THE AUGUSTA’S CAPTAIN JAMES FOSKETT personally escorted Truman to his quarters. The president would stay in the admiral’s cabin (which had its own private head), directly across from the captain’s cabin, where Jimmy Byrnes was assigned, both cabins one flight up from the ship’s main deck. The Augusta measured 600¼ feet long, its beam rising 66 feet high. Cruising speed: 32.7 knots. The ship was named for a city in Georgia, but the crew called it “Augie” for short, and it had a distinguished career. It was aboard this ship that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met face-to-face for the first time as leaders of their respective countries, in Canada’s Placentia Bay on August 9, 1941. Now, with Truman aboard, the Augusta followed 1,000 yards behind the light cruiser USS Philadelphia, the two ships operating as Task Force 68.
An “Advance Map Room” was set up onboard with a direct communications line to the White House Map Room, so the president could be in constant contact with intelligence sources from all over the world. Truman was given a telephone directory for onboard calls (he was #51), along with instructions for laundry, barber, and tailor. He had a list of the books in the ship’s library, and another of the crew members from his home state of Missouri. At lunch the first day at sea, he stood on line in the chief petty officer’s mess with his aluminum tray, and when he sat down at a table, the sailors next to him were too nervous to speak. He lightened them up quickly. “Old Harry sat around batting the breeze like he’d known us all his life,” recalled one sailor who sat next to Truman.
The ocean voyage would last eight days, and at night the Augusta traveled with lights on rather than in blackout, now that German U-boats—the rattlesnakes of the sea, as FDR had called them—were no longer torpedoing ships in the Atlantic. Truman’s group fell into a routine. The State Department had put together red-covered tomes full of position papers for Truman to memorize. Similar books were prepared for Roosevelt on the way to Yalta, but FDR never read them. Truman did—thousands of pages. At least once a day he met with Byrnes and Leahy, along with assistants, to firm up proposals that were then prepared for presentation at the upcoming conference. Recalled Chip Bohlen, who was present at many of these meetings: “Truman, a newcomer as a world leader, was understandably somewhat nervous about confronting such awesome figures as Churchill and Stalin . . . During our conferences, Truman spent little time on small talk and jokes. He stuck to business.”
Each day Truman received news updates from the Advance Map Room. The first day at sea, a memo arrived detailing Curtis LeMay’s latest bombing of Japan: “600 B-29 Superfortresses have dropped nearly 4,000 tons of incendiary and demolition bombs on the main Japanese island of Honshu.” Japanese cities such as Shimizu and Kofu were receiving their “first baptism of incendiaries,” the firebombs killing indiscriminately. Rumors of peace feelers from the Japanese had led Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew to make a statement from Washington: “Conversations relating to peace have been reported to the Department from various parts of the world, but in no case has an approach been made to this Government, directly or indirectly, by a person who could establish his authority to speak for the Japanese Government, and in no case has an offer of surrender been made.”
When Truman was not in conferences, he walked the ship from bow to stern restlessly, followed often by Fred Canfil, as loyal as a dog, and Harry Vaughan, who had a habit of talking too much. (“I don’t suppose anyone gives more advice than I do,” Vaughan said, “and has less of it used.”) Each night at six o’clock a thirty-piece band played a symphonette program, followed by dinner. At eight o’clock a movie was shown in Byrnes’s room (the first night featured The Princess and the Pirate, starring Bob Hope). Truman slipped out of these movies to play poker in his quarters. One night over a card game, conversation turned to the election in Britain. Churchill believed that his present government would win, but one could not say for sure. At the poker table, newsman Robert Nixon insisted that Churchill was on his way out of office.
“The Conservative government, with Churchill as its head, is going to go out,” Nixon insisted. Was he right? The voting had taken place, and it would be days before the count was completed, which meant that, if there was a change in British leadership, it would occur right in the middle of the Potsdam Conference.
