Posted on 08/13/2005 4:32:50 PM PDT by Libloather
War prisoner believes atomic bomb saved his life
By DAVID LEVINSKY
Burlington County Times
Thomas Calderone believes the atomic bomb saved his life.
Sixty years ago today, the Pemberton Township man was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp wondering how he would survive a fourth year of daily work and few rations when word was received that Japanese forces had surrendered.
Calderone's lasting memory of the day - dubbed V-J Day for "victory over Japan" - was simply the Japanese guards telling the prisoners, "no more work."
"We didn't understand why," Calderone said last week. "We didn't understand a lot of Japanese, but we figured something was up. The next day we all listened to the emperor's speech and learned they had surrendered. We didn't believe it. We had no inkling. We never got any news or information. All we ever heard from the guards was that the Japanese were winning the war."
Thanks in large part to the atomic bombs, Japan agreed to demands for an unconditional surrender, ending World War II. Sixty years later, V-J Day remains special to Calderone and scores of other surviving servicemen and civilians who lived through the war.
Calderone was among hundreds of American soldiers who had been captured in the spring of 1942 on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines. For the next 31/2 years, he and other POWs lived and labored in a camp known as Nagoya No. 6., where they were given one meal of 500 grams of food each evening. If prisoners were unable to work, their daily ration was cut in half, Calderone said.
"I was convinced I was going to die there. You stay in a POW camp all those years and your mind gets stagnated. I didn't think I would ever come home," he said.
It wasn't until after his release that the Red Cross workers told Caldersone and the other prisoners the surrender was due to atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"I didn't even know what an atomic bomb was," Calderone said.
He would quickly learn. After their release, the prisoners were transported through Hiroshima on the way to evacuation boats.
"It was just like you see in the papers. Everything was burnt and bent. They said, 'that's what the bombs did.' "
Looking back, some critics have questioned the use of the atomic bombs in the war. But Calderone and several other veterans argue that dropping the bombs was the only way to forestall a mass invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Such an invasion would have likely resulted in the deaths of thousands, possibly millions of American servicemen, Japanese soldiers and civilians. American prisoners of war in Japan would have almost certainly been executed, Calderone said.
"If America had invaded Japan, they were going to kill all the POWs. I wouldn't be here now," he said.
Ernie Del Casino knows the feeling. During World War II, the Mansfield resident was stationed with a unit of Higgins landing crafts that saw action throughout the war in the Pacific.
"The men would line up and shake hands before leaving on a mission," Del Casino recalled. "Pretty soon, I didn't recognize a single one of them as having been there (at) the beginning."
Some Allied war planners expected more than a million American soldiers would die in any invasion attempt, and Del Casino said he expected his luck would have quickly run out during an invasion.
"We had already been informed that we were going to be carrying the first troops onto the beaches of Japan and that it would be the hardest thing yet," Calderone said. "I will love Truman until the day I die because who knows what would have happened."
He said he was sleeping off a hangover on Aug. 14 at a base in the Philippines when "all the Navy boats in the harbor started shooting all over the place."
"I fell to the floor and started burying my head in the sand when I heard all these people yelling, 'It's over! It's over!' My immediate thought was, 'What am I going to do now.' The Army had been a way of life for the last 21/2 years. A little bit later it sunk in that I was going home."
Del Casino believes he was one of the first soldiers to set foot on the Japanese mainland on Sept. 2 after a formal surrender was signed aboard the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
"Since we were already set to carry the first of the invasion force, they made us first with the occupying force," he said. "We were right there beside the Missouri when they were signing. I remember they flew over with so many bombers and planes that it darkened the sky. I think it was one last show of force for the Japanese that we meant business. Afterwards, they gave us the go-ahead to start our landing."
Peter Sarraiocco learned of the war's end in yet another way. The Southampton resident served as a navigator on a B-29 bomber and was returning from a mission over the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan, when the news of the surrender arrived over radio.
"Before takeoff, we had waited and waited hoping the surrender would happen because every mission had dangers. We flew in special planes that were stripped of all armaments except for the tail gun. We flew only at night and very long distances completely on our own in order to bomb enemy oil refineries," Sarraiocco said. "Eventually, the colonel told us to take off."
Their mission - possibly the last of the war - turned out to be their most dangerous, Sarraiocco said.
"We had the choice to fly around or over this seashore city on the western point of Japan," he said. "We went over it, and darn if they don't have anti-aircraft guns, which they shot at us. I kept thinking, the war is going to end and I'm going to get killed."
Fortunately, the plane was not hit by enemy fire, Sarraiocco said. After completing their bombing mission, the crew members received the radio message about the surrender.
"Looking back, what seems most striking is how young we all were," Sarraiocco said. "I was only 21 or 22 years old then. I now have four grandchildren, the oldest is 30. I can't imagine those kids doing what we did.
"We took it for granted and just did what we believed had to be done."
"We did what we had to do," said Mansfield resident Jack Foster about his 2 1/2 years of service with an Army Air Corps grounds crew in the Pacific.
"It was very, very hard, and I think it certainly changed us all a lot. Everybody was just so damn happy once it was all over."
E-mail: dlevinsky@phillyBurbs.com
Thanks Harry!
The POWs is one consideration I had not thought of when considering if the nukes should have been used. I've always focused on the forces it would have taken to conquer the mainland. That alone was staggering to me. Now it's obvious to me that we save many POW lives by droping the nukes. Most Excellent.
I knew a man who just finished up in Europe and was being shippied to the Pacific when the bomb fell----he was very grateful too.
I confess to the same mistaken assumption. This is a great story that increases our understanding.
Harry made the right decision..
See my post #8.
wow.
Monster ping...
Thanks! I was probably slowly typing away when you posted.
Those guys were somethin'.weren't they?
Yes, I agree about the understanding.
I believe so too.
Just like my uncle in the Big Red One. Their number had been called for OLYMPIC. He'd survived dragging an M-1 through the entire ETO from TORCH to Tunisia to Sicily to Normandy (they arrived on D-Day +2, I think), Aachen and the Huertgen Forest, and he told my dad later he didn't like his odds in an invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. Harry Truman bailed him out bigtime.
My late father in law was grateful for the bombs; he was due to take part in the invasion of Japan in the fall of 1945.
bump!
My own father's Pacific bomber group had hundreds of aircrew bail out and survive, only to be tortured and murdered by the Japanese.
The WWII Japanese were barbarians, making the Nazi's look like gentlemen by comparison.
America was more than merciful to limit the atomic bombs to just two cities of Japan.
We had every right to lay waste to the entire country.
I know of a Navy man, now deceased, who was slated for part of the invasion. It saved his life too. I know all his grandchildren and children, and his widow. He married after the war, as I recall. The children were all born after the war.
Some think we could have ended the war without the bomb. But no one can say for sure. The bomb certainly showed the Japanese where the power was. It was the right decision.
A friend of my parents was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. The man had a couple of mental breakdowns in the years that followed, usually during times of extreme stress. The one I remember mostly followed the death of their 3 yr. old daughter. She was hit by a drunk driver as she ran across the street in front of our house.
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