History's Secret Heroes - Series 4: Kiyoshi Tanimoto and the Atomic Bomb

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hey, it's Ryan C. Crest for Albertsons and Tom Thumb. It's time to stock up and save now through October 27th. Get $10 off when you spend $25 or more on participating items. Just look for participating item tags that aren't on eligible items from brands like Nutella, Ferrero Rocher, Alchine, Hagen Doss, Swanson, Vitamin Water, Starbucks, Quaker, and Angel Soft. Clip once and save through October 27th every time you shop. Grab these hot deals before they're gone. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Is World War Two back up for debate? I'm Tristan Redmond, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. If you live in Europe or the US, the chances are you thought the rights and wrongs of World War Two were mostly settled, which is why some of us were surprised to find out that the podcast at Tucker Carlson not only disagreed, but he's been podcasting about it with a British politician. Today on the show, we explore why. Listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you listen. That Monday morning, Kyoshi Tanimoto woke early. It was a very hot day in Hiroshima, Japan. It was already 25 degrees Celsius and humid. The atmosphere on the streets was tense. The city was in an uproar because there was a sense that some sort of major air raid was coming. Warning sirens had been ringing throughout the night. While the people of Hiroshima rushed around to prepare as best they could, Tanimoto had his own plans. He was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He had promised to help a member of his congregation move furniture and various articles to a spot in the western suburbs of the city. The pair of them had moved the church's belongings out of the possible target area, everything from bibles and hymnals to the organ and piano. Today, Tanimoto was going to help his friend move some personal belongings too. Tanimoto was alone because of the fear of some sort of attack. His wife and eight-month-old baby, they would go a few blocks some blocks north to a friend's home and spend the night there. Tanimoto left his passage in the city centre, pushing a handcart through crowds of people. He met his friend. They loaded a closet onto the handcart and set out for a house a couple of miles away in the hills. As they went, the air raid sirens sounded again. But the Japanese radar operators could just see three planes. That was far too few for a bombing raid, so they sounded the all clear. Tanimoto and his friend arrived at the house at eight o'clock in the morning. They were tired from all the pushing uphill and rested overlooking the city. At 15 minutes past eight, one of the three planes, the Enola Gay, dropped a single bomb. The bomb was codenamed Little Boy. It took 53 seconds to fall to its detonation height. A bright white flash filled the sky across the horizon. Brighter than anyone had ever seen. Yet there was no sound at all. Both Tanimoto and his friend immediately left for cover. Tanimoto held himself down between two large stones. He felt debris rained down on him. Disoriented, he struggled to understand what had happened. He looked up to see the house that collapsed. Initially, he imagined that a local bomb had fallen on the very spot where he was. And it took him a while to understand that that was not the case. He looked down upon the city of Hiroshima. And then that's when he stood and saw the extraordinary service of the city of Hiroshima below him. What in the world has happened here? A mushroom cloud unfurled upwards from the city. The sky grew darker and darker. Slowly, people began to stagger out, away from the devastation into the hills. And Tanimoto, at that point, thought of the fact that his wife and baby were in the middle of the city. And he was also thinking about his congregation and his church. And so he began running. He sped against the tide, fleeing, walking, running, scrambling and climbing over obstacles. Reverend Tanimoto thought only that he must save his family and his flock. I'm Helena Boncarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's secret heroes. True stories of deception, acts of resistance and courage from World War II. Kyoshi Tanimoto and the atomic bomb. On the 6th of August 1945, a United States B-29 bomber dropped the world's first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Japan had attacked the United States at the end of 1941 in Pearl Harbor. It's brought both nations into the Second World War in the Pacific theatre. Japan fought on the side of the Axis powers, aligning itself with Nazi Germany. The United States joined the Allies. But when Germany surrendered in May 1945, Japan kept fighting. The American government hoped this new type of bomb, an atomic weapon, would finally end the war. For the people who lived in the city, it was a life-changing event. In Hiroshima there was just that tremendous flash, and then many people sort of lost consciousness, especially if they were close to the hypersetter. Kim Brandt is a historian of 20th century Japan. People were kind of thrown distances. They were thrown out of their houses, say 20 feet or more. They lost consciousness. Many died under the rubble of buildings that had collapsed on them. Many people were terribly injured by the shattering glass of windows. And of course then fires started almost immediately. Many people were burnt to death or they received terrible burns. Around 70,000 people died instantly. Those who were able tried to escape the flames, but Kyoshi Tanimoto ran back into Hiroshima. He encountered this utterly silent, ghostly procession