James Cameron’s “uncompromising” HIROSHIMA movie
On Dec. 22nd 2009, whilst on the Japan portion of his Avatar world tour, director James Cameron visited 93 year old cancer suffer Tsutomi Yamaguchi, who until his death last week, was officially the only man left standing to have survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.
Cameron was so moved by their meeting, he made a pledge to “pass on his rare and harrowing experience to future generations”.
Cameron has since optioned Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima, a non-fiction account of the two-day bombings from the survivors point of view which is released in the coming weeks, and right now he’s looking into the possibilites of turning it into an “uncompromising” feature.
Pellegrino accompanied Cameron on his visit to meet Yamaguchi, so he obviously had an eye on adapting the book before he had even met the war survivor, which would probably indicate that Cameron has already started research on this one. He too has spent his own money on the rights, allowing himself the freedom to pitch it to a studio when he feels the time is proper and right – and after delevering Avatar and becoming The King of the World once again – if this is what he wants to do next, a studio would be more than willing to fund it.
We know Cameron, ever since growing up with the Cuban missile crisis – has been effected by the fear of war and his worry for a doomsday future was explored in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and, of course he made Avatar, a anti-war, pro-environmentalist blockbuster that despite it’s mass entertainment selling point, carries as much of a political punch as we’ve seen in a while.
If anyone in America was to make a big Hollywood picture about the effects of Hiroshima – then Cameron may just be one of the few we could trust to get it note perfect and make it the right way. Because it’s Cameron, it’ll be high quality, meticulously researched and as he says… uncompromising.
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James Humberd:
“The problem these days is that so many people try to tell us that there was no reason to fear anything these people might do. But I remember they were of the same generation of Japanese who raped, slaughtered, butchered, 300,000 to 400,000 people in Nanking, China. … I would never apologize for what we did during the war, especially the Atom Bombs.”
It’s sad to read paranoid and even racist comments like this.
You basically argue that the Japanese — both civilians and soldiers — during WW II, were barbaric monsters who deserved to be nuked. Is this some sort of twisted attempt at justifying the use of the A-bombs? Does it make your conscience better perhaps?
You mention a few anecdotes and claim that the loyalty of the ethnic Japanese in the US was questionable as well, and that the US government was right to intern them. Well, the US government disagrees with you: Back in the early 80′s they admitted it was a mistake and apologized (see study “Personal Justice Denied”, which concluded that the decision to incarcerate was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”). Yes, some of them might have felt loyalty to Japan, but that’s not sufficient reason to intern an entire community. You even suggest that these people might have done the same thing in the US as the Japanese Imperial forces did in China. That sounds more like wild paranoia than rational thinking to me.
May I also remind you that the Japanese American 442nd Infantry unit became the most highly decorated regiment in the history of the US Armed Forces? Their stellar performance during WW II was one of the reasons why the internees were released well before the end of the war. Despite their heroic efforts, they were still treated badly when they returned home, because of their Japanese roots.
You and a few other people here also argue that the Japanese Imperial Army committed barbaric acts during WW II. Yes, they did, but is it less horrible that the Nazis killed millions of Jews? Or what about the Allies? They did kill hundreds of thousands of civilians as well, and Allied soldiers raped tens of thousands of women during the campaigns in Europe and Asia. I see no constructive point in trying to determine who was the most gruesome bad guy in WW II.
I wish there were more people like Mr. Charlie Pellegrino, who isn’t blinded by hate and who’re willing to look to the future and focus on more constructive issues. I don’t think Charlie is trying to put the blame on anybody in particular. By focusing on the nuking of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he reminds us of the horrible effects of these weapons. Nobody wants to see nuclear weapons used in another war. I hope that even you, James Humberd, agree with me on that issue, even though you don’t mind the nuking of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
I’d like to round off this post by saying that I hope Mr. Cameron decides to produce or direct a film based on Mr. Pellegrino’s book. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve heard it’s excellent, so I’m definitely going to buy it.
I agree: It’s not what we did to them or what they did to us or what we did to them first and what they did to us before that – - all the way back to when the first cell divided. It’s all about what atomic bombs do. It’s all about the future. OUR future. – - Charles Pellegrino
And how ever horrible the potential of the Atom Bomb, in the recent decades, the existance of the Bomb has Eliminated world wars.
I hope people realize the Bomb most likely can not stop terrorists. They don’t care how many of their people might be killed.
For example, if you went to the city or area where the idiot lived, who bombed Oklahoma City a few years ago, and dropped a half dozen Atom Bombs, would that stop more bombings like the one in Okla city?
Of course not, just like most Moslems do not want to bomb the USA, so killing a million of them is not the answer to terrorists.
RE: whiskey on January 10, 2010 at 2:01 am
It seems to me if people are so horrified by what the Japanese did to the Chinese [and other Pacific Asian countries] in WWII then how can they justify [or accept] doing similar things to the Japanese? I mean, you are either horrified by atrocities toward other human beings or you are not. The idea that a whole nation of people deserved what they got is a pretty screwed-up way of thinking about things. War is sometimes necessary but only in a preventative or defensive way – not for revenge or giving people ‘what they deserve’. Note that Curtis Lemay – a commander who showed no quarter whatsoever once said: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” Even he understood the actions he commanded [no matter how necessary] qualified as horrible.
