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FS: And then, when we bombed Hiroshima in retaliation for Pearl Harbor -- revenge is never profitable. Pearl Harbor was strictly military operations. The planes came in from carriers 300 miles north of the island, flew over Honolulu, and didn't drop any bombs until Pearl Harbor, which is 6 or 7 miles east of downtown Honolulu. They sank seven ships which shouldn't have been there anyway, they should have been out on patrol. And they killed more than a thousand men. No women, no children, no civilians, no civilian, no private property, strictly military operation.

In retaliation, we killed with the Hiroshima bomb 30,000 children, and they're still dying from leukemia and other radiation. Three of the people I took to Hiroshima have since died as a result from leukemia, which is the commonest radiation disease. When we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, it was purely revenge. There were no Japanese soldiers in Hiroshima. There was no garrison there except a few guards in the castle where American prisoners of war were held. The Japanese army was not there. In fact, I think we killed more Americans, soldiers, than Japanese. There were eight or ten or a dozen prisoners of war in the dungeon of the castle which was destroyed. Harry Truman knew these people were there. I'm sure he did. I think the Pentagon knows their names. They were sacrifices, largely to see if the bomb would do what it was built to do. They spent years and millions of dollars developing an atom bomb, and they had two -- one called, "big boy," the other called "little boy." I don't know which one, but the Enola Gay, a bomber with a crew of five men flying out of Okinawa dropped one on Hiroshima. Hiroshima was not the designated target. It was not a military base. They were supposed to drop it perhaps on Nagoya, which was a port city and perhaps of military significance, but the designated target was socked in. So they had this bomb, they didn't want to take it away, and they dropped it on the nearest city, largely just to get it off their hands.

EG: A secondary target, a secondary target, if you can't get to the first.

FS: Then we had the other bomb, "little boy," three days later. Nagasaki had not even heard generally that Hiroshima had been bombed, and they were not prepared. Nagasaki bomb didn't do nearly so much damage, because while Hiroshima was on the flat delta of the Ota River with -- Hiroshima means three rivers -- the bomb wiped out everything in 10 mile radius and the noise was heard for a hundred miles all direction. But Nagasaki has an inland harbor with two or three ridges leading down to the waterfront, and the bomb fell between two ridges and so it wiped out only a fraction of the city. There was, in that destroyed fraction, a medical college, which was in session, and I don't know how many, three or 400 students, only two people survived. They were a couple of students or faculty who were in the x-ray film storage space in the basement.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.