1945 (4 page)

Truman mused out loud, "Two weeks. Well, I daresay we can't roll them off an assembly line like Ford does cars." It brought a small, bitter chuckle from the others, even from the dour Leahy, who was vehemently opposed to using the bomb.

Just two days prior, Ford had begun the production of civilian vehicles at a plant in New Jersey, and the other carmakers were lusting to follow. Even without the surrender of Japan, the United States was starting to ease back into a less restrictive economy.

"We might have had a bomb ready a couple of days sooner," Groves continued, "but, with peace so likely, we canceled the planned shipment of fissionable material to Tinian. No need, we thought."

Truman rose and the others did as well. It was a gesture of respect for his new rank that still surprised him. "All right, we have a war to win and I have an announcement to make to the world. I'm afraid our people are going to take this as yet another example of Jap duplicity, and I can't say as I blame them. This is going to make the real ending of the war just that much more brutal and bloody to achieve."

Truman returned quickly to his office. Even without taking into consideration what the fanatics were causing to be inflicted on the civilians of Japan, the thought of sending still more young men to die in battle had almost caused him to weep. He had been so hopeful that the shocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the Russians' declaration of war and subsequent invasion of Manchuria, would have caused even the most radical Jap to see the light. It was a horrible responsibility, and he silently cursed Roosevelt for dying and thrusting it upon him.

Japan was not the only problem of immense magnitude that he and the United States had to deal with. The war had ended in Europe, but not the killing, as the oppressed took savage revenge on their oppressors or, sometimes, just the weak. Poles had massacred several hundreds of Jews who had survived the concentration camps and who had tried to reclaim their possessions from Polish squatters. What to do with the Jews, along with the millions of other refugees, was an enormously complex problem.

General Eisenhower had just informed him that the "breadbaskets" of Europe had not produced much in the way of crops this year, and since those lands were now in Russian zones, what grain that would be harvested would be heading for the Soviet Union. Along with feeding England and France, the United States was going to have to find enough foodstuffs for Germany and other countries.

Russia was also on the march in Asia. Stalin was openly supporting the Chinese Communists under Mao Tse-tung in their war against the Nationalists, who, however corrupt and incompetent, were allies of the United States . Russian armies were driving the Japanese armies from Manchuria and Korea , and it looked as if those lands would come under Soviet control. Any hopes that the American possession of nuclear weapons would deter Stalin's ambitions had been dashed.

Last, but hardly least, was the question of the U.S. economy. The country had been on a total war footing for years, and there was a real need to begin boosting the production of civilian goods and integrating millions of returning servicemen into the fragile economy. This had to be done carefully to prevent a return to the Great Depression. After twelve years of economic pain and ruin, there were those who felt that a depressed economy and great numbers of unemployed might be the normal state of capitalism for the twentieth century. Truman fervently wanted to prove them wrong.

At least, Truman thought with some satisfaction, the Widow Roosevelt had finally moved out of the White House and returned to her Hyde Park residence in New York. His wife, Bess, and his daughter, Margaret, were only a few steps away, and their presence was a great comfort to him. He was surprised to find that the Roosevelts, who'd lived in the White House since 1933, had never truly considered it their home and had allowed it to fall into neglect and disrepair. Bess had been appalled at the filth.

Harry Truman grinned. Bess would take care of that little problem. All he had to do was end this damned war.

P-47
fighter pilot Dennis Chambers had been shot down over northern Kyushu in May 1945. The twenty-six-year-old Army Air Corps captain had endured harsh interrogations from his captors, during which, in accordance with new air force policy, he told them everything he knew rather than resist until the information was pulled from him, piece by bloody piece. Like many downed airmen, he fabricated wild stories that seemed to satisfy the Japs rather than the bland truth that he didn't really know much at all about grand strategy.

Routine beatings left him bloody but not badly hurt, and then he was taken to the prison camp just outside the port city of Nagasaki.

