The FReeper Foxhole Remembers Father P. Siemes and Hiroshima (8/6/1944)

In the meantime, it has become midnight. Since there are not enough of us to man both litters with four strong bearers we determine to remove Father Shiffer first to the outskirts of the city. From there, another group of bearers is to take over to Nagatsuki ; the others are to turn back in order to rescue the Father Superior. I am one of the bearers. A theology student goes to warn us of numerous wires, beams, and fragments of ruins which block the way and which are impossible to see in the dark. Despite all precautions, our progress is stumbling and our feet get tangled in the wire. Father Kruer falls and carries the litter with him. Father Schiffer becomes half unconscious from the fall and vomits. We pass and injured man who sits all alone among the hot ruins and whom I had not seen previously on the way down.

On the Misasa Bridge, we meet Father Tappe and Father Lubmer, who have come to meet us from Nagatsuki. They had dug a family out of the ruins of their collapsed house some fifty meters off the road. The Father of the family was already dead. The had dragged out two little girls and placed them by the side of the road. Their mother was still trapped under some beams. They had planned to complete the rescue and then press on to meet us. At the outskirts of the city, we put down the litter and leave two men to wait until those who are to come from Nagatsuki appear. The rest of us turn back to fetch the Father Superior. Most of the ruins have now burned down. The darkness kindly hides the many forms that lie on the ground. Only occasionally in our quick progress do we hear call for help. One of us remarks that the remarkable burned smell reminds us of incinerated corpses. The upright, squatting form which had passed by previously is still there. Transportation on the litter, which has been constructed out of beards, must be very painful to Father Superior, whose entire back is full of fragments of glass.

In a narrow passage at the edge of town, a car forces us to the edge of the road. The litter bearers on the left side fall into a two meter deep ditch which they could not see in the darkness. Father Superior hides his pain with a dry choke, but the litter which is now no longer in one piece cannot be carried further. We decide to wait until Brother Kinjo can bring a hand cart from Nagatsuki. He soon comes back with one that he has requisitioned from a collapsed house. We place Father Superior on the cart and wheel him the rest of the way, avoiding as much as possible the deeper pits in the road. About half past five in the morning, we finally arrive at the Novitiate. Our rescue expedition had taken almost twelve hours. Normally, one could go back and forth to the city in two hours. Our two wounded were now, for the first time, properly dressed. I get two hours sleep on the floor; someone else has taken my own bed. Then I read a Mass in gratiarum actienem; it is the 7th of August, the anniversary of the foundation of our Society. We then bestir ourselves to bring Father Kleinserge and other acquaintances out of the city.

We take off again with the hand cart. The bright day now reveals the frightful picture which last night's darkness had partly concealed. Where the city stood, everything as far as the eye could reach is a waste of ashes and ruin. Only several broken skeletons of buildings completely burned out in the interior remain. The banks of the river are covered with dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses. On the broad street in the Hakushima district, naked, burned, cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who still live. A few have crawled under the burnt-out autos and trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse. An old woman and a girl whom she is pulling along with her , fall down at our feet. We place them on our cart and wheel them to the hospital at whose entrance a dressing station has been set up. Here the wounded lie on the hard floor, row on row. Only the largest wounds are carefully dressed. We convey another soldier and an old woman to this place but we cannot move everybody who lies exposed in the sun. It would be endless and it is questionable whether those whom we can drag to the dressing station can come out alive, because even here nothing really effective can be done. Later, we ascertain that the wounded lay for days in the burnt-out hall-ways of the hospital and there they died. We must proceed to our goal in the park and are forced to leave the wounded to their fate.

We make our way to the place where our Church stood to dig up those few belongings that we buried yesterday. We find them intact. Everything else has been completely burned. In the ashes, we find a few molten remains of the holy vessels. At the park, we lead the housekeeper and a mother with her two children on the cart. Father Kleinserge feels strong enough, with the aid of Brother Nobuhara, to make his way home on foot. The way pack takes us once again past the dead and wounded in Hakushima. Again no rescue parties are in evidence. At the Misasa Bridge, there still lies the family which Father Tappe and Luhmer had yesterday rescued from the ruins. A piece of tin had been placed over them to shield them from the sun. We give them and those nearby, water to drink and decide to rescue them later. At three o'clock in the afternoon, we are back in Nagatsuki.

