My father was a sergeant in the China, Burma, India war theater, in Stillwell’s army.  He served in all three countries.  After VE day he and many other sergeants were flown back to the US from India to attend Officer Candidate School.  None were “college boys” but all were experienced, and all were being trained to fill the need for officers in the expected invasion of Japan. 

The United Stated used the Atomic Bomb on Japan while my dad was in training.  Given the survival rate of Second Lieutenants in that war he was convinced that dropping the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved his life.  My mother felt even more strongly about it.  I was raised with that belief.

That belief was reinforced when we were in China.  An editorial cartoon in a Chinese paper, on the 40^th anniversary Hiroshima, had two panels.  One a caricature of a bucktoothed Japanese soldier bayonetting a baby with the caption “Nanjing 1937” and the second, a picture of a mushroom cloud captioned “Hiroshima, 1945” with a caption underscoring both panels that can be roughly translated “What goes around comes around.”  After 40 years!

Pop was a fair man, and when I was in Junior High, he gave me Hiroshima by John Hershey.  He wanted me to understand the terrible cost paid by others because of that the bomb that saved his life.  It was an important part of my education and led to a period of my life when I considered myself a pacifist.  (I no longer do, because my experience of war in the Balkans and Africa. I find it difficult to remain a pacifist in the face of genocide and ethnic cleansing.)

When I posted first from Hiroshima, I said I had no words.  I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve seen in the sea days since we left Okinawa and sailed past Iwo Jima.  Rob Quintrell’s lectures on those battles and on the atom bombings have helped inform my sea day thoughts.  Some of the books I’ve been reading on these sea days, recommended by fellow passengers, have also focused my thoughts especially discussions of what was going on within the Japanese government.

At both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we saw young people brought through the museums and peace parks.  Both city’s exhibits outlined the effects of nuclear warfare on Japanese people.  We saw students laying peace cranes on a monument and staring at horrible pictures and descriptions of death and destruction.  The museum in Nagasaki provided a context, outlining Japanese actions in China, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which paved the road to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  A tablemate at dinner who had been a Mormon missionary in Japan for two years said this type of recognition of history was rare.  He had lived in Hiroshima and while people were activists against nuclear weapons, they did not understand the context in which the U.S. used them. “Why did this happen to us?”

The museums do not mention is the number of Japanese lives that might have been saved by the war ending the way it did.

I knew the author James Mitchner slightly.  He lived in Sitka when he wrote his novel Alaska.  He made it a point to get to know folks in town.  Just before he died, he wrote a letter, and instructed it not be released until after his death.  Our World War II lecturer, Rob Quinyrell, read it to our group.

“…I can understand how some historians can argue that Japan might have surrendered without the Hiroshima bomb, but the evidence from many nations involved at that moment testify to the contrary. From my experience on Saipan and Okinawa, when I saw how violently the Japanese soldiers defended their caves to the death, I am satisfied that they would have done the same on Kyushu. Also, because I was in aviation and could study battle reports about the effectiveness of airplane bombing, especially with those super-deadly firebombs that ate up the oxygen supply of a great city, I was well aware that the deaths from the fire bombing of Tokyo in early 1945 far exceeded the deaths of Hiroshima. So I have been able to take refuge in the terrible, time-tested truism that war is war, and if you are unlucky enough to become engaged in one you better not lose it. The doctrine, cruel and thoughtless as it may sound, governs my thought, … I stood there on the lip of the pulsating volcano, and I know that I was terrified at what might happen and damned relieved when the invasion became unnecessary. I accept the military estimates that at least one million lives were saved and mine could have been one of them.”

More important than litigating the rights and wrongs of the past is navigating a way forward. In Nagasaki there are exhibits about efforts to forge peace, about existing nuclear arsenals and discussions on how to control them. 

The Nagasaki Peace Committee made a controversial decision this year.  Each year they invite representatives of the world’s nations to the commemoration.  This August 9 they pointedly did not invite Israel, Russia or Belarus.  Because of the exclusion of Israel, the US and several EU ambassadors remained in Tokyo.

In the meantime, the class groups at the Nagasaki museum seemed more interested in the details of destruction in the first half of the exhibits than in the second half, searching for solutions — forging peace.  I hope the students come back. I hope the whole international community comes back.

***

As close my computer tonight I read the following headline in the New York Times;

“Nobel Peace Prize Is Awarded to Japanese Group of Atomic Bomb Survivors.”

Nihon Hidankyo is a grass-roots movement of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The group’s efforts have helped establish a “nuclear taboo,” the Nobel committee said.

“The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said during his announcement on Friday.