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Wednesday, August 5, 2015

When U.S. Troops Were Exposed to Atomic Bomb in Japan

I've posted dozens of pieces about the atomic bombing (before and after) of Japan in August 1945.  Here's a story, from my book Atomic Cover-Up,  on what happened, weeks later, when the first U.S. troops arrived. 

On September 8, General Thomas F. Ferrell arrived in Hiroshima with a radiologist and two physicists from Los Alamos, ordered by Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves to return to Tokyo the following day with preliminary findings. There was some urgency. It was one thing if the Japanese were dying of radiation disease; there was nothing we could do about that. But sending in American soldiers if it was unsafe was another matter.

Three days later, Farrell announced that “no poison gases were released” in Hiroshima. Vegetation was already growing there.

The first large group of US soldiers arrived in Nagasaki around September 23, about the time the Japanese newsreel teams started filming, and in Hiroshima two weeks later. They were part of a force of 240,000 that occupied the islands of Honshu (where Hiroshima is located) and Kyushu (Nagasaki). Many more landed in Nagasaki, partly because its harbor was not mined. Marines from the 2nd Division, with three regimental combat teams, took Nagasaki while the US Army’s 24th and 41st divisions seized Hiroshima. The US Navy transported Marines and evacuated POWs, but its role ashore (beyond medical services) was limited.

Most of the troops in Hiroshima were based in camps on the edge of the city, but a larger number did set up camps inside Nagasaki. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions. Some bunked down in buildings close to ground zero, even slept on the earth and engaged in cleanup operations, including disposing bodies, without protective gear. Few if any wore radiation detection badges. “We walked into Nagasaki unprepared…. Really, we were ignorant about what the hell the bomb was,” one soldier would recall. Another vet said: “Hell, we drank the water, we breathed the air, and we lived in the rubble. We did our duty.”

A marine named Sam Scione, who had survived battles on Guadacanal, Tarawa and Okinawa, now arrived in Nagasaki, sleeping first in a burned-out factory, then a schoolhouse. “We never learned anything about radiation or the effects it might have on us,” he later said. “We went to ground zero many times and were never instructed not to go there.” A year later, on his return to the United States, his hair began to fall out and his body was covered in sores. He suffered a string of ailments but never was awarded service-related disability status.

The occupying force in Nagasaki grew to more than 27,000 as the Hiroshima regiments topped 40,000. Included were many military doctors and nurses. Some stayed for months. The US Strategic Bomb Survey sent a small group of photographers to take black-and-white photos of blast effects. By all accounts the Americans were charmed by the Japanese, thankful that the bomb might have helped end the war and profoundly affected by what they witnessed. “In the back of our minds, every one of us wondered: What is this atomic bomb?” a Nagasaki veteran later testified. “You had to be there to rea1ize what it did.” After describing the horrors, he added: “We did not drop those two [bombs] on military installations. We dropped them on women and children…. I think that is something this country is going to have to live with for eternity.”

Not every American felt that way, of course. A staff sergeant who served in Hiroshima named Edwin Lawrence later recalled thinking, “The Japs got what they deserved.” What he remembered most vividly was the constant smell of charcoal in the air. Mark Hatfield, a young naval officer in 1945 and later a longtime US senator (known for his opposition to the Vietnam war), would reflect on his “searing remembrances of those days” in Hiroshima when a “shock to my conscience registered permanently within me.” Much of his legislative and personal philosophy was “shaped by the experience of walking the streets of your city,” he wrote to the mayor of Hiroshima in 1980, adding that he was “deeply committed to doing whatever I can to bring about the abolition of nuclear weapons.”

The biologist Jacob Bronowski revealed in 1964 that his classic study Science and Human Values was born at the moment he arrived in Nagasaki in November 1945 with a British military mission sent to study the effects of the bomb. Arriving by jeep after dark he found a landscape as desolate as the craters of the moon. That moment, he wrote, “is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it.” It was “a universal moment…civilization face to face with its own implications.” The power of science to produce good or evil had long troubled other societies. “Nothing happened in 1945,” he observed, “except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man.“

When Bronowski returned from Japan he tried to persuade officials in the British government and at the United Nations that Nagasaki should be preserved exactly as it was. He wanted all future conferences on crucial international issues “to be held in that ashy, clinical sea of rubble…only in this forbidding context could statesmen make realistic judgments of the problems which they handle on our behalf.” His colleagues showed little interest, however; they pointed out delegates “would be uncomfortable in Nagasaki,” according to Bronowski.

