Yoshida recalled the sun’s brutal heat “like a slow execution” in his testimony “I Must Not Die,” English translation provided by Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims.
Governor Nagano’s memory of the destruction in the Urakami Valley is quoted from his testimony at the Nagasaki Broadcasting Company Web site, “Nagasaki and Peace,” http://www2.nbc-nagasaki.co.jp/peace.
Medical and food relief: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, edited by the Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Health and Medical Services in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, USSBS report no. 13; “Prompt and Utter Destruction: The Nagasaki Disaster and the Initial Medical Relief” by Nobuko Margaret Kosuge in International Review of the Red Cross 89:866; and Nagasaki Speaks.
For Dr. Akizuki Tatsuichiro’s experiences at First Urakami Hospital, see “A Week of Horror and Human Love” in The Light of Morning. His memory of feeling “depressed in spirit” by the night of August 10 is quoted from his memoir Nagasaki 1945.
Other hibakusha testimonies related to relief efforts: Tsuguyoshi Kitamura in Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society; Itonaga Yoshi in Nagasaki August 9, 1945, edited by Mary Wiesen and Elizabeth Cannon; and Fukahori Yoshitoshi, interview with the author in 2011.
NAGASAKI, AUGUST 11–14
Memories of searching for lost family members in the ruins: Chie Tayoshi in Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society; Motoko Moriguchi in The Unforgettable Day, edited by Miyuki Kamezawa; Hitoshi Hamasaki at My Unforgettable Memory at the Nagasaki Shimbun Peace Site, http://www.nagasaki-np.co.jp/peace/hibaku/english/07.html; and the testimonies of Tadao Nakazawa and Sumiko Sakamoto in Testimonies of the Atomic Bomb Survivors.
Family reunifications: An anonymous survivor described how she was left for dead in a pile of corpses in War and Atomic Holocaust on Trial by Shigeyuki Kobayashi. Hisako Kyuma was reunited with her father at a relief station; see Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society.
Wada’s memory of cremating his friend Tanaka is quoted from Genbaku ju roku nen no koe [Sixty Years of Voices: Stories of the A-Bomb Survivors], edited by Imaishi Motohisa and translated by Christopher Cruz.
Allied POWs in Nagasaki: Charles Barkie and J. H. C. deGroot in Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society; Nagasaki Speaks; and The Jack Ford Story: Newfoundland’s POW in Nagasaki by Jack Fitzgerald.
Living in the ruins: Kazue Abe’s Bearing a Small Cross; Sano Fujita and Sachi Ogino in Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society; Matsu Moriuchi in We of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai; and Wada Hisako, interview with the author. Ikuko Doira remembers how her family of eight slept in shifts on one tatami mat in Living Beneath the Atomic Cloud, edited by Takashi Nagai.
Fuji Urata Matsumoto remembered the “lonely funeral” she and her sister held for their mother in We of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai.
Dr. Kenji Miake recalled the smell of “scorched chicken meat” and the dismal conditions at the Shinkozen relief station in Nagasaki Speaks.
For relief personnel as of August 14, see Governor Nagano’s “Report No. 8. Matters Concerning Air-Raid Damage and Emergency Counter Measures, 8-14-45” in Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, USSBS report no. 93:3, p. 215.
Dr. Akizuki described injured survivors comforting one another with Christian prayers in his testimony in The Light of Morning. His anger at the government and disbelief at the newspaper article claiming that protection against the “new-type bomb” was possible is quoted from Nagasaki 1945.
SURRENDER, AUGUST 15
The United States’ reply to Japan’s surrender offer was reported by the Associated Press; see “Text of U.S. Reply on Issue of Emperor,” Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 1945.
The emperor’s decision to surrender is quoted from The Rising Sun by John Toland. For the Japanese Cabinet’s final debates, see also “‘The Second Sacred Judgment’ August 14, 1945” (document 74), in The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, edited by William Burr; and the sources listed above for the Tokyo meetings.