The mood aboard the ship was positive, though the pressure was palpable. The two previous Big Three meetings, Tehran and Yalta, had occurred under a veil of secrecy. The entire world knew of this upcoming conference. Meanwhile, the president was eager to hear news of the test shot in New Mexico. Admiral Leahy was still positive the experiment would never work. “This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done,” the White House chief of staff insisted. “The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
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On July 14 the Augusta steamed past the white cliffs of Dover and into the English Channel. Truman stood atop the bridge focusing his eyes on this breathtaking sight. Seven ships of His Majesty’s fleet greeted the president, six destroyers and the HMS Birmingham light cruiser, which served as an escort. Aboard each stood rows of hundreds of British sailors saluting Truman, shouting three cheers as he passed.
“Three cheers for Mr. Truman,” thousands of sailors roared, “President of the United States!”
The Augusta cruised past an army encampment along the shore where thousands of American GIs were awaiting their journeys home, the men climbing over one another trying to get a look at the president. As the ship moved closer to its berth, Truman saw a sea of ecstatic Belgians and Hollanders on the banks of the water—men, women, old and young, shouting with delight and pumping fists in the air. They were a reminder that Truman was the face of the nation that had saved these people from Hitler. He was the face of the nation that was now the hope of rebirth for millions of Europeans.
At Antwerp the Augusta was boarded by a welcoming party, notably General Eisenhower himself. Truman walked off the boat at 11:10 a.m. on July 15. The scene was a mesmerizing display of security and logistics. Soldiers began unloading from the Augusta 83 suitcases, 1 trunk, 40 small pieces, plus office gear, Map Room equipment, 36 cans of motion picture film, and the president’s kitchen equipment, which would follow him to Potsdam. Swarms of military police had been surveilling this terrain for days, and twelve P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes patrolled the skies. Truman climbed into an armored car, and a motorcade left the port for a forty-five-minute ride to an airfield in Brussels, where transport planes awaited. Secret service and MPs flanked the motorcade, while directly behind the president’s car a truck motored with eight machine gunners and eight sharpshooting riflemen.
In Brussels the party took off in three C-47 transport planes and landed some three hours later at Gatow outside Berlin. A dozen officials greeted Truman, including Ambassador Harriman and Secretary of War Stimson, who had arranged travel for himself and his team aboard the USS Brazil and had arrived the day before. Though not officially invited, Stimson was to play a key role at Potsdam. The Second Armored “Hell on Wheels” Division performed military honors at the airfield. Truman inspected the guard, as was custom. “Everyone was relieved when this was over,” recalled Joseph Davies, who was present. “The Secret Service had been quite nervous about it. When [Truman] walked in front of the line they could not possibly have protected him from a long distance shot.”
Then Truman was back in a car for the ten-mile drive to his villa. From inside his car, he could hear explosions in the distance. Russians were still detonating German mines, left over from the war. The explosions were at a safe distance but close enough to rattle the president’s nerves. Along this short drive he saw another ominous sight. The airfield at Brussels had been guarded by American and British troops, but here in eastern Germany the roadway was guarded by Russians. Armed frontier guardsmen stood along the entire route at 50- to 100-yard gaps, each a reminder that the president was inside Soviet-occupied territory.
He arrived at his quarters in Babelsberg—a small suburb between Berlin and Potsdam—at approximately 5 p.m., the motorcade lurching to a stop at 2 Kaiserstrasse, a three-story stucco villa on Lake Griebnitz. The lake had served as a popular summer getaway for Berliners before the war, while the villa itself had belonged to a well-known German filmmaker. This filmmaker had been taken by the Soviets—to where, no one knew. “The house as all others was stripped of everything by the Russians,” Truman wrote in a diary on this day. “Not even a tin spoon left.” The Soviet hosts had hastily refurnished the place with odds and ends, giving it a bizarre feel. “It is comfortable enough,” Truman noted, “but what a nightmare it would give an interior decorator.” Though the villa was yellow, it quickly became known as “the Little White House.”
