The Day of the Bomb on Nagasaki's Christians

As I suspected some did not like me telling home-truths about American history. One correspondent even described what happened as a "mote" compared with the "beam" of British anti-Catholicism.

Mass murder of innocent Catholic women, children and elderly?

Is that a "mote"?

Well, I doubt he/she can really mean that. It was too awful for that.

The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki

Here is what one American writer forcefully and dramatically says of the day the bomb fell on Nagasaki:

"62 years ago, on 9 August 1945, the second of the only two atomic bombs (a plutonium bomb) ever used as instruments of aggressive war (against essentially defenceless civilian populations) was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, by an all-Christian bomb crew. The well-trained American soldiers were only 'doing their job' and they did it efficiently.

It had been only 3 days since the first bomb had decimated Hiroshima on 6 August with chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government and the Emperor had been searching for months for a way to an honourable end of the war which had exhausted the Japanese to virtually moribund status. (The only obstacle to surrender had been the Truman administration’s insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan – an intolerable demand for the Japanese.)

The Russian army was advancing across Manchuria with the stated aim of entering the war against Japan on 8 August, so there was an extra incentive to end the war quickly: the US military command did not want to divide any spoils or share power after Japan sued for peace.

The US bomber command had spared Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kokura from the conventional bombing that had burned to the ground 60+ other major Japanese cities during the first half of 1945. One of the reasons for targeting relatively undamaged cities with these new weapons of mass destruction was scientific: to see what would happen to intact buildings – and their living inhabitants – when atomic weapons were exploded overhead.

Early in the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress called Bock’s Car, took off from Tinian Island, with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains, and headed for Kokura, the primary target. (Its bomb was code-named “Fat Man,” after Winston Churchill.)

The only field test of a nuclear weapon, blasphemously named “Trinity,” had occurred just three weeks earlier, on 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The molten lava-rock that resulted, still found at the site today, is called trinitite.

With instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting, Bock’s Car arrived at Kokura, which was clouded over. So after circling three times, looking for a break in the clouds, and using up a tremendous amount of valuable fuel in the process, it headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest Christian church in the Orient, St. Mary’s Cathedral, but it also had the largest concentration of baptised Christians in all of Japan. It was the city where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549, a Christian community which survived and prospered for several generations.

However, soon after Xavier’s planting of Christianity in Japan, Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests began to be accurately perceived by the Japanese rulers as exploitive, and therefore the religion of the Europeans (Christianity) and their new Japanese converts became the target of brutal persecutions.

Within 60 years of the start of Xavier’s mission church, it was a capital crime to be a Christian. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their beliefs suffered ostracism, torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity had been stamped out.

However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptised Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government – which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the government, the Japanese Christian community built the massive St. Mary’s Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.

Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that St. Mary’s Cathedral was one of the landmarks that the Bock’s Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his bomb site over Nagasaki that day, he identified the cathedral and ordered the drop.

At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching, radioactive fireball. The persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving centre of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero.

And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in 9 seconds. The entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out."

[From The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story by Gary G. Kohls]

The aftermath...

Horrible and horrifying. What real man or woman can excuse it? It is just too disgusting.

And yet it happened!

However, God was able to draw good out of evil as He often does. Here is a wonderful story by way of example.

'Here is Dr. Takenaka’s story.

It all began only hours after the atom bomb mushroomed over Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. Dr. Takenaka was working as a surgeon in a military hospital just outside the city of Nagasaki. Almost half of the medical personnel in the city died in the first seconds of the blast.

Nagasaki is shaped something like a salad bowl with mountains on three sides. The open side makes Nagasaki one of Japan’s great seaports. When the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, fire and radiation splashed up the sides of this salad bowl-like city. It is estimated that about 60,000 people died in the blast.

The American bomber, nicknamed Bock’s Car, had the city of Kokura, not Nagasaki, as its primary target. However, the clouds were so thick over the primary target, that the bombardier could not pick up his aiming point. As fuel was running low, the pilot had to go to Nagasaki, which was his secondary target.

