COUNTDOWN 1945

Move over Erik Larson, there’s a new sheriff in town and his name is Chris Wallace (just kidding). Well, Wallace’s book is certainly on par with the writer of Dead Wake, Erik Larson, the king of non-fiction books that read like fiction. Wallace’s chapters were countdown days to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan during WWII. For instance, the first chapter was countdown: 116 days, and the last two chapters were countdowns: 43 seconds and Firestorm. Each chapter ending with a cliffhanger to the next. I also liked the short chapters, long ones put me to sleep for whatever reason. The book was co-written by Mitch Weiss, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and bestselling author of the Heart of Hell...so I’m going to assume he had a lot to do with Countdown 1945.

Countdown 1945 goes over in detail the last 116 days of The Manhattan Project, the death of FDR, the emergence of Harry S. Truman, the last weeks of the famous Potsdam Conference (Stalin, Churchill, & now Truman replacing FDR), the genius of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team and of course, Col. Paul Tibbets, Jr, and his crew that flew the B29 Superfortress (Enola Gay) that dropped Little Boy (atomic bomb) on Hiroshima on 8/6/1945. Was that a long fused sentence, or what? 

Oppenheimer headed the team at Los Alamos, New Mexico where they finished the development of the atomic bomb. He was the son of a German immigrant, six feet tall, 135 pounds with an “appetite for rare steaks, stiff martinis, spicy foods, and cigarettes.” And did I forget to mention “a genius of theoretical physics?” Students at Berkeley and California Institute of Technology loved him! “But Oppenheimer had a dark side, too...he didn’t tolerate small talk...dismissive to the point of rudeness and his brilliance could be clouded by melancholy and peevishness.”

“FDR thought very little of Truman, keeping him out of the war effort during Truman’s short stay at VP...he made no particular impression on me.” That’s why Truman didn’t know anything about the Manhattan Project. Truman was president for 13 days before the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, walked into the oval office. “He handed the president a short, typewritten memorandum and waited while Truman read it. The first sentence was a battering ram...within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” It will be (down the line) Truman’s call whether to drop the bomb or not.

 “Creating an atomic bomb was a devilishly complex process. First, the country had to produce radioactive fuel. Then it had to figure out how to safely detonate the fission process-setting off an atomic chain reaction-at the right moment and in the right place. And it had to pull all of this in complete secrecy.” There you go, you got a 43-page taste of what this book is all about. Did I like it? No. I loved it!

RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Comment: “The closer the U.S. got to the Japanese homeland, the more fiercely the enemy fought. Not a single Japanese unit surrendered. And the enemy homeland was mobilizing for an invasion and the bloodiest battle of all. Japan had more than two million troops stationed there. And every civilian had been armed and trained to fight.” 

After the successful testing of the atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico on 7/16/1945, the Los Alamos workers partied in the streets. Hooray, hooray.

Then the euphoria died down.

When Oppenheimer imagined what it would be like to be under the explosion in Hiroshima, he mumbled to himself…”Those poor little people. Those poor little people.” President Truman wrote in his diary, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.” General Eisenhower was against the dropping of the bomb, he wanted to overrun Japan. Truman wondered if he should warn Hiroshima, would they still surrender? If he did invade the main islands, the price could be millions of dead and wounded Americans besides the Japanese dead and wounded.