Chapter Fifteen

IN THE EARLY WEEKS OF TRUMAN’S PRESIDENCY, A REMARK WAS OFTEN heard repeated in the White House press room: “Franklin D. Roosevelt was for the people. Harry S. Truman is of the people.” Even on his feet, the spare midwesterner seemed smaller than his wheelchair-bound predecessor. He appeared awkward and self-conscious in his new role. When a band played “Hail to the Chief,” Truman did not know the protocol, and could not decide what to do with his hands. Salute? Stand at attention with hands at his side? Shake hands with visitors? The first time it happened, he tried to do all three. A reporter assigned to write a “color story” about the new president told his editor: “This man’s color lies in his utter lack of color. He’s Mr. Average. You see him on your bus or streetcar. He sits next to you at the drugstore soda fountain. There must be millions like him.”¹

The morning after Truman was sworn in, he arrived early at the White House. He had expected a morning briefing with his senior military aides. But a message had evidently miscarried, for they had not received the word and were nowhere to be found. For more than an hour the new president waited, “somewhat impatiently,” until a flustered secretary tracked down Admiral Leahy, the White House chief of staff, and Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, the senior White House naval aide. They collected their briefing papers and hurried to the Oval Office, where they found the new president seated behind FDR’s mahogany desk, still covered with his predecessor’s collection of sundry trinkets and gadgets.

The two admirals, standing to attention, began summarizing the latest issues before the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Truman interrupted: “For God’s sake, sit down! You make me nervous! Come around here in the light where I can get a good look at you.” Leahy and Brown pulled up chairs. Truman studied their faces, Brown recalled, “without the least trace of self-consciousness about the fact that we were also examining him.”²

In the course of their discussion, and in a larger meeting with the Joint Chiefs at eleven o’clock, it became painfully clear that Truman was not up to speed. He had not been adequately briefed on the state of the war, either in Europe or the Pacific, and he knew little about the latest moves in the global geostrategic chess match that was being played against the Soviet Union. The new president possessed a commendable work ethic, and he read top-secret reports and memoranda until his eyes smarted from the strain. In his diary, he wrote of long “hectic days” in the “Great White Jail,” his nickname for the White House.³ At times he seemed defensive about the gaps in his knowledge, even in private meetings with his inner circle of advisers and military chiefs. Some noted Truman’s reluctance to ask questions, for fear of appearing ignorant, even when he plainly needed more information. When a course of action was proposed, Truman often replied that he had already been thinking along the same lines, as if trying to avoid the impression that he was merely doing as he was told.

Historians have concluded that Truman grew into the role of commander in chief, and eventually proved more than equal to the job. But in the spring and summer of 1945, the growing pains were evident—and the decisions he must confront during those early weeks were among the most important of his presidency.

In his diary, Bill Leahy expressed concern about the “staggering burdens of war and peace that [Truman] must carry.” Privately, according to Leahy’s son, the admiral regarded his new boss as a “bush-leaguer.” He had been accustomed to speaking his mind to Roosevelt, knowing that the late president was “captain of the team” and might accept or reject his advice according to his own judgment. But Truman did not yet possess the confidence or independence to buck his advisers. Truman was in their hands, Leahy told another aide, which meant that everyone who advised the president bore heavy responsibility, and must be absolutely sure they were right.⁴

In his diary and his subsequent memoir, Leahy betrayed no sense of responsibility or culpability for the new president’s relative ignorance. One is struck by this lack of self-awareness in a Washington statesman otherwise respected for his wisdom and good judgment. Whatever he knew or did not know about the state of FDR’s declining health, Leahy had been at the late president’s elbow for most of the last year of his life. He certainly knew enough to anticipate that Truman might be thrust into the role of commander in chief at any moment. Leahy was the White House chief of staff and the chairman of the JCS. What steps did he take to ensure that the vice president was properly briefed? Who else had that duty, if not himself? No adequate explanation has ever been provided for this breakdown in the basic procedures of sound constitutional government.

Leahy had been personally close to FDR, he told Truman, and was “distressed” by his death. He was inclined to retire from the navy and from his position as White House chief of staff. But Truman needed him for the sake of continuity, if nothing else, and asked him to stay on the job to help him “pick up the strands of the business of the war.” After Truman gave assurances that he would adhere to the same decision-making procedures used by FDR, Leahy agreed to remain on the job for at least a few more months.⁵ It turned out that he served another four years, to the end of Truman’s first term in office.

Even now, at this late stage of the campaign, basic questions of military strategy and foreign policy in the Pacific remained unresolved. Would an invasion of Japan be necessary, or would the intensifying blockade and bombing campaign be enough to force surrender? Should the Allies land on the coast of China? Did they still need or want Russia in the war? How strong was the “peace party” in the Japanese ruling circle, and could it be strengthened? Must the late FDR’s doctrine of unconditional surrender be unbendingly applied? Did Hirohito wield the power and influence to put an end to the war—and if so, should the Allies signal that he could keep his throne? These were immensely complex questions, without obvious answers. The ordinary mechanisms of military planning were blended with high considerations of international politics. Defeating Japan was only the most immediate problem. Looming ahead was the creation of a new postwar order in Asia, with its implications for the territorial ambitions of Stalin, the red menace in China, and the status of former British, French, and Dutch colonies.

At a State-War-Navy meeting on May 1, Jim Forrestal told his two colleagues that it was time to “make a thorough study of our political objectives in the Far East.” Given Stalin’s recent backsliding on the political independence of Eastern Europe, they should be wary of Soviet ambitions in the Far East. Forrestal asked: “Do we desire a counterweight to that influence? And should it be China or should it be Japan?” If the latter, the United States must have a plan to rebuild Japan’s economic power and regional standing. In subsequent meetings, the cabinet considered the future status of Korea, Hong Kong, Indochina (Vietnam), and Manchuria. Entries in Forrestal’s diary leave the impression that these questions were being confronted for the first time. At another State-War-Navy meeting on May 29, the three secretaries considered whether Truman should release a statement clarifying the meaning of unconditional surrender, and perhaps addressing the postwar status of Japan’s imperial dynasty. The question was tabled by unanimous agreement, because “the time was not appropriate for [the president] to make such a pronouncement.”⁶

Leading figures in the navy and the Army Air Forces roughly agreed on one point: that an invasion of Japan was unnecessary and should be avoided. They stressed the cumulative effect of the air-sea blockade, which promised to cut off virtually all remaining maritime traffic into Japan. Without this last dribble of imported oil, raw materials, and food, the Japanese economy would seize up and its people would starve. Concurrently, the destructive intensity of the aerial bombing campaign would surge to new heights. Hundreds of newly commissioned B-29 Superfortresses were flying into the theater from the United States, and thousands of bombers, and fighters of the Eighth Air Force were redeploying from Europe. The Third Fleet was preparing a six-week rampage in enemy waters, which promised the largest carrier airstrikes in history against Japanese cities, seaports, and the road and rail network.

While these punishing blows took effect, some argued in favor of landing troops on the Asian mainland. Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, U.S. Army commander in China, wrote that “establishment of a lodgment on the coast would of course electrify the Chinese and cause them to redouble their efforts to gain land contact and thus open communications.”⁷ Admirals Nimitz and Spruance advocated seizing the Chusan Islands group, southeast of Shanghai, and the nearby Ningpo peninsula, on the southern side of the Yangtze river estuary. Their objective was to establish a bridgehead into China, throw a lifeline to Chiang Kai-shek, and provide more time (said one of Nimitz’s top planners) to “build more airfields and just bomb Japan to its knees.”⁸ This prospective “Operation LONGTOM” won the provisional backing of the JCS, and was assigned a tentative launch date of August 1945.

MacArthur argued for a direct invasion of Japan at the earliest possible date. Pecking away at the coast of China, he said, would only waste time, lives, and treasure. The Japanese could not be defeated by blockade and bombing alone, he said—and he pointed to the example of their German allies, who had refused to surrender even after their cities had been reduced to rubble. “The strongest military element of Japan is the Army which must be defeated before our success is assured. This can only be done by the use of large ground forces. . . . Just as is the case with Germany, we must defeat Japan’s Army and for that purpose our strategy must devise ways and means to bring our ground forces into contact with his at decisive points.”⁹ From his headquarters in Manila, MacArthur told Marshall that he could take Kyushu with forces already in the Pacific. If it became necessary to invade Honshu and capture Tokyo, he would require reinforcements from Europe and the United States.¹⁰

Operation DOWNFALL, as it was codenamed, aimed at conquering and pacifying Japan within eighteen months of the final defeat of Germany. An early version of the plan, developed by the JCS planning staff in Washington, was presented to FDR and Churchill in February 1945 at the Argonaut Conference on Malta. downfall consisted of two phases: an invasion of southern Kyushu in late 1945 (olympic), to be followed by an invasion of Honshu in the spring of 1946 (coronet). Each of these great amphibious assaults, especially coronet, would dwarf the previous year’s invasion of Normandy. downfall would require the combined strength of all branches of the military services and all forces within both MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s theaters, with a supporting role by British and other Allied forces. The assault on Kyushu would be handled by the veteran Sixth Army under General Krueger, veteran of the Philippines campaign. His forces would include two reinforced army corps plus a third comprised of three marine divisions; they would land simultaneously at Miyazaki on the east coast, Ariake Bay to the south, and Kushikino on the west coast. The decisive second-phase coronet would be aimed at the heavily populated and industrialized region of the Kanto Plain. It would be spearheaded by the Eighth Army under General Eichelberger, whose forces would land on beaches at the north end of Sagami Bay. The coronet assault would involve no fewer than twenty-five divisions, with additional reinforcements to be brought into action as needed. If an overpowering pincer attack on Tokyo did not force a surrender, Allied forces would occupy the capital—and then fan out from that hub, attacking in every direction, wiping out organized resistance in one province after another, until the entire nation lay prostrate and subjugated.

The initial timetable, fixed by the JCS in late March 1945, envisioned an OLYMPIC landing on December 1, 1945, followed by a coronet landing on March 1, 1946. On Nimitz’s recommendation, considering the risks to the fleet posed by winter storms, the target date for olympic was moved forward to November 1, 1945.¹¹

For the moment, the JCS left the perennially quarrelsome issue of command unity unresolved. Like all amphibious invasions, DOWNFALL would require sustained and intricate cooperation between the air, ground, and naval forces. But in the spring of 1945, the various internecine frictions and rivalries in the Pacific were growing worse, not better. Personal communications between the two theater commanders were frosty on a good day. In April, each man invited the other to visit his respective headquarters in Manila and Guam; both invitations were regretfully declined.¹² General Richardson, the senior army officer in Nimitz’s theater, asked to travel to the Philippines to confer with MacArthur. Nimitz withheld permission, explaining that he wanted first to settle the ongoing negotiations.¹³ A week later, Nimitz swallowed his pride and flew to Manila, where he was briefed on MacArthur’s draft plan for DOWNFALL. The SWPA commander proposed to take command of Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyus, and all land-based air forces in the Pacific. Nimitz balked. He flew back to Guam and put his staff to work on an independent navy plan for the amphibious phase of DOWNFALL, intending only to “consult” with MacArthur as necessary.¹⁴

Nimitz kept a framed photograph of MacArthur prominently displayed in his office in Guam. Visitors naturally assumed that it was a gesture of respect. When the Pacific fleet intelligence officer, Ed Layton, asked why the photograph was there, Nimitz smiled and replied, “Layton, I’ll tell you. It’s to remind me not to be a horse’s ass.”¹⁵

On April 13, General Sutherland, MacArthur’s right hand, traveled to Guam and proposed a basic reorganization of the Pacific theater commands. The multiservice theater command, he said, had been shown to be an unworkable “shibboleth.” MacArthur wanted command of all army forces throughout the Pacific, including garrisons on islands under Nimitz’s command. Nimitz was welcome to take command of the Seventh Fleet, which had been under MacArthur’s command for the past three years. Each service would assume administrative and logistical responsibility for its own forces, regardless of their locations. After the Okinawa operation, added Sutherland, “no army troops would be allowed to serve under an admiral.”¹⁶

