Henry L. Stimson

Stimson was initially opposed to the internment of Japanese Americans away from the West Coast, but he eventually gave in to pro-exclusion military advisers and secured Roosevelt's final approval for the incarceration program. The administration was split in the wake of Pearl Harbor, with Justice Department officials arguing against "evacuation" and the Army and the War Department leaders demanding the immediate relocation. Still opposed to the idea of wholesale eviction, Stimson spent much of January 1942 in fielding calls from military advisers and West Coast politicians on the potential threat of a Japanese American fifth column. By February, John McCloy and others from the pro-exclusion camp had won him over.

On February 11, Stimson and McCloy briefed in a phone conference Roosevelt, who gave his Secretary of War the go-ahead to pursue whatever course he saw fit. McCloy contacted Karl Bendetsen to begin formulating a removal strategy immediately after. Roosevelt granted Stimson the final approval to carry out the eviction of West Coast Japanese Americans on February 17, and two days later, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the establishment of military zones that excluded certain persons.[24]

As the Western Defense Command began circulating civilian exclusion orders, a new debate formed regarding Japanese Americans in the Territory of Hawaii. Stimson joined other officials to push for the exclusion of all "enemy alien" Japanese from the islands.[24] (Japanese immigrants were prohibited by law from naturalization and so were classified as enemy aliens, regardless of their residential status.) However, Japanese Hawaiians were the largest ethnic group in the territory and the foundation of the Island's labor force. Since mass removal was infeasible both economically and politically, Stimson's proposal quickly fell through.[25]

Although Stimson believed it to be "quite impossible" to determine the loyalty of Japanese Americans and eventually came to support the army's incarceration program, he remained unconvinced on the legality of the policy: "The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. The latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system."[26]

Stimson authorized the release of Japanese Americans from camp in May 1944 but postponed permission for them to return to the West Coast until after the November elections to avoid controversy in Roosevelt's upcoming campaign.[24]

On November 21, 1943, the news broke that General George S. Patton, commander of the U.S. Seventh Army, had slapped an enlisted man who suffered from nervous exhaustion at a medical evacuation hospital in Sicily.[27] The incident caused a storm of controversy, and members of Congress called for Patton to be relieved of command. General Dwight Eisenhower opposed any move to recall General Patton from the European Theater and said privately, "Patton is indispensable to the war effort - one of the guarantors of our victory."[28] Stimson and McCloy agreed; Stimson told the Senate that Patton would be retained because of the need for his "aggressive, winning leadership in the bitter battles which are to come before final victory."[29]

Stimson strongly opposed the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize and to partition Germany into several smaller states.[30] The plan also envisioned the deportation and the summary imprisonment of anybody suspected of responsibility for war crimes. Initially, Roosevelt had been sympathetic to the plan, but Stimson's opposition and the public outcry when the plan was leaked made Roosevelt backtrack. Stimson thus retained overall control of the US occupation zone in Germany, and despite the plan's influence on the early occupation, it never became official policy. Explaining his opposition to the plan, Stimson insisted to Roosevelt that 10 European countries, including Russia, depended upon German trade and its production of raw materials. He also stated that it was inconceivable that the "gift of nature," which was populated by peoples of "energy, vigor, and progressiveness," should be turned into a "ghost territory" or "dust heap."

What Stimson most feared, however, was that a subsistence-level economy would turn the anger of Germans against the Allies and thereby "obscure the guilt of the Nazis and the viciousness of their doctrines and their acts." Stimson pressed similar arguments on Harry S. Truman, when he became president, in the spring of 1945.[31]

Stimson, a lawyer, insisted, against the initial wishes of both Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on proper judicial proceedings against leading war criminals. He and the War Department, drafted the first proposals for an International Tribunal, which soon received backing from Truman. Stimson's plan eventually led to the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–1946, which have strongly influenced the development of international law.

Stimson arriving for a Truman cabinet meeting in August 1945.

