Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [327]
Among some ordinary people news of the bomb prompted not triumphalism, but the darkest reflections. A letter to the New York Times described Hiroshima as “a stain on our national life. When the exhilaration of this wonderful discovery has passed, we will think with shame of the first use to which it was put.” British housewife Nella Last recorded in her diary how she and her Lancashire neighbour received the news: “Old Joe called upstairs851, brandishing the Daily Mail: ‘By Goy, lass, but it looks as if some of your daft fancies and fears are reet. Look at this.’ I’ve rarely seen Jim so excited—or upset. He said: ‘Read it—why, this will change all t’world. Ee, I wish I was thutty years younger and could see it aw.’” Mrs. Last, however, reacted very differently: “I felt sick—I wished I was thirty years older, and out of it all…This atomic bomb business is so dreadful.”
Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado declared that the bombs proved that universal military training was stupid. President Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor, said it showed the importance of goodwill visits such as Soviet trades unionists were then making to the United States. Leaders of the oil and coal industries issued statements reassuring stockholders that for the foreseeable future the new discovery would have little effect on existing fuels. Some left-wingers demanded that atomic patent rights and means of production should remain controlled by Congress, and not be allowed to fall into the hands of large oil or munitions combines. To the embarrassment even of many capitalists, the prospect of an end of hostilities caused the New York Stock Exchange to fall sharply. A correspondent of the London Sunday Times wrote: “It is always unedifying when moneyed interests are revealed as benefiting or believing themselves to benefit more from war than from peace.”
Some senior U.S. soldiers in the Philippines were disgruntled to find themselves facing financial loss of a different kind. One of their number had returned from a liaison mission to the Marianas shortly before, reporting that Twentieth Air Force officers had created a $10,000 pool, to bet that the war would end before October. Since MacArthur’s people knew that Olympic was not scheduled until November, some hastened to accept the air force wager. “From what we knew852 and the way it looked to us, that was an easy bet to win. We started taking up the $10,000, but we didn’t get very far with it,” Krueger’s G3, Clyde Eddleman, wrote ruefully. “…The next thing we knew Hiroshima disappeared.”
A British corporal of Fourteenth Army in Burma, George MacDonald Fraser, noted: “It is now widely held853 that the dropping of atomic bombs was unnecessary because the Japanese were ready to give in…I wish those who hold that view had been present to explain the position to the little bastard who came howling out of a thicket near the Sittang, full of spite and fury, in that first week of August. He was half-starved and near naked, and his only weapon was a bamboo stave, but he was in no mood to surrender.”
Nowhere was relief at the dropping of the bomb more intense and heartfelt than in prison camps throughout the Japanese empire. Yet even among those for whom Hiroshima promised deliverance, a few displayed more complex emotions. Lt. Stephen Abbott’s closest friend, Paul, a devout Christian, entered their bleak barrack room in Japan and said: “Stephen—a ghastly thing has happened854.” He described the destruction of Hiroshima, as reported on the radio, then knelt in prayer. Eighteen months later, Abbott wrote a letter for publication in The Times, citing his own status as a former POW, and arguing that a demonstration