Harry Truman and the Price of Victory

What did President Harry S. Truman and his senior advisers believe an invasion of Japan would cost in American dead? Is In recent years this has been a matter of heated historical controversy, with Truman’s critics maintaining that the huge casualty estimates he later cited were a “postwar creation” designed to justify his use of nuclear weapons against a beaten nation already on the verge of suing for peace. The real reasons, they maintain, range from a desire to intimidate the Russians to sheer bloodlust. One historian wrote in the New York Times, “No scholar of the war has ever found archival evidence to substantiate claims that Truman expected anything close to a million casualties, or even that such large numbers were conceivable.” Another skeptic insisted on the total absence of “any high-level supporting archival documents from the Truman administration in the months before Hiroshima that, in unalloyed form, provides even an explicit estimate of 500,000 casualties, let alone a million or more.”

A series of documents recently discovered at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum in Independence, Missouri, and described by this author in an article in the March 2003 Pacific Historical Review, tells a different story.

In the midst of the bloody fighting on Okinawa, which began in April 1945, President Truman received a warning that the invasion could cost as many as 500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives. The document containing this estimate, “Memorandum on Ending the Japanese War,” was one of a series of papers written by former President Herbert Hoover at Truman’s request in May 1945.

The Hoover memorandum is well known to students of the era, hut they have generally assumed that Truman solicited it purely as a courtesy to Hoover and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had been Hoover’s Secretary of State. As it turns out, however, Truman had a much higher opinion of Hoover than do today’s historians.

“What we now know,” says Robert Ferrell, the editor of Truman’s private papers, “is that Truman seized upon this memo and sent memoranda to his senior advisers asking for written judgments from each.” Moreover, adds Ferrell, this discovery “not merely shows that Truman knew about such a high casualty figure” far in advance of the decision to use atom bombs but that he “was exercised about the half-million figure—no doubt about that.” Yet another discovery, by the Hoover Presidential Library’s former senior archivist, Dwight Miller, indicates that the estimate likely originated during Hoover’s regular briefings by Pentagon intelligence officers.

Truman forwarded the memorandum to the director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, Fred M. Vinson, on June 4. Vinson had no quarrel with the casualty estimate when he responded three days later. He returned the original memo along with one of his own, suggesting that Hoover’s paper be shown to Stimson, Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew, and former Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Truman sent copies of the memo to all three men, asking each for a written analysis of it and summoning Grew and Stimson to a meeting to discuss their analysis with him.

Grew immediately forwarded the memo to Judge Samuel L. Rosenman, a longtime adviser and speechwriter for FDR who was then serving as Truman’s special counsel. Stimson, meanwhile, passed on his copy to the Army’s deputy chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Handy, because he wanted to get “the reaction of the [Army] Staff to it,” and he mentioned in his diary that he “had a talk both with Handy and with Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall on the subject.”

Hull was first to respond. Although branding the memo an “appeasement proposal” because it suggested that the Japanese be offered lenient terms to entice them to a negotiating table, he did not take issue with the casualty estimate. Grew, in his reply to the memo, confirmed that the Japanese “are prepared for prolonged resistance,” adding that “prolongation of the war [will] cost a large number of human lives.”

Stimson wrote: “We shall in my opinion have to go through a more bitter finish fight than in Germany….” Truman also met with Adm. William Leahy on the matter. In addition to serving as the President’s White House chief of staff, the admiral was his personal representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and acted as unofficial chairman at their meetings. Leahy sent a memorandum stamped URGENT to the other JCS members, as well as to Stimson and Secretary of the Navy James Horrestal, saying that the President wanted a meeting the following Monday afternoon, June 18, to discuss “the losses in dead and wounded that will result from an invasion of Japan proper,” and he stated unequivocally: “It is his intention to make his decision on the campaign with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible in the loss of American lives.”

At the Monday meeting all the participants agreed that an invasion of the home islands would he extremely costly—but that it was essential for the defeat of Imperial Japan. Stimson said he “agreed with the plan proposed by the point Chiefs of Staff as being the best thing to do, hut he still hoped for some fruitful accomplishment through other means.” Those other means ranged from increased political pressure brought to bear through a display of Allied unanimity at the imminent Potsdam Conference to the as-yet-untested atomic weapons that might “shock” the Japanese into surrender.

