Child in Hiroshima shortly before the dropping of the bomb.Though it has been seventy years since the United States of America introduced to the world the very weapons which could potentially annihilate the global population when it dropped two atomic bombs on the island nation of Japan, the world is no closer to nuclear nonproliferation than it was during the first years of the Cold War. Despite the many mutual promises made to significantly downsize their respective nuclear arsenals, the United States and Russia are continually in possession of the world’s largest stockpiles. And in the case of the United States, there isn’t even a significant attempt to reverse course. While proclaiming his desire to live in a world without nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama has in actuality authorized the U.S.’s vast nuclear arsenal to be renewed and “modernized” at a cost of $1 trillion over the next thirty years. (So much for being too “broke” to alleviate homelessness and poverty!) The sheer hypocrisy of this is astounding on too many different levels. While the U.S. – in an attempt to starve Iran economically and draw it into war – continues to falsely accuse the Islamic Republic of trying to obtain a single nuclear weapon, the U.S. is renewing its vast arsenal which already numbers in the thousands. All the while these neocons would like the world to forget that there has been only one nation in the history of the planet that holds the dubious distinction of stooping so low as to use these weapons of mass destruction on an enemy population during war time. That is of course the United States, which dropped not one, but two atomic weapons on civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at World War II’s end, and then attempted to cover its tracks by claiming the bombs actually saved lives in the end.
Condemning the horrific and unprecedented atrocities committed by the U.S. against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the most unequivocal terms is by no means an attempt to absolve imperial Japan of its own crimes against humanity during WWII, nor is it an implication that it was an innocent victim during that war. Rather, Japan was much the same as all the other imperialist nations at the time, including the U.S. The only difference in the crimes carried out on behalf of the imperialist powers of the West – the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, etc. – as opposed to those of Japan is that in the case of the latter it was a non-white nation engaged in the cruel enterprises of colonialism and imperialism. Japan, just like the West, carried out monstrous atrocities against the native inhabitants of Asian countries it invaded, a prerequisite for placing people under colonial occupation with the goal of robbing them of their natural resources and labor in order to build and enrich the empire. It was not benevolent concern for the indigenous inhabitants of nations suffering under the heel of Japanese imperialist aggression which was the cause of America’s enmity towards Japan leading up to WWII, however. To the contrary, for much of the 20th century American policymakers openly welcomed the ravaging of China by Japan and the nations of the West, subjecting China to an what was known as an “Open Door Policy”. The U.S. certainly couldn’t make the case that it was concerned for Asian people subjected to Japanese occupation, considering how at the turn of the 20th century U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines went about savagely murdering Filipino men, women and children, putting them into pens (concentration camps) guarded by vicious dogs, and subjected them to water-boarding and other forms of torture. [Zinn, Howard. A Peoples’ History of the United States. (1980). Pages 313-317.] At the end of the first five years of U.S. occupation, 15% of the Filipino population ceased to exist. Nor could it be argued that the U.S. was particularly concerned about the people affected by the Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula or the occupation of Vietnam, considering how brutal the U.S. military itself was to be with these same peoples when America went to war with them in the years following Japan’s defeat. The true source of hostility between the United States and Japan stemmed from the growing Japanese military presence in the Southwest Pacific Ocean where the U.S. extracted important raw materials for its market, such as tin, rubber, and jute among other things. It was for this reason the U.S. imposed a total oil and scrap iron embargo on Japan in the summer of 1941, resulting in Japan losing “access to three-fourths of its overseas trade and 88 percent of its imported oil.” The embargo was instituted for the purpose of preventing Japan from becoming “more and more self-sufficient” (according to a State Department Memo) and less in need of American-produced goods. By instituting the Japanese embargo, the U.S. all but declared war on Japan in all but name only, an action most Americans today are taught nothing about. It was this embargo that ultimately lead to what’s been presented as a startling, totally unexpected attack on a Pearl Harbor naval base at the end of the same year. [Zinn, pgs. 410-411.]
