In the meantime, on June 12 General Groves had received a summons in midmorning to see Stimson at the War Department. Stimson’s first request to Groves was for the names of the Japanese cities that had been reserved for possible atomic attack.
Groves hesitated. Only this very morning he had completed drafting a memo to Marshall. It was headed “Atomic Fission Bombs,” stamped “top secret,” and contained concise summaries of four targets: Kokura, Hiroshima, Niigata, and Kyoto.
These were the latest revised recommendations of the Target Committee. In making that selection, the committee had taken into account the “psychological factors”; it was deemed desirable to make the first use of the bomb “sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it was released.”
Psychologically, Kyoto was seen as the best target: it had the “advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.”
On the other hand, Hiroshima “has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focusing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed.”
Groves still favored Kyoto. Its intelligentsia would spread the word of the bomb’s awesome power. Faced with such evidence, the Japanese government would have to surrender.
Groves believed that bringing about that surrender was a military matter. He therefore told Stimson that he planned to submit the suggested target list to General Marshall the next day for approval.
“I wish to see it.”
Groves tried to conceal his alarm. “I would rather not show you the report without having first discussed it with General Marshall, as this is a military operational matter.”
Stimson had spent thirty-five years in public service, most of it close to U.S. presidents. He was not used to being opposed, though old age had taught him tolerance. He continued to extend it toward Groves. “This is a question I am settling myself. Marshall is not making that decision. I would like to see the report.”
Groves continued to hedge. “It’s back in my office.”
“Then have it brought over.”
“It will take some time.”
Stimson’s patience ran out. Fixing his eyes on Groves, he made his point acidly clear. “I have all morning. Use my telephone to get it over here right away.”
An unhappy Groves sent for the report.
Stimson again asked Groves to name the targets.
“The primary is Kyoto. …”
“I will not approve that city.”
“Mr. Secretary, I suggest you will change your mind after you read the description of Kyoto and our reasons for considering it to be a desirable target.”
“I doubt it.”
Stimson explained something Groves had never seriously considered. “Kyoto is an historical city, and one that is of great religious significance to the Japanese. I visited it when I was Governor-General of the Philippines, and was very much impressed by its ancient culture.”
A messenger arrived with the target report. Groves launched into the argument in favor of Kyoto: the city was filled with booming war plants; it was an ideal choice. Stimson cut him short, called in Marshall, and repeated his strong objections to Groves’s proposal.
Groves later produced the only detailed account of what followed.
Marshall did not express too positive an opinion, though he did not disagree with Mr. Stimson. It was my impression that he believed it did not make too much difference either way. … Personally, I was very ill at ease about it and quite annoyed at the possibility that he might think I was short-cutting him on what was definitely a subject for his consideration. After some discussion, during which it was impossible for me discreetly to let General Marshall know how I had been trapped into by-passing him, the Secretary said that he stuck by his decision. In the course of our conversation, he gradually developed the view that the decision should be governed by the historical position that the United States would occupy after the war. He felt strongly that anything that would tend in any way to damage this position would be unfortunate. On the other hand, I particularly wanted Kyoto as a target because it was large enough in area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atomic bomb. Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect.
Still “ill at ease and annoyed,” Groves retreated to his office. Despite Stimson’s strictures, during the time ahead Groves would continue to press for Kyoto even though he was told that the president himself also opposed atom-bombing that city.
Later Groves would claim, by a somewhat dubious twist of logic, that it was he who was responsible for actually saving Kyoto. “If we had not recommended Kyoto as an atomic target, it would not of course have been reserved and would most likely have been seriously damaged, if not destroyed, before the war ended.”
38
For the past seven days, Lewis and his crew had been waiting in Omaha to pick up the new bomber. Ever since Tibbets had chosen the plane, it had been receiving “special handling,” and consequently the plant was delayed in turning it over to Lewis.
While waiting, some of the crew had picked up girls and held a succession of increasingly wild parties at a local hotel. One of the men got involved with a married woman, and they were caught in bed together by her husband. In the ensuing fight, the police were called, and it had taken Lewis’s considerable diplomacy to square matters. He had also placated irate motorists after another of the fliers “bombed” passing cars with beer bottles from his bedroom window. When the hotel management complained, Lewis managed to calm them down.
Over the past months, Lewis had become increasingly protective toward his crew. Within the group, the barriers of rank largely disappeared; there was an easy, first-name relationship between officers and enlisted men. Socially, Lewis spent considerable time in the enlisted men’s club, removing his officer’s jacket and often wearing one of Sergeant Joe Stiborik’s instead.
Private Richard Nelson, the nineteen-year-old radioman, found the way Lewis treated him as an equal surprising. Caron believed the pilot was trying to develop a close-knit, interdependent unit in which the men “could rely on each other in combat.”
When flying, Lewis still did everything “by the book”; he punished mistakes with a few choice words. But no outsider was allowed to criticize what he considered “his crew.” He told the men, “You got a problem, I’ll sort it out.”
