Killing the Rising Sun

by Bill O'Reilly

  Leg irons clanking, the column of men is marched to the gallows and up the thirteen steps to the platform. The executioner stands at one end. His three assistants place a black hood over the head of each condemned man. Nooses are then lowered over the hoods and cinched snugly across their throats.

  The process will be repeated for the second group to be hanged: General Seishiro Itagaki, Koki Hirota, and General Heitaro Kimura.3

  The hangings take place twenty-nine minutes apart. The Buddhist priest, Shinso Hanayama, will write that he could hear the trapdoors swing open at 12:01 a.m. and again at 12:30 a.m.

  Within ninety seconds of climbing the gallows, each man is swinging from a rope. The bodies are then removed and cremated, the ashes dispersed so that no memorial shrine might ever honor the men’s lives.

  In his last words, Tojo, the man most responsible for the millions who died in the Pacific during World War II, says he is sorry.

  The once arrogant and bloodthirsty prime minister is reduced to a broken man.

  Thus, two days before Christmas, the Japanese brutalizers are no more, closing one of the most violent eras the world has ever known.4

  30

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  SEPTEMBER 10, 1949

  9:00 A.M.

  The young ensign from Brooklyn looks at his brunette wife, who is holding their newborn son. The baby is big, more than ten pounds. The ensign has been back from the Pacific for more than two years and is now starting a new life: father and provider.

  William James O’Reilly hopes his new son will follow in the tradition of his ancestors: hardworking Irish Catholics who value family and loyalty over money and material things. He and his bride of just over a year, Angela, are thrilled with their baby boy, whom they name Billy—William James O’Reilly Jr.

  Bill and Angela married in New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in 1948. She already had a good job as a physical therapist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and it is there where baby Billy is born. Ensign O’Reilly, with a college degree from Saint Francis College and military training at the College of the Holy Cross, is trying to decide on a career direction. Now, with the arrival of the baby, the urgency of that decision is more pronounced.

  The newlywed couple lives in a small apartment just over the George Washington Bridge in northern New Jersey. Money is tight. Already the ensign is regretting leaving the navy, where there is security and direction. Unlike many of his peers, Bill O’Reilly Sr. loved his time in the service. He learned much during the occupation of Japan, the experience bringing him a measure of respect for the Japanese people, who, in his opinion, endured the occupation with discipline.

  Soon, the ensign will move his wife and baby to the teeming New York City suburb of Levittown, on Long Island. Here, inexpensive housing is being built en masse and mortgages for veterans are favorable. The price for a Spartan two-bedroom home is eight thousand dollars. Both Bill and Angela will live there until they die.

  * * *

  My father was always nostalgic for the navy and fascinated by World War II. He firmly believed he would have been killed if MacArthur’s land invasion had come to fruition; his ship, the USS Oneida, was set to ferry hundreds of marines close to the beaches of Japan. Only later did my father find out that thousands of Japanese kamikaze pilots were waiting to attack the US fleet. The carnage would have been devastating.

  Ensign William J. O’Reilly

  And so it is that Ensign O’Reilly, his wife, and their two children—my sister Janet arriving two years later—built yet another traditional American family over the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. My dad never prospered in the marketplace, keeping his job as a low-level financial analyst for almost thirty years. As a child of the Great Depression, he valued a steady paycheck more than anything. Thus, he settled for a pedestrian job and allowed his vast talents for communication to go undeveloped.

  Not usually introspective, my father was convinced of one certainty, which he shared with me on a few occasions—that his very existence, and therefore my life as well, was likely saved by a terrible bomb and a gut-wrenching presidential decision that is still being debated to this day.

  But for the young ensign and his present-day son, there really is no debate, only a stark reality. Had the A-bombs not been used, you would very likely not be reading this book.

