Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a POW Near Nagasaki - WSJ
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OPINION | COMMENTARY
Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a
POW Near Nagasaki
We prisoners know the blasts were necessary to end the war. No
Japanese soldier or civilian was preparing to surrender in August 1945.
By LESTER TENNEY
Updated Aug. 7, 2015 6:46 p.m. ET
What does it mean to fight to the end? In April 1942, it meant fighting until my tank
battalion and I were forced to surrender at the Battle of Bataan. For everything else that
followed I only fought to survive: the Bataan Death March, brutal transport aboard a
“hell ship” to Japan, and slave labor in a Mitsui coal mine.
Emperor Hirohito PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
For my imperial Japanese enemy, in contrast, to fight to the end meant to give his life in
a presumably noble and glorious fashion. He would die for the emperor—who ruled by
divine right—confident that he would be enshrined with his ancestors for his efforts in
defense of a mythic civilization. There could be no surrender and no negotiated peace.
Death itself was beautiful, and death alone was honorable.
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Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a POW Near Nagasaki - WSJ
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The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, upended
this belief. The bombs showed the Japanese the devastating and ultimately inglorious
outcome of their fight. The bombs offered no true opportunity for confrontation and no
chance of death with honor; they promised only obliteration.
Like its erstwhile ally Nazi Germany, Japan was fighting an ideological war. A superior
race was destined to guide those less graced. Death for the empire earned a blessed
afterlife in the emperor-god’s eternal favor. For a loyal subject, surrender was a betrayal
of everything that sustained the empire’s system of patriotic values. The only option in
the face of certain battlefield defeat was to fight to the death.
Japan tried to keep fighting long after any chance of victory was gone. On the mainland,
women, children and the elderly were armed with sharpened bamboo sticks. Beginning
in May 1945, schools for disabled children were ordered to organize military units and
women ordered to serve in volunteer combat units. Young men were recruited by the
hundreds for kamikaze missions aboard wooden gliders or small boats.
The country’s infamous biological-weapons research program was hard at work
concocting flea-borne plague agents to float by submarine and balloon toward populated
American shores. By the late spring of 1945, some incendiary explosives called fugo had
already landed on the West Coast.
On Okinawa during the 82-day battle from early April to mid-June 1945, the Japanese
military instructed civilians to fight and die rather than surrender to the advancing U.S.
forces. Civilian households, comprised almost entirely of women and children, were
given grenades and encouraged to destroy themselves along with any Americans they
might encounter. Many did.
In the late spring of 1945, I saw that the cruelty with which we prisoners of war were
treated was only increasing. Our guards told us that Japanese units facing attack had
received orders to kill all military and civilian POWs in their custody. They were to
unburden themselves to focus on the fight. The executions were to begin Aug. 17.
No Japanese soldier or civilian was preparing to surrender that August.
Early on the morning of Aug. 9, from the POW camp where I was held some 30 miles
across a bay, I saw the sky over Nagasaki change. It glowed red and the air turned warm
against my skin.
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Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a POW Near Nagasaki - WSJ
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Until then, red was the color of my subjugation. My Japanese guards were certain that
red had a uniquely Japanese meaning. It wasn’t just the central color of their flag, it was
viewed as emotionally representative of their pure spirit and sincerity. The red sky over
Nagasaki ended those illusions.
At that moment, I made a bet with a friend that soon we would all be set free. I was right.
Japan’s surrender saved us. The dropping of the bombs, as Emperor Hirohito himself
acknowledged, was the only thing that made that surrender possible. As he explained to
his subjects, “Should we continue to fight, it would only result in the ultimate collapse
and obliteration of the Japanese nation.” The bombs inflicted indiscriminate, total
devastation, as no battle or bombing before, showing the consequences of trying to fight
to the end. The bombings destroyed hope and glory, past and future.
It’s also true that the bombings were acts of tragic and unprecedented violence. The
bomb—this “cruel weapon,” as the stunned emperor recorded in his surrender message
on Aug. 15—ruined two cities, brought suffering and death to many tens of thousands of
people and drastically altered landscapes and ecologies. Its use also transformed the
nature of modern warfare and erased the last faint lines separating civilian and military,
illegitimate and legitimate targets.
We POWs—men who were starved and tortured, who suffocated in the holds of hell
ships, who were beaten at will, who died for lack of medical care, and who saw friends
worked to death—have no doubt that the atomic bombs ended the war. The bombs took
away all the justifications for Japan to continue to fight.
The visual obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that Japan could soon cease
to exist. Or as the emperor concluded, “the war situation has developed not necessarily to
Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her
interest.” There would be no glorious end.
Mr. Tenney served in the 192nd Tank Battalion of the U.S. Army.
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