Month: August 2005

Posted on

1945 Again

The little I’ve known about the atomic bombings and Japan’s surrender goes like this: We dropped a bomb on Hiroshima on August 6. Then when that didn’t immediately produce the desired result, we dropped another one on Nagasaki — a secondary target since there was bad weather over the primary — on August 9. That was all the Japanese could take, and they surrendered August 15. I’ve never thought much about what happened in the days between the second bombing and the surrender, and always figured the U.S. government stood by as Japan came to its inevitable decision.

Of course, it didn’t happen that way. There was a war on, and it didn’t stop. Conventional bombing continued. We had a third atomic bomb ready to go. Richard Rhodes, in “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” says that when the Japanese failed to move fast enough to surrender, President Truman ordered the Air Force to resume incendiary attacks on Japanese cities. The air commander in the Pacific, Gen. Hap Arnold:

“…still hoped to prove that his Air Force could win the war; he called for an all-out attack with every available B -29 and any other bombers in the Pacific theater and mustered more than a thousand aircraft. Twelve million pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed more than half of Kumagaya and a sixth of Isezaki, killing several thousand more Japanese, even as word of the Japanese surrender passed through Switzerland to Washington.”

I’d guess that one of the most unknown aspects of World War II for most Americans is the scale and destructiveness of the U.S. attacks on Japan’s cities, of which the raid August 14 was the last. A project called the National Security Archive just published a collection of documents on the development and use of the bomb. Among the papers are notes taken at an April 27,1945, meeting of the committee of military officers and Manhattan Project scientists assigned to come up with a list of targets for the bomb (Hiroshima was at the top of the list; from that day on, the city and everyone in it were under a death sentence). The notes include a plain-spoken description of the nature of the ongoing bombing campaign:

“It should be remembered that in our selection of any target, the 20th Air Force is operating primarily to laying waste all the main Japanese cities, and that they do not propose to save some important primary target for us if it interferes with the operation of the war from their point of view. Their existing procedure has been to bomb the hell out of Tokyo, bomb the aircraft, manufacturing and assembly plants, engine plants and in general paralyse the aircraft industry so as to eliminate opposition to the 20th Air Force operations. The 20th Air Force is systematically bombing out the following cities with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on another:

Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yawata & Nagasaki.

“Colonel Fisher also advised that the 20th Air Force existing operational plans pointed toward dropping 100,000 tons of bombs on Japan per month by the end of 1945.”

I got to know one of the cities on that list, Nagoya, as an exchange student in the ’70s. Conscious as I was of the war and what it had done, despite the fact the city was all virtually new, it didn’t sink in what happened there. Later, I found a U.S. Air Force damage survey of the city, which I think had been home to close to 2 million people. The map showed a few small splotches of yellow — to denote undamaged areas — in a sea of gray. Ninety-five percent of the city had been destroyed.

Posted on

Evil Counsels

Tonight’s topic — what is it again? It’d be great to tee off on the National Abortion Rights Action League’s misguided and idiotic TV ad against John Roberts, Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Politics aside, if you can’t beat someone with the real record of their deeds and opinions, your fallback position really shouldn’t be to lie and distort and fabricate. Leave that to the pros on the other side.

But no, that’s not the topic. I could hold forth on Schwarzenegger, our very own blockhead Führer; he provides lots and lots of bile ‘n’ outrage material. And then there’s Bush: Every soldier’s mom’s best friend.

I have something more abstract on my mind. Here it is: Whitney v. California, decided by the Supreme Court in 1927. The case concerned a young woman from Oakland, convicted under a state law that outlawed “criminal syndicalism”; in practice, that meant the Communist Party and similar organizations were simply illegal, and having anything to do with them could be a felony. Miss Whitney, as the court’s opinion refers to her, was found guilty for doing no more than attending a party convention; that’s because the party in question advocated the overthrow of the capitalist system. The Supreme Court upheld her conviction on technical grounds; the majority opinion also held that the law was an acceptable exercise of state power to address a public danger and did not restrain the rights of free speech, assembly, and association.

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote a concurring opinion. He acknowledged in passing his acceptance of the technical grounds for upholding Whitney’s conviction. But his real purpose was to attack the law and the intolerance of free speech it reflected. It’s a ringing articulation of the importance of unrestrained debate in a democracy, and it’s widely celebrated as such. Check Google for “Whitney v. California,” and you’ll come up with about 9,000 hits. The U.S. State Department includes the case background and the Brandeis concurrence in its list of “basic readings on democracy.” I wonder how many people in Bush’s cabinet or the Congress have read it.

The opinion might be hard to digest in an age where some consider even soundbites on serious subject a little too weighty for some audiences to handle, But, in the context of Supreme Court writing, Brandeis is succinct and crisp. In current parlance, the whole concurrence is a highlight reel. Just one passage:

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”

I never intended to come back to John Roberts and that abortion-rights ad. But there it is: “The freedom to think as you will and speak as you think.” What that means today is blasting away at your foes without fine attention to details like how all the facts, if you have any, might fit together. There’s not enough respect for, or faith in, the other side of what Brandeis suggests: “The fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”

Posted on

The Third Bomb

I know I’ve been on the atomic bomb thing a little lately. Hear me out. Again.

I’m kind of surprised by what I don’t know about some aspects of the A-bomb attacks and their context. It’s part of popular lore that we had two atomic bombs in August 1945 — one named Little Boy, one named Fat Man — and that we dropped the former on Hiroshima and the latter on Nagasaki. For extra credit, you might know that the bombs were markedly different from each other. But how much more?

