60 Years Since Hiroshima 806
cryptoz writes "Today is the 6th of August, 2005, exactly 60 years after the first nuclear device was used in a war. Japan remembers what happened, as do those around the world. Elswhere, we remember where the bomb hit, as well as how it worked." From the article about Japan's observation of the anniversary: "The anniversary comes as regional powers meet in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind rising calls in Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the United States. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was among those attending the ceremony in Hiroshima, 690 km (430 miles) southwest of Tokyo." We've previously reported on the anniversary of the first nuclear explosion.
Victim's story (Score:1, Interesting)
I wanted to go to school, but my father said 'I have a very strange feeling today - you shouldn't go to school, stay with us'.
That morning I was on the road near the house and all of a sudden I saw a flash of blueish white light - a magnesium-like flash and soon after a big sound with dust, and I was blown away and fell on the ground.
I found myself lying on the ground near the house. I thought the house was just in front of me but I couldn't see it because everything had become so dark and many pieces of wood and roof tiles and rubbish were falling on my head.
And in the darkness there was a strong, strong wind like a typhoon. I couldn't open my eyes but tried to get back to my house and in the darkness I heard somebody was crying - my brother and sister.
I was 2.4km from the hypocentre but houses nearer the hypocentre had caught fire and were burning.
I saw long lines of refugees, just quiet, I don't know why they were so quiet. There were long lines, like ghosts.
Most of them were stretching out their arms because the skin was peeling off from the tips of their fingers. I could clearly see the hanging skin, peeling skin, and the wet red flesh and their hair was burned and smelled, the burnt hair smelled a lot.
And many people, just slowly passed by the front of my house.
Parched
All of a sudden a hand squeezed my ankle. I was so scared but they said 'get me water'. Almost all the people were just asking 'water', and 'help me'.
I rushed into my home where there was a well and brought them water. They thanked me but some of them were drinking water and vomiting blood and [then] died, stopped moving. They died in front of me. I felt regret and so scared. Maybe I killed them? Did I kill them?
And that night, 6 August, my father was so busy looking after the neighbours, but when he came back he said: 'Listen children - you shouldn't give water, some of the refugees died after drinking water. Please remember that.'
Then I felt so guilty, and I saw them many times in my nightmares. I thought I was a very bad girl - I didn't do what my father said - so I kept it a secret. I didn't tell anybody this story until my father died.
There was black rain falling, black rain mingling with ashes and rubbish and oil, something like that. It smelled bad and there were many spots on my white blouse - sticky, dirty rain.
In the morning people were moving, brushing away flies from their skin. My house was full of injured people.
But as a little girl I was so curious. I wanted to see what the city looked like. My house was at the bottom of a hill - I climbed up the hill, near our house, and then I saw the whole city. I was so astonished - all the city was flattened and demolished. I counted just a couple of concrete buildings.
In denial
The next day some of the buildings were still burning, and the next day, and the next day, and for three or four days I climbed the hill to see what the city was like.
I have a brother-in-law. He was living almost at the centre of the city - his family was very close to the hypocentre. Until now his family members were missing and he didn't want to recognise they were all gone, so he refused to say and report the family's names to the officials and he didn't want to visit Hiroshima.
Right now, he is living far away in Tokyo, and only last year he decided to report to Hiroshima city that his family members - his mother and sister - had passed away.
And there were so many people [who saw] so many dead or dying, but actually, most of them made up their mind not to tell anyone about what they saw.
Private Yutaka Nakagawa was a 20-year-old soldier and veteran of the Indonesia campaign, stationed in Hiroshima when the bomb fell on 6 August 1945.
I was in the barracks on the night of the 5 August. There was a warning of an air-raid. But I was in bed.
What ordinary men can do (Score:5, Interesting)
Three men involved in the attack on Hiroshima shared with the BBC their memories of a day that has stayed with them for 60 years.
Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, 84
The day before the mission we sat through briefings on Tinian island where they told us who was assigned to which plane, and we ran through what we were going to do.
About 2pm we were told to get some sleep. But I don't know how they expected to tell us were we dropping the first atomic bomb on Japan and then expect us to sleep.
