Posted on 12/05/2009 6:00:32 PM PST by NYer
Major "Chuck" Sweeney had an extremely risky takeoff before dawn, loaded as he was with the 4.5-ton A-bomb, "Fat Man". Now they were over their primary target, Kokura. He had made three runs over the hopelessly clouded city when he made a shocking discovery: the auxiliary gasoline pipe was blocked. Unless they dropped the bomb soon, they would never get home. He turned his plane southwest for the secondary target, "Nagasaki, urban area".
His B-29 was over Shimabara just before
11 A.M. A radio announcer saw this and excitedly broadcast a warning, and Nagasaki people who heard him ran for their shelters. Moments later, Sweeney and his crew saw Nagasaki right below them through a cloud break, immediately recognizing the Urakami River and the Matsuyama Sports Ground. That put them almost two miles northwest of the planned drop, but time had run out. Bombardier Kermit released the bomb. It was just 11 A.M. when Fat Man went plummeting down onto the city of two hundred thousand souls, of whom more than seventy thousand would die, many without a trace.
Inside the Urakami Cathedral, Fathers Nishida and Tamaya were hearing confessions again after the all-clear. The cathedral was only a third of a mile from where Fat Man detonated and was reduced to rubble in an instant. No one would be sure how many perished inside.
Less than two miles away from the cathedral, Chimoto-san was working on his rice paddy on Mount Kawabira. He heard a noise, looked up and saw a B-29 emerging from the clouds. It disgorged a huge black bomb, and he threw himself to the ground. He waited a minute. Then came an awful penetrating brightness, followed by eerie stillness. He looked up and gasped at the huge pillar of smoke, swelling grotesquely as it rose. Suddenly he realized that a hurricane was rushing toward him. Houses, buildings, trees were being cut down before his startled eyes as if by some enormous, invisible bulldozer. Then came a deafening roar, and he was hurled like a matchbox into the stone wall sixteen feet behind. Shaken to his very soul, he gaped at the pines, chestnuts and camphor laurels torn from the ground or broken off at the trunks. Even the grass was gone!
Midori's nineteen-year-old cousin Sadako Moriyama had just found her two small brothers chasing dragonflies in the Yamazato school yard. She told them their mother wanted them. At that moment, she heard the plane and ran with them to the school shelter. As they entered, they were picked up and hurled to the far wall, and she blacked out. Coming to, she heard the two children whimpering at her feet and wondered why it was so dark. As a little light began to penetrate the gloom, she was paralyzed with terror. Two hideous monsters had appeared at the shelter's entrance, making croaking noises and trying to crawl in. As the darkness lifted a little, she saw they were human beings who had been outside when the bomb exploded. In less than seconds, they had been skinned alive, half a mile from the epicenter, and their raw bodies had been picked up and smashed into the side of the shelter.
She went outside. The light was weak, as if it were barely dawn. She cried aloud when she saw beside the sandbox four children, without clothes or skin! She stood there transfixed, her eyes involuntarily drinking in the hideous details. The skin of their hands had been torn away at the wrists and hung from their fingernails, looking like gloves turned inside out.
Feeling she was losing her reason, she dashed back into the shelter, accidentally brushing the two victims still squirming and moaning near the entrance. Their bodies felt like potatoes gone rotten. Their horrible animal croaking sound began again. She realized they were saying something. Mizu, mizu. Water, water. That cry was to run like a cracked record in the nightmares of Nagasaki survivors for years.
Michiko Ogino was ten years old and enjoying the summer holidays at home. Just after 11 A.M. she was terrified by a giant lightning flash, followed by a horrendous roar, and within seconds she was one of the thousands pinned under the roofs or walls of their homes. The blast of the bomb caused air to rush from the epicenter at over a mile a second, knocking houses flat. Almost immediately, an equally violent wind rushed back into the vacuum left at the epicenter.
