Presidential Predicaments: Truman III-What, Exactly, Did He Agree To?
Strictly speaking, President Truman may not have ordered the atomic bomb to be used in Japan though he did agree with General Marshall and Secretary of War Stimson that it might be.
But what exactly did President Truman agree to? The journal President Truman kept at Potsdam contains the following entry.
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.
What Truman agreed to, then, was a “purely military” use of the bomb on “military objectives and soldiers and sailors” and not on “women and children.” Earlier, the Interim Committee advising President Truman had called for something similar: the use of the bomb on a “war plant surrounded by worker’s homes.” A “strategic” military use.
General Handy’s directive to General Spaatz had imposed no such constraints.
The entry in Truman’s Potsdam journal shows that Truman knew by this time that the bomb was a “terrible” weapon. Did he also realize that its effects could not be limited to the “purely military” objectives he and the Interim Committee had specified? I think he had not.
At Potsdam, President Truman had learned that earlier Stimson had removed Kyoto, the historic capital of Japan, from the military’s target list. Stimson has been said to have removed Kyoto because he had honeymooned there and knew what a beautiful and historic place it was. In any case, it had been one of the cities reserved from General LeMay’s firebombing.
Truman had agreed with Stimson on removing Kyoto. The Pentagon’s Target Committee had substituted Nagasaki. It was the fourth choice.
Tokyo, the “new” capital of Japan, would have been an unsuitable target at this stage of the game, not because it was a beautiful historic place but because by now two of General LeMay’s low-level firebombing attacks had largely destroyed it. The first of these attacks, in March 1945, had killed more people--women, children, old people, people in hospitals as well as soldiers, sailors, and military workers who might have been in the city--than would be killed in either of the atomic bombings that were to come.
Also in March of 1945, according to a publication by the World War II Museum in New Orleans, the Japanese military had “mustered every single male age 15 to 60 and every single female age 17 to 40. This inducted about a quarter or more of Japan’s total population, about 18 to 20 million people.” Had the Japanese themselves thus invited discarding the distinction between civilian and military targets?
At the time Handy’s directive to Spaatz went out in July, Japanese cities could mount little to no defense against air attacks. Before some of LeMay’s firebombing attacks, which were ongoing, warning leaflets were now being dropped. Truman’s Potsdam journal entry had called for a warning but Handy’s directive to Spaatz had mentioned nothing about warnings, and no warnings would be given for the two atomic bombings. Unless we want to count the general warning contained in the Potsdam Declaration issued by the U.S., the U.K. and China on July 26, the day after Handy’s directive was sent to General Spaatz. The Potsdam Declaration said that if Japan did not surrender unconditionally, it would be faced with “prompt and utter destruction.”
This one hadn’t done the trick.
After Hiroshima, what “prompt and utter destruction” might mean was clearer. The element of surprise was also gone. Plans were made to drop warning leaflets on the next city on the target list to be bombed, which would turn out to be Nagasaki. One way and another, however, Nagasaki would not be warned. Warning leaflets were dropped on Nagasaki, but on the day after Fat Man had detonated upon it.
When President Truman agreed in Potsdam to the first use of the new “special” bomb, had he realized that this bomb was not capable of being used as a “purely military” weapon, that it was instead what shortly after the war would come to be called a “weapon of mass destruction”--a weapon that did not and could not distinguish between military targets and civilians?
Indications are that President Truman did not realize this.
Who did? The bomb had never been used before. Did our military leaders realize that the new weapon could not have a “purely military use”?
Did those who suspected there could not be a “purely military use” care?
Can we infer anything from the aim points for the two bombs? The aim point for the Hiroshima bomb was not a “war plant surrounded by worker’s homes” as had been called for by the recommendation of the Interim Committee. The aim point was a T-shaped bridge, the Aioi bridge, chosen not because it was a military target but because it was near the center of the city and should be easy for the bombardier to see. The city was said to contain soldiers and army depots. It also contained schools and hospitals.
The aim point for the Nagasaki bomb was, however, a war plant—the large Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works.1
In neither case did the bomb fall that all that close to the aim point—nothing new for “strategic” bombing. The misses didn’t matter much. In Hiroshima, the bomb destroyed a city with a population of over two-hundred fifty-thousand. In Nagasaki, the bomb fell on a civilian area between the Mitsubishi works and a torpedo factory and destroyed all three, and more besides.
At this stage of the war, had the distinction between civilian and military targets ceased to matter? To General LeMay and to those who had approved the firebombing attacks he had been conducting since March and would conduct even after the atomic bombings, it had, de facto, ceased to matter. Still, no one on the U.S. side, including LeMay, ever stopped talking as if the distinction mattered. Just not as much as bringing the war to the earliest possible conclusion.2
President Truman’s entry in his Potsdam diary entitles us to assume, I believe, that he was not at that time someone for whom the distinction had ceased to matter.
After the war, however, when it was apparent to those were allowed to see the evidence of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that these bombs were not military weapons, President Truman had nonetheless accepted the version of events that had him ordering the use of the bombs. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project, expressed to Truman once the misgivings of some scientists about having developed the weapon. Truman bridled. Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project scientists hadn’t ordered it to be dropped, he said. “I did.”
Three years after the bombs were dropped, while campaigning in Wisconsin, in a speech given on October 14, 1948, after Stimson’s “Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb” came out, Truman said,
As P] resident of the United States, I had the fateful responsibility of deciding whether or not to use this weapon for the first time. It was the hardest decision I ever had to make. But the President cannot duck hard problems—he cannot pass the buck. I made the decision after discussions with the ablest men in our Government, and after long and prayerful consideration. I decided that the bomb should be used in order to end the war quickly and save countless lives—Japanese as well as American.3
Shortly after the war, Truman had been sent a desk sign by a Missouri supporter that said “The Buck Stops Here.” Truman had placed the sign on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. He seems also to have lived the principle.
But we know President Truman did have misgivings about having approved the use of the bomb “for the first time.”
In October 1950, during a meeting Truman had with General MacArthur on Wake Island, President Truman had taken a walk on the beach with, among others, a young Marine photographer named Joe O’Donnell, who had been assigned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war. “On the walk back,” O’Donnell writes
I was beside the President and the thought occurred to me that never would I have a more opportune moment to ask my question.
“Mr. President,” I said. “I was a Marine photographer assigned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war, and I often wondered if you had any second thoughts about your decision to drop the bomb on those cities.” His reply startled me. It was quick and loud, if somewhat cryptic.
“Hell, yes! I’ve had a lot of misgivings about it, and I inherited a lot more, too.4
The remark that O’Donnell took as “somewhat cryptic” might well have been a reference by Truman to the conversation he’d had with Oppenheimer.
Truman may have gone along with the dropping of the first atomic bomb, the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.
But however we want to come down on the question of whether President Truman ordered the first use of the atomic bomb, it’s clear to me that he did not order the second use—the dropping three days later of the bomb that fell on Nagasaki.
For a more detailed discussion from a slightly different angle, see Alex Wellerstein’s http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2018/01/19/purely-military-target/. See also his entry on “The Kyoto Misconception.” http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconception/. Wellerstein’s blog has many excellent entries on the Truman era and a book is forthcoming that I, for one, will be eager to read.
See Curtis LeMay, Mission with LeMay, Doubleday 1965, 379-388.
Joe O’Donnell, Japan 1945: a US. Marine’s photographs from Ground Zero. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2005, p. 85