The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 8 | Issue 25 | Number 1 | Article ID 3375 | Jun 21, 2010

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Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence　　ヒロシマ——沈黙を破る

Yuki Tanaka, Howard Zinn

Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence

Howard Zinn with an introduction by YukiTanaka

Introduction to The Bomb by Howard Zinn

In January 2010, Howard Zinn passed away atthe age of 87. His new book, The Bomb, willsoon be published in the U.S. by City LightsBooks. The Japanese edition will be publishedsimultaneously by Iwanami Publishing House.This small book consists of two chapters –Chapter One, “Hiroshima: Breaking theSilence” and Chapter Two, “The Bombing ofRoyan.” The texts of both chapters, which havepreviously been published separatelyelsewhere, are now combined in one book witha new introduction by the author. In ChapterOne, which is excerpted here, Zinn lucidlyanalyzes the causes of the Pacific War anddeals with important issues related toresponsibility for the atomic bombing ofHiroshima and Nagasaki in a comprehensiveyet concise manner. In Chapter Two, hedescribes the tragic consequences of theunnecessary bombing mission over Royan, asmall French coastal town, conducted by U.S.Forces only a few weeks before the end ofWorld War II in Europe, a mission in whichZinn himself participated as a bombardier. Zinnpassed away without seeing a final publishedcopy of this compelling book, with its profoundcriticism of the inhumanity of indiscriminatebombing.

In June 1966, Howard Zinn, together withRalph Featherstone, visited Japan at theinvitation of Beheiren (the Japan Peace-for-Vietnam Citizen’s Alliance), a major grassroots

movement against the Vietnam War, led by OdaMakoto. Featherstone was a leading member ofSNCC (the Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee), The following year, Featherstonebecame program director of SNCC. He wasassassinated on March 9, 1970 when a carbomb exploded in Maryland outside thecourthouse where H. Rap Brown, SNCCchairman, was to stand trial.

This was the first time that Zinn, a formerbombardier of the U.S. Army Air Force, metOda Makoto, a survivor of the fire bombings ofOsaka City conducted by U.S. Forces in nearly50 raids between 19 December 1944 and 14August 1945. In total, U.S. Forces dropped168,000 tons of bombs, including napalmbombs, on more than 100 cities throughoutJapan. Ninety percent of these were dropped byB-29 bombers in the last five months of theAsia-Pacific War. According to statistical datacompiled by the Center of the Tokyo Raid andWar Damages, the estimated casualties of thesebombings, including those of the two atomicbombings, come to 1,020,000, including560,000 deaths.

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Napalm bombs were first used experimentallyin Europe towards the end of World War II,before being widely employed in aerial attacksagainst Japanese civilians. One such initialexperiment with these new bombs containing“jellied gasoline,” was conducted by more than1,200 bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, forwhich Zinn was a bombardier, over a beautifulbeach town called Royan near Bordeaux in mid-April 1945, three weeks before Germany’ssurrender. The target of this bombing missionwas some 30,000 to 40,000 Nazi soldiers whowere ready to surrender, and were merelyawait ing the end of the war, as theircommander, Vice-Admiral Ernst Schirlitz,negotiated an accommodation with AdmiralHubert Meyer, French commander in theregion, preparatory to surrender. The resultwas the total destruction not only of theGerman base but also of this charming seasideresort town and its ancient chateaux. TheGermans lost several hundred men, but thenumber of civilian deaths resulting from thisattack is unknown. In the forthcoming book,The Bomb, Zinn describes this mission in thefollowing words: “I remember distinctly seeingthe bombs explode in the town, flaring likematches struck in fog. I was completelyunaware of the human chaos below.”

