Unconditional by Marc Gallicchio

Author:Marc Gallicchio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

“A Great Victory Has Been Won”

The thirteenth and final meeting of the Big Three at Potsdam ended with the approval of the joint communiqué at 12:30 a.m. on August 2. At 7:15 a.m., Truman departed the Little White House for Gatow Airfield and the C-54 plane that would deliver him to an airfield in Southwest England. Secretary of State Byrnes, who was next in the line of succession (given there was no vice president), flew in a separate C-54. Their destination was the USS Augusta, anchored in Plymouth Roads. The 800-mile flight took them over the Isle of Wight to Harrowbeer Airbase, 10 miles outside Plymouth. After a short trip by car, the president’s party arrived at Mill Dock and boarded Admiral Sir John “Ralph” Leatham’s barge, which took them to the Augusta. At 11:20 a.m., the president boarded the cruiser after an absence of seventeen days.

The day’s main events consisted of meetings with King George VI, who was aboard the battle cruiser HMS Renown, also anchored in Plymouth Roads. The president, Byrnes, and Admiral Leahy had lunch with the monarch on the Renown. This was ostensibly a social call, but the participants did discuss the situation in the Pacific. During that conversation, Leahy confirmed his skepticism about the atomic bomb by making a bet with the king that the new weapon would not work. Later that afternoon, Truman repaid George VI’s courtesy by playing host to His Majesty on the Augusta. The formalities completed, Augusta got underway a little before 8:00 p.m. Truman was headed home.1

As the president steamed west, in Manila, General MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, was updating estimates of Japanese strength on Kyushu. On August 2, ULTRA showed that there were 545,000 Japanese servicemen on the island. Five days later, the number had risen to 560,000. American cryptanalysts also recorded a steadily increasing number of aircraft moving into range of the Kyushu invasion beaches. Most of these were trainers being converted into suicide planes, similar to those that had attacked the U.S. fleet off Okinawa to such devastating effect. The Japanese were also amassing a flotilla of suicide watercraft, including small surface vessels, midget submarines, and human-piloted torpedoes.2

The evidence of the Japanese buildup on Kyushu prompted the planning officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to explore alternatives to OLYMPIC, and with a sense of urgency not usually found in routine contingency planning. On August 4, the Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC) forwarded a report to the Joint Staff Planners (JSP) recommending that in light of “the possible effect upon OLYMPIC operations of this buildup and concentration,” the JSP should instruct MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz to “review their estimates of the situation, reexamine objectives in Japan as possible alternatives to OLYMPIC, and prepare plans for operations against such alternate objectives.”3 Attached to the report was a draft memorandum for MacArthur and Nimitz explaining that conditions on Kyushu did not require an immediate change in their directive, but did warrant serious consideration of OLYMPIC’s prospects and an evaluation of possible alternatives.

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