The last U.S. bombing attacks on Japan: U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II: Combat Chronology 1941–1945, compiled by Kit C. Carter and Robert Mueller; The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes; and The Army Air Forces in WWII, vol. 5, edited by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate.
A translation of the emperor’s “Imperial Rescript on Surrender, 1945” is in Japan: A Documentary History, vol. 2, edited by David J. Lu.
Reactions to the surrender by military and civilians: The Rising Sun by John Toland; Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower; and Japan at War by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook. For the execution of POWs in Fukuoka, see “‘To Dispose of the Prisoners’: The Japanese Executions of American Air-Crew at Fukuoka, Japan, During 1945” by Timothy Lang Francis, Pacific Historical Review 66:4.
Reactions to the surrender in Nagasaki: The emperor’s radio address briefly interrupted Tsue Hayashi’s search for her daughter; see Hibaku: Recollections of A-Bomb Survivors, edited by Mitsue Kubo. Atsuyuki Matsuo overheard the surrender announcement on the radio while cremating his wife’s body; see Testimonies of the Atomic Bomb Survivors. Other testimonies: Kazue Abe in Bearing a Small Cross; Raisuke Shirabe in The Light of Morning; Tatsuichiro Akizuki in Nagasaki 1945; and numerous individual hibakusha accounts.
CHAPTER 4: EXPOSED
RADIATION EXPOSURE AND EARLY MEDICAL CARE
The initial stages of radiation illness and subsequent deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are documented in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly chap. 8, edited by the Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sources for doctors quoted in this chapter: Dr. Shiotsuki Masao remembered the “pinprick”-sized purple spots that appeared on his patients and detailed his efforts to autopsy the deceased in his book Doctor at Nagasaki: “My First Assignment Was Mercy Killing.” Dr. Akuzuki Tatsuichiro is quoted from his memoir, Nagasaki 1945. For Dr. Shirabe Raisuke, see “My Experience of the Atomic Bombing and an Outline of Atomic Bomb Disease” in The Light of Morning; “Medical Survey of Atomic Bomb Casualties,” The Military Surgeon 113:4; and A Physician’s Diary of Atomic Bombing and Its Aftermath by Raisuke Shirabe, M.D., edited by Fidelius R. Kuo. Dr. Shirabe’s original survey questionnaires and other materials are housed at the Division of Scientific Registry at the Atomic Bomb Disease Institute of Nagasaki University. See also The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai for information on his Nagasaki Medical College relief team caring for victims who had fled to the countryside outside Nagasaki.
In Death in Life, Robert Jay Lifton traced the origins of the rumor that plants would not grow in the atomic-bombed cities for seventy years to a statement about the Hiroshima bombing by chemist Harold F. Jacobson, which was reported (and soon retracted) in U.S. newspapers on August 8, 1945.
Hibakusha testimonies: Hisae Aoki remembered walking with her sister through the ashes of her school’s playground in Testimonies of the Atomic Bomb Survivors. An anonymous male, in The Witness of Those Two Days, vol. 2, described quenching his thirst with water from a gravesite memorial. Miyuki Fukahori recalled that corpses still floated in the river; see Nagasaki Under the Atomic Bomb: Experiences of Young College Girls, edited by Michiko Nakano.
U.S. RADIATION KNOWLEDGE AND DENIAL
Evidence of U.S. prebomb radiation effects knowledge: Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s statement on the bomb’s lethal radiation is quoted from “Memorandum from J. R. Oppenheimer to Brigadier General Farrell, May 11, 1945” (document 5) in The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, edited by William Bu
rr. Dr. Stafford L. Warren noted the lack of scientific study on the potential radioactive aftereffects of the bombs in “The Role of Radiology in the Development of the Atomic Bomb” in Radiology in World War II, edited by Leonard D. Heaton et al. For other examples, see The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes; The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, edited by William Burr, especially documents 6 and 12; Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century by J. Samuel Walker; and The Road to Trinity by Kenneth D. Nichols.
