At 2:40 a.m. on August 6, 1945, three United States Army Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from the North Field airstrip on tiny Tinian Island, one of the Mariana Islands in the western north Pacific Ocean. The three planes, named Necessary Evil, The Great Artiste and Enola Gay, were bound for Japan, which at that time had been at war with the United States ever since the Japanese bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.
It was not the first time aircraft had left Tinian Island in 1945 flying towards Japan. The U.S. Army had conducted surveillances and practice bombing runs toward the Japanese mainland earlier that same year. These flights were different. The Enola Gay was carrying a special cargo, a uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy. It was one of the world's first atomic bombs and the plan that day was to drop it and detonate it, not against just a military target but on a city going about ordinary life (such as it was in wartime) filled with civilians including women and children.
The target that morning was Hiroshima, a city established in 1589 by the feudal warlord Mori Terumoto at a time when the entire nation of Japan was engulfed in a civil war. Terumoto built a castle in the city to serve as his personal stronghold but didn't hold it, or Hiroshima, very long, having it stripped from him for backing the losing side in the Battle of Sekigahara in the year 1600. Over the subsequent almost three and half centuries, Hiroshima had grown into a city of 350,000 people and transformed itself during the industrial revolution in the late 1800s and early 20th century into one of Japan's most important manufacturing cities.
At 8:15 a.m. that morning of August 6, Little Boy exploded at 1,900 feet above the center of Hiroshima. What had taken the Japanese centuries to build was almost utterly destroyed in seconds. Wiped out at the same time as most of the city were an estimated 70,000 people, most of them civilians. And there would be a lot more death to follow. For better or worse, the United States had just ushered in the age of the atomic bomb.
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| The Atomic Bomb Dome viewed from the southeast, which is generally the direction of the blast. |
I feel one of the most powerful benefits of travel is that it sometimes causes us to challenge how we see the world and its history. Before I visited Hiroshima this past May I had my own opinions about what happened between the United States and Japan towards the end of World War II. Those opinions included my own made up justification for the country that I call home dropping the most powerful bomb ever developed to eradicate a city with less military value than other equally accessible targets.
I use the term "made up" here not to suggest that my impression of what happened was necessarily wrong, but simply that it was based on few facts and a lot of supposition. I feel I know more now. And that day I spent in Hiroshima two months ago for sure caused me to challenge my version of the truth that I had developed. I may still not have it right but I know my new version is based on more information than my past one.
Step off the train at Hiroshima Station today and you'll find a city that looks a lot like all the other Japanese cities that I passed through on my way from Tokyo to get there. Lots of concrete buildings, neat and orderly streets filled with people going about their days and FamilyMarts and 7-11s on just about every corner. I expected this. I also expected that soon after dropping my luggage off at the station's storage lockers I would find some kind of history that was quite different than a typical Japanese city. I was lucky enough to find one of the meipuru-pu buses that take you around the city right when I got out of the station. I hopped on for free with my Japan Rail Pass.
My destination that day was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on the north tip of the island between the Ota and Motoyasu Rivers, a spot maybe a few hundred feet west of the epicenter of the explosion back in August of 1945. The Park is a gathering spot for a number of different memorials and monuments with the overall theme of remembrance and hope that this sort of event never occurs again.
The memorials and monuments vary in type and scale. There is a Peace Bell which you can ring with the hope that we never forget what happened at Hiroshima. There's a pretty grisly burial mound with the remains of some of the victims in addition to a cenotaph honoring all the victims of that day and the aftermath. There's a children's memorial and a memorial honoring the Koreans who were only victims of the bomb because the Japanese had invaded Korea and conscripted them into service.
The main organizing element of the Park is a linear pool of water running north-south that links the saddle-shaped cenotaph (shown above) to a Flame of Peace. Look through the underside of the saddle and beyond the flame and you'll see what is now called the Atomic Bomb Dome, the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, which serves as an emblem of the type of destruction wrought upon a typical concrete and steel building by the explosion. It is the only building destroyed that day left in a state of ruin as a reminder of what the bomb did.
