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00:00Northfield on the island of Tinian, in the Marianas, 1,500 miles south of Japan.
00:22In the summer of 1945, this was the biggest airbase in the world.
00:33Here on August the 5th, the world's first uranium bomb was loaded into a B-29 bomber named
00:39Enola Gay, after its pilot's mother.
00:45Next morning before dawn, the Enola Gay took off.
00:49Its target, Hiroshima.
01:19The Enola Gay.
01:26The Enola Gay.
01:28The Enola Gay.
01:32The Enola Gay.
01:39The Enola Gay.
01:44The Enola Gay.
01:57On April the 12th, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, died suddenly.
02:07The nation mourned its lost leader.
02:14He had brought them from the depths of economic depression twelve years before.
02:21Now he had led them to the eve of victory in a world war.
02:29Two months before his death, Roosevelt had been at Yalta in Russia, laying the political
02:34foundations of the post-war world.
02:36Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to restore democracy to Eastern Europe, particularly Poland.
02:43They also asked Stalin to confirm that Russia would join the war against Japan three months
02:49after the defeat of Germany.
02:51In a cheerful atmosphere, the big three thought they had reached agreement.
02:58Well, Yalta was really the high point of the relationship between the three men.
03:03Victory was in the air.
03:05The Germans were in retreat.
03:07And so there was a little more talk, in addition to military matters, to the future.
03:15Poland again became the most troublesome point.
03:21And it's interesting that both Roosevelt and Churchill felt they had an agreement with Stalin.
03:28The problem with Poland, as with all Eastern Europe, was that the Western leaders wanted a freely elected government there.
03:36The Soviets wanted a government friendly to Russia.
03:41They thought the West understood and accepted this.
03:46Poland, from their point of view, was not going to be an outpost of the West, nor any of the Balkan countries.
03:55They thought they'd had various agreements about spheres of influence with Mr. Churchill.
04:01They left Greece pretty much in British hands.
04:06They could have certain proportional influences in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and particularly Poland.
04:16My impression at Yalta was that the Russians thought we had in substance accepted that demand.
04:28After Yalta, Roosevelt lived for only two months.
04:33Even by then, he and Churchill had become disillusioned by the interpretations the Russians were putting on what was agreed there.
04:41The very, very tough exchange of telegrams on both sides between Stalin and Roosevelt makes it very plain.
04:49that Roosevelt, before he died, knew that Stalin was breaking his agreements.
04:54I think it went sour because the military developments strengthened Russia's hands and that, where the Russians had felt it necessary to be considerate of Western opinion,
05:08At Yalta, a few months later, they didn't feel any such necessity because the war was going so well for them and therefore they swept aside some of the engagements they got into.
05:20That certainly applied particularly about Poland.
05:23Roosevelt had been seen as a friend by the Russians.
05:26Roosevelt had been seen as a friend by the Russians.
05:28His successor, Harry Truman, was an unknown quantity both to them and to his own advisers.
05:34I left to, as soon as Roosevelt died, to go back to see Mr. Truman.
05:41I wanted to be sure that President Truman understood the position of our relationships
05:46because there had been so much euphoria in the air about the warm relationships that existed with our gallant allies.
05:55And, um, I got home within a week of the time that Roosevelt had died.
06:02I found, um, in my first experience with President Truman, I found he was an avid reader.
06:09I found he'd read all the telegrams and understood from those messages the difficulties we were going to have.
06:17The arrival of their foreign minister, Molotov, in Washington on April the 23rd
06:23gave Truman a chance to prove, as he put it, that he would stand up to the Russians.
06:29Even as his arrival raised hopes on the thorny Polish question,
06:33the world learned that Russia had just signed a 20-year pact of friendship with Poland's Warsaw government.
06:40This Polish government had no pro-Western members. They were all pro-Soviet.
06:44The Western leaders were angry and upset.
06:48Molotov saw Truman and his Secretary of State Stettinius, Al-Jahiss's boss.
06:53By that time, the Polish situation had, to use a gentle word, crystallized.
07:02The Russians were moving forward.
07:05They seemed to be paying no attention to the kind of provisional government that the British and Americans had hoped for.