MacArthur’s proposal amounted to an amicable divorce between the army and navy, but it would require complex administrative reassignments that would absorb staff attention during preparations for the largest operation of the war. The issue could only be decided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Leahy later observed, “The problem of command in the Pacific was one of those situations that would not remain quiet despite successive ‘settlements’ made.”¹⁷ Judging that it was the only way to avert an open break between the army and navy, the chiefs issued the necessary directives. MacArthur took the new title “Commander in Chief, United States Army Forces in the Pacific,” or COMAFPAC. In an “eyes only” message to MacArthur, General George Marshall referred to “a great deal of most unfortunate rumor and talk in this country” about the army-navy feud, and asked the new COMAFPAC to “do your best to suppress such critical comments in subordinate echelons and I will do the same here with a heavy hand.”¹⁸

No sooner was that issue resolved, however, than a new quarrel broke out over the command setup for DOWNFALL. Nimitz wanted to keep the model that his commanders had employed since Operation galvanic in November 1943, in which the invasion force was landed under naval command, and the ground general took control of his forces only upon setting up his headquarters ashore.¹⁹ MacArthur not only rejected this proposal but refused to discuss it further, insisting that it be sent up to the JCS for a ruling. He took special umbrage at the suggestion that the fleet commander, during the passage to the invasion beaches and the initial landing phase, should control “all publicity, including army as well as navy elements.”²⁰

In Washington, the issue seemed headed toward stalemate. Marshall bluntly told King that they were “apparently in complete disagreement” about the command structure for DOWNFALL, and insisted that the JCS immediately choose “a commander with the primary responsibility for this campaign.”²¹ The threat was implicit. If the question could not be settled in the next JCS conference, it would have to be appealed to the president of the United States. As the two Pacific offensives converged on Japan, it was growing harder to sustain the case for two autonomous theater commanders. MacArthur was senior to Nimitz, and he was unrivaled in public popularity and stature. FDR had been a dyed-in-the-wool navy man, but Truman was a veteran of the army. Recognizing the weakness of his position, King retreated. The JCS issued a directive assigning “primary responsibility” for DOWNFALL to MacArthur, with the face-saving proviso that Nimitz or his designated fleet commander would have broad leeway, if not autonomy, during the amphibious phase of the operation.²² Operation longtom, the proposed landing on the China coast, was scrapped.

ADMIRAL BARON KANTARO SUZUKI, the prime minister who assumed power in April 1945, was a decrepit old man of seventy-seven years, hard of hearing and prone to nod off in meetings. Long retired from the navy, he had served for nearly a decade as a grand chamberlain of the imperial court, and was personally close to Hirohito. During the aborted army coup d’état of February 1936, he had been shot and nearly killed. Privately, there seems to have been an understanding between Suzuki and the emperor that the new government must find a way to end the war, even if it meant acquiescing to harsh Allied demands. When the time was ripe, it was agreed, the emperor would be invited to issue a “sacred decree” to end the war.

At the same time, every figure in the leadership was cognizant of the threat of military uprisings, assassinations, and even civil war. If the government was overthrown, there would be no chance of opening talks with the Allies, and Japan would be completely destroyed. In a sense, the peace party’s struggle to end the war was a conspiracy that had to be kept secret long enough for it to succeed. That Suzuki had narrowly survived an earlier assassination attempt only made the point more poignant. As Richard B. Frank writes in Downfall, his study of the end of the Pacific War, “The recognition of deadly threats from within is a key to understanding the motivations of some of the tiny handful of men controlling Japan’s destiny.”²³

The reshuffled cabinet represented an attempt to integrate the various ruling factions, which were stalemated on fundamental questions of war and peace. Admiral Yonai, the furtive peacemaker, was retained as navy minister. General Korechika Anami was brought in as army minister, a move that placated Hideki Tojo and other hardliners of the army’s ascendant “control” faction. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the former commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, was made chief of the Naval General Staff, in which capacity he would join the hardline “fight on” caucus with Anami and army chief of staff Yoshijirō Umezu. Shigenori Togo, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, was appointed foreign minister. Togo accepted the post only after receiving assurances that he would be free to pursue a plan to extract Japan from the war within one year.

The main decision-making body of the government remained the six-headed Supreme War Direction Council (SWDC), of which all the aforementioned were members. But a new and important change was now introduced: SWDC conferences would be limited to the six principals, without aides or lower-ranking officers in the room. The “Big Six” would conference behind closed doors, with the Marquis Koichi Kido (the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal) and the emperor to make eight. And it was these eight men—influenced by perhaps ten or fifteen more—who would grapple toward a consensus in the closing weeks of the Pacific War.

Consensus was their elusive goal. Nothing could be done unless and until it was established. To describe their painstaking ritual of group decision-making, the Japanese used an expression derived from ancient gardening practices: nemawashi. What it meant, literally, was the process of extracting the roots of a mature tree from the soil before it was transplanted to a new location. Each individual root had to be dug out of the ground. It was a meticulous and delicate job that required time and care. If it was done badly, the tree might die. Nemawashi explained why a formidable statesman like Admiral Yonai, a former prime minister who had led a secret peace faction since joining the government in 1944, could not bring himself to speak plainly to his colleagues. Even after the defeat of Nazi Germany, when the inevitability of Japan’s defeat was no longer in doubt, Yonai found that “it was difficult for me, or I think for anyone else, to broach the subject of war conclusion to anyone.” He spoke to Suzuki only in an “abstract way,” remarking that “I don’t think we can continue with this much longer.”²⁴

The same institutional defects that had produced Japan’s irrational decision to launch the war in 1941 now prevented a rational decision to end it. There was no real locus of responsibility or accountability in Tokyo. Power was dispersed in piecemeal fashion across various military staffs and bureaucracies. Army and navy leaders were figureheads who could be manipulated, deposed, replaced, or even killed by younger officers down the ranks. A sudden turn from war toward peace would require the compliance of many widely scattered interests and players, including officers in the middle ranks of both services. A stubborn lack of consensus, combined with the chronic threat of revolt, explained what the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey called the “unusual time-lapse between the top civilian political decision to accept defeat and the final capitulation.”²⁵

At Yonai’s suggestion, Suzuki had ordered the SWDC staff secretary to prepare a survey of Japan’s overall economic and strategic position. The secret report, entitled “Survey of National Resources as of 1–10 June 1945,” was presented on June 6. The conclusions were spelled out with culturally atypical directness—not only was defeat inevitable, but the national economy was headed toward a crackup, and the Japanese people were losing faith in their leaders. Statistics told the story of shipping losses, production declines, depletion of oil stocks, disruption in rail transportation, and a worsening food situation. With the pending loss of Okinawa, sea communications with the Asian mainland would be severed, and entire industries would have to suspend operations. Shortages of consumer goods would cause skyrocketing inflation, and the food situation would reach the point of crisis by the end of 1945, with the “appearance of starvation conditions in the isolated sections of the nation.” As for the military situation, all remaining warplanes would be deployed as kamikazes, but critical shortages in aviation gasoline loomed. Even assuming that the suicide planes and submarines managed to sink one-fourth of the U.S. invasion fleet, “it would be difficult to defeat American plans through annihilation on the sea.” The report detailed the overwhelming power of American fleets and air forces, and warned that “about one-half of the approximately 60 divisions assigned to the Western European Theater of Operations have been redeployed against Japan.”²⁶

Admiral Toyoda, one of three hardliners on the Big Six, later told American interrogators that the statistics proved that Japan’s war-making potential was in precipitous decline. And yet, he said, no one in the room summoned the courage to propose that Japan accept defeat on Allied terms. “When a large number of people are present like that, it is difficult for any one member to say that we should so entreat,” said Toyoda, “so the decision was that something must be done to continue this war.”²⁷ The roots would have to be dug out of the ground, one by one. More time was needed. Caught between competing impulses to seek peace or go on fighting, the SWDC moved to do both. The council unanimously adopted a two-track “fundamental policy.” The army and navy would mobilize forces for an all-out defense of the homeland. The foreign ministry would ask the Soviet Union to initiate and mediate peace negotiations with the Allies. On June 8, Hirohito gave this plan his official sanction, as he always did when his advisers were unanimous.

“Ketsu-go,” the operational plan to repel an Allied invasion of the homeland, was circulated the same week the Suzuki government came to power. It involved a climactic, spasmodic effort to pour substantially all of the nation’s remaining military and economic resources into countering an invasion. Ketsu called for a massive troop buildup, to be accomplished through the mobilization of new and reserve army divisions; the deployment of forces to the regions considered most likely as points of invasion; the construction of coastal fortifications behind the expected invasion beaches; and an unprecedentedly large kamikaze assault on the Allied fleet. The plan correctly anticipated that the invasion would occur before the end of the calendar year 1945. The Japanese were also right in assuming that the first landing would come in southern Kyushu, to be followed in the spring of 1946 by a larger invasion of the Kanto Plain and the Greater Tokyo region.

As recently as January 1945, there had been only eleven fully mobilized army divisions in Japan. In April and May, as U.S. forces overran Okinawa, the Imperial Japanese Army began transferring units from Korea and Manchuria, and mobilized new and reserve divisions at home. By July 1945, a two-stage mobilization had brought the total to thirty frontline fighting divisions, twenty-four coastal defense divisions, twenty-three independent mixed brigades, two armored divisions, seven tank brigades, and three infantry brigades.²⁸ At the same time, Japanese forces were transferred to Kyushu, where the next Allied thrust was expected. By the end of July there were fifteen divisions, seven independent mixed brigades, three independent tank brigades, and two coastal defense units on the island, with total troop strength surpassing 800,000. Due to shortages and declining munitions production, not all of these units were properly armed or equipped. Despite a prodigious attempt to stockpile ammunition in caves and bunkers impervious to bombing or bombardment, it was expected that many Japanese frontline units in Kyushu would run low on ammunition if the campaign lasted beyond a few weeks.

At the same time, Tokyo stepped up efforts to organize, arm, and train civilian militias. All men between the ages of fifteen and sixty, and all women between the ages of seventeen and forty, were drafted into these local fighting organizations, whose enlistment roles officially topped 25 million. Many were equipped with nothing better than spears or household weapons. Every citizen-fighter was exhorted to kill at least one barbarian invader before dying in turn. These preparations proceeded under the new national slogan: “The Glorious Death of the 100 Million.”²⁹

After early June 1945 the Japanese air forces largely abandoned their attempts to defend against American raids, husbanding their remaining planes for the final battle. In July, about 9,000 aircraft were in reserve throughout the home islands; virtually all, including trainer aircraft, would be deployed as kamikazes against the U.S. invasion fleet. The aircraft industry was assigned to turn out another 2,500 planes for this purpose by the end of September. Pilot training had been so curtailed that many of the prospective kamikaze flyers could do nothing but take off and perform basic aerial maneuvers. Given the depletion of avgas reserves, most would remain grounded until the day they took off to fly their last mission.

American bombing raids and fighter sweeps continued to target Japanese airfields, and great numbers of planes were destroyed on the ground. But there was only so much the Americans could do to counter the kamikaze threat. Some of the enemy “airplanes” they destroyed on the ground were actually mockups made of plywood, while the real machines were dispersed and well hidden. American bombs punched craters in airstrips, but the kamikazes only had to take off—they did not intend to return or to land at all—and therefore they could operate from primitive dirt airstrips that were quickly and cheaply repaired. In attacking an invasion fleet off Kyushu, the kamikazes would enjoy two tactical advantages that they had not possessed during the Okinawa campaign. First, it was a short flight; and second, the attackers would fly from various airfields around the island, which meant that they would approach the invasion fleet from different directions simultaneously. The Japanese navy was also pouring major efforts into producing suicide submarines and speedboats, as well as suicide gliders to be launched from mountain peaks. The plan aimed to destroy one-fourth of the U.S. invasion fleet. Even if that estimate was out of reach, as it almost certainly was, the kamikazes could realistically hope to draw more blood off Kyushu than they had off Okinawa.

