Meditations on the Bomb
The price paid is worth examining
When I was a boy, I’d spend some weekends and vacations with my grandfather, at his home in Vermont. I came to understand that the small, fierce old man who lived at the top of a hill with a barely-tamed dog and a woman he called “the Dragon Lady” had fought in a war. I’d grown up reading the kind of glory-filled stories about war that boys love, and I was insatiably curious. So I asked him about it.
He’d deflect my artless questioning with good humor, but he didn’t tell me much either. All I could glean about the war was pieced together from studying his reactions as we watched the The Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne together, and that he had a Japanese officer’s sword in an umbrella stand in one of the dark corners of his home, an old trophy.
When I got a little older, I learned about how we’d dropped the bomb on Japan on August 6th, 1945, and about the accompanying horrors. In school, we were reading a book called Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which was about a young girl dying of leukemia from the radiation caused by the bombs.
So one autumn day while we were sweeping up leaves on the long driveway of his home, I asked him whether he felt bad that the U.S. had dropped the bombs, and killed all of those innocent Japanese people, like little Sadako Sasaki.
He responded without hesitation. “If we hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here, and neither would you.” There wasn’t any anger in his response, just a matter-of-fact statement as a cool wind blew by us. I nodded and we went back to raking the leaves.
In the intervening years, I’ve read extensively about the horrors we unleashed on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to try and understand the price that was paid for my grandfather’s life. I came to understand that it's a critical event in world history whose details are largely unknown to the public because those details are beyond nightmarish. But I think we owe it to ourselves, and maybe even to the countless dead, to get acquainted with the reality.
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In Hiroshima, where a bomb was dropped at 8:15 a.m. on a Monday morning, witnesses described a sudden silver-white flash of light, like the magnesium powder flash of an old-timey camera. Everything and everyone the light touched was burned.
A young woman named Asima Okoshi was in the bathroom when the bomb fell and was spared the burning effect of the sudden flash. She emerged from her home to see the city of Hiroshima engulfed in flame. Crowds of people surged by, many burnt beyond recognition, their skin peeling off, some dragging it behind them on the ground as they fled.
“Looking around for my sister, I saw her lying sprawled in the corridor. The right side of her body covered with terrible burns… ….I put my sister on my back and fled barefoot to Hijiyama Park. Her face was festering from her burns and her right eye was hanging out. I pushed the eye back into its socket and tried to use a gauze mask to hold it into place but her ear had melted away and there was nothing to attach the mask to.”
Sixteen-year-old Akira Onogi recalls a blue flash of light, and then awakening in the rubble of his family home. He describes hearing the frantic cries for help of his mother and his sisters and their children, digging frantically through the debris to find them.
“I looked next door and saw the father of a neighboring family standing almost naked. His skin was peeling off all over his body and was hanging from fingertips. I talked to him but he was too exhausted to give me a reply. He was looking for his family desperately.”
Later, as his family fled from the blast zone, a small girl flagged them down. Her mother had been trapped under a beam that had fallen on the lower part of her body.
“Together with neighbors, we tried hard to remove the beam, but it was impossible without any tools. Finally, a fire broke out endangering us. So we had no choice but to leave her. She was conscious and we deeply bowed to her with clasped hands to apologize to her and then we left.”
These sort of stomach-churning details are ubiquitous throughout survivor accounts. More than half the population of the city of 350,000 had been killed or badly injured by the bomb.
But the horrors didn’t stop there. A few hours after the initial blast, a black rain began to fall over the city. Ash, mixed with radioactive fallout from the explosion. Survivors, parched by the heat of the blast, tried to catch droplets in their open mouths. Some used garbage cans to gather raindrops to quench their thirst. Many of those exposed to the rain, like the then two-year-old Sadako, who I’d read about in school, later died of radiation-induced cancer.
The day after the bomb was dropped, Japanese radio relayed the account of a young officer who had witnessed the events in Hiroshima. “Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death." A few days later, the U.S. would drop Fat Man on Nagasaki, and the horrors would repeat themselves.