07:18Therefore, protests, angry protests, were going to the Russians about that.
07:25And Truman decided to have a showdown at which he was gifted.
07:31On that occasion, as you know from what is now part of the history books,
07:37he accused Molotov, in effect, of violation of the agreements as early as that.
07:45This is a strange thing to do in the midst of a war, by no means yet won, with an important ally, but he did it.
07:54And it ended by Molotov saying,
07:58I've never been talked to like this in my life.
08:01And Truman saying, well, if you keep your agreement, you won't be talked to like that, just like a schoolteacher.
08:06Statenius, who'd been present, told me the next morning that he was still shaken.
08:13He said, I thought the whole conference was off.
08:16Well, that was an unfortunate conversation.
08:20It was one of the first diplomatic conversations that Truman had.
08:25And I can only say that it was not a diplomatic statement on Truman's part.
08:32He used good, solid Missouri language, which was very definite.
08:37And Molotov had talked to other people that way, but had had no one talk to him that way.
08:43So that he was very much upset.
08:45And I think he, I gained the impression that he thought this was a new voice.
08:50Not Roosevelt anymore, but a more aggressive president.
08:55When he was sworn in two weeks earlier, Truman had said he would continue Roosevelt's policies.
09:01But his sudden harshness with Molotov now worried the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson.
09:06The day after the confrontation, Stimson told Truman about something he thought could transform America's dealings with Russia.
09:14Stimson's biographer, McGeorge Bundy.
09:17Stimson wrote to Truman,
09:20I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter.
09:27I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office, but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you've been under.
09:35It, however, has such a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.
09:50The next day, April 25th, Stimson explained to Truman that his view of foreign policy, Stimson's, was dominated by the imminent prospect of atomic power and the terms which might be got from Russia in exchange for sharing atomic secrets.
10:11It was Truman's first detailed news of the atomic bomb and its diplomatic potential.
10:18He asked Stimson to head a committee to decide his military use.
10:23By this time in great secrecy, two kinds of atomic bomb had been developed.
10:28One based on uranium, the other on a man-made element, plutonium.
10:34The uranium bomb did not need testing, but there was only one.
10:39The plutonium bombs, easier to produce in quantity, would have to be tested before use.
10:44The first would be ready by July.
10:48A special unit of the American Air Force had begun practicing the tactics involved in dropping one very large bomb with great accuracy and then getting away as fast as possible.
10:58Its commander was Colonel Paul Tibbetts.
11:02Up to this point, anything in the way of an error in bombing up to five or six hundred feet was considered good bombing.
11:11So I told them then, if you have a hundred foot error from twenty-five thousand feet, you're just a borderline case.
11:17I want it less than a hundred.
11:19I was told immediately, you can't do this.
11:22And so I said, I don't know why not.
11:25And they said, well, nobody's ever done it.
11:26But I said, that's no reason why it can't be done.
11:28I said, practice, they tell me, makes perfect.
11:31So I said, we'll practice and you'll practice until you do it.
11:44From their forward bases in the Mariana Islands, American B-29 bombers were already attacking Japan's cities with more conventional weapons.
11:52To begin with, the results were poor.
11:59General Curtis LeMay developed a new tactic, low-level incendiary raids.
12:05With aerial photography, you could outline a general area, but not precisely.
12:13You just couldn't avoid doing collateral damage.
12:17And I'm sure we burned down a lot of Japanese buildings that had nothing to do with the war industry at all.
12:27This, of course, is one of the sad things of war that can't be helped.
12:33On March the 9th, 1945, 2,000 tons of incendiaries were dropped on Tokyo, destroying 16 square miles of the city.
12:4380,000 civilians died.
12:46More that night in Tokyo than in the whole of England in the Blitz.
12:50Most suffocated in the firestorm.
12:53LeMay now attacked city after city.
12:56It looked as if the B-29s alone might defeat Japan.
13:00It wasn't until General Arnold asked a direct question.
13:04How long is the war going to last?
13:06And then we sat down and did some thinking about it.
13:09And it indicated that we would be pretty much out of targets around the 1st of September.
13:17And with the targets gone, we couldn't see much of any war going on at the time.
