Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [319]
And indeed, even while the Allied warlords conferred in Germany, Japanese exchanges with the Russians continued. As agreed between Truman and Stalin, on 18 July Moscow sought clarification of Tokyo’s position. Two days later, Ambassador Sato sent a signal to his government, passionately urging that Japan should offer its surrender, subject only to preservation of the kokutai. Foreign Minister Togo dismissed this proposal: “The whole country as one man will pit itself against the enemy in accordance with the Imperial Will so long as the enemy demands unconditional surrender,” he informed Sato—and, of course, through Magic the Americans—on 21 July. Four days later, Togo told Sato to inform Moscow that if Russia remained indifferent to Japanese requests for mediation, “we will have no choice but to consider another course of action.” This plainly signalled a threat to approach the other Allies. Nothing in these messages was likely to persuade Washington that Tokyo had embraced reality. Magic decrypts of messages from neutral diplomats in Japan to their home capitals showed their assessments matching everything the Americans knew from the Moscow-Tokyo exchanges: the Japanese were determined to fight to the end. Their government explicitly rejected the urgings of such rationalists as Sato to accept unconditional surrender.
In Potsdam, debate continued about the wording of Stimson’s proposed ultimatum or proclamation to Japan. The Joint Strategic Survey Committee disliked the notion of promising, as the secretary of war wished, that the emperor’s position would be protected. Its members, good republicans, preferred to say that “Subject to suitable guarantees against further acts of aggression, the Japanese people will be free to choose their own form of government.” The War Department’s Operations Division, Stimson’s drafters, remained determined to offer a commitment to sustain the emperor, and substituted: “The Japanese people will be free to choose whether they shall retain their Emperor as a constitutional monarchy.” The joint chiefs of staff told the president that they favoured the JSSC version, which best fitted the American vision of national rights to self-determination.
On 21 July, General Groves’s full report from Alamogordo, brimming with exhilaration, was received in Potsdam: “For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion!…The test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone…We are all fully conscious that our real goal is still before us. The battle test is what counts in the war within Japan.” When Stimson read Groves’s dispatch aloud to Truman and Byrnes at the Little White House, the president looked “immensely pepped up.” The news, he told the secretary of war, gave him “an entirely new confidence.” McCloy noted in his diary: “The Big Bomb stiffened Truman and Churchill…They went to the next meeting like little boys with a big red apple secreted on their persons.” Stimson was enraged to learn that Groves had reinstated Kyoto as primary target for the first bomb. He hastened to signal Washington, vetoing the general’s choice, though the rationale explained to Truman was scarcely enlightened. Sparing Kyoto, Stimson suggested bizarrely, should ensure “a sympathetic Japan to the United States in case there should be any aggression by Russia in Manchuria.”
The War Department, in its turn, signalled to Potsdam that it should be possible to use the first atomic bomb soon after 1 August, depending on weather, and almost certainly before the tenth. On the morning of 23 July, Truman told Stimson that he accepted the latest draft of his “warning message” to the Japanese. He proposed to issue this as soon as possible. On the morning of 25 July Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanding the U.S. Army’s Strategic Air Force in the Pacific, received a written order for dropping the two bombs on Japan, approved in Potsdam by Stimson and Marshall. It is uncertain