Before flying to Omaha, Sergeant Robert Shumard, the tall, soft-spoken assistant engineer, came to Lewis visibly upset because one of the MPs at Wendover had shot and killed his red setter dog. Lewis’s anger was awesome; he verbally flayed the MP. His reaction only increased the respect and affection the crew had for their unorthodox captain.
Equally, some of them resented the intrusion of Ferebee and van Kirk, even Beser and Jeppson, and, on those rare days when he flew with them, Tibbets. On those occasions, Lewis was “demoted” to copilot. Even then, he tried to make it clear that it was “his crew” that was flying the plane.
Caron felt that Lewis and his overpossessiveness could create a problem when the colonel came to fly the mission. The tail gunner had no doubt that it would be Tibbets who would command the first strike. He liked the days when Tibbets flew with them. “He was just a gentleman, quiet and studious. Now Bob, he was a fine pilot, but he behaved like a cowboy.”
This morning of June 14 at the Martin plant in Omaha, Lewis had his regular crew with him. It was a red-letter day for them all. With a good deal of joking and storytelling, they inspected their shiny new B-29. After preflight-checking the plane thoroughly, flight engineer Duzenbury said he was satisfied. Lewis ordered the crew aboard, started engines, and took off. He circled Omaha once, and then set course for Wendover.
At 9:30 A.M., the Joint Chiefs of Staff arrived in Truman’s office. With them came Stimson, his assistant, John J. McCloy, and other senior advisors.
For two days, on June 14 and 15, th
e chiefs, the military heads of the armed forces, had been perfecting their invasion plans for Japan, code-named “Olympic” and “Coronet.”
Olympic called for an initial assault against southern Kyushu on November 1, 1945, with a force of 815,548 troops; Coronet was the plan for the invasion of Honshu five months later, in the Tokyo area, with a commitment there of a further 1,171,646 men.
Truman listened intently as General Marshall presented the case for invasion. A “considerable discussion” followed on the expected casualty rate.
Stimson summed up the prospects. “A landing operation would be a very long, costly and arduous struggle on our part … the terrain, much of which I have visited several times, has left the impression on my memory of being one which would be susceptible to a last-ditch defense.”
The possibility of a political settlement after a warning to the Japanese was raised by Stimson’s assistant. McCloy believed there were many Japanese who did not favor the war, and, given the opportunity, their opinions might be influential.
The suggestion caught the meeting unawares.
Stimson agreed that Japan was “not a nation composed of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours.” He also agreed that before the actual invasion some sort of “last-chance warning” should be given which made clear to the Japanese leaders that if they did not surrender, they would be responsible for what followed. Stimson was not yet sure whether or how this warning should be linked to the atomic bomb.
The chiefs listened but expressed no opinion about the atomic bomb—except that if it was used it should be dropped without prior notice. The matter was not pressed, for nobody in the room could yet know what the bomb would actually do. And nobody, in McCloy’s words, could even be “certain in spite of the assurances of the scientists that ‘the thing would go off.’ ”
Without positive proof of the weapon’s viability, it was impossible to plan a meaningful strategy other than in terms of conventional warfare.
Truman reluctantly approved the invasion plans, aware that ultimately a million American lives could be lost as a result of his decision.
President Truman’s concern about casualties would doubtless have been even greater had he known that Japanese intelligence had anticipated the American plans, and that at the very moment he was giving the go-ahead for the invasion of Kyushu, reinforcements were being rushed to that island.
Those forces, charged with repelling the Americans, now had their headquarters in Hiroshima.
39
Shortly after dawn on June 19, a dull rumble awoke Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama. The sound came from within Mount Futaba. Construction gangs were using compressor tools to burrow out an underground communications complex inside the base of the hill.
Yokoyama’s gun post was immediately above the bunker, and it meant that he and his men lived from dawn to dusk with a jarring sound beneath their feet that reminded Yokoyama of earth tremors.
The destruction he had witnessed on his last visit to Tokyo, coupled with his parents’ attitude toward the proposed marriage to his commanding officer’s daughter, had left Yokoyama badly shaken. To make matters worse, he had been away during the second American air attack on Hiroshima. Nor was he consoled by Colonel Abe, his commander, who said that with each day that passed, the chances of Yokoyama’s seeing action increased.
Abe continued to be solicitous, treating Yokoyama as if he were already a member of the family. But Yokoyama was not so sure. His mother had written a guarded letter saying his father was having to delve deeper into the girl’s background. Until these inquiries were complete, she urged her son to limit his social contact with his commander. Yokoyama found himself inventing excuses to turn down invitations to dine at Abe’s home or visit him at the officers’ mess in Hiroshima Castle. The temptation to go was strong. Yokoyama would have given anything to escape the tedium of life on the gun post.
