Wednesday, August 9, 2023
In bed at 10:15, up at 6:30, ears ringing, back aching. 64℉, high 83℉, cloudy day, AQI=58, Moderate, wind W at 7 mph, 4-8/16 mph, drought continues. The sun rose at 5:51 and sets at 8:03, 14+12.
I have two especially vivid memories of that visit to Ground Zero. First, when I came out of the Hiroshima train station, I was struck by how new and modern the city was. It took me a second to remind myself that of course every building I was seeing had been built within the preceding 20 years. I still feel some embarrassment over that initial reaction. Second, I remember many Japanese children at the Peace Memorial staring at me as if I were a freak. I did not see other Americans or Westerners while I was there and it was not unlikely that, for those children if not for their parents, I and my companions were the first Americans they had seen. We were not only Ameicans but Marines with 'whitewall haircuts' and we could hardly have looked more different from the Japanese men the children were accustomed to. I felt as freakish as I looked to those children. The Peace Memorial had many photographs and other artifacts showing the effects of the bomb on the people and the city of Hiroshima. It is a very real horror show. My father had been one of the 70,000 Marines who fought on Iwo Jima to defeat the Japanese Empire and, according to some theories at least, had been spared the probable next campaign (after Okinawa) of invading Japan's home islands. only by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So I felt rather more connected to Hiroshima, its people and war history, and its bombing, than others might feel. Remembering those children now reminds me of all the children who died or were mutilated in that war, and of all the children who died or were mutilated in Vietnam where I was headed in 1965, and all the children in Iraq and Afghanistan, in so many other places and now in Ukraine who have been killed or mutilated in modern warfare. The memories are still fresh, but to express the thoughts they trigger, words fail me."
And another post written when Presient Biden visited Hiroshima this year:
"One day, the woman who owned or at least managed the bar we Marine officers frequented in Iwakuni took us on a commuter train to nearby Hiroshima to see the Peace Memorial Museum at Ground Zero. The twentieth anniversary of the bombing of the city was only several weeks away. I was – stupidly – struck by how new and modern the city was as I emerged from the train station. Walking to and through the Peace Memorial Museum was a searing experience. The “Atomic Bomb Dome” building was still standing. The bomb had detonated almost directly above that building and a few others that were still standing. The force of the blast was downward, blowing away roofs and floors and everything in between but leaving the steel-reinforced exterior walls standing.
I was solemn the whole time I was in Hiroshima, but the atmosphere in the city’s downtown area and even around the Peace Memorial was busy, and bustling, like New York or Chicago. There were a great many people, including families with children, at the Peace Memorial and their demeanors seemed not all that different from people going into the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, kind of semi-festive. The Japanese adults ignored my friend Ron Kendall and me but little children stared at us. For many of them, I suspect we were the first Americans or Europeans that they had seen in person and up close, or perhaps they stared because of the Marine Corps ‘whitewall’ haircuts that we had. I was a freak in the eyes of the children.
It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt. I was (forgive the expression) blown away by the photographs and artifacts and the realization of where I was. I was a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the bomb was dropped, but I am connected with Hiroshima by the fact that I am American. By the fact that my father shared a killing field with Japanese soldiers. By the fact that the justification for dropping the bomb was to obviate the necessity of invading the home islands, an invasion my father had been in line for. By the fact that I was a Marine on my way to another Asian killing field. By shared humanity. The Japanese government would have resisted invasion to the bitter end, as the Germans had, and the cost in lives would have been appalling. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that. Indeed, the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been ‘designed’ to make it clear to the Americans how high the cost of invasion of the home islands would be. But was it necessary to bomb the city? Two cities? Could the power of the Bomb have been shown by dropping it atop Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Bay or on the big naval base at Yokusoka? The U. S. had inflicted perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties by the firebombing of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945 while the battle was raging on Iwo Jima, and then on Okinawa. The destruction already inflicted on the home islands narrowed the choice of ‘suitable’ targets for the A-bombs but I believe it is naïve to think that Truman and the generals and the American public did not wish to inflict maximum civilian casualties. The firebombing raids proved otherwise. The feeling had to have been widespread that, as the song said, ‘we’re going to have to slap the dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.”
I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but visiting the Peace Memorial and seeing evidence of the devastation wrought by the American bombing was a fitting introduction to my impending work in Vietnam. The Japanese suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties from American strategic bombing, mostly from B-29 missions from late 1944 through the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The human toll in Vietnam was to be worse.
The day I left the United States for Japan and Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson spoke with Robert McNamara about the situation in Vietnam: “. . . it’s going to be difficult for us to very long prosecute effectively a war that far away from home with the [political] divisions we have here and particularly the potential divisions. And it’s really had me concerned for a month and I’m very depressed about it because I see no program from either Defense or State that gives me much hope of doing anything except just praying and grasping to hold on during [the] monsoon [season] and hope they’ll quit. And I don’t believe they’re ever goin’ to quit. And I don’t see that we have any plan for victory militarily or diplomatically.”
How prescient."
. . . . . . . .
I have thought a lot about Hiroshima since seeing the movie Oppenheimer when it opened in national theaters. I don't think anymore of the justification vel non of bombing Hiroshima though I should, but I still wonder about Nagasaki and indeed the firebombing of all those Japanese cities. And about the dispute between Oppenheimer and Edwad Teller over the development of the H-bomb. It is hard to conceive of bombs having thousands of times the destructive power of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki weapons, but the U.S. has them as do the U.K., France, Russia, China, and Israel. It's been 78 years since Hiroshima/Nagasaki and no country (or non-State actor) has used an atomic or thermonuclear weapon since Nagasaki. So we have become numb to the inherent dangers they represent. In the post-war years when I was a child, there were air raid drills conducted in American schools and bomb shelters located in American cities and in the basements and back yards of affluent American homes. At least until Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, only the cognoscenti had any conscious fear about the huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons around the world. Now Vladimir Putin threatens to use them on the European battlefield (which is to say, everywhere) in Ukraine. And realistically, what is to stop him? He has already created a wasteland in eastern and southern Ukraine with his artillery, airborne weapons, and landmines, Why not with radiation? Modern "tactical" nuclear warheads have yields up to the tens of kilotons, or potentially hundreds, several times that of the weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just knowing the human species, it is hard for me to believe that there will never again be an atomic or thermonuclear weapon used in warfare, perhaps by a state, perhaps by a terrorist group. Oppenheimer's fears were entirely justified. God, save us from ourselves.
One final thought - I remember so well my father telling me, on one of the very rare occasions when he spoke of his experiences on Iwo Jima, that he and the other Marines were not worried about being shot by a rifle or a machine gun. They were terrified of being blown up, blown apart by high explosives - artillery shells, rockets, mortars. He didn't add, but I know it was true from reseacrch, that there were parts of human bodies all around, an arm and shoulder, a leg, a head, limbs, organs, tissue. Horrible sights too sickening even to imagine. With the atom bomb comes a new terror, one not restricted to combatants but shared by everyone potentially under a nuclear blast - vaporization. Simply being instantaneouly vaporized, converted to ash or gas powerfully dispersed, blown away by the horrendous blast effect of the bomb. And of course, burns and radiation sickness for those who survived the blast. The effect I find most disturbing is vaporization, instantaneous disappearance, with no body or body part to be buried or cremated, just gone, turned to nothing, except perhaps to fall as part of the radioactive 'black rain' that falls back to earth after the explosion.
Somber thoughts every August.
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