13:24By the spring of 1945, Japan was helpless in the face of American air and naval power.
13:41Most of the Japanese merchant fleet and navy had been sunk.
13:46An effective blockade had cut off Japan from her overseas armies.
13:51Grounded most of her air force for lack of fuel and threatened her population with starvation.
13:57American fighter bombers roamed at will, backing up the devastating fireworks.
14:05Many Japanese politicians realized that their country could not hold out much longer.
14:16April the 1st.
14:17American troops land on Japanese soil, Okinawa.
14:20Only 350 miles from the mainland.
14:23They face fierce resistance.
14:26But as the battle starts, the growing peace party in Japan secure the appointment of a new cabinet, led by Admiral Suzuki.
14:35When the Suzuki cabinet came into existence, the military situation was deplorable.
14:45And moreover, the economic plight of our nation was quite apparent.
14:53The military commander tried to squeeze the last drop, so to speak, of the nation's blood, in order to prosecute further the useless war.
15:11But it became evident to any sensible man that we were at the end of the tether.
15:19The younger officers in the army, the extremists, thought that we should fight to the bitter end, until every man had been killed.
15:34But the war minister, General Anami, didn't agree.
15:38He thought that if we fought on until the Americans invaded the mainland, and then hit their forces hard on the beaches once, we could then negotiate peace on terms more favorable to Japan.
15:52But Truman would not negotiate. He told Congress so in May, after Germany's defeat.
15:59Our demand has been, and it remains, unconditional surrender.
16:08I want the entire world to know that this direction must and will remain unchanged and unhampered.
16:22Truman now faced two major problems, how to deal with the Russians in Europe, and whether to ask them to fulfill their pledge to join the war against Japan.
16:36In Germany, Russian and Western troops exchanged toasts.
16:41But already Churchill was sending urgent messages to Truman, warning that an iron curtain was being drawn down in Europe by Russia.
16:48The big three must meet quickly before, as he put it, the armies of democracy melted.
16:54And Truman had a new Secretary of State, James Burns.
16:59Burns wanted to finish the war against Japan before the Russians could join in, and cause problems for the West in Asia too.
17:07It was ever present in my mind that it was important that we should have an end to the war before the Russians came in.
17:23But Stimson wanted to avoid hasty decisions in Europe or the Far East before the bomb was ready.
17:28He wrote to Truman.
17:30Over any such tangled weave of problems, the atomic secret would be dominant.
17:37It seems a terrible thing to gamble, with such big stakes in diplomacy, without having your MasterCard in your hand.
17:48Truman reassured Stimson.
17:50The big three meeting was postponed until the 15th of July, on purpose to give us more time.
17:58Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's close friend whom Stalin trusted, was sent to Moscow at the end of May to take the heat temporarily out of the Polish issue.
18:07He reported back that he had smoothed things over.
18:11Stalin had also promised, unprompted, to join the war against Japan on August the 8th.
18:16While Hopkins was in Moscow, Stimson's committee reached its decision.
18:22The committee studying the atomic bomb unanimously recommended that it be used as soon as possible, without warning, against a major Japanese military establishment.
18:36Only this, Stimson thought, would provide the psychological blow which might induce Japan to surrender.
18:44Although he agreed with some of Truman's advisers that the Japanese should be given an ultimatum, which made it clear that they could keep the Emperor.
18:53He opposed announcing this until after the bomb had at least been tested.
19:00But after the war, he wrote, it is possible, in the light of the final surrender, that a clearer and earlier exposition of American willingness to retain the Emperor could have produced an earlier ending of the war.
19:18June the 18th, Washington.
19:21General Eisenhower is given a hero's welcome after his victory in Europe.
19:27In the White House that day, Truman is asked to approve his Joint Chiefs of Staff's plans to invade Japan in November.
19:35We gathered up our papers and started to go out.
19:38And Mr. Truman spotted me and he said, Mr. McCoy, nobody gets out of this room without voting, without expressing himself.
19:45Everybody else has.
19:46Do you think I have any other alternative?
19:50I looked over at Colonel Stimson.
19:53He always liked to be called Colonel.
