Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [308]
The scientists’ scruples counted for little alongside the consensual perception of America’s leadership that here was a weapon which could decisively strengthen their hands in confronting the Soviets as well as defeating the Japanese. The builders of the bomb were fatally hampered in their attempts to promote a debate about its use by the fact that security made it impossible, indeed treasonable, even to discuss its existence outside their own circle. Most focused concern not upon the bomb’s use, but upon whether a warning should first be given to Japan, and whether the peace of the post-war world might best be secured by sharing America’s atomic secrets with the Soviets.
If the scientists had better understood the disastrous strategic predicament of the Japanese in 1945, more would have opposed Hiroshima. As it was, however, the men who knew most about the new weapon were quarantined from awareness of the context in which it would be employed. Meanwhile, the politicians responsible for determining the bomb’s use had an inadequate sense of its meaning for civilisation. Byrnes told Truman: “It might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.” Overwhelmingly the most important representative of the Manhattan Project in Washington was not a scientist, but General Groves. Triumphalist about the monumental undertaking of which he was chief administrator, he rejected any notion that his country might fail to exploit its fulfilment.
Groves is one of the least-known significant military figures of the Second World War. It is hard to overstate his importance in sustaining momentum towards the detonation of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A major-general whose rank would have entitled him only to a divisional command in the field, he had been promoted by fate to extraordinary authority. An army chaplain’s son, as deputy chief of construction for the army he had played a major role in building the Pentagon. In September 1942 he was a forty-six-year-old colonel eagerly awaiting overseas posting—“I wanted to command troops”—when he was instead ordered to supervise the Manhattan Project. “If you do the job right, it will win the war,” he was told.
It seems likely that his superiors said this to reconcile the engineer to a thankless domestic posting, rather than because they believed it at the time. Groves’s assignment was unique for a soldier, requiring him to oversee thousands of civilian scientists of the highest gifts and often most wayward personalities, led by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer. Beyond these guiding brains, Groves was responsible for a workforce that eventually grew to 125,000, embracing engineers, administrators and construction personnel, centred upon the development laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and operating other facilities all over the United States. Most of these people had no notion, of course, about the objective of their labours. The paunchy, bustling general reported only to the secretary of war and the army chief of staff. To Groves’s own amazement, as the bomb approached completion he was deputed by Marshall also to assume responsibility for its operational use.
Groves was bereft of tact, sensitivity, cultural awareness, and human sympathy for either the Japanese or the bevy of Nobel laureates whom he commanded. He harassed and goaded the scientists as if they were army engineers building a bridge. Yet his effectiveness demands the respect of history. His deputy, Col. Kenneth Nichols, described him as “the biggest sonofabitch835 I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable. He had an ego second to none…tireless energy, great self-confidence and ruthlessness. I hated his guts and so did everyone else, [but] if I was to have to do my part all over again, I would select Groves as boss.” At the end of April 1945, the general was exultant. The sun shone