queerbychoice | Some Quotes About August 6th

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Some Quotes About August 6th

I do not know how to describe that light. I wondered if a fire had been set in my eyes. I don't remember which came first - the flash of light or the sound of an explosion that roared down to my belly. Anyhow, the next moment I was knocked down flat on the ground. Immediately things started falling down around my head and shoulders. I couldn't see anything; it seemed pitch dark. I managed to crawl out of the debris.

Soon I noticed that the air smelled terrible. Then I was shocked by the feeling that the skin of my face had come off. Then, the hands and arms too. Starting from the elbow to my fingertips, all the skin of my right hand came off and hung down grotesquely. The skin of my left hand, all my five fingers, also came off. What happened to the sky that had been such a clear blue one only a moment ago? It was now dark, like dusk. I ran like mad toward to bridge, jumping over the piles of debris.

What I saw under the bridge was shocking. Hundreds of people were squirming in the stream. I could not tell if they were men or women. They looked all alike. Their faces were swollen and grey, their hair was standing up. Holding their hands high, groaning people were rushing to the river. I felt the same urge because the pain was all over my body which had been exposed to a heat ray strong enough to burn my pants to pieces. I was about to jump into the river only to remember that I could not swim.
          —Futaba Kitayama, who was 1.7 kilometers from the center of the explosion, and 33 years old at the time

Her mother trapped under their collapsed house, a young girl was sobbing violently. She yelled to her neighbors, "Save my mother." Three men could not have budged that beam. Flames were moving in quickly. There was no way to save her. I joined my hands in prayer. "Please forgive me," I said, and left.
          —Akira Onogi, "A-bomb victims' drawings," Hiroshima Speaks Out!

He managed to leave the hospital after 3 years and 7 months.
          —"Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Japan Congress Against A- and H-Bombs

President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used [the bomb] primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.
          —"The Myths of Hiroshima," The Los Angeles Times (emphasis added)

[A] Gallup Poll of 1,010 [American] adults released this week . . . showed that 57 per cent approved of the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while 38 per cent said they disapproved. Gallup said the new poll numbers changed only slightly from 1995, when 59 per cent said they approved and 38 per cent voiced disapproval.
          —"60 Years On, Americans Support Bombing," news.com.au

The American majority polled by Gallup is obviously the same American majority that eagerly supported Bush's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that still doesn't appear at all ready to admit that there was or is anything wrong with blowing up the entire nation of Afghanistan for the sake of trying to get some Al Qaeda members along with the civilians, although denying that Iraq was and is a mistake seems to be getting rather harder for them these days, only because - shock! - Americans are dying instead of only Iraqis.

I see that a different new public opinion poll has just found that a minuscule, hair-thin majority of Americans are just now, for the very first time, no longer finding their skulls quite thick enough to prevent them from becoming dimly aware that - SHOCK! - President Bush isn't an entirely honest person. Um. If they're only just now noticing that, I have to conclude that this is entirely the wrong lesson for them to be learning. What they really need to be learning is that they themselves have about the same amount of honesty left in their own bodies as the amount of life left nowadays in the dry, cold skeletons of the people who died instantly on August 6, 1945. Because, uh, if it's taken you this long to figure out that President Bush isn't honest . . . well, there just isn't enough sheer stupidity in the whole world to explain away that level of delusion without some willful self-deception involved.

And by the way? President Truman wasn't honest either. Maybe in another 60 years, a minuscule, hair-thin majority of Americans will get around to becoming dimly aware of that, too.

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I'm not so sure you properly interpret the various poll respondents. I know 'people are smarter than you think' is a difficult position to defend, but what the hell.

Hiroshima was terrible. Sarah just came back from spending weeks there. But those descriptions could all fit a lot of other terrible things that happened. People die in the most horrible situations, all over the world, and you don't even need to leave World War II to find them.

The atomic bomb was a horrible thing. But war is a horrible thing, and was more so in 1940's. The atomic bomb just brought it home. We think Vietnam was so much grittier and more frightening than other ground wars, but that's just because we didn't have TV cameras in Stalingrad and on the beaches at Normandy.

I have a lot of strongly conservative Republican friends with whom I've spent a long time talking, and they are not stupid people. They are working off a slightly different subset of the facts from you, and they take a strikingly different set of attitudes toward things. But it's easy to ignore all that and just decide the reason they don't see thins your way is that they're terribly flawed people and you're not.