There's some powerful stuff in the Park, but honestly it is difficult to understand exactly what happened on August 6, 1945 from walking around the city. The words on the plaques and the various memorials all provide a ton of useful narrative both about the consequences of atomic bombs and the need to prevent these kinds of attacks. Even the burial mound failed to adequately convey to me exactly what had happened. And I don't think it's just a lack of imagination on my part or a lack of ability to empathize.
I've visited other sites where people have inflicted inhumane sorts of punishment on their fellow man since I've been writing this blog. I'm thinking primarily of the Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich, Germany and the Civil War prisoner of war Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia. In each of those places, the suffering was personal, meaning it was handed out and witnessed man to man under the supervision of other men, and the remembrances of what had happened were tangible, either through a reconstruction or the actual buildings there at the time. It's not difficult to feel overwhelmed with grief and horror when you are standing in a gas chamber designed to kill people, even if it was never used.
At Hiroshima, you can't get the same kind of experience by visiting memorials. The killing that occurred there was impersonal. The men that did the killing simply dropped a bomb out of an airplane. They never saw their victims. They never understood the kinds of lives they were wiping out and how much people suffered. And there were no discreet sites where the killing happened. It occurred everywhere all at once in a flash. That doesn't make it less regrettable, just less tangible.
Not even the Atomic Bomb dome gets you the same kind of experience. Its presence there almost makes it seem like that building was one of hundreds or thousands left in that state and that during reconstruction its neighbors were either re-built or completely demolished. That's not the case at all; most of the structures in the city in 1945 were not made of concrete and steel but instead of wood and paper and those were annihilated instantly. It's just difficult to understand how completely destroyed everything and everyone was from the Peace Memorial Park today.
But make no mistake, something horrific happened here. After the initial blast killed the first 70,000 people, the survivors were the first in our history to come face to face with the reality of the aftereffects of an atomic bomb. And those realities are terrifying and must have been unbearably painful. There were of course people horribly burned as a result of the fire and heat that was unleashed by the blast. But there were other symptoms that seemed unrelated to the burns: vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, wounds as small as needle pricks that wouldn't heal, bleeding from the mouth and ears.
A lot of the remedies tried to combat these symptoms didn't work because the doctors administering the sick had never dealt with patients experiencing deterioration and death through radiation poisoning. If someone was exposed to it during the bomb blast they were suffering badly. If they drank the poisoned water in the city after the black rain fell, it was even worse. I can't imagine how confusing, distressing and horrific the days were after that bomb was dropped.
While you can't understand much of this from walking around the Peace Memorial Park, there are places in Hiroshima where you can get this perspective. If you are looking to understand what happened in that city in August of 1945, I would suggest you seek them out. You won't think about this event the same way when you do.
Head to the south end of the Peace Park and you'll find the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It features exhibits and historical timelines in a sequence on two floors of the building. There's an especially effective "bomb's-eye" view animation sequence that takes you through the devastation behind the initial blast right at the entrance to the exhibit which sets you up well for what's to come. More interesting to me was the narrative embedded in the historical timeline, because it helped change my impression of why the United States actually dropped the bomb in the first place.
It seems to me after visiting the Museum and watching documentaries and reading accounts since I returned from Japan that by the time August of 1945 rolled around the Japanese had little chance of winning their part of World War II. They were being defeated in battle all over the Pacific rim, support for the war was waning at home and the war in Europe had ended which would allow the United States and the Soviet Union to concentrate all their attention on the defeat of the Japanese. And herein seems to lie the crux of the issue surrounding the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima and a little later a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.
World War II significantly shifted the balance of military power in the world out of western Europe and into the United States and the Soviet Union. The theory advanced in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is that the U.S. dropped the bombs that ended the war on Japan for two reasons: (1) to justify the cost of the research and development of the technology and (2) to send a message to the Russians, who at the time were fighting the Japanese in Manchuria on their way to potentially capturing a cold weather Pacific port that some feared the Soviets would never relinquish.
