"Why We Did It!"

     Such thinking seems ghoulish now, but it was not out of the mainstream in the spring of 1945.  Bombing civilian centers was anathema at the beginning of the war, but after the London blitz and the day-and-night raids against Germany in 1943-44, city-bashing had become routine, accepted by a war-weary public.  In its March 19, 1945 issue, Newsweek celebrated the fact that "perhaps one million persons were made homeless" by LeMay's firebombing of Tokyo.  It seemed clear, after the kamikaze attacks and fights to the death in Okinawa and Iwo Jima, that breaking Japan's will would take drastic measures.

     Still, the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, was disturbed by the firebombing of Japan.  Stimson was an old-school gentleman, the unofficial chairman of the East Coast establishment.  He was a warrior - at the age of 50, he had asked for a combat command in the first world war - but he believed in civilized war, with the rules of fair play.  As secretary of state in the late 1920's, he had abolished America's code-breaking capability because "gentlemen do not open other gentlemen's mail."  Now, as secretary of war, he thought that he had insisted on "precision" bombing, and he protested against the wholesale slaughter wreaked by General LeMay's bombing campaign.

     Stimson was still stewing over the May 25th firebombing of Tokyo  several days later when he called General Groves and demanded to know the target list for the A-bomb.  Groves was balky about telling him.  "On this matter, I am the kingpin," insisted Stimson.  Groves grudgingly replied that the target was Kyoto.  Stimson, who had visited the shrines decades before, said no.  Smashing Japan's cultural center was wrong.  It was akin to the Japanese targeting the Lincoln Memorial.

     Stimson was haunted by the bomb, which in his diary he also called "the thing", "the dire", "the dreadful", "the terrible", and "the diabolical".  The night after he ordered Groves not to bomb Kyoto, he was unable to sleep.  In his diary, he wrote that the bomb "may destroy or perfect International Civilization."  The weapon could be "a means for World Peace."  Or, he wrote, it may be "Frankenstein".  Stimson's ambivalence was the product of his background.  As a Wall Street lawyer, he had tried to be ethical, refusing to represent seedy clients.  But his real-world experience had also taught him that expediency was sometimes necessary.  This mix of principle and calculation was blended into his strongly held view that the United States must be the single greatest power after the war, and that it was his job - his personal responsibility as an arbiter of the WASP upper class - to lay the groundwork.  However frightening, the bomb could be a "mastercard" in the great game of diplomacy.  "I called it a royal straight flush, and we mustn't be a fool about the way we play it," he wrote in his diary.

     Stimson's sense of duty weighed on him; at 77, he was physically spent.  He still rode and played paddle tennis at his estate on Long Island.  On one evening in June of 1945, he told his assistant, John McCloy, that he would probably have to skip an important meeting, scheduled at the White House the following day, to discuss plans for the invasion of Japan.  The landings on Kyushu island, on beaches named after cars (Beach Buick, Beach Cadillac, etc.), were scheduled to begin November 1.  Stimson was all done in, he told McCloy, he had to rest.  That evening, at his mansion off Rock Creek Park, Stimson did sit and listen as McCloy, a fellow Wall Street lawyer, worried aloud about the cost of invading Japan.  From Europe and all over the Pacific, 1 million men were being assembled for the final assault on the homeland.  Pentagon planners were predicting that 20,000 American soldiers would die in the first month.  In fact, the death toll might well have gone higher.  Japanese draftees were being trained to strap on explosives and hurl themselves at tanks, while high-school girls were equipped with carpenter's awls to guard their honor.

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