BY THE END OF TRUMAN’S SECOND WEEK alone in the White House, he began to feel like a haunted man.
“I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches,” he wrote Bess on June 12, “all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy [Andrew Jackson, presumably] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt] . . . The din is almost unbearable.” Truman was now two months into his presidency. “Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice President,” he wrote Bess. “Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems real.” Three days later Truman wrote Bess again, following a phone call: “It was nice to talk with you last night. I was so tired and so lonesome I did not know what to do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt attended a luncheon at the White House around this time, and she described Truman in these terms: “His family is gone, the house is bare & stiff & he’s the loneliest man I ever saw. He’s not accustomed to night work . . . and he doesn’t like it. He’s not at ease & no one else is. I am so sorry for him & he tries so hard.”
In his first two months as president, Truman had devoted a majority of his time to foreign affairs, but domestic issues were becoming increasingly critical. He submitted his first military budget to Congress on Monday, June 11. (The total program for the new fiscal year would run $39,019,790,474—a 25 percent cut in military spending from the year earlier, reflecting the end of hostilities in Europe.) There were labor strikes that required executive orders from the president, so the federal government could take over factories, coal mines, and railroads, all critical to the war effort. Truman called on farmers across the nation to increase food production in every possible way: “The supply lines to feed our troops and the millions fighting and working with them are the longest in the history of warfare.”
He was still searching for advisors he could trust with respect to the home front. He confided in his press secretary, Charlie Ross, his federal loan administrator, John Snyder, and White House special counsel/speech writer Sam Rosenman that they were his three most trusted confidants with respect to domestic policy. “Took Ross, Snyder and Rosenman to the ‘House’ for lunch,” Truman wrote in a diary entry. “Gave them a libation before we went to the daily dining room for lunch. Told the three of them that they were most in my confidence and that I wanted frank and unadulterated statements of fact to me from them—and that when they couldn’t treat me on that basis, they’d be of no use to me.”
Regarding his politics, he “has answered by actions the question on every lip at the time of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” noted a Chicago Tribune columnist. “What kind of President will Truman make?” He had proven a Jeffersonian Democrat, as he defined the term. He was out for the little guy, the common man, workers and farmers, for all those who fell easy prey to the greed and manipulation of the powerful forces that capitalism sometimes fostered. His liberalism raised some eyebrows on Capitol Hill even among some right-leaning Democrats, but Truman was prepared to dig in and fight on domestic issues, as Americans would soon find out. As he once said, “The President has to look out for the interests of the 150 million people who can’t afford lobbyists in Washington.” He would fight for the kind of man he had once been but was no more—an ordinary American.
Still, as a wartime president, he had to focus primarily on the global emergency. June 18 would prove to be a critical day, for the Truman administration and the war.
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At 3:30 p.m. on June 18, Truman called a meeting to order of his Joint Chiefs of Staff and his top civilian cabinet advisors from the War Department. The brain trust of the American military gathered. Here sat General George Marshall, Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Lieutenant General I. C. Eaker of the army air forces (representing General Arnold, recovering from a heart attack), and the chief of the president’s staff, Fleet Admiral Leahy. Secretary of War Stimson was in the room, as were Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. The president wanted to know from each an opinion on the most efficient means of forcing Japan to surrender unconditionally, and to bring the war to an end.
General Marshall spoke first, reiterating arguments he had already posed but now with more detail. The situation in Japan was “practically identical” to the situation in Europe before the Normandy invasion, Marshall said. He believed that “the only course to pursue” with respect to Japan was the course that had brought the Nazis to their knees: a ground invasion. He had chosen the island of Kyushu at the southern end of Japan’s mainland for the landing, and he set D-day at November 1—four and a half months’ time.
Marshall listed the reasons for the timing: “Our estimates are that our air action will have smashed practically every industrial target worth hitting in Japan as well as destroying huge areas in Jap cities,” he said. “The Japanese Navy, if any still exists, will be completely powerless. Our sea action and air power will have cut Jap reinforcement capabilities from the mainland to negligible proportions.” Any delay past November 1 could force a further delay of up to six months due to winter weather, he explained.
The general then discussed what could be expected in casualties. The United States had suffered roughly 20,000 casualties (killed, wounded, missing) in the invasion of Iwo Jima, against an estimated 25,000 Japanese (killed and taken prisoner, for there was no way to even guess how many were wounded). In Okinawa—the fiercest fought ground battle of the Far East war, and one in which the U.S. forces were on the brink of declaring victory—the Americans had suffered 34,000 army and 7,700 navy casualties, against 81,000 Japanese (the latter number being “not a complete count,” according to the military statisticians). U.S. casualties in the first thirty days of the Normandy invasion had been 42,000. There was no way to estimate the number of casualties expected in the invasion of mainland Japan, but Marshall did say this: “It is a grim fact that there is not an easy, bloodless way to victory in war and it is the thankless task of the leaders to maintain their firm outward front which holds the resolution of their subordinates.”