Mother and child, Hiroshima, Aug. 5, 1945, the day before the bomb.By the end of July, 1945, after three years of war, an American victory was all but assured. The U.S. military “had control of the sea and air and were systematically eliminating [Japan’s] ability to wage war.” The Japanese “were surrounded by the Navy. They couldn’t get any imports and they couldn’t export anything.” That Japan was by all means defeated is a fact which even the highest officials of the U.S. military establishment and the officially-appointed U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey attested to. According to Admiral William Leahy, the de facto Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and highest ranked military officer from 1942-1949, “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” In the words of General (and future President) Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” The scientific director of the “Manhattan Project” (which produced the first nuclear weapons) himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer, stated that the bombs were dropped on “an essentially defeated enemy”. In fact the Japanese had made it known that they were willing to surrender but for one condition, that they be allowed to retain their Emperor as constitutional monarch. In the opinion of Ellis Zacharias, the Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, “Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen.” Even the hot-blooded General Douglas MacArthur was of the opinion that dropping A-bombs on Japan was unnecessary. “The war might have ended weeks earlier,” said MacArthur, “if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” And finally there was General Curtis LeMay who would assert without reservation, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
The sole condition onto which Japan tied its surrender – that of retaining their Emperor Hirohito – had been on the table since the end of 1944, and the Roosevelt White House and U.S. Military establishment were both fully aware of this. Two days prior to the Yalta Conference at which the leaders of the major ‘Allied’ powers – Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin – met, Gen. Douglas MacArthur sent to President Roosevelt a summary of the Japanese position, including its sole condition of surrender. This he was able to do due to the fact that the U.S. military had decoded the Japanese code years earlier and therefore was able to intercept and read all messages sent from Japan to its foreign emissaries, including one from February 24, 1945 from Japanese foreign minister Shigerori Togo declaring, “It is his Majesty’s heart’s desire to see swift termination of the war.” According to MacArthur’s summary of the intercepted telegrams,
“The Japanese would accept an occupation, cease hostilities, surrender its arms, remove all troops from occupied territories, submit to criminal war trials, let its industries be regulated, asking only that their emperor be retained.”
The above is exactly what came to pass, only the Americans would make the decision to carry out the war for seven more months instead of simply allowing for the single condition that the emperor remain, a condition they later acceded to anyway. As Counter Punch‘s Thomas Knapp put it,
“The US fought two of the war’s bloodiest battles — Iwo Jima and Okinawa, at a cost of tens of thousands of Americans killed — then unleashed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan’s civilian population, rather than accept that condition. But once the war was over, Hirohito was allowed to remain Emperor.”
During the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, at precisely 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, the B-29 bomber plane known as Enola Gay unleashed for the first time in history a weapon of mass destruction on a civilian population when it dropped the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” on a highly-populated area in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Of a population of 350,000 people, 100,000 were immediately incinerated. In the days and weeks to come, tens of thousands more would succumb to their wounds, and those who survived would suffer effects such as tumors and cancer, caused by the intense radiation, for the rest of their lives. According to the Los Angeles Times, of the more than 140,000 victims killed, 95% were “women and children and other noncombatants.” Survivor Setsuko Thurlow, who was at school with her classmates when the bomb hit, recalls being one of only three of her classmates to have survived the bomb’s initial impact. The others she remembers screaming as they were burned alive. Equally horrifying was the sight of many of the bomb’s survivors on the streets. “Parts of their bodies were missing,” she recalls, “flesh and skin hanging from their bones, some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands, and some with their stomachs burst open, with their intestines hanging out.”
And then, not even three days after plunging Hiroshima into ruins and creating a living hell on earth, the Enola Gay dropped yet another atomic bomb, this one given the name “Fat Man”, on a mostly civilian-populated city – Nagasaki. 50,000 people were killed on impact, and tens of thousands more died in the days and weeks to follow. This second atomic bombing of a Japanese city “followed so closely upon the first there was no time for the Japanese war council to meet with the emperor and reach their conclusion to surrender.” The terms of surrender for the Japanese were made known five days later, on August 14. According to the terms deemed acceptable by the U.S., Hirohito would remain as Emperor of Japan, proving without a shadow of a doubt that the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary acts of aggression (war crimes). President Harry S. Truman, whose decision it ultimately was to use the bombs, was fully aware his actions would lead to “the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children.” Even the U.S.’s own official Strategic Bombing Survey came to the disturbing conclusion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as the two targets “precisely due to their concentration of activities and population.” [Zinn, pg. 424.] In the case of Nagasaki, there is some speculation that the true purpose of dropping this bomb was seeing the effects of what a bomb made of plutonium as opposed to uranium (which was what “Little Boy” was made from) would do to a city and its population. What is no longer doubted however is the fact that at least the first bomb was dropped as a warning to the Soviet Union, as if to say, “Do not challenge us. Otherwise, this is what will become of you.” This is underlied by the fact that Stalin had agreed earlier at the Yalta Conference to join the United States in the war against Japan after defeating Germany in Europe. Once the Soviets began to make good on this promise, the decision was made to end the war in such a way that the U.S. would emerge as the sole-occupier of Japan. In a sense it was the initiating act of the Cold War.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima (and days later Nagasaki), the American public was bombarded with pro-military propaganda claiming the bombings were not only morally justifiable but were in fact necessary because they “saved over a million American lives” that would have been lost in event of a ground invasion. Interestingly, the man who came up with this number later admitted to essentially pulling it from his ass. Yet it is still cited in high school and college textbooks across the nation. The late great historian Howard Zinn once noted how in the minds of the U.S. military establishment, “if Americans can be induced to accept [the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki], they can accept any war, any means, so long as the war makers can supply a reason.” Unfortunately the general American public has subsequently demonstrated many times over that no atrocity is too egregious to tolerate being committed in their name.