Oda Makoto, on the other hand, personallyexperienced many of the bombings of Osaka

City. In total, about 15,000 people were killed,340,000 houses were destroyed, and anestimated 1.2 million people lost their homesand were driven from the second largest city inJapan. Oda had vivid memories not only ofhiding in a shabby and fragile air raid shelter inhis backyard, trembling with fear from thehorrific noise and vibration, but also of thedistinctive smell of corpses under the rubblecaused by the bombings. This terrifyingexperience as a teenage victim of aerialbombardment remained a vital source ofenergy for Oda’s prolific writing as well as forhis political activities and involvement in civilmovements, which continued until his death in2007, at the age of 75. These experiences alsoallowed him to extend his imagination toempathize with the victims of similarindiscriminate bombings, such as the Chinesecivilians attacked by Japanese Imperial Forces,and later Vietnamese victims of Americanbombings. Undoubtedly the bombing was theexperiential foundation for his lifelong searchfor peace and justice.

Shortly after the war Zinn, became acutelyaware of the horror experienced by the victimsof indiscriminate bombing, as he beganimagining the experiences of victims of his ownindiscriminate attacks. His humane sense ofpersonal guilt impelled him to criticallyexamine the history of his nation in a bid todiscover how the U.S. had become capable ofcommitting atrocities like indiscriminatebombing. After studying at New YorkUniversity on the GI Bill, he earned a Columbiahistory M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1958.Together with his achievements as an historian,he became a leading anti-war, peace, and civilrights activist. In his best selling book, APeople’s History of the United States, originallypublished in 1980, he re-examined Americanhistory from the “bottom up,” i.e., from thev iewpoint o f the work ing and o f tendisadvantaged members of society rather thanthat of the political and economic elite.

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Zinn and Oda, who started their careers fromopposite directions – one a perpetrator, theother a victim of indiscriminate bombing – wereunited as anti-war campaigners in Japan in mid1966. Together with Ralph Featherstone, theytraveled all across Japan including Hiroshima,conducting “teach-ins” and attracting a largeaudience in each city they visited. Everywherethey talked passionately about the Vietnam Waras well as many issues related to peace andjustice, in particular civil rights issues.

Howard Zinn speaking in Colorado, 2004

To my regret, I never had the chance to meetHoward Zinn, though Oda Makoto was a closefriend of mine for almost 30 years. In March2003, less than a month before the Bushadministration launched the Iraq War, theJapanese edition of Zinn’s book, Terrorism andWar, which I translated, was published. Iwanted Zinn to come to Japan to promote hisbook, conducting “teach-ins” again with Oda inseveral cities. I e-mailed him and proposed thisplan. Zinn replied immediately, informing me

that regrettably, his schedule was booked forseveral months and it would not be possible totravel overseas for a while. This was notsurprising, considering his constant and activeinvolvement in anti-war campaigns in his homecountry.

Zinn, in this new book, The Bomb, tried toprovide more than a simple historical accountof indiscriminate bombings conducted duringWorld War II. As stated in his introduction, “Tothis day, the vicious reality of aerial bombing islost to most people in the United States, amilitary operation devoid of human feeling, anews event, a statistic, a fact to be taken inquickly and forgotten.” He wanted to warn usthat indiscriminate aerial attacks on civilians, amilitary strategy with a long history, are stillpart of the harsh reality of many peoples’ livesin countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan andPalestine, and that we as civilians ought to doour utmost to prevent this carnage of our fellowhuman beings.

In remembering Zinn, one of his formerstudents, Henry Maar, tells of a piece of adviceZinn once gave him: “Don’t get buried in theprofession. Stay at the edge, keep half of yourself outside the academy, outside the library, inthe real world of social conflict. Don’t write foryour colleagues but for your fellow citizens.” Itis true that academic work can be stimulatedby involvement in civil movements, and that thesignificance of academic work is constantlychallenged by social movements, above all bythose that one participates in. Yet, I am acutelyaware of how difficult it is to keep the balancebetween academic work and civil movements,and to produce outstanding results in both.Zinn demonstrated magnificently how toaccomplish this difficult task. In this sense, hewas my hero and remains so now that he is nolonger with us.

Let me conclude this introduction to Zinn’swork with one of my favorite passages from hisYou Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train:

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“If we do act, in however small a way, we don’thave to wait for some grand utopian future. Thefuture is an infinite succession of presents, andto live now as we think human beings shouldlive, in defiance of all that is bad around us, isitself a marvelous victory.”

