Thanks, Hal for posting the article.
Yesterday, while I was driving back across the Golden Gate Bridge, National
Public Radio, played a taped 1946 interview with a young woman in her
twenties who lived in a suburb of Hiroshima. Because of one American parent
she spoke English. She was interviewed by an official USA Commission
investigating the effects of the bomb. Her descriptions of living victims,
seeking refuge in her town, were absolutely horrific - the yellow flesh that
would not stop peeling, etc.
Fifty years after the event, this is the first time the archive tape was
ever publicly aired in the United States (other than once in Japan). The
woman - whose name I did not catch - is still alive 84 and lives in the
Bronx or Brooklyn, I think. She had never talked about it to anyone before
NPR interviewed her to talk about the tape. Her father had told his children
to repress the memory and get on with living.
I was almost five years old, growing up in the SF Bay Area when the bombs
were dropped on Japan. Not oblivious to the fear of Japanese attacking us,
nor the fact that my uncles were stationed in what I think was called the
"Pacific Theater", but oblivious to the internment of Japanese-Americans,
and the bombs (nor probably just as devastating, the fire bombings and
destruction of Tokyo and other Japanese cities - war crimes all).
But more to the point, hearing this young woman's voice in English giving
the most intimate account of the nuclear disintegration of human faces -
instinctively I just broke out in tears and balling. It was almost as if it
was something, this purging, for which I had been waiting to express.
Isn't it amazing how and what we continue to carry inside over decades -
until someone, this woman's voice, for example, comes along and goes "Pop"
and the buried consciousness of horror comes rolling right up into the
present!? 

The NPR Interview may be found on their web site.

Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com





> My father was an army officer in 1945, scheduled for the invasion of Japan.
> Projections were horrific--a million US casualties (not deaths)--I've seen the
> written briefing he was given. Awful enough without exaggerating. <My father,
> who was deeply troubled by the bomb, always found those figures
> comforting--the bomb a lousy option, but better than the alternative. Current
> estimates of what the cost of an invasion would have been, based on fuller
> knowledge of the state of Japanese industry and will by that date, are far
> lower, and, since the Japanese no longer had a navy or airforce, a blockade,
> plenty cruel enough, would have done the job with little danger to our
> side--the Japanese had been trying to negotiate a peace deal for quite a while
> anyway. But let's assume that Truman believed the figures, or even a quarter
> as much. We're still left with the question of whether unleashing what we did
> wasn't more dangerous in the long run. Maybe it was really the opening salvo
> in the post-war power struggle--like, "Don't mess with us."
> 
> But let's go back to the "bomb as act of mercy" justification. Couldn't the
> germans have said the same if they'd had an a-bomb and dropped it on London?
> Why not, to avoid a large percentage of the 30 million or so WWII deaths,
> blanket the enemy--whatever enemy--with same?
> 
> As to the other atrocities you mention, the behavior of others is never
> permission, and there are anyway enough horrors to go around without leaving
> anyone with nothing to feel bad about. We have no monopoly on atrocities, but
> we don't have clean hands, either.
> 
> There were famously few prisoners taken on Okinawa. The official explanation
> was that the Japanese were determined to die rather than surrender. This
> wasn't my father's experience. There were strict orders to take
> prisoners--they were needed for intelligence. Nonetheless, my father was
> greeted by the sight of his "boys" jumping on the belly of a Japanese soldier
> they had just decapitated, to force the blood to spurt more powerfully. He
> recalled flecks of blood in a GI's blond hair.
> 
> Hiroshima Day hardly seems an appropriate time for recriminations or
> justifications.
> 
> Mark
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Aug 6, 2005 11:46 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Hiroshima
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2005 11:11 AM
> Subject: Re: Hiroshima
> 
> 
> Thanks for that Hal.
> 
>> Still, he professes wonder at the American reaction to 9/11.
> "Americans were terrified by what happened, but not by Hiroshima. Which
> was the most terrible?"<
> 
> Yup.
> 
> Doug
> 
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton  Ab  T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
> 
> 
> 
> And are the Japanese "terrified," now, by the activities of the Imperial
> Japanese Army in Nanking?  Or those of its "medical researchers" in
> Manchuria?  Or by the mass-kamikaze exercises they - women, children,
> civilians of all sorts - underwent in '45 to prepare for an invasion, which
> could easily have cost 2 million American lives and perhaps 15 million of
> theirs?