Hiroshima Burned Into Veteran’s Memory

It was a clear autumn day when Thomas McCoy stepped into the atomic age.

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He was a young Navy ensign given leave to tour Hiroshima two months after the city was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a civilian population.

Five decades later, the shadow of Hiroshima remains imprinted on McCoy’s mind much like the shadows of bombing victims still hang heavily on the Japanese consciousness.

“You couldn’t help but realize the awesome power of the bomb,” said McCoy, now a management consultant and great-grandfather living in Camarillo.

“We had read a lot in the papers about the damage caused by the atomic bomb. But, still, what we saw hardly seemed possible.

“We could not see anything that resembled a city.”

In an effort to hasten the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman made the fateful decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki that killed 75,000 more civilians. But it was not until Aug. 14 that Japan’s reticent military government unconditionally surrendered.

Hiroshima had been a major industrial center with a population of 350,000. The bomb dropped by the Enola Gay killed an estimated 70,000 on impact and 130,000 more within five years due to radiation exposure.

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Scholars will argue for years over the decision to drop the bomb, but few will argue it hastened the end of the war.

McCoy and several Navy buddies, including Mark Hatfield, now a Republican senator from Oregon, made their trip to Hiroshima in a Navy landing craft from the Japanese port of Kure where their ship, the Whiteside, was anchored.

After about 20 miles of traveling upstream, dodging partially sunken boats, McCoy and friends docked beside the city and disembarked.

“We went ashore, not as conquering heroes, but as sailors who were glad the war was over,” said McCoy, who acknowledged he was prepared for the devastation, but still shocked by what he saw.

“What was once a flourishing city was nothing but a shambles . . . there wasn’t one brick upon another . . . huge buildings were now tiny pieces of stone.

“All the bodies were buried, but there was still a smell of death to the place.”

Although he has suffered no ill-effects from his tour of Hiroshima, McCoy said he probably would not have toured the scarred ruins with today’s knowledge of radiation.

“We didn’t know anything about radiation back then,” McCoy said. “The fact is we shouldn’t have gone there. It’s not what you would call a sound decision.”

As McCoy walked around the city, he was surprised not to find anything resembling personal effects. No pots, no pans, no hair brushes, nothing.

“We couldn’t find a thing, not even a plate. Everything literally went to ashes. Even all the glass had melted. It was like walking around the remains of a burned-out building--such terrific heat that no personal objects could be found.”

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What McCoy did bring back were photographs of what he saw--now aging photos of what was then a young McCoy posing with Navy pals by street cars with a moon-like landscape beyond.

The trolley cars, which resembled ones in San Francisco, were part of a small system put together by a city already struggling to rebuild.

Most of the people McCoy met were civilians walking with their remaining belongings through the streets on their way to nearby villages and towns.

“I felt there was a common bond, like we were just average people caught up in a war directed by generals and politicians,” McCoy said.

But while McCoy said he sympathized with the survivors he met, he strongly disagrees with historians who argue the bomb should never have been dropped, let alone on civilians.

“What was the alternative? A million more dead from an invasion of Japan?

“The bomb took lives, but it saved lives too,” said McCoy, who ferried troops at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and saw firsthand how the ferocity with which a losing Japanese army could fight. “It was a necessary evil.

“I wouldn’t be alive today, nor would my five children, six grandchildren and great-grandson, if the atom bomb had not been dropped because I know I would have been killed if we had invaded Japan.

“None of us who were to fight in the invasion were particularly optimistic about our futures, not after Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese were going to fight to the last man. It would have been an even bigger nightmare.”

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