When the Russian forces learned of Hitler’s death a general telephoned to Moscow and told the Russian leader. Stalin said, “So, that’s the end of the bastard.”
IN THE PACIFIC, the war went on. Already it had lasted three-plus years, in part because the British and Americans had put the war with Hitler first. In Burma, British forces kept three armies of Japan tied down, and the United States used the time to manufacture airplanes, ships, and landing craft, and capture Japanese island bases.
To understand the Asian war zone, picture one huge swath of ocean, diamond-shaped, dotted here and there with islands. Japan is at the top. In 1942 America had lacked soldiers, ships, and long-range bombers, so it couldn’t strike directly at Japan. Instead, it had to start with Japanese-held islands at the bottom of the diamond, which were easier to reach. From there the U.S. forces had to battle toward the top, island by island. Many islands were only spits of sand or rings of coral, but the United States needed many of them as bases for its ships and planes. Its forces didn’t hit each island. Instead, they hopped from one key island to another, leaving Japanese defenders stranded on unneeded islands in between.
The Japanese fought back with courage, prepared to give their lives for emperor and country. When they were defeated, officers would often lead a final, hopeless charge in order to be killed and thus escape the shame of being captured. On Iwo Jima island over 20,000 Japanese fought fiercely to defend what was really just a dead volcano. Almost to a man they died.
By 1944 Americans had pushed to several hundred miles from Japan, close enough for bombers to attack it. Air raids shattered factories, sank the remnants of the Japanese navy, and triggered fires that burned Japanese wood-and-paper homes as if they were oily rags. A firestorm burned sixteen square miles of Tokyo, boiled the water in canals, and killed 89,000 people.
In April 1945, while Allied armies neared Berlin, Americans struck the island of Okinawa, 325 miles south of Japan. The enemies fought bitterly on hills and ridges honeycombed with cannon ports and tunnels. Using flamethrowers and explosives, Americans killed countless soldiers and civilians in the tunnels. Offshore, young Japanese pilots deliberately crashed their planes on U.S. ships. One of them composed this haiku:
If only we might fall
Like cherry blossoms in the spring —
So pure and radiant.
After nearly ninety days the U.S. forces won Okinawa. All the senior Japanese commanders killed themselves.
The climax of the war, it seemed quite clear, would be a struggle for Japan itself. The Germans had by now surrendered, so U.S. troops in Europe would no doubt sail around the world to join the fight. Perhaps the Russians and the British, who had recently recaptured Burma, would take part. Recently conquered Okinawa, no doubt, would serve as launching site. Presumably the conquest of Japan would cost the lives of many people, since the Japanese would surely fight as hard as they had on the other islands. Half a million, maybe a million U.S. troops would die, and far more Japanese, both soldiers and civilians.
Happily, both sides escaped that fate. To make clear why that was so, we’ll look at what had happened on another front.
LONG BEFORE THE WAR, physicists had learned that atoms are more complicated than they once believed. The atom isn’t, as they had thought before, the smallest piece of matter. Inside it there is much, much more. At the center is a nucleus with particles called protons and neutrons. Usually, a force holds the neutrons together. However, it was found, the neutrons of one atom can be made to break the nucleus of another, and this will free a huge amount of the energy that holds the nucleus together. To illustrate: if all the energy in the atoms in an airplane ticket were released, it could power a plane for several thousand trips around the earth.
Just before the start of World War II, scientists were pondering that force. Some among them theorized that if they could find an element whose atom’s nucleus they could split, and whose nucleus would shed more neutrons than it absorbed, they might produce a “chain reaction.” They theorized that atoms of uranium — a radioactive metal — might do the job. Neutrons shed from split uranium nuclei might be made to shatter other nuclei, thus releasing yet more neutrons that would split yet other nuclei, and so on.
The energy released would be immense, like nothing ever known on earth. One might convert it into cheap electric power, which would be a boon for humankind. On the other hand, if one could free that energy in just an instant he’d have a bomb so strong it could destroy a city.
World War II provided an opportunity to test the theory. Early in the war four physicists — all Jews, born in Europe but living in America, and well aware of Hitler’s plans for Jews — sent a spokesman to President Roosevelt. They urged that America make an atom (or nuclear) bomb before the Germans did. Roosevelt decided that it would do so, secretly and fast. Centers for the project rose up overnight, first in universities and then in lonely valleys and empty deserts. Other countries’ experts joined the project, and by 1945 the work involved 120,000 men and women.
Problem number one was this: were chain reactions only theory or could you make them happen? A team directed by an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, did the dangerous research. They worked in secret in a squash court underneath the University of Chicago football stadium. Finally, in a scary test, they brought about a self-sustaining chain reaction without making the Windy City any windier.
