Japan’s War, Peace Shrines Incomplete

In the Peace Park marking the epicenter of the atomic bomb that destroyed much of this city on Aug. 9, 1945, stand seven statues symbolizing peace.

Two of the statues are from Nagasaki’s sister cities, Porto, Portugal, and Middelburg, the Netherlands.

The other five are from communist countries--the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany and the most recent, the striking “Maiden Statue of Peace” showing a young woman contemplating a dove perched on her left arm, was presented by the People’s Republic of China last year.

In 1978, a section of the park was established for nations to contribute statues symbolizing peace.

Obviously the one country--more than any other--that one would expect to contribute a statue to the park would be the United States.

So far, however, there is no statue from the United States.

Surely other visitors to Nagasaki must wonder as my wife, Arliene, and I did, why there isn’t a statue from the United States, the only nation ever to use an atomic bomb in warfare, the nation that dropped the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later.

A committee should be organized, a fund drive launched or a congressional appropriation made for a peace statue created by an American sculptor to be placed alongside the other statues.

Visiting Nagasaki and Hiroshima is an overwhelming emotional experience.

My wife and I had made this journey to Japan primarily to visit the two atomic bomb cities. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time. To have a better understanding of the world is to see as much of the planet as possible, the pleasant and the distressing.

As a young sailor aboard an attack transport, the Garrard (Amphibious Personnel Attack 84), part of the 3rd Fleet off the coast of Japan during the waning weeks of World War II, I vividly recall the dramatic announcements aboard ship about the dropping of the two “super” bombs.

If the atomic bombs had not been used, the Garrard would have been part of Operation Olympic, the seaborne invasion of Japan. The United States and Japan were preparing for the bloodiest battle in the history of mankind.

But the war suddenly ended Aug. 14, 1945, only days after the atomic bombings with the surrender of Japan.

Historians estimate as many as 1 million American and 5 million Japanese lives would have been lost in that final battle if atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima (174,000 killed) and Nagasaki (74,000 killed).

U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson said at the time:

“This deliberate, premeditated destruction (by the atomic bombs) was our least abhorrent alternative. It stopped the fire raids, in the strangling blockade. It ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies.”

The ethics of using the bombs have been debated ever since.

Why didn’t the United States demonstrate the unbelievable destructive force of the “super” bomb by dropping one or more in the waters off Japan instead of destroying the two cities, many have contended in hindsight.

But Japan already had been devastated by B-29 raids. Fire bombs from the planes had ravaged 119 of that nation’s major cities.

In Tokyo, 34 square miles had been leveled and more than 130,000 people had been killed by conventional bombs from B-29s. I was in Tokyo at the end of the war. There was virtually nothing left.

Yet, the Japanese continued to fight, refusing to surrender. So, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The absence of an American peace statue in Nagasaki’s Peace Park is a tremendous disappointment.

So is the lack of a statement in the atomic bomb museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, explaining the history of what led to the atomic attacks and reasons the United States had for dropping the bombs.

As visitors begin to view the photographs, relics and documents of the horrors of the atomic bombs, there should be a statement placing what happened in the proper context.

Nowhere in the museums is there any mention that Japanese military leaders had embarked on the conquest of much of the world in the 1930s and 1940s, causing the deaths of millions in the taking of Manchuria, a great part of China, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, the Pacific islands, the bombing of Pearl Harbor with the loss of 19 U.S. ships and 2,300 lives Dec. 7, 1941, and much more.

Nowhere is there a statement that the U.S. government believed by dropping the bombs, it forced Japan to surrender and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stopped the war, thus sparing millions of others in the ensuing battles that would have taken place.

Nowhere is the explanation that the United States was not out to kill in wholesale fashion, to deliberately level two major cities in order to conquer and control another nation forever. America’s purpose was to end the war and let the world live in peace.

In the eyes of the hundreds of Japanese students who pass through the museums each day and the hundreds of others too young to remember World War II who visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States is perceived as an unconscionable villain, the only nation that unleashed the unthinkable horror of atomic bombs on mankind.

“This reminds me of when we visited Moscow, Leningrad and Yalta and how the Soviet guides recalled the devastation done to their country by the Germans during World War II. And how 40 years later the Russians still have strong feelings about the Germans,” Arliene said after visiting the horrors in the museum in Hiroshima.

“I remember wondering how the Germans could come back to Russia after what their soldiers had done. I have the same feeling here, wondering if the Japanese feel that way about us because of what happened here in Hiroshima. . . .”

En route to Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the long flight over the Pacific and aboard the Shinkansen, or bullet train, from Tokyo, we read John Hersey’s 1946 classic “Hiroshima,” the story of six who survive the atomic bombing of that city.

Hersey’s description of pastor Kiyoshi Tanimoto “reaching down and taking a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in glove-like pieces” is portrayed in startling lifelike statues in the Hiroshima museum, figures emerging from the firestorm walking with the skin of their hands peeling off.

“What a terrible sight. It was hell on Earth,” said Hideo Shinpo, a 43-year-old survivor, in a quote that is part of the caption on the lifelike mural.

The horror of the bombing is everywhere in the museums. Photos of survivors in agony. Roof tiles with human bones. Melted plates with human bones. Photographs showing the dispersal of the dead days after the bombings. Photos of women and children, dead and dying from radiation. Photos showing the devastation of the two cities.

At the peace fountain in Nagasaki in memory of atomic bomb victims who died crying for water are inscribed the words of 9-year-old Sachiko Yamaguchi: “I was very thirsty and went for water. I found the water with something like oil all over it. They told me that it had flown down from the air. But I wanted the water so much that I drank it even though it was covered with filth.”

“Mizu! Mizu! (Water! Water!),” moaned the victims as they died of intense thirst.

In Hersey’s book he tells of victims with “eye sockets hollow, fluid from melted eyes running down their cheeks.”

Photographs in the museums bear out the description.

You see the victims today, 41 years after the bombings, riding the buses and streetcars in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, walking along the sidewalks, their faces scarred forever with red and purple blotches, scorched by the bomb.

Schoolchildren raise their fingers in peace signs to passing foreigners. Huge stacks of brilliantly colored paper cranes appearing like floral wreaths are at the foot of memorials at the peace parks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Students visiting the museums fold the cranes and leave them as prayers for those who died in the two devastating blasts.

What had been the worst devastation in man’s history is now shopping centers, hotels, high-rise buildings embracing the two peace parks with the only atomic bomb building still standing, the haunting skeletal dome of Hiroshima’s Museum of Science and Industry, burned and melted with its skeletal steel frame tower exposed to the sky.

Life in the two cities goes on.

It is a sobering, numbing experience for visitors viewing the exhibits in the museums.

One’s mind is flooded with a mix of all sorts of flashbacks: Of Pearl Harbor, of Bob Scheibel who lived across the street and Paul Liebsch, who lived across the alley and several other high school classmates who never came back from the war.

Of being part of the fighting on faraway Pacific islands, the invasion of Okinawa April 1, 1945, surviving Japanese kamikaze attacks, being present at the release of prisoners--some of them survivors of the Bataan death march--from the infamous camps at Sendai on northern Honshu, of our ship being next to the battleship Missouri when papers to end the hostilities were signed.

For all who visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the experience is a lasting reminder of the senselessness of war, of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and the need for understanding and the respect of humanity by all mankind and by all nations of the world.