In the wake of the bombs, many of those in proximity died of cancer. Some survivors developed strange rod-shaped growths in the place of their nails, which contained blood vessels and bled when broken. Today, the death toll is estimated at between 110,000 and 246,000, with thousands of others developing cancer from the radiation afterward, the effects of which the U.S. had initially argued were a myth.
The images of mass death from the Bomb and the gruesome aftermath, as survivors like Onogi so vividly described, was so common that much of the art produced by blast survivors depicts it.
Those images remain central in Japanese art even now. A scene in the 1980’s anime Barefoot Gen does a remarkable job of capturing the melting skin and other details relayed by survivors.
Here in the U.S., our education on the dropping of the bomb avoids horrors like these, in part because of our discomfort with the subject matter. We prefer to think that we just bopped the Japanese on the head “Loony Tunes” style to get them in line.
Where does it leave us? My grandfather was a thoughtful guy, who passed down a love of reading and history to me. I suspect he’d thought about the moral complexity of his situation. Would he melt a hundred thousand people to save the lives of him and his friends? How many kids with cancer were worth it for him to be able to go home to Lee, Massachusets and raise his own children, instead of ending up a line in a memorial inscription in the town cemetery?
The grimmest passages in history books oftentimes come down to scared people doing terrible things to each other because they believe they have no choice. Sometimes, all the options are bad. Standing in his yard and fielding questions from his inquisitive grandson, more than thirty years after the last Imperial Army holdout had come out of the jungle to lay down his gun, the old man knew where he stood.
At the time that the Enola Gay dropped the first of the two bombs on Hiroshima, young Tom Tyre was in Guam. Just eighteen years old, he’d survived the bunker-to-bunker warfare at Iwo Jima, and was preparing alongside his fellow Marines to be shock troops in the bloody land invasion of Japan in the coming weeks, a circumstance barely averted by Japan’s surrender after the bombings.
A land invasion meant that my grandfather would be sent back into the meatgrinder that he’d narrowly survived on Iwo Jima. In the barest terms, this meant him and his fellow soldiers literally having to run into gunfire and explosions which would certainly kill and maim many of them. This would not happen for a minute or an hour, but repeatedly for weeks at a time. At Iwo Jima, he’d endured this for a full thirty-six days. If you are feeling some urge to condemn my grandfather’s support for dropping the bombs in the face of the suffering they caused, reflect on your willingness to run through minefields while being shot at for a month.
His answer to my question on his driveway that one fall day was simple: if the U.S. had to invade Japan by land, he did not believe he would have made it through alive. Given a Back to the Future-style butterfly effect, if my grandfather hadn’t ever been able to meet my grandmother and have my mom who produced me, I wouldn’t exist to be able to have these moral quandaries. In his terse Irish-American way, I think he was trying to express that in the face of non-existence, morality feels less relevant than survival.
The facts seem to support his conclusion that not dropping the bomb would have meant his death. Imperial Japan was an utterly radicalized enemy, in the grips of fanatical zealotry that meant that a ground invasion was likely to be devastatingly costly to all parties. The U.S. had done a lot of math to try and figure out what the death toll would look like, with projections anywhere between 250,000 and a million people, on the Allied side alone.
For their part, the Japanese were determined to make us pay grievously for every step forward on their soil. As we battled from island to island in the Pacific theatre, they’d shocked U.S. soldiers with banzai charges and mass suicides, on multiple occasions convincing the population of occupied islands to take their own lives rather than undergo American occupation. Defense of their homeland was likely to play out similarly, with civilians being trained to resist the American military till their last breaths.
It’s likely that Akira Onogi, the Japanese teenager who dug his family out from the rubble of his collapsed home, and was haunted for the rest of his life by the girl and her mother who he couldn’t save, would have been one of the teenagers mobilized to defend his homeland.
In other words, a land invasion of Japan could have put brave high schooler Onogi on the other end of the barrel of a gun from him. My grandfather understood all of this. I believe he also would have understood that, detached from the movements of nations at a geopolitical level, Onogi was no less moral an actor than him. Just another scared young man trying to stay alive while traversing hell on earth, hoping for the chance to grow old and field dumb questions from his own grandchildren.
What the hell, you might be saying. Why did you tell me all this? The bomb was horrible, but the alternative of a land invasion sounds like it was even worse. All of this moral gray is giving me heartburn!
