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| Sunday, 25 August 2002 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Ground Zero: Hiroshima 1945, Manhattan 2001 by Steve Benson (This article was published in 'The Arizona Republic' newspaper, USA, August 04, 2002.) Americans, joined by others around the world, will soon solemnly mark the first anniversary of one of the most vicious terrorist attacks in history. On Sept. 11, 2001, a handful of fanatical killers, commandeering four airplanes, rained terror from our skies, smashing into our buildings, disemboweling our society, and indiscriminately slaughtering more than 3,000 innocent people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. The individuals responsible for this ghastly criminal act were members of the organization known as al-Qaida. In the name of their peoples and their God, they exacted "righteous" revenge on Americans for what they saw as our long record of inhumanity against the inhabitants of their lands. This week, Americans, joined by fellow inhabitants of the globe, will pause to silently remember other deliberate and horrendous terror attacks that occurred 57 years ago this week. On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, two small crews of fiercely dedicated, highly skilled executioners, piloting two planes, delivered mass death from high above the ground to more than 200,000 innocent civilian men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including 23 American aviators being held as prisoners of war in downtown Hiroshima. The soldiers in this "holy" cause were members of an organization known as the United States Air Force. In the name of the God and country whom they, too, had sworn to serve, these men carried out acts of wanton destruction against a people who were targeted for a special brand of hellfire because of Japan's hideous inhumanities against our fighting forces. Perspective Putting America's atomic atrocities in historical perspective, Gordon Prather, a former nuclear weapons physicist at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and New Mexico's Sandia National Laboratory, offers justifiers of genocide a basic course in how to win wars and incinerate people: "You may suppose that last September the world saw the worst-ever act of terror. Wrong! . . . We dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima - also not a military target - in order to terrorize millions of Japanese. " Exactly. Hearing that Japanese cities had been nuked, war-weary Americans couldn't have been happier. Leading a war of hate and revenge unrivaled in the annals of the American killing machine (against an admittedly brutal Asian foe who was much more easy to despise than the Germans because he looked different from "us") was President Harry S. Truman. In a letter to his wife-to-be, Truman confessed that he did, in fact, "hate Chinese and Japs . . . It is race prejudice I guess," he wrote. "But I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America." The passing of time didn't seem to soften Truman's heart. Dropping a 7,200-degree Fahrenheit uranium bomb on a non-military target was, after all, proper payback to those "Jap savages," as Truman called them, for what their military had done to our military on Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbour. Nothing could contain Truman's joy when, receiving word of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima, he gleefully exclaimed, "This is the greatest thing in history!" But not everyone agreed. Murray Kempton, a young American infantryman stationed in the Philippines preparing for the scheduled final assault on the Japanese home islands, remembers recoiling in horror at the news: "Children died in Hiroshima, and America did it. . . . We cannot deny the distinction between killing a solder in the field and bombing a baby in the crib and not forfeit most of our claims for differentiating men from jungle beasts." Firestorm Meanwhile, back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Japanese versions of New York City's Ground Zero, only much bigger - the atomic cauldron bubbled and churned. There, just like in lower Manhattan, it was not easy picking up the pieces when there were so few pieces to pick up. Almost five square miles of Hiroshima had literally been erased, more than 90 percent of its structures either smashed or damaged by the blast and subsequent firestorm that had been carried to it in the arms of the cheerfully named "Little Boy" bomb. In Nagasaki, much the same sickening story. Nearly two square miles in the heart of the city flattened; 12,000 buildings destroyed or damaged. All by Little Boy's fiendish fraternal twin, "Fat Man." Then there were the people - or what was left of them: incinerated, liquefied, vaporized. Kind of like the 3,056 victims of Sept. 11. And what did we call this strategy of terror? Ironically enough, the Manhattan Project! Manhattan: where terrorists struck us 57 years later. For several months, back in the 1970s, I lived and worked in Hiroshima. I stood at the hypocenter of Hiroshima's blast zone, in its downtown Peace Park. The spot is marked by an "Atomic Clock" that rises into the sky on girders of twisted steel, sounding its wailing warning every morning precisely at 8:15: Zero Hour. One of my language teachers, Kajiyama Sensei, was a 6-year-old boy sitting in a Hiroshima schoolroom that bright August day. He told of seeing "a great, huge light" and hearing "a tremendous explosion." His school building collapsed but he managed to escape - only to rush home to find he no longer had a home, or a mother and older brother. In Peace Park, I passed by the mass grave of unknown thousands of civilians - full of mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters - their ashes buried beneath a soft, grassy mound. On my return stateside, I visited the USS Arizona, its white sepulchre resting atop a pitted, rusting hull that juts out of the gray water of Pearl Harbor, serving as the final resting place for 2,000 American sailors who died in that treacherous attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Military targets Since 9-11, many have turned our national sentiment toward comparing the al-Qaida bombings of lower Manhattan to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. However, Pearl Harbor was a military target during wartime. Instead, we should be comparing the al-Qaida