Ghosts of Hiroshima
Charles Pellegrino . 2025 . 940.5425 PEL
- Interesting subject, interesting characters, lazy and technically weak book organization. Difficult to read in multiple sittings for a busy "time-sliced" reader. Hopefully this wiki page will help other confused readers.
- After introducing characters by full name, they are referred to by first name in disconnected vignettes afterward, though indexed by last name. The individuals described suffer horribly but similarly, and it is difficult to differentiate them later without referring to the last-name-ordered "Key Eyewitnesses Index" followed by a repeated reread of some of the indexed material. Much is not indexed, and some names pop up then go away without reference or indexing.
- Some individuals referred to by last name. Four "Yamaguchi" individuals mentioned multiple times in the index, though thankfully not overlapping. "Key Eyewitnesses" section only mentions Tsutomu on page 261
- Chapters are titled metaphorically, note section pages are titled by chapter number. Some notes have references, many are personal communication, undocumented elderly or second hand memories from 80 years after the event. This is mostly about remembered feelings.
p001 Prologue: By Accidental Connections, or by Spooky Action at a Distance?
p001 Morgan Robertson 1898 Futility
p003 Beyond The Spectrum 1908 stories about Japan attacking Hawaii and Manila with a light superweapon
p007 ch01: Sunrise
- p006 " ... orchards of Hiroshima aflame. It smelled like cherry pie. "
p021 ch02: Butterfly, Butterfly
- p024 17yo Saito Michiko in bunker 10 blocks from hypocenter
- p025 brief unconciousness, emerges to smashed landscape, goes searching for wife
p048 Harold Urey asks Lt. Col. Kenneth Nichols to find 100 tons of uranium ore.
p049 Edgar Sengier has 200 tons of pitchblende in NYC, 1000 more tons on Staten Island.
p050 Warned by Enrico Fermi, mined in 1939 Congo, source of almost all Manhattan Project uranium, also fueled reactors to make plutonium
p053 ch03: Profiles of the Future
p075 ch04: Neutron Star
p075 Jacob Beser radar fuse for Little Boy, flew on Enola Gay
- p077 Enola Gay crew mostly did not know what they were carrying, Beser figured it out
p083 Tibbets maneuver: crash dive and course reversal
- p084 bomb trajectory 4 miles downrange; dive accelerates plane while turning opposite direction
- nine slant miles from detonation
- p084 Tibbets smelled and tasted the radiation pulse from detonation, Beser (without goggles) temporarily flash-blinded
p087 Shiroi machi hiroshima 1985 film White City Hiroshima
p089 Hiroko Tasaka moved to US, married Harry Harris
- p089 "her family would become bound by marriage to one of the" Enola Gay crewmembers Citation Needed
- p090 "logarithmically increasing loss of life" ... huh? Pelligrino confused, may have meant "exponentially"
p091 Second mission primary target Kokura weapons plants
- p092 streetcar wheels and hundreds of teeth on ground
p093 Nuclear scientist Yoshio Nishina "we must make War Minister Anami understand there is no defense against this kind of power"
- p094 "growing the stars" unexplained Japanese metaphor "Hoshi o sodateru"(?) meaning ... hoping? aspiring?
- p096 children grow fast, incorporate radioisotopes ("radioactive elements" "toxins") in bones
- p097 bomb a "child killer" ... Ch4 note 11 reference to personal communication ... why bother?
p098 Mitsuo Fuchida military pilot interrogated by Walter Lord
p099 Japanese 1937 sinking of USS Paney and strafing of survivors in China, some witnesses left alive to test US resolve
- p099 US oil and steel built Japan's military
- p100 Ch4 note 12 p281 "They bombed Pearl Harbor with the Ninth Avenue el (scrapped NYC transit rail)
p100 Earl Warren absence of sabotage was "the most ominous sign in our whole situation"
- p101 1/16th Japanese ancestry was enough for interment in US prisoner camps
p102 Toyo Mitataki photos from Manzanar camp
Two views of Manzanar : an exhibition of photographs 1978 Ansel Adams and Toyo Mitataki. UO and UW libraries, $30 used in germany
p105 ch05: Surfing the Improbability Curve
p109 Bockscar Flight Engineer Jacob Beser 600 gallons of reserve fuel not pumping. Rulebook says don't fly, Major Charles Sweeney says "We're going."
- p111 Imperial Palace: if the Allies landed on Japan, execute all POWs
- p111 "plutonium core was very unfriendly to electrical systems" BALONEY. Tubes, relays, and wires are NOT affected. CITATION NEEDED. Fuse monitor warning light.
p112 Warning light a false positive cleared by weaponeer Phil Barnes, who diagnosed reversed wires in the bomb's wiring in flight with seconds to spare.
p112 Camp 25 Fukuoka coal mine actually Miiki coal mine in Fukuoka provin
p283 note 7 Charles Sweeney War's End - MultcoLib offsite
p113 POW Camp 25 guard "Hyato" (sic) Hayato Hirano -- Missing, Believed Killed 2010 by John Baxter $$ used, no US libraries
- p120 Bockscar - divert to secondary
- p128 "Fat Man ... named after fat Winston Churchill"
p133 ch.p1206: All This Has Happened Before; All This May Happen Again
p132 Hiroko Tasaka Harris in the Hiroshima Maidens by Rodney Barker
no connection to The Nuclear Family by Ari Beser
- p136 Nagasaki local governor emerged from his bunker, then returned to hide, doing nothing for anyone.
p137 Tsutomu Yamaguchi with colleagues in room on the shielded side of a strong steel stairwell from the Nagasaki blast, 300 others died in obliterated rooms next door
- author makes confusing "chop through" analogies instead of strong steel and concrete inertia of a central building column designed to withstand earthquakes.
