Road to Surrender E-Book

Evan Thomas

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 481

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'A true page-turner.' All About History, ☆☆☆☆☆ 'Urgent, compulsively readable and powerfully resonant' Sinclair McKay You know Oppenheimer, the man who created the atomic bomb… Now meet the men who detonated it, and the extraordinary weight of their decisions…Road to Surrender by New York Times bestselling author Evan Thomas is a riveting, immersive account of the agonizing decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan – a crucial turning point in World War II and geopolitical history. At 9:20 a.m. on the morning of May 30, General Groves receives a message to report to the office of the secretary of war "at once." Stimson is waiting for him. He wants to know: has Groves selected the targets yet? So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America's decision to drop the atomic bomb―and Japan's decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who had overall responsibility for decisions about the atom bomb; Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, the only one in Emperor Hirohito's Supreme War Council who believed even before the bombs were dropped that Japan should surrender. Henry Stimson had served in the administrations of five presidents, but as the U.S. nuclear program progressed, he found himself tasked with the unimaginable decision of determining whether to deploy the bomb. The new president, Harry S. Truman, thus far a peripheral figure in the momentous decision, accepted Stimson's recommendation to drop the bomb. Army Air Force Commander Gen. Spaatz ordered the planes to take off. Like Stimson, Spaatz agonized over the command even as he recognized it would end the war. After the bombs were dropped, Foreign Minister Togo was finally able to convince the emperor to surrender. To bring these critical events to vivid life, bestselling author Evan Thomas draws on the diaries of Stimson, Togo and Spaatz, contemplating the immense weight of their historic decision. In Road to Surrender, an immersive, surprising, moving account, Thomas lays out the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of three people who changed history. 'This dramatic, you-are-there masterpiece provides a convincing explanation of one of the great moral questions of 20th century history: was America right to drop the atom bomb on Japan at the end of World War II? … This is an indispensable book for those who want to understand the moral issues surrounding the use of great power.' Walter Isaacson 'In this meticulously crafted and vivid account, Evan Thomas tells the gripping and terrifying story of the last days of the Second World War in the Pacific. Writing with insight and understanding, he recreates for us those critical moments when, for better or worse, the decisions, from the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the Japanese surrender, were made.' Margaret MacMillan

Leseprobe

“Urgent, compulsively readable and powerfully resonant. There are moments in history where you wonder how it was possible for individual shoulders to bear the nightmarish moral weight. The unearthly light of the atomic detonations above Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 continues to haunt the world – and in this pulse-quickeningly intense account of the last days of World War II, Evan Thomas explores the grim choices that faced three key figures on both sides of the conflict. By turns surprising, illuminating, and thought-provoking, Thomas also throws light on the extremities of human power, and the effect on those who wield it.”

Sinclair McKay, author of Dresden

“A terrifying, heartbreaking account of three men under unimaginable pressure . . . This is history that crackles with journalistic immediacy. I challenge you not to read this book in a single sitting.”

Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea

“This dramatic, you-are-there masterpiece provides a convincing explanation of one of the great moral questions of twentieth-century history: Was America right to drop the atom bomb on Japan at the end of World War II? This is an indispensable book for those who want to understand the moral issues surrounding the use of great power.”

Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker

BY EVAN THOMAS

Road to Surrender

First: Sandra Day O’Connor

Being Nixon

Ike’s Bluff

The War Lovers

Sea of Thunder

John Paul Jones

Robert Kennedy

The Very Best Men

The Man to See

The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson)

To Joanna and Noah

Overleaf: Surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on the battleship USS Missouri, September 2, 1945.

Contents

Introduction: The Dilemma

Part One

1.   Sleepless

“The terrible,” “the awful,” “the diabolical”

2.   Target Practice

“May [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace”

3.   The Stomach Art

“THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN”

4.   The Patient Progresses

“You judge it; I can’t”

5.   Prompt and Utter

“Shall the worst occur”

6.   A Bucket of Tar

“What the hell, let’s take a chance”

Part Two

7.   Terrible Responsibility

“I had a rather sharp little attack”

8.   Denial

“Fire every damn flare in the airplane!”

9.   Sacred Decision

“There is life in death”

10.   Gambits

“The Superforts are not flying today”

11.   Plots

“What are you thinking of?”

12.   Is Tokyo Next?

“This man is tottering”

13.   To Bear the Unbearable

“Like a mid-summer’s night dream”

14.   No High Ground

“The only way you can make a man trustworthy”

Epilogue: Reckonings

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Photograph Credits

Index

Introduction

The Dilemma

B-29s fly past Mount Fuji on their way to Tokyo.

IN AUGUST 1945, AFTER THE UNITED STATES DROPPED atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered, the soldiers, sailors, and airmen scheduled to participate in the invasion of Japan reacted as you might expect. They cheered, they danced. Some of them wept with relief. Others sat in quiet disbelief. One infantry officer, who had been wounded in action in Europe and was slated to lead a rifle platoon up a defended beach near Tokyo, recalled thinking, “We were going to live. We were going to grow into adulthood after all.”

In more recent years, scholars of World War II have argued that it was not necessary to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, or that it was not necessary to drop more than one, or that the Japanese might have been moved to surrender if the United States had staged a demonstration of the bomb’s power on a deserted island. That argument has gained popular currency. When I was writing this book, friends would ask, was it really necessary to drop two atomic bombs? In school and college, many had been exposed to books and scholarship that argued that, by August 1945, Japan was ready to surrender, and that America’s real motivation in dropping the A-bomb was to intimidate Russia in the earliest days of the Cold War.

The facts are otherwise. On the morning of August 9, 1945, after the United States dropped two atomic bombs and Russia declared war on Japan, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the group of six leaders who ran Japan, deadlocked on whether to surrender. The vote was a tie, three to three. The most powerful leaders, the ones who ran the army, wanted to keep on fighting. For five more days, Japan teetered on the edge of a coup d’état by the military that would have plunged Japan into chaos and extended the war for many bloody months. On the last night, coup plotters seized control of the Imperial Palace, running through the halls looking for a recording of the emperor’s voice, to be broadcast the next day at noon, announcing Japan’s surrender. (The recording, fortunately, was tucked away in a room reserved for ladies-in-waiting.) Hot and dark, largely burned out by American firebombs, Tokyo roiled with intrigue and deception, including large doses of self-deception on the part of the leaders responsible for deciding.

