Finding the newspaper clipping that proved my father toured the ruins of Nagasaki in 1945, shortly after the use of the atomic bomb as a weapon for just the second time in the history of the world, was important to me for several reasons.
I've been filing a claim with the Veterans Administration for compensation for his exposure to the radiation there: late in his life he has developed two forms of cancer and his doctors told me very clearly that exposure at Nagasaki could easily explain this. So I've sent the newspaper article to the VA and am hoping for the best on that.
A page from my grandmother's World War II scrapbook, featuring clippings about my father.
But more than that, I wanted this event in our family history to be recorded for all the generations to come. My father was there and saw with his own eyes how terrible it was and his words are descriptive as well as give insight to his character:
He wrote: "Yesterday I learned first hand what President Truman meant when he said, 'As an alternative we offer you prompt and utter destruction.' We drove down to Nagasaki. That place is really a mess."
My father was recalling that this did not have to happen. The U.S. had offered Japan the alternative of surrender. They chose not to do so. Many more lives on both sides would have been lost in a bloody, terrible, lengthy invasion of the Japanese home islands. But Nagasaki was also a terrible choice.
He continues: "The stench of the dead is still present in some places ... Anyone who had the starting of a war in his mind should see Nagasaki. I believe he would change his plans."
No one hates war like a soldier, my father once told me. And he said something similar to his mother in his last V-letter home, on Mother's Day 1945, while he was still in the thick of the Battle of Okinawa. I found this in the same scrapbook with the article about my father's Nagasaki experience, which came just a few months later:
"Let us hope this will be the last Mother's Day that mothers will have to be concerned about the whereabouts and safety of their sons ... I am looking forward to the day when I can send you a Grandmother's Day card. I hope it won't be too long until we can make that wish come true. Lots of Love, Ashley. "
Dad, home on leave, standing next to his proud father Joseph Roy Chapman, in the backyard of 1009 Palmetto in Homewood, Alabama. Shortly after this, he met my mother, married, and entered the last phase of World War II in the Pacific and then returned to the U.S. and lived happily ever after.
I've been looking for this World War II-era article for some time. I finally found it this week in a dusty old box at my parents' home in Los Altos.
The article, which is not labeled but appears to be from the Birmingham (Alabama) News, is based on a letter my father wrote home to his parents at the end of the war. I found his word's much as I have found him: intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate. I think if you click on the piece it will be big enough for you to read too. I'll have more about all this, later. But it is a slice of our family history--and American history--that I am so pleased has not been lost.
Before I had ever seen this photo, my father described to me his eyewitness astonishment at the the devastation of Nagasaki and the "leaning smokestacks" he saw there in September/October 1945.
On this August week in 1945 the world was changed forever with the release of the atom bombs at Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).
We could debate forever the efficacy of the decision to use these terrible weapons; but one thing you can say--nobody has been foolish enough to start a world war in the sixty-four years since.
My father was on Ie Shima, a tiny island less than a mile from Okinawa, when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The American fighter pilots, who flew from the airstrip he had built and was maintaining under daily bombings by the Japanese, said they could see the mushroom cloud that day when they went up on patrol.
Over Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. The A-bomb there ended the war and thus may have saved at least a million lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. But the end still came at a terrible cost.
It was all over very soon after that, and my father--on standby to be part of the invasion of the Japanese home islands (scheduled for November 1945)--was relieved, along with the rest of America, that the horrible war was finally at an end. On September 23, the U.S. Marines came ashore at Sasebo to begin the Occupation and shortly afterward (and before the typhoon hit on October 8, 1945) my father and his Army Corps of Engineers aviation battalion also came ashore in Sasebo to occupy and improve the airfield there.
My father on steamy Ie Shima, July 1945.
He never spoke much about the three months he spent in Sasebo. He and my mother had married in Spokane, Washington in 1944, after a rather brief courtship. When they met, Dad was getting ready to go overseas to be part of the Battle of Okinawa. When he came home in November 1945, she reports that all he said was: "The Japanese children were really cute."
It wasn't until many years later, when I was visiting my grandmother in Spokane and we were paging through her scrapbook, that a newspaper clipping caught my eye and began to fill in some of the blanks. Dated September or October 1945, it was headlined something like this: "Captain Chapman Visits A-Bomb Site" and told about my father's visit to Nagasaki, quoting him on the destruction he had seen there. I wondered what he had been doing there? I wondered why he had never mentioned it? I wanted to ask him about it. But until recently, I did not.
In recent years, with the onset of his illness, my Dad has been talking much more about his memories of World War II, so I've begun to research the War's end in the Pacific, the part of the conflict about which I've known the least. Sasebo, where my father was part of the first days of the Occupation, is just 29 miles across a very small bay from Nagasaki.
According to the Marines Corps archives on the Occupation of the Sasebo/Nagasaki area, dated September 1945: "Lieutenant Colonel George L. Cooper later recalled: '[Nagasaki] Ground zero appeared to have been a rather large sports stadium [actually ground zero was bounded by the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and by the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north] and all of us were categorically ordered to stay out of any place within pistol shot of this area. The result of this order was that everybody and his brother headed directly for ground zero as soon as they could, and in no time at all had picked the area clean of all movable objects."
Which explains why my father toured Nagasaki. The war was over. He, like every other G.I., was bored and wanted to go home. He, like every other G.I., wanted to see the most amazing site in the world that was, in his case, just a jeep ride away. He went sightseeing. And what he saw there was so terrible he didn't speak about it for sixty-four years.
What was there, I asked him recently? "What was there? Nothing was there. It was flattened. Just those tilting smokestacks. Nothing else."
In May of this year, my father was diagnosed with leukemia/lymphoma. We're not yet sure what the treatment will be since he has a number of other ailments, but this week, during a visit to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, I told the doctor of my father's visit to the A-bomb site at Nagasaki. She raised her eyebrows. Leukemia/lymphoma can sometimes be connected with exposure to radiation. So we're looking into it further.
My father is going to be 90 in four months and, according to his doctor, something else is likely to take his life before this new disease does so.
But the connection is food for thought. He may be paying the price for a soldier's curiosity. He was very surprised to still be alive at the end of the War, he says. He probably thought he was now invincible.
Captain Chapman (third from left, back row) with his men on Ie Shima. Behind the group, you can see the small channel of water that separates Ie Shima from the hilly terrain of Okinawa. Behind the group of men on the other side, you see what looks like a rice field surrounded by a white picket fence, topped by a tall flag post sporting an America flag. Those are graves and the white wood are the crosses. July 1945.
A page from my grandmother's World War II scrapbook, featuring clippings about my father.
Dad, home on leave, standing next to his proud father Joseph Roy Chapman, in the backyard of 1009 Palmetto in Homewood, Alabama. Shortly after this, he met my mother, married, and entered the last phase of World War II in the Pacific and then returned to the U.S. and lived happily ever after.
