War Stories II (74 page)

 

President Truman

By August, the Japanese high command planned to station nearly 250,000 troops on Kyushu, where they planned to counter-attack with 6,000 kamikaze aircraft. These suicidal missions would attempt to destroy a quarter of the Allied invasion force before they landed, while American troops were still aboard their amphibious troop carriers.

Meanwhile, American code-breakers, still unknown to the Japanese, were intercepting messages that indicated Russia and Japan were holding secret talks. Russia, although a U.S. ally in the European theater, had signed a neutrality agreement with Japan before the events of Pearl Harbor.

These behind-the-scenes negotiations between the Soviet Union and Japan took place during the first two weeks of June 1945. At Emperor
Hirohito's behest, Japanese diplomat Koki Hirota met with the Russian ambassador to Japan to discuss a possible new relationship between the two countries. Hirota offered to share all of Asia with the Soviet Union, telling the Russian ambassador, “Japan will be able to increase her naval strength in the future. That, together with the Russian army, would make a force unequaled in the world.”

The idea of a Russia–Japan alliance complicated the American plans for Operation Olympic. Would an agreement between the two nations mean that Russian troops might come to the aid of the Japanese in the event of an Allied invasion?

MacArthur's headquarters announced the end of all Japanese resistance in the Philippines, and the liberation of the Philippines was declared on 5 July. By 10 July preparations for Operation Olympic were under way, and 1,000 bombing raids against Japan were planned. Four days later, they began. The first naval bombardment of the Japanese Home Islands also commenced.

Meanwhile the U.S. was secretly considering the use of an incredible new weapon, capable of destroying an entire city. Destroying a city wasn't a new concept. American B-29s under General Curtis LeMay, who had assumed command of the 20th U.S. Army Air Corps in the Mariana Islands, had leveled cities. After three months of bombing Japanese cities, however, few targets had been destroyed. General LeMay suggested that it would take his air force until October to destroy the fifty most important cities in Japan.

By late July, U.S. bombers had been dropping bombs on Japanese cities for several months, and although 300,000 casualties resulted from these raids, it took many missions and numerous tons of bombs to do it. These bombing raids did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the Japanese.

The U.S. now had the means to destroy an entire city with a single device—the atomic bomb—in a single bombing run. Such a weapon would
certainly demonstrate to the Japanese warlords that continuing the war was futile. When MacArthur was briefed on the atomic bomb project, he was surprised. It seemed to him to have suddenly appeared as simply another military option, while it had in fact been decades in the making.

While the Manhattan Project is credited for the creation of the first atomic bombs, the concept was at least twenty years old. The first scientific papers were offered following World War I and throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The idea of an atomic bomb came first to Leo Szilard, a native of Budapest who immigrated to Great Britain, in 1933. His idea was patented and the patent was secretly transferred to the British Navy. The secrecy and patents did not put an end to the study and experiments toward nuclear fission. A number of countries took more than a passing interest in the project.

In fact, in October 1940, Imperial Army Commander Sosaku Suzuki had sent Tokyo a report “on the possibility of Japan developing an atomic bomb” based on uranium deposits in its newly acquired Chinese and Burmese territories. And in April 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Army had given its approval for the Japanese development of an atomic bomb.

U.S. war leaders were concerned that both the Germans and the Japanese might be working on atomic weapons of their own. Fortunately for the Allies, the Japanese war leaders had taken a more traditional route, focused on building ships and aircraft and using highly trained, thoroughly committed troops. Their scientists had not actively pursued the idea of making atomic bombs.

In the United States, FDR had approved the top-secret plan for exploring nuclear fission as a basis for an atomic bomb, rather than moving forward with a plan for a nuclear energy reactor. The Manhattan Project was years ahead of any other nation's quest for the atomic bomb. American scientists worked around the clock for the duration of the war to build the atomic bomb. They would soon see the culmination of all their efforts.

In April, Truman had informed Russian premier Josef Stalin that America was completing work on an atomic bomb; Stalin's spies in the U.S. had already told him.

On 16 July, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully tested a few seconds before 0530 at the “Trinity” site in the middle of the desert. Code-named “Gadget,” the detonation yielded over twenty kilotons of explosive energy. In the process, the steel tower holding the “Gadget” was vaporized.

Word was sent to Truman, who was in conference with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam to discuss the Allied efforts for ending the war. Truman told the other leaders that the United States now had a way to end the war swiftly, once and for all.

The next day, 17 July, the Allied leaders met once more at Potsdam to consider the possibility that Japan might be open to surrender terms.