***Below is a set of images from those fateful days and their aftermath in August, 1945. Weapons of war, death and destruction are the true legacy the United States has left on this world. We can either learn from this, or we can continue on the path to ultimate annihilation that those who control the U.S. military industrial complex seem most intent on doing.
“Little Boy” (left) and “Fat Man” (right) were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The crew of the Enola Gay, the plane from which “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The plane was piloted by Theodore “Dutch” van Kirk.
Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. embarking on the Enola Gay flight that would kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians when it dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima from the Enola Gay.
A picture showing the mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb’s impact, proudly autographed by Enola Gay crew members.
The destruction and devastation of Hiroshima, proudly autographed by the Enola Gay’s Col. Paul Tibbets Jr.
20 minutes after “Fat Boy” was dropped on Nagasaki
aerial view of Nagasaki; before (left) and after (right) the bomb
The warping effect of the bomb on a beer bottle, from a photo taken in 1961
The shadow of a Hiroshima victim is permanently etched in stone, caused by the effects of the immense nuclear radiation.
Hondori shopping center in Hiroshima; before (above) and after (below)
Nagasaki after the bomb
An elderly woman is lost amidst the chaos in the aftermath of the nuking of Nagasaki.
Nagasaki. August 10, 1945. An orphaned Japanese youth carries his injured sibling after the atomic bomb destroyed their city.
Newly orphaned children who managed to survive the blast in Nagasaki wonder aimlessly amidst the rubble of their once-vibrant city.
Nagasaki
Another orphaned child
A staircase warped by the effects of radiation; Hiroshima
Hiroshima
burn victim
A doctor attempting to tend to a victim burned in the Hiroshima atrocity.
A man burned in Hiroshima develops large tumors over his back and arms; pictured in 1947; LIFE Magazine.
A picture of three survivors of the Hiroshima bombing taken in 1947; LIFE Magazine.
A Nagasaki survivor developed large tumors on his back
an atomic bombing burn victim several years after the bombing
Eyes that have seen the first nuclear weapon attack on humanity.
A woman cares for a scarred young patient; Hiroshima.
The initial wounded survivors of Hiroshima’s aftermath. Many would die in the days and weeks to come.
Survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing seemed in many ways as if walking corpses.
Hiroshima destruction
A Hiroshima survivor forever bears the marks of humanity’s cruelest aggression and barbarism; in front of one of the few buildings in Hiroshima to survive the impact. (It remains there to the present day, now called the Memorial to Peace.)
An obliterated corpse in Nagasaki; LIFE Magazine
Hiroshima burn victim and survivor
A child survivor and burn victim; Hiroshima
Sumiteru Taniguchi was 16 years old when a nuclear bomb made of plutonium was dropped on Nagasaki. He had to lay on his stomach for three whole years after the skin was completely burned from his back, all the while he was “begging the nurses to let him die.“
A mother who survived the attack on Nagasaki breastfeeds her badly-injured baby; August, 1945.
Hiroshima, July 1946; nearly one year after the attack.
Hiroshima
A young Hiroshima burn victim in a hospital bed, so badly damaged that death must have felt at that time enviable.
An infant whose features have been warped by nuclear radiation.
A scene that can only be described as Apocalyptic destruction
United States Hypocrisy 
Here is another photo of Sumiteru Taniguchi of Nagasaki, about 5-6 weeks after the bombing.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48695.htm
Thank you for sharing this. I’d never seen this one before. The amount of pain he must have been in!
US
The photo of burned girl with her knees up labeled “Hiroshima” is really in Nagasaki. Photo is
via Dr. Masao Shiotsuki; that’s him in the background. See his book, DOCTOR AT NAGASAKI.
Also, I doubt the authenticity of “An infant whose features have been warped by nuclear radiation”;
as being from Japan; might be but after 59 years teaching about it all, and 17 summers exploring in Hiroshima and Nagasaki I never ran across that photo. It might be from Soviet testing.