Several scholars have explored U.S. officials’ postwar denial and minimization of radiation effects and the War Department’s efforts to maintain control over the press reports related to the atomic bombs. See, for example, “Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan” by Laura Hein and Mark Selden in their essay collection Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age; “Censorship and Reportage of Atomic Damage and Casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki” by Glenn D. Hook, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23:1; “Covering the Bomb: Press and State in the Shadow of Nuclear War” by Robert Karl Manoff, in War, Peace and the News Media, Proceedings, March 18 and 19, 1983, edited by David M. Rubin and Marie Cunningham; and Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell.
An excellent resource on the impact of occupation censorship on the world’s understanding of the effects of the atomic bombs is The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan by Monica Braw. For the press code, censorship instructions, and other Japanese media restrictions during the U.S. occupation, see Conquered Press: The MacArthur Era in Japanese Journalism by William J. Coughlin; User’s Guide to the Gordon W. Prange Collection: Part I: Microform Edition of Censored Periodicals, 1945–1949, edited by Eizaburo Okuizumi; and “Revised Basic Plan for Civil Censorship in Japan, September 30, 1945,” Records of Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters, World War II, Record Group 331, SCAP GHQ, box 8552 folder 8, National Archives at College Park, MD.
For General Groves’s denials of radiation effects, see “Japanese Reports Doubted,” New York Times, August 31, 1945, and “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales” by William L. Laurence, New York Times, September 12, 1945. The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, edited by William Burr, includes the transcript of Groves’s conversation with Lt. Col. Rea at Oak Ridge (document 76) as well as General Farrell’s September 1945 reports from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (documents 77a and 77b). Groves’s belief that troops could enter an atomic-bombed area thirty minutes after an explosion is noted by Barton J. Bernstein in “An Analysis of ‘Two Cultures’: Writing About the Making and the Using of the Atomic Bombs,” Public Historian 12:2. For Groves’s characterization of radiation deaths as “pleasant,” see his testimony before the U.S. Senate in “Atomic Energy, Part 1, Hearings Before the United States Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, 79th Congress, 1st Session, Nov. 27–30, December 3, 1945” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). Despite postwar assurances by Groves and others that the first atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, had no detrimental radioactive impact, high levels of radioactivity from fallout were recorded several miles east of the testing site, and cattle in the area lost hair and developed skin lesions. Recently, U.S. health officials acknowledged that ingestion of contaminated food and water near the site has not been sufficiently studied and may have contributed to the overall level of radiation exposure for area residents. In 2014, the National Cancer Institute launched a follow-up investigation of the possible connection between reports of unusually high cancer rates in the area and residents’ radiation exposure following the Trinity test; see “Decades After Nuclear Test, U.S. Studies Cancer Fallout” by Dan Frosch, Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2014.
U.S. correspondent George Weller’s reports from early postwar Nagasaki were rediscovered by his son, Anthony Weller, in 2002 and subsequently published in First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War.
For a reprint of Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett’s first dispatch from Hiroshima and his confrontation with General Farrell, see his book Shadows of Hiroshima.
Japanese officials’ concerns about the potential impact of residual radiation on those living in the hypocenter area, in contradiction to U.S. teams’ assessments, are noted in “Report on Damage in the City of Nagasaki Resulting from the Atomic Air Raid, 10-3-45, Commander in Chief, Sasebo Naval District” in Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, USSBS report no. 93:3.
For the findings of the various U.S. military and scientific research teams in Nagasaki in the fall of 1945, see The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Manhattan District; Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, edited by Ashley W. Oughterson and Shields Warren, a condensed version of the six-volume report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan; and the reports of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Pacific Survey).
USSBS film crew director Daniel A. McGovern argued for the value of the Nippon Eiga-sha film in “Memo, Lt. Daniel A. McGovern to Lt. Commander William P. Woodward, December 29, 1945,” Production Materials from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, edited by Abé Mark Nornes, University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications, accessed 2013, https://www.cjspubs.lsa.umich.edu/electronic/facultyseries/list/series/production.php. For other details on the appropriation of this film, see “Suddenly There Was Emptiness” in Japanese Documentary Film by Abé Mark Nornes; “Iwasaki and the Occupied Screen” by Erik Barnouw, Film History 2:4; and Atomic Cover-up by Greg Mitchell.