A few years ago, someone asked me whether there was a third bomb. Must have been. How soon did we have it? No idea.

Inspired partly by the recent atomic bomb blog and partly by a friend’s recommendation, I went out and picked up a used copy of Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” I turned to the end of the book, because the part of the story I was immediately interested in is back there.

So what about that third bomb? Rhodes writes:

“[Gen. Leslie] Groves had reported to [Gen. George Marshall] that morning [the day after the Nagasaki attack that he had gained four days in manufacture and expected to ship a second Fat Man plutonium core and initiator from New Mexico to Tinian [the island base from which the attacks were launched] on August 12 or 13. ‘Provided there are no unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in the theatre,’ he concluded cautiously, ‘the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather following 17 or 18 August.’ Marshall told Groves the President wanted no further atomic bombing except by his express order and Groves decided to hold up the shipment, a decision in which Marshall concurred.”

So a third bomb was nearly ready. There was some discussion, among Air Force brass, anyway, about dropping the next bomb on Tokyo. Then Japan surrendered on August 15.

The pace of building more bombs after that was slow, largely because the raw materials were in such short supply. According to Rhodes: The United States had seven operational bombs a year after the war ended; a year after that, 13. Then the pace began to pick up: By late 1949, its stockpile reached 200. By that time, the United States was no longer the only nuclear power — the Soviet Union detonated its first A-bomb on September 23, 1949.

Posted on

August 9

In observance of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki — 10 years ago, in other words — San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum created an online exhibit of pictures a Japanese photographer took the day after the attack. A little more than a dozen. That’s about all you’ll want to see.

Another commemoration: For the past few weeks, a writer has “blogged” the events of 1945 as they unfolded from mid-July through the bombing of Hiroshima. I haven’t read everything on the site, but the material is distilled from secondary sources (such as Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”). It’s actually effective — it’s still gripping to read about the mission/attack as it unfolded, both in the air and on the ground. (Thanks to Marie, who pointed out the site on her blog.)

One perhaps embarrassingly modest conclusion: Something good did come out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People still think about the bombings and are still exploring the experience. Mutually assured destruction and Bush’s magic missile shield aside, that compulsion to remember is our best defense against a sequel.

Posted on

Anatomy of a Toot

As promised, photographic documentation of what’s called locally “a toot.”

But having spent two hours posting 11 pictures in that little photo album, I’m reminded why I don’t do it more often. I mean, it takes two hours. Part of the problem is the seeming inflexibility of the TypePad photo albums: The pictures appear on your working site in the reverse order you chose them; when you post them, they appear in reverse order again — or, to look at it another way, in the same order you orginally picked them. That always confuses me and I wind up writing absurdly prolix captions (also time consuming) that are supposed to have some sort of narrative order but come out rather jumbled. The current effort’s a case in point. Could be that later I’ll go back in and try to fix my fractured storytelling. But for now: Bed.

Posted on

Brief Road Blog

In Chico (just west of Paradise) after a quick un-air-conditioned ride up Interstate 5 in a red ’93 Honda Civic hatchback (aka “The Machine Messiah) to visit a Sacramento Valley monastery celebrating its 50th anniversary. Temperature: 106. Relative humidity: 9 percent. The backstory: The monastery figures in a long tale involving Leland Stanford (in a cameo), William Randolph Hearst, and a 12th century Spanish abbey. I’ll relate all — as many others have done — later. With dramatic photographic evidence.

Posted on

August 6

At the tail end of the day — actually, tale end would work just as well — a moment’s pause to acknowledge the Hiroshima anniversary.

On one of the bike club email lists I subscribe to, one mostly for Berkeley folks and our ilk, one member sent out a mildly worded note that he planned a ride out to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory today to reflect on “human intelligence and human stupidity.” Good for him. Then, to underline his feelings, I guess, he appended a simplistic screed copied and pasted from someplace on the Web that declared that the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the “two worst terror acts in human history.”

That set off a chain reaction of responses that fell into two familiar camps:

–It was essential to use the bomb to avoid the slaughter that would have attended a U.S. invasion of Japan’s home islands. And besides, war is hell. And here were similar or worse atrocities and mass deaths during the war, some due to Allied bombing.

–Japan was about to collapse. The argument about preventing mass casualties is a myth. The bombings were entirely avoidable and amount to mass murder, plain and simple.

At one point, I would have veered toward the second camp. And I still can’t accept there was no acceptable alternative to dropping the bomb on a virtually defenseless civilian target. That being said, it’s disappointing that the discussion is reduced to such absurd oversimplifications and dominated by the need for an uncomplicated answer.

Easy for us, most of whom have no direct experience of the magnitude of violence unleashed in modern warfare to try to justify or condemn the bombing. The reality was terrible, and terribly complex. Just one example: The immediate backdrop to the bombing was the battle of Okinawa. Three months. Two hundred fifty thousand killed; 100,000 civilians killed. There was good reason to dread the next step in an invasion of Japan.

As I said, I can’t buy that dropping the bomb was the only option. But what did the decision really come down to? Callous disregard for life? Desire to avoid sacrificing U.S. troops in a bloody invasion? Reckless use of a lethal and perhaps imperfectly understood technology? Lasting animosity for a nation that hit us with a sneak attack? Underlying racial and cultural hatred? Desire to show the Soviets what would be in store for them if they got out of hand? Impulse to do something, anything to finish off a fierce and much-feared enemy?

I choose all of the above.