I am sure James Cameron will present us a film that shows the moral quandary of dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He may even come down on the side that is was not necessary or that it was wrong. But so what? History is always up to interpretation. However, few think WWII wasn’t a just war. Our military action in WWII will always be considered far more good than bad. But the important thing – as Charles Pellegrino so eloquently notes – is the future. If we can let people know that atomic [nuclear] war should never happen again we’ll all be better for it.
Remember Dec 7, 1941? A few thousand Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, so did we declare war on those few thousand? No way, we declared war on their mothers, their grandmothers, their sisters, and every one of their type, until they all gave up.
I don’t recall that the Japs promised to kill only military at Pearl Harbor, and they had already killed a million humans in the war they had started, for no known reason.
General Lemay said that only because he was sure that if he had lost the war, he knew the type of people who would have won.
No James we did not declare war on mothers, grandmothers and children. Don’t be barbaric. I mean maybe some did but that kind of thinking is completely barbaric. It’s the kind of attitude that justifies any kind of action we do against anybody. You’re making an assumption that the civilians are guilty because they are born in a country we are at war with. And that the civilians must certainly hate us so they deserve to die too because they are no different than the soldiers. That is faulty thinking.
As a result of war innocent civilians do die. They especially did in the 20th century. But the killing of civilians should never be a goal. And even if our enemies make it a goal [think the terrorists of today] it does not mean we should turn around and do the same thing.
Do you mean the Japs did not intend to kill women and children in Nanking? How were they going to not kill women and children in Pearl Harbor?
I bet if you look at our declaration of war, it doesn’t exclude, but it does include every one in that, at that time, horrible country.
Did the Japs kill any women and children in Manila?
You can bet that war was declared on all people in that country, in hopes that someone might care enough about the women and children in Tokyo, to stop the war before more of them were liked. But at that time, that was not important to the Japs in charge.
For all these years, I have been waiting for a reason they started the war in the first place, in the early 1930’s, then why pick on the USA.
Correction:
war before more of them were killed.
James it seems we are not on the same page. I happen to be horrified by war because it kills people. Such as the people in Nanking AND Pearl Harbor AND people in Hiroshima. Get it?
War is sometimes necessary. That is obvious. But the idea that it is okay to kill civilians because the other side is doing it too – seems to me to be barbaric thinking. I really don’t think American soldiers think that killing civilians is a goal or something desired. It might happen due to the nature of war but really we want to kill the soldiers and the leaders who are trying to kill us before we kill anyone else. However, you seem to be offering an eye-for-an-eye mentality. War really should not be about that.
Being Anti A-Bomb/Nuclear weapons in general, doesn’t suggest that anyone supports what the Japanese did. That’s a different topic and should be dealt with in it’s own film.
My father served aboard the USS San Francisco, a heavy cruiser, (CA-38) from ’44 thru ’46. He witnessed Iwo, Okinawa and many other naval and land engagements.
I recall asking him about the decision to use “secret weapons” to bring Japan to it’s Imperial knees. General Curtis LeMay’s use of Tinian and other north Marianas islands to fire bomb the populations of Tokyo as well as other industrialized cities caused far more devastation and wanton killing than either Fat Man or Little Boy. I don’t recall seeing any comparisons of that decision as being racist or anything other than sound military strategy to close the war, soonest.
To armchair quarterback decisions made 65 years ago when society and the world in general was a far, FAR different place than today, is folly. Perhaps these are merely opportunities to voice personal feeling founded solely upon a life and society enabled by those very same decisions and sacrifices.
Well said, Peter. Recently, at Mt. Sinai hospital (where many of us who worked during the recovery operation in the World Trade Center volunteer for regular and complete physical and psych data collection [we're all laboratory rats]), I sat with a Marine who had just returned from Afghanistan. In Ground Zero New York, he was surrounded by human casualties, and was still having nightmares – which seemed to be intensifying eight years later. And his worst nightmare from Afghanistan was the day he killed an unarmed man who surprised him by coming suddenly around a corner. It is the civilian casualties – in Afghanistan and in New York – that haunt him to this day.
On a related note, Bocks Car Pilot Charles Sweeney was almost called up (at Tibbetts’ request) on charges for endangering America’s last atomic bomb by flying through flak three times (in the end, with fighters coming up), trying to hit the primary target of Kokura, instead of Nagasaki, because the primary target was a strictly military compound and Nagasaki was surrounded by a large civilian population. Sweeney was under orders to overfly the target only once and to proceed to the secondary target (Nagasaki) immediately if he and the bombadier could not get a visual fix on the primary. Sweeney had a very difficult and unenviable job to do, and against orders he gave gunners on the ground second and third chances to hit his plane, driven by a hope of minimizing civilian casualties. Even at Nagasaki, he went against orders, dropping the bomb more than two miles upriver of the assigned aiming point after assuring his commander that he would be within a few hundred feet of the point – knowing that he could use a valley’s shotgun effect to take out all of the military targets, bypassing more than 50,000 civilians downriver in Nagasaki proper. Even for the flight crews, an awareness of civilian casualties often weighed heavily upon them. After the Hiroshima mission, Sweeny had actually sought out a priest, after learning that no surrender was forthcoming and he was going to have to do this again. One of his flight engineers (Joe Fuoco) later reported that the atomic bombing was far, far more personal than a 500-strong B-29 raid, because all those souls came back to only a few men in three planes. Thus, Fuoco found his nuclear mission much more disturbing than a firebombing mission that had killed twice as many people in a single night. One of the last things ever said by this undeniably patriotic American was that “this must never happen again.” Like me, his belief was that the past serves us only by pointing toward lessons that may make our future history a little less bloody and tragic. His thoughts were all about the future. – - Charles Pellegrino
powerful stuff. i’m beginning to see why its a story that needs to be told
The purpose of war is to make the other side concede. It is hoped by either side, that if enough women and children are killed, and enough property is destroyed, the other side will give up. If enough of the military is destroyed, they must give up.