I didn't get a wink. Nor did most of the others. But at 10pm we had to get up again because we were flying at 2.45am.
They briefed us that the weather was good, but they were sending weather observation planes up so we would have the best information on targeting Hiroshima.
We had a final breakfast and then went down to the plane shortly after midnight.
There was a lot of picture-taking and interviewing going on - by the military - and it was a relief to get in the Enola Gay about an hour before we took off.
We flew in low over Iwo Jima while the bomb crew checked and armed Little Boy (the uranium bomb) and once we cleared the island we began climbing to our bombing altitude of just over 30,000 feet.
It was perfectly clear and I was just doing all the things I'd always done as a navigator - plotting our course, getting fixes to make sure we were on course and reading the drifts so we knew the wind speed.
As we flew over an inland sea I could make out the city of Hiroshima from miles away - my first thought was 'That's the target, now let's bomb the damn thing'.
But it was quiet in the sky. I'd flown 58 missions over Europe and Africa - and I said to one of the boys that if we'd sat in the sky for so long over there we'd have been blown out of the air.
Once we verified the target, I went in the back and just sat down. The next thing I felt was 94,000lbs of bomb leaving the aircraft - there was a huge surge and we immediately banked into a right hand turn and lost about 2,000 feet.
We'd been told that if we were eight miles away when the thing went off, we'd probably be ok - so we wanted to put as much distance as possible between us and the blast.
All of us - except the pilot - were wearing dark goggles, but we still saw a flash - a bit like a camera bulb going off in the plane.
There was a great jolt on the aircraft and we were thrown off the floor. Someone called out 'flak' but of course it was the shockwave from the bomb.
The tail-gunner later said he saw it coming towards us - a bit like the haze you see over a car park on a hot day, but moving forwards a great speed.
We turned to look back at Hiroshima and already there was a huge white cloud reaching up more than 42,000 feet. At the base you could see nothing but thick black dust and debris - it looked like a pot of hot oil down there.
We were pleased that the bomb had exploded as planned and later we got to talking about what it meant for the war.
We concluded that it would be over - that not even the most obstinate, uncaring leaders could refuse to surrender after this.
In the weeks afterwards, I actually flew back to Japan with some US scientists and some Japanese from their atomic programme.
We flew low over Hiroshima but could not land anywhere and eventually landed at Nagasaki.
We didn't hide the fact that we were American and many people turned their faces away from us. But where we stayed we were made very welcome and I think people were glad that the war had ended.
Morris "Dick" Jepson, 83
I was a young second lieutenant in the US Air Force and was designated as the weapons test officer on the Enola Gay.
Enola Gay returns after Hiroshima mission (photo: Smithsonian Institution)
For Dick Jepson, the Enola Gay flight was his first combat mission
Actually, I live in Japan (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Please read this before commenting (Score:4, Interesting)
On a side note, perhaps the worst implication of the a-bomb dropping was what's called the "genocidal mentality." The idea is that now that the idea of an ultimate weapon to wipe out so many people at once has entered our consciousness, humans have developed an inherent mental threshold that is much lower than that of leaders in previous centuries, termed "psychic numbing." A good article on the subject is here [himalmag.com]. Here's a choice quote: "Nuclearism does not remain confined to the nuclear establishment or the nuclear community. It introduces other psychopathologies in a society. For instance, as it seeps into public consciousness, it creates a new awareness of the transience of life. It forces people to live with the constant fear that, one day, a sudden war or accident might kill not only them, but also their children and grandchildren, and everybody they love. This awareness gradually creates a sense of the hollowness of life. For many, life is denuded of substantive meaning. The psychological numbing I have mentioned completes the picture. While the ordinary citizen leads an apparently normal life, he or she is constantly aware of the transience of such life and the risk of mega-death for the entire society. Often this finds expression in unnecessary or inexplicable violence in social life or in a more general, high state of anxiety and a variety of psychosomatic ailments. In other words, nuclearism begins to brutalise ordinary people and vitiates everyday life."