Marshall was convinced that “every individual moving to the Pacific should be indoctrinated with a firm determination to see [the invasion] through.” He put the number of troops required for the operation at 766,700. The invasion plan was as follows: (1) to have the Russians attack the Japanese occupying Manchuria in China; (2) to “vitalize the Chinese” with air support and supplies so they could handle the Japanese occupying other parts of their country; and (3) all of which would allow the Americans—with British aid—to go after mainland Japan.
Truman went around the room and heard not a single dissent. Lieutenant General Eaker of the air forces noted that he had a fresh cable from his boss, General Arnold, saying he too agreed the invasion should move forward. Stimson went along with the plan, with reservations. He had visited Japan years earlier when he had served as governor-general of the Philippines, under President Coolidge, and he had followed the politics of Japan for longer than anyone else at the table. He felt he knew the Japanese more personally. He believed that there were a lot of Japanese citizens not interested in fighting this war, but if this “submerged class” was attacked on their homeland, they would fight savagely. It would be a terrifying, bloody ordeal. Truman also wondered aloud if the invasion by the white man would further impel the Japanese to combat with religious zeal.
Leahy brought up unconditional surrender. He feared that an insistence on unconditional surrender “would result only in making the Japanese desperate and thereby increase our casualties.” Leahy believed unconditional surrender was unnecessary, that the United States could agree to softer terms in exchange for fewer lives lost. For example, the United States could allow the Japanese emperor to remain in power. Might not the enemy surrender, if the enemy was told it could retain its monarchy?
Truman was increasingly wary of this argument. The shock of Pearl Harbor was still fresh in the American consciousness. Would a conditional surrender be construed as a failure on the part of the Truman administration? Even a stab in the back of the deceased former president, FDR? This whole war was a result, many believed, of the failure of the United States to force complete unconditional surrender on the enemy in the last war. If the Americans had truly accomplished that after World War I, the argument went, there was no way Pearl Harbor or the rise of Hitler could have occurred. As Eleanor Roosevelt had written in June 1944: “We gave up unconditional surrender the last time . . . and now we have sacrificed thousands of lives because we did not do a thorough job.”
The pressure was on Truman to not make that mistake again.
The Soviets had promised to join the war on August 8. Truman asked if the decision on the invasion should be delayed, as the declaration of war by the USSR could be enough to push the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. All agreed, this matter was of major importance.
When the president asked one final time if there was unanimous opinion in the room regarding plans for a ground invasion, all agreed, it should be a go. Leahy remembered watching Truman at this meeting. “Truman was always a good listener,” Leahy recalled, “and I could not gauge exactly what his own feeling was. He did indicate in our discussion that he was completely favorable toward defeating our Far Eastern enemy with the smallest possible loss of American lives.”
At the end of this meeting, Truman turned to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who had not yet spoken.
“McCloy, you didn’t express yourself,” Truman said (according to McCloy’s recollections), “and nobody gets out of this room without standing up and being counted. Do you think I have any reasonable alternative to the decision [on the invasion] which has just been made?”
McCloy turned to his boss, Stimson, who said, “Say what you feel about it.”
“Well, I do think you’ve got an alternative,” McCloy said. “And I think it’s an alternative that ought to be explored and that, really, we ought to have our heads examined if we don’t explore some other method by which we can terminate this war than just by another conventional attack and landing.”
McCloy began by saying that he agreed that the Japanese might surrender if they were given word that they could retain their monarch, Emperor Hirohito. Then McCloy brought up the bomb. “Well as soon as I mentioned the word ‘bomb’—the atomic bomb—even in that select circle, it was sort of a shock,” he recalled. “You didn’t mention the bomb out loud; it was like mentioning Skull and Bones in polite society at Yale. It just wasn’t done.”
McCloy argued that the United States should tell the enemy of the bomb, and if Japan did not surrender, it would be used. He said, “I think our moral position would be better if we gave them a specific warning of the bomb.”
The response, as McCloy remembered the conversation: “We don’t know that it will go off; suppose it doesn’t go off; our prestige will be greatly marred.”
“All the scientists have told us that the thing will go,” McCloy said. “It's just a matter of testing it out now, but they’re quite certain from reports I’ve seen that this bomb is a success . . .”
Truman said the group should “explore this,” but decisions with regard to the bomb could not be made until it was tested successfully. Truman ordered the Joint Chiefs to move ahead with plans for a ground invasion of Japan, an order that would begin the process of putting more than three quarters of a million Americans in harm’s way.
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At the time of this June 18 conference, Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos in New Mexico were straining to meet the July 4 deadline for the first test of an atomic bomb. The scientists had instructions to prove that a bomb could work before Truman left the country to sit at the bargaining table with Stalin and Churchill at the upcoming tripartite meeting in the Potsdam suburb of Berlin. As Oppenheimer later told an interviewer, “We were told that it would be very important—I was told I guess by Mr. Stimson—that it would be very important to know the state of affairs before the meeting at Potsdam at which the future conduct of the war in the Far East would be decided.”
