The Very Un-Christian Nagasaki Bomb


By Gary G. Kohls

Sixty-nine years ago, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, Japan, instantly annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of them Japanese Christians, and wounding uncountable numbers of others.

For targeting purposes, the bombing crew used St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral, the largest Christian church in East Asia. At 11:02 a.m., on Aug. 9, 1945, when the bomb was dropped over the cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan.


The ruins of the Urakami Christian cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan, as shown in a photograph dated Jan. 7, 1946.

At the time, the United States was arguably the most Christian nation in the world (that is, if you can label as Christian a nation whose churches overwhelmingly have failed to sincerely teach or adhere to the peaceful ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount).

The baptized and confirmed Christian airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently, and they accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with a number of near-fatal glitches. Most Americans in 1945 would have done exactly the same if they had been in the shoes of the Bock’s Car crew, and there would have been very little mental anguish later if they had also been treated as heroes.

Nevertheless, the use of that monstrous weapon of mass destruction to destroy a mainly civilian city like Nagasaki was an international war crime and a crime against humanity as defined later by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Of course, there was no way that the crew members could have known that at the time. Some of the crew did admit that they had had some doubts about what they had participated in when the bomb actually detonated. Of course, none of them actually saw the horrific suffering of the victims up close and personal.

“Orders are orders” and, in wartime, disobedience can be, and has been, legally punishable by summary execution of the soldier who might have had a conscience strong enough to convince him that killing another human, especially an unarmed one, was morally wrong.

Hard to Surrender

When Nagasaki was destroyed, it had been only three days since another U.S. atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” had decimated Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bombing on Aug. 9 occurred amid chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government, which had known for months that it had lost the war, was searching for a way to honorably surrender.

The only obstacle to surrender had been the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan and possible subjected to war crimes trials. That was a deal-breaker, an intolerable demand for the Japanese that prolonged the war and prevented Japan from giving up months earlier.

The Russian army had declared war against Japan on Aug. 8, hoping to regain territories lost to Japan in the humiliating (for Russia) Russo-Japanese war 40 years earlier, and Stalin’s army was advancing across Manchuria. Russia’s entry into the war represented a powerful incentive for Japan to end the war quickly since they much preferred surrendering to the U.S. than to Russia.

And, of course, the U.S. did not want to divide any of the spoils of war with Russia. By showing off the new nuclear weapons, Washington also sent an early Cold War message to Russia that the U.S. was the new planetary superpower.

Aiming at Aug. 1, 1945 as the earliest deployment date for the first bomb, the Target Committee in Washington, D.C.  developed  a list of relatively un-damaged Japanese cities that were to be excluded from the conventional U.S. aerial fire-bombing campaigns (that, during the first half of 1945, burned to the ground more than 60 mostly defenseless Japanese cities).

The list of protected cities included Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura, Kyoto and Nagasaki. Those five relatively undamaged cities were to be off-limits to the terror bombings. They were to be preserved as potential targets for the new “gimmick” weapon that had been researched and developed all across America during the two years of the Manhattan Project.

Ironically, prior to Aug. 6 and 9, the residents of those cities considered themselves lucky for not having been bombed as much as other cities. Little did they know why they were being spared from the carnage.

The Trinity Test

The first and only field test of an atomic bomb had been blasphemously code-named “Trinity” (a distinctly Christian term). It had occurred three weeks earlier at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The results were impressive, but the blast had just killed off a few hapless coyotes, rabbits, snakes and some other desert varmints.

The Trinity test also unexpectedly produced huge amounts of a new mineral that was later called “Trinitite,” a molten lava rock that had been created from the intense heat (twice the temperature of the sun) of the above ground bomb blast.

But the first full effects of an atomic bomb on a human population were not demonstrated until Aug. 6, with the obliteration of Hiroshima. But there was a second bomb, a different design from the first, that was ready for use.

So, at 3 a.m. on the morning of Aug. 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress (that had been “christened” Bock’s Car) took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains. Barely making it off the runway before the plane went into the drink (because of the 10,000 bomb in its hold), it headed north for Kokura, the primary target.

