I do not of course want to propose anything to jeopardize the war with Japan but, horrible as it may seem, I know it would be better to take greater casualties now in conquering Japan than to bring upon the world the tragedy of unrestrained competitive production of this material…. In the name of the future of our country and of the peace of the world, I beg you, sir, not to pass this off because I happen to be unknown, without influence or name in the public eye….
The letter reached the White House, but whether Truman saw it is not known. It was, however, returned shortly with no sign of presidential reaction.
The one hint of Truman’s state of mind to be found in his own hand is a diary entry on Sunday, June 3: “Have been going through some very hectic days,” is his only comment. Later, he would say that of course he realized an atomic explosion would inflict damage and casualties “beyond imagination.”
Actually, no one was very clear on what power the weapon might have. Forecasts provided by the scientific panel for the explosive force varied from the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT to 20,000 tons.
Estimates by the scientists on how long it might take the Soviets to develop such a weapon ranged from three to five years, although General Groves personally reckoned as much as twenty years.
Stimson was thinking more of the larger historic consequences. At the final meeting of the committee he had said how vitally important it was to regard the bomb not “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe,” and like O. C. Brewster, he warned that the project might mean “the doom of civilization.” It might be a Frankenstein monster, or it might mean “the perfection of civilization.” (Ernest O. Lawrence of the scientific panel had forecast the day when it might be possible to “secure our energy from terrestrial sources rather than from the sun.”) But no one knew.
On Wednesday, June 6, Stimson came to discuss the report with the President in more detail.
Stimson told Truman he was deeply troubled by reports of the devastation brought on Japan by the B-29 fire raids. He had insisted always on precision bombing, Stimson said, but was now informed by the Air Force that that was no longer possible, since in Japan, unlike Germany, industries were not concentrated but scattered among and closely connected with the houses of employees.
As Stimson appreciated, attitudes about the bombing of civilian targets had changed drastically in Washington, as in the nation, the longer the war went on. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1937, it had been viewed as an atrocity of the most appalling kind. When the war in Europe erupted in 1939, Roosevelt had begged both sides to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism” of bombing civilians. His “arsenal of democracy” speech in December 1940 had had particular power and urgency because German bombers were pounding London. (“What a puny effort is this to burn a great city,” Edward R. Murrow had said.) But the tide of war had turned, and the “ghastly dew” raining from the skies in the Tennyson poem that Truman still carried in his wallet had become more ghastly by far. That winter, in February 1945, during three raids on Dresden, Germany—two British raids, one American—incendiary bombs set off a fire-storm that could be seen for 200 miles. In all an estimated 135,000 people had died.
A recent issue of Life carried aerial photographs taken after three hundred B-29 bombers swept such destruction on Tokyo, said Life, as was hitherto visited on the city only by catastrophic earthquakes. The magazine said nothing of how many men, women, and children were killed, but in one such horrendous fire raid on Tokyo the night of March 9–10, more than 100,000 perished. Bomber crews in the last waves of the attack could smell burning flesh. With Japan vowing anew to fight to the end, the raids continued. On May 14, five hundred B-29s hit Nagoya, Japan’s third largest industrial city, in what The New York Times called the greatest concentration of fire bombs in the history of aerial warfare. On May 23, five square miles of Tokyo were obliterated. Thirty-six hours later, 16 square miles were destroyed. As weeks passed, other coastal cities were hit—Yokahama, Osaka, Kobe.
Stimson told Truman he didn’t want to see the United States “outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” But he was also concerned that targets in Japan might become so bombed out by conventional raids that S-1 would have no “fair background” to show its strength, an observation that seems to have struck Truman as so odd, coming on top of Stimson’s previous worry, that he actually laughed, then added that he understood.
Neither Stimson nor General Marshall was concerned over whether the bomb should be used on Japan, only with how to use it to stop the slaughter as quickly as possible. Stimson’s directive to General Groves in 1942 had been to produce the bomb at “the earliest possible date so as to bring the war to a conclusion.”
As Stimson stressed, the committee’s role was advisory only. The responsibility for a recommendation to the President was his alone, and he was painfully aware of all that was riding on his judgment.
The ultimate responsibility for the recommendation to the President rested on me [he would later write], and I have no desire to veil it. The conclusions of the Committee were similar to my own, although I reached mine independently. I felt that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisers, there must be administered a tremendous shock which could carry convincing proof of our power to destroy the Empire. Such an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese, that it would cost.
