D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC
Page 43
High-ranking Japanese officials accused of major, or Class A, crimes were tried at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, or Tokyo War Crimes Trial—the Pacific equivalent to the Nuremberg Tribunal. These trials were convened in the Japanese War Ministry, on the outskirts of the capital, on May 3, 1946, and lasted for thirty-one months. The eleven justices were from each of the countries at war with Japan. Altogether, twenty-five major military and civilian leaders were tried, the most famous of them (General Hideki Tojo, who had failed in a suicide attempt in August 1945. The Emperor was not put on trial because General Douglas MacArthur, who virtually ruled Japan during the first years of the occupation, thought that this would provoke major resistance to the American occupation. The defendants, who were all incarcerated in Sugamo Prison, made an iron pact to keep their sovereign’s name and reputation unsullied, despite robust protests from the Australian and French judges that he should stand trial, since only he possessed the final authority to declare war.
All but two of the defendants were found guilty of a criminal conspiracy to wage aggressive war, an unprecedented charge in international law, which did not attribute responsibility for acts of war to specific individuals or consider aggressive war a crime. Seven top Japanese officials went to tin; gallows: General Tojo, Koki Hirota, Prime Minister during the time of Japan’s most vicious atrocities against Chinese civilians and soldiers, General I wane Matsui, who commanded troops involved in tin Rape of Nanking, General Akira Muto, head of the occupation of the Philippines, and three others. None was repentant: all of them dropped to their deaths shouting, “Banxai.”
The other convicted high officials received prison sentences ranging from seven years to life. Few of those who went to prison served their lull sentence. In 1958, the last of the prisoners were granted clemency and released.
**Had the atomic bombs not been dropped, and had Japan prolonged the war, Curt is LeMay would have continued, and greatly accelerated, his bombing campaign, turning Japan into a scorched waste land and killing many more people than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
EPILOGUE
Remembering
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO up to Japan tomorrow?” Paul Tibbets asked Chuck Sweeney at almost the very hour MacArthur was signing the formal surrender on the Missouri. The next morning, with Tibbets at the controls, twenty members of the 509th, along with a few scientists, flew to Tokyo in a C-54 transport. They wanted to see Hiroshima but the runways were in no condition to handle their plane, so, after a brief stay in Tokyo, they flew to a field sixteen miles from Nagasaki. They were the first group of Americans to visit the area after the bomb blast—and they were not supposed to be there.
Tibbets was shocked by the terrible destruction in the Urakami Valley. “Block by block had been flattened, as if by a tornado…. Strangely, however…there were no bodies anywhere…. There were not many people in the streets in the heart of the city. But outside the areas where the damage was heaviest, in the major residential and business districts of the city, life was proceeding in an almost normal manner. The people were polite and didn’t even seem to think it unusual that American airmen were there so soon after the long war.”
Sweeney walked alone to where ground zero would have been, 2,000 feet from the destroyed Mitsubishi Steel and Armament Works, in what had been a povertystricken community of small homes and industrial plants. Although there had been no firestorm as there was at Hiroshima, the bomb had obliterated the entire industrial valley. Of the approximately 70,000 people who eventually died in Nagasaki as a result of the bomb (about 40,000 immediately), almost all were from this area. Standing in this tremendous field of rubble and ruin Sweeney “thanked God that it was we who had this weapon and not the Japanese or the Germans…. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood…. My crew and I had flown to Nagasaki to end the war, not to inflict suffering.”
Tibbets’s reaction mirrored Sweeney’s. He had no animosity toward the Japanese people. He saw himself fighting against an evil system imposed on the people by a powerful military regime. That is why, he says, “I have no personal feeling of guilt about the terror that we had visited upon their land.” Tibbets has never deviated from that position.
“Please try to understand this,” he told reporter Bob Greene forty-five years after the war. “It’s not an easy thing to hear, but please listen. There is no morality in warfare. You kill children. You kill women. You kill old men. You don’t seek them out, but they die. That’s what happens in war.”
Tibbets has no patience with revisionist historians who claim the bomb would not have been used on Caucasians. “If the Germans had not surrendered, I would have flown the bomb over there. I would have taken some satisfaction in that—because they shot me up…. My instructions were to create an elite bombing force…with the understanding that, when trained, they would be divided into two groups: one to be sent to Europe and the other to the Pacific…. There was no Japanese target priority,” he argues in his own book on the flight of the Enola Gay. “All our early planning assumed that we would make almost simultaneous bomb drops on Germany and Japan.”