Bock’s Car’s plutonium bomb was code-named “Fat Man,” after Winston Churchill. “Little Boy,” first called “Thin Man” (after President Franklin Roosevelt) was the bomb that had incinerated Hiroshima three days earlier.

Yet, the reality of what had happened at Hiroshima was still sinking in among the members of Japan’s Supreme War Council in Tokyo, complicating their ability to understand the need for an immediate surrender.

But it was already too late because by the time the War Council was meeting, Bock’s Car flying under radio silence was already approaching the southern islands of Japan, hoping to beat the typhoons and clouds that would have caused the mission to be delayed for another week.

The Bock’s Car crew had instructions to drop the bomb only with visual sighting. But Kokura was clouded over. So after making three failed bomb runs over the clouded-over city all the while running dangerously low on fuel, the plane headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

The History of Nagasaki Christianity

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity because the city had the largest concentration of Christians in all of Japan. The Urakami Cathedral was the megachurch of its time, with 12,000 baptized members.

Nagasaki was the community where the legendary Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier established a mission church in 1549. The Catholic community at Nagasaki grew and eventually prospered over the next several generations. However it eventually became clear to the Japanese rulers that the Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests were exploiting Japan; and soon all Europeans and their foreign religion were expelled from the country.

From 1600 until 1850, being a Christian was a capital crime in Japan. In the early 1600s, those Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their new faith were subject to unspeakable tortures, including crucifixion. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity was extinct.

However, by the mid-Nineteenth Century, after the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Matthew Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government.

With this humiliating revelation, the Japanese government started another purge; but because of international pressure, the persecutions were eventually stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. By 1917, with no help from the government, the re-vitalized Christian community had built the massive St. Mary’s Cathedral in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.

So it was the height of irony that the massive Cathedral one of only two Nagasaki landmarks that could be positively identified from 31,000 feet up became Ground Zero for the atomic bomb. The Bock’s Car bombardier identified the landmarks through a break in the clouds and ordered the drop.

At 11:02 a.m., during Thursday morning mass, hundreds of Nagasaki Christians were boiled, evaporated, carbonized or otherwise disappeared in a scorching, radioactive fireball that exploded 500 meters above the cathedral.

The black rain that soon came down from the mushroom cloud surely contained the comingled remains of many Nagasaki Shintoists, Buddhists and Christians. The theological implications of Nagasaki’s Black Rain surely should boggle the minds of theologians of all denominations.

Nagasaki’s Christian Death Count

Most Nagasaki Christians did not survive the blast. Six thousand of them died instantly, including all who were at confession. Of the 12,000 church members, 8,500 of them eventually died as a result of the bomb. Many of the others were seriously sickened.

Three orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school disappeared into black smoke or became chunks of charcoal. Tens of thousands of other innocent non-combatants also died instantly, and many more were mortally or incurably wounded.


And here is another ironic point of this tragic chapter of history: What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in nine seconds.

Even after a slow revival of Christianity over the decades since World War II, membership in Japanese churches still represents a small fraction of 1 percent of the general population, and the average attendance at Christian worship services has been reported to be only 30. Surely the decimation of Nagasaki at the end of the war crippled what once was a vibrant church.

A Chaplain’s Conversion

Father George Zabelka was the Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group (the 1,500-man United States Army Air Force group whose only mission was to successfully deliver the atomic bombs to their targets). Zabelka was one of the few Christian leaders who eventually came to recognize the contradictions between what his modern church had taught him about war and what the early pacifist church had taught about homicidal violence.

Several decades after being discharged from the military chaplaincy, Zabelka finally concluded that both he and his church had made serious ethical and theological errors in religiously legitimating the organized mass slaughter that is modern war. He had come to understand that, as he articulated it, the enemies of his nation were not, according to New Testament ethics, the enemies of God, but were rather fellow children of God who were loved by God and who therefore were not to be killed by God’s followers.

