On August 9, 1945, just before 11 a.m., a solitary American bomber is making its final approach on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. In the form of a plutonium 235 bomb called Fat Man, resembling a giant winged tumor, the B-29 is carrying death for some 100,000 Japanese.
At that same moment, my aunt Reggie is almost directly below the bomber. She is a Sacred Heart teaching nun from Montreal, imprisoned by the Japanese military when war broke out.
She is about to be engulfed in an event so filled with terror and grief that the full reality would long be suppressed by the American military.
That morning the primary target for the bombing mission was the Japanese city of Kokura. Finding a heavy cloud cover over Nagasaki, the B-29 turned away from Kokura, and as an angel of death, began the short flight to Nagasaki. It is Japan's most Catholic city. There is no war industry. It has never been bombed, so the coming casualties could not be attributed to anything but the atomic bomb. It is to be merely a demonstration of death, designed to scare the Soviet Union, America's new rival for world dominance.
Sister Regina knows none of this, but she does notice the guards have become apprehensive and much more polite. They have heard about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima three days earlier. She has not. On this morning she is allowed to go gather grass for the camp cow.
Looking back, she realized the guards must have heard about the atomic bomb, which had been dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier. She has heard nothing.
What she is suddenly hearing is the approach, high up, of single bomber. In her letter dated September 12th, 1945, and smuggled home, Aunt Reggie writes: "I think the approach of a solitary plane deceived the Japanese...I looked up to see if it were visible, but quickly decided that it would be wiser to hurry back to the camp.
The bomber finds Nagasaki is also covered with clouds, but not for long.
It is 11.02 am. From only 1,500 feet, Fat Man is dropped dead center over Nagasaki. The bomber veers off. The crew looks down.
"I began to run. I had gone only a few steps when suddenly there was a fearful explosion and everything was golden yellow. It seemed as though the sun had burst and I was lost in its midst..."
At the flash point the temperature soars to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with winds reaching 1,000 kilometers an hour. Inside one square mile there is nothing but black ash and grey cinder.
She wrote that the city burned for days: "Two thirds of the population of Nagasaki are dead. The city itself is a mass of ruins. They are still burning the dead. The hospitals having been destroyed, the wounded are not being cared for."
Doctors, nurses and nursing sisters knew nothing of radiation poisoning, so her next line has resonance. "Some patients apparently recover, then suddenly die from hemorrhages."
All reporting from Nagasaki would be heavily censored for years. She managed to get that letter out through a Sacred Heart diplomatic pouch of sorts.
In the aftermath, a Japanese and American film crew rushed to Nagasaki. But the film they shot was suppressed for more than 40 years. When bits and pieces were finally aired, the impact on public policy that the nuclear attack should have triggered was diminished by the passage of time.
It proved the axiom that news delayed is as effective as news suppressed.
My aunt Reggie was never the same again. The imprint of that explosion was like the effect of a gigantic X-ray, left on her body and her mind for a lifetime. She never would leave the Japan she loved so deeply. But in the end it comes as no surprise to learn Aunt Reggie succumbed
to cancer. Her mind was also deeply affected. Her friends said, "she was never quite right" after
experiencing that cataclysm.
The American radical commentator Chris Hedges writes that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mass murder, an event as evil as the Holocaust. As in the bombing of Germany's big cities, almost all the casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian, mostly old men, women and children.
The bombing was denounced by General Eisenhower and General MacArthur who said the war was won and the atomic bombs unnecessary. In the end, it was a political event. It was merely a demonstration of death.
going on Gilligan's Island?
The cruiser, USS Indianapolis, which was actually delivering parts for the 1st atomic bomb, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine causing the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy. That was on July 30, 1945.
The Potsdam Conference had been held from July 17-August 2, 1945 setting the terms for Germany's & Japan's unconditional surrender. By July 26, the Potsdam Declaration had been broadcast to Japan, threatening total destruction unless the Imperial Japanese government submitted to unconditional surrender. But the Japanese leaders decided to ignore the Allies' demands and fight on. Even after the annihilation and utter destruction of Hiroshima, they still wouldn't give up. It still took almost a week after Nagasaki's destruction for the Emperor and the Supreme Council to admit defeat and surrender.
