The Atomic Bombing of Japan - The First Shots of the Cold War? (416)

26:32Now, there were prime orders from Washington that these bombs had to be dropped visually. They had the technique to drop by radar, but the radars were very primitive and they needed to drop these bombs visually. That was the order. That was a very high level. I mean, almost not quite presidential, but right at the top, this order. They're circling this city, Kokura, which is covered in smoke from a US ray because the winds, I think, have changed direction. And they cannot see the city properly to bomb it. They can't see their target. They can't see their aiming point. They try three times, twice from one direction, once from a second direction, and from a second direction, so three times.

27:15And each time they do this, they keep not being able to see the end point. The fuel is now running really low. Japanese fighters, they're hearing them on the radar circuits. They can hear the Japanese fighters being scrambled. Flak is starting to come up from the ground. They haven't dropped the bomb on the primary target. They can't reach base. They don't have that level of communication, as I was saying before. They can't actually have the range to reach base and ask what to do. And an argument breaks out in the plane. The tension is unbelievable in there. They're carrying this atomic bomb. They're running out of fuel.

27:49What are they going to do? They decide to go to their secondary target, which was Nagasaki. And they fly to Nagasaki. They reach Nagasaki and it's socked in. There's cloud over Nagasaki as well. And now they're really facing a problem. They've only got room for one bomb run. And even with this one bomb run, there's a real chance that they're going to have to ditch if they go back. No way they're going to go back to Tinian. They might get back to the most forward American base at Okinawa, but they might also have to ditch. So do they risk that? Do they risk trying to carry the bomb back? Do they risk ditching it, dropping it into the sea, landing in the sea with it on board, which no one's ever done before?

28:30Or do they drop it through cloud and break orders? This blazing argument breaks out in the plane between the weaponier who's a man called ashworth who later became a very senior admiral of the us sixth fleet and the pilot and this man called charles feeney and these arguments start to kind of really worry everybody in the crew what do we do do we drop do we not drop do we drop do we not drop finally they agree that they've got to drop this thing they've got to break orders and they do they set up for a radar bomb run they cross above the clouds and at the last moment the bombardier a man called bien spots through a hole a stadium that he recognizes from photographs of nagasaki and he says i can see the stadium and he drops the bomb kind of half visually, half on radar.

29:27But the truth is they haven't a clue where they dropped the second atomic bomb on a city. They don't know where they dropped it. They drop it. They get the hell out as quickly as they can. They land back at Okinawa several hours later with one minute's fuel left on board. Literally, the engines start dying as they're actually coming to, and the final engine goes when they actually reach the end of the runway. They have no idea where they dropped this bomb. And as it turns out, in this extraordinary irony, they actually managed to drop the bomb completely by accident, very close to the factories that made the torpedoes that were used in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

30:12So the war kind of ends, you know, in full circle. There's a connection between how it begins in 1941, if you're America, of course, and how it ends on August the 9th, 1945. Effectively, it went on five days, longer than that, but all six days. But that's what happens. So it's a total cock-up on the mission. And these guys are kind of lucky not to be court-martialed. But in the end, an atomic bomb is an atomic bomb. The city is destroyed, and a few days later, the Japanese surrender.

30:44Cold War Conversations:the american bombing of of japan has been going on for a number of years and even with their conventional weapons they have killed hundreds of thousands of the japanese population i mean tokyo almost looks like it's had an atomic bomb hit it because of the conventional the fire bombing and that that's a lot of that's because a lot of these cities are made out of wood and within centuries they just catch a light and the americans are creating a firestorm but so not not belittling the casualties in hiroshima and uh and and nagasaki that there's been this ongoing campaign and i presume when the the japanese see a single b-29 they just think well that they're just a weather reconnaissance or or something like that plane they have no idea what is coming.

31:35Cold War Conversations:And I guess in the following days, they must be really nervous about any single US aircraft over Japan. Yeah, I mean, interesting enough, the sirens never went when the plane, the Enola Gay plane and the two planes that were away, there's a strike force, and it's the Enola Gay, the camera plane, the instrument plane, three. And no sirens went off. I mean, it was way hard. I asked a lot of people at the time, what did you see? and it was three tiny glinting silver dots. They were flying about the same height as a modern airline. In fact, I asked if you saw the white vapor trails, but most people think they weren't.

