Countdown to Hirosima: Shockwave
2005
This is a rather large book on the use of the atomic bombs and what led up to that. As usual, I am only going to point out a few things I thought were most interesting.
Stimson was the Secretary of War, and, thanks to him, Kyoto was not reduced to radioactive rubble:
”Stimson hated the idea of bombing Kyoto. He and his wife, Mabel,had visited the city twice, once in 1926 and again in 1929, and he was enraptured by its temples and architectural glories. Even more, he recognized that the city was the spiritual and cultural center of Japan. Far from forcing the Japanese to capitulate, its destruction might ensure the exact opposite, stiffening the nation's resolve to fight the American barbarians to the last man, woman, and child.”
The book talks about Tacko Nakamae, a schoolgirl in Hiroshima. That March (1945), the students were put to work “to help win the war.” Taeko was sent to the city's telephone exchange to work six days a week, long hours, to fulfill her “duty to her country and her emperor.”
The headlines in the July 16, 1945 newspaper Chugoku Shimbun read “Victory is Definitely with Us! Our Sacred Country Will Repel the Hated enemy!”
Two years previously there had been 2,000 food shops in the city center. Now there were fewer than 150, and those had little food to sell. (This was a result of Operation Starvation, the US effort to starve the people of Japan by sealing off the harbors and stopping the import of food.)
Other schoolgirls were working in a 16th century castle bunker, keeping track of approaching B-29 flights.
One 12-year-old said “Even if we have to die we shall fulfill our duty. That is our resolve.”
Although Hiroshima had a port, it wasn't very active any more. Half the jetties were used to grow food.
Hiroshima was a manufacturing base, using small “cottage units” to make tinned beef, drinks, tank tracks, booby traps and gasoline bombs, among other things. (This would help support the people who believe in the use of the atomic bomb, since so many civilians were involved in this manufacturing in their own homes, thus, they could be considered a legitimate target.)
8000 school children were involved in tearing down houses to make firebreaks in the city. The city itself had only 16 fire trucks, and they were old.
”Within just six weeks of the destruction of Tokyo on March 9, some 178 square miles of Japan's cities had been razed to the ground. Twenty-two million of her people were now homeless, almost a third of her entire population. An estimated 900,000 people had so far died in the bombings, considerably more than the 780,000 combatant Japanese who had died in the Pacific battles.”
In other words, lots more civilians died in the war than did actual soldiers.
There was actually some discussion about using the atomic bomb and then immediately using an incendiary raid to really destroy the city, but the scientists wanted to know exactly how powerful the atomic bomb was by itself, and any other kinds of raids would only make things harder to figure out.”The Japanese were objects of loathing or fear or disgust or contempt; rarely were they just human beings.”
The book discusses how the US media continually painted a picture of the Japanese as other, alien, merciless and fanatical torturers “who behaved more like monkeys or gorillas than humans.”
A button on sale at the time read “Jap Hunting License-Open Season-No Limit.”
Admiral William Halsey, who commanded the South Pacific force, urged his men to “kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.” He also said “The only good Jap is a Jap who's been dead six months.”
”The reaction of many decent Americans [to Pearl Harbor] was a kind of animal vengeance. It crossed every level of society. General Joseph Stilwell wrote to his wife:'When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.' The demonization of an entire people is concentrated in that one sentence. Cockroaches do not merit human sympathy. They get killed instead.”
Truman himself wrote in his own diary:
”Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new...”
Some of those killed in Hiroshima were not the native Japanese. 25,000 Koreans in forced labor programs died in the bombing, along with several hundred Chinese, some Japanese Americans who had been in Japan before the war started and couldn't return to the US, and ten American POWs, some of which died in the blast and others of which were killed by angry civilians.
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