Black Rain and Blue Light

The Battle Against the Cycle of Reciprocal Cruelty

American-born six-year-old Minoru Furuta emerged from the rubble of his two-story collapsed home in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Sent to Japan by his parents to live with relatives in 1941 to learn Japanese culture, his mother and father remained in the United States but had since been imprisoned in an internment camp in Arizona. Furuta crawled out from underneath the debris and could hear his guardian and her four-year-old son screaming from the middle of the house, trapped under the rubble. He looked down at his hand and saw his index finger hanging only by the skin, likely cut by flying glass. Due to the shock, he felt no pain, only the intense heat as he surveyed the demolished landscape, fires burning all around him. He approached a man standing nearby holding a stick that extended from the ground up to the middle of his chest. He asked the man for help, but as he got closer, he realized the man was actually a corpse. The body proceeded to fall to the ground as the boy helplessly watched the horrific scene.

The Royan Mission

The orders came at 3 a.m. one night in April 1945, when the air crew was awakened in their sleeping bags inside their steel barracks in East Anglia, England. The 490th Bombardment Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces had already flown missions over Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary and they suspected their missions may have come to an end, with the fighting in Europe winding down. Being awakened at this hour, however, suggested otherwise. The airmen entered their briefing rooms unperturbed, familiar with the routine: in order to take off by dawn, they typically had three hours of intelligence briefings, followed by breakfast and equipment checks. They learned their target was a German garrison within and outside Royan, a seaside resort on the western coast of France. No attacks were currently taking place, but the mission was to destroy the contingent regardless. They were told of a new type of weapon they would be using, their bomb bays loaded with thirty 100-pound bombs containing a new substance they were informed was “jellied gasoline,” later known as napalm.

Howard Zinn was a bombardier on the flight and he recalled the mission after taking off from the airfield:

Our bombs were not precisely directed at German installations but were dropped by toggle switch over the Royan area, on seeing the bombs of the lead ship leave the bomb bay—a device good for saturation bombing, not pinpoint bombing (aside from the fact that the Norden bombsight, which we were trained to use, could not be counted on to hit enemy installations and miss nearby civilians from a height of 25,000 feet). The toggle switch was connected to an intervalometer which automatically dropped the bombs, after the first fell, in a timed sequence. From our great height, I remember distinctly seeing the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.

Among the dead were hundreds of German and French soldiers on the ground and an untold number of civilian casualties, among the estimated 1,000 who remained in the town. According to reporting at the time: “Royan, a town of 20,000, once was a vacation spot. About 350 civilians, dazed or bruised by two terrific air bombings in forty-eight hours, crawled from the ruins and said the air attacks had been ‘such hell as we never believed possible.’” A local described the scenes of “cries, death rattles….A woman appeals for help, her head appears alone, her body crushed under an enormous beam,” concluding: “Royan has gone down with the civilized world, by the error, the bestiality, the folly of man.” It turned out the attack had not been conducted out of military necessity, as reported by the French military, but rather “an ardent desire for battle—a battle where victory was certain.”

Zinn later learned that the U.S. had not been the first to bomb the town. An earlier bombing by the British on January 5 had largely missed the German targets. 35-50 Germans were killed and 85-90% of the town was demolished, with upwards of a thousand French civilians killed and hundreds wounded. The civilian casualties were high due to the second raid taking place an hour after the first. As citizens tried to rescue their neighbors, they also fell victim to the second bombing raid. A local truce between the armies had to be secured for ten days to allow for the search for survivors within the wreckage.

The attack on Royan in which Zinn participated on April 14-15 had “made the annihilation of the city complete.” It was a pyrrhic victory for the French troops on the ground. The bombing was meant to assist them in battle, since the bombs were dropped on a German contingent amounting to 5,500 soldiers, but the military calculations excluded the approximately 1,000 French citizens still left in the town. “These last acts,” wrote a local writer, “left a great bitterness in the hearts of the Royannais, because the Armistice followed soon after, an Armistice foreseen by all. For the Royannais, this liberation by force was useless since Royan would have been, like La Rochelle, liberated normally some days later, without new damage, without new deaths, without new ruins.” After conducting extensive research into the attack decades later, Zinn concluded: “The evidence seems overwhelming that factors of pride, military ambition, glory, and honor were powerful motives in producing an unnecessary military operation.”

