The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story

[Faryn Balyncd]

The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story

by Gary G. Kohls, M.D.

(August 2007, originally published August, 2005, The Idaho Observer)




. . . It had been only three (3) days since the first bomb, a uranium bomb, had decimated Hiroshima on August 6, with chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government and the Emperor had been searching for months for a way to an honorable end of the war which had exhausted the Japanese to virtually moribund status. (The only obstacle to surrender had been the Truman administration's insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan — an intolerable demand for the Japanese.)

The Russian army was advancing across Manchuria with the stated aim of entering the war against Japan on August 8, so there was an extra incentive to end the war quickly: the US military command did not want to divide any spoils or share power after Japan sued for peace.

The US bomber command had spared Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kokura from the conventional bombing that had burned to the ground 60+ other major Japanese cities during the first half of 1945. One of the reasons for targeting relatively undamaged cities with these new weapons of mass destruction was scientific: to see what would happen to intact buildings — and their living inhabitants — when atomic weapons were exploded overhead. . . .





. . . With instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting, Bock's Car arrived at Kokura, which was clouded over. So after circling three times, looking for a break in the clouds, and using up a tremendous amount of valuable fuel in the process, it headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest Christian church in the Orient, St. Mary's Cathedral, but it also had the largest concentration of baptized Christians in all of Japan. It was the city where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549, a Christian community which survived and prospered for several generations. However, soon after Xavier's planting of Christianity in Japan, Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests began to be accurately perceived by the Japanese rulers as exploitive, and therefore the religion of the Europeans (Christianity) and their new Japanese converts became the target of brutal persecutions.

Within 60 years of the start of Xavier's mission church, it was a capital crime to be a Christian. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their beliefs suffered ostracism, torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity had been stamped out.

However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government - which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the government, the Japanese Christian community built the massive St. Mary's Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.

Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that St. Mary's Cathedral was one of the landmarks that the Bock's Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his bomb site over Nagasaki that day, he identified the cathedral and ordered the drop.

At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching, radioactive fireball. The persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving center of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero.

And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in 9 seconds. The entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out. . . .





http://medicolegal.tripod.com/kohlsnagasaki-untold-story.htm

[annm4peace]

1. why do people un recommend ?

is truth are to take ?

there are vigils happening all over the country in remembrance.

St.Paul is having one Sat at Como Park

[SidDithers]

9. Why do you think that a "cut and paste" post with a link...

with no original content or comment from the OP is worthy of a spot on DU's Greatest Page?

Sid

[Faryn Balyncd]

2. It's interesting what some, even on DU, choose to "Unrecommend", & choose not to remember.

[SidDithers]

12. Nah, I just didnt' think it was a very good article...

bit to Jesusy for my tastes.

Sid

[lunatica]

3. I rec'd but it's still in the < nether region

truth counts

[eyepaddle]

4. Well, it's another tidbit to add to the mountain of history that WW II produced

but other than being a footnote for the bombing event, I'm not sure this will markedly change many people's view of the bombing of Nagasaki. I wouldn't feel any more sanguine had all 20-30,000 vistims been Buddhist for example.

World War II was the time when our technical and industrial capacity really caught up and even surpassed human's innate belligerence and aggression.

Gwynn Dyer's book (I think the title is "The Deadly Habit" but it has been years since I read it so I kind of forget, my apologies) really lays that out.

[Chemisse]

5. I wonder how the bombardier felt

What does it feel like to know you are obliterating the lives of tens of thousands of men, women and children?

I would expect it would be haunting, to say the least.

[eyepaddle]

6. I don't know this specific guy's war record, but at the time

bombing rather indiscriminatley and setting fire to people was rather accepted--it was something that all nations with the bombers to pull it off did. And while the fact that it only took a single bomb an instant to inflict that level of carnage was surprinsing it was accepted that that much carnage was required.

Sitting here in 2009 I know there is no way I could have dropped that goddamend bomb, but for guys who had spent months fire bombing cities at low altitude at night where the trainling planes in the formation could smell the burning people from the earlier waves, well, things probably looked a bit different.

Most of the aircrews were horrified by what they were doing, but their commitment to duty meant that they would do it.

Humans are weird.

Edit: typos.

[Captain Hilts]

8. For people who had been at war for 4 years and who had lost friends and kin in that war

it is even easier.

Eleanor Roosevelt - peacenik that she was - said she would have dropped the bomb.

[eyepaddle]

13. Plus the reaction to the Kamikazes.

I think that really shocked the Americans and made them wonder what it might actually take to make the Japanese quit.

[kegler14]

10. The firebombing of Dresden incinerated tens of thousands

but that's what they did back then. It was all or nothing in the World Wars. Let's hope we never see another.

[Captain Hilts]

14. Churchill was horrified at what was being done to Dresden. nt

[kegler14]

7. Well, the Nagasaki bombadier said he would never apologize

for his role, although he also hoped he would be the last person to ever drop an atomic bomb. He stayed in the military for his career. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, also had no regrets and remained in the military. In 1975 he even re-enacted dropping the bomb -- complete with fake atomic explosion -- at an air show in where else but Texas!!

[SpiralHawk]

11. The k and the r

eom