In Washington, meanwhile, decision makers were not, for the most part, thinking about the bombs’ effect on the Soviet Union. They were praying that the bombs would bring Japan to its senses. Indeed, they were seriously considering dropping another. The Washington leaders were not free of their own illusions as they struggled over what to do, but they faced a hard reality. They were actors caught in a dilemma as old as war but never more grotesquely distended: that to save lives it was necessary to take lives—possibly hundreds of thousands of them.

This book is a narrative of how the most destructive war in history ended—and very nearly did not. It asks what it was like to be one of the decent, imperfect people who made the decision to use a frighteningly powerful new weapon. How did they choose how many bombs to drop, when, where, and to what end? I learned that the word decision does not accurately describe the fraught, inexorable process that they went through. Were they somehow subject to “psychic numbing,” as scholars have suggested? A few, like Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the chief of the XXI Bomber Command, seemed to be (or pretended to be) unfeeling or at least matter-of-fact. “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting,” said LeMay, whose B-29s burned to death at least 85,000 residents of Tokyo on one night in March 1945. But others were troubled, even tormented, though they, too, tried not to show it. Duty, mercy, expediency, and ending a four-year war all pulled at them.

The problem for these men—the looming, intractable, seemingly unsurpassable obstacle—was that Japan was unwilling to surrender. By the summer of 1945, the empire appeared to be defeated. Japan’s ships had been sunk, its cities burned, and its people were on the verge of starvation. But its military leaders, who commanded 5 million soldiers under arms, as well as greater citizen armies equipped with pitchforks and scythes, seemed bent on mass suicide. To attempt to defeat them by invading and seizing territory seemed sure to produce the greatest bloodbath of all time—and the Japanese, or at least their military leaders, beckoned the Americans to it.

The Allied forces assembled a vast invasion armada, including at least a dozen hospital ships, but the projected casualty estimates were so ghastly that even the most upright of men, Gen. George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the army, invited his subordinates to fudge the numbers. Dropping the A-bomb on Japan was a foregone conclusion. That Japan would surrender was not. The atomic bombs would kill roughly 200,000 people. Had Japan fought on, likely many more people would have died, possibly millions more, in Asia as well as Japan.

Two weeks after the bombs fell, the Allied armed services staged a magnificent surrender ceremony on a battleship in Tokyo Bay, with wave after wave of American warplanes flying overhead. But I wondered: How did they feel, the decision makers, when the celebration ended and the cheering stopped? What were the complicated emotions of these men, most of them never-complain, never-explain stoics of their generation, practiced in the art of denial?

Occasionally true feelings, or something like them, would slip out. In November 1945 J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist in charge of developing the bomb at the secret laboratories of Los Alamos, appeared in the Oval Office and cried out to President Truman, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands!” According to the president’s account, Truman coolly dismissed Oppenheimer and instructed that “the cry-baby scientist” never be brought around to him again. Telling the story later, Truman would imitate Oppenheimer wringing his hands. “I told him the blood was on my hands—to let me worry about that,” said Truman.

In later years, Truman liked to say that the decision to drop the atomic bombs was his and his alone. The reality was not so straightforward. Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, who ran the Manhattan Project that built the bomb, once scoffed that Truman was “like a little boy on a toboggan” careening downhill—that he had little or no control over a process that was already well along when Truman took office and essentially unstoppable. Groves’s jibe about Truman is not fair; as commander in chief, Truman did take responsibility, and if he was sometimes opaque or chose to look the other way, that does not distinguish him from other great presidents who were also politicians, notably his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Still, Truman was not the main actor in the story of how America (and its allies) and Japan came to end World War II.

Our story begins and ends with the man who oversaw the building of the atomic bomb and authorized the order to deliver it, FDR’s and Truman’s secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson. Stimson is today a largely forgotten figure. He was, in 1945, a rather antique Victorian with the blind spots and racial prejudices of his time and class. He was old and sick and sometimes absent or seemingly out of the loop as the war ground to its bloody end. And yet in the last act of a long career of public service, he found a way to face up to the conflicting demands of great power. He embodied and preached a philosophy that would make the United States, for all its flaws, the world’s essential nation: the belief that American foreign policy should be a blend of realism and idealism. It should balance humanitarian and ethical values with cold-eyed power used in the national interest.

This balance is hard to achieve and maintain. At times, it is impossible. The effort almost killed Stimson in the summer of 1945. On the morning he brought Truman the first photos of Hiroshima, or what was left of it, after the first bomb fell, Stimson had a small heart attack. After he presented the president a month later with the first-ever plan to control nuclear weapons, he had a major heart attack. He was physically frail, to be sure, but his diaries show that he was also suffering from existential anguish.

Stimson signed off on the order to deliver the atomic bombs, and it was sent to Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, the army air forces commander assigned to lead the strategic bombing campaign in Operation Downfall, the final assault on the Japanese home islands. The low-key, almost diffident Spaatz was described by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as “the best air commander I know.” In Europe, Spaatz had been responsible for orders to drop thousands of tons of bombs at the cost not only of tens of thousands of civilians but also of thousands of soldiers and airmen, including many Americans. He quietly, dutifully, and expeditiously gave and carried out death-dealing orders. But that did not mean that he was not affected by what he was doing. On August 11, 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed by atomic bombs—at his command—Spaatz wrote in his diary (self-consciously, awkwardly, as if he were testifying for the historical record—or before his Maker), “When the atomic bomb was first discussed with me in Washington, I was not in favor of it just as I have never favored the destruction of cities as such with all inhabitants being killed.” Yet faced with the continued refusal of the Japanese to surrender, he recommended dropping a third atomic bomb on Tokyo, on an area already burned out by firebombs. And indeed, President Truman told America’s British allies that he was resigned to dropping a third bomb—on Tokyo—just hours before he learned of Japan’s surrender on the late afternoon of August 14 (August 15 in Japan).

