"World War II On Topic" is made possible by The Herzstein Foundation.

Jeremy Collins

Hello. I'm Jeremy Collins, the Director of Conferences and Symposia at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. This is World War II On Topic, a weekly podcast, where we highlight some of our best programs with historians and authors. Today's episode is brought to you by the museum's Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and the Media and Education Center. We are going back to 2020 when Dr. Ed Lengel, then the museum senior director of programs hosted a webinar with President Harry Truman's grandson, Clifton Truman Daniel, and Paul Sparrow, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum director. Though both speakers referenced photographs during the conversation, we feel their words stand on their own. If you would like to view the webinar, you can find the link to it in the description. They presented on Roosevelt's and Truman's role in the Manhattan Project and the dramatic race for atomic power. The Manhattan Project's success would've been impossible without President Roosevelt's committed leadership and President Truman's decision to employ the weapons. This culminated in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

Hello everybody. This is going to be a fantastic program this morning, or this afternoon, wherever you are. I'm Ed Lengel. I'm senior director of programs at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. I'm joined today by two gentlemen. The first is Paul Sparrow, who is director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Museum and Library in Hyde Park, New York, following a career as a documentary filmmaker and a senior executive at the museum. And Paul has been directing the Roosevelt Library Museum since 2015, and he will be talking obviously about FDR and the Manhattan Project. Our second guest is Clifton Truman Daniel, who is the eldest grandson of President Harry Truman.

He is also a Truman scholar. He's spent quite a bit of time studying the life and career of his grandfather, and he currently serves as honorary chairman of the board of trustees at the Harry Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri. So today will give a great opportunity for question and answer. I mean, please weigh in with lots of questions. We've already been talking quite a bit off camera about our topic today, and I guarantee there's going to be a lot of interesting ideas and discussions. So I will begin and introduce Paul to begin us in our program. Thank you.

Paul Sparrow

Thank you, Ed. And thank you Clifton for being part of this today. I'm very excited. This is one of those topics that has generated enormous amount of debate throughout the years. The background for Franklin Roosevelt of course is that he was struggling in the late 1930s to convince Americans who were very isolationist, that they had to take an interest in the problems that were going on in Europe. Some of the things that he understood about the spread of fascist Nazi Germany and the threat from Japan, many Americans disagreed with and didn't want to see the American public get involved. So one of FDR's big issues was rebuilding the military. Hundreds of new ships were constructed, there was a Peacetime Draft instituted. So he was very focused on how America would respond to the threat from Nazi Germany. So I'm just going to share a PowerPoint here that has a few images in it.

That's the king and the queen and the president, sorry. Then this is Leo Szilard on the left and obviously Albert Einstein on the right. So they started drafting this letter to the president to try to convince him that the United States needed to get involved. Now, although Leo Szilard was a world-famous physicist, obviously he didn't have the same status that Albert Einstein did. So the letter was drafted under Einstein's name and here's a copy of the letter which as you can see was sent in August of 1939. So the war in Europe still has not started yet. Germany doesn't invade Poland until September, but this is the lead-up to it and there's this tremendous concern on the part of these scientists and you can say here's an excerpt: "That it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large, massive uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium like elements would be generated.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs and it's conceivable then much less certain that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type carried by a boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory." Then, of course, just a few weeks later, Germany invades Poland, and we are in the start of World War II. On October 19th, FDR responds back to Professor Einstein and obviously, a lot had been going on there, but he said, "I found this date of such import that I have convened a bureau consisting of the head of the bureau standards in the chosen representative of the army and Navy to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium." Now over a period of the next several years, there's different committees that are formed, but on June 28th, 1941, the Office of Scientific Research and Development is created, which oversees the whole project.

And man named Vannevar Bush is put in charge. This is really the point at which the whole project gains tremendous momentum. There is a sense now that there is a cohesive and coherent objective. They need to develop a bomb. They need to beat the Germans to it. And then, of course, just a few months later, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, which gives even greater impetus to the development of this bomb. So the two men who were responsible for the development on the left there, you see Leslie Groves, who is the military representative, essentially in charge of the entire operation. And then the right, you see the famous scientist, Robert Oppenheimer. Now there Los Alamos facility is the one that's most famous, but of course, there are more than 20 different facilities all across the country. Hundred thousand, more than a hundred thousand people involved in this from extracting uranium core and building munitions and recruiting scientists and all done under top secrecy.

Meanwhile, at the same time, the British had been developing a similar nuclear bomb development, which they called the Tube Alloys. And early on in the war, when the Germans were bombing the British, they decided that the British and Americans should work together. Britain shared a lot of their data and their science with the Americans and several British scientists came over. But by 1943, this photograph was taken at what is now Camp David, what FDR called Shangri-La. By 1943, the Americans had essentially cut the British out of the development of the bomb and the Manhattan Project. This was done for a variety of reasons, but Churchill was very upset about this and wanted the British to get back involved in this partnership. Then a few months after this photo was taken in August of 1943, right before the Quebec Conference, there had been tremendous tension between the Americans and the British regarding the plans for D-Day.

