Day 193: Hidden Agendas

There is something in journalism called a slow news day. This usually falls on a Sunday or during the holiday period when the authorised sources of information are at rest. Nothing happens then, apart from acts of God and disorder in far-away places. It is generally agreed that the media show cannot go on while the cast is away.

This book is devoted to slow news. In each chapter, the setting changes, from Iraq to the East End of London, from Burma to the docks of Liverpool and the West of Ireland, from Vietnam to Australia and the 'new' South Africa. In all these places, events have occurred that qualify as slow news. Some have been reported, even glimpsed on the evening news, where they are unremembered as part of a moving belt of images 'shot and edited to the rhythms of a Coca-Cola advertisement', wrote one media onlooker, pointing out that the average length of the TV news 'soundbite' in the United States had gone from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 9.9seconds.

That is the trend. In American television, a one percentage point fall in the ratings can represent a loss of $100 million a year in advertising. The result is not just 'infotainment', but 'infoadvertising': programmes that 'flow seamlessly into commercials'. This is how commercial television works in Australia, Japan, Italy and many other countries. Britain is not far behind; the ever-diminishing circle of multinational companies that control the media, especially television, take their cue from the brand leader, Rupert Murdoch, who says his role in the 'communications revolution' is that of a 'battering ram'.
...
Diego Garcia Is a British colony in the Indian Ocean, from which American bombers patrol the Middle East. There are few places as important to American military planners as this refuelling base between two continents. Who lives there? During President Clinton's attack on Iraq in 1996 a BBC commentator referred to the island as 'uninhabited' and gave no hint of its past. This was understandable, as the true story of Diego Garcia is instructive of times past and of the times we now live in.

Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Archipelago, which ought to have been granted independence from Britain in 1965 along with Mauritius. However, at the insistence of the United States, the Government of Harold Wilson told the Mauritians they could have their freedom only if they gave up the island. Ignoring a United Nations resolution that called on the British 'to take no action which would dismember the  territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity', the British Government did just that, and in the process formed a new colony, the British Indian Overseas Territories. The reason and its hidden agenda soon became clear.

In high secrecy, the Foreign Office leased the island to Washington for fifty years, with the option of a twenty-year extension. The British prefer to deny this now, referring to a 'joint defence arrangement'. This is sophistry; today Diego Garcia serves as an American refuelling base and an American nuclear weapons dump. In 1991, President Bush used the island as a base from which to carpet-bomb Iraq. In the same year the Foreign Office told an aggrieved Mauritian government that the island's sovereignty was 'no longer negotiable'.

Until 1965, the Ilois people were indigenous to Diego Garcia. With the militarisation of their island they were given a status rather like that of Australia's Aborigines in the nineteenth century: they were deemed not to exist. Between 1965 and 1973 they were 'removed' from their homes, loaded on to ships and planes and dumped in Mauritius. In 1972, the American Defense Department assured Congress that 'the islands are virtually uninhabited and the erection of the base will cause no indigenous political problems'. When asked about the whereabouts of the native population, a British Ministry of Defence official lied, 'There is nothing in our files about inhabitants or about an evacuation.'

A Minority Rights Group study, which received almost no publicity when it was published in 1985, concluded that Britain expelled the native population 'without any workable re-settlement scheme; left them in poverty; gave them a tiny amount of compensation and later offered more on condition that the islanders renounced their rights ever to return home'. The Ilois were allowed to take with them 'minimum personal possessions, packed into a small crate'. Most ended up in the slums of the Mauritian capital, leading wretched, disaffected lives; the number who have since died from starvation and disease is unknown.
~~Hidden Agendas -by- John Pilger

Day 188: The Savage Wars of Peace

Between January 1899 and May 1902 the U.S. Army ruled Cuba, first under stolid Major General John R. Brooke, then under the more dashing Major General Leonard Wood, erstwhile commander of the Rough Riders. Unlike the Filipinos, the Cubans did not fight U.S. rule, in large measure because they were confident that it would be temporary; with the passage of the Teller Amendment in April 1898, Congress had eschewed any desire to annex the “pearl of the Antilles.” The Cuban insurrectos took a bonus of $75 a man and duly disbanded. The U.S. Army picked up the pieces after the Spanish left: Soldiers went around distributing food to a hungry populace, staging a sanitary campaign, erecting thousands of public schools (modeled on those of Ohio), rooting out corrupt officials, building roads and bridges, dredging Havana harbor, and generally attempting “to recast Cuban society, such as it was, in the mould of North America.”