The following are extracts from Chapter One,on atomic bombing, from The Bomb.

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6,1945, turned into powder and ash, in a fewmoments, the flesh and bones of 140,000 men,women, and children. Three days later, asecond atomic bomb dropped on Nagasakikilled perhaps 70,000 instantly. In the next fiveyears, another 130,000 in- habitants of thosetwo cities died of radiation poisoning.

No one will ever know the exact figures, butthese come from the most exhaustive reportavailable, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: ThePhysical, Medical, and Social Effects of theAtomic Bombings, put together by a team ofthirty-four Japanese scientists and physicians,then translated and published in this country in1981. Those statistics do not include countlessother people who were left alive, but maimed,poisoned, disfigured, blinded.

The sociologist Kai Erikson, reviewing thereport by the Japanese team of scientists,wrote: “The question is: What kind of mooddoes a fundamentally decent people have to bein, what kind of moral arrangements must itmake, before it is willing to annihilate as manyas a quarter of a million human beings for thesake of making a point.”

Let’s examine the question properly raised byKai Erikson, a question enormously importantprecisely because it does not permit us todismiss horrors as acts inevitably committed byhorrible people. It forces us to ask: what “kindof mood,” what “moral arrangements” wouldcause us, in whatever society we live, withwhatever “fundamental decency” we possess,to either perpetrate (as bombardiers, or atomic

scientists, or political leaders), or to just accept(as obedient citizens), the burning of childrenin vast numbers.

That is a question not just about some past andirretrievable event involving someone else, butabout all of us, living today in the midst ofoutrages different in detail but morallyequivalent, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It isabout the continued accumulation by nations(ours being first) of atomic weapons a thousandtimes more deadly, ten thousand times morenumerous, than those first bombs. It is aboutthe expenditure each year of a trillion dollarsfor these and what are soberly called“conventional” weapons, while fourteen millionchildren die each year for lack of food ormedical care.

We would need, then, to examine thepsychological and political environment inwhich the atomic bombs could be dropped anddefended as legitimate, as necessary. That is,the climate of World War II.

It was a climate of unquestioned moralrighteousness. The enemy was Fascism. Thebrutalities of Fascism were undisguised bypretense: the concentration camps, the murderof opponents, the tortures by secret police, theburning of books, the total control ofinformation, the roving gangs of thugs in thestreets, the designation of “inferior” racesdeserving extermination, the infallible leader,the mass hysteria, the glorification of war, theinvasion of other countries, the bombing ofcivilians. No literary work of imagination couldcreate a more monstrous evil. There was,indeed, no reason to question that the enemy inWorld War II was monstrous and had to bestopped before it enveloped more victims.

But it is precisely that situation—where theenemy is undebatably evil—that produces arighteousness dangerous not only to the enemybut to ourselves, to countless innocentbystanders, and to future generations.

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We could judge the enemy with some clarity.But not ourselves. If we did, we might havenoted some facts clouding the simple judgmentthat since they were unquestionably evil, wewere unquestionably good.

The pronoun “we” is the first deception,because it merges the individual consciences ofthe citizenry with the motives of the state. Ifour (the citizens’) moral intent in making war isclear—in this case the defeat of Fascism, thehalt to international aggression—we assumethe same intent on the part o f “our”government. Indeed, it is the government thathas proclaimed the moral issues in order tobetter mobilize the population for war, andencouraged us to assume that we, governmentand citizens, have the same objectives.

There is a long history to that deception, fromthe Peloponnesian wars of the fifth centurybefore Christ through the Crusades and other“religious” wars, into modern times, whenlarger sections of population must bemobilized, and the technology of moderncommunication is used to advance moresophisticated slogans of moral purity.

As for our country, we recall expelling Spainfrom Cuba, ostensibly to liberate the Cubans,actually to open Cuba to our banks, railroads,fruit corporations, and army. We conscriptedour young men and sent them into theslaughterhouse of Europe in 1917 to “make theworld safe for democracy.” (Note how difficultit is to avoid the “we,” the “our,” thatassimilates government and people into anindistinguishable body, but it may be useful toremind us that we’re responsible for what thegovernment does.)

