The Bombs Bursting in Air

We did our patriotic duty over the Fourth of July weekend – we attended a fireworks show.

I also managed to help my daughter get started on the summer reading project assigned by her school.

All the incoming fourth-graders were given a list of 10 books to read and instructed to choose four of them to write about in brief book reports. The reports will be due on the first day of the fall semester. Because the books will be used throughout the year, the school recommended that we buy rather than borrow from the library.

Saturday morning before the Fourth, my daughter and I held a little planning session, estimating the time needed to read the books and write the reports. I showed her how to work backwards to create a schedule.

It was late morning by the time we got to our favorite bookstore in Hollywood. We browsed the shelves in the children’s section, but had a hard time finding any of the books on the list. A salesgirl noticed our travail and came to our rescue. She located about half the titles on the list (I was looking in the wrong places) and placed a special order for the rest.

When we finished, it was time for lunch. Over hot dogs and fries at a fast food place near Paramount Studios, my daughter opened one of her new books to read while I finished the morning paper. The title she chose was Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I had never heard of it before, but assumed from the title that it had something to do with origami.

Before long, I noticed that my daughter was uncharacteristically quiet. She was reading intently, a frown on her face. Soon the questions started coming.

“What is leukemia?”

“It’s a blood disorder, a type of cancer. Why?”

“Can it kill you?”

“It can. Sometimes people get over it, but it’s very serious.”

“Can children get it?”

My apprehension began to rise. “Yes, sometimes. Is that what the book is about?”

“It’s about a girl in Japan. Her name is Sadako. She lives in a city in Japan named Hiro…” She paused, uncertain of the pronunciation.

“Hiroshima.”

“We dropped a bomb on it in World War II, an atomic bomb. Did that really happen, Dad?”

It took me a moment to answer. “Yes. At the end of World War II, the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered and the war ended very soon after.”

“Did the bombs kill a lot of people?”

“Yes. You remember your science class last year when they talked about matter and you learned a little bit about atoms? Well, when you split atoms apart, it releases a huge amount of energy. In a bomb, that’s very destructive. The atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II were far more powerful and destructive than any bombs used before that. Just one bomb could destroy most of a city, and, yes, many people died.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Very many, but I can’t remember the exact number. We’ll look it up when we get home.”

“Why did we do it?”

“Well, it’s complicated. The United States had fought a long war with Japan. A lot of soldiers had died. The American government was worried that a lot more would die if we had to invade Japan to make them surrender. After the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered and we didn’t have to invade.”

I paused, struggling with myself over what to say next.

“That’s the explanation I’ve heard most often,” I continued. “Not everybody agrees, however. Some people who study history say it wasn’t necessary for us to drop atom bombs on people in cities to avoid an invasion and win the war. Others say it was. So people still argue over why we did it and whether or not we should have.”

She looked at me for a minute, trying to take in what I had said. With her next question, the focus shifted slightly.

“But some people got sick later, a long time later, like years after the bomb exploded,” she said. “Sadako was just a baby when the bomb fell, but she didn’t get leukemia until she was eleven. How come?”

“That’s because of radiation,” I said. I’m sure at that point my forehead had become a mass of wrinkles. “I can’t really explain it very well, but the bomb hurt people several ways, through explosive force, through heat, and through radiation, which can cause changes in people’s bodies, Sometimes the changes happen very fast, but sometimes it takes many years for the damage to show up. That’s apparently what happened to the girl in your story. The radiation caused changes in her body that showed up as leukemia many years later.”

When we got home that afternoon, we looked up “Hiroshima” in the World Book on my daughter’s Mac. The entry for Hiroshima was pretty basic. It said that from 70,000 to 100,000 may have died in the initial blast on the morning of August 6, 1945, and that more died later from the effects of radiation.


We clicked on a sound icon and heard Harry Truman’s flat Missouri tones from a radio address recorded three days later:

"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us."

My daughter finished Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes later that afternoon. Before retiring that night, I picked up Sadako and read it myself. It told the story of a happy and very lively child who was stricken very suddenly. After hearing a friend relate the old legend that an illness will be dispelled if the stricken person makes 1,000 paper cranes, Sadako makes that her quest as she lies in her sickbed.

The rest of the story traces Sadako’s emotional journey and that of her family as she completes 644 paper cranes before death steals her away.