The occupation’s most spectacular achievement occurred when Walter Reed, a U.S. Army doctor, confirmed the intuition of a Cuban physician that yellow fever was not transmitted by general filth or other factors but by one particular variety of mosquito, the silvery Stegomyia fasciata. A mosquito-eradication campaign undertaken by the Army Medical Corps produced immediate results: In 1902, for the first time in centuries, there was not a single case of yellow fever in Havana; just two years before there had been 1,400 known cases. Incidence of malaria, another scourge of the city, of all tropical cities, plummeted nearly as much. Such dramatic improvements in public health were to become a commonplace feature of American colonial administration.

Knowing that the U.S. military occupation would be brief, and determined to safeguard American interests in Cuba after the troops went home, Congress passed the Platt Amendment in 1901. Under its terms Cuba would be obligated to obtain Uncle Sam’s approval before signing any foreign treaty; maintain low foreign debt; ratify all acts of the U.S. military government; and give the American armed forces the right to intervene at any time to protect life, liberty, and property. In addition, Cuba would have to provide the U.S. long-term leases on naval bases; it was this provision that would lead to the creation of a naval station at Guantánamo Bay in 1903. In short, the Platt Amendment represented a considerable abridgment of Cuban sovereignty.
Havana went along because it had no choice. It was only when the Cubans pledged to honor the Platt Amendment that the U.S. Army left the island, though the U.S. Navy remained a looming presence offshore. Cuba now had its own government headed by Tomás Estrada Palma, a former schoolmaster who had spent years living in New York State, but it was in effect an American protectorate.

Panama
The Platt Amendment, following the outright annexation of Puerto Rico, signaled that the U.S. was intent on turning the Caribbean into an “American lake.” This desire grew stronger once an isthmian canal was under way. The story of how the republic of Panama was created is well known and need not be recounted in much detail here. As we have seen, U.S. troops had been frequent visitors to Panama, landing there thirteen times between 1856 and 1902 to guarantee freedom of transit for Americans. Although most of Panama’s population had long chafed under the distant rule of Bogotá, in the past U.S. forces had always preserved Colombia’s sovereignty over the isthmus. That would change in 1903.

At the time, Colombia’s congress and president were balking at the proposed U.S. terms for a canal treaty, demanding more money. The U.S., with its burgeoning power in the Pacific, considered a canal a strategic necessity, and President Theodore Roosevelt was furious at the “homicidal corruptionists” in Bogotá for reneging on their commitments to allow the project to proceed. Although they did not instigate a Panamanian revolution, the president and his secretary of state, John Hay, knew about it beforehand and tacitly encouraged the plotters. The revolutionaries counted on American military intervention and were not disappointed. On November 2, the gunboat Nashville, which had just arrived at Colón on Panama’s Caribbean coast, received secret orders from the Navy Department to “prevent landing of any armed force with hostile intent, either government or insurgent.” The remarkable thing about this telegram is that, when Commander John Hubbard of the Nashville received it, the revolution had not yet broken out. It would start the next day.

By the time Hubbard received his orders, 500 Colombian soldiers had already landed at Colón, but they still had to traverse the isthmus to reach Panama City, capital of the province. The American railroad superintendent dissembled and told them there were not enough rail cars available to take all of them, but he allowed the Colombian general and his staff to go by themselves. They arrived just in time to be captured by the rebels who took over Panama City on November 3. The success of the revolution was sealed when the USS Dixie appeared off Colón on the evening of November 5 and disembarked 400 marines under Major John A. Lejeune. The Colombian army detachment left at Colón decided not to tangle with the marines; instead their colonel accepted an $8,000 bribe from the Panamanian plotters to sail back to Cartagena with his men. Within the next week, eight more U.S. warships arrived at Panama, effectively foreclosing any possibility that Colombia would take the isthmus back by force.