Although there were clouds over Nagasaki, too, the oval stadium, near two Mitsubishi war-goods plants, was visible. The bomb, called the Fat Man, was released by parachute to explode at an altitude of 1600 feet. This was a plutonium bomb, even more devastating than Hiroshima’s uranium bomb. Because the bomb was dropped off target and the wind took it even more off course, Madame Butterfly’s house was saved, but “ground zero”, the epicentre of the blast, was right over the Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption in the Urakami district of Nagasaki.

The only things found in the ashes of the 2000-seat Cathedral were the charred buttons from the cassocks of the Japanese priests hearing confessions during the High Mass going on at the time. Not deliberately, of course, but Christian America had just destroyed the largest Christian church in the Orient, and snuffed out about 75 percent of the Christians who lived in and around Nagasaki.

Dr. Takenaka went on to describe the scene shortly after the A-bomb exploded. He said, “Being only a few miles away, we knew something dreadful had happened to the city. But when we arrived on the scene itself, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Blazing rubble, littered with bodies burned beyond recognition; incredible heat, and the stench of scorched flesh made us nauseous. Horribly burned people, screaming hysterically, twisted and squirmed uncontrollably in pain, terror and panic -- pleading pitifully for help. Many of the irradiated victims were faceless, with only indentations where eyes, nose and ears had once been, their skin hanging in folds from their arms and legs. Among the ashes were both the living and the dead. Even though we were experienced medical personnel, the scale of devastation shocked us, to the point that we were temporarily immobilized”.

This man with bushy eyebrows and greying temples continued, “I thought to myself, if there’s a hell, this is what it must be like. Many of the survivors were burned so badly that even under the best circumstances, nothing could be done to save them. Supplies were short; needs were enormous. Vehicles were stalled in the rubble, so the wounded had to be carried by hand to whatever clearing could be found.”

Dr. Takenaka said that glazed-eyed survivors, screaming in agony, pulled frantically at his white coat, begging him to do something for them.

“I did what I could,” he said dejectedly.

Because everything had been levelled, there were no shelters where the victims could be taken to protect them from the 100-degree heat of the scorching August sun. Many simply expired in the ashes of their own homes and places of business.

In a voice filled with sadness, Dr. Takenaka went on, “The heat from the fires, plus the heat from the very hot sun exhausted us quickly, but we knew we must try to keep going for the sake of the victims. Most of us worked without rest for over 48 hours. Food and water were simply non-existent at that point. Radiation and epidemic loomed as our greatest fears. So many dead, unburied bodies made the danger of plague positively frightening”.

Dr. Takenaka continued: “We were working in the Urakami Cathedral section of the burned-out city. As I made my way slowly through piles of human bodies, I heard what I thought was the sound of singing. I couldn’t believe my ears”.

Dr. Takenaka’s tone softened and quickened. “Frankly, because I was on the verge of exhaustion, I wondered if I was beginning to hallucinate, the horrors of this hell being too much for a human being to bear. Suddenly, I saw them, 20 or 30 people, some critically burned, sitting in a kind of circle singing and apparently praying. They had beads in their hands which reminded me of the Buddhist jus beads. On a closer look, as I made my way over to this little group, I discovered the beads had crosses on one end. They seemed like a tiny island of composure and serenity in what I would forever remember as a nightmarish sea of horror, destruction and panic.”

'Who are you?', I asked, still not sure that I wasn’t going out of my mind.

The noise of screaming and crying around us was so loud, I could hardly hear their reply.

'Who are you?' I shouted again at the top of my voice.

The reply came back, 'We are Christians, and we are praying to our God.'

Of course, I had heard of Jesus Christ, but this was the first time in my life that I had ever spoken to Christians. For people to have such inner composure at a time like this jolted me way down deep inside with a strange mixture of fear and awe. I said to them, ‘Some of you are badly burned. Let me do what I can for you.’"

As the doctor prepared to give these hapless victims medical attention, he was stunned to hear them say, “Thank you for coming to us, doctor, but God is with us and will take care of us. Please go and help those who need you more. We will be all right.”

