A New World: Part I

The United States in 1945

An almost immaculate silence fills the air in the rolling, green hills that surround Kyoto, Japan. Among the black pines, ginko trees, and Sugi cedars that have been growing in some cases for thousands of years, the calls of gray herons, brown-eared bulbuls, and carrion crows are muted along with the gentle breath of the wind. Here, silence is life’s daily bread. Like the hills that surround the city, silence fills the nearly ten thousand sun-red torii gates that have dotted the Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine since the year 711. Or the silence that fills the woody halls and immaculately scalloped shingles of the Kiyomizu-dera temple that was built in 778—along with the thousands of other similar shrines and small vendor lined streets that define a city that was Japan’s capitol from 794 to 1869.

But in 1945 that silence was nearly broken by the most destructive force ever conceived by mankind, a force that nearly turned the city’s some 2,000 shrines and immaculate halls of cedar and washi paper into ashes in an instant—along with hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents. But the city’s people lived, their lives uninterrupted by fire and brimstone. Its great halls and towering gates continued standing. And its silence remained, unperturbed. All because of an aging New Yorker on the precipice of his 78^th birthday, a man named Henry Stimson.

In the spring of 1945, Stimson looked forward to retirement. Whether he knew it or not, he had five years to live. Since 1940, he had been serving in his second stint as the United States’ Secretary of War. A graduate of Yale and then Harvard Law, Stimson had been the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York under President Theodore Roosevelt. After losing a race for the Governor of New York in 1910 to John Alden Dix, Stimson served his first stint as Secretary of War under President William Howard Taft, from 1911 to 1913. Four years later—at the age of 50—Stimson served in the Army under the rank of Brigadier General in the First World War. Then, under President Calvin Coolidge, Stimson was named the Governor-General of the Philippines, then a U.S. territory. Beginning in 1929, under President Herbert Hoover, he served as Secretary of State until 1933, when he retired from public life. But when Stimson—a Republican—received the call from President Franklin D. Roosevelt amid the outbreak of World War II in 1940 to return to the halls of power, he answered it.

As spring turned to summer—and the Cherry Blossoms in those rolling hills in Kyoto began their bloom—it appeared that Stimson’s hope, to retire once and for all upon the war’s end, might finally become true. In Europe, the Germans had surrendered on May 7, 1945; and in the Pacific, it appeared that the Imperial Japanese Army was on its last legs. Still—even after the vicious fire bombings of Tokyo in March killed over 100,000 and left the city smelling of burnt flesh as nearly half of its wooden buildings were incinerated—Imperial Japan showed no sign of surrender. On June 21, the U.S. took Okinawa, the island that dots Japan’s southernmost point. 110,000 Japanese had died in the fighting, along with 12,000 Americans. It was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. In fact, in 1945 alone nearly 50,000 Americans had been killed in the Pacific, along with 1.5 million Japanese. Unless Japan surrendered, the war would continue. And that would mean the most brutal march in human history—all the way to Tokyo, a march that would likely drag into 1946 and 1947, and cost millions more lives.

To prevent such a thing, there was the question of if, and where, to use the atomic bomb the United States had been developing in the secluded hills of New Mexico. At the top of the list for the bomb’s potential use were two cities: Kyoto and Hiroshima. As the Target Committee led by General Lesley Groves wrote in a report dated July 2, 1945:

“KYOTO: This target is an urban industrial area with a population of 1,000,000. It is the former capital of Japan, and many people and industries are now being moved there as other areas are being destroyed. From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget.”

As late as July 21—just two and a half weeks before the first bomb was dropped—Groves wrote to Stimson that Kyoto was the first choice among the military advisors. The very next day, Stimson repeated in a meeting with President Truman something he had said all along: do not hit Kyoto. His reasons were many, but chief among them was personal: Henry Stimson had been to Kyoto twice with his wife, and they adored the city. They first visited the ancient capitol in the fall of 1926, as part of a pan-Asian tour to prepare for Stimson’s upcoming role as the Governor-General of the Philippines. In his diary he described a “delicious dinner at the Miyako Hotel” and visits to the Geisha district in Gion, and the temple at Kiyumizu. Three years later, in March 1929, he returned as his term as the Governor-General ended.