If I'd been in that poll, I would've been one of that 57%. I'm doing my best to understand everything and make the best decisions. You disagree with me, and I probably have something to learn from you.

Maybe calling me stupid isn't helping the process, you know?

Thanks for sharing this. That first quote was deeply and profounding affecting. Oh my god.

And I only just looked at the pictures (which Sarah says she saw the originals of). oh my god.

And I can't help but think, this happened with every carpet bombing, and still does. We have no idea.

It's a tough call. I think that, in the back of my mind, I always knew (duh) that atomic bombs were Very Very Bad. But I think that I would have agreed with the 57 or 58 percent and say that the use of the A-bomb in WWII was a necessary evil. Until I read the first quote in this post. Call me pathetically, Pollyanna-ishly pacificistic (and unrealistic) if you wish, but I can't stomach the thought of ordering or allowing something that horrendous to happen to multitudes of human beings. Americans are so narrow-sighted. The A bomb makes Sept. 11 look like a day in the park, and yet we talk about that day as if we suffered like no other country has ever suffered.

What I mean is: I do see that war is something that cannot ALWAYS be avoided and that there are sometimes Very Good Reasons why a nation would want to go to war. Sometimes, a leader or a country may think that the good consequences of military action outweighs the bad. That all being said, I still think it's wrong in EVERY circumstance to kill and maim other human beings.

I was brought up Quaker, and Quakerism teaches total, unconditional pacifism. So I can 100% understand that last sentiment.

Sometimes the world just doesn't cooperate. Do you think we should have fought Japan at all? Or Germany? There are similar stories to be found anywhere we went to war. We bombed so many German cities to the ground.

Had we not stopped the Nazis, would we have the blood of another six million Jews on our hands? No, It's true that the blood falls squarely on the hands of the people pulling the levers and running the train cars in the camps. But we cannot ignore the choice we faced and that there would be consequences to whatever we decided.

It was among the greatest horros of war. But I just don't know if it was the wrong thing to do. If not in Hiroshima, then in all the other places we bombed cities to stop a greater evil. It's a difficult and terrible choice, one that never has a good answer, but sometimes one of them is a little better. And sometimes that's all you have.

I'm of pretty mixed feelings about this. On one hand, when I worked in Japan, I met lots of people who had either known someone, or known someone who knew someone who'd experienced Hiroshima.[*] So these accounts are nothing new to me. The suffering was horrible, horrible.

On the other hand, my parents and my relatives grew up in Hong Kong. And they recounted to me the terrors of Japanese carpet bombings, the hiding in the basements. My dad still says he has vivid memories of his older brother running him piggyback away from the site of one of the bombings. That, too, was horrible, horrible---not in a quick instant way, but a gruesomely slow way, wearing you down day by day. The stopping of them was a relief.

Was the atomic bomb necessary to stop the Japanese? It's definitely a matter of debate. My point is simply that sympathies---especially in war---are complicated. So many victims on all sides.

[*] These Japanese, I should point out, while regarding Hiroshima as a terrible terrible thing to have happened, did not universally denounce the United States. Many of the Japanese ("liberals", to be sure, since I'd worked at an environmental think tank) I'd met seemed like they wanted to repent for Japan's actions in World War II. So some seemed to regard Hiroshima as kinda somewhat sorta understandable.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible things. The fact remains that these cities weren't bombed for a whim in peacetime, but instead after the end of a very long and bloody war launched by Japan with little regard for civilian life outside of the Japanese ethnos. (You raise me some bomb victims, I'll raise you some Unit 731 germ warfare victims, or Rape of Nanjing victims, or comfor women victims, or starved Vietnamese peasants, or ...)

Japan had to be defeated decisively. Japan wasn't going to surrender. This would guarantee hundreds of thousands of American military dead when the United States invaded Kyûshû (to say nothing of Japanese military and civilian dead) and sharply increasing the possibility of a mainland Japan invaded by the Soviet Union and partitioned on the German model.

My thoughts on the bomb? Horrible and appalling, and the remainder of the 20th century and the whole of the 21st are coloured by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the bomb came from that time and--I believe--might have been the least bad option.

If it was the Nazis we cared so much about, we would have dropped the bomb on Germany.