The Americans wanted to go ahead and get a date and make D-Day happen. And Churchill and the British military were very reluctant. They had been dragging their feet coming up with alternative strategies. So at this meeting in August of 1943 in Hyde Park, right before the Quebec Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill are essentially playing a quid pro quo here. Roosevelt saying to Churchill, if you will commit to the D-Day invasion of Normandy, we'll bring you back into the nuclear project and that's what happened. Both agreements were signed on the same day, right before the Quebec Conference started. In 1944 this was taken right after the democratic convention. It's one of the few times that Roosevelt got together with his at this point vice presidential candidate, but soon-to-be vice president. There was very little communication going on at this point.

It's really one of FDR's I think failings as a leader that he did not fully brief Truman on the development of the nuclear bomb, his plans for the United Nations, a whole range of topics, and this was a critical part of that. This photograph was taken on April 11th, just the night before FDR died and you can see he is a very sick man here. When he died, there was a tremendous sense of loss, not just for Americans, but for people all over the world who had seen him as this great champion of freedom and a fighter for their independence and against fascist Nazi Germany. A few months later, they had completed development of the first atomic bomb.

This is the scaffolding for the test of the Trinity test, which was the first time they were actually going to test this bomb. Then you see here, this is the explosion of Trinity. So by this point, of course, Truman is president, and I'm going to close this off now. At this point, Truman is president. He's been briefed and I'll turn it over to Clifton to talk about the processes that were happening internal to the Truman administration. But I will say this, there was never any question within the Roosevelt administration or his top military advisors if they were going to use the bomb. They were going to drop that bomb as soon as it was ready.

Clifton Truman Daniel 

Thank you, Paul. I appreciate that. And I'll just say, I'm going to piggyback on the comment that you made about President Roosevelt not telling my grandfather anything. That's certainly true. Years ago when I met David Roosevelt, FDR's grandson for the first time we were talking about our grandfather's relationship. Before we all went upstairs to our rooms in the hotel, I said, "David, your grandfather didn't tell my grandfather a damn thing." And we all went to bed. The next morning we came down to breakfast and I said, "Good morning, David, how are you?" And David said, "I'm not going to tell you."

I'll start off by saying that my grandfather never spoke to me about the atomic bombs. It was a tough subject. He died when I was 15 years old and we saw them on family vacations. So it was always Thanksgiving, Christmas, or going down to Key West during the spring and that's my fault. I could've asked him, but I didn't. Had I asked him he would not have told me anything that he had not written or said publicly. He made the decision to use the atomic bomb to shorten the war and save lives, both American and Japanese. He did not find out about the atomic bombs until Secretary of War Stimson told him right after his swearing-in on April 12th, 1945, but Stimson only told him just the rudiments, just the bare minimum.

We have a very powerful new weapon I need to brief you on it. It wasn't until almost two weeks later, that Stimson and General Groves gave my grandfather a full briefing on the Manhattan Project. Not long after grandpa formed the interim committee of scientists and leaders in the field and including some of the scientists who'd worked on the bomb, including Dr. Oppenheimer, to decide if the weapon should be used. And if so, how? And I never learned about any of this from grandpa as I said. I found out about this in school. I learned in school like everybody else. I learned from my textbooks. For me, the dropping of the bomb has always been much more of it's what you do afterward. It's how grandpa felt about it. It's how we deal with the legacy and as Paul said, this continues to be debated.

People still write books about this. People still talk about it and it goes back and forth. I guess it was my son, Wesley. This must have been in 2003 or four when my son Wesley was 10 years old, he brought home a book from school Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. And for those of you who don't know the story, Sadako Sasaki was a real little girl who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of Hiroshima. She and her family did, but Sadako was diagnosed with radiation-induced leukemia about nine years later. To help in her treatment she followed a Japanese tradition that says, if you fold a thousand origami paper cranes you are granted a wish. Good health, a long life. The crane is a symbol of life and longevity in Japan. She folded 1300 cranes, but sadly she died of the leukemia at the age of 12 in 1955.

There is a monument to her and to all of the children who were killed or sickened or wounded by the bomb. That was the first human story I'd ever seen of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Everything up to that point had been in my textbooks or from my mother talking about my grandfather's decision. So this was the first human story and the teacher Rosemary Barilla didn't just give the kids the book. She taught them Japanese history. She taught them Japanese culture. They had a tea ceremony in class. They folded cranes. I came home one afternoon and I found Wesley in the living room wearing a kimono with green tea and sushi laid out on the coffee table behind it. So I mention this about every five years, Japanese journalists on anniversaries of the bombing Japanese journalists, call the Truman library and ask if they can speak to a family member.

And it's usually me. I mentioned to a Japanese journalist that I had read Sadako's story with my son and that story got back to Japan. I had a call from Masahiro Sasaki, who is Sadako's older brother, also a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. And he just said, "Can we meet someday and maybe do something together?" And I said, "Yes." We met five years later in 2010 in New York at the 9/11 Tribute Center and Masahiro and his son Yuji were donating one of Sadako's last grains to the center as a gesture of healing in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. During that meeting, Yuji took out, he had a little plastic box and he removed a tiny paper crane, and he put it in my palm, and said, "That's the last one that Sadako had folded before she died."