After we have had a few swallows and a little food, Father Stelte, Luhmer, Erlinghagen and myself, take off once again to bring in the family. Father Kleinserge requests that we also rescue two children who had lost their mother and who had lain near him in the park. On the way, we were greeted by strangers who had noted that we were on a mission of mercy and who were carrying the wounded about on litters. As we arrived at the Misasa Bridge, the family that had been there were gone. They might well have been borne away in the meantime. There was a group of soldiers at work taking away those that had been sacrificed yesterday. More than thirty hours had gone by until the first official rescue party had appeared on the scene. We find both children and take them out of the park: six year old girl who was uninjured and a twelve year old girl who had been burned about the head, hands, and legs, and who had lain for thirty hours without care in the park. The left side of her face and the left eye were completely covered with blood and pus, and we thought that she had lost an eye. When the wound was later washed, we noted that the eye was intact and that the lids had just become stuck together. On the way home we took another group of three refugees with us. The first wanted to know, however, of what nationality we were. They too, feared that we might be Americans who had parachuted in. When we arrived in Nagatsuki, it had just become dark.

We took under our care fifty refugees who had lost all their belongings. The majority of them were wounded and not a few had dangerous burns. Father Nekter treated the wound as well as he could with the few medicine that we could, with effort, gather up. He had to confine himself in general to cleaning the wound of purulent material. Even those with the smaller burns are very weak and all suffered from diarrhea. In the farm houses in the vicinity, almost everywhere there are also wounded. Father Nekter made daily rounds and noted in the capacity of a painstaking physician and was a great Samaritan. Our work was, in the eyes of the people, a greater boast for Christianity than all our efforts during the preceding long years. Three of the severely burned in our house died within the next few days. Suddenly the pulse and respirations ceased. It is certainly a sign of our good care that so few died. In the official aid stations and hospitals, a good third or half of those that had been brought in died. They lay about there almost without care, and very high percentage succumbed. Everything was lacking; doctors, assistants, dressings, drugs, etc. In an aid station at a school at a nearby village, a group of soldiers for several days did nothing except to bring in and cremate the dead being in the school.

During the next few days, funeral processions passed our house from morning to night, bringing the deceased to a small valley nearby. There, in six places, the dead were burned. People brought their own wood and themselves did the cremation. Father Dalrer and Father Yeures found a dead man in a nearby house who had already become bloated and who omitted a frightful odor. They brought him to this valley and incinerated him themselves. Even late at night, the little valley was lit up by the funeral pyres.

We made systematic efforts to track our acquaintances and the families of the refugees who we had sheltered. Frequently, after the passage of several weeks, someone was found in a distant village or hospital but of many there was no news. These were apparently dead. We were lucky to discover the mother of the two children whom we had found in the park and who had been given up for dead. After three weeks, she saw her children once again. In the great joy of the reunion were mingled the tears for those whom we shall not see again.

The magnitude of the disaster that befell Hiroshima on August 6th was only slowly pieced together in my mind. I lived through the catastrophes and saw it only in flashes, which only gradually were merged to give me a total picture.

What simultaneously happened in the city as a whole is as follows : As a result of the explosion of the bomb at 8:15, almost the entire city was destroyed by a single blow. Only small outlying districts in the southern and eastern parts of the town excaped complete destruction. The bomb exploded over the center of the city. As a result of the blast, all the small Japanese houses in a diameter of five kilometers, which encompassed 99% of the city, collapsed or were blown up. Those who were in the houses were buried in the ruins. Those who were in the open sustained burns resulting from contact with the substance or rays omitted by the bomb. Where the substance struck in quantity, fires sprung up. these spread rapidly. The heat which rose from the center created a whirlwind which was effective in spreading fire throughout the whole city. Those who had been cut off by the flames became casualties. As much as six kilometers from the center of the explosion, all houses were damaged and many collapsed and caught fire. Even fifteen kilometers away, windows were broken.

