[Mb-civic] 60 Years After A-Bomb, Old Foes Meet Over a Deep Divide - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

60 Years After A-Bomb, Old Foes Meet Over a Deep Divide

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 7, 2005; Page A01

TINIAN, Northern Mariana Islands, Aug. 6 -- Sixty years ago today, the 
world went black for Keijiro Matsushima, then a 16-year-old Hiroshima 
schoolboy. He vividly recalled an airplane he now knows was the Enola 
Gay shimmering in the sky like a "flying Popsicle" before the great 
flash from the atomic bomb vaporized tens of thousands and left a 
ghostly parade of "the half-living covered in ash and burns" to die in 
the months ahead.

Since those days, Matsushima said he has felt a "deep if troubled" 
connection to this Pacific island, about the size of Manhattan, that 
housed the runways and staging area for the U.S. atomic strikes. The 
same can be said for Michael Kuryla, 79. He is among the few remaining 
survivors of the USS Indianapolis, sunk on July 30, 1945, by a Japanese 
submarine after delivering parts of the bomb to Tinian. Kuryla spent 
five days adrift before being rescued, watching scores of his fellow 
crewmen drown while others were devoured by sharks.

On opposite sides of the fateful mushroom cloud, Matsushima and Kuryla 
are bound by invisible links that drew them and 200 others this week to 
an extraordinary and controversial commemoration here. Few questions in 
modern history remain more divisive than whether the U.S. bombings of 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Six decades after the war, and 
with their countries now the closest of allies, no two groups remain 
more polarized on the issue than U.S. Pacific war veterans and Japanese 
survivors of the attacks.

<>At what most participants described as the last major gathering at 
this historic site for a vanishing generation of World War II vets, the 
local organizers did the once-unthinkable -- they brought the two sides 
together.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/06/AR2005080600850.html 

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