Nagasaki survivor wants U.S. to acknowledge Allied prisoners who died
Rudi Hoenson wants the U.S. to officially acknowledge Allied prisoners who died
Rudi Hoenson wouldn’t have written Barack Obama had the president acknowledged, just once, that the atomic bomb that devastated Nagasaki also targeted Rudi and 200 of his friends.
“It’s his own fault that he’s being pestered by some old fool,” the 93-year-old says.
Not that Obama is any more to blame than anyone else. It’s just that all these years later, it still bothers Hoenson that no one in officialdom has acknowledged that Allied prisoners were among those on the ground when the U.S. detonated a nuclear device over the Japanese city on Aug. 9, 1945.
You might recognize Hoenson. A year ago today, on the 70th anniversary of the raid, the Victoria philanthropist finally went public with the story he had kept private all his life: He had been at Nagasaki when the bomb fell.
It was a chilling, graphic account: He was clearing the rubble from an earlier air raid, one that had killed the man next to him, when he glimpsed a parachute high in the morning sky. Then came the blinding flash, the instant inferno, the hellscape of the dead and dying, the burned women and children.
For the Dutch-born Hoenson, it was the culmination of 31⁄2 years of captivity. Taken prisoner in what is now Indonesia, he was pressed into forced labour in the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki. The brutal conditions killed well over 100 men. Just 200 remained in the Fukuoka 14 PoW camp when the bomb exploded just 1.4 kilometres away. Estimates of the number killed in Nagasaki vary widely, from 22,000 to 75,000.
Some of the prisoners perished in the month it took the Allies to arrive. “Twenty had died by then, and under terrible conditions, because there were no painkillers, no medications, and these guys were badly burned,” Hoenson says. Eighty of the survivors were then taken aboard a hospital ship, the New Haven, though they were so emaciated that Hoenson wonders how many survived. Hoenson himself had dropped to 80 pounds from 160.
Given all he endured, Hoenson is remarkably at ease. In a visit at the Lodge at Broadmead the other day, he looked like a man on vacation: Hawaiian shirt, shorts, sandals. He bears no bitterness to his former captors; they were just acting according to what Japanese society then demanded, he says.
It has always bugged him, though, that none of the Allied powers has ever spoken about the bombing of those 200 Fukuoka 14 prisoners (plus those at another PoW camp farther from the blast zone). So when Obama visited Hiroshima — the other atomic bomb target — this spring without going to Nagasaki, it felt like just one more instance of being ignored.
Hoenson wrote Obama to ask for public acknowledgment of what happened and the erection of a memorial in Nagasaki. A month later, he has yet to hear back, but it felt good to make the attempt.
“I’m not doing it for myself,” he says. “I’m doing it for the 200 guys who suffered.” He thinks he might be the last of them alive, and feels compelled to speak on their behalf.
“To have 200 people completely off the map, after what they went through, that’s not nice.”
Not that he disagrees with the decision to drop the bomb, even if the Allies knew the prisoners were there (though that remains an open question). Nagasaki was a legitimate military target, crowded with shipyards and factories. “Were they ashamed that they dropped the bomb on us? They shouldn’t be.”
He also believes the atomic bombs shortened the war, saving lives.
On his way home from captivity, Hoenson flew out of Okinawa in the nose of a B-29 bomber. It offered a bird’s-eye view of the fleet of aircraft — 2,000 of them, the pilot told him — that the Allies had amassed. “They were ready to pound Japan. Tokyo would have been completely flattened. Osaka would have been completely flattened. They would have taken millions of lives.”
Note that in March 1945, a 300-plane raid on Tokyo created a firestorm that killed up to 130,000 people, more than died at either Nagasaki or Hiroshima.
“I have not complained about them doing the bombing,” Hoenson says. “My only complaint is they did not acknowledge there were 200 prisoners of war.”
He does not want money, he stresses. In fact, he bristled this year when the Dutch government sent him 25,000 Euros — roughly $36,000 — as compensation for wages lost during captivity. It came way too late for the former Dutch PoWs who could have used the money but have since died. He wrote a rocket of a letter to the Dutch government, chastising it for not making the widows and heirs of the dead prisoners eligible for the payments.
“Under no circumstances would I use that money for my own pleasure.”
So Hoenson gave the money to the Lodge at Broadmead, one of his favourite causes. Hoenson, who invested wisely after immigrating to Canada in 1951, has given more than $900,000 to the veterans’ facility so far.
That includes putting up $250,000 of the $500,000 that was just raised to equip each resident’s room with a bed lift. He plans to donate more when Broadmead launches its next campaign, one meant to increase the comfort of the aging residents, this September.
His attachment to his fellow veterans — those who live in Broadmead, those who died as PoWs and the 200 who were in Fukuoka 14 when the atomic bomb fell — is profound.
The feelings are particularly intense at this time of year. “Always, when we get close to Aug. 9, memories come back.”
No bitterness, though. “It’s done,” he says. “Life goes on, eh?”
“I was there, and I wonder, is this what awaits us sinners in hell?” — Nagasaki survivor Rudi Hoenson