Both Stimson and Spaatz followed a rigid code of duty; both agonized over the brutal means to what they saw as a just end. In this book, I draw on their diaries and papers, some given me by family members, to help tell what happened, as closely as possible and as it happened—in real time and in the present tense. I do not pretend that these records are precise road maps to the psyches of the people who kept them. Diaries, after all, are often written for posterity—as a record of the way people wish to be remembered. (Spaatz’s diary for August 11, quoted above, may be a case in point.) But at important moments, the diaries and letters of Stimson and Spaatz are remarkably candid about the kinds of inner conflicts that can pull at men who are, outwardly at least, sure of themselves.

Of course, the American side is only half the story, and perhaps not even the most important half. What of the Japanese? What made them finally surrender even after two atomic bombs did not? More than seventy-five years later, Emperor Hirohito remains an enigmatic figure, wrapped in veils by palace courtiers who venerated him as a deity. He revered his ancestors, but he was, in truth, a very mortal being who was not sure which frightened him more—the American B-29 bombers or his own rebellious army officers.

Fortunately for history, a proud, brave, stubborn man, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, did more than any other person to bring Japan’s ruling Supreme War Council to accept surrender in the apocalyptic spring and summer of 1945. I draw on unpublished diary entries provided by his grandsons to tell his story here as well.

Though Stimson and Spaatz never met Togo—and probably knew very little, if anything, about him—these three men became unlikely partners in averting a cataclysm of death beyond anything the world has ever seen or, one hopes, will ever experience. It was a close-run thing.

Part One

1.

Sleepless

“The terrible,” “the awful,” “the diabolical”

Secretary of War Henry Stimson adored Mabel, his wife of more than fifty years.

Washington, D.C.March 1945

HENRY STIMSON, THE SECRETARY OF WAR, IS KNOWN for his resolute personal integrity. As a New York lawyer in the early 1900s, he had “stood outside the Wall Street group,” as he once explained it, and “did not adopt the methods of the others.” He could, and did, turn down clients he thought were likely to be found culpable, no matter how large their potential fees. “I can just hear the gates of the jail clanking shut behind you,” he told one group of corporate investors who had come with a scheme to evade the antitrust laws. Stimson has always cared more about his own probity and public service than about amassing wealth. Nonetheless, he is wealthy.

Stimson is a nineteenth-century gentleman contending with the forces of twentieth-century global warfare. He is not lacking in confidence. He is a devout Christian and an equally ardent practitioner of power politics. When the contradictions gnaw at him, he is determined not to show it. Though rich from representing clients with private wealth, he served as a trust-busting prosecutor for President Theodore Roosevelt, as an unapologetic colonial administrator and negotiator for President Coolidge, as secretary of state to President Hoover, and as secretary of war twice—first for President Taft, and now for Franklin Roosevelt.

In Washington, Stimson lives in a spacious, airy, architecturally unremarkable house called Woodley, set on eighteen acres of grass and woods, high on a hill above Rock Creek Park, a couple of miles from the White House. In 1929, newly appointed to be secretary of state in the Hoover administration, Stimson bought Woodley for $800,000, a small fortune at the time.* He was able to afford the house because, on the advice of a shrewd cousin, he had sold his overvalued shares before the stock market crashed in October of that year.

Stimson enjoys Woodley in part because the house comes with a stable for horses. Once he had mounted chargers with hard mouths and ridden to the hounds. Now, at the age of seventy-seven, he guides a Tennessee walking horse into the park, trotting along for ten or twenty miles some evenings, “refreshing rides,” he writes in his diary.

In his high-ceilinged bedroom at Woodley on this, the first night of March 1945, Stimson cannot sleep. He takes a sedative, though he does not want to. He does not drink alcohol, and he prefers treating his various ailments, real and imagined—a bum leg, a sore hip, a nervous stomach, an aching tooth—with regular exercise. In addition to a riding stable, Woodley has a platform for deck tennis and, for those evenings when Stimson is truly worn out, a clipped green for tossing lawn bowls.

Stimson has not slept well for many years. He is habitually an insomniac. He was sleepy on the day of Pearl Harbor and sometimes struggles not to doze off at councils of war at the Pentagon. Now, after four years of willing himself to build and oversee the most powerful military force in the history of mankind, his eyes are pools of fatigue.

With short bangs parted in the middle and old-fashioned suits buttoned to the top, Stimson looks like a frumpy schoolmaster. His posture is always erect, as if he is standing at attention, on alert. He has been, in a manner of speaking, on guard almost all his life.

His mother died when Stimson was only eight years old. Grief-stricken, his father had taken refuge in his work, as a doctor at a New York hospital. Stimson was sent to live nearby with his grandparents and a maiden aunt. At the age of thirteen, he was dispatched to boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

The school known as Andover was, in the 1880s, anything but posh. Boys were charged with removing their own waste-water, and the dormitories stank. Football was the newly popular sport, but Stimson was narrow-shouldered and slight. He preferred to hunt small animals with a shotgun in the surrounding woods. He chased ever bigger game as a young man, sometimes hunting grizzly bears alone.

It is the dreary season between winter and spring in Washington. The sleeping potion taken by Stimson does not work, and he tosses fitfully in his bed at Woodley. “A bad night last night, which required a sedative and consequently made me rather touchy and dull during the day,” Stimson records in his diary late on the next day, March 2. “I took up with McCloy the problem of getting up a set of short statements of the points which I wanted to bring up with the President and the things which I wanted to get done, but I was so dull that it was hard work to do it.”

“McCloy” is John “Jack” McCloy, one of Stimson’s assistants. Stimson likes to hire bright young men from Harvard Law School. (One of his early assistants was Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice, still a close friend.) Jack McCloy seems to know everything that is happening in Washington, all written down on a yellow legal pad. Stimson is very fond of McCloy and his wife, Ellen. They often take tea or dine with Stimson and his wife, Mabel, in the evening, after a game of deck tennis or lawn bowls.