By June 1945, Oppenheimer’s secret laboratory in the New Mexico desert had become a full-blown town. The pace of the work was astounding, especially to the men performing it daily. In March 1943, “Oppie” (as most people at Los Alamos called him) had arrived with the first members of his research team. Now, barely more than two years later, about 4,000 people were living at Los Alamos in some 300 newly constructed apartment buildings, some 50 dormitories and 200 trailers. The residents had their own radio station and their own Los Alamos town council.
Throughout the existence of the Manhattan Project, these scientists and military men worked according to a simple ideology. As put by Oppenheimer: “Almost everyone knew that if [the bomb] were completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war.” Now that the first test was near, however, many of these figures had begun to confront an ambivalence over the morality of their work. Some scientists at Los Alamos had begun hosting meetings to discuss their fears about the effects this bomb would have on Japan and what it would mean for the future of humanity, but Oppenheimer did not approve. That was the work of politicians, he said. Their work was to build a weapon that would end the war. It was only a matter of time, however, before the voice of dissenting scientists demanded to be heard.
On June 11, James Franck—a Nobel laureate—produced a petition signed by seven Manhattan Project scientists in Chicago. Franck attempted to place this document in the hands of the secretary of war. “We feel compelled to take a more active stand now because the success which we have achieved in the development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past,” the petition read. The scientists determined that there was no hope of avoiding “a nuclear armament race” among nations in the future, particularly with the USSR. Just because the bomb was being born, these scientists believed, did not mandate that it should be used against human targets. The petition pointed out that the United States had “large accumulations of poison gas, but not use them.”
Ultimately, the petition called for “a demonstration of the new weapon . . . before the eyes of representatives of all the United Nations, on [a] desert or a barren island.”
This petition was signed seven days before Truman’s June 18 meeting with his Chiefs of Staff and war cabinet, on the planning of the Japanese invasion. The president was never made aware of it at the time. He was, however, almost certainly made aware of another document, dated June 16: the findings of Robert Oppenheimer’s Scientific Advisory Committee, formed to allow the Manhattan Project scientists to voice an opinion on what should be done with their work. Oppenheimer summed up the findings as follows:
The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous; they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use . . . We [Oppenheimer’s Scientific Advisory Committee] find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.
On the same afternoon as Truman’s meeting with his military advisors on Japan (June 18), General Eisenhower made his triumphant return to Washington. Roughly a million people lined the streets to praise Eisenhower—“definitely the biggest crowd in the capital’s history,” according to the city’s police department. Here was “Iron Ike,” who had led Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942; who had commanded the 1944 D-day invasion of Normandy; who had served as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. When he marched down the aisle in the House Chamber to the speaking platform, a who’s who of political and military power was there to see him: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen, diplomats, Mrs. Mamie Eisenhower, everyone but Harry Truman, who chose not to appear, to give Eisenhower all the spotlight. The Washington News called Eisenhower’s roaring reception Congress’s “greatest ovation in 25 years.”
At the speaker’s podium, the general “looked nervous and embarrassed and rather like the high school valedictorian just prior to his speech,” recorded one reporter in the crowd. When Eisenhower began his remarks, many in the crowd believed that they were listening to a speech from the next president of the United States.
That night Truman hosted Eisenhower at the White House for a “stag party.” More than a hundred guests attended. Eisenhower was “a real man,” in Truman’s words, and the president enjoyed himself immensely. The Marine Band Orchestra delivered all the White House favorites. Truman escorted Eisenhower into the State Dining Room, where the formality of place cards was omitted. Eisenhower brought his son John with him, who had graduated from West Point on June 6, 1944—D-day—and had then joined his father on the beaches of Normandy. The day after Eisenhower’s White House fete, Truman wrote Bess: “Eisenhower’s party was a grand success . . . He is a nice fellow and a good man. He’s done a whale of a job. They are running him for President, which is O.K. with me. I’d turn it over to him now if I could.”
The timing of Eisenhower’s return to Washington was fortuitous, for the day after his speech at the Capitol, word came from the Far East that Okinawa had fallen. Truman received a communiqué from a naval aide on June 19: “Okinawa: It is officially stated that the enemy resistance was broken today. A breakthrough was made in two places. The enemy is being pushed off the southern end of the island. Mopping up is under way.” One of the most bitterly fought battles of all time was ending. Officially, the Allies would not declare the victory until June 22. Churchill sent Truman a heartfelt congratulatory cable that summed up this historic battle succinctly: “The strength of will-power, devotion, and technical resources applied by the United States to this task, joined with the death-struggle of the enemy, of whom 90,000 are reported to be killed, places this battle among the most intense and famous in military history.”
Even before the final shot was fired, nearly 100,000 military engineers and construction workers began turning the island of Okinawa into a sprawling staging area with airfields and living quarters for hundreds of thousands of soldiers, in preparation for the November 1 invasion of Japan.