of survivors streaming out of the city and trying to escape the inferno that the city was becoming. What she saw was a scene from hell. This endless list of grotesque types of injuries, people who were covered with shards, glass. Many of them were so badly burned that strips of skin were hanging down from their faces, from their backs, from their arms, from their hands. Most of them were naked or semi-naked. Some people held an unearthly pose. Many of them were walking with their hands sort of held out with palms down in front of them. To Tanimoto, they looked like a procession of ghosts. And the other thing was their utter silence. Nobody was saying anything. They were just a hobbling, walking, being carried, slowly out of the city in this terrible zombie-like condition. But as he made his way into what was left of the city, Tanimoto heard voices. Many people calling out from the collapsed buildings, they were saying, "Tasuke te kure, tasuke te kure, please help me, please help me." He heard this over and over. His first impulse was to help them. Among those he met were a dazed elderly woman, with a small child, age 3 or 4. He carried the child on his back to a nearby school. But he quickly realized that there was very little he could do. Many people were trapped under tons of rubble and things were burning. And he was the only sort of able-bodied person he could see around him. He kept going towards the city centre. He felt just tortured with guilt, about having pressed on for what he considered to be selfish reasons. As Tanimoto hurried between the rubble of collapsed buildings, the old roads he knew became impossible. All of the buildings that he was moving amongst had been flattened as if they were toys by a gigantic hammer, and the roads were increasingly full of debris, corpses, and fire. Without any of Hiroshima's familiar landmarks, Tanimoto struggled to find his way back to the neighborhood where he hoped to find his wife and child. With his way locked on every side, he came to the bank of the river. In desperation, he kicked off his shoes and flung himself across. He asked God to protect him so he could find his family. All of a sudden, his miracle was granted, among a crowd of people he saw his wife, Chisa. Her chemise was covered in blood. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, she looked stricken and go slight. But she held their baby in her arms. I was only eight months old baby that time. Coco Kondo, born Coco Tanimoto, was the daughter Kyoshi Tanimoto had been running to save. In that morning, my father was already out helping others, but one of the church members wanted to talk to my mother. Chisa spoke to her husband. And she explained what had happened, which is that she had in fact gone back to the percentage early in the morning. And she had been standing in the entryway, talking to a parishioner, Mrs. Takagi, when the bomb hit. In suddenly, whole house crashed. That means there's no lights coming from outside. You know, because a whole house crashed. Oh, my mother's head. So she was unconscious. Well, while she found herself covered in rubble, the baby beneath her, but she woke up because of the crying of the baby. So she asked her help, help, help, help, no one came. She knew she had to do with, you know, little Coco. So I don't know how she did it, but she tried to make a hole. And she was able to make out a little bit of light coming through above her. And with great effort, she was able to sort of scramble and scrabble and pull and push until she had opened the whole large enough to put the baby out first and then to sort of wriggle out herself. When she was out already, oh, the fire, so we barely made it. The hope of finding Chisa and Coco had propelled any motor back into the city, but now he felt the horror. She explained this to her husband quickly. And Tanimoto said, and what of Mrs. Takagi, the parishioner with whom she had been speaking. And he said that his wife had a very sad expression on her face and she said, I don't know. Tanimoto was filled with anger. And the rage was, how could you, the wife of a minister, abandon one of our parishioners and think only of yourself and escape without ascertaining Mrs. Takagi's safety? However, he claims that looking at his wife, who was a little bit bloodied and was sort of in her underwear and had clearly been through, you know, something pretty hellish, he couldn't bring himself to actually scold her. He just said, okay, and then he turned around to leave because he needed to find out what had happened to Mrs. Takagi. After scaling piles of rubble and swimming across the river, Tanimoto was barely dressed himself. Chisa ran into the house and came out with a woman's blouse and a head covering. And he put them on and he ran towards the flames. Hey, it's Ryan C. Just look for participating item tags to earn on eligible items from brands like Nutella, Ferrero Rocher, Alchijn, Hagen Doss, Swanson, Vitamin Water, Starbucks, Quaker and Angel Soft. Clip once and save through October 27th every time you shot. Restrictions apply, see website for full terms and conditions. Is World War II? Back up for debate. If you live in Europe or the US, the chances are you thought the rights and wrongs of World War II were mostly settled, which is why some of us were surprised to find out that the podcast at Tucker Carlson not only disagreed, but he's been podcasting about it with a British politician. Today on the show we explore why. In the usually Western always mention about Christianity. His parents wanted him to become a monk. They took him to the temple. They were hoping, maybe my father is going to change from Christianity to maybe he's going