Ten days later, Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration. It demanded that Japan unconditionally surrender to the Allies, and without going into any details about the atomic bomb, it warned the Japanese that the alternative to a full surrender was “complete and utter destruction.”

Meanwhile, components of “Little Boy”—a working atomic bomb—were carried to Tinian Island in the South Pacific aboard the cruiser USS
Indianapolis
.

A few days after the bomb components had been safely offloaded, a lone Japanese submarine managed to sink the
Indianapolis
, resulting in the loss of nearly 900 sailors. The
Indianapolis
went to the bottom so quickly that a radio distress call wasn't even sent. Survivors were left adrift for two days, resulting in an even greater loss of life.

That week the tragedy of the
Indianapolis
was the dominant story in the headlines, along with Truman's Potsdam Declaration. On 28 July, Tokyo rejected Truman's call for an unconditional surrender.

Nevertheless, General MacArthur was already thinking about the end of the war. Both the Americans and Japanese knew that it was inevitable. The Japanese refused to accept the idea of surrender. In previous wars, the parties
had merely declared an armistice. But Truman's mandate to the Japanese called for an unconditional surrender.

Churchill, Stalin, and others had tried to talk Truman out of making Japan submit to an unconditional surrender. The Allies' argument was that the Japanese would likely accept an armistice or conditional surrender, so they could negotiate terms for peace. It was the concept of unconditional surrender that made them choke.

The U.S. State Department and the president had sent MacArthur a list of reforms they wanted to achieve; their consensus was that the only way to achieve these goals was to mandate them through unconditional surrender terms. MacArthur had added his own ideas. While he had his own problems with Truman, this wasn't one of them. He agreed that the reforms had to be made, and without an unconditional surrender, the Japanese could find allies who might help them negotiate their way out of the Americans' terms.

The reforms presented in the Potsdam Declaration dealt primarily with destroying Japanese weapons, giving feudal farmers an opportunity to own land, ending the clan monopolies on industry, giving women equal rights, and replacing the imperial form of government with a democracy. To Truman and MacArthur, these were non-negotiable.

After Tokyo's rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, Truman must have assumed that the Japanese government was in a total state of denial. They apparently believed the war was still winnable.

As Japan seemed prepared to commit national suicide rather than surrender or negotiate seriously with the Americans, Truman decided to follow the only course of action offering him the opportunity to end the war quickly and save the most lives.

Truman consulted with Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the Joint Chiefs' General George Marshall the day before the first atomic bomb fell on Japan. Later that day, General LeMay received the word from Washington confirming the mission for 6 August.

Colonel Paul Tibbets was the pilot for the new B-29 Superfortress that would carry the bomb, which he named “Enola Gay” in honor of his mother. Colonel Tibbets told his B-29 crewmen, “You will be delivering a bomb that can destroy an entire city.” He didn't know any more about the inner workings of the device than they did, but told his men simply, “It's something new called ‘atomic'.”

“Little Boy” was loaded on the Enola Gay that evening. At midnight on 6 August, the crew got its final briefing. The twelve-man flight crew consisted of Colonel Tibbets, commanding officer and pilot; Captain Robert Lewis, copilot; Major Thomas Ferebee, bombardier; Captain Ted Van Kirk, navigator; Lieutenant Jacob Beser, radar countermeasure officer; Navy Captain William “Deke” Parsons, a Manhattan Project scientist; Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenbury, flight engineer; Sergeant Robert Shumard, assistant engineer; Sergeant Joe Stiborik, radar operator; Staff Sergeant George Caron, tail gunner; Lieutenant Morris Jeppson, bomb electronics test officer; and Private First Class Richard Nelson, radio operator.

The Enola Gay started its takeoff checklist and took off at precisely 0245 on 6 August. The flying time to mainland Japan would be about six hours. At about two hours from the target site, Captain Parsons supervised the arming of “Little Boy.” The Enola Gay, still flying at just over 31,000 feet, approached Hiroshima at about ten minutes before nine. The morning was clear and the skies were empty of enemy fighters or anti-aircraft flak. By now the navigator, engineer, and pilots could see the target, Aioi Bridge. At seventeen seconds past 0915 (0815 Hiroshima time) the bomb was released.

It took exactly forty-five seconds for “Little Boy” to fall six miles to the explosion altitude of 1,850 feet, closer than 650 feet to the landmark bridge. It exploded above the city with an effective yield of fifteen kilotons. In an
instant, a brilliant, awful, blinding light filled the cockpit of the Enola Gay. Reflex action caused the crew to turn and look back at the light. But it faded as quickly as it came, and after it an angry, dark, and fiery form roiled across the landscape, rising skyward in a slowly forming mushroom cloud of debris, smoke, and fire that obscured Hiroshima.