Sixty Years Later…
Editor & Publisher, The Press and
Hiroshima: How the press carried word of the creation of the atomic
bomb -- and its first use in war -- 60 years ago today. Referring to American
leaders, the Chicago Tribune commented: "Being merciless, they were
merciful." A drawing in the same newspaper pictured a dove of peace flying
over Japan, an atomic bomb in its beak. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001010500
Editor & Publisher Special Report: Hiroshima Film cover-up Exposed http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001001583
Jack Hart, one
of The Oregonian’s managing editors, talks about his father’s long secret
mementos of Nagasaki.
Destroyer of worlds: On the 60th anniversary of America's atomic bombing of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a son reflects on his father's photos of the
devastation -- and the complexities behind the decision to drop the bombs.
“Four months after I was born, my mom and I
accompanied dad back to Japan, where he served in the occupation force. My
mother attended the war-crimes trial of Hideki Tojo, the former Japanese prime
minister who was executed for authorizing the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Mom's stories
always made me think about what would have happened if the war had gone the
other way. Surely there would have been different war-crimes trials with
different defendants. And surely one of them would have been Gen. Curtis LeMay,
the American whose command killed more than 1 million Japanese civilians, most
of them women and children, on more than 60 B-29 raids, one of them Special
Bombing Mission 16.
World War II, it is said in this country, was the last good war, a
clear contest between light and darkness. In our national consciousness, it
lacks the confusing complexities of Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. And there is no
denying the moral righteousness of our war against the Axis powers. Still, for
me, nothing about any war, including that one, is clear anymore.
Consider just one
more fact from my family history. My
father was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States at 16. During
the war, as he served in the American Army, allied bombers struck Augsburg, his
hometown. His mother -- my grandmother -- ran next door to take shelter with
the neighbors. A bomb obliterated
the house, killing her instantly. That was just a couple of years after Dad
earned his American citizenship and not long before he shipped out for New
Guinea.
Maybe that explains
why I get so impatient when I hear the self-certain arguments that fuel both
sides of the debate over Iraq. Nothing is clear about modern war, filled as it is with
inherent contradictions. Bombs kill soldiers and children, munitions workers
and grandmothers. And
maybe that's what my father was trying to tell me when he broke his long
silence that night. He'd kept only
four images of Nagasaki, after all. One was of a torpedo plant. One was of a
hospital. And two were of a church.
http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1123235763290520.xml&coll=7
The Myths of Hiroshima: in a post 9/11
world, America must face the truth about the bomb
By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, LA Times, Friday, August 5, 2005
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin are coauthors of "American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," published
earlier this year by Knopf.
SIXTY YEARS ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the
center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people
were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants.
At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months.
Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a
similar fate.
The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 — just five days
after the Nagasaki bombing — Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor
had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and
still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even
"saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had
been required to invade mainland Japan.
This powerful narrative
took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we
are as a nation. A
decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an
exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped
the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political
battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view
of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just
war.
But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the
narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian
downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of
thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military
target."
Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate
surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese
home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has
shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" — and many
other historians have long argued — it was the Soviet Union's entry into the
Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing,
that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.
The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that
"special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians
to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese
cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives
were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge
Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had
pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's
magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the
Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated
enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James
Byrnes, quite plainly used it 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.
These unpleasant
historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action
that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially
sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.
Today, in the post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the
truth about the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima
have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs
are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as
Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of
terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons?
Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would
ultimately threaten our very survival. Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst
national nightmare — and Osama bin Laden's frequently voiced dream — an atomic
suitcase bomb smuggled into an American city: "Of course it could be
done," Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, "and people could destroy
New York."
Ironically, Hiroshima's
myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we
invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings
that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender — and, he
says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us
into retreating from the Mideast.
Finally, Hiroshima's
myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic
arrogance.
Oppenheimer warned against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He
observed that "if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right
and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,'
then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed…. You will find
yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bird5aug05,0,760322.story