32:13They weren't vapor trails up there, but they're very, very, very high. Just three of them, completely nothing. Hiroshima was only bombed briefly once earlier that year. It hadn't been bombed. It hadn't been touched. There were rumors in the city that the reason why it hadn't been touched was that Truman, President Truman's mother, was being kept prisoner in the city. It was actually that rumor that people were trying to work out, why is our city not? And lots of people. I have letters. I read letters from people saying, send my son to Hiroshima. Can he come and stay with relatives in Hiroshima?

32:46Because it's the safest city in Japan. But it was untouched deliberately. It was a target selection committee, and I interviewed one of the last surviving members of that target selection committee, the people that chose Hiroshima as the target. And this target selection committee met twice, essentially, once in May and once in June, before the bomb had even been tested. They selected Hiroshima precisely because it hadn't been bombed. They wanted to see exactly what an atomic bomb could do to a city. And what's the point they wanted other people to see? We might come to this later. It wasn't just the Japanese.

33:21It was also the Soviets. I mean, this is where the Cold War begins, actually. They were already talking about it being important that the impact of one bomb on one city should be witnessed and should be publicized. And the discussion about publicity, in fact, they used publicity director of a major, I think it was AT &T, a major American corporation, was part of the Manhattan Project. incredibly they were thinking like decades ahead about publicizing the bomb so to pick up on your point about conventional firestormer you're absolutely right the operation in march 1945 on tokyo was devastating unbelievably devastating in fact by august 1945 some 900 000 people were homeless in japan and hundreds of thousands have been killed by that time in conventional warfare the whole point about the atomic bomb was it was one bomb one bomb from one plane could do this to a city not hundreds of planes not a thousand bomber raid just one and that was its power that was its impact that's what they wanted to get across that they had the power to do this and to keep doing it because the impression was and the decision was to keep building these bombs until the Japanese surrendered.

34:47They were going to drop bombs continually. I mean, I think it was a production line planned for up to 12 or 15 atomic bombs. They're going to keep going until the Japanese stopped, basically. So the idea of a single bomb, very, very powerful. However, in the target selection committee meetings, there is an unbelievable conversation, actually, about whether to follow up the atomic bomb immediately with a full-scale conventional raid on Hiroshima. Real discussion about that. Why do we hit them really hard? We'll drop the atomic bomb, and while they're just completely devastated, their city's destroyed, God knows how many of you have been killed, we'll follow up with a full-scale raid on top of that.

35:38And that was seriously discussed in the meeting. These men sitting around the table actually discussed that. And the only reason why they decided not to do that was because it would muddy the effect of the atomic bomb. It would make it harder for those that needed to know, the Japanese, possibly the Soviets, and the rest of the world, to see the power that this one bomb had, the damage that this one bomb could wreak on one city. So they decided in the end not to do that and to keep it, in the worst sense of the word, pure.

36:15Cold War Conversations:Wow. Wow. And the target selection is an interesting story because there's that scene in Oppenheimer where I think it's Stimpson, the secretary for war, where he says, well, no, no, you can't bomb that city. My wife and I spent our honeymoon there and we thought it was very nice. Or some words to that effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Henry Stimson was kind of an aristocratic, as you say, Secretary of War. He was quite old by then. He was very involved with the bomb, but at the same time, he hated it. He was terrified of it. I mean, he was sort of a Victorian gentleman who was flung into the middle of the 20th century.

36:54and so he had very ambivalent feelings towards the bomb and towards the use of the bomb and he was as you rightly say he was governor general of the philippines and had twice been to kato with his wife once i think their honeymoon in 1926 and again he'd actually been this wasn't in the film in 1929 even twice so he loved the place he saw that it was the spiritual heartland And he saw it was a very important, sacred place. And he said, we can't bomb that. General Groves, who was the head of the Manhattan Project, an incredible sort of Logan Roy character from Succession, but several times over.

