Nagasaki: When Truman Atom Bombed the Home of Japanese Catholicism

On a bright but cloudy morning on August 9, 1945, a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber named "Bockscar" flew over the Japanese port city of Nagasaki and dropped a highly radioactive ("dirty") Plutonium implosion bomb onto the city. It landed 300 yards from the second largest Roman Catholic cathedral in the Far East, Urakami Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The bombing was personally ordered by US President and Democrat Party leader, Harry S Truman.

The story is now partly the subject of a major new film named Oppenheimer after the US scientist who led the Atom bomb program. It was called the Manhattan Project, namely led by Dr J Robert Oppenheimer.

The pilot of Bockscar was Major Charles Sweeney, an Irish-American, brought up Roman Catholic. He had not had a clear view of the initial target, Kokura (now Kitakyushu), and, running out of fuel, headed back over Nagasaki when he spotted the turret of the Cathedral. Concluding that must mean there were people nearby, he decided to drop the bomb more or less on top of it. 

Whether he knew it was a Roman Catholic Cathedral or not is unclear. What is clear is that long after he learned that Urukami Cathedral was Catholic, Sweeney continued to claim that dropping the bomb was necessary and good.

August 9, 1945

The bomb exploded at 11.02 in the morning. It blew most of the Cathedral, most of the city, and most of its inhabitants to smithereens in a blinding flash.

The remains of the city were engulfed in a massive emission, and consequent dust cloud, of toxic radiation. It caused large numbers of the few that survived the blast to die over the next days, months, and even years – some even 20 years later - from acute radiation poisoning.

Bockscar had dropped what is known in the nuclear trade as a "dirty" bomb, meaning that, upon exploding, it would release a very high emission of poisonous nuclear radiation.

This was the nuclear bomb that went on giving for years after it was dropped – giving to the people of Nagasaki the horrible after-effects of nuclear radiation that slowly killed victims for years.

The vast majority of the people obliterated and vaporized by this fearsome weapon were civilians, children, women, elderly. Almost all of them had nothing to do with the war save to endure the constant air attacks of Allied bombers and the loss of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons in the conflict. Children were blasted to tiny pieces of mangled flesh and fractured bone by a huge bomb dropped right on top of them.

Who Decides Who Lives and Dies

The US Target Committee was chaired by Brigadier-General Leslie Groves on the appointment of General George C Marshall. Marshall was then Chief of Staff of the US Army. The committee consisted partly of military officers and partly of scientists from the Manhattan Project.

They were deeply unqualified to choose targets in Japan for any kind of bomb, let alone an atomic bomb. However, Kyoto was originally on the target list but was taken off by order of US Secretary of State, Henry L Stimson. 

According to Edwin Reischauer, a US Army Intelligence officer and Japanologist, "the only person deserving credit for saving Kyoto from destruction is Henry L Stimson, the Secretary of War at the time, who had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier." 

Stimson had discovered that the historic city of Kyoto was one of the great artistic centers of the world. But this came about by pure chance. The Target Committee was otherwise unequipped to understand such issues. It focused only on city size and population numbers.

Very little research was needed to discover that Nagasaki was the one Japanese city most likely to be friendly to the Western Allies. This was not only because it was a port city, but also because of a vitally important cultural reason. Even when Japan was closed and isolated, foreigners would still enter and visit through Nagasaki. 

Center of Japanese Catholicism

That vital reason was that Nagasaki was the very epicenter of Japanese Catholicism.

It had become so after European missionaries arrived in the 16th century. Missionaries like St Francis Xavier, who found the Japanese receptive to Christianity and declared that the Japanese were a naturally religious people. Even famous samurai (feudal knights) and daimyo (feudal lords) began to convert to Christianity. So many people converted that the government took fright and began to persecute Christianity to stop its spread.

