Posted on 12/05/2009 6:00:32 PM PST by NYer
Major "Chuck" Sweeney had an extremely risky takeoff before dawn, loaded as he was with the 4.5-ton A-bomb, "Fat Man". Now they were over their primary target, Kokura. He had made three runs over the hopelessly clouded city when he made a shocking discovery: the auxiliary gasoline pipe was blocked. Unless they dropped the bomb soon, they would never get home. He turned his plane southwest for the secondary target, "Nagasaki, urban area".
His B-29 was over Shimabara just before
11 A.M. A radio announcer saw this and excitedly broadcast a warning, and Nagasaki people who heard him ran for their shelters. Moments later, Sweeney and his crew saw Nagasaki right below them through a cloud break, immediately recognizing the Urakami River and the Matsuyama Sports Ground. That put them almost two miles northwest of the planned drop, but time had run out. Bombardier Kermit released the bomb. It was just 11 A.M. when Fat Man went plummeting down onto the city of two hundred thousand souls, of whom more than seventy thousand would die, many without a trace.
Inside the Urakami Cathedral, Fathers Nishida and Tamaya were hearing confessions again after the all-clear. The cathedral was only a third of a mile from where Fat Man detonated and was reduced to rubble in an instant. No one would be sure how many perished inside.
Less than two miles away from the cathedral, Chimoto-san was working on his rice paddy on Mount Kawabira. He heard a noise, looked up and saw a B-29 emerging from the clouds. It disgorged a huge black bomb, and he threw himself to the ground. He waited a minute. Then came an awful penetrating brightness, followed by eerie stillness. He looked up and gasped at the huge pillar of smoke, swelling grotesquely as it rose. Suddenly he realized that a hurricane was rushing toward him. Houses, buildings, trees were being cut down before his startled eyes as if by some enormous, invisible bulldozer. Then came a deafening roar, and he was hurled like a matchbox into the stone wall sixteen feet behind. Shaken to his very soul, he gaped at the pines, chestnuts and camphor laurels torn from the ground or broken off at the trunks. Even the grass was gone!
Midori's nineteen-year-old cousin Sadako Moriyama had just found her two small brothers chasing dragonflies in the Yamazato school yard. She told them their mother wanted them. At that moment, she heard the plane and ran with them to the school shelter. As they entered, they were picked up and hurled to the far wall, and she blacked out. Coming to, she heard the two children whimpering at her feet and wondered why it was so dark. As a little light began to penetrate the gloom, she was paralyzed with terror. Two hideous monsters had appeared at the shelter's entrance, making croaking noises and trying to crawl in. As the darkness lifted a little, she saw they were human beings who had been outside when the bomb exploded. In less than seconds, they had been skinned alive, half a mile from the epicenter, and their raw bodies had been picked up and smashed into the side of the shelter.
She went outside. The light was weak, as if it were barely dawn. She cried aloud when she saw beside the sandbox four children, without clothes or skin! She stood there transfixed, her eyes involuntarily drinking in the hideous details. The skin of their hands had been torn away at the wrists and hung from their fingernails, looking like gloves turned inside out.
Feeling she was losing her reason, she dashed back into the shelter, accidentally brushing the two victims still squirming and moaning near the entrance. Their bodies felt like potatoes gone rotten. Their horrible animal croaking sound began again. She realized they were saying something. Mizu, mizu. Water, water. That cry was to run like a cracked record in the nightmares of Nagasaki survivors for years.
Michiko Ogino was ten years old and enjoying the summer holidays at home. Just after 11 A.M. she was terrified by a giant lightning flash, followed by a horrendous roar, and within seconds she was one of the thousands pinned under the roofs or walls of their homes. The blast of the bomb caused air to rush from the epicenter at over a mile a second, knocking houses flat. Almost immediately, an equally violent wind rushed back into the vacuum left at the epicenter.
