https://conservativewoman.co.uk/8-14am-august-16-1945-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/
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Father John A. Simes was starting
his day at Hiroshima when it happened, at about quarter past eight on 6 August
1945 http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Hiroshima_Siemes.shtml
. He was up in the hills with the Jesuit Mission that had relocated there after
the gigantic fire-bombing of Tokyo in March by hundreds of American planes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Meetinghouse
. This time, incredibly, to inflict similar damage only needed a single bomb, a
weapon so different that it took Father Simes some time to piece together what
had happened. Conventional air raids in World War Two – yet how is napalming
civilians conventional? – claimed perhaps twice as many lives in Japan as
Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s victims combined; but ever since that day 75 years
ago, warfare’s potential has been on a new, even ghastlier level.
The British people’s reaction to
the radio news, first relayed on the Home Service at 6 p.m., was not unmixed
rejoicing, according to sources quoted by David Kynaston in his ‘Austerity
Britain’ (pp. 82-86). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Austerity-Britain-1945-1951-Tales-Jerusalem/dp/0747599238
The nine o’clock edition gave more details of the Bomb and its effects – still
hard to discern through the ‘pall of smoke and dust’ - on what had been a
Japanese ‘army base’ at six but three hours later was ‘a city of once over
300,000 inhabitants.’ There was ‘elation’ at the prospect of peace, but
‘terror’ at the scale of destruction; the novelist Ursula Bloom and her husband
were speechless with horror; the Dean of Oriel College abandoned any belief in
a Just War; J R R Tolkien wrote to his son deploring ‘the utter folly of these
lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes; calmly plotting
the destruction of the world’, especially while mankind’s ‘moral and
intellectual status is declining.’ A London schoolteacher noted the hypocrisy
of cheering the ‘Atomic bomb’ yet hating the Germans for their air raids on us;
a housewife in Cumbria worried whether Japan had the Bomb, too, and was merely
biding its time; a Scots engineer wrote in his diary, ‘There is no hope in man…
The end is near – perhaps some years only.’
Out East, the morale of the ‘Forgotten
Army’ had been low: they had learned of Victory in Europe, but had been
expecting perhaps another ten years of fighting the Japanese to the last ditch.
Instead, to their great relief, the conflict was to end in a few days. What,
however, did they make of the Bomb?
There are three books that taken
together serve as a trilogy describing the war in Burma at first hand and at
every level. The first, ‘Defeat Into Victory’ (1956) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Defeat-into-Victory-William-Slim/dp/0330509977
, is by the Fourteenth Army’s commander, Lieutenant General (later Field
Marshal and Viscount) William ‘Bill’ Slim. In the final chapter ‘Afterthoughts’
he saw that future armies, facing enemies in possession of battlefield nuclear
weapons that could wipe out whole units at a stroke, would have to fight in a
dispersed, semi-autonomous fashion in order to complete their campaigns.
The second, John Masters’ ‘The
Road Past Mandalay’ (1961) https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-road-past-mandalay/author/masters-john/
, is by one of Slim’s military planners who for a time took command of a Gurkha
Brigade dropped behind the Japanese lines, initiating a ferocious battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters#Life
and ultimately forced to retreat. When he returned to HQ he resumed the heavy
burden of intricate planning and towards the conclusion of the Burmese campaign
became so exhausted that he was in danger of making fatal errors. Granted
leave, he set off to walk the Himalayas with his new wife. Near the end, they
came to the Rest House in Joshimath where the resident priest remarked that he
was glad the fighting was over. This made no sense until His Holiness showed
him a newspaper over two weeks old, with the splash headline ‘ATOMIC BOMB
DROPPED ON JAPAN.’ The couple had started on their mountain journey, cut off
from communication with the outside world, on the morning of 6 August.
‘I believed with instant conviction that there could
be no more war. No more tactics, no more strategy, only total destruction – or
peace. The training and experience of a lifetime had vanished into the thin
Himalayan air, and I was happy.
‘I took my wife in my arms and kissed her. His
Holiness said, in Hindi, ‘May God bless you, in peace.’
1992 saw the appearance of
‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quartered-Safe-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0007105932
, George MacDonald Fraser’s celebrated vivid account of his part in the Burma
Campaign, serving as a private in Cumbria’s Border Regiment. Many years after
the war, he argued with a man who was denouncing the nuclear bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as obscene, monstrous and barbarous. Fraser reflected on
what other and how many more lives would have been lost had the war continued;
possibly his own, in which case his three children and six grandchildren would
never have been born:
‘And that, I’m afraid, is where all discussion of
pros and cons evaporates and becomes meaningless, because for those nine lives
I would pull the plug on the whole Japanese nation and never even blink. And
so, I dare suggest, would you. And if you wouldn’t, you may be nearer to the
divine than I am but you sure as hell aren’t fit to be parents or
grandparents.’
Here we are now, with these
horrors sitting in their silos and launch tubes, plus chemical weapons and vile
diseases carefully crafted by laboratory white-coats. Which of the above
witnesses are right? Among the military, the tactician, the idealist, the
balance-of-terror-ist? For the civilians, the elated, the horrified, the
triumphant, the bleak pessimist?
How can we get rid of such dark
toys? For surely, we’re not fit to play with them.
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Suggested further reading:
John Pilger on the risks of another nuclear war:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now
Professor Francis Boyle argues that atomic weapons are illegal:
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/04/atomic-bombings-at-75-the-illegality-of-nuclear-weapons/
______________________________
Suggested further reading:
John Pilger on the risks of another nuclear war:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now
Professor Francis Boyle argues that atomic weapons are illegal:
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/04/atomic-bombings-at-75-the-illegality-of-nuclear-weapons/
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