Countdown 1945

May 15, 2020
What it took for Harry Truman, after fewer than three months in the White House, to decide to drop the atomic bomb--and how the plan was executed. The end of World War II in the Pacific was as definitive as the mushroom cloud and firestorm produced by the weapon that brought it about. Fox News Sunday anchor Wallace describes a moment in history when both intense deliberation and decisive leadership were essential. On April 12, 1945, Truman, then the vice president, was summoned to the White House, where he expected to meet President Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, he was received by the president's wife, Eleanor, who told Truman that Roosevelt had died, only a few months into his fourth term. Truman was shaken by the news, but it was a cryptic message from Secretary of War Henry Stimson that would define the rest of that year--and the war. Stimson informed the new president about Roosevelt's top-secret project to build a nuclear weapon, and he did not prevaricate in describing the weapon's potential to the new president: "Modern civilization might be completely destroyed." Wallace describes how Truman thought that there was every reason to believe that the alternative to using the new weapon--a ground invasion--would result in hundreds of thousands of deaths, on both the American/Allied and the Japanese side. The author peppers in the story of Hideko Tamura, a young Japanese girl who was sent away from her home in Hiroshima only to beg her mother to return--just in time to survive the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Wallace presents a mostly entertaining, if familiar, history of the three months between Truman's taking office and the dropping of the bombs, but he only briefly engages with issues like the suffering of innocent Japanese and the intense misgivings of scientists like Albert Einstein. A brisk work of history that weaves together the various factions responsible for the deployment of the first nuclear bombs.

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May 25, 2020
Fox News Sunday host Wallace debuts with a propulsive account of the final months of WWII leading up to atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drawing on eyewitness accounts from Allied leaders, U.S. bomber pilots, and atomic scientists, Wallace opens with FDR’s death in April 1945 and the swearing-in of President Truman, who immediately learns that the government has been developing “the most terrible weapon ever known in human history.” Among those briefed about the plans, there was “a long, deeply felt debate” about the morality and efficacy of atomic weapons, Wallace writes. Separately, military leaders were planning to invade the Japanese home islands of Kyushu and Honshu in what would have been “the biggest military operation in U.S. history.” Days after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviets invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, threatening to permanently alter the map of Asia. Defiant silence from Japanese leaders led to the bombing of Nagasaki, a mission that “almost failed before it began.” Wallace, with help from journalist Weiss, writes with verve and an eye for cinematic detail, though much of the story is well-known. Still, this accessible, evenhanded account serves as an entertaining introduction to one of the most momentous decisions in world history.

June 1, 2020
April 12, 1945, witnessed the loss of a wartime leader with the passing of President Franklin Roosevelt. In the latter stages of WWII, the Allied effort was gaining ground over Axis powers, but victory was far from assured. Vice President Harry Truman assumed the presidency with trepidation, especially when informed of the Manhattan Project: the vast country-spanning effort that employed hundreds of thousands of men and women and maintained the covert purpose of building an atomic bomb. The crucial players in this wartime machine were many, from scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the New Mexico arm of the project despite reservations about his past Communist Party affiliations, to colonel Paul Tibbets, who led the team that ultimately dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Journalist and FoxNews anchor Wallace charts the perilous and unsure course of the U.S. during the waning days of WWII, capturing the various personae who brought the bomb to fruition. With minute-by-minute suspense, Wallace masterfully writes of the trying time and the Allies' omnipresent doubt up to the very last second.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)