And the concept that Japan was about to surrender anyway is so not some left-wing invention. Truman and his cohorts agreed among themselves on August 3rd that Japan was about to surrender anyway. Then they dropped the bom on August 6th. Even if you want to claim they were wrong in their own opinion that Japan was about to surrender, you still can't claim that their actual reason for dropping the bomb had nothing to do with believing it was necessary to end the war, because they said themselves, to each other, in private, that they didn't believe it was necessary. They only claimed otherwise when speaking to the general public, as propaganda.

Also, with statements like 'people are smarter than you think' I fear you've entirely missed the point I was trying to make. What I was actually saying is that I do not believe stupidity is at all the real primary culprit for Americans' lack of shame about their government's bombings. I do not believe that Americans really are anywhere near stupid enough to account for all that. On the contrary, I believe they are intentionally, willfully being dishonest with themselves. It is not the same thing as mere innocent stupidity at all.

Unquestionably, the Japanese government has been known to commit plenty of atrocities of its own, and certainly the Japanese are in a much better position than plenty of other countries to find Americans' war crimes "understandable." And I certainly hope they want to repent for their own war crimes too.

But I don't believe that in any way lessens ours. I don't believe the supposed "necessity" of bombing Hiroshima or Nagasaki is anywhere near as "debatable" as it's generally presented in the U.S. as being. As I said in another comment above, plus in the original post itself, Truman and his cohorts agreed among themselves on August 3rd that Japan was about to surrender anyway. Then they dropped the bom on August 6th. Even if you want to claim they were wrong in their own opinion that Japan was about to surrender, you still can't claim that their actual reason for dropping the bomb had nothing to do with believing it was necessary to end the war, because they said themselves, to each other, in private, that they didn't believe it was necessary. They only claimed otherwise when speaking to the general public, as propaganda.

For the fourth time in this comment thread, I will repeat: Truman and his cohorts agreed among themselves on August 3rd that Japan was about to surrender anyway. Then they dropped the bomb on August 6th. Even if you want to claim they were wrong in their own opinion that Japan was about to surrender, you still can't claim that their actual reason for dropping the bomb had nothing to do with believing it was necessary to end the war, because they said themselves, to each other, in private, that they didn't believe it was necessary. They only claimed otherwise when speaking to the general public, as propaganda.

The truest thing said on this thread is that willful self-deception is quite a different phenomenon from mere brute stupidity. And people keep chiming in, as regular as lemmings, to prove it true.

Yeah, I was actually significantly less pessimistic about Americans' morality at the time I wrote this very angry entry than I am after reading the responses to it.

My own opinion is that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely unnnecessary, and therefore abhorrent.

If the US wanted to confirm to Japan that it could end the war with nuclear weapons, it could have bombed military sites or a small uninhabited island near Japan.

And once one bomb was dropped, was the second bomb really necessary?

People say that an invasion of Japan would have caused widespread starvation as millions of Japanese would be cut off from food supplies. If that is so, then merely quarantining ships from entering / leaving Japan and destroying the railroad lines would have been sufficient to halt Japanese capabilities within a couple of months. And forcing Japan to negotiate for surrender.

I suspect the real reason for bombing Japan was to send a signal to the Soviet Union. Truman was notified of the successful test of the Trinity bomb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_site) late one night during the Potsdam Conference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_conference). Churchill reported that the next day, Truman was suddenly more bold towards Stalin. Towards the end of the war, Soviet Union would have invaded Japan just as they invaded North Korea. I think Truman forced the war to end sooner to keep Japan from being taken over by communism.

Even if Truman wanted to end the war sooner for that reason, and chose the atomic bomb as the means for convincing Japan to surrender, he could have spared civilians.

Of course not, because since the Vietnam war the US government jails journalists who go into American war zones without express Pentagon permission and an escort of government minders, and so all war-reporting done by American reporters since that conflict has been and continues to be nothing more than worthless, laughable state-produced propaganda. American media has even been ordered by the Pentagon for years at a time that it may not broadcast images of American coffins or dead American soldiers because it makes government look too bad. So how could they talk freely about carpet bombings or anything else?

For Western perspective there is the BBC, for Arab perspective there is Al-Jazeera and for the Pentagon's perspective there is American media.

the debate here seems to be mainly about whether Japan would have surrendered without using the bomb, and I think it's one thing to say "Japan is probably going to surrender" and quite another to say "Japan has surrendered." I bet Truman & Co. were not likely to give the benefit of the doubt to a country that had attacked them without warning.