This soft-spoken, ingenuous man paused reflectively, his eyes misty, and then went on, “Everyone around me was reaching out desperately, begging me to come and give them medical attention. I just could not believe my ears when this group of Christians calmly asked that I go to the others who needed me more. I honestly never dreamed this kind of selfless concern for others really existed. Although I knew nothing about the teaching of Jesus Christ, I immediately saw the difference between a true Christian and the rest of us. In the presence of indescribable suffering, their faith in God never wavered; and they were more concerned about others than themselves.

“I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that most of that little band of Christians died before the fires went out in their incinerated city.”

Now, with a little smile, Dr. Takenaka observed, “My first contact with Christianity revealed a remarkable quality of heart, and an heroic dimension of inner strength. I said to myself, if there is a God, I hope that God will give me the faith to believe what these Christians believed.”

Fifteen years later, in Tokyo, Dr. Takenaka met the famous Paris Foreign Missionary, Fr. Candau. After a year’s instruction, Dr. Takenaka was baptized a Christian.

For this one Japanese naval doctor, the atom bombing of Nagasaki became the vehicle of his conversion from Buddhism to Christianity. Dr. Takenaka’s story and mine intersected only one time in this world, at a Tokyo Rotary luncheon. But I’ll never forget him or the fact a Rotary Club on the outskirts of Tokyo brought us together in the early 1970s.

As Dr. Takenaka and I parted that day in Tokyo, he left me with these words: “The great Jesus Christ taught that the gift you have received, you should give as a gift. I believe the seeds of my own Christian faith were sown in atom-bombed Nagasaki. My heart tells me that those dying Christians passed on to me the gift of their Christian faith. And now I try my best to share my own faith with others. I believe I am the spiritual child of those Nagasaki Christians. For them, dying was truly gain; and for me staying alive meant becoming Christian -- this was also gain. From those Christians, I learned a very important lesson: I must let God be God in my life.”'

[From Atom-bombed Nagasaki by Rev Fr Stephen Lynch OFM]

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring...

...

I like America but...

... here are just a few examples of why there has been a lot fundamentally wrong in the 250-year history of the USA and why a lot of peoples still harbour a strong and unfortunate animus against America.

1. Jefferson enslaved his own illegitimate children by a slave


Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his black slave, Sally Hemings, keeping his offspring enslaved.

Regarding marriage between blacks and whites, Jefferson wrote that:

"[t]he amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent."

In complete contradistinction to the Spanish Catholic monarchy, church and missionaries who supported and protected the rights of men of all races, and whom, let it be said to his eternal shame, Jefferson so detested and abused, Jefferson considered blacks, hispanics and native Americans inferior. Many modern US Liberals will hotly deny this fact but it is clear and evident from his writings.

In addition, Hemings was likely the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (John Wayles had a reputation for having sexual relations with his own slaves).

The allegation that Jefferson fathered children with Hemings first gained widespread public attention in 1802, when journalist James T. Callender, wrote in a Richmond newspaper:

“...[Jefferson] keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally.”

A 1998 DNA study concluded that there was a DNA link between some of Hemings descendants and the Jefferson family. Three studies were released in the early 2000s, following the publication of the DNA evidence. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, appointed a multi-disciplinary, nine-member in-house research committee of Ph.D.s and an M.D. to study the matter of the paternity of Hemings’s children. The committee concluded:

“it is very unlikely that any Jefferson other than Thomas Jefferson was the father of [Hemings's six] children.”

Some have attempted to suggest that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas's younger brother, was the father of at least one of the slave children, Eston, but the National Genealogical Society Quarterly then published articles reviewing the evidence from a genealogical perspective and concluded that the link between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was clearly credible.

In short, the alleged lover of liberty enslaved his own children.

Let us not forget that this was also the man who wrote of the brutal murder of the French Catholic king and queen and of the very young royal princes and princesses, that "the tree liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants" all the while that he was enslaving his own half-black children.

It was, among others, this man, the drafter of the American Declaration of Independence, whom Dr Samuel Johnson had in mind when he wrote:

“Why is it that the yelps for liberty come loudest from the drivers of slaves?”

And yet this is the man who is held up as the exemplar of American liberty and politics.