Truman had a bedroom, an office, and a bathroom, a flight of steps above the ground floor. Windows offered a view of the lake. In a room between his bedroom and his office, the head of the secret service detail, George Drescher, had already unpacked his bags. Byrnes, Leahy, Ross, Vaughan, and Chip Bohlen also took up residence in this house. There were no screens on the windows; mosquitoes would be feasting at night. Additionally, the bathrooms were “wholly inadequate,” according to Commander William Rigdon, an assistant naval aide who would be in charge of the president’s kitchen.
But at least the Americans knew they were safe. Army engineers had fumigated the place, checked all the electrical wiring, and inspected the foundation for booby traps or bombs. Secret service had assigned code names to each member of the party, in case their communications were intercepted. Truman was Kilting; Leahy was Coffeetree; Byrnes was Iceblink.
In several nearby villas, Washington officials were settling in. A whole American neighborhood had been created here in Babelsberg, the villas marked “State Department” and “Chiefs of Staff” and “Foreign Office.” American flags flew from each, and U.S. military police patrolled the main road 24/7. Truman had issued strict orders that no American should “liberate” any items from any of these villas. No souvenirs. Each official was assigned a mess area and times when he could eat, and given information on the locations of bars where Americans could gather, where films would be shown, plus the locations of barbershops and laundry. Each man received a “Safeguard Your Health” memorandum, with instructions to drink water only from “authorized sources,” not to enter unauthorized buildings, and to consume only U.S. ration liquor, as “the cleanliness and purity” of foreign liquors were questionable.
To accommodate all these figures, the army had requisitioned an extraordinary amount of materials: 5,000 linen sheets, 50 vacuum cleaners, 20 lawn mowers, 100 bedside lamps, 250 bottle openers, 250 corkscrews, 500 ashtrays, 25 reams of paper, 100 garbage baskets, 20 electric typewriters, and 3,000 rolls of toilet paper. All of Truman’s food would be served at his villa, where also his valet would handle his laundry. The army had flown in a physician for the president—Dr. Wallace Graham, who had attended wounded men at the D-day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge and had been wounded himself in the fighting. A Missourian, Dr. Graham would become Truman’s physician from this point onward, for the rest of Truman’s life.
The president was exhausted from the journey. He had no way of knowing how long his sojourn in Europe would last. That night he cabled Matthew Connelly in the White House, instructing him to deliver the following message to Mrs. Truman: “Safely landed in Berlin. Things in good shape. Margie owes me two letters. Please call Mamma. Lots of love. Signed Harry.” Then he went to bed.
He had a lot on his mind. The prime minister would be calling at the Little White House in the morning.
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At 11 a.m. on July 16, Winston Churchill appeared at Truman’s villa with members of his party, including his daughter Mary. Churchill, now seventy years old (nearly a decade older than Truman), was bleary-eyed. He was a night owl. As his daughter mentioned, to make this 11 a.m. appointment, Churchill had awoken earlier than he had in ten years. Truman had already been awake for four and a half hours.
The president was slightly dubious about Churchill, for the prime minister had been at times demanding and irritating in his correspondence. “The difficulties with Churchill are very nearly as exasperating as they are with the Russians,” Truman had recently written in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt. Churchill also enjoyed the patrician upbringing that instantly ingratiated him to Roosevelt—a background of wealth and social stature that Harry Truman lacked completely. Upon their first shake of hands, however, Truman fell for the prime minister.
“I had an instant liking for this man who had done so much for his own country and for the Allied cause,” Truman later wrote. “There was something very open and genuine about the way he greeted me.”
The pink-cheeked prime minister stood only five feet six, but he possessed a transcendent magnanimity. His life seemed to chart the very course of British history, starting in the military (he had served in Cuba, India, Egypt, and Sudan), then in government (he had been, at different times, secretary of state for war, secretary of state for the colonies, minister of defense, and, since 1940, prime minister). He was an accomplished landscape painter and the author of more than twenty books—histories, memoirs, and biographies.* Though his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was American-born, Churchill had come to symbolize Britain’s resolve. His speeches during the early war years, when the United Kingdom’s fate looked bleak at the hands of the Nazis, had inspired the will of the nation to fight, and like FDR, Churchill had a deep understanding of his place in time, the knowledge that his life would be chronicled by authors and warriors forever.