It was rumored that the enemy fliers had first spread an explosive and incendiary material over the city and then had created the explosion and ignition. A few maintained that they saw the planes drop a parachute which had carried something that had exploded at a height of 1,000 meters. The newspapers called the bomb an "atomic bomb" and noted that the force of the blast had resulted from the explosion of uranium atoms, and that gamma rays had been sent out as a result of this, but no one knew anything for certain concerning the nature of the bomb.

How many people were a sacrifice to this bomb? Those who had lived through the catastrophe placed the number of the deaths at least 100,000. Hiroshima had a population of 400,000. Official statistics place the number who had died at 70,000 up to September 1st, not counting the missing....and 130,000 wounded, among them 43,500 severely wounded. Estimates made by ourselves on the basis of groups known to us show that the number of 100,000 dead is not too high. Near us there are two barracks, in each of which forty Korean workers lived.

On the day of the explosion they were laboring on the streets of Hiroshima. Four returned alive to one barrack and sixteen to the other. 600 students of the Protestant girl's school worked in a factory, from which only thirty to forty returned. Most of the peasant families in the neighbourhood lost one or more of their members who had worked at factories in the city. Our next door neighbour, Tamare, lost two children and himself suffered a large wound since as it happened, he had been in the city on that day. The family of our reader suffered two dead, father and son; thus a family of five members suffered at least two losses, counting only the dead and severely wounded. There died the Mayor, the President of the Central Japan District, the Commander of the City, a Korean prince who had been stationed in Hiroshima in the capacity of an officer, and many other high-ranking officers. Of the professors of the University, thirty-two were killed or severely injured. Especially hard hit were the soldiers. The Pioneer Regiment was almost entirely wiped out. The barracks were near the center of the explosion.

Thousands of wounded who died later could doubtless have been rescued if the received proper treatment and care, but rescue work in a catastrophe of this magnitude had not been envisioned; since the whole city had been knocked out at a blow, everything which had been prepared for emergency work was lost, and no preparation had been made for rescue work in the outlying districts. Many of the wounded also died because they had been weakened by under nourishment and consequently the strength to recover. Those who had their normal strength and who received good care slowly healed the burns which had been associated by the bomb. There were also cases, however, whose prognosis seemed good who died suddenly. There were also some later, after an inflammation of the pharynx and oral cavity had taken place. We thought at first that this was the result of inhalation of the substance of the bomb. Later, a commission established the thesis that gamma rays had been given out at the time of the explosion, following which the internal organs had been injured in a manner resembling that consequent upon Roentgen irradiation. this produces a diminution in the number of the white corpuscles.

Only several cases are known to me personally where individuals who did not have external burns died later. Father Kleinserge and Father Sieslik, who were near the center of the explosion, but who did not suffer burns became quite weak some fourteen days after the explosion. Up to this time small incised wounds had healed normally, but thereafter the wounds which were still unhealed became worse and are to date (in September) still incompletely healed. The attending physician demonstrated a leucoponis. There thus seems to be some truth in the statement that radiation had some effect on the blood. I am of the opinion, however, that their generally undernourished and weakened condition was partly responsible for these findings. It was also noised about that the ruins of this city emitted deadly rays and that many workers who went there to aid in the clearing died, and that the central district would be uninhabitable for some time to come. I have my doubts as to whether such talk is true and myself and others who worked in the rained area for some hours shortly after the explosion suffered no such ill effects.

None of us in those days heard a single outburst against the Americans on the part of the Japanese, nor was there any evidence of a vengeful spirit. The Japanese suffered this terrible blow as part of the fortunes of war...something to be borne without complaint. During this war, I have noted relatively little hatred toward the Allies on the part of the people themselves, although the press has taken occasion to stir up such feelings.