- p141 wife Hisako Yamaguchi and son Katsutoshi bring skin cream for husband Tsutomu to Mitsubishi tunnel shelter. She stores it in the coolest, deepest part of the shelter when the Nagasaki bomb detonates.
- p143 Kenshi Hirata remarried 1955, his children hidden from prejudice by his deceased wife's parents and new neighbors.
p156 After Hirohito's August 15 surrender announcement, Admiral Matome Ugaki refuses to surrender, leads seven rocket-augmented bombers overloaded with explosives to kamikazi-attack US-held Okinawa ... and disappears ... "ghost squadron"
- p156 Flies and mosquitos seared dead by bomb flash
p160 Truman August 9 letter to warhawk Georgia Senator Richard B. Russell. " ... save as many American lives as possible. But I also have humane feelings for the women and children in Japan."
- p160 Truman's grandson Clifton and his Hiroshima-born friend Masahiro Sasaki find letter, place it and paper crane in Truman Library
p163 ch07: The Fallen Sky
- p166 Watergate, 1974 Richard Nixon: "Do they not realize that I could get on that phone and in ninety minutes, seven hundred million people could be dead?"
- p169 Facultative maggots debride dead and necrotic tissue, stranger helps wife heal Tsutomu Yamaguchi
- p169 Live leeches exude anticoagulants to keep blood flowing
- p170 "Tsutomu Yamaguchi would make a full and equally perplexing recovery"
- p170 ch7 note 7 p291. Dr. Nagai "The Bells of Nagasaki" at Multco PSU
p171 Emperor knew about Yoshio Nishina atomic bomb design, "total extinction of human civilization"
- p174 freed POWs distribute airdrop food oversupply to Japanese children's hospitals
- p174 guard Hyato's family charitable Buddhists, gave some food to prisoners, hid their faith during the warv
- p175 concert-quality loudspeakers invented to tell Okinawa civilians that Americans weren't cannibals, were there to help
p179 ch08: Is It Dusk Already?
p178 WW2 interred George Takei nephew of Nobel laureate Setsuko Thurlow
p178 Keiji Nakasawa Hiroshima artist
p182 Fr. Maximilian Kolbe took place of another condemned prisoner at Auschwitz, patron saint of amateur radio operators
p183 Urakami Cathedral 500m from epicenter, burst height 530m, most Japanese Catholics lived nearby.
p184 ch8 note 1 p292 vaguely related fission detonation propulsion
- p185 gold and silver coins illegal, melted into 5 gram bars
- p187 some Tule Lake internees deported to Japan, Tak Futumoto's family to Hiroshima area
- p188 Hiroshima hospital X-ray plates in lead lined cabinet overexposed by gamma rays from bomb
- p189 survivors treated as infectious, self-censor
- p193 ch8 note 5 p295
- p193 From Pearl Harbor to Golgotha 1953 Peggy Covell, Mitsuo Fuchida, Kazuo Kunegaski
- p200 Shigeo and Sadako Sasaki paper cranes, increasingly tiny
- p217 Donald Trump: "You Japanese won't have to invade anyone next time. If this buying keeps up, all you'll really have to do is throw ous out of your country"
- p217 Two Japanese in NYC ask "Which direction to Radio City, please?", elderly woman shouts "You fucking found Pearl Harbor! Go find Radio City!" The visitors found it; then they bought it.
- p225 2024 "... and America resumed underground testing of nuclear weapons ..." not yet, though Trump threatens to do so.
p251 Epilogue: Island in the Stream of Stars
p252 "Morgan Robertson wrote another book" Which of many books? This implies what?
p257 Appendix: Key Eyewitnesses
- p257 John Baxter, Jacob Besser, Peggy Covell
- p258 Mitsuo Fuchida, Kinuko Fukui, Hyato Hirano, Kenshi Hirata, Haruno Horimoto
- p259 Akira Iwanaga, Kazuo Kanegasaki, Mizuh Takama Kikusaki, Kimiko Kuwabara, Walter Lord, Shigeoyoshi Morimoto
p260 Elizabeth Ooka, Mami Samejima, Sadako&Masahiro Sasaki, Charles Sweeney, Leo Szilard, Dr. Susumu Tsunoo
p260 Setsuko Thurlow 2018 Nobel Peace Prize
- p261 Alistair Urquhart, Koichi Wada, Tsutomu Yamaguchi