More than 9,000 Allied POWs were processed through Nagasaki, but the number of occupation troops dropped steadily every month. By April 1946, the United States had withdrawn military personnel from Hiroshima, and they were out of Nagasaki by August. An estimated 118,000 personnel passed through the atomic cities at one point or another. Some of them were there mainly as tourists, and wandered through the ruins, snapping photos and buying artifacts. When the servicemen returned to the United States, many of them suffered from strange rashes and sores. Years later some were afflicted with disease (such as thyroid problems and leukemia) or cancer associated with radiation exposure.

Little could be proven beyond a doubt, and all of their disability and compensation claims were denied, despite the efforts of a new group, the Committee for US Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killing Their Own, a book published in 1982, charged that their experience “closely resembles the ordeals of a wide range of American radiation victims, consistently ignored and denied at every turn by the very institutions responsible for causing their problems.” The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers. A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.”

 In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of US bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects. The costs of the superpower arms race after Hiroshima can be measured in trillions of dollars, but also in the countless number of lives lost or damaged due to accidents and radiation exposure in the massive nuclear industry that grew to astounding proportions throughout the country in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the long-overlooked military personnel who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki—key players in one of the last largely untold stories of World War II—were truly the first “atomic soldiers,” and how many may still be suffering from their experience remains unknown.

For more, see Atomic Cover-up

28 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing. My biological grandfather was in Japan helping clean up and died 2 years after from cancer. He also left behind a wife and 3 kids who were thrust into poverty and not given any compensation. I inherited his hat and wonder if it carries any radioactive isotopes. It could show that the effects were longer lasting than was thought.

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing. My biological grandfather was in Japan helping clean up and died 2 years after from cancer. He also left behind a wife and 3 kids who were thrust into poverty and not given any compensation. I inherited his hat and wonder if it carries any radioactive isotopes. It could show that the effects were longer lasting than was thought.

Unknown said...

My father-in-law was on the Ticonderoga and was radiated when he was in Japan

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Anonymous said...

My father served in the 2nd Division of the Corp at Nagasaki, and died early in life from prostate cancer. He always wondered if it came from here. No protective clothing was ever issued. Guess we'll never know.

Anonymous said...

My father was in the 2nd Marine corp, 195 Platoon, he went into Nagasaki the day after the bomb.He and two others were the one's who took down the highest Japanese Commander, can not recall his name right now, but recall the story my dad told me of it. My dad was given his sword.My dad died at 79, he always said something was wrong with his neck, he died of some unknown blockage in his asparagus, suspected cancer.

Anonymous said...

My father was in the navy on board a ship that was 30 miles off shore when the bomb was dropped. He stated when the wind was "right",you could smell death and radiation. My father died at the age of 47 from pancreatic cancer. He always felt it was from the radiation of the bomb. My father wrote a letter a week for 4 years to my grandmother. We have most of them. I am going to reread all of the letters to see if my dad mentioned which ship he was on. I would like to know if any other seamen were affected by this radiation. In the letters, my father mentioned that he could not mention the destination of his deployment or future deployments due to security.

BigFreeekinNate said...

My grandfather was in Japan after the bombs dropped- and he died from Leukemia at 59 years old!! I had no idea until recently...

Sue Wared said...

My dad was in the 2 nd platoon. He died at 43 of acute leukemia. I have a copy of his death certificate acute leukemia due to extreme exposure to radiation . Can anyone help me? I believe we can find enough victims who died of cancer , my dad had no previous nor any family history of cancer let alone leukemia. We were 3 young children with a 35 year old widowed mother due to the impact of the bomb during my dads assignment as a marine in Japan August 1945. Do anyone want to join me and try to locate as many families and it survivors as my dad would have been 92 in seeing why these men and their families are being ignored? I have read where there have been settlements to other atomic veterans up to $75,000. I will lead the charge if I can find others who were impacted.Sue wared hawker7820@yahoo.com

Sue Wared said...

Correction hawker7810@yahoo.com

Sue Wared said...

My dad was in the 2 nd platoon. He died at 43 of acute leukemia. I have a copy of his death certificate acute leukemia due to extreme exposure to radiation . Can anyone help me? I believe we can find enough victims who died of cancer , my dad had no previous nor any family history of cancer let alone leukemia. We were 3 young children with a 35 year old widowed mother due to the impact of the bomb during my dads assignment as a marine in Japan August 1945. Do anyone want to join me and try to locate as many families and it survivors as my dad would have been 92 in seeing why these men and their families are being ignored? I have read where there have been settlements to other atomic veterans up to $75,000. I will lead the charge if I can find others who were impacted.Sue wared hawker7820@yahoo.com

rightgirlwrongtime14@gmail.com said...