I can see the economic justification. As disgusting as the concept is, I can imagine politicians struggling to answer why we spent so much on developing a weapon that was never used. But I can also see the perceived need to back the Russians off and quickly. If the Soviet army fought their way through to the Chinese coast, word was they intended to invade Japan and end the war. And I can see that situation, particularly trying to get them out of Japan, being intolerable to the U.S.
Standing in the Peace Memorial Museum after having walked through a good part of the city that was destroyed, I cannot see how dropping the bomb on that city caused the end of the war. It may have accelerated it and got it done to hinder the Soviets' plans, but I believe the surrender of Japan was inevitable and it seems to me the annihilation of Hiroshima was unnecessary. And I get that it's easy for me to say that in 2017 without understanding what the butterfly effect of not dropping the bomb would have been. But try arguing with me after you have been to the city that the first bomb destroyed.
If the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall covers the essential history, then the place to understand the destruction wrought on the city and its people is the National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, which is located just a bit north of the Museum near the Cenotaph.
The building and its exhibits are focused on the people who died in the initial bomb blast and the days, months and years following. People who could have been just like you and me at one time, just going through a war not mandated by the people but by the military leaders who saw Japan's continued existence dependent upon foreign expansion to seize necessary raw materials. The National Peace Memorial Hall is a simple building, just basically a single ramp curving around and down to a circular Hall of Remembrance. The ramp contains stopping points with narratives and exhibitions describing the events leading up to August 6. But the payoff is down below in the Hall of Remembrance.
If there's a spot in Hiroshima where dropping the bomb and destroying a city hit home for me with all the weight that comes with that event, it was in the Hall of Remembrance. The walls of the Hall are a 360 degree photographic depiction of the condition of the city after the dropping of the bomb as taken by United States Army photographers once on the ground. There's almost nothing there. Almost everything is destroyed and in pieces on the ground.
Sure, there are a few buildings, including the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, still partially standing. These structures were likely built in the early 20th century to withstand Japan's earthquakes and they lasted through the blast to some degree. But anything else with any surface area is gone and reduced to a thin layer of rubble on the ground, the rest incinerated on the spot. There are some tree trunks and metal skeletons of radio towers and sadly enough one Shinto torii still upright but all the leaves and small branches on the trees are stripped, having too much mass to withstand the pressure of the blast.
The effect of these photographs showing a former city as an almost completely denuded landscape on me was shocking. I couldn't have imagined I would have felt quite this way in Hiroshima. I expected to be sad and remorseful and respectful. I didn't imagine I'd see something that would have affected me the way that photographic mural did. When I think back to my time in the Hall, I think about how I would feel if it were my town that was laid to waste that way. I don't want that to happen ever again anywhere.
Before you get too upset with me for second guessing the United States government making extreme choices to end a war started by a country that over the years before the bomb was dropped committed horrific crimes against humanity, let me say a couple of things. First, to their credit, the Japanese are genuinely apologetic about and acknowledging of the fact that they started the war. They also appear to be genuinely ashamed of their former leaders and committed to never allowing this same sort of thing to happen again. Terms such as "mistaken national policy" in the exhibit narratives are real expressions of regret for me. I've been other places where the aggressors of war are not conciliatory; that's not a concern in Hiroshima.
Secondly, let me say I have no idea what the world would be like if the United States hadn't dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe there would have been a future war where nations would have already exchanged volleys of nuclear weapons because they wouldn't have seen what these things actually do to people and nations. It's really difficult to second guess history, especially when the result of horrific actions means the end of wars. I'd just encourage anyone before you get too entrenched in your position that dropping an atomic bomb was right to visit the place where it was dropped before getting too argumentative about your position.
