The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 66 years ago was the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war. STEPHEN LEWIS speaks to a York RAF veteran who visited Hiroshima a year after the bomb fell.

THE first view Ernest Astley had of Hiroshima was from the air, through the window of a Dakota. It was September 1946: a year after the atomic bomb.

Ernest was an 18-year-old flight mechanic with 17 Squadron BCAIR. He had heard about the bomb, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he looked out of the window.

“We’d been flying over green, and then suddenly it was all brown, just nothing,” he says. “Green, then suddenly brown: nothing but the odd bit of tree here and there.”

He was young, and all he could think of to say was: “Wow! Hey, look at this!”

It wasn’t long before he got to see the city again, at even closer quarters. Japan had been occupied by the Allied powers after it surrendered a year earlier following the bombing of Nagasaki.

Ernest, who grew up in Keighley and now lives at Dunnington, was stationed with 17 Sqn at Miho, on Japan’s north-west coast.

That September, however, he and some colleagues were flown to Iwakuni, near Hiroshima, to take part in what he calls a “firepower demonstration”.

They passed over Hiroshima on the way. And a couple of days later, prompted by curiosity, he and some friends took a train to see the city for themselves.

From the ground, the devastation was even more striking than it had been from the air. Many of the buildings, as was common in Japan, had been built of wood. They had all gone, Ernest says. A few larger concrete buildings still stood, sticking up like fingers out of the rubble. “But they had no windows or anything.”

Everywhere was ruin – you could sometimes see the outlines where streets had been, but the streets themselves were gone.

A photograph taken at the time he was there shows the devastation – and the odd, charred outline of blackened trees still standing.

“But what I remember most was seeing lots and lots of bottles, all welded together,” he says. “I suppose it had been a factory. And in another area, bikes were melted together by the heat. I guess they must have belonged to people who had ridden to work.”

There were also signposts still standing. The white, reflective surfaces had survived. “But the black letters had been eaten away by the heat of the atomic bomb.”

Ernest and his friends climbed to the top of one of the concrete buildings still standing. It was little more than a shell, the concrete steps they climbed bubbled from the heat of the blast. From the top, they had an unparalleled view of the city – including the former Industrial Promotion Hall, the domed building now known as the Atomic Bomb Dome, the ruins of which still stand as a mute memorial to what happened.

That view was astounding, Ernest says. “It was amazing. Just devastation.”

There were some Japanese people searching through the rubble. But, on that first visit, Ernest and his colleagues didn’t speak to them.

“I suppose they were looking for things, rummaging about for things. We were in uniform, and they just ignored us. They were standing around not giving us any notice at all.”

He visited the city three more times during his 18 months in Japan: again in 1946, then in 1947 and 1948. By 1947, there were “a lot more people about, putting up wooden buildings. By 1948, they were building the peace park, and there were shops going up”. Mute testimony, that, to the enduring human spirit to survive and rebuild.

On that last visit, he talked to some Japanese survivors, asking them what they thought about the bombing.

“They said it was the best thing that could have happened,” he says. “They say it saved a lot of Japanese, US and English lives.”

The Japanese had been a fiercely proud, warrior nation, determined to defend their shores to the last, he points out.

“The whole population of Japan was ready to fight in the caves and mountains. Even the girls had sharpened bamboo knives.”

It was only the dropping of the bombs that broke their spirit, and forced the Japanese emperor to surrender. “It was a horrifying thing, but a necessary thing.”

That is not a view shared by everyone. There has, in recent weeks, been a fierce debate in the letters pages of The Press about the ethics of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The dropping of the bomb, together with the intensive fire-bombing of other Japanese cities that came earlier, constituted “some of the most extreme terrorist atrocities in the history of the world”, claimed Press reader R Westmoreland in one letter.

But you have to have been there, Ernest says. “You need to have been there to understand the Japanese mind and their belief in their emperor being a god: their belief in death, and willingness to die for the emperor.”

Not all of the Japanese people Ernest met after the war were quite as forgiving as those survivors he spoke to in Hiroshima.

