Hiroshima bomb.
It was the atom bomb that precipitated Russia's entry into the war. No doubt, after the bomb, Chiang Kai-shek would have liked to back out of the agreement with Russia, but it was scarcely possible in view of Roosevelt's and Churchill's firm commitments at Yalta
— and, above all, perhaps, because there was now an enormous Russian army
overrunning Manchuria.
What annoyed the Russians at Potsdam was not the vague news of some American
"super-bomb", but the "Potsdam Ultimatum" to Japan of July 26 demanding unconditional surrender. They claim that they had not been consulted about this Anglo-American-Chinese Ultimatum, and when they asked that its publication be postponed for two days, they were told that it had already been released. This may well have made them wonder whether the United States and Britain were not in a hurry to obtain a Japanese capitulation before the Soviet Union entered the war.
They may have wondered—and yet they did nothing about it, still assuming that the war could not be won in a short time without their participation. And they were certainly going to participate, since Stalin thought the spoils promised him at Yalta well worth a major military effort.
There is much conflicting evidence about the Japanese response to the Potsdam
Ultimatum. According to both the American official version and the Russian (repeated in the official History) the Japanese rejected it; according to certain Japanese sources, the Japanese Government "virtually" accepted it, though it asked for further clarifications.
[The German writer Anton Zischka, Krieg oder Frieden (War or Peace), Gütersloh, 1961, pp. 61-5 puts forward the view that the Japanese reply to the Ultimatum was either
accidentally or, more probably, deliberately mistranslated by certain American officials, Premier Suzuki's "no comment pending further information" being translated as "we are ignoring the ultimatum", the word mokusatsu meaning either "ignoring" or "no comment", according to the context.]
Be that as it may, it is certain that on August 2 Ambassador Sato paid an urgent visit to Molotov in connection with the Potsdam Ultimatum; he was anxious to obtain the
immediate cessation of hostilities and hoped that, with Russian mediation, the absolutely crucial question of the Emperor—not mentioned in the Potsdam Ultimatum—would be
settled in an acceptable manner. Molotov was totally unresponsive, obviously unwilling to see Japan capitulate before Russia had joined in the war. When, six days later, he asked Sato to call on him, it was only to inform him of the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan. That was two days after the Hiroshima bomb.
The wording of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan was odd. It said that, since the capitulation of Germany, Japan was the only Great Power wanting to continue the war; since Japan had rejected the Potsdam Ultimatum the Japanese Government's proposals
that the Soviet Government act as a mediator had "lost all basis". Since Japan had refused to capitulate, the Allies had asked the Soviet Union to join in the war, and so to shorten it.
The Soviet Government considers that such a policy is the only one that will bring about an early peace, rid peoples of further sacrifices and sufferings and enable the Japanese people to avert the dangers and destruction that Germany suffered after
her refusal to surrender unconditionally.
As from August 9, the Soviet Union would consider herself in a state of war with Japan.
On that night of August 8 Molotov received the press, simply to communicate to it the text of the Soviet declaration of war. He looked even more stony-faced than usual and, after answering only two or three quite innocuous questions, hastened to end this "press conference". Molotov did not mention the Hiroshima bomb; and nor did anyone else.
Yet th
e Bomb was the one thing everybody in Russia had talked about that whole day.
The bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on the morning of the 6th, but it was not till the morning of the 8th that the Soviet press published, almost at the bottom of the foreign page, a short item—one-third of a column to be exact—which was part of the Truman
statement on Hiroshima. The bomb, this statement said, was equal in power to 20,000
tons of TNT.
Although the Russian press played down the Hiroshima bomb, and did not even mention
the Nagasaki bomb until much later, the significance of Hiroshima was not lost on the Russian people. The news had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realised that this was a New Fact in the world's power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to Russia, and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that Russia's desperately hard victory over Germany was now "as good as wasted".