On November 6, 1903, the U.S. government formally recognized the Republic of Panama. One of the new government’s first acts was to sign a treaty giving the U.S. permission to build a canal under extremely generous terms that turned the Canal Zone—a 10-mile-wide strip on either side of the waterway—into U.S. territory. It was as brazen—and successful—an example of gunboat diplomacy as the world has ever seen. When Teddy Roosevelt was subsequently accused of having committed (as the New York Times termed it) an “act of sordid conquest,” he asked Attorney General Philander Knox to construct a defense. “Oh, Mr. President,” Knox is said to have replied, “do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”
War Plan Black
The isthmian canal, completed in 1914, gave the U.S. an invaluable strategic advantage—the ability to move its fleet quickly between the West and East Coasts, the Pacific and the Atlantic—but also a major headache: protecting the precious waterway. It was the same challenge Britain faced with the Suez Canal. London’s response was to assert control over Egypt, the Sudan, and virtually the entire Mediterranean. The U.S. took a similarly sweeping approach with Central America and the Caribbean.

Naval planners looked at the map and realized that there were only a handful of main channels into the Caribbean, the most important being the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola. Control of Puerto Rico and Cuba gave the U.S. a chokehold over this “strategic center of interest” (to use Alfred Thayer Mahan’s words), though the navy remained interested in acquiring bases in Hispaniola as an insurance policy. By 1906 the U.S. Navy was big enough to ensure that no other power would contest control of its own backyard: It deployed 20 battleships, roughly the same number as Germany, and second only to Britain’s 49. The extent of American naval might was trumpeted by the cruise of the Great White Fleet around the world in 1907–1909.

Military planners are paid to be paranoid, and despite America’s growing power, they constantly saw threats looming, principally from Berlin. The leaders of the War and Navy departments lived in constant fear that Germany would establish bases in the West Indies or South America and then use them to attack U.S. shipping, the Panama Canal or—worst-case scenario—the American mainland itself. This was the basis of War Plan Black, completed in 1914 by the General Board of the U.S. Navy.

These worries were not entirely farfetched. The German navy, under the command of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was constantly, if unsuccessfully, scheming to acquire a base in the West Indies. The German admiralty staff also drew up war plans between 1897 and 1905 for seizing either Puerto Rico or Cuba as a staging area for an attack on the East Coast of the United States. Operations Plan III, as the German Caribbean strategy was called, was mothballed after 1906, when rising tensions in Europe forced the German navy to focus its attention closer to home. But after World War I broke out, German U-boats did attack some shipping close to the American mainland (though in the Atlantic, not the Caribbean) and the German foreign office did concoct a wild plot for an alliance with Mexico, which would supposedly receive in compensation the return of the southwestern United States. (The Zimmerman Telegram, laying out this plan, was intercepted by British intelligence and helped draw the U.S. into the war.)

The modern-day reader is certainly entitled to doubt in retrospect how much of a threat Germany ever posed to U.S. control of the Caribbean, but the danger loomed large enough at the time and helps to explain American willingness to intervene in the region. These fears were crystallized in the Venezuela crisis of 1902–03.

~~The Savage Wars of Peace -by- Max Boot

Day 186: Railroads in the Heartland

During the formative years of the railroad industry, the desire for the iron horse and a grasp of the realities of finance and politics prompted states in the Old Northwest to launch ambitious systems of public works (canals and railroads in particular), unded and built by "the people." But the crippling economic impact of the Panic of 1837, which devastated the region, eventually prompted the sale of state-sponsored railroads to risk-taking capitalists. The time seemed auspicious for private enterprise to open this transportation frontier.   

It would be a combination of individual investors, syndicates, and the continued financial backing from units of government (federal, state, and local) that made possible the completion of the rail network in the Midwest. And it was an impressive accomplishment. At midcentury, Ohio counted 575 miles of railroad; Michigan, 342; Indiana, 228; Illinois, 111; and Wisconsin, 20. Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri, however, had none. On the eve of the Civil War, the Ohio mileage, largest in the nation, had soared to 2,946; Illinois, 2,790; Indiana, 2,163; Wisconsin, 905; and Michigan, 779. Even though Minnesota continued to await the iron horse, Iowa's mileage stood at 655, and Missouri's was 817. Expansion continued before and after the Panic of 1873 triggered several years of severe depression and again after the hard times of the 1890s interrupted track laying.   

