Hiroshima Day

The Peace Vigil at the Quaker Meeting House, Aylesbury

Today is Hiroshima Day which is being commemorated with a Peace Vigil by our friends at the historic Quaker Meeting House in Aylesbury. They are remembering, as we all must, 6th August 1945, the day when an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed a few days later by another dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The two cities were destroyed and casualties, mostly civilians, were estimated at around 200,000, with many more people dying later from injuries and illness.

Following a firebombing campaign that destroyed many Japanese cities, the Allies prepared for a costly invasion of Japan. The war in Europe ended when Nazi Germany signed its instrument of surrender on 8 May, but the Pacific War continued. Together with the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, the United States called for a surrender of Japan in the Potsdam Declaration on 26 July 1945, threatening Japan with "prompt and utter destruction". The Japanese government ignored this ultimatum. American airmen dropped Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, followed by Fat Man over Nagasaki on 9 August.

Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefecture health department estimated that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness. In a US estimate of the total immediate and short term cause of death, 15–20% died from radiation sickness, 20–30% from burns, and 50–60% from other injuries, compounded by illness. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians, although Hiroshima had a sizeable garrison.

Aylesbury Labour Party members in the Peace Garden
at the Quaker Meeting House

The members of the Society of Friends share a deep commitment to peace, simplicity, truth and equality. Peter Benenson, a member of this Quaker Community who lived locally at Quainton founded Amnesty International in 1961. 

The Quaker William Penn founded Philadelphia (The City of Brotherly Love) and is buried at the Quaker settlement nearby at Jordans. William Penn (October 14, 1644 – July 30, 1718) was founder and "Absolute Proprietor" of the Province of Pennsylvania, the English North American colony and the future U.S. State of Pennsylvania. He was known as an early champion of democracy and religious freedom and famous for his good relations and his treaties with the Lenape Indians. Under his direction, Philadelphia was planned and developed.

As one of the earlier supporters of colonial unification, Penn wrote and urged for a Union of all the English colonies in what was to become the United States of America. The democratic principles that he set forth in the Pennsylvania Frame(s) of Government served as an inspiration for the United States Constitution. As a pacifist Quaker, Penn considered the problems of war and peace deeply, and included a plan for a United States of Europe, "European Dyet, Parliament or Estates," in his voluminous writings.

The Hiroshima Genbaku Dome 

after the bombing

It was the Quaker Thomas Ellwood who organised a cottage for a blind John Milton at nearby Chalfont St Giles and who encouraged him to write “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained.”

http://daithaic.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/poems-on-underground.html 

When Milton came here in 1665 he was a broken man. Aged 57 he had gone blind and fled London to escape the Plague. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 many of his friends had been arrested, tortured and executed and he himself feared arrest at any time. He had been no bit player in the Civil war and the Parliamentary Government of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. He had written a pamphlet defending the regicide of Charles I and had acted as Cromwell’s Foreign Minister. His third marriage to a woman 30 years younger had bitterly estranged him from his two daughters and this former man of substance was now in poverty, relying on the discrete charity of friends. The Parliamentary and Puritan cause he had allied himself with was in ruins and in his blindness and sadness he returned to poetry he had put aside 20 years earlier for solace.

http://daithaic.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/surly-republican.html

As for Hiroshima this terrible event was the opening chapter on the nuclear age and the threat of nuclear weapons worldwide. Under the slogan ‘Hiroshima never again’ Peace Campaigners have campaigned for nuclear weapons to made illegal and to be never again used or threatened to be used. The need is just as great now as ever it was.