Adachi filled a balloon with gas and attached to it a small canister containing high explosive. The trial balloon bomb was launched and tracked for some distance by a Zero fighter. It climbed steadily into the Japan Current and then headed eastward on a journey which would take it across the Pacific, passing north of Hawaii, and eventually to the coast of the United States.
Other balloon bombs followed.
Radar was not yet advanced enough to warn of their approach.
The Japanese, of course, did not know if the balloons had reached their target. But navy chief of staff Admiral Toyoda, mindful of his promise to carry the war to the American shore, ordered full-scale production of the balloon bombs.
Soon, all of America’s West Coast cities would be targets. Given favorable weather conditions, the balloons might even reach Salt Lake City and Chicago.
In the coming weeks, some six thousand balloon bombs would be launched. Of those that would arrive in the United States, most would fall in the deserts of California and Nevada and the forests of Oregon. It would never be officially revealed how many victims they had claimed. And nobody will ever know how many Japanese balloon bombs still lie unexploded in remote areas of North America.
The first wire-service flash of Roosevelt’s death had reached army intelligence chief Arisue in Tokyo before most people in Warm Springs were aware of the event.
Since then, he had been busily building up a psychological profile of Truman. Most of his information came from the Japanese military attaché in Bern, Lieutenant General Seigo Okamoto, who had been the link in Arisue’s abortive attempts to contact Allen Dulles.
Aided as well by wire-service copy and transcripts of monitored broadcasts, Arisue came to an unexpected conclusion: Truman was going to be even tougher than Roosevelt.
The new president would, in Arisue’s estimation, “overwhelm the old man” who had been prime minister of Japan for the past ten days.
On April 5, a serious political crisis, brewing for weeks, had finally erupted in Tokyo. On that day, General Kumaki Koiso, the compromise premier following Tojo’s forced resignation, had suggested to the military that they allow him a share in their decision making. The generals had refused. Koiso had resigned.
He was replaced by Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, a hero of the Russo-Japanese war, whose frail body bore three bullet marks—a legacy of the days he had fallen foul of right-wing extremists in the army.
Arisue was astounded that Suzuki had accepted a post where the risks of death were even greater. He would have been more astonished to know that the emperor himself had charged Suzuki with the task of finding a means of ending the war. Those means did not, of course, include outright surrender.
Within hours of accepting office, Suzuki had received alarming news. Japan’s ambassador in Moscow had cabled that the Soviet Union did not intend to renew its neutrality pact. It would be allowed to lapse automatically in one year. Finding an acceptable means of ending the conflict became even more urgent.
The prospect of Japan’s negotiating a peace was very much on Arisue’s mind. On the very day Roosevelt was being buried on the other side of the world, he had learned that naval intelligence was again trying to contact Allen Dulles in Switzerland.
Arisue understood the reasoning of his naval counterparts; it coincided with his own. Truman was a hard-liner; it would be better to settle with him now, while Japan still had some bargaining power left. The American bombing offensive, the sea blockade, the relentless ground-fire barrage which had now crept to within 350 miles of Tokyo—to Okinawa, where a fierce and bloody battle was raging for the last major island between the enemy and Japan’s westernmost mainland island, Kyushu—all these would ultimately weaken Japan to the point where the unacceptable unconditional surrender would be all that was left.
But Arisue and the other moderates did not believe Japan should surrender unconditionally. He believed that, by negotiation, Japan should attempt to hold some of the territory her forces had occupied in the war, and even if this proved impossible, there must at absolute minimum be a guarantee by the Allies of the emperor’s safety and continuing omnipotent rule.
Arisue did not trust the navy to achieve even this fundamental requirement in its maneuvering in Switzerland. He cabled military attaché Okamoto in Bern and told him to redouble his efforts to contact Dulles.
33
On Truman’s desk was a letter from Stimson. It had arrived the day before, April 24.
Dear Mr. President,
I think it very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office, but have not urged it since on account of the pressures you have been under. It, however, has such a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.
Truman had arranged an appointment for his secretary of war at midday. The president would be happy to have any information that might help him keep the Russians in their place. He had shown his mettle three days earlier when Molotov and Gromyko, en route to the opening session of the United Nations in San Francisco, had stopped by the White House. Truman had told them the Soviet Union was reneging on its Yalta agreements. His language was so blunt and without diplomatic euphemisms that Molotov had bridled. “I have never been talked to like this in my life.”
Truman’s reply was crisp. “Carry out your agreements, and you won’t get talked to like this.”
Promptly at noon, the secretary of war arrived. Stimson said he was expecting one other person. Five minutes later, Groves appeared. He had slipped in through the back door to avoid arousing speculation among the journalists stationed in and around the executive mansion.
Stimson said the meeting was to discuss details of a bomb equal in power to all the artillery used in both world wars.
Groves winced inwardly. He had earlier told Stimson not to lay too great an emphasis on the bomb’s power; he did not want the new president to become alarmed at the sheer magnitude of the weapon.
But Stimson was determined to lay out all the facts. He began to read from a prepared memorandum.
Within four months 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.
Although we have shared its development with the United Kingdom, physically the U.S. is at present in the position of controlling the resources with which to construct and use it and no other nation could reach this position for some years. Nevertheless, it is practically certain that we could not remain in this position indefinitely.
Stimson explained that the theory behind the making of an atomic bomb was widely known. He went on to conjure up a nightmare that could come to pass.
We may see a time when such a weapon may be constructed in secret and used suddenly and effectively…. With its aid, even a very powerful unsuspecting nation might be conquered within a very few days by a very much smaller one…. The world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.
Truman paused, then posed a question: was Stimson at least as concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as with its capacity to shorten the war?