In 1947 he visited Tokyo. It had been relentlessly fire-bombed, many of its wood buildings razed to the ground. “The US actually did more damage in the fire bombing of Tokyo than at Hiroshima,” he says.

He and two colleagues were given a tour of the city – in uniform, as usual. “We walked down this road, and there were lots of people sitting crowded on the pavements with pools of belongings all about them.

“They all looked at us, and there was something about the way they looked… I said to our guide, ‘Why are they looking at us like that?’, and she said they were firebomb victims, and they knew we were air force…”

They beat a hasty retreat.

The reason for Allied forces being in Japan after the war was to try to build bridges, Ernest stresses.

He developed a deep respect for the Japanese people, he says – and even forged some friendships. On One occasion when he was working on a Spitfire, he remembered that he’d left his wallet lying on top of his bed. He rushed back – to find that the boy who cleaned his room had tucked his wallet safely in the blankets, with all the cash safely intact.

“He would not accept any reward for his honesty,” Ernest says.

On another occasion, he came across three British airmen hitting a Japanese labourer. He stopped them, and took the man – whom he knew as Oscar – up to his room, where he dressed his cuts and bruises with his first aid kit.

He returned to his room one day to find that his narrow, hard mattress had been replaced by a six inch thick spring mattress, like the ones officers had.

He saw Oscar later and asked where it had come from.

“He said they had been putting mattresses in the officers’ rooms, and they had one spare mattress so he had brought it to his very good friend. To the day I left the squadron I was the only airman with a spring-interior mattress.”

The US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in the closing stages of the war: the first on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; the second on Nagasaki three days later. They remain the only times nuclear weapons have been used in war to date.

The Hiroshima bomb, know as ‘Little Boy’, was dropped from the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of pilot Paul Tibbets.

Within four months of the bombings, it is estimated that between 90,000 and 166,000 people died at Hiroshima, and between 60,000 to 80,000 at Nagasaki. About half the deaths occurred on the day of the bombings, mainly from flash or flame burns, with the remainder dying in the following months from burns, radiation sickness, or injuries compounded by sickness.

Japan announced its surrender on August 15.

Was it right to drop the bomb?

Yes

EVERY August, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, there are American citizens who insist on ‘wringing their hands’ over the dropping of the atomic bomb, wrote essayist Tomas Sowell in a piece for Capitalism magazine in August 2005.

But far more people were killed in the conventional bombing of German and Japanese cities during the war – and vastly more people were killed with bullets and cannon on the Russian front.

The alternative to dropping the bomb was an invasion of Japan, he wrote. “Those plans included casualty estimates even more staggering than the deaths that have left a sea of crosses in … cemeteries at Normandy and elsewhere.”

The Japanese had already demonstrated, in the island-hopping war in the Pacific and in the use of kamikaze pilots, that they would fight to the death.

“Japan’s plans for defence against invasion involved mobilising the civilian population, including women and children, for the same suicidal battle tactics. That invasion could have been the greatest bloodbath in history… “As it was, the unconditional surrender of Japan enabled General Douglas MacArthur to engineer one of the greatest historic transformations of a nation from militarism to pacifism.”

No

IT IS undeniable that some good came out of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is, wrote twice Republican US presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan in WorldNetDaily in August 2005. “In a week, Japan surrendered, World War II ended and, across the Japanese empire, soldiers laid down their arms. Thousands of US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Japanese who would have perished in an invasion of Japan survived, as did Allied POWs who might have been executed.”

But, he asked, was using the bomb moral?

“(President) Truman’s defenders argue that by using the bomb, he saved more lives than were lost... Only the atom bombs, they contend, could have shocked Japan’s warlords into surrender. But if terrorism is the massacre of innocents to break the will of rulers, were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorism on a colossal scale?”

It would not have been necessary to invade Japan at all, Buchanan argued. It could have been isolated and left to ‘rot on the vine’.

Truman’s own chief of staff, Adm William Leahy, once wrote that the use of ‘this barbarous weapon’ was of ‘no material assistance’ in the war against Japan, he pointed out. Leahy added: “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages...”