So whether or not the bomb was good at ending the war, it may have had more deadly consequences decades later. It's something worth thinking about that isn't typically brought up in pragmatic discussions about war-termination scenarios for the pacific theater in WWII.
Don't forget Nagasaki (Score:3, Interesting)
So let me remedy that with a link to the San Francisco Exploratorium's exhibition of restored photos taken shortly after the attack, Remembering Nagasaki. [exploratorium.edu]
Thank God for the Atom Bomb (Score:2, Interesting)
A sad day? (Score:2, Interesting)
The way we finished the war saved a lot more lives then would have been lost if we all kept fighting.
Re:important to note (Score:5, Interesting)
My grandpa actually survived the Tokyo firebombing, but I don't have time to go into details...
Some people seem to be wondering why there is so much attention given to the bombs, and not to other bombings or battles, in Japan.
I think there is a similarity between the effects of the nuclear bomb and the attacks on 9-11. Before someone flames me for comparing the two attack's victims, let me explain. The reason the Japanese still talk about those particular attacks more than the Tokyo firebombings is largly psychological. Before the a-bomb, Japan had thought of itself as largly protected from invasion, much as America thought itself far removed from the mideast's politics. The a-bomb is what finally shattered that illusion, and it is because of this shock that it is still remembered. The Tokyo bombings were probobly more significant militarily and casualty-wise, but the a-bombs had a cultural significance far beyond firebombs. It's somewhat like how 9-11 is symbolized by the twin towers being hit, but the Pentagon attack is overlooked because there is no footage of it for the media to display.
The point of the bombs was to show American might and that it would be impossible to resist them; Japan had thought of itself as a 'holy nation' that could withstand any storm, but the Americans unleashed god-like powers with the a-bomb and showed that Japan's nationalist superstitions were no match for American science.
It's for that and other cultural reasons having to do with the surrender that the A-bombs are remembered, though of course the regular bombings are too.
on mokusatsu and weapons that make peace (sort of) (Score:5, Interesting)
20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, I have always wondered what would have occurred had we never dropped the bombs. It would be hard for me to believe that the Japanese would ever have surrendered otherwise. At the time, it was seen as a fate worse than death (the "unendurable"), and they were teaching women and children in just about every prefecture to fight with bamboo spears. This seems like determination that could only be broken by a weapon so powerful, awe-inspiring, and magical as an atomic bomb would seem in 1945.
Move beyond the war with Japan's rather explosive resolution and you have more to speculate about that leads back to it. Without our demonstration of the power of atomic weapons in Asia, would the U.S. and Soviets really not have blown the shit out of each other during the cold war? It seems to me that deterrence only works when there has been a demonstration of the consequences of unchecked aggression. This may be reductio ad absurdum, but I did not start caring about my parking tickets until I got a boot [clamp] on my car. The atomic bomb's use brought the power of nuclear weapons out of the abstract, and I for one am very thankful for the success of nuclear weapons today. They have put an end to war between developed nations, leaving our leaders to their inane intrigues and bullying (at least it's not World War III).
This fact leads me to a paradox that I find interesting. Targeting non combatants with nuclear weapons was definitely the wrong thing to do. It is terrorism. But in this case, considering all that could have been, I feel that it was right to do the wrong thing, even if for the wrong reasons.
Re:Japan's history (Score:5, Interesting)
Japan not mentioning the medical experimentation it conducted on Chinese civilians as well as the number of Korean/Chinese women forced into sexual slavery is sort of like Germany forgetting the "incident" (official Japanese textbook phrasing) where 6 million Jews died.
Would we tolerate the latter? Of course not. Why do we tolerate the former then?
Btw, I've taken US History/US History AP in American high schools., and it has extensive coverage of the oppression that Native Americans suffered, from the time Columbus landed all the way to the Trail of Tears. Do you know how Japanese textbooks characterize the Rape of Nanking?
The Rape of Nanking is described as an "incident" where the Japanese Army met fierce resisitance in taking Nanking (this seems to gloss over the fact that all Chinese troops had withdrawn from the city, and many citizens were displaying Japanese flags from their windows to get in the good graces of the conquerers). This is NOT from the highly disputed minority textbook which doesn't mention it at ALL, but rather from the one which about 40% of Japanese High School students read. In a recent radio broadcst (~2 weeks ago) I heard on NPR, a visiting Japanese psychology professor recalled incidents where college freshmen asked him whether America won the war, or if Japan did.
