Shadow Of The Bomb
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday August 4, 2005
Sixty years ago the atom bomb forced Japan's surrender. Memories fade but we should heed its power then and the potential now, writes John Huxley.
FOR the crew of the Australian destroyer HMAS Quiberon, stationed about 100 kilometres off the Japanese coast, August 6, 1945, began much like most other war-duty days: looking and listening for the tell-tale whine of fighter planes. British planes, whose pilots would need rescuing if forced to ditch before they could land safely on their aircraft carrier. And Japanese planes, whose Kamikaze pilots - like modern suicide bombers - would crash into Australian and British ships attached to the United States Third Fleet. But some time after breakfast that morning, a different sound was heard: a distant rumble, that turned into a deep drone, recalls Sydney man Morris Willcoxson, who was working below deck as a communications coder. "Then, a few minutes later they flew over us. One after another. These big bombers. It was really odd." It was history in the making. Not until a few days later did Willcoxson, now 80, learn that among the big Boeing B-29s was a plane called Enola Gay and that it was carrying a 12.5 kiloton atom bomb. Shortly after 8.15am the bomb, ironically dubbed "Little Boy", would be dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. By nightfall, about 50,000 would be dead. Within days, Japan would have surrendered. Like most people in the allied countries, Willcoxson was initially elated the war was over. "At the time we didn't realise the intensity and brutality of the bomb," he says from his Eastwood home. His crewmate, Jack Salvado, did. In 1946, he visited the ruins of Hiroshima. "It was devastating, disastrous," says Salvado, 82, who lives in Anglesea, Victoria. "Something you never forget." Sadly, those who were there at the dawn of the atomic age, like Willcoxson and Salvado, and thousands of other Australians who served in the Pacific campaign, are disappearing fast. Of the NSW members of the Quiberon Ex-Servicemen's Association who served in World War II, only a handful remain. And those "pre-boomers" who grew up in the shadow of the bomb, who squirmed at apocalyptic movies such as Dr Strangelove, marched in Sydney's huge Palm Sunday peace protests and still recall Cold War crises with a shiver, are ageing. Or at least, losing their public voices. As Dr David Walker, professor of Australian studies at Victoria's Deakin University, suggests, the momentous events of the 1940s and '50s must sometimes seem like "something from a neolithic age" to today's children. So, as Australia commemorates their 60th anniversary, what do the dropping of the first atom bomb and Victory over Japan (or Victory in the Pacific, as many now prefer to call it) mean to today's generation of young men and women? And to children in schools? Has the memory of the bomb, to adapt the words of the poet T.S. Eliot, become more of a whimper than a bang? Does Hiroshima still resonate? Or does it seem, like VP Day, remote, almost unrecognisable? Though linked, the two events are, of course, separate issues. As a former NSW RSL president, Rusty Priest, says: "Hiroshima was a means to an end, the defeat of Japan, costing lives on one hand and saving lives on the other hand. The celebration is really for victory in the Pacific, the end of a dreadful war and the return of loved ones, while remembering those who did not return and those left behind. They'll carry the scars of war forever."Regrettably, the commemoration of these events now barely within living memory has never been as widespread, as wholehearted, as that reserved for the far more distant, globally less significant, Gallipoli campaign of 90 years ago."More people now embrace the story of Kokoda Track," says David Low, who has been working with Walker on a project called Memories of War. "But, sadly, so much of the Pacific campaign was a messy, unholy slog. "As well, Australia was marginalised [by the Americans]. It's somehow difficult to make a good nation-building story out of it all. Even the treatment of Australian prisoners of war doesn't sit easily with the notions of bravery and mateship in action that you got with Gallipoli. It's almost like a competing notion of what constitutes bravery." Similarly, Low says, Australia's perception of Hiroshima has been ambivalent, and its willingness to embrace the message in its mushroom cloud has been intermittent and, as far as the abandonment of nuclear weapons is concerned, ineffectual. As self-styled "old lefties" such as Bronwyn Marks and young activists such as Kieran Longridge acknowledge, in crude marketing terms, "the bomb" - as symbol of mass, potentially total, destruction - remains a difficult concept to sell. "It's a potent image, but one that for many people engenders a feeling of helplessness - especially when there are so many other issues to worry about," says Marks, president of the local Hiroshima Day Committee. Longridge, a peace and nuclear disarmament campaigner for Greenpeace, agrees. "The problem is: how do you take a place of fear and make it empowering?" Australians have been asking themselves the same question since August 1945 as they ran through what the historian Tim Sherratt, from Canberra, has called the "the good atom, bad atom routine". Utopia or apocalypse? Relaying the news from the ruins of Hiroshima, the Herald posed the appalling dilemma in two subheadings: "Terrifying new weapon" and "Big possibilities in peace." Humour was used to soften the horror. A cartoon showed a typical Aussie bloke reading the newspaper while his wife, bent on hands