Father Zabelka’s conversion away from the standardized violence-tolerant Christianity turned his Detroit, Michigan ministry around 180 degrees. His absolute commitment to the truth of gospel nonviolence just like Martin Luther King Jr. inspired him to devote the remaining decades of his life to speaking out against violence in all its forms, including the violence of militarism, racism and economic exploitation.


Likewise, the Lutheran chaplain for the 509th, Pastor William Downey (formerly of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota), in his counseling of soldiers who had become troubled by their participation in making murder for the state, later denounced all killing, whether by a single bullet or by weapons of mass destruction.

Ruined Souls

In Daniel Hallock’s book, Hell, Healing and Resistance, the author talks about a 1997 Buddhist retreat led by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. That retreat attempted to deal with the hellish post-war existence of combat-traumatized Vietnam War veterans.


The truth of Hallock’s comment should be a sobering wake-up call to Christian leaders who seem to regard as equally important both the recruitment of new members and the retention of old ones. The fact that the U.S. is a highly militarized nation makes the truths of gospel nonviolence difficult to teach and preach.

I am a retired physician who has dealt with hundreds of psychologically traumatized patients (especially combat-traumatized war veterans), and I know that violence, in all its forms, can irretrievably damage the mind, body, brain and spirit; but the fact that the combat-traumatized type is totally preventable as well as, for the most serious cases, virtually impossible to cure makes prevention work so important.

And that is where Christian churches should and could be instrumental. An ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure.

These traumas are deadly and sometimes even contagious. I have seen violence, neglect, abuse and the resultant traumatic illnesses spread through families even involving the third and fourth generations after the initial victimization or perpetration.

It is important to know the hidden history of Nagasaki Christianity and the virtual annihilation of it by American Christians. The Bock’s Car bomber crew members, like most grunts in any war, were at the bottom of a long complex anonymous chain of command. They only “pulled the trigger” of the weapon which was manufactured by some other entity and put in their hands by still others. As in all wars, the WWII soldier trigger-pullers usually didn’t know exactly who they were trying to kill or even why.

The early church leaders, who knew the teachings and actions of Jesus best, rejected the nationalist, racist and militarist agendas of the national security agencies of the day. They also repudiated the pre-Christian eye-for-an-eye retaliation doctrines that have, over the past 1,700 years, regained dominance and led Christians to willingly kill both Christians and non-Christians in the name of Christ.



9 comments for “The Very Un-Christian Nagasaki Bomb

  1. Zachary Smith
    August 9, 2014 at 11:21 am

    My quick count found the word “Christian” was used 42 times in this essay.

    Aiming at Aug. 1, 1945 as the earliest deployment date for the first bomb, the Target Committee in Washington, D.C. developed a list of relatively undamaged Japanese cities that were to be excluded from the conventional U.S. aerial fire-bombing campaigns (that, during the first half of 1945, burned to the ground more than 60 mostly defenseless Japanese cities).

    Kohls does not seem to appreciate that those “fire bombing campaigns” were vastly worse than the dual Hiroshima and Nagasaki events. Nor that Christian airmen dropped those fire bombs. During a single air raid against Tokyo in April, the Japanese death toll was higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And there were many other fire raids against Japan.

    Three orders of nuns and a Christian girlâ€™s school disappeared into black smoke or became chunks of charcoal. Tens of thousands of other innocent non-combatants also died instantly, and many more were mortally or incurably wounded.

    Multiply those numbers by ten for the Tokyo fire bombing. It was a horror almost beyond imagination. Everybody from babies to old people were burned to death. So why is Kohls so obsessed by the A-bombs? Frankly, I don’t know, but obsession is the best description I know.

    This gentleman is one of the ‘like clockwork’ types I’ve spoken of previously. When August rolls around it’s time to write another article about the unique sin of the A-bomb use in Japan.