Even as they poured troop reinforcements into Kyushu, the Japanese could not discount the possibility that the initial attack would come on Honshu near Tokyo—or even somewhere farther afield, such as northern Honshu or Shikoku. Plan Ketsu provided contingency plans for troop movements to meet the invaders wherever they might land. Coastal sea lifts and rail transportation would be provided whenever possible. But given the ongoing disruption of transportation systems, combined with the myriad problems of a looming energy crisis, ground force mobility would be limited. If necessary, reinforcements would march across the country on foot, as in the ancient days of the samurai. If the Americans bypassed Kyushu and landed on the Kanto Plain, according to the IGHQ’s estimate, sixty-five days would be needed to move reinforcements from Kyushu to Nagoya, and an additional ten days to deploy them on the battlefield. If it took two-and-a-half months to get those reinforcements into action, it was doubtful whether they could arrive in time to save the capital.³⁰

The situation might grow so dire that the headquarters could not maintain its communications with outlying regions. Anticipating the erosion of basic command-and-control functions, the army was reorganized into quasi-autonomous regional commands—the First, Second, and Third Armies, with responsibility for north, central, and southern Japan, respectively. Civil administration was decentralized, with more local autonomy granted to prefectural governments, so that they could deal with local crises brought about by food shortages and disrupted transportation. The growing assault of the B-29s, the loss of sea communications even in the Inland Sea and the Sea of Japan, the threatened breakdown of the electrical power grid, the depletion of remaining fuel stocks, and the specter of famine—given these calamitous trends, it was not clear whether the Japanese would be capable of mounting a centrally organized defense of their homeland.

The second “track” pursued by the Suzuki government, a bid for peace talks, was coordinated through Togo and the foreign ministry. Tentative peace feelers had been sent out through diplomats and private citizens in neutral European capitals, and through the Catholic Church. Allied intelligence had tracked and reported on these various cloak-and-dagger capers, correctly inferring that they did not have the full and undivided backing of the Japanese regime.^* Hopes for a truce in China led nowhere, as did plans to ask Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime to mediate broader peace talks with the Allies.

Moscow remained the focus of Tokyo’s diplomacy. Japan was willing to surrender most (perhaps all) of the territory and commercial privileges it had won in the Russo-Japanese War forty years earlier. In return, it hoped to obtain oil and other needed raw materials from Siberia, and to retain the status of an independent “buffer state” in East Asia, balancing the interests of the USSR and the Anglo-American powers. With the backing of the SWDC, including the hardline faction, the Japanese government formally asked the Kremlin for assistance in arranging a truce and a negotiated peace with the Allies. These entreaties were conveyed simultaneously through the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo. The Japanese asked the Russians to receive a special diplomatic envoy in Moscow—Fumimaro Konoye, the royal prince and former prime minister who had been ousted from power in 1941.

The Russians listened to these plaintive entreaties and offered no encouraging reply, but did not reject them outright. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs, seemed to drag his feet. He was often unavailable; meetings were postponed, rescheduled, and then postponed again. Molotov asked Japanese ambassador Naotake Sato to provide more concrete proposals. The USSR would reply to the Japanese requests, he told Sato, after he and Stalin had returned from the Allied conference in Potsdam, Germany (July 17–August 2, 1945). The Japanese did not yet know or suspect that the Russians had already pledged to join the war against Japan. At Yalta, Stalin had fixed the date of the Soviet attack for three months after the fall of Germany. The Soviet dictator led the Japanese along with inconclusive diplomatic exchanges, intending only to buy time for his forces to redeploy from Europe. Throughout June and July, Russian troops, tanks, and artillery were traveling east by rail and massing on the Manchurian border. The point of Stalin’s characteristically devious game was to get his country into the last phase of the war against Japan, thus gobbling up territory on the cheap.

In an SWDC meeting of June 18, Hirohito gave the clearest signal yet that he was with the peace faction, stating, “I desire that concrete plans to end the war, unhampered by existing policy, be speedily studied and that efforts be made to implement them.”³¹ He wanted to know the timing of Prince Konoye’s mission to Moscow. Konoye later told American interrogators that he received “direct and secret instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity.” According to the SWDC staff secretary, Suzuki and Togo secretly agreed that if the Kremlin refused to mediate peace talks, they would appeal directly to the United States for terms.³²

But the factions in Tokyo had agreed on nothing beyond a vague appeal to the USSR. Nothing more concrete or conciliatory would be tolerated by the army. The regime’s public policy was to fight to the bitter last, while its diplomatic activities were kept secret. Prime Minister Suzuki’s public statements remained as spirited and bellicose as ever. The very idea of surrender was anathema; even the peacemakers were working on the assumption that some kind of bargain could be struck. Privately, some in the ruling circle recognized that Japan would be forced to give up its entire overseas empire, but others expected to retain territories the nation had controlled in earlier decades, including Korea and Formosa. The army high command was willing and even eager to pull out of China and southeast Asia—but they intended to withdraw their troops under Japanese command, not to surrender and be disarmed. As for allowing an Allied occupation force on Japanese soil without a fight, any Japanese leader who proposed such a disgraceful idea was asking for a bullet between the eyes. Even now, in the summer of 1945, the men who ruled Japan were slow to recognize that they could not simply turn the hands of the clock back to 1941, or 1937, or 1931, or even 1905. They wanted peace, but they could not yet face up to the stark reality of their total defeat.

FOR AMERICAN SUBMARINES on patrol in the western Pacific, the spring of 1945 was a season of famine. They found few Japanese ships of any kind. “Gone were the fat, loot-laden convoys that tried to blast their way back to the Empire,” wrote Vice Admiral Charlie Lockwood, the Pacific submarine commander. “Vanished were the huge transports, piled high with munitions and packed to the rails with enemy troops, headed southward from the enemy’s homeland.”³³ Sinking scores plummeted. In April, nineteen submarines managed to sink just eighteen enemy cargo ships of combined 66,352 tons, and ten warships of 13,651 tons. In May, the score declined to fifteen merchantmen of 30,194 tons and five warships of 4,484 tons.³⁴ Most of the few remaining targets were found in the domain of Admiral Fife’s Subic Bay command—in the Java Sea, the Gulf of Siam, and close inshore along the coast of Indochina. Increasingly, U.S. submarines preyed upon the dilapidated little trawlers, junks, and sampans that were always found teeming in those waters. Most were innocently laden with noncontraband cargoes such as rice, grain, fish, coffee, sugar, or salt, and manned by Chinese, Thai, or Malayan crews. But they were plying the coastal trade between ports in Japanese-occupied territories, and that was enough to doom them. In a July 1945 patrol off the east coast of Malaya, the submarine Blenny sank sixty-three small craft with her deck guns. In most cases, but not all, skipper William Hazard gave the crews a warning before opening fire, allowing them to evacuate their vessels and take to their rafts and lifeboats.

As solitary commerce-raiding cruises became less productive, the submarine fleet had to devote itself to new missions involving closer cooperation with other Allied forces. During the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns, submarines acted in versatile roles—to scout the Japanese coast, sink enemy picket boats, and provide early warning of kamikaze strikes. They scouted and charted enemy minefields, and laid mines themselves in channels traversed by enemy shipping.³⁵ Supporting technologies advanced by giant steps. By the spring of 1945, U.S. subs were equipped with new sonar and radar systems that made them considerably more deadly as hunters, and new radio transceivers enabled them to send and receive communications even while submerged. Lockwood and LeMay, whose respective headquarters were now neighbors on Guam, collaborated personally to improve recovery rates for downed Superfortress aircrews. By February 1945, at least four submarines were stationed directly along the flight line of each B-29 bombing mission. They called themselves the “Lifeguard League.” Procedures improved continuously, though never at a pace to satisfy either Lockwood or LeMay. By June, Lifeguard League submarine crews were coordinating directly by radio with the aircrews of the navy “Dumbos”—search and rescue patrol planes—as they patrolled overhead.³⁶

Japan’s last remaining viable sea link to Asia was through the Sea of Japan, the “back door” between the enemy’s home islands and its vital territories of Korea and Manchuria. No American submarine had attempted to penetrate that largely enclosed marginal sea since the destruction of Mush Morton’s Wahoo in September 1943. In the interim, the Japanese had upgraded and fortified their antisubmarine defenses in the three main entrance and exit routes. The narrow northern lanes at La Perouse and Tsugaru Straits were heavily patrolled by aircraft and small craft and guarded by coastal artillery. Tsushima Strait, between Kyushu and Korea, was 40 miles wide, but a powerful warm current ran north through it, and it was one of the most heavily mined seaways in the world. Lockwood had taken an interest in new frequency-modulated (FM) sonar systems that might enable a submarine to thread the Tsushima mine barrier, and by 1945 the technology had matured enough that it seemed worth the obvious risks. After conducting tests in dummy minefields off Pearl Harbor, Lockwood sold the idea to King and Nimitz. The operation was dubbed BARNEY.

On June 4, 1945, a nine-submarine wolfpack crept into Tsushima Strait. They entered in three groups of three, each taking a slightly different route through a four-layered mine barrier. They stayed deep, below 150 feet, with their FM sonar sets tilted upward to “see” the locations of floating mines. As each boat snuck through the forest of steel mine cables, eluding the faint, ghostlike images depicted on the FM sonar scopes, the seconds passed like minutes, and minutes like hours. The Flying Fish remained submerged for sixteen hours, near the limit of her battery’s endurance, while her crew panted and sweated in the oxygen-deprived confines of her hull.³⁷ On the Tinosa, a mine cable scraped along the length of the outer hull, making a noise that every man on her crew could identify with hideous clarity. Would it pull the mine down and blow the boat apart? One sailor recorded in his diary that the tension aboard the Tinosa was so severe that “if you dropped a penny on the deck, people would be on the ceiling.”³⁸

All nine made it safely through to “Hirohito’s private bathtub,” where they commenced a three-week rampage, sinking a total of twenty-eight ships for 54,784 tons.³⁹ With its maritime economy teetering on the brink of collapse, Japan could not afford to lose those ships. The Bonefish was destroyed in Toyama Bay on June 19 by the Japanese frigate Okinawa and a flotilla of smaller patrol craft. The remaining eight survived and escaped the enclosed sea by dashing through La Perouse Strait, the same northern passage where the Wahoo had met her end two years earlier. Their tactic was to stick together and remain on the surface, using their surface guns to fight off any Japanese destroyers or patrol craft that tried to stop them. But a welcome heavy fog concealed their daring high-speed surface run on June 24, and they encountered no opposition. They returned directly to Pearl Harbor, arriving on July 4. The Bonefish and her crew were mourned, but twenty-eight sinkings were deemed an acceptable result. Lockwood had hoped for more, but Operation BARNEY had productively capped the remarkable wartime career of the Pacific submarine fleet.

After flying hundreds of tactical missions over Kyushu, in support of the invasion of Okinawa, LeMay’s B-29s resumed their strategic bombing campaign against Japanese cities and industries. Growing armadas of Superfortresses returned again and again to hit the aircraft plants in greater Tokyo and Nagoya, and the remaining industrial areas of Osaka, Kawasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama. Faced with raw materials shortages and crippling airstrikes, the Japanese largely abandoned any hope of replacing their aircraft losses. Indiscriminate firebombing of the urban centers continued and intensified. On April 13, northwest Tokyo was hit by 327 Superforts carrying a mix of incendiaries and 500-pound general-purpose bombs. The citizens had learned to run away, rather than stay and fight the fires, so the casualty figures were lower than during the great March 9–10 raid. Otherwise, the results on the ground were much the same: 11 square miles of the city burned to the ground. Two days later, another major strike hit Kawasaki, south of Tokyo, and destroyed much of the city. Tokyo was largely burned out by that time, but the Superfortresses returned to the capital several more times. A five-hundred-plane daylight raid targeted the southern and central downtown districts on May 24. Two nights later, when some of the fires of the May 24 raid were still burning, another massive attack dropped 3,252 tons of M-77 bombs into Ginza and Hibiya, upscale downtown commercial and residential neighborhoods bordering upon the Imperial Palace.

After seven major incendiary raids, there was not much of Tokyo left to bomb. Half of the great metropolis, about 57 square miles, lay in ashes. The population had declined by about 50 percent, and homeless refugees would continue their exodus until the end of the war.

