WITH DEAD AND DYING. NO ONE SCREAMED OR CRIED. SOME SURVIVORS ENVIED THE DEAD’
and bleeding, skin and flesh was coming off their bones.
“A training field the size of two football pitches was packed with dead and dying. No one was screaming or crying. There were just moans and whispers. Tens of thousands of people were begging for water. There was not a single medical doctor or nurse. I worked all day trying to help. I watched all night as huge balls of fire incinerated my hometown.
“Some survivors said they envied the
saved multiple numbers over that from being killed in the war, on the American side and on the Japanese side.”
George Elsey, an aide to Truman, agreed: “The final decision was not made by Truman, but by the Japanese authorities when they rejected any opportunity to surrender their armed forces and save further massive loss of life.”
Truman, who, in the face of continued Japanese stubbornness, ordered the dropping of a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later, also reasoned that, “I realise the tragic significance of the atomic bomb. dead. To live in the aftermath was as hard or harder than dying. All of us were homeless with no food or medical care. The next day people came from neighbouring cities. They tried to rescue survivors, started cremating the corpses and tried to find family and friends. We had no idea what radiation would do to the body. The rescuers became victims. I lost two uncles, two aunts, two cousins, my sister-in-law, my sister and her four-year-old child. They survived the
But we have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor. I guess those who have starved, beaten and executed American soldiers have abandoned all pretence of obeying international laws of warfare.We have used it to shorten the agony of war and to save the lives of thousands of young Americans.”
Paul Wilmshurst, who wrote, produced and directed Hiroshima, says he didn’t seek to take sides. “Hiroshima is still such a powerful story because it is still such a shocking fact that it actually happened. It’s almost impossible to get your head around it.
MEMORIAL: A skeletal dome in Hiroshima that became today’s A-Bomb Dome
initial blast but were both badly burned. My mother was rescued from under a crushed building. My father was out of town fishing. From the boat he saw the rising mushroom cloud.
“My parents found me, and we went to look after my sister and her child. We spent several days with them until they died. The soldiers came, dug a hole in the ground, threw the bodies in, poured gasoline in and threw in a lighted match.
“There was no human dignity. I watched without feeling. Those who had no family had to stay and died of radiation sickness. Babies were born with deformities. There was social discrimination because people thought the sickness was contagious.”
“We are not trying to say whether it was right or wrong. Dropping the bomb was an outrage, an unthinkable act. But there was a lot of evidence that every last citizen of Japan was prepared to defend their country. Schoolgirls were even being trained to attack American soldiers with sharpened bamboo sticks.
“When you look at the casualties that would have been involved in an American invasion of Japan and the intransigence of the Emperor cult and the shame and difficulty of imagining surrender, that’s when the outrage and unthinkableness of dropping the bomb unblocked things.
“The issue we tussled with when making the film is that there are no answers. You can’t ever feel that there’s any resolution because you’re having to hold separate, contradictory thoughts at the same time.
“There may have been an overall benefit in saving vast numbers of lives. But the reality is that all those people died in the most terrible, unimaginable way.
“The Japanese also had to deal with the second wave of radiation sickness. They discovered that the impact was not just the destructive blast, but also an insidious invisible force that people would spend years coming to terms with.”
IF THERE is one message the director definitely wanted to get across it is one of learning from past mistakes. “There is a lot of serious instability in the world at the moment, and that worries me. Even so, if you took away all the arguments about exhaustion at the end of six years of fighting the Second World War and the need to bring it to a close, the idea of dropping another atomic bomb would be madness.”
We’ll leave the last words to Akiko Takakura, then 19, who, even though she was just 260 metres from the epicentre of the explosion, survived, thanks to the earthquake-proof walls of the bank where she worked as a clerk.
Outside, she and a colleague found a vision of hell. “The words ‘city of death’ came to mind. There were only dead people. It had been rush hour, 8.15 in the morning.
“People who had been walkin to work were doubled up dead over each other as far as we could see. They had died immediately, naked, burnt. I just asked myself, ‘Why?’ and could not find any words. The two of us crouched down and burst into tears.
“How could such terrible things happen?”
●●Hiroshima airs tonight at 7.35pm on PBS America (Freeview 91, Freesat 155,Virgin Media 273 and Sky channel 174)