Kamikaze (13 page)

“Find anything?” Joe called from a decent distance away. Her grandfather knew better than to traipse across a possible crime scene.

There was no need for Jackie to reply. The moment she turned to face him, the old man could see the answer in the pain around her eyes. She was tough, but he was tougher, for Joe was a veteran of both the Depression and the Pacific War. So when he held his arms wide open to embrace her, Jackie swiftly closed the gap between them. Both Hetts, however, knew that no matter how hard they clung to each other, that gap would always be there, for the generation connecting them had been snatched away.

“Why?” Jackie choked. “Why kill Dad?”

“Wrong place, wrong time,” Joe mumbled flatly.

“No!” she replied, gritting her teeth. “There must be more. Why? Why?
Why!
”

Hickam’s Flag

Potsdam, Germany

July 16, 1945

On May 8, 1945, less than a month into Harry S. Truman’s presidency, Nazi Germany surrendered.

So that left the “Japs.”

How Truman felt about the “Japs” was a matter of record. “I think one man is just as good as another, so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman,” he once wrote. “Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

In his hatred of the Japs—Truman called them “savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic”—the president wasn’t alone. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor—Roosevelt’s “date which will live in infamy”—had enraged America to its racial core. Hitler’s war was white on white, but the fight
with Japan was different. The Japs were the Other; comic books portrayed them as bucktoothed yellow monkeys. Some GIs in the Pacific War collected scalps or ears as trophies.

Admiral William Halsey told men going into battle, “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. The only good Jap is a Jap who’s been dead for six months.”

The motto of the U.S. Marines was: “Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ’em dying.”

The commander of the Tenth Army at the Battle of Okinawa, General Joseph Stilwell—also known as “Vinegar Joe”—wrote, “When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.”

As Truman put it, “When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.”

That’s why the American flag that flapped at the meeting of Truman, Churchill, and Stalin in Potsdam, Germany, in July was the same Stars and Stripes that had flown from the flagpole at Hickam Field during the Japanese sneak attack.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

Truman did.

And this was the man who would decide whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

They called it Truman’s Little White House, this grimy yellow-and-red lakeside villa in Babelsberg, between
bomb-blasted Berlin and the site of the Potsdam Conference. Yesterday, after a week at sea on the
Augusta,
the president had docked at Antwerp, Belgium, then flown in for his first showdown with Joseph Stalin. As luck would have it, Stalin was delayed for a day, so Truman and James Byrnes, his secretary of state, toured Berlin, sightseeing instead of strong-arming. That night, after they’d returned to the villa for drinks and dinner, Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, arrived with a coded telegram. A subsequent cable carried much the same message:

To Secretary of War from Harrison. Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams here to my farm.

 

“Big brother” was the world’s first atomic device. It had been exploded that pre-dawn at Alamogordo Bombing Range, two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, in New Mexico’s desert.

“Little boy” was code for the uranium bomb to be dropped on Japan.

“Highhold” was Stimson’s home near Washington.

“My farm” was the Virginia spread of Stimson’s assistant, George Harrison.

The medical terms in the telegram bamboozled those who manned the Potsdam communications center.

They thought that the secretary of war—who was seventy-seven years old—had just become a dad.

From the moment Truman assumed his role as U.S. commander in chief, after the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, his focus was on Russia. On April 13, the day after he was sworn in, Truman was advised that Churchill was upset with the Russians. They weren’t living up to their agreements in Europe, and hadn’t been since the Yalta Conference.

Now it was time for the president to meet Generalissimo Stalin in conquered Germany. The location chosen was Potsdam’s Cecilienhof Palace, the estate of the former kaiser. Before leaving, Truman told the world what he hoped to achieve: “We’ve got to teach [the Russians] how to behave.”

To that end, the Americans had made the conference coincide with their first test of the atomic bomb. With the test a success, Truman had an ace up his sleeve for his negotiations with Stalin. The time was nigh for a little atomic diplomacy. As Truman liked to say, whenever he had the upper hand, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Behind the scenes, however, another man called the shots: the “assistant president,” Jimmy Byrnes. Byrnes had spent thirty years in the House and the Senate, and sat on the Supreme Court, and served Roosevelt as director of war mobilization, and seemed to be the man to step into FDR’s shoes ... until he lost the vice-presidency to Truman at the
Democratic Party’s 1944 Chicago convention. In fact, when the “old Missouri farmer”—as Truman liked to call himself—had first arrived in the Senate in 1935, it was Byrnes who took him under his more experienced wing.

Truman looked up to Byrnes, and Byrnes looked down on Truman. He regarded his new president as a political nonentity with no abilities to speak of and no knowledge of how to conduct foreign policy—or much else, it appeared. Byrnes saw Truman as an accident of history, and not a good accident. So of course, Truman made Byrnes not only his secretary of state, but also his chief adviser on the question of whether to drop the bomb.

And now it was “bull bat time.”

Bull bat time was a phrase politicians used for a night of drinking, playing poker, and discussing matters of state. So after Stimson brought news of the explosion of the bomb, Truman and Byrnes filled their glasses with Jimmy’s best bourbon and took a congratulatory stroll to see the moon and the stars reflect off Griebnitz Lake.

“We
did
it,” Truman said.

“We sure did,” Byrnes agreed.

The men clinked glasses and downed a slug of whiskey as a toast to the bomb.

“So how should I play this with Uncle Joe tomorrow?” asked Truman.

“Hard ball,” Byrnes replied. “When you sent Hopkins to Moscow, what’d you tell him?”

“I told him to use a baseball bat, if he thought that was the proper approach to Stalin. Just crack him over the head.”

“That’s good advice,” said Byrnes. “We’ve got blue chips on the table. The Russians are planning world conquest. Force is the only thing they understand. The atomic bomb will make Stalin more manageable in Europe. It’ll bully him. A combat display against the Japs will impress the Russkies with Uncle Sam’s military might. We’ll be able to dictate our own terms at the end of the war. There’s only one way to play this. Give ’em hell, Harry.”

July 17, 1945

“That SOB!” Truman fumed over drinks the following night. “Did you see how he tried to push me around, Jimmy?”

“You stood your own, Harry. You bossed the meeting.”

“When we had pictures taken, did you see how Stalin stood on the step above me? The balls of that guy! And they call me the ‘little man.’ Hell, I’m five-feet-eight. Stalin’s got to be five-five. Five-six, tops. He thinks he’s the ‘big I am’? Well, I’ve got news for Uncle Joe. In time, he’ll see how big
I
am.”

July 18, 1945

Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for lunch to compare notes on Stalin. The president wrote in his diary: “P.M. & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a
success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.”

July 20, 1945

Fortified by the muscular success of the atomic bomb, Truman stood up to the Russians—as Churchill saw it—“in a most emphatic and decisive manner.”

Then Truman wrote to his wife, Bess: “We had a tough meeting yesterday. I reared up on my hind legs and told ’em where to get off and they got off. I have to make it perfectly plain to them”—Stalin’s Russians and Great Britain—“at least once a day that so far as this President is concerned Santa Claus is dead and that my first interest is U.S.A., then I want the Jap War won and I want ’em both in it … They are beginning to awake to the fact that I mean business.”