19:55He'd been Colonel of a regiment in World War I.
19:57And rather than Secretary, I looked over at Stimson and he nodded.
20:02He nodded, he said, go ahead.
20:04So I started in and I said that I thought, didn't I?
20:08We ought to have our heads examined if we didn't, at this point, begin to think in terms of a political culmination of the war rather than a military culmination.
20:17And I said I'd give them some terms.
20:21I'd send a message over to them.
20:23I'd spell out the terms, just what they were.
20:25And I remember trying to, when Truman said, well, what are your terms?
20:29What would you do?
20:30I hadn't quite prepared for the actual dictation of the surrender terms at that point, but I started in.
20:36And I said in the first place, I'd say you can have the Mikado, but he's got to be a constitutional monarch.
20:42You've got to have a representative form of government from here on.
20:45You can have access to but not control over foreign, over raw materials so that you can have a viable economy.
20:53And I spelled it out as best I could.
20:55And I'd say besides that, we've got a new force, and it's in the force of a new type of energy that will revolutionize warfare, destructive beyond any contemplation.
21:08And I said I'd mention the bomb.
21:10Well, mentioning the bomb, even that late date in that select group was like, it was like, they were all shocked because we, it was such a closely guarded secret.
21:20It was comparable to mentioning skull and bones at Yale, which you're not supposed to do.
21:26That's, but Mr. Truman said, this is just the sort of thing I was trying to reach for.
21:32Get that all spelled out.
21:33At that point, Stimson did come in and join and support my position.
21:38But then later on, Mr. Burns, who was then Secretary of State, who was not present, vetoed the idea of offering them the Mikado.
21:48No one can only, one can only speculate as to whether it would have happened if we hadn't put the message to the Japanese government, the form that I indicated, including the Mikado.
22:00I always had the feeling, in view of some of the information that we have had since, of the tendency on the part of some of the real military hotheads in Japan to think that this was perhaps the best way out.
22:14That we might have been able to avoid the dropping of the bomb.
22:19By this time, the battle for Okinawa is almost over.
22:24Twelve thousand Americans had died.
22:26A bloody foretaste of what invasion of the mainland might cost.
22:30For the Japanese, the lesson was harsher still.
22:34A hundred thousand died.
22:38A hundred thousand died.
22:40And for the first time in the war, their soldiers surrendered in thousands.
22:45As the last resistance ended on June the 22nd, the new Japanese cabinet made its first move towards peace.
22:57Ultimately, we had to conduct negotiations with our military opponents, that is to say, America and Britain.
23:07But the high command refused categorically to entertain any idea of starting conversation with the enemy powers.
23:20The only great power left out of the enemy camp was Soviet Union, because of the fact that nominally there existed still the neutrality pact.
23:36And so this was the only window open for peace endeavors.
23:44And this window looked toward the north.
23:48And so we argued it out with the military command.
23:53And the military command finally, reluctantly, acceded to our request that we start negotiations with the Soviet Union, in order to arrive at the final destination, which was Washington and London.
24:13But it was the Chinese foreign minister, not the Japanese, that Stalin had been meeting.
24:19A huge Japanese army still occupied parts of China, including Manchuria.
24:25The Russians and Chinese were negotiating terms under which Stalin would attack that army.
24:33When Truman sailed to Europe on July the 7th for his meeting with Stalin and Churchill, he knew, through intercepted messages, that Japan wanted an end to the war, but not unconditional surrender.
24:45Truman and Burns now had several options open to them.
24:49They could modify the surrender terms.
24:52They could encourage the Russians to invade Manchuria.
24:55They could demonstrate the atomic bomb.
24:58They could invade Japan itself.
25:01But Truman decided that he would drop atomic bombs on Japan without warning.
25:08This alone, he hoped, would end the Pacific War quickly before the Russians joined in.
25:14And it would immensely strengthen American bargaining power in Europe.
25:18The decision had already been taken when Truman arrived for the Big Three meeting on July the 15th.
25:24The next morning, just before dawn, at a remote desert site in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer and the team that had designed and built the bomb witnessed the first atomic explosion.
25:40I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
25:47Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty.