Where were the dead victims of the Nagasaki blast that Tibbets failed to see on his visit to the city? Where were the wounded? The dead were vaporized or already in their final resting place. The wounded were packed into emergency centers, like the one run by Dr. Takashi Nagai, a professor of radiology at the medical school of the University of Nagasaki. Dr. Nagai had been swept into the air and injured by the atomic blast. His house was buried and his wife killed. A few days later, he carried her blackened bones to a relief center in the countryside, where he gathered together a small band of doctors, nurses, and students. They were working night and day to help the sick and dying while Sweeney and Tibbets were touring the city. Nagai and his colleagues were in the country because the bomb had destroyed the Nagasaki Hospital and Medical College. It had also killed half of the city’s medical personnel.
Nagai was a devout Catholic and most of the victims he treated were from his parish church, the Urakami Cathedral, only 500 yards from the hypocenter. The area around the cathedral, the largest in East Asia, contained over half of the city’s 14,000 Roman Catholics, who traced their religious roots back to the conversion efforts of St. Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century. Almost all of them were killed by the blast, which also destroyed the cathedral.
After closing down his relief center in the mountains, Nagai moved to a small hut built on the site of his former house. He began a life of meditation and prayer, surrendered almost all of his earthly belongings, and dedicated his life to the desperately poor people of the neighborhood. He died in 1951, and today his home is a shrine, visited by people from all over the world. Some of them remember Nagai’s dying words. “Grant that Nagasaki may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world.”
For those who lived through the worst of it, it was a war that was never over. “Instead of talking about it, most [American fighting men] didn’t talk about it,” said James Jones. “It was not that they didn’t want to talk about it, it was that when they did, nobody understood it. It was such a different way of living, and of looking at life even, that there was no common ground of communication in it.”
Long after the war, an infantryman who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge got talking to Jones at a bar. He said his platoon had taken some prisoners near St. Vith. “There were eight of them, and they were tough old timers, buddy. Been through the mill from the beginning. It was about the fourth or fifth day, and we needed some information. But they weren’t talking, not those tough old birds. You had to admire them. So we took the first one off to the side, where they could see him, and shot him through the head. Then they all talked. They were eager to talk. Once they knew we were serious. Horrible? Evil?… We needed that information. Our lives depended on it. We didn’t think it was evil. Neither did they. But how am I going to tell my wife about something like that? Or my mother?”
Nor could folks back home fully understand the comradeship and love that kept Marines like Eugene Sledge together under the most awful assaults on their humanity—or the horrifying mental torture that some men experienced, pain that persisted for years after the fighting ended.
Airman Ray Halloran walked through a hell storm after the war.
WHEN I GOT HOME I WAS NOT that boy my parents saw go away. I met them, for a few hours, at the train station on my way to a hospital in West Virginia. They looked real worried. I was limping badly and they were convinced I’d lost a leg. I told them I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to prove it by pulling up my pants. If I had they would have seen the nasty scars from the lice and flies that had bit me in my cage. I think they could also see that, mentally, I wasn’t in good shape. I was a little strange.
At the Army hospital at White Sulphur Springs, I got excellent care, but I couldn’t talk to the doctors and nurses about my feelings. They didn’t know what was inside me. Only the other patients did, those who had suffered in the war. We hardly ever talked about our experiences; but you looked at another patient and you knew he understood. They were the only people I could communicate with, so I was afraid to leave the hospital.
After a while, I made a try of it, took a shot at normal life. I got a job and in 1953 I got married and we adopted three children. I was okay most of the time but the nights were bad. I broke windows and did a lot of other dumb things, like running out in the streets screaming. That terrified my wife and children.
I had horrible nightmares. I dreamed I was falling through space and was trying to reach out for something. I saw fires all around me, and people beating me. I’d crawl in closets and under the bed to get away from what was happening to me. I didn’t talk much about it. I thought it was my problem to solve.
I never wanted to go back to Japan—never! They had done this to me, especially the guards that beat me, like this guy we called “Horseface.” I could have killed him. But then I decided to go back. I did it because I thought it would help me get rid of the nightmares. I had to get better. I couldn’t go on the way I was. If I could see things that were still real inside my head—the torture prison, the city burning down around it, almost killing me, the people who beat me—see them as they are now, not as they were back then, maybe that would help me get better. My wife thought I was goofy but nothing else was working.
I had a contact. I had been in touch with one of my former prison guards, the only one in the prison who treated me like a human being. Before this. I arranged for him to come to study at the University of Illinois. There should be a reward for good people, I think. He would be the anchor I needed over there.