And at that point, he and his father asked if I would go to the Memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As my lead for that, I took my grandfather. In 1947, he made a state visit to Mexico and during that visit, he placed a wreath at the tomb of six Mexican army cadets, who had fought to the death against US forces in 1847. And of course, a reporter asked my grandfather afterwards, "Why would you place wreath to a monument, to our enemies?" And my grandfather said, "Because they had courage. Courage does not belong to any one country. You recognize and honor courage wherever you find it." Likewise, I thought that suffering in war universally does not belong to any one country. If you recognize it and you acknowledge it. So we went to Japan in 2012, my wife Polly and my sons, Wesley and Gates and I went.

We attended both ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in between we spoke to more than two dozen survivors just to let them tell us their stories and Chrissy, if we have the PowerPoint, I'm not quite as adept as Paul is doing this from home because I'm doing this on my phone. That is me and Masahiro Sasaki in the Peace Park in Hiroshima at the start getting ready to in for the memorial that's on August 6th, 2012. Next one, please. And this is you can see behind that's our interpreter sitting next to us. That's Masahiro and me and our interpreter and you can see behind her and me is the Atomic Bomb Dome, which was the Industrial Production Hall in Hiroshima that was nearly directly below the blast and was spared because of its steel and stone construction. It withstood the bomb and it stands as a memorial of the bombing now. I included that picture because the first question I was asked in Japan is, are you here to apologize?

My answer to that was no, I'm here to honor the dead and listen to the living in the hopes that we don't ever anybody on the planet ever does this again. The question came up several times and during this interview, it came up again and Masahiro Sasaki answered it for me. He jumped ahead of the question and said, "Look, if we asked Clifton for an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he can ask us for an apology for Pearl Harbor. And where do we go from there? Then it just becomes a blame game." Next slide, please. I'm placing a wreath at the back of an office building, oddly. It used to be the site of the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters, where 12 American prisoners of war were being held when the bomb went off. All 12 of them died and they are interned.

They're buried with the Japanese victims of Hiroshima. A Japanese gentleman Shigeako sorry Shigeaki Mori spent 25, 30 years, and a lot of his own money finding out, doing the research to find out exactly what happened to those 12 servicemen because their families back here in the states did not know. The secrecy around the bombing and the war and the fact that there was the destruction, records were destroyed. People did not know what had happened to their loved ones and he found out for them and reported on the fate of every one of those men. Next, please. That is Yuji Sasaki, Masahiro's son and that is one of Sadako's original cranes. And right after we went to Japan in August, Yuji flew to Hawaii and donated that crane to the USS Arizona Memorial, where it sits today at the end of the exhibit. Next, please.

Those are seedlings. That's at the Powell Gardens in Kansas City. Those are seedlings from trees that survived the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And some of them will be planted at the Truman Library when we reopen, hopefully later this year. Next. That's the Japan Society and of course, that's me on the left with the microphone is Shigeko Sasamori, who survived Hiroshima. She was one of the Hiroshima Maidens. She came to this country for reconstructive surgery. Next to her is Cynthia Miller, whose father Delos Van Dine worked on the Manhattan Project and bombings afterwards. She has been dealing with radiation sickness since she was a child. So she is in some respects, a survivor, and next to her with his head bowed is Jongkeun Lee who's also a survivor of Hiroshima. This is speaking to high school students.

I did this on and off for four years speaking in the company of survivors, just telling this story and letting students hear firsthand what it was like to survive a nuclear explosion. Again, in the interest of peace and disarmament. Next, please. That's Orval Amdahl. He brought that sword home from Japan. He was a Marine artillery captain, and he brought that sword home at the end of the war, put it in his closet. He didn't really want to take it, but the quartermaster was telling him to take the swords and Orval brought it home, put it in the closet, kept it oiled, kept it nice. And finally, after 67 years through the Nagasaki St. Paul, Minnesota Sister City Commission, he found the son of the officer who had to surrender that sword. Next slide, please. And he gave it back to him in a ceremony in St. Paul in 2013.

And that's Mr. Motomura, Tadahiro Motomura over there on the left, sitting down with his entire family. And over there to his, in the left-hand side of the photo is the sword and a shrine to it, to his family, which it was a wonderful gesture on both parts. One for Orval for giving it back. And two for Mr. Motomura to come to this country with this entire family to receive it. So those are the kinds of things that I've been interested in since the bombings, the acknowledging the harm that was done on both sides. I have shaken hands with American servicemen, Pacific war veterans who have told me that had it not been from my grandfather's decision, they would not have survived the war. They would not have families. They would not be here and I've had their children and grandchildren tell me the same things, but I've also held in the palm of my hand, that little girl's crane. So the object for me is to honor both.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

Thank you, Clifton. Very, very moving and powerful presentation. There's so much to discuss with respect to two of the most important and towering personalities of the 20th century in relation to the Manhattan Project and to the dropping of the bomb or the bombs and the consequences in Japan and the United States and the world. We have a number of questions, but I'm going to start off with a couple of my own. Paul, FDR stood in charge through the first several years of the Manhattan Project. It was really his administration that brought it to fruition and one of the most important things that he accomplished was the funding of the Manhattan Project and correct me if I'm wrong. I recall that it cost $2 billion to bring the Manhattan project to completion and that's $2 billion in 1945 money. You can imagine it would be astronomically more now. Can you say something about how FDR made that happen and this was something that was concealed from Congress?