Stimson is to meet with President Roosevelt the next noontime to talk about Russia. He wants to trust the Russians but is wary of them. They are America’s allies in this war, and he does not want them to be America’s foes in the next.* Stimson has a maxim, which he says he learned as a member of his Yale secret society, that “the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” But the reality of world war has tested his faith in this credo. As Hoover’s secretary of state in the early 1930s, he shut down America’s foreign code-breaking operation because he disapproved of “reading other gentlemen’s mail.” Now, a decade later, the secretary of war receives a daily summary of broken Japanese and German coded messages, known as MAGIC and ULTRA.* At an arms control conference at St. James’s Palace in London in 1930, Stimson urged the great powers to ban submarines as a cruelly underhanded tool of war; instead, they became vital weapons in America’s arsenal.

Now Stimson wonders, can America trust the Russians? If postwar Europe is going to be rebuilt along the lines he imagines—as a place of freedom and the rule of law, open markets, and free trade—the Russians will have to cooperate. But Stimson has been discouraged to learn, especially from the American ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, that Russia is a stubbornly paranoid police state. Stimson is torn between his realism—his intuitive grasp of power as a tool— and his idealism—his wish, however tenuous, that the Russians can be made trustworthy.

As the Red Army smashes into German-occupied eastern Europe in the late winter of 1945, the Russians are moving into German prisoner of war camps full of captured American soldiers and fliers. These men need to be rescued and returned to America. But for no apparent reason, the Russians have banned American planes with medicine and supplies from landing in the “liberated” Soviet domain. Stimson wants President Roosevelt to send the Kremlin leader, Joseph Stalin, a sharply worded telegram demanding immediate redress.

Escorted into the Oval Office at twelve-thirty P.M. on Saturday, March 3, Stimson hands FDR his proposed cable to Stalin and an underlying batch of papers. Stimson is pleasantly surprised when the president actually reads the documents. “He read them both through in detail, every paper, something that he very rarely does,” he recalls as he dictates to his recording machine that night. In their frequent meetings over the past four years, the secretary of war has had difficulty pinning down President Roosevelt, who likes to skip—or dodge—from topic to topic. Getting FDR to make a decision, Stimson laments, is like “chasing a vagrant sunbeam around an empty room.” He may be the only cabinet officer to have told the president, face to face, to stop lying to him. At least once Stimson has hung up on him.

At the same time, Stimson appreciates Roosevelt’s broader vision, his determination to make a world free of tyranny, as well as his playful humor. “Why, you old Republican lawyer,” FDR teased Stimson when the secretary of war once suggested an action that, while apparently necessary for the war effort, was not necessarily legal. It involved circumventing Congress to aid embattled Britain against the Nazis.

That night Stimson worries in his diary about his old friend: “The President looked rather thin and a little tired. He didn’t seem to me to be quite as lively as he usually was. I have been a little bit troubled because the expression on his face has changed somewhat and he looks older.” Roosevelt has less than six weeks to live.

“Mabel has a little cold, so we didn’t go to church and she stayed in bed all morning,” Stimson writes the next day, Sunday, March 4. In the afternoon, he sets off on a two-mile walk “up around the Cathedral,” the Washington National Cathedral, with its lush formal gardens and its Anglican neo-Gothic towers, which are visible for miles across the city. “I found the long pull up the hill was harder than I had ever had it before and I realized that I am overweight and overage.” (He is also suffering, though he does not yet know it, from heart disease.) “When I got back to Woodley, Ellen McCloy and the two children were there and pretty soon Jack came in and we had tea together. This evening I shall be alone with Mabel.”

Stimson often ends his diary entries with “I dined alone with Mabel.” He avoids most Washington dinner parties and never goes on a whiskey-and-poker night toot with the boys. He is devoted to his wife of more than a half century. As a student at Yale, he was smitten by the pretty, innocent, loving Mabel White at a whist party and courted her in the back pew of a New Haven church. She returns his devotion, accompanying him on long gallops (she rides sidesaddle), on hunting trips, and on lengthy diplomatic missions to Nicaragua and the Philippines. At night, the two often read poetry to each other.

But Mabel is, to use the nineteenth-century term, “neurasthenic,” subject to nervousness and vague maladies that can send her to bed for days at a time. She was wounded when Stimson promised his father to keep their engagement a secret for more than five years. Stimson’s ambitious father deemed Mabel to be insufficiently grand; she had no place in New York society, and no dowry.

Duty has always weighed heavily on Stimson. In 1910, when his friend Theodore Roosevelt persuaded him to run for governor of New York (his candidacy was ill-considered and unsuccessful), reporters began referring to Stimson as “the icicle.” Even his friends joke that he is a “New England conscience on legs.” He learned emotional reticence from his father. “I am going out of town for a few days,” his father would mumble, without telling his son that he was going to visit the grave of his wife, the mother for whom Stimson still mourned. Stimson, who hates to be physically touched, is not one to ask for a comforting hug. But with one friend of forty years, he let down his guard ever so slightly and revealed that he was laboring under the impression that his father, in some awful way, blamed him for his mother’s death.

From suffering can come empathy. Well concealed beneath the erect posture—“he never slumped,” recalled a niece—is compassion for the suffering of others, even those who might seem undeserving of pity. When Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau recommended that Germany be “pastoralized”— its industry plowed under—Stimson vigorously protested, not just because it would weaken postwar Europe’s recovery but because Germany might become a wasteland of starving peasants. In his diary, he noted that “it is very singular that I, the man who had charge of the Department which did all the killing in the war, should be the only one to have any mercy for that other side.” He said as much to his friend and colleague Gen. George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the army. “Marshall and I laughed over this circumstance together,” Stimson recorded.

The laugh was most likely a dry, rather mirthless chuckle between two congenitally reserved men, but there is, nonetheless, affection between them. Marshall and Stimson have a true bond—fortunately for the war effort, for it would be chaos if the uniformed and civilian chiefs let their egos clash.* By mutual agreement, the door between their adjoining offices at the Pentagon is always kept open. Stimson enormously admires Marshall’s legendary self-restraint. (“I have no feelings,” Marshall says, “except those for Mrs. Marshall.”)