Not only was Nagasaki the center of Japanese Christianity but it was the city in which Japanese Catholic martyrs had been put to death. St Paul Miki (Feast Day 6 February) and his companions had been put to death by crucifixion and piercing by spears in 1597. This was when widespread persecution of Christians took place during the Tokugawa Shogunate, Emperor Ogimichi, and imperial regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Thereafter, the Christians of Nagasaki were compelled to hide their religious beliefs during a long period of persecution. This era accompanied the seclusion policy of the government cutting Japan off from the rest of the world for some 250 years.

These underground Christians were later to be known as Kakure Kirishitan, or "hidden Christians." They were Japanese Catholics who went underground at the start of the Edo period in the early 17th century due to persecution.

Era of Nagasaki's 'Kakure Kirishitan'

From the beginning of the isolation of Japan until its re-opening in the 19th century, these Kakure Kirishitan kept the Catholic faith. Cunningly they disguised it under a veneer of apparent Buddhism, without a single Catholic priest to provide them with the Sacraments or to catechize their children. 

They kept the faith secretly, making their priestless Masses and services appear like Buddhist services. Even their statues of the Virgin Mary and the saints appeared like Buddhist statues to avoid persecution by the authorities.

The authorities, whenever they uncovered a secret Christian, would force them to stamp, or spit, upon the Cross, or upon an image of the Virgin Mary, on pain of death to those who refused. This resulted in many more Japanese Christian martyrs who, after refusing to desecrate Christian symbols, were then executed, often by crucifixion.

Two French priests from the Société des Missions Étrangères, Father Louis Furet and Father Bernard Petitjean, landed in Nagasaki in 1863. They intended to build a church honoring the principal martyrs of Japan but were astonished to discover tens of thousands of Kakure Kirishitan living in Nagasaki. A large number of those lived in Urukami village, the district of Nagasaki where the cathedral was later built.

'Kakure Kirishitan' Come Out of Hiding

A church was finished in 1864 and later became Oura Cathedral dedicated to the Japanese martyrs. Before long, tens of thousands of underground Christians came out of hiding to attend the Masses and services at the newly built church in Oura.

Approximately 30,000 secret Christians came out of hiding when religious freedom was re-established in 1873 after the Meiji Restoration. These Kakure Kirishitan were also known as Mukashi Kirishitan ("ancient Christians").

When news of this reached Blessed Pope Pius IX in Rome, he declared it "the miracle of the Orient."

Construction of Urakami Cathedral began in 1895 after the long-standing ban on Christianity was lifted. 

The missionary clergy purchased land where the humiliating interrogations of hidden Christians had taken place for two centuries. They bought it from a village chief.

When completed in 1925 it was the largest Christian structure in the Asia-Pacific region. That status lasted until the construction of the still larger Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Hong Kong.

It became the Co-Cathedral of Nagasaki together with Oura Cathedral.

Both cathedrals were blown to bits when Bockscar dropped its deadly payload on the unsuspecting capital of Japanese Christianity, the one part of Japan that could reasonably be expected to be most favorable to the Western Allies.

Philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe's Criticism

When protesting in 1956 at her college, the late and world-famous Catholic philosopher at Oxford University Professor Elizabeth Anscombe wrote about giving Truman an honorary degree:

"…[B]ombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The decision to use them against people was Mr Truman's. For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human actions… In the bombing of these cities, it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end. And a very large number of them, all at once, without warning, without the interstices of escape or the chance to take shelter, which existed even in the 'area bombings' of the German cities."

By no standard of morality known to man could this horrific war crime ever be justified. The deliberate decision to bomb to smithereens non-combatant children, women, and elderly people is always and everywhere a shameful form of mass murder. It is every bit as immoral as mass murdering Jews and other non-combatant minorities in concentration camps. 

Those children, women, and elderly had nothing to do with the prosecution of the war. From the beginning, that was a decision only of their government and not them. Therefore, to deliberately target these non-combatants was, and is, an obviously immoral war crime.

British Lord Snow's Perspective

Moreover, to choose Nagasaki as a target for the dropping of an atomic bomb was an act, not only of grave criminality and immorality but of intense stupidity and strategic folly.

Yet, how many people know the real story of the decision to drop an atom bomb on the center of Japanese Catholicism? Very few, in my experience.