25:57And to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says,
26:05Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
26:12I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
26:15The plutonium bomb exploded with a force of 20,000 tons of TNT.
26:23The desert, at the point of the explosion, was turned into glass.
26:28By July 1945, Japan's economy was crumbling and her cities were defenseless against the B-29 raids.
26:35Although her army remained virtually intact, Japan's war industries were smashed.
26:41One million civilians had died.
26:47Millions more were homeless.
26:51The US Air Force had no doubts that surrender was only weeks away.
26:56It was a hopeless situation for them.
27:01And the B-29s were flying over Japan at will, and they couldn't do anything about it.
27:08We could destroy any target at will without much opposition.
27:14So with this hopeless situation facing, they just didn't have the will continue.
27:21As a matter of fact, they had been trying to get out of the war for about three months before they actually did.
27:29And that they had asked the Russians to be an intermediary to try to negotiate them out of the war.
27:36And the Russians had been stalling.
27:41The late got the European war finished so they could get into the Pacific war before it ended.
27:52Stalin and Molotov refused to see the Japanese ambassador before they left Moscow for the last big three meeting for ten years.
27:59Also at Potsdam, Secretary of War, Stimson, he passed on detailed news of the atomic test to Truman and Burns, who, he noted in his diary, were immensely pleased.
28:14The President was tremendously pepped up by it and spoke to me of it again and again when I saw him.
28:20He said it gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence.
28:25And when Stimson told Churchill about the successful test the next day, Churchill said he now understood how this pepping up of Truman had taken place and that he felt the same way.
28:37The British and Americans now debated whether to tell the Russians about the bomb.
28:43Some argued that its full weight as a diplomatic lever would only become evident after it had been dropped on Japan.
28:50After one of our meetings, just as we adjourned, Truman went up with his interpreter to Stalin and told him briefly what we had discovered and what the effect of the atomic bomb would be.
29:07And all Stalin did was to nod his head and say thank you quite quickly and his expression changed in no way and that was all there was to it.
29:19When it was a tremendous disappointment, we thought he would be flabbergasted at this thing, but he just passed it off as an instant.
29:26Whether he knew about it, whether he didn't want to show any great emotion in regard to it, I don't know.
29:35All I know is that he took it very much in his stride and somewhat to our disappointment went on to the next item in the agenda.
29:44And this rather dismayed Stimson because he thought that once having disclosed this, there would be immediately a great Russian rush on the part of the Soviets to sit down and talk to us about what the future implications of this thing and what the future uses of it would be.
30:07But he got no encouragement at all.
30:10Stimson's tactics had misfired.
30:13The big three had met before the full power of the atomic weapon was revealed.
30:17And Stimson feared that from now on Secretary of State Burns would use the bomb to try to lever direct concessions from the Russians.
30:26I rather think that Mr. Burns had something of the thought that this would be a sort of a point of leverage in diplomatic exchanges.
30:38Whereas I think Mr. Stimson or Colonel Stimson had a different idea of the use of the bomb.
30:46He wrote to the president to urge direct negotiation on the nuclear issue and argued that relations with Russia may perhaps be irretrievably embittered by the way in which we approach the solution of the bomb with Russia.
31:05For if we fail to approach them now and merely negotiate with them having this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase.
31:23With the atomic weapons now almost ready for use, it was time for Truman to issue a final ultimatum to the Japanese.
31:31And again, Stimson's advice was rejected.
31:34Truman and Burns decided not to modify the unconditional surrender formula by offering the Japanese the chance to keep their emperor.
31:42My hope is that the people of Japan will now realize that further resistance to the forces of the nation, now united in the enforcement of law and justice, will be absolutely futile.
31:57There is still time, but little time, for the Japanese to save themselves from the destruction which threatens them.
32:08The very purpose of it was to assure them that they would have the decision and at the same time not start a controversy among ourselves about the position of the emperor.
32:27When the post-dom proclamation was issued, Foreign Minister Togo and I worked together, many sleepless nights, and I took this proclamation to the attention of the Foreign Minister and explained the substance of it.
32:50Togo at once said that this was acceptable, and he immediately went to the palace and asked for an audience.
