August 6
The vozhd suspected a double cross. He was determined to join the war against Japan, keeping a promise he had made to Roosevelt at Yalta. In return for delivering the knockout blow against the Japanese militarists, the Soviet Union would be rewarded with a series of territorial concessions, ranging from the island of Sakhalin to control over the principal ports of Manchuria. Stalin even had hopes for a joint occupation of the Japanese mainland—with a Soviet officer serving as deputy to General MacArthur as the supreme Allied commander.
Suddenly, without explanation, everything had changed. Truman no longer seemed as eager to secure Soviet participation in the war as when he first arrived in Potsdam, just two weeks before. The latest version of the Allied ultimatum to Japan omitted a reference to the “vast military might of the Soviet Union” that had been part of an earlier draft. Instead, it hinted at the existence of a new weapon that would ensure “the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland,” in addition to the “complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces.” The cryptic references to the atomic bomb may have been obscure to the Japanese, but they were crystal clear to Stalin, thanks to his spies in Los Alamos. He understood that the Soviet Union and the United States were now engaged in a vast geostrategic competition, unfolding across Europe and Asia. The immediate focus was the surrender of Japan. Would America succeed in finishing off Japan with its new explosive device before the Red Army stormed into Japanese-occupied Manchuria?
Molotov received the text of the Potsdam proclamation from Byrnes in the late evening of July 26. The document bore the signatures of Truman, Churchill, and the Chinese nationalist president, Chiang Kai-shek, who had given his assent by telegram. The Russians had no problem recognizing Chiang as the legitimate leader of China—overlooking the claims of the Communist Mao Tse-tung—but they wanted to have a say in dictating Japan’s surrender. Molotov’s aides immediately got to work on the text of an alternative four-power declaration, confirming that the Soviet Union was ready to join in the war against the “Japanese militarists.” “Japan must understand that further resistance is futile,” the Soviet draft declared. “Japan must end the war, lay down its arms and surrender unconditionally.”
A Molotov aide, Vladimir Pavlov, telephoned the U.S. delegation five minutes before midnight on July 26 to request a three-day delay in issuing the document to allow for consultations. His American contact rang back fifteen minutes later to say it was too late. U.S. radio stations based on the West Coast had begun broadcasting the full text of the proclamation in English, and highlights in Japanese, at 11:00 p.m. Berlin time. By the time the proclamation was issued, one of the signatories was no longer in office. The British Broadcasting Corporation had announced Churchill’s resignation as prime minister on the 9:00 p.m. evening news—10:00 p.m. Berlin time.
There was no Big Three meeting on July 27, as the British had not yet returned from London. Truman flew to Frankfurt for the day to inspect American troops. When Molotov called on Byrnes at 6:00 p.m., he immediately broached the subject of Stalin’s exclusion from the Potsdam proclamation. Byrnes produced a rather lame excuse. “We did not consult the Soviet government because you are not at war with Japan. We did not want to embarrass you.”
“I am not authorized to discuss the matter any further,” Molotov replied stiffly.
The next plenary session, on July 28, was delayed until 10:30 p.m. to allow Clement Attlee time to reach Berlin. The new British prime minister sank deep down in his chair, puffing at his pipe. He was accompanied by his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who did most of the talking. The president and the generalissimo were unimpressed. A couple of “sourpusses” was how Truman described Attlee and Bevin in a letter to his daughter. He had become comfortable with “fat old Winston” despite his windy oratory. “He knew his English language, and after he’d talked half an hour, there’d be at least one gem of a sentence and two thoughts maybe, which could have been expressed in four minutes.” With Churchill gone, Truman could not wait to get home.