He and his wife met me at the airport and we had dinner at the Palace Hotel overlooking the Palace grounds, right near where I was a prisoner of the Kempeitai. This worked out well. I started feeling blood and air coming back into me. I even got up in the middle of the night and walked around the perimeter of the Palace grounds. Was I looking for the torture prison? Maybe I was.
Later I found out where it had been. At first, no one would tell me. Everyone claimed they knew nothing about it. But some people arranged to have me taken there. It was done in secret. The people in the building said I was at the wrong place. I knew they were wrong. I looked around, and then left. No one there could hurt me anymore. I started to feel better.
I traveled all over Japan on the trains. I went to a town called Shizuoka, where I met a doctor who spoke perfect English. He took me to a small mountain in the middle of the town that had been turned into a memorial. Two B-29s had slammed into one another and crashed in the town. A Buddhist monk found the mangled bodies and buried them on the mound. They were human beings, he told the angry townspeople. They deserved a proper burial. He also built a memorial for them, a simple but handsome obelisk. On the other side of the mound he had built an identical memorial for the 2,000 people of the town who had been killed during that raid.
The doctor brought along two bouquets of flowers. He handed me one. He said, “You put yours by the monument for our people and I’ll put mine by the monument for your people.” It was a beautiful setting, on the crest of a hill overlooking the town. We both prayed and then quietly walked down the hill, each lost in our own thoughts. We went to his home and he made me feel at ease.
After this trip, I saw Japan in a different way. I wasn’t ready to change my final judgment. Nor had I conquered all my demons. But I was getting better. And now after five trips over there I have lots of Japanese friends and I can say that I have no animosity toward the Japanese people. And gradually, I’ve become a more settled person. I’m not normal yet. But I don’t have anger in me.
I guess it’s kind of selfish. I’ve used the people who made me sick to help me get better.”10
The following is a list of the 126 American amphibious invasions in the war in the Pacific. It was compiled using official Army and Marine sources and was prepared in association with Martin Morgan, the research historian at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.
DATE
SITE
August 7, 1942
Guadalcanal
August 7, 1942
Tulagi
August 7, 1942
Gavatu
August 7, 1942
Tanambogo
August 7, 1942
Florida
August 30, 1942
Adak
January 11, 1943
Amchitka
February 21, 1943
Banika
February 21, 1943
Pavuvu
May 11, 1943
Attu
June 22, 1943
Woodlark
June 23, 1943
Kiriwina
June 30, 1943
New Georgia
June 30, 1943
Rendova
June 30, 1943
Baraulu
June 30, 1943
Sasavele
June 30, 1943
Vangunu
August 12, 1943
Baanga
August 13, 1943
Vela Cela
August 15, 1943
Vella Lavella
August 15, 1943
Kiska
August 27, 1943
Arundel
September 13, 1943
Sagekarasa
October 6, 1943
Kolombangara
October 27, 1943
Choiseul
November 1, 1943
Bougainville
November 1, 1943
Puruata
November 3, 1943
Torokina
November 20, 1943
Tarawa
November 21, 1943
Bairiki
November 20, 1943
Makin
November 20, 1943
Butaritari
November 20, 1943
Kotabu
November 22, 1943
Kuma
November 21, 1943
Abemama
November 26, 1943
Buariki
December 15, 1943
Arawe
December 26, 1943
Cape Gloucester
January 2, 1944
Saidor
February 1, 1944
Majuro
February 1, 1944
Calalin
February 1, 1944
Dadap
February 1, 1944
Kwajalein
February 1, 1944
Ninni
February 1, 1944
Gea
February 1, 1944
Gehh
February 1, 1944
Ennylabegan
February 1, 1944
Enubuj
February 1, 1944
Ebeye
February 1, 1944
Mellu
February 1, 1944
Ennuebing
February 1, 1944
Ennumenn
et
February 1, 1944
Ennubirr
February 1, 1944
Ennugarrett
February 1, 1944
Roi
February 1, 1944
Namur
February 4, 1944
Loi
February 4, 1944
Burnet
February 5, 1944
Bigej
February 5, 1944
Gugegwe
February 6, 1944
Ennugenliggelap
February 12, 1944
Rooke
February 15, 1944
Nissan
February 17, 1944
Eniwetok
February 17, 1944
Rujoru
February 17, 1944
Aitsu
February 17, 1944
Bogon
February 17, 1944
Engebi
February 17, 1944
Parry
February 29, 1944
Los Negros
March 11, 1944
Butjo Mokau
March 12, 1944
Huawei
March 15, 1944
Manus
March 20, 1944
Emirau
April 1, 1944
Koruniat
April 1, 1944
Ndrilo
April 3, 1944
Rambutyo
April 9, 1944
Pak
April 22, 1944