    I’m going to concede that Kohls is sincere. But I’m also going to say the man is a tunnel-vision fanatic. He grabs an idea, and sticks to it like glue. Facts aren’t going to deter him, because HE has the subject all figured out. From that previous link I learned Kohls is also an anti-vaxxer. That’s all I needed to know to conclude he’s a nutcase. A sincere nutcase to be sure, but a nut all the same.

    When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a second one became a necessity. That’s because the Japanese militarists could have rationalized that Hiroshima was some kind of cosmic accident like a meteor strike or freak accident resulting from a conventional bombing. Or that the US had only one such weapon!

    Perhaps some kind of ‘demonstration’ could have been done with the second explosion, but this would have been a stretch in the real world. The Japanese were perfectly capable of shooting down B-29s, and the risk of losing the airplane, crew, AND the impossibly expensive bomb was just too high.

    It’s my view that both the US and Japan were fortunate the A-bombs existed. Without them the death totals were going to rise to the millions, and probably to the tens of millions.

  2. Zachary Smith
    August 9, 2014 at 12:12 pm

    I can’t edit my previous post, so a brief addition here.

    I spoke of fantasies, and they’re on full display here. WHAT IF everybody in the world had the same good & pure thoughts as me (or you – or your sister-in-law) Nobody has any wrong thoughts. Everybody is both sane and honest – and is a devout member of the Peace Church. There won’t be any disagreements about doctrine, nor how those doctrines are interpreted. Nor any schisms. Other religions will evaporate. Or somehow become just like our Peace Church.

    It’s a thing of magic. And of fantasy.

  3. Joe
    August 9, 2014 at 12:55 pm

    To summarize Zachary Smith’s major points:
    1. We did worse to civilians than the atomic bomb
    2. I don’t care what history REALLY shows, I say that the bombs shortened the war.
    3. The Japanese MIGHT have thought ______ such and such.
    You’re entitled to your opinion, Mr. Smith, but facts show otherwise — that dropping the bombs actually followed Japan’s consideration of terms of surrender.

  4. Zachary Smith
    August 9, 2014 at 2:23 pm

    2. I donâ€™t care what history REALLY shows, I say that the bombs shortened the war.

    So tell me, what did history “REALLY” show? If you have some inside information not well known to others, kindly share it. I have several books on the subject, and quite a few saved files from the internet. If my current little collection is deficient, I’d like to remedy the situation.

    Links and sources would be greatly appreciated.

    Regarding your third point, believe it or not, the Japanese authorities were available for interview after the war. So their ‘thoughts’ were not exactly a black hole.

  5. Allen H
    August 10, 2014 at 12:09 am

    It appears that Kohls commentary has a few misstatements. The cathedral never was the aim point. The original aim point was near the Mitsubishi shipyards and the center of the city. Nagasaki was over 90% obscured by cloud cover. Bock’s Car was over a mile off target and their low fuel condition did not permit a correction. They decided to bomb by radar, if necessary (and against orders). At the last moment, bombardier Kermit Beahan saw a break in the cloud cover and spotted a recognizable landmark – the Mitsubishi stadium, which he used for his aiming point. The stadium happened to be near the cathedral.
    The hilly topography of Nagasaki sheltered many from the blast and helped to reduce the death toll. Ironically, the off-target bomb drop destroyed the Mitsubishi torpedo factory – the factory that had manufactured the specially modified torpedos that were used in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
    The story of the Emperor’s status being the sole condition for surrender has been repeated so often that many accept it as true. It is patently false. Before the atom bombs, the Japanese leaders had many conditions before they would consider ending the war – No occupation of Japan. Japanese military would self disarm. Japanese would conduct their own war crimes trials. Japan would be permitted to keep some of their conquered territories. The Emperor would retain the power that he presently exercised. – These were conditions that no sane government could accept. Basically, the militarists that started the war and prosecuted it with unprecedented viciousness wanted to save their miserable hides.
    The issue of the Emperor’s status became the sole sticking point in the Japanese surrender only after the atom bombs and the Soviet attack.
    Much is said about the Japanese and American lives that were presumably saved by an early end to the war. But included in this count must be the lives that were being lost throughout Japanese occupied regions of Asia as a result of the brutal Japanese occupation. Estimates of monthly deaths in these regions range from a low of 150,000 to a high of 250,000. This would be for each month that the war continued – a very sobering statistic.
    Basically, the atom bombs gave the Emperor the leverage to overrule the militarists and end the war.