Dennis was left counting his advantages. First, he understood a smattering of Japanese, courtesy of an immigrant houseboy his parents had employed. He gradually picked up enough from his captors to be reasonably fluent, which he kept secret.

A couple of his friends were beaten to death for minor infractions, and he'd watched in horror as one man was beheaded for some unintended insult to a guard. At least that kind of death would have been swift. All too often, punishment consisted of having rations reduced, and since the rations were already below subsistence level, that meant lingering death by painful starvation.

Although bruised and cut, he still had his health, and being a small man a little under average height and build, he didn't require much in the way of food to keep him going. Early in his captivity, Chambers realized that he could stomach eating anything if it meant surviving, and he made a point of digging up worms and eating insects to supplement the small balls of rice the Japanese provided.

This only delayed the inevitable. He was a lean man, and when he did lose weight, it came from muscle and not from any fat. He soon felt himself wasting away and knew that he would soon look just like the others. Men who'd been POWs longer than him looked like corpses, skeletal and covered with ulcerating sores. Several suffered from infections of the scrotum that caused the sac to balloon up several times larger than it should be. Dennis could only guess at their agony.

Chambers tried not to torture himself by thinking about his wife and his home the way so many of the other POWs did. Whenever an unbidden thought did break through his defenses, he blocked it out.

Despite his privations and bleak future, he didn't contemplate escape. After all, where the hell would he go? A white man in the middle of Japan would stick out like a sore thumb. If he tried and was caught, the punishment would be savage and fatal. He and his buddies talked it over. They would wait.

Like every able-bodied American, British, or Australian POW in the camp, Chambers had to work for his meager rations. He and a handful of others had been put to work in one of the small factories on the outskirts of Nagasaki, where he performed menial work under the scrutiny of his masters. He welcomed the work. It broke up the monotony of the days and frequently kept him away from his guards.

Better, many of the civilian workers in the factory were not sadists like the guards and treated him reasonably well. A couple of them even slipped him bits of food from their own meager supplies out of pity for him. He knew he was fortunate to be working where he was. Many POWs were forced to work in the area's coal mines, under extremely harsh and primitive conditions that caused deaths and numerous injuries.

He had been alone in the basement of the factory moving storage boxes when the entire world had lit up about him with an unearthly, incandescent glow. Stunned, thinking only that one of the many American planes often seen overhead had bombed the factory or crashed nearby, he'd simply frozen.

Seconds later, the fist of a shock wave hurled him against a wall and covered him with debris. He later thought he might have lost consciousness. When he did revive to the point where thought was possible, he began to dig himself out, knowing only that the proper direction was up.

It might have taken him hours, but he finally broke through to fresh air and to sights that stunned him. All about him, Nagasaki was destroyed, buildings flattened and burning. Then he looked up and saw a black storm cloud of immense fury churning and roaring above him as it fought the winds that sought to push it away.

Then he knew. Rumors had been rife in the camp of a superbomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. Most people dismissed it as the hallucinations of starving men, just like the ones that had thousands of Negro cavalrymen on white horses riding to free them. Now he knew the stories of the bomb were true and that it had now decimated Nagasaki.

The bomb had freed him. There was no sign of his guards or his fellow prisoners. If they were dead, it was a shame, but he was alive and he intended to stay that way. If he stuck around, he might get lynched by an angry Japanese mob. There would no longer be any small kindnesses from the Japanese civilians. They would want revenge and he wasn't certain he blamed them. His plans for waiting out the end of the war had suddenly changed. He had to run for his life and hide.

He'd gathered his thoughts. It was reasonable to conclude that no one would ever look for him, and the Japanese people he saw milling about were distracted and would ignore him for the time being.

He was covered with dirt and most of his clothes had been shredded by the blast and the effort of digging himself out. Dennis looked no different from any of the scores of others who milled about him aimlessly and in shock.