Stalin eyed Attlee and Bevin suspiciously, shocked not only by the ingratitude of the British electorate but also by Churchill’s failure to fix the result. He had privately told Churchill that he expected him to be reelected with a comfortable majority of “about eighty” seats. “This queer manifestation of our British democracy is quite beyond the grasp of Russians,” noted Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador to Moscow, in a condolence letter to Clementine Churchill. “To a Russian it is inexplicable that a people should be allowed to deliberately put out of office a man who has led them through the darkest day of their history to a thumping victory.” Clark Kerr found himself surrounded by “a bunch of gibbering and bewildered Russians” demanding explanations. Molotov, in particular, was “clearly much upset” by the election result, “throwing up his fat hands and asking ‘why, why?’ ”
With malicious delight, Clark Kerr imagined Stalin going home that night, getting out of “his latest (and rather pansy) uniform,” and pondering “where a free and unfettered popular vote in Russia would leave him.” Via a Polish official, he learned that Stalin’s first reaction to Churchill’s defeat was to pronounce the British people “tired of war. They are turning their minds away from the beating of Japan to internal problems. This may make them softer about the Germans.” The vozhd did not intend to permit his own people to get similarly distracted.
Stalin wasted no time emphasizing his unhappiness over the Potsdam declaration. He began by saying that he had received a new peace feeler from the Japanese government. He felt a “duty” to keep the Allies informed—despite their failure to inform him in advance about the ultimatum to Japan. The Soviet Union, Stalin announced stiffly, would refuse the Japanese request for mediation. The gesture of Allied solidarity was not as magnanimous as he tried to make it sound. He knew the Americans had succeeded in breaking the Japanese diplomatic code—and were able to read communications between Tokyo and Moscow.
A truer indication of Stalin’s changing attitude toward the United States was his decision to speed up his own preparations for attacking Japan. Soviet generals had told their American counterparts that the Red Army would be ready to invade Manchuria in the second half of August. Determined not to be beaten by the Americans, Stalin now gave secret or-ders for hostilities to be advanced by ten to fourteen days. He also ap-pointed Marshal Alexander Vasilevskii supreme commander of all Soviet forces in the Far East. The race to finish off Japan was under way in earnest.
Stalin’s displeasure with his western Allies went far beyond his concerns over Japan. He was convinced that Truman was reneging on promises made at Yalta by FDR. In conversations with Davies, their most sympathetic American interlocutor, Stalin’s aides complained that Russia was being robbed of the fruits of its hard-won victory. Molotov wanted to know why the United States had changed its position on reparations. In a rare display of emotion, he described how Hitler’s armies had “despoiled everything of value” in Russia. “They enslaved women and children in barbaric death chambers. They tortured and killed thousands upon thousands. They destroyed whole cities.” It seemed to Molotov that the Americans were more concerned with the welfare of the defeated Germans than their long-suffering Russian allies. He could not understand why there had been such “a marked change of attitude since Yalta.”
“We trusted President Roosevelt and we believed in him,” Molotov said grimly. “It is not easy for us to understand your new president.”
Jimmy Byrnes sensed the time had come to make a deal. “I know how to deal with the Russians,” he boasted to his staff. “It’s just like the U.S. Senate. You build a post office in their state, and they’ll build a post office in our state.”
The outline of the probable Potsdam agreement was as clear as it was cynical. All three parties would hold on to what they already had, making only token concessions to grand but nebulous concepts such as “Allied cooperation,” a “united Germany,” and the “spirit of Yalta.” Stalin would not permit any threat to the stability and cohesion of his new eastern European empire. Nor would he compromise on the borders of Poland, which were under the full control of the Red Army. Similarly, Truman had no intention of relaxing his hold over the parts of Germany that were under American or British occupation. He would not permit Stalin to get his way on reparations, whatever the hints and promises made to Russia by FDR. As far as Truman was concerned, there would be “no reparations” at all if the Russians continued to strip their part of the country bare.
Truman and Byrnes invited Stalin and Molotov to a private negotiating session on Sunday, July 29, at the Little White House in Babelsberg. Molotov showed up by himself and was escorted to the president’s study on the second floor, overlooking the lake. He explained that his boss had “caught a cold and his doctors would not let him leave the house.” The Americans had no way of determining the gravity of the generalissimo’s illness or whether it was real or diplomatic. Truman was sufficiently alarmed to reflect on the likely political consequences of Stalin’s death. “It would end the original Big Three,” he mused in a diary entry the following day. “First Roosevelt by death, then Churchill by political failure and then Stalin.… If some demagogue on horseback gained control of the efficient Russian military machine, he could play havoc with European peace for a while. I also wonder if there is a man with the necessary strength and following to step into Stalin’s place and maintain peace and solidarity at home. It isn’t customary for dictators to train leaders to follow them in power.” On balance, the president felt the West was better off with the devil it knew than someone else.
