Final impact

“There will be no escape from justice for those responsible for starting this war,” he continued. “Or for those who have committed crimes in its prosecution. But your people do not need to share in that punishment. The invasion of your Home Islands for which you are preparing will not come. No American soldier will set foot there while we remain at war. There is now no reason for them to do so. Lay down your arms, and we will come peacefully, to help you rebuild and to take your place in the community of civilized nations. Resist us and you will be destroyed. There will be no glory, no honor in such resistance. Only the most abject folly. Your warrior spirit will count for nothing inside the fireball of an atomic explosion. Such human or spiritual considerations are irrelevant. You have twenty-four hours to reply.”

Again, he allowed a small pause to add gravity to his words. The faces of the military men in the room were somber, and largely unreadable. Henry Stimson, his secretary of war, was nodding grimly, but with noticeable enthusiasm. It was Stimson who had argued strongly-and in the end, effectively-for delaying their first atomic strike until they had a sufficient store of weapons to launch equally devastating follow-up strikes and, just as important, enough planes to deliver them as far as Moscow if need be. It was the only way to dissuade the Soviet Union from any misadventures. Truth was, Roosevelt could have ordered the destruction of Berlin at any time in the last three months, and he knew that years from now there were going to be historians damning him for not having done so. If he had been planning to run in the next election, there would doubtless have been some dunderheads who accused him of letting Americans die needlessly while he built up a stockpile of A-bombs that could have saved their lives.

But in his heart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that they did not die needlessly. Stimson was right. With no knowledge of how far any Communist atomic program had advanced, there was no alternative to building a deterrent that was immediately available and credible. When Lodz had disappeared inside a mushroom cloud, that debate had ended.

In the brief moment while he drew his breath he glanced over to his wife, who smiled at him with such understanding and kindness that it nearly broke his heart. He pressed on.

“And finally to you, my fellow citizens of this great republic, and to our friends and allies throughout the free world, I can only say, thank you. In our history books it is presidents, prime ministers, and generals who are credited with winning wars, but those books are wrong. It is you, all of you, who have worked and fought and sacrificed so much these last years, to whom victory belongs. Unfortunately I cannot promise you that peace is with us just yet. I cannot force our enemies to see reason if they are intent on blinding themselves to it. But I can promise you that we will not spend one life more than necessary to bring them to account. And if that means burning them from the face of the planet, then so be it.

“Thank you for listening, and good-bye.”

He held the blank gaze of the middle camera lens until the producer signaled that they were done. It was a weird unnatural thing, sitting there with a silly grin on your face, and not something he saw himself ever growing used to. Harry S was welcome to it.

Polite applause broke out among the civilians as he relaxed.

“Well, do you think they’ll get the message, Henry?” he asked Stimson.

“Who, Mr. President? The Japanese or the Russians?”

“Both of them.”

D-DAY + 42. 14 JUNE 1944. 1705 HOURS.

THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

“You! You are responsible. This is your fault!”

Beria could feel his bowels turning loose and watery as Stalin pounded the table and shouted at him in front of the whole Politburo. The fact that they were meeting at such an unusual hour was evidence enough of a crisis. Stalin’s dark, knitted brows, and the pipe lying broken on the empty table in front of him, confirmed the worst. He was in a killing fury of such unbridled intensity that nobody dared speak, or even look sideways at the object of his anger, lest the supreme leader of the workers’ state suddenly transfer his wrath. Even Malenkov kept his eyes studiously downcast, and he could always be counted on to revel in any misfortune that befell Laventry Beria.

“But I am not responsible for the Americans’ atomic program,” the NKVD chief protested. “I am responsible for our own, and that has delivered more than I was asked.”