In mid-July of 1945, technicians detonated an experimental atom bomb. It exploded on a steel tower in the desert of the southwest United States. Dazzling light inflamed the sky, and a shock wave roared and echoed off the hills. The heat transformed the tower to vapor, and it fused the desert sand to glass. A ball of flame arose, and then a giant, surging, bluish cloud. From twenty miles away the research leader, Robert Oppenheimer, watched it all through welder’s glasses. The sight reminded him of words from Hindu scriptures: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”
Here the story changes from science to its application. Roosevelt had died in early spring, and Harry Truman was now president. It fell to him to make the choice to use the atom bomb or not. He knew that if he did, many guiltless Japanese would die. However (this is clear from what he later said), he also thought the Japanese would quit the war if they were to witness what the bomb could do. Using it to force surrender, rather than invading, might save the lives of many Americans and a great many more Japanese.
Truman had another reason to use the bomb: the simple fact that he possessed it. Behind it lay two billion dollars and three years of work. Could he allow all that to go to waste? When he ordered that the fearsome thing be dropped on Japan, he had not so much decided to employ it as not to not employ it.
In early August 1945, airmen put an atom bomb aboard a B-29 “super-fortress” plane. Technicians called it Little Boy, but it looked like a long, black trash can with fins. The pilot flew the airplane 1,500 miles to south Japan, and there he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, a seaport and an army headquarters. It flattened four miles of the city’s center, and left 80,000 people dead or dying.
For a teacher and her pupils on the city’s outskirts, the calamity occurred like this. The teacher cried, “Oh, there’s a B!” meaning a B-29, and the children all looked up. They saw a brilliant flash and felt a wave of awful heat. Then, a pupil says, “pitch darkness [comes]; [and] from the depths of the gloom, bright red flames rise crackling, and spread moment by moment. The faces of my friends…are now burned and blistered, their clothes torn to rags; to what shall I liken their trembling appearance as they stagger about? Our teacher is holding her pupils close to her like a mother hen protecting her chicks, and like baby chicks paralyzed with terror, the pupils were thrusting their heads under her arms.”2
2This and the following quotation are from Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), pp. 716 and 728.
Another teacher climbed a nearby hill. “I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared,” he later said, “…I was shocked…. Of course I saw many drea
dful scenes after that — but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima — was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt…. Hiroshima didn’t exist — that was mainly what I saw — Hiroshima just didn’t exist.”
The United States called upon Japan to quit the war or to “expect a rain of ruin from the air.” When Japan did not respond, the United States dropped another bomb, this time on the port of Nagasaki. This bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, was mightier than Little Boy. Nagasaki’s hills confined the blast, and fewer people died at once than had at Hiroshima. But in the next few years wounds and radiation sickness killed far more.
Ever since Hiroshima, people have asked if it was right to use these bombs. That is not a historical question, but it does involve some matters of historical fact. Some objectors say Japan was ready to make peace; no bombs were needed to persuade it. But official Japanese internal messages sent at the time make clear that the Japanese had not decided yet to quit the war. Some objectors say the United States should have dropped the first bomb on a desert island to demonstrate the weapon’s awful power. But if this distant demonstration had not impressed the Japanese enough, what then? Bomb a city? And then another? That could not be done, because America had only Little Boy and Fat Man. No other bomb was ready.
Some say the use of atom bombs was racist, that the United States would never have dropped them on Caucasians. In fact, the United States had intended them for Hitler’s Caucasian Germans, but Germany had left the war before the bombs were ready. The Japanese suffered Hitler’s beating.
Defenders of the using of the bombs agree with Truman that by sparing both sides an invasion the bombs saved far more lives than they destroyed. Defenders also make the point that ordinary bombs in other places took more lives than did the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Allied air raids in Germany (all together) killed between one-third and two-thirds of a million. The pilots on both sides discovered in the war that, with “luck” a bombing raid could cause a giant firestorm. When this happened, everything in a city burned that could burn. Humans died for lack of air, then shriveled down to small black bundles. As we said above, such a firestorm killed 89,000 people in Tokyo. That was more than died at Hiroshima.
After Nagasaki, Japan gave up at once. The emperor broadcast the news to his subjects, who had never heard his voice before. He told them that Japan would endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable. The Japanese surrendered on the U.S. battleship Missouri, which was anchored in Tokyo Bay.
Now the war was over, everywhere.
Among those present at the signing of surrender was the secretary of the Japanese foreign minister. He later wrote a report for the emperor. He said that while aboard the battleship he noticed many little rising suns, symbols of the flag of Japan, painted on a bulkhead. They represented airplanes, ships, and submarines the U.S. battleship had sunk. He tried to count the suns, he wrote, but “a lump rose in my throat and tears quickly gathered in my eyes, flooding them. I could hardly bear the sight. Heroes of unwritten stories, these were young boys who defied death gaily and gallantly…. They were like cherry blossoms, emblems of our national character, swiftly blooming into riotous beauty and falling just as quickly.”3
3William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (1978), p. 534.
ONLY AS THE fighting ended did the whole world learn about the Nazis’ foulest deed, apart from the war itself. When Allied soldiers, fighting toward Berlin from east and west, burst through the barbed wire of the Nazi camps, they found the proofs.