Anxious to get out of “this Godforsaken country” as soon as possible, Truman let Byrnes do most of the bargaining. The secretary outlined the two most important outstanding issues: Poland’s western boundary and reparations. Once these matters were settled, it would be possible to wind up the conference. To open the negotiations, he offered his Russian counterpart 25 percent of German industrial equipment “available for reparations” in the Ruhr and a Polish frontier that followed the line of the Eastern Neisse River. This did not satisfy the equally canny Molotov. He pointed out that “25 per cent of an undetermined figure meant very little.” He asked for a “fixed sum,” equivalent to $2 billion. He also insisted on a Polish frontier along the Western Neisse, an arrangement that would give Poland an additional eight thousand square miles of German territory. Having rejected the initial American bid, Molotov drove the quarter mile up Kaiserstrasse to consult with Stalin.
Byrnes and Molotov met again at 4:30 p.m. on July 30, this time in the Cecilienhof Palace. Truman chose not to attend; Stalin remained “indisposed.” The secretary announced he was prepared to agree to the Western Neisse border. He also held out the possibility of a compromise on western diplomatic recognition for the governments of Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. But he made clear these concessions had to be part of a package that included an agreement on reparations.
The haggling continued at the foreign ministers’ meeting at 5:00 p.m. in the grand hall of the crown prince’s palace. Sensing that he had to make a concession of his own, Molotov lowered his demand for industrial equipment from the Ruhr from $2 billion to $800 million.
Byrnes repeated that it was “impossible” to name any kind of fixed sum. “We have no information about the amount of equipment that will be available for the payment of reparations.”
Realizing that he had hit a brick wall, Molotov shifted direction. He wanted to know who would determine how much equipment would be “available for reparations.” The Russians wanted to vest this authority in a central “Control Council,” representing all the occupying powers. The Americans and British were determined to retain the final say on how much equipment was removed from the territory they controlled.
“We cannot agree to take away the right of veto from the commander of the zone,” Byrnes insisted. He reminded Molotov that the United States had made a big concession to the Soviet Union on the Western Neisse.
“That was a concession to Poland, not to us,” rejoined the Russian.
Final agreement was left to the Big Three, or the “Big 2½,” as a British wit labeled the Churchill-less troika. Stalin returned to the negotiating table on the afternoon of July 31, apparently none the worse for his “indisposition.” The vozhd succeeded in clarifying the language on reparations. Most of the German reparations payable to the Soviet Union would come from the Soviet-controlled zone, but an unspecified amount of industrial equipment could be removed from the western zones once the needs of the “German peace economy” had been met. The Soviet Union would have the right to acquire “10 per cent of such industrial equipment” on its reparations account “without payment or exchange of any kind.” The Russians could also trade food and raw materials from their zone for a further 15 percent of surplus industrial equipment in western Germany. The amount of available industrial equipment would be determined by the Control Council subject to the “final approval of the Zone Commander in the Zone from which the equipment is to be removed.” The western Allies had preserved the right of veto.
Truman finessed a plea from Stalin for a formal invitation to join the war against Japan. He watered down the Russian draft to eliminate any suggestion that the United States was the demandeur, in diplomatic parlance. The furthest he was prepared to go was to sign a letter stating that the Russians had an obligation under the newly drafted United Nations charter to “consult and cooperate with other great powers” in eliminating the Japanese security threat. The president refused to beg. Instead, in the phrase of a Potsdam historian, “he sounded more like a teacher reminding a forgetful pupil of his chores.”
In the meantime, a top-secret telegram had arrived in Babelsberg from Stimson, who was now back in Washington. The secretary of war notified Truman that preparations for an atomic attack against Japan were almost in place. The Japanese government had declared it intended to “ignore” the Allied ultimatum. The president had already given the verbal go-ahead for the bomb. His only remaining task was to authorize release of the accompanying press announcement “as soon as necessary.” He told his aide George Elsey that the news must not break before his departure from Potsdam, now scheduled for the early morning of August 2. “I don’t want to have to answer any questions from Stalin,” he explained. He scribbled out a reply to Stimson and handed it to Elsey for transmission to Washington.