In World War II, the assumption of a commonmotive for government and citizen was easierto accept because of the obvious barbarity ofFascism. But can we accept the idea thatEngland, France, the United States, with theirlong history of imperial domination in Asia, inAfrica, the Middle East, Latin America, were

fighting against international aggression?Against German, Italian, Japanese aggressioncertainly. But against their own?

Indeed, although the desperate need forsupport in the war brought forth the idealisticlanguage of the Atlantic Charter with itspromise of self-determination, when the warended, the colonized people of Indochina had tofight against the French, the Indonesiansagainst the Dutch, the Malaysians against theBritish, the Africans against the Europeanpowers, and the Filipinos against the UnitedStates in order to fulfill that promise.

There were pious statements about self-determination, noble words in the AtlanticC h a r t e r t h a t t h e A l l i e s “ s e e k n oaggrandizement, territorial or other.” However,two weeks before the Charter, U.S. ActingSecretary of State Sumner Welles was assuringthe French government: “This Government,mindful of its traditional friendship for France,has deeply sympathized with the desire of theFrench people to maintain their territories andto preserve them intact.”

It is understandable that the pages of theDefense Department’s official history of theVietnam War (The Pentagon Papers) weremarked “TOP SECRET—Sensitive,” becausethey revealed that in late 1942 PresidentRoosevelt’s personal representative assuredFrench General Henri Giraud: “It is thoroughlyunderstood that French sovereignty will be re-established as soon as possible throughout allthe territory, metropolitan or colonial, overwhich flew the French flag in 1939.”

As for the motives of Stalin and the SovietUnion—it is absurd to even ask if they werefighting against the police state, againstdictatorship. Yes, against German dictatorship,the Nazi police state, but not their own. Before,during, and after the war against Fascism, thefascism of the gulag persisted, and expanded.

And if the world might be deluded into thinking

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that the war was fought to end militaryintervention by great powers in the affairs ofweaker countries, the post-war years quicklycountered that delusion, as the two importantvictors—the United States and the SovietUnion—sent their armies, or surrogate armedforces, into countries in Central America andEastern Europe.

Did the Allied powers go to war to save theJews from persecution, imprisonment,extermination? In the years before the war,when the Nazis had already begun their brutalattacks on the Jews, the United States,England, and France maintained silence.President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hullwere reluctant to put the United States onrecord against the anti-Jewish measures inGermany.

Shortly after we were at war, reports began toarrive that Hitler was planning the annihilationof the Jews. Roosevelt’s administration failed toact again and again when there wereopportunities to save Jews. There is no way ofknowing how many Jews could have been savedin various ways that were not pursued. What isclear is that saving Jewish lives was not thehighest priority.

Hitler’s racism was brutally clear. The racismof the Allies, with their long history of thesubjugation of colored people around theworld, seemed forgotten, except by the peoplethemselves. Many of them, like India’s Gandhi,had difficulty being enthusiastic about a warfought by the white imperial powers they knewso well.

In the United States, despite powerful attemptsto mobilize the African American population forthe war, there was distinct resistance. Racialsegregation was not just a Southern fact, but anational policy. That is, the Supreme Court ofthe United States, in 1896, had declared suchsegregation to be lawful, and that was still thelaw of the land during World War II. It was nota Confederate army but the armed forces of the

United States that segregated black from whiteall through the war.

A student at a black college told his teacher:“The Army Jim Crows us. The Navy lets usserve only as mess-men. The Red Cross refusesour blood. Employers and labor unions shut uso u t . L y n c h i n g s c o n t i n u e . W e a r edisenfranchised, Jim Crowed, spat upon. Whatmore could Hitler do than that?”

When NAACP leader Walter White repeatedthat statement to an audience of severalthousand in the Mid-west, expecting they woulddisapprove, instead: “To my surprise anddismay the audience burst into such applausethat it took me some thirty or forty seconds toquiet it.”