Meaningless Death

General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, was experiencing feelings of depression as he learned that the atomic bomb was soon to be deployed on Japan. He expressed to Henry Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War “my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’” Stimson could not believe Eisenhower’s reaction, expecting him instead to have been in complete agreement. “The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude,” Eisenhower wrote, Stimson in turn refuting his points “almost angrily.”

Minoru Furuta was playing with a hammer on his front porch in Hiroshima on August 6, banging it against a chair, while his caretaker and her son were inside. The Enola Gay B-29 bomber was flying overhead at 31,000 feet and missed its target of a “T”-shaped bridge in the city center by 800 feet, detonating instead 580 feet above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Furuta saw a bright flash of light and was knocked unconscious for several hours. Within 1-2 hours, a radioactive black rain fell over most of the city. Furuta and his two family members had miraculously managed to survive; however, he alone as a six-year-old had the daunting task of freeing them from the debris. “I couldn’t believe myself that I had that much power. I moved all the lumber to the side. I don’t even have consciousness of what I’m doing,” he remembered. He had survived the atomic bombing through several strokes of luck: his home had not caught fire like others in the vicinity and he had remained unconscious under the wreckage of his home, avoiding the radiation burns suffered by those above ground. On his way out of the city, he recalled looking at a nearby river: “At low tide, the banks were covered with dead bodies. It didn’t horrify me. The only thing I remember was me trying to get away from that place.” He would return to the city on occasion over the next few days as his caretaker looked for her husband, who was never found. “I remember the piles of dead bodies there. They poured gasoline on them and set them on fire, but sometimes, you’d hear screams coming from inside the piles. The Japanese army did that to prevent the spread of disease.” After about a month, the woman died from the after-effects of the bombing and the two boys also showed signs of radiation sickness. The symptoms were extreme and recovery took years: Furuta experienced his hair falling out, had pain in his body making it difficult for him to wear clothes, and also sought treatment to fight off numerous infections.

Over 100,000 Japanese civilians and tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers died as a result of the bombing. At least 12 American soldiers also died as a result of the bombing, having been captured in the days preceding attack and imprisoned in a military facility near the epicenter of the blast. Three American prisoners of war (POWs) were spared as they had been transferred to Tokyo for interrogation prior to the attack.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, most of the Japanese doctors and nurses were either dead or wounded and could not assist the victims. Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto reached downwards to grab a woman by the hands, one of twenty people in a sandpit two weak to move. Her skin fell off “in huge, glove-like pieces.” The shock of this sight caused him to sit down and take a moment to recover. “These are human beings,” he kept repeating to himself. Tanimoto, as part of a group of priests, rescued two young sisters who had stayed in the river for hours, the salt water seeping into the burns and cuts on their bodies. The youngest began to shiver, saying she was cold. A priest borrowed a blanket and wrapped her in it. She started to shake even more. “I am so cold,” she said. A few seconds later, the shivering stopped as she had died.

One the remaining physicians reported the state of the soldiers he witnessed:

“They had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back. One soldier, whose features had been destroyed and was left with his white teeth sticking out, asked me for some water, but I didn’t have any. I clasped my hands and prayed for him. He didn’t say anything more. His plea for water must have been his last words.”

A second bomb was planned to be dropped on Nagasaki, this time filled with plutonium rather than highly enriched uranium, a further opportunity to test a new weapon. A U.S. Air Force officer in Guam wrote with concern to the War Department on July 31: “Reports prisoner of war sources, not verified by photos, give location of Allied prisoner-of-war camp, one mile north of center of city of Nagasaki. Does this influence the choice of this target for initial Centerboard operation? Request immediately reply.” The reply was swiftly returned: “Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged.” 40,000-70,000 died as the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, August 9, the vast majority Japanese civilians, along with about 150 Japanese soldiers, and approximately a dozen Allied POWs from the Netherlands. An American soldier imprisoned alongside them managed to survive.

On August 14, five days after the Nagasaki bombing, the U.S. forces sent a thousand planes to conduct air raids on Japanese cities. Makoto Oda lived in Osaka at the time and went outside when the terrain was quiet to find thousands of corpses strewn in the street. He recounted in “The Meaning of ‘Meaningless Death’” how he found leaflets dropped by the Americans written in Japanese that had accompanied the bombs: “Your government has surrendered. The war is over.”