The possibility of dropping the atomic bomb on some target other than a city, as a harmless technical demonstration for the Japanese, had been considered by the committee and by the scientific panel and it had been rejected. General Marshall had thought initially that the weapon might first be used against such a “straight military objective” as a large naval installation, and then, if necessary, against manufacturing centers, from which the people would be warned in advance to leave. “We must offset by such warning methods,” Marshall had said, “the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.” But by now apparently Marshall had changed his mind, and besides, he was not formally a member of the committee. The scientists were able to propose no demonstration sufficiently spectacular to give the needed “tremendous shock.” Probably only one bomb would be ready. There were worries it might not work, and that any advance announcement of a supposedly all-powerful secret weapon that failed would be worse than no attempt and only bolster Japanese resolve to fight on. Writing for the scientific panel, Oppenheimer said:
The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiation will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternates to direct military use.
Byrnes had introduced the further thought that if the Japanese were told in advance where the bomb was to be dropped, they might bring American prisoners of war to the area. Oppenheimer, who supposedly knew the most about the bomb, stressed that the number of people killed by it would be considerably less than in a conventional incendiary raid. Oppenheimer’s estimate was that twenty thousand would die.
Stimson told Truman what the committee had stressed, and what all his senior military advisers were saying, that it was the “shock value” of the weapon that would stop the war. Nothing short of that would work.
Okinawa was on Stimson’s mind—Okinawa was on all their minds. An attack on the American armada by hundreds
of Japanese suicide planes, the kamikaze, had had devastating effect—thirty ships sunk, more than three hundred damaged, including carriers and battleships. Once American troops were ashore on the island, the enemy fought from caves and pillboxes with fanatic ferocity, even after ten days of heavy sea and air bombardment. The battle on Okinawa still raged. In the end more than 12,000 Americans would be killed, 36,000 wounded. Japanese losses were ten times worse—110,000 Japanese killed—and, as later studies show, civilian deaths on the island may have been as high as 150,000, or a third of the population.
“We regarded the matter of dropping the bomb as exceedingly important,” General Marshall later explained.
We had just been through a bitter experience at Okinawa. This had been preceded by a number of similar experiences in other Pacific islands. [The first day of the invasion of Iwo Jima had been more costly than D-Day at Normandy.]…The Japanese had demonstrated in each case they would not surrender and they fight to the death…. It was to be expected that resistance in Japan, with their home ties, could be even more severe. We had had one hundred thousand people killed in Tokyo in one night of bombs, and it had seemingly no effect whatsoever. It destroyed the Japanese cities, yes, but their morale was affected, so far as we could tell, not at all. So it seemed quite necessary, if we could, to shock them into action…. We had to end the war; we had to save American lives.
Among some scientists connected with the project, but not party to the committee’s discussions, there was sharp disagreement with such reasoning.
In early April, Leo Szilard of the University of Chicago, the brilliant Hungarian-born physicist who, with Einstein, had helped persuade Roosevelt to initiate the project in the first place, wrote a long memorandum addressed to Roosevelt saying that use of an atomic bomb against Japan would start an atomic arms race with Russia and questioning whether avoiding that might be more important than the short-term goal of knocking Japan out of the war. Because of Roosevelt’s death, the memorandum was not sent. Instead, Szilard set about arranging an appointment with Truman through a friend and colleague at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, a mathematician named Albert Cahn, who came from Kansas City and had once, to pay his way through graduate school, worked for Tom Pendergast. A date was made for Szilard to see Matt Connelly, the new appointments secretary, and Szilard went to the White House. Connelly, having read Szilard’s memorandum, agreed it was a serious matter. (“At first I was a little suspicious,” he also said, “because the appointment came through Kansas City.”) He told Szilard it was the President’s wish that he see Jimmy Byrnes, and Szilard, who was unaware of Byrnes’s role on the Interim Committee or that Byrnes was soon to become Secretary of State, took an overnight train to Spartanburg, accompanied by a University of Chicago dean, Walter Bartky, and another noted physicist, Harold Urey.
The three men saw Byrnes on May 27, just days before the crucial, last meeting of the Interim Committee. Reading the memorandum, Byrnes was at once annoyed by its tone. The true situation, it said, could be evaluated “only by men who have firsthand knowledge of the facts involved, that is, by the small group of scientists who are actively engaged in this work.” Byrnes was put off also by Szilard himself, a notably eccentric man of expansive ego. “His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy making made an unfavorable impression on me,” Byrnes later wrote.
According to Szilard, Byrnes said he understood from General Groves that Russia had no uranium and that through possession of the bomb America could “render the Russians more manageable.” Szilard felt certain it would have precisely the opposite effect.
According to Byrnes, what Szilard, Bartky, and Urey told him about the power of the bomb did nothing to decrease his fears of “the terrible weapon they had assisted in creating.”
Szilard left Spartanburg determined to draw up a petition to the President opposing on “purely moral grounds” any use of atomic bombs on Japan. Stopping again in Washington en route to Chicago, he saw Oppenheimer.
