The mood of senior officers at the defense review meeting was buoyant. One followed another to expound a similar theme. Hiroshima, like all other Japanese cities, was ready to meet the enemy. There was loud agreement with the words of the elderly officer who spoke last. “Let the American bombers come—and soon. They will fall from the skies under our guns!”
His eyes swept the room, lighting on the coterie of young antiaircraft officers that included Yokoyama. “The honor will fall to you to strike the first blows. The enemy is arrogant. He believes he can enter our skies with safety, to bomb our women and children. He will be shown otherwise. Do not fail. We will repeat the success of Pearl Harbor.”
14
In Tokyo, Major General Arisue was showing signs of strain; his face was a shade grayer, the pouches under his eyes darker. He was suffering from lack of sleep, proper meals, and fresh air. These past two months had made severe inroads into his considerable stamina.
His Lisbon contact was unable to provide further details about the mysterious American war project. And without hard information, Arisue could not brief his agent in Brazil, who was packed and ready to slip into the United States.
Increasingly, his department was under pressure from the high command. Data were urgently requested on the B-29s that had started to raid Tokyo and other cities. The arrival of the huge bombers had astonished the Japanese. They had never seen aircraft so big, so fast, so well armed. Information was requested about their bases. Arisue had pinpointed the Marianas, and cursed the lack of spies he had on the islands. He was unable to answer specific questions on the number of American bomber squadrons based there, the supply backup they possessed, the sort of intelligence which would help produce an accurate profile of American strength.
His special listening posts were monitoring nothing of importance in the brief air-to-air conversations between enemy pilots over Japan; ground defenses had been largely unsuccessful in shooting down B-29s. Arisue’s tough interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Oya, was finding it difficult to get even the few American airmen who had been captured to talk.
The latest, Colonel Brian Brugge, Oya had seen soon after he was shot down nine days before, on December 3. Brugge was an important catch; he was deputy chief of staff of the Seventy-third Bomb Wing, based on Saipan.
According to Oya, the stubborn West Pointer refused to cooperate. “We interrogated him thoroughly. He kept a tight lip. He wouldn’t crack. Later, he began to suffer from malnutrition. He disliked Japanese food. He died.”
Arisue was unhappy that his enthusiastic interrogator had not been able to extract any useful information from this senior American officer. Then, at his lowest ebb, knowing his reputation was being seriously challenged in certain quarters, Arisue received a further piece of unsettling news.
For some days he had been sure that his archrival, naval intelligence, was in contact with a Swedish banker, Per Jacobsson, in Bern, Switzerland. He knew that the purpose of this move was to make contact through Jacobsson with the Americans, leading, hopefully, to a negotiated peace.
In Japanese eyes, there was a fundamental difference between a negotiated peace and surrender. Even so, Arisue’s first reaction had been to expose the plotters. Caution stayed him. They undoubtedly included some of the highest-ranking naval officers. If he failed to prove a case against them, he would be in serious trouble. However, he could not help but wonder. Supposing Japan could not win the war? Supposing a negotiated peace was the only answer?
Even two months ago, such thoughts would have been unthinkable for Arisue. But throughout this day they gnawed at him. He sent for situation reports; he questioned staff officers; he studied projections of enemy intentions. Whichever way he turned, the one inescapable truth faced him: the war was going badly. Japan, in his later words, “was short of everything except courage.”
By evening, he had come to the conclusion that there was no way Japan could achieve victory. Equally, he knew that so long as the country kept fighting, it was not defeated.
With these thoughts in mind, without consulting anyone, General Arisue decided he would prepare the groundwork for a negotiated peace. He knew that if he were discovered, he would be branded a traitor and executed. But by nightfall he was making his first moves to establish a link in Bern with Allen Dulles, European director of the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency.
15
Seated at a writing desk in his suite in the Carlton Hotel, a few convenient blocks away from the White House, financier Alexander Sachs had little time to study the newspapers or listen to the radio programs marking the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
Sachs, the man who had been instrumental in alerting President Roosevelt to the possibility of atomic weapons, was about to reenter the scene.
Yet, for Sachs and millions of Americans, December 7 was a day when the media were particularly compelling. Commentators continued to return to a single theme in recalling Pearl Harbor: the country could neither forgive nor forget Japan’s treachery; the “Day of Infamy” would have to be avenged.
Vastly better equipped on land, sea, and in the air, American forces were about to pull a drawstring around the enemy. The Japanese air force was spent; if the kamikaze planes still struck terror in those who were facing them in increasing numbers, newspapers played down the suicide planes as a passing phenomenon, a last, reckless throw by a desperate enemy.
Tokyo Rose’s taunt of “Come and get us” was now receiving a confident rejoinder on Stateside radio stations. “We’re coming, Rose, we’re coming!”
Nobody doubted that America’s youth was paying a high price for the long journey to Rose’s Tokyo lair. An average of five thousand Americans were dying each week in the relentless push across the Pacific. But as the newspapers pointed out, the numbers were grimmer for the enemy. The decisive aircraft carrier engagement off Guam had become known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” while the loss of the islands had cost the Japanese fifty thousand dead.
The mood this morning throughout America was uncompromising. The enemy, in the words of one commentator, “must be hit with everything we’ve got.”
Alexander Sachs knew that “everything we’ve got” was likely soon to include an atomic bomb. Five years after first calling on Roosevelt to authorize its construction, Sachs now wanted the president to put a curb on when and how the bomb would be used.
The financier had been successfully lobbied by the group of scientists beginning to have second thoughts about the weapon. Among them were Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who had been so vocal in 1939 about the need for America to equip itself with an atomic arsenal. They now argued that the world situation had changed. The Nazi capability to produce atomic bombs could be discounted. They believed Japan could be beaten by conventional weapons. Any brief military advantage that nuclear bombs would bring America could be outweighed by political and psychological losses. The damage to American prestige, argued Szilard, could be immense if the United States were the first to drop the bomb. If America did so, then Einstein foresaw a worldwide atomic armaments race.
Roosevelt had rejected these arguments. Perhaps he felt the scientists underestimated the enemy’s ability to keep fighting under almost any circumstances.
Sachs had agonized for days over his draft for a startling proposal. But now, in his neat handwriting, he had outlined the conditions he believed Roosevelt should insist upon before ordering the bomb to be dropped.