As with the equally immoral bombings of civilians in Germany, the numbers killed were grossly understated by Western leaders and historians. This was chiefly, one suspects, out of an attempt to minimize the shame of what they must have known were gravely immoral acts.

The late United Kingdom Labor Party member of the British House of Lords, Lord Snow, was also an accomplished scientist and civil servant. Lord Snow set out the Godkin lectures of 1960, later collected into a book entitled Science and Government. In precise detail, he told the sorry story of the near-complete failure of the Allied carpet bombing campaign against Germany during World War II, reaching its peak in 1944.

Decorated Critics

Lord Snow cites Nobel laureate, Professor Patrick MS Blackett, OM, CH, FRS, another member of the British House of Lords. Lord Blackett was a scientific adviser to the British Admiralty during the War. He quotes Lord Blackett as saying that the carpet-bombing campaign, by attacking civilian, rather than military, targets, lengthened the war by at least 6, if not 12 months. It is a persuasive indictment against the strategic bombing campaign. 

Lord Snow cites both Lord Blackett and the official naval historian of the War, Captain Stephen Roskill CBE, DSC, FBA, RN as agreeing that the diverting of long-range bombers to bombing German cities, and away from protecting the Atlantic convoys, very nearly cost the Allies the Battle of the Atlantic and thus the whole war, so foolish a policy was it. (Captain Roskill was a brother of the British judge and member of the UK's then highest court, the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, Lord Roskill.) 

The final proof, if more were needed, was later provided by the postwar survey of the bombing results. This was titled, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939-45. It was compiled by historian Dr Noble Frankland CB, CBE, DFC, and diplomat and historian Sir Charles Webster KCMG, FBA. 

This survey showed that the calculated results of bombing civilian areas were grossly over-estimated by partisan, pro-carpet-bombing advocates, like Churchill's primary scientific advisor, Professor "the Prof" F A Lindemann Cherwell (Lord Cherwell). Moreover, they were also overestimated by opponents of carpet bombing within the Civil Service, including scientists and permanent civil service department heads like Sir Henry Tizard GCB, AFC, FRS.

Stimson's Report

Even more embarrassing were the less-than-wholly-approving conclusions of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, commissioned by Secretary of State Stimson.

In fact, the US survey concluded, relative to the atomic bombings, that "based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to December 31, 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." [P 127]

And yet we are repeatedly and persistently told, by apologists for the atomic bombing, that the war would not have ended if the atomic bombs had not been dropped and that they were thus a moral necessity.

This view simply does not accord with the known facts.

Japan's Little Known Peace Initiatives

In fact, the Imperial Japanese government had already made peace overtures, via the Soviet Union.

Professor Elizabeth Anscombe referred to them in her 1956 pamphlet when she wrote: 

"In 1945, at the Potsdam Conference in July, Stalin informed the American and British statesmen that he had received two requests from the Japanese to act as a mediator with a view to ending the war. He had refused." 

Stalin, anxious to waste the energies, men, and resources of both the Allies and the Japanese, simply refused the peace offers hoping that the Allies would think the Japanese were being insanely obstinate and that only an invasion of the Japanese mainland would bring them to their senses.

The first experimental atomic bomb exploded in the desert at Alamogordo New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, just in time for the Potsdam Conference which began the very next day. 

On the same day, Dr Leo Szilard and 60 other scientists protested the use, without warning, of the atomic bomb in Japan. They emphasized the moral responsibility for such use of weapons of mass destruction.

Although the US government ignored such protests, the Japanese government, on the next day, July 18, 1945, submitted one of its requests for peace arbitration to the Soviet Union.

Thus, long before the atomic bombs were dropped the Japanese were already suing for peace.

Firebombing Japan's Cities

However, the pilots and their leaders were already well-hardened to the consequences of area, or carpet bombing. They had long been carpet bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities, just as their colleagues had done to German cities.

The damage suffered by these cities was even more extensive than that caused by the atomic bombs.

In all the carpet bombings, almost all of those killed were innocent, non-combatant civilians, mostly children, women, and the elderly.

