To Hell and Back: The Last Train From Hiroshima (AsiaPacificPerspectives) by Charles Pellegrino

Author:Charles Pellegrino
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: WWII, Japan, History
ISBN: 9781442250581
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-08-05T12:00:00+00:00

As his contemporaries told it, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”

During the passage of nearly two thousand years, those words had rarely been more apt. Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, who had missed his meeting with Prefect Nishioka but had survived the fires of Hiroshima and arrived in Tokyo with barely more than a “sunburn” on one side of his face, insisted with Dr. Sagane that the Americans possessed only enough nuclear material for the delivery of two atomic bombs.

“They appear now to have used both of them,” Hata said. “They have now done the worst that they can do.”

Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, with the evidence from physicist Yoshio Nishina weighing heavily upon him, had been pressing, as politely as he could, for a unified plea to the Emperor for a decision.

War Minister Korechika Anami seemed to have stopped worrying altogether and was actually learning to embrace the bomb. Having heard descriptions of the atomic cloud booming into the stratosphere like a radiant flower, he waxed poetic and said, “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?”

The self-styled warrior poet’s lesson to young kamikaze and Kaiten pilots had been much the same. He taught them that their destiny was war—“to fall for the Emperor like petals from a flower.” In several days, following revelations that he knew of and was now considering fellowship in a military coup against the Emperor, aimed at eliminating all possibility of surrender, Anami would commit ritual suicide after treating his friends to sake, showing them two of his “death poems,” and lamenting both his great crime against the Emperor and the great poet that the world was losing.

At this moment, Anami was refusing to tolerate the foreign minister’s phrase, “The war situation grows more unfavorable for us every hour.” Togo was forced to rephrase his words, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

General Yoshijiro Umezu assured Anami that antiaircraft countermeasures concentrated against two or three planes traveling alone should be able to repel an atomic attack.

“And what if they should have another atomic bomb already in waiting on one of the islands?” Foreign Minister Togo broke in. “And what if they know we have learned by now to beware especially of only two or three planes? Do you not believe they are smart enough to hide one bomb among a fleet of fifty B-29 raiders? Or a hundred? And how are we to shoot them all down?”

For a moment, it seemed to Togo that War Minister Anami had no answer; but with cheeks flushing red and glistening with tears, he said, “I am quite sure we can inflict great casualties on the enemy; and even if we fail in the attempt, our hundred million people are ready to die for honor, glorifying the deeds of the Japanese in recorded history.”

General Umezu agreed, and announced, “We must fight on with courage and find life in death. It is the only way we can honor so many brave men who have already died for the Emperor.

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