Tell me one town or city that the Japs bombed during the whole war, from the early ’30s, where women and children were not killed. If they knew that women and children were being killed in the war they started, certainly they must have known that their women and children would also be killed.
There was no one place where we could drop the bomb where enough military would be eliminated, so that the Japs would have to give up.
Remember, we saved the lives of millions of people, by dropping the bomb when we did. Had we been able to drop it earlier, the war would have been over, and lives would have been saved.
Since the Japs must have known they were going to lose the war, why didn’t they give up earlier? They just didn’t care that more people, on both sides, were going to die.
I like the atom bomb because it saved millions of lives in the 1940s, and helped stop other World Wars in the 50s and 60s.
By the way, what did the Japs plan to do after their nation was invaded, if we won, or we gave up and left?
Ya saved the lives of millions while killing millions of other lives over the power struggles of who has the bomb? How can we get it so the superpowers will take us seriously? And BTW we’ll stop at nothing TO get it. Nuclear armament hasn’t worked to prevent any wars**, and what little influence it has exerted, it has done so from the perspective of the generation that grew up when the dropping of an A-bomb wasn’t a you tube clip.
**it stoped the Korean war, oh wait… The Vietnam war, darn. The Cold war? Kinda. Gulf War? Sorry. Afghanistan? Nope. What about the Iraq war, damn-it! Really effective anti-war tool. Ya I left out about 70 other wars since that bomb was dropped. The only thing it did was act like a childs security blanket for those naive enough to believe that sort of non-sensical B.S.
If you went to the hometown of the idiot who bombed Oklahoma City, and dropped an atom bomb, would that reduce the possibility that no one else would bomb a city in the USA?
Of course not, just the same way that an Atom bomb dropped on Yemen, would have no effect in stopping another attempt to bomb an airplane.
But using the concept of MAD, we were assured that Russia would not take the chance of bombing the US, because of the retaliation.
I have been against all wars we have been involved in since WW II. But come to think of it, an illegal action by the US Military during the Korean War, led to the best thing that ever happened to me.
They were not supposed to recall me to active duty, because I didn’t have enough time left on my enlistment. It’s a long story, but as a result of being called back to active duty, I met my Most Beloved Sweetheart of the next 55 years.
During the Cold War, the superpowers involved and their citizens had a very clear memory of what the atomic bomb would do. Since the 1980s, a dangerous amnesia has slowly settled in. But even while people’s memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively clear, I remember pointing to my co-designer of the Valkyrie rocket, Jim Powell, that when all was said and done, the shock therapy humanity had received from the revelations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have produced the longest (large scale) strategic peace the world had ever known. “The balance of terror seems to be working,” I had said. To which Jim replied, “And it will keep right on working. Right up till the very last second.” – Charles Pellegrino
I am not all that familiar with the Valkyrie rocket. At Rocketdyne, I created and installed a system, using an IBM Ramac, for production control of Saturn, Atlas, and Thor engines.
A few years later, while working at RCA, I wrote the manuals for two of the Saturn computers, created the training curse, went to Huntsville and trained NASA how to do it. Since everyone got to the moon and back, I figure I did my job right.
It’s a long story, but sometimes it did seem like a curse, instead of a course.
@JaySmack: Do you know how many American casualties we had in Okinawa alone? Fifty thousand, with 12,000 dead. Each of those men gave their lives so that you could could live a better life, and perhaps remember them, too. Should we have needed to invade the Japanese mainland, estimates of casualties ran into the hundreds of thousands.
For a war that we did not seek nor provoke, but which was brought upon us.
If you hate us so much, feel free to move to somewhere where they think alike. Venezuela and Cuba come to mind.
But please stop dragging us down when we’re fighting to reclaim our national soul from the forces of socialism.
Ahwatukee T: If any more proof of what Truman thought he was sending our soldiers into, after Okinawa and as the fleet was being prepared for the battle of mainland Japan – it is the fact that the United States mint, during this preparation period, was ordered by the White House to mint so many purple hearts that we have not run out yet – through the Korean and Viet Nam wars into Gulf Wars I and II and into Afghanistan, all of the purple hearts being given out still date to this single, huge WWII minting of June 1945. I cover this in the book, along with what happened in China under the occupation and what happened to American POWs in Japan. Far from covering up the history, Japanese editors came forth bidding on the whole book. During my investigation, Japanese scholars opened up (for example) records about the real story of “The Faithful Elephants” – not the watered down and sanitized version told in an American book for young adults – - but how the starvation of the animals and the torture of their keepers was intended as an (inspirational) example to children being trained as the undersea equivalent of Kamikaze pilots (for the Kaiten torpedoes being manufactured in Nagasaki), as the time of the mainland invasion approached. Among the survivors in my book is a fourteen year old boy who was to have been one of those kaiten. Japanese historians (among them Maika Nakao who gave a paper at Columbia University in fall 2009) have been studying Japan’s WWII nuclear program – which had been far ahead of the German program in terms of atomic bomb design and which was decades ahead of America in particle beam weaponry. No one has pretended that scientists of the era were studying such things merely to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. All of this is covered in the book. Please read my postings above and you’ll see that my father and my uncle Art were headed for mainland Japan’s shore when the war ended – and, having already survived much, neither expected to survive this.