Burma Campaign Reconciliation

I recently visited Japan with the Burma Campaign Society on a goodwill and reconciliation tour to bring together some of the few remaining survivors of the war. 

We were very happy to see 97-year-old former Fusilier, Richard Day, shaking hands with former Japanese infantry sergeant-major, 104-year-old Katsuo Sato. Both had been enemy belligerents at Kohima during the war in Burma. They now greeted each other as reconciled friends. 

• Former Enemies Now Friends: 97-Year-Old British Soldier Who Fought in the Battle of Imphal Tours Japan

Our Japanese hosts could not have been more hospitable, friendly, and courteous. It was a pleasure to meet and spend time with them.

At the various press conferences held, I made clear, as a former serving British officer, my moral objections to the Allied atomic and carpet bombing of innocent Japanese non-combatant civilians during that war. In particular, I objected to the bombing of Nagasaki, the center of Japanese Christianity. This became a point of interest for the Japanese reporters, and I was questioned about it.

We visited Nagasaki, seeing both the hypocenter of the explosion and the peace park. 

A part of Urakami Catholic Cathedral has been erected at the hypocentre to remind all that the bomb was dropped only 300 yards away from that cathedral. It had only been finished 20 years earlier, in 1925.

By an extraordinary coincidence, we met an elderly lady, aged 97, accompanied by her daughter and granddaughters, coming out of a restaurant.  She had witnessed, not only one but both atomic bombs. 

Having just seen the bomb at Hiroshima, she escaped to Nagasaki expecting to be safe, only to see the second bomb. She was fortunate - she survived both.

Obliteration of Christian Symbols

But curiously, in this city, once the center of Japanese Christianity, not a single religious symbol has been allowed to be erected at any of the sites dedicated to the memory of the bombing. Despite repeated inquiry, I was unable to find a proper explanation for this.

My tentative conclusion was that to avoid any contention about which religious symbols would be appropriate in a city where the Kakure Kirishitan had been persecuted by their Buddhist and Shinto brothers, the authorities must have decided that all religious symbols were to be excluded.

However, as always happens when religious symbols are excluded, this simply meant, and still means, an entirely self-contradictory victory for atheism and secularism, the very reverse of what should be commemorated at such a tragic site.

Thus, as I mounted the escalators to go up to the peace park, what were the first two memorials that I encountered after entering?

One from the Soviet Union and the other from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic!

Christianity could not be celebrated at the site of this, the most Catholic part of Japan, destroyed by a cruel and brutal atomic bomb. But Communism, a totalitarian ideology of the Soviet Union that had refused the Japanese peace requests which might otherwise have prevented the bombing, was allowed to erect its false and mendacious monuments.

Calling On Putin and Pavel to Right a Wrong

I call upon President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Petr Pavel of the Czech Republic to insist that the Nagasaki City Council pull down these deceitful monuments. They should be replaced with Christian monuments from Russia and Czech to commemorate the fact that the bomb was dropped upon the center of Japanese Christianity.

And I call upon the governments of the free world, and the United Nations, likewise, to acknowledge the criminal nature of that bombing. Let them pledge never again to allow such wholesale mass destruction of innocent, non-combatant children, women, and elderly people, to take place.

But is this a lesson that mankind is willing to learn or even acknowledge?

There are rules and laws of war designed to protect the innocent but will belligerent nations respect them?

As war rages in Ukraine, and in the Middle East, these questions are as relevant today as they were in 1945. Our failure to admit the crimes that have been committed by our own side will not help resolve the issues. However, on the contrary, they will only serve to worsen them.

War criminals and terrorists must learn that the truth will come out eventually. The laws of war are there to be obeyed, not flouted.

And the simple rules of morality in war do not change merely because of the growth of technology.

It is always wrong to target innocent non-combatants, it always has been, and it always will be. The sooner governments remind themselves of this basic principle, the better.

The Feast Day of St Paul Miki, a Japanese Christian martyr, is February 6.

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Author: James Bogle
James Bogle is a barrister (trial attorney), historian, writer, and former army officer.