It might also, Truman hoped, convince “Uncle Joe” to behave. Only a fool or a maniac would risk war against a nation equipped with the most devastating weapon ever developed.
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was literally obliterated by an atomic bomb. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The next day, as the Red Army marched into Manchuria against the Kwantung Army, which could offer only token resistance, a B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
On September 2, 1945, aboard the battleship USS Missouri, in Tokyo Harbor, Japanese foreign minister Shigemitsu Mamoru, on behalf of Emperor Hirohito, unconditionally surrendered the Japanese empire to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, the officer Truman had designated as Supreme Commander, Allied Powers.
Even before the official Japanese surrender, senior Navy and Marine officers knew—again, substantially from reports of OSS agents in China—that the civil war in China, between the Communists under Mao Tse-tung, and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, was a threat to world stability that the United States was going to have to deal with, and that the Marines would most likely be sent there to do the dealing.
Less than forty-eight hours after the surrender, a warning order was issued to the Marines—who had been gathered together in the III Amphibious Corps, and who had been training for the invasion of the Japanese home islands—to prepare to move to China.
In October 1945—a month later—Truman, by Presidential Directive, “disestablished” the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
The joke whispered around Washington was that it was the only way Truman could see to get rid of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, who had headed the organization since its birth—also by Presidential Directive—in June 1942.
Donovan, who had won the Medal of Honor in France in World War I, had been a law school classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a lifelong crony. While there was little doubt that it was an effective tool of war, it—and Donovan—was cordially detested by the military establishment, and there is little doubt the very senior brass encouraged the new Commander-in-Chief, whenever they had his ear, to quickly put it out of business
Whatever the reasons, the OSS—its detractors said that OSS meant “Oh, So Social”—was “disestablished” and the vast majority of its 12,000 men and women almost instantly released to their civilian pursuits. The very small percentage of OSS personnel who were members of the “regular” military establishment were returned to the regular Marine Corps, Army, and Navy, where they were most often greeted with less-than-wide-open welcoming arms.
Truman, who was never reluctant to admit he’d made a mistake, had by the early months of 1946 decided he’d made one in killing off the OSS.
By then, Soviet intentions were already becoming clear, and the bureaucratic infighting of the newly “freed” independent intelligence services of the Army, Navy, and State Department had made it clear that the nation did indeed need a central intelligence agency, whether or not the various Princes of Intelligence liked it or not.
Truman, in yet another Presidential Directive, gave it one. He “established” the Central Intelligence Group and the National Intelligence Authority. Then, in 1947, he pushed through the Congress a bill making it law. The Central Intelligence Agency was born. Possibly as a sop to the regular military establishment, and possibly because he was singularly qualified for the post, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, USN, was named first director of the CIA.
On March 5, 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, British wartime Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
That was certainly true, but it wasn’t Soviet Russia’s only iron curtain.
There was another one in Korea, a peninsula extending into the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan from the Asian continent. It had been ruled, rather brutally, by Japan since 1895.
Almost casually, when the Soviet Union finally agreed to enter the war against Japan, it was decided that the Soviets would accept the surrender of Japanese forces in the north of Korea, and the Americans in the south. The 38th parallel divided Korea, just north of Seoul, into roughly equal halves, and the 38th parallel became the demarcation line.
Immediately upon moving into “their” sector of Korea, the Soviets put in power a Korean Marxist named Kim Il Sung, and promptly turned the 38th parallel into an iron curtain just as impenetrable as the one in Europe.
The Soviet government expected that Japan would be divided as Germany