I closed the book and reflected on my conversation with my daughter earlier in the day. I think I handled things reasonably well, at least I hope so. I answered her questions. I tried to keep things simple and clear. When she asked why we dropped the bomb, I gave her the most commonly accepted answer, but also let her know that not everyone agrees. When she’s older, perhaps she’ll be able to approach the matter with an open mind and come to her own conclusions.

For my part, I still feel torn. It’s not hard to believe that the Okinawa experience – 50,000 American casualties, roughly a third of the invasion force in a span of less than three months – weighed heavily on the US military and civilian leadership. The toll from an invasion of Japan’s home islands – for the Japanese and the Americans alike – would have been tragically great (although not nearly as great as some of the wildly inflated casualty projections created and publicized after the war ended).

All the same, by the summer of 1945 Japan was thoroughly exhausted and on the brink of defeat. No less a figure than Dwight Eisenhower believed that use of atomic weapons against the Japanese was unnecessary and shared his objections with Secretary of War Henry Stimson when the latter briefed him on plans to use the bomb:

I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face".

In light of Japan’s condition by the middle of 1945, our insistence on unconditional surrender is open to question. Many historians believe Japan continued to resist only because our unconditional surrender demand made them fear that the dethronement and destruction of the emperor – someone they were conditioned to see as divine -- would be the final outcome of defeat.

Some historians have cited evidence to suggest that Truman did not give adequate consideration to alternatives to using the atom bomb on Japanese cities. Other have marshaled evidence that the bombs were dropped not to defeat the Japanese, but to send a message to Stalin.

What is the true answer? I don’t know. What I do know is that the question is legitimate. True patriotism is not blind, willfully ignorant or averse to facing hard questions. There are moral concerns that transcend purely national ones. One may love one’s country and still listen to the voice of conscience. And one should never forget the human connection, even with the bitterest enemy. This last is perhaps what Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes teaches most clearly.

It must have been hard for Americans to acknowledge moral quandaries over the use of atomic weapons on Japanese cities in 1945 at the end of a vicious war. Ironically, it may be even harder in the America of today. For the 1995 fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, the National Air and Space Museum, a unit of the Smithsonian, employed professional historians to develop a commemorative exhibit for the Enola Gay, the US warplane used in the attack. They produced plans for an exhibition that aimed for balance and frankly acknowledged controversy and a multiplicity of views and opinions.

The result was a firestorm of criticism from military lobbies, veterans’ organizations and conservative politicians like Newt Gingrich, then at the height of his power in Congress. The Smithsonian caved in under the pressure and abandoned the planned exhibit in favor of a replacement exhibit that was historically suspect, but overtly celebratory and loudly (if superficially) patriotic.

The sixtieth anniversary is weeks away, but there has evidently been no effort to resurrect the analytical, historically complex kind of commemoration the Smithsonian originally planned for 1995. What fared poorly in the Gingrich years a decade ago would perhaps fare even more poorly in the post-9/11 America of George W. Bush.

•

My wife worked on the Fourth of July but her shift ended as the afternoon drew to a close. We decided to watch the fireworks show in Exposition Park. My wife brought curry puffs and fruit to snack on.

We parked in the lot off Martin Luther King Boulevard and followed the crowds through the taped-off paths in front of the Coliseum to the lawns on the east side of the park, near Figueroa. There was still room on the grass. We found a spot, spread our mat and huddled together, waiting for the show to begin.

As nighttime crept in, temperatures fell a little lower than they usually do in July in Los Angeles, but no one seemed to mind. The mood of the crowd was pretty uniformly one of happy anticipation. There were many families with children.

There was a sudden thud as the first mortar fired and the show began. A missile traveled upward, trailing smoke, then vanished into the dark blue void. It reappeared as a starburst and a shower of red and gold sparks. The crowed erupted in cheers.

For the next minute no one knew what to expect. The bombardier and the pilot forgot to put on their dark glasses and therefore witnessed the flash which was terrific. Fifteen seconds after the flash there were two very distinct slaps and that was all the physical effects we felt. We turned the ship so we could observe results and there in front of our eyes was without a doubt the greatest explosion man had ever witnessed. The city was 9/10 covered with smoke and a column of white cloud, which in less than three minutes reached 30,000 feet and then went up to 50,000 feet. I honestly have the feeling of groping for words to explain this or I might say, my God, what have we done? Everyone on the ship is actually dumbstruck, even though we had expected something fierce.

Photos (b&w) from the National Archives.