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
I should probably do a Google search, but somewhere I read that 1,000 allied prisoners were dying each day from the brutality, neglect and starvation diets. (Our guys looked like Dachau survivors.)
Then there was a standing order to all POW camp commanders to dispose of their prisoners as soon as the invasion started.
Two anecdotals:
1) When asked if we should have dropped the bomb, people under Jap occupation replied "Why did you drop only two?"
2) When a Jap diplomat was told we had only two bombs, he said "If we'd known you had only two . . ." and then shut up, implying they wouldn't have surrendered even after Nagasaki.
It's all I can do not to belt these latter-day apologists who whine we were wrong to drop the bomb.
Do any of those nitwits honest to God think that Japan wouldn't have used it against us if they had developed one first?
General MacArthur told Secretary of War Stinson that the invasion would cost over a million casualties to American forces alone, and the War department report concluded that the Japanese would suffer between 5 and 10 million dead, and the United States between 1.7 and 4 million casualties.31,617 American POWs were liberated.
Secret intercepts indicated that Japanese defenses were far in excess of original estimates.
D Day in Europe was conducted with 175,000 troops.
Seven million American troops were in the Pacific now...
From Flyboys. pages 291-295
And this little gem:
-snip the POWs will be concentrated and confined.... until final disposition may be made...-snip Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, and whether it is accomplished by means of mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, or decapitation, dispose of them as the situation dictates. -
It is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces. - Minister of War, Shitayama.
I would imagine that more than a few of those fortunate survivors got wood for the first time in over three years, having seen that.
There were more than two...two's all it took.
...The Sen Toku I-400 class (イ-400) submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy were the largest submarines of WW2, and the largest in the world until the development of nuclear ballistic submarines in the 1960s. These were submarine aircraft carriers and each of them was able to carry 3 Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft underwater to their destinations. They also carried torpedoes for close range combat and were designed to surface, launch the planes then dive again quickly before they were discovered.
The I-400 was originally designed so that it could travel round-trip to anywhere in the world, and it was specifically intended to destroy the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal. A fleet of 18 boats was planned in 1942, and work on the first one was started in January 1943 at the Kure, Hiroshima arsenal. Within a year the plan was scaled back to five, and only three (the I-400 at Kure, and the I-401 and I-402 at Sasebo) were completed...
...As the war turned against the Japanese and their fleet no longer had free reign over the Pacific, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, devised a daring plan to attack the cities of New York, Washington D.C., and other large American cities as well as to destroy the Panama Canal.
One of Yamamoto’s plans was to use the sen toku (secret submarine attack), so that in the opening days of 1945, preparations were underway to attack the Panama Canal. The strategy was to cut the supply lines and access to the Pacific by U.S. ships. The plan was to sail westward through the Indian Ocean, around the southern tip of Africa, and attack the canal’s Gatun Locks from the east, a direction from which the Americans would not expect and were little prepared to defend. The flights would, of course, be one-way trips. None of the pilots expected to survive the attack, a tactic called tokko. Each pilot was presented with a tokko short sword, symbolic of the ultimate sacrifice.
Before the attack could commence from the Japanese naval base at Maizuru, word reached Japan that the Allies were preparing for an assault on the home islands. The mission was changed to attack the Allied naval base on Ulithi where the invasion was being assembled. Before that could take place, the Emperor announced the surrender of Japan...
More about these subs from http://starbulletin.com/2005/03/20/news/story1.html
... Their first mission was called "Operation PX," a plan to use the aircraft to drop infected rats and insects with bubonic plague, cholera, dengue fever, typhus and other diseases on American West Coast cities. When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the target was changed to the Panama Canal....
There were an estimated 100,000 Allied POWs in Japanese hands at the end of the war.
The bomb saved them all.
..and I will add once again that the guys stationed in eastern China, one of which was my father, would have surely been part of Olympic or Coronet -- needless to say, I might not be writing this.
"part of the Emperor's order, June 8, "Ketsu-Go," or Decisive Operation.
"Meanwhile the biological warfare unit 731 developed "Cherry Blossoms at Night," a plan to have Kamikazi planes launch from a submarine and contaminate San Diego with plague infested fleas."
Flyboys, page 293 A very heavily sourced and annotated book
Thanks!
Bottom line: the bombs saved lives...
Thanks for the comments. I agee.
Thanks for the post.
Apparently, your father was pretty cool...
Nor to this day have they ever paid a cent in reparations.
We were out of uranium after two.
I'm too lazy to do a Googleization on that, but I don't think you're correct....you could be, but I seem to recall there was another handful of targets ready to get zotted.
Happy Hiroshima Day! Happy Nagasaki Day! Truly days of celebration for the USA.
"The Spirit Warriors prepared for the final decisive battle.
The Battle plan was called "Ketsu-Go," or Decisive Operation."
The entire civilian populace - armed with bamboo spears and plenty of Yamato damashii (ask me what that is) would shatter jewel the hell out of the gaizin
On June 8, the emperor sanctioned Ketso-Go as "The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth In the Conduct of the War," which proclaimed that Japan must fight to the finish and choose extinction before surrender."
The American were to be fought in the interior rather than at the waters edge and Japan would use "sure victory weapons."
Japan would become one big Iwo Jima.
The army and the emperor were going to manage the war from vast underground caves in the Matsuhiro mountains
All men ages 15 to 60 and all women 17 to 40 were organized.
All schools were suspended and to become military bases.
- snip - Suicide tactics would save the realm.
Children trained to carry backpacks of explosives would throw themselves under tanks.
Foreign minister Shidehara wrote, "If we continue to fight back bravely, even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed... there would be room to produce a more favorable international situation for Japan."
- snip - "Due to the nationwide food shortage... - it will be necessary to kill all of the infirm old people, the very young, and the sick.
Admiral Onishi: "If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in kamikaze effort, victory will be ours."
20 million was an understatement.
Behind them were nearly 3 million well armed Japanese troops and 32 million civilians being trained for a heroic last stand. - But Japan lacked cloth, so "henceforth all combatants would all be in civilian dress."
General MacArthur told Secretary of War Stinson that the invasion would cost over a million casualties to American forces alone, and the War department report concluded that the Japanese would suffer between 5 and 10 million dead, and the United States between 1.7 and 4 million casualties.
Secret intercepts indicated that Japanese defenses were far in excess of original estimates.
D Day in Europe was conducted with 175,000 troops.
Seven million American troops were in the Pacific now...
From Flyboys. pages 291-295
No, we had one more, but that is all.
Back stateside. Truman was upset they blew the first two in a few days and didn't let the parts for the last be sent over.
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