33:01The emperor approved Togo's judgment that this should be accepted and the war be terminated at once.
33:11Foreign Minister Togo said in the cabinet meeting that we can stop the war without the question of the emperor.
33:19We can keep the emperor right.
33:22But at that time we, the Japanese government, asked some intermediation, mediation, mediation to Russia.
33:36So many cabinet ministers said, well, let us see the situation for a while.
33:44Prime Minister Suzuki announced that Japan would ignore the ultimatum.
33:49Perhaps Russia would save Japan's honor.
33:52After all, the Potsdam Declaration had not been signed by Stalin.
33:56He might still mediate.
33:58Stalin told Truman about the Japanese approaches.
34:02Truman knew all about them.
34:04The Japanese codes had been broken.
34:06Both leaders agreed to ignore the peace feelers, and Truman sailed home on August the 3rd.
34:14With no response from the Japanese, he authorized the Air Force to drop the atom bomb as soon as they were ready.
34:21The Japanese foreign minister Togo in desperation cabled his ambassador in Moscow.
34:27Since the loss of one day relative to this present matter may result in a thousand years of regret,
34:34it is requested you immediately have a talk with Molotov.
34:38But Molotov would still not meet the ambassador.
34:42On August the 6th, two days before the Russians had said they would attack the Japanese,
34:48the Enola Gay set off on its 1500 mile journey.
34:53I noticed when I taxied out that there were several hundred people that were in the area that the aircraft were parked in.
35:02There were some in front of the control tower.
35:05And people were out there standing to look and see what was going on without really knowing what they were looking at.
35:11But it was something different, so they wanted to be a part of it.
35:15They wanted to see what was taking place.
35:17Now there's one bomb, and one airplane is going to carry that bomb, and that's the group commander.
35:22That's then Colonel Tibbetts with his full crew.
35:26My crew was assigned to fly in formation on his right wing during the bombing for a couple of reasons.
35:33Somebody had to fly there, and I was scheduled by him to fly the second mission if there were to be a second mission.
35:41We would have a third aircraft flying on the left wing who would drop back just before the bombing.
35:47He was equipped with cameras.
35:49We would fly unseen by each other for the first three hours.
35:54And to make rendezvous at 8,000 feet over Iwo Jima at 6 a.m., this was the plan.
36:03We made the rendezvous quite successfully, and then we had about an hour and a half or a little over that to go along in a lazy formation on a beautiful night out over the Pacific with moons and cloud puffs that looked like powder puffs.
36:16It was a quiet, peaceful evening, believe me, and nothing much went on.
36:22A little bit of talk in the airplane, but that's always normal on a mission.
36:27But then you get a quiet period, and while we were going along there, I guess everybody was dreaming or something because it was quiet.
36:35At 8.15, on the morning of August the 6th, the Enola Gay, flying at 32,000 feet, released its bomb over Hiroshima.
36:47As soon as the weight had left the airplane, I immediately went into this steep turn as did Sweeney and Marquardt behind me.
36:55And we tried then to place distance between ourselves and the point of impact.
37:01In this particular case, that bomb had 53 seconds from the time it left the airplane until it exploded.
37:08That's how long it took it to fall from the bombing altitude, 53 seconds.
37:12And this gave us adequate time, of course, to make the turn.
37:16Now, we had just made the turn and rolled out in a level flight when it seemed like somebody had grabbed the hold of my airplane and gave it a real hard shaking,
37:28because this was the shock wave that had come up.
37:31This was something that I was glad to feel because it gave me a moment of relief after all having worked on that bomb for well over a year, you know.
37:49That 53 seconds time while I'm turning the airplane, I'm wondering, is it or is it not going to work?
37:55And, of course, the shock wave hitting us was an indication it had worked.
38:01Therefore, I felt that success had been achieved.
38:05When the bomb came, I saw the yellowish flash, and I was buried in the darkness.
38:12The two-story wooden building that was my house with eight rooms in it was blown down to pieces and covered me up.
38:21When I regained consciousness, everything was pitch dark all around me.
38:30I tried to stand up, but my leg was broken.
38:33I tried to speak, and I found that six of my teeth had been broken.