Large numbers of blacks did go along with JoeLouis’s famous statement that “There’s lots ofthings wrong here, but Hitler won’t cure them.”And many were anxious to show their couragein combat. But the long history of Americanracism cast a cloud over the idealism of the waragainst Fascism.

There was another test of the proposition thatthe war against the Axis powers was in goodpart a war against racism. That came in thetreatment of Japanese Americans on the WestCoast. There was contempt for the Nazis, butwith the Japanese there was a special factor,that of race. After Pearl Harbor, CongressmanJohn Rankin of Mississippi said: “I’m forcatching every Japanese in America, Alaska,and Hawai i now and putt ing them inconcentration camps. . . . Damn them! Let’s getrid of them now!”

Anti-Japanese hysteria grew. Racists, militaryand civilian, persuaded President Rooseveltthat the Japanese on the West Coastconstituted a threat to the security of thecountry, and in February of 1942 he signedExecutive Order 9066. This empowered thearmy, without warrants or indictments orhearings, to arrest every Japanese American on

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the West Coast, most of them born in theUnited States—120,000 men, women, andchildren—to take them from their homes, andtransport them to “detention camps,” whichwere really concentration camps.

John Dower, in War Without Mercy, documentsthe racist atmosphere that developed quickly,both in Japan and in the United States. Timemagazine said: “The ordinary unreasoning Japis ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing ...indicates it.”

Indeed, the Japanese army had committedterrible atrocities in China, in the Philippines.So did all armies, everywhere, but Americanswere not considered subhuman, although asPacific war correspondent Edgar Jonesreported, U.S. forces “shot prisoners, wiped outhospitals, strafed lifeboats.”

We did do indiscriminate bombing—not atomic,but with enormous civilian casualties—ofGerman cities. Yet, we know that racism isinsidious, intensifying all other factors. And thepersistent notion that the Japanese were lessthan human probably played some role in thewillingness to wipe out two cities populated bypeople of color.

In any case, the American people wereprepared, psychologically, to accept and evenapplaud the bombing of Hiroshima andNagasaki. One reason was that although somemysterious new science was involved, itseemed like a continuation of the massivebombing of European cities that had alreadytaken place.

No one seemed conscious of the irony—thatone of the reasons for general indignationagainst the Fascist powers was their history ofindiscriminate bombing of civilian populations.Italy had bombed civilians in Ethiopia in itsconquest of that country in 1935. Japan hadbombed Shanghai, Nanking, other Chinesecities. Germany and Italy had bombed Madrid,Guernica, and other Spanish cities in that

country’s civil war. At the start of World War II,Nazi planes dropped bombs on the civilianpopulations of Rotterdam in Holland, andCoventry in England.

Franklin D. Roosevelt described thesebombings as “inhuman barbarism that hasprofoundly shocked the conscience ofhumanity.” But very soon, the United Statesand Britain were doing the same thing, and ona far larger scale. The Allied leaders met inCasablanca in January 1943 and agreed onmassive air attacks to achieve “the destructionand dislocation of the German military,industrial and economic system and theundermining of the morale of the Germanpeople to the point where their capacity forarmed resistance is fatally weakened.”

This euphemism—“undermining of themorale”— was another way of saying that themass killing of ordinary civilians by carpet-bombing was now an important strategy of thewar. Once used in World War II, it wouldbecome generally accepted after the war, evenas nations were dutifully signing on to the U.N.Charter pledging to end “the scourge of war.”It would become American policy in Korea, inVietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

There was huge self-deception, not among thepolitical leaders who consciously made thedecisions, but on the part of the lower-levelmilitary who carried them out. We had beenangered when the Germans bombed cities andkilled several hundred or a thousand people.But now the British and Americans were killingtens of thousands in a single air strike. MichaelSherry, in his classic study, The Rise ofAmerican Air Power, notes, “so few in the airforce asked questions.” (I certainly did not,participating in a napalm bombing of theFrench town of Royan a few weeks before theend of the war in Europe.)