In late March, the 313th Bombardment Wing began laying mines in Japanese harbors and inland waterways, a campaign aptly called Operation STARVATION. LeMay initially resisted taking on this new mission, regarding it as yet another exasperating diversion from his main strategic bombing program—but aerial minelaying ultimately proved to be one of the single most productive uses of the B-29s. In an initial weeklong blitz, the planes dropped hundreds of mines into Shimonoseki Strait, the channel between Kyushu and Honshu. Surprised by this sudden rain of mines into a vital shipping chokepoint, the Japanese lacked effective countermeasures. The Americans dropped a variety of different mine types—acoustic, magnetic, and pressure-triggered devices—that sank to various depths. Japanese minesweepers were overwhelmed, lacking the equipment or know-how to locate more than a fraction of the mines. Some were equipped with diabolically clever arming devices, including timed delays and counters that did not activate the warhead until a specified number of ships had passed over. The pressure mine, triggered by fluctuations in water pressure caused by a passing ship, could not be detected at all by the minesweepers. The Japanese called it “the Unsweepable.”⁴⁰

In April and May, the 313th Wing Superforts mined all major waterways in the Inland Sea, the Kure-Hiroshima anchorages, the naval base at Sasebo, the ports of Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka, the Bungo Suido Strait, and the major ports on the Sea of Japan. When minesweepers began making progress in clearing Shimonoseki Strait, waves of B-29s rained thousands of new mines into it. The assault effectively shut down this vital western gateway to Japan’s Inland Sea. In growing desperation, Japanese merchant sea captains tried to force the minefields, hoping and praying for good luck. Many ships vanished in gigantic towers of whitewater.

Operation STARVATION eventually sowed more than 12,000 mines into Japanese waters. Though it spanned only the last five months of the Pacific War, the campaign sank or otherwise disabled 1,250,000 tons of shipping, accounting for 9.3 percent of all Japanese shipping losses during the war. The missions were usually flown at night, over areas that were not strongly defended by antiaircraft batteries. In 1,529 aerial minelaying sorties, only fifteen B-29s failed to return, representing a loss rate of less than 1 percent. USSBS analysts concluded that the deadly campaign should have been launched earlier and laid on with greater weight: “Minelaying has been the most economical in both men and material of all types of warfare against shipping.”⁴¹

The Twentieth Air Force was growing rapidly as reinforcements flew in from China and the United States. By July it was brought up to five wings, totaling more than 1,000 B-29s, with total personnel (including flight crews, administrative personnel, and ground support units) of 83,000. The 58th Bombardment Wing, which redeployed from China and India following the dissolution of the 20th Bomber Command, set up shop on West Field, Tinian. The newly activated 315th Bombardment Wing operated from the just-completed Northwest Field on Guam. Equipped with the new AN/APQ-7 Eagle radar system, the 315th Wing Superforts executed a series of pinpoint strikes on Japan’s largest oil refineries, storage complexes, and pipelines. Using radar alone, the specially trained aircrews could hit their targets with deadly precision, even when bombing through impenetrable cloud cover. During the last six weeks of the Pacific War, maximum effort bombing missions—huge strikes involving six hundred or seven hundred Superfortresses—hit Japan two to three times a week. The pilot Charles Phillips wrote of those late-war missions: “We could pick any city and burn it to the ground at will, in good weather or bad, visually or by radar.”⁴²

Performance and maintenance metrics improved by leaps and bounds. The average engine life of the once-troublesome Wright R-3350 engines was tripled, from 250 hours to 750 hours. Mission abort rates fell to under 10 percent. P-51 Mustangs joined up with the northbound B-29s from their newly expanded airbases on Iwo Jima. They easily massacred the Japanese fighters that rose to intercept the incoming formations, scoring a cumulative shootdown ratio of approximately eight to one. After mid-June, Japanese interceptors were rarely seen by the American aircrews. B-29 loss rates fell to under 1 percent per mission. By the end of the war, as LeMay was fond of saying, it was statistically safer to fly a bombing mission over Japan than to fly a training mission at home.

ON JULY 1, THE THIRD FLEET was back at sea, radio silent, northbound for Japan. An armada of 105 ships, including seventeen aircraft carriers and eight battleships, was arrayed in three task groups. By a fair margin, it was the most powerful naval striking force ever assembled in history. Its mission was to operate against the Japanese home islands, launching airstrikes along the coasts of Honshu and Hokkaido, hitting cities, factories, dockyards, and shipping and transportation facilities. It would strike “virgin” targets in Japan’s northern regions, which lay beyond the range of the B-29s. And it would attempt to finish off the last vestiges of the Japanese fleet, at anchor in Tokyo Bay and the Inland Sea. Admiral Halsey and his force would be at sea for several weeks, rearming and refueling from logistics ships and tankers that would meet him at predetermined times and coordinates, and then returning again and again to strike the home islands with unprecedented fury.

On July 10, before dawn, the fleet maneuvered into a launch point about 170 miles southeast of Tokyo. The initial fighter sweep caught the Japanese completely by surprise. In a long and busy day of air operations over greater Tokyo, the carrier planes dropped 454 tons of bombs and fired 1,648 rockets on industrial facilities, dockyards, bridges, power stations, and airfields. No Japanese fighters rose to offer resistance. Antiaircraft fire claimed ten U.S. planes; five more were lost to operational accidents.⁴³

Vanishing into the Pacific void, the fleet raced north, and then doubled back to descend suddenly upon northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido, which had never yet been struck by enemy bombing raids. Barnstorming over the region’s many harbors, carrier planes dropped bombs and fired rockets into ships at anchor, returning with claims of twenty-four ships destroyed and many more damaged. They destroyed planes on the ground, parked wingtip to wingtip alongside remote northern airstrips; they hit and destroyed ammunition dumps, buildings, radio stations, factories, and warehouses. Others targeted the rail infrastructure, tearing up railyards, destroying bridges, and smashing locomotives and boxcars. Honshu and Hokkaido were linked by a cross-channel rail ferry system. The carrier airmen sank four rail ferries and hit several more, which were forced to run aground. This single day’s work cut coal shipments from Hokkaido to Honshu by about 50 percent.⁴⁴ It was poor flying weather, wet and cloudy with poor visibility, and many of the strikes were cancelled; but Task Force 38 still managed to complete 871 sorties before nightfall.⁴⁵ According to Admiral Radford, “Aerial opposition was practically nil.”⁴⁶

July 15 brought a new milestone in the war: the first naval bombardment of the enemy’s homeland. A battleship-cruiser-destroyer force maneuvered into the offing near Kamaishi, site of a major steelworks, and opened fire at dawn. For two hours, 16-inch shells fired by the South Dakota, Indiana, and Massachusetts laid waste to the foundry and coke ovens. The following day, another surface force hit the Nihon Steel Company and the Wanishi Ironworks at Muroran, Hokkaido. The Missouri joined the bombardment group off Muroran, giving Halsey a front-row seat to a “magnificent spectacle.”⁴⁷ Fires spread into nearby Kushiro, burning about twenty city blocks to the ground. According to Mick Carney, they saw no enemy aircraft at all, and counterfire from shore batteries was weak and intermittent. He concluded that the Japanese must be nearly finished: “We moved the battleships right in there to bombardment range any place along the coast that we felt like it, and there was no ability to resist effectively. So it was pretty apparent that we were flogging a dead horse.”⁴⁸

In those last weeks of the war, the Japanese were doing little or no offshore scouting. U.S. submarines and carrier planes had sunk most of their coastal picket vessels. They had few remaining patrol planes or pilots. “They would send out one airplane to scout the fleet, and we would shoot him down,” recalled Arthur R. Hawkins, a Hellcat pilot with VF-31 on the Belleau Wood. “Then they would do it again the next day. They sent him out; if he didn’t come back, they knew the fleet was out there.”⁴⁹ Finding that they could operate with impunity even within sight of the Japanese coast, the Americans did not bother to conceal their location. “There just wasn’t anything to shoot at,” said Hawkins. “They weren’t in the air. We were on bombing strikes, and we would go in, drop our bombs, and just sit around and shoot them on the ground.”⁵⁰

On the sixteenth, Task Force 38 withdrew to the east and rendezvoused with its fueling and logistics group. Sidling up alongside the fleet oilers, the great fleet drank 379,157 barrels of fuel. Simultaneously, 6,369 tons of ammunition and 1,635 tons of supplies and provisions were transferred from the storeships into the fleet’s storerooms and magazines. The entire process was completed in about eighteen hours. Admiral Radford did not exaggerate when he called it “the greatest logistic feat ever performed on the high seas.”⁵¹

Charging back toward Honshu on July 17, Task Force 38 planes swooped down on Tokyo Bay and the naval base at Yokosuka. They ganged up on the battleship Nagato, at anchor in the bay. At the outset of the war, and during the attack on Pearl Harbor, she had been the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Now she was reduced to a blackened, smoking, listing wreck. Other U.S. planes strafed and bombed airfields throughout the region, destroying would-be future kamikazes on the ground. Battleships and cruisers moved in close to the shoreline to bombard the Mito-Hitachi area. Falling in with the British Pacific Fleet under Vice Admiral Bernard Rawlings, the whole enormous force launched coordinated airstrikes against major ports in the eastern part of the Inland Sea. They paid special attention to the remaining units of the Japanese fleet anchored off Kure Naval Base.

The Japanese navy was immobilized, and no longer presented a threat to the Allies, but the airmen were determined to pay off this final installment of a forty-four-month-old debt. “Remember Pearl Harbor” was chalked on the fleet’s ready room blackboards. “Call this what you will,” said Mick Carney, “it was a deep-seated feeling in the minds of all of us, that the ignominy of Pearl Harbor would never be wiped off the slate until they had been repaid in full, and until they were utterly destroyed.”⁵² In a coup de grâce on July 26, carrier planes pulverized two dozen Japanese warships riding at anchor, effectively wiping out the last remnants of Japanese naval power. “By sunset that evening,” wrote Halsey, “the Japanese navy had ceased to exist.”⁵³

During those late-war operations, Halsey regularly spoke to war correspondents assigned to ride with the Third Fleet, serving up his familiar threats to impose a vengeful peace on the Japanese. Asked about conditions for a Japanese surrender, he said that Hirohito should “pay for impersonating God.”⁵⁴ He pledged to seize the emperor’s white horse as a trophy of war. In an interview for Collier’s magazine, Halsey said that Japan was “not fit to live in a civilized world,” and suggested that one Japanese officer should be executed for every American prisoner of war who died in captivity.⁵⁵ On July 23, his catchphrase “Kill More Japs” appeared under his face on the cover of Time magazine.⁵⁶ Halsey was annoyed by the prohibition against bombing the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The Third Fleet commander, according to Carney, had little time for the “pantywaist idea” that Hirohito might be useful to the Allies in a postwar role: “The thing to do, as we saw it, was to go get him, get Number 1 and knock him off.”⁵⁷

Halsey’s pugnacious tirades played well in the American press, but they contradicted and undermined the themes of Allied propaganda. A week after Halsey’s return to the Pacific, an analysis published by the Office of War Information (OWI) warned:

The downward trend in Japanese morale may take a long or a short time before it reaches a point that makes possible the termination of the war. The military pressure brought to bear will be the principal controlling factor, but of major significance will be the degree to which most of the Japanese continue to believe that the Allies intend:

a. To kill, torture or enslave the Japanese people;

b. To destroy the Japanese way of life with its Emperor and related values.⁵⁸

Throughout that summer, Halsey’s own carrier planes were dropping millions of leaflets over Japan. The documents encouraged Japanese civilians to look forward to a peaceful, prosperous, and just future after the war. “The United States do not want to hurt you or your families,” one such leaflet stated. “The United States do not want your country. What the United States wants is an end to aggression and peace throughout the world.”⁵⁹

With a coordinated effort by the State Department, the military, and the OWI, the Americans had finally crafted a coherent strategy for “Psyops,” or psychological operations against Japan. An OWI leaflet-producing operation on Guam employed hundreds of civilians and printing machinery on the scale of a major newspaper. Fresh from the presses, the documents were loaded into 500-pound casings that were triggered to open 4,000 feet above the ground. By these means, one leaflet “bomb” could cover an entire city. According to OWI’s estimates, 63 million leaflets were dropped on Japan in the last three months of the war.⁶⁰

A few major themes were emphasized in all propaganda leaflets: Japan’s military defeat was inevitable; the militarist regime was feckless, deceitful, and self-serving; peace would improve the lives of the Japanese people. A fundamental tenet of all Allied propaganda was to avoid mentioning the emperor at all, but to aim all criticism at the “military clique.” Nazi Germany, Japan’s major ally, had suffered total defeat. Now Japan was alone, and would bear the full brunt of Allied power. “Japan now faces a crisis, in which the full strength of the Allied nations will soon be concentrated against her,” a typical leaflet stated: “Does she not feel lonely?”⁶¹ The documents were often decorated with favorite Japanese motifs, such as Mount Fuji or cherry blossoms in bloom. The dialect used in early leaflets was rather stiff and formal—“too highbrow for practical effect,” as one analyst put it.⁶² But as Japanese-American nisei and other language experts brought their expertise to bear on the problem, the prose grew more fluid and straightforward. In some cases, Japanese prisoners of war assisted in drafting or editing the messages. Elmer Davis, the OWI chief, wrote that all propaganda messages repeated three overarching themes—“that we are coming, that we are going to win, and that in the long run everybody will be better off because we won.”⁶³

Added to the leaflet campaign were 100,000-watt shortwave radio transmissions from Hawaii and California, later amplified by a 50,000-watt clear channel radio tower erected on the northern coast of Saipan. The OWI broadcasts were repetitive, often echoing the same messages printed on the leaflets, and postwar research revealed that very few Japanese had heard them at all. The most effective propaganda broadcasts were aimed directly at the Japanese leadership, most notably the “Zacharias broadcasts” of June and July 1945.

Ellis Zacharias was a naval intelligence officer who had lived and studied in Japan in the 1920s, and spoke the language fluently. He was a friend and colleague of Edwin Layton, the Pacific Fleet intelligence officer, and Joseph Rochefort, who had led the code-breaking unit at Pearl Harbor that had won the Battle of Midway. Zacharias believed that the ruling group in Tokyo might be susceptible to a direct appeal to end the war. He proposed a series of broadcasts modifying or at least clarifying the meaning of the “unconditional surrender” doctrine. After many weeks of discussion, a series of broadcast scripts was approved by the State Department, the OWI, and the Joint Chiefs. Zacharias made his initial radio broadcast on May 8, 1945—VE-Day. They followed at weekly intervals, until the first week of August: fourteen broadcasts in all. In each, Zacharias repeated that “unconditional surrender” applied only to “the form in which hostilities are terminated,” and did not constitute an intention to subjugate or enslave Japan. He quoted other Allied statements, such as the Atlantic Charter and the Cairo Declaration, which guaranteed universal human rights and the principle of self-determination. Japan had come to a fork in the road, said Zacharias, and the nation faced a categorical choice: “One is the virtual destruction of Japan followed by a dictated peace. The other is unconditional surrender with its attendant benefits as laid down by the Atlantic Charter.”⁶⁴

Zacharias’s fourth broadcast brought forth a direct reply from Dr. Isamu Inouye, who identified himself as an official government spokesman. It came by way of a shortwave radio broadcast from Tokyo. The text was stilted, cagey, and noncommittal. But the tone was moderate, and it did not reject the suggestion of a peace settlement: “Japan would be ready to discuss peace terms,” said Inouye, “provided there were certain changes in the unconditional surrender formula.”⁶⁵

PHYSICISTS HAD KNOWN for four decades that vast stores of energy were locked up inside the atom. In the years immediately prior to the Second World War, experiments had shown that a rare isotope of uranium, U-235, had the property of being highly “fissionable,” meaning that its neutrons could penetrate the positive electrical barrier of the nucleus, a process that liberated “free” energy. Nuclear fission offered great promise as a source of cheap, limitless electrical power. But the momentous discovery also pointed to a more ominous scenario—that under certain conditions not found in nature, a mass of pure U-235 could be manipulated to trigger a chain reaction that would release a spectacular burst of energy, an explosion equivalent to about 20,000 tons of TNT. Nonscientists struggled to comprehend what the physicists were talking about, and most were instinctively skeptical. But an impressive consensus was found among leading scientists in the field. They warned that the theoretical basis for an atomic “superbomb” was sound, and the daunting challenges involved in building it could be overcome, probably within a few years, with a sufficient investment of funding, expertise, and industrial-scale engineering.

Humanity would certainly be safer without possessing this terrible power, but no one trusted Adolf Hitler to agree. Germany was thought to possess the requisite scientific competence to build an atomic bomb, and Allied intelligence warned that the Nazis had taken steps to secure the needed materials. Through their conquests, the Germans controlled a “heavy water” plant in Norway, and had access to uranium ore deposits in Czechoslovakia and the Belgian Congo. If Hitler should obtain a nuclear weapon, there would be no effective countermeasure; the Nazi dictator could use it to impose his will on the world, even if his armies were vanquished in conventional military terms. The sole defense would be to possess the same monstrosity, with the credible threat to retaliate in kind.

British research into the field they called “Tube Alloys” had advanced to a certain point in 1941, when the United States entered the war. Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to combine national efforts, and to carry on the work in the mainland United States. On December 28, 1942, FDR signed an order to commence major industrial construction. Colonel Leslie R. Groves, an army engineer who had overseen the completion of the Pentagon, was placed in charge of the secret project. It was assigned a first-priority AAA rating, which empowered Groves to lay claim to funds, resources, and personnel without having to explain to anyone what he was doing. If it was necessary to identify the program—to fill in a blank on a requisition form, for example—Groves instructed his clerks to write “Manhattan Engineer District,” a sleight of hand inspired by the fact that no part of the project was in New York.

To fund this “Manhattan Project,” Stimson and Marshall began by raiding the accounts of various conventional weapons development programs. But when the time came to build huge and expensive isotope separation plants in Tennessee and Washington state, the secretary and the army chief of staff knew they needed congressional authority. They went up to Capitol Hill and sat down with House and Senate leaders. Stimson spoke vaguely about an abstruse science that he did not really understand—but neither did the congressmen, he added, so what was the point of going over the details? The War Department needed $600 million right away, and would need more soon. For the sake of secrecy, there should be no details on the appropriation line, and the rank-and-file members of Congress should be told nothing at all. As Marshall remembered it, Stimson told the legislators that they “would have to take his word for it and my word for it that it was of vital importance that we get this additional money and that it was of equally vital importance that not a word be breathed of what the thing really was.”⁶⁶ They wanted a blank check for a project whose details were also left blank, and they got it. The total cost of the Manhattan Project eventually grew to $2 billion.

Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer managed the project’s brain center, which gathered the specialists and scientists together in a remote and heavily guarded compound at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The site was an arid mesa between rocky canyons, nestled between the Jemez Mountains to the west and the Sangre de Cristo Range to the east. The roads, unpaved and muddy during the spring rains, were heavily traveled by jeeps and army trucks. Research and development work was conducted in the Technical Area, a fenced-in complex of offices and laboratories the size of four city blocks. In an outer perimeter was the residential district, a community of cookie-cutter prefabricated apartment houses, laundries, mess halls, schools, and a movie theater. Los Alamos grew steadily throughout the war, to a peak population of about 5,800—a mountain village of wayward and willful geniuses, whose scientists, mathematicians, and engineers included some of the most renowned figures in their respective fields. Despite the heavy security presence—fences, watchtowers, checkpoints, dogs on leashes, soldiers with fixed bayonets—Los Alamos was a young and vibrant civilian community, where pregnant wives pushed strollers along sidewalks and gangs of children roamed among the white clapboard buildings. Many residents had fled Europe to escape the rampaging armies of the Third Reich, giving their presence here a dimension of karmic justice.

The first problem confronted by the designers was to separate the two main isotopes of uranium, acquiring a pure “critical mass” of the lighter and rarer isotope U-235. At the outset, no one could say precisely what that critical mass might be. Estimates ranged from a low of about one pound to a high of about 200 pounds. If the figure was at the lower end of that range, the bomb might be feasible; if at the higher, it might lie beyond the industrial engineering resources of any nation, at least within the expected duration of the war. In that sense, the Manhattan Project was undertaken with full knowledge that it might fail. The substance U-235 had never been isolated in pure form, except in submicroscopic quantities. There were several possible means of enriching larger amounts: the leading candidates were gaseous, chemical, and thermal diffusion. A fourth possibility, whose discovery was a major breakthrough, was to convert U-238 into plutonium, a new and extremely fissionable element which could then be more easily separated from the residual uranium. In each case, however, there was no easy means to attain the weapons-grade purity needed for an atomic bomb. There were no shortcuts. All of the proposed enrichment processes required industrial engineering on a monumental scale.

Having received a blank check from the U.S. taxpayer, the project directors decided to pursue all routes simultaneously. A complex of uranium enrichment plants was established on a 56,000-acre site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The site was chosen in part for its isolation, in part because the energy-hungry uranium “calutrons” could draw upon the power capacity of the nearby Tennessee Valley Authority. The plutonium operation was built at the Hanford Engineer Works near Richland, Washington. This was remote sagebrush country northwest of the Columbia River, which provided a plentiful supply of water to cool the reactors. The scale of the construction was gargantuan even by Manhattan Project standards; more than 1,200 buildings were built at the Hanford site, and during the construction phase the population of the secretive camp surpassed 60,000, making it the fourth most populous city in the state.⁶⁷

The second hurdle faced by the scientists at Los Alamos was to bring two separated portions of fissile material together almost instantaneously, forming a critical mass that would initiate a self-sustaining chain reaction. The two halves had to be slammed together at high velocity, or the chain reaction might sputter out before the entire mass was merged, producing a much smaller blast, or none at all. The trigger mechanism, with the fissile material, had to be housed in a metal casing small enough to be carried and dropped by an airplane. The original idea was to fire the subcritical halves at one another using conventional explosives in the form of a “double gun.” But in July 1944, the scientists discovered that plutonium was so spontaneously fissionable that a simple gun-type mechanism would produce a weak “fizzle” rather than a full-scale nuclear blast. The proposed solution was to create a symmetrical implosion shockwave using an intricate system of lenses. Work on this project lagged, and some of the scientists assigned to it actually despaired of solving the problem. After fits and starts, with theoretical contributions by the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann and the practical engineering work of Russian-born chemist George Kistiakowsky, a functional implosion trigger was made ready in the spring of 1945.

By that time, sufficient quantities of weapons-grade fissionable uranium and plutonium were finally being produced at Oak Ridge and Hanford. Oppenheimer and his team were confident that they could deliver three bombs—one uranium and two plutonium—by the middle of the year. Because the implosion mechanism entailed a risk of failure, they planned to test the first plutonium bomb in July 1945. (Confident that the simpler gun-type trigger in the uranium bomb would work as designed, they did not believe it needed advance testing.) By sheer quirk of fate, therefore, the first atomic bombs would become available after the defeat of Germany but before the defeat of Japan.

Before succeeding to the presidency, Truman had been only faintly aware of the Manhattan Project. In 1943, when he was still a senator from Missouri, his select committee to investigate waste and corruption in the war industries (the “Truman Committee”) had demanded information about the mysterious plants under construction in Tennessee and Washington. Secretary Stimson had warned him off, referring only to a top-secret weapons program involving a new field of science, and Truman had gamely agreed to inquire no further. As vice president he had been told nothing more, in conformity with the strict need-to-know stricture enforced upon the project. On his first day as president in April 1945, Truman received a short verbal briefing from Stimson about the secret drive to build “a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” Later that afternoon, Truman learned more from James F. Byrnes, the former war mobilization tsar who would soon be appointed secretary of state. In his memoir, Truman wrote that he was “puzzled” by these thumbnail sketches of a bomb that might have the power to “destroy the whole world.”⁶⁸ On April 25, he received a formal soup-to-nuts briefing from Stimson and Groves (since promoted to major general), who answered all of the president’s many questions about the project.