If your trip to Hiroshima takes you through Tokyo, whether before or after, I think it's worth seeking out the mural in Tokyo's Shibuya Station called Myth of Tomorrow. The work is a large scale painting by the Japanese artist Taro Okamoto inspired by what happened both at Hiroshima and later at Nagasaki. It is considered by many people to be the Japanese Guernica, depicting the height of the horrors of war in Japan just like Pablo Picasso depicted the height of the horrors of war in Spain through what the Franco regime did to the city of Guernica.
The mural has a long and complicated history, including being lost for 30 years in Mexico, but is now on display in a public train station for all passing through and by to see. It's worth at least a few moments to stop and look if you are passing through the station. I found it before visiting Hiroshima. Now that I've been to the city, it seems more horrible and brutal and I suppose that's sort of the point. I love visiting places that reinforce my experiences when I travel; I feel the Myth of Tomorrow did that for me. Looking back at the pictures I took of that work reinforces the regret that I feel for what happened in Hiroshima.
The initial blast from Little Boy killed an estimated 70,000 people. By the end of 1945, just five short months later, there were an additional 70,000 dead from the aftereffects. I am proud of the efforts both my birth country of England and my home country of the United States made to fight in and end World War II in both Europe and the Pacific. Visiting Hiroshima for sure challenges that pride. It is difficult to justify wiping out an entire city and almost half its inhabitants when you are standing in the place where it happened. Hiroshima may not be everyone's preferred destination when traveling in Japan but I thought it was important to go here and draw my own conclusions about what happened on the ground. I think it's essential we see complicated issues like wars from the other side. Hiroshima allowed me a little glimpse through a different point of view. I'm sure I don't understand it completely but I'm sure I understand more now.
I use the term "made up" here not to suggest that my impression of what happened was necessarily wrong, but simply that it was based on few facts and a lot of supposition. I feel I know more now. And that day I spent in Hiroshima two months ago for sure caused me to challenge my version of the truth that I had developed. I may still not have it right but I know my new version is based on more information than my past one.
Step off the train at Hiroshima Station today and you'll find a city that looks a lot like all the other Japanese cities that I passed through on my way from Tokyo to get there. Lots of concrete buildings, neat and orderly streets filled with people going about their days and FamilyMarts and 7-11s on just about every corner. I expected this. I also expected that soon after dropping my luggage off at the station's storage lockers I would find some kind of history that was quite different than a typical Japanese city. I was lucky enough to find one of the meipuru-pu buses that take you around the city right when I got out of the station. I hopped on for free with my Japan Rail Pass.
My destination that day was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on the north tip of the island between the Ota and Motoyasu Rivers, a spot maybe a few hundred feet west of the epicenter of the explosion back in August of 1945. The Park is a gathering spot for a number of different memorials and monuments with the overall theme of remembrance and hope that this sort of event never occurs again.
The memorials and monuments vary in type and scale. There is a Peace Bell which you can ring with the hope that we never forget what happened at Hiroshima. There's a pretty grisly burial mound with the remains of some of the victims in addition to a cenotaph honoring all the victims of that day and the aftermath. There's a children's memorial and a memorial honoring the Koreans who were only victims of the bomb because the Japanese had invaded Korea and conscripted them into service.
The main organizing element of the Park is a linear pool of water running north-south that links the saddle-shaped cenotaph (shown above) to a Flame of Peace. Look through the underside of the saddle and beyond the flame and you'll see what is now called the Atomic Bomb Dome, the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, which serves as an emblem of the type of destruction wrought upon a typical concrete and steel building by the explosion. It is the only building destroyed that day left in a state of ruin as a reminder of what the bomb did.
There's some powerful stuff in the Park, but honestly it is difficult to understand exactly what happened on August 6, 1945 from walking around the city. The words on the plaques and the various memorials all provide a ton of useful narrative both about the consequences of atomic bombs and the need to prevent these kinds of attacks. Even the burial mound failed to adequately convey to me exactly what had happened. And I don't think it's just a lack of imagination on my part or a lack of ability to empathize.