Paul Sparrow 

Well, FDR was a master of the mechanics of government. He understood how to get things done. He would, as he famously said, try something. If it doesn't work, try something else, just make it happen. So during this period, prior to the start of the war, prior to Pearl Harbor, he had been consistently raising military budgets, building up a relationship with both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Bill. Both his secretary of Navy and his secretary of war were Republicans that he appointed in 1940. So he had a pretty strong coalition. After Pearl Harbor really was unlimited checkbook and one of the things that he was really very astute on was the ability to keep everything compartmentalized so that as the Manhattan Project grew, it became this black box project that literally only a handful of people in the administration knew what it was about.

I've always felt that one of the reasons that FDR brought Truman on as his vice president at that point was that Truman had famously headed the Truman Commission, which was investigating military expenditures, looking for corruption and profit taking. When he discovered this massive outflow of cash to this Manhattan Project and he asked about it, he was told, "Just leave that alone." And he did, and he didn't make it a focus of his investigation.

So this funding that he created for was really under this whole massive outlay of capital from the federal government. And although it was close to $2 billion at the time, again, it depends how you measure the money. It might have been more, it might have been less. There's a lot of ancillary projects that fed into it, but 50, $60 billion in today's dollars and it was his effort because he was so terrified that Hitler was going to get the atomic bomb before we did. And actually, during the Battle of the Bulge in December and January of 1944 and '45, he asked is the bomb ready? Can we use it in Europe to stop this offensive? So there's no question that he was willing to use the bomb.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

And it's an interesting contrast too. You mentioned Hitler in contrast between him and FDR is the Nazis did pursue atomic weapons program. I think it's arguable whether had they made the right decisions during the process, they might have reached a point of achieving that power by the end of the war. But Hitler scoffed at his scientists and scoffed at the whole concept. It was not something he was willing to take seriously. Of course, many of the greatest scientists who lived in Germany and Europe were Jewish and they had fled Nazi persecution before the war and had gone to places like Britain and the United States but Hitler was, was very cynical toward the whole thing. You put, by contrast, FDR took the whole thing seriously from the very beginning and it was something where his stewardship really did play just a massive role in making it happen as well as Winston Churchill.

Paul Sparrow 

He truly believed in the power of science and I think with Hitler, you see Hitler he refused to fund the Navy, but he funded submarines. He would fund rockets and things like that but he essentially, early in the war cut the funding for the nuclear program. He also didn't like the fact that there were so many Jewish scientists involved in the physics of it and that was one of his part of his issue. If you look at the resources he put into the death camps and the concentration camps, I mean he could easily have funded his atomic program if he hadn't been so intent on the destruction of Europe's Jews.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

Right. Very good. I'm going to direct this comment to you and it's really an observation which had been made in a previous program we did with Saul David about Okinawa and the atomic bomb some weeks ago. This is from Rob Eisenberg. He says, "I mentioned this at a prior museum briefing on this topic. I'm a museum docent at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We had a museum guest some years back who had been a Japanese pilot during the war. When seeing the Enola Gay in our museum, he referred to it as the plane that saved his life by bringing a rapid end to the war." Which he thinks is an interesting perspective. Did you hear any similar perspectives from the Japanese who you met and in your tours?

Clifton Truman Daniel 

I have heard that I have not, but I've heard it secondhand. I have not had a survivor tell me that firsthand, but the survivors that I worked with and the survivors that I know we work together on the subject of disarmament toward peace and disarmament. So they and their American counterparts tend to steer away from... I don't want to say steer away from anything good, but they want to keep the focus on the destruction, the devastation, the horror of the bombings. So when we're talking to kids, we don't often let those stories in, but they do exist. You're right there are Japanese, there are former pilots, there are even survivors who will say that. And the survivors as heart-wrenching as their stories are, they will also tell you that they were gearing up for the invasion. They were training. They were drilling with bamboo poles, sharpened bamboo sticks. Civilian units were attached to military units. They would be under their command. They were told to fight to the death against American soldiers. So those stories I have heard and they go hand in hand with the destruction.

Dr. Ed Lengel

Right. I think it's fair to say that if operation Olympic hadn't taken place, not only would there have been tremendous casualties for American and Allied forces conducting the invasion, but the devastation in Japan would've been astronomical. I have a question from Jim Cohort and I think this would be for both of y'all directed to you Clifton first. He says, "By mid-1945, the USA had only had three to five atom bombs, both uranium and plutonium types. If we used them and Japan didn't surrender. Presumably, we would've had to continue with the invasion. How did this piosity of weapons factor into Truman's thinking about using the bomb and targeting? Do we know if FDR realized we would have so few weapons?"

Clifton Truman Daniel 

I think, Jim, we only had three. We'd done the test at Alamogordo. Then we had the Little Boy which we used on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki. Little Boy being uranium and Fat Man being a plutonium bomb. I think we had one more and I don't know as much research as I've done on this what the plan was. I know that grandpa was exhorted by Senator Russell of, I want to say, Alabama. Senator Russell wrote him a long telegram, said, "Use those bombs and if you run out, use conventional bombs. Bomb the Japanese until there's nothing left." He was very angry and wanted... Grandpa did not want to do that and responded to Senator Russell that he did not like having to use those weapons did not like the idea of destroying Japan.

