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Date: February 17, 2004


"1st American POW added to gallery of Hiroshima dead

By Gary Schaefer
Associated Press

HIROSHIMA, Japan -- Near where the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, the faces of the victims silently appear and fade on a wall of television monitors in a relentless display of the attack's human toll.

Amid the thousands of faces, one stands apart: that of Cpl. John Long Jr., U.S. Army Air Force.
Long, who died in the blast while being held by the Japanese, is the first American serviceman to be enshrined at a memorial here, throwing light on the little-known story of U.S. prisoners of war who perished at Hiroshima.

"It shows how indiscriminate the slaughter was," said Shigeru Aratani, a curator at the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. "Enemies and friends, soldiers and civilians, women and children--they were all killed."

Long bailed out of his B-24 bomber as it was shot down near Hiroshima days before the Aug. 6, 1945, bombing. The 27-year-old steelworker from New Castle, Pa., was among at least 10 American POWs killed in the attack.

The names of seven American POWs have been added since the 1970s to an official book of victims updated annually by the city, but the list is encased in a stone cenotaph and is not visible to the public.

The American prisoners were absent from the memorial hall, which opened in 2002 and displays 9,000 bomb victims for 700 visitors a day, until Long's 35-year-old great nephew, Nathan Long, offered the airman's photo last month.

Long says the portrait is a "small story" compared to the catastrophic suffering of Japanese victims. The bombing killed some 68,000 people instantly, 140,000 by December. Thousands of Koreans brought to Japan as forced labor died, as did Americans of Japanese descent who were trapped after war broke out.

But the POWs are among the least remembered casualties--their fate wasn't widely known until researchers digging through archives began to document the story in the 1970s.

An important clue came in 1977 when a professor from Hiroshima University found a Japanese list of 20 American POWs listed as killed in the atomic attack.

Some of those names were later found to belong to prisoners who had been killed elsewhere in grisly experiments that the Japanese military apparently wanted to hide.

The others were the crews of three aircraft shot down near Hiroshima on July 28, 1945, after a raid on Japanese warships in nearby Kure.

© 2004, Chicago Tribune"