Hiroshima bombing: 50 years on

Hiroshima bombing: 50 years on

Recently, The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey
Stockwin visited a small Pacific island which played a large role
in the tumultuous events of 50 years ago, when mankind entered
the nuclear age. Following is his report.

TINIAN, Northern Marianas (JP): Aug. 6th, 1995. Fifty years
ago, this small island, bounded by the Pacific Ocean and the
Philippine Sea, made history.

Nowadays a deep, almost resonant, silence generally
encompasses much of Tinian, especially in the area where history
was made, and which was once occupied by the specially-selected
509th Composite Group of the U.S. Air Force.

Small cenotaphs, dotted around the island, are the sole
tangible proof that there was once a huge American military
presence here. Ironically, the only ruins are of sturdy stone
buildings from an earlier era of Japanese colonial rule. But the
pattern of roads, laid out in 1944 by .U.S Navy Seabees to
resemble that of Manhattan, still carry New York names --
Broadway, Riverside Drive, 8th Avenue.

It's hard to remember that in 1945 Tinian was the biggest and
busiest air base in a world still at war.

From its six, two-mile runways at two airfields, hundreds of
four-engined B-29s were constantly departing for, and returning
from, endless bombing raids on the cities of Japan.

At 02:45 a.m., on the morning of August 6th, there was
increased tension as a single B-29 from the 509th prepared for
take-off.

Named the Enola Gay, the B-29 was carrying the deadliest
weapon yet devised by the human race.

Uncertain of the weapon and of the aircraft, the crew finally
assembled and armed the new four-ton weapon once in flight. Many
B-29s crashed on take-off. The overloaded Enola Gay used up every
inch of one runway at North Field before lifting off on its six-
hour journey to Japan.

The Enola Gay had four potential targets, depending on the
weather conditions: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki and Niigata. It
was a beautiful cloudless sky when the B-29 arrived over
Hiroshima. At 8:15.17 a.m. the new weapon nicknamed Little Boy
was dropped from 31,000 feet.

Forty-five seconds later, at 8:16.02, the world's first atomic
bomb, but the second nuclear explosion, detonated at 1,900 feet,
with a force equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT, destroying the
city below, killing between 70,000 and 80,000 people immediately,
and probably as many, or even more later, as a result of
radiation.

By the time the Enola Gay completed the six hour flight back
here to North Field, the world, though not Japan itself, was
already grappling with the news that mankind had entered a new
and yet more terrible stage in it's age-long pursuit of better
weaponry.

The Japanese were slow in reacting, in part because the
destruction at Hiroshima was so complete that it took a day or so
before the detailed news reached Tokyo. Many Japanese first heard
about atomic bombs from the millions of leaflets, hurriedly
produced in Saipan; flown from Tinian; and dropped on them by B-
29s.

Three days later, at one hour past midnight on August 9th, the
Soviet Union launched a massive blitzkrieg into the Japanese
colony of Manchukuo (now the northeastern provinces of China),
having been spurred into action a week ahead of schedule.

Three days later, another B-29, Bock's Car, sortie from
Tinian, carrying Fat Boy, a plutonium bomb, destined for the
Kyushu industrial city of Kokura. Bad weather saved Kokura. Fat
Boy was, instead, dropped on Nagasaki -- with savage irony, given
that Nagasaki was the one Japanese city open to Western influence
during Japan's centuries of isolation.

Fifty years on, the world is still grappling with the reality
of the nuclear age, and what was or was not accomplished in
August 1945.

As the Hiroshima anniversary takes place, there is a veritable
orgy of American introspection. Was the U.S. justified in
dropping the A-bomb? Or were other more devious motives also at
work?

For those Americans who now look at World War II with the
contrary outlook born of the Vietnam War, it is easy to assert
that the U.S. was in the wrong.

For those Americans who think of their country as an
essentially moral nation, it is difficult to insist that the A-
bombing was wholly right.

The doubts and the divisions are papered over in the opinion
polls as the U.S. declines to second-guess history. In one recent
poll, 76 percent of all age groups said that no apology was due
for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rising to 84 percent among those old
enough to remember World War II.

Some Japanese must assume that U.S. President Bill Clinton
does not read the polls. Japanese politicians, officials,
editorial writers and intellectuals have continued to ask for an
apology, even after Clinton rejected any such gesture in advance
of the demands being made.

It is hardly the kind of behavior which the U.S. might expect
of a close and valued ally. But then, as the Hiroshima/Nagasaki
anniversary takes place, there is an orgy of Japanese
introspection, too.

At least many Americans worry over the past wrong they may
have done to Japan. The Japanese, as ever, are overwhelmingly
concerned only with the wrong done to them.

Those generations of Japanese brought up to believe that the
Pacific War really began on August 6th, when the wicked Americans
dropped those terrible bombs, are being reconfirmed in their
misperceptions. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one-sidedly
commemorated. Most other World War II events are as one-sidedly
forgotten.

Japan, in short, is once again recalling only that it was the
victim -- while playing down, or forgetting, that it was often
the victimizer.

The full, complex pattern of events, often horrible ones,
which marked the global conflict, initiated by Japan in 1931 as
it conquered Manchuria, and which culminated in the dropping of
the atomic bombs, is not a topic about which the Japanese are
introspective.

