Begun as a way to honor Civil War dead, the commemoration now called Memorial Day was long called Decoration Day from the practice of decorating the graves of war-dead. Memorial Day 1945 marked an uneasy time of mixed emotions. There was celebration, remembrance, and dread. World War II in Europe was over by three weeks and no more battle casualties would join the rows of crosses planted from North Africa to the beaches of Normandy and across France into Germany. But the war in the Pacific against Japan still raged. Many Americans who had fought in Europe feared they would be going to the other side of the globe to continue the fight against Japan rather than back to the States for a victorious homecoming.

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Eleanor Roosevelt intended to pay a quiet visit to her husband Franklin’s fresh grave at Hyde Park, but found instead an overflowing crowd of well-wishers. Among the tributes to the fallen leader was a wreath sent by the current president, Harry Truman. It was laid on Roosevelt’s grave to honor the man who had led America longer than any other president and died within sight of victory.

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Truman also sent a message to a “Salute to the GI’s of the United Nations” rally in Madison Square Garden. The new president emphasized the four essential human freedoms long articulated by Roosevelt: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The American Secretary of State and the Soviet Ambassador to the United States were in attendance. Each praised American-Soviet cooperation in the war and expressed hopes for a long-lasting peace.

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On that Memorial Day in 1945 there was indeed hope that battlefields would become relics of the past, but a detailed letter on its way to Truman via Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, from an engineer working on the Manhattan Project (see June 11th entry in this timeline) contained a warning that various very secret projects being carried out in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington would culminate in a new weapon with implications for the “inevitable destruction of our present day civilization.”

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In what Stimson called the “letter of an honest man,” Oswald C. Brewster sent President Truman a profound analysis of the danger and unfeasibility of a U.S. atomic monopoly. Brewster was an engineer for the Kellex Corporation, which was involved in the gas diffusion project to enrich uranium; Brewster recognized that the objective was fissile material for a weapon. That goal, he feared, raised terrifying prospects with implications for the “inevitable destruction of our present day civilization.”

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Once the U.S. had used the bomb in combat other great powers would not tolerate a monopoly by any nation and the sole possessor would be “be the most hated and feared nation on earth.” Even the U.S.’s closest allies would want the bomb because “how could they know where our friendship might be five, ten, or twenty years hence.” Nuclear proliferation and arms races would be certain unless the U.S. worked toward international supervision and inspection of nuclear plants.

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Brewster suggested that Japan could be used as a “target” for a “demonstration” of the bomb, which he did not further define. His implicit preference, however, was for non-use; he wrote that it would be better to take U.S. casualties in “conquering Japan” than “to bring upon the world the tragedy of unrestrained competitive production of this material.”

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​This photo shows a couple of paragraphs from the Brewster letter which was kept secret until 2005.