Not To Be Forgotten Today
Not To Be Forgotten Today
August 6th a US bomber escorted by 5 other planes drop a lone bomb which exploded over the city of Hiroshima at 8:15 AM, creating a firestorm destroying an estimated 70 percent of the city and killing an estimated 70,000 Japanese. Today is that day when what is left of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as they are known in Japan, gather at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to mourn the city’s destruction by the American military during World War II, and to serve as a living testament to the abiding dangers of the atomic bomb.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the nuclear assault and the remaining hibakusha were diminished, victims of the twin forces of the coronavirus pandemic and advancing age. Despite the health risks, a relatively small number of survivors attended this year. They believed that “they’ve come this far” and “can’t quit,” the chair of the Hiroshima branch of the Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers’ Organizations, Kunihiko Sakuma said. City officials and peace activists had envisioned a series of grand events to commemorate what will most likely be the last major anniversary of the bombing for almost all of the hibakusha still living.
Hiroshima 75th Anniversary: Preserving Survivors’ Message of Peace, New York Times, Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno, August 5, 2020
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
August 31, 1946
Hiroshima
By JOHN HERSEY
I—A NOISELESS FLASH
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything….
Anne:
I knew you would add to this sad event in our history. Thank you.
Bill
Sad and ugly.
There has been some history written about the planning for Olympic-Coronet, the invasion of Japan.
It would have been incredibly bloody for both sides.
Let us hope we never face these sorts of decisions again.
After spending most of the War in the Atlantic my father
was waiting in San Diego to ship out and join the fleet
for the invasion of Japan.
Instead he got discharged and home in time for my sister
to be one of the first baby boomers. I was born two weeks after
Pear Harbor.
So needless to say I have a little different perspective
on Hiroshima,
Spencer, my dad was in advanced stages of training (somewhere in Texas, I think) when the bombs essentially ended the conflict. He told us he expected to be in the Japan theater by early September. He was discharged quite quickly and returned to Wisconsin.
Remembering on this day that George Bush and Donald Trump have abandoned treaties meant to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons, strikes me as appropriate. Then too, Barack Obama was convinced to abandon setting a “no first use of nuclear weapons” policy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/science/obama-unlikely-to-vow-no-first-use-of-nuclear-weapons.html
September 5, 2016
Obama Unlikely to Rule Out First Use of a Nuclear Weapon
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
Aides have told the president that such a guarantee would undermine allies and embolden Russia and China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/opinion/end-the-first-use-policy-for-nuclear-weapons.html
August 14, 2016
End the First-Use Policy for Nuclear Weapons
By JAMES E. CARTWRIGHT and BRUCE G. BLAIR
The United States has a policy allowing the first use of nuclear weapons. Abolishing it will save money and make the world safer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/opinion/nagasaki-the-forgotten-city.html?ref=opinion
August 7, 2015
Nagasaki, the Forgotten City
By SUSAN SOUTHARD
ON Aug. 9, 1945, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, situated on a long, narrow bay on Japan’s southernmost main island, Kyushu.
From the beginning, this attack was different than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima three days earlier, yet the experiences of the two cities have been fused in memory, to the point that we use the term “the bomb” to refer to both events. The result has been to consign Nagasaki to the edge of oblivion.
Many Americans believe their government’s official narrative: that the two bombs, dropped in close succession, led to Japan’s surrender. But it is now well known that the surrender was prompted at least as much by the Soviet Union’s decision to join the Allies in the war against Japan. Just 11 hours before the Nagasaki bombing, 1.5 million Soviet troops crossed into the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, in northern China, and attacked the depleted Japanese Army there on three fronts.
The United States expected the Soviet action, but the delivery of the second atomic bomb was not dependent on the timing of the Soviet invasion, Tokyo’s response, or even a specific order from President Harry S. Truman. His sole directive had been to use nuclear weapons on Japan “as made ready” — and on Aug. 8, the second bomb’s assembly was complete.