I've visited other sites where people have inflicted inhumane sorts of punishment on their fellow man since I've been writing this blog. I'm thinking primarily of the Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich, Germany and the Civil War prisoner of war Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia. In each of those places, the suffering was personal, meaning it was handed out and witnessed man to man under the supervision of other men, and the remembrances of what had happened were tangible, either through a reconstruction or the actual buildings there at the time. It's not difficult to feel overwhelmed with grief and horror when you are standing in a gas chamber designed to kill people, even if it was never used.
At Hiroshima, you can't get the same kind of experience by visiting memorials. The killing that occurred there was impersonal. The men that did the killing simply dropped a bomb out of an airplane. They never saw their victims. They never understood the kinds of lives they were wiping out and how much people suffered. And there were no discreet sites where the killing happened. It occurred everywhere all at once in a flash. That doesn't make it less regrettable, just less tangible.
Not even the Atomic Bomb dome gets you the same kind of experience. Its presence there almost makes it seem like that building was one of hundreds or thousands left in that state and that during reconstruction its neighbors were either re-built or completely demolished. That's not the case at all; most of the structures in the city in 1945 were not made of concrete and steel but instead of wood and paper and those were annihilated instantly. It's just difficult to understand how completely destroyed everything and everyone was from the Peace Memorial Park today.
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| Head west to Hiroshima from Tokyo and you may pass by the mural Myth of Tomorrow in Shibuya Station. |
A lot of the remedies tried to combat these symptoms didn't work because the doctors administering the sick had never dealt with patients experiencing deterioration and death through radiation poisoning. If someone was exposed to it during the bomb blast they were suffering badly. If they drank the poisoned water in the city after the black rain fell, it was even worse. I can't imagine how confusing, distressing and horrific the days were after that bomb was dropped.
While you can't understand much of this from walking around the Peace Memorial Park, there are places in Hiroshima where you can get this perspective. If you are looking to understand what happened in that city in August of 1945, I would suggest you seek them out. You won't think about this event the same way when you do.
Head to the south end of the Peace Park and you'll find the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It features exhibits and historical timelines in a sequence on two floors of the building. There's an especially effective "bomb's-eye" view animation sequence that takes you through the devastation behind the initial blast right at the entrance to the exhibit which sets you up well for what's to come. More interesting to me was the narrative embedded in the historical timeline, because it helped change my impression of why the United States actually dropped the bomb in the first place.
 |
| Ringing the Peace Bell in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park. |
World War II significantly shifted the balance of military power in the world out of western Europe and into the United States and the Soviet Union. The theory advanced in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is that the U.S. dropped the bombs that ended the war on Japan for two reasons: (1) to justify the cost of the research and development of the technology and (2) to send a message to the Russians, who at the time were fighting the Japanese in Manchuria on their way to potentially capturing a cold weather Pacific port that some feared the Soviets would never relinquish.
I can see the economic justification. As disgusting as the concept is, I can imagine politicians struggling to answer why we spent so much on developing a weapon that was never used. But I can also see the perceived need to back the Russians off and quickly. If the Soviet army fought their way through to the Chinese coast, word was they intended to invade Japan and end the war. And I can see that situation, particularly trying to get them out of Japan, being intolerable to the U.S.
Standing in the Peace Memorial Museum after having walked through a good part of the city that was destroyed, I cannot see how dropping the bomb on that city caused the end of the war. It may have accelerated it and got it done to hinder the Soviets' plans, but I believe the surrender of Japan was inevitable and it seems to me the annihilation of Hiroshima was unnecessary. And I get that it's easy for me to say that in 2017 without understanding what the butterfly effect of not dropping the bomb would have been. But try arguing with me after you have been to the city that the first bomb destroyed.