and knees, cleaned the kitchen floor. "The release of atomic energy is the most stupendous event in the history of mankind," the husband remarks. "That's all right," replies his long-suffering wife. "But will it scrub floors or stand in the butcher's queue for me?" In fact, over subsequent years, Australia embraced the atom - the good atom, that is - more enthusiastically, perhaps, than any other Western nation. At times the mood was positively gung-ho. As Sherratt recalls, when Sydneysiders turned on their radios at 8am, on July 1, 1946, for live coverage from Bikini Atoll of the testing of the world's fourth atomic device, they were greeted with excited cries of "Bombs away! Bombs away!"Two years later, Sydneysiders flocked to the Royal Easter Show to see an Atomic Age exhibition, starring an "atomic genie", who emerged from nuclear clouds with electrons "whizzing around his head like bush flies", and featuring a three-minute re-enactment of Hiroshima. "There was genuine fascination with nuclear power, not just among the scientific community but the public generally," says Low, recalling how a racehorse was named Hydrogen (favourite for the 1953 Melbourne Cup, it came sixth). The following year, the Duke of Edinburgh, on a visit to Australia, was presented with a lump of uranium in a metal casket. "It was a symbol of Australia's modernity, and of its power," Low says. A power not just to generate electricity, but to "turn deserts into green, lush fields", to conquer the tyranny of distance.There were, too, serious defence and economic considerations. Suddenly, Australia was sitting on a uranium mine. Nuclear testing on Australian soil - on the little-remembered Monte Bello Islands, off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, and at Emu Plains and Maralinga in South Australia - encountered little or no opposition. Rather it was a source of national pride. Even movies, such as On the Beach - shot in the late 1950s in "end of the world" Melbourne, failed to spook Australians. "It almost reinforced the feeling that we were bystanders of events happening a long way away," Walker says. Little wonder that movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, so popular in Britain and, on a smaller scale, in New Zealand, made little impression in Australia. "It wasn't really until the Vietnam War that the bomb, the peace issue, were subsumed into mass protest marches," says Marks, who recalls the impact of being taken by her mother to the Art Gallery of NSW as a child to see the Hiroshima Panels. These were stark, charcoal drawings far removed from more recent "nuclear porn" representations that seem almost to celebrate the grandeur of giant mushroom clouds.Since the 1960s, Marks suggests, the nation's engagement with the nuclear issue has oscillated, peaking during times of emergency - notably the Cold War and Star Wars stand-offs between the US and the Soviet Union - levelling off as perceived threats recede. When the Cold War ended, when symbolically the Berlin Wall was pulled down in 1989, when the superpowers started talking disarmament, the world again breathed a sigh of relief. But subsequent crises - such as the French resumption of testing in the Pacific, border conflict between the neo-nuclear powers India and Pakistan, and even recent stockpiling by North Korea and Iran - have shown that "Hiroshima" is not dead. More like dormant: waiting to be reignited by new international flashpoints, or domestic issues, such as uranium mining or nuclear power. "One thing is clear," Marks says, hopefully. "The lack of mass protests should never be mistaken for apathy. People do care." It's a view confirmed by a recent Lowy Institute report which revealed community-wide insecurity about nuclear weapons. Even young Australians - so often stereotyped by baby boomers, especially, as being more conservative than previous generations, more focused on homework than on world politics - care. Morris Willcoxson's three grandchildren, aged 18 to eight, know all about the bomb. And so, it can be assumed, do most Sydney schoolchildren. At the request of the Herald, Andy Graham, a member of the Hiroshima Day Committee and a teacher at Sydney's Chester Hill High School, conducted a straw poll of students. Of a roll call of year 7-12 pupils, only about a fifth knew of Hiroshima and its significance. In a year 11 class of average ability the split was almost 50-50. But significantly, in a year 10 class studying modern history everyone knew about the first bomb. So they should, Graham believes. "It's a fundamental thing in history. It's a hoax that the bomb ended World War II," he says, referring to the continuing mathematical debate over lives lost, lives saved by the bomb."The basic fact is that it was the moment when people went to a new level of bastardry ... where man distanced himself nicely from the killings." For those like Stuart Rees, director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University, who believes that "the terrible lessons of Hiroshima are still waiting to be learnt", the continuing challenge is to transform youthful awareness into activism. Translating passive community fear into a proactive push to disarm will not be easy. But Longridge believes the 60th anniversary commemorations offer an opportunity to highlight the brutal fact that, far from being defused, the bomb continues to represent a "clear and present danger" to Australia. "There are still an estimated 30,000 nuclear weapons worldwide, 96 per cent of them controlled by the US and Russia," says Longridge. "Sixty years after Hiroshima, our sense of security is illusory."
© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald