Chapter 9: Read the Declaration Slowly

The new president took the chair at a table by a lake.

At ten minutes past five on the afternoon of 17 July 1945, Harry Truman walked into the great hall of a palace beside a lake and took his seat at a large round table. Tall windows looked out on lawns and old trees, and beyond them the water lay still in the summer light. The palace had been built during the First World War as a country house for a crown prince, with dark wooden panelling and many small rooms. Now its hall held three delegations, their interpreters and the flags of the three great powers. Because he was the only head of state among the three leaders, the others asked the new president to take the chair.

The special train that travelled slowly westward in the middle of July, with guards at every bridge, carrying the marshal of the eastern ally to this meeting, had arrived a day later than planned, and the opening of the conference had to be put back by one day. The president used that day to drive through the ruins of the defeated capital nearby, and he wrote in his diary that he had never seen such destruction.

Only three months had passed since he had taken the oath of office in the evening after the death of his predecessor. He had never met the marshal before. He had met the prime minister of the western ally only the day before. I want you to sit beside him for a moment at that table, a plain man who had grown up on a farm and who felt, as he told reporters in April, as if the moon and the stars had fallen on him.

The talks at the lakeside palace shaped the defeated country.

For more than two weeks, from 17 July to 2 August, the leaders and their foreign ministers met almost every day. Most of their work concerned the war in the west, which was over, rather than the war in Asia, which was not. They agreed the principles on which the defeated country would be governed in its four zones. It would be disarmed. Its war industries would be dismantled. The organizations of its former regime would be dissolved. Its political life would be rebuilt from the local level upward, on a democratic basis. If you read the minutes of those sessions, you will find long and patient arguments about coal, railways, food and the movement of goods between the zones, and you may be surprised, as I was, at how much of the peace was a matter of timetables and supplies rather than of grand words.

The leaders also agreed that each occupying power would take reparations mainly from its own zone. They agreed to set up a council of foreign ministers to prepare the peace treaties with the smaller former partners of the Axis. They accepted, as a provisional arrangement until a final peace settlement, a new eastern border for the defeated country, far to the west of the old one.

One sentence of their final report has stayed with me more than any other. It said that the transfer of populations from the lands to the east, which had already begun, should be carried out in an orderly and humane manner. You should know that millions of people were moved in the years that followed. For many of them, the journey was neither orderly nor humane. I ask you to remember them, too, among the people whose war did not end with the guns.

On 25 July the prime minister of the western ally flew home to hear the results of his country's general election. On 26 July it was announced that his party had lost. Two days later, the new prime minister took his place at the round table.

Think of a long-distance train in which the crew changes at a station halfway along the line. The passengers stay in their seats, the timetable is unchanged, and the train moves off again in a few minutes. The change at the lakeside palace was like that, quiet and orderly, and it was itself a small sign of the peace that the war had been fought to protect.

A new weapon was mentioned in a few words after a session.

On 16 July, the day before the conference opened, a new kind of bomb had been tested for the first time in a desert on the far side of the ocean. The president was told of the result that evening, and fuller reports reached him during the following days. On 24 July, after the evening session, he walked over to the marshal and told him, in a few words, that his country now had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The marshal replied calmly that he was glad to hear it and hoped it would be put to good use.

That was the whole of the conversation, as far as anyone could tell.

Those who watched it thought that the marshal had not understood. We now know that he had been told of the weapon's development long before by his own intelligence services. You may find it hard to read that short exchange without a chill, because in those few sentences lay the beginning of a new and anxious age.

The declaration of 26 July was published to the world.

On 26 July 1945 the leaders of three nations at war with the island empire issued a declaration from the lakeside palace. They were the president, the prime minister of the western ally, and the leader of the great republic in Asia which had fought the island empire since 1937. That leader was not at the conference and gave his agreement by telegram. The marshal of the eastern ally did not sign, because his country was not yet at war in Asia.

The declaration had thirteen short points. It called on the government of the island empire to proclaim the unconditional surrender of all its armed forces. It warned that the alternative was prompt and utter destruction. It said that the authority of those who had led the people into war must be removed for all time, that the empire would lose the territories it had taken, and that it would be occupied until a peaceful government had been formed.

It also contained other promises, and these are the ones I would most like you to notice. The soldiers, once disarmed, would be allowed to return to their homes and lead peaceful and productive lives. The people would not be enslaved or destroyed as a nation. Freedom of speech, of religion and of thought would be established, together with respect for fundamental human rights. The occupying forces would be withdrawn as soon as these aims were achieved and a peaceful and responsible government had been established by the freely expressed will of the people. I hope you will read these lines twice, because they show that even in a demand for surrender, the authors were already trying to describe a peace that the defeated people might one day accept as their own.

The text was broadcast by radio from the far shore of the ocean and dropped over the cities of the island empire in leaflets. Its words reached the capital of the island empire on the morning of 27 July.

Read the thirteen points aloud and give each one a breath.

Keep a quiet half hour for this. Find the full text of the declaration of 26 July, which is printed in many collections of documents, and read it aloud slowly. Read one point at a time. After each one, stop and take a single slow breath before you go on.

You will find that the whole text takes only a few minutes to read, even at that pace. You will also notice, I think, how the hard words and the gentle ones are mixed together. The warning of utter destruction stands only a few lines away from the promise that soldiers would go home to peaceful lives. The demand for surrender sits beside the promise of freedom of thought.

Now imagine that you are a minister in the capital of the island empire on that summer morning, holding a copy of the text. You must decide, with colleagues who disagree with one another, which of its words to trust. You cannot ask its authors what they meant. The text says nothing at all about the emperor, whom millions of your fellow citizens regard with deep reverence. You will begin to see why the government hesitated, and why the hesitation cost so much.

When you have finished, sit for a while in the silence. Those few minutes of reading took the government of the island empire nearly three weeks to answer.

The answer from the capital was taken as a refusal.

On 28 July the prime minister of the island empire, an elderly admiral who had been wounded long ago in an attempt on his life, spoke to the press about the declaration. He used a word that can mean to take no notice of something, or simply to withhold comment. His government was divided. Some ministers wanted to accept the declaration. Others hoped that the eastern ally, still neutral, might help to negotiate gentler terms. Others wanted to fight on and inflict such losses that the Allies would offer something better.

Abroad, his words were reported as a flat rejection. The orders already given for the use of the new bomb were left to run their course.

I have often wondered how much of the history of that summer turned on the difficulty of translating one short word. You may wonder too. A word is like a railway switch: the train goes on in one direction or another, and a small movement of the lever decides which.

In three August days the last hopes of delay were swept away.

On the morning of 6 August 1945, at a quarter past eight, the first of the new bombs fell on a city of the island empire. About seventy thousand people died that day, and by the end of the year the number had grown to about one hundred and forty thousand. Most of them were civilians: schoolchildren, factory workers, mothers and old men, soldiers and conscripted workers from distant lands.

Late in the afternoon of 8 August, the foreign minister of the eastern ally received the ambassador of the island empire in the eastern capital. He read to him a statement that from the following day his country would consider itself at war with the island empire. If you did the small exercise of counting three months from 8 May when you read about the palace by the sea, you will see that the promise made there was kept to the very day. Shortly after midnight, in the first hours of 9 August, the armies of the eastern ally crossed the frontiers into the vast northern territories held by the forces of the island empire on the mainland of Asia.

On 9 August, at two minutes past eleven in the morning, the second bomb fell on a port city of the island empire. About seventy thousand people had died there by the end of the year.

I give you these numbers and nothing more. Each of them was a person with a name and a family. If you have a candle in your house, I would ask you to light it now, for the dead of those two cities and for all the dead of the war in Asia, on every side and in every land.

The council met at midnight in a shelter below the palace.

