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By Root 1207 0

wreaked havoc in Asia. It seems mistaken of some historians to perceive this view as reflecting a crude competitive nationalism on the part of the U.S. government. Truman’s and Byrnes’s attitude was certainly ruthless, but it lacked neither realism nor statesmanship. They understood, as some people in the West did not yet understand, the depth of evil which Stalin’s Soviet Union represented. They may be accused of treating Japan with a summary abruptness which its residual military power did not make necessary. But it was the misfortune of the Japanese in July 1945 that their own prevarication coincided with other imperatives oppressing America’s leadership.

To Truman, Byrnes, Acheson and many others, swift victory over the declared present enemy of the democracies would also send an important signal to their undeclared prospective foe. It seems correct to acknowledge that a race to claim victory over Japan took place between America and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1945. The motives of the U.S. government, however, seem deserving of more respect than critics accord them. It also seems mistaken to convey even an implicit impression that the principal objective of the Hiroshima bomb was to impress the Soviet Union. This was certainly a highly desirable secondary purpose of Colonel Tibbets’s mission. But it remains almost impossible to doubt that the atomic weapons would have been used to hasten Japan’s surrender whether or not the Soviets were on the brink of intervention.

If this argument is important in assessing Truman’s Hiroshima decision, however, it does not address the question of what manner of warning might first have been given. As far as is known, none of the Americans or British present at Potsdam voiced moral scruples about using the bomb. But the Western Allied leadership exhaustively debated the merits of first presenting an ultimatum to the Japanese, along the lines proposed by Stimson and McCloy. Winston Churchill, in his last days as prime minister after losing the July 1945 British general election, renewed his urging that the unconditional surrender doctrine should be modified.

Truman was not overawed by the greatest Englishman. “We had a most843 pleasant conversation,” he wrote of their first meeting, in a characteristic passage of his Potsdam diary. “He is a most charming and a very clever person—meaning clever in the English, not the Kentucky sense. He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me, etc., etc. I gave him as cordial a reception as I could—being naturally (I hope) a polite and agreeable person. I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap. You know, soft soap is made of ash hopper rye and it burns to beat hell when it gets into the eyes.”

Truman rejected Churchill’s emollient proposal as swiftly as Roosevelt had done in Cairo. When the prime minister made reference to giving the Japanese “some show of saving their military honour,” the president responded tartly that, since Pearl Harbor, they had little of this commodity left. He remained unimpressed when Churchill persisted “that at any rate they had something844 for which they were ready to face certain death in very large numbers.” Churchill told Truman that Stalin had disclosed to him the Japanese peace feelers to Moscow. The Soviet leader, who shortly afterwards repeated the same story to the U.S. president, plainly hoped to exploit this disclosure as earnest that he would conduct no secret bilateral negotiation with Tokyo.

Yet, just as Truman’s mention to Stalin at Potsdam that the U.S. “now possessed a new weapon of unusual destructive force” came as no surprise to the Russian leader, so he also probably knew or guessed that the Americans were reading Japanese cipher traffic. Soviet agents had penetrated Western intelligence as thoroughly as they had done the Manhattan Project. A notable feature of Potsdam was the fashion in which the Big Three revealed to each other supposed secrets which were already known to the recipients.