The news, that same day, that Russia had declared war on Japan aroused no enthusiasm at all. The idea of fighting another war, so soon after all the losses suffered in the war against Germany, had never been popular. Knowing nothing about the Yalta Agreement,
most Russians now felt that the new war had been forced on Russia, or at any rate
precipitated, by the Hiroshima Bomb. It had, of course, been known for a long time that masses of Russian troops were being sent to the Far East, but everybody felt that there must be some connection between the news about Hiroshima in the morning, and
Russia's declaration of war on Japan a few hours later.
On August 7—the day after Hiroshima—Stalin summoned to the Kremlin five of the
leading Russian atomic scientists and ordered them to catch up with the United States in the minimum of time, regardless of cost. Beria was placed in charge of all the
laboratories and industries which were to produce the atom bomb. Contrary to American expectations, the first Soviet A-bomb was exploded in the Ust-Urt Desert, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea on July 10, 1949; two further A-bombs were exploded within
the next week. The Soviet H-bomb followed four years later.
But this was in the future, and the thought that the Americans had a monopoly of the atom bomb had a deeply depressing effect on Russian opinion. The Russian press
continued to be silent about it, and the issue of the English weekly Britansky Soyuznik which was the first paper inside Russia to give any details on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sold in the black market for sixty roubles, instead of the official two roubles, or the usual
"black-market" price of twenty roubles.
The feeling of resentment against those who had dropped the atom bomb was so acute
that any feeling of animosity against Japan was conspicuously absent. I remember that evening of August 8 only too well. There was feverish activity amongst the many
Japanese living at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow. They were packing their bags in order to take them to the Japanese Embassy before midnight. They looked morose but
dignified, and—partly perhaps because they always tipped well—the hotel staff were
very helpful. Nobody else showed any malice either. Shortly before midnight, as they were piling their last trunks on lorries, something of a crowd gathered around, but no hostility was shown and many people even lent a hand with the trunks. It was like a
subtle little demonstration of sympathy.
The papers the next day did little more than paraphrase the Note declaring war on Japan, and recall all the evil that Japan had done to Russia and the Soviet Union in the past—
starting with the Russo-Japanese war, and going on to Japanese Intervention in 1919, to Lake Hassan and Halkin Gol, and to all the help Japan had given to Hitler. If, in the past, Marxist writers had said that Japan had stopped the spread of Russian imperialism in the Far East in 1904-5, the papers now spoke of her "perfidious attack on the Russian Navy at Port Arthur", and the "blot of shame" from which Russia had suffered for forty years.
In the next few days, the press reported mass meetings in many factories loudly
approving the declaration of war on the "Japanese militarists and imperialists." In reality, the Russians who felt passionately about Germany, had no feelings about Japan at all, and the new war against Japan was distinctly unpopular, except possibly among Russians in the Far East.
The only thing in its favour was that it did not last long. It was clear from the start that the three Russian army groups—the Baikal Front under Marshal Malinovsky, the First
Far-Eastern Front under Marshal Meretskov and the Second Far-Eastern Front under
General Purkayev, all of them under the general command of Marshal Vassilevsky—had
overwhelming superiority over the much-vaunted Kwantung Army. Within a few days
they had penetrated deep into Manchuria. The heavy and often fanatical Japanese
counter-attacks made little difference; the Russians had more men and incomparably
more guns, tanks and planes than the Japanese. On August 16 General Antonov, the
Soviet Chief-of-Staff, announced that the declaration of August 14 by the Emperor was
"only a general statement on Japan's capitulation", and that no cease-fire order had been given to the Japanese troops fighting the Russians. There had been no actual capitulation by the Japanese armed forces; therefore "the Soviet offensive in the Far East must continue." On August 17 Marshal Vassilevsky sent an ultimatum to the commander of the Kwantung Army, demanding surrender by noon, August 20. The surrender of this
Army was, indeed, announced by Stalin in an Order of the Day on August 22. The
Russians had used airborne troops extensively in Manchuria, particularly to occupy the ports of Dairen and Port Arthur where they feared an American landing. They also
hastened to penetrate into Northern Korea. The Russian Pacific Navy played an important part in the combined operations that resulted in the occupation of Southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands; here, in particular, the Russians met with stiff Japanese resistance—
even long after the official capitulation.