The primary point is that the bombs were dropped – simply that – and they turned out to have effects that should be utterly horrifying to any normal human mind. I worked as a forensic archaeologist in Ground Zero New York and still I have mightmares – and though surge cloud effects tore people apart a third of a mile away from the World trade Center downblasts – that was scarcely 10% of the force released by the Hiroshima bomb (which misfired, by the way, and could be counted as a “dud.” When General MacArthur saw the far greater destruction wrought by the Nagasaki bomb, he spared no expense in making sure it became, by comparison to Hiroshima, the forgotten bomb). As I said before, and I’ll say again, this is all a matter of looking to the past for signposts to the future. There is only one message: This must never happen again. You can agree with that (and with that alone), can’t you? – - Charles Pellegrino
Charlie P Wrote: The primary point is that the bombs were dropped – simply that – and they turned out to have effects that should be utterly horrifying to any normal human mind.
==============
Yes the power of that Bomb was terrible, perhaps as powerful as the humans who caused the Rape of Nanking. So don’t expect me to feel sorry for the death of people who never mentioned that horror was worse than the Bomb.
How about the bombing of Tokyo, more people were killed there, than by the Atom Bombs, but still the Japs would not stop the stupid war they started for no known reason.
And I would say: The primary point is that the bombs were dropped – simply that – and they turned out to have effects that should be utterly WONDERFUL to any normal human mind. The War was ended.
Dr. Humberd: You seemed to have understood what I was talking about when you responded to my earlier posts. Now you appear to wish the Hiroshima bomb had not misfired and had made a a much wider Ground Zero zone – or that we had developed hydrogen bomb technology earlier. Would you really look at an atomic bombing survey map and say, “They should have built the bomb bigger – for more effects that would have been “utterly WONDERFUL?” You must be having a bad day, because yourr earlier letters were much more intelligent than the one above.
I have acknowledged that the firebombings of Tokyo killed more people than Hiroshima. Also, that by the time the atomic bombs were dropped, the Americans were running out of target cities because of the extensive firebombings. If you read my book (and I cannot blame you for not reading it because it will not out until early next week), and if you read the chronology of events leading from the August 9 bombing of Nagasaki, through America’s four day moratorium in which only threatening leaflets (and not a single firebomb) got dropped, you’ll see that the atomic bombs by themselves did not bring about the surrender. It was the final 3,500 B-29 firebombing raid of everything left standing except the Imperial Palace, on the night of August 14 – combined with the very visible approach of the fleet – that brought about the surrender. Up to that point, a military coup within the palace, in which people were literally hacked to pieces and the emperor was held prisoner in an attempt to prevent his broadcast of a surrender, seemed on the verge of succeeding.
As far as what was done in China (and Korea, and to American POWs), this too is in the book and contrary to what has been written by various bloggers, the Japanese have made no effort to hide or downplay any of this. It is they, in fact, who revealed to me the true story of the “Kaiten and the Faithful Elephants,” a lesson to their own children that one must question authority, and not follow it blindly. As I have also stated above, on one side of my family we had people headed for mainland Japan when the surrender came – people who became excellent parents to me and my cousins and who would likely not have survived another Okinawa. On the other side of my family, in occupied China (Manchuria), the people were decimated – worse than decimated.
But now that we know – through forensic archaeological investigation combined with survivors’ accounts – just what these weapons do (and some of the horror is totally new to scientific understanding), what on Earth is so disagreeable about the message that no one, anywhere on Earth, has a right to use one of these weapons again?
You don’t have to buy the book if the idea is so detestable to you. There are plenty of libraries. Just read it. Learn from the science of it – as did an Israeli scientist of my acquaintence. About a year ago he wrote an editorial in which he argued that his country not only had a right to possess the atomic bomb but under the right circumstances to fire off a pre-emptive strike: “To do unto the other fella as he would do unto Israel and do it first.” After reading a first draft of the book, his mind was changed, about his thermonuclear inverse to the Golden Rule. He said that he did not understand, until reading, just what the phrase, “Nuke them” really meant. He now believes that no one, ever again, must use one of these weapons. And he has begun to spread that belief.
Most people seem to understand the “do not drop” theme when it comes to mustard gas, nerve gas, or biological weapons – or dive-bombing passenger planes into sky scrapers. And if you educate yourself, you’ll see that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not a story of victims and victimization, but a warning pointed directly at the future of our entire civilization (or, alternatively, it’s lack of a future: Something akin to the History Channel’s “Life After People” series – except with a lot fewer trees and animals). – - Charles Pellegrino
Thank you Charlie P. It is nice to know that my two years of High School has convinced you of my position in life. When I worked at RAND Corp 55 years ago, all my Hotel Res, and plane tickets said Dr. Humberd. But as my Brother, with a real PhD, said, I was too dumb to know how smart I was.
My only point was, I never understood why the Japs attacked us, but I had two Brothers, and two Brothers-in-law, headed for the invasion of Japan, so I didn’t care how many Japs were killed to convince them to quit fighting.
I was in the Merchant Marine in 1946 on a troop ship, then in the Army later in the year. If I could tell you all the stories I was told by the people who were there, it would fill your book.
By the way, just in case you care, there are thousands of pages in my Web Site, http://www.travel-tidbits.com/.