“Release when ready but not sooner than August 2. HST”
The Potsdam conference wrapped up with two final plenary sessions on August 1. The disposal of Germany’s foreign assets was settled in a way that foreshadowed the political division of Europe. Stalin and Truman had little difficulty agreeing to an imaginary dividing line “running from the Baltic to the Adriatic,” corresponding to the reach of the different Allied armies. All German assets to the east of the line would go to the Soviet Union; everything to the west would belong to America and Britain.
The president had one final matter he was determined to raise before leaving Potsdam. He wanted to demonstrate forward movement on his favorite diplomatic obsession—the proposal for a Europe-wide inland waterway system under international control. Stalin had already dismissed the idea as impractical, but Truman wanted some mention of it in the final communiqué. The self-described “innocent idealist” was convinced that canals and rivers had been key to the economic development of the United States and could do the same for war-torn Europe. Noting that he had “accepted a number of compromises during this conference,” he addressed a “personal request” to Stalin to at least acknowledge that the free navigation idea had been “discussed” at Potsdam. Truman’s earnestness left the generalissimo unmoved.
“That question was not discussed,” he said coldly.
“But I raised it at length on three different occasions.”
Stalin pointed out that there was nothing in the communiqué about his demand for Russian forts along the Dardanelles, which he regarded as much more vital to his country’s national security than the internationalization of waterways. When Truman offered to include both subjects in the statement, Stalin became visibly irritated.
“Nyet,” he snapped. He then uttered the only English words that anybody at Potsdam ever heard him use. “No. I say no.”
Truman’s face flushed at the rebuff. “I cannot understand that man,” he muttered to himself. He turned to his secretary of state, who was seated immediately to his right. “Jimmy, do you realize we have been here seventeen whole days? Why, in seventeen days, you can decide anything!”
All that remained was to wrap up the conference with the customary expressions of gratitude and friendship. Shortly after midnight, Stalin expressed his personal thanks to Byrnes, “who has worked harder perhaps than any one of us to make this conference a success.” Truman, who had privately decided that he never wanted to experience such a diplomatic ordeal again, said he hoped to host the next meeting in Washington.
“God willing,” said the leader of the world’s first atheist state.
The president and the generalissimo shook hands, never to meet again.
On paper, the Potsdam conference preserved a united German state. The leaders gathered in Cecilienhof decreed that occupied “Germany shall be treated as a single economic unit” and called for “uniformity of treatment of the German population throughout Germany.” The practice, however, was very different. The Potsdam decisions led inexorably to the division of the country into two rival entities—guided by competing ideologies, geopolitical ties, and economic and political systems. The goal of unification was undermined from the start by the decision to make national military commanders ultimately responsible for occupation policies in their particular zone. The Control Council was powerless to act without the consent of the national commanders, who were sovereign within their own bailiwicks.
American and Russian policy makers were never able to agree on the most basic question, whether to feed the defeated German people or let them go hungry. The answer to that question determined everything else: the resources required for the functioning of the German “peacetime economy,” the revival of German industry, and the creation of democratic institutions. The British intelligence official Noel Annan came to believe that the reparations decision shaped “the future of Germany. All talk about a central government—reunification, denazification, frontiers and the rest—was secondary to the decision about reparations. The decision determined that the Western powers would be responsible for the German economy in their zones.” The Americans and the British never made more than symbolic transfers of industrial equipment to the Soviet zone. Stalin lost interest in the idea of a united Germany once he understood that he would receive little in return.
Differences over reparations and supplying Berlin had the effect of creating an “economic iron curtain splitting Europe in two,” in the phrase of one of Truman’s economic advisers. Western commanders were now responsible for feeding 2 million refugees who had fled to the American and British zones of Germany for a mixture of political and economic reasons. There was no way they were going to dismantle German factories and ship the contents eastward when they were struggling to provide basic necessities to the population in their zones. Complaints that the other side had failed to keep its promises became more and more common. Western military officers responsible for handling day-to-day economic crises quickly concluded that there was no surplus to be handed over to the Russians. “We are preventing Germany from having any economy at all and at the same time are filling the press and the air with a lot of prating about democratic principles,” grumbled the deputy American commander in Berlin. Implementing the economic provisions of the Potsdam agreements was like “sticking bayonets into a dead man.”
