The Target Committee (Kindle Single) (7 page)

This jolted the joint chiefs, who were forced to confront the military reality of “unconditional surrender.” Hitherto, they had not fully digested the scenario of the Russians acting as their allies in a Japanese invasion. Yet Truman was publicly committed to getting the Russians into the Pacific War, at least at this stage. (After the successful test of the bomb he would adopt the opposite view, and try to keep them out.) Were the Russians needed at all, several chiefs wondered. Silence. King spoke: The Soviets were “not indispensable” and “we should not beg them to come in.” His view echoed the feelings in the room.

Leahy then broke ranks and directly challenged the hardline insistence on “unconditional surrender,” which would see the Japanese forced to grovel and Hirohito tried as a war criminal. It would only make the Japanese fight harder, Leahy insisted. He did not think the imposition of an unconditional surrender “at all necessary.” Truman appeared to agree, at least in part, suggesting that the definition of “surrender” had not yet been fixed.
⁷⁸

Clearly, for Truman, the invasion plan was fading rapidly from the list of alternatives – and this, critically, was at a time when the atomic bomb had not yet been tested. Why, he wondered, was an invasion necessary given the manifest defeat of Japan? Surely the collapse of the Japanese economy, the total US sea blockade and ongoing massive air raids had
“already created the conditions in which invasion would probably be unnecessary,” as the historian Max Hastings has argued.
⁷⁹

Indeed, Truman had convened the meeting precisely because he hoped to prevent “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to another.” If the invasion of Kyushu and later Honshu was the best of “all possible alternative plans,” demons of doubt lingered in the president’s mind.
⁸⁰
Truman reluctantly authorized the continued
planning
of the invasion of Japan, but he had lost faith in its usefulness, could not countenance the likely casualties, and would never approve its execution – regardless of whether the bomb worked.

As the meeting drew to a close, and the joint chiefs gathered up their papers, Truman asked McCloy, thus far a quiet observer, for his opinion. A clever, thoughtful man, the assistant secretary of war was not afraid to speak his mind. Only the day before he had urged Truman to drop the phrase “unconditional surrender.”

For months McCloy had been the “leading oarsman” in Washington opposing the policy:
⁸¹
“I feel,” he noted in late May, “that Japan is struggling to find a way out of the horrible mess she has got herself into . . . I wonder whether we can’t accomplish everything we want to accomplish without the use of that term.”
⁸²

He now found himself sitting among “joint chiefs of staff and security and presidents and secretaries of war,”
⁸³
contemplating the weapon nobody dared name.

“Nobody leaves this room until he’s been heard from,” Truman said. McCloy glanced at Stimson, who nodded. McCloy’s words do not appear in the official minutes, but he reprised the discussion in his memoir, and others later verified his account:
⁸⁴
The bomb offered a “political solution,” McCloy said, that would avoid the need for invasion.
⁸⁵

A hush ensued. McCloy continued: “We should tell the Japanese that we have the bomb and we would drop it unless they surrendered.”
⁸⁶
Naming S-1 “even in that select circle . . . was sort of a shock,” he would recall. “You didn’t mention the bomb out loud; it was like . . . mentioning Skull and Bones [an undergraduate secret society] in polite society at Yale; it just wasn’t done. Well, there was a sort of gasp at that.”

McCloy persevered: “I think our moral position would be stronger if we gave them a specific warning of the bomb.”
⁸⁷

The president seemed interested, and urged McCloy to take up the matter with Byrnes, who was about to be sworn in as secretary of state (in fact, Byrnes was effectively doing much of the job in advance of his official appointment). Later, McCloy did as instructed, and Byrnes swiftly killed the idea. As Truman knew, Byrnes firmly opposed any “deals” with Japan that might be considered “a weakness on our part,” as McCloy later wrote.
⁸⁸

For the rest of his life, McCloy would regret the “missed opportunity” of June 18, insisting that the Japanese would have surrendered had America made it clear that Japan could retain its emperor and warned them of the bomb. Instead, the president had “succumbed to the so-called hardliners” at the state department, as McCloy wrote in a letter to presidential adviser Clark Clifford at 89 years of age.
⁸⁹

***

In the following days, dramatically higher estimates of casualties further doomed the invasion plan. Nimitz, King and MacArthur all warned of a greater number of dead and missing than the estimate given at the meeting on June 18. Even MacArthur ratcheted up his modest estimate to 50,800 casualties in the first 30 days.
⁹⁰
No one could provide accurate projections, of course, and Truman never received a clear or unanimous calculation of likely losses, according to King.

Soon after the war Truman claimed that Marshall had estimated total US battle casualties of a Japanese land invasion at 500,000. The press would send the figure soaring to one
million American casualties. That figure has bedeviled sensible debate ever since.
⁹¹

The estimated casualty rates of a hypothetical Japanese invasion were ludicrously inflated after the war. Simple school arithmetic is enough to demonstrate this. The Allied invasion force, if it had gone ahead, was expected to total 760,000. In other words, Marshall was claiming after the war that America would have sustained battle casualties of at least 70 percent of the invasion force – an absurd body count, given that the invaders would have been attacking a demoralized, ill-equipped adversary in a land devastated by air raids and bereft of basic commodities.

It is often argued that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a million American lives. Those who today swear by this figure are in fact saying that the Japanese would have killed 250,000
more
troops than were slated to take part in the invasion. By this reckoning,
every
American soldier would have died. Another way of looking at it is this: If one million were killed, total casualties for the first 30 days would have been around three to four million (as total casualties tend to be about three times the body count). If they were true, these figures would make a mockery of the US infantryman’s fighting ability.