Michiko was hopelessly pinned there, but her screaming brought a stranger who freed her. Outside, she was startled to see evil-looking clouds that twisted and writhed and blackened out the sun. 'What kind of new lightning had done this? Then she became conscious of a tiny voice becoming hysterical. It was her two-year-old sister trapped under a crossbeam. She turned for help and saw dashing toward them a naked woman, her body greasy, and purple like an eggplant, and her hair reddish brown and frizzled. Oh no! It was Mother! The speechless Michiko could only point to her sister under the beam. The mother looked wildly at the fires that had already started, dived into the rubble, put her shoulder under the beam and heaved. The two-year-old was free, and the mother, hugging her to her breast, collapsed onto the ground. There was no skin left on the shoulder that she had put under the beam, just raw bleeding meat. Michiko's father appeared, badly burnt too. He watched in dumb helplessness as his wife groaned and struggled to rise. Then all her strength ebbed away, and she collapsed, dead.
Nagasaki was now burning, and Sakue Kawasaki sat in disbelief inside the Aburagi air-raid shelter. He could see people staggering about outside, naked and swollen like pumpkins. Then came a babel of croaking voices piteously begging for mizu, mizu, but where could he get water? There was a puddle of dirty water outside the entrance to the shelter, and one of the victims crawled over, lowered his lips into it and drank with succulent noises. He tried to crawl to the shelter but collapsed and stopped moving. One by one, the others drank from the puddle and crumpled up motionless. What terrible thirst could drive men to act like demented lemmings?
The plutonium-239 bomb exploded in Nagasaki with the equivalent force of twenty-two thousand tons of conventional explosives but with vast differences. Setting aside for the moment the A-bomb's lethal radiation, there was its intense heat, which reached several million degrees centigrade at the explosion point. The whole mass of the huge bomb was ionized and a fireball created, making the air around it luminous, emitting ultraviolet rays and infrared rays and blistering roof tiles farther than half a mile from the epicenter. Exposed human skin was scorched up to two and a half miles away. Electric light poles, trees and houses within two miles were charred on the surface facing the blast. The velocity of the wind that rushed out from the epicenter was more than one mile per second, sixty times the velocity of a major cyclone. This caused a vacuum at the epicenter, and another cyclone rushed back. in, picking up acres of dust, dirt, debris and smoke that darkened the writhing mushroom cloud.
Young Kata-san was walking his cow on a hillside outside Oyama, five miles south of the epicenter. He was startled by the flash and watched, rooted to the spot, as a huge white cloud rose up like a grotesque organism fattening itself by some weird magic. The cloud was white on the outside but fired by some hideous red energy within. Then came alternating flashes of red, yellow and purple. Gradually the cloud went into a mushroom shape, and a black. stain grew on its stem. When the cloud reached a great height, it burst open and collapsed like an obscene grub that had gorged on more than its stomach could hold. The mountains all around were lit by the sun, but the area below the cloud was shrouded in darkness. Then came Kato's second shock, a roar of wind so strong that Kato mistook it for another bomb exploding nearby.
A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai, Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb 
How does the killing of an innocent child ever become moral?
When it strikes terror in the heart of a chief of state? And causes him to override his generals and surrender?
Terrorism is a tactic. It has its uses in a just war.
Not liking the answer does not make it any less answered.
A little more light bedtime reading for you.
In 1942 Ishii (the head of Unit 731) begins field tests of germ warfare on Chinese soldiers and civilians. Tens of thousands die of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases. U.S. soldiers captured in Philippines are sent to Manchuria.
Gulf of Tonkin was until several years later, in 1964.
I've had my uncertainties about this for years. Prior to that, I had accepted history as it was presented to me. Thank you for a very thought-provoking post.
I still think that there is plenty of room to feel compassion for the innocent who had nothing to do with the decision making and war who had to suffer on all sides.
No they were not. Even the Japanese will tell you that.
Aggression is aggression. Spinning the facts of history so that own own country's acts of aggression are justified is sophistry. "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the LORD weigheth the spirits." Prov. 16:2.