Delivering food and raw materials to Berlin became a logistical nightmare for the western Allies after the Russians cut off the traditional sources of supply in mid-July. Flour had to be shipped in from Holland, coal from the Ruhr, potatoes from Hanover. Cargo trains backed up at Magdeburg, the sole transit point between the American and Russian zones, due to the dismantling of railway tracks by the Red Army. To feed Berliners, the Americans drove cattle across the border into the Russian zone but were unable to find Soviet troops authorized “to receive the cattle, which were without food and water.” A Pentagon memo noted dryly that “German farmers in the U.S. Zone were obviously not enthused about delivering cattle” to Berlin. Coal deliveries to the western sectors of Berlin became “a continuous source of friction and argument.” It took many months to build up stable reserves.
The complaints of lower-level officers gradually made their way up to General Lucius Clay, who was in overall charge of the occupation. At first, Clay loyally tried to implement the Potsdam provisions on a united Germany, but the task was beyond him. “After one year of occupation, zones represent airtight territories with almost no free exchange of commodities, persons and ideas,” he reported to his superiors in May 1946. “Germany now consists of four small economic units which can deal with each other only through treaties.” Without free trade and a free market, implementation of the reparations plan was “absolutely impossible.” It would lead to “economic chaos.”
Fewer than a hundred days had passed since American and Russian soldiers exchanged hugs and vows of eternal friendship on the banks of the Elbe River, but it already seemed like a different age. Representatives of the rival occupation armies in Berlin were shooting at each other even as their supreme commanders posed for family photographs and issued triumphant communiqués, just fifteen miles down the road, in Potsdam. The dream of a defeated but united Germany jointly occupied by her conquerors was giving way to the reality of superpower competition. Nowhere were the two armies in closer proximity—and more intense contention—than in the ruins of Hitler’s capital.
On the afternoon of July 31, as Truman and Stalin haggled over the terms of German reparations in the Cecilienhof Palace, American military police received a report of looting by Russian troops at the Görlitzer railroad station in Berlin. It was a familiar story. Red Army soldiers preyed on the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were flooding into the city from Silesia in trains so overcrowded that people had to cling to the roofs and outside doors. When the trains reached Berlin, the passengers were frisked at gunpoint by Russian soldiers, looking for jewelry, watches, and other valuables. Since the Görlitzer Bahnhof was in the American sector of the city, the Americans felt an obligation to protect the refugees.
By the time military police showed up at 5:00 p.m., the Russians had commandeered a room in the station hotel. The Soviet officers refused to allow the Americans to search the room. They claimed they were “resting” prior to catching a train. Reinforcements were summoned—and the hotel was soon surrounded by American armored vehicles. At this point, three of the Russians decided to leave, ignoring attempts to arrest them.
“Halt!” shouted an American soldier who had just arrived on the scene. He pointed his pistol at the Russians, two of whom stopped in their tracks. The third Russian, Major Mikhail Kolomets, kept on walking. The American shouted “Halt!” again and grabbed Kolomets by the shoulder. He saw the Russian reach for his hip pocket and “look at me kind of funny.”
“No,” yelled the American, firing his pistol at the Red Army major and wounding him in the stomach. Kolomets died two days later.
Such incidents became increasingly common as the Americans and British sought to impose their authority on their sectors of Berlin. Virtually every day brought fresh reports of looting by Russian soldiers, abductions of political opponents, rapes, shootings, armed robberies, and countless cases of drunkenness. The only remaining nightclub in Berlin had to be closed following a clash between heavily armed American and Red Army soldiers. Many of the confrontations ended in bloodshed and high-level recriminations.
“You must control and discipline your troops,” the American commanding general lectured his Soviet counterpart. “You can’t expect us to let them run wild in our sector, looting and shooting, without doing something about it.”