He was taking the steps that he thought he had to take. His plans beyond and I know he was a bit taken aback that the second bomb had been used as quickly as it had. It was then that grandpa took control of the atomic weapons. It was after Nagasaki that he took control back from the military and put it in the Office of the President where it resides today. His sort of flipping comment about it was, I don't want some dashing Lieutenant Colonel to be the one to make the decision to use all of those. It was a serious weapon and a horrible weapon and he wanted a lot of thought to go into that. But I honestly don't know. Maybe Paul does what the plan was if they'd had to use the third one and then the Japanese had still resisted.

Paul Sparrow 

Well, the third atomic bomb actually wasn't ready yet. It was going to be at least another week after the dropping in Nagasaki before the next bomb would be ready. Then it was going to be several additional weeks before number four and five would be operational. So there wasn't really another, they couldn't just drop another bomb at that point, but I think it's very hard for people today to understand what the perspective was in August of 1945. The world had been at war for almost six years. The level of destruction that had been inflicted on Allies and on the Axis powers, particularly Germany, the firebombing of Dresden, the bombing of population centers in both Germany and in Japan, the firebombing of Tokyo, more people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than in Hiroshima.

I mean the scale of violence, the horror that was being inflicted across the world, to be honest, the atomic bomb was not some kind of massive escalation of what was already going on. It was simply a more powerful weapon that was just part of this horrific world that had descended into this chaos. So there is a problem in understanding what the perspective was for people who'd lost family members, all these soldiers were there ready for an invasion that a million Americans might die. Easily, five to 10 million Japanese would've died in the invasion. So was there a plan? The plan was all-out war and they were going to use whatever weapons were available.

Dr. Ed Lengel

World War II really built toward a crescendo of violence and horror at the end and the atomic bombings in many ways were just a culmination of that, of what was already happening. We have a couple of questions on Facebook and I will personally field the first one then open it to you gentlemen for comments. So David asks, he says, "My understanding is that German scientists intentionally drag their feet to delay or prevent the completion of an atomic weapon, is this true?" And this relates in particular, there's a German scientist named Werner Heisenberg, who was around only probably the leading German atomic scientist in 1942, who called a number of meetings in that year and conferences where he made the argument to Albert Speer as well as some others, that an atomic bomb was feasible. That with the right resources, he could make it happen.

But then when Speer and Ferdinand Porsche and others pressed him on that, he suddenly backed off. And indeed suggested that there was some question that an atomic detonation might unfold endlessly until the whole world was blown up, which is something many of the scientists worried about. There's a lot of debate, whether Heisenberg really meant what he said. Whether he was in purpose, trying to hold back the program because of his fears about Hitler gaining this power, or whether he really was afraid and really was uncertain after all on whether he could do it.

I would suggest, and we can't get inside Heisenberg's head. I would suggest that there was probably more an element of fear in him, as well as he was accused by Nazis of being a "white Jew" for carrying on this program. The Nazis as you said, Paul were extremely suspicious of scientists, to begin with. So it's a tricky question that really hasn't been answered, but I rather err on the side that they were incompetent rather than necessarily trying to hold back the Nazis. Do either of you have any comments on that? Then I'll move on. Jim, on Facebook, asks, "What was the relationship between Roosevelt and Truman with General Leslie Groves?"

Clifton Truman Daniel

I'll just say real quick, again, back to my grandfather, not being told anything about the atomic bombings, not being told much of anything about anything while he was vice president. I believe the first time that he met General Groves was when secretary of war Henry Stimson brought the general to the White House a little less than two weeks after grandpa was sworn in to tell him everything they could about the Manhattan Project and the atomic bonds. And grandpa even wrote in where the buck stops. He wrote his memoirs and he wrote after the presidency, which my mother edited and put into a book, but he wrote that General Groves had snuck in by the back door so that nobody would see him coming and that's how top secret it was.

Paul Sparrow

Yeah. FDR had a very specific management style, particularly regarding military operations. Admiral Leahy was his Chief of Staff. George Marshall was the Army Chief of Staff. He dealt with them almost exclusively with the way he would communicate what he needed to have done out on the operational side of things. He did meet with Groves but again he really wanted the operations to be managed, all was being done by the military, as military operations. He had tremendous input on strategy, on technique, and where we should be focusing, but it was similar with Eisenhower. He had very little contact with Eisenhower even though he was the Supreme commander, most of the communications went through either General Marshall or Admiral Leahy.

Clifton Truman Daniel

Yeah. And just Paul, I don't mean to... I keep sounding like FDR didn't tell my grandfather anything like it's a crabby family problem. It's simply difference in management styles. I don't mean to suggest that Roosevelt was intentionally holding things back.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

Following up on that Tom Kentis of Chicago asked, "Was there ever a list compiled of who knew what, but was not disclosed until Stimson told Truman?"

Clifton Truman Daniel

A list of who knew, what about the bombs?

Dr. Ed Lengel

Yeah. Or about the Manhattan-

Clifton Truman Daniel

About the Manhattan Project. I know they tried to keep that list as small as possible. Just as an aside years ago, after we went to Japan, I visited Oak Ridge, Tennessee to tour the city and to see the facilities where they refined the uranium. One of the chilling facts that came out, of course, they were scientists, scientists had families. They brought their kids with them and they had a high school and the high school had a football team. The high school football team never played a home game and never had their names on their jerseys and never were allowed to talk to kids on the other team. They came, they played, they left. So a lot of secrecy. I don't know about a list of who knew what, but they kept it as small as possible.

That Tube Alloy away term was used in Oak Ridge as well. That they were making Tube Alloy rather than refining uranium. So even the young women, the Calutron Girls, the women who were using, who were calibrating, the machines that you refined the uranium. They did not know what they were doing with those machines. I think one was even told that it was an ice cream maker. So they tried to keep a lid on all of it. So list must have been small, but probably bigger than we think it was.

Paul Sparrow 

There are only about a dozen people in the administration, nonmilitary people in the administration who really understood what the Manhattan Project was. First of all, the science was fairly complicated and somewhat unknown. I mean, there had been lots of articles and popular mechanics and things about the possibility of a nuclear bomb, but it was not something that people really readily understood. Even the people in Los Alamos who were working on the project understood they were working on a bomb and a weapon, but they didn't even fully understand what they were working on. It was so compartmentalized. So if you were in the department that was working on the explosives, that would compress the uranium to create the... You were focused entirely on how you create spherical explosives, that would create a uniform compression to ignite the uranium, but they didn't even know what they were trying to ignite. So I do think the level of secrecy was pretty extraordinary.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

And even despite that, though, the Soviets did manage to infiltrate the Manhattan Project. Paul, why was that? Was there anything FDR could have done to have prevented that? Is there any blame to be laid anywhere?

Paul Sparrow

Remember that the Soviet Union was our ally. So some of this idea that they were the bad guys here, they were the Allies and they lost more than 20 million people fighting the German. So there was a different perspective of who the Soviets were during the war than there is now, or even during the Cold War. But yes, there were multiple penetrations of the operation, secrets were smuggled out, designs were smuggled out, [inaudible 00:42:41], obviously, to terrific damage. A lot of the espionage was not discovered until the fifties or even later but again, at the same point America was conducting espionage against the Soviets. The whole world was at war and you trusted your allies only as far as you had to.

Clifton Truman Daniel 

And yeah, grandpa of course, famously said during, they found out that the bomb worked, I believe the day after he arrived in Potsdam to meet with Stalin and Churchill. He told Stalin about the bomb and Stalin took it very, very lightly and just sort of nodded and said, "Well, I hope you make good use of it." And grandpa got suspicious right then and there that he was very nonchalant about that.

Dr. Ed Lengel

So that leads into a question from Jeff Dasner. He says, "I'm curious about the reaction and response that the Soviet had in regards to the dropping of the bombs. It's my understanding that Stalin was hoping to become involved in the invasion of Japan in hopes of splitting it into separate spheres, much like post-war Germany. Was there any communication between Truman and the Soviets or any the other Allied Powers before or after the dropping of the bombs?"

Clifton Truman Daniel

Jeff and that's a question that comes up when they go on discussing whether or not the bombs were necessary or whether it was cruel or specifically whether or not it was a gambit to keep the Soviets from gaining influence in Japan because we had the Soviets had agreed to go to war with Japan. They were fighting the Japanese on the mainland and the bombs were set off in China and not China. I'm spacing. They were up anyway. They were engaging the Japanese army on the continent and the bombs were dropped on the Japanese islands. Some of the latest scholarship, I believe has it that the war was brought to a swift conclusion because of the double whammy of the bombs on the home islands of Japan and the Soviet army coming in and engaging troops on the continent. That it was just too much.

It was overwhelming. My grandfather did not and the charge that's made by because the relationship with the Soviets was, and we just talked about it. It was complicated. They were Allies, but we didn't trust them and we knew good and well, what Stalin would try to do, and eventually tried to do in moving into various, taking over various territories during and after the war. But grandpa, I don't think used the weapons to stop the Soviets from coming in. That was not a major point in his thinking. If it happened great that we kept them off of Japan, but he did not make that decision to keep the Soviets out of Japan. He made that decision to stop the war and save lives.

Dr. Ed Lengel

So Fred asks, "Did Truman and Marshall inform Douglas MacArthur in advance of the atomic bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima and if yes, how many weeks or days in advance was MacArthur informed?" And I'm going to build on that by asking, this is something we had discussed separately before when we were arranging this about informing Eisenhower and Eisenhower's opinion, but beginning with MacArthur, do we know if he was informed or not?

Clifton Truman Daniel 

I'll just say I have not heard that he was told ahead of time. They kept that bombing under wraps as much as they could. So I'll just say, honestly, I don't know whether they told MacArthur in advance or not.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

And what about Lethenhower's opinion on this?

Clifton Truman Daniel 

I don't know... Eisenhower's opinion on the bombing afterward?

Dr. Ed Lengel

Yes. Was he informed before this took place?