Imagine the international condemnation of the Holocaust was referred to as an incident, and not covered beyond two sentences in the entire history book. The German people have dealt with their atrocities in WWII; Willi Brandt, a former German Chancellor, KNELT in front of the Jewish Holocaust memorial. When has the Emporer of Japan done the same for the Chinese and Korean people? Don't give me the crap about apologies already being made; what use is there for apologies when the mindset of an entire nation, as reflected through its' educational system, fails to appreciate the extreme pain and anguish it has caused just 50 years before?
Just to be clear, I'm not justifying the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities with what I said earlier. It is no less horrific, regardless of Japan's wartime activities. I just wish ensure that certain parts of Japan's wartime past don't get overshadowed.
Re:What God will say to them (Score:3, Interesting)
The tally of people killed isn't the entire story. Americans would much prefer that Japanese died than fellow Americans. And that is a good justification; after all, we were at war with a country that attacked us.
It really makes no sense to say that an American should value the life of a WWII-time Japanese person as much as the life of a WWII-time American.
Re:Please read this before commenting (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, the only large-scale genocides took place before the advent of nuclear weapons. In fact, since nuclear weapons were developed and used, and their terrible destructiveness has seeped into every rational and halfway rational mind on the planet, we have become more and not less sensitized to the ugly destruction of total national warfare, and, arguably, this is exactly why there have been fewer and fewer of these every year. You might like to think that lots of peace movements and moralizing fringe preachers have brought unprecedented peace to the world, but there's ample evidence for the contrary theory that we're all just, finally, scared enough of the consequences of full-scale war that we're routinely turning to other methods to solve our problems.
Why not consider India and Pakistan's conflict over the Kashmir as a case in point? We have strongly conflicting cultures (Hindu and Islamic), with a long history of oppressing the other when it is in minority status, and we have a bitter contest over a prize (the Kashmir), and we have stentorian nationalist leadership, dictatorial in the case of Pakistan, semi-dictatorial in the case of India earlier in this century.
Given this reality on the ground, the Indians and Pakistanis unsurprisingly fought three wars over the Kashmir in quick succession from the time of their formation as nations (1947) until 1971. Then both Pakistan and India decided to go nuclear, perhaps thinking foolishly (as people will) that this might give each an advantage over the other.
Now, your theory suggests that this should have led to a brutalisation of the Pakistani and Indian political culture, and increased willingness (say) to consider military options over peaceful. But what actually happened is that there's been no general war along this border for an unusually long 35 years, and it now seems the Pakistanis and Indians are realizing they will just have to uneasily get along, as the Soviets and Americans did during the Cold War, since each now has the capacity to obliterate the other.
So, whether or not The Bomb was good at ending World War II, it may well have had far more beneficial consequences in the decades following: by making World Wars III and IV and so forth simply unthinkable.
Re:Please read this before commenting (Score:2, Interesting)
I really dislike that "justification" for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here's a similar hypothetical justification to show why it is so distasteful. Bear in mind the following is an example by parody, not my actual belief.
The US was dragging its heels in joining the landwar in Europe. Millions of people were dying each year; often through starvation and disease in addition to the horrors of war. Even when the US began to commit troops it was a paltry offering in comparison to the hardships of other nations. It wasn't until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that the US citizenship woke up to the reality of the war. That single strike by the Japanese helped to galvanise the US into action. They were suddenly committed to the war because they themselves were under threat. The US assistance in Europe helped speed the downfall of the Axis. It is fair to say that despite the tragic loss of life at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese strike brought forward the end of WWII and saved countless millions.
It is impossible to forget that "justification" seeing as it's trotted out so often, but I certainly don't give it any credibility no matter how often it is repeated.
Re:Before some say 'Poor Japan' (Score:2, Interesting)
It's amazing how many people don't even know that Japan surrendered before the bombs were droped. It's really making me sick how many people justify the bomb saying it saved lives, when the war could've been ended even sooner.
