Seeing Nagasaki two months after it was shattered by the atomic bomb on Aug. 9, 1945, was enough to turn Navy navigator Bill Hanson against war the rest of his life.
"It was a terrible sight. The destruction is hard to describe," said Hanson, a retired Ewa Beach accountant, who went to Japan as a Navy quartermaster to clear the seas of mines at the close of World War II.
"It was all a mangled mess," he said of the factories that once stood where the bomb exploded. At the center of the explosion was a Catholic church whose thick walls were reduced to rubble.
"It was like sitting in a bowl," with everything demolished within a 2-mile radius. Hanson recalled huge gas or oil tanks were uprooted and pushed onto their sides like they weighed nothing — "that’s what so impressed me."
The bomb that devastated Nagasaki came three days after the U.S. dropped the first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima in a pivotal move to bring a quick end to World War II and save American lives. It worked. With 120,000 Japanese killed instantly, a crippled Japan surrendered unconditionally within a week.
When Hanson, 87, read about Honpa Hongwanji’s Hawaii Betsuin’s annual peace walk Saturday to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, his strong feelings about the need for peace moved him to call the Buddhist headquarters to express his support. "I’ve always had a spot in my heart for Nagasaki because I was there," but he won’t be participating because of a disability.
Hanson, born and raised in California, said he got to know the Japanese people in the month his mine sweeper was stationed in a nearby district. "They showed us no animosity. I never found a Japanese person who was angry at us. They did not show fear of us. I think they were just glad the war was over," he said.
Living in Hawaii the past 27 years, he’s gained even more respect for Japan’s efforts to establish a peaceful relationship with the U.S., and as for the Japanese, "they’re a class people," he added.
He’s often thought, "Why in the world did the government decide to bomb those two cities? I think they could have accomplished the same thing by letting the bombs go off in remote areas just to show how powerful they were. Later on I read that even (Gen. Dwight D.) Eisenhower thought it was not necessary." (Eisenhower commanded all Allied forces in Europe.)
His experience in Nagasaki led to his conviction that wars are "totally unnecessary. In every war we’ve lost (thousands), and many came back missing one or two legs, or their brains are smashed, and they suffer the rest of their lives because of that. It just turned me against war. That just makes me so angry with the federal government for allowing that to happen," he said.