Actually, I do care. And I thank you for your service, in the Army and the Merchant Marine (which also took high casualties in various conflicts and whose vital role is often overlooked by history); and I thank you also for your service during the Apollo program (in which I gather you are one of those men who worked so many seven day weeks that they missed their children growing up in order to open the doors to a new wilderness – to which we are only now about to return, this time, to stay).
We are slowly losing your generation and it is important for you to get your story down (and the stories you heard) – including your opinions – for future generations of historians. Had I waited much longer, the story of Joe Fuoco would have been lost – and fortunately, Charles Sweeney (after our long-ago brief conversation) wrote his memoir, “War’s End.” If you are expecting that I have cast either of these men in a bad light, then you will be surprised when you read the book. You will probably be even more surprised if you see the film, “Three Ground Zeros,” which features an interview with Joe Fuoco, and which was filmed for Japan TV by Hideo Nakamura.
And again, the bottom line is that we should all be hoping for and working for the same goal: That our civilization will never see a city awaken to a new dawn of atomic death. At a dinner in Japan, about the time we met with Mr. Yamaguchi, James Cameron expressed to me his greatest fear: that someone would unleash a multi-kiloton bomb in an American city, and that we would immediately go to the default setting of a blood-lust war in which hundreds of megatons would be unleashed on multiple sides in retaliation, after retaliation, after retaliation. The resulting famine and global economic collapse (to say nothing of intentional EMP effects) would make the Great Depression and perhaps even the fall of Rome look utterly nostalgic by comparison, right at the moment our civilization is on the cusp of being able to accomplish almost anything we can dream.
My late friend (and one of the twenty most brilliant minds I have ever known), Fathjer Mervyn Fernando, lamented that our civilization, while connecting the world in a single living membrane of human thought (like Jim C’s Eywa), was surging with learning and scientific know-how; yet frighteningly lacking of wisdom. “Our way of thinking must change,” he said; and when he visited the United Nations with Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Masahiro Sasaki, he said that Mr. Yamaguchi and Masahiro’s sister Sadako (who died in 1955 at age 12 while teaching the viral theory of the pay-it-forward principle) had found the way. “And we should follow,” Fr. Fernando said.
Please agree with me that our past cannot be changed – only learned from, in order to be used as a tool for improving the future. The only relevant question is, what shall we chose to learn from those two days in August? We can remain trapped by our past and lead each other perpetually to blame. Or we can hope to write a better history of tomorrow.
Which shall it be?
- – Charles Pellegrino
A quick note on the above: Readers, please excuse the various typ-o errors (chose for choose, etc). These are quick first draft replies and spelling was never my strong point in the first place. – Cherles Pellegrino
The only thing that has changed in war, for thousands of years, is the power of the weapons.
Just a quick example, a couple of paragraphs from one of my books:
During our travels throughout Europe we have visited at least a thousand cities, towns, and villages that had, or still have, protective walls and gates, or that were constructed like a fortress. Centuries ago people could not travel twenty miles from home, a farmer could not travel to his field without the possibility of attack, or involvement in some war or confrontation.
In all our travels in Europe, including several trips to countries behind the “Iron Curtain” and maybe 250 international border crossings, we’ve had little trouble with customs’ inspection, and no involvement at all with border police or the military. Nuclear war is so unthinkable, that maybe any war is less thinkable and now governments must learn to live with one another. National borders and unique languages continue, as they should, but in spite of terrorist attacks in recent years, it is now easier and safer to move from place to place without fear of attack, than it was centuries ago, in medieval days.
========
In France, Peille is perched on the very tip of a mountain shaped like a loaf of bread standing on end, with the town covering the top like a knit cap. The farmer traveled miles down the mountain to his field, but back up the hill at night. It wasn’t safe to build towns on the level ground.
—-
There is another paragraph I want to post, but at the moment I can not find it.
Dear James: Good historical analysis. I think we’re coming to points of agreement, about the larger picture, and about the future. – - Charles Pellegrino
Charlie P, you may like to view these pages.
http://www.travel-tidbits.com/tidbits/005626.shtml
http://www.travel-tidbits.com/tidbits/004973.shtml
http://www.travel-tidbits.com/tidbits/006124.shtml
—And when Cameron’s finished with making his self-sering, anachronistic WWII moral alibi —he might take a quality light
to his, and Hollywood’s decades of financial ‘involvements’ with the most awesome, unoutted and unrepentant genocidal regime in human history —across the Pacific. ( the name of said place is withheld because speaking critically of it will cause PC disablement and will threaten your life —TRUE!)
70 million exterminated in ‘peacetime’ that James Cameron, and the
rest of Hollywood, just doesn’t have the time to look at.
SOOOOO $$$$$$ad…
AMEN
Will they include any real stories?
My Brother –in-law, Harold
I was there when the war was ended, and I was there too when Japanese General Yomasheitia was still there — he conducted the Bataan Death March. It was my pleasure, along with some of the rest, to bring him down out of the hills as a captive.
Later on I had the good fortune of being at General Homma’s and General Yomasheitia’s trials. I saw them both convicted of war crimes, and saw General Homma be convicted to death by the firing squad. Yomasheitia was convicted, and executed by hanging. General Yomasheitia was called The Malayan Tiger. Hanging took away all the honor they ever had at home.
Later at Clark Field we came under fire by Japanese who were still up in the mountains, and we had to go and dig them out,— however we could get them out. These men did not believe that the war was over.
—————-
My Brother Jesse, later a College Prof for several decades.
