FLASH-BANG in the Blue

75 years ago yesterday, my father was a GI stationed in Manilla. He was preparing for the land invasion of Japan that would never happen.

The baby boom was a year from booming when a FLASH-BANG boomed in the sky above the babies of Hiroshima. Many people think the bomb had to hit the ground before ignition. Not so. The civilians below emerging from their shelters after getting the all clear signal thought they heard the terrifying sound of yet another B plane which contradicted the signal.  Confused, they searched the horizon for the B plane when the blue sky caught fire 800 meters over head.

The pilot of the B plane was thinking of his mother

A few moments later thousands of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers were dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, burned, radiated and death walking to nowhere trying somehow to get somewhere with no idea what had just happened. Houses, temples, shrines, schools, gardens obliterated, poisoned, ruined.

Hell on earth in a flash and a bang.

Yesterday, I watched the 1953 Japanese film simply called Hiroshima. The movie features thousands of "extras" many of them survivors of the FLASH-BANG, many of the survivors mutilated, radiated and amputated re-enacting their shock, awe and horror of the moments, hours and days after the blast with Nagasaki still to come.

The film played as a documentary in Japan but an exploitation film when it played in America setting the tone for flicks like the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them and in Japan itself Rodan, Godzilla and many others.

Why did the giant chicken cross the universe?

To destroy Tokoyo.

Larf, larf, larf.

We boomers not yet ten in 1953 had no idea how to deal with the bomb or with the flicks. Should we be proud, ashamed, horrified, amused? Meanwhile our parents struggled with the unimaginable calculus of "lives saved" due to the estimations that an actual invasion of Japan would have cost more lives than the lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hey we won the war.

My Dad came home

The boomers were born.

Japan recovered.

We tend to forget.

Let's not forget.

Let's never forget.