Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Also in Washington that busy Saturday, in the U.S. Navy Cryptographers’ Department, a young woman translated a decoded secret Japanese telegram sent four days previously from Tokyo, asking the Japanese consul in Hawaii to report on U.S. berthing positions, ship movements, and torpedo netting at Pearl Harbor. Concerned, she took the message plus some related ones to the head of her department, who told her that he would get back to it on Monday.

Just over twenty-four hours later, in Hiroshima Bay, the commander in chief of the Japanese fleet was piped aboard his flagship, moored among other battleships, to hear the first messages coming in about the success of the surprise attack on the anchored U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor by planes from his carrier fleet. That afternoon, Congress declared war on Japan. On Thursday 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States. Winston Churchill’s reaction was “So we had won the war after all.” Only a few weeks later, Enrico and Laura Fermi heard their five-year-old son, Giulio, cheerily singing a verse he had picked up from other little boys:

The people of Hiroshima welcomed the massive extension of the war, which for them had been under way since the invasion of Manchuria more than ten years previously. They rejoiced at the continuing success of their forces as they conquered Hong Kong, Malaya, the Philippines, Singapore, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), and many Pacific islands such as Guam. They shared their emperor’s view that “the fruits of war are tumbling into our mouth almost too quickly.” They hummed patriotic songs such as “Divine Soldiers of the Sky” about Japanese paratroopers descending on the foe like “pure white roses” from heaven. They read cleverly drawn and widely circulated comic strips showing the victorious Japanese forces “saving the country from foreigners” by cutting “the iron chain with which the Anglo-Americans had surrounded Japan.”

The comic strips showed how Japan was heading a greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, eliminating pernicious Western influence throughout the region and replacing it with Japan’s own “imperial way.” People flocked to Hiroshima’s cinemas, where newsreels showed advancing Japanese troops welcomed by smiling local people. Propaganda features followed, such as Suicide Troops of the Watchtower, about a Korean guerrilla who came to appreciate the justice of the Japanese cause and slew his own comrades.

At the same time Hiroshima geared up for the expanding war. A new industrial port and an army airport were swiftly constructed. Extra workers were recruited for the naval dockyard established on reclaimed land in the southwest of the city in 1939 by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Small workshops sprang up in houses all over the city to produce parts or simple military equipment. Among the new workers were many young women. They dressed not in kimonos but in more practical tunics and work pants and cheerfully attended the mandatory military drills. Other women—members of the Defense Women’s Association—donned their purple-and-white sashes to stand outside Hiroshima’s department stores, soliciting help with their sennimbari —strips of white cloth decorated with one thousand red stitches, each sewn by a different woman. The sennimbari were presented to soldiers going off to the war to wish them good luck and long life.

Many of the city’s male inhabitants had been conscripted and boarded transports in Hiroshima Bay for duty overseas. Their wives and families could not help but worry. The situation of the family of the tailor Isawa Nakamura was not unusual. His wife, Hatsuyo, heard no news from him for a long time. Then, in March 1942, came a brief telegram: “Isawa died an honourable death at Singapore.” Promoted to corporal, he had been killed on 15 February, the day Singapore fell. Army payments to Mrs. Nakamura ceased on his death, and she had no alternative but to use her husband’s sole legacy—his sewing machine—to get work to sustain herself and her three children, Toshio, Yaeko, and Myeko.

Government information was cascaded down to the people through a series of organizations stretching from the prefecture to town associations and then to neighborhood associations. The latter might consist of only ten or twenty households, while a town association might have seventy neighborhood associations within it. The neighborhood associations were already implementing food rationing, which had begun in the largest cities in 1940 and a little later in Hiroshima. Now they redoubled their efforts to eliminate the black market and, aided by dramatic posters captioned “Donate to Win,” encouraged the collection of metals for the war effort. Families piled their cooking pots up with the iron railings from their verandas to be melted down for weapons. One Hiroshima resident recalled how much she “missed the sound of the temple bells” since even they were demounted and fed to the furnaces.

The expansion of the war also gave a fillip to Japan’s nuclear program. A week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Navy—traditionally a fierce rival of the Imperial Army and resentful of the atomic bomb project that Lieutenant General Takeo Yasuda had asked Yoshio Nishina to initiate—convened a meeting of scientists and technicians. Captain Yoji Ito of the Navy Technology Research Institute announced to the gathering that the navy too wished to develop a nuclear weapon. He asked Nishina, who was present, to get involved in this project also.

Nishina agreed. Although he personally believed the attack on Pearl Harbor to have been insane, he was a patriot. Also, the army’s interest in atomic research was waning as a result of his predictions of the long timescales involved. The navy had more money and, he hoped, perhaps more patience. Although Nishina was not enthusiastic about building a bomb, he recognized that naval support would enable him to continue his own nuclear research. He was joined on the naval project by the elderly Hantaro Nagaoka, who, in gentler days, had known Ernest Rutherford.

In Germany the atomic bomb program was about to fall victim to a military and political situation that, by the end of 1941, had changed dramatically, with German troops bogged down outside Moscow and with Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Hitler ordered the total mobilization of the German economy to focus on an all-out pursuit of “total war” to secure the victory that at the time of Heisenberg’s visit to Copenhagen had seemed so nearly his. One consequence was that Army Ordnance ordered a review of all its research programs, and Erich Schumann told the Uranium Club that fission research could continue “only if a certainty exists of attaining an application in the foreseeable future.”

In February 1942 Army Ordnance called a conference on fission, to which the scientists submitted a cautiously optimistic 144-page report. Provided that the army supplied them with appropriate materials, a successful working reactor to generate atomic energy could be expected shortly and would have the potential to power submarines and other warships. The prospects for nuclear weapons depended on developing techniques for separating uranium, but, the scientists reminded the army, there was another option for producing weapons material: generating plutonium in a reactor.