We visited Iwo Jima the 7/8 of December 1944, and then at Christmas, and then the first of the year. (My Brother Paul was fighting and surviving the “Battle of the Budge” at the same time, and won a Bronze Star.) When Iwo Jima was to be invaded in February, we were excused because of our small size, and sent to do escort duty and submarine patrol off Guam.
Iwo Jima is of special interest to me. I was there on December 8 (Dec 7 in the States), and again two times at Christmas
Worse yet, on December 24, 1944 we went in less than a miles from the beach and sank a ship. Later we learned they had guns that would shoot about five times that far. And then we chased a Japanese destroyer transport straight north at 34.8 knots for several hours and sank it. Usually our group included three Cruisers and five Destroyers. Each of us would be assigned a piece of the checkerboard and carpet bomb the island.
It amazes me how people on this thread believe this topic is sacrosanct, not to be discussed nor dramatized by filmmakers unless of course it is from the perspective of the US military. A film about the atomic bomb is a film for a worldwide audience precisely because it would be a movie about the bomb and its impact on civilians.
A movie focused on the experiences of people who were on the ground when the first atomic bombs exploded, is a movie worth making. The power of the bomb was so great that it continued taking civilian lives decades after the war.
During the first test of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer,the man who led the project to develop the weapon, watched in awe as a mushroom cloud formed in the distance as bright as thousands of suns. A number of thoughts ran through his head, one of which was “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Oppenheimer knew the strategic use of atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs meant the inevitable deaths of millions of civilians, since the power of these weapons rendered them incapable of “sugically” destroying lone military targets. It was he who fought to stop the global proliferation of nuclear weapons, but by then, the science was well known and other countries were already producing their own atomic weapons. But to say a movie about the affects of the atomic bomb on civilians is off limits and anti-American is absurd. If anything, it will inform those who do not understand the short and long term affects of these weapons.
Movies have been made about D-day, the Holocaust, genocide in Africa and other atrocities around the world. A film about what civilians experienced when these weapons of mass destruction exploded over their cities is a movie about the detonation of atomic bomb and civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a film that is long over due and James Cameron is definitely the right director for the project.
Can anyone please tell me why the US did not drop the initial A-bomb on Japanese wilderness as a warning? The destruction of a forest would have demonstrated the weapons great power without such a severe loss of innocent life. Even if the emperor did not surrender immediately and a more plump target was necessarily bombed there still would be less resentment after the war. It would have been more graceful for the US to have demonstrated its merciful intentions by initially bombing an area free of population yet visible to the Japanese.
Is it because US wanted to be able to study the effects of the new weapon on a populated city? Or they wanted revenge from Pearl Harbor? Or feared Japanese would not fear the weapon enough to maintain a stable surrender? I know there must have been some time of policy decided by the leaders. Anyone know why?
Actually they staggered the bombing, waiting for the Japanese to decide to surrender. When they didn’t, they continued the bombing. They had two more bombs to drop after the surrender which were never released. The Japanese people who invaded our country provoked us to war. Lives were saved, SAVED by the dropping of the bombs. In addition, the Japanese people who tortured the Chinese did worse things than the Nazis. This was a monstrous, out of control group of people who had to be stopped. Hindsight is sure great, isn’t it, all you peaceniks.
After the first atomic test in July 1945, a vote was taken among key Los Alamos scientists and 83% were in favor of a petition to explode a “demonstration bomb” over a relatively uninhabited area of Japan. It should be noted that most of the scientists believed that a high altitude burst would disperse almost all radiation effects above ground. Prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most viewed the weapon as essentially a new kind of fire-bomb in the tool kit. Only afterward was it understood that the radiation effects on the ground were stronger and even more horrible than anyone anticipated. This, combined with later escalation in the development of nuclear armaments, led at least one scientist (Harold Clayton Urey) to a nervous breakdown, and led even Albert Einstein to say, had he known what humanity would do with this, he’d have become a watch-maker.
Up to the moment those first two atomic bombs were exploded, we, as an electronic civilization, were still barely adolescent. After Nagasaki, and the revelations of exactly what nuclear weapons do to human bodies, we were adult, with all the sudden responsibilities of adulthood.
Are nuclear weapons and civilization compatable? That is the question – which, over only the next four decades as we are forced to solve and possibly prevent a series of ecological (and thus economic) perfect storms, shall determine whether we excell into technological adulthood, or whether we become a mostly forgotten and distorted kernel of truth behind the next Atlantis myth.
- – Charles Pellegrino
I don’t like the fact that people are killed in a war, but let’s quit complaining about the Atom Bombs dropped on Japan. The Japs killed twice that many people, especially women and children, in the rape at Nanking. And they still don’t admit it happened.
Here is a true story about the power of a Computer Error. I have talked to scientists who were at Los Alamos, and of course they don’t believe it, but being familiar with computer errors, and especially with Computer Criminals, I firmly believe it may be the way it happened.
A BOMB WITH TWICE THE POWER
When I was at Ft Huachuca, Arizona working on a computerized war game, one of the IBM maintenance engineers had an interesting story. I have often wondered if it might be true, and he wondered the same thing.
On February 28, 1954, the United States tested its first ever Hydrogen Bomb during test shot “Bravo” in the Bikini Atoll. The “Bravo” test’s “yield of approximately 15 megatons was a surprise to the scientists, who did not expect” a yield of that size and the island, where the bomb was located, almost disappeared.
Well, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, they used an IBM 704 Computer computer to design much of that bomb, and to determine what would happen as a result of the explosion. The IBM 704 used a 36 bit binary accumulator, and each bit had a value of twice that of the bit to its right.