In Manchuria, too, even after the official capitulation of the Kwantung Army, numerous Japanese units continued to fight and it was not till September 12 that the final results of the war against Japan were published in a special Sovinformbureau statement. This said that, between August 9 and September 9 the Japanese losses were: 925 planes, 369 tanks, 1,226 guns, 4,836 machine-guns, 300,000 rifles. In relation to the number of prisoners, these figures suggested that the mighty Kwantung Army had been very poorly equipped.
594,000 Japanese prisoners had been taken, including 20,000 wounded. Among the
prisoners were 148 generals. The Japanese dead were put at 80,000. The Russian
casualties were stated to be extremely low in comparison: 8,000 dead and 22,000
wounded.
[The present-day History (IVOVSS, vol. V, p. 581) gives the same figures for the Japanese prisoners, but puts the equipment figures rather higher; it says that the Baikal and 1st Far-Eastern Front alone captured 1,565 guns, 2,169 mortars, 600 tanks, 861
planes, and 13,000 machine-guns. The History gives no figures for Russian casualties, which suggests that they were higher than the official 1945 figure.]
On September 2 the final capitulation of Japan was signed on board the US battleship Missouri. The Soviet signatory was a General Derevyanko, totally unknown to the general public in Russia.
Stalin's broadcast that day left people with a strangely unsatisfactory impression. He dwelt, to an extraordinary degree, on the victory over Japan being Russia's revenge for her defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. He recalled that, taking advantage of the weakness of the Tsarist Government, Japan had perfidiously attacked the Russian Navy at Port Arthur, in almost exactly the same way as she was to attack the US Navy at Pearl Harbour thirty-seven years later.
Russia was defeated in that war. As a result, Japan
grabbed Southern Sakhalin and firmly established herself in the Kuriles, thus padlocking our exits to the Pacific...
This defeat of the Russian troops in 1904 left a bitter memory in the minds of our people. Our people waited and believed that this blot would some day be erased.
We, people of the older generation, waited for this day for forty years. Now this day has come.
In conclusion he said that peace had come at last, that the Soviet Union was no longer threatened by either Germany or Japan, and he paid a tribute to the armed forces of the Soviet Union, the United States, China and Great Britain who had won this victory over Japan.
There were fireworks that night to celebrate Victory over Japan; but in and around Red Square there was barely one-tenth of the crowd that had turned out to celebrate the defeat of Germany on May 9.
It was a hollow victory, and everybody was conscious of it. For many years afterwards the official Soviet line was (and still is, though rather less emphatically) that Japan capitulated because of the Soviet Union's entry into the war: if the mighty Kwantung Army had not been defeated, Japan's resistance to America and Britain would have
continued for years, and cost them a million lives or more. It was, in fact, precisely the same argument as that Truman, Churchill and others applied to the atom bombs which,
they said, had precipitated Japan's unconditional surrender and had so saved untold
American and British lives. In reality the best evidence shows that Japan was on the point of surrendering at the time of the Potsdam Ultimatum, and merely wanted assurances
concerning the status of the Emperor—the very question Ambassador Sato put to
Molotov on August 2, four days before the Hiroshima bomb, and six days before the
Soviet declaration of war.
[How unnecessary it was to drop the atom bomb is shown by Major-General J. F. C.
Fuller in The Second World War (London, 1948), p. 395: "On the 10th a broadcast from Tokyo announced the acceptance of the Potsdam Ultimatum 'with the understanding that
[it] does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of the Emperor as a sovereign ruler'. On the following day the Allies replied: 'From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor... shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers'. [In other words, there was no question of hanging the Emperor as a war
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