Sections of the Midwest saw some construction following the return of prosperity with the Spanish-American War and up until World War I. Unlike railroad building on the Great Plains and in parts of the West, which was considerable during the 1920s, by 1917 the railroad map of the Midwest had jelled. Most of the new lines between 1898 and 1917 were feeders, branches primarily created to haul agricultural, lumber, or mineral traffic, although some cut-offs, designed to speed the flow of goods and people, were installed. In 1911 the Interstate Commerce Commission, which Congress created twenty-four years earlier to regulate the rail enterprise in the public interest, made its annual enumeration of the mileage in the Midwest. Illinois ranked in the top position regionally with 11,980 miles (only Texas, with 14,777 miles, could claim a greater intrastate network); Iowa, 9,855; Ohio, 9,128; Michigan, 8,943; Minnesota, 8,931; Missouri, 8,108; Indiana, 7,447; and Wisconsin, 7,399. Such impressive figures were hardly surprising considering these states' economic strengths and population levels.   
The vast natural and human wealth and potential of the Midwest caused it to attract ''smart money." Investments poured into farms, businesses, and factories and continued for decades, interrupted only by the occasional depression and eventually by the "rust bowl" years of the 1970s and 1980s. This growth prompted railroad promoters in the antebellum years to recognize that the iron horse must link more than "inland" communities to a waterway: lake, river, or canal. It did not take long for a broken and scattered pattern of rail lines to give way to what economic historian Alfred D. Chandler has correctly labeled "system building." The thrust of railroading after the Civil War was to fuse together smaller, independent roads into larger, unified ones. A combination of mergers, leases, and stock controls made possible a sophisticated railroad structure. These consolidated roads, flying their own corporate banners, undertook their own programs of line construction.
   
By the dawn of the twentieth century the Midwest could not claim to be the sole place served by affiliated rail systems, often allied with the nation's premier banking and investment houses. Yet a regional review suggests that the East and especially the South still had substantial numbers of small and medium-sized carriers, although even there the loss of corporate independence was accelerating. On the other hand, great railways already dominated the West. The Southern Pacific, for one, had gained "octopus" status in the minds of Californians, owing to its size, economic prowess, and the literary skills of novelist Frank Norris. Again, the Midwest took on more of a balanced, mixed position. Here a combination of systems, notably the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul; Chicago & North Western; Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific; and Illinois Central; lesser carriers like the Chicago Great Western; Detroit, Toledo & Ironton; Minneapolis & St. Louis; Monon; Pere Marquette; and Wisconsin Central; and a number of autonomous short lines, including the Kalamazoo, Lake Shore & Chicago; La Crosse & Southeastern; and Muscatine North & South, predominated.   

Regional differences did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. In a 1903 interview for a Twin Cities newspaper, A.B. Stickney, the driving force behind the Chicago Great Western, which recently had completed a strategic extension into the Omaha Gateway from Fort Dodge, Iowa, told the reporter that "we in the richest farm and factory belt of our country have created a mixture of large and not so large railroads. . . . The Maple Leaf Route [Chicago Great Western] faces the task of continuing to provide the best service to its many loyal patrons in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri where there are so many David and Goliath contests."   

By the turn of the twentieth century the railroad map of the Midwest was unequaled. Anyone who examined it would quickly sense that this was the vital center of America's massive and far-flung network of steel rails. Most striking were those principal east-west arteries the "high-iron" speedways from eastern metropolises to Chicago and St. Louis and the equally significant transcontinental roads or their connectors to western destinations. Moreover, there were other important lines and the many miles of branches and twigs that sprang from the sturdy stems.

~~ Railroads in the Heartland : Steam and Traction in the Golden Age of Postcards -by- H. Roger Grant

Day 131: Book Excerpt: Bob Dylan

The whole Bangla Desh set was premiered over the radio a few nights ago, neatly coinciding with the Indian Army’s rout of the West Pakistani forces and the liberation of the East, thus putting the sweet seal of history on the cause that launched this record in the first place. Three of us sat listening for an hour or more, though admittedly we weren’t as polite as the audience at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh at Madison Square Garden last August: we turned off the first half-hour of Ravi Shankar. Then the Harrison-Leon Russell-Mad Dogs & So On part began.

I found most of it dull, and after a bit the whole show began to bother me immensely. Admittedly the huge band was tight and well-rehearsed. Harrison sang with conviction and Eric Clapton was spectacular. OK, it was well-produced. Well-produced oatmeal.