37:35Extraordinary, terrifying, powerful, shocking, amazing human being, depending on your point of view. Who, without whom, it would never have happened. The Manhattan Project would never have been successful. he was determined to bomb Kyoto for exactly the reasons why Henry Stimson didn't want to bomb Kyoto precisely because it was the sacred heart of Japan it was a kind of a central part of their nationhood of their kind of spiritual identification or identity and that's exactly why he wanted to completely destroy it but it's kind of interesting that in ways Stimson was more affected by aesthetic credentials than he was by humanitarian ones.

38:17What mattered was not destroying buildings and temples rather than human beings. He was okay with human beings, but he wasn't okay with thousand-year-old temples, which is kind of warped thinking and also very elitist in its own way. Groves didn't care a jot about that. And he fought very hard to get Kyoto at the top of the list. And my goodness, it remained at the top of the list for a long, long time until finally in a kind of rearguard action, Stimson said, it's not happening. And so Groves reluctantly put Kyoto to one side and the next one up the list suddenly found itself in the prime nuclear slot.

38:58And that was Hiroshima.

39:01Cold War Conversations:I mean, we've mentioned the Soviets. Now, the Soviets are fully aware of the Manhattan Project. It's, I think, safe to say, well, not riddled with spies, but there are significant scientists at Los Alamos who are providing information to the Soviets. I think that Stalin knew about the Trinity test. He certainly knew about the Trinity test. At the Poxdown Conference, where basically the future of Europe and the world was being kind of carved up, in July 1945, there was a moment where Truman says, well, you know, we've got something quite big that we're intending to use quite soon. And Stalin says, oh, that's a very good idea.

39:45You know, go ahead and use it. And he thinks, oh, they'll never go. And Churchill, who was in on the story, of course knows what's going on, thinks, well, you know, we're on top here. And of course he wasn't at all. Yes, it was riddled with spies. Klaus Fuchs is one of the most famous of all and famously one of the best. I mean, Fuchs was very clever, actually. He was a fantastic dancer in Los Alamos. He's well known for the foxtrot. And he was a great party lover. He was also a great babysitter. He was always on hand ready to do babysitting if necessary, which sounds a little bit odd. But I think what it was, was his way of getting close to key people.

40:24Because when you're in that kind of environment, in that familial environment in Los Alamos, conversations take place. You talk to people and you talk to people who are not necessarily in your little bit of the bomb. because it was all very highly structured and departmentalized, very much need to know. So he was talking to people. He was getting that information. He was driving down to Santa Fe at the base of the mountains, lovely city. He was passing on information to his Soviet handler, which was all going straight back to essentially to Stalin. It's going right back there. So Stalin knew everything.

40:56He knew exactly what was going on. On the other hand, And it's perfectly clear that the Americans were also fighting a kind of third war in their heads, a third possible war against the Soviet Union. I mean, a really interesting snippet of information that I didn't really know about until I started researching the book. at the Yalta conference, I think in February, 1945, when of course Roosevelt was president, Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill were talking about when the Russians would enter the war. The Russians remember the Soviets. I use the term interchangeably, but the Soviets, forgive me for that.

41:35The Soviets were not in the war against Japan. They were neutral. That was the key. but they wanted Manchuria in China that was occupied by Japan. And in 1945, in February at Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill were very, very keen to bring Stalin into the war, to get the war over with quickly. And they agreed that Stalin would come in around August the 8th, 1945, with an invasion of Manchuria. That was what was agreed. Essentially, it was agreed. By the time you get to July 1935, and the bomb has been tested at Trinity and it's working, the last thing on earth that is wanted is for the Soviets to get involved in the war and somebody to take huge chunks of China, just like they've taken huge chunks of Eastern Europe.

42:33But that date of August 8th is very significant. because on the midnight of August the 8th, 1945, the Russians with a million men crossed the border into Manchuria. And just a few hours later, the second bomb was dropped to Nagasaki. So the Americans were timing it. They were trying to get the war finished as quickly as I think. There was a deadline. There was a ticking clock here. So it's not just about ending the war with Japan. It's stopping the Soviets from crossing that border. And essentially, by ending the war four or five days later, that ended the invasion of Manchuria for the Russians.

43:16So it was timed. I mean, there were other considerations, but essentially it was timed. It was timed to stop that war before the Soviets got as far into China as they had done into Eastern Europe, which so worried the Americans and Churchill.

43:33Cold War Conversations:obviously the Soviets are still developing their weapon and the Americans have this monopoly on the weapon and they're not I mean it seems pretty obvious that they weren't going to share those secrets with the Soviets but they don't even share it with the Brits either no they don't no no they absolutely don't they keep it very many they're the most powerful nation on earth and they've got this they don't want to share it with the Brits no they're very in fact Britain ends up having to develop its own independent nuclear deterrent because they're not getting all of those here. They've got some of it.

44:07Of course, some British scientists obviously worked in Los Angeles, but no, you're absolutely right. I had this extraordinary moment when I was researching the book one night, and I had never seen this document before, but I do quote it in the book. One night, I was in the National Archives in Washington, DC, and I was going through these boxes of files and amazing material. And I remember there was a storm coming, that's right, and the library was going to close earlier than usual. It was going to close at eight o 'clock and it was about 7.15, 7.20. It was my last day in the library. I had about 40 minutes left.

44:45It was nighttime. I can remember that. And I was one of the very last people in the reading room and I was going through the last box and I had almost got to the bottom of it and I picked up a document that was at the bottom of the pile that was marked top secret in its day, but obviously released. And I opened this document up and I actually have the name of it. And the document was a memo from Groves, General Groves, and it contained another document, which I'd never seen quoted anywhere before at that time. Now, some of your listeners would maybe know about this now, but it wasn't known about when I first wrote this book in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of the bomb.

45:24And it says, estimated bomb requirements for destruction of Russian strategic areas. And the date is about 30th of August, 1945. And it contains a list of 66 Soviet cities in order of size, population, beginning with Moscow, 66 of them. And on the right-hand side is a column saying the number of bombs, atomic bombs, required to destroy each of those cities. 204 bombs will be required to destroy 66 of the biggest cities in the USSR. What is extraordinary is that that document must have been prepared before the war was even over. In other words, when there were still smoking ruins in Nagasaki and in Hiroshima, somebody in the Pentagon was sitting down and working out how many of these things are going to be required to take out 66 of the biggest cities in the Soviet Union.

46:27It's extraordinary. I'd never seen that before anywhere. And it's a very chilling list. It literally goes city, population, square mileage, number of bombs, right the way down the list, 66 of them, 204 Hiroshima-sized bombs. They were already in their heads fighting World War III.

46:47Cold War Conversations:I found it really useful watching the Oppenheimer film again to get some more clarity on the context of the development of the bomb and some of the politics behind it. It's quite a difficult film, quite complicated actually. Yeah, watching it a second time around, I could focus more on other stories there, but it was apparent they were very fearful of communist infiltration right from the off. And so they were very fearful of the Soviets. And this was even in, you know, 42, 43, that they were conscious of that and thinking that they were going to be the next enemy once Germany and Japan were defeated.

47:30Exactly. And one of the reasons why they didn't want to share the information about the atomic bomb with the Brits is, remember, Plus Fuchs had come to Britain first, right, before he then went on to Los Alamos. As far as they were concerned, Britain was porous, right? It was poor and porous, which is kind of the same thing. You know, people were poor. It was battered by six years of war by then, you know, and its intelligence services were not robust. There wasn't enough money to fund them and they just were not robust enough. And the fear was that if there's going to be a leak, that's where it was going to come from.

48:11In fact, the irony was it came from Los Animals. It came from the beating heart, if you like. But the fear was it could come from Manchester University or other kind of centers of nuclear research in the United Kingdom. That was the real fear. So they didn't trust anyone. It wasn't like they didn't trust the British. They didn't trust the British not to reveal the secrets to the Soviets. That was the real danger. Okay. So that's why they held tight to their own. I mean, they did the same thing with missile technology. It was exactly the same thing with V2 technology. I mean, the Brits got nothing.