To advise on the issues presented by atomic weapons and energy, its use in the war and the postwar period, Truman established a committee of senior political, industrial, and scientific figures. Its ad hoc character was reflected in its name: the “Interim Committee.” More formal agencies would be created later; for now, however, the limitations of secrecy allowed only for a small panel whose members were already “read in.” Stimson was appointed chairman, and Byrnes was among its members; others included Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Karl Compton, Ralph Bard (Forrestal’s deputy at the Navy Department), and William Clayton, an assistant secretary of state. A scientific advisory panel was added as a subcommittee; Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi were among its members.

In introductory remarks at the first meeting of the Interim Committee, Stimson urged his colleagues to think broadly about the issues before them: “While the advances in the field to date had been fostered by the needs of war, it was important to realize that the implications of the project went far beyond the needs of the present war.”⁶⁹ Meeting for two consecutive days on May 31 and June 1, 1945, the committee agreed that the new bomb should be used against Japan “as soon as possible.”⁷⁰ Formal recommendations to the president were deferred to a later date, but the minutes reflected a collective view that “we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Dr. Conant suggested, and Stimson agreed, that the “most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”⁷¹ Selection of targets was referred to a target committee, whose members included General Groves and several Manhattan Project scientists.

The welter of major policy decisions taken by American leaders between May and August 1945 were among the most complex in the nation’s history. Purely military strategy was amalgamated into high considerations of foreign policy; all minds, including those of senior generals and admirals, were turning toward the postwar order. The president’s men were absorbed in the day-in, day-out skirmishes with Stalin over the Yalta accords, the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, the political claims of Charles de Gaulle in France, and the charter of the United Nations. They were just beginning to think about the future of Asia, the status of former Japanese territories, the fate of British colonies, the red insurgency in China, the future of Japan under Allied occupation, and the still-uncertain matter of whether Japan’s overseas armies would lay down arms if ordered to do so by Tokyo, or if they would have to be beaten in the field even after the home islands were subjugated. Major decisions were confronted under pressure of time and events. They were rendered by a tiny circle of civilian and military officials whose numbers were limited by secrecy, and who had been carrying a staggering workload for years. In some cases, by their own accounts, the president’s men were feeling the strain of prolonged physical and mental fatigue. Far-reaching decisions were made “on the road,” while they were at the Allied conference in Potsdam, Germany. Their neophyte commander in chief had not been well prepared for the job, and he had not been doing it long enough to acquire his predecessor’s expertise, self-assurance, and finesse.

In considering whether to leave Hirohito on his throne, U.S. policymakers were of two minds. Joseph C. Grew, the last prewar ambassador to Tokyo, who now served as undersecretary of state, was sensitive to American public opinion, which demanded that the emperor be held accountable as a war criminal. He took a hawkish tone in his public statements, as when he told a radio audience that negotiating terms of surrender with Japan would be to “temporize with murder and to negotiate with treachery embodied in human flesh.”⁷² Grew was wary of diplomatic exchanges that might draw the Allies into protracted negotiations. But he privately argued that Hirohito must play a role in the war’s final act, because he alone possessed the power to compel all his forces at home and overseas to lay down arms. An imperial rescript issued by the Showa emperor, Grew told a journalist friend, was “the one thing that might do the trick and it might save the lives of tens of thousands of our own fighting men.”⁷³

In deliberations preceding the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration, most of the leading American players (including Truman) favored signaling to the Japanese that their imperial house would survive unconditional surrender. In JCS and cabinet meetings in June, a consensus seemed to gel that it would serve the interests of the United States and the Allies to retain the emperor as a partner or puppet. But the precise wording of such a statement always evoked dissent. All were sensitive to the charge that they were subverting their late commander in chief’s doctrine of unconditional surrender. In answer to seemingly ad hoc objections, they repeatedly struck all references to the emperor or his dynasty from American and Allied public statements. That did not change until the second week of August 1945, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but before the final Japanese surrender, when the Americans implicitly promised to leave Hirohito alone. In the end, as Grew put it ruefully, the United States “demanded unconditional surrender, then dropped the bomb and accepted conditional surrender.”⁷⁴

Meeting with the president in the Oval Office on June 18, Secretaries Stimson and Forrestal and the four Joint Chiefs reviewed their overall strategy against Japan. The blockade of the home islands was underway and would intensify, and all could hope that a surrender might precede the invasion of Kyushu, or at least the invasion of Honshu the following spring. In either case, however, planning and logistical moves had to be taken immediately to prepare for a landing on November 1. Marshall argued that Operation OLYMPIC was “essential to a strategy of strangulation” because it would have the effect of tightening the air-sea blockade while at the same time providing the logistical backstop for the decisive coronet invasion of the Kanto Plain. Admiral King, speaking for the navy, agreed that it was important to proceed with all contingent preparations for olympic and coronet. However, he believed that “the defeat of Japan could be accomplished by sea-air power, without the necessity of invasion.”⁷⁵ Leahy continued to argue that an invasion of Japan was neither necessary nor desirable, but he did not object to preparing contingency plans. Truman approved the DOWNFALL plans and signed orders to transfer the necessary forces from Europe and the United States.

One of the knottiest questions that summer was the desirability of Soviet participation in the East Asian war. FDR had gone to great lengths to secure Stalin’s promise to join the war against Japan; in 1943 and 1944, it had probably been the highest U.S. priority in diplomacy with Moscow. But by June 1945, as it became clear that communism and democracy must wage a long global contest in the decades ahead, many in the U.S. camp questioned whether the Russians were needed or even wanted in the war against Japan. Soviet entry into the war was more likely to force Japan to surrender, but it would also allow the Red Army to seize strategic territory from which it would not be easily dislodged. A larger Soviet footprint in East Asia threatened to enhance communist influence throughout the region. MacArthur later declared that he was “astonished” to learn that a deal had been struck to bring the Soviet Union into the war: “From my viewpoint, any intervention by Russia during 1945 was not required.”⁷⁶ King and Eisenhower each separately advised the president to offer no concessions or inducements to secure Russia’s participation.⁷⁷ Newly sworn Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had earlier favored inviting the Soviets into the war; now he wanted to keep them out. Byrnes distrusted the Russians, based on their treacherous conduct in Eastern Europe; and he did not think they were needed, because he expected the atomic bomb to force a quick Japanese surrender.⁷⁸ Byrnes’s assistant Walter Brown recorded in his diary: “JFB still hoping for time, after atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill, thereby being in a position to press for claims against China.”⁷⁹

Truman was not pleased about traveling to Potsdam, and he would have liked to give the conference a miss. But the JCS and cabinet was unanimous in agreeing that the president’s presence was necessary. On the train from Washington to Newport News, Virginia, where he would embark upon the cruiser Augusta for the eight-day transatlantic passage, Truman wrote his wife to say that he was “as blue as indigo about going.”⁸⁰ Leading his entourage were Admiral Leahy, Secretary Byrnes, and a large deputation of military and civilian aides. (Byrnes had managed to keep his rival, Henry Stimson, off the ship; Stimson flew to Europe and joined the party in Potsdam.) The Augusta arrived at Antwerp on July 15. Truman and his party traveled in a forty-car motorcade to an airfield near Brussels, and then flew over the war-scarred wastelands of the fallen German Reich to Potsdam, a historic seat of Prussian kings, south of Berlin.

The Potsdam Conference would deal mainly with European questions, unresolved in the Yalta talks earlier that year, including German-Polish-Soviet borders, reparations, occupation zones in Germany, and Turkish sovereignty over the Dardanelles. The final push against Japan, and the arrangements that would prevail in postwar Asia, were addressed only between the seams of the main conference agenda, largely in informal sessions among the principals. Churchill traveled to Potsdam, but during the second week of the conference he was replaced by a new prime minister, Clement Attlee, whose Labour Party had won a landslide victory in Britain’s first national election since 1939.

Potsdam being in the Russian zone of occupation, Stalin served as the conference host. Formal meetings were held in the opulent halls of the Cecilienhof Palace, a former royal prince’s residence. Dignitaries of the several powers were quartered at grand houses in Babelsberg, a nearby town, from which the residents had been summarily expelled at gunpoint. Truman and his party moved into a three-story stucco house on Kaiserstrasse, which the Americans called the “Little White House.” Listening devices had been placed throughout the house, and the service staff included several Soviet NKVD agents.

Stalin, arriving a day late, first met Truman at the Little White House at noon on July 17. The two leaders shook hands with a cheerful flourish, grinning broadly and baring their teeth at each other. Stalin summarized his government’s ongoing negotiations with the Chinese, aimed at securing an agreement that would establish borders and conditions for the pending Soviet attack on Manchuria. Truman was noncommittal, a posture that may have disappointed Stalin; the Soviet leader had hoped that the U.S. president would issue a formal request for the USSR’s participation in the East Asian war, providing a pretense for the Russians to abrogate their neutrality pact with Japan. But Truman and his government had no intention of providing that satisfaction, because it was now clear that they had soured on the prospective Soviet entry into the war. Winston Churchill noticed this new attitude and remarked upon it in a note to Sir Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary: “It is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan.”⁸¹

THE SITE CHOSEN FOR TRINITY, the first nuclear test, was a desolate plain deep in the New Mexico desert, about 200 miles south of Los Alamos. The bomb would be detonated atop a 100-foot steel tower, at the coordinates designated “Ground Zero.” A control bunker built of heavy timbers covered by earth was located 6 miles from the tower; the base camp was 10 miles away. The test was scheduled for dawn on July 16, 1945.

As the clock ticked down to “Zero-Hour,” the desert was dark and chilly. The beam of a searchlight, positioned near the tower, sliced through the low overcast. At Sandy Ridge, an observation site south of the base camp, scientists, journalists, and visitors drank coffee from thermoses and stamped their feet to keep warm. Passing around a pair of binoculars, they took turns studying the distant floodlit tower. An army sergeant read out instructions by the light of a flashlight. When the two-minute countdown began, he said, the observers should lie down on the ground, faces turned away from the tower. After the blast, they could turn and look at the cloud above the tower, but to avoid injuring their eyes they should not gaze directly at the fireball. For those determined to look directly at the explosion, plates of welding glass were handed out; they were instructed to hold them in front of their faces and to peer through them. They should wear long sleeves and trousers to protect their skin. Bottles of suntan lotion were passed around in the inky darkness, and people smeared it on their exposed faces and hands. They should remain prone until the shockwave had passed over: “The hazard from blast is reduced by lying down on the ground in such a manner that flying rocks, glass and other objects do not intervene between the source of blast and the individual.”⁸² Automobile windows should be left open.

A siren would indicate when it was safe to rise from the ground. At that point, all personnel whose duties did not require them to remain in the area should return to base camp immediately and board the waiting buses. The zone would be evacuated until radiation measurements were taken.

At an earlier stage of the Manhattan Project, physicists had debated the risk that the blast might be much larger than predicted by their calculations. Some had worried that it would ignite the nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere, perhaps even annihilate the planet. Subsequent calculations had seemed to rule out that scenario. But Enrico Fermi, who was at the observation post at Sandy Ridge that night, had a predilection for gallows humor. He offered to take wagers on the odds that the bomb would set fire to the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would destroy the State of New Mexico or the entire world. Either way, his colleagues might have retorted, no one would collect winnings.

At the control bunker, Oppenheimer and Groves presided over a technical and communications staff of about twenty. The small, enclosed space was cluttered with electronic equipment and radios. They were concerned about the weather. Flashes of lightning were seen in the overcast, and scattered showers had been reported to the south. A meteorology team was in radio contact with specially equipped B-29 weather reconnaissance planes overhead. If the wind was blowing too hard in the wrong direction, there was a risk of deadly fallout traveling 300 miles east to descend over Amarillo, Texas. But an hour before dawn, conditions were deemed suitable for the test.

