The World: The Unmentioned Victims

Even in the smoking ruins of Hiroshima, it was a sight that few could forget. The young man, his hands behind his back, was tied by a piece of wire to a crazily tilting utility pole. How he got there is still a mystery. He wore only a pair of red, green and yellow trunks. He appeared miraculously unblemished. But what burned itself into the minds of those who saw him was that the prisoner was an American.

“He was the handsomest boy I ever saw,” recalls Jiro Tamura, a former Japanese army captain. On that morning, just 24 hours after the atomic bomb fell, Tamura was combing the city in search of his wife (he never found her). At the eastern end of the Aioi Bridge, almost directly beneath the flash point of the bomb, he saw an old woman hurling pieces of concrete at the captive and screaming, “You Yankee devil!” When Tamura returned in the afternoon, the American was dead, chunks of concrete strewn around his battered body.

Three days later, the American was buried by a bicycle dealer. Last year, after the dealer died, his widow talked about the incident to a local newspaperman. Before long, many survivors of the bomb came forward with similar stories. Their testimony firmly establishes that among the 200,000 victims of the holocaust, which struck 26 years ago this week, as many as 23 may have been Americans.

Some months after the war ended, a former Japanese military policeman gave U.S. occupation authorities 23 sets of dog tags that had been taken from U.S. prisoners of war who were in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. In the confusion of postwar Japan, their deaths were never publicly acknowledged. Most were captured airmen, and most doubtless died in the first shock wave. But Eyewitness Tamura clearly recalls seeing the bodies of two American P.O.W.s who had been beaten to death, apparently with rifle butts, by their military captors.

Last year Hiroshima Mayor Setsuo Yamada asked the U.S. embassy in Tokyo for information about the American victims. None was forthcoming. “If it is only possible to get any of these identified,” he says, “I would ask our municipal assembly to take steps to enable us to enshrine them in the cenotaph in our Peace Park.”

The Pentagon has no records on the Americans caught in the bombing. Washington’s National Archives, however, recently declassified its records, which show that there were roughly 20 American P.O.W.s in Hiroshima; the names of only eight of those killed are known. In time, it could be that those eight will be memorialized in the cenotaph, which bears the words:

REST IN PEACE. THE MISTAKE SHALL NOT BE REPEATED.