January 8, 1996

The December 31 Plain Dealer front page heading "(German) U-Boat that surrendered on May of 1945 carried uranium among war material intended for Japan", added another chapter to the history of Japan's desperate attempt to construct an atomic bomb to drop on an American city. The article continued by saying it is unknown what really happened to the captured cargo and inferred it was used by the United States in the development of our three atomic bombs.

This summer one of our Company's customers on Guam sent me a copy of the July 21 (Guam) Pacific Daily News. The lead article on the Asia page was a dispatch from Tokyo where physicist Tatsuasaburo Suzuki, 83, two days before had made public an explanation of Japan's World War II atomic research. Suzuki was part of a team of 50 leading university and military scientists desperately attempting to develop an atomic bomb. The Japanese army destroyed all records at the end of the war.

Uranium 235 had been acquired, but short of the amount needed for a bomb. Money and material were a shortcoming. So desperate were they for parts it was considered scrapping a battleship from Japan's shrinking navy to gain steel for continuing the experiments.

What might the world be like today if the German U-boat had reached Tokyo and its cargo provided the missing links in Japan's atomic development. Perhaps Los Angeles would have been destroyed by an atomic bomb on August 6?

Running through the Pacific News article, from the subhead title to the bottom of the page was a repeated comment, from the Imperial household on down, there would have been no hesitation whatsoever over dropping the bomb on an American city.

Our action was not revenge, but a calculated effort to close out the bloodiest international conflict in history. It is impossible to estimate the number of Japanese civilian and military and American casualties had there been an invasion.

This summer it was interesting and irritating to read and hear about the morality of dropping the bomb...Ask the Bataan death march GI who watched his buddy in front, stagger and fall out of formation, savagely bayonetted to death. Or Ed Leonard on Guam, rounded up for shipment to P.O.W. confinement in Japan, having a bible thrust in his hand at the last minute by his wife, Marquita. Ed never saw Marquita again. She was ordered to be a comfort woman, refused and was shot. Or the medics lining the rail of a hospital ship off of Okinawa, waiting anxiously for a landing craft churning from the beach, stacked to capacity with wounded from the bloody interior fighting on Okinawa, only to be horrified as a Kamikaze pilot guided his plane midship of the struggling landing craft.

General George Marshall, recalling the March 1945 change in 20th Air Force tactics to low-level bombing with the new M-69 incendiary, is quoted, "We had 100,000 people killed in Tokyo in one night and it seemingly had no effect whatsoever."

I recall later on the 10th our air field caught the overflow from the stacked up Marianas tactical fields: Limping B-29s, coming in with three engines, red rockets, wounded aboard. And that March 9-10 night bombing firestorm wiped out an area of Tokyo three times larger than the size of Lakewood, leaving 1,000,000 homeless. New tactics now began to target every Japanese city over 30,000 that had military installations, with explosives and fire bombs.

War is pure hell. It is ironic, that as a civilization advances with healthier, longer, more comfortable lifespans, the darkside advances too as we develop more effective ways of killing people.

And as a concluding footnote: "The mills of the gods grind slowly." The plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki destroyed the Mitsubishi war production plant that had manufactured the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor.

Harold Gilbert