There are people who are qualified to make the distinction whether the bombs ended the war -- American war generals, and the official congressional study (Strategic Bombing Survey):
Re:Serious Question - Number of Nukes in 1945? (Score:4, Interesting)
The big uranium and plutonium extraction plants were up and running by the end of WWII. Those plants were way overdesigned; over several decades, they produced the materials for about 20,000 bombs. Neither Groves nor Marshall expected to win the war with just two bombs. The plan was to use about thirteen just to "soften up" the landing zones for the invasion of Japan.
After the war, there was a short period during which the US didn't have any working A-bombs in inventory. The original ones were really prototypes, with no shelf life, no safeguards, and a need for an expert to tend and arm them. It took a while to develop a ruggedized, safe to handle "GI-proof" A-bomb.
Re:What God will say to them (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese
Oh, and before anyone says this, whatever the Communists purportedly did is not relevant in this discussion.
Re:What God will say to them (Score:3, Interesting)
The primary planning was to make further fighting so bloody that American politicians would want to negotiate a more generous ending.
Re:What God will say to them (Score:3, Interesting)
First off, Chiang's reference to Japan as "complicit in the holocaust" is way off. As Rabbi and author Hillel Levine [aarp.org] (and former visiting professor in China) wrote in "In Search of Sugihara", the Japanese Consul-General in Lithuania issued visas to over 6,000 Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Lt. Gen Higuchi Kiichiro supported the first conference of Jewish communities in the Far East in 1937, and later aided Jews who had fled to Manchuria (and is mentione in JNF's Golden Book). Col. Yasue Senko did similar. As a body, the Japanese government was unwilling to do anything to interfere with their ally, but had a stated opposition to participation ("Outline of Measures Toward Jewish Peoples", 1938).
Anyways, back to Nanking. The city fell on Dec. 13, 1937, to Japanese forces under the command of Gen. Matsui. In his diary, he wrote at the time that he ordered that anyone who looted or starting a fire, even accidentally, would be punished; he also sought to eradicate the "disdain" for the Chinese among many of his men, who had been fighting them for so long. In the same entry, he wrote "I could only feel sadness and responsibility today, which has been overwhelmingly piercing my heart. This is caused by the Army's misbehaviors after the fall of Nanking and failure to proceed with the autonomous government and other political plans."
He caused conflict with his division commanders when he propose that the memorial for the Japanese war dead also honor the Chinese war dead; they compromised by holding a separate service. After Matsui returned to Japan, he erected a statue of Kannon [geocities.com] (the Goddess of Mercy) on Izuyama in 1940, to deify both the Japanese *and* Chinese soldiers.
His Buddhist confessor wrote, after Matsui's death, that ""I am ashamed of the Nanking Incident," said Matsui according to Hanayama.
The statue of Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, erected by Matsui.
"After the memorial service, I gathered up everybody and warned them with tears of anger. Both Prince Asaka and Lieutenant General Yanagawa were there. [I told them] we came all the way to stand on the majesty of the Emperor, but the dignity [of the Imperial Army] was lost at a stroke through the brutal acts of the soldiers. But then everyone laughed. To my displeasure, a certain division commander even uttered, 'of course.'" By all accounts, he was a true "unified asia" believer who saw the Chinese not as enemies, but as future allies and friends whom he wanted to unify against Western intrusion, but was unable to control his war-weary men when it mattered.
The photos in the book are just embarassing - at least the ones that have been traced to their sources. One of Chinese heads on the ground was traced to Sato Susumu, who purchased it in a photographer's studio in Huining, where it was labelled "Heads of Bandits Shot To Death in Tieling" (i.e., killed by Manchurian nationalist Zhang Xueliang's men). Another claims to be Japanese soldiers cutting someone's head with a hay cutter, yet the uniforms are clearly Chinese nationalist (Asahi Shinbun later posted a retraction after posting the picture as it was originally claimed). Another is a cropped image of bodies washing up on a beach downstream from clearly war-devastated area, leaving only the pile of bodies in frame. The photo "Comfort Women Being Rounded Up" is actually a picture from a 1937 edition of Asahi Graph, the
Re:Importance of rememberance (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, according to points 9 and 10 of the McCollum memo [whatreallyhappened.com], it was hoped that Japan could be led "to commit an overt act of war".