My Granddad had just been in the battle of Iwo Jima. He served with the 5th Marine Division. He had not accumulated enough days to get home. So he was attached to the 2nd Marine Division and sent to Nagasaki to clean up. He suffered from bad health issues his entire life. He died at age 74. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, but his dialysis doctor said he doesn’t have that and called it something else to do with his blood and it was because he had been exposed to toxic chemicals. Some 70 years later I was having kidney problems and having a CT. I immediately got a call from doctor saying you get to an emergency room ASAP. You have 2 blood clots in your lungs and my blood tests kept coming back weird. A cancer doctor is called in because there are those multiple myeloma markers showing up. Luckily, this guy was smart enough to ask me if anybody genetically related to me had worked around toxic chemicals. When I told him about my Granddad being sent to Nagasaki to clean up after the bomb, he said “say no more, I know”. More expensive test done and I was born with a mutated gene. I am going to be on Coumadin the rest of my life and that has been weekly blood tests and of course more susceptible to blood clots and multiple myeloma. Also, if I should have children they are at risk for me passing the gene to them! I am devastated. Those Marines were not told what they were walking into and they were not given masks or gloves. You pull an 18 year old kid who had just stepped out of hell on Iwo Jima and because he is a few days short on going home drop him off in another hell filled with toxins that I know the government knew about is horrific. How many generations are going to be affected? I want some answers!!!

Unknown said...

My tather died at 36 years old of lung cancer after serving in Japan immediately after serving in the Phillipines in 1945. After the fighting there they were sent after the bomb had dropped in Nagasaki (within a few weeks) to help the people out and clean up. My mother was turned down (she had 2 small children) for compensation due to a service related death. The army and government's stand has always been and continues to be "NO, not our fault or problem". It is very clear to us that my dad died due to his service. We have photos of him, camping out in Japan...they drank the water, sat in the dirt, ate the food etc. The gov't has essentially refused to study this (I believe Britain has) in expectations that everyone will die and nothing will need to be done. I have tried to read as much as possible on the subject. There is an organization called the National Assoc. of Atomic Vets (they also have a facebook group) which can give you info on filing a claim. It doesn't help that the military records from the army were burned to the ground in 1972 in Missouri.
Atomic Vets who were later present in the States and places like Bikini Atoll have recourse through the Justice Dept and some have received recompense. Atomic Vets from WW11 are required to go through the VA which is laughable being they cannot handle anything from Vietnam on.
I would like to add that my sister and I both have suffered from immune illnesses since childhood. My sister's illness is very rare and in studies has been directly linked to people whose parents have been directly exposed to radiation. People are handing this down to children and grandchildren but the Army and gov't has made a seriously concerted effort to hide that fact.
If you want to attempt to get some help, the National Atomic Vets association can point you in the right direction.

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jwn said...

My grandfather was in Nagasaki as part of the clean up crew. He was in the Armored Infantry as a Tank Driver, so they put him on a caterpillar.

He had respiratory problems and a tracheotomy, as well as perhaps the worst medical condition Gian Beret Syndrome. He had a bad case with complete paralysis. While Grandpa was able to eventually regain much of his mobility through intense physical therapy, he walked with a cane the rest of his life. It was only through the VA that made that happen.

One thing was as a child when I stayed with my grandparents, we often were at the VFW on Saturday nights. I will never forget Grandpa and his army buddies talking together and often crying. These were tough guys, and really a cross section of the community. Some rich, some not so much,. but on those nights they were soldiers reliving the horrible experiences of the death and destruction and aftermath of the atomic bombs.

I am sorry for the Japanese people killed, but that war cost our family my Great Uncle, and much of Grandpa's health, as well as the mental health of the men he served with.

I thinmk what we overlook is that we all see the movies that show killing and radiation, and scary images. These people in Japan had been the direct victims of a totally new way to kill. And it didn't discriminate. Men, Women, Children, old people. Grandpa used to break into tears (when drinking) remembering the children. I can't imagine what he experienced.

All in all, they (Grandma an Grandpa) never received anything other than health care. Grandpa was an Atomic Veteran and didn't even have a medal for that.

When I hear all this talk of reparation for slavery, and native Americans, I can sympathize, as these folks (men and women who served in theater) deserve the same.

Those bombs destroyed American serviceman's lives. And our family never received even an explanation (grandpas medical records were sealed on his death and we couldn't see them).

Seems time for some answers why precautions weren't taken (they new the danger, but nothing was done. the men and women were told it was safe.

So as far as the feds go, case closed.

Unknown said...

when dad had been drinking he started on his Nagasaki speech. 2nd MC Div, engineer, captain. is there any first person accounts of this?

Unknown said...

I'm sorry!

Unknown said...

My uncle served in the 2nd marine division as well. Was sent to Nagasaki after the battle of Saipan and Tinian. He lived to be 92 left us In 2018 but also was diagnosed w prostate cancer in 2004 he always wondered if it was from the war