You can take it back to the 1850s when the French invaded the place. Or the 1940s when Japan did. The Vietnamese refer to their wars in respect to who it was they were fighting at the time. Our intervention they called “The American War’’.
The Japanese weren’t trying to surrender...
Kantoro Suzuki’s cabinet was hopelessly divided between those who wanted to surrender CONDITIONALLY, and the militarists who wanted to surrender CONDITIONALLY.
Where the factions differed in was what were the conditions...
Only after the dropping of the two atomic bombs and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war with the invasion of Manchuria did the non-miltarists gain the upper hand, and convince Hirohito to accept UNCONDITIONAL surrender...the leader of the militarists Korechika Anami commited suicide as a result after a failed coup attempt to stop the surrender.
I suggest you read the following for a better understanding of the cause of VJ-Day:
Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan By Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
During the six weeks of the Nanking Massacre, the Chinese were not simply murdered. They were tortured, humiliated, and raped. The Japanese used a wide variety of methods of murder. They chased the Chinese into the Yangtze River with machine guns, drowning them. They poured gasoline on people, and shot them, so the victims flickered up like candles. They cut the eyeballs out of men, and then burned the people while they were still living. They tied Chinese civilians up on posts, and threw grenades to watch their flesh fly. A Japanese general poured acid on a man until he died of corrosion. Some Chinese were attacked with awls. Others were castrated. Some Chinese even had their hearts cut out. Some women were beaten at the vagina with fists and other objects until they died. Even babies were victims; they were skewered and tossed into boiling water. Hakudo Nagatomi, a Japanese war veteran, described, "I remember smiling proudly as I took his [another general's] sword and began killing people...The head was cut clean off and tumbled away on the ground as the body slumped forward, blood spurting in two great gushing fountains from the neck."
The Japanese finally left China when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th. 1941. I believe that is what you meant. My point is we are not a war-mongering, blood-thirsty people bent on conquest. If we were I’d be paying 10 cents a gallon for gas becasue we could have invaded any oil producing nation on Earth, taken their oil and they couldn’t do anything about it.
Oh?
Japanese soldiers laughingly made games out of these atrocities. The Japanese generals organized contests to see how many Chinese one soldier could murder in a given time. Whoever killed the most won. News reporters and visitors came to observe the competitions and raise praise for the victor back in Japan. Sometimes the number of bodies reached as high as five-hundred in a single contest. In one such contest, two officers were racing to one hundred. However, they lost count, so they continued to one hundred and fifty. A short while later, the Nichi-nichi, a Tokyo newspaper, printed the story with pride. Highly respected Japanese doctors and scientists went to China to do scientific research on unwilling Chinese victims. In many cases, the subjects were American and Russian prisoners. Tests were done without anesthesia or pain killers. The Japanese placed people in pressure chambers to see how long it would take until their eyes popped out of the sockets. Lethal bacteria and other biological weapons were tested on people tied to stakes. Fetuses were cut from pregnant women and preserved in jars. The Japanese government also sponsored bombings of bubonic plague on villages to test germ warfare for later use on the United States.
The massacre at Bien Hoa was not an attack upon the United States.
They also buried people alive. Forget trying to get through to narses’’. He/she has their mind made up. The sub-text is “America guilty/Japan/innocent.’’
History is hindsight, pure and simple. Nothing we say here will ever change it.
Of course we are. We had no qualms about conquering the North American continent, Mexico, Cuba, the Philippines, or Hawaii. The reason we don't conquer the Saudis is because it's easier just to let them sell us the oil, not because of our superior national morality. (In fact, we threatened to "kick their ass and take their gas" as our own several times during the Cold War.)
Look, I'm as patriotic as anyone, but the idea that the United States government can do no wrong is not only stupid, it's nonsensical. Our nation is run by the heirs of Machiavelli, just as every other nation in the world is.
Oh grow up! You’re reaching here and it smacks of moral relativism.
Not at all. Narses is simply saying that we murdered a lot of innocent civilians in the course of winning World War II. And guess what: we did. An honest person will accept that fact of history and deal with it honestly.
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