38:38Then I realized that my face was burnt and my back was burnt.
38:43There was a slash right across from one shoulder down to the waist.
38:48I crawled to the river bank, and when I got there, I saw hundreds of bodies come floating down the river.
38:57And it was then that I realized, with a shock, that all Hiroshima had been hit.
39:03The day was clear when we dropped that bomb. It was a clear, sunshiny day, and visibility was unrestricted.
39:14So as we came back around, again facing the direction of Hiroshima, where we saw this cloud coming up.
39:24The cloud by this time, now two minutes, the cloud was up at our altitude.
39:29We were 33,000 feet at this time, and the cloud was up there and continuing to go right on up in a boiling fashion.
39:36It was rolling and boiling.
39:39The surface was nothing but a black boiling, only thing I can say, like a barrel of tar.
39:48Probably the best description that I can give.
39:51This is exactly the way it looked down there.
39:53Where before there had been a city, distinctive houses, buildings, and everything that you could see from our altitude,
39:59now you couldn't see anything except this black boiling debris down below.
40:05We took pictures as rapidly as we could.
40:09My immediate concern after that was, it's time to get out of here.
40:14I encountered along the Cesar's lines of escapees.
40:20All of them had no cloth whatsoever on their bodies.
40:26And the skin, from their faces, arms, and breasts, peeling off and hanging loose.
40:40And yet, without any expression, in deep silence, they are escaping.
40:49I thought it was a procession of ghosts.
40:55The words went back basically to the effect that the bombing conditions were clear.
41:01The target had been hit.
41:03The results were better than had been anticipated.
41:06And that message was sent on back.
41:08From there on, it was just a proposition of letting everybody talk for a few minutes and get it all out of their system.
41:14The excitement was over.
41:16Pretty soon it became a rather routine flight back home.
41:20As a matter of fact, it was routine enough that I let Bob Lewis and the autopilot fly that airplane.
41:27I went back and got some sleep for about the first time in 30 hours.
41:30And I was ready for it.
41:32In a long, drawn-out war, you begin to get casualties from the side effects of exhaustion, privation, disease, and things of that sort.
41:45So getting it over with as quick as possible is a moral responsibility of everyone concerned.
41:54Now, it's true that we knew the war was over, and if we just waited a little while, it would be over because the Japanese were negotiating.
42:04And we knew this by the fact that we had broken our code and were listening to the communications.
42:09But I believe that President Truman made the proper decision to use it because it probably hastened the negotiations.
42:21And even if we just saved one day, to me it would be worthwhile.
42:26You have to do it.
42:27Well, I thought it was absolutely unnecessary because by the time the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, we were conducting negotiations with the Soviet government, looking towards an early end of hostilities.
42:46And we were completely exhausted.
42:50And the Navy and the Army, too, were slowly becoming more amenable to the idea of peace.
43:07An appalling subject to talk about.
43:10And the United States has consciously and unconsciously agreed with a guilt complex about its use.
43:19But Truman made the decision on the basis of the military necessities.
43:25And I think an impartial analysis, particularly from the Japanese themselves, more evidence is coming out that they would have fought on fanatically.
43:36You know, they did fight on fanatically in some of the islands, even in spite of the surrender.
43:41And the Emperor wouldn't have had the courage to have called it off or wouldn't have had the support to call it off.
43:50When I heard about atomic bomb, I was so astonished.
43:55And I frankly say the American people is brutal.
44:05I wondered if American people really civilized.
44:10But at the same time, I thought this may become a key for Japan to end the war.
44:20It was two days before the Japanese government realized what the atomic bomb was and what it had done.
44:32Seventy thousand had died in Hiroshima.
44:36Another seventy thousand were injured.
44:39Ninety-seven percent of the city's buildings were destroyed or severely damaged.
44:44President Truman, on hearing the news, called it the greatest thing in history.
44:51The peace group in the Japanese cabinet hoped that the bomb might persuade the war faction to accept surrender.
44:58As the cabinet met on the morning of August the 9th, it received further shattering news.
45:05The previous evening in Moscow, Molotov had finally received the Japanese ambassador and bluntly told him that Russia was about to declare war on Japan.
