Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [306]
Yet as Germany foundered, King and Arnold allowed themselves to be persuaded that planning must continue for Olympic. Marshall, although he had never been enthusiastic, “went firm.” However unwelcome, the invasion option must be kept open. Given the lead time indispensable to a huge amphibious operation, a commitment was needed forthwith. Experience, especially at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, showed that the enemy exploited every day of grace to strengthen his defences, and thus to raise the cost of delaying invasion. The chiefs of staff were also concerned that the American people’s patience with the war was ebbing, and thus that it was essential to hasten a closure in the east. On 25 April the joint chiefs of staff adopted JCS 924/15, endorsing Olympic. Their memorandum, which should be regarded as prudent recognition of a contingency, rather than as an ironclad commitment, was forwarded to the president—the very new president—of the United States.
Harry Truman has come to be regarded as one of America’s outstanding national leaders of the twentieth century. In the spring of 1945, however, this decent, simple, impulsive man was all but overwhelmed by the burden of office thrust upon him by Roosevelt’s death on 12 April. “I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen upon me,” he told reporters on the afternoon that he was sworn in. “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now.” One journalist said: “Good luck, Mr. President.” Truman said: “I wish you didn’t have to call me that.” By one of Roosevelt’s most hubristic omissions, given the desperate state of his own health, he had made no attempt to ensure that his vice-president was briefed to address the vast issues which now fell to his lot. Until 12 April, Truman was not even a recipient of Magic intelligence bulletins. Those who observed him closely during his first months at the White House believed that much he said and did was motivated by insecurity, a desire to appear authoritative and decisive, though within himself he felt equipped to be neither. Such self-awareness deserves the sympathy of posterity.
On 10 May, responding to perceived Russian breaches of faith in Europe, Truman directed that lend-lease supplies to the Soviet Union should be terminated. Grew and Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador in Moscow, wanted him to go further, and repudiate the Asian provisions of Yalta. Stimson dissuaded the president from these courses, observing that “the concessions…to Russia on Far Eastern matters…are…within the military power of Russia to obtain regardless of U.S. military action short of war.” But Truman’s conduct in the months that followed was dominated by a determination to prove his own fitness for office, above all by making no unnecessary concessions to the bullying of the Soviet Union, and by conducting the last phase of the war against Japan with a conviction worthy of his great predecessor, and of his great nation. He now discovered that science promised an extraordinary tool to further these ends.
On 24 April Truman received from Stimson a letter requesting a meeting to discuss “a highly secret matter.” Next day, the secretary of war and Maj.-Gen. Leslie Groves, senior officer responsible for the Manhattan Project, revealed to the new president its secrets, about which he had previously received only intimations. “Within four months,” wrote Stimson, “we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” Groves was bent on dropping two, to prove to the Japanese that the first nuclear explosion represented no unique phenomenon.
The Manhattan Project represented the most stupendous scientific effort in history. In three years, at a cost of $2 billion, the U.S.—with some perfunctorily acknowledged British aid—had advanced close to fulfilling a programme which much of the scientific world had thought