48:41The Russians and the Americans divided the spores between them. And frankly, the Americans got most of it. They went in really fast to take that missile technology of Werner von Braun out and then test it in America on white sands. That's what they did. The Brits got nothing. They, you know, left behind over and over again. So the fear was, this is technology at the cutting edge. Whoever has this technology is going to run the world, is going to decide the fate of the free world effectively. And at a time when everybody knew how ruthless Stalin could be and Stalin's Soviet Union could be, it was essential to block any possible leakage of key intelligence in that direction, which would mean, if necessary, clamping down on certain key relationships with your greatest ally, the one with whom you have the so-called special relationship, namely us.

49:38So these fears are really kind of infecting. I mean, it's completely clear that in some of the conversations that are taking place in Potsdam in July 1945, Stimson, the man you mentioned earlier on, the Secretary of War, who had, as I said, this very ambivalent relationship with the bomb, had complete access to all the top secret telegrams that were being sent from the Japanese ambassador in Moscow to the Japanese foreign minister in Tokyo. All of that secret information had been decrypted. There was the equivalent of an Enigma decrypt, you know, the Enigma code. It was like that. They were called magic intercepts.

50:24He could read all of that traffic. And in that traffic, he can see the increasing panic of the Japanese ambassador. Remember, Russia is not in the war at this point. And the increasing panic of the Japanese ambassador in Moscow saying, we've got to get a peace deal. We've got to find a way in which the Russians can mediate a deal between the Americans or the allies and us, because if we don't, things are going to go really wrong very, very quickly. And this panic infects all of these intercepts. He can see, he being Stinson, that the Japanese, or at least elements in the Japanese cabinet, are desperately looking for a way to make peace.

51:07The country's falling apart. It's blockaded. The only war industry that is actually increasing its production is that of bamboo spears. It's incredible. People are eating grass. As you rightly say, 90 % of the cities have been completely destroyed. The industry is at a standstill. The country has nothing left. The possibility that there ever would be an American or allied invasion, land invasion like Normandy of Japan is frankly remote. It's very unlikely to happen. but the country is falling apart. And yet, despite all of this, and despite Stimson seeing all these magic intercepts, seeing these increasingly panicked efforts to see if there's a way to get peace, nothing gets done.

51:55The bomb still gets dropped. Why? Why does it get dropped? Why does it get dropped with so much publicity around it? Why not have that conventional way after it? Why choose a city which is sided by three kind of very high hills, essentially small mountains, which explicitly in the target committee are chosen because it will focus and concuss the blast even more effectively and make the impact of this atom bomb even greater? Why is this happening at this time? And you are forced to conclude that, and it's clear in some of these conversations taking place at Potsdam, that the real enemy here is not Japan, which is on its knees.

52:39It's not about saving lives. Not really. That was a discussion that took place after the war. It never happened before, before the bomb was dropped. Only afterwards. It's about terrifying the Russians. This is what we've got. don't basically F-U-C-K with us because we have something that you do not have and we will use it. And here is the number of bombs we need to take out every single one of your cities if we need to. So it's a really interesting thing that all of these people who clung to that mantra, who flew those missions and felt that what they were doing, and I understand this was just saving lives, you know is quest to me it's highly questionable many of your listeners will vehemently disagree with me but i mean having really buried myself in this evidence for years i'm sort of forced to that conclusion that this was a very cynical exercise in the end um necessary strategically and tactically as far as the next possible war was concerned but not necessarily so as far as

53:48Cold War Conversations:the current war was concerned yeah i'm sure there'd be a lot of comments um bring them on bring them on yeah yeah but um i mean that that's some fascinating details that you've shared there some bits i i i didn't know but i think one one of the things that i found quite quite powerful was the two crew of Boxcar, the B-29 that bombed Nagasaki, returning to the city weeks after the bombing to see the results of their work. Can you just talk about that? Of course I can. I was absolutely stunned when I heard that story when I interviewed these people. So let me just explain to people what happened.