to, he wanted to learn more about Buddhism. The senior monk was too busy to meet them that day. They went home. Then few weeks, a few months later, they have to go back to the temple on the way to the temple. My grandmother passed away on the street, just heart attack. Devisedated by the loss of his mother, he turned definitively towards Christianity. His father disowned him. He went on to study theology. After that, he won a scholarship to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. For a while, he served in the church in California. But when war broke out in Europe and Asia, Kyoshi Kanamoto found himself in an enemy nation. As fascists rose to power in Germany initially, Japan aligned itself with them. There was this growing sense of a kind of almost structural opposition with the West. Nazi Germany's aggressive expansion of its borders in Europe made it look powerful to some in Japan. Japan had occupied Korea since 1910 and invaded Manchuria in 1931. By 1937, Japan was fully at war with China. After years of ever closer support and mutual admiration, Japan formed the axis with Germany and Italy in September 1940. I do find it kind of an odd contradiction that Hitlerian Germany, which was so racist and was so committed to the idea of a white supremacism, would have found it possible and convenient to ally with an Asian nation. But they did. The United States hadn't yet joined the Second World War. Still, it was backing Japan's enemy, China. Its relations with Japan were tense. In California, Kyoshi Kanamoto was in a tricky position. He has written of some jarring experiences he had, you know, encountering the anger of Americans and also of Chinese Americans who were very understandably quite upset about what Japan was doing in East Asia. You returned to Japan, but he wasn't exactly welcome back. He spoke English fluently. He had American clothes that he wore. And he was considered both as somebody who had associated closely with Americans in the United States and as a Christian, which of course was a western faith, he was suspect. On the 7th of December 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The raid sunk four battleships, destroyed scores of planes, and killed more than 2,400 Americans. War was declared between the nations. For an emotive this made things worse still. He was put under surveillance and was frequently questioned by the police. On the 6th of August 1945, Kyoshi Tanimoto ran around the burning city of Hiroshima. He found several people he knew, including members of his congregation and of his neighborhood association. He gathered them together in a park. He wanted to get them across the river way from the raging fires. He found a kind of a punt, a boat that was actually filled with the corpses of four or five what looked like soldiers. He had to drag those bodies out of the punt. He said he set a prayer for them. He dragged the punt down to the water. And then using a pole, he began this exhausting work throughout the rest of the day. of ferrying people from Chugan from this little garden park area to the other side of the river. And he did this until nightfall. It's kind of unbelievable. I don't quite know how he managed it. Fire started to sweep into the park. Tenimoto gathered a group of men who weren't too badly hurt, using buckets and basins to carry water. And their own remaining clothes to beat down the flames. They fought it back for two hours. In the days after the attack, even some of those who seemed relatively unhurt fell ill. Symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, a tremendous feeling of weakness, a fever often developed, a very high fever. Others developed these kind of large bruise-like skin discoloration over their bodies their hair fell out. These people kept dying and there seemed to be no way to help them. Tenimoto did what he could, reading passages from the Bible to the ailing and to the bereaved. Just three days after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it dropped another on the city of Nagasaki. On the 15th of August 1945, the Emperor of Japan announced its surrender. But the human suffering was not over. Two weeks after the Hiroshima blast, Tenimoto himself came down with a high fever of over 40 degrees. For two months, he had to stay in bed. As soon as he recovered, he set to work again. He was just tirelessly walking about the city, checking on parishioners. He was very much aware of the tremendous misery that so many people were living on a day-to-day basis. In Japan doing a wartime, the children, I think about the fourth graders, those kids are going to the countryside with the schoolteachers. So they'll be safe. But the parents, grandparents are living in Hiroshima, many were there in Pasta Bay. Many survivors had flash burns caused by the blast. These scarred into painful, rubbery masses known as kiloids. It could often actually impede bodily functions in a variety of ways, so that people's eyelids might be scarred in such a way that they couldn't close them properly or open them, or their mouths, or often something that really was a problem for survivors with hands and arms, would be scarred in such ways that they couldn't work. Tony Motto was horrified by the suffering. He was also consumed by his guilt that he hadn't been able to save more people and that he'd survived. He dedicated himself to helping the survivors of the bombing. These people came to be known as Hibakusa, bomb-affected people. But few outside of Japan knew how badly survivors were suffering. Then, in 1946, Tony Motto met an American journalist, John Hersey. Hersey was writing an article for the New Yorker magazine. He interviewed Tony Motto and five