After the victories at the beginning of the war, the enemy was rather looked down upon, but when the Allied Offensive gathered momentum and especially after the advent of the majestic B-29's the technical skill of America became an object of wonder and admiration. The following anecdote shows the spirit of the Japanese: A few days after the atomic bombing, the Secretary of the University came to us asserting that the Japanese were ready to destroy San Francisco be means of a equally effective bomb. It is dubious that he himself believed what he told us. He merely wanted to impress upon us foreigners that the Japanese were capable of similar discoveries. In his nationalistic pride, he talked himself into believing this. The Japanese also intimated that the principle of the new bomb was a Japanese discovery. It was only lack of raw materials, they said, which prevented its construction. In the meantime, the Germans were said to have carried the discovery to a further stage and were about to initiate such bombing. The Americans were reputed to have learned the secret from the Germans and they had then brought the bomb to a stage of industrial completion.

We have discussed among ourselves the ethics of the use of the bomb. Some consider it in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civil population. Others were of the view that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers and that the bomb itself was an effective for tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical to us that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever the good that might result ? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?

Additional Sources:

orwell.ru
www.jimcorley.com
www.pref.hiroshima.jp
www.bu.edu
www.english.uiuc.edu
svr1.marketrends.net
www.maxwell.af.mil
www.wpafb.af.mil
hiroshima.tomato.nu
www.theenolagay.com
www.huffmanworks.com

Wednesday's weird warship, USS Guam (CB-2)

Alaska class battlecruiser
Displacement. 27,000
Length. 806'6"
Beam. 91'1"
Draft. 27' 1"
Speed. 31 k.
Complement. 2,251
Armament. 9 12", 12 5", 56 40mm, 34 20mm, 4 aircraft

On May 31 1916 the age of the battlecruiser came to an inglorious end when three British battlecruisers were sunk during the Battle of Jutland. Or so we thought. 25 years after that battle, on February 02, 1942, the keel was laid on the world's last battlecruiser, USS Guam. Officially called a "large cruiser" by the US Navy, the USS Guam was designed to operate independently against enemy cruiser forces. However, just like her ancestors at Jutland, she often found herself in the battle line with the battleships. And like her ancestors, she was lightly armored, compared to the battleships, and any enemy battleship could have sent her to the bottom. By the time she entered service, the war at sea was winding down and she never got a chance to do the job for which she was designed. Instead of chasing enemy cruisers, she spent the war in the battle line, defending the fleet against air attacks and bombarding enemy positions ashore. This is the story of the last battlecruiser to be built.

The USS GUAM (CB-2) was launched 12 November 1943 by the New York Shipbuilding Corp., Camden, N.J.; sponsored by Mrs. George Johnson McMillan, wife of Captain McMillan, former governor of Guam; and commissioned 17 September 1944, Captain Leland P. Lovette in command.

After shakedown off Trinidad GUAM departed Philadelphia 17 January 1945 and joined the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor 8 February via the Canal Zone. Shortly thereafter GUAM was visited by Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. Clearing Pearl Harbor 3 March GUAM sailed into Ulithi 13 March where she joined forces with her sister ship ALASKA and other fleet units to form another of Admiral Marc Mitscher's famed task groups.

Sortie was made from Ulithi next day and Admiral A. W. Radford's Task Force 58, one of the most powerful task forces in naval history, proceeded to vicinity of Kyushu and Shikoku, arriving the morning of 18 March. In her group sailed some of the most gallant ships ever to go into harm's way: carriers YORKTOWN, INTREPID, INDEPENDENCE, and LANGLEY; battleships MISSOURI and WISCONSIN; cruisers ALASKA, ST. LOUIS, SAN DIEGO, FLINT; and 15 destroyers in the screen. GUAM's battle debut soon came. The fight began with five kamikaze attacks on the carriers. GUAM's guns were directed at the raiders. During this first battle, the carriers ENTERPRISE and INTREPID, both in GUAM's force, were damaged but continued to operate. ENTERPRISE took a bomb hit near her island structure; a suicide plane crashed INTREPID's flight deck aft and glanced off and plunged into the sea. Continued air attacks during the afternoon resulted in the destruction of four enemy planes by GUAM's group, one of which she splashed. The next afternoon GUAM was despatched to escort damaged FRANKLIN from the combat area. This lasted until 22 March.