“Maybe they had a few drinks and the wine caused them to get out of hand,” conceded the Russian general. “But we don’t shoot Americans when they come into our sector.”
The American general explained that shooting first was “an American tradition, growing out of frontier days” when “the man who shot first lived.” History does not record what the Russians made of this patently self-serving explanation.
The fault did not lie entirely on the Russian side. In letters home, a senior American officer acknowledged that some of his men were “trigger-happy.” General Jack Whitelaw complained that the quality of the average American soldier had declined sharply since the end of the war. “We have no army over here. The Army is just a lot of homesick boys with a liberal sprinkling of rascals.” In other letters, he told his wife that “too many Russian marauders are being killed in our district.… Russia is not going to give up anything that she considers essential to her wellbeing without a fight and I mean a fight. If we want that, we had better get ready for it. I don’t think that America wants to fight the only nation left with whom we have never been at war. But I may be wrong. Certainly I see all around me rascals and idiots who seem hell bent on stirring up trouble.”
Germans as well as Russians complained about the American habit of shooting first and asking questions later. Tales of random shootings by American soldiers filled the censorship reports compiled by the military government from intercepted German correspondence. “Some [Americans] act like gangsters,” was a typical complaint from a resident of the middle-class suburb of Zehlendorf. “Here in our district they drag some into the woods, beat them up and rob them.” A Steglitz man described how two of his friends were attacked by five American soldiers. “They were punched, thrown down, and their heads knocked against a wall. Then they were kicked in the ribs.” The most notorious incident involved the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Leo Borchard, who was killed at an American military checkpoint. The conductor was being driven home late at night by a music-loving British colonel who had invited him to dinner. The colonel was unaware of the existence of the checkpoint. His headlights blinded the American sentry who failed to recognize the British staff car. Although he aimed for the tires, he ended up shooting Borchard through the head. The musician died instantly.
During their first five months in Berlin, American troops shot dead ten Russians and wounded another seven, with zero casualties on their own side. The head of the U.S. military government, Colonel Howley, attempted to explain the disparity:
• The Russians draw their weapons as a persuader, without the intention of shooting;
• Even when they shoot, they are inclined to shoot in the air rather than shoot at the Allied soldier;
• The short Russian pistol, no bigger than the palm, is a very inaccurate weapon;
• In most cases, the Russian officer or soldier was so drunk that careful aim was out of the question.
American officers suspected the Germans of doing everything in their power to pit one occupying army against another. “They get the troops bitching and blaming all their difficulties on the Russians,” complained Major General James Gavin, commander of the 102nd Airborne Division, which moved into the city in early August. “The Germans will be disappointed, and I believe surprised, if we do not come to blows with the Russians before the winter is over.”
Truman was delighted to finally leave Potsdam immediately after breakfast on Thursday, August 2. He flew to Plymouth in southwest England, where he boarded the cruiser Augusta for the five-day voyage back across the Atlantic. The first three days of the journey were uneventful, the sea unusually calm. The president took the opportunity to relax and listen to his favorite classical tunes played by the ship’s orchestra. He spent the evening of August 5 watching The Thin Man Goes Home, the latest hit movie from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. The cruiser maintained a steady speed of 26.5 knots.
The following day, Monday, August 6, Truman decided to eat lunch with the crew, belowdecks. The Augusta was now some two hundred miles south of Nova Scotia, just a day out from Newport News in Virginia. Shortly before noon, one of the Map Room watch officers, Captain Frank Graham, handed the president an urgent message that had just arrived from the War Department in Washington. Truman’s face broke out into a broad grin as he perused the contents. An atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan sixteen hours earlier. “Hiroshima was bombed visually with only one tenth cloud cover at seven fifteen PM Washington time August five,” the message read. “There was no fighter opposition and no flak … results clear cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test.”
“This is the greatest thing in history!” exulted Truman, clasping the messenger by the hand.
A second message arrived a few minutes later from Stimson, confirming the contents of the first message. “First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.”
The president jumped to his feet, calling out across the mess room to Byrnes. “It’s time for us to get on home.” He waved the decoded message triumphantly in front of him as he addressed the crew. He was in no doubt that the war with Japan was effectively over. Pearl Harbor had been avenged.
“Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success.”
The crew responded with clapping and cheers, pounding the tables in front of them. “Mr. President, I guess that means I’ll get home sooner now!” one sailor shouted out. The ship’s radio system began broadcasting excited news bulletins from Washington. A presidential statement described the Manhattan Project as “the greatest scientific gamble in history.”
It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.… We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.… It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
The statement made clear that the Americans and the British would not be sharing the secrets of the bomb with their Russian allies, at least for the foreseeable future. “Under present circumstances it is not intended to divulge the technical processes of production or all the military applications, pending further examination of possible methods of protecting us and the rest of the world from the danger of sudden destruction.”
For many Americans, jubilation over the seemingly imminent defeat of Japan was tinged with foreboding. The discovery of atomic energy was “the greatest scientific achievement of this war and could be the greatest in history,” editorialized the Chicago Tribune. “It may also mean the obliteration of the civilization that makes such discoveries possible.” The Washington Post described the sense of “bewildered awe” that had greeted the news. “We must love one another or die,” the news-paper cautioned. “Otherwise the story of homo sapiens will become, as the late Lord Balfour once said, ‘a brief and unpleasant episode in the history of one of the minor planets.’ ” The military analyst of the New York Times, Hanson Baldwin, warned that the “secondary effects” of the bomb—he was not yet familiar with the term “radiation”—could leave survivors of the initial blast “marred or maimed, blinded, deafened, diseased.”
Yesterday man unleashed the atom to destroy man, and another chapter in human history opened, a chapter in which the weird, the strange, the horrible becomes the trite and the obvious. Yesterday we clinched victory in the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind.
The reaction in Europe and Britain was equally ambivalent. The British diplomat Pierson Dixon summed up the startling possibilities in a laconic diary entry later that day. “It is the dawn of utopia or the end of the world.”
Stalin traveled back to Moscow by heavily guarded armored train across Poland, a country that had been unceremoniously moved, as if on a railway carriage, nearly two hundred miles to the west. He heard the news about the destruction of Hiroshima at his Kuntsevo dacha, on the evening of August 6, the day after his return from Berlin. (Moscow time was seven hours in advance of Washington time, and six hours behind Tokyo time.) His daughter, Svetlana, arrived at the dacha to show off her newborn son, whom she had named Joseph, in honor of her father. But Stalin was too preoccupied to pay much attention to either his first grandson or his only daughter. He was constantly interrupted by the “usual visitors” bearing reports about the atomic bomb.
There was little doubt in the minds of Stalin and his senior aides about Truman’s real intentions. The vozhd observed that Hiroshima “has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed.” Molotov shared his master’s belief that the atomic bomb was “not aimed at Japan but rather at the Soviet Union.” The Americans were saying, in effect, “Bear in mind you don’t have an atomic bomb and we do, and this is what the consequences will be like if you make a wrong move!”
Stalin responded to the bombing of Hiroshima by further accelerating his plans for attacking Japan. On the evening of August 7, he ordered Marshal Vasilevskii to commence operations against Japanese-occupied Manchuria at midnight local time on August 9. At 10:10 p.m., he received a Chinese delegation led by Foreign Minister T. V. Soong, in his Kremlin study. Time was running out to reach an agreement with the Chinese on Soviet operations in Manchuria prior to the invasion. The nationalist government was still resisting Russian demands for control over Port Arthur, Dairen, and a tsarist-era railroad connecting the Chinese ports with Harbin and Vladivostok. Stalin calculated that the Chinese would become more reasonable once Soviet tanks drove the Japanese out of Manchuria. He was determined to extract all the territorial concessions promised by FDR at Yalta in return for joining the war in the Far East. It was vitally important that Soviet forces occupied Manchuria before Japan was bludgeoned into submission by American bombs.