Those memories—of Kyoto’s immaculate silence, of its awe-striking temples and verdant hills—remained with Stimson. And they remained with him long enough for him to become the strongest voice against the city’s destruction, a fight he was willing to take to the President. In his journal on July 24, President Truman noted his agreement with Stimson: “I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson…we as leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.” But of course, when it comes to municipal targets, there is no such thing as a “purely military one.” Kyoto would be saved—its shrines, its monasteries, its silent bamboo forests—would remain preserved, for all of humanity to see. But the first city that would be hit, Hiroshima, described to the President as “an Army city,” was in fact full of the “women and children and innocent civilians” Truman later said he sought to avoid killing.

Less than three weeks after Truman’s meeting with Stimson, and just four days after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the first atomic bomb in human history was dropped at 8:15 AM from a plane piloted by Brigadier General Paul Tibbets from the B29 Superfortress bomber he named to honor his mother, Enola Gay.

Tibbets and his crew took off at in the dark at 2:45 AM from Tinian in the Mariana Islands—alongside two other planes, The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil. For six hours they flew—across a vast and deep blue Pacific Ocean—until they reached western Japan. As they found their target below, the center of Hiroshima, human history itself straddled two epochs. In the first, there was the discovery of fire 800,000 years prior, the discovery of gunpowder in the 9th Century, the use of iron and ore, of electricity, and even flight. Discoveries that propelled humanity exponentially into the future. And now, as Tibbets flew over the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the second epoch was about to begin. In the ensuing 53 seconds—as the Little Boy bomb dropped 31,000 feet—humanity would stand on a new precipice, one defined not by discovery but by destruction. Down below, in the river-streaked city, 250,000 people were waiting, unaware that they were about to become subjects in the most twisted science experiment in human history.

Instantly, about 100,000 of them died. Some of them were 12 years old, like Hiroo Tao, Hiroka Nishimoto, and Seigo and Masaro Takeda. Others were 13 and 14, like Hiroshi Ueda, Toshiko Sekioka, and Yuriko Yamamoto. They saw a bright, flashing white light which within moments became a “blackish red-orange.” Those who survived recalled an “electric smell” although almost none of them recalled any sound whatsoever. One five-year-old, a boy named Myeko, asked his mother, “Why is night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?” As John Hersey described in one of the most essential pieces of writing a human has ever produced, “The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke.”

In a real sense, those who died in the blinding, white flash were the lucky ones. Those who survived and the tens of thousands who died in the days, weeks, months and years to come were forced to suffer, such as the father of 13-year-old Eiichi Tsuda, who identified his child days later after he found his son’s cap and belt on a mutilated body near the Temma Bridge. Others, like a brother and sister named Aiko, 9, and Toru, 7, would begin to lose their hair within a week of the blast. Four years later, Toru would die—and 20 years later, Aiko would too at 29 in 1965, another casualty of the bomb’s inhumanity.

Three days after the blast, when Japan did not immediately surrender, a second atomic bomb was dropped at Nagasaki as the process repeated itself. It was, Truman exclaimed, “the greatest thing in history.” A New World had been made. While the hills of Kyoto remained silent and untouched, the tens of thousands left alive amid the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be left trying to identify their children through their lunch boxes and wrist watches. America now was God—and He was vengeful.

Still left, however, was the question of how America would divide and conquer Japan after its surrender. That would be answered swiftly when America’s emissary in the Pacific—General Douglas MacArthur—touched down at Atsugi Airfield outside Tokyo on August 30, 1945. America, which had destroyed the nation of Japan with a force not known before to humanity, would now govern it.

For that story, “A New World: Part II”—released next week on March 11—you will need to be a paid subscriber. You can become one by clicking here.

Sources:

John Hersey. Hiroshima. 1946.

Gary J. Bass. Judgement At Tokyo. 2023.

Alex Wellerstein. “The Kyoto Misconception.” 2020. https://alexwellerstein.com/publications/2020-wellerstein_kyoto_misconception.pdf

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2023/07/24/henry-stimson-didnt-go-to-kyoto-on-his-honeymoon/