Hitler had for long preached hate of “under-men” — meaning flea-bitten Slavs, “half-ape” blacks, and, most of all, satanic Jews. As soon as he won power, Nazis persecuted German Jews, and on the eve of war in 1938 they started here and there to murder them. But World War II gave the Nazis a free hand, not only in Germany but in all the lands they conquered. Now was the time for what Hitler called the “final solution to the Jewish question.” Nazi leaders told subordinates to murder all the Jews in Europe. If we let a few survive, they said, one day they will seek revenge.
When killing Jews, the Nazis found, the hardest problems were logistic. Germany held only half a million Jews, but in Europe as a whole they numbered eleven million. By far the largest number lived in the Polish and Russian lands the Germans took in 1941 and ’42. How best to kill so many was the problem.
Was it more efficient to bring death to victims, or victims to their deaths? The Nazis tried both ways. At first they sent their death squads to the towns where Jews resided, marched them to the nearby fields, and mowed them down with guns. They also sent out special mobile execution vans. Soldiers crowded up to sixty victims in a van and piped in fumes from the van’s exhaust pipe. Early in the war, a satisfied inspector claimed that three such vans had “processed 97,000 without any evidence of mechanical defects.”
Eventually the Nazis found it best to bring the victims to their deaths. They collected Jews, crammed them into freight cars, shipped them to transit ghettos or labor camps, housed them in filth, overworked and starved them, and let them freeze. They hauled the Jews who failed to die, and many others, to death camps, where they shot or gassed them. (Their gas of choice was an insecticide that had the merit of posing no risk to soldiers who released it.) Then they burned the bodies.
Those who did the killing were ordinary soldiers and civilians. They saw themselves as decent Germans doing hard but needed work. They never used such words as “haul” and “gassed,” and they liked to gild their deeds with words like “special treatment,” “resettlement,” and “liquidation.” They murdered Gypsies, the disabled, and 5 to 6 million Jews.
Did the Germans know what was happening in the death camps? Everybody knew. The Nazis sometimes boasted of the murders. In 1942 Hitler told a crowd, “At one time the Jews of Germany laughed at my prophecies. I do not know whether they are still laughing or whether they have lost all desire to laugh…. They will stop laughing everywhere.” All over Hitler’s Europe people watched as Germans rounded up Jews. German soldiers in the camps took photographs and told their families what they saw and did. The British learned about the killings from decoded German messages. The leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, also knew, though he had little to say about it.
Surely, one would think, when Hitler came to power Jews everywhere in Europe should have fled. They must have learned about his persecutions, so why didn’t they leave while they could? Not many did. Flight meant leaving all they owned, their families and friends, their homelands. One day, they believed, this misery would end. So most of them were caught.
Where they could, the Jews resisted, as they did in Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto. The Germans herded nearly half a million Jews inside this section of the city and walled them in. From the ghetto, every day, they hauled about 5,000 Jews to a secret death camp in the countryside. They pretended those who were deported merely went to labor camps, but after they had nearly emptied the ghetto some Jews who had escaped the death camp brought back the awful news.
The Jews still living in the ghetto began to fight. Using homemade bombs and captured German weapons, they drove the Germans from the ghetto, but their enemies returned with tanks and cannons, gas and flamethrowers. For a month the two sides fought, around and through the shattered houses. Finally, the Jews ran out of ammunition, and many of their leaders killed themselves. It had cost the Germans several hundred soldiers to deport or kill some 55,000 Jews. They dynamited Warsaw’s Great Synagogue, and their general named the report he wrote for Hitler, “The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More.”
Among the Jews who fled from Germany in the 1930s were the family of Otto Frank. A Jewish banker’s son, Frank grew up in comfort. He had a year of business training in America, and in World War I he served as an officer in the German army. A few years later he married. When Hitler came to power, Otto and Edith Frank sensed the danger, and with their little daughters, Margot and Anne, they moved to the Netherlands.
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nbsp; The Franks had not escaped. As World War II began, Hitler seized the Netherlands. The Franks and other Jews were made to mark their clothes with yellow stars, and authorities expelled the girls from school. When the Nazis started hauling Jews from Holland to the death camps, the Franks and several other Jews went into hiding in some rooms in a house that Otto had used for business. Here they lived for two years. At the risk of their own lives, non-Jewish friends brought them what food they could find, mostly lettuce and spoiled potatoes. In the daytime, office workers were near them, so the hiders spoke in whispers. For ten hours at a time they didn’t flush the toilet.
Anne Frank, now fourteen years old, began to keep a record of their life in hiding.4 She knew that Germans soldiers were arresting friends and other Jews. “We assume that most of them are being murdered,” she wrote. “The English radio says they’re being gassed.” And later: “In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see long lines of good, innocent people accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them until they drop.” In July 1944 she wrote: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too.”
The Human Story Page 37