What we did in Japan is a black mark on humanity; that kind of “civilized” modern barbarism is awfully hard to stomach and keep down and to think they framed it as necessary action when it wasn’t chills me down to the ground. What kind of monsters would make such a decision, to murder hundreds of thousand of innocent civilians in order to send a message to a rival government?
And we support those monsters, we are those monsters and we don’t even recognize it in ourselves, blithely assuming we are the good guys and hiding the truth behind all our glorious platitudes and patriotic fervor as we annihilate human beings en mass and it doesn’t stop we keep doing it. If a government is willing to go this far there is nothing beyond believing about them, no conspiracy theory too far fetched, too blatantly evil to not be a real possibility, now back to business as usual. Angels cry at what we have done.
What surprises me is that adults in this day and age can be so naive as to believe that we can fight a war and somehow be less brutal and pick targets more carefully than our enemy and still prevail. I still prefer that our "monsters" win and not theirs.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
http://www.upa.pdx.edu/IMS/currentprojects/TAHv3/Content/PDFs/Operation_Super_Sunrise.pdf
Despite the author's statement, Nagasaki wasn't merely some civilian population center with no connection to the military. Nagasaki was a center of heavy indisty - specifically, it was a shipbuilding center for Mitubishi Heavy Industries, a major contractor for the Imperial Navy. That's right, Nagasaki factories and shipyards were building warships, making it a perfectly legitimate target.
Further, the author glosses over other historical accounts of the justification for the bombings and focusses only on professional military opinions, thereby concluding it was nothing but a demonstration for the Soviets. That's a completely unsubstantiated opinion. Truman had plenty of information that Eisenhower and other flag officers didn't - in particular, estimates on how many lives would be lost if a conventional military campaign had to be undertaken. Truman didn't particularly want to chance that they were right and that over a million casualties would be sustained on such a campaign, so he approved use of atomic weapons.
Like many latter-day hand-wringers, Mr. McKenna doesn't bother to contemplate the context of the decision; he merely tosses out a few facts that support his mindset and expects everyone to agree with his philosophizing. As someone who had three grandparents on active duty by V-E day, I'm glad the Brian McKennas of the world weren't taken seriously circa 1945.
Then you say the author "focuses only on professional military opinions." Well, who would you have liked to decide on military strategy? I'm all ears.
The "million" lost lives is as much an excuse as the rest: Japan was ready to surrender on the condition that it be allowed to keep the imperial system. Since this was granted, there would have been NO need for an invasion.
While it's true McKenna may have taken a few liberties with how things happened, I can tell that the most important element that informs your thinking is not factual history, but rather the fact that your grandparents were in the war. I'm not saying I have no respect for them, I do. But there's a difference between the soldiers who fought obeying orders and the people at the top who conducted the war according to THEIR priorities. And you can be sure that the lives of either your grandparents or mine didn't hang high in the balance.
Next, let's look at legitimate military targets. It wasn't until our latter-day philosphers that the idea arose that civilians should be completely off-limits. In antiquity, defeated cities were enslaved (with men often killed). By the middle ages, cities were beseiged, and everyone was affected. By the 20th century, indescriminate artillery fire was an acceptable method to get a city or nation to surrender, and was used by all. You are using a philosophical anachronism by trying to fit 21st century ethical norms onto a 1940s decision.
Futher, where is your evidence that Japan was "ready to surrender?" As a history buff (with a history degree and someone who has studied this period), I've never seen a substantiated claim of that. Use of Kamakaze pilots augers otherwise.
As far as who IS qualified to make these decisions? Maybe the guy who made them: the President of the US, with access to all of the information available at the time.
P.S. - Don't patronize me with the discussion about my motivations about my family. My opinion is my own, derived from facts, not familial loyalty.
