1945

Near his shelter, he located a puddle and lapped it like a dog when his cupped hands wouldn't retain enough to quench his suddenly enormous thirst. Then he took a stick and began to dig in the soft ground. It was as he had hoped. The damp earth was full of insects.

As he ate, he decided that, whatever happened from here on in, he was not going back to a prison camp. Even if he died in the hills of Kyushu, he would do so as a free man.

Later, as the days stretched on, he began to wonder. How long could he endure and survive on his meager diet in the mountains of Kyushu? The weather was mild, but winter was inevitable. He had no idea how cold it would get, but it would certainly be much cooler than the present. What if he had to spend a long time in the hills? What if it took years for the war to end? Then he thought of something even more awful, and it made him shudder, nearly cry. What if it never ended? If that was the case, then he was condemned to spend whatever remained of his life running, hiding, and slowly starving to death.

Despite his circumstances, he saw black humor in the alternative possibility that the war would end and he would never find out. That would be just his luck.

CHAPTER 4

"I'm not too sure which appalls me the most, the rioting by our servicemen in San Francisco, or the civilian riots in other cities," said Marshall.

"They all sicken me," Truman said. "Look at the numbers for San Francisco. An estimated twenty thousand soldiers and sailors ran amok for two days before other military and state police could take control. They rampaged through Chinatown and killed anyone who looked even remotely Asian, hoping, I presume, that they were somehow killing Japs. God, more than a hundred dead and a thousand injured."

"Are you counting the rapes?" Marshall asked.

The riots in San Francisco had begun as a drunken celebration of victory over the Japanese by tens of thousands of servicemen overjoyed that they were not going to be fighting the Japs. When they found out the truth, the celebrations turned ugly. Most of the rapes had occurred during the celebration phase, the murders later on.

"No," Truman said sadly. The document on his desk indicated three thousand reported rapes in San Francisco alone, and God only knew how many unreported. "And will somebody tell me why the people of Detroit felt it necessary to kill another score of Negroes? Hadn't they had enough of race rioting in 1943?"

Where there had not been an Asian population to attack, the colored people of many large cities had become the target of the mobs' wrath.

Secretary of State Jim Byrnes lit a cigarette. "What is happening to these people, these criminals? May I presume there will be a lot of arrests and court-martials?"

Marshall shook his head. "Presume nothing. Most of the rioters in San Francisco are unidentified, except for a few score picked up by the police as drunk and disorderly. As to the rapes, most women won't testify, even if they could identify their assailants. The San Francisco hospitals reported giving out several thousand douches and sending the women home. There were so many raped women they had no other way to treat them. In order to defuse the situation, we are shipping as many of the soldiers and sailors out of California as quickly as possible and have confined the rest to their barracks.

"The police in Detroit and other cities finally seem to have everything under control, and there have been some arrests, although there does seem to be a lack of enthusiasm regarding actually prosecuting people."

"Not if I can help it," Truman snapped.

"Will we get convictions?" Byrnes asked.

Truman rose and paced. "Realistically, in today's climate we don't stand a snowball's chance of convicting someone for killing a Jap, Chinese, or colored man, but women and children were killed and that's something else entirely."

Truman took a deep breath to calm himself. "Which brings me to the point of this discussion, gentlemen. We must show ourselves as striking back at the Japanese in Japan and doing so extremely harshly. The actions of the mobs simply show how much the people's hatred of everything Japanese has increased. General Marshall, what is the status of the next bomb?"

Marshall answered quickly, "The bomb components have been flown to Tinian, and it is being assembled now. We will be ready anytime after the twenty-second of August."

"Good. Now, General, what about a target?"

Marshall paused, knowing that his answer could condemn thousands to death. The sixty-five-year-old five-star general had built the army from a scratch force to a massive entity in only a few short years. He had been the confidant of Roosevelt and was now Truman's trusted adviser.