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.