The Last POWs

Kill them or let them live, it’s your choice, Nobuichi Fukui, a Japanese lieutenant, was told by his superior officer on how to treat the few remaining American POWs in custody. World War II had ended and the Americans were unaware of this, but in the mind of Fukui’s superior, they were no longer necessary for any purpose. Fukui reminded him of the humanitarian treatment of POWs required by the Geneva Conventions, of which Japan was a signatory. The superior officer conceded that Fukui was likely correct and that he would sign an order to secure their transfer.

It was August 17 and Fukui was still feeling the influence of the American missionaries who had turned him into a devout Christian. He later claimed he could hear their voices asking him to save this group of nine airmen, who had been captured on a separate bombing mission targeting a Japanese battleship two days after the Hiroshima atomic bombing. They were grouped in custody with two additional U.S. military officers, a naval aviator and an Air Force sergeant, who were severely injured in the atomic blast and were barely clinging to life. The two men had survived by jumping into a cesspool and were suffering from radiation sickness, nauseous and vomiting, with green liquid coming out of their mouths and ears.

Fukui entered their cell and told the men they were in danger of being harmed by others. He assured them he would return to transport them later that day to another location. Accompanied by a flatbed truck and driver that afternoon, Fukui told the airmen to put on blindfolds for their journey. He attracted attention from nearby Japanese officers by issuing the instructions in English. On the way to a military police station in Hiroshima’s Ujina district, after a short amount of time, he ordered the driver to stop the truck. The city, once bustling with people, was now silent. He turned to the U.S. soldiers and told them to take off their blindfolds and stand up. “Look what you have done! One bomb!” he castigated them. “Look there,” he continued, pointing to funeral pyres. “That blue light, those fires are women burning. It’s babies burning. Is it wonderful to see the babies burning?” The soldiers were silent, except for one who responded: “Did you ever hear of Bataan?” Another soldier of the group, who ultimately returned to the U.S. as a result of the actions of Fukui, recounted in a documentary film what he witnessed after removing his blindfold: “Nothing was vertical. Block after block, the streets had been cleared, so you could see outlines of where the blocks were, but in between, there was nothing.”

The two Americans suffering symptoms from the atomic bomb had a horrendous night in their prison cells, screaming and asking their captors to put them out of their misery. The other POWs pleaded on their behalf: “Do something!” A Japanese doctor replied: “Do something? You tell me what to do. You caused this.” The two severely ill men died within a matter of hours.

Another Japanese military police officer had earlier tried to locate American POWs in Ujina, following their aircraft being shot down on July 28. Hiroshi Yanagita, a warrant officer, was recovering from a hangover when the Hiroshima atomic explosion ripped through his building, throwing him naked from his bed in a second-story room. His surroundings on fire, he jumped out of the window to find the building had collapsed and that he was now on the ground floor. He located a sheet to wear and made his way to Ujina. There he met up with a group of 10 soldiers and went looking for the American POWs at the now-decimated Hiroshima Castle where they had been held, finding none remaining. Upon reaching the Kempeitai military police headquarters west of Hiroshima, Yanagita was informed by another officer that he had tried to move the two surviving American prisoners to the headquarters but found this task to be impossible, leaving them on a bridge. They were last seen tied to poles, hands behind their backs, being beaten to death by stoning and clubbing that morning on the Aioi Bridge, which had been the aiming point for the atomic bomb, named Little Boy by the U.S. military.

The War Is Over

“Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan.” Back in the United States following his last mission in France, awaiting further instructions, Zinn happened upon this newspaper headline. Having never heard of the term “atomic bomb,” he was nonetheless excited at the prospect that his planned bombing raids in Japan were now canceled; the war was over. “Like other Americans, I had no idea what was going on at the higher levels. And I had no idea what that ‘atomic bomb’ had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima, any more than I ever really understood what the bombs I dropped on European cities were doing to human flesh and blood.”

After leaving the military, Zinn read John Hersey’s 1946 book Hiroshima where he learned the horrifying details of the effects of the bombs and was moved by passages such as: “The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands.” Zinn began to question his own bombing missions, writing an essay on the topic and the folly of reciprocal violence stemming from the theory of national guilt: “If silence and passivity in the presence of evil committed by political leaders is deserving of a death sentence, then the populations of all the great powers do not deserve to live. But only in those ordinary people, rethinking their role, is there a possibility for redemption and change…This may require resisting a false crusade—or refusing one or another expedition in a true one. But always, it means refusing to be transfixed by the actions of other people, the truths of other times. It means acting on what we feel and think, here, now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience.”

Zinn and Furuta, in the decades that followed, would each react in different and unexpected ways in response to the lessons of the war that changed both of their lives.