But of course, these figures are incredible. Indeed, it is fair to speculate that if Marshall had actually believed his postwar casualty estimates at the time of the June 1945 meeting of the joint chiefs, it is inconceivable that he would have supported a land invasion. The fact that he did, emphatically, support the invasion is the best argument
against
his postwar casualty estimates, which were plainly put forward to justify, post facto, the use of the atomic bomb.

In short, the bomb did not “save” these hypothetical lists of dead and wounded Americans. It was never a case of “either the bomb or the invasion.” In early July, Operation Downfall lost the support of Truman and the joint chiefs not because the atomic bomb offered an alternative (it had not yet been tested), but because the invasion plan was seen as too costly (with estimates of the number of dead, wounded and missing calculated at 120,000–150,000) and ultimately unnecessary, given Japan’s military and economic defeat. The bomb was not a factor in the decision at the time – but it would become
the
factor in the decision after the war.

***

On July 16, almost a month after the joint chiefs met, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated at Alamogordo in the New Mexican desert. The news raced down the secret channels to the anointed few, delighting Truman and Churchill, then at the Potsdam Conference in Berlin in negotiations with Stalin.

In late July the final target list was confirmed: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. To Groves’ annoyance, Kyoto was not on it. A relieved Stimson received the list in Potsdam, via a cable from General Arnold. The four chosen cities were “believed to contain large numbers of key Japanese industrialists and political figures” who had sought refuge from major destroyed cities, adding to the cities’ suitability as targets. The strikes would be visual (not radar-guided), to ensure accuracy. The bombardiers would require clear skies, and if weather favored one city over another, the crews would divert in mid-attack to the more visible target. Two plutonium bombs were expected to be available in August, one around the 6th and another on the 24th.
⁹²
Three more atomic weapons were scheduled to be available in September, and at least seven per month thereafter.

The first bombs were ready earlier than Groves anticipated. On August 6, the B-29
Enola Gay
, piloted by Tibbets and named after his mother, dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, killing 78,000 people on the first day – including more than 8000 schoolchildren working in the city as forced labor. On August 9, the B-29
Bockscar
dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 35,000 within hours – including most of the city’s 12,500 Catholics, the
largest Christian community in Japan at the time; as well as those working in the city’s education and medical facilities, most of which were situated near the hypocenter. Hundreds of thousands would die in coming years, from wounds, radiation sickness, cancers and related conditions. Virtually all were civilians.

Contrary to popular consensus, the atomic bombs did not persuade Tokyo to surrender. After hearing of the “special weapons,” the small group of elderly men who then ran Japan resolved to fight on, to the last Japanese, if necessary,
unless
America met their sole remaining condition: the preservation of the life and dynasty of their beloved Emperor Hirohito. Washington duly met this condition, two days after the destruction of Nagasaki, in a cable sent on August 11 that granted the Japanese people the right to choose their postwar government. On August 14, Japan conditionally surrendered.

* * *

The full story of the atomic bomb breaches the confines of a Kindle Single. To piece it all together, read Paul Ham’s new history of the atomic bombs
, Hiroshima Nagasaki
(Thomas Dunne, 2014)
.

Notes and Sources

The Committeemen

¹
Groves, L.,
Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project
, Da Capo Press, New York 1962; pp63, 70, 102

²
Oppenheimer, J.R.,
Letters and Recollections
, Kimball-Smith, A. & Weiner, C. (eds), Stanford University Press, Stanford 1980; pp28–29

³
Quoted in Bird, K. & Sherwin, M.,
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2005, p51; see an alternative translation in Proust, M. & C.K. Scott Moncrieff (trans.),
In Search of Lost Time
, Centaur, New York 2013

⁴
Oppenheimer, J.R.,
Letters and Recollections
, pp41, 70, 74, 94, 165

⁵
Ibid.

⁶
Ibid.

⁷
For more on Parsons, see: Ham, P.,
Hiroshima Nagasaki
, Thomas Dunne, New York 2014; and Walker, S.,
Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima
, HarperCollins, New York 2005

⁸
http://www.atomicarchive.com/History/trinity/assembly.shtml

⁹
Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942–46, NARA RG77, entry 1, roll 1, file 5, subfile 5b – Directives, Memorandums etc., to and from the Chief of Staff, Secretary of War

¹⁰
Ibid.

¹¹
Quoted in Sherwin, M.,
A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies
, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2003; p62

¹²
Nichols, K.D.,
The Road to Trinity
, William Morrow and Company, New York 1987; p108

¹³
Lawren, W.,
The General and the Bomb
, Dodd Mead, New York 1988; p43

¹⁴
Norris, R.S.,
Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man
, Steerforth Press, Vermont 2002; p135. For a portrait of Groves, see also Kelly, C. (ed.),
The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of its Creators, Eyewitnesses and Historians
, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York 2007; p118

¹⁵
Groves, p4; see also Groueff, S.,
Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb
, Little, Brown, Boston 1967; p12

¹⁶
Quoted in Kelly, p119

¹⁷
Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942–46, NARA RG77, entry 1, roll 1, file 2: Production, Operations, Raw Materials and Construction

¹⁸
Lawren, p62

¹⁹
Target Committee: The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan, Harry S. Truman Student Research File, Truman Library

The Target Committee Meets

²⁰
Quoted in Nichols, p177; see also Sherwin, M.,
A World Destroyed
, and
http://www.osti.gov/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945-present/international_control_1.htm

²¹
Notes on Initial Meeting of Target Committee, May 2, 1945, Top Secret, MED Records, Top Secret Documents, NARA RG77, file no. 5d (copy from microfilm), document 4

²²
Quoted in Frank, R.,
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire
, Penguin Books, New York 2001; p254