Ron the Yarn Spinner

 

August 6, 1945

 

 Compliments of Dan Rostenkowski

 

It was a gift from our local congressman. A nice ballpoint pen? A travel mug? Calendar?

An inexpensive tchotchke? No. It was a paperback book? Light reading maybe?

 

Not really. This was 1968 in Chicago, Illinois, a quarter century before the Cold War was to end (1991). The book is titled “In Time of Emergency. A Citizens Handbook on Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters” and three quarters of it addressed just nuclear attack.

 

“A nuclear attack against the United States would take a high toll on lives. But our losses would be much less if people prepared to meet the emergency, knew what actions to take, and took them.”

 

At first, I thought all this was true, we should be prepared, but then I recalled hiding under my desk years earlier when I was in grade school and Civil Defense conducted its monthly test. The spine-tingling wail of air-raid sirens filled the air sending waxing and waning alerts of a potentially imminent aerial threat.

 

Looking out the classroom window towards downtown Chicago,” I thought. “This three-quarter inch laminated desktop is going to protect me if Chicago gets nuked. Who are you kidding? How prepared can you really be, and can you survive? The 1959 motion picture, “On the Beach” confirmed my doubts. “

 

Secretly, like everyone else, I hoped never to be a victim of a nuclear attack, but no one really talked about it. Sure, some people built in-house shelters, but it was not commonplace. (I knew of only one. See photo above ) For the ordinary citizen, the threat of attack was something you did not think about on a day-to-day basis. It was like the dark cloud Al Capp used in his Lil Abner comic strip, but it was a mushroom cloud, and you never wanted to look up and see one.

 

I met someone who did.

 It was summer, 2015 and the hospital room was darkened except for the glow from the television screen. Jane was surprised to see us but happy to have visitors. My wife introduced me while Jane muted the volume on the TV. I asked if she was watching a favorite show and she said, “Yes.”  “Oh, were you a dancer?”  asked my wife, Juli. “No,” Jane said. “I just like watching the judges argue about the performance and of the contestants. Jane was watching “Dancing with the Stars” while recovering from surgery.

 

Jane was a close friend of my wife’s aunt and godmother, Adelaide. The two were co-workers at United Airlines. Adelaide introduced Jane to Juli some years ago and one day during casual conversation Juli spoke about Jane, and I knew I had to meet her. Juli and I decided to visit her and offer company as she recovered from surgery.

 

Ninety-two-year-old Kuzuko (Jane) Yaguchi was an eyewitness to the first atomic bombing.

 

Jane and her husband Masakazu (“Mas”) were both born in the U.S but emigrated to Japan separately for personal reasons and then married before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Mas was later conscripted into the Japanese military while Jane remained at home, a small village in the Japanese countryside, about one-hour’s train ride from a major city: Hiroshima.

 

After the war, Jane and Mas returned to the U.S. She changed her name because her coworkers had difficult pronouncing “Kuzuko.” Why Jane? “Well, I was born in January,” she said.

 

Watching the judges deliberate on “Dancing with the Stars” reminded Jane of the heated exchanges the then feisty 22-year-old would often have with her Japanese neighbors when she lived on the outskirts of the first city to be targeted by a nuclear weapon.

 

“These were just country people,” she would say. “None had visited the U.S. Throughout the time I lived in Japan, the people were always confident that Japan would win the war. “They had no idea how big the USA really was. They came to know.”

 

Jane remembered the sun slowly rising into an open sky with the promise of a warm and pleasant day on Monday, August 6, 1945, while she watched three American B-29 Superfortress bombers fly overhead. Two of the planes were escort aircraft carrying cameras and measuring equipment. The third, the Enola Gay, carried something more: a crew of twelve and a devasting new weapon.

 

From the ceiling of the plane, hung Little Boy, but there was nothing little about the device. It was ten feet long and weighed 8,000 pounds.

 

The Enola Gay, part of the 509^th Composite Group, had been specially modified to carry this heavy load: new propellers, more powerful engines, and bomb bay doors that opened faster. The plane had to use the entire runway to lift off from Tinian, a North Pacific Island in the Marianas, 1500 miles south of Japan, 5 hours earlier, taking it near the water’s edge before rising into the sky.

 

“There was a bright flash of light and a huge mushroom-shaped cloud,” Jane said. “People were later yelling; it is a new bomb…. It is a new bomb.”

 

 

Little Boy, a uranium gun-type atomic bomb with the destructive power of 12.5 kilotons of dynamite was dropped from the Enola Gay by parachute and then exploded over Hiroshima destroying houses and buildings with a radius of 1.5 miles.

 

“Everything looked flattened,” Jane said.

 

An estimated 90,000 – 166,000 Japanese were killed because of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, many of them civilians. One-half died on the first day. Others died later from burns, radiation sickness and related injuries.

 

“There were funerals every day,” Jane told us.

 

The Japanese economy was a disaster in 1945. Compared to 1941, the fishing catch was down by almost 80% and the rice harvest was the worst in 30 years. Hunger was widespread.

 

Jane told us “There was severe rationing. Many people even bartered their clothes, kimonos, in exchange for food.”

 

Following the bombing of Hiroshima and later Nagasaki, on August 12, 1945, Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. Hirohito recorded his capitulation announcement to the people of Japan, called Gyokuon-hoso in Japanese (“Jewel Voice Broadcast”) two days later and it was broadcast over radio to the Japanese people the next day.

 

By this time, Tokyo had already accepted the surrender terms of the Potsdam Conference, but the Japanese people were awaiting a formal announcement from the emperor. In Japan’s Shinto religious tradition, his voice was the voice of a god.

 

Jane remembers listening to the radio message.

 

“It was the first time we ever heard the emperor speak,” she said.

 

 

While Little Boy destroyed most of the city with the winds creating the greatest devastation, the true damage would not be realized for years to come. The long-term effects of the atomic bomb were discovered to include genetic problems, birth abnormalities, and increase risk for cancer, as well as mental trauma. It took less than one millionth of a second for the bomb to expose the residents of the city of Hiroshima with hyper-energetic radiation. These charged photons passed through wood and paper, tearing into vulnerable human cells.

 

After 1945, the Japanese began to use the word “hibakusha” meaning “explosion affected persons” to describe the atomic bomb survivors. The role of the atomic bombings in Japan’s surrender and the ethics of the two attacks are still debated even today.

 

Paging through the “Citizen’s Handbook,” I focused on the words nuclear attack as if it addresses a single event: one “bomb” dropped on Washington D.C., New York City, even Chicago. In truth, that would never happen. A nuclear exchange would be horrendous and involve ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) which (by treaty) can carry up to ten warheads. So, one missile alone can devastate ten American “Hiroshimas” and there are hundreds of missile silos on both “sides.” Couple this with what we know from the aftermath of the two bombings in Japan and you realize the book is out of date - with reality - much like hiding under my grade school desk. The best preparation for the ordinary citizen is to pray we never experience nuclear Armageddon. The Doomsday Clock is still set at two minutes to Midnight. It is time.