As Secretary of War, Stimson took direct and personal control of the entire atomic bomb project, with immediate supervision over General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project. Both Roosevelt and Truman followed Stimson's advice on every aspect of the bomb, and Stimson overruled military officers when they opposed his views.[32][33] That is best seen after military planners had selected Kyoto as the most promising target in southern Japan for nuclear attack. Stimson, remembering his honeymoon in that city, once again overruled his generals:

Kyoto had been favored for the very first attack but the committee opted to blitz Hiroshima, which was an important army depot and embarkation port within an urban environment. Targets in the south were given priority to boost possible invasion plans but the ancient city of Kyoto was withdrawn because the U.S. Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who had honeymooned there, said it was an important cultural center and "must not be bombed."[11]

The Manhattan Project was managed by Major General Groves (Corps of Engineers) with a staff of reservists and many thousands of civilian scientists and engineers. Groves nominally reported directly to General George Marshall, but Stimson was really in charge. Stimson secured the necessary money and approval from Roosevelt and from Congress, ensured that Manhattan had the highest priorities, and controlled all plans for the use of the bomb. Stimson successfully tried to get "Little Boy" (the Hiroshima bomb) dropped within hours of its earliest possible availability. Japan was to be forced to surrender, and the bombing of Hiroshima August 6 was likely a finishing blow for Tokyo.[34]

Stimson ultimately concluded that if the US had guaranteed the Japanese preservation of the imperial constitutional monarchy, Japan might have surrendered and prevented the use of atomic bombs.[35]

In retrospect, historians debate whether the impact of continued blockade, relentless bombing, and the Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria would have somehow forced Japanese Emperor Hirohito to surrender sometime in late 1945 or early 1946 even without the use of atomic bombs but with massive Allied casualties.[36] Stimson looked beyond the immediate end of the war. He was the only top government official to try to predict the meaning of the Atomic Age, and he envisioned a new era in human affairs.[37] For half-a-century, he had worked to inject order, science, and moralism into matters of law, state, and diplomacy. The impact of the atom bomb, he thought, would go far beyond military concerns to encompass diplomacy, world affairs, business, economics, and science. Above all, Stimson stated that the "most terrible weapon ever known in human history" opened up "the opportunity to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved."[38] He thought that the very destructiveness of the new weaponry would shatter the ages-old belief that wars could be advantageous. It might now be possible to call a halt to the use of destruction as a ready solution to human conflicts. Indeed, society's new control over the most elemental forces of nature finally "caps the climax of the race between man's growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control--his moral power."[39][40]

In 1931, when Japan had invaded Manchuria, Stimson, as Secretary of State, proclaimed the Stimson Doctrine: no fruits of illegal aggression would ever be recognized by the United States. Although Japan ignored it, according to Stimson, the wheels of justice had now turned and the "peace-loving" nations, as Stimson called them, had the chance to punish Japan's misdeeds in a manner that would warn aggressor nations never again to invade their neighbors. To validate the new moral order, he believed that the atomic bomb had to be used against combatants and workers in the war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both contained combatant bases and major centers of war industry that employed tens of thousands of civilians. The question for Stimson was not one of whether the weapon should be used. Involved were the simple issue of ending a horrible war and the more subtle and more important question of the possibility of genuine peace among nations. Stimson's decision involved the fate of mankind, and he posed the problem to the world in such clear and articulate fashion that there was a nearly-unanimous agreement mankind had to find a way so that atomic weapons would never be used again to kill people.[41][42][43]

• Bonnett, John. "Jekyll and Hyde: Henry L. Stimson, Mentalite, and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb on Japan." War in History 1997 4(2): 174–212. ISSN 0968-3445 online
• Ferrell, Robert H. Frank B. Kellogg; Henry L. Stimson (1963); as Secretary of State online
• Gerber, Larry G. "Stimson, Henry Lewis"; American National Biography Online February 2000.
• Gerber, Larry G. The Limits of Liberalism: Josephus Daniels, Henry Stimson, Bernard Baruch, Donald Richberg, Felix Frankfurter and the Development of the Modern American Political Economy (1983).
• Hodgson, Godfrey. The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950 (1990). popular biography
• Jordan, Jonathan W., American Warlords: How Roosevelt's High Command Led America to Victory in World War II (NAL/Caliber 2015).
• Malloy, Sean L. Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (2008)
• Morison, Elting E. Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (1960), scholarly biography
• Newman, Robert P. "Hiroshima and the Trashing of Henry Stimson" The New England Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), pp. 5–32 in JSTOR
• Schmitz, David F. Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man (2000)

• Stimson, Henry and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War. (1948) (memoirs)