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NDTV
4 days ago
- General
- NDTV
When The US Bombed This Japanese City 12 Hours Before WWII Ended
World War II was hours from ending when the sky over Japan's Kumagaya turned orange. In one corner of the city, a woman gave birth. American bombers approached, their bellies full of napalm. She had no shelter and no time. By dawn, her daughter, Kazumi Yoneda, would be one of the youngest survivors of the last firebombing raid of WWII. That night, August 14, 1945, nearly 90 US B-29 bombers dropped more than 6,000 tonnes of incendiaries on Kumagaya. At least 260 people were killed, thousands injured, and three-quarters of the city turned to ash. All in 12 hours. The war ended with the voice of Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan's surrender. Kazumi Yoneda would later write of her birth in a book of poetry titled 'The Day I Was Born': " The day I was born, flames devoured the city. My mother gave birth, held me close - And stood among The ruins of her home. Her body gave no mother's milk She held her ever-crying child in her arms." Kumagaya, with a population of under 50,000, was not a major industrial centre. It had a small air academy and a modest aircraft parts facility, but many have since questioned the justification for the raid. According to war correspondent Homer Bigart, even some of the bomber crews were uneasy, questioning the necessity of targeting what he called "a pathetically small city of little obvious importance." The aircrews, idle since Nagasaki, were told Kumagaya had rail yards and factories, enough to justify one last raid. They were also told to listen for a code word: 'Utah'. If they heard it, Japan had surrendered, and they could turn back. The code word never came. Pilot Vivian Lock, who flew that night, later wrote, "I have always regretted all the innocent people killed, injured and the loss of home and property." The B-29 crews, he said, kept asking mid-flight: "Have you heard anything yet?" hoping for 'Utah'. Kazue Hojo, 7, ran with her family through the burning streets. A shard of metal tore into her mother's neck. Her baby brother was burned. "It was bright like daytime," she recalled. By morning, the city was flattened. Survivors wept in the streets. "That's my most painful memory of the war," Ms Hojo told CNN. At Sekijoji Temple, a statue of monk Kobodaishi bears a scorched face, rescued by a priest as the temple collapsed. For decades, the statue was hidden until a peace museum asked to show it. Students cried when they saw it. They asked questions. "If people are to learn about peace, they can see the statue," said 79-year-old head priest Tetsuya Okayasu. The Kumagaya raid was part of General Curtis LeMay's incendiary campaign, which had already devastated dozens of Japanese cities, including Tokyo, where a single night of bombing in March 1945 killed more than 1 lakh people.
RTÉ News
06-07-2025
- General
- RTÉ News
Taoiseach 'deeply moved' by story of Hiroshima survivor in Japan
When the US warplane dropped a 4,400kg atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and 43 seconds later it detonated 600 metres above the city, eight-year-old Teruko Yahata was playing in her garden on what was a sunny August morning in 1945. The first indication of the enormity of what had just happened, she told Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Friday, was that the sky was suddenly and dramatically illuminated, in what she described as a blinding "bluish-white" light. The second indication was the rising black/grey nuclear cloud, which Ms Yahata said was "as if the heavens had become a huge flower". Then the force of the blast raced through her district, more than two kilometres from the point of detonation, and knocked her to the ground, causing her to lose consciousness. The atomic bomb dropped by the B-29 warplane, Enola Gay, triggered a powerful shockwave that levelled almost every structure within a radius of 1.5km. The intense heat it generated in-turn set off a firestorm that engulfed district after district. It is estimated that 70,000 people were obliterated immediately by the blast, with another 70,000 dying from 'radiation sickness' over the following months. More than half of the city's population was wiped out. Hiroshima had become the first city in the world to be targeted by a nuclear weapon and, to my amazement, Ms Yahata was steadily relating her incredible eye-witness testimony nearly eight decades later. I had spotted an unassuming, bespectacled woman, wearing a white cardigan and a pearl necklace over her dark dress, slipping into the office of Hiroshima Mayor, Kazumi Matsui, while Mr Martin was speaking with Japanese journalists. I'm not sure whether it was her purposeful stride that caught my attention, or the fact that she then carefully laid out a map of Hiroshima on a table. Either way, something made me enquire about this quiet and stylish woman at the back of the room. An official whispered to me: "She's one of the hibakusha" - a collective term which translates as "bomb-affected-people". Ms Yahata was introduced to the Taoiseach, and she first pointed out on her map where the epicentre, or more correctly hypocenter, of the blast was located, and how that related to her suburb. She had a strong voice and