Nagasaki by Craig Collie

Author:Craig Collie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two hours after his meeting with Sato and as the Red Army launched its invasion, Molotov met with the American and British ambassadors, Averell Harriman and Clerk Kerr. He told them he had just delivered to Sato a declaration of war on Japan. While once the Soviet Union had thought it would not be able to move onto a war footing with Japan until mid-August, it was now able to keep to its Yalta undertakings. The announcement of Russia’s entry into the Far East war would go to the press and radio at 8.30 p.m. (2.30 a.m. in Tokyo, 1.30 p.m. in Washington). Molotov told Kerr that he regretted the necessary treatment of Sato in this development. Sato was a ‘kind-hearted man’ with whom Molotov said he’d always had good relations.

Immediately after the meeting with Molotov, Harriman met with the Soviet leader. In the exchange of diplomatic pleasantries, each explored what the other knew—and what the other knew of what they knew. The American expressed his nation’s gratitude at Russia’s entry into the war.

‘The United States and the Soviet Union are now allies again,’ he said.

Stalin told Harriman of the advances into Manchuria by each front of the Red Army there . . . in advance of the events. Harriman asked how Stalin thought the atomic bomb would affect the Japanese. Neither would have been aware that at that time Bockscar was on its way to Japan. Stalin replied that the Japanese were looking for a pretext to replace their present government with one committed to undertake surrender.

‘The bomb gives them that pretext,’ he said.

The reality, however, was that Stalin knew that Japan was not contemplating surrender at that time. The Americans must have known it also, from their intercepts of Sato’s coded cables, but that information may not have reached Harriman.

The ambassador said it was good that the US and not Germany had invented the atomic bomb, innocently echoing a diary comment by Truman without including the Soviet Union. Stalin commented that Soviet scientists had found harnessing atomic power a difficult challenge. The British had got nowhere too, he said, although they had excellent physicists. However, German laboratories working on the project had now been seized by the Russians. A breakthrough might come out of that, was the implication.

Harriman told him that the United Kingdom had pooled its knowledge with the US since 1941 under an arrangement through Churchill, something the Russian already knew from his spies.

‘It must have been expensive,’ Joseph Stalin said.

‘It cost two billion US dollars,’ was the reply. Money was no object to the US was the subtext.

On returning to the embassy, Harriman sent a cable to Truman and Byrnes advising them of the evening’s developments. An hour later, NV Novikov of the Soviet embassy in Washington called on the US State Department and formally advised what the Secretary of State already knew.

At three o’clock, Truman held an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office. Byrnes was seated on his left; Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, came in and sat on his right.

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