After replenishing GUAM rejoined Task Group 58.4 and departed for combat area in vicinity of Okinawa Gunto, Japan. On the night of 27 to 28 March 1945 Admiral F. S. Low's Cruiser Division 16 in GUAM conducted bombardment of the airfield on Minami Daito. Then until 11 May GUAM supported carrier operations off the Nansei Shoto.

After repairs and replenishments at Ulithi GUAM again departed for the waters east of Okinawa, as a unit of Admiral Halsey's 3d Fleet, Task Group 38.4. Here she continued to support the carriers launching fighter sweeps over the Kyushu airfields. On 9 June GUAM, ALASKA, and five destroyers conducted a 90-minute bombardment of Okino Daito. Course was then set for Leyte Gulf, arriving San Pedro Bay 13 June after almost 3 months of continuous operations in support of the Okinawa campaign.

GUAM now got a new assignment as flagship of Cruiser Task Force 95, composed of large cruisers GUAM and ALASKA, four light cruisers, and nine destroyers. This force steamed into the East China and Yellow Seas between 16 July and 7 August 1945 on a shipping raid. Direct results were few, but the fact that a surface sweep of Japan's home waters could be made without harm proved that overwhelming dominance and mobility of American sea power. GUAM's group retired to Okinawa 7 August.

A few days later GUAM became the flagship of Rear Admiral Low's North China Force and circled the Yellow Sea parading American naval might before the major ports of Tsingtao, Port Arthur, and Darien. She then steamed into Jinsen, Korea, 8 September 1945 to guarantee occupation of that liberated country. GUAM departed Jinsen 14 November and reached San Francisco 3 December landing a contingent of Army troops for discharge. Clearing San Francisco 5 December 1945, GUAM arrived Bayonne, N.J., 17 December. She remained there and decommissioned 17 February 1947. GUAM berthed with the New York Group, Atlantic Reserve Fleet until 1 June 1960 when her name was struck from the Navy List. She was sold for scrapping 24 May 1961 to the Boston Metals Co., Baltimore, Md.

GUAM received two battle stars for World War II service.

While USS Guam was the last battlecruiser to be built, she was not the last battlecruiser to survive. That honor goes to the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz (ex German SMS Goeben), who was not scrapped until 1976.

Big Guns in action!

Thanks for today's look at Hiroshima from a participant on the ground.

For what it's worth, here is my two cents about the Father's take on it. First let me say, I can't imagine what a horrific event it must have been to witness, but we lost many thousands of our own throughout the war and I keep that in perspective.

'None of us in those days heard a single outburst against the Americans on the part of the Japanese, nor was there any evidence of a vengeful spirit' -- Father P. Siemes

Here he contradicts himself, remember he had said a sword had been drawn against them until they explained they were not Americans, but Germans.

The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever the good that might result ?

What he does here is leave us what amounts to two questions. I'll give my answers.

Yes to the first statement, no to the actual question. It seems to me the Father shows he neither understands evil or war or what is just in the 'big picture'.

IMHO, what was just about the bombing was that it saved many lives in the long run which was and is a just purpose.

To the second part, what was evil was the annihilation of innocent peoples by the enemy to begin with. Had the Father not known what was going on in Europe? We were not the aggressors or evil doers here.

Sometimes you have to take life to save life. Those human beings with standards of behavior based on a sense of right and wrong, the moral among us on this earth, have shown time and time again, we are the ones willing to give up our lives so that others may live.

If we must take the life of some to save the lives of many we pray that Providence is on our side and we go with God.

< /rant>

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