So, by July 24 Tokyo had been excluded from the target list for the first two bombs and subsequent bombs. General Groves expects to have more information on future availabilities in a few days which will be furnished you when received. Two tested type bombs are expected to be available in August, one about the 6th and another the (?)th. The following targets have been selected: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata anbd Nagasaki.Ģ. The first bomb (gun type) will be ready to drop between Ausut 1 and 10 and plans are to drop it the first day of good weather following readiness.ī.
The following plan and schedule for initial attacks using special bombs have been worked out:Ī. A Jletter from Colonel John Stone To General Arnold. On the morning of the 11th Groves spoke to Marshall and 'it was decided that no further shipments of material should be made to the Theater until the question of the Japanese surrender was decided' (Groves letter to Thomas F Farrell.) Groves sent a memo to Hap Arnold on the 10th suggesting that Tokyo might be added to the target list. Providing there are no unforseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in the theatre, the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.Īpparently Marshall sent the memo back with the handwritten directive: 'It is not to be released over Japan without express authority from the President.' We have gained 4 days in manufacture and expect to ship from New Mexico on 12 or 13 August the final components. The next bomb of the implosion type had been scheduld to be rady for delivery on the target on the first good weather after 24 August 1945. Norris's Bio of Groves, Racing for the Bomb, Norris quotes a letter from Groves to Marshall dated August 10: It interesting to note the comparison here with Tokyo. 'In this respect Kyoto has the advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.The Emperor's palace in Tokyo has a greater fame than any other target but is of least strategic value.' Indeed from the minutes of the second meeting of the targeting committee it was noted about Kyoto: It is the spiritual heart of Japan and had not been bombed so would have had both a primary effect of a high value morale target and a secondary effect of testing the bomb. I would have thought that from this list, if we follow the reseaning that 'test' drops were no longer needed then Kyoto would have been an inviting target. As you say the original recommended list of targets, decided in May, were: As for Tokyo being the target i'm not sure and Gordin does not give a source for his guess. Same as you I always assumed the planned production meant that there would not be any more bombs unitl December at the earliest.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Or perhaps a decapitating strike was intended, to take out Hirohito and his ministers? Though that might actually make surrender more difficult to organise.Ĭlearly I'll have to add Gordin's book to my to-read list. Perhaps the thinking was that two 'test' drops were enough, and that if no surrender followed, it was time for a higher-value morale target? It could be questioned how much of Tokyo was left to destroy after the 65 conventional (or fire) raids which had already taken place. Tokyo wasn't on that list (the other cities were Kokura and Niigata). That surprises me a little, given that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen from a list of cities spared from conventional bombing so that the effects of the atomic bombs could be better assessed. He says there that the third drop would 'probably' have been on Tokyo. According to Seeman, it would be ready for use on 19 August.Īs for where it would be used, I got that from the first chapter of Michael Gordin's Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. And it turns out that there was one ready to be shipped out to Tinian at that very moment. Seeman on 13 August, about atomic bomb production in the next few months.
But a comment at Edge of the American West pointed me in the direction of a memo recording the conversation between General John E. For a long time, I've believed that the two bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ones which would be available for a month or two.
Or, rather, might have been had not Japan surrendered on 15 August. On this day in 1945, the third atomic bomb was dropped on Tokyo.