I don't feel we should have war anymore. I just want peace in the world. No more bombs dropped anywhere,' Lillian Uba says
Rocky Mountain News: Local: "'
Six decades of grieving, healing
By James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News
August 15, 2005
In terms of sheer scope, size, death and horror, there has never been a struggle to match World War II. For six years, the majority of the planet's countries fought across four oceans and every inhabited continent. In the end, an estimated 68 million people died, some one by one, others by the tens of thousands as the blazing annihilating might of atomic weapons was unleashed.
But atomic power was not the only innovation ushered in by WWII. Jet aircraft, long-range missiles and radar are just some of the ways technology altered the face of war.
Nowhere - and no one - was safe from the fighting as the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) were pitted against the Allies (led by the United States, Great Britain and - later in the war - the Soviet Union).
This was the war that was stained by the atrocities of the Holocaust - during which the Nazis destroyed an estimated 6 million Jews and millions of other victims - and the treachery of Pearl Harbor. It was the war that featured D-Day - the most epic military invasion in all of history - and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
[]
I don't feel we should have war anymore. I just want peace in the world. No more bombs dropped anywhere,' she says."
Everywhere the girl ran the fire followed her. Down streets, around corners, along the river, great flailing curtains of flame turned the winter night into a horrible, burning day.
Ikijigoku, hell on earth, thought the girl as she ran like frightened prey before the fire.
Lillian Noda survived the night of March 10, 1945 - the night 334 B-29 bombers unleashed a blizzard of incendiary bombs on Tokyo's industrial district - but as many as 200,000 others didn't. When she awoke from a fitful sleep in an elementary school and shed her blanket of newspapers, the city she looked out on was gone.
"It was burned flat; there was nothing left," she says. She remembers the "smell was terrible." Burnt homes, burnt factories and, especially, burnt bodies. Even the food - mostly rice balls - tasted of ashes.
Six decades of grieving, healing
By James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News
August 15, 2005
In terms of sheer scope, size, death and horror, there has never been a struggle to match World War II. For six years, the majority of the planet's countries fought across four oceans and every inhabited continent. In the end, an estimated 68 million people died, some one by one, others by the tens of thousands as the blazing annihilating might of atomic weapons was unleashed.
But atomic power was not the only innovation ushered in by WWII. Jet aircraft, long-range missiles and radar are just some of the ways technology altered the face of war.
Nowhere - and no one - was safe from the fighting as the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) were pitted against the Allies (led by the United States, Great Britain and - later in the war - the Soviet Union).
This was the war that was stained by the atrocities of the Holocaust - during which the Nazis destroyed an estimated 6 million Jews and millions of other victims - and the treachery of Pearl Harbor. It was the war that featured D-Day - the most epic military invasion in all of history - and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
[]
I don't feel we should have war anymore. I just want peace in the world. No more bombs dropped anywhere,' she says."
Everywhere the girl ran the fire followed her. Down streets, around corners, along the river, great flailing curtains of flame turned the winter night into a horrible, burning day.
Ikijigoku, hell on earth, thought the girl as she ran like frightened prey before the fire.
Lillian Noda survived the night of March 10, 1945 - the night 334 B-29 bombers unleashed a blizzard of incendiary bombs on Tokyo's industrial district - but as many as 200,000 others didn't. When she awoke from a fitful sleep in an elementary school and shed her blanket of newspapers, the city she looked out on was gone.
"It was burned flat; there was nothing left," she says. She remembers the "smell was terrible." Burnt homes, burnt factories and, especially, burnt bodies. Even the food - mostly rice balls - tasted of ashes.
posted by Greta Jane at Thursday, August 18, 2005
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