Sometime after the above mentioned bomb test, this IBM engineer found what he believes was a factory wiring error (an error that existed forever as far as this computer was concerned), and that wiring error would at certain times eliminate the far left bit in the accumulator!
And when that happened, the number in the accumulator was 1/2 the value it should have been, which, if all these suppositions were correct, would result in a bomb twice as powerful as expected. A 35 binary bit number could equal 17,179,869,184, a 36 binary bit number could equal 34,359,738,368, quite a difference, especially when you are measueing elements that will result in megatons of power.
When this man discussed this problem, he would be almost overcome with the possible implications of such an error. When you consider that the people designing the bomb had no real idea what to expect, they would be happy with almost any really large answer, and if the answer was consistent, that most likely would be more than good enough.
No one had ever detonated a bomb of this size, and no one had ever worked with numbers like these, at least not on a computer where each digit of each calculation wasn’t observed by a human. Scary, isn’t it?
When you also consider that a computer of more than minimum size will not last long enough to test every possible condition that can exist inside that computer, it’s easy to see why people must remain concerned as more and more computers do more and more things.
Your comment Please.
I hate to get involved in this subject, but the truth must be known!!!!
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During WW II the US Government interned about 120,000 ethnic Japanese. We were told there was a possibility they would help Japan in case of an invasion, or would cause harm to important features, such as electric lines, water lines, etc. It is true that thousands of people of Japanese background joined the U S Army, and fought with honor, but these days we are told that we must not believe that any of these people would mean to do harm to the US.
I moved to So California in 1955, bought a house in Encino, and had a job at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. Someone at RAND recommended a nursery in the West LA area, for plants we needed to plant at our new house. The owner, or at least a worker, at that nursery was in his 70’s and had been born in Japan, and spent the war time in an internment camp.
On the day we visited one time, there had been an article in the newspaper about the internment of Japanese, and since this elderly gentleman had been in a camp, I asked him about it. The subject of the article had been something about the harm they could have caused. For some reason, this gentleman told me that he was well aware of people who lived in the Los Angeles harbor area, who were prepared to help Japan in any way they could. They had radios, and had special items available and hidden away, that they would display as signals for any airplane, or invading force.
I don’t remember other details, just that he said many (of course not all) of the Japanese in the harbor and along the coast, were prepared to help Japan in any way they could. A few years later I met a man (not Japanese) who had lived in the hills of San Pedro, overlooked the harbor area, especially the farms and gardens of the Japanese who then lived on what is called Treasure Island, in the Los Angeles harbor. He said he had seen some of the “signals” that were prepared by the people who lived there.
Ten to fifteen years later I met two men, who had been teenagers in the camps during the war. They told me that people in those camps talked about what they were prepared to do, and what they would like to do to help Japan, and they told me of meetings of groups of people who tried to smuggle information out of the camps, to people who could communicate with Japan.
By the way, these two Gentlemen did not know each other. One lived in Los Angeles, and the other lived in San Francisco. I don’t remember anything else about them, and would not tell it if I did. They were both very nice gentlemen, and said that they were not in agreement with the problems they became aware of in the camps, but said they were many people in favor of helping Japan if they could.
Among the reasons I never made notes on our conversations, was that I felt this must be well known to the general public, and there was no reason for me to give it a second thought. I haven’t given this subject much thought in the past 45 to 50 years, but these days when so many people want the US to apologize to Japan for the Atom Bombs dropped in WW II, I have tried to remember what I learned then.
From late 1937 to the spring of 1938, in Nanking alone, at least 350,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by the Japanese. As many as 80,000 women and girls were raped, then mutilated or murdered. Thousands of victims were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, or disemboweled. To this day the Japanese government has refused to apologize for these and other World War II atrocities, and a significant sector of Japanese society denies that they took place at all.
Wouldn’t it be fair and balanced for the people who want us to apologize for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to first get the Japanese people and their Government to at least acknowledge the Rape of Nanking — just a few of the 10 to 30 million Chinese who died during the Japanese occupation of China. There were relatively few victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atom bombs killed less than half as many people as were killed in the Rape of Nanking alone.
The problem these days is that so many people try to tell us that there was no reason to fear anything these people might do. But I remember they were of the same generation of Japanese who raped, slaughtered, butchered, 300,000 to 400,000 people in Nanking, China; who conducted the Bataan Death March; they operated slaughter camps in many parts of the South Pacific and Asia; and this was the generation of Kamikaze pilots. We were told so many stories of ancestor worship, and other characteristics that would lead us to think the Japanese in the US, would still be faithful to their homeland.
In 1980, in Ponape, in the Caroline Islands, I talked to people who were imprisoned by the Japanese, and said they would have starved to death if the locals had not fed them. I remember reading books and articles about the people who had been imprisoned in the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila.
When I was in the US Army, stationed at Fort Sill, Okla. in 1947, several men in the barracks had been prisoners of Japan, and would wake in the middle of the night screaming, as they remembered how they were treated. The Army did not officially admit it, but these men were permitted to remain in the Army, in hopes it would help them become rehabilitated. For some it worked, for others it didn’t. One of the men was a cook, and he said that he had been the personal cook for General Wainwright, when they were both in prisoner-of-war camps in Taiwan and Manchuria. He was a real mental case, and was permitted to remain in the Army, only because of his association with the general.
