Posted on 03/17/2008 5:00:40 PM PDT by Coleus
It was a clear, hot summer day on Aug. 6, 1945, when 10-year-old Kenji Kitagawa kissed his mother and brother goodbye before leaving for school. The fifth-grader didn't know that would be the last time he would see them alive. Life was forever altered for Kitagawa and the rest of the world 62 years ago, as an American B-29 bomber, flying 26,000 feet above his hometown of Hiroshima, Japan, dropped an atomic bomb.
Now 73, Kitagawa travels the world as part of an effort to educate people on the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Sponsored by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, Kitagawa has been publicly reliving his experiences from Hiroshima for the past three years. With foundation Chairman Steven Leeper serving as translator, Kitagawa shared his experience with an audience of about 60 people at Christ Church in Summit last Sunday.
"After retiring, I had this feeling that I was not going to live much longer, and I thought, 'What is the most important thing for me to do?' and my mind was brought back to this place," he said, referring to Hiroshima. Kitagawa and his classmates were awaiting an assembly program at their school when the bomb hit at 8:16 a.m. A flash of blue and white light came like lightning through the windows, charring all who were directly exposed, Kitagawa said. Confusion and panic followed, as a ferocious blast of wind came crashing into the school.
"There was an amazing roaring sound and the entire school started to collapse," said Kitagawa. "I remember falling and feeling like a hammer was hitting me over the head." When he came to, the classroom was in total darkness. He would learn later that the sun became obliterated by the mushroom cloud from the bomb.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
One word response: Nanking.
Japan started the war and we ended it, quite convincingly.
Become a useful idiot?
NEVER FORGET...
I thought this was going to be a one word article:
Dean's yell: Yeeeaaaaarggggh!!!
Children were taught that, because it works!
As a soldier in Germany during the 1970's, this is exactly what were were taught to do and were expected to attack the enemy after the initial blast.
That's an out and out lie of ommission. The American Military had seen the civilian suicides/homicides by the thousands as entire families killed themselves with grenades or jumping off the Marpi Point cliffs of Saipan after that islands invasion. It wasn't just our military casualties our military was worried about.
Semper Fi,
TS
[Probably would have cost a million Americans.]
Which means many of us wouldn’t be here to read this post because our fathers or grandfathers would have died in Japan.
Too bad he does not have a segment included of the brutality that caused the bomb to be dropped...
What I am amazed at, and pass on to my kids every time the anniversary comes around and the peace folks float their oragami stuff on the lake - the Japs said they would fight to the death (like on Okinawa) after the first bomb. Luckily we had a second one.
Bump
NEVER FORGET...
i think that’s an Australian
Duck and cover, storing food in the basement ect. gave way to “just nuke me already” fatalism around ‘85. Maybe that is because the ice was melting I don’t know. Anybody else feel that was the case? (born in ‘72)
That looks like a great article. I will read all of it later. I recall my Dad telling me he was in the second planned invasion force. He was serving on the USS Puget Sound in August 1945.
Thank God for Harry Truman. I may well owe my life to his superior judgment.
Dad passed last week. Always a hero to me.
> Here’s a description of what an invasion of Japan would have involved:
And that doesn’t even include how much further they
would have been on whatever it was they were testing
in what is now PRK.
But thinking about this can case liberals' mental processes to seize up,
We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap
And Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it
We’ll skin the streak of yellow from this sneaky little fellow
And he’ll think a cyclone hit him when he’s thru it
We’ll take the double crosser to the old woodshed
We’ll start on his bottom and go to his head
When we get thru with him he’ll wish that he was dead
We gotta slap the dirty little Jap
We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap
And Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it
The Japs and all their hooey will be changed into chop suey
And the rising sun will set when we get thru it
Their alibi for fighting is to save their face
For ancestors waiting in celestial space
We’ll kick their precious face down to the other place
We gotta slap the dirty little Jap
We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap
And Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it
We’ll murder Hirohito, massacre that slob Benito
Hang’em with that Shickle gruber when we’re thru it
We’ll search the highest mountain for the tallest tree
To build us a hanging post for the evil three
We’ll call in all our neighbors, let’em know their free
We gotta slap the dirty little Jap
An old guy recounts his awful experience as a 10 year old child, which he did not talk about for years......
Personally, I found the article very intersting and I feel sorry that the man (who was ten years old at the time) lost most of his family and over 90% of his school mates.
There are not many people alive that have first hand knowledge of what it was like to survive a nuclear blast.
Can't you just take in the experience this guy had without minimizing it.
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