A human tragedy

Sunday 29 July 2012

Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and the Unknowing

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Reviewed by Alastair Mabbott

by Craig Collie

(Portobello, £20

By virtue of not being Hiroshima, Nagasaki risks being relegated an afterthought, its destruction a mere coda to the detonation of the first atomic bomb three days earlier over Hiroshima. But the toll of death and suffering was just as great, and, by basing large portions of this book on the eyewitness testimonies of survivors, Craig Collie has reasserted the tragedy of its annihilation and given it a human face.

Through the eyes of a handful of people – including a schoolgirl, a Catholic priest, a tram driver and two Australian prisoners of war – Collie recreates the Nagasaki of August 1945. Japan was a beleaguered country by that time, fighting a losing battle against the US, and in that industrial port hungry and worn-out people were making ends meet as best they could in the belief that, as the Emperor promised, they would triumph in the end.Collie opens with the bombing of Hiroshima, an account derived partly from descriptions by Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the unfortunate man who experienced the Hiroshima bomb then took a train home to Nagasaki only to go through the same ordeal three days later. In the aftermath, the rest of Japan was kept in ignorance of the city's fate. Confusion and incomprehension reigned among the government and the upper echelons of the military over the thought that a single bomb could have caused so much damage. Rumours ran rife, and witnesses such as Yamaguchi, who returned to Nagasaki swathed in bandages and told his workmates what he had seen, were met with scepticism.As always, it's the individual tragedies that stick in the mind, such as the man on a train carrying his wife's head back to her parents in a box, or the mother and children simply evaporating in the shock wave before a stunned witness's eyes. Collie's emphasis on the plight of the innocent people on the ground is this book's great strength, although it does crowd out other aspects he might have covered. The Manhattan Project itself, which created the first atomic bombs, and which by then had cost the US $2 billion, is left unexplored, as are the political and strategic decisions which led to it. Even Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, merits only a walk-on part. We get far closer to the crews who dropped the bombs, and are right there in the cockpit of the B-29 bomber Bockscar with Major Charles Sweeney as he almost aborts the mission after a host of problems, including the last-minute switch from the original target of Kokura (Nagasaki was a late addition to the list of potential targets).Relegating Hiroshima to the introduction and focusing the book on Nagasaki inevitably places at centre stage the question of why it needed to be bombed at all. Hiroshima was an unambiguous demonstration that America had a weapon against which there was no defence. With the Potsdam Declaration issued, Japan had been shown that the ultimatum could be backed up with monstrous force. And yet the US felt the need to drop another. As becomes clear from Collie's account, even if its participants hadn't yet realised it, the Cold War had already begun and was determining their actions. The Russian army was massing on the border of Manchuria, ready to sweep into Japan. But America wanted Japan to surrender before the USSR invaded and made the kind of territorial gains on Japanese soil they'd made after victory in Europe. Japan, nevertheless, hesitated. The prime minister and foreign minister were resigned, with Emperor Hirohito's tacit consent, to defeat. What seems to have proved fatal for the people of Nagasaki was not their government's determination to continue the war at all costs but their delay in agreeing on terms of surrender, conceding defeat without losing face. In the end, it was not the destruction of Hiroshima that forced them to accept the inevitability of surrender, but the breaking news of Russian tanks crossing their borders.But, by that point, the B-29 commanded by Charles Sweeney was already in the air.

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A human tragedy

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