General Wainwright, who had been captured in Corregidor early in the War, became the commanding General of the military district that included Fort Sill. One day he visited Fort Sill and since I was a Battalion clerk, I was able to make sure I had the opportunity to at least see him, at a distance.
The cook mentioned above, had gotten drunk (as he did very often), and went to the Post Headquarters to see the General. Of course the MPs would not stand for that, and would not believe his story, so grabbed him and were taking him away. The cook screamed, “Hey Skinny, they got me, come help.” The General, who was in a meeting, heard him, recognized his voice, and came to help him. If nothing else, we now all believed the cook when he told stories about his years with Skinny Wainwright. The General said that without the help of this cook, who could create something eat out of thin air, he would not have survived the prison camp.
I would never apologize for what we did during the war, especially the Atom Bombs. I had a brother in the South Pacific, a brother in the Army in Europe who might have been sent to the Pacific, and my brother -in-law who fought in North Africa and in Italy, was already ordered to go to Japan. Without the Atom Bomb, they most likely would not be alive today. Another Brother-in-law was already in the So Pacific, and would have been sent to Japan.
Although I must admit that one brother and the brother-in-law (he weighs less that 100 pounds) are in hospitals in California and Indiana with tubes and wires, and other problems, at least they had 50 years of a wonderful life. I just got word that my brother-in-law died in late August 2005, the very day I wrote this story. Lucky him!!
One brother died in Late September. He had been awarded the Bronze Star Medal, for his heroics during the Battle of the Bulge.
Another Brother, a Naval Officer, had sunk Jap ships in Iwo Jima, and other places, was obviously on his way to invade Japan.
Lucky us, the Atom bomb stopped all that possible disaster.
Agreed – it’s a very scary world in which computers are being called upon to do more and more in the weaponry arena. Some of the applications of insect mechanics, being bridged now to face recognition factors, just as battery technology advances to make the once-impossible thinkable, had better make people start turning with a little more of a cold sweat to James Cameron’s first solo effort, “Terminator” (sans time travel, of course).
On the impression that my book or any film that may be made on this subject is aimed at “complaining about the bombs dropped on Japan” – the sole aim is to educate people about what these bombs do. It’s an easy trap: to get stuck in the past and in the cycle of blame. My own father was one of a small minority of the 82nd Engineer Battalion who had not been changed out due to death or crippling wounds by the end of the European theatre – from Africa to Normandy, Vire, and Buchenwald. In the summer of 1945, he was in training for the invasion of the Japanese mainland; and he was certain he would not survive – when suddenly the war ended. On the other side of my family, they experienced the slaughter you speak about in China. And still, I will tell you we need to get away from blame, and away from who dropped the bombs, or why. There is only one thing to be learned from the scientific and human results of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Now that we know what really happens underneath an atomic bomb, no one should ever be the first to use one of these weapons again, for any reason whatsoever.
And I hope that people – more and more of them against impossible odds – will come to believe that nuclear weapons must be eliminated from our civilization. The awful reality is that it is far, far less likely that this will happen than a world in which we all become witness to a detonation in the heart of a city that will bring forth a blood-lust launch of a hundred more atomic bombs, into a spiral downward that will know no end.
We are standing now on the precipice of the Darwinian moment (as described in “The Descent of Man”): “The first thing that must be asked about future man is whether he will be alive, and will know how to keep alive, and not whether it is a good thing that he should be alive.”_
NOTE: My above post (beginning with the word “Agreed”), was in reply to the post directly ahead of the post above me – which addressed both the issue of blame (which is not relevant to my book) and an issue involving the evolution of computer technology in weaponry. – - C. Pellegrino
Jim Humberd: You present, above, a historical view that is little-known, about one end of the spectrum of people who were in California, and went to the internment camps. (I am not going to argue for or against your opinions. They are what they are: part of our human history.) On the other end of the spectrum, there were people like Spark Matsunaga, who fought in the much decorated Japanese-American unit of volunteers, and who as a senator, later started the U.S. Soviet Space Cooperation Initiative, in the hope that by learning to survive together all alone in the cold and the dark – in space and in the depths of the sea – we might discover our common humanity, and decrease the likelihood of nuclear war. I was a conservative Republican who joined his think tank at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The International Space Station and the joint Russian-American expeditions to the oceans’ hydrothermal vent zones (“Prelude to Titan”) are Matsunaga’s and Keldesh’s, Sagan’s and Sagdeev’s legacy.
Another bit of largely unknown history is what happened to Italian-American families in California. Like the Japanese-Americans (most of whom prefer to be called, simply, “American”), they either had to sell or lose their homes and businesses. Instead of being interred in camps, they were made to move 25 miles from the coast (John Bruno, who has been with James Cameron from the Terminator years, was among these families).
My mother could tell what happened to families of German descent. She was adopted into one such family. Her adoptive father was a decorated American WWI veteran whose lungs had been badly damaged by mustard gas. It did not matter. The family became a test case in New York for the atrocity of returning children to their biological parents, no matter how bad those parents might have been. All of this was done in the name of a farcical organization that then called itself “Child Protective Services.” The court papers with regard to this removal from a “German” family are simply ghastly. The only people I have ever considered to be my grandparents (my mother’s adoptive parents) were allowed to be referred to in open court as, “The Furher,” and worse (and that was just my grandmother). I learned that the grandfather I never met, before the war ended and before my mother was able to escape back to them, died of “mustard gas lung” in a VA hospital, pointing every day to a picture of the little girl he missed, trying to say her name, over and over.
Just one more piece of history that needs to be remembered.
- – Charles Pellegrino