As for Truman, he said at the meeting that he “was clear on the situation now and was quite sure that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should proceed” but expressed the hope “that there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”

—D. M. Giangreco

“An Hour of Pretty Music”

When Walter Lord died Last May, the newspapers saluted his huge influence as a historian: all those books that vividly reconstructed events like the fall of the Alamo (A Time to Stand), the bombing of Pearl Harbor (Day of Infamy), and the sinking of the Titanic (A Night to Remember). But history wasn’t his first love.

As a young boy in Baltimore in the late 1920s, Walter began buying Bing Crosby’s records, and forever after he was hooked on American popular song. His New York apartment was cluttered with sheet music and with shelves of 78-rpm records of show tunes, movie songs, popular standards, and big-band numbers. He knew them all; I often played for him and other addicts who wanted to sing them around a piano.

Another thing nobody knew was that Walter wrote one lyric—for an international hit song that nobody knew had a lyric. It was “The Third Man Theme,” the zither-plucked melody by Anton Karas that runs through the movie starring Orson Welles as a black-market rogue in postwar Vienna. Walter got the job, he told me, because he happened to know a lawyer who worked with David O. Selznick, the film’s producer.

“Karas’s melody was very catchy and contagious, and Selznick’s people decided it would sell 200,000 more copies if it had words…. I was the only person who knew what Selznick wanted: that whoever wrote the lyric, it had to have zither in the first line. That’s how I won out over all those other lyrics that were probably infinitely better. Somebody like Yip Harburg wrote a lovely lyric, which I later saw, that was all about autumn leaves. Selznick didn’t want autumn leaves. He wanted a zither.”

That’s how the lyric begins, and it goes on for 64 bars, perhaps the most meandering lyric since “Begin the Beguine.” “I still get royalties from ASCAP every year,” Walter told me, “for any recorded evidence that ’The Third Man Theme’ was played, with or without the lyrics.”

One night in 1988 1 got a letter from Walter that said he was in a hospital, about to have a serious operation. “The doctors seem optimistic,” he wrote, “but they are also a little ‘iffy,’ leading me to think of various contingencies. To begin with, I wouldn’t want any funeral. But I wouldn’t mind a memorial service featuring the kind of music I’ve enjoyed so much—just an hour of pretty music in the 1930s–50s fashion…. The perfect place would be a small room in the Princeton Club, around noon, perhaps in the period around my birthday, October 8.”

I was very upset by the letter but also very moved that on the night before he thought he might die, what was most important to him was this body of American songs that had been part of his life since he was a boy. As it turned out, he lived another 13 years. But I kept the letter and continued to regard it as his final wish, and last October, in a room at the Princeton Club, around noon, his friends and I gave him the good-bye he wanted.

— William Zinsser

Rock City Revival

A few years ago the Hampton Inn chain of roadside hotels sponsored a survey that revealed that people vacationing by car are intrigued by the historical oddities they find along the highways. This led to the company’s Save-a-Landmark program, which seeks out places that need, according to a company press release, “minor repairs, a good coat of paint, or even a detailed cleaning.” Having noticed our article “See Rock City” in the April 2000 issue, the folks at Hampton Inn thought we’d like to know about the project’s second beneficiary. They sent us this picture, showing hotel employees and residents of Sevierville, Tennessee, sprucing up the 1940s Willie Chancy Barn, a local treasure on Route 411. With its multiplicity of highways, this country offers hundreds of thousands of such challenges, and Hampton Inn has taken on many, including the Rain of Arrows in Mancos, Colorado, which dates from 1959; the 20-foot-tall Big Duck, a 1931 Long Island landmark (once a restaurant, now a gift shop) in Flanders, New York, which received a newly painted coat and beak; and a 70-year-old Standard Oil gas station on the former Route 66 in Odell, Illinois. Hampton Inn wants to hear from residents and travelers across the country about future candidates. Contact them by mail at Explore the Highway with Hampton, c/o DCW, 8730 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069 or via their Web site at www.hamptoninn.com.