45:16Eight hours later, exactly three months after the defeat of Germany, just as Stalin had promised, Russia attacked the Japanese army in Manchuria.
45:27Japanese hopes of Russian mediation were at an end.
45:31American hopes of finishing the war before Russia became involved were thwarted.
45:36Later that same morning, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.
45:49It killed sixty thousand people.
45:52But even now, the Japanese militants held out for a surrender without an occupation.
45:59The peace party wanted only to preserve the emperor's position.
46:04For the first time to break the deadlock, the emperor Hirohito was called in to decide.
46:12He chose peace.
46:14I shall never forget the emotion of that time.
46:21Everybody started to cry.
46:24So I looked at the emperor's face.
46:27He just kept silent.
46:31But he wore a white robe on his hands.
46:41He wiped his own face several times.
46:48So we had, we could know that he, his emperor himself, his mother's emperor himself crying.
46:58I shall never forget the emotion in this room at that time.
47:09On August the 10th, the Japanese made it known they would surrender if the emperor were allowed to stay.
47:16On August the 12th, the allies sent a non-committal reply.
47:21By this time, Japan's army was near revolt.
47:25Even if a thousand atom bombs had been dropped, and even if Japan had been completely devastated,
47:36you must remember that Japan's honor was at stake.
47:40The pride of the Japanese at that time, who felt that the only honorable way out of the war
47:46was not to surrender, but to die to the last man.
47:52The Americans dropped leaflets urging the Japanese to surrender.
47:56These almost upset the delicate maneuverings of the peace party.
48:01That could have caused a lot of trouble.
48:08Civilians and soldiers all over the country were completely unaware of what was going on.
48:14If they had found out that the government was actually negotiating peace with the United States,
48:20the situation would have become impossible.
48:24It might even have led to a revolution.
48:27So I felt we had to reach a final decision as fast as possible.
48:35Once again, on August the 14th, the emperor met a divided supreme war council
48:45and told them they must accept the allied ultimatum.
48:49He himself would broadcast the next day.
48:53That night, a group of junior officers invaded the palace and tried to seize the recording of the emperor's message.
49:00They couldn't find it.
49:01The coup failed.
49:03At noon on August the 15th, the Japanese people heard their emperor's voice for the first time.
49:12The war, he told them, has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.
49:25Moreover, the enemy has begun to use a new and most cruel bomb.
49:31Should we continue to fight, it will not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation,
49:40but also the total destruction of human civilization.
49:45We must therefore endure the unendurable.
49:52When the emperor addressed the nation at large through his broadcast,
49:59I know that 99 men out of 100 were taken aback.
50:08They expected the emperor to urge them to fight on.
50:13So the shock was tremendous.
50:20And those army officers, particularly the younger ones,
50:25who said that they had to fight to the bitter end,
50:31were naturally disillusioned.
50:34Some even tried to demonstrate with the decision taken by the cabinet for surrender.
50:47In a way it could be said that the atomic bombings and Russia's sudden attack on Japan helped to bring about the end of the war.
51:01If those events had not happened,
51:03Japan at that stage probably could not have stopped fighting.
51:08The war had ended, but not the dying.
51:21And radiation sickness, which the Americans had not foreseen, would kill thousands more in the years to come.
51:38The morning of September the 2nd, 1945, the United States battleship Missouri is anchored in Tokyo Bay.
51:46The new Japanese foreign minister, Shigemitsu, limps on board to sign the surrender document.
51:53The Allied commander, General McCarver.
52:10I now invite the representatives of the emperor of Japan, and the Japanese government, and the Japanese imperial general headquarters,
52:24to sign the instrument of surrender at the places indicated.
52:29The foreign minister's aide, Kase, watched the ceremony.
52:35I saw many thousands of sailors everywhere on this huge vessel,
52:42and just in front of us were delegates of the victorious powers in military uniforms glittering with gold.
52:53And looking at them, I wondered how Japan ever thought she could defeat all those nations.
53:04Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world,
53:11and that God will preserve it always.
53:17These proceedings are closed.
53:22Alright,
53:25three yeas,
53:26passed back,
53:30a huge
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