Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.
A reminder (inadequately supplied by Oppenheimer) of what happened at the other end of the bomb in Hiroshima. Based on my visit. Excerpted from my book Atomic Cover-up.
In the northwestern corner of the Peace Park, amid a quiet grove of trees, the earth suddenly swells. It is not much of a mound – only about ten feet high and sixty feet across. Unlike most mounds, however, this one is hollow, and within it rests the greatest concentration of human residue in the world.
Grey clouds rising from sticks of incense hang in the air, spookily. Tourists do not dawdle here. Visitors searching for the Peace Bell, directly ahead, or the Children’s Monument, down the path to right, hurry past it without so much as a sideways glance. Still, it has a strange beauty: a lump of earth (not quite lush) topped by a small monument that resembles the tip of a pagoda.
On one side of the Memorial Mound the gray wooden fence has a gate, and down five steps from the gate is a door. Visitors are usually not allowed through that door, but occasionally the city of Hiroshima, which manages the Mound, honors a request from a foreign journalist.
Inside the Mound the ceiling is low, the light fluorescent. One has to stoop to stand. To the right and left, pine shelving lines the walls. Stacked neatly on the shelves, like cans of soup in a supermarket, are gleaming white porcelain canisters with Japanese lettering on the front. On the day I visited, there were more than a thousand cans in all, explained Masami Ohara, a city official. Each canister contained the ashes of one person killed by the atomic bomb, identified on the exterior.
Behind twin curtains on either side of an altar rest several dozen pine boxes, the size of caskets, stacked, unceremoniously, from floor to ceiling. They hold the ashes of an estimated seventy thousand unidentified victims of the bomb, according to officials. If, in an instant, all of the residents of Wilmington, Delaware, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, were reduced to ashes, and those ashes carried away to one repository, this is all the room the remains would require.
Most of those who died in Hiroshima were cremated quickly, partly to prevent an epidemic of disease. Others were efficiently turned to ash by the atomic bomb itself, death and cremation occurring in the same instant. Those reduced by human hands were cremated on makeshift altars at a temple that once stood at the present site of the Mound, one-half mile from the hypocenter of the atomic blast. The cremations were carried out by rescue workers who rarely knew the identity of the bodies they were burning. The ashes of those cremated elsewhere in the city were carted to a temporary storage site at the temple.
In 1946, an Army Air Force squad, ordered by Gen. Douglas MacArthur to film the results of the massive U.S. aerial bombardment of Japanese cities during World War II, filmed a solemn ceremony at the temple (recorded in my film, also titled Atomic Cover-up), capturing a young woman receiving a canister of ashes from a local official. Later that year, survivors of the atomic bombing began contributing funds to build a permanent vault at this site and, in 1955, the Memorial Mound was completed.
For several years the collection of ashes grew because remains of victims were still being found. One especially poignant pile was discovered at an elementary school.
The white cans on the shelves have stood here for decades, unclaimed by family members or friends. (In many cases, all of the victims’ relatives and friends were killed by the bomb.) Every year local newspapers publish the list of names written on the cans, and every year several canisters are finally claimed and transferred to family burial sites. Most of the unclaimed cans (a total of less than 800 as of 2023) will remain in the Mound in perpetuity, now that so many years have passed.
They are a chilling sight. The cans are bright white, like the flash in the sky over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. From all corners of the city the ashes were collected: the remains of soldiers, but mostly physicians, housewives, the elderly, infants, and other civilians. Unclaimed, they at least have the dignity of a private urn, an identity, a life (if one were able to look into it) before death.
But what of the seventy thousand behind the curtains? The pine crates are marked with names of sites where the human dust and bits of bone were found – a factory or a school, perhaps, or a neighborhood crematory. But beyond that, the ashes are anonymous. Thousands may still grieve for these victims but there is no dignity here. “They are all mixed together,” said Ohara, “and will never be separated or identified.”
Under a mound, behind two curtains, inside a few pine boxes: This is what became of one-quarter of the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” and the recent award-winning The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years. He writes often at Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.
Great topic Mr.Mitchell, “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana
2022-08-16 After nuking Japan, US gov’t lied about radioactive fallout as civilians died
After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, US government officials lied to the media and Congress, claiming there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that civilians did not face “undue suffering,” that it was “a very pleasant way to die.”
https://multipolarista.com/2022/08/16/japan-us-lied-radioactive-fallout/
Aug 6, 2015 Hiroshima at 70: Have We Learned Anything?
Today is the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, in a Japanese city. Civilians who had little control over their government were victims. Was it justified and have we learned anything from it?
https://youtu.be/l9fWJHRNYiQ
Aug 6 2015, Hiroshima at 70: Have We Learned Anything?
We learned to make the same mistake over again and not care about the results. So many people protested nuclear weapons when Reagan was POTUS, there should be far more people protesting Biden’s foreign policy follies.
Yes sir! Hindsight is 20/20.
So what?
Those bombs ended the war with the least deaths on our side.
Their side?
If more of their deaths would have ended the war sooner we should have killed more of them.
Tens of thousands of more deaths on “our side” than if the US had just accepted the Japanese surrender and taken the win five months earlier.
What MIGHT have happened if the US had refused to take the win in March AND hadn’t used the atomic bombs in August? Who knows? That would be woulda coulda shoulda speculation. But we do know that the refusal to take the win in March DID, not could have, cost American lives.