Every other song seemed to be about one of three things: 1) God saving us. 2) This is the way God planned it. 3) Chant the name of the Lord and you’ll be free. (Nick Tosches has suggested that this course of action did not seem to be getting the people of Bangla Desh very far; nasty of him to bring that up.)
All of the devout rockers on Harrison’s stage seemed to be missing their own point. If this gibberish had any relation to reality, or even any internal consistency—perils of pantheism—then the same god that allowed this wonderful concert to take place was also raining hot death on the other side of the globe. To achieve some kind of spiritual balance, perhaps.

Well, it reminded me of Joseph Heller’s God, the Vicious Practical Joker. The songs chosen made a mockery of what the event was supposedly about—raising funds and world awareness for the plight of refugees from the war in East Pakistan and the fight for Bangladeshi independence—and I imagine this comes across much more blatantly on record than it did at the concert itself, since the electric presence of the stars doesn’t blank out any doubts in a mindless glow of being there with George, Ringo, and Bob Dylan. Which is nothing to sneeze at: I’d have liked to have been there too. But I wasn’t, and I have to take what I can get, along with the rest of the audience that wasn’t there either, and what I get is a feeling of being sold down the river, smothered by some of the silliest ideals of western civilization, and flattered by a superstar glitter that fails to hide the almost total emptiness of the production.

There’s a line in Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” where he warns, “Beware of maya,” maya being an Indian word for “veil of illusion”—and without even going into the fact that the avoidance of darkness is a perfect definition of illusion, it has to be said that a veil of illusion is precisely what this concert has to offer.

There are some exceptions to the bland sound, the horrible fake gospel shouts, and the silly songs. Leon Russell makes a valiant attempt to erase the pompous mood of the event, delivering a wild version of “Jumping Jack Flash,” braking into a long jive story that resolves itself into the Coasters’ “Youngblood” and finally edges out and roars back to where it began. That’s exciting, and as anomalous to the general drift of the concert as two other high points, Ringo’s “It Don’t Come Easy” and Dylan’s last number, “Just Like a Woman.” If the genius of this man seems occasional now, when it comes it is staggering, and nothing can touch it. Ah, Bob Dylan!

One of the best things about Dylan’s side of the set is that it can make you feel like a fan again. A Bob Dylan fan. It’s moving to hear George Harrison say, “I’d like to bring out a friend to us all, Mr. Bob Dylan,” and implicitly join in the cheers; to recognize, in yourself, the thrill the audience is experiencing; to delight in the applause that breaks in on the choruses they and you have publicly celebrated and privately cherished for years. In spite of the fact that the movie promises to be uniquely boring, I’ll be there to see how Ringo looks playing tambourine with Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s performance is steady, but most of his material seems just out of his reach, as if he couldn’t quite catch the emotional rhythm of the songs. But from the first notes of “Just Like a Woman,” it’s clear that something else is happening. Here he rises to one of the great performances of his career. He sings the song the way Hank Williams would sing it if he were still alive, with the ghostly chill of “Lost Highway.” It may well be the equal of anything he has ever done, and if it took him five years to regain the power he once had, then what matters is not how long it took, but that he has regained it. What began, some years ago, as a change in attitude, seems finally to have grown into a changed point of view, and an authentic, as opposed to a contrived, maturity.

His performance reveals nuances of emotion and commitment that do not even seem to be implied in the recording we know from Blonde on Blonde. What is absent from the song, now, is the sense of bitterness that emerged both as a complaint and contempt five years ago, and the performance here imposes an enormous agony on the simple matter of living through the day, until finally, in the last verse, it increases in intensity and Dylan’s voice is acting out a resistance to the calamity of life that stops a long way short of forgiveness.

~~Bob Dylan -by- Greil Marcus

Day 34: Book Excerpt: American Arsenal

On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt, vacationing at a favorite spa in Warm Springs, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Harry Truman, sworn in as president that evening, seemed an unlikely successor. He was a failed Kansas City haberdasher whose debts had been paid by the political machine of Kansas City’s Boss Pendergast, whose patronage interests he had faithfully served—he was known as “the Senator from Pendergast.” Under pressure from the Democratic Party’s leaders, Roosevelt had selected Truman to replace the incumbent vice president, the left-leaning Henry Wallace, as his 1944 running mate. Truman had shown little experience or judgment in foreign affairs. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Senator Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

Truman held his first cabinet meeting immediately after his swearing-in. After the meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson waited for the others to leave the room and then told the president that a project was under way to develop a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. The next day, James Byrnes, whom Truman would soon appoint secretary of state, told the president “with great solemnity” that “we were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.”