Stimson and Marshall do not quarrel and bicker—or posture or strut—but neither do they anguish or vituperate. True, Stimson can be too persistent. Marshall feels obliged to warn him not to lecture the president, whose eyes begin to glaze over when the secretary of war bears down on a point. But neither man, when intent on matters of life and death, shows much emotion. Given their jobs, they cannot afford to.

Some regard a conversation with Stimson as an audience with the Almighty. Still, he has a sweeter, more vulnerable side. Stimson and Mabel had tried but were unable to have children, apparently because Stimson had been made sterile by a case of the mumps a month before they married. They compensated by their devotion to various nieces and nephews and to the young men, like Jack McCloy, who worked closely with Stimson. He welcomes them to his home, plays with their children, gives them freedom and responsibility, and trusts them.

Stimson’s charges are a confident lot. They are unintimidated by his moral certainty and laugh off his periodic fits of temper over minor matters, which can pop up at odd moments, often when the secretary of war cannot figure out how to operate his “squawk box,” the speaker for his telephone. In the evenings at dinner, McCloy and Bob Lovett, whom Stimson sometimes refers to as “the Imps of Satan,” will re-enact Stimson’s unsuccessful attempts to conquer his temper over trivial nuisances. Mabel pretends to look surprised. Stimson gives his dry guffaw, then finally laughs until his eyes well up. Stimson has given McCloy and Lovett great authority, which they exceed.

On the morning of Monday, March 5, a still weary Henry Stimson steps into General Marshall’s office to attend the daily meeting of the Operations and Intelligence staff. The news from the European front is good. Eisenhower’s forces are close to crossing the Rhine, while the Russian army is pushing toward Berlin from the east. Stimson usually just listens to these situation reports; lately, he is so swamped with work that he can attend the morning meeting only every two or three days. But this morning, at the mention of Dresden, a city on the line of the Russian advance into eastern Germany, the secretary of war interrupts. He has read in The New York Times this morning an article about the Allied firebombing of this ancient and beautiful city (“Florence on the Elbe”) in mid-February, taking thousands of German lives. A German news source is quoted as saying, “Today we can only speak of what was Dresden in the past tense.”

Stimson wants an investigation. At the Operations and Intelligence meeting, he points out that Dresden is the capital of Saxony, and that Saxony is “the least Prussianized part of Germany.” In his diary later that night, Stimson records that “the account out of Germany” makes the destruction “even on its face terrible and probably unnecessary.” According to his diary entry, he goes on to say, “We ought to be careful to see that it is not destroyed so that it can be a portion of the country which can be used to be the center of the new Germany.”

His questioning touches on issues about civilian bombing that the U.S. Army Air Forces have struggled with.

In the early days of the war, when politicians were condemning the German bombing of European cities as fascist barbarism, the army air forces promised “precision” bombing of military and industrial targets. Fairly quickly, the British, eager for revenge after their own cities had been extensively bombed by the Luftwaffe, gave up on precision bombing as essentially futile. Instead, RAF Bomber Command, under the leadership of Gen. Arthur Harris, also known as “Bomber” Harris, opted for “area bombing”—bombing city centers. The hope was to break German morale by “dehousing” the population, a euphemism coined without apparent irony.

But the Americans, idealistic about their moral values and technical knowhow, forged ahead with precision bombing. The idea was that an American bombardier peering through a Norden bombsight should be able to put a bomb “into a pickle barrel,” as the manufacturers claimed, or at least within the vicinity of the target. Or so it was demonstrated on clear, windless days, flying over a bombing range in Kansas. In cloudy, stormy Europe, with the skies full of German flak and fighters, the bombs rarely land where they are supposed to— on railway yards and munitions factories. They do land on the civilians living nearby. “Precision bombing” is really a misnomer for what amounted to area bombing. Still, the Americans can say, truthfully, that they intend to hit military or industrial targets, not civilian targets.*

The day after Stimson asks for an investigation into the bombing of Dresden, General Marshall sends the army air forces’ response. It is basically a nonresponse. Dresden was an important target, the “center of a railway network and a great industrial town.” The British began bombing the city on February 13 “on accurate markers starting fires.” The next day a smaller number of U.S. planes bombed it, going after railway marshaling yards but unable to aim accurately. Using the “Pathfinder method,” the British dropped flares and burning red pyrotechnic candles as target indicators; waves of bombers followed, dropping high explosives and incendiaries. The skies were undefended, and the tight bombing patterns of the Pathfinders created a vast conflagration in a city packed with refugees. Results were “unobserved” in Dresden because there was so much smoke from the massive, wind-whipped firestorm.

Stimson replies with a handwritten note: “I doubt this report makes the case any better—on the face of it the British on Feb 13 bombed the city. While our bombing was said to be aimed at military objectives the results were practically unobserved. I think the city should be photographed carefully and the actual facts made known.”

It will take three weeks to receive an inconclusive report from U.S. Strategic Air Forces Headquarters in Europe. Both the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped incendiary bombs, along with high explosives, Stimson is told, but the British dropped roughly five times as many. “Due to the proximity of these two attacks and the absence of intervening photographic coverage, it has been impossible to allocate damage to attacking air forces.”

Once, before exhaustion set in, Stimson might have pressed a little harder to find out exactly what happened in Dresden during those two days and nights in February. As a prosecuting attorney, he was noted for his single-minded pursuit of the facts. As secretary of war, at least in the early days, he was known within the Pentagon for “dipping down,” for consulting with a trusted adviser to cut through bureaucratic obfuscation and stay on top of events on the ground.

But his trusted adviser for airpower, Robert Lovett, while devoted and highly capable, is perhaps not entirely forthcoming with his boss. Lovett is assistant secretary of war for air. Balding, with heavy-lidded eyes and a handsome, chiseled face, sardonically funny, he had been a Wall Street investment banker and urbane sophisticate who socialized with New Yorker wits and Broadway producers. He is also an ardent champion of airpower. His Yale secret society tap came while he was training to be a naval aviator in World War I. Commanding a bombing group known as “the Yale Unit,” Lovett was one of the first to understand the value of strategic bombing—to bomb not the submarines at sea but the many submarines in port in their pens. In the days before Pearl Harbor, he took the lead in persuading his friends running the automobile industry to begin converting their assembly lines to make warplanes, tens of thousands of them. “My business was banking. Now it’s airplanes,” he explained.

