2005-08-11 - 6:32 a.m.
August 6, 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. What follows is a rendition of a conversation I had with my father concerning the event.
I asked if there had been rumors of a secret weapon beforehand. The question allowed me to approach the subject without being too obvious, and would encourage, I hoped, reminiscence. Dad seldom spoke of those years, never without prompting. But if one were somewhat oblique, he could be coaxed into talking. I remember listening as a boy while he and another man discussed at a dinner gathering their time in the Pacific. At one point I wondered aloud if they had been in the same boat. Of course, everyone laughed—and less heartily again when the other man said, Yes they had been in the same boat… just not in the way I imagined.
Sometime during that same dinner—or actually, in the interval before dessert—Dad related a story of getting lost while gathering bananas, ending up behind Japanese lines. Fortunately the men in his unit realized when he didn’t return what must have happened and began piping Glenn Miller into the rain forest so he could make his way back. For forty years those two stories accounted for most of my knowledge of Dad’s time overseas. So I decided this fine August day, as we sat together on the side porch drinking iced tea, to ask about the bomb.
“No, we didn’t have any idea about that,” Dad said. He took a drink of his iced tea and set the sweating glass back down. “It wasn’t like it is now. The news didn’t report every little thing. There was more a sense of patriotism back then. And censorship was strict. Even before we left to go overseas the Army cut out any mention of the west coast in my letters home.”
“Where did you end up?”
“Zamboanga City, Mindanao. The Philippines. I wrote in one letter about Aunt Minnie and Uncle Dan, ending with a verse from Philippians: 'Do not be anxious over anything, but let everything be done by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving to God.' Everyone puzzled over that for a bit, especially as I didn’t have an Uncle Dan. But Sister figured I was headed for the Philippines and got out a map. Minnie and Dan they reasoned must mean Mindaneo.”
“It’s a wonder you weren’t arrested for being a spy.”
“Ha. Well, I did get called in once for complaining about mistreatment in one of my letters. They gave it back and told me to rewrite it.”
We sat quietly, feeling the heat of early August and the Sunday quiet combining to make a languorous, lazy afternoon. From somewhere high in a tree a cicada began its shrill, spiraling buzz. I waited for it to stop.
“Did you know you were headed for Japan?”
“Nobody told us, exactly, but it wasn’t top secret.” Dad lifted his glass and looked at it, reflecting, it seemed, on a place now half a world and half a lifetime away. “We pretty much knew where the last stop would be.”
As a younger, more naive person I had thought that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary, believing there were better alternatives. What I didn’t appreciate then was the determination of the Japanese not to give in. The military had already decided the only alternative to unconditional Japanese surrender would be armed invasion of their multi-island nation—planned as the OLYMPIC operation— and projected losses for both sides were horrific. Imagine Iwo Jima and Okinawa on a much bigger scale. Mom put it succinctly to me once back in my then radical youth: “If it hadn’t been for the bomb, your father wouldn’t be here today. And neither would you.”
Now I wondered aloud what it must have been like as a 19 year old to face the prospect of what seems now, and must have seemed all the more to my father then, an unavoidable and imminent confrontation with death. To have that threat suddenly removed through an agency of secret and almost unimaginable invention—a deus ex machina, as it were, delivered from the sky—must have been an incredible relief.
“Yeah, we were pretty happy. But you know, they told us it would be 75 years before it would be safe to walk the ground where they’d bombed, because of the radiation. And yet two months later there we all were—thousands of us—walking through the middle of what had once been Hiroshima.”
“They never should have let you go in.” Mom, who had been in the kitchen listening, came onto the porch and sat down. I knew what she meant. Already Dad has had three bouts with cancer; Mom is pretty sure she knows why.
We sat in silence for a bit, listening to the cicada start up its shrill ruckus again. It seemed there was not a whole lot more to say on the subject of Hiroshima—at least not today. As an ending aside I'll add that it turned out the Japanese were amazingly friendly and co-operative under the occupation, which probably wouldn't have been the case if not for the bomb. Dad befriended a young girl, and might have adopted her had the Army permitted. But that is another story, and one I don’t really know. This story ends—in my mind’s eye, at least—one November day when a young soldier stood in the cold before a destroyed tower with a skeletal dome. Sixty years ago.