The next morning — 30 minutes before the Nagasaki bombing — Japan’s Supreme War Council convened to try yet again to find agreement on surrender terms. Stalin’s declaration of war had ended any last hope of Soviet help in attaining more favorable surrender terms.
Council members pressing for immediate surrender were gravely concerned about lack of food and supplies for Japanese troops, the dire domestic situation and the Hiroshima bombing. Militarists were willing to fight to the death for the guaranteed preservation of Emperor Hirohito’s postwar sovereignty. When news of the Nagasaki attack arrived, the deliberations continued without further mention of it. That night, Hirohito broke the deadlock and sanctioned surrender.
In the United States, Nagasaki was overshadowed by Hiroshima from the very start. While the first atomic bombing gained headlines, the Nagasaki bombing shared the day’s news with the Soviet advance. In a radio address on the evening of Aug. 9, Truman outlined a political and economic framework for postwar Europe. He referred to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only once, but did not mention Nagasaki.
About 74,000 people in Nagasaki died instantaneously or within five months of the bombing. Only 150 were military personnel. Another 75,000 people were injured, and these numbers do not count those who fell ill and died from radiation-related conditions in the decades to come.
Initially, purple spots appeared on their bodies, their hair fell out, and they developed high fevers, infections, and swollen and bleeding gums. Later, cancer rates surged. The survivors, known as hibakusha, lived in constant fear of illness and death.
The United States suppressed this part of the story. In the fall of 1945, high-level American officials rebutted news reports of deaths from radiation exposure. For years to come, the occupation authorities censored news accounts, photographs, scientific research and personal testimonies about the attacks.
To counter growing criticism of the bombings, American leaders established a narrative that the bombings had ended the war and saved up to 1 million American lives by preventing an invasion of Japan. (These postwar casualty estimates were far higher than pre-bomb calculations.) Most Americans accepted this narrative.
Few Americans know much about Nagasaki. A center for trade in the late 1500s, it was the vanguard for the nation’s early modernization and the hub for Catholic missionary outreach. When Japan officially banned Christianity in 1614, then closed its borders to outside contact from the 1630s to the late 1850s, Nagasaki alone was allowed to continue limited international trade, providing the city’s growing population exposure to Asian and European arts, science and literature. Nagasaki continued to thrive after Japan re-established diplomatic relations with the West, becoming the third largest shipbuilding city in the world. Christians who had long hidden their faith re-emerged, and Nagasaki became the home of the largest Catholic church in East Asia. An estimated 10,000 Catholics died in the 1945 bombing.
Sumiteru Taniguchi, 16, was delivering mail on his bicycle in the northwestern corner of the city when the force of the explosion hurled him into the air. Even from a mile away, the searing heat instantly disintegrated his cotton shirt and burned the skin off his entire back and one arm. Three months later, he was finally taken to a naval hospital 22 miles north of the city, where he lay on his stomach for more than three years, begging the nurses to let him die. Later, after he had learned to sit, stand and ultimately walk again, Mr. Taniguchi seethed in anger at what he believed was the unnecessary nuclear devastation of his city and its people.
Over the past 70 years, Mr. Taniguchi and tens of thousands of other hibakusha have navigated punishing injuries, late-onset radiation-related illnesses, and haunting fears that they would pass on genetic disorders to their children and grandchildren. Many never speak about their atomic bomb experiences, even within their families. In a remarkable act of resilience, however, Mr. Taniguchi and a small number of hibakusha made the very personal choice, some as early as the mid-1950s, to speak publicly about their survival.
They do not tell their stories to promote Japan’s victimization, or to minimize the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the suffering and deaths of Asian civilians and Allied military personnel at the hands of brutal Japanese soldiers. Rather, they speak to eliminate ignorance about the realities of nuclear war and to eradicate nuclear stockpiles across the globe.
The official narrative remains the dominant opinion of most Americans. In that story, Nagasaki fades in memory; we should not let it. Our time to understand the survivors’ experience of nuclear war is running out. Only they can tell us what it was like, and their lives are coming to an end.
