When I was ten years old and still in junior school, I read two books that
were in the school library written by the same author whose name I do not
remember. Both books were fiction aimed at young readers and both were about
events in the Second World War (this would have been in 1966, so only 21
years after the end of the war; it still resounded loud in the culture of
the time). I don't remember what one book was about, but the other started a
life-long interest: it was about the atomic bomb and the events that led it
to be dropped on Hiroshima. I don't know quite why this caught my
imagination so strongly; maybe because it was only three days after my
birthday, so I felt a 'calendar connection'.
Either at junior school or secondary school, in an exercise I wrote a free
verse poem about this; the only lines that I remember were something like
'The Enola Gay [the name of the airplane that dropped the bomb] flew through
the sky on a sunny day". I remember feeling very apologetic about the rhyme
Gay/day as we were supposed to be writing free verse.
In my second year at BGS, we were allowed to join school clubs, so I joined
the chemistry club. Maybe even then I knew something of the physics behind
the bomb, for I proposed to the amusement of the master in charge that I
wanted to build an atomic bomb. I knew about the separation methods between
Uranium 238 and 235, but obviously I had no idea of the quantities required
nor of the damage that the radiation would create. I was advised to stick to
something simpler; this probably led to me creating plastics. I would make a
terrible stink in our kitchen at home by boiling together urea and
formaldehyde that I obtained from our local chemist (pharmacist), after
explaining what I needed those chemicals for.
I learnt a great deal of the development of the bomb by reading Richard
Feynman (both his books and his biography) and a little from the biography
of Robert Oppenheimer. A few days ago I read a new book called 'The
Hiroshima men' that didn't go into the physics of the bomb, but rather
discussed the Pacific war, the various island campaigns and what life was
like in Hiroshima both before and after.
I have to admit that as a European, I knew very little about the Far East
campaign. I'm embarrassed to say that my main sources of information were
'The Cryptonomicon' (once again) and one book by Tom Clancy whose name I
don't recall but was centered on Saipan in the Mariana islands. I did know
that the Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian but I didn't know that Saipan
was close to Tinian. I did know the name of the pilot, Paul Tibbets, but I
didn't know that his mother's name was Enola Gay (and thus the plane).
So this book added a great deal of my understanding of the Pacific war and
the A-bomb whilst duplicating very little. It is only fitting that I read
this book only a week or two before the 80th anniversary of the
major event described.
Shortly after having written the above words, I find myself engrossed in what might be termed 'a historical romp', called 'The Turing Protocol", by one Nick Croydon. This plays fast and loose with history; like 'The Cryptonomicon', we have a fictional Alan Turing who does a lot of things that the real Turing did, but also a lot of things that the real Turing did not, such as inventing a machine for sending message back though time, called Nautilus. It is used when 'in real life', it is decided to have the D-day landings at Calais, due to supposedly bad weather at Normandy. A massacre occurs. Fictional Turing sends himself a message back in time by two weeks, to convince Churchill to stand fast on the target of Normandy, even if Eisenhower invokes bad weather as a reason to land at Calais. I've just got up to the following paragraphs
On the 6th of August 1945, the uranium bomb codenamed ‘Little Boy’ was loaded on to a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay. After a six-hour flight, Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped his weapon from 31,000 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb exploded 1500 feet above the city at 8.15 in the morning, destroying every building in a one-mile radius.... The war was over, but the world had changed forever. The military use of atomic bombs had a profound effect on Alan. He knew that, through technology, weapons would get more powerful, faster and smaller. He was determined that Nautilus and its power should never be weaponised. Nautilus’s legacy should be to prevent the horrors of war, to save lives. He considered whether Nautilus could be used to prevent such an atrocity, but came up short. The Americans would never have changed their minds and the Japanese would never have surrendered solely from the threat of destruction. His only hope was that once the world experienced the power of atomic weapons, they would never be used again.
On the 6th of August 1945, the uranium bomb codenamed ‘Little Boy’ was loaded on to a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay. After a six-hour flight, Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped his weapon from 31,000 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb exploded 1500 feet above the city at 8.15 in the morning, destroying every building in a one-mile radius.... The war was over, but the world had changed forever. The military use of atomic bombs had a profound effect on Alan. He knew that, through technology, weapons would get more powerful, faster and smaller. He was determined that Nautilus and its power should never be weaponised. Nautilus’s legacy should be to prevent the horrors of war, to save lives. He considered whether Nautilus could be used to prevent such an atrocity, but came up short. The Americans would never have changed their minds and the Japanese would never have surrendered solely from the threat of destruction. His only hope was that once the world experienced the power of atomic weapons, they would never be used again.
There is no escaping the legacy of Hiroshima.
This day in blog history:
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 275 | Back to school | MBA, Project management | |
| 1412 | My father's eyes (slideshow) | Home movies, Father, Youtube, Song videos |
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