Truman and his closest military and political advisors, with the exception of Stimson, seemed to have had no real understanding of the atomic bomb. Byrnes, a master Senate politician who had been Truman’s mentor there, would see the bomb as a club to be used to bully the Russians; Hap Arnold, chief of the AAF, likely saw it in the same way as did Curtis LeMay, who said that he understood that the bomb would make a “big bang” but that it “didn’t make much of an impression on me.” To them, it was just a bigger bomb. Stimson warned Truman that the United States could not keep its nuclear monopoly for long and urged the president to appoint a committee of leading citizens to advise him on its use and to consider international control. The president agreed, and named an Interim Committee that included Stimson, Byrnes, Bush, Conant, and Karl Compton. A scientific advisory panel, including Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and Arthur Compton, was formed to provide technical expertise to the Interim Committee. The advisory committee excluded scientists who were hesitant to use the bomb, such as Szilard, James Franck, and Urey.

On May 31, the Interim Committee made its recommendation. Oppenheimer and Arthur Compton had advised the committee that the bomb would have the explosive equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT and would kill about twenty thousand people if dropped over a city, with more injured by burns or radiation. (Both estimates were low. The estimate of those killed was based on the assumption that Japanese civilians would take shelter from an air raid, while the actual bombing was by a single plane without advance warning.) The committee discussed alternatives to bombing a Japanese city— arranging a demonstration of the bomb for the Japanese, dropping it on a preannounced target in Japan, or dropping it on a neutral area, perhaps an uninhabited island. All these ideas were rejected. Dropping the bomb on an uninhabited area would not show its destructive power. And what if the bomb fizzled, or what if the Japanese brought American POWs to a preannounced site? The Interim Committee’s minutes for May 31: “Secretary [Stimson] expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible. At the suggestion of Dr. Conant the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”
...
In his advice to Truman, Stimson showed his disconnection from the conduct of the war in Japan. After the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo, he had asked Arnold whether there had been any deviation from the policy of precision bombing. When Arnold told him that there had been no change in strategy, that the civilian casualties were only incidental, Stimson accepted his answer. As late as May 16, Stimson told Truman that insofar as possible he was holding the AAF to precision bombing, and that similar rules would be applied to the atomic bomb. But he must have known what was happening, as his decisions and advice to the president show. Stimson removed Kyoto from the target list for both conventional and atomic bombing because of its historic and artistic treasures, saying he “did not want to have the reputation of the United States outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” and he told Truman that he worried that Japan’s cities would be so “thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.” Truman’s response was to laugh and say he understood. Stimson deceived himself about the firebombing campaign in Japan, and he deceived his new president. The historian Tami Biddle has written that over Hiroshima, “no moral threshold was crossed that had not been crossed much earlier in the year.”

On June 14, the Joint Chiefs met to plan the invasion, and they acted almost as if the atomic bomb did not exist. The Army was certain that an invasion would be necessary, and the Navy and AAF agreed to plan for a conditional invasion if blockade and bombing failed to end the war. On June 18, the Joint Chiefs met with Truman, who expressed his concern about the American casualties that would result from facing Japan’s two-million-man homeland army. No one seemed able to offer a definitive alternative to an invasion. Gen. Ira Eaker represented Arnold, who did not attend. Like Arnold, Eaker was under orders to support Marshall, and he endorsed the decision to invade the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu. As far as the Army was concerned, there was nothing to discuss. LeMay arrived for a meeting the next day, and Marshall slept through his presentation.

At the Potsdam Conference in July, Truman received news of the successful Trinity test in New Mexico of the first atomic bomb, and he mentioned to Stalin almost in passing that America had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin (who of course knew all about it from Klaus Fuchs and other spies) said that he hoped that the Americans “would make good use of it against the Japanese.” America, Britain, and China agreed on the Potsdam Declaration, a July 26 ultimatum to Japan to surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction.” It made no mention of the bomb, nor did it offer to preserve the emperor system. The declaration was delivered by radio broadcast rather than through neutral countries’ diplomatic channels, which may have led the Japanese to view it as propaganda.

~~American Arsenal -by- Patrick Coffey