Mafia Souvenirs

It was the mob’s biggest mistake: a full-scale powwow in a podunk hideaway that blew the cover off their secret society. The 1957 fiasco held the racketeers up to ridicule and touched off a long-term decline in the power of organized crime. It also turned Apalachin, New York, the site of the sit-down, into such a landmark on the crime map that eager crowds turned out last August when the house where the meeting was held, and the belongings of the host, went under the auctioneer’s gavel. So legendary is the Apalachin “convention” that the card table on which some of the nation’s top hoodlums may or may not have played pinochle drew a bid of $18,100.

In 1957 Joseph Barbara was a successful immigrant living near Binghamton. His hilltop estate boasted seven bedrooms and two horse barns. He also was “connected”: He had friends in what would come to be known as La Cosa Nostra. When those friends needed an out-of-the-way spot to get together, Joe’s house seemed perfect. The wiseguys figured the locals were more concerned with roosters than with rackets.

But two sharp-eyed state troopers spotted the plethora of limousines and blockaded the November barbecue. The round-up of Mafia leaders—Profaci, Gambino, Genovese—made headlines around the world. Public outcry, followed by new laws and relentless surveillance, eventually paid off. The tide of organized crime receded from its late-fifties high-water mark.

Joe Barbara died in 1959, a victim of the heart disease that the mobsters offered as an excuse for their visit. His wife left many family belongings behind when she sold the estate; the go-getter who bought it had ideas of turning it into a museum, but the project didn’t pan out.

Devotees of the relics of crime are as avid as any other collectors. When the site of the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was demolished in 1967, the bullet-pocked wall was carefully dismantled and sold brick by brick. Not long ago a collector paid $25,000 for the barber chair in which the Murder Inc. boss Albert Anastasia was himself murdered, a hit that was one of the issues on the Apalachin agenda a few months later.

Mary Ann Andrews knew she was paying too much when she offered $100 for a Limoges dish from the estate, but it was nostalgia as much as the aura of criminal celebrity that kept her in the bidding. She had gone to school with Joe Barbara, Jr., and remembered him tooling around in convertibles and taking friends out for Italian dinners at which no check was ever presented.

The Barbara possessions are scattered to the winds now. A week after the auction some had already turned up on eBay. The “Apalachin boys” have pretty much disappeared too, deposed, slain in mob wars, gunned down by old age. The former Brooklyn gang boss Joseph Bonanno, one of the last of the attendees, died in May at age 97. Apalachin itself hasn’t changed much. It remains decidedly rural, and a gathering of fancy cars might still raise an eyebrow.

Not attending the auction was the retired state trooper Vincent Vasisko, who, along with his partner, Sgt. Edgar Croswell, blew the whistle on the mob 46 years ago. He already owned the best souvenir of all, he told reporters: “Memory.”

—Jack Kelly

War Movies

Fifteen years ago Steve Mormando expanded his career as a U.S. Olympic sabre fencing team member (and fencing coach at NYU) to include selling old war movies. Today his catalogue, Belle & Blade, offers the largest selection of military videos anywhere; in fact, it’s so complete that it can even serve as a reference work. With the widest possible interpretation of what gives a movie a military theme, its offerings range from the 1927 The General (“Keaton’s masterpiece and probably the most formally perfect and funniest of the silent comedies …”) to Preflight Inspection of the B-17 E (“This preflight is divided into three parts. Exterior airframe, interior airframe inspection and engine check …”). Specialty items include a demonstration—the only one you’re ever likely to see—of the U.S. Army Model 1917 Six-Ton Tank (America’s first battle tank), the 1968 epic Waterloo with Christopher Plummer as Wellington, Rod Steiger as Bonaparte, and the Soviet army as the British, the French, and the Prussians (the original four-hour version is not available anywhere—Mormando is offering a reward to whoever can scratch up a print for him to look at—but even in its two-hour-and-twenty-minute length “there is not a war film that compares to the scope and power of this one”), and Gun Camera Footage of World War II. Expanding some on its franchise, the Belle & Blade catalogue also includes a vast selection of Westerns. As for the proprietor, he’s doing well enough to have just purchased a 1942 Ford three-star general’s staff car in mint condition—complete with a photo of Jimmy Doolittle in the car: “Wow! You can bet I’m having a ball!” Belle & Blade is at 124 Penn Avenue, Dover, NJ 07801; its Web site, www.belleandblade.com.