Re: Reflections as a POW

Date: June 09, 2004

"Reflections on World War II

BY ARNOLD ABRAMS Staff Writer

The first time Arnold Bocksel saw a B-29 Superfortress was on Aug. 17, 1945, when he was standing in a Japanese-run prisoner of war camp in Mukden, Manchuria.

World War II had just ended, and Bocksel, who had been a Japanese prisoner for 3+ years, was stunned by the plane's enormous size. He was equally surprised by its mission, which had been switched from bombing to delivering tons of food, medicine and clothing.

"It was amazing," the former Army warrant officer, now 90, recalled Monday. "The first thing I did was down three cans of corned beef, which was washed down with three chocolate bars. Then I got sick to my stomach."

Monday's scene was somewhat different.

Bocksel, a longtime Syosset resident, was on hand at the American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in Farmingdale, with Thomas Costa, a former Air Force bombadier, to watch the landing of a B-29.

Both men were on hand to participate in a controversy that has gained strength in recent years about the atomic bombing of Japan: Most veterans and other U.S. supporters claim the bombing was necessary to end the war; protesters insist it was unnecessary and racist.

"I say essentially one thing to those protesters, many of whom were not yet born when the bomb was dropped," said Costa, an 81-year-old North Merrick resident, who was part of the elite unit trained to drop an atomic bomb. "I tell them that if there hadn't been a Pearl Harbor, there never would have been a Hiroshima."

An estimated 120,000 Japanese were killed on Aug. 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Another 75,000 perished three days later, when a second one was dropped on Nagasaki. Another 75,000 to 100,000 reportedly died over the next four decades because of radiation exposure.

The surrender of Japanese forces, which quickly followed the second bombing, made unncessary the planned invasion of Japan -- which, U.S. military officials estimated, might have generated up to 500,000 American casualties. "Can you imagine what that would have been like?" said Bocksel, a survivor of the legendary Bataan Death March the Japanese forced their prisoners to make.

The Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, is housed in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The B-29 that landed at the Farmingdale museum will be on display there from Wednesday through Sunday.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc. "