In the event he probably disliked it less than he expected. He found Berlin ‘an awful city’ and never wanted to see it again—but who would not in the circumstances—and he was impatient to get back after a month away. However, he felt that he acquitted himself well. As the only Head of State he presided over the conference. The surprise—and the misjudgment—was that he liked Stalin. He reminded him of Pendergast! To his wife he recorded it without ambiguity: ‘I like Stalin’ (July 29th).3 To his diary he was no more circumspect, ‘I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell.’ (July 17th)44
He was rather less forthcoming about the British, whom he approached with a slightly ungracious suspicion. Before he sailed for Europe he told Bess: ‘George VI R.I. sent me a personal letter today by Halifax. Not much impressed.’ However, he added ‘Save it for Margie’s scrapbook.’5 This was an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace, which visit, to save time, he managed to change to a luncheon in a British battleship. This he approached with little more enthusiasm: ‘I’ve got to lunch with the limey King when I get to Plymouth.’ However, to his diary, after the event, he was rather more forthcoming. He found the King ‘a very pleasant and surprising person’ and the lunch ‘nice and appetising’.6 Perhaps he was primarily concerned to assure Mrs Truman that he was not acquiring Roosevelt’s taste for European royalty.
His first judgment of Churchill was more surprising, but also a little cool: ‘He is a most charming and a very clever person -meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense. He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me, etc. etc. Well, I gave him as cordial a reception as I could—being naturally (I hope) a polite and agreeable person. I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap.’7
The change of British Government on July 27th he took with less dismay than, he believed, did Stalin. But here again his comments certainly betrayed no anglomania: ‘The British returned last night. They came and called on me at nine-thirty. Attlee is an Oxford man and talks like the much overrated Mr Eden and Bevin is a John L. Lewis. Can you imagine John L. being my Secretary of State—but we shall see what we shall see. ‘8
During his journey back across the Atlantic the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. The final decision to do so had been taken by him at Potsdam a day or so after the full results of the Alamogordo test in the New Mexican desert had been received. This is now regarded as the most controversial, some would say immoral, and therefore difficult, decision of the Truman presidency. At the time it was not so seen. The testimony of Churchill puts the contemporary view with complete authority: ‘The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.’9
Did this point to short-sighted callousness on the part of Truman and all those around him, including the British? The charge of short-sightedness may have more validity than that of callousness. To evalute either, however, it is necessary to think oneself back into the circumstance of the time. Brutal though the world of the 1980s may be in some ways, and appalling beyond belief though the contingent nuclear threat may have become, the carnage actually experienced in the mid-1940s was qualitatively quite different from that to which countries at peace, or even engaged in sporadic guerrilla fighting, are habituated. Now an accident involving a hundred deaths rings around the world. Then an estimated 45,000 people had recently been killed in three days of ‘conventional’ bombing of Dresden. The comparable, and still more recent figure for the fire raids on Tokyo was 78,000. Dresden was unnecessary, but nobody thought that the war against Japan could be waged without such raids, and only one close advisor, Arnold, the Commander of the Army Air Force, believed that it could be won by them alone. The rest believed that victory would involve an invasion of the Japanese mainland. In the aftermath of the bloody battle for Okinawa General Marshall estimated that this would cost half a million American casualties. In any direction therefore there stretched a path of carnage.
The news that the Alamogordo test had been a success, and that the bomb was available for use, which reached Truman on the fourth day of Potsdam, came to him as a relief and not as a burden. It justified a huge secret investment of money and resources which had been made on executive responsibility alone. It assured a much quicker victory at a cost of many fewer American casualties, and probably of fewer Japanese ones too. It eliminated the (fairly faint) possibility of the Russians getting the bomb first. And, Truman felt, it strengthened his position in trying to handle Stalin during the remaining two weeks of the conference and beyond.