OCCUPIED NAGASAKI, FALL AND WINTER 1945
For Allied prisoner of war Syd Barber’s memory of his first view of the destruction in Nagasaki, see Twilight Liberation by Hugh V. Clarke. Other details about Allied POWs released through Nagasaki: Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society; The Jack Ford Story by Jack Fitzgerald; Surviving the Sword by Brian MacArthur; Prisoners of the Japanese by Gavan Daws; and “Experiences at Nagasaki, Japan” by Benedict R. Harris and Marvin A. Stevens, The Connecticut State Medical Journal 9:12.
Quotations by occupation troops: Rudi Bohlmann, interview with Curt Nickisch on All Things Considered, NPR, August 9, 2007; and Keith B. Lynch in World War II Letters, edited by Bill Adler. Lt. George L. Cooper recalled how “everybody and his brother” quickly made their way to the hypocenter area in “Securing the Surrender: Marines in the Occupation of Japan” by Charles R. Smith, Marine Corps Historical Center. The film Nagasaki Journey, produced by Judy Irving and Chris Beaver, contains footage of occupation troops arriving by ship into Nagasaki harbor.
An excellent source for the overall Japanese experience during the occupation is Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of WWII by John W. Dower. For additional information about the occupation of Nagasaki, see “Securing the Surrender” by Charles R. Smith, Marine Corps Historical Center; Reports of General MacArthur, vol. 1 supp., by the U.S. Department of the Army; and Nagasaki: The British Experience: 1854–1945 by Brian Burke-Gaffney.
Key details for Nagasaki troop movements and activities can be found in reports created by the U.S. Nuclear Test Personnel Review (NTPR) program of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (formerly the Defense Nuclear Agency). In response to U.S. veterans’ concerns over potential health risks resulting from exposure to ionizing radiation, the NTPR was established in 1977 to provide estimates of radiation exposure for military personnel engaged in “radiation-risk activities,” including those who served in Hiroshima or Nagasaki during the occupation, prisoners of war held in or processed through the two cities, and personnel who participated in U.S. atmospheric nuclear testing through the early 1960s. For occupation veterans, these reports outline the movements, locations, and activities of personnel ass
igned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, data that was then correlated with the measurements taken by U.S. scientists in the fall of 1945 to determine the “worst-case scenario” for their potential radiation exposure. While the NTPR’s analysis concludes that residual radiation levels were not high enough to cause adverse health effects, no follow-up studies on the veterans themselves have ever been conducted, and many continue to press for injury claims through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. See “Fact Sheet: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces” by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency; and Radiation Dose Reconstruction: U.S. Occupation Forces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 1945–1946 by W. McRaney and J. McGahan. For the veterans’ perspectives, see Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation by Harvey Wasserman et al. (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1982); and Invisible Enemies of Atomic Veterans by John D. Bankston (Victoria, B.C.: Trafford Publishing, 2003).
Atom Bowl: “Atom Bowl Game Listed,” New York Times, December 29, 1945; “Omanski Tops Bertelli in 1st Atom Bowl,” Washington Post, January 3, 1946; and “Nagasaki, 1946: Football Amid the Ruins” by John D. Lukas, New York Times, December 25, 2005.
For Hayashi Shigeo’s experiences when photographing the city, see his testimony at the Nagasaki Broadcasting Company Web site, “Nagasaki and Peace,” http://www2.nbc-nagasaki.co.jp/peace.
U.S. occupation medical support: “Impressions of Japanese Medicine at the End of World War II” by Richard B. Berlin, Scientific Monthly 64:1; “Radiation Effects of the Atomic Bomb Among the Natives of Nagasaki, Kyushu” by J. S. P. Beck and W. A. Meissner, American Journal of Clinical Pathology 6; Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Health and Medical Services in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, USSBS report no. 13; “Experiences at Nagasaki, Japan” by Benedict R. Harris and Marvin A. Stevens, The Connecticut State Medical Journal 9:12.
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