Two weeks after Truman was sworn in, Secretary of War Henry Stimson smuggled General Leslie Groves into the White House and presented the new president with a typed memorandum. "Within four months," Truman read, "we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon in human history. . . ."
Attempts were made to persuade Truman that he might win an early peace by telling Japan that America did not intend to remove the Emperor. Truman seemed to go along when this was argued on May 28 by Joe Grew, the ambassador to Tokyo for ten years and acting secretary of state, and by Herbert Hoover. On June 12, Stimson, Grew and Navy Secretary James Forrestal recommended that the new terms should be promulgated on the fall of Okinawa, which happened on June 21.
Truman turned this opportunity aside. He postponed an initiative to his meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam (July 17ÐAugust 2), already delayed to allow time for the Alamogordo bomb test. It is now clear, as it was not for 40 years, that Truman succumbed to the persuasions of his old Senate crony, Jimmy Byrnes, former Supreme Court justice and FDR's "assistant president." Byrnes was not sworn in as secretary of state until early July, but Truman made Byrnes his personal representative on Stimson's famous Interim Committee of eight civilians. Byrnes, not the ailing and often absent Stimson, dominated the committee. It was Byrnes who formulated the recommendation that "the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers' homes; and that it be used without prior warning." It was Byrnes who quashed Marshall's ideas of a demonstration on a military installation and of inviting the Russians to see the test. All Truman's advisers found that Byrnes called the shots. When on June 18 John J. McCloy, Stimson's assistant secretary, sketched how tolerance for the Emperor might end the war quickly, Truman said: "That's exactly what I've been wanting to explore. . . . You go down to Jimmy Byrnes and talk to him about it." McCloy got nowhere with Byrnes.
On July 2, just before Truman left for Potsdam, Stimson presented the draft of an ultimatum. Paragraph 12 said a peacefully inclined Japanese government "may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty." On the voyage, Byrnes got Truman to delete this. It stayed deleted despite the momentous news they received on July 12Ð13, in mid-Atlantic, from U.S. code breakers, that Tokyo had cabled the Japanese ambassador in Moscow emphasizing the Emperor's "heart's desire" for peace, but adding that demands for unconditional surrender would force Japan to fight on.
Byrnes redrafted the July 26 ultimatum. Out went the explicit assurance on the Emperor. In came a sentence that could be conceived as a threat to him: "There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan." The language all but guaranteed Japanese rejection. But when the Japanese did surrender, on August 10, a day after the Russian invasion, Byrnes and Truman accepted that the Emperor would stay. Had they tried that in June, the war might have ended then.
DECISION TO USE THE ATOMIC BOMB
by Gar Alperovitz
HIROSHIMA
by John Hersey