Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World (Chris Wallace’s Countdown Series) Hardcover – Illustrated, June 9, 2020

Although I am very familiar with this story reading many of the books and visiting all the important sites, I purchased this book primarily due to my admiration for Chris Wallace and his contributions. The authors have created a well written concise book that all can easily read. It reads like a spy-novel. This novel has real life people whose lives cascade with the events from FDR’s death to “ Fat Man” over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. This effective and highly descriptive technique certifies and personifies the historical events of the period. The authors allow the reader to peer into these lives which is foreign to usual historical texts.After many years of questioning why the plutonium weapon was tested first at Trinity, I found my answer on page 125. Simple, they did not know it would work! Additionally, on the same page the authors corrected their mistake of where Alamogordo was 230 miles south of Los Alamos (not north as indicated on page 110). This defect in the text is illuminating in it possibly reveals the authors and or the editors have never been to the Manhattan Project Research Sites of Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Hanford and Cannon AFB. I find that interesting.The book indirectly defends Truman’s decision to use the weapon. On page 82 it is stated the Japanese had 4 million soldiers coupled with several million armed civilians to resist a US invasion while the Americans had 2 million in the Pacific at this time. Siege warfare proscribes a 4 to one advantage when assaulting a hardened objective. This means the US would have needed at a minimum 30 million soldiers to neutralize the Japanese regarding a home island invasion. This is double the 14 million the US had under arms at that time!The book reveals the stubbornness of the Japanese to capitulate. The Giulio Douhet Theory of offensive bombing doctrine appears to fail during WW II in Europe and also in Japan even with these super weapons. As described in this text both sides were taken back by the power of the bombs. Little did the Japanese know the US only had two. However, Japanese scientists conveyed to the Emperor the US could produce more of the second weapon for it was created from reactor plutonium.The book’s index is very helpful along with the many timely and appropriate photos which supports this interesting story. This is one of the best written books I have read in years. If you do not know anything about this topic, you will understand the history.

Since the subject of the book is the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, one might expect that the principal focus of the book is describing the technical difficulties involved in the creation of that weapon. That topic is briefly discussed, but the subject of the book is the 116 days before the dropping of the bomb, and by that time, even though it had not yet been tested, most of the technical difficulties had been resolved. What had not been resolved was whether the United States would use it and if it did what cities would be targeted, was there a plane capable of carrying such a bomb, who would be the crew and what type of training would they require, should the Japanese be forewarned and if so to what extent. Wallace gives an extraordinary amount of detail in explaining the emotions and effort put into making these decisions. He describes the backgrounds and personalities of some of the scientists, in particular Oppenheimer, but he focuses more upon the men who comprised the crew of the Enola Gay - their extraordinary abilities, their carousing, their conflicts and the vast amount of preparation that was needed by them to fly a specially prepared B-29 to drop the bomb. Wallace does give some vignettes of how the bomb affected some ordinary citizens both American and Japanese. There were a couple of minor facts that also impressed me. I did not realize that the bombs were transported across the Pacific via navy cruiser to Tinian, one of the Mariana Islands. I had thought they were always transported via air. That cruiser, the USS Indianapolis, arrived at Tinian on July 26, 1945 and 4 days later while heading to the Leyte Gulf, it was sunk by the Japanese. Another minor fact that impressed me was that many of the scientists were Jewish.At the end of the book, Wallace discusses the morality of dropping the bomb. It is estimated that between 90,000 to 146,000 were killed in the bombing of Hiroshima and between 39,000 to 80,000 in the bombing of Nagasaki. Let’s just estimate that a total of 250,000 were killed from the two bombings. Previous to these bombings the Allied air raids on Japan killed between 240,000 to 900,000. Some of the American military estimated that between 250,000 to one million Americans would die in trying to take the island of Japan, because fighting would become more intense as the Japanese defended their homeland. Others have claimed that the war was already won and that the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering. Such an assertion can easily be dismissed. After the bombing of Nagasaki, almost all of the Japanese generals did not want to surrender. They wanted to fight on. Although the samurai warriors no longer exist, their code that death is better than surrender still pervades Japanese society and can be seen in the suicide bombers. The Emperor was able to override their determination to die rather than submit. If we had not dropped the bomb, probably at least a million Americans would have been killed and probably several million Japanese. If the saving of human life is a measure of the morality of an action, then our dropping the bomb, was an extremely moral act. It is true, that if every nation possessed such a bomb and used it in warfare, then the human race would either cease to exist or live in a state unrecognizable as human life. So every precaution was set in motion to prevent this from occurring, but the notion that if the United States had never developed the bomb, then no other nation would have felt the need to do so is an absurdity, and our failure to develop the bomb would have put us at the mercy of an aggressor who did possess it.