Michiko was hopelessly pinned there, but her screaming brought a stranger who freed her. Outside, she was startled to see evil-looking clouds that twisted and writhed and blackened out the sun. 'What kind of new lightning had done this? Then she became conscious of a tiny voice becoming hysterical. It was her two-year-old sister trapped under a crossbeam. She turned for help and saw dashing toward them a naked woman, her body greasy, and purple like an eggplant, and her hair reddish brown and frizzled. Oh no! It was Mother! The speechless Michiko could only point to her sister under the beam. The mother looked wildly at the fires that had already started, dived into the rubble, put her shoulder under the beam and heaved. The two-year-old was free, and the mother, hugging her to her breast, collapsed onto the ground. There was no skin left on the shoulder that she had put under the beam, just raw bleeding meat. Michiko's father appeared, badly burnt too. He watched in dumb helplessness as his wife groaned and struggled to rise. Then all her strength ebbed away, and she collapsed, dead.
Nagasaki was now burning, and Sakue Kawasaki sat in disbelief inside the Aburagi air-raid shelter. He could see people staggering about outside, naked and swollen like pumpkins. Then came a babel of croaking voices piteously begging for mizu, mizu, but where could he get water? There was a puddle of dirty water outside the entrance to the shelter, and one of the victims crawled over, lowered his lips into it and drank with succulent noises. He tried to crawl to the shelter but collapsed and stopped moving. One by one, the others drank from the puddle and crumpled up motionless. What terrible thirst could drive men to act like demented lemmings?
The plutonium-239 bomb exploded in Nagasaki with the equivalent force of twenty-two thousand tons of conventional explosives but with vast differences. Setting aside for the moment the A-bomb's lethal radiation, there was its intense heat, which reached several million degrees centigrade at the explosion point. The whole mass of the huge bomb was ionized and a fireball created, making the air around it luminous, emitting ultraviolet rays and infrared rays and blistering roof tiles farther than half a mile from the epicenter. Exposed human skin was scorched up to two and a half miles away. Electric light poles, trees and houses within two miles were charred on the surface facing the blast. The velocity of the wind that rushed out from the epicenter was more than one mile per second, sixty times the velocity of a major cyclone. This caused a vacuum at the epicenter, and another cyclone rushed back. in, picking up acres of dust, dirt, debris and smoke that darkened the writhing mushroom cloud.
Young Kata-san was walking his cow on a hillside outside Oyama, five miles south of the epicenter. He was startled by the flash and watched, rooted to the spot, as a huge white cloud rose up like a grotesque organism fattening itself by some weird magic. The cloud was white on the outside but fired by some hideous red energy within. Then came alternating flashes of red, yellow and purple. Gradually the cloud went into a mushroom shape, and a black. stain grew on its stem. When the cloud reached a great height, it burst open and collapsed like an obscene grub that had gorged on more than its stomach could hold. The mountains all around were lit by the sun, but the area below the cloud was shrouded in darkness. Then came Kato's second shock, a roar of wind so strong that Kato mistook it for another bomb exploding nearby.
A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai, Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb 
I don’t think anybody here is defending the Japanese or other enemies of WWII..
What I think we are saying was that the use of the bomb was immoral and many of us believe it was a war crime, evil, or something similar.
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
Really? How does the killing of an innocent child ever become moral?
If targeting an *entire* city for destruction - knowing full well it’s a civilian target - isn’t a war crime than I don’t know what is...
Hastening an end to the war does not justify the massive killing of civilians.
Remember, the charge of “war crimes” belongs to the victor - as stated elsewhere in this thread, you didn’t see any of our guys on trial because we happened to have won.
If targeting an *entire* city for destruction - knowing full well it’s a civilian target - isn’t a war crime than I don’t know what is...
Hastening an end to the war does not justify the massive killing of civilians.
Remember, the charge of “war crimes” belongs to the victor - as stated elsewhere in this thread, you didn’t see any of our guys on trial because we happened to have won.
.
Fat Man exploding over Nagasaki, Japan during its use.
>>The bomb was the humane way to bring the war in Japan to a rapid close.
Humane? The bomb was an example of man’s inhumanity to may - these people crawling around “croaking” wouldn’t agree that this was a humane way to die, nor was it humane that they were not soldiers and could not defend theirselves or shoot back.
