Chapter Six
1. Based on a 1937 Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name, To Have and Have Not tells the story of a down-on-his-luck charter boat captain in wartime Martinique. The character of Harry “Steve” Morgan, played by the forty-five-year-old Bogart, soon falls for the young American traveler, Marie “Slim” Browning, played by Bacall. The two generated a great deal of interpersonal chemistry on and off the set, leading director Howard Hawks to enlarge Bacall’s role. Bogart’s third wife, actress Mayo Methot, filed for divorce in May 1944. Bogart and Bacall married in May 1945 and would remain happily wed until his death from cancer in 1957. Their son, Stephen, born in 1949, is named for the character in To Have and Have Not.
2. Byrnes was one of Roosevelt’s eight appointees to the Supreme Court, but he stepped down after less than a year, leaving the bench in 1942. The former US senator from South Carolina and good friend of FDR preferred helping the president run the war effort to the intellectual rigor of the Supreme Court. He would later go on to serve as secretary of state and governor of South Carolina.
3. The reason for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was its need for precious resources: coal, iron, salt, and arable land. The growing Japanese population meant that the nation was not self-sufficient. Manchuria offered the chance to gain access to those natural resources and relocate Japanese citizens to work the fields. The Soviet Union’s intended invasion was fueled by a similar search for territory and mineral resources and also by desires to regain lands lost in the Russo-Japanese War, particularly the warm-water naval base at Port Arthur; install a pro-Soviet regime in Korea; and invade Japan itself.
4. Approximately 127,000 Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.
5. The Maltese Falcon was a 1941 film noir that marked the directorial debut of John Huston. Humphrey Bogart played private detective Sam Spade; he was complemented by a stellar supporting cast that included Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Elisha Cook Jr. Robert Serber, the Los Alamos scientist in charge of code-naming the bombs, chose “Fat Man” from Spade’s nickname for Greenstreet’s character. The naming of “Little Boy” is more complicated. The Maltese Falcon was originally written by Dashiell Hammett. A third atomic bomb prototype, code-named “Thin Man” after a separate Hammett story, was abandoned in July 1944. “Little Boy’s” shape was smaller and more bulbous than that of “Thin Man,” which is how it earned its code name. At the time of the atomic bomb’s development, Hammett was serving as an enlisted soldier in the Aleutian Islands, soon to be discharged at the rank of sergeant. Hammett would be called before Congress in 1953, suspected of harboring Communist sympathies. He refused to cooperate and was blacklisted, making it impossible for him to find work as a writer. Ironically, as a veteran who served in World War I and World War II, Hammett is now buried at Arlington National Cemetery.