thedrifter
08-22-08, 06:28 AM
A World at War: Atomic bomb's devastation provided a lesson in humanity
Posted by dsims August 22, 2008 01:00AM
"There are no ordinary lives," Ken Burns said of those who served in a global cataclysm so momentous that the filmmaker titled his 2007 documentary simply "The War."
Many who served in so many different ways during World War II are gone now.
Some took their stories with them.
But not this one.
By Aug. 9, 1945, Jack Madison had barely beaten the odds against survival.
The U.S. Navy motorman's machinist mate 2nd class was wounded while fighting the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and managed to live through the Bataan Death March.
He had become a 90-pound shadow of his former self as one of many Allied prisoners of war working as slave laborers in coal mines outside Nagasaki, Japan.
But the fortunes of a man who would one day teach high school math in Northeast Ohio would be tested once more that day.
Madison died in 2003. According to stories he told family, friends and a book author, he had been standing at the edge of a coal-washing pit when the second atomic bomb used in World War II hit Nagasaki, three days after the first attack on Hiroshima.
The blast threw Madison into the coal pit. He was knocked unconscious but still alive thanks to nearby hills that deflected much of the explosion that ultimately claimed an estimated 70,000 lives.
A month later, after Japan had surrendered, Navy Seaman 1st Class Donald Smith, a crewman aboard the USS Marathon attack transport, arrived in Nagasaki to help collect the Allied POWs.
The sight of the shattered city -- described in one Japanese report as "a graveyard without a tombstone standing" -- was unlike anything Smith had seen since joining the Navy in 1944.
"It was devastated. There wasn't anything there. Just chimneys poking up here and there," recalled Smith, 82, of Elyria.
The former farm boy from Avon had been through some tense times by then, starting with the invasion of Okinawa, when he ferried Marines to the beachhead.
"There were 38 Marines in our landing craft, and we were all scared. We didn't know what to expect," he said.
Fortunately for the sailors, unfortunately for the Marines, the Japanese held their fire until the invaders were well inland.
Then there was the night when a Japanese suicide submarine -- essentially a manned torpedo packing 3,300 pounds of explosives -- blew a huge hole in Smith's ship. Most of the 38 sailors killed in the attack died in their sleeping quarters amidships, Smith said.
The sailor would also weather a massive typhoon that swept through Okinawa, sinking 12 ships and grounding more than 200 others. Smith said his ship climbed and dropped between 35-foot waves, and whether you were topside or below decks, "you'd have to hang on for dear life with both hands."
But an equally enduring memory has always been the blasted city of Nagasaki, and the rows of emaciated POWs lining the docks.
"They were half-starved, but when they went through our mess hall, the food had to be rationed or else they'd eat too much and it'd kill them," Smith said.
Jack Madison, who eventually settled in Middleburg Heights, may or may not have been among those POWs.
Before his death from heart problems at age 81, he rarely talked about the war, his family and friends said.
A story he did tell once was that after the bomb blast and his fall -- injuring his head and breaking some ribs -- he and other POWs were kept in the coal pit for three days. He said that when they returned to the prison camp, they saw the remains of others there who hadn't escaped the blast. "It was a pretty raunchy scene," he recalled in a taped interview with a family member.
Madison's daughter, Jackie Maslanka, 52, of Parma, remembered that her father "had no patience for complaining when there was food in front of you. He once said, 'If you had to eat rats, you'd never complain again.'
"He never, ever complained about a meal, or anything else for that matter," she added. "He'd always say he was living on borrowed time. He felt that every day he had was a bonus, and he literally lived his life that way."
A friend, Dane Carney, 61, of Parma, recalled, "The amazing thing about him was that he did not hate the Japanese after the war. Maybe it was part of his desire to leave the past behind him."
Or maybe it was part of something that Donald Smith also learned.
At Nagasaki, 63 years ago, both sailors witnessed the impact of the ultimate weapon of human destruction during World War II.
