Human Resilience

A few days ago, in his weblog, "Rook's Rant," its proprietor, Guy Andrew Hall, wrote this, in that very distinctive, no holding back style of his:

I have been thinking, right from the start of reports of damaged levees and increased flooding after the hurricane hit that New Orleans was a dead city. But in actuality, I think it will be the death of the whole region.

I can remember when I thought in similar lines, and probably for a longer time. Then I went to Hiroshima.

I arrived there in the summer of 1959, fully expecting that that city would still have waiting for me at least a few obvious signs of the total devastation that it had suffered from being the first city in history to be atom bombed. Of course it was 14 years later, but in my mind the Bomb had exploded only yesterday, an impression helped along by repeated readings of John Hershey's very vivid "Hiroshima."

I was surprised to find that, if I hadn't already known what had happened there, I would have seen absolutely no sign that that city had ever been anything other than the normal prosperous, bustling, glistening Japanese big burg, of which I had seen a number by that time -- and never mind that most of those cities, some much larger, had also risen anew from the ashes in the same brief period of years.

Fortunately, assuring me that I was in the right place after all, the Hiroshima city fathers had established a large "Peace Park" in the area of Ground Zero. And they had left intact the ruins of one and only one small atom-bombed structure, an industrial arts building, directly above which the "genshi-bakudan" had detonated.

Today that modest conglomeration of several dozen blasted bricks gripped by a few twisted steel beams is still there -- kept in that state of ruin by the Japanese as a reminder, and most likely at some expense, else it would long ago have crumbled into dust.

I knew about the incredible resilience of humankind, but that excursion drove it home.

The dozen and some years it had taken me to get to Hiroshima were in fact much more than enough for a city's complete recovery, no matter what it had undergone. Using conventional explosives, the U.S. bombed many other cities in Japan with matching thoroughness, but almost as fast as those cities could be demolished, the Japanese would build them up again, and that was probably one of the main reasons that the Americans felt it was necessary finally to use something as ultimate as the atom bomb. But in view of the already demonstrated Japanese resilience, how ultimate was it?

Not totally. That's my belief. Instead, I think the development that really drove the Japanese to surrender after the second atom bombing, at Nagasaki, was the belated Russian entrance at nearly the same hour into the fighting against them. That sank their hopes without a bubble.

So how's this for a heresy that, if it escaped these confines, would drive all true devotees of the Military Channel into an uncontrollable rage? It's possible that just as Stalingrad had a lot more to do with the victory over the Germans than did the landings at Normandy, it was the U.S.S.R. turning the attentions of its mighty war machine next to the Japanese in Manchuria that was the clincher in the Pacific, more so than the doings of the Enola Gay and Bock's Car, thus downgrading those to mere atrocities.