See, http://sun.iwu.edu/~rwilson/PNDclass.html
and, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48695.htm
Here is Taniguchi-san’s last message, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DQaAz-Xvo
Keep the efforts going!
Thanks for the information and corrections. I’ll have to look into them when I get a chance.
My Sept. 12, 2017 comment: “corpses of Hiroshima’s victims”: These are photos from the Capp Collection of the Hoover Institution, now assumed (with good reason) to be from the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan.
“A Hiroshima survivor appears on Japanese television in the 21st century to talk about the attack.” This is not an A-bomb victim; he is a victim of leprosy.
“corpses of Hiroshima’s victims” These appear to be victims of a non-A-bomb disaster, but I’ve lost track of which one.
Are you sure about that? Thanks for pointing it out. I’ll have to remove those images.
“General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific and the second-highest-ranking active-duty officer in the US Army, considered the bomb ‘completely unnecessary from a military point-of-view.’ and became both angry and depressed when he learned that the United States was about to se it. He held a press conference on August 6, before the bomb drop was announced, and told reporters that the Japanese were ‘already beaten . . .’
“The Untold History of the United States”, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
Interesting. I wonder sometimes if McArthur’s strong emotional ties with Japan had more to do with an affinity for that country’s virtual fascism before the end of the war and an unbridled hatred of communism, considering how he advocated nuking China and the North Koreans during the American-Korean war in the following decade.
Use of A-bombs totally unnecessary. Just google words to the effect ” US bombing of Japan 1945″. You will see astonishing numbers of Japanese casualties and the fact that for 6 months US bombed with out fear of any ground fire or air resistance.
Thank you Carl. The bombing of so many Japanese cities, including Tokyo, was so devastating that the death toll eclipsed even the atomic bombings. It’s amazing how historians so readily accepted Truman’s justification for the use of the bombs, yet many of the contemporary writers at the time in the mainstream press surprisingly didn’t. (Of course later they would swallow the ‘official’ explanation as well.)
Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
This are the “after-effects” of war ….. “The Nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 70 Years Later” .. is that what we want?
I guess this is what you expect with a capitalist war waged to further corporate interests. There’s also evidence the US prolonged the European conflict (in WWII) by 8-12 months in order to arrange for Nazi war criminals to surrender to the US (rather than the USSR) and to organize the Rat Line that would enable many of them (those who weren’t employed by the CIA or NASA) to escape to South America.
Isn’t it incredible how quickly the CIA rescued and employed so many Nazis yet persecuted anyone who so much as expressed empathy with the Soviet Union after the war? There no equivalent to the “Red Scare” when it came to a government war on right-wing fascists. The U.S. was much more ideologically akin to Nazi Germany than the Soviet Union.
I think it almost certain the bombing was ‘experimental’, the Manhattan Project’s carrying through of the project to operational status. No one then could really know what would happen (except mathematically) as the bomb was an unprecedented invention. It was an act of criminal irresponsibility that deserved the death sentence. But as far as Truman’s administration was concerned it was also a political act of terrorism, as you Imply. It certainly wasn’t an act of war. Japan had no army by 1945 and was sending schoolboys into battle with the expectation of their suicide during their attacks and evoking the suicide ethic so close to Japanese values. There needs to be a real effort to link the Truman administration, and every subsequent US government administration, with perpetrators of war crimes and atrocities carried out against other humans. Truman is among the worst on the list that includes Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Genghis Khan. Genghis is a good comparison. He destroyed the tolerant Muslim culture of the Abbasids who worked harmoniously with Greek and European scholars, and created the world of mutual suspicion between Muslim and ‘Christian’ we live in today. Americans should not be satisfied with bullshit about ‘fighting for democracy’ etc.
A wonderful analysis as usual Phillip! As you say, the experimentation factor is certainly quite important in all this, and while they certainly didn’t “know” exactly what would happen, they were definitely aware that it was going to be horrific, and in fact monstrous! After all, isn’t that what the purpose of making the bomb was for? To cause destruction and terror unlike anything ever seen. Regardless of what those who made it would late claim, the purpose of making the weapon was so that it could be used.
I’ve often wondered about the ‘deterrent’ justification. How can stockpiling so many nuclear warheads around the world be necessary when one would do the trick? And why start so many wars with weak opponents if peace is so important to US administrations? Yeah yeah, gotta stop the commies, the Muslims, the terrorists…say, who we stopping this time? What about fighting poverty or environmental damage or poor education or poor taste or intolerance or ignorance or…disposal of nuclear waste!…but you can’t bomb those opponents can you? Talk about a one trick pony.
