Day 81 : Book Excerpt : Hiroshima Nagasaki

A few medical teams survived the blast and acted immediately to help others: Tatsuichiro Akizuki, the only doctor to walk away from the wreckage of Urakami No. 1 Hospital, stayed in the stricken area to treat 70 in-patients and more than 300 seriously wounded who later arrived. He toured the bomb shelters, ‘fighting hopelessness to administer treatment to the fatally wounded’. Similarly, Dr Raisuke Shirabe of Nagasaki Medical College and his staff dragged themselves without rest around the smoking rubble, tending to hundreds of wounded; Dr Shirabe continued to treat people for weeks afterwards, despite the loss of his two sons.

Dr Takashi Nagai, the dean of the radiology department of Nagasaki Medical College, set a similar example – despite suffering from leukaemia. That morning, just before the plane approached, he walked to his office at the college, a ferro-concrete building 800 metres from Urakami Cathedral. He began preparing a lecture when an ‘invisible fist’ smashed through the windows. He lay under rubble with a deep cut to his right temple and mumbled for God’s forgiveness: the zealous Catholic convert had intended to confess three sins that afternoon.

Next door, in the X-ray room, Nurse Hashimoto clung to a bookshelf bolted to the floor. The room seemed to sway and bend; the primitive X-ray machines broke up and scattered. Through the window, beyond the smoke and wreckage, the formerly green Mount Inasa glowed red, like a large ember rising out of the bay. She ran down the hall, protected by the heavy walls of the X-ray department, and found five other survivors; they dragged out Dr Nagai and bandaged his head. ‘Help the patients!’ he cried. With wet hand-towels over their faces the nurses plunged into the smoke-filled wards and led or stretchered the patients out. Dr Nagai hurried downstairs to the underground emergency theatre, now flooded and useless. His illness and blood loss – his bandages now resembled a red turban – overwhelmed him. His colleague Dr Raisuke Shirabe used a novel technique to staunch the blood flow: he pressed a tampon into the wound and sutured the skin over it.

Thousands of near dead staggered up the Urakami Valley towards the hospital. The wounded carried the fatally wounded; children dragged their dying parents; parents clutched their children’s bodies. They bumped and shuffled up the hillsides, glancing back at the fires that drew closer, and one by one they collapsed from dehydration or exhaustion.

At the sight Dr Nagai and his team ‘started to lose our nerve’, he later said. The hospital and medical college were virtually destroyed; the ruins of five auditoriums later revealed the charred remains of hundreds of students sitting at their desks. A heavy roof had fallen on Dr Nagai’s First Year; all except for one died like butterflies pinned to a specimen board. Nothing useful remained in the college, no medicines or equipment. Sensing his colleagues’ despair, Dr Nagai issued an order: ‘Quick, find a Hi no Maru [a Japanese flag].’ This struck his friend Dr Ogura as absurd, but Dr Nagai insisted: when a flag could not be found, he grabbed a white sheet and smudged a red circle in the centre with his blood-soaked bandages. Dr Ogura tied the flag to a bamboo pole and drove it into a clearing on the hill above the hospital – a rallying point beyond reach of the fires. ‘It was so simple an act and yet the psychological effect was profound,’ he remembered. Dr Nagai then directed the construction of a field clinic on a stone embankment near the clearing.

Fires, not a firestorm, consumed Urakami; droplets of black rain extinguished the flames. Dr Nagai scoured the lines of refugees coming up the hill for any sign of his wife. When she did not appear his strength broke: ‘She’s dead, she’s dead!’ he cried, and resisted a terrible urge to rush headlong into the smoke-filled valley to find her. His legs gave way and he fainted. He awoke on a stretcher in a field, looking up at a thinly curved moon. Men were building shelters for the injured as nurses boiled vegetables in air-raid helmets over open fires. Somewhere people sang, ‘Umi Yukaba’ (If I Go Away to the Sea), a popular patriotic song. He got up and took the hands of his medical staff; they sat in silence, looking out over the remains of Nagasaki.
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Truman heard of the success of the Nagasaki mission through cables from Farrell and Groves. His reaction was sombre; gone were the exuberant speeches, fellow back-slapping, mutual congratulations. His mood was sober, defiant – and vengeful. The Japanese people had brought this on themselves, his radio address made clear that day. ‘We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor … against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare.’ Truman drew no distinction between civilian and soldier; mother and murderer; child and monster. In a total racial war, there were no distinctions; the victor wrote the laws of war. The ‘Japanese people’ had inflicted these atrocities on America, Truman said in tones that suggested he protested too much. ‘They’ had broken the laws of war; ‘they’ must pay for the crimes of their masters. He reflected the feelings of mainstream America, for whom ‘the Japs’ were collectively guilty.