was speaking in English - a language she had mastered at the age of 83, so that she could dispense with translators and reach a wider audience directly. This small detail gave me a big insight into the petite, strong-willed woman sitting in front of us. Ms Yahata said she regained consciousness quickly after the atomic blast on 6 August 1945, and heard her mother's voice calling out for her. Like her city, Ms Yahata's childhood had just been blown to smithereens by the blast, and she'd now been catapulted into a nightmarish nuclear world. She told us that when she saw her mother: "I noticed that there were fragments of glass sticking out of her back, and her white dress was now stained bloody red." She witnessed her father carrying her great-grandmother on his back as he escaped their house. "There was so much smoke in there, that I could barely see the inside of the house. It had been turned upside down, and the shattered glass from the sliding doors was everywhere," she said. Ms Yahata remembered her mother praying as they left their ruined family home: "It was silent outside, and virtually all of the houses surrounding ours were destroyed." There was also fear, if not terror. "We thought that there was sure to be a second and, perhaps, a third bombing." Given that threat, and the intense destruction all around them, Ms Yahata's family decided to flee to the mountains where they had friends. But hunger stalked the land there, as the structures of society as they'd known it, were gone. Her direct testimony of eking out a life in a nuclear winter had a powerful impact on everyone in the room, including the Taoiseach. Mr Martin recounted afterwards how he'd been horrified as Ms Yahata described the hellish scenes she'd witnessed, including encountering people suffering from radiation burns with "skin peeling-off their arms". The Taoiseach said he had been deeply moved when Ms Yahata spoke of how her family, and so many others, faced starvation in those dark months after the bombing. He said she told him how, even to this day, she attaches huge significance to a bowl of rice - as she's never forgotten being given one by a stranger when she was starving as a child. Mr Martin said the purpose of his visit to Hiroshima had been to express sympathy to the victims, such as Ms Yahata, but also to reaffirm Ireland's strong and long-standing commitment to disarmament and denuclearisation. Against the backdrop of the bombing of Iran by Israel and the US, with the stated aim of destroying its capacity to make nuclear weapons, Mr Martin described the world today as "a very dangerous place." "If Iran… was ever to secure a nuclear weapon, then the prospect of proliferation for the nuclear weapons within the Middle East, for example, would grow very significantly," he contended. The Taoiseach suggested that there was a paradox about humanity, given its ability to exhibit both "incredible ingenuity" and "profound stupidity" as evidenced by its ever increasing capacity to develop weapons which could destroy the planet. "I was at the AI [Artificial Intelligence] summit in Paris… one person spoke about the application of AI to warfare, which would really be on a different level altogether, in terms of the destruction that could be wreaked on humankind." While in Hiroshima, the Taoiseach spent most of his time in the company of the city's Mayor, Kazumi Matsui. In blistering midday sunshine, they laid a wreath and stood together at the cenotaph for the victims, a sculptured arc designed to provide shelter for the souls of those killed by the bomb. In the near distance, we could see the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, commonly called the A-Bomb Dome. This iconic building was left ruined by the nuclear strike but somehow is still standing - quite a feat given it was just 160m from the hypocentre of the explosion. The Taoiseach said he learned a lot from Mayor Matsui - not just about what happened in August 1945, but also how the population recovered from the collective trauma. "I think the mayor made a very good point when he said to me… that you have to break the cycle of hate. "And that's the key issue, that the people of Japan had a huge hate visited upon them. You must learn to stop hating, and if you can do that, then you can build peace," he said. But undoubtedly the most memorable person of all those introduced to the Taoiseach in Hiroshima was Teruko Yahata. "The thought that came through, [while] speaking to her, was the resilience of humankind. It's quite extraordinary that she survived," she said. The Taoiseach is among many impressed by Teruko Yahata. In 2013 she was appointed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Ambassador for Denuclearisation - an official recognition of her tireless campaign work. Yet, while she has spoken to any and every nationality about her incredible story, it turns out there was a special reason why Ms Yahata really wanted to talk to Ireland's Taoiseach. Mr Martin told us after their meeting: "As it transpires, her daughter married an Irishman living in the United Kingdom, and she has a grandson, Conor. She said [he was] named after a great Irish King… so the world is indeed a small place." It clearly is a small place, just as it is a vulnerable place, as Ms Yahata has testified for 80 years.