The Soviet media were awaiting instructions on how to report the news of the atomic bomb. Pravda carried a five-paragraph summary of Truman’s statement on the bottom of this page of its August 8 edition, next to a much longer article, “Leninism and Progressive Russian Culture in the 19th Century.” The front-page headlines focused on the harvest in Ukraine, but Soviet citizens had long been trained to ferret out the real news in obscure places in the paper. A twenty-four-year-old physicist by the name of Andrei Sakharov glanced at the newspaper on his way to the bakery. He was so stunned that his legs “practically gave way. There could be no doubt that my fate and the fate of many others, perhaps of the entire world, had changed overnight. Something new and awesome had entered our lives, a product of the greatest of the sciences, of the discipline I revered.”
Despite the lack of information, ordinary Russians grasped the significance of the atomic bomb as quickly as their leaders. The British journalist Alexander Werth reported that the bomb was the only subject Muscovites talked about all day. “The news had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realized that this was a New Fact in the world’s power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to Russia, and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that Russia’s desperately hard victory over Germany was now ‘as good as wasted.’ ” From top to bottom, Russians were convinced that the bomb’s “real purpose was … to intimidate Russia.”
Stalin also took steps to vastly expand the Soviet Union’s own nuclear weapons program. He assigned responsibility for Task Number One, the code name for the atomic project, to his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, who had demonstrated his organizational skills by running the gulag. The vozhd made clear that no expense was to be spared to end the American monopoly. An army of half a million slave laborers would be assigned to building the facilities and processing the uranium needed to produce a Soviet bomb. Stalin brushed aside Kurchatov’s qualms about diverting resources from the shattered civilian economy. “If the baby doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs,” he snapped. “Ask for anything you need. There will be no refusals.” He had just one demand in return. “Provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time.”
A million and a half Soviet troops poured across the 2,730-mile border into China in the predawn hours of August 9, attacking from half a dozen different directions. They swept through the Gobi Desert toward Peking, across the mountains and rivers of Manchuria toward Harbin, and along the heavily forested coast of the Sea of Japan. It was the last major set-piece operation of World War II. The Soviet troops enjoyed “a paper superiority of two to one in men, five to one in tanks and artillery, two to one in aircraft.” The Russian troops advanced behind a massive barrage from katyusha rocket launchers and tanks that overwhelmed the Japanese defenders. Unable to motivate their soldiers with stories of recent Japanese atrocities against Russian civilians, Soviet commanders invoked memories of the humiliating defeat in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The time had come, political officers told their troops, “to erase the black stain of history against our homeland.”
As in Europe, the invading armies were followed by reparations teams who dismantled industrial plants and government buildings for shipment back to Russia. Truman’s reparations chief, Edwin Pauley, who arrived on an inspection tour soon afterward, estimated the resulting damage to the Manchurian economy at around $2 billion. What Pauley termed “Operation Locust” was ostensibly targeted against Japanese property owners in Manchuria, but in practice there was “little distinction” between the treatment meted out to the Japanese and the Chinese.
Reeling before the Russian onslaught, the outnumbered Japanese army soon found itself split into several different pieces. The Japanese retreat was so rapid that the occupiers were unable to honor a promise to evacuate the puppet Chinese emperor, Pu Yi, who was captured by the Red Army and taken to Russia. After capturing eastern Manchuria, the Russian invaders swept down the Korean peninsula. They stopped at the thirty-eighth parallel, just to the north of the city of Seoul, in accordance with an agreement with the United States. (A few days earlier, after consulting a National Geographic map late one night in the Pentagon, two U.S. Army colonels had suggested the thirty-eighth parallel as a “convenient dividing line” between Allied operations on the Korean peninsula.)
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After pushing hard for Soviet participation in the war against Japan, Truman was not at all pleased by the manner in which it came about. “They’re jumping the gun, aren’t they?” he observed to his chief of staff when he heard the news from Manchuria.
“Yes, damn it,” Admiral Leahy replied. “The bomb did it. They want to get in before it’s all over.”
Stalin acted just in time. Ten hours after the Red Army launched its attack on Manchuria, a U.S. Air Force B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. Japan surrendered six days later, on August 15. The race to deliver the final knockout punch to Japan—pitting Russian land power against American airpower—had concluded with a virtual dead heat. The Second World War had finally ended, to be replaced by a new type of global conflict that would consume the lives, energies, and ideological passions of an entire generation of Americans and Russians. The transformation of World War II Allies into Cold War rivals had been accomplished in a period of just six months.