The self-serving way in which the Japanese are "commemorating"
the 50th anniversary has to be seen to be believed. One aspect of
this is that the side of the U.S. debate which criticizes the
atomic bomb-dropping gets excellent coverage in the Japanese
media. Conversely the Japanese cannot read many articles or
analyses indicating why the bombing was considered to be
necessary in 1945.

So, one reaches an ironic conclusion. On both sides of the
Pacific Ocean one crucial missing element in the respective 50th
anniversary commemorations is the same: an absence of wider
perspective.

Simply because nuclear weapons are so frightful, carrying as
they do the capability of destroying the human race, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki are allowed to dominate debate to an undesirable
extent, thereby helping the Americans to agonize more profusely,
and the Japanese to obliterate memories more eagerly.

Here on Tinian itself lies a clue why it is still possible to
assert that the dropping of the atom bombs was necessary, however
distasteful that act seems in retrospect.

At the southern tip of the island, at the opposite end to the
former U.S. bases, lies a small memorial cenotaph at Suicide
Cliff, where hundreds of Japanese civilian residents, made to
believe by the Japanese military that a dire fate awaited them at
American hands, jumped on the rocks and into the crashing waves
below rather than surrender. Women strangled their babies before
jumping. Japanese soldiers shot those who preferred to hide out
in caves.

The Tinian civilian mass suicides are seldom mentioned in
history books. The Banzai Suicide Cliff on nearby Saipan, where
thousands of Japanese civilians (maybe as many as 20,000) jumped
to their deaths, to avoid capture by the Americans, is more
widely known. It is a desolate place, made more bleak by the many
Japanese tourists who appear dimly aware, or just plain ignorant
of the tragedy that once happened there.

What is seldom recognized is that these two suicide episodes
in Tinian and Saipan were part of a larger picture in which the
Japanese militarists and their bureaucratic henchmen were pushing
Japan itself over the cliff.

Everyone has now heard of the kamikaze corps of Japanese
airmen diving their planes and themselves into U.S. navy ships.
Kamikaze has passed into the English language, denoting self-
destruction. At least 2,600 such airmen, maybe many more, awaited
the American invaders at airfields around Japan, prior to the
dropping of the atom bombs.

But the kamikaze were only one part of the broader Japanese
suicide strategy, which was effectively in command from mid-1944
onwards. Once Saipan and Tinian fell, thinking Japanese knew they
were defeated, but usually dared not express the thought. Prime
Minister Hideki Tojo resigned in disgrace. But the Japanese
polity could not recognize defeat.

So, at Pelileu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, the Japanese no longer
fought to defeat the Americans, but merely to kill as many as
possible before they themselves died. Here on Tinian, only 252
soldiers out of a 9,000 Japanese garrison survived. Lone
stragglers in the caves of Tinian were still being hunted because
they refused to surrender even as the Enola Gay and Bock's Car
took off for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On Leyte and Luzon and many other Philippine islands,
approximately 200,000 Japanese died as they fought on
pointlessly, rather than surrender. On Corregidor, 2,000 Japanese
committed mass suicide by blowing themselves up with their
arsenal. In the Rape of Manila 15,000 Japanese Marines took
100,000 Filipinos with them as they, too, fought to the death.

In the famous naval Battle of Lingayen Gulf, the Japanese
carriers, bereft of but a handful of aircraft, committed suicide
as decoys.

Later, the largest battleship ever built, the Yamato was sunk
when it started out on a one-way suicide mission to Okinawa. In
the battle for Okinawa, the number of Okinawan and Japanese
civilians forced over the Suicide Cliff there dwarfed the similar
deaths on Tinian and Saipan.

Meanwhile, from March 9th, 1945, onwards, massed B-29s laid
waste numerous Japanese cities with incendiaries and napalm,
killing up to half a million Japanese, but still the Japanese
militarists refused to think of surrender. Instead the suicide
strategy dictated that a 26 million militia was being trained to
repel the expected Allied invasion with staves where they had no
guns, while all 70 million Japanese were being brainwashed to
believe that it was glorious for them to die for their country.

Against this background, it seems pointless to deny that the
atomic bombs, however abhorrent, however cruel, served a useful
political purpose.

Together with the Russian blitzkrieg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were the ultimate gaiatsu -- the external pressure, without
which, now as then, Japanese governments are often paralyzed and
refuse to act.

It was not merely that the A-bombs meant that tens, and maybe
hundreds of thousands of American and Allied lives were saved,
which would otherwise have been lost in the conquest of Kyushu
and Honshu. The A-bombs almost certainly helped to preserve
millions of Japanese lives as well.

It would be a wonderful sign of democratic health if, 50 years
on, a few Japanese were forcefully reminding the nation that the
only reason Japan was still fighting when the A-bombs came
onstream was the horrendous, savage fascist regime which had
endorsed the suicide strategy way beyond any sane calculation.

Sadly, Japanese democracy, so far, appears unequal to this
test.

Here, amid the resonant silence which surrounds the pits where
the atom bombs were loaded onto their planes, it is possible to
see that Tinian, in its moment at the hub of history, achieved
much. It helped save the Japanese from themselves.