BOOK II
11.
While Bennie Schriever was still off in the Pacific in those heady days right after the defeat of Japan, the power relationships of the world in which he had grown up and fought a war were already in motion toward a profound transformation, as great in geopolitical terms as if the plates of the earth underpinning the continents had shifted in some gigantic tectonic movement. The multipolar world of his youth and early manhood was gone. Imperial Japan’s far-flung Asian empire was a memory. Japan itself was in cinders, some irradiated from the two atomic bombs the United States had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Germany’s cities had been made of brick and concrete, not the wooden buildings that would be soft prey to incendiaries from Curtis LeMay’s B-29s, but Germany too was in rubble. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had endured for twelve, the invincible führer hunkering in his bunker and blowing out his brains with his pistol amidst the flames and ruins of the Wagnerian funeral that was the final battle for Berlin.
France was in moral and physical collapse from its defeat by Germany in 1940, from the shame of Nazi occupation and collaboration by the Vichy regime, and from the devastation wrought by Allied armies after they had invaded at Normandy in 1944 to liberate Western Europe. Great Britain was exhausted by the cost of the victory. The British had been at war since Hitler had invaded Poland in September 1939. They had been drained of a quarter of their national wealth and more than 400,000 lives, including civilians killed by German bombs, out of a population still suffering from the keen memory of the 908,371 men who were supposed to have bought peace with their lives in the trenches of the First World War, that earlier war to end all wars. India, the jeweled keystone of their vast and cherished empire, was about to spin off in independence, initiating an irreversible process of imperial fragmentation and dissolution.
Only the United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from the war with their statures enhanced. Americans had every reason to feel pleased with themselves. With the exception of Honolulu, not a single enemy bomb had fallen on their cities. Their economy, prostrate during the Great Depression, had been turned into a colossus of productivity to arm and equip not only the U.S. forces but also those of Great Britain and the Soviet Union through Lend-Lease. The war spending by the “Arsenal of Democracy” had brought jobs and prosperity to tens of millions. The sacrifice in lives had been large but not beyond proportion—292,131 battle deaths and 115,185 from disease and other causes in an armed forces of 16.3 million men. There was the consolation that all of them had died in the cause of humanity. In contrast to the disillusioning experiences of the Europeans, there had never been a “bad” war in American historical memory. All American wars, beginning with the Revolution to wrest independence from Britain for the Thirteen Colonies, had been unifying ventures, moral crusades in which manhood was proven and glory won. Even the losers in the American Civil War, those who had fought under the stars and bars flag of the Confederacy, had been honored men in their home communities, despite their defeat. Their cause might be a lost cause, but in the white American South it had remained a sacred cause. There had been deviations, of course. The war with Mexico in the 1840s had been a war of conquest and the United States had fought another war of conquest in the Philippines, the first American imperial possession in Asia, at the turn of the twentieth century. These, however, had been pushed out of the American historical consciousness. In this uniquely American perspective the war just concluded had been the ultimate in the long line of good wars, a triumph of American military and industrial genius over the most hideous of enemies. And there was the additional comforting thought that the United States alone had the atomic bomb.
The new president, Harry Truman, who as vice president had succeeded to the office following the death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, was under the impression that the monopoly would last a good many years. Major General Leslie Groves, the Army engineer who had headed the Manhattan Project, the huge, top secret enterprise that created the bomb, predicted it would take the Soviet Union “ten, twenty, or even sixty years” to build one. In October 1947, he was a bit more precise—fifteen to twenty years. Other not so sanguine voices within the scientific community and the intelligence services said the Soviets would probably have a bomb by the early or mid-1950s. Truman paid less attention to them. He assumed that, for the foreseeable future, the United States alone would hold the great destroyer. He and his new secretary of state, James “Jimmie” Byrnes, had devised a scheme of “atomic diplomacy” to wield the bomb as a cudgel to keep the Soviet Union in line in the postwar years.
Franklin Roosevelt, who died before the first mushroom cloud of the atomic era rose over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, in Trinity, the code name for the successful test of the implosion-type bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had hoped to perpetuate the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union into cooperation in the postwar years. In February 1945, he and Winston Churchill, the British wartime leader, had met with Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, at Yalta in the Crimea and ratified Soviet hegemony over Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the other nations of Eastern Europe in exchange for Stalin’s commitment to join the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany. While Stalin promised to hold free elections and foster democratic institutions, it was understood that these would be shaped to serve Soviet interests, that Eastern Europe would lie within the Soviet Union’s postwar sphere of influence. Roosevelt’s Republican opponents would later use Yalta to sully his memory by accusing him of having “given away” Eastern Europe, but Roosevelt could not give away what Stalin, in fact, already possessed. By the end of January 1945 the Red Army had driven Hitler’s Wehrmacht from almost all of Eastern Europe and had broken into Germany for the advance on Berlin, which fell on May 2. Short of now going to war with the Soviet Union to wrest Eastern Europe from Stalin, the most that could be done was to try to mitigate his treatment of its peoples.
Roosevelt believed that reason and restraint worked best with Stalin. His scrappy successor had a different attitude. Truman was, to begin with, much more militantly anti-Communist. The day after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Truman, then a senator from Missouri, had advocated keeping both German and Russian blood flowing: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word.” Henry Stimson, the elder statesman and holdover secretary of war from Roosevelt’s administration, warned him that atomic diplomacy would backfire, that attempting to negotiate with the Soviets with “this weapon ostentatiously on our hip” would only increase Stalin’s innate suspicion and distrust. Truman did not believe him. He was convinced that the way to handle the Soviets was with strong words made stronger by the shadow of the mushroom cloud behind them. “If you don’t cut out all of this stalling and let us get down to work,” Byrnes said to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, at the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in September 1945, the first major postwar conference, “I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.” The remark was phrased as a joke, but Molotov, and Stalin when it was relayed to him, understood the menace behind it.