This blog first appeared as a column in The Andersonstown News
Right – attention at the back there…Now, how’s your general knowledge? OK then, try this: what was important about Friday two weeks ago? I’ll give you a clue: it was an anniversary. No, not a royal birthday .Still stuck? OK, it was the 76th anniversary of an important event for the Japanese people. On 6 August, 1945, at 8.15 a m, the Americans dropped an atom bomb they had nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ on the city of Hiroshima.
The moment the bomb struck, 70,000 people were killed. By the end of 1945, the effect of radiation and burns swelled the number of dead to somewhere between 90,000-166,000. Ninety per cent of those killed were civilians. Some 70% of the city’s buildings were destroyed.
There was film footage of the attack and research into the effect of the bomb on the people, but that was kept under wraps, especially from the Japanese people. It was only in 1951, when the occupation of Japan ended, that the information was released.
Three days after Hiroshima, on 9 August 1945, the Americans dropped a second bomb, this time on Nagasaki, at 10.50 a m approximately. They nicknamed this bomb ‘Fat Boy’. It immediately killed 35,000 people. By the end of 1945, 60,000-90,000 people in Nagasaki had died from burns and radiation.
About two years after the bombing of both cities, leukemia cases began to rise and peaked around 4-6 years later. The worst affected by leukemia were Japanese children.
In Hiroshima, the bomb was so destructive it permanently burned the shadows of people and objects into the ground – these became known as ‘Hiroshima shadows’.
Here’s a description of the aftermath by a survivor:
“The appearance of people was. . . well, they all had skin blackened by burns. . They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back. They held their arms bent [forward] like this. . . and their skin – not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too – hung down. If there had been only one or two such people. . . perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people. . Many of them died along the road – I can still picture them in my mind — like walking ghosts.”
Why did the Americans drop two atomic bombs – wasn’t the destruction of Hiroshima enough? One might have thought so. But two days after the Nagasaki atom bomb, US President Harry Truman said “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”
August 1945 wasn’t the first bombing attack by the US on Japan. On the night of 9-10 March 1945, the Americans dropped 1,665 tons of conventional bombs on Tokyo. These released napalm bomblets,’ killing 100,000 Japanese people and injuring a million. Yes, Virginia, the same Tokyo that we’ve been watching on our screens for the past two weeks at the Olympic Games.
Today, the US expresses great concern over the possibility that countries like Iran might develop nuclear weapons. Meanwhile the US itself has a stockpile of almost 8,000 nuclear warheads/bombs. So the US is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons and it has by far the greatest number of nuclear weapons. President Harry Truman never apologised for what he said about the Japanese people or for the mass annihilation of Japanese citizens.
If terrorism is the indiscriminate killing of the enemy in order to strike terror into them, then the US must get the gold medal for terrorist acts. And it would appear terrorism works. Two days after Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally.
August 6th and 9th 1945: lest we forget.
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