68 years ago, at 11:02 am on August 9th,
1945, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped a plutonium bomb, on
Nagasaki, Japan. That bomb was the second and last atomic weapon that
had as its target a civilian city. Somewhat ironically, as will be
elaborated upon later in this essay, Nagasaki was the most Christian
city in Japan and ground zero was the largest cathedral in the Orient.
These
baptized and confirmed airmen did their job efficiently, and they
accomplished the mission with military pride. There was no way that the
crew could not have known that what they were participating in met the
definition of an international war crime (according to the Nuremberg
Principles that were very soon to be used to justify the execution of
many German Nazis).
It had
been only 3 days since the August 6th bomb, a uranium bomb, had
decimated Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bomb was dropped amidst considerable
chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government had
been searching for months for a way to honorably end the war. The only
obstacle to surrender had been the Roosevelt/Truman administration’s
insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor
Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from
his figurehead position in Japan – an intolerable demand for the
Japanese that prolonged the war and kept Japan from surrendering months
earlier.
The
Russian army had declared war against Japan on August 8, hoping to
regain territories lost to Japan in the disastrous Russo-Japanese war 40
years earlier, and Stalin’s army was advancing across Manchuria.
Russia’s entry into the war represented a powerful incentive for Japan
to end the war quickly and they much preferred surrendering to the US
rather than to Russia. A quick end to the war was important to the US as
well. It did not want to divide any of the spoils of war with Russia.
The Target Committee in Washington, D.C. had
made a list of relatively un-damaged Japanese cities that were to be
excluded from the conventional fire-bombing (using napalm) campaigns
that had burned to the ground 60+ major Japanese cities during the first
half of 1945. That list of protected cities included, at one time or
another Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura, Kyoto and Nagasaki. These relatively
undamaged cities were off-limits from incendiary terror bombings but
were to be preserved as possible targets for the new “gimmick” weapons
of mass destruction.
Scientific
curiosity was a motivation in choosing the targeted cities. The
military and the scientists needed to know what would happen to intact
buildings – and their living inhabitants – when atomic weapons were
exploded overhead. Ironically, prior to August 6 and 9, the residents of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered themselves lucky for not having been
bombed as much as other cities. Little did they know.
Early in
the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress that had been
christened Bock’s Car, took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific,
with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains,
and headed for Kokura, the primary target. Bock’s Car’s plutonium bomb
was in the bomb bay, code-named “Fat Man,” after Winston Churchill.
The only
field test (blasphemously code-named “Trinity”) of a nuclear weapon had
occurred just three weeks earlier (July 16, 1945) at Alamogordo, New
Mexico. The molten lava rock that resulted from the heat of that blast
(twice the temperature of the sun) can still found at the site today. It
is called trinitite.
The
reality of what had happened at Hiroshima was only slowly becoming
apparent to the fascist military leaders in Tokyo. It took 2 – 3 days
after Hiroshima was incinerated before Japan’s Supreme War Council was
able to even partially comprehend what had happened there, to make
rational decisions and to discuss again the possibility of surrender.
But it was
already too late, because by the time the War Council was meeting that
morning in Tokyo, Bock’s Car and the rest of the armada of B-29s was
already approaching Japan – under radio silence. The dropping of the
second bomb had initially been planned for August 11, but bad weather
had been forecast, and the mission was moved up to August 9.
With
instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting, Bock’s Car
arrived at the primary target, but Kokura was clouded over. So after
futilely circling over the city three times, there was no break in the
clouds, and, running seriously low on fuel in the process, the plane
headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.
The history of Nagasaki Christianity
Nagasaki
is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the
site of the largest catholic church in the Orient, St. Mary’s Cathedral
(completed in 1917), but it also had the largest concentration of
baptized Christians in all of Japan. It was the megachurch of its time,
with 12,000 baptized members.
Nagasaki
was the location where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier,
established a mission church in 1549. The Christian community survived
and prospered for several generations. However, soon after Xavier’s
planting of the church in Japan, it became obvious to the Japanese
rulers that Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests were exploiting
Japan, and it didn’t take too long for all Europeans to be expelled from
the country – as well as their foreign religion. All aspects of
Christianity, including the new Japanese converts, became the target of
brutal persecutions.
By 1600, being a Christian was a capital
crime in Japan. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their
new religion suffered torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman
persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the
reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese
Christianity was extinct.
However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after
the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an
offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that
there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their
faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government –
which immediately started another purge. But because of international
pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity
came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the
government, the growing Japanese Christian community had built the
massive Urakami Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.
Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and
evil, that the massive Cathedral was one of two Nagasaki landmarks that
the Bock’s Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his
bomb site 31,000 feet overhead, he identified the cathedral through a
break in the clouds and ordered the drop.
At 11:02 am, during morning mass, Nagasaki
Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching
radioactive fireball that exploded 500 meters above the cathedral.
Ground Zero was the persecuted, vibrant, surviving center of Japanese
Christianity.
The Nagasaki Christian death count
Since the Cathedral was the epicenter of the
blast, most Nagasaki Christians did not survive. 6000 of them died
instantly, including all who were at confession that morning. Of the
12,000 church members, 8,500 died as a direct result of the bomb. Three
orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school disappeared into black
smoke or chunks of charred remains Tens of thousands of innocent Shinto
and Buddhist Japanese also died instantly and hundreds of thousands were
mortally wounded, some of whose progeny are still in the process of
slowly dying from the trans-generational malignancies and immune
deficiencies caused by the deadly plutonium.
What
the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of
persecution, destroy Japanese Christianity, American Christians did in 9
seconds. Even today those who are members of Christian churches in
Japan represent a fraction of 1% of the population, and the average
attendance at Christian worship services is 30. Surely the decimation of
Nagasaki at the end of the war crippled what at one time was a thriving
church.