Stimson depends on Lovett to keep him abreast of the air force. On May 3, 1944, he noted that Lovett gave him his usual “very fair and intelligent analysis.” A month later he observed that Lovett was “judicious and fair minded.” But as the war has dragged on and problems have multiplied and the weary secretary of war has been forced to delegate more and more to his aides, he can’t always remember what Lovett has told him. “Talked to Lovett, whom I had not seen in a long time,” he recorded in late November 1944. “He gave me a resume of what especially was going on in the Air Force. I cannot remember at this moment of dictation exactly what it was, but I know it was something important which will be before us very soon.”

Lovett believes that bombing can be used to break civilian morale. He is, in his own way, a moralist: he believes in giving the Germans a dose of their own medicine. He works closely with the army air forces commander, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, who has observed that Lovett possesses a “hidden power.” Indeed, when Arnold suffered his fourth heart attack in three years in January 1945, Lovett, though a civilian, increasingly assumed Arnold’s air force duties. There is no record of Lovett’s views on the bombing of Dresden. But it is doubtful he shares much with Stimson, which may help explain why the secretary of war is still learning about the extent of the firebombing of Dresden from The New York Times three weeks after the fact.

The use of a far more overwhelming, destructive force is much on Stimson’s mind during the first two weeks of March 1945. He is distracted, and the weather matches his mood, dank and gray, “abominable,” he records. On March 5, after agitating about Dresden in the Operations and Intelligence staff meeting in Marshall’s office, he needs to take a nap. In the afternoon, he records later that day, “I called in Harvey Bundy, who has been anxious to see me as to S-1.”

Bundy is one of Stimson’s valued assistants, a reserved, brainy lawyer by way of Yale College and Harvard Law School. “S-1” is the code name for the atomic bomb project. (The Americans call it “the Manhattan Engineering Project,” and the British, “Tube Alloys.”) The scientists at work on the bomb call it “the gadget.” In his periodic diary entries about S-1, Stimson refers to the weapon as “the dire,” “the dreadful,” “the terrible,” “the awful,” and “the diabolical.”

The secretary of war first learned of S-1 in November 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. For some time, largely unnoticed by the larger world, scientists in various countries had been working on the secret of splitting the atom to release energy—in an instantaneous, massive, primal spasm—creating, potentially, a bomb big enough to destroy a city. Fleeing Hitler’s Germany, Jewish scientists had brought their atomic expertise to England and America in the 1930s. (It might be said that Hitler lost World War II on April 7, 1933, when Germany banned Jews from government.) At first tentatively, President Roosevelt’s government took up the project (already started by the less well-resourced British) in extreme secrecy, but with gathering determination and ever more resources to create a workable bomb.

The fear back in 1941 had been that Germany would be the first to build an atomic bomb. Not until late 1944 did the tight circle of Americans charged with developing the bomb understand that the Germans were too far behind to catch up. In early 1945 Nazi scientists were getting close to building a missile powerful enough to reach New York, but thanks to Hitler’s disdain for “Jewish science,” the Führer had no atomic bomb to put atop the missile. But by then, Germany was no longer the primary target. In May 1943 a top-secret “Target Committee,” composed of scientists and military officers, had provisionally decided to aim the first atomic bomb at Japan— probably at a Japanese fleet in a harbor. The scientists feared that if a dud were to land on Germany, the Nazis might be able to reverse-engineer their own “gadget.” No one seems to have worried much about the ingenuity of Japanese scientists.

Secretary of War Stimson has been overseeing S-1 as a kind of chairman of the board. His chief role, through 1943 and 1944, was to keep the money flowing from Congress without divulging too much about the work. Now, at the beginning of March 1945, he realizes that the bomb is nearing readiness, and that the hour to act is drawing near. After “a most thorough and searching talk” with the straitlaced Bundy, Stimson records in his diary that night of March 5:

We are up against some very big decisions. The time is approaching when we can no longer avoid them and when events may force us into the public on the subject. Our thoughts went right down to the bottom facts of human nature, morals, and government, and it is by far the most searching and important thing that I have had to do since I have been here in the office of the Secretary of War because it touches matters that are deeper than even the principles of present government.

Stimson does not say in his diary just what he and Bundy discussed, but Bundy’s notes do: the need for an international arms control agency to hold on to the atomic bomb after the war. Surprisingly, perhaps, the two men do not talk about whether to drop the bomb in this war. The focus is on how to avoid the use of more and bigger bombs in the next one.

In his conversation with Bundy, Stimson suggests a curious choice for the kind of man who should run the postwar international arms control agency: Phillips Brooks, a late-nineteenthcentury Episcopal priest and Bishop of Massachusetts. By later generations, Bishop Brooks will be remembered, if at all, for writing the lyrics to the Christmas hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” In the bishop’s time, the Gilded Age, a period when the sermons of moral crusaders were sometimes front-page news, Brooks was an apostle of a movement called Muscular Christianity.

What the country—and the whole world—needs now, Stimson tells Bundy, according to Bundy’s notes, is a spiritual revival based in Christian principles. Only through faith will mankind find the self-discipline to control its powerful deadly weapons.

Stimson’s existential worry, of long duration, is that man’s technical capacity to do evil will outrun man’s human capacity to do good. He hopes that man can be made more moral— indeed, can one day achieve moral perfection—but he fears that science, and its temptations, will overcome morality first. Specifically, he worries that the emotions stirred up by this war will lead to a more terrible next war.

Stimson doesn’t doubt that Americans are willing to use the atomic bomb in this war. There was no public outcry protesting the firebombing of Dresden; indeed, apart from some newspaper columns and a sermon or two, the public did not react at all to the burning of large numbers of civilians by the Allies in the once-lovely historic city. Americans want to punish Germany, which has overrun continental Europe, and even more, they want vengeance against Japan for attacking Pearl Harbor. Atrocity stories have been appearing in the newspapers about the Japanese starving or abusing American POWs and Asian citizens alike, sometimes horribly, with rapes and beheadings.

Mostly Americans want the war to end, so that their husbands and sons can come home. By March 1945, war weariness is settling in, certainly among congressmen under pressure from business leaders and their lobbyists chafing at war rationing and regulatory red tape. Stimson’s immediate concern is that Americans will not be willing to make the added sacrifices necessary to finish the fight.

In the winter of 1945, the U.S. armed services appear to face a manpower shortfall. The war is far from over: Germany is reeling but is still threatening the Allies with secret weapons like missiles, jet planes, and a rumored “death ray.” Japan’s home islands have been barely pricked by American weaponry, much less conquered. The Joint Chiefs of Staff predict the Allies will need another six months to defeat Germany and another year to grind down Japan. Draft allotments are barely enough to fill the ranks. Nonetheless, in March, with the war dragging on, Congress is still balking at a compulsory service act. Stimson has been frustrated by lawmakers, reflecting their constituents, who want to declare victory and be done with it. Soon veterans of combat in Europe with enough “points” will be discharged, and few of the American soldiers and sailors rotating home from the battlefields of Europe will be eager to fight in an even uglier war in the Pacific.

Stimson knows that America probably will have to use the atomic bomb to end the war. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill have already signed an agreement that the bomb “might” be used “against Japan . . . after mature consideration.”

Much is at stake for the men creating S-1. The bomb will be successfully tested in July, after which Stimson will tell Bundy and McCloy, “Well, I have been responsible for spending two billion dollars on this atomic venture. Now that it is successful, I shall not be sent to prison in Fort Leavenworth.” (He is joking, but not lightly.) There is no discussion at the higher levels of government about not using the bomb. It is simply understood that the American public would want to use a weapon that could save the lives of thousands of American soldiers, regardless of the humanitarian cost. The inevitable use of “the gadget” is taken for granted, even though it will almost surely kill large numbers of Japanese civilians.

Stimson does not question this informal consensus, not in any formal way, not in any written record he will leave behind, including his diary. But that does not mean he does not think about what he has referred to as “the terrible,” “the awful,” “the dreadful,” especially in the hours before dawn. Jack McCloy will later be asked how his boss thought about the bomb. “On his knees,” McCloy will answer.

At dinner on the night of March 8, in his elegant but spare dining room, lined with the heads of stags that he has shot, Stimson is feeling a little revived. He and Mabel always sit down at a precise hour, no cocktails beforehand. But then “just as we finished dinner Mabel suddenly toppled over unconscious at her end of the table and gave me the fright of my life,” a shaken Stimson will write the next day. The seventy-seven-year-old Stimson leaps up and carries Mabel to the sofa, and a doctor is summoned. Mabel quickly comes to, “but it was a desperate time for about five or ten minutes,” Stimson will record.

As it turns out, nothing is really wrong with Mabel. She may have been dehydrated from her cold. Physically, she is soon up and reading aloud with her husband at dinner. But it is not uncommon for one spouse to carry the stress of another—indeed, through a bit of mysterious alchemy clinically known as “projective identification,” a person can sometimes mentally transfer his or her cares and woes to another. It is one of the human psyche’s myriad ways of defending oneself from deep inner conflict. (In 1967, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara struggles over the quagmire of the Vietnam War, his wife, Margie, and his son Craig will develop painful stomach ulcers. McNamara will later ruefully remark, “They had my ulcers.”)

On March 9, just as Stimson speaks into his recording device about his “desperate time” with Mabel, an armada of B-29 bombers is taking off from airfields on Guam and Tinian, two of the Mariana Islands in the far Pacific, bound for Tokyo. In the summer of 1944, in hard fighting, American soldiers and Marines liberated the Marianas from the Japanese, and Seabees set to work building the largest airfields in the world— launching pads, finally, for bombing the Japanese homeland, a twelve-hour round trip, fifteen hundred miles away.

For many months, the army air forces tried daytime “precision” bombing against Japanese aircraft factories, but the bombs almost always missed. Japan was, it seemed, even cloudier than Germany. The B-29s, magnificent new flying machines that could climb to thirty thousand feet, barely in range of Japanese fighters, were being blown about by a never-before-observed meteorological condition later dubbed “the jet stream.” The 130-to-230-mph winds either stopped the west-bound planes cold or blew east-bound planes right past their targets.

Desperate for results, the head of the XXI Bomber Command, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, tried a new strategy. He sent the bombers in low, at night, when they had a better chance to evade flak and the dwindling number of Japanese fighters. Since the newfangled but finicky Norden bombsight was next to useless at night, precision bombing was out. So using a new, improved incendiary bomb filled with a jellied gasoline called napalm, LeMay set out to light a fire on the ground that would spread. He knew that Japanese cities, made largely of wood, would burn. On the night of March 9–10, by setting off a ferocious firestorm, the B-29s burn out sixteen square miles of the Japanese capital. The crews in the planes can smell the burning flesh. It will eventually be determined that roughly 85,000 residents of Tokyo, or probably more, die in the conflagration. According to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, the fires started by the B-29s and their napalm bombs killed more people in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of war.

On March 10, the scope of the damage in Tokyo, though not the death toll, is widely reported with banner headlines in the American papers. “B-29s Pour Over 1,000 Tons of Incendiaries on Japanese Capital; Tremendous Fires Leap Up Quickly in Thickly Populated Center of Big Enemy City” reads The New York Times.

On March 13, three days after the Tokyo firestorm, Stimson, feeling the stress of the job, reports in his diary, “After lunch which I took at home with Mabel, I had a nice talk in the afternoon with Bob Lovett who had just returned from the South, and I also had a nice little game of deck tennis— gentle and quiet, which did me a lot of good.”

Assistant Secretary of War for Air Lovett had been in Florida meeting with Hap Arnold, the army air forces commander, who was recuperating from his fourth heart attack in three years. The firebombing of Tokyo seemed to signal a momentous strategy shift by U.S. Army Air Forces. After Dresden, Stimson had publicly stated that the United States did not engage in terror bombing of cities. Now it appeared that they were doing so, or something close to it.

