“Miss Kayoko Nobutoki, a student of girls’ high school, Hiroshima Jazabuin, and a daughter of my church member, was taking rest with her friends beside the heavy fence of the Buddhist Temple. At the moment the atomic bomb was dropped, the fence fell upon them. They could not move a bit under such a heavy fence and then smoke entered into even a crack and choked their breath. One of the girls begun to sing Kimi ga yo, national anthem, and others followed in chorus and died. Meanwhile one of them found a crack and struggled hard to get out. When she was taken in the Red Cross Hospital she told how her friends died, tracing back in her memory to singing in chorus our national anthem. They were just thirteen years old.
“Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor’s sake.”
A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much about what it was like. Mrs. Nakamura’s conception of it—and awe of it—was typical. “The atom bomb,” she would say when asked about it, “is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it is six thousand times that of the sun. It exploded in the air. There is some radium in it. I don’t know just how it works, but when the radium is put together, it explodes.” As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It was war and we had to expect it,” And then she would add, “Shikata ga nai,” a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word “nichevo”: “It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.” Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: “Da ist nichts zu machen. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
Many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could possibly erase. “I see,” Dr. Sasaki once said, “that they are holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo just now. I think they ought to try the men who decided to use the bomb and they should hang them all.”
Father Kleinsorge and the other German Jesuit priests, who, as foreigners, could be expected to take a relatively detached view, often discussed the ethics of using the bomb. One of them, Father Siemes, who was out at Nagatsuka at the time of the attack, wrote in a report to the Holy See in Rome: “Some of us consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civilian population. Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”
It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface, their recollections, months after the dis-aster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary Schooclass="underline" “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbours were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”
RECENT AND FORTHCOMING PENGUINS
THE ANATOMY OF PEACE
BY EMERY REVES
IN a book destined to startle by the very nature of its simplystated truths, Emery Reves analyzes the cause of war and the nature of peace. He finds that the only condition in human society that creates war is the unregulated relationship between sovereign social groups: that wars occur wherever and whenever sovereign power units come into contact.
Peace will exist, he declares, only when absolute national sovereignty, which causes anarchy in international relations, gives way to universal legal order when the relationship between nations is regulated not by treaties but by law.
Since its first publication in June, 1945, over 150,000 copies of this book have been sold in America. It has been argued about by over 20,000 discussion groups in the United States. An open letter to the American people, urging them to read and study the book, appeared over the signatures of Owen Roberts, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Dr. Einstein Thomas Mann, Christopher Morley, and a number of Senators, clergy, and other public men in America.
Penguin Books have arranged for the publication of the book in Great Britain at a price which will enable every man and woman of goodwill to obtain and read it, so that the urgency of the problem of world reconstruction and this reasoned attempt to face the foremost issues of our time may be discussed as widely as possible.
THE NUREMBERG TRIALS
BY R. W. COOPER
THIS popular but full account of the epoch-making trial of the War criminals at Nuremberg, specially written for Penguin Books by The Times special correspondent, is intended as a permanent summary and record of the first attempt to bring to justice the authors and begetters of an international crime against humanity.
The reasons for the holding of the trial are discussed in Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe’s foreword. The body of the book consists of a summary of the Indictment and the general case for the Prosecution; details of the cases against the individual accused, with extracts from the evidence given in the course of the trial; a condensation of the final speech for the Prosecution; particulars of the case against the Organisations; and a summing-up of the final judgment and sentences.
Although not an “official” publication, the book has been prepared in consultation with the Central Office of Information, and its treatment of the material is dispassionate and objective
WHY SMASH ATOMS?
A. K. SOLOMON
WHAT we to-day call atom-smashing, the scientists of the Middle Ages called transmutation, a change in the kernel of the atom so violent that its elementary nature is altered. In the Middle Ages the problem was the conversion of metals into gold, the creation of riches from poverty.