My paternal grandfather has been dead some twenty-two years now, so much of what I know of his life is second- and third-hand, and thoroughly anecdotal. I know this: he died of cancer, and he was a POW in Japan. And he saw the flash of the Hiroshima bomb.
He was around 18, a native of Indonesia (then under Dutch rule) when he was mobilized into the Dutch colonial army to defend the country against the Japanese invading forces. The colonial army, called KNIL, had at that point already capitulated, but due to the crippled communication infrastructure the draft hadn't yet been cancelled. Having never held a rifle, having just been inducted into basic training, my grandfather was put on a boat and shipped to a Japanese labour camp.
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We don't know much about where he went or what he did there. He seldom spoke of it, and I was only knee-high at the time he was still healthy enough to talk much at all. He would later, on his deathbed, admit that if he were to recover, the one place in the world he'd like to see again was Japan. He said it seemd a beautiful place through the bars of his barracks, and he'd have liked to see it as a free man.
Toward the end of his imprisonment he was stationed in the Nagasaki shipyards labour camp, up until the end of July, 1945. Two weeks later, Fat Man would be dropped.
That's all I know. How he was repatriated, what his circumstances were when he saw the flash of the Hiroshima bomb... if I've heard anything on these topics at all it's such a mess of contradictory stories from different relatives it doesn't bear repeating. However, about a decade ago, I came across a book that at least painted some pictures for me.
The sister city of Nagasaki is in the Netherlands, a wealthy and large municipality that's been bucking to be named a 'city' for decades, and not too far from my secondary school. Through outlandish circumstances I (in no way affiliated with Amstelveen) was asked to be a member of the youth representation of Amstelveen when a large contingent of Nagasaki dignitaries, journalists, scholars and a set of school kids would pay a visit to Amstelveen. The reason I was asked is because I'm of Indonesian descent, and the triangle between Holland, Indonesia and Japan, focused on the second world war, was a significant topic planned for the visit.
You know that stereotype of Japanese people with cameras? It's true. Every single one of the Japanese attendees -- professors, politicians, everyone -- had a disposable yellow Kodak cardboard clickybox. When the Japanese kids laid a wreath on the Indonesian colonial monument, the Mayor of Nagasaki actually stood shoulder to shoulder with the press photographers so that his photos would look as good as the professionals'... I digress a bit.
To prepare for the event, I'd interviewed my paternal grandmother and, through the mists of her mild dementia, I gleaned stories from which I could fashion what ultimately became quite a moving speech, which would later be quoted in some Nagasaki newspaper -- I was once sent a copy which I since lost, but it was all squiggly gobbledygook anyway.
After the speechifying, a woman from the Dutch Indies Comittee came and spoke to me because the story I'd told about my grandfather so closely resembled the accounts of her husband, who'd also been a POW in Japan. He'd later recorded his experiences in a series of articles published in a national newspaper, later still collected and published as a book, and wouldI like a copy? I would indeed. She sent it a week later, and I read it in a day.
Now, it's equally possible that my grandfather and this woman's husband knew each other, saw each other, or never met. I'll never know. But the story in the book was nothing short of harrowing.
This gentleman was still working at the Nagasaki docks when the bomb was dropped on the city. He and his mates were walking back to their barracks, along a road lined with cherry blossom trees, overlooking the city. He remembered blinking and seeing red, and when he opened his eyes, the ragged, paper-thin clothes on the prisoner in front of him were on fire. He remembered having no response at all until the sound hit like a massive thunderclap a second or two later. What had most likely happened was that he was just passing the trunk of a tree at the exact moment the plutonium core detonated, and he was protected from the initial light and heat blast simply by the luck of being in the tree's shadow.
The prisoners were quickly herded back into the barracks and effectively locked up there while the guards and soldiers went into the ruined city to help the evacutation and relief efforts. With very limited access to food and certainly no medical supplies, the conditions described in the book were horrifying. One of the burned prisoners complained of lions roaring in his ear, and when they inspected it, they found maggots crawling in his ear canal, grinding against his eardrum. They had no tools to remove them.
He described being unable to hate the guards for abandoning them even when the worse-off prisoners started dying. Some 40 000 of their countrymen had just been killed, some of them simply vaporized. The soldiers were concerned for their families, their friends, and their duty to their country. With 25 000 wounded, infrastructure shattered, there was no food to spare for prisoners, and certainly none of the precious antibiotics, disinfectants and painkillers that the Japanese victims so desperately needed.
The most formidable weapon of mass destruction ever created by mankind has only been used twice in its history, by the United States against Japan.
I once learned that the original targets for the nuclear strikes had been Tokyo and Kyoto, the capital city and the seat of the Emperor respectively, but that these were rejected because their destruction would be so devastating to the Japanese spirit that peaceful relations between the US and Japan would be unimaginable in future.
It reminded me of some morbid wisdom which I believe my grandfather gave to me when I was too young to understand, or to recall clearly now:
You can beat a man to within an inch of his life, steal his money and burn his house, and you could still one day be friends. Kill his child, and you have an enemy for life.
I won't deny that nukes are awesome, as Stephen Colbert demonstrates.
But stories like these are food for thought.