other survivors. When it was published, it caused a sensation. It brought Reverend Tony Motto a lot of attention. He began to get all kinds of messages and packages and letters from his older acquaintances and friends in the United States, and also from strangers who were just terribly impressed by Hersey's account. Support and donations flooded in, Tony Motto became the director of the Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation. He hoped this would help those in need. Countless orphans were left in the city of Hiroshima. Many lived on the streets and had to scavenge for food. In the United States, Tony Motto worked with American activists to set up the moral adoption program. This scheme collected money from American donors to support the orphans. Tony Motto developed a later plan in 1955 to bring 25 badly scarred, disfigured young women, the so-called Hiroshima Maidens, to the US where they received plastic surgery. While he was in the United States, Tony Motto was invited onto a popular television show. This is your life. He was introduced to people from his past, his family were there, including Coco. "H10! My father was on the TV show called This Is Your Life, and that changed my whole life." In a staggering moment, Tony Motto was introduced to Captain Robert Lewis. Lewis was the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft, which had dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Of course, my father doesn't know anything about this. "Now you've never met him. I've never seen him. But he's here tonight to clasp your hand in friendship." Captain Robert Lewis, United States Air Force, who along with Paul Tibbetts, piloted the plane from which the first atomic power was dropped over Hiroshima. "You know, can you, how awkward could this possibly have been for him? And I have to say how dignified he was, and how he managed in this extraordinarily difficult and public situation to sort of keep his cool. He actually shook hands with the pilot." Coco Gondo didn't feel like being polite. "I heard that he was a co-pilot. Since I was a little girl, I met so many children who were orphaned, many girls who were disfigured. And at the first, I couldn't see their faces. Everybody was disfigured." I said to myself, "Where I grown up, I'm going to definitely find the people who are the B-29 in Hiroshima." "Do you know what I wanted to do? I wanted to give them a punch or a bite or a kick. I wanted to revenge." The shows host asked Captain Lewis how he felt after he dropped the bomb. "Are you at her something in your log at that time? As I said before, Mr. Edwards, I wrote down later. My God, what have we done?" "I did see that. Two came up to his mind. I was shocked. My goodness, I thought they were the monsters. But I never heard the monsters, you know, coming down from their eyes. And that means the man is the same human being with me. And that tears changed my whole view, if I hate, not them. And of course, you know, I couldn't speak English, so the end of that program, I don't know what to do. I tried like a crab. Little by little, I just wanted to stand next to Captain Lewis. I just wanted to touch his hand. Because when I touched his hand, he wore my hand very tightly. That's the moment I changed. If I hate, I should hate myself." It's impossible to say how many people eventually died as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The total is estimated as between 140,000 and 166,000. A further 60 to 80,000 died following the bombing of Nagasaki. Many survivors lived the rest of their lives with illnesses as well as trauma. Some, like Tanimoto, dedicated themselves to ensuring it never happened again. At the age of 77, Kyoshi Tanimoto died of pneumonia, complicated by liver failure. He asked his daughter and others to continue his mission. Since I was a little girl, he always says, "Koko, you were able to live through it." That's why we want you to work for peace. Tanimoto did hope that with God's help, he would be able to use this unspeakable disaster that had befallen him and his community in Hiroshima to a good end. That he would be able to turn it toward preventing bombs, atomic bombs from ever being used again, and ultimately to prevent war. Next time, on History's Secret Heroes, how did Madeline Rifu go from a vengeful assassin to a decorated member of the fort? French resistance. She was running across rooftops, five stories up, balancing on gussars, firing her gun driven by a madness and an adrenaline. Madeline refores defiant resistance. Subscribe to History's Heroes on BBC Sounds and make sure you have push notifications turned on. We'll let you know as soon as new episodes are available. This cultural life from BBC Radio 4. I will never go into anything so deep like that again. The world's leading artistic figures reveal their creative influences. Disappay, disagree, disavow. I'm John Wilson and my recent guests have included the sculptor Anish Kapoor, photographer Annie Lieberwitz, the actor Kristen Scott Thomas. It has made me good at telling stories about people who have a secret suffering. And former children's laureate Frank Cultural Boys. If arts got one function, it's to point to what's wonderful and say, look, this is your world, it's insane. Listen to this cultural life on BBC Sounds is World War II. Back up for debate. If you live in Europe or the US, the chances are you thought the rights and wrongs of World War II were mostly settled, which is why some of us were surprised to find out that the podcast of Tucker Carlson not only disagreed, but he's been podcasting about it with a British politician. Listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you listen.