Liberal Japanese are probably as aware as you are that they don't have much of a leg to stand on for accusing others of atrocities during World War II. That does not forgive the atrocities on either side. We are also very harsh on Japan over propagandistic textbooks that gloss over their atrocities against people all over Asia and the prisoners of war they took.

As far as whether vaporizing two civilian cities with no military or strategic value was necessary to "stop the Japanese," such things are quite frankly only debated in idiot America, the same as Americans continue to pathetically "debate" whether they 'won' the Vietnam war that the entire world watched them lose, or it was a 'stalemate'; the same as the Japanese continue to pathetically debate whether or not the rape of Nanjing ever happened that there is documentary photographic proof of. For that matter in North Korea it's understood that the space shuttle was Kim Il Sung's idea and certain communities continue to 'debate' whether or not the earth is flat.

I think

pure_agnostic's comment, right above yours, adequately refuted the notion that there was any way in hell that bombing Hiroshima could have been considered necessary.

I'll have to ask for citations.

I'll be blogging about this later, but I can't find any references to that in McCullough's Pulitzer-winning biography of Truman, or in Walker's Shockwave and Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy. Truman wanted to use the bomb, yes, partly because so much had been invested in its manufacture, but he really doesn't seem to have believed that Japan would surrender unconditionally, on the German model, without facing a direct threat to its homeland. A Soviet conquest of Japan was obviously undesirable, while an American landing would kill millions of people as per the plans of the Japanese government. The bomb was necessary, or at least, the least bad option. Truman did believe it was necessary, though the scenes of destruction naturally made him go back partly on what seemed so certain at the time.

I cited my source in the quotation in the original post. It's the link to the article "The Myths of Hiroshima" in The Los angeles times.

Can you point me to a reference for this?

I already did, in the original post. "The Myths of Hiroshima" in The Los Angeles Times. Which, in turn, cites its own source.

Both of you have misunderstood me. I'll post it again: "My point is simply that sympathies---especially in war---are complicated." Note the emphasis on sympathies this time and my lack of interjection of personal opinion. And when, earlier, I used "debateable" I mean "I've heard people debate it." Now you are free to define away everyone who debates it as "idiots", but that would be missing one of my two points, which is that it is not only Americans and Westerners who have this view, which appears to be how it is characterized here.

I am not talking about the logical assessment of the Hiroshima bombing, nor am I talking about my own personal assessment of the bombing, which both of you made assumptions about. Personally, I have deplored the use of the atomic bomb. I actively participate in a group that arose out of opposition to the use and testing of nuclear weapons. But it bothers me when I see people characterize "only Westerners" as being in support of the bombing of Hiroshima, as if Westerners are the source of all of these beliefs. Because my own experience with people in support of the bombing has *never* been with Americans; it has been with older Chinese and Koreans[*]. And they have defended the bombing of Hiroshima with a vigor that you would probably find horrific. And that I do find horrific, too, but with an added level of sympathy (which perhaps I add because they aren't Westerners, wrongly or not).

And sympathy is the key word. I wasn't talking about justice or ethics or even who constitutes a war criminal. I'm talking about the sympathies of people who *aren't* Americans or even Westerners who have suffered, and my own sympathies for people who've suffered and (wrongly or not) feel that the bombing was justified, whether or not I ultimately agree with their position.

[*] Some are legally also Americans, but they would reject that label themselves.

I've read Hasegawa, and they misapply his findings. For instance, he himself concludes that the Japanese government was quite prepared to lead the Japanese into a mass suicide--when Prince Konoe was interviewed in 1946, he said that he expected the war would have lasted to the end of 1945.

The Japanese government wasn't rational. The Army minister was talking, in closed sessions of the Imperial war cabinet, about how beautiful a mass sacrifice of the Japanese nation would be. The Japanese were already starving, but their government didn't care, going so far as to give people who signed up to be kamikaze fighters when the Americans arrived extra rations. And, well, judging by Soviet behaviour in central and eastern Europe in 1945-1946, the surrender of Japan before the Soviets could invade the Home Islands had a decided net humanitarian effect.

Must...pay...attention...

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Some Quotes About August 6th

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