Clifton Truman Daniel

Again, I don't know if Eisenhower was told before. I don't know how secure that we thought our communications were to let them know far afield what was going on. Although you'd think they would, I mean, these Eisenhower and MacArthur were out on the ground running the war. You'd think they would let them know. Planning an invasion.

Paul Sparrow 

I would think that Nimitz in the Pacific probably was informed because of course they had to transport the bombs aboard the USS Indianapolis, and then the trigger mechanisms were flown into Naval bases in the Pacific Tinian Island. There's no way they could have not informed the Naval supreme commanders out there. So I would assume that Nimitz probably knew about it as did I'm sure Leahy.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

And Eisenhower was critical of the bombings. Does that ring true with both of you that it was an honest criticism that if he had been consulted or had been in charge that he wouldn't have dropped the bombs or does that seem more like benefit of hindsight from his perspective?

Clifton Truman Daniel

There was some hindsight on the part of General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, and others after the bombings, after the true nature of the destruction and the radiation and the illness was beginning to be learned, people did back off. I don't remember whether or not I was for it in the beginning or not. Although I can't imagine given the projections for the invasion, I would've thought that he would have agreed with anything that would have stopped that or stalled, that because they were... I mean, the projections were, they keep coming down on I think that the one telling fact is that we minted this country made half a million Purple Heart medals in advance of that planned invasion. Medals that I believe we're still using today. I think we're still using that original cache of Purple Hearts. So they understood that it was going to be a blood bath on both sides. I don't know why, but that's what I think it is just when you find out how horrible a weapon they are, people tend to back off. But I honestly don't know. I'm sort of spitballing here.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

I believe he wrote in his memoirs that he said that he felt that it was a mistake to do it, first of all, because of the civilian casualties. But second, he thought the United States was ceding the moral high ground. But whether this was a case of him advising Truman, not to do it ahead of time, or whether it was more something that he felt afterwards was a mistake is not entirely clear.

Clifton Truman Daniel 

Militarily grandpa was getting the go-ahead from his advisors.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

Right.

Clifton Truman Daniel 

General Marshall included.

Paul Sparrow

Again, I would just say that Eisenhower approved the firebombing of Dresden. So the idea that he had some kind of moral qualms against the wanton murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, again, this was total war. I think many people after the bombs were dropped and the war ended in hindsight said, "This was a horrific bomb. We should have found another way." But at the time there wasn't another way other than the invasion of mainland Japan, which would've resulted in many, many more casualties on both sides.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

Yeah. Gus on Facebook, who is age 11 asks, "How did they choose the targets?"

Clifton Truman Daniel

With the help of that interim committee, Gus, they selected targets that they believed to be knew or believed to be military targets, primarily military targets. They knew there were civilians there. Hiroshima for example had a port. It had a couple of military, it was headquarters for a couple of military outfits, including I think the second army and certainly the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters, and they had the port. They were training soldiers and shipping them out to China from Hiroshima. So they had a port. Nagasaki was a ship-building center.

You had the Mitsubishi ShipWorks down at the mouth of the river and the harbor. So that those were considered military targets and that's how they chose. Also, there was some, unfortunately, some factor I believe that they factored in whether or not these places had been bombed already because the scientists and the military wanted to know what kind of destruction the bombs would have and they wanted a pristine target. So I'm not sure how much that figured in, but I know that was at least part of it, but they were trying to choose military targets that would cripple some industry and do a lot of damage.

Paul Sparrow 

I do know that in the initial list of targets, the Japanese sacred city of Kyoto was listed as a potential target. And it was taken off the list because it was felt to be such a cultural icon for the Japanese and it had very little military value that it was. So there was a consideration of the sites from a cultural perspective. But, again, at that point, they understood that they might have to literally bomb the entire country in order to be successful in the invasion.

Clifton Truman Daniel

Yeah. I met years ago, one of the former docents at the Truman Library is named Lana white. She was born Setsuko Miyazaki. And she lived in Kokura, which was actually the primary target for the second bomb. But the weather was cloudy over Kokura that day and the planes circled for a time looking for a break in the weather, couldn't find one and flew on Nagasaki, and Lana at the age of 12 remembered those planes overhead. When she heard later that Nagasaki had been bombed, she knew that Kokura had missed being the target for the second bomb.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

Paul, you said earlier at the end of your presentation that you feel confident that FDR would have used the atomic bombs. Do you think that he and this is true for Harry Truman as well would have considered using them against Germany if the situation had demanded it?

Paul Sparrow

I absolutely do believe that he would've used it against Germany and he even asked whether the bombs were ready again during the Battle of the Bulge. Again, I think it's so hard for people today to understand what toll the war had taken on our leadership. It was a horrible, horrible war and FDR wanted to end the war. You remember there was tremendous pressure on him to find a way to save the Jews who were being killed in these death camps and they knew that the only way you could save the Jews was to end the war. So I believe if the bomb had been ready and he felt that by dropping the bomb, it could end the war with Germany and save the Jews he would've done it.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

We have time for one more question, I think and then I'll open it up to you gentlemen for any closing comments. And this one is from Fred, which he asked a while ago, "How much did Colonel Tibbets and the crew of the Enola Gay know of the devastating destructive power of the atomic bomb they were launching in Hiroshima? Did they realize the tens of thousands of civilians would be killed? And how did the captain and crew of Boxcar, which came afterwards know of the destructive power of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki?"