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Business Standard
29-06-2025
- Science
- Business Standard
Luis Alvarez deserved a livelier biography than Collisions offers
Nevala-Lee recounts succession of events that followed: degrees from University of Chicago and a long, illustrious career, most of it at Berkeley. Alvarez was ambitious, arrogant and often prickly NYT COLLISIONS: A Physicist's Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs by Alec Nevala-Lee Published by Norton 338 pages $31.99 The physicist Luis Alvarez is one of those 20th-century figures whose life was so eventful that it should be catnip for a biographer. Consider even a partial list of his activities: working on explosive detonators for the Manhattan Project; flying in a B-29 observation plane to witness the bombing of Hiroshima; testifying as a government witness in the hearings to revoke the security clearance of his former colleague J Robert Oppenheimer (who had invited Alvarez to Los Alamos); searching via X-rays for hidden chambers in an Egyptian pyramid; and arguing, in a paper with his geologist son, that an asteroid had wiped out the dinosaurs. After the assassination of John F Kennedy, Alvarez pored over the Zapruder film and conducted experiments involving firing bullets at melons to conclude that the president was killed by a lone gunman. In 1968, his work on bubble chambers and elementary particles won him a Nobel Prize. 'Charismatic, physically agile and daring, Alvarez was one of the last representatives of an era that could still see physics as a heroic enterprise,' Alec Nevala-Lee writes in Collisions, his new book about the man. It's a tantalising characterisation. Just don't get too excited. 'Alvarez has been described as a scientific Indiana Jones, but his reputation as a maverick was built on a foundation of patience and discipline.' The assessment is entirely fair, though it's only as the biography progressed that I realised how the word of caution also serves as a warning sign. Nevala-Lee, a novelist and the author of a biography of Buckminster Fuller, is eminently qualified to get to know such a lively and complicated subject. Yet in seeking to deflate the myth of the audacious Alvarez, he has overcorrected, jettisoning drama and tension in favour of diligent explanation. The result is a thorough, dutiful parsing of Alvarez's work in the laboratory and a strangely pallid portrait of the man himself. Alvarez was born in 1911 in San Francisco, and enjoyed a privileged upbringing. His father, Walter, was a physician who also wrote popular books like How to Live With Your Ulcer and Live at Peace With Your Nerves. Luis's maternal grandparents had been missionaries in China; his paternal grandfather had emigrated to the United States from Spain. Luis, pronounced 'Lewis,' never learned Spanish; blond-haired and blue-eyed, he was known in college as 'the Spanish Swede.' When, after graduating from high school, he almost got himself killed in a mountaineering accident, he decided that he needed to balance his brash sense of adventure with meticulous preparation. Nevala-Lee recounts the succession of events that followed: degrees from the University of Chicago and a long, illustrious career, most of it at Berkeley. Alvarez was ambitious, arrogant and often prickly. For the most part, the Alvarez of Collisions is in the lab, while his long-suffering first wife is at home, raising their two children. So much of his work was top-secret that he could not confide in her. Not that this stopped him from being comically indiscreet with almost anyone else. During a family ski trip to Idaho, he struck up a conversation with another vacationing couple in the hotel lobby and talked loudly about his classified work. A government inquiry into his 'bragging campaign' noted his eagerness to be seen as 'quite the big shot.' Such a big mouth was especially surprising for someone who tended to deploy 'his talents in defence of an authorised narrative,' Nevala-Lee says, elsewhere describing Alvarez's political attitude as mostly conservative. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Alvarez complained that the other scientists at Los Alamos had become 'almost neurotic,' while he stayed unwaveringly supportive of the decision to use atomic weapons. Wading into the Kennedy assassination discourse, he selectively reported his results on the melon experiment to shut down arguments about a second shooter. When he X-rayed the pyramids, he kvetched about all the 'pyramidiots' who annoyed him with their pet theories about telepathy and psychokinesis. He kept all the conspiratorial letters he received in his 'nut file.' I pulled most of these tidbits from Collisions ; the morsels are there, but they're drifting in a sea of detail. Such an emphasis might be deliberate, a wilful refusal to indulge Alvarez's self-serving self-presentation in order to focus the reader's attention on what truly mattered: how his laboratories worked. As Nevala-Lee puts it, 'Alvarez's own impact consisted less of any one discovery than of the culture that he passed down to his protégés.' Bringing such a culture to life would be a challenge for any biographer. I appreciated Nevala-Lee's careful research and his sense of obligation. But I finished the book bleary-eyed and worn out — and wanting something more. The reviewer is non-fiction book critic for The Times
The Mainichi
21-06-2025
- The Mainichi
Memorial service held in Fukuoka for American POWs executed near end of WWII
FUKUOKA -- A memorial service was held here to honor American prisoners of war executed by Imperial Japanese Army personnel on June 20, 1945 -- less than two months before the end of World War II in Japan. A total of about 20 people from both Japan and the United States attended the service held at Aburayama Kannon temple in Fukuoka's Jonan Ward on June 20 both in person and online to pray for the victims' souls. Attendees included relatives of the POWs visiting from the U.S., officials of the U.S. Consulate in Fukuoka, and kin of war criminals involved in the executions. In a series of events collectively called the "Seibugun Jiken" (Western District Army incidents), the former Imperial army's Western District Army command in Fukuoka executed approximately 30 American POWs, including B-29 bomber crew, without court martials in three separate instances from June to August 1945. Between May and June that year, the "Kyushu Imperial University vivisection incidents" occurred, where eight POWs were taken to present-day Kyushu University and died after being subjected to experimental surgeries. The first executions of POWs on June 20 took place the day after the U.S. military's Great Fukuoka Air Raid. Kentaro Tohji, an army captain who executed four POWs, had lost his mother in the air raid. He was later sentenced to death by hanging as a war criminal but had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and passed away at the age of 68 in 1983. His third son, Katsuya, 71, who lives in Fukuoka's Chuo Ward, attended the service and remarked, "War leaves deep scars on both winners and losers." Timothy Lang, 61, whose uncle was a crew member of a B-29 bomber that crashed near present-day Yame, Fukuoka Prefecture, and was captured and executed, also attended the service online. He expressed his heartfelt wish that wars that take young people's lives will never happen again. The memorial service, the sixth to be held, was organized by military aviation history researcher Hiroyuki Fukao, 54. Beside the main hall of Aburayama Kannon are four "jizo" Buddhist statues erected by Tohji to honor the POWs he executed. Attendees offered incense there to pay their respects to the deceased.
20-06-2025
- General
Memorial Service Held in Fukuoka for Executed U.S. POWs
Fukuoka, June 20 (Jiji Press)--A memorial service was held in Fukuoka on Friday for U.S. prisoners of war who were executed without trial by the western command of the now-defunct Imperial Japanese Army in the closing days of World War II. The event was attended by people related to the POW executions from Japan and the United States, including a consul of the U.S. Consulate in Fukuoka and a U.S. Forces Japan chaplain. "We must do our part to ensure that the friendship between our two nations continues and leads to lasting peace," Katsuya Toji, 71, the third son of a former paymaster captain of the army who was judged a war criminal, said in his address at the ceremony, held at the Aburayama Kannon temple in the southwestern Japan city. Toji's father, Kentaro, executed four captured B-29 bomber crew members soon after Kentaro lost his mother in a U.S. air strike. "War leaves deep scars, not only on the defeated but also the victors," Toji stressed. [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