  POSTSCRIPT

  EMPEROR MICHINOMIYA HIROHITO was stripped of all power by General Douglas MacArthur. However, the general felt that Hirohito was symbolically vital to healing the nation’s postwar wounds. As such, MacArthur quietly decreed that Hirohito be absolved of all responsibility for war crimes. To maintain the ruse that the emperor was not directly involved in the war effort and its many atrocities, MacArthur and Hirohito collaborated to slant testimony of the war crimes defendants away from the emperor. In recent decades, revisionist historians in Japan have repudiated the notion that the emperor is not divine, suggesting that the wording of Hirohito’s pronouncement was a vague gesture to placate the American occupiers.

  “The occupation forces tried to sever the bond between the emperor and the Japanese people,” reads a plaque at Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine and Museum. “They widely advertised the new year statement as the ‘emperor’s declaration of humanity’, but in actuality the emperor had done no more than to announce a return to the principles stated in Emperor Meiji’s [1868] charter oath.”

  Hirohito made a point of boycotting the Yasukuni Shrine, in the heart of Tokyo, after the war when he learned that the ashes of Japanese war criminals had secretly been enshrined there. In the four decades between the war’s end and his death, Hirohito appeared regularly in public, greeting foreign heads of state during their visits to Tokyo and traveling abroad to meet with both Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and US president Gerald Ford. In 1975, he famously had his photograph taken with an entirely different head of state, posing alongside Mickey Mouse during a visit to Disneyland in California. Emperor Hirohito died on January 7, 1989, at the age of eighty-seven, after reigning for sixty-three years. He is said to have been buried wearing a Mickey Mouse watch.

  * * *

  ROBERT OPPENHEIMER became world famous once the atomic bombs were dropped and details of the Manhattan Project were released to the public. He appeared on the cover of both Time and Life magazines as the intellectual face of the dawning nuclear age. For a time, Oppenheimer tried to return to the academic world, but after realizing that his passion for teaching had waned, he accepted a position as director of a think tank known as the Institute for Advanced Study. He became an advocate for nuclear arms control. The explosion of a new weapon known as the hydrogen bomb in 1952 ushered in the new age of thermonuclear weapons that explode with a force exponentially surpassing the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. These new weapons actually require an atomic reaction to trigger the greater thermonuclear detonation, leading to the saying, “All nuclear weapons are atomic, but not all atomic weapons are nuclear.”

  Currently, nine nations possess the power to wage nuclear war: the United States, Russia, Israel, the United Kingdom, France, China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. In all, it is estimated there are 16,300 nuclear weapons in existence.

  Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance was suspended in 1953, then stripped altogether in 1954 after the FBI charged him with Communist associations. A later examination of declassified files would show that Oppenheimer never betrayed the United States and had resisted several attempts by the Russian KGB to recruit him as a spy. However, this revelation came long after Oppenheimer’s death from throat cancer on February 18, 1967, at the age of sixty-two. His wife, Kitty, to whom he had remained married despite infidelities on his part, had his body cremated and his urn dropped into the sea just offshore from their beach home in the US Virgin Islands. The house was subsequently destroyed in a storm, leaving the urn’s exact resting place a mystery—much like Robert Oppenheimer himself.

  * * *
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  The effects of the atomic bomb on HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI were felt for decades. Both cities have been rebuilt in remarkable fashion, with almost all buildings possessing the same concrete-and-steel constitution as those structures that survived the initial blasts. In Hiroshima, the legendary A-bomb Dome has become the most enduring symbol of the first atomic bomb. The T-shaped Aioi Bridge, which served as Enola Gay’s aiming point, survived the bombing and remained in place for several years afterward. However, structural damage caused by the A-bomb eventually took its toll, and the bridge was rebuilt.

  The former Geibi Bank’s Hiroshima location that survived the attack not only still exists but is open to the public free of charge. The building is unchanged in many ways, and the teller windows have been replaced in their original positions. Visitors are welcome to walk the nine steps up from the street and into the concrete-and-steel building to re-create AKIKO TAKAKURA’s fortuitous early arrival at work on the morning of August 6, 1945.

