HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!

HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 6, 2008

“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday “President Truman reveals a U.S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.”

“I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.

“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’

‘Thank God for that!’ they echo as one.

“’Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities,’ I ask innocently, seeing that as the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break out into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean it to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that? I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, ‘It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003 AuthorHouse), pp. 301-302.


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Today, August 6, 2008, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) featured the BBC (Great Britain) and the DW-TV (Germany) News as it does every day, Monday thru Friday, which I watch religiously.

Were it not for this coverage, I might have forgotten how moved and confused I was in 1945 when Hiroshima was bombed. That day and that scene, I thought, had made an indelible mark on my soul, yet were it not for these two foreign news sources, it would have passed from my attention completely.

The BBC showed some 45,000 mourners in Hiroshima today at the shrine of those who lost their life that August morning so long ago. The BBC reporter said, “Some 140,000 lost their lives in little over a minute, tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation, while many sicknesses to this day can be traced to radioactive contamination.” The reporter said nothing about psychological or emotional damage.

I hope other American news sources to which I am not privy covered this 63rd anniversary because it is that important, that significant in the annals of man.

Lest we forget, this conflagration was the greatest single destruction of human life in a single event in recorded history. Writer Norman Cousins felt such profound guilt over the bomb’s use on human beings that he immediately wrote a slender volume, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking Press 1945), which became a national bestseller.

Cousins opens with these lines:

“The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehension.”

Science, he goes on to say, has eclipsed man. Man can see that piety is obsolete, faith is obsolete, mysticism is obsolete, prophetic vision is obsolete, and any modern man can see he is obsolete. Cousins sees a terrible revenge for making men obsolete, for making their inventions more relevant and powerful and more controlling than they are.

He ends the 49-page book with an absurd course to the future, and he says in all seriousness since man is obsolete:


“Let him dissociate himself, carefully and completely, from civilization and all its works. Let him systematically abolish science and the tools of science. Let him destroy all the machines and the knowledge which can build or operate those machines. Let him raze his cities, smash his laboratories, dismantle his factories, tear down his universities and schools, burn his libraries, rip apart his art. Let him murder his scientists, his lawmakers, his statesmen, his doctors, his teachers, his mechanics, his merchants, and anyone who has anything to do with the machinery of knowledge or progress. Let him punish literacy by death. Let him eradicate nations and set up the tribe as sovereign. Let him, in short, revert to his condition in society in 10,000 B.C. Thus emancipated from science, from progress, from government, from knowledge, from thought, he can be reasonably certain of prolonging his existence on this planet.

“This is a way out if ‘modern’ man is looking for a way out from the modern world.”

I read that little book at my uncle Leonard’s in Detroit the summer of 1946. He was head of the department of finance & commerce at the University of Detroit. He asked me what I thought, and I told him, not understanding sarcasm or absurdity, that I thought the author was quite mad.

“No, Jimmy,” my uncle said, “he’s quite sane. It is madness that he fears and madness that he desires to prevent.”


Sixty years later, we have the genocide of Pol Pot of Cambodia who killed millions of scholars and professional people to drive that society back into the Stone Age.

There are the lawless tribes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey who resemble today what he warned about then when lawlessness prevails.

We have had ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia, and in many other places in Africa.

There is even fear that terrorist possess nuclear suitcase bombs, bombs more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, that could kill millions in a single blast if detonated in a major city of the world.

Sense and sensibility were expressed in the appendix to this little book with excerpts from THE FEDERALIST on The Making of the Constitution of the United States of America (1788). Cousins’ ultimate declaration for modern man to survive is to make war obsolete.

Incidentally, it was many years later that I learned the answer to my question to my da’s railroad buddies: was there a significant military presence in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped?

There was not. In fact, more than 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, people like you and me, people who get caught up in the hysteria of the times and forget that we are all human beings and members of the same human race.

I was but a boy when that conflagration happened, a curious boy, and one that followed the war almost in an obsessive-compulsive manner in The Clinton Herald. So much so, as I point out in my memoir-as-a-novel, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to update the class daily on events when I was in the fourth grade.

By another curious accident, I was at the University of Iowa when author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a visiting scholar, and I heard him talk about his novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. I was chemistry major but loved literature, and was always taking electives outside my discipline.

Vonnegut was at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of that city in February 1945. Dresden was not a strategic military target, but an ancient and historic city. Why, then, did British bombers attempt to bomb the city into antiquity?

Vonnegut suggested the revenge bombing was for the German V-2 rocket attacks that destroyed much of London in 1943 – 1944. He captured the Dresden insanity with the novelist’s eye and quoted statistics of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped compared to the single one dropped at Hiroshima.

He wondered why the crew of the Enola Gray, or the Allied observers who went into Hiroshima afterwards had failed to write novels of the earth shaking event. I wonder to this day if any of them ever did. Biographies have been written, true, but mind wrenching novels? I don't think so.

We can talk of the shame of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the shame of Russian Siberia in the handling of dissidents, and the shame of the Japanese Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, but why no expression of remorse for Hiroshima?

I didn’t understand as a boy, and I don’t understand now as an old man. It could happen here lest we forget.

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