Hold on for a second. Never say never when you’re talking about the psychos who run the U.S. military industrial complex. There’s isn’t anything on planet earth they would admit to NOT being able to bomb.. If you can declare a ‘war on terror’ and ‘war on drugs’, there’s not much you won’t declare war on.
Amen!
Rosaliene makes a good point and i second it
Thank You for this very worthwhile sharing
best wishes
john
American occupation of the Philippines in 1898 and occupying the country for about 50 years was barely mentioned in our high school history books. One sentence , that’s all there is to it.
The amount of people I’ve come across in my lifetime who even know there was an American occupation of the Philippines can be counted on one hand! Recently, I was talking to someone who noted that the “difference” between today’s military personnel and that of WWII and prior was that the pre-WWII generations had “better morals” and “training”. Then I reminded them of the atrocities committed during this occupation at the dawn of the 20th century and not surprisingly they had no clue what I was talking about.
The Philippines got its independence from the US on July 4, 1946, . However, they got a big tracks of property , almost a small town….. Clark Air Force base, and Subic naval Base, the largest US military installations outside of US.
It’s sad to think that there is still a huge occupying U.S. military base there to this very day! And I’m sure you’re well aware of the recent case of an American soldier who murdered a transgender Filipino woman and has yet to truly face justice as far as I’m aware. I’ve also read of a Maoist insurgency that is opposed to the continuing presence of the base. I find it hypocritical for the U.S. to be making a huge fuss about China’s building of artificial islands in the South China Sea while at the same time the U.S. has foreign military bases throughout Asia for the stated purpose of “containing China”. New naval bases are being constructed on Okinawa and on an island off South Korea as we speak, and there is strong opposition from the people who are living there. Of course the elites care little about the wishes of the inhabitants.
Actually they left after the 99 yearlease had expired, in the case of Clark Air base, it was premature. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo forced the US government to abandon Clark, and at that time, Clinton was actually downsizing the military bases overseas. By the way, I don’t know if Filipinos know this… I think they know, but Americans are in Mindanao, the second big island in the Philippines. There’s a Muslim insurgency going on there, and I think the American military is there for support.
At any rate, Filipinos love the US. Chris Matthews on Hardball lsted the top 5 countries that are very friendly to the US. UK and japan aren’t even on the list. Kenya is # 5 ( for now,because of Obama ) and # 1 is the Philippines. The Communist insurgency is practically over. The insurgency peaked during former Pres. Marcos’s dictatorship, and at that time, Filipinos depended on the armed insurgents to fight his regime. But they’re practically zero now.
Thank you for informing me. I read a lot of news but it appears I’m not real up to date here. I had no idea the communist insurgency was over with. I wonder why the U.S. is so popular in the Phillilpenes?
Benevolent colonizers ?
The first thing the American gov’t did was to bring in thousands of ” teachers ” , called the Thomasites ( the name of the ship was Thomas or something ) , patterned the eduacational system after the US, and most importantly, the Americans acted like good, benevolent colonizers. In the end, they say, the sum total is , ” more than 400 years stuck in the convent, then 50 years of Hollywood “. That’s hard core. ( The Philippines was aSpanish colony from 1521 to 1898. ) The Philippines is 90 % Catholic. They say the country sticks out like a sore thumb in Asia, with a totally different culture and heritage, with Spanish names. The Philippines therefore gravitated towards the West,aka US.
This is quite interesting. I’ve always kind of been under the impression that Japan seemed the most akin to the ‘West’ (in the last half of the century that is) but you make a good case for the Philippines being more so due to the years of Spanish colonialism and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
Japan seems to be most akin to the West , but I think it’s just on the surface. Malaysia and Indonesia look very modern , but they have laws that will execute people if they get out of their Muslim religion. That’s a sad fact, and they have admitted it. The Philippines is trying to bond with SouthEast Asian countries, including Japan and Korea, but more with Japan and Korea. The country has been looking for its own identity, but it seems it has given up. Their identity is ” there’s no identity”. The Philippines is a hybrid. And they have now accepted it.
I will admit I didn’t know this. I will not claim to knowing so much history though
While these photos were painful to look at, I thank you for the reminder of why we need to continue our struggle to end all wars and strive for peaceful coexistence among peoples everywhere.
Yes, while certainly not pleasant viewing, it is important for Americans and others who reside in imperialist countries to see the results of what is being done in their names. “Security” and “defense of freedom” this is not.