Kokura’s Luck

The earth is turning across the dateline and the anniversary of the day has already happened in Hiroshima . It is another round number, sixty this time, since the sleek B-29 named after the pilot’s mother arrived in the morning sky.

The mayor of the city called for the nuclear powers to abandon their arsenals and “stop jeopardizing human survival.” There were prayers and water offered for the dead, as has become traditional.

I keep the memory of them with me on this week each year, because they will not leave me. The three days that string themselves together in early August will not permit me to forget. There is the death of Hiroshima today , and tomorrow, when the Russians entered the war against Japan , almost four years since the Americans were attacked, and eight since the Emperor’s men butchered 370,000 Chinese at Nanking .

The third day in the string is the day of the second bomb, intended for the city of Kokura , an ancient castle-town that guarded the Straits of Shimonoseki between the home islands of Honshu and Kyushu . There is a saying in Japan that became popular after the death of Nagasaki . The phrase “Kokura’s Luck” means to escape a horrible fate without being aware of it.

The morning that Paul Tibbets flew to Hiroshima , mounds of military materiel were being moved from trains, pre-staged for the great and final battle that would thrust the Americans back into the sea. The final struggle was at hand, and with stoic courage, the Emperor, advised by his War Council, expected his people would triumph in the end.

The Japanese called this strategy of fierce resistance Ketsu Go, or “Operation Decisive.” The premise was that the suicidal attacks unleashed in the defense of Okinawa had stunned the Americans, and that inflicting similar huge casualties on the invasion of the Home Islands would force termination of the war on terms better than those of “Unconditional Surrender,” as announced in the Potsdam declaration.

The great secret of the war was the penetration of Axis military and diplomatic codes.

It was a stunning revelation to me when the secret became known in the 1970s, literally the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and cloaked in as many secrets that were held tighter than those of the nuclear program.

I will never forget finding a trove of papers in the trash on the way to grade school one morning with the phrase “Formerly Restricted Data” stamped prominently across the top. I took some with me, and looked at the electrical diagrams on the sheets of yellowed paper in class.

I did not know what they were, or what they meant. But they had been part of a personal archive of someone who worked on the Bomb. There is a stark contrast to the papers of the codebreakers. The very fact of their existence was not formally de-classified for twenty-five years after the bomb was dropped, and not all of them then.

The Brits got their teeth into the codes first, courtesy of a prescient Pole who stole a prototype of the German enciphering machine called “Enigma.” The first computers were developed to crack the millions of numerical possibilities to reveal the true text within the scrambled letters and numbers. The British system of control of this astonishing secret was called “Ultra,” and if you understand it, the collection, processing, analysis, access and distribution of the radio intelligence, you have the key to understanding everything that came after.

The American version was called “Magic,” and was oriented toward the Pacific conflict. The Allies employed a division of labor on production of the sensitive material, and without understanding who saw the daily Magic reports, it is impossible to evaluate the relative truth or importance of diaries and memoirs that remain of the actors of the day.

The daily summaries of the intercepted radio traffic were produced for a very small audience. They were called the Diplomatic Summary , the Far East Summary , and the European Summary . There were some who were in the know, and there were others, very important ones, who did not.

General Leslie Grove, commander of the Manhattan Project, did not have access to the summary reports. Nor did the Vice President, or workmanlike commanders like Curtis LeMay, who was directing the campaign to turn the industrial targets of Japan into ash.

Redacted versions of the sole remaining file copy of the Diplomatic Summary became available in 1978, and served to buttress the contention that has become the mainstream of the academic version history: the Japanese wanted to surrender, the bomb was not necessary to force the Japanese to surrender, and the use of the awful weapons was an act of monstrous brutality with an eye toward the intimidation, not of the suffering Japanese people, but of Stalin.

There were enough missing passages in the documents that were released that could support the idea that there was more in the record that needed to be covered up. Suspicion of the government was quite justified, at least by those of us who grew up after the great conflict was ended.

But the gaps in the record were actually intended to protect another sensitive secret. The codebreakers were also busily at work on the communications of our Allies. The complete, unaltered set of documents was not made public until 1995- and by that time the damage and suspicion had done their work. History was effectively re-written, the vanquished became victors, and the world was stood on its head.

It is good, perhaps, that those who read the original reports in their time and made decisions upon them were in their graves by the time the revisionists began to spin their webs of conspiracy, else they might have felt the urge to break the oaths they swore to keep the great secret.

