George,

I woke up today thinking about the three trips I made to Hiroshima, first, in 1954, then again, twice in 1984.

The thirty years separating my visits were marked by a totally different attitude towards the event of 1945. ...I can recall, having more of a curiosity about the city in 1954. ...I felt the bomb was really a good thing and had ended the war allowing my three brothers to return from the Pacific theater, two wounded (one,seriously); the other, filled with horrible memories of his duty on Okinawa,the last major battle before The Bomb.

When I returned in 1984,the city had been completely rebuilt and it was virtually impossible to find anyone who remembered that infamous day! I met one woman, on the center island (Nakajima) of the city, who had lost her entire family - there were no survivors from that small enclave.They had all emerged from bomb shelters after the "all clear" siren had sounded and were exposed to the full wrath of the explosion that occured in the air, a few hundred yards from that tiny island in the middle of the Ota River....

The bridge that crosses the river near "ground zero" had a turn off to the middle island that from the air appeared as a T and served as a target for the "Enola Gay" - they missed it by a matter of about 100 feet.The bridge, though heavily damaged, survived till the early eighties; apparently, the river absorbed the tremendous shock wave.I digress - the woman I met told me that many of the dead were taken to small islands in the Inland Sea and were buried in mass graves.

Later, the Japanese government sought to identify as many of the dead as was possible. The remains were brought to Nakajima and buried in a huge dome shaped mound. The remains of this woman's father had been found and buried in the mound. She visits the spot every day at approximately 8:15AM - the time of the bomb.

The Japanese refer to the event as Gembaku Shi. ..and, you see the Kanjii characters repeated on gravestone after gravestone in the many cemetaries that are part of this city.

As I talked to this woman and visited the shrine and museum, the enormity of this horror began to gnaw at my consciousness and I suddenly felt elements of guilt that, I, as a human being,had been part of this and welcomed it!

The museum is full of photos of children, horribly burned, freakish pictures of people who were fortunate enough to be wearing white clothes, thus avoiding the radiation. A shadow of what had been a man, seared into the step of the Sumitomo Bank.

Identifying what had been human versus animal ashes was largely based on the volumn of the small pile!

I saw a father and son in the museum, I noticed the elder man had an artificial leg; as they walked past the glass case filled with the middle school kid's obento (lunch) box display and the melted coins they had held in their pockets and purses, the father began to weep and turn away.The son told me, his father had lost his leg at the battle of Guadacanal as a member of the Marine Corps.

After I came away, I couldn't stop thinking about my feelings when I had come here in 1954. It took several days to get past the feelings of despair that I felt.

I know that President Truman was conflicted over the decision, but, realistically, from January to August of 1945, 80,000 Americans had died in the war with Japan, had the bomb been available in January, it is difficult to think that the President would have hesitated to use it.

I have heard all the arguements(some from Japanese) - eg:we should have demonstrated the effects of the bomb on some distant island.. ...but there were many in the scientific community that weren't so sure that a bomb using uranium would be reliable and one failure would have hardened the resistance of the Japanese.

The bomb dropped on Nagasaki used plutonium.

It is difficult to imagine human beings capable of such nightmarish acts against each other. In the current era, I think we are once again moving closer to the belief that nuclear weapons can be "tactical".

Harry Tenny (electronic mail, August 6, 2002)

P.S. Interestingly, much of the debris that had been buried and bulldozed, has gradually worked its way back to the surface. Smashed pottery shards and crumbled roof tiles lay everywhere.