Presidential Predicaments: Truman II-What Have We Here?
President Truman learned about the first successful test of an atomic bomb five days after it took place in New Mexico. He was still at the Potsdam Conference in eastern Germany with the other leaders of the Allies. He got the word in a coded message that contained few details. Still, you could see it gave him a big boost.
The war with Germany was over but the war with Japan was still on. The Soviets had not yet declared war on Japan. President Truman was hoping that Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union and our ally in World War II, would do that soon. The Soviet forces would have to come from their western front in Europe all the way out east.
Three days after Truman got the word about the successful test, at an informal social gathering at the conference on July 24, he approached Joseph Stalin and told him that we had a new weapon “of unusual destructive force.” It was just the two of them. Truman reported later that Stalin seemed surprisingly unexcited by the news. He said only that he hoped we’d “make good use of it against the Japanese.”
We know now that even though we had tried to keep from the Soviets any information about the Manhattan Project and our work on the bomb, Stalin had learned about it anyway, from Soviet spies. Quite a lot about it. He had, in fact, learned about our work on the bomb long before President Truman had. We didn’t know Stalin knew.
Use of the new bomb on Japan was ordered by the military on July 25, the day after Truman’s exchange with Stalin. The order, which may have been drafted by General Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Project, went out over the signature of General Thomas Handy, the Acting Chief of Staff of the Army in the Pentagon. The actual Chief of Staff of the Army, General George Marshall, was in Potsdam with President Truman, as was Marshall’s civilian boss, the Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The order was directed to General Carl Spaatz, the current commander of the Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific.
After Truman’s talk with Stalin, how had matters unfolded? Let’s imagine it. Truman had probably not been seeking Stalin’s approval to use the bomb, but he got it. He undoubtedly had already the approval of our British ally, represented for the moment at the conference by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was just about to get voted out of office. Starting the next day, the British would be represented at the conference by the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee.
Soon after his exchange with Stalin, President Truman probably got together with Stimson and Marshall and agreed with them that the order to use the bomb should go out. One of them, probably General Marshall, then sent a secure message to General Handy in the Pentagon that told him to issue the “directive” that went out to General Spaatz.
The directive authorized General Spaatz to “deliver” the bomb on any of the four cities that had been selected by the Pentagon’s Target Committee and approved by Stimson. All four cities had been shielded from General LeMay’s many firebombing attacks so that the effects of the new “special” bomb could be more clearly seen.
The bomb could be delivered to one of these cities, the directive said, as soon as it was ready and the weather was suitable for visual bombing.
Handy’s order tells General Spaatz that use of the bomb had been approved by Marshall and Stimson. President Truman is not mentioned. It is clear, then, that Truman’s approval was not thought to be crucial.
Our Constitution makes the president the “commander in chief” of the armed forces. But the President does not, of course, order every attack or specify the weapons to be used.
Did President Truman actually order the first atomic bomb to be dropped or is it more accurate to say that he went along with the decision made by the military authorities, Chief of Staff General Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Marshall’s civilian boss?
After the war, when concerns about use of the bomb had begun to emerge, Stimson offered a justification of the decision to drop in a piece that appeared in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s magazine, entitled “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” Some of Stimson’s claims in the article have been questioned, but the article’s arguments remain the default justification for the decision.
Whatever you think about Stimson’s justification, one implication is clear. The decision was Stimson’s. Truman is mentioned only as warmly supporting Stimson’s earlier decision to remove the city of Kyoto from a target list that had been worked up by the Pentagon.
The Target Committee had been assisted in choosing its targets by Manhattan Project scientists, including Oppenheimer. They were in the best position to predict what the effects of the astounding new bomb would be. Hiroshima was at the top of the list.