Please pardon another Memorial Day post. While most of what modern storage systems protect are business records there is also the use of storage for saving our cultural heritage – of which this is a small part.
My father, Tom, was an officer in the US Navy Medical Corps during World War II. As a newly commissioned 2nd lieutenant he was aboard a submarine tender anchored at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As a doctor he spent the next 36 hours in an operating room working on the wounded.
Less than 4 years later he was aboard one of the first US ships to enter Nagasaki’s harbor after the Japanese surrender. In a brief memoir he describes a visit to Okinawa on the way to Tokyo – where he was aboard the USS Missouri when the formal surrender was signed – and then on to Nagasaki, the 2nd city to suffer an atomic bomb attack.
USS Haven, a USN hospital ship, in 1954
The primary mission the Haven was the collection of Allied POW’s in need of medical care from the many camps in the area.
The trains began arriving every three or four hours each one with several hundred men. Each new arrival was a thrill with the band playing “Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here” and the sailors and marines on the platform cheering. It was an experience to see the somewhat bewildered expressions of the men on the trains change to tears, smiles and laughter as they realized that they had reached the end of the road – that the day, the longing for which had sustained them through months and years of torture and mistreatment, was at hand.
While in Nagasaki he visited a Japanese hospital:
What we saw in that hospital was something I wouldn’t have missed seeing for anything but something I never want to see again.
Everywhere you looked there were desperately sick people, mostly women and children. Many were horribly burned and over and around all of them were flies by the millions. There were no beds – all patients were lying on straw mats on the floor. In the corridors of the hospital, the patient’s kin had set up their charcoal burners and were preparing a meal thus filling the hospital with smoke. One sensed that death was hovering over many of these people – while we were examining one recent admission, two died close by.
My father soon had his hands full with some very sick POWs.
Within a few days after the released prisoners of war had started arriving at our processing station, my two wards were filled with sick men, many of them living skeletons. Many people thought that it would be only a matter of “resting them up for a couple of days” and giving them plenty to eat. Those of us working with them, however, soon realized that a great many of them were desperately ill and urgent measures were necessary to save them.
But he also got the chance to meet with some of the scientists from the Manhattan project that developed the bomb.
It was our good fortune that the committee sent out by president Truman to study the atomic bomb explosion arrived in Nagasaki soon after we did. They asked to be quartered on board the Haven and inasmuch as I was in charge of the officer’s mess, it was my duty to look after them. As a result I had many interesting discussions regarding the atomic bomb and its possibilities with the members of the committee several of whom were scientists who had worked with the bomb from the beginning. Of course, they gave out no information except what had been released for publication, still it was a thrill to talk with the men who had done much to work it out.
At the conclusion of a lecture by one of the scientists my father concluded:
It may have ended the war for us, but it may some day be turned against us and we would lose the things for which we fought this long bloody war. Our country could be the greatest force for peace and security in the world if it would but accept the responsibility. Even out here few think of anything but getting back and forgetting what they have seen out here. “Let’s get home and look after our own affairs – what these people do out here is none of our business”, they say. And these are intelligent men – it depresses me. We are still selfish and materialistic, we have learned nothing apparently.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. The complete 12 page document – scanned and OCR’d into a PDF – is available here. Scanning from an old typescript is imperfect so there may be errors.
StorageMojo will be back to its regularly unscheduled programming tomorrow.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks very much for these memories on this Memorial Day!
I can’t imagine what my grandparent’s generation lived through — but they could not, perhaps, imagine the international zoo of people that I have lived with, worked with, and consider dear friends.
Let us hope that we can continue the work to make the world better for us all.
This was one of the best memorials I have read today. Thanks Robin! Your insight into the real world is remarkable.
Robin,
Thanks for sharing this, it really makes you put things in perspective.
Lyca
Fascinating and sobering stuff, especially in light of the news that North Korea has tests an A-bomb of very similar yield to the one used at Nagasaki. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the bombs hadn’t been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – not, in terms of what would have happened in the resolution of WWII. Opinions vary on that. No, I wonder what would have happend in the forthcoming Cold War. The effects of these two relatively modest A bombs on two Japanese cities were devastating – more so than even the greater loss of life of the fire-bombing of Tokyo, simply because this was just one, single event. Truly a game changer.
Those images were burnt into the consciousness of a a least two generations. The wartime generation and that of mine, born in the decade or two after the war. That post WWII era always had those images and the apocalyptic novels and films that ran through the period. Nevil Shute wrote “On the Beach”, Walter M Milmr jr wrote “A Canticle for Leibowitz” and Stanley Kubrik filmed Dr Strangelove. All the whils there were those images – was it that which stopped the Cuban Missile Crisis running out of control? Was it that which allowed the politicans to reign in General MacArthur in the Korean war?
With the first hand experience of these events fading away, I wonder if “A Canticle for Leibowitz” will prove prescient – that human beings are ultimately unable to control organised agression and that we are bound to repeat our mistakes. The history of conventional warfare rather supports that notion.
Hi Robin…
Thanks for posting this story…it’s really good. My father was on the USS Haven on that voyage to Nagasaki in 1945 – he was a pharmacist mate. To me, it’s interesting to read the various stories of that voyage – I think your dad’s is the best I’ve seen.
An interesting article, thanks for posting it.
My grandad was a British POW liberated from camp Fukuoka #2 on Koyagi Island by Nagasaki in September ‘45. He’d been there since October 1942 working in the Kawanami shipyard.
He was 4 miles from the epicentre of the Atomic blast and lived to the ripe old age of 88.
Cheers,
Derek Robertson.