54:37So just a quick recap of dates. everybody hates dates but very briefly it helps here always the sixth the bomb was dropped on hiroshima three days later the bomb was dropped on nagasaki always the 15th is essentially the date of it's vj day it's the surrender depending which time zone you're on actually a week or maybe two weeks after that tibet's and his team tibet's is the head of the atomic bomb squadron known as the 509th, Paul Tibbetts, who flew the Enola Gate as the captain and led the whole thing. He turns to his mates and says, do you know what? Why don't we go to Hiroshima and see what we did?

55:18Let's go there. We've got a plane. Let's just go. And a bunch of them who'd been on these missions, variously, some on both missions, because some were on both missions, and some just on one or other of those two missions, thought this was a great idea. so they jumped on a plane which tibet's flew and they flew up to japan they went first actually to tokyo briefly and then from tokyo they tried to land at hiroshima at the airport in hiroshima which was completely destroyed so rather frustratingly for them they couldn't land in hiroshima but they saw what it looked like from the air and they flew instead to nagasaki and they landed at nagasaki now this was just after the end of the war like days afterwards so So, in fact, there were barely any American troops in Nagasaki.

56:06I think there were only about 15 or 20 Americans in the whole city. And here are these guys who'd actually just destroyed that city a couple of weeks previously, who anonymously, not revealing themselves as to who they were, get some Jeeps, commandeer some Jeeps, and they drive into the city. I interviewed two people who were on that bizarre tourist trip. I mean, it's like a weird tourist trip. They go in. And what was extraordinary was both of these men, and one in particular, a man called Don Albury, who was the co-pilot on the boxcar aircraft that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, was stunned by the scale of what he had done.

56:53Stunned by it. I mean, I can still remember his face. That's what you don't really get. It's very hard to describe that. I can still remember his face. and he was a man what in his early mid 80s at the time i wouldn't want to put a number on exactly but something like that and he was absolutely stunned by it and he talked about driving through this total devastation street after street after street after street of total devastation but no bodies except he didn't one point see the shadow of a body that had been sort of basically what happens is that where a body is sitting somewhere, it's completely destroyed, it's incinerated essentially by the unbelievable heat of the body.

57:37When the bomb first goes off, it's approximately 10 ,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun in the first billionth of a second. So anything is just completely, it's incinerated, destroyed, it goes. So the shadow of where that person was sitting or standing famously is left there, scorched onto a stone. and he saw that which totally shocked him just one person against some steps sitting there at the moment the bomb went off but then they got to a hospital and that was the first time he saw bodies and children he saw bodies outside on the grounds and he saw bodies inside some dead some terribly badly burned and i said to him you know what do you say what did that feel like i said what was you know what was that like for you to see that two weeks or whatever it was after you dropped that bar and there's this incredible pause and he said i don't want to think about it i can't go back there i can't go back there he just couldn't go back there and he wouldn't go back there it was too much for him.

58:47And then there was a very long pause. And I thought to myself, do you know what? I think we've reached the end of this interview. And I just said, thank you very much. And that was really very interesting and very candid. And I realized that this is probably the last interview. In fact, it was, he was ever going to give him his knife. And then he just said, his mind was still there in that hospital, and he just said, never again. Never again. I mean, is that a lesson for us? None of us have seen what an atomic bomb can do, but there's a lot of talk about what atomic bombs might do. There's a lot of threats in the world.

59:27There are very few international agreements which are functioning today. Basically none, to be honest, in any practical sense. There are many countries developing or have developed nuclear weapons secretly that are subject to no protocols whatsoever. This is Oppenheimer's nightmare vision, as I said at the beginning of the conversation. But nobody knows, nobody saw what Don Albury saw and is still alive unless they are survivors themselves. And there are very few of them left. In the next few years, there won't be any either. So I think these things are really important to hear. And I will never forget Aubrey's face at the end of that interview as he shook his head and just said in his quiet voice, never again.

1:00:13This is a man who co-piloted the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Ibasaki.

1:00:20Cold War Conversations:You have been listening to Stephen Walker, the author of Shockwave, Countdown to Hiroshima. There's links in the episode information showing you where you can buy the book and help support the podcast. the episode extras such as videos photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information the podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and i'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road the cold war conversation continues in our facebook discussion group just search for Cold War Conversations in Facebook. Thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week.

1:01:28Thank you.