  Nagasaki is less than four hours by bullet train to the southwest of Hiroshima. The rugged nature of the countryside is a subtle reminder that the Operation Olympic invasion would have required overcoming very formidable terrain. Nagasaki’s bustling port and dockland are a popular port of call for cruise lines, cargo ships, and Japanese naval vessels. A large monument of polished stone two miles by streetcar from downtown Nagasaki (a stark contrast to the monument to the Hiroshima hypocenter, a small plaque located in an alley, with the words “Enola Gay” misspelled as “Enora Gay”) marks the site of the A-bomb’s hypocenter.

  Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki does not define itself by the atomic bomb. But both cities are tourist sites because of the explosions. Their local monuments and museums detailing the bombs’ damage are well worth a visit.

  * * *

  The father of the atomic age is ALBERT EINSTEIN, whose famous 1905 equation, E = mc2, explains how mass is transformed into energy, thus theoretically making possible a nuclear explosion. The German-born physicist was visiting the United States in 1933 when Adolf Hitler rose to power. He chose not to return home, due to the Third Reich’s intolerance of Jews. At age sixty-one, Einstein was granted US citizenship in 1940. The year prior to that, he wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, alerting him to Nazi Germany’s hopes of developing a nuclear weapon. This led to the formation of the Manhattan Project, beginning the race between the United States and Germany to develop the first atomic bomb.

  Einstein, however, was not allowed to take part in the Manhattan Project. The FBI thought that Einstein’s status as an avowed pacifist with liberal sympathies made him too great a security risk. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover maintained a secret file on Einstein but was never able to prove that the physicist had Communist ties. Many of Einstein’s friends relocated to Los Alamos to take part in the project, and they made him well aware of its ongoing progress.

  In 1947, Einstein was working with the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, based in Princeton, New Jersey. As part of that group, he penned a letter that reads in part: “We scientists believe upon ample evidence that the time of decision is upon us—that what we do, or fail to do within the next few years will determine the fate of our civilization.…

  “In the shadow of the atomic bomb, it has become apparent that all men are brothers. If we recognize this as truth, and act upon this recognition, mankind may go forward to a higher plane of human development. If the angry passions of a nationalistic world engulf us further, we are doomed.”

  Albert Einstein died in 1955 from an aortic aneurysm at the age of seventy-six. His body was cremated, but only after his brain had been removed without permission by a Princeton Hospital pathologist so that it might be studied for science.

  * * *

  COLONEL PAUL TIBBETS was dogged by controversy about the Hiroshima bombing for the rest of his life. However, he never backed down from his belief that he had done the right thing. The Enola Gay itself became an unlikely lightning rod for controversy when the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, planned to refurbish it after many years of neglect and place it on public display to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end. Workers spent two decades and more than three hundred thousand man-hours to restore the plane to its original condition. The tone of the exhibit was to have been apologetic, suggesting that America was wrong to have dropped the atomic bomb and that as few as thirty-one thousand American lives would have been lost in the first months of an invasion of Japan. Under pressure from veterans’ groups, the exhibit was altered to allow visitors to come up with their own interpretation of the ethics of dropping the bomb. The Enola Gay is now displayed at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

  Bockscar, the aircraft from which the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, has also been lavishly restored. It is currently on display at the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

  Both Colonel Tibbets of Enola Gay and MAJOR CHUCK SWEENEY of Bockscar were promoted to general during their long military careers. Tibbets stayed in the air force and proved instrumental in pioneering the transition to jet-powered bomber flight. Sweeney left active duty after the Second World War but continued to fly in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Sweeney died in Boston in 2004, at the age of eighty-four. Tibbets lived to be ninety-two years old and requested that he be cremated rather than buried, so that protesters might not make his grave site a rallying point for antinuclear demonstrations. His ashes were scattered over the English Channel, over which he had flown many times during World War II.