The scowling LeMay has been portrayed, unfairly, as a merciless killer. Especially in later years as strategic air commander, he was prone to making cold-blooded statements. (He wanted to threaten to bomb North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age.”) He did not smile (in fact, he couldn’t; his face was frozen by a condition called Bell’s palsy), and he was easy to caricature. But he was not reckless with the lives of his pilots.

Though he did not get direct orders to firebomb Tokyo from Arnold or anyone in Washington, he was not acting entirely on his own. The taciturn, cigar-chomping general had been told that he might, like his predecessor, Gen. Haywood Hansell, be replaced as the head of the XXI Bomber Command if he failed to get results, measured by aerial photos of targets destroyed. Precision bombing was failing, so he needed to find something that worked, and incendiary bombs had promise; indeed, at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, the air force had erected a Japanese-style village to practice burning it down. The air force later explained that LeMay wasn’t targeting civilians—that the bombers were aiming at small industries widely dispersed in residential neighborhoods—but this seemed to be a rationalization for the sort of area bombing of cities that, in Europe, had long been the province of the British RAF, not the USAAF.

If Lovett and Stimson discuss the Tokyo firebombing in their talk on March 13, Stimson does not say so. Nor, for the next two months, will he mention in his diary anything about bombing civilians.

Stimson badly needs a prolonged rest. Every weekend throughout the war, he has flown with Mabel in his Army DC-3 to Highhold, his estate on the North Shore of Long Island. Highhold is large and comfortable, though Stimson notes in his privately printed memoir that it has none of the faux-château grandeur of the robber baron estates dotting the so-called Gold Coast nearby. (Stimson’s estate is “a gallop apart” from Theodore Roosevelt’s house, Sagamore Hill, in nearby Oyster Bay.) On clear days, gazing out at the thin strips of blue to the south (the Atlantic Ocean) and the north (Long Island Sound), Stimson has been able to regain his bearings, at least on most weekends. With its bridle paths and tree-shaded lawns, Highhold, he tells Mabel, soothes him as soon as he sets foot there.

But he needs to get farther away and for longer than a weekend. The army has requisitioned the Biltmore Hotel in Miami for R&R, and it has rooms available to the secretary of war. On March 18 Stimson records in his diary, “This morning after a rather tortured night, a good deal of doubt and uncertainty, Mabel helped me out by deciding that she thought we ought to go to Miami after all and give up going to Highhold because I could not possibly get the freedom from the care that is weighing me down there and get the absolute rest that I apparently need. So we have decided to go to Miami tomorrow, and once we decided it has been a great relief.”

Ten days later he picks up his diary again to report that “we had delightful weather and a very complete rest, but we were both so tired that it seemed like a long time before we could get over the fits of depression that were natural to such a situation.” He swam, twice a day, in the surf. He went deep-sea fishing and caught a bonito. And he visited an army air forces “redistribution center,” where men who fought in Europe are being reassigned to units to fight in the Pacific.

Recounting the trip in his diary on March 28, Stimson praises the “sympathetic work” of the officers preparing the airmen to go back into battle. “All the men whom I met were . . . very grateful for it,” he records.

He is speaking two days after the Americans have finally won the Battle of Iwo Jima, a five-week struggle, costing the lives of almost seven thousand U.S. Marines and virtually all twenty thousand Japanese soldiers, to capture an island that is about one-sixth the size of Nantucket. (The Americans want the island to serve as an air base to support bombing raids on Japan.) The men at the Miami redistribution center are being sent off to fight much greater numbers of equally fanatical Japanese on their far larger home islands.

Two years after the war, Stimson will sit with Harvey Bundy’s son, McGeorge Bundy, to write his memoir, titled On Active Service in Peace and War. The writing, which is mostly by McGeorge Bundy, is arch and self-consciously literary and refers to Stimson in the third person. But it probably captures Stimson’s true feelings as he lay awake—at Woodley, at Highhold, and in his hotel room in Miami—thinking about the atomic bomb and remembering that visit to the men at the Miami redistribution center in the spring of 1945:

In March, he [Stimson] visited an Air Forces redistribution center in Florida. There he met and talked with men on their way to the Pacific after completing a term of duty in Europe. The impression he received was profound. These men were weary in a way no one reading reports could readily understand. They would go to the Pacific, and they would fight well again, but after this meeting Stimson realized more clearly than ever that the primary obligation of any man responsible for and to these Americans was to end the war as quickly as possible. To discard or fail to use effectively any weapon which might spare them further sacrifice would be irresponsibility so flagrant as to deserve condign punishment. Paraphrasing Shakespeare (but with life and not death as his end), Stimson could have said, as he felt, that “He hates them who would upon the rack of this war stretch them out longer.”

And yet to use the atomic bomb against cities populated mainly by civilians was to assume another and scarcely less terrible responsibility.

* About $13 to $14 million in 2022 dollars.

* Russia has been fighting Germany since Hitler broke a peace pact with Moscow and invaded Russia in June 1941. The Kremlin and Japan have a neutrality pact, signed in April 1941, but in April 1945 Russia will announce that it will let the pact lapse in a year’s time. At the Yalta Conference in February, discussing the postwar international order, Russia promised the Allies that it would go to war against Japan even sooner, within three months of Germany’s surrender.

* MAGIC is the code word for decrypted Japanese diplomatic cables. ULTRA is the code word for all decrypted communications coming out of Europe and the Pacific—the coded messages of at least thirty other governments, including those of America’s allies.

* Stimson had served in the military, first as a sergeant in the national guard. (He enlisted partly because he regretted missing the Spanish-American War.) When America entered World War I, he sought—at age fifty—a commission in the U.S. Army. He commanded an artillery unit in France, got a glimpse of action, and quietly relished being called “Colonel” in later life.

* The British were not wrong that precision bombing was technologically impossible in the early 1940s; their motive for area bombing was not simply revenge. As Tami Biddle, a longtime expert on strategic bombing at the U.S. Army War College explains, precision bombing is a misleading term the Americans used—with the best of intentions—to describe area bombing in a reasonably circumscribed area when the conditions (clear weather, no flak, etc.) were just right.