Lol
You do not understand the difference between sharing a position and your silly, “if they’d done this, it would have been shorter”
I simply shared that if our side could have killed more Japanese and if that would have made them stop fighting sooner I would have been fine with it.
You on the other hand are just being Pollyannish and keep declaring the Japanese really wanted to stop fighting but we made them continue…that is such a internet declaration of certainty…
Sure if only…..
You internet debate club guys are hillarious..
Next you’ll declare that too many dead is bad or how someone dies matters.
That you do not understand is why internet debates are jokes.
I didn’t say “if they’d done this, it would have been shorter.”
I simply noticed that the US intentionally chose to make it longer.
That’s what happened.
Sorry it’s inconvenient to your narrative, but it happened whether it’s convenient to your narative or not.
So you have determined the US “chose” to extend the war.
We could have stopped the war in 41 by surrendering.
But we did not like the terms did we?
Japan refused our terms until we killed enough of them.
But let’s argue about a war over 60 decades old….not.
You will just make pronouncements as if they are fact and I’ll laugh at your complete assurance that you just know better than the actual participants of a historical event because you read some books you agreed with.
“We could have stopped the war in 41 by surrendering.”
Maybe you could have. My parents were seven years old in 1941 and it was more than a quarter century after that before I could do anything at all.
Could the US have stopped the war in 1941 by surrendering? Presumably, although not certainly. But it chose not to.
Could the US have stopped the war in March of 1945 by accepting the Japanese surrender offer? Presumably, although not certainly.
What would have happened if it had done something other than what it did? Something other than what happened. What might that have been? Impossible to know.
But what we do know is that the US did choose not to accept the Japanese surrender offers starting in March 1945, and that tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Japanese subsequently died before the war ended.
Your speculation that extending the war and using the bombs saved more lives than it cost is just that — speculation. It’s what-iffism. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be correct, of course. But we do know what did happen versus your pie-in-the-sky fantasies about what might have happened.
Lol
You are still trying to get into a idiotic pissing contest over a historical event.
I barely bother reading your attempts at being a fake history professor trying to “teach” me.
Whatever you believe could have been different does not interest me but it does make me laugh at a fake history professor trying to “inform” us dummies that disagree with your coulda’s.
I don’t believe anything in particular “could have been different.”
I simply notice what actually happened.
Your woulda/coulda/shoulda “it saved lives” stuff is entirely speculation.
All we know is what ACTUALLY happened — tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Japanese died during five months of the US refusing to accept a Japanese surrender on terms that they ended up granting anyway.
If the US had accepted the surrender earlier, there are scenarios under which fewer, or more, might have died. We have no way of knowing which of those scenarios might have played out. All we know is what DID happen and how many DID die.
I’m not trying to “teach” you anything, for the same reason I don’t try to teach pigs to sing (it doesn’t work and annoys the pigs). You can accept fact, reality, and history, or reject it. No skin off my ass either way.
Now we’re at the part where instead of hitting “block/ignore,” you start whining about how unfair it is that others are allowed to say things that bother you.
Internet blog history lessons are worth what one pays for them.
Thanks for the laugh.
It really appears the less I take you seriously the more upset you get…..
The more upset you get because I do not take you seriously just causes me to take you even less seriously.
And round and round we go…
The next time you upset me will be the first time.
And there won’t be a first time.
Have a nice day.
You too.
Someone is out there who is interested in your alternative history musings it’s just not me.
Someone needs a Substack column where people do want that stuff…
…and occasionally even pay for it.
Alternative history can be fun — Harry Turtledove has done quite a bit of good stuff in that genre.
As a frustrated novelist, I’ve worked on several alternative history projects, and have one that might actually get finished (I’m a few thousand words into it — a Lovecraft Mythos take on the Nazi saboteurs who got dropped off by a U-boat along the Florida coast in 1942).
But outside of fiction, I tend toward a skeptical approach of the “revisionist history” that a lot of libertarians really fall into. I resist applying a different, lesser evidentiary standard to it than to the “official version.”
Revisionist history involving, if we had done this topics, is a never ending discussion that is fun in person but not typing on my phone.
The alternative history novels can be fun as was Amazon’s Man in the Castle much better than the British ’70s efforts at the topic.
As to “official” versions of history; it’s all “historical relatism” to me after you get past the dates and numerical aspects.
The historian is writing to persuade the reader to view the events as they and perhaps “act”(the meaning of which can be fluid) in a desired way.
You read enough of them and you can see the craft of writing in regards to story telling for an audience (who wants reassurance not some heretic like that OTHER writer whose audience feels the same.)
Correct. The Japanese had been trying to negotiate terms of surrender for months prior to August 1945. The US refused all conditions, even though retaining the Emperor was the only one the Japanese had. Which the US allowed after the end of the war anyway.
In a macabre manner that mound looks like the Stupas of India and the Dagobahs of Sri Lanka. The Stupa and Dagobah are not burial mounds. They are the architectural representation of the Buddha and pilgrims circumambulate around them.
Look at that, even today there are Empire apologists even here on antiwar.com who think that it was somehow morally justifiable to reduce tens of thousands human beings to ashes in an instant.
The Japanese committed untold atrocities across Asia, does that mean the random people who lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “deserved” to be murdered like that? No more wars. No more nuclear weapons. We have learned all the wrong lessons and swallowed so much propaganda to justify mass murder.