Churchill had arrived in Germany the day before, like Truman, and was staying in a similar villa at 23 Ringstrasse, two blocks away—a six-minute walk. In addition to his daughter, the prime minister had with him his foreign minister, the First Earl of Avon, Anthony Eden, who would be at the prime minister’s side during the conference, and Alexander Cadogan, a British foreign affairs expert. With Byrnes present, the group enjoyed a two-hour social visit. Truman told the prime minister that he had prepared an agenda for the conference and asked Churchill if he had as well.
“No,” the Briton said. “I don’t need one.” Truman must have wondered if the prime minister was overconfident. Either way, it was clear that Churchill had long grown accustomed to face-to-face diplomacy at its highest stakes.
By the end of their first meeting, the prime minister came to understand what all believed to be Truman’s most noteworthy personal trait: his “obvious power of decision.” Truman invited personal friendship, and Churchill was moved. “I felt that here was a man of exceptional character and ability,” he wrote of his first impressions of Truman, “with an excellent outlook exactly along the lines of Anglo-American relations as they had developed, simple and direct methods of speech, and a great deal of self-confidence and resolution.”
Before leaving, Churchill and Truman “struck a blow for liberty” with tumblers of whiskey. The meeting, all agreed, was wonderful. One of Churchill’s entourage, Cadogan, wrote in his diary: “P.M. delighted with Pres.”
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Truman was expecting to meet Stalin in the afternoon but was informed that the Soviet generalissimo was ill, so his arrival would await another day. Stalin, it turned out, was recovering from a mild heart attack. So Truman decided on an unscheduled tour of Berlin. He left the Little White House at 3:40 in an open car with Leahy and Byrnes beside him. The car turned onto the famed Autobahn, and along one side of the highway, the U.S. Second Armored Division was deployed—some eleven hundred jeeps, trucks, and tanks, probably the largest armored division in the world. When the president’s car stopped to greet the division’s commanding general, Leahy said, “This is the most powerful land force I have ever seen. I do not see how anybody could stop them if they really wanted to go somewhere.”
The general responded, “Nobody has stopped them yet!”
Turning toward the city center, Truman saw for the first time what the Allies had done to Berlin. American and British bombers had reduced the city to rubble—piles of it two and three stories high—while the Red Army had sprayed what little bits of buildings were still standing with machine-gun fire. “You could smell the effluvia of the unburied dead,” remembered journalist Robert Nixon, who was in a car following Truman’s. “It was a ghostly sight.” The stink of death, and of feces emanating from shattered buildings that were being used as outdoor toilets, was made more acute by stifling July heat. Through this destruction, Russian bulldozers had cleared a way for cars to travel.
The sight of surviving Berliners left Truman in despair. He described “the long, never-ending procession of old men, women, and children wandering aimlessly along the Autobahn and the country roads carrying, pushing, or pulling what was left of their belongings.” There was little access to food, water, or shelter. Here was a woman trying to start a fire so that she could heat soup for her children. Here was a sign amidst the rubble reading NICHT FÜR JUDEN (Not for Jews). At the center of Berlin, the car turned down the Wilhelmstrasse to the remains of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. Truman could now see the shattered balcony where the Nazi leader had so often addressed his brainwashed followers.
“That’s what happens,” Truman said to Leahy and Byrnes, “when a man overreaches himself. I never saw such destruction. I don’t know whether they learned anything from it or not.”
Truman had fought in a European war as a younger man and had seen war’s devastation. But he had never seen anything like Berlin in July 1945. In contrast to the Great War, World War II was a fully industrialized conflict. The French 75 cannon had given way to swarms of 60,000-pound, four-engine bomber aircraft capable of shredding whole cities. He wrote in a diary entry that night of his impression of Berlin. It had left him philosophical and fearful for the future of mankind.
“I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll [be] no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll [be] a reckoning—who knows?”