War prisoner believes atomic bomb saved his life (Just another 60-year-old V-J day war story)

Philly Burbs .com ^ | 8/13/05 | DAVID LEVINSKY

[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

[A.A. Cunningham]

I'll defer to Tibbetts and others recollections:

In an August 2002 interview with Studs Terkel published in the British Guardian newspaper, Paul Tibbetts recalled something similar: "Unknown to anybody else--I knew it, but nobody else knew--there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. He said, 'You got another one of those damn things?' I said, 'Yessir.' He said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'Over in Utah.' He said, 'Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.' I said, 'Yessir.' I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over."

[bill1952]

Thats interesting. You would have thought that Harry was right in the loop on dropping those babies, but I guess he wasn't.

[bill1952]

Flyboy Robert Bill Connell, the last man off Chichi Jima alive weighed 100 pounds. - 6 feet tall.

Flyboy Robert Goldsworthy: I had beriberi, my ankles were swollen.
I had amoebic dysentery, had yellow jaundice, and I weighed 85 pounds.
I was lifted onto the deck by two sailors and I stumbled over to the railing and looked at Omori prison camp and shook my fist and yelled.

"You bastards, I beat you."

After 14 years of war the Japanese also released all of it's Chinese prisoners.

There were 56.

- Flyboys. pg 301

[patriciaruth]

The Raid just released in limited theatres with Benjamin Bratt (not bad), and Joseph Finnes (good as always)
is true story about a rescue mission to save 500 American POW's in the Philippines.
The Japanese had scheduled to execute them (by pouring kerosene on them while in an air raid shelter and burning them alive) because of the successful landing of McArthur and the imminent loss of the parts of the Philippines that the Japanese still controlled.

I think we all should support The Raid by going to see it in a theatre. We drove 40 miles to see it and it was definitely worth the time and money.

Forced by bankruptcy to put out this movie, which has been on their shelves for 2-3 years, Miramax and Hollywood need to know that we will support pro-American movies and not go to all the anti-American trash that is scheduled to be released this year.

[rudy45]

From the Internet Movie Database site:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0326905/

[patriciaruth]

Thanks! Looks like the movie is called The Great Raid. (I was buying popcorn when the title first started.)

[Last Dakotan]

According to eyewitness accounts, the Japanese brought a captured US flyer to Hiroshima, chained him to a pole, and brutally stoned him to death after the bombing.

[bill1952]

I don't have any account of that, but I believe it totally.

"As revenge for B-29 attacks in May and June, Professor Fujuiro Ishiyama, director of external medicine at Kyushi Imperial University, had strapped eight captured American flyboys to operating table.
The professor didn't administer an anesthetic.
He began to cut.

He sliced out one flyboy's lung and placed it in a surgical pan.
The patient was alive. Then he slit his lung artery and watched the boy gurgle to death in his own blood.
Another boy had his stomach cut out - while conscious.
He then cut five of the boy's ribs, slit an artery, and watched to see how long his heart would pump before he died.
He bored a hole in another boy's skull, inserted a knife and twisted it around in his brain.
He wanted to see what parts of the boy's body jumped and jerked with each turn."

Japan's last war. - Ienaga, pg 189