Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

One of the most captivating monologues in film history almost seems out of place in a movie about a giant shark.  It's like plunking Henry V's St. Crispian's Day speech into a Michael Bay movie.

It's about Hiroshima and so is a book by John Hershey.  The first half of Hiroshima was originally published as an entire issue of The New Yorker roughly a year after the first atomic weapon was used against Japan.  It was wildly popular and was converted to book format shorty there after.  The second half, which deals with the same people featured in the first, but 40 years later, was added to the book editions.

The focus of the text is on six people who were far enough out of the blast zone to survive the bombing yet close enough to tell stories about those who didn't.  Their stories intertwine a fair bit, a likely indication that Hershey went in one direction from the centre of the blast rather than travelling around the circumference of the circle of people who survived.  It seems almost hokey at times that the major players have as much interaction with each other as they do.

While it would have been unimportant for audiences of the time, the book could benefit from a forward that sort of sets the scene.  The battle of the Pacific would still be fresh in the minds of readers in 1946 but the absolute carnage of battles on Tarawa, Luzon and Iwo Jima are not necessarily known by modern readers.  The reality is that the Americans believed that losses on both sides would be so great that they felt they had no option other than using the atomic weapons.

Here's a table that summarizes the losses on both sides of the war leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki).  It is adapted from a similar table in The Ghosts of Iwo Jima by Robert Burrell. 

                              American Military               Japanese Military

Battle	KIA\MIA	WIA	Total	KIA\MIA	Captured	Total
Luzon	8,310	29,560	37,870	192,000	9,700	201,700
Tinian	389	1,816	2,205	9,162	0	9,162
Marshalls	711	2,339	3,050	11,087	361	11,448
Leyte	3,593	11,991	15,584	48,790	0	48,790
Okinawa	11,933	39,119	51,052	110,000	10,755	120,755
Saipan	3,452	13,160	16,612	27,000	2,000	29,000
Guam	1,435	5,648	7,083	10,000	0	10,000
Palaus	1,948	8,515	10,463	13,600	302	13,902
Gilberts	1,933	2,725	4,658	5,236	430	5,666
Iwo Jima	6,821	19,217	26,038	18,110	216	18,326
Col. totals	40,525	134,090	174,615	444,985	23,764	468,749

Doing some math on the battles leading up to what could have been the attack on Japan, the table illustrates that Japanese military doctrine of the time of defending to the last man was something they took quite seriously.  In all of these encounters, 5% of the Japanese forces involved ended up surviving and surrendering. The rest, were killed by American soldiers or by their own hand.  Another 40 thousand Americans and that's a total of half a million people lost in the battle of the Pacific.

These numbers do not include civilian losses, either through bombings or suicides.  In particular, 5000 or so civilians were lost on Saipan.  Of the suicides, there were some that leaped to their deaths rather than face what they had been told the Americans would do to them based on the propaganda they had heard at the time.



Had Japan been invaded, the American military had worked out that 500 thousand to a million American combatants would die, Japanese losses would be at least five million and perhaps as many as ten million.  The combined death toll of the sinking of the USS Indianiapolis and the bombings of  both Hiroshima and Nagasaki is about a quarter million and seems rather small in comparison.

And that's just the dead, not the wounded.  The U.S. military had made up half a million purple heart medals in anticipation of the invasion of Japan.  The purple heart is given to soldiers, sailors, air men and marines who are wounded in combat.  The medals that were made for the invasion that didn't occur supplied the Americans with all of the purple heart medals they needed for the Korean War, the Vietnamese War, the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War and they still have some left over.  Nearly 60 years after and they still haven't had as many wounded as there would have been by invading Japan.

That's a lot of history and all of is only barely eluded to in Hiroshima on page 6 of the 1989 edition where Hershey mentions a "squad of soldiers who had been digging into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion..."

One of the things about Hiroshima that is really interesting is the guesses that the Japanese recount as to what has happened to them.  Bombings are nothing unusual for the Japanese, but they have no concept of what an atomic weapon is, or what kind of damage it can cause.  Their lack of knowledge about a major turning event in world history is rather similar to the early reports of the D-Day invasion from American media.

The complete broadcast day can be heard by checking out the archive.org archive of the day's broadcast of CBS. The Americans (at least the Columbia Broadcast System) learned first of this major incident in world history first through German broadcasts, not their own war office.  That makes sense I suppose, its a bad idea to give away military secrets to civilians, but there is definitely a parallel in knowledge between the two incidents that is hard to ignore.

Anyway, I had known a fair bit about the war prior to reading Hiroshima, and had heard some of the stories of survivors.  I have no idea where I read it anymore, but one that always stuck with me from before was of a small girl who, as she grew up, continues to pick glass out of her scalp as it pushes its way upward from her skull.

Hiroshima had a couple of moments like that for me.  At one point some soldiers ask for some water and they are described as having their eyes melted from their sockets.  Another anecdote tells of someone trying to assist a woman (I think) to stand, and in holding her hand, her skin leaves her hand as if it were a glove.  Those are absolute chilling images.