The anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

blueveinedthrobber
I can think of many things that should never have been but are. In any event I am greatful that we the US developed it and the Germans who tried did not. Can you imagine how much worse the outcome would have been if the Germans and Hitler had won the race.

By MAKI BECKER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

LAGRANGEVILLE, N.Y. - Sixty years later, Tomiko Morimoto West still remembers the low drone of the B-29 that flew over Hiroshima and changed her life forever.She was just 13. The horrific atomic blast on Aug. 6, 1945, all but wiped out her hometown in an instant. Her widowed mother was killed, and her grandparents would die later in agony.

"They left me all by myself," she said.

All alone, she suffered the effects of radiation sickness, which may have contributed to her inability to have children. But she is not bitter.

West, now 73 and a retired Vassar College lecturer, believes the atomic bomb that robbed her of her family and her innocence saved countless lives - Japanese and American.

"If it was not for the atomic bomb, we [Japanese] were in such a mental state, we would have fought until the last person," said West, who was taught as a little girl how to fight with a sharpened bamboo stick in the event of an invasion.

"I never, never, never hated the Americans," said West, who now lives near Poughkeepsie and is married to a former G.I.

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, West was in a factory courtyard with other girls her age, where they worked to support the war. She recalled how they all looked up at the American plane in the cloudless sky.

"Suddenly, there was a flash," she said.

She wouldn't know until much later that a 5-ton atomic bomb had been dropped on her city. Forty thousand people were killed instantly. Another 100,000, including her grandparents, would die by the end of the year from wounds and radiation sickness.

After the flash, she saw a brilliant orange orb, the color of the sun as it sets in the ocean, erupt in the sky - and she hit the ground.

When she looked up, the buildings around her and much of the city were on fire. The students ran up a small mountain to escape the flames.

Her teacher told the students, "You have to stay until somebody comes to pick you up."

But no one came for West. So when morning came, the teacher told her to go home.

West was stunned by the hellish ruins of Hiroshima. Burned soldiers, their skin dripping off their arms, begged her for water. Wailing mothers stopped her to ask if she had seen their children. A charred trolley car was packed with lifeless passengers still hanging onto the handrail. As she crossed a bridge over a river, she looked down and saw "a sea of dead people."

When West finally reached her home, she found it flattened. "I didn't know where to go," she said.

West tracked down her grandparents in a mountain cave surrounded by other wounded survivors. "I remember the horrible smell," she said. Her grandfather was hurt, with shards of glass embedded in his back.

About a week later, she went back to her house and found her mother's body crumpled in the rubble. "I guess [the house] came down on her."

On Aug. 15, a week after a second A-bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki, Japan surrendered.

Within the next 10 days her grandparents died, and the teenager had to cremate them both by herself. West became sick and went to the Americans for treatment.

As an adult, she learned English and met a G.I. named Melvin West. He was "very cute, very quiet," she said.

He went back to the U.S. and they exchanged letters for several years before he invited her to join him. They were soon married, and settled in Lagrangeville.

This weekend, as she has done for so many previous A-bomb anniversaries, West and her husband will participate in somber memorials. "It gives me a chance to mourn," she said.

West believes the horror and sadness of her youth taught her to appreciate life.

"I live amid the trees, surrounded by nature, and I get up every morning and I'm so happy," she said. "I feel I'm the luckiest person."

Originally published on August 5, 2005

My father was in a unit that was being transferred from the European theater (after 2 1/2 years) to the Pacific theater in August 1945. He never had a problem with the bombing. My problem with it is that in MHO it was unnecessary. The Japanese were folding and the dropping of those bombs was more of a test, to see how they would work in combat that a necessary strategic strike. We go around and around about this on these threads.

littlek wrote:

Around a third of Hiroshima's population was dead within a week of the attack. That's somewhere above 100,000 people.

It has taken Bush a little longer to reach the 100,000 mark, but he finally did manage to kill over 100,000 Iragi people.

And they weren't even near Pearl Harbor.

Littlek, if you want to get a first hand account, read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0553205986/102-2802182-0136965

The Nagasaki bombing was the really horrible one, and totally unnecessary. I have been given to believe that it was a test for the plutonium bomb.

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The military had simply been given orders to drop each bomb as it became available,

Letty
For what ever reason there was to drop the Bomb on Nagasaki I can not even entertain the reason being to test it's effect upon people.