Instead, he would spend this day, as he did all the others, drilling his men—and surveying through his binoculars the signs that Hiroshima was now the linchpin in the defense of the whole of the western half of Japan. By road, rail, and sea, in defiance of American bombers and submarines, men and supplies were pouring into the city. After further training and fitting-out there, they were moved to their forward positions on Kyushu. Remaining in his command center in Hiroshima, in charge of all troops in the west, was the man who had been chosen by his emperor and the high command to save Japan from defeat.
At the foot of Mount Futaba, not far from Yokoyama’s protective antiaircraft guns, Field Marshal Shunroku Hata had set up his headquarters.
Hata was one of the most successful, famous, and respected commanders in all Japan. He was close to the emperor and had once been considered for the post of prime minister. Instead, he was given a position perhaps as important: he was named head of the Second General Army and told that only he could save Japan from ignominious defeat.
His arrival in Hiroshima disturbed the officers in Hiroshima Castle. Quiet-mannered but stern, Hata overawed them. The sixty-five-year-old field marshal had more experience of war than all of them put together. They were relieved when he decided not to make his headquarters in the castle.
By the middle of June, Hata’s headquarters staff of some four hundred men included many of the best military brains in the country. They planned to wage a war of attrition the like of which the world had never witnessed.
Gradually, under Hata’s command, the island of Kyushu was being turned into an armed fortress; from the Goto Archipelago in the north to the Osumi Islands in the south, a system of interlocked defenses was being erected. They stretched back from the coast, layer upon layer, devised to cause the maximum casualties to the enemy. Linking it all was a complicated communications network controlled from Hiroshima and ending at Hata’s headquarters.
The city itself was a beehive of war industry; hardly a home was not involved in manufacturing parts for kamikaze planes and boats, for bombs, shell casings, rifles, and handguns.
Recently an order had been given to plaster the walls of the city with a new slogan:
FORGET SELF!
ALL OUT FOR YOUR
COUNTRY!
Hata planned that when invasion came, every man, woman, and child in western Japan would carry a weapon.
Children were shown how to construct and hurl gasoline bombs; enough bottles and fuel were being conserved to make over three million.
Even the infirm were mobilized. In Hiroshima the bedridden and wheelchair-bound were assembling booby traps to be planted in the beaches of Kyushu.
For the main thrust against the invaders—an engagement now commonly referred to as “the great climactic battle”—Hata had under his command some four hundred thousand men, many of whom were already in place on Kyushu. Minoru Genda, the architect of the Pearl Harbor raid, had recently arrived there as commanding officer of a large, newly formed fighter group. In addition, there were about five thousand aircraft standing by, ready to be used as kamikazes.
In Hiroshima, forty thousand troops had their headquarters in the castle. Down by Hiroshima Harbor, at Ujina, a further five thousand soldiers, mostly marines, were perfecting their own novel seaborne kamikaze tactics. Hundreds of small suicide craft, most the size of rowboats, were being fitted with motors, filled with explosives, and concealed in coves around the bay. If an invasion force arrived, the boats would be brought out of hiding, and each, manned by its crew of one, would be steered into a landing craft to blow up on impact.
Hata believed that although it was impossible for Japan to defeat America, so also it could be made impossible for America to defeat Japan. He hoped that once the Americans had sampled the welcome he was preparing, they would come to the negotiating table and drop their demand that Japan surrender unconditionally.
40
Tibbets looked down on Hiroshima.
Its rivers, bridges, harbor, the castle and adjoining military drill fields were all clearly visible in the recon
naissance photographs before him. So were the roads, railroad, warehouses, factories, barracks, and private homes. Here and there the urbanization was broken up by parks and woods. Beyond the city lay the hills, cocooning Hiroshima on three sides. They provided an almost perfect natural barrier to contain an atomic blast.
He noted the ground defenses, an irregular chain of gun posts stretching from Mount Futaba in the northeast to the harbor in the south.
Speaking quietly and authoritatively, using all his accumulated experience of bombing, Tibbets delivered his judgment on the suitability of Hiroshima as a target. “The various waterways give ideal conditions. They allow for no chance of mistaking the city. Hiroshima can be approached from any direction for a perfect bombing run.”
His listeners silently considered this assessment.
Tibbets continued with his careful study, now turning to reconnaissance photographs of other Japanese cities spread out on the conference table in General Henry Arnold’s office in the Pentagon.
This June 23 meeting was the latest in a series that were settling the crucial details of how best to defeat Japan.
A few days ago, LeMay had flown in from Guam especially to attend. He had already been told—on a fleeting visit Tibbets made to Guam earlier in June—that it would be too dangerous for the crew to drop an atomic bomb from below twenty-five thousand feet. In Washington, Groves had spelled out to him the probable power of the bomb and the reason the potential targets had been chosen.
LeMay had barely reacted when Groves told him that the actual operation would be entirely under “your control, subject of course to any limitations that might be placed upon [you] by instructions.” Only Groves knew that those instructions would be so worded that effective control of the operation would remain in his own hands.
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