that Bush and Conant had proposed to him and he had proposed in turn to the President. On May 1, the day German radio announced the suicide of Adolf Hitler in the ruins of Berlin, George L. Harrison, a special Stimson consultant and the president of the New York Life Insurance Company, prepared for the Secretary of War an entirely civilian committee roster consisting of Stimson as chairman, Bush, Conant, MIT president Karl Compton, Assistant Secretary of State William L. Clayton, Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard and a special representative of the President whom the President might choose. Stimson modified the list to include Harrison as his alternate and carried it to Truman for approval on May 2. Truman agreed and Stimson apparently assumed his interest in the project, but the President significantly did not even bother to name his own man to the list. Stimson wrote in his diary that night:
The President accepted the present members of the committee and said that they would be sufficient even without a personal representative of himself. I said I should prefer to have such a representative and suggested that he should be a man (a) with whom the President had close personal relations and (b) who was able to keep his mouth shut.
Truman had not yet announced his intention to appoint Byrnes Secretary of State because the holdover Secretary, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., was heading the United States delegation to the United Nations in San Francisco and the President did not want to undercut his authority there. But word of the forthcoming appointment had diffused through Washington. Acting on it, Harrison suggested that Stimson propose Byrnes. On May 3 Stimson did, “and late in the day the President called me up himself and said that he had heard of my suggestion and it was fine. He had already called up Byrnes down in South Carolina and Byrnes had accepted.” Bundy and Harrison, Stimson told his diary, “were tickled to death.” They thought their committee had acquired a second powerful sponsor. In fact they had just welcomed a cowbird into their nest.
Stimson sent out invitations the next day. He proposed calling his new group the Interim Committee to avoid appearing to usurp congressional prerogatives: “when secrecy is no longer required,” he explained to the prospective members, “Congress might wish to appoint a permanent Post War Commission.” He set the first informal meeting of the Interim Committee for May 9.
The membership would assemble in the wake of momentous change. The war in Europe had finally ground to an end. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower celebrated the victory on national radio the evening of Tuesday, May 8, 1945, V-E Day:
I have the rare privilege of speaking for a victorious army of almost five million fighting men. They, and the women who have so ably assisted them, constitute the Allied Expeditionary Force that has liberated western Europe. They have destroyed or captured enemy armies totalling more than their own strength, and swept triumphantly forward over the hundreds of miles separating Cherbourg from Lttbeck, Leipzig and Munich…
These startling successes have not been bought without sorrow and suffering. In this Theater alone 80,000 Americans and comparable numbers among their Allies, have had their lives cut short that the rest of us might live in the sunlight of freedom…
But, at last,
Eisenhower had watched Colonel General Alfried Jodl sign the act of military surrender in a schoolroom in Rheims — the temporary war room of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force — in the early morning hours of May 7. Eisenhower's aides had attempted then to draft a suitably eloquent message to the Combined Chiefs reporting the official surrender. “I tried one myself,” Eisenhower's chief of staff Walter Bedell Smith remembers, “and like all my associates, groped for resounding phrases as fitting accolades to the Great Crusade and indicative of our dedication to the great task just accomplished.” The Supreme Commander listened quietly for a time, thanked everyone for trying and dictated his own unadorned report:
The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945.
Better to be brief, better than resounding phrases. Twenty million Soviet soldiers and civilians died of privation or in battle in the Second World War. Eight million British and Europeans died or were killed and another five million Germans. The Nazis murdered six million Jews in ghettos and concentration camps. Manmade death had ended thirty-nine million human lives prematurely; for the second time in half a century Europe had become a charnel house.
There remained the brutal conflict Japan had begun in the Pacific and refused despite her increasing destruction to end by unconditional surrender.
Officially Byrnes was retired to South Carolina. In fact he was visiting Washington surreptitiously, absorbing detailed evening briefings by State Department division chiefs at his apartment at the Shoreham Hotel. On the afternoon of V-E Day he spent two hours closeted alone with Stimson. Then Harrison, Bundy and Groves joined them. “We all discussed the function of the proposed Interim Committee,” Stimson records. “During the meeting it became very evident what a tremendous help Byrnes would be as a member of the committee.”
The next morning the Interim Committee met for the first time in Stimson's office. The gathering was preliminary, to fill in Byrnes, State's Clayton and the Navy's Bard on the basic facts, but Stimson made a point of introducing the former assistant President as Truman's personal representative. The membership was thus put on notice that Byrnes enjoyed special status and that his words carried extra weight.
The committee recognized that the scientists working on the atomic bomb might have useful advice to offer and created a Scientific Panel adjunct. Bush and Conant put their heads together and recommended Arthur Compton, Ernest Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi for appointment.
Between the first and second meetings of the Interim Committee its
B. Report on Weather and Operations
C. Gadget Jettisoning and Landing
D. Status of Targets
E. Psychological Factors in Target Selection
F. Use Against Military Objectives
G. Radiological Effects
H. Coordinated Air Operations
I. Rehearsals
J. Operating Requirements for Safety of Airplanes
K. Coordination with 21st [Bomber Command] Program
Detonation height determined how large an area would be damaged by blast and depended crucially on yield. A bomb detonated too high would expend its energy blasting thin air; a bomb detonated too low would expend its energy excavating a crater. It was better to be low than high, the committee minutes explain: “The bomb can be detonated as much as 40 % below the optimum with a reduction of 24 % in area of damage whereas a detonation [only] 14 % above the optimum will cause the same loss in area.” The discussion demonstrates how uncertain Los Alamos still was of bomb yield. Bethe estimated a yield range for Little Boy of 5,000 to 15,000 tons TNT equivalent. Fat Man, the implosion bomb, was anybody's guess: 700, 2,000, 5,000 tons? “With the present information the fuse would be set at 2,000 tons equivalent but fusing for the other values should be available at the time of final delivery… Trinity data will be used for this gadget.”
The scientists reported and the committee agreed that in an emergency a B-29 in good condition could return to base with a bomb. “It should make a normal landing with the greatest possible care… The chances of [a]