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
“Unit 731’’ Harbin, China. Damn right. Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Bataan Death March.....
“Our soldiers, attacking in defense of our country, which was the victim of an un-provoked attack in WWII, were innocent.”
Even when they raped or murdered innocent civilians?
>>Our soldiers, attacking in defense of our country, which was the victim of an un-provoked attack in WWII, were innocent.
What I meant is that they were going to attack, not that they were evil, immoral, etc. In other words, the fact that they were part of an invasion force puts them in a far different category than the priest giving confession who died in the blast.
Ask the Japanese of the WW2 generation that question. They started the damn war.
(Value of Life of 1 American Soldier) > (Value of Lives of 1,000 Enemy Civilians)
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
The whole thing with the Japanese sounds to me like the kid that murdered both his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
The Nation of Japan attacked us without warning while we were at peace and for the most part, the people cheered.
They slaughtered Chinese in every method imaginal for 10 years prior to attacking Pearl Harbor. Again, the people for the most part, approved. Admiral Yamoto advised against attacking America. For this assination plots were hatched against him.
And last but not least, every Japanese male , female, and child was ordered and indoctrinated to fight to the death when the Island was invaded. They were planning on inflicting at least 1 million casualites just on the beaches.
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
How many of those "innocent children" had practiced their gutting skills on the living bodies of US Service members?
Japan was putting weapons into the hands of those "innocent children" and telling them to kill for the Emperor.
Maybe this is a question you should be asking the parents of the cute little tots.
Killing innocent civilians in war is murder. It is a war crime. It is a means to an end that cannot be justified. Whether innocent civilians are killed by bullets, firebombs, conventional bombs, atomic weapons, or simply starved to death is irrelevant.
In our age, unfortunately, the structures of our various global civilizations are so complex and entwined that war cannot be fought without killing innocent civilians. It is therefore impossible to wage a just war in the modern age. It would therefore seem that the only moral way to respond to an attack in the modern age would be to surrender immediately, and accept slavery or extermination at the hands of the aggressor.
However, any such surrender is itself a moral failure. Allowing one’s children to be enslaved or exterminated when one has the means to resist is likewise to commit murder.
Therefore, when an aggressor nation attacks, there is no moral solution. All options are immoral. To resist an aggressor leads to murder. To acquiesce to an aggressor likewise amounts to murder.
God provides a moral solution to the problem of war in the modern age. His solution is to not make war. We are to love our enemies, which means never committing any act of aggression against them. If this law were followed by all nations, war would not exist.
But since the aggression of nation against nation does exist, we are left with no moral option when attacked. To resist aggression means to become murderers of innocent civilians. To surrender in the face of aggression also means to become murderers of innocent civilians. War therefore makes murderers of both sides. This is the great tragedy of war.
Therefore, since we will end up committing murder whether we resist aggression or acquiesce to it, the only choice remaining to us is to minimize the number of murders we commit in the cause of national defense. Since we must murder innocent civilians in order to survive, the best course of action is to keep the number of murders we commit to the minimum possible. This is done by fighting the war as brutally as possible, in order that war be ended as quickly as possible, and the amount of blood on our hands be kept as small as possible.
And afterwards, when the war is over and the aggressor has been vanquished, it remains to us to fall on our faces before the Just Judge and beg His mercy, receiving in humility His just recompense for the innocent blood that we have shed. We can only trust that God will forgive us of murder; we can only pay the temporal penalty for shedding innocent blood.
***
When an embryonic human being becomes implanted into the Fallopian tube of his or her mother, no chance of a live birth exists. The baby is certain to die if left to develop. The mother will also certainly die if the pregnancy continues. The parents or other responsible parties in such cases are therefore left with two options: murder the embryonic human being by removing it from the mother’s body, or murder both baby and mother by allowing the pregnancy to continue. Since murder is committed in both cases, no moral option exists. In such cases — as in war — all we can do is murder as few people as possible in order to save what life we can, and to accept the punishment for our actions without self-pity and without complaint.
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