Well, maybe it’s important that, from time to time, we think deeply about the almost unspeakable realities on which our comfortable modern lives are built.
In the face of these nightmare images, the cold moral utilitarianism of comparing casualties from the atomic bomb to projected deaths from a ground invasion of Japan seems utterly insufficient at best, and downright sociopathic at worst. These terrible things happened to real people, like you or me, not just numbers in a history book or a Wikipedia page.
We just passed the 79th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, where hundreds of thousands of Japanese were horrifically murdered, with barely a murmur. But I don’t want to stop existing, and presumably readers whose family members also fought in the Pacific feel the same.
The best I can offer is that it’s good to think about these troubling realities from time to time, to reacquaint ourselves with the prices that were paid for our grandfathers, even if we wouldn’t take them back. Maybe, it’s like how it's beneficial for someone who eats meat to slaughter and butcher an animal just once in their life, so they remember that the protein doesn’t just come from the grocery store aisle.
Great column. Covers both experiences.
The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should teach people why we DON'T build and USE atomic bombs.
One side of this that was left out...the third part of the triangle.
As the war neared its end, the Japanese ordered that all the surviving PoWs, who had been used as slave labor under appalling conditions, be killed. They could be gassed, shot, beheaded, or burned. It didn't matter how. They were not to be turned over to the Allies, as they would testify to the deliberate starvation, brutality, and even vivisection of living PoWs.
Those PoWs included some of my relatives, bagged at Singapore, and forced to work on the Burma-Siam Railway of Death. After they finished that, still sick and starving, they were shipped to Japan to work in coal mines. All the young Japanese men were in uniform, you see.
After the bombs were dropped, Emperor Hirohito ordered his nation to accept the Allied Potsdam Proclamation. One of its most important points was that Japan yield, alive and intact, all PoWs.
Tokyo promptly sent new orders to the PoW camp commandants: turn the camps over to the senior Allied PoW. Any camp officer or guard who had committed atrocities or mistreated the PoWs in any way was told to pull off that badly-wrapped-parcel uniform and vanish.
The PoW camp commandants did just that. When OSS teams parachuted into Manchuria and China, or US Navy landing craft disgorged Marines in Japan, or Royal Navy landing craft did the same for Royal Marines in Malaya and Singapore, the Japanese turned over the camps to the liberators' representatives.
They brusquely ordered the Japanese to start bringing in food, if necessary on the hoof. The PoWs discovered to their fury that the Japanese had been withholding Red Cross parcels. And American B-29s dropped containers full of food and other supplies on the camps while they awaited liberation.
One camp got a film projector and newsreels...the PoWs found out how their side won the war. They had no idea who all the big names in the newsreels were. They had an even more Rip Van Winkle experience when the liberating armies arrived.
The PoWs had fought wearing soup bowl helmets, khaki uniforms (with shorts for the British), long Springfield or Lee-Enfield rifles, and beer-bottle grenades to hurl at tanks.
The liberating British and American troops arrived wearing green uniforms, steel pots (American), jungle hats (British), clutching short carbines (American) or Sten guns (British), and lugging fearsome steel pipes they called "Bazookas" that easily ripped holes in Japanese tanks. It was a whole new army.
Anyway, the A-bomb saved all those PoWs. They were able to go home and start healing. They spent a great deal of time complaining to National Health and the Veterans Administration that despite the lack of documentation, their various illnesses WERE the result of being PoWs, never getting compensation from the Japanese (they got it from the British and American taxpayers), but finally receiving their 75 percent disability money. When they were in their 80s.
I dated a woman whose grandfather fought in the Pacific theater in WWII, as my grandfather had. She loved her grandfather dearly but was terribly distressed whenever she heard him refer to "the Japs."
One evening, we settled in to watch Bridge on the River Kwai. When the film concluded, after a few minutes of silence, she said, "Is that what it was really like?"
"No," I said. "It was much worse."
She cut her grandfather some slack after that.
I think it's not possible for anyone who has not been in war to understand war. The best we can do is try to appreciate how much worse war is than any person's ability to explain or show how bad war is.
And that is why we must never stop teaching lessons like these.