This most publicised proponent of this interpretation of events is probably Robert B. Stinnett [google.com] but it is controversial interpretation [wikipedia.org]. Read and make up your own mind.
Re:The decision was reasonable (Score:3, Interesting)
Japan initiated war against Korea and China. After certain atrocities became apparent in American media, the American government decided to stop selling to the Japanese items that were critical to their war effort and occupation, including, I believe, oil and scrap metal. Although this was certainly the right thing to do morally, it was an act of economic war. As a highly predictable consequence, Japan moved into South-East Asia attempting to "take back" into the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" countries that were then occupied by Western powers. Because Japan wanted to the resource-rich Phillipines, which was at that time an American colony, they also attacked the American naval facilities at Pearl Harbor, hoping to destroy the West's ability to retaliate for the attacks on their suzerainities. America must have realized that by cutting off Japan's supply of raw materials that they would face some retaliation.
>Recall that Japan and Germany created a war against humanity with INDUSTRIAL genocide.
And we responded in turn with our own form of genocide, with the killing of millions of Japanese civilians.
>Recall that Germany was furiously working on the nuke - if things had been differently, London and Moscow would have been targeted.
But Germany had already been defeated when the bomb was dropped on Japan. There was no threat of an atomic attack against the Allies.
>Recall that millions of civillians and millitary personel were killed as part of the axis war plans .
And millions of Axis civilians and military personnel were killed by the Allies. How can you simultaneously condemn their actions and justify ours? All sides of this war had their own war criminals. The Allies killed by bombing of civilian areas FAR more people than the Axis did.
>I would have been angry if the allied powers had a means to immediately end the war, even at great civillian loss, and chose not to use it for fear of later slashdot-weenies whinning about being "nice" during a war.
I agree. The reason they should have considered not using the bomb was the great number of civilian casualties that it would inflict. But in actuality, the bomb was used for the very purpose of killing civilians. The stated targets: in Hiroshima, the 2nd General Army Headquarters and in Nagasaki, the Mitsubishi arms factories could have been destroyed by conventional bombing. But more importantly, these cities were selected because they hadn't yet been subject to wide-scale bombing, so they would provide a better arena to see the exact effects of the bomb. In addition to this, prior to Hiroshima, the Americans did not drop warning leaflets asking civilians to evacuate the area.
>I've been to the countries occupied by Japan during the 30s and 40s, and the people to this day go out of their way to say "thanks" for the US millitary efforts sixty years ago. Phillipines, China, Indonesia, Australia...
Funny, I can't remember the occupation of Australia... When did this happen?
The use of the A-Bomb was, and continues to be, one of America's great shames.
Re:The problem with the debate... (Score:2, Interesting)
What I can't understand is how people like yourself can disregard the horrible actions of the Japanese during the war, so you can justify faulting America for using nukes.
If we had started the war, and used nukes to bomb Japan into submission so we could continue our expansionist goals, you would have a point... but that isn't what happened at all.. America didn't start the war (we were happy to stay our of it!); America doesn't have expansionist goals; and America didn't use nukes in an offensive manor.
America used nukes in a defensive manor.. to stop the Japanese from continuing their war in Asia. I put their in bold because it was their war. It was a war they created.. a war the Japanese created that cost millions of lives.
America has nothing to be ashamed of... we ended a war we didn't start, and a war we didn't want to fight. Since when should a country be ashamed of defending itself.
The Japanese are the only ones who should be ashamed of what happened... They should be ashamed of a war they created.. They should be ashamed of the millions of lives they caused to be lost... that should weigh on their souls for many years to come...
Re:Interesting read (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, that's a nice fairy tale. They were ready to surrender before the bomb, they just wanted to negotiate.
"It is easy to condemn the bomb drop without all the facts at hand. "
Apparently it's also easy to approve of it without all the facts too.
Re:What God will say to them (Score:2, Interesting)