2. Harry S Truman lied about Hiroshima


Here is how Truman announced the Hiroshima bombing:

"The British, Chinese, and United States Governments have given the Japanese people adequate warning of what is in store for them. We have laid down the general terms on which they can surrender. Our warning went unheeded; our terms were rejected. Since then the Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it will do in the future. The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction. I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb. Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first. That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labour of discovery and production. We won the race of discovery against the Germans. Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbour, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretence of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us."

Used against those who attacked Pearl Harbour? Who is he kidding? How many Japanese women and children civilians attacked Pearl Harbour?

But, in any case, he is knowingly lying.

He knew - as did his generals - that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both cities and not military bases.

It was, regrettably, a base lie.

Moreover, Nagasaki was the city of the Nagasaki Catholic martyrs and the centre of Japanese Catholicism - the one place in Japan that was most likely to be the most sympathetic to the West.

Indeed, they dropped the Bomb only a short distance away from the principal Roman Catholic Cathedral of Japan - St Mary's in Urakami, Nagasaki. Moreover, they got Irish-American boys to do it and that with a dirty, high-radiation, A-Bomb that went on killing by radiation sickness for decades after; and this on the sacred site of the Nagasaki Catholic martyrs of 1597.

What astonishing stupidity and moral depravity!

The ruins of St Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Urakami, Nagasaki, after the "Fat Man" dirty Atom Bomb exploded near it, having been dropped by Irish-American air crew

Pope John Paul II visited some of the many Catholic victims of the dirty "Fat Man" bomb many years later in a Nagasaki hospital.

Hang your head in shame, Harry Truman and the American leaders of that time for this atrocious crime against humanity!

America - do not make excuses for this crime. Just admit it, repent and make reparation to God and man for it.

3. JFK, LBJ and the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, Catholic President of Vietnam

Here is a clip of President Lyndon Johnson admitting to Sen Eugene McCarthy that the USA orchestrated the assassination of President Diem.



In fact, it was during JFK's Presidency that the decision was made and - as documents now clearly show - with the full knowledge and approval of Catholic President John F Kennedy.


Shocking but true!

Catholic Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem at prayer, later assassinated with US connivance

I anticipate the usual weak and disgraceful apologies for this act of barbarism:

1. Diem was himself corrupt.

Where's the proof that he was any more corrupt than every other South-East Asian leader? None? Ok - then why kill him?

But even if he were corrupt, by what conceivable moral rule could the USA claim the right to aid and assist those who sought his life? By what conceivable moral rule does anyone, government or individual, have the right to kill another human person save justly in a just war or after just due process of law? NONE AT ALL. OTHERWISE IT IS CALLED, AND RIGHTLY SO, BY THE ODIOUS NAME OF MURDER. AND THE COMMANDMENT SAYS "THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER". IT COULD NOT BE CLEARER!

2. Diem was not going to unite South Vietnam against the Communist North.

So what? How does that give anyone the right to murder him?

3. Diem probably had some of his opponents murdered.

Probably!?!?

Says who? Where's the proof? Diem was a devout, traditional Catholic who came from a long line of Catholic aristocrats who had been Mandarins under the Emperor since the 17th century and earlier. Where is the evidence that he was a man who would turn to murder?

Even if it were true, how does that give anyone the right to murder him in return? The US could have called him before an International Criminal Tribunal if they had had the proof. But connive at his murder? How can that be right?

After Diem came President Nguyen Van Thieu - also a Catholic and a convert from Buddhism.

The US government soon enough dumped Thieu, too, and he had to escape his own country for fear of murder by the victorious Communists after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.

And who can forget the harrowing stories, told by US soldiers themselves at various tribunals and enquiries, of their carelessly massacring Vietnamese women and children under orders from equally careless and seemingly amoral officers.

Officers of a great nation like the USA allowing such disgusting behaviour?

How shocking is that? And yet it happened!

4. ...and have things got noticeably better under William Jefferson Clinton or since?

I have just returned from New York and these thoughts crowded into my mind along with many other examples of the insularity and false ideology that is, even today, all too dominant in the USA despite its enormous wealth and power.

There is a lot that is good in the USA but a lot that is still inexcusably not good.

Come on America. You can do better!

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