One month after the Dresden bombing, onMarch 10, 1945, three hundred B-29’s flewover Tokyo at low altitude, with cylinders of

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napalm and 500-pound clusters of magnesiumincendiaries. It was after midnight. Over onemillion people had evacuated Tokyo, but sixmillion remained. Fire swept with incrediblespeed through the flimsy dwellings of the poor.The atmosphere became superheated to 1,800degrees Fahrenheit. People jumped into theriver for protection and were boiled alive. Theestimates were of 85,000 to 100,000 dead.They died of oxygen deficiency, carbonmonoxide poisoning, radiant heat, directflames, flying debris, or were trampled to death(Masuo Kato, The Lost War: A JapaneseReporter’s Inside Story).

That spring there were more such raids onKobe, Nagoya, Osaka, and in late May anotherhuge bombing of what remained of Tokyo. Thiswas accompanied in the press by continueddehumanization of the enemy. LIFE magazineshowed a picture of a Japanese person burningto death and commented: “This is the onlyway.”

By the time the decision was made to drop theatomic bomb on Hiroshima, our minds hadbeen prepared. Their side was vicious beyonddescription. Therefore, whatever we did wasmorally right. Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and theirgeneral staffs became indistinguishable fromGerman civilians, or Japanese school children.The U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay (thesame one who, during the Vietnam war, said:“We will bomb them back to the Stone Age”)asserted: “There is no such thing as aninnocent civilian.”

President Truman’s secret diaries were notrevealed until 1978. In them Truman referredto one of the messages intercepted byAmerican Intelligence as “the telegram fromJap Emperor asking for peace.” And, afterStalin confirmed that the Red Army wouldmarch against Japan, Truman wrote: “Fini Japswhen that comes about.” It seems he did notwant the Japs to be “fini” through Russianintervention but through American bombs. This

explains the obvious rush to use the bomb inAugust, days before the Russians werescheduled to enter the war, and months beforeany planned invasion of Japan.

The British scientist P M S Blackett, one ofChurchill’s advisers, wrote (Fear, War, and theBomb) that the dropping of the bomb was “thefirst major operation of the cold diplomatic warwith Russia.”

There has been endless discussion about howmany American lives would be lost in aninvasion of Japan. Truman said “half a million.”Churchill said “a million.” These figures werepulled out of the air. Historian BartonBernstein’s research could not find anyprojection for invasion casualties higher than46,000.

The whole discussion about casualty figures ispointless. It is based on the premise that therewould have to be an American invasion of Japanin order to end the war. But the evidence isclear that the Japanese were on the verge ofsurrender, that a simple declaration on keepingthe position of the Emperor would havebrought the war to an end, and no invasion wasnecessary.

Indeed, much of the argument defending theatomic bombings has been based on a mood ofretaliation, as if the children of Hiroshima hadbombed Pearl Harbor, as if the civilian refugeescrowding into Dresden had been in charge ofthe gas chambers. Did American childrendeserve to die because of the massacre ofVietnamese children at My Lai?

If silence and passivity in the presence of evilcommitted by political leaders is deserving of adeath sentence, then the populations of all thegreat powers do not deserve to live. But only inthose ordinary people, rethinking their role, isthere a possibility for redemption and change.

Down to the present day, the massive bombingof civilians is justified, by intellectuals putting

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into respectable words the crude and brutishargument: “Sure we committed mass murder.But they started it. Our conscience is clear.”

That argument aims the slogan “Never Again”only at them, never at ourselves. It is aprescription for the endless cycle of violenceand counter v iolence, terrorism andcounterterrorism, that has plagued our times,for which the only response is: “No more warsor bombings, of retaliation. Someone, no, we,must stop that cycle, now.”

Copyright 2010 by The Howard Zinn

Revocable Trust. Reprinted by permission ofCity Lights Books.

Yuki Tanaka is Research Professor, HiroshimaPeace Institute, and a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal. He is the author most recentlyof Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn Young, eds.,Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth CenturyHistory. He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Recommended citation: Howard Zinn and YukiTanaka, "Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence," TheAsia-Pacific Journal, 25-1-10, June 21, 2010.

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