At zero minus twenty minutes, the first of several red warning flares went up at Ground Zero. All remaining personnel at the steel tower left by jeep for the bunker. The time intervals were announced by an impassive voice on the radio net. In the bunker, men crouched over their instrument panels. Tension escalated; time seemed to slow down. Dr. Conant said he “never imagined seconds could be so long.”⁸³ Oppenheimer did not speak, and did not even seem to breathe; he held on to a wooden post to steady himself as he gazed through the bunker’s nearly opaque blue-tinted windows. At zero minus ten seconds, a green flare shot up and descended slowly through the clouds above Ground Zero. The final ten seconds seemed to last an eternity. Whatever they thought of the bomb as a military weapon, the scientists had dedicated years of their lives to building it; they had staked the prestige of modern physics upon it; they had convinced Uncle Sam to divert rivers of the taxpayers’ money to pay for it. Whatever their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, an observer noted: “It can safely be said that most of those present were praying and praying harder than they had ever prayed before.”⁸⁴

At 5:30 a.m., the countdown reached zero and the voice on the loudspeaker said, “Now.” A pinprick of searing white light expanded almost instantly to become a small sun, half a mile in diameter, and the predawn darkness vanished in a cosmic flash, as blinding as a photographer’s flashbulb. For a moment, the desert was lit to the horizon by a noonlike brightness, until most of the light was suddenly sucked back into the vortex of the blast, or so it appeared to the witnesses. Ascending, the great orb seemed to liquefy and dissolve into boiling neon colors, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of gold, green, orange, blue, gray, and purple. Elongating vertically into the shape of a column, it rose through the cloud ceiling and climbed to 10,000 feet, 20,000 feet, 30,000 feet. A mushroom cloud formed at the top, at an altitude later estimated at 41,000 feet, while the base remained a surging, seething, churning mass of gas, smoke, and dust, as bright as burning magnesium but more colorful. For 40 miles in every direction, the New Mexico wilderness was bathed in a violet light that illuminated every hill, ridge, and gulch with searing clarity.

At the bunker, the observation posts, and the base camp, men rose to their feet and embraced, slapped backs, shook hands, shouted in glee, and laughed and danced like children. The tension on Oppenheimer’s face dissolved and was replaced by an expression of grateful relief. Dr. Kistiakowsky, designer of the plutonium implosion trigger that had just proven itself to work, threw his arms around Oppenheimer and shouted in triumph. Someone said to General Groves: “The war is over.” Groves replied, “Yes, after we drop two bombs on Japan.”⁸⁵

At Sandy Ridge, most observers ignored the instruction to lie down while awaiting the arrival of the shockwave. Forty-five seconds after the explosion, the phantasmagoric tableau remained silent—they felt heat on their faces but had heard no noise at all. Finally the sound fell upon them, a sustained, awesome, guttural rumble with a gust of warm air and a tremble in the earth underfoot. The reverberations merged into waves of sound that rose and fell for a long time before subsiding. Some found the blast wave gentle or even anticlimactic after the spectacular visual effects they had witnessed. That was undoubtedly true, but only because they were a long way from Ground Zero.

After their first flush of triumph, the observers became more subdued and reflective. Ernest O. Lawrence recalled “hushed murmuring bordering on reverence.”⁸⁶ To Kistiakowsky, the atomic blast was “the nearest thing to doomsday that one could possibly imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last man will see what we have just seen.”⁸⁷ As they boarded their vehicles to clear out of the area, the sun peeked over the eastern horizon. Philip Morrison noticed that the sensation of heat on his face was the same as that produced by the earlier explosion. On that morning, he said, “we had two sunrises.”⁸⁸

The light had been seen in communities as far away as Santa Fe to the north, Silver City to the west, and El Paso to the south. In Albuquerque, 175 miles north of Ground Zero, early-rising civilians had stopped and wondered at the flash of light on the southern horizon. According to a story in the local press, a blind girl in the city had cried out, “What was that?”⁸⁹ To discourage inconvenient questions, Groves arranged to have the commanding officer of the Alamogordo Air Base announce that an ammunition depot had blown up.⁹⁰

In the days following the test, a few brave souls returned to the TRINITY site to investigate the results. Their portable Geiger counters cried out so loudly and insistently that they switched them off. To limit their exposure to radiation, a ten-minute rule was applied: each individual could visit the site only once, and could remain for only ten minutes. A mile from Ground Zero, the desert brush was blackened and flattened, facing away from the blast site; closer in, it was entirely burned away. Where the tower had once stood was a bowl of pulverized earth at the bottom of a shallow crater, 1,200 feet in diameter. The ground was glassy and smooth, with greenish streaks running through it; the sand had literally been turned to glass.

A faint rust-red blotch stained the ground at the center of the crater. Investigators determined that it was vaporized ferrous oxide, which had condensed and fused with the silicon in the sand—or in other words, the last trace of the ten-story steel tower that had held the TRINITY bomb.

THE FIRST REPORT ARRIVED IN POTSDAM later that day, at 7:30 p.m. local time. A War Department aide telegrammed Stimson: “Operated on this morning. Diagnosis not yet completed but results seem satisfactory and already exceeded expectations.”⁹¹ Stimson walked over to the “Little White House” to deliver the news to Truman and Byrnes, who were delighted. The cryptic first telegram was followed by several more, all inscribed in similarly cagey terms. A long and detailed report from Groves arrived by courier on July 21. The force of the explosion had equaled between 15,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT, which was at the higher end of the range of predictions. Groves had once boasted that the Pentagon (his earlier creation) was invulnerable to aerial bombing; he now withdrew that claim.

Stimson read the entire text to Truman and Byrnes. The war secretary recorded in his diary that the president was “tremendously pepped up and spoke to me of it again and again when I saw him.”⁹² Churchill noted that Truman’s newfound pep was on display the next morning in negotiations with Stalin, when he “stood up to the Russians in a most emphatic and decisive manner, telling them as to certain demands that they absolutely could not have, and that the United States was entirely against them.”⁹³

After discussing it with his advisers, Truman decided to let Stalin know of the TRINITY test, though only in the most general terms. He approached the Soviet dictator on the evening of July 24, and told him (through an interpreter) that the United States had developed a “new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin seemed unmoved, remarking casually that he hoped the Americans would make good use of it against Japan. Truman wondered whether the other man had grasped the significance of what he had been told. He did not know or suspect that Soviet espionage had successfully penetrated the Manhattan Project, and that the Russians were already well informed about the bomb.

American cryptanalysts had long since broken the codes used by the Japanese government to communicate with its diplomats in foreign capitals. This message traffic, codenamed MAGIC, was summarized and analyzed in top-secret memoranda distributed to senior American civilian and military officials. By this means, U.S. leaders were fully aware of Tokyo’s bid to persuade the Soviet government to mediate an armistice with the Allies. The spirited exchanges between Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and Ambassador-in-Moscow Naotake Sato made for lively and fascinating reading. The tenor of Togo’s “extremely urgent” cables to Sato revealed his sense of desperation. On July 11, he urged the ambassador to act with “all haste” in petitioning the Kremlin. The following day, Togo added that Sato should convey to Foreign Commissar Molotov that “His Majesty” personally hoped “to restore peace with all possible speed.”⁹⁴ In a comment accompanying this intercept, U.S. intelligence analysts noted that it offered the first tangible evidence that Hirohito was behind these diplomatic appeals to Moscow.

Sato’s length of service in the diplomatic corps made him senior to Togo, and he had previously served as foreign minister (in 1937). As such, he was not at all cowed by the current head of the ministry, and did not hesitate to express his own magnificently blunt opinions about these desperate eleventh-hour overtures. Sato informed Togo that the Kremlin would never be enticed by the vague petitions he had been instructed to make. Being “extremely realistic,” the Russians would not be moved by anything short of concrete proposals to end the war on terms that the Allies might deem acceptable. “If the Japanese empire is really faced with the necessity of ending the war,” he lectured the foreign minister on July 12, “we must first of all make up our minds to do so.”⁹⁵ Truer words had never been written, but Togo could act only according to the halfhearted consensus agreed to by the SWDC. Any proposal including specific peace terms would divide the ruling group and cause the Suzuki government to fall.

In his subsequent cables to Tokyo, Sato urged the government to recognize that the war was already lost, which meant that Japan had “no alternative but unconditional surrender or its equivalent.” The sole condition that might tempt the Allies, he judged, would be “maintenance of our national structure,” meaning an assurance to leave Hirohito on his throne.⁹⁶ But Togo only reiterated his prior instructions to petition the Kremlin for assistance in arranging a truce. Peace was urgent, he wrote, but “on the other hand it is difficult to decide on concrete peace terms here at home all at once.”⁹⁷ Sato could read the meaning between those lines: the regime was hopelessly divided, and the intransigent militarists abhorred any terms resembling unconditional surrender. Togo’s hands were tied, and so were Sato’s.

As the second week of the Potsdam Conference got underway, the Americans confronted pressing decisions about the Pacific endgame. Preparations for DOWNFALL were underway with a scheduled invasion date of November 1. Intelligence sources had detected a buildup of Japanese troop strength on Kyushu. The Americans had become wary of Russian participation in the war, but they knew they could do nothing to keep their erstwhile communist allies out of it, and the Red Army would be prepared to invade Manchuria by mid-August at the latest. According to General Groves, two atomic bombs would be ready for use against Japan within the next two weeks. Some had raised objections on moral grounds against using the weapons without providing an explicit prior warning, or using them against cities instead of military targets. Petitions had been submitted by various groups of Manhattan Project scientists. Ralph Bard, undersecretary of the navy and a member of the Interim Committee, favored a preliminary warning. He wrote Stimson: “The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling.”⁹⁸

But the prevailing assumption in the Interim Committee, its subcom-mittees, and the cabinet had always been that the bombs would be used against Japan. Proposals for a demonstration or a warning were considered and rejected, chiefly because they seemed unlikely to lead to surrender. Admitting that opinions among Manhattan Project scientists were varied, the Scientific Panel (Oppenheimer, Conant, Lawrence, and Fermi) concluded: “We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”⁹⁹

The Target Committee had produced a final list of four cities: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, and Niigata. The four were selected because they had not yet been leveled by conventional bombing, and thus promised to give the fullest and most dramatic expression to the bomb’s power. Stimson had struck Kyoto off an earlier list. Reasoning that the ancient capital’s historical and cultural significance made it unique, Stimson worried that destroying it would arouse the hatred of future generations of Japanese. (The war secretary was obliged to nix Kyoto twice: evidently, Groves really wanted to hit the city.) Hiroshima and Kokura were home to important military bases, depots, or arsenals; Nagasaki and Niigata were identified only as important shipping and industrial centers. By order to the Twentieth Air Force, those four cities had been set aside—preserved, quarantined, left intact, spared the fury of LeMay’s incendiaries, so that the atomic bombs could destroy them at one stroke. Although radar targeting was now reliable, the bombs were to be dropped in clear weather, so that the explosions could be seen and photographed from the air: “The four targets give a very high probability of one being open even if the weather varies . . . as they are considerably separated.”¹⁰⁰

The Allies had agreed in principle that a final warning would be issued to Japan. Issuing this declaration from Potsdam, amidst the ruins of Nazi Germany, would lend symbolic power to the ultimatum—emphasizing that Japan was now without allies, and would soon share the same fate. But the precise wording of the declaration was the subject of prolonged and intricate debate. In several previous statements, including the Atlantic Charter, the Cairo Declaration, and the United Nations Charter (signed in San Francisco a month earlier), the Allies had already set forth their war aims and their vision for the postwar international order. The question now arose: Should these be repeated and amplified? To what extent should the Allies spell out intentions for the occupation of Japan? Several leading figures in the American camp, including Stimson and Grew, favored giving an assurance that the imperial dynasty could continue as a constitutional monarchy. They reasoned that such an assurance might empower the peace faction in Tokyo, perhaps bringing the emperor directly into the decision. Moreover, they added, the Allies were going to need Hirohito to enforce the surrender and to serve as a consenting vassal. Others, notably Secretary of State Byrnes, objected that any such pledge would compromise the doctrine of unconditional surrender, and might be read by the Japanese as a sign of irresolution.

On July 17, as the draft “Three-Party Statement” circulated through the Allied governments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization recommended edits in a cable from Washington. The draft had stated that the Japanese people would choose their own government, and “This may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty if it be shown to the complete satisfaction of the world that such a government never again will aspire to aggression.” On the recommendation of the JSSC—the internal JCS “think tank”—the chiefs recommended deleting that sentence entirely. Two reasons were offered: first, because the reference to the “present dynasty” might be misconstrued as an intention to depose Hirohito in favor of his son; and second, because the provision might discourage “radical elements in Japan” by suggesting that the Allies intended to maintain the system of “Emperor worship.”¹⁰¹ The reasoning was not persuasive on either count. The first objection called for a clarification of the wording, not wholesale deletion; the second made little sense at all, because “radical elements in Japan” had no power to influence the decision to surrender. Nevertheless, the proposed deletion was accepted by Truman and his advisers in Potsdam, apparently without much discussion or debate. Both Leahy and Marshall seem to have supported the deletion without objection, although both had earlier favored clarifying the emperor’s postwar status.

