The ugly truth and nothing but the truth
Two recent events marked a resurrection of the debate surrounding that one ultimate act of war - the dropping of the A-bomb over Hiroshima. First, Tsutomu Yamaguchi died three weeks ago at the age of 93. He was a rarity among his fellow Japanese. He not only survived the Hiroshima blast but lived to tell his story after emerging alive when Nagasaki was bombed just days later. In fact, he was one of what is to believed 165 people who survived both bombings. These individuals were transferred to Nagasaki after the Hiroshima bomb run to remove them from harm’s way. Their and Mr. Yamaguchi’s stories make up a good portion of a new book just published which describes in gut-wrenching detail the actual effects of experiencing the atomic bomb blast and its deadly after-effects. The book, “The Last Train From Hiroshima,” by Charles Pellegrino is sure to jumpstart the moral debate which continues to swirl around President Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. We’ll get to that in a moment but it’s worth considering Pellegrino’s findings and observations, based on detailed interviews with survivors and the various official histories documented by both the American and Japanese military forces.
Pellegrino found out from survivors that those who lived to tell their tale did so because they were the recipients of blind, random good fortune. It wasn’t God’s will or divine intervention. They were in the right place at the right time, sheltered from the searing heat produced by the blast and afterward, from the deadly gamma and infrared rays. Because of their position, usually behind sound physical structures, they were protected from the flattening effects of the explosion. But what these survivors witnessed after the debacle defies mere description. For example, they immediately noticed something very disturbing about those who were exposed to the heat and flash of the explosion wearing brightly colored clothes with designs. The heat of the blast permanently branded the clothing designs into their skin. Those who were wearing any kind of metal, say like a wristwatch, died much quicker than other survivors. The reason? When the heat hit, it was so intense that it literally melted the metal into the skin of the person. This exposed the person to enhanced doses of radiation since the metal acted like a superconductor. These unfortunate folks died of radiation sickness very, very quickly. Many people reported that the smell of burning human flesh, quite prevalent over all of Hiroshima, was “quite similar to the scent of squid when it was grilled over hot coals with a few pieces of sweet pork thrown alongside.” But that is nothing like what Pellegrino describes what the Japanese called “atomic bomb disease.”
In a passage that puts to shame the descriptions of a vast wasteland in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” survivors tell of coming upon so-called “ant-walking alligators.” These were Japanese who were rendered eyeless and faceless from the corrosive effects of the supercharged heat of the blast. Their heads and torsos were transformed into blackened alligator-like hides which displayed large, gaping red holes - either huge ulcers or their mouths. The following is a continuation of the descriptions provided by witnesses:
“The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds. The noise they made was worse than screaming. They uttered a continuous murmur - like locusts on a midsummer night. One man, staggering on charred stumps of legs, was carrying a dead baby upside down.”
So, just what kind of person lived through all of this to live another day? As one Japanese doctor recalled, those who survived were “the people who ignored others crying out in extremis or who stayed away from the flames, even when patients and colleagues shrieked from within them . . . those of us who stayed where we were, those of us who took refuge in the hills behind the hospital when the fires began to spread and close in, happened to escape alive.” In short, those who survived either were just plain lucky or selfish, self-centered and guided by instinct to live rather than the desire to engage in altruistic behavior toward others in danger. This echoes the exact conclusion reached by Primo Levi in his riveting memoir of his survival in a Nazi concentration camp, “If This Be a Man.” Those who lived weren’t the best or the kindest; indeed, they were the first to perish. It was the inmate who was the meanest, the cruelest, the most conniving who made it through. Levi called this conundrum “The Drowned and the Saved.” It had nothing to do with who deserved to live or who called upon their God for salvation. The former has no relevance to the discussion and the latter is just wishful thinking, kind of like resorting to the prayer method at the track. It’s the ugly truth. It’s something that we don’t want to consider because it upsets the neat, pretty conventions we subscribe to. If we pull through, it’s God’s will, right? But if not, well, He never gets any of the blame.
Pellegrino has avoided any moral discussion of the Hiroshima bombing, instead focusing on the forensic aspects of the incident. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing to discuss. I subscribe to Paul Fussell’s analysis. Fussell - poet, intellectual, teacher, author of “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb” and veteran Marine who fought on Okinawa - observes that “the degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.”
President Truman, who I am sure was up many a sleepless night over the decision, had concluded that there were to be no more American lives spent in those bloody days leading up to Japan’s capitulation which, but for the dropping of the atomic bomb, would have never come about short of a full-scale invasion of the Japanese islands. If you were a young conscript, waiting on the deck of a transport ship for deployment in the planned invasion of Japan (an operation that would have involved 1,000,000 American servicemen and servicewomen), you, too, thanked God for the atomic bomb and the end of a war that had already taken upwards of 50,000,000 lives.