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| A small portion of the devastation cause by the bomb, seen in the National Peace Memorial Hall. |
The building and its exhibits are focused on the people who died in the initial bomb blast and the days, months and years following. People who could have been just like you and me at one time, just going through a war not mandated by the people but by the military leaders who saw Japan's continued existence dependent upon foreign expansion to seize necessary raw materials. The National Peace Memorial Hall is a simple building, just basically a single ramp curving around and down to a circular Hall of Remembrance. The ramp contains stopping points with narratives and exhibitions describing the events leading up to August 6. But the payoff is down below in the Hall of Remembrance.
If there's a spot in Hiroshima where dropping the bomb and destroying a city hit home for me with all the weight that comes with that event, it was in the Hall of Remembrance. The walls of the Hall are a 360 degree photographic depiction of the condition of the city after the dropping of the bomb as taken by United States Army photographers once on the ground. There's almost nothing there. Almost everything is destroyed and in pieces on the ground.
Sure, there are a few buildings, including the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, still partially standing. These structures were likely built in the early 20th century to withstand Japan's earthquakes and they lasted through the blast to some degree. But anything else with any surface area is gone and reduced to a thin layer of rubble on the ground, the rest incinerated on the spot. There are some tree trunks and metal skeletons of radio towers and sadly enough one Shinto torii still upright but all the leaves and small branches on the trees are stripped, having too much mass to withstand the pressure of the blast.
The effect of these photographs showing a former city as an almost completely denuded landscape on me was shocking. I couldn't have imagined I would have felt quite this way in Hiroshima. I expected to be sad and remorseful and respectful. I didn't imagine I'd see something that would have affected me the way that photographic mural did. When I think back to my time in the Hall, I think about how I would feel if it were my town that was laid to waste that way. I don't want that to happen ever again anywhere.
Before you get too upset with me for second guessing the United States government making extreme choices to end a war started by a country that over the years before the bomb was dropped committed horrific crimes against humanity, let me say a couple of things. First, to their credit, the Japanese are genuinely apologetic about and acknowledging of the fact that they started the war. They also appear to be genuinely ashamed of their former leaders and committed to never allowing this same sort of thing to happen again. Terms such as "mistaken national policy" in the exhibit narratives are real expressions of regret for me. I've been other places where the aggressors of war are not conciliatory; that's not a concern in Hiroshima.
Secondly, let me say I have no idea what the world would be like if the United States hadn't dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe there would have been a future war where nations would have already exchanged volleys of nuclear weapons because they wouldn't have seen what these things actually do to people and nations. It's really difficult to second guess history, especially when the result of horrific actions means the end of wars. I'd just encourage anyone before you get too entrenched in your position that dropping an atomic bomb was right to visit the place where it was dropped before getting too argumentative about your position.
 |
| Detail of Myth of Tomorrow, showing a skeleton burning from the heat of the blast. |
The mural has a long and complicated history, including being lost for 30 years in Mexico, but is now on display in a public train station for all passing through and by to see. It's worth at least a few moments to stop and look if you are passing through the station. I found it before visiting Hiroshima. Now that I've been to the city, it seems more horrible and brutal and I suppose that's sort of the point. I love visiting places that reinforce my experiences when I travel; I feel the Myth of Tomorrow did that for me. Looking back at the pictures I took of that work reinforces the regret that I feel for what happened in Hiroshima.
The initial blast from Little Boy killed an estimated 70,000 people. By the end of 1945, just five short months later, there were an additional 70,000 dead from the aftereffects. I am proud of the efforts both my birth country of England and my home country of the United States made to fight in and end World War II in both Europe and the Pacific. Visiting Hiroshima for sure challenges that pride. It is difficult to justify wiping out an entire city and almost half its inhabitants when you are standing in the place where it happened. Hiroshima may not be everyone's preferred destination when traveling in Japan but I thought it was important to go here and draw my own conclusions about what happened on the ground. I think it's essential we see complicated issues like wars from the other side. Hiroshima allowed me a little glimpse through a different point of view. I'm sure I don't understand it completely but I'm sure I understand more now.
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| The Atomic Bomb Dome: Before and after. |
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