Like Stimson, like so many, Oppenheimer by this time was worn out, his nerves on edge. There were problems at Los Alamos. Detonators were not firing as they should, the work was falling behind schedule. Oppenheimer looked a wreck. He had been stricken with chicken pox and lost 30 pounds. Though over six feet tall, he weighed all of 115 pounds.
“Oppenheimer didn’t share my views,” Szilard recalled. “He surprised me by saying, ‘The atomic bomb is shit…a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon that is useful in war.’ ”
To what extent Byrnes discussed Szilard with Truman, if at all, is not recorded. But in his discussions about the atomic bomb, Admiral Leahy had been assuring Truman that “the damn thing” would never work. To Leahy it was “all the biggest bunk in the world.”
On Saturday, June 2, after less than a month in residence, Bess, her mother, and Margaret had packed and left Washington by train to spend a long summer in Independence. Madge Wallace was not happy with life in the White House, nor was Bess. “We are on our way home, underlined, four exclamation points,” wrote Margaret, who, to her father, seemed in a very unsatisfactory humor. “I hope—sincerely hope,” he wrote privately, “that this situation (my being President) is not going to affect her adversely.”
At home, the old house at 219 North Delaware was being patched up and repainted after years of neglect. It would be gray no more, but white now, with “Kentucky green” trim at the windows, as befitting the “summer White House.”
After only a few nights alone, Truman began feeling desolate and more than a little sorry for himself. The first Sunday, giving no advance notice, he walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church and slipped into a back pew unnoticed by most of the congregation. It was where Lincoln had sometimes worshiped, he knew. “Don’t think over six people recognized me,” he wrote in his diary.
One evening Admiral Leahy stayed over for dinner and afterward he and Truman played hosts at a reception for White House employees and their families. But most nights were taken up with work in the upstairs Oval Study, where the long windows stood open to the mild spring air.
From sounds in the night, Truman became convinced the house was haunted and tried to imagine which former residents might be involved:
June 12, 1945
Dear Bess:
Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice President. Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems real.
I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches—all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show the din is almost unbearable….
General Eisenhower made a triumphal return to the city, spoke to a joint session of Congress, and Truman gave a stag dinner for him at the White House, which everyone thought a big success. “He’s a nice fellow and a good man,” Truman reported to Bess. “He’s done a whale of a job.” There was talk everywhere of running Eisenhower for President, which, Truman told her, was perfectly fine by him. “I’d turn it over to him now if I could.”
Alone in the old house he would poke about in the closets, adjust the clocks. He hated being by himself, hated having breakfast alone, or even going through the motions of dressing for the day. “I’m always so lonesome when the family leaves. I have no one to raise a fuss over my neckties and my haircuts, my shoes and my clothes generally,” he lamented in his diary. “I usually put on a terrible tie not even Bob Hannegan or Ed McKim would wear just to get a loud protest from Bess and Margie. When they are gone I have to put on the right ones and it’s no fun.”
Ye
t the truth seemed to be that things were going exceedingly, inexplicably well for him. His popularity was beyond imagining. A Gallup Poll reported that 87 percent of the people approved his conduct of the presidency, which was a higher rating even than Roosevelt had ever received. Nor was the woeful man of the evening letters the one who turned up in the office each day. “And as usual, he is in good humor,” Eben Ayers noted one Monday morning. Truman was pleased with his popularity on the Hill, pleased with his press conferences, his staff. He loved having Charlie Ross on duty. Most heartening was the “good progress” made by Hopkins, who returned from Moscow on June 12 and, with Joseph Davies, came for breakfast the next morning. Davies was back from a mission to London to see Churchill.
In long cables from Moscow Hopkins had given full account of his every conversation with Stalin. Though greatly offended by the manner in which Lend-Lease had been shut off, Stalin seemed willing to let the matter pass. He had agreed even to the American position on voting procedure in the United Nations Security Council, which in effect meant the San Francisco Conference was saved.
Churchill, in further cables, had been urging again that there be no withdrawal of American forces to the designated occupation zones in Europe. “Nothing really important has been settled yet,” he warned Truman, “and you and I will have to bear great responsibility for the future.” But Hopkins told Truman any delay in the withdrawal of American troops from the Soviet zone was “certain to be misunderstood by the Russians.” Reportedly General Eisenhower also thought it unwise to keep American forces in the Russian zone. Truman, determined still to do nothing in violation of Roosevelt’s agreements at Yalta, and believing this the best possible way to demonstrate America’s good faith to the Russians and to induce them to carry out their own obligations in return, informed Churchill on June 11 that, as agreed, American troops would pull back, which Churchill saw as a terrible mistake. A few years later, Truman would write: