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they had enough of race rioting in 1943?"
    Where there had not been an Asian population to attack, the colored people of many large cities had become the target of the mobs' wrath.
    Secretary of State Jim Byrnes lit a cigarette. "What is happening to these people, these criminals? May I presume there will be a lot of arrests and court-martials?"
    Marshall shook his head. "Presume nothing. Most of the rioters in San Francisco are unidentified, except for a few score picked up by the police as drunk and disorderly. As to the rapes, most women won't testify, even if they could identify their assailants. The San Francisco hospitals reported giving out several thousand douches and sending the women home. There were so many raped women they had no other way to treat them. In order to defuse the situation, we are shipping as many of the soldiers and sailors out of California as quickly as possible and have confined the rest to their barracks.
    "The police in Detroit and other cities finally seem to have everything under control, and there have been some arrests, although there does seem to be a lack of enthusiasm regarding actually prosecuting people."
    "Not if I can help it," Truman snapped.
    "Will we get convictions?" Byrnes asked.
    Truman rose and paced. "Realistically, in today's climate we don't stand a snowball's chance of convicting someone for killing a Jap, Chinese, or colored man, but women and children were killed and that's something else entirely."
    Truman took a deep breath to calm himself. "Which brings me to the point of this discussion, gentlemen. We must show ourselves as striking back at the Japanese in Japan and doing so extremely harshly. The actions of the mobs simply show how much the people's hatred of everything Japanese has increased. General Marshall, what is the status of the next bomb?"
    Marshall answered quickly, "The bomb components have been flown to Tinian, and it is being assembled now. We will be ready anytime after the twenty-second of August."
    "Good. Now, General, what about a target?"
    Marshall paused, knowing that his answer could condemn thousands to death. The sixty-five-year-old five-star general had built the army from a scratch force to a massive entity in only a few short years. He had been the confidant of Roosevelt and was now Truman's trusted adviser.
    "Sir, the original list included four Japanese cities that were largely spared conventional bombing in order to get maximum effect from the atomic bomb. Along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the list included Kokura and Niigata. If we stick with the original list, then only the last two remain. Air force generals Spaatz and LeMay would like to expand that very short list by also adding Tokyo and Kyoto, and they are backed by General Arnold."
    LeMay and Spaatz commanded the air forces in the Pacific, while Gen. "Hap" Arnold was the air force representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since he was technically subordinate to Marshall , he was not present.
    Byrnes answered quickly, "We've gone over that ground before and there is no reason to change the list. If anything, the decision to not atom bomb Tokyo and Kyoto is even more compelling. Simply put, we need both those cities relatively intact if we are ever to end this war. Tokyo is the administrative hub of Japan, and if we destroy it and the government, possibly killing the emperor, we could wind up with no one remaining in charge to call an end to the war. Quite frankly, gentlemen, I believe that the emperor is the only person who can surrender Japan.
    "Kyoto's the religious center of Japan, virtually a city of temples. It would be tantamount to bombing the Vatican and then informing Italy's Catholics that we respected them and their culture. Using atom bombs on Kyoto could easily result in millions more fanatics ready to die for their country than there are now.
    "General, we have too much to lose, and, yes, I do recognize the fact that we have been firebombing both cities with