The Making of the Atomic Bomb

and his country.”

Which was exactly what Marine Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift was finding at the time, late 1942, in the Solomons at Guadalcanal. “General,” he wrote the Marine Commandant in Washington, “I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting. These people refuse to surrender. The wounded will wait until men come up to examine them… and blow themselves and the other fellow to death with a hand grenade.”

It was frightening. It required a corresponding escalation of violence to combat. John Hersey felt the need to explain:

A legend has grown up that this young man [i.e., the U.S. marine] is a killer; he takes no prisoners, and gives no quarter. This is partly true, but the reason is not brutality, not just vindictive remembrance of Pearl Harbor. He kills because in the jungle he must, or be killed. This enemy stalks him, and he stalks the enemy as if each were a hunter tracking a bear cat. Quite frequently you hear marines say: “I wish we were fighting against Germans. They are human beings, like us. Fighting against them must be like an athletic performance — matching your skill against someone you know is good. Germans are misled, but at least they react like men. But the Japs are like animals. Against them you have to learn a whole new set of physical reactions. You have to get used to their animal stubbornness and tenacity. They take to the jungle as if they had been bred there, and like some beasts you never see them until they are dead.”

As an explanation for unfamiliar behavior, bestiality had the advantage that it made killing a formidable enemy easier emotionally. But it also, by dehumanizing him, made him seem yet more alien and dangerous. So did the other common attribution that evolved during the war to explain Japanese behavior: that the Japanese were fanatics, believers, as Grew had preached, “in the incorruptible certainty of their national cause.” The historian William Manchester, a marine at Guadalcanal, argues more objectively from a longer perspective postwar:

At the time it was impolitic to pay the slightest tribute to the enemy, and Nip determination, their refusal to say die, was commonly attributed to “fanaticism.” In retrospect it is indistinguishable from heroism. To call it anything less cheapens the victory, for American valor was necessary to defeat it.

Whether bestiality, fanaticism, or heroism, the refusal of Japanese soldiers to surrender required new tactics and strong stomachs to defeat. In his best-selling 1943 book Guadalcanal Diary war correspondent Richard Tre-gaskis reported those tactics from the first land battles of the Pacific war at Guadalcanal:

The general summarized the fighting… The toughest job, he said, had been to clean out scores of dugout caves filled with Japs. Each cave, he said, had been a fortress in itself, filled with Japs who were determined to resist until they were all killed. The only effective way to finish off these caves, he said, had been to take a charge of dynamite and thrust it down the narrow cave entrance. After that had been done, and the cave blasted, you could go in with a submachine gun and finish off the remaining Japs…

“You've never seen such caves and dungeons,” said the general. “There would be thirty or forty Japs in them. And they absolutely refused to come out, except in one or two isolated cases.”

The statistics of the Solomons campaign told the same story: of 250 Japanese manning the garrison on Guadalcanal when the marines first landed only three allowed themselves to be taken prisoner; more than 30,000 Japanese shipped in to fight died before the island was secure, compared to 4,123 Americans. Similar patterns obtained elsewhere. The proportion of captured to dead Japanese in the North Burma campaign was 142 to 17,166, about 1:120 when a truism among Western nations is that the loss of one-fourth to one-third of an army — 4:1 — usually bodes surrender. Paralleling Japanese resistance, Allied losses grew.

As the slow, bloody push up the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands gained momentum through 1943, the question the behavior of Japanese soldiers raised was whether such standards applied not only to the military but to the civilians of Japan as well. Grew had sought to answer that question in his lectures the year before:

I know Japan; I lived there for ten years. I know the Japanese intimately. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end. Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated. That is the difference between the Germans and the Japanese. That is what we are up against in fighting Japan.

In the meantime the United States manufactured flamethrowers to burn Japanese soldiers from their caves. A seasoned journalist who had traveled in Japan before the war, Henry C. Wolfe, called in Harper's for the firebombing of Japan's “inflammable,” “matchbox” cities. “It seems brutal to be talking about burning homes,” Wolfe explained. “But we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for national survival, and we are therefore justified in taking any action that will save the lives of American soldiers and sailors. We must strike hard with everything we have at the spot where it will do the most damage to the enemy.”

The month Wolfe's call to aerial battle appeared in Harper's — January 1943 — Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill at Casablanca. In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill's surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power… The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.” Roosevelt later told Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle:

We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee — and then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.

Churchill immediately concurred — “Any divergence between us, even by omission, would on such an occasion and at such a time have been damaging or even dangerous to our war effort” — and unconditional surrender became official Allied policy.

16 Revelations

“How would you like to work in America?” James Chadwick asked Otto Frisch in Liverpool one day in November 1943.

“I would like that very much,” Frisch remembers responding.

“But then you would have to become a British citizen.”

“I would like that even more.”

Within a week the British had cleared the Austrian emigrd for citizenship. Following instructions “to pack all my necessary belongings into one suitcase and to come to London by the night train” Frisch made the rounds of government offices with other emigr6 scientists in one crowded day — swearing allegiance to the King, picking up a passport, collecting a visa stamp at the American Embassy — and hurried back to Liverpool, where the delegation would board the converted luxury liner Andes the next morning. Headed by Wallace Akers of ICI, the British group included the men General Groves would ask to review barrier development as well as men