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The physicists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein in August 1939 had warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the possibility that the Germans might create a bomb of unprecedented force from a new source of energy, uranium. The Advisory Committee on Uranium that Roosevelt then convoked finally reached a decision to build an atomic bomb for the Allies.
For this purpose, the Manhattan Project began in June 1942 under the supervision of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, deputy chief of construction for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He set up three widely separated production centers: the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the Hanford Engineer Works in the state of Washington; and Project Y at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Other work was conducted at the University of Chicago, where Italian refugee physicist Enrico Fermi on December 2, 1942, produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, opening the way to develop nuclear fuel for atomic weapons. Scientists at Oak Ridge worked on uranium and others at Hanford on plutonium. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer collected distinguished scientists and engineers to join under his direction at Los Alamos to produce the atomic weapons themselves.
Groves and Oppenheimer labored mightily, although not always peaceably, to keep all these independent-minded scientists working harmoniously and productively. After many false starts, some errors, and at least one serious accident, they tested the first atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945. It produced a human-made explosion of unprecedented strength. Samuel Morse is said to have asked about the telegraph he invented, “What hath God wrought?” The atomic scientists instead looked at each other, appalled, and asked, “What have we done?” Most of them were relieved that the decision of whether or not to use this terrible weapon rested on President Harry S. Truman.
His advisers differed among themselves. Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall represented the majority opinion among the military—that dropping the bomb was the only way to avoid the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides they foresaw if the Allies had to invade Japan. They pointed to the terrible losses both sides had suffered on Okinawa, knowing that the next battle could only be worse. The scientists were divided. Szilard and others petitioned against using the bomb. Some suggested that the Japanese be warned beforehand of the power of the atomic bomb, and others argued that Japanese representatives should be invited to a demonstration of the bomb’s power. Other scientists cautioned that the next atomic bomb might fail to explode and that only two more bombs were immediately available. The military said that given a warning, Japan might shoot down the plane carrying the atomic bomb and/or move American prisoners of war to the site. Physicist Edward Teller’s proposal to explode a bomb high over Tokyo Bay at night without warning was rejected because of doubts that such a demonstration would adequately impress the Japanese. In the end, the formal panel of scientists advised the president’s committee considering the question that they saw “no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”
Thanks to the cracking of the Japanese diplomatic code in 1940, the Americans knew that in the fall of 1944 and again in April 1945 the Japanese had approached the Soviet Union, with whom they were not yet at war, in the hopes of negotiating a conditional surrender. However, the intercepts also showed that the Japanese still held out for significant Allied concessions. Moreover, in the summer of 1945 intercepted military dispatches revealed that the Japanese had built up a huge force in southern Japan, the site of the prospective invasion, and the conduct of Japanese troops throughout the war had repeatedly demonstrated the national determination to fight to the death rather than to surrender. Indeed, history has shown that Japanese militarists were urging a mass immolation of the populace, in an effort to impose the ancient samurai code of honor developed for warriors on civilian men and women. The god-emperor Hirohito took no decisive action until after the dropping of the atomic bombs.
Japanese expert Joseph Grew, U.S. acting secretary of state, raised the possibility of assuring the Japanese that if they surrendered their emperor would be allowed to remain. Only the emperor, said Grew, could make his armed forces accept surrender. Yet anything that modified the demand for unconditional surrender would raise difficulties among the Allies, for Hirohito symbolized the evil system in Japan in the same way that Hitler symbolized it in Germany.
The planned American invasion, “Operation Downfall,” had two parts. In the first, about November 1, 1945, 767,000 marines and soldiers would begin landing, backed by an invasion fleet larger than that of the landings in Normandy in June 1944. If the Japanese still held out after the occupation of the southern half of the island of Kyushu, the second part of the operation, about March 1, 1946, would send twice as many men as the first onto the main island, Honshu. Some experts estimated that the war so conducted would not cease until the end of 1946. Adm.William Leahy told the president that the United States would have to expect the same 35 percent casualties suffered on Okinawa.
Believing that an invasion could cost a quarter of a million or even a million American casualties, Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb. He wrote in his diary, “I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” In a letter to Professor James Cate on January 12, 1953,Truman wrote, “I asked Secretary [of War] Stimson which sites in Japan were devoted to war production. He promptly named Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among others.”
On August 6, 1945, Col. Paul W. Tibbetts piloted the Enola Gay to the city of Hiroshima, carrying the “Little Boy” atomic bomb, fueled by uranium. When they dropped it, it destroyed the center of the city, killing some 66,000 Japanese instantly, and inflicting on some 69,000 others radiation that was to have devastating after effects. The Japanese still did not surrender, despite another warning from the White House that otherwise they might “expect a rain of ruin from the air,” and on August 9 the “Fat Man” bomb, fueled by plutonium, was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 39,000 and injuring and exposing to radiation 25,000 more. The same day the USSR, having finally declared war on Japan, invaded Manchuria, where fighting continued until August 20. Meanwhile, on August 14 the Japanese agreed to an unconditional surrender, and the next day Hirohito without ever mentioning surrender told his people that his government was negotiating with the enemy and called upon them to accept the coming of peace. Even then, die-hard militarists in Japan tried to destroy all the copies of Hirohito’s recorded announcement of war’s end to keep the news from the people, and they came near to bringing off a coup. On September 2 Japanese representatives signed the surrender document aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay—despite MacArthur’s fears that a kamikaze attack might interfere.
Since then, the morality of using atomic bombs has been widely debated. No such debate occurred on the ships headed for Japan carrying war-weary U.S. soldiers from Europe; they cheered as their ships turned around in mid-ocean when Japan sued for peace. No such debate occurred among the U.S. sailors and marines on the navy ships that had fought their way island by bloody island across the Pacific. No such debate occurred among the U.S. soldiers and nurses who had been prisoners of war of the Japanese ever since the occupation of the Philippines. No such debate occurred among American families awaiting the return of brothers and sisters, husbands and sons, some of whom had been overseas for three years or more. No such debate occurred among the Australian soldiers who had fought around the world, knowing that their homeland was threatened with Japanese occupation, nor among the Chinese and Filipinos and Koreans who had known the terrors and tortures of Japanese occupation. Thousands of veterans who had already been assigned to the invasion of Japan when the bombs were dropped still say at the beginning of the 21st century, with infantry sergeant Don Dencker,“God bless the atomic bomb. It probably saved my life.” In the final reckoning it must be remembered that, according to the best estimates available, more people died in the battle for Okinawa than were killed as a result of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
At the most basic level, Japanese and American cultures and values clashed, and neither country understood the other. Americans did not understand the concept of the god-emperor as the focal point of Japan’s political and social system. It was one thing for Germans to envision life without Hitler, who had seized power only in 1933. It was another for Japanese to imagine their nation without a hereditary ruler whose authority had descended to him over a span of 1,000 years. Equally, the Japanese, who had made themselves hated all over Asia in the countries they conquered, could not anticipate the way in which the United States would help its former enemies rebuild their countries— indeed, in 1945 Americans themselves did not know how they would behave in victory.