Nagasaki was evidently the place where many weapons and warships were built, these things killing many of our soldiers. It did appear to be a meaningful wartime target, although of course I would have recommended aiming at the industrial targets with more conventional bombs, not obliterating the whole place.
The atom bombs may have saved a million US soldiers, in that an invasion of Japan was rendered unnecessary. One million American casualties were expected in an invasion, with probably more than a million Japanese casualties. The population was being set up to defend the homeland with sharpened sticks along with more conventional weapons. That is the information Harry Truman acted on when he gave it the OK.
Was it an atrocity? Probably. Attacking the civilian population of a warlike, totalitarian regime doesn't get to the ones who started the war and pursued it with vigor. I'd rather see government leaders attacking other government leaders, not doing it by proxy with masses of troops. But warfare often gets out of control.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were so-called air bursts at some altitude above the ground. There were two purposes: one, to maximize the damage caused by the shock wave, and two, to reduce the amount of material sucked up into the mushroom cloud that would become fallout. Finally, the bomb was dropped at over 30,000 feet, and the B-29 immediately exececuted a hard turn to get away from the blast. It was at 11 miles away when the blast occured.
They were so magnanimous they only dropped 15 million napalm bombs.
A document by an Air Force Colonel shows they were so magnanimous that when they received a memo from the army requesting the Air Force to "strafe all civilian refugee parties," [they] complied. The first massacre occurred at Nogeun-Ri (south of Seoul). Veterans interviewed by AP in 1999 corroborated Korean survivors' accounts. There were over 200 cases of such civilian killings by the U.S. military, mostly air attacks. They were magnanimous, but I guess they were even more scared of Communists hiding among the refugees.
They spared all leaders of Unit 731, the Japanese unit that conducted biological experiments. Not a single one of them was prosecuted for war crimes, in exchange for their knowledge on how to deliver germ bombs. They conducted germ warfare in North Korea, but not on such a large scale as the Japanese had in China. I guess that too should count as being magnanimous.
Although germ warfare was always denied by the US, the report of an International Commission composed of scientists from six countries and led by British embryologist Joseph Needham, identified germs of bubonic plague, cholera, and anthrax from post-mortem results conducted on victims.
If that's being magnanimous, I wonder what it would have been like if they had conducted themselves as soldiers obeying orders.
No!
The United States was brought into the war by Japan's sneak-attack and murder at Pearl. Japan refused to surrender after Hiroshima. The Japanese Empire and the Emperor own the dead in both cities.
But, he was obviously a father and family man. He knew right and wrong despite how that can get blurred on the battlefield. He did not condone the 2 bombings of heavily populated civilian areas despite anything the Japanese ever did to him or the US. Civilians should never pay for the sins of governments and soldiers, but they always do.
His brother (my uncle), who fought as a navyman for 3 years in the Pacific, was stationed in Japan immediately after. He saw the aftermath and to this day refuses to talk about it. It was an indescribable act of vengeance, cruelty, and power.
I have family that served to WWII, Korea, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. War is indeed "Hell."
No one like death and casualties...but that is war. NO ONE.
was it worth the deaths in nagasaki and hiroshima? we'll never know. but the japanese army and navy brought death, torture and destruction to mainland china and asia for many years before the united states entered the war.
and please remember pearl harbor. before december 7, 1941, it would have been difficult to find many americans who wanted to go to war in asia or europe.
all war is horror, which is exactly why it should always be the last choice.
"That morning the primary target for the bombing mission was the Japanese city of Kokura. Finding a heavy cloud cover over Nagasaki, the B-29 turned away from Kokura, and as an angel of death, began the short flight to Nagasaki"
Later in the article
"The bomber finds Nagasaki is also covered with clouds, but not for long."
how did this guy get a job? And how did this article make it past the editor? (do they have editors on here)
Just an overall terribly written piece. Redundant sentences, duplicate sentences in one instance, confused story, the list is very long.