Close to Home: Did the Hiroshima bombing save lives?

Seventy years ago, my father, Lt. Irving Winkler, was on the island of Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands. This was the base from which Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets and his B-29 crew took off and dropped the atom bomb.

As we mark the 70th anniversary of the atomic blast above Hiroshima, Japan, many of our fellow citizens are engaged in deep soul-searching, self-recrimination and doubt. Or they wish the rest of us would be.

They wish we would face the “truth” about America, about the bomb and about Hiroshima. They would also like to wish away a few inconvenient facts.

For instance, I’ve come across a number of people who believe that we developed the bomb to be used on Asians and that we would never have used it on the Germans. The Manhattan Project was started in response to the threat of German A-bomb development. When it is pointed out that the bomb wasn’t used on Germany simply because the war in Europe ended before we could test the bomb, these people, in my father’s expression, “have conniptions.”

Despite being head of a Signal Corps unit on Tinian, my father was vague with us about what he knew of the atomic bomb. In mid-1945, an invasion of Japan seemed imminent. My father had stayed abreast of the war in Europe. He saved a copy of the hometown newspaper with the 1944 D-Day invasion detailed. Years later, he told us of seeing a task force being assembled in the Pacific that would dwarf the one used at Normandy.

In July 1945, my father received leave to go home, where he would get married. On Aug. 6, returning from their honeymoon, and looking forward with apprehension to my father’s return to the Pacific Theater, my parents heard a news bulletin. A new type of bomb had been dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

“The war is over!” exclaimed Irv.

“How do you know?” asked my mother, unbelievingly.

Well, he was on Tinian.

Although both my parents lost civilian relatives to Hitler in the Holocaust, they didn’t feel vengeance toward Hitler’s ally on hearing the news of the bomb. They felt relief - relief was the overwhelming emotion to most Americans.

Let’s forget that Lt. Winkler and his fellow Americans who might have been killed or injured in that huge invasion if Truman had forgone dropping the atomic bomb.

What about the Japanese? What about innocent Japanese citizens who would otherwise have died had we not dropped the A-bomb?

With the speedy end to the war brought about by the bombing, Gen. Douglas MacArthur arrived in Japan as supreme commander of the occupation to find many communities threatened with starvation. He issued an order forbidding the consumption of local food supplies by the occupation forces, set up Army kitchens to help feed the populace and imported 3.5 million tons of food from U.S. Army supplies. He explained, “Under the responsibilities of victory, the Japanese people are now our prisoners, no less than did the starving men on Bataan become their prisoners when the peninsula fell. As a consequence of the ill treatment, including starvation of Allied prisoners in Japanese hands, we have tried and executed the Japanese officers upon proof of responsibility. Can we justify such punitive action if we ourselves, in reverse circumstances but with hostilities at an end, fail to provide the food to sustain life among the Japanese people?”

Does this express the attitude of a violent, racist people? Compare this American response to today’s would-be atomic power, Iran: “Death to America,” “Death to Israel.”

By the end of the war, smallpox was rampant in Japan. The Americans administered smallpox vaccinations to 70 million Japanese in three years and curbed the disease. There was a 79 percent drop in tuberculosis cases in Japan after the Americans administered 23 million vaccinations. Through inoculation and education, typhoid, paratyphoid, cholera and dysentery were substantially reduced or eradicated.

MacArthur’s medical officers estimated these health measures saved 2 million lives in the first two years of occupation.

Would any of this have been possible without the bomb?

H.B. Winkler is a resident of Santa Rosa.