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Friday, August 6, 2010

Spirituality: Pedro Arrupe on the Hiroshima Bombing

As usual, Father Arrupe had risen at 4:30 a.m. He opened the window. The smell of night soil, used as a fertilizer, greeted him. After adding the finishing touches to making his bed, he would, with no shoes on, sit on his heels, in Japanese fashion, on a tatami mat in the chapel, his eyes closed as he prayed and meditated.

After Mass Father Arrupe went into the garden. It was a bright, clear, summer morning, just a few cumulus clouds flecking the sky. The air was fresh and clean. The leaves moved in the gentle breeze. Dew still clung to the red flowers of the sycamores and the camellias that grew in abundance in the garden tended so lovingly by the novices. He made a special point of inhaling deep the sweet fragrance of many flowers, the azalea, iris, rhododendron, blue anemone. He gazed with increasing awe at the wonderful colours of the delicate flowers and leaves. His weeks in solitary confinement in Yamaguchi prison had taught him to appreciate nature to the full. Even such a common sight as the terraced rice-fields beyond now held a special magic for him.

*****
At 8:15 two planes were sighted by anti-aircraft spotters of a battery on Hiroshima Harbour. They were B-29s, one following the other, but separating rapidly. ...

The two aircraft acted oddly. When the first was almost a half-mile ahead of the other, it banked violently toward the right. At the same time, the second aircraft banked left; below it two tiny parachutes blossomed white against the blue. The men in the battery let out a cheer; obviously the second plane was in some kind of trouble and the crew was bailing out.

A group of factory workers from the Mitsubishi Works were pedaling along merrily on their bicycles. "B-san,"   one of them shouted, B-29, pointing upwards with his left hand. Some others looked up as well. Then suddenly they all stopped pedaling and dismounted.

'Look! Something's dropped from that plane,' one of the men shouted. They also cheered and clapped, a few even threw their cloth caps in the air, as they saw the two parachutes descend from the planes. The crew of one of the B-29s had baled out! The men on the ground rejoiced. And what they would do to the crew when they touched land! The men kept gazing up at the parachutes.

While the men on the ground were gazing up into the sky, Major Thomas Ferebee, a poker-playing Southerner, was looking down on them from a height on 30,000 feet. He was the bombardier of the Enola Gay.


*****

Captain Robert Lewis, Enola Gay's co-pilot, looking down from thousands of feet, murmured aloud,

'My God! What have we done!'

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