1945

"They will soon move to Yokohama to be with cousins. I have no desire to be with them. They are rooted in self-pity and the past, while I wish to live in the future. Now, will you take me with you to Hawaii?"

"Of course." He pulled her closer to him. The car had stopped almost directly in front of them. "It won't be a problem. I think I'm owed some pretty big favors by some very important people."

The car doors opened. OSS agents Peters and Johnson stepped out. They grinned happily and waved when they saw Joe. Joe laughed. "What the hell took you guys so long?"

CHAPTER 87

WASHINGTON, D.C.

"Gonna miss you, Jim," President Harry Truman said as he reluctantly accepted his secretary of state's letter of resignation. "You did a helluva job under some rotten conditions."

Byrnes shrugged, but the compliment pleased him. He had hoped to give it another year or so at State, but the pressures of the job in the past several months had accelerated the overall deterioration of his health. All his ambitions were now behind him.

"Harry, if I want to live to enjoy my retirement, I'd better go now. At any rate, General Marshall will do an outstanding job as my replacement. Sometimes I get the feeling Marshall's been prepping for this all his life. He's the man to shepherd the new world as it develops."

After a few minutes of small talk, Byrnes departed, leaving Truman with his many thoughts.

First and foremost, World War II was over and now the world was learning the true nature of nuclear warfare. Scientists from many nations were examining the ruins of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, and the residue of the straits bomb. Radiation, so casually dismissed as a factor in earlier calculations, was being redefined as a deadly killer that never stopped killing.

Truman knew that a portion of the world's population would forever castigate him for using the terrible weapon, but he had done so with a clear conscience and the hope that the bomb would bring an early end to the war. That the war had not finally concluded until the early months of 1946 was sad, but not as awful as it could have been for either side had it dragged on even longer.

In the war's beginning, many predictions had called for fighting the Japanese until the latter part of the 1940s. "The Golden Gate in '48" had been the GIs' sarcastic lament. It meant that they themselves did not figure to get home until 1948. Truman considered himself responsible for doing much better than that.

The "peace with honor" had been less than the unconditional surrender of Japan that FDR had first declared was requisite. American military occupied less than a third of Kyushu and were negotiating with the Japanese government for long-term leases for naval, air, and army bases in the Kagoshima, Ariake, and Sasebo areas. After the boys came home, the total number of Americans at the several bases would likely be less than a hundred thousand and would be more concerned with Russia than Japan. That American troops would be coming home had offset any resentment that perhaps the Japs had gotten off too easily. Of course, newsreel films of the devastation in Japan reinforced that the Japs had been brutally beaten.

Joseph Grew was ensconced in Tokyo with several hundred civilian and military "advisers" who now worked with the new Japanese government. Homma and Ozawa had announced their intention to resign and retire from public life. Hirohito had renounced his claim to being a godhead, and democratic elections were being planned. The political face of Japan was being restructured.

Japan had withdrawn any claims to Formosa or Korea, although Okinawa would revert to Japanese control. Japanese garrisons, many starving and in wretched condition, had almost all departed from distant parts of the Empire and, like their brethren on the home islands, were being disarmed by their own government while American representatives watched. It was all astonishingly peaceful now.

War crimes were a touchy issue. Many of the major possible criminals were already dead. Anami, Sugiyama, and Tojo, to name a few, had either been killed or had committed suicide, while Ishii seemed to have disappeared. Even so, an international tribunal made up of representatives from Spain, Portugal, the Vatican, Switzerland, and Sweden would judge those the United States wished to prosecute.

Homma would not be prosecuted. There was substantial evidence that he might not have known the Bataan Death March was occurring. He had accepted moral responsibility for the atrocity insofar as he had been in command of the Japanese forces involved. In light of his subsequent actions in bringing the war to an end, he was given the benefit of a reasonable doubt.

Truman received the latest on casualties for Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu. The total stood at just under 350,000, and almost a third of those were dead. It was a staggering addition to the total of 300,000 Americans killed in all the other battles of World War II.