I agree with Anne that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible events.
But you must place the American and Japanese lives that were saved because the US did not have to physically invade the country. The people who made the decision to drop the bombs believed that they were saving lives. Moreover, were the lives lost there worse than all the people who died from the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
I will not disagree with anything you are saying about the consequences, both known and unknown. But against that there were other lives saved and wounds not experienced that might have actually been worse than what happened in those two cities. We do not know, but it was something Truman and others had to weigh in the balance. Meanwhile continue to make the consequences of the Bomb as bad as you can in the hope that it may prevent others from using A & H Bombs in the future.
spencer:
It is only to be recognized as something terrible and terrifying in occurrence and to remind us not to take such action again without reflecting upon what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was anticipated that after the November landings in the south there would be a second landing on the east coast in March. I believe the First Army was going to be refitted and shipped for the March landings.
If memory serves correctly the first Marine division to land In the south was assumed to be nonexistent by 6:00 pm that evening. The next waves were told they would be walking across bodies to get to high ground.
A number of family members would have hit the ground within the first 30 days. Family history could have been much different.
I have never read much about the planned invasion of Japan
But I have read a lot about the Marines on Okinawa and that is what everyone had in mind in planning the invasion.
The remembrance for me is bound with fewer safeguards against nuclear conflict since 2001 with the presidency of Bush and through the Obama and Trump years. This presidency has frightened me as the remembrance made clear to me.
The March 10th incendiary raid on Tokyo killed from 80-100 thousand. That was one raid in a series. The overall death count from a similar raid in April was estimated at 200,000. There were scores of similar raids on Japan in 1945 with similar horrific fatalities.
World War II was different from most other wars in that, even as the tide turned, neither Germany nor Japan tried to find a diplomatic way of ending the war. There were no talks, no “peace feelers”, no diplomatic overtures. (I don’t count Rudolph Hess, and nobody else does either.)
Based on the casualties taking Okinawa, the US expected about a million US casualties invading Japan. That’s not a million dead, maybe only a 100 thousand dead, but everyone expected a bloody campaign. The Japanese casualties were going to be much higher, perhaps millions dead, many more wounded.
It wasn’t the destructive power of the atomic bombs that ended the war. By 1945, that level of destruction was common place in wartime Japan. It was the sheer alien nature of the weapon. It was that a single plane and a single bomb could cause so much damage.
(It wasn’t just the Japanese who were shocked. Hersey’s book was just as much a product of the atomic shock.)
Kalesberg:
John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” was required reading in my magnet high school in Chicago next to Riverview Park. From the time I was 14 to the time I left active duty in the Marine Corp in 1971, I was with all males except for the dates I had with young women and when I met my wife before going overseas in 68 and again in 70.
Even so isolated as a male, I can not imagine in my head the horrific blast which rained down upon the Japanese from the fire-bombing and nuclear blasts that resulted from our efforts to bend their will to our demands. Then too, I did not have to fight them like my father and uncles did.
I am sure I would have had little pity or care about them then. Ours was a different war and far too many of us perished for something which did not have to be in the sixties and seventies.
Thank you for your comment.
I always said that — if we had not fought Germany; us desperately trying to survive — it never would have occurred to us to bomb a single populated city (!) in Japan. We just continued the policies of desperation without thinking about it. Japan was helpless and a threat to no one. We could simply have walled it off from all connection with the world — told them to sign on the dotted line or go back to rice farming for the next 25-50 years; no raw materials or finished goods from the outside.
That was very much the original plan for post WW II Germany.
Called the Morgenthau Plan, it would have destroyed all heavy industry in Germany and force them to just be an agricultural economy. However, the Cold War ended that quickly as we wanted Germany as a strong ally against Russia and Eastern Europe.
I’m sure the Korean War would have done the same thing for Japan.
Moreover, to give the man his due, General MacArthur did a fantastic job of ruling Japan in the late 1940s and creating the modern democracy we now know as Japan.