9 August 2020 — 0234 mdt

Both sides now

By Mary Sheehy Moe

They called him “The Great Artiste” — either because of his pinpoint precision in dropping bombs or his way with women. Charismatic and swashbuckling, Kermit Beahan was a squadron favorite. On this day 75 years ago, he was aboard Bockscar, a B-29 bomber headed to Nagasaki.

Nagasaki had not been the first choice for the detonation of Fat Man, the first plutonium bomb. In fact, until the day before, it hadn’t even been on the list of potential targets. Kokura, with its arsenal and munitions workers, had top billing. But the clouds simply would not part over Kokura that morning, and Bockscar was running low on fuel. The crew could not make it back with Fat Man aboard. Nagasaki was nearby.

It was The Great Artiste’s birthday. “What are you gonna be on your birthday?” he later commented, “the guy who somehow figures out how to use the atomic bomb or the guy who has to drop it in the ocean”?

For a brief moment, the clouds parted over Nagasaki – or so the artiste claimed. Others say the lack of precision suggests he relied on radar, not a visual sighting. But the Fat Man blew. The rest is history.

The target, Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, was some 4,000 feet from Ground Zero. It was destroyed. So was a torpedo factory to the north. In between, so were a prison holding Allied soldiers, a tuberculosis clinic, a hospital and two medical schools, a cathedral, a school for the deaf and blind, a high school, and at least four children’s schools. An estimated 40,000 individuals were killed that day, many of them children. Therein lie some tales:

Shigeko Matsumoto’s family had been hiding in a bomb shelter for several days and were playing outside that morning. At 11:02 “the sky turned bright white” and they were knocked off their feet, propelled back into the shelter.

“As we sat there shell-shocked and confused, heavily injured burn victims came stumbling [in] en masse. Their skin had peeled off their bodies and faces and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons. Their hair was burnt down to a few measly centimeters from the scalp. Many of the victims collapsed as soon as they reached the bomb shelter entrance, forming a massive pile of contorted bodies. The stench and heat were unbearable.”

Takato Michishita’s mother told his sister not to go to school that day. “Why?” his sister asked. “Just don’t,” his mother responded. Then, with Michishita in tow, she went out to get groceries. When the sky went white at 11:02, they plunged into a shop and his mother huddled over him under a tatami mat. The glass and dust and debris finally settled, and the pair hurried home under an inky sky to find his sister, “shell-shocked but alive.”

Her classmates were not so lucky. Everyone in her school that morning died.

Minori Moriuchi was in a fruit tree reaching for a cricket when he was blinded by the light. “I thought the sun had exploded,” he remembers. He jumped to the ground and lay there while it shook and debris pelted him. A little while later his aunt came to his house with his two cousins. She was leading the 5-year-od by the hand and carrying the 3-year-old. She told Moriuchi that his younger cousin had died after begging for water.

“They were burned red and black,” Moriuchi said. “I could not distinguish their faces from their heads, or their clothes from their skin. When I tell my story, this scene always comes back to me. I always regret that I couldn’t do anything for this kid who died without a drink of water. It was all he wanted.” Only 8 years old, Muriuchi watched six family members die in his home over the next few days.

Yoshiro Yamawaki’s father did not come home that terrible August 9. The next morning he and two brothers went to the factory where he worked. The atrocities they saw en route may have prepared them for what they saw at their destination. In the smoldering ruins, they found their father’s corpse.

A nearby worker told them that if they wanted to take him home, they would need to cremate him. The crematories had all been destroyed. So, “my brothers and I gently laid his blackened, swollen body atop a burnt beam in front of the factory … and set him alight. His ankles jutted out awkwardly as the rest of his body was engulfed in flames.”

When they returned the next day with a pot and tongs to collect his ashes, they discovered he was only partially cremated. After much consternation and debate, they realized they didn’t have the heart to try again. They decided just to take a piece of their father’s skull so that they could observe the Japanese practice of passing around a tiny piece of the cremated skull with chopsticks.

“As soon as our tongs touched the surface, however, the skull cracked open like plaster and his half-cremated brain spilled out. My brothers and I screamed and ran away, leaving our father behind. We abandoned him, in the worst state possible.”

“I will never forget it.”

Years later, Kermit Beahan, “The Great Artiste,” described what he saw as he looked down on Nagasaki 75 years ago: “A mushroom cloud bubbling and flashing orange, red and green. It looked like a picture of hell …. I was told the area would be destroyed, but I didn’t know the meaning of an atomic bomb.”

In spite of the devastation, Beahan believed throughout his life that the nuclear option had been the right choice, “the best way out of a hell of a mess.” As he aged, though, he would usually add that he hoped to be the last man ever to drop an atomic bomb.

On this day, let us pray that he always has that distinction.