~~Hiroshima Nagasaki -by- Paul Ham

Day 34: Book Excerpt: American Arsenal

On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt, vacationing at a favorite spa in Warm Springs, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Harry Truman, sworn in as president that evening, seemed an unlikely successor. He was a failed Kansas City haberdasher whose debts had been paid by the political machine of Kansas City’s Boss Pendergast, whose patronage interests he had faithfully served—he was known as “the Senator from Pendergast.” Under pressure from the Democratic Party’s leaders, Roosevelt had selected Truman to replace the incumbent vice president, the left-leaning Henry Wallace, as his 1944 running mate. Truman had shown little experience or judgment in foreign affairs. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Senator Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

Truman held his first cabinet meeting immediately after his swearing-in. After the meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson waited for the others to leave the room and then told the president that a project was under way to develop a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. The next day, James Byrnes, whom Truman would soon appoint secretary of state, told the president “with great solemnity” that “we were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.”

Truman and his closest military and political advisors, with the exception of Stimson, seemed to have had no real understanding of the atomic bomb. Byrnes, a master Senate politician who had been Truman’s mentor there, would see the bomb as a club to be used to bully the Russians; Hap Arnold, chief of the AAF, likely saw it in the same way as did Curtis LeMay, who said that he understood that the bomb would make a “big bang” but that it “didn’t make much of an impression on me.” To them, it was just a bigger bomb. Stimson warned Truman that the United States could not keep its nuclear monopoly for long and urged the president to appoint a committee of leading citizens to advise him on its use and to consider international control. The president agreed, and named an Interim Committee that included Stimson, Byrnes, Bush, Conant, and Karl Compton. A scientific advisory panel, including Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and Arthur Compton, was formed to provide technical expertise to the Interim Committee. The advisory committee excluded scientists who were hesitant to use the bomb, such as Szilard, James Franck, and Urey.

On May 31, the Interim Committee made its recommendation. Oppenheimer and Arthur Compton had advised the committee that the bomb would have the explosive equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT and would kill about twenty thousand people if dropped over a city, with more injured by burns or radiation. (Both estimates were low. The estimate of those killed was based on the assumption that Japanese civilians would take shelter from an air raid, while the actual bombing was by a single plane without advance warning.) The committee discussed alternatives to bombing a Japanese city— arranging a demonstration of the bomb for the Japanese, dropping it on a preannounced target in Japan, or dropping it on a neutral area, perhaps an uninhabited island. All these ideas were rejected. Dropping the bomb on an uninhabited area would not show its destructive power. And what if the bomb fizzled, or what if the Japanese brought American POWs to a preannounced site? The Interim Committee’s minutes for May 31: “Secretary [Stimson] expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible. At the suggestion of Dr. Conant the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”
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In his advice to Truman, Stimson showed his disconnection from the conduct of the war in Japan. After the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo, he had asked Arnold whether there had been any deviation from the policy of precision bombing. When Arnold told him that there had been no change in strategy, that the civilian casualties were only incidental, Stimson accepted his answer. As late as May 16, Stimson told Truman that insofar as possible he was holding the AAF to precision bombing, and that similar rules would be applied to the atomic bomb. But he must have known what was happening, as his decisions and advice to the president show. Stimson removed Kyoto from the target list for both conventional and atomic bombing because of its historic and artistic treasures, saying he “did not want to have the reputation of the United States outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” and he told Truman that he worried that Japan’s cities would be so “thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.” Truman’s response was to laugh and say he understood. Stimson deceived himself about the firebombing campaign in Japan, and he deceived his new president. The historian Tami Biddle has written that over Hiroshima, “no moral threshold was crossed that had not been crossed much earlier in the year.”

On June 14, the Joint Chiefs met to plan the invasion, and they acted almost as if the atomic bomb did not exist. The Army was certain that an invasion would be necessary, and the Navy and AAF agreed to plan for a conditional invasion if blockade and bombing failed to end the war. On June 18, the Joint Chiefs met with Truman, who expressed his concern about the American casualties that would result from facing Japan’s two-million-man homeland army. No one seemed able to offer a definitive alternative to an invasion. Gen. Ira Eaker represented Arnold, who did not attend. Like Arnold, Eaker was under orders to support Marshall, and he endorsed the decision to invade the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu. As far as the Army was concerned, there was nothing to discuss. LeMay arrived for a meeting the next day, and Marshall slept through his presentation.

At the Potsdam Conference in July, Truman received news of the successful Trinity test in New Mexico of the first atomic bomb, and he mentioned to Stalin almost in passing that America had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin (who of course knew all about it from Klaus Fuchs and other spies) said that he hoped that the Americans “would make good use of it against the Japanese.” America, Britain, and China agreed on the Potsdam Declaration, a July 26 ultimatum to Japan to surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction.” It made no mention of the bomb, nor did it offer to preserve the emperor system. The declaration was delivered by radio broadcast rather than through neutral countries’ diplomatic channels, which may have led the Japanese to view it as propaganda.

~~American Arsenal -by- Patrick Coffey