On July 24, Stimson made a last-ditch attempt to reinsert a provision offering to retain the Japanese monarchy. According to a diary entry he made later that day, Stimson met with Truman and “spoke of the importance which I attributed to the reassurance of the Japanese on the continuance of their dynasty and I had felt that the insertion of that in the formal warning was important and might be just the thing that would make or mar their acceptance.”¹⁰² Truman declined on practical grounds, explaining that a draft of the declaration had already been sent to Chiang Kai-shek for his signature. Stimson accepted that reasoning, but he recommended that Truman be prepared to offer verbal assurances through diplomatic channels if and when direct talks were opened with the Japanese government.

Meanwhile, orders to carry out the atomic attacks were being written and distributed in Washington. A special B-29 air group based on Tinian had trained to drop the atomic bombs, and was ready to perform their mission. Various components of the weapons were being transferred to the Marianas by air and sea. General Carl Spaatz, recently named overall commander of USAAF Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, was in Washington. On July 25, he reported to the War Department and conferred with Marshall’s deputy, General Thomas T. Handy, the acting army chief of staff in Marshall’s absence. Spaatz had received verbal orders to drop the two bombs, but he told Handy that he needed a “piece of paper” spelling out the order. Handy drafted and signed an order directing the Twentieth Air Force to deliver the “first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.” Additional bombs would be dropped on the same list of target cities “as soon as made ready by the project staff.”¹⁰³ A final clause added that the directive had been issued “by direction and with the approval” of Secretary Stimson and General Marshall. That was the only written order pertaining to the use of atomic bombs against Japan.

At the “Little White House” in Potsdam, on that same date (July 25), Truman met alone with his secretary of war—and if the president’s diary is to be believed, his verbal instructions to Stimson could not be reconciled with the orders just issued in Washington:

I have told the Sec. Of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new [i.e., Kyoto or Tokyo].

He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance.¹⁰⁴

But Handy’s order, written under Stimson’s authority, was in line with the instructions he had already received from Potsdam. It was based upon the recommendations of the Interim Committee and its subcommittees, as approved by the cabinet and the president. The bombs would be dropped as they were made ready, and as weather conditions permitted, on the four Japanese cities selected by the Target Committee. The order made no mention of warnings, military objectives, or sparing women and children. The cities had not been chosen for their military character, and the military installations therein were not specified as aiming points for the bombs. They were chosen because they fulfilled the three conditions specified by the Target Committee—namely, that they were “large urban area[s] of more than three miles diameter,” which were “capable of being damaged effectively by a blast,” and were “likely to be unattacked by next August.”¹⁰⁵

Truman’s diary entry of July 25 remains an inexplicable curiosity. Perhaps he felt sudden qualms, and soothed them with therapeutic delusions. He might have sensed that future historians and biographers were reading over his shoulder, and hoped to be commended as a man of delicate conscience. If so, the entry was a feckless gesture, serving only to leave the impression that the diary was not a faithful record of Truman’s inner thoughts. His famous homespun motto—“The buck stops here”—was printed on a sign featured prominently on his desk in the Oval Office. After the first atomic bomb detonated over the center of the seventh largest city in Japan, the non-buck-passing commander in chief would identify Hiroshima as an “important Japanese Army base,” which was true in the same sense that San Diego was an important American naval base. In his memoirs, published in 1955, Truman took responsibility for the decision to use the atomic bombs—but even then, in retirement, a decade after the fact, he could not bring himself to acknowledge that cities had been targeted. Reproducing in full the July 25, 1945, directive signed by General Handy, Truman added: “With this order, the wheels were set in motion for the first use of an atomic weapon against a military target. I had made the decision. I also instructed Stimson that the order would stand unless I notified him that the Japanese reply to our ultimatum was acceptable.”¹⁰⁶

ON JULY 26, THE POTSDAM DECLARATION was released to the global press by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China. It demanded the immediate and unconditional surrender of Japanese armed forces, and warned that refusal would result in the “utter devastation” of the Japanese homeland: “Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.”¹⁰⁷ Japan would never again be permitted to embark on a career of foreign conquest. The influence of the militarist caste would be completely and permanently eliminated. War crimes would be prosecuted in international tribunals. All foreign territories would be given up, and Japanese sovereignty would be forever limited to the home islands. Its forces overseas would be disarmed and permitted to return home in peace. The Allies would occupy “points in Japanese territory” for as long as necessary to ensure that the “self-willed militaristic advisers” were ousted and the military demobilized. Industry would be permitted to recover, and the economy would have access to international trade. Contrary to the propaganda disseminated by the Japanese regime, said the statement, “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation,” and a peaceful and responsible government would be instituted “in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”

The declaration was received in Tokyo shortly after dawn on July 27, via shortwave radio broadcast from San Francisco. As the text of this “Three-Party Statement” was translated and circulated through the ministry offices, Japanese leaders fixated on the fact that it was signed by the U.S., British, and Chinese leaders, but not by Stalin. Upon this thin reed they placed great hopes. They knew Stalin and Molotov were in Potsdam, in close touch with the Americans and British, and yet the USSR had not backed the ultimatum. Did that mean the Soviets were willing to step in as a mediator?

Foreign Minister Togo acted quickly to head off a preemptive rejection of the declaration. In a private meeting with the emperor, he said that the statement “leaves room for further study of the concrete terms,” and “we plan to find out what these concrete terms are through the Soviet Union.”¹⁰⁸ In an emergency meeting of the SWDC later that morning, Togo told his colleagues that the declaration could be interpreted as a softening of prior demands, and might plausibly be represented as a face-saving “conditional” surrender. Although it contained no reference to the Imperial House, the reference to the “freely expressed will of the Japanese people” gave hope that the emperor could be retained. He warned that rejecting the declaration outright might bring catastrophic consequences, and recommended withholding any official reaction until his diplomats could sound out the Russians. Further discussion produced a shaky accord. While awaiting the Russian response to Japan’s prior entreaties, the government would express no view on the Potsdam Declaration. The newspapers would be directed to downplay it.

The following afternoon, at four o’clock on July 28, the aged Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki held a press conference carried over the radio. It was no easy task to explain the temporizing policy negotiated by the two factions of the Big Six. Suzuki could say nothing of the overtures in Moscow, which were secret; and he could not imply that the declaration provided an opening for peace talks, because the hardliners would rise up in protest. In an apparently off-the-cuff remark, he told the press that the government intended to “mokusatsu” the Potsdam Declaration. This idiomatic Japanese expression translated literally as “to kill with silence,” but could also be translated as to “ignore,” “reject,” or “take no notice of.” Under the circumstances, “mokusatsu” might be seen as an attempt to steer a middle course between accepting and rejecting the ultimatum—in other words, “no comment.”

If that was Suzuki’s purpose, he failed badly. The phrase was ambiguous even in Japanese, let alone in English translation. Without clear contrary guidance from the government, the Japanese press reported that the prime minister had rejected the declaration with a contemptuous flourish. On the twenty-ninth, the Yomiuri Shinbun led with the headline: “Laughable Surrender Conditions to Japan.”¹⁰⁹ By then it was too late for Suzuki to walk his comments back. In a subsequent meeting of the SWDC, the three hardliners agreed that it was unacceptable for the government to take an equivocal position on the Potsdam Declaration. Peacemakers Togo and Yonai argued that nothing more should be said, but the prime minister agreed to issue a clarification. At a press conference that morning, Suzuki said: “I think that the joint statement is a rehash of the Cairo declaration. The government does not think that it has serious value. We can only ignore it. We will do our utmost to complete the war to the bitter end.”¹¹⁰

At first the American translators had puzzled over “mokusatsu” and debated the possible shades of meaning or emphasis. But this second statement sent a much clearer signal. Truman offered his own pungent translation: “They told me to go to hell, words to that effect.”¹¹¹ The old Japan hands in Washington noted that Suzuki had carefully avoided rejecting the ultimatum outright. They inferred that he was talking to potential insurrectionists in the army, rather than to the governments that had issued the ultimatum. In the following days, radio eavesdroppers picked up army and diplomatic communications suggesting that some in Tokyo were ready to surrender on the basis of the Potsdam Declaration. But those intelligence tidbits only confirmed what American leaders already knew—that the Japanese ruling group was deadlocked, and the hardline “fight on” faction remained strong enough to arrest any move toward surrender.

A secure cable from the “Little White House” instructed General Groves to launch the first atomic bombing mission no sooner than August 2, 1945, the final day of the Potsdam Conference. Truman wanted to be away and at sea when the first nuclear weapon was dropped.¹¹²

That same week, the conventional bombing assault on the Japanese homeland was reaching an unprecedented scale. The results on the ground went far beyond anything that had been done in Europe—or indeed, anywhere else in the history of warfare. In the heart of major cities, one could gaze to the horizon in any direction and see nothing but fields of ash and hillocks of rubble, with a few blackened chimneys or steel girders standing here and there. The largest air raid of the war occurred on August 1, 1945, when 853 B-29s dropped more 6,486 tons of incendiaries, precision bombs, and aerial mines on cities and waterways throughout western Japan. By that date, the Japanese civilian death toll had probably run well into the hundreds of thousands.

If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. Hundreds of bombers and fighters of all types, U.S. and British, were redeploying from Europe; at the same time, new airplanes were being turned out of American aviation plants, and freshly trained aircrews were flying them into newly constructed airfields on nearby Okinawa. At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan.¹¹³ According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo Plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.¹¹⁴ The rain of devastation would cripple the nation’s internal transportation infrastructure, shutting down the economy and leading to mass famine in urban regions. “Another six months and Japan would have been beaten back into the dark ages,” said Curtis LeMay, “which practically was the case anyhow.”¹¹⁵

In those last weeks of the war, the Twentieth Air Force began waging a new and devastating form of psychological warfare. The Superforts began “calling their shots”—that is, dropping leaflets over cities to be hit, warning the population to evacuate, and then returning one or two days later to destroy them. On July 27, for example—the same day the Potsdam Declaration was received in Japan—60,000 warning leaflets were dropped on eleven cities. Six of those eleven were hit the following day. The ploy was repeated again on August 1 and a third time on August 4. In each case, the warnings were made good. The Japanese government and news media attempted to suppress the warnings, but the news spread widely by word of mouth, and panic swept through the leafleted cities. Refugees clogged the roads and trains as entire urban populations tried to flee to the country. Munitions industries were paralyzed for lack of workers. After the war, the USSBS concluded that the “shot-calling” leaflets had been “one of the most spectacular moves in psychological warfare.”¹¹⁶ They had dramatized the powerlessness of Japan’s military and air forces, convincing many ordinary Japanese that defeat was inevitable. The USSBS concluded that approximately half the Japanese population had either seen one of the leaflets or had heard about their contents by word of mouth.

At the same time, the warnings were appreciated by many Japanese as gestures of consideration and sympathy. A woman in Nagaoka credited the leaflets with saving her life. Her own government had refused to pass on the vital news that the city had been listed as a target, she said—but “I believed the Americans were honest and good people in letting us know in advance of impending raids.” She fled, and three days later Nagaoka was firebombed. A factory worker in Akita shared the sentiment. “They were not barbarians,” he said of the men flying the great silver bombers overhead. “They gave us notice. They said to evacuate.”¹¹⁷

* Future CIA director Allen Dulles, posted to Bern, Switzerland as an agent of the OSS, was in indirect contact with representatives of the Japanese government. The fascinating details were declassified in 1993. See “OSS Memoranda for the President, January–July, 1945,” accessed September 7, 2018, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence. When queried directly by JCS chairman William Leahy, Dulles denied knowledge of any such contacts. Leahy, I Was There, p. 384.