And yet, as Smith said, the biggest lesson he brought home from the war was to "get along with your fellow man."
Ellie
Posted by dsims August 22, 2008 01:00AM
"There are no ordinary lives," Ken Burns said of those who served in a global cataclysm so momentous that the filmmaker titled his 2007 documentary simply "The War."
Many who served in so many different ways during World War II are gone now.
Some took their stories with them.
But not this one.
By Aug. 9, 1945, Jack Madison had barely beaten the odds against survival.
The U.S. Navy motorman's machinist mate 2nd class was wounded while fighting the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and managed to live through the Bataan Death March.
He had become a 90-pound shadow of his former self as one of many Allied prisoners of war working as slave laborers in coal mines outside Nagasaki, Japan.
But the fortunes of a man who would one day teach high school math in Northeast Ohio would be tested once more that day.
Madison died in 2003. According to stories he told family, friends and a book author, he had been standing at the edge of a coal-washing pit when the second atomic bomb used in World War II hit Nagasaki, three days after the first attack on Hiroshima.
The blast threw Madison into the coal pit. He was knocked unconscious but still alive thanks to nearby hills that deflected much of the explosion that ultimately claimed an estimated 70,000 lives.
A month later, after Japan had surrendered, Navy Seaman 1st Class Donald Smith, a crewman aboard the USS Marathon attack transport, arrived in Nagasaki to help collect the Allied POWs.
The sight of the shattered city -- described in one Japanese report as "a graveyard without a tombstone standing" -- was unlike anything Smith had seen since joining the Navy in 1944.
"It was devastated. There wasn't anything there. Just chimneys poking up here and there," recalled Smith, 82, of Elyria.
The former farm boy from Avon had been through some tense times by then, starting with the invasion of Okinawa, when he ferried Marines to the beachhead.
"There were 38 Marines in our landing craft, and we were all scared. We didn't know what to expect," he said.
Fortunately for the sailors, unfortunately for the Marines, the Japanese held their fire until the invaders were well inland.
Then there was the night when a Japanese suicide submarine -- essentially a manned torpedo packing 3,300 pounds of explosives -- blew a huge hole in Smith's ship. Most of the 38 sailors killed in the attack died in their sleeping quarters amidships, Smith said.
The sailor would also weather a massive typhoon that swept through Okinawa, sinking 12 ships and grounding more than 200 others. Smith said his ship climbed and dropped between 35-foot waves, and whether you were topside or below decks, "you'd have to hang on for dear life with both hands."
But an equally enduring memory has always been the blasted city of Nagasaki, and the rows of emaciated POWs lining the docks.
"They were half-starved, but when they went through our mess hall, the food had to be rationed or else they'd eat too much and it'd kill them," Smith said.
Jack Madison, who eventually settled in Middleburg Heights, may or may not have been among those POWs.
Before his death from heart problems at age 81, he rarely talked about the war, his family and friends said.
A story he did tell once was that after the bomb blast and his fall -- injuring his head and breaking some ribs -- he and other POWs were kept in the coal pit for three days. He said that when they returned to the prison camp, they saw the remains of others there who hadn't escaped the blast. "It was a pretty raunchy scene," he recalled in a taped interview with a family member.
Madison's daughter, Jackie Maslanka, 52, of Parma, remembered that her father "had no patience for complaining when there was food in front of you. He once said, 'If you had to eat rats, you'd never complain again.'
"He never, ever complained about a meal, or anything else for that matter," she added. "He'd always say he was living on borrowed time. He felt that every day he had was a bonus, and he literally lived his life that way."
A friend, Dane Carney, 61, of Parma, recalled, "The amazing thing about him was that he did not hate the Japanese after the war. Maybe it was part of his desire to leave the past behind him."
Or maybe it was part of something that Donald Smith also learned.
At Nagasaki, 63 years ago, both sailors witnessed the impact of the ultimate weapon of human destruction during World War II.
And yet, as Smith said, the biggest lesson he brought home from the war was to "get along with your fellow man."
Ellie