    • Zachary Smith
      August 10, 2014 at 3:45 pm

      It appears that Kohls commentary has a few misstatements.

      Indeed! Thanks for the excellent materials you presented. The whole situation was chaotic, and time was of the essence.

      BTW, another non-trivial matter was the Allied POWs held by Japan. They were in dreadful shape, and when the invasion began they were scheduled to be murdered. I don’t have the precise numbers at hand, but I believe they were in excess of 100,000.

      Frankly, I doubt if the home island slave laborers from Korea would have been allowed to live. Useless mouths to feed, and potential dangers to the natives when the landings began. There were over 500,000 of these if a quick internet search can be believed.

  6. Lutz Barz
    August 10, 2014 at 5:19 am

    Monotheism is evil. The New Testament is totally fabricated. The reality of Jesus as Christ another myth maybe based on a person who had been a faith healer or a Zealot who was compromised. Either way its is all myth. Thus it is easy for one of this religion to massacre thousands [as encouraged in the Old Testament] without a flicker of concern. And why you Amerikans always have such an issue about this confabulated ideological delusion is indeed worrisome. The bombing was atrocious as were the Japanese. War is atrocious. There is no excuse even though now the world has several flash points which the US is doing everything but to contain.

  7. Larry G
    August 10, 2014 at 12:12 pm

    The A-bombs didn’t shorten the war. (Neither did the late firebombing of Japanese cities.) Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki for two reasons: 1) He wanted to preempt the Russian invasion of Japan in order to give the US a competitive advantage in the Cold War, which he himself was about start. 2) He wanted to try out in a real-world setting the greatest weapons of mass destruction ever invented, while simultaneously frightening the world into accepting American planetary hegemony. Though a few of his details may not be completely accurate, Kohls is right on when he suggests that Truman’s bombings were outrageously unChristian. Jesus clearly taught nonviolent resistance to evil. World leaders who have followed his teachings include Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Though both were martyred, they were far more successful than the United States military has been in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. A church that isn’t a peace church is a church that has abandoned discipleship. If you disagree with the ethic of Jesus, so be it – just don’t call yourself a Christian.

  8. Zachary Smith
    August 10, 2014 at 3:33 pm

    If you disagree with the ethic of Jesus, so be it â€“ just donâ€™t call yourself a Christian.

    Kohls was very emphatic about the “Christian” stuff, and you’ve brought up the topic once again. Reviewing a few of the “Jesus” things which come immediately to mind. From the Sermon on the Mount:

    31 â€œIt has been said, â€˜Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.â€™[f] 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

    A quick internet search turns up a statistic that 40-50% of US marriages end in divorce. Driving through Alabama a couple of years ago I was shocked to see roadside billboards advertising $139 divorces. Quite a high percentage of non-Christians in the US.


    The Americans I’ve encountered who do this total precisely zero. I’ve never heard of any who follow this teaching of Jesus. Have you?


    The rich young man who wanted to go to Heaven. He was told he had to give away everything he owned to the poor. He couldn’t do it. In fact, I’ve never heard of any Christians doing that. But then, I don’t get around much.

    17″These are the miraculous signs that will accompany believers: They will use the power and authority of my name to force demons out of people. They will speak new languages. 18They will pick up snakes, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them. They will place their hands on the sick and cure them.”

    That’s from the end of Mark. There are a few snake handlers. From all accounts they’re held in contempt by other Christians for attempting to follow a plainly-written directive from Jesus. I’ve never heard of any poison drinkers. Nor hands-on-the-sick healers.

    So far as I’m concerned, the people who DO these things are entitled to get on their high horse and lecture others about Jesus and His ethics. The rest can take a hike.

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