Re: Hiroshima 60
Well, here is a guy who gets it:
I went to Hiroshima last month and visited the most haunting ruin in the world and then walked through a graceful park to the “Peace Museum” (the War Museum). It is sombre, informative and horrifying. Models and large mural photographs show the city before and after the bomb. There are statistics of death, heat, pressure and radiation, eye-witness accounts of children watching their mothers die in front of them, anecdotes, such as the man about to catch the dragonfly, and little household relics, such as molten spoons and a wristwatch stopped at 8:15. But the most evocative remnant stands outside the museum on a riverbank. It is the ruin of the “Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall,” usually known as the “A-Bomb Dome.”
Hiroshima is built on a large delta consisting of seven rivers. At its centre is the T-shaped Aioi Bridge, which provides a three-way crossing where one river divides into two. This T was the target for the atomic bombardier. He was slightly out and the bomb exploded about 180 metres to the south, 550 metres above the ground.
I gazed at it for a long time from every angle and then paced out the distance south to where the bomb had gone off. In an act of compulsive foolishness I stared upward to look for the spot in the air.
Was Truman right to drop it? I have no doubt he was. However I look at it, I cannot see other than that the bomb saved millions of lives, Allied and Japanese. All British combatants in the Second World War that I have ever spoken to, including my parents, described the same reaction when they heard of the Hiroshima bomb: tremendous relief. A foreman, Tommy, at a factory I worked at in Lancashire in 1980, told me that in July, 1945, he was in the Pacific doing exercises for the invasion of Japan. He expected to die. He thanked the bomb that he became a grandfather.
The most effective soldiers in the war were the Germans. The only way the Allies could beat them was to outnumber and outgun them. They seemed to have a limitless supply of officers with quick, flexible minds who could read a battle and make a swift and intelligent assessment of the best tactics required.
For the opposite reason, the Japanese were among the most ineffective soldiers in the war. Tough, brave and stoical, they became useless as battle winners if you killed their commander. They could not think for themselves and, without orders and leaders, became a ferocious and implacable mob, hopeless for securing victory but terrifyingly dangerous in refusing defeat. They would not surrender. The casualties when the Americans invaded the outlying islands in the Pacific held by the Japanese were sickeningly high because they just would not surrender.
The invasion of Japan itself would probably have been the bloodiest episode in human combat. Expecting it, Japanese Imperial Headquarters called for “100 million deaths with honour.”
Making things worse was the chaotic leadership of Japan. Japan’s “15-Year War” had not been started by political leaders but by two mad colonels in Manchuria. We shall never know what happened at command level in Japan during the war, because documents were destroyed before the Allied occupation, but there certainly was murderous conflict between generals, admirals and politicians. The Emperor was the only one with supreme authority, even if he lacked will, and we are lucky he survived.
Killing Hitler would have shortened the war; killing Emperor Hirohito would have lengthened it. He was for making peace but needed a special reason for doing so. The threat of the Soviet Union’s joining the war against Japan was not enough. The atomic bomb was.
The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. The second was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. Was it necessary? I’m afraid so. There was still dithering and defiance after the first bomb and the American idea was to keep on blowing until the enemy’s flame went out. The historian Herbert Feis explains the mood of American people then, saying they had “impatience to end the strain of war blended with a zest for victory. They longed to be done with smashing, burning, killing and dying – and were angry at the defiant, crazed, useless prolongation of the ordeal.” The Americans hurried to roll out the Nagasaki bomb, wanting to give an impression of continued, massive and irresistible destruction. The third bomb would be ready to fall by August 17. But on August 15 the Emperor announced the surrender.
Then there was a large-scale experiment on human beings that gave spectacular confirmation of the principle that institutions and not race determine the virtues and well-being of mankind. The U.S. forced democracy on Japan. It worked like a charm and, with enduring peace, achieved a happy wonder.
The Japanese, always industrious and inventive, became model democrats – tolerant, peaceful and considerate. The grandsons of men who abused British prisoners in PoW camps now treat their grandsons with respect and decency. There is an obvious improvement in health in Japan and it has reached new levels of manufacturing prowess and efficiency, improving the whole world with its marvellous products.
The casualties of Hiroshima were mainly from blast and heat. Radiation killed far fewer and these mostly suffered acute damage from the massive direct radiation that struck fast-growing cells in the gut, skin, marrow, blood and in foetuses, causing hideous deaths and abnormalities. Chronic radiation effects, the long-lasting effects, were quite small. By 1990 the total number of the survivors from both bombs who died from cancer caused by the radiation was estimated at 428 – an average of 10 a year since the bombs were dropped. The figure for genetic damage done by the radiation is more precisely known. It is zero. No increase in genetic defects in children born to survivors who conceived after the bomb has ever been seen.
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=a29a17a7-9022-42b3-8a76-e8dc748e31aa&page=2
very reliable source all of a sudden. 