Clifton Truman Daniel

From what I know, they could see it and feel it. They not only got the shockwave, Tibbets I think both, I believe they said they could taste that when after the shockwave hit them, they could taste. It tasted like metal. The air was filled with the and I assume that's due to the radiation or some other effect of the bomb, but they could all taste metal in their mouths as they flew away. And they dove to get away from Hiroshima. One of the survivors Reku Yomata was on a schoolyard in Hiroshima and she remembered just before the bomb hit, she remembered looking up and seeing a curved contrail.

So the Enola Gay dropped the bomb, turned, and dove to gain speed so they could get as far away as possible and that's the last thing... Well, Reku survived the bombing. She was knocked out, but that was the last thing she saw before the bomb exploded. And it wasn't it the pilot of... Was it the pilot of Boxcar who went on I believe on What's My Line? later in the fifties and met Reverend Tanimoto from Hiroshima? I'm probably mixing apples and oranges here, but he felt really bad, guilty and bad, about the bombing.

Paul Sparrow 

Yeah. I think the pilots of the Enola Gay had been told that they were going to drop this very, very powerful bomb. But other than the small number of people who had witnessed the test at Trinity of these power... No one understood what these bombs were capable of. I think everyone was shocked. Even the people who had studied and built the bomb were shocked at the destruction of Hiroshima. Now, the pilots for Boxcar with Nagasaki, they knew because they had seen what had happened at Hiroshima. So they certainly understood what they were about to do. But I think all the people board the Enola Gay were stunned when they saw the explosive power of one bomb. Remember many of these were experienced air force pilots who had blown dozens of more missions where you would drop hundreds of bombs on a target and not get anywhere near the same effect.

Dr. Ed Lengel 

And that being said, Paul Tibbets to the end of his life was I think unapologetic is the right word. It's not that he was happy to have had to do this, but he felt it was a matter of duty that it was his responsibility to do it to the best of his ability as an officer. Do you have any final comments? I would say just broadly to start with Paul and then moved to Clifton on the lessons to be learned from this, one of the most important, if not the most important event of the 20th century?

Paul Sparrow

I think it goes to what FDR's dying wish was, which was the creation of the United Nations. He understood that the horror of World War I and World War II had brought us to the point where if there was another world war, it would destroy the planet. So his focus was on creating this international entity that could help diffuse the tensions that could find ways that were diplomatic for solutions.

It was all he really cared about at the very end when he went to Warm Springs to try to recover was because, at the end of April, there was going to be the first meeting of the United Nations to draft a charter for how this international institution would work. I think we have to look back and say, 75 years later, he was right. The United Nations is a flawed organization, but it has prevented us from going into another world war, despite enormous tensions and the frictions that were created in a post-war world. So I do think the importance of international diplomacy, the importance of countries learning, and having a venue to come together and resolve their differences is really the positive legacy and perhaps the only positive legacy of the tragedy of having to drop atomic bombs.

Clifton Truman Daniel

Thank you. And I'll piggyback on what we were talking a minute ago about Colonel Tibbets. When my grandfather met Colonel Tibbets, after the war, he asked him, "Has anybody been giving you a hard time about using that weapon about dropping the bomb?" And Tibbets told him that no, he had not had that experience. But grandpa said, "If they do you tell them that was my decision, not yours." So he kept the decision long to himself. Five years later, he was on Wake Island getting ready to meet with General MacArthur. He had with him a White House photographer named Joe O'Donnell, who had been a Marine photographer and taken some of the first photos of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And O'Donnell he had been very shaken by that and O'Donnell had my grandfather alone for a couple of minutes and he asked him, point blank.

He said, "Didn't you ever have any regrets about using that weapon?" And my grandfather said, "Hell yes, you don't use something like that without having regrets. Without regretting having to." He said he would do the same thing again under the same circumstances, but he regretted having to do it. I'll just end with something that a Nagasaki survivor Sakawai Shakira said to... She didn't say it to me, but she said it publicly. She said, "I think the basic idea of peace is to have some idea of other people suffering." So that going forward, we can debate the use of the bomb and whether or not it was just or right. But I think that we all have to look with eyes wide open at what those bombs did and who it happened to and prevent it.

Dr. Ed Lengel

Thank you. I think that's an appropriate ending to what has been a wonderful and I think very enlightening conversation. Paul Sparrow, Clifton Truman Daniel. Thank you very much.

Clifton Truman Daniel 

Thanks, Ed.

Paul Sparrow

Thank you, Ed, and thank you, Clifton. I appreciate the chance and opportunity to talk with you.

Clifton Truman Daniel 

Likewise, Paul, thank you. That was great.

Jeremy Collins

Thank you for listening. If you liked what you heard, please consider visiting nationalWW2museum.org/podcasts for more episodes. Again, that is national w w, the number two, museum.org/pods. This series is made possible by the Albert and Ethel Herzstein charitable foundation, which supports content like this from the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, don't forget to rate and subscribe. It goes a long way to helping others find this series. I'm Jeremy Collins signing off.