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 
What dance do you do when you hear an american soldier died?
Narses thinks all american soldiers should die so it (Narses is an it not a human) would be a mass shooting of all our soldiers.
Only a worthless brainless piece of crap who’d rape a child would call the atomic bombing terrorism.
WHy would it have been better for hundreds of thousands more to die in a ground invasion?
Nothing worse than an atheist using God.
> Biblical history says otherwise.
Christ doesn’t.
You should tremble before Gozer the gozerain. He will come in one of the prechose forms. During the rectification of the Vuldranii, he came as a large and moving torb. Then, during the third reconciliation of the Mekertix supplicant, they chose a new form—that of a giant Sloar! Many shubbs and zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.
> Actually the correct interpetation is thou shalt not murder...
The correct interpretation is “Thou shalt not kill.” People, for their own purposes, have tried to insert wiggle-room into God’s clear intention.
> Also ecc. states “a time for war”.
Solomon is supposed to have written Ecclesiastes. He is probably right: there is a time for war. That doesn’t mean that God sanctions it or approves of it. He clearly doesn’t.
> I am for a defense of anything which is dear to me...family, home Nation, peoples I love. And if that means I kill someone in the process then so be it. Safety for me and mine will always come first. The USA is my country.
That is all very well, and I happen to share some of those sentiments, but they are entirely irrelevant to this discussion.
> Nothing worse than an atheist using God.
Nothing more dam’ned, either. By definition, atheists can’t seek forgiveness because they don’t believe in God.
That is why Atheism is the “Unforgiveable Sin” and the “Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” that Christ talks about.
What is the original Hebrew word used in that phrase?
Thank you. And how is that word used in the Bible?
Is the original Hebrew word ever used in reference to the slaying of animals, or the taking of life in war?
Nah, just anyone literate enough to read the dictionary.
ter⋅ror⋅ism
/ˈtɛrəˌrɪz
Show Spelled Pronunciation [ter-uh-riz-uh
–noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
Definition 1 fits fairly well: The bombs were violent, threatening, and intimidating and ultimately effective in coercing the desired political result. However, one could argue that the definition should be amended to specify that the violence should be upon noncombatants, in order to distinguish terrorism from ordinary military combat.
This thread has strayed into some unpredictable and esoteric areas. I am not equipped to argue theology, or military history, with most of you. However, I wonder how many of you actually lived through WWII and the aftermath? The following outline some of my experiences:
How many of you actually knew survivors of the Bataan Death march? How many of you actually went to school with Japanese children who returned from the re-location camps? How many of you learned at an early age the difference between Japanese and Chinese surnames in order to identify your classmates (and then became confused when the Koreans moved in)? How many of you sent packages to orphans and refugees in Europe through the many agencies set up to help after Hitler fell? How many of you were ever taught in school by a surviving POW? How many of you remember the rationing and privations that the American people gladly endured at home — restrictions on the purchase of butter, meat, rubber, metals, sugar, flour?
I consider living through such experiences ALMOST first hand knowledge — not tainted by the personal biases of historians.
Allow me to add that the Manhatten Project was not a small group of scientists working in one secret location, as the movies lead us to imagine. There was a large network of people working on different aspects in many locations — often not aware what the others were doing. Members ranged from highly educated scientists — even captured Germans — to skilled craftsmen whose formal education had ceased in 8th grade. From my reading and from knowing some of those people personally, I do not believe that many of them knew the full effects of the A Bomb in advance. If so, they would have protected themselves from the radiation. Do you know that most of the pioneers of the modern nuclear field died of leukemia?
Those who say that women and children were specifically targeted in Japan and Europe, instead of industrial targets, are ignoring the fact that targets were everywhere, just as they were here. I personally have known people who machined military airplane parts in their basements in Detroit during WWII and supplied them to the government during the war. Are you telling me that this did not happen overseas too?
How about my grandmother in CA whose entire dairy production was taken over by the military? It wasn’t her choice. Would she be considered a military target because her milk and cream was feeding our soldiers?
This day, I honor 2 uncles (Annapolis grads) who were lost in WWII, another uncle who survived Pearl Harbor as a young recruit, an uncle who served as a medic, an uncle (too old to serve) but whose business manufactured airplanes and was taken over by the govt., and every other male in the family who aided the war effort in whatever way. And then there were my aunt and uncle who, through the auspices of the US Army, moved their young children to Japan for several years after the Japanese surrender to restablish a school system for a particular town during the Occupation.
I guarantee that none of these folks deliberately targeted civilians and children. They were supporting our troops and our country.
I should have added to the above, how many of you were herded into your badroom (away from the ears of your grandmother who had 2 sons serving) to hear your parents discuss in hushed tones the capture of a Japanese sub off the coast of Oregan and the recovery of dud bombs in the hills of San Diego?
And I haven’t even mentioned the periodic Air Raid warnings when we had to draw the black out curtains and sit in darkness and silence until the all clear warnings were sounded.
Point: we lived with terror at home in the good old USA too.
This thread has strayed into some unpredictable and esoteric areas.
Most, if not all who read the article neglected to read it all the way through where it states:
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.
Thank you for your excellent post and ping!
I did read that. My comments were directed mostly to those who seemed to imply that most Americans (if not all) were war-mongering sadists who delighted in the suffering of women and children. I read the whole thread, but I thought that it diverged from reality. The theology of a just war are better discussed with one’s confessor, or minister. I thought that I’d profile some of the people that I have personally known.
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