bombing of New York and D.C. with the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both of which were cruel annihilation of innocent civilians. From a strictly military vantage point, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific during World War 2, General Douglas MacArthur, felt that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "completely unnecessary." MacArthur wasn't the only high-ranking officer who, during the course of the war, felt that use of the atomic bomb against Japan was wrong - militarily, morally, or both. The supreme Allied commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1945 shared his "grave misgivings" about "that awful thing" he called the atomic bomb with Secretary of War Henry Stimson. He told Stimson "Japan was already defeated," and "seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face,' " that "dropping the atomic bomb was "completely unnecessary," and that "our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was . . . no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives." Admiral William "Bull" Halsey publicly said in 1946: "The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. Why reveal a weapon like that to the world when it wasn't necessary?" Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry H. Arnold, spoke out in his memoirs: "It always appeared to us [meaning himself and other top Air Force brass] that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, also expressed his revulsion: "It is my opinion," he wrote in his memoirs, "that the use of this 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. . . .My own feeling was that in being the first to use it we have adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages." Then, in 1946, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey issued a final report that went directly to the point: "Based upon a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." Alternatives So why did Truman decide to go ahead and drop the bombs anyway, especially when the following was already known? Firstly, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki, as Truman well knew, were, at that late stage of the war, significant military bases or production hubs. Pure and simple, they both were densely populated cities that had been temporarily spared - so that they could serve as psychologically shocking showcases for the destructive power of American atomic weaponry. Secondly, the Japanese, as MacArthur wrote Herbert Hoover in 1959, "were beaten and seeking peace long before the bombs were dropped." As early as the fall and winter of 1944, a hopelessly situated Japan was sending out peace feelers through various channels, including to the Swedes, Chinese, Russians and even the Vatican. In January 1945, it proposed surrender terms, relayed through Gen. MacArthur to the Roosevelt White House, which turned out to be virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by both sides on the deck of the USS Missouri on Aug. 15, 1945. Thirdly, an invasion of Japan was not necessary to force its capitulation through a costly land assault. Three out of the four Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined by many other military leaders, and prior to the dropping of the A-bombs, had concluded that Japan was vanquished and, thus, an invasion was not required. J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, wrote in the journal Diplomatic History: "The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short period of time. .......It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it." Those alternatives included a negotiated conditional peace settlement with Japan, allowing for retention of its emperor; staging a warning demonstration of the bomb before deploying it in combat (an option strongly favored by several Manhattan Project scientists who had worked on the bomb); or, as Leahy and others suggested, waiting for Japan to yield under the crushing pressure of air and naval bombardment. Fourthly, the dropping of the atomic bombs did not appreciably save American lives. To the contrary, the actual estimates of U.S. casualties in a variety of invasion scenarios were presented to Truman at a June 1945 meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a report prepared by the Joint War Plans Committee. Figures that the Joint Chiefs regarded as reliable fell at least 454,000 casualties short of the 500,000 that Truman himself had estimated. Motives In the end, then, despite all the good reasons not to drop the atomic bomb, Truman, the "little man in the White House," as he had been referred to - who was always afraid, even in adulthood, of being known as the "sissy" he had been called growing up - went ahead with the decision to melt 200,000 noncombatants. Why? The answers are as varied as the kaleidoscope of colors produced by a nuclear explosion. According to columnist Philip Nobile, the explanation was as transparent as it was criminal: "Despite the advice . . . to change the surrender terms and warn the Japanese about the bomb and/or demonstrate it first, [Truman] simply wanted to nuke the Japanese, and fast. Truman's motives were money and the Soviets. The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion, and he desired to impress the rapacious Stalin with a show of American might and end the war before he invaded Japan." Others, like attorney and author Kenneth Glazier, claim that Truman (quoting the president's own words), "regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used." The legacy of the Bomb is not that it "brought the boys home," but that it might bring the end for all of us. In our day when George W. Bush, in the morally corrupted post-Hiroshima world of nuclear terror, speaks chillingly of developing a so-called "pre-emptive" first-strike strategy using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against perceived enemies, it behoves the rational and compassionate to remember that whether or not the A-bomb ended World War II, it ushered in an era of American military domination, megadeath and global revenge. In the face of such unilateral U.S. power, the only strategy of our "adversaries" is to turn it back against itself. Thus, the terrorist bombings of Sept. 11 may be a sign that the Manhattan Project has come home to roost. [Steve Benson is The Republic's political cartoonist.] |
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