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 
All you said is true, but, in the OLD TEST, many times GOD Commanded Israel with Israel’s army to go out and wipe out it’s enemies, and sometimes God commanded Israel to kill every man, woman and child....
The debate on this thread seems to have drifted into the area of religion. Now I don’t know what denomination these are that take the position against the bombing that ended WW2 in Japan (both nuclear and the firebombing), but I venture a wild guess by saying they are Roman Catholic - or perhaps some sort of eastern religion. These are the same religious types that vote predominately Democrat. Bleeding heart liberals, and anti-war cowards.
The position they take sounds more in keeping with DU than FR.
We also let it “slip out” that we had more A-Bombs ready to go. We did not of course, but the Japanese had to think about that one.
I am astonished to find any argument on FR which is in apparent agreement with Chris Matthews that West Point and the American military is the ‘Enemy Camp’.
The World War 2 generation understood what was necessary to win. Our generation refuses to face the fact that victory often involves having to do some very ugly things.
The end result of being unwilling to do whatever is necessary to win, is you become subjugated by whoever IS willing to do whatever it takes. A doctrine prohibiting injury of civilians results in the enemy using human shields and keeping their arms caches in school basements.
I choose not to be concerned with discussions of general morality. My objective is to achieve liberty for my family, friends, and our children, by whatever means necessary. I will advocate that the best path to victory is the one which minimizes loss of life WHILE STILL ACHIEVING VICTORY.
If the only way to have my own be safe from enslavement, is the total extermination of the other side, then I will not hesitate. The other side's leadership has the option of avoiding the deaths by leaving us alone, and thus I assign all responsibility for the necessary deaths to the aggressor.
One additional benefit of dropping the Bomb was that it unambiguously informed Stalin that we had the means to stop him from taking over Western Europe, and would not hesitate to use it.
I have been reading through this thread and have seen enough. With all due respect, dear narses, you are using the liberal line of “the children” to gain sympathy for your argument, and that is wrong.
My father, too, was set to be a part of the invasion of Japan. His unit was in battle against the Japanese on the island of Luzon for 99 days. He saw the atrocities of the Japanese against the Filipinos - and to our soldiers.
I attended a reunion of some of the members of dad’s battalion after his death. They told me that, when they were preparing for the invasion of Japan, they all had to make out wills. The casualty rate was expected to be up to 90 percent. They said, when they went into Japan during the occupation, that every home was armed - even down to sharpened sticks. Every man, woman and child was expected to fight. The loss of life would have been massive on both sides.
I stop short of calling the dropping of those bombs ‘humane’, but it certainly saved more lives than what were lost in those two cities. Also, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial centers for the Japanese war machine. What happened there was a horrible thing, but it was necessary. It was a brutal measure that needed to be taken for the sake of both sides. It brought the war to a swift end, saving lives of many more of “the children” than were, unfortunately, killed with the dropping of the bombs.
When I see the pictures of those who were directly affected by the bombing of those cities, my heart breaks. But I think of the events that lead up to it, and what started it in the first place. The Emperor of Japan brought judgment down upon his people - not us.
I know I won’t change your mind, narses. But those of us whose fathers were there are here today because of the actions taken to end the war.
Apparently, you did not read the article through in its entirety. Quote:
A Song for Nagasaki tells the moving story of this extraordinary man, beginning with his boyhood and the heroic tales and stoic virtues of his family's Shinto religion. It reveals the inspiring story of Nagai's remarkable spiritual journey from Shintoism to atheism to Catholicism.
That was the purpose of the article ... no socialist agenda is involved.
Also, thy do not mention the Chinese children that were killed by Japanses bombs bullets, and bayonetts. They forget about the Philippine children killed by Japan bombs.And never will you hear them mention the bombing of Manila after Mc Arthur removed the anti-aircraft guns and declared itan open city. Lastly, what the Batan Death March?
They also do not say anythig about the Germans bombing Warsaw in Poland, Rodderdam in Holland, London in England, Conventry in England.
As I said before, they sound like the kid that murdered both parents and then threw himdelf on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
The other side never does anything wrong, according to yjem. It is always us. Over here, there are always too many people ready to jump on their bandwagon.
The early Christians were able to be pacifistic only as long as they lived under the protection of the Roman Peace. Yes, those to openly threatened the social order were thrown to the lions (literally), but if you kept your beliefs fairly quiet and stayed out in the boonies where you were less likely to be officially noticed, you could live out your life in peace and relative freedom.
Once the Empire collapsed, Christians who wanted to survive had to give up pacifism, or at least give some support and respect to the knights who protected them from barbarian raiders, and provided them with enough security that they could live, work, and raise their families without having their harvests plundered and their women and girls raped and abducted.
Forget trying to get through to narses’’. He/she has their mind made up. The sub-text is “America guilty/Japan/innocent.’’A falsehood. Ill-mannered and untrue. The minimum courtesy on THIS site is to ping those you talk about. I suppose I should be grateful the profanity you used in your private messages is absent here but the ugly lies you tell about others is just as obscene.
Oh get over yourself. When you rhetorically poke people in the eye as you do with your moral relativism, expect a broad side.
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
I agree. A criminal and immoral one.
cynwoody says: "It has its uses in a just war."
Obnoxious and false. Principles of the Just War
A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4).
Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.
The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.
The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
The end result of being unwilling to do whatever is necessary to win, is you become subjugated by whoever IS willing to do whatever it takes.So you endorse terrorism? Deliberate killing of civilians?
All soldiers going into combat have to prepare wills, at least they did in WWII. Many choices other than deliberate targeting of civilians were possible. The US chose terror as a weapon. It was an immoral choice. Your father could have been ‘saved’ by choosing demonstration targets that destroyed military installations, instead we burned alive and poisoned civilians. I am glad our fathers and grandfathers who survived came home. That doesn’t stop me from recognizing a great moral crime for what it was.
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