When the Sun Turned Black

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.

Wow! Look at all of these "Christians" weighing-in with their suppositions that the A-bombs were a good thing, and saved many lives!

To begin with, it is never correct for a Christian to let the ends justify the means, when the means are themselves morally objectionable. Killing innocent civilians as a directly intended result of an action in wartime is always morally wrong. It is murder. Just as the actions that took place at the WTC on 9-11 were acts of mass-murder of innocents, just as the German bombing of Poland and Russia and the London Blitz were acts of mass-murder, just as our own Allied bombings of virtually every major German and Japanese city were later on. All of these were "terror bombings" of civilian populations. All of the various armed forces engaging in them admitted as much, including Allied commanders. "Bomber" Harris of the RAF made no secret that he thought these were terror bombings, and he was far from alone.

Indeed, we put Germans and Japanese on trial after the war for bombing, shooting, gassing civilian populations everywhere they could outside of their own turf. We hanged such people. And rightly so. I do not deny the fact that Germans and Japanese started these deliberate attacks on civilian population centers. But, from a Christian POV, how does that justify our doing the exact same thing - with regard to bombing and shooting civilians anyway - on a hugely increased scale later on? We lost any and all moral superiority by the end of the war when it comes to the topic of bombing and other destruction of population centers. The only real moral high-ground we might have retained is that, especially in Germany, we did not engage in premeditated genocide like they did.

As for the A-bombs themselves, they are just an order of magnitude worse than what we were doing anyway, long since, with carpet-bombing runs of thousands of B-17s and B-29s at a time. But to drop them as we did, under the background circumstances, was absolutely reprehensible. Many people claim that there would have been 500,000 to a million American casualties. This is nothing more than contemporary propaganda. There are other documents at play showing that the US would be facing something closer to 50,000 casualties, at a maximum. And that is assuming the worst politically: that the Japanese would really have the will to fight on. But they were done!

They had nothing left to fight with in any conventional military sense. They had virtually no navy at all by this point. Leyte Gulf pretty much finished that. They had no Air Force either, outside of the Kamikazis. They could have been blockaded until the population forced the government to surrender. But even that was not necessary.

For months, the Japanese government had been trying to make surrender overtures to the Allied forces, and they were stonewalled. Unconditional surrender had already been declared as a goal, and there would be no conditions entertained. Not that the Japanese had very many. Mostly, they just wanted to keep the emperor on his throne. We said no, that we would guarantee nothing like that, and might put him on trial along with the generals. Ironically, of course, he wound-up staying anyway, due mostly to General McArthur employing some basic understanding of human nature, and seeing the utility of keeping Hirohito alive to smooth the occupation of Japan.

The Japanese were willing to surrender, with minimal terms. We stalled them all through June and July 1945, because, well, by God, we were building the damned bombs, and we were going to use them! We missed an opportunity in Germany, since the war was over there. Besides, it would be a lot easier to drop those bombs on Japan anyway, since there were racial considerations that would be less "objectionable" doing it to them. Once the Trinity test (ironically named!) took place successfully near Alamagordo, NM in late July 1945, nothing the Japanese might do to surrender would be honored. We had to end the war with those bomb drops.

And we sure did! This great Christian Nation, armed with the "rightness of our cause," dropped not one but two bombs, both of them on militarily meaningless targets, with the full understanding that the overwhelming majority of the people to be killed were women, children and men too old to be in the army, or already wounded in previous military action. Nagasaki, ironically, was the city in Japan with by far the highest concentration of Christians, and Hiroshima had a relatively large contingent as well. Not that that should matter, since the real issue is deaths of innocent civilians, period, but it is interesting that that is how things turned out.

Now, if you've read this far, you're probably grinding your teeth at me! Look, I am no pacifist. I believe countries have a right to defend themselves from unjust attack. Our country was certainly attacked first, and without warning. But consider again the fact that Japan was trying to surrender. It was all but over, if we wanted to take negotiations seriously. The firebombings of many Japanese cities, as well as the two atomic bombs, of course, were totally unnecessary - by any standard, not just a Christian one - anytime after June 1945 (a case could be made for April).

And here's the proof: virtually every American commander, either contemporaneously or just a few years later, admitted as much! The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were militarily not justified. Here are some quotes from this ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html ) website (there are plenty others like it, for those who want to research the matter, but this one is concise and has some good quotes from our own commanders):

American leaders who were in a position to know the facts did not believe, either at the time or later, that the atomic bombings were needed to end the war.

When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, General Dwight Eisenhower was deeply troubled. He disclosed his strong reservations about using the new weapon in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):

During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face."

"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.

Shortly after "V-J Day," the end of the Pacific war, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers summed up in a memo for General MacArthur: "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either these events took place."

Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:

It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan ... The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

If the United States had been willing to wait, said Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, "the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials."

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use. "Japan was essentially defeated," he said, and "it would be wrong to attack its cities with atomic bombs as if atomic bombs were simply another military weapon." In a 1960 magazine article, Szilard wrote: "If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them."

End of quoted passage. I don't think there is any doubt that the A-bombs on Japan were military overkill and as much an "object lesson" warning to the Soviet Union as anything else. It is impossible to justify them from a Christian POV under any circumstances, but, as it is, there were no circumstances that could even sort of legitimize these actions. Had the Germans of Japanese done the same thing to us, and we prevailed to win the war anyway, there is no doubt whatsoever that the use of atomic weapons would have been defined as a war crime, and the advocates and implementors of such atrocities would have been executed for those kinds of bombings alone, never mind whatever else they may have done.

World War Two has been over for nearly 65 years. We need to begin to cut through all of the propaganda and misdirection of the public that took place then, and view things with the objective lens of history-from-a- distance. Simply swallowing justifications based on highly inflated casualty figures just won't do anymore. All of us conservatives have no qualms admitting that our own government today is not exactly attuned to telling us the straight dope when it is not in their interest, no? Things were no different then. We dropped the bombs on Japan because we were bound and determined to do so. Ninety percent or more of the casualties were women, children and old men. Christians! How do you really think Jesus would view this sort of civilian massacre, especially when the country on the receiving end was trying to surrender for some time back? What would be your sense of vengeance, and upon what moral justification would your rage be based, if we were on the receiving end of such an attack ourselves? Fight back? Sure. Attempting to destroy the military that attacked you unjustly is legitimate. But deliberately killing millions of the enemy's civilian population simply as an act of retribution? A tit-for-tat sort of thing? I'd rather not explain myself for that with God, thanks!

This country went to war in 1941 against two war-mongering counties, one of which had directly attacked us. We were in our rights to "respond." But, by the end of the war, we were doing just as many - and more! - war crimes as they ever did. We just happened to win, so you never saw any of our guys in the docket at war crimes tribunals. The whole world should have been ashamed by 1945. The doe-eyed innocence we allegedly had as a country into the early sixties was, in reality, long-gone. We fooled ourselves for years. I personally fooled myself about this for years. Maybe it's time to wake up.

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