Alone in a sea of Japanese people, he'd seen that many had been horribly burned. Some were nothing more than walking corpses who stumbled along on charred limbs before they pitched over and died. Many of the normally modest Japanese people were naked and seemingly unaware of it as the blast had seared clothing right off their backs or burned the fabric into their flesh. Many of them had folds of flesh dangling from them as if someone had tried to skin them and then, for some demented reason, stopped.

In front of him, a specter reached its clawed hand for Chambers. It might have been a man once. Its teeth were visible as stumps in a lipless mouth, and it tried to speak but only a gurgling growl came forth. The thing had no face, and white liquid was where the eyes once were. Dennis realized that the creature couldn't see or hear him, but reached with blistered hands for anything in its mindless path. Dennis stepped aside and let the horror pass. He had to get the hell out of Nagasaki right away.

He selected the corpse of a man who still had most of his clothing and pulled the body out of the roadway. No one noticed him. Then he stripped the body and put on the dead man's Japanese clothing. They were a little small, but he could make them do. For once he was thankful that he had lost so much weight in the camp. No one paid him the slightest bit of attention as people trudged past, their eyes glazed over with their own shock and horror.

He covered his face and hands with dirt and some grease he found by a ruined car, hoping it made him look less Caucasian. Then he'd joined the torrent of humanity, most of it frighteningly silent, as it flowed out of the ruined city of Nagasaki and into the bleak hills that rose out of the northern part of the island of Kyushu. On his way he saw the shattered hulk of the Catholic cathedral of Nagasaki. However small the numbers of worshipers might have been, the only center of Christianity in Japan had been destroyed by an allegedly Christian United States.

As he walked, it further struck him that no one was doing anything for the people of Nagasaki. There was no plan; there was no government left in the area to start helping its people. All had been destroyed and no one knew where to begin. He looked behind him and saw that the pillar of the cloud had finally begun to stream away, and that it had lost much of its peculiar mushroom shape. It had begun to rain large, warm drops, and he wondered if the explosion had caused rain as well. Could the bomb have been so powerful that it changed the weather?

At a point, he broke away from the main throng and struck out into the more rugged area around Mount Tara, which was to the north of Nagasaki .

Hours later and high on a grass-covered ridge, he found the remains of a farmer's hut that must have been abandoned a few years before. He propped up stones and pieces of wood to keep the rain off him. The weather was warm so he didn't fear exposure, but the efforts of the day had exhausted him. He had to rest and he had to find food and water.

Near his shelter, he located a puddle and lapped it like a dog when his cupped hands wouldn't retain enough to quench his suddenly enormous thirst. Then he took a stick and began to dig in the soft ground. It was as he had hoped. The damp earth was full of insects.

As he ate, he decided that, whatever happened from here on in, he was not going back to a prison camp. Even if he died in the hills of Kyushu, he would do so as a free man.

Later, as the days stretched on, he began to wonder. How long could he endure and survive on his meager diet in the mountains of Kyushu? The weather was mild, but winter was inevitable. He had no idea how cold it would get, but it would certainly be much cooler than the present. What if he had to spend a long time in the hills? What if it took years for the war to end? Then he thought of something even more awful, and it made him shudder, nearly cry. What if it never ended? If that was the case, then he was condemned to spend whatever remained of his life running, hiding, and slowly starving to death.

Despite his circumstances, he saw black humor in the alternative possibility that the war would end and he would never find out. That would be just his luck.

"I'm not too sure which appalls me the most, the rioting by our servicemen in San Francisco, or the civilian riots in other cities," said Marshall .

"They all sicken me," Truman said. "Look at the numbers for San Francisco. An estimated twenty thousand soldiers and sailors ran amok for two days before other military and state police could take control. They rampaged through Chinatown and killed anyone who looked even remotely Asian, hoping, I presume, that they were somehow killing Japs. God, more than a hundred dead and a thousand injured."