  * * *

  MOCHITSURA HASHIMOTO, commander of the I-58 submarine that sank the Indianapolis, received word of the atomic bombings while still at sea. He and his crew thought the reports were just American propaganda. The submarine returned to port on August 15, just in time to learn of the Japanese surrender. Though the war was over, Hashimoto was promoted and given command of the destroyer Yukikaze, tasked with traveling to China to bring Japanese troops home. However, the United States Navy, still reeling from the Indianapolis tragedy, summoned Hashimoto to America to testify in the court-martial proceedings of Captain Charles McVay. Hashimoto appeared in court in Washington, DC, on December 11, 1945, and stated that there was nothing more McVay could have done to save his crew and that the captain was innocent of all charges. Despite this testimony, McVay was still found guilty. Hashimoto retired from the Japanese navy shortly after his return to his homeland in 1946; he later followed in his father’s footsteps and became a Shinto priest. He died on October 25, 2000, at the age of ninety-one.

  * * *

  JEAN MACARTHUR, wife of General Douglas MacArthur, lived to be 101 years old. She died in New York City of natural causes in 2000, some thirty-six years after her husband’s passing. She was instrumental in the building of the MacArthur Memorial, a museum and research center in Norfolk, Virginia, serving as chair of the board during its development and cutting the opening ribbon at the age of ninety-one. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan presented Jean MacArthur with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1994, during a visit to the United States, the emperor and empress of Japan paid a private visit to her New York apartment at the Waldorf Towers. She never remarried after the general’s death, and was buried at his side in the rotunda of the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk.

  * * *

  ARTHUR MACARTHUR IV, son of General Douglas MacArthur, is still alive, though his whereabouts have become an urban legend. At seventy-seven years of age, he no longer goes by his given name, preferring instead to be called David Jordan. After being paid a $650,000 settlement to move out of his rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan’s Mayflower Hotel in 2014, he relocated to Greenwich Village, where he is known to play the piano and avoid all contact with those wishing to associate him with the MacArthur name.

  * * *

  Several future American presidents saw military service during World War II,
among them naval officers JAMES EARL “JIMMY” CARTER and GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH.

  Carter, as a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy, was considered to be an active-duty serviceman during the war. He entered Annapolis in 1943 and graduated with the class of 1946. If the war had not ended, Carter would most certainly have been sent to the Pacific with his classmates as part of the naval invasion that would have been launched against Japan. Carter later served on the USS Mississippi, a battleship that had seen extensive service in the Pacific theater. In 1948, he transitioned to submarines, where he served as one of the first group of sailors aboard nuclear submarines. Jimmy Carter was discharged from the navy in 1953.

  George H. W. Bush, America’s forty-first president, joined the navy in 1942 at the age of eighteen, earning his wings as a naval aviator before his nineteenth birthday. He was assigned to the Pacific theater of operations, where he would fly fifty-eight combat missions during the war. On September 2, 1944, exactly one year to the day before the Japanese surrender, he was forced to bail out when his Avenger dive bomber was hit by enemy flak. Bush parachuted to safety, spending four hours afloat on a life raft before being rescued by an American submarine. He resumed flight operations and was based on the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto. In December 1944, after fifteen months of combat duty, he was reassigned to Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, where he served as a flight instructor until his release from the navy upon the Japanese surrender in September 1945.

  Both presidents Bush and Carter were asked by Bill O’Reilly to give their opinions about President Truman’s decision to drop the A-bomb. Their letters are printed in this book for the first time, as is the opinion of President George W. Bush. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama declined to give their opinions of Truman’s actions.

  * * *

  The relationship between Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur did not have a happy ending. The last vestige of the war did not fade until April 28, 1952, when the American occupation of Japan was completed through a treaty signed in San Francisco and peace formally declared between the two nations. By then, DOUGLAS MACARTHUR’s tenure as supreme commander for the Allied powers was long over. On June 25, 1950, the Communist state of North Korea invaded its neighbor to the south, and MacArthur was named commander of the United States and South Korean forces, charged with repelling the Communist advance. The general successfully launched one of history’s greatest amphibious invasions in September 1950, sending waves of troops ashore far behind enemy lines at Incheon and recapturing the South Korean capital of Seoul. In October 1950, PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN flew to Wake Island in the Pacific to meet with MacArthur about the status of the Korean War and present him with the Distinguished Service Medal—MacArthur’s fifth.