On the morning of 9 August the six leaders of the council for the conduct of the war met in the capital of the island empire. They debated for hours. Three of them, led by the foreign minister, wanted to accept the declaration on the single condition that the position of the emperor be preserved. Three others, led by the war minister, wanted to add further conditions about disarmament, occupation and the trial of those accused of war crimes. The cabinet met in the afternoon and evening, and it too could not agree.

Shortly before midnight on 9 August the council met again in the presence of the emperor. They gathered in an air-raid shelter dug into a hill in the grounds of the palace, below the emperor's library. It was a small room with wooden panelling, hot and airless in the summer night, with a single table covered by a cloth. The emperor sat on a plain chair before a gilded screen. The ministers sat at the table in their dark uniforms and morning coats, sweating in the heat, and each in turn stated his view. You should imagine the air in that room as close and heavy, with the men in their stiff collars waiting for their turn to speak, each of them aware that whatever was said there might decide the lives of millions on both sides of the war.

At about two in the morning on 10 August the prime minister rose and asked the emperor to decide. The emperor spoke quietly. He said that the war could not be continued without bringing even greater suffering to his people. He said that the time had come to bear the unbearable. He agreed to accept the declaration on the one condition that his own position be preserved.

The meeting in the shelter ended at about half past two in the morning. In the capital of the president's country, thirteen hours behind on the far side of the ocean, it was then half past one in the afternoon of 9 August. People there were back at their desks after lunch. They did not yet know what had been said in the heat of the shelter, and you may find it strange, as I do, that the world could be so quiet in one place while it turned in another.

Notes crossed the world through neutral capitals for four days.

On the morning of 10 August the government of the island empire sent its offer to the Allies through the governments of two neutral countries. The reply, drafted by the president's secretary of state, was sent on 11 August and reached the capital of the island empire on 12 August. It said that from the moment of surrender the authority of the emperor and the government would be subject to the supreme commander of the Allied powers. It said that the final form of government would be established by the freely expressed will of the people.

The ministers in the capital argued again for two days about the meaning of those words. On 13 and 14 August Allied planes dropped leaflets over the capital. They told the people, for the first time, what their government had offered. The leaders feared that the news would cause unrest among the officers who wished to fight on.

I once listened to an old shellac record on a gramophone in the flat of a friend named Klara. The machine stood on a lace cloth on a side table by the window. She wound the handle, lowered the needle, and a voice came out of the horn through the crackle, thin and far away, like a voice from the end of a long tunnel. "It is always strange," she said, "to hear someone speak who has been silent for so long." I thought of that afternoon when I first read about the night of 14 August, and I think you will understand why.

On 14 August a recording was prepared in the palace in the dark.

At about eleven in the morning of 14 August the emperor called the ministers and the council once more to the shelter below his library. Again they stated their views, and again they could not agree. Then the emperor spoke. He said that he had listened carefully and that his opinion had not changed. The Allied reply was acceptable. He asked the ministers to prepare at once an imperial rescript ending the war, and he said that he was ready to speak to his people himself by radio, if that would help them to accept it. Several of the ministers wept openly at the table.

Through the afternoon and evening the cabinet worked over the text of the rescript, word by word, at a long table in the prime minister's residence. You can picture them under the dim lamps, crossing out phrases and writing others above them, while officials carried the pages back and forth. The emperor signed the final text late in the evening. That night the government sent its acceptance of the Allied terms through the neutral capitals.

Meanwhile, technicians of the national broadcasting service had been called to the palace grounds with their recording equipment. They set it up in a room on the second floor of the household ministry building. The capital was blacked out, as it had been for months. The windows were covered, and only a few shaded lamps lit the room where the microphone stood on its stand, the cables ran across the floor, and the technicians tested their machines and waited in silence.

Outside, the night was hot and very dark. Across the city, people were sleeping in shelters and in the half-burned remains of their houses, not yet knowing what had been decided. At about twenty-five minutes past eleven on the night of 14 August, the emperor walked along a dim corridor of the household ministry toward the waiting microphone. The blank discs were ready on the turntables, and a technician stood with his hand on a switch.