The diplomatic traffic demonstrated that the Japanese warlords were interested in preserving themselves along with their Emperor. The most sincere attempt to sue for terms through the Japanese embassy in Moscow was explicitly stated in terms that the militarists would remain in a post-War government.

There was more, though.

In addition to the diplomatic communications was a flood of military information that revealed something quite disturbing.

The Japanese had discovered that the invasion of the Home Islands would begin with a massive assault on  Kyushu . The Americans called it “Operation Olympic.” The amphibious assault would feature the landing of up to nine divisions on the rocky beaches, and then a steady march to the north, and a jump across the narrow Strait of Shimonoseki to Honshu and thence to Tokyo .

American intelligence felt there were no more than three Japanese divisions available to stop them. “Magic” radio intercepts indicted that the force assembled under Ketsu Go made the ratio actually closer to one-to-one. The landings would have been mass suicide.

I lived on a ship in the old Imperial Navy Yard at Yokosuka, on Tokyo Bay. The stories about what lay beneath us were the stuff of legend. Some of the tunnels were said to lead twenty miles underground and still be full of ammunition. The steep rocky hills were honeycombed with fighting positions. The American Navy utilized the old underground command post until this year, and there were stories of underground hospitals for the casualties to come.

At the Atsugi airbase where MacArthur landed on his private plane, underground revetments remained, and a concealed aircraft assembly plant so the latest model Mitsubishi fighters could fly right out. I even met one of the greatest of their pilots, the legendary Saburo Sakai. An old man then, he was still serene in his mission to kill the invaders, if called.

To the north, at Misawa, there were dozens of fighters of the latest model in concealed caves. They were booby-trapped after the Emperor’s declaration of surrender, and after one went off, killing the American investigator, concrete was poured down the portals and the past was sealed off.

So, surrounded by the evidence that Olympic would be resisted to the last man, I was increasingly dismayed as the historic record was hi-jacked by the revisionists.

The complete record indicates that from mid-July of 1945 through this first week in August, a huge military buildup continued on Kyushu . On this morning so long ago, the trains were disgorging materiel as the shimmering silver shape of Colonel Tibbet’s aircraft came into view.

High above the city, conditions were deemed favorable for the drop. A few minutes later, the city died in flames. The mission went like grim clockwork. The seven bombers that flew all played their parts, the weather pathfinders, the deception planes. Everything went according to plan.

Flying in the chase plane “Great Artiste” was a New York Times reporter named William L. Laurence, personally recruited by General Leslie Grove to document the first nuclear test at Trinity Flat in the Alamogordo Desert . He was later selected to witness the operational employment of the weapons in person.

His words are more florid if less mystical than those of Chief Scientist Robert Oppenheimer. Laurence was a word hack, like me. Oppenheimer fiddled with the inner workings of the cosmos. He breathed the couplet of Shiva, from the Bagavad-gita when he saw Trinity light up: “I am death. I am become the destroyer of worlds.”

Laurence donned his welding goggles when the rest of the Great Artiste crew did, and was transfixed by “a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high . . . no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes . . .a giant mushroom came shooting out of the top to 45,000 feet, a mushroom top that was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, a thousand geysers rolled into one…”

The cool, phlegmatic mission commander, Paul Tibbets, was greeted by General “Tooey” Spaatz, commander of Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific when Enola Gay landed back at Tinian Atoll . There was a cheering crowd, and Spaatz pinned the Distinguished Service Medal on the wiry little Colonel. The other crew members received the Air Medal.

They were mostly comfortable with what they had done. Not all of them. Some of the crew would not talk about their participation and took their memories to the grave. I have a gray feeling about the Bomb and its use, too. I worked around nuclear weapons for several years, and was simultaneously attracted and repulsed by their cool beauty.

I’m glad I never had to be part of their use. I visited Nagasaki once, long ago, and saw where the Catholic cathedral had stood that morning, packed with worshippers. I left silent and sober.

Kokura was completely cloud-covered when Shiva came that morning, and death had to move on. There was a tiny hole in the clouds above Nagasaki, permitting the bomb to be dropped.  And so there is the story of Kokura’s luck.

Luck had nothing to do with Hiroshima . At 8:15 this morning, the moment of the blast, Hiroshima ‘s trolleys stopped and a crowd smaller than the number that died gathered at Peace Memorial Park for a moment of silence, broken by the tolling of a bronze Shinto bell.

A flock of doves was released into the sky.

Sometimes I feel the urge to cry for the dead. But I am easily confused. Sometimes I can’t discern which ones merit the tears.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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