He had flown Judge Sam Rosenman to Potsdam, and Rosenman was now aboard the Augusta to work on a speech with Truman. He wanted to slip quietly back into the White House, and he worked hard on the trip home. He requested no ceremony upon his return to the United States, for celebration would seem callous in moments of such public agony. He could only hope that it would serve its purpose: to end the war, to save lives. Truman had told himself in his diary, days earlier, that “military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” Surely he knew that this bomb, as technologically marvelous as it was, did not have the sentience to separate military individuals from civilians. No further record of his activities on this night survives, but one can imagine him staring at the ceiling of his quarters, exhausted from the strain of his trip, and tense from anticipation of an explosion that was about to change the world. The first night at sea, Truman’s party gathered at eight thirty in Secretary Byrnes’s cabin for a Man, about a nightclub owner who gets murdered by gangsters and comes back as a ghost to haunt his killers. Shortly after George VI departed, the engines throttled and the president began his journey home, to face the American people. He signed his name on the cards, one of which went to the king’s daughter Elizabeth, later known as Queen Elizabeth II. An orchestra played the American national anthem and “God Save the King.” The king asked Truman to autograph cards for his wife and daughters, which amused Truman terrifically.
The king leaned in and said, “Admiral, would you like to lay a little bet on that?”Īfter lunch, the royal party visited Truman aboard his ship, the Augusta, again with full military honors. “It sounds like a professor’s dream to me!” “I do not think it will be as effective as is expected,” the admiral said. Leahy was still sure the bomb was going to be a dud. During lunch the king brought up the atomic bomb, and in fact, as Byrnes later recalled, “most of our luncheon conversation was devoted to the bomb.” The king was excited about the postwar usefulness of atomic energy. Truman found George VI to be amazingly well informed.
The king wore an admiral’s uniform, while Truman was in civilian clothes. The president had come aboard the Renown amid full military honors, with bugles blaring and thousands of sailors of both British and American colors standing at attention, their spines as straight as the mainmast, upon which the American and British flags waved in the breeze.Īt lunch with the king, Truman had Leahy and Byrnes flanking him. The British were particularly talented with pomp and circumstance, especially when it came to their sovereign-the famously stuttering king of Britain and its commonwealths. Truman stood aboard the battle cruiser HMS Renown in the harbor at Plymouth, England, shaking the hand of George VI, just before 1 p.m.