Hiroshima 1945

Independence, Missouri - 1944?

My father had a box of debris in one of the drawers of his secretary. When I was a small child I was intrigued by the molten glass and blobs of melted metal. He had  brought the stuff back from Hiroshima after wandering its leveled streets in the months after Japan's surrender. 

Ten year's ago I took some of the molten glass up to the local university to have it checked for radioactivity. My father's death from cancer a short time before had piqued my curiosity. Was it possible that his early exposure to Hiroshima had played some part in his death. By the time I checked the debris, forty years after it was collected, there was no radioactivity left of any consequence.

My Dad was twenty when the war ended. The only action he saw was when the merchant vessel he was assigned to, as part of a naval gun crew, circled a mine for several hours after leaving Okinawa. Sharpshooters took turns trying to blow it up until the ship's captain gave up. They sailed on to the south east coast of Japan where my Dad got shore leave at the former center of Christian Japan.

My Dad was not a warrior. He wouldn't let us have a dog because he'd seen his own dog hurt in a dog fight. I suspect that he got through his school years without ever getting into a fight himself. He told me, when I was quite young, how he under-reported his weight in the navy in order to face a smaller opponent in the boxing matches that the services staged to help their recruits become men. I remember thinking that this wasn't fair somehow but I suspect my Father was just trying to coach me into some practical appreciation for survival. 

The first person to harass my Dad was an "Armenian" kid on his merchant ship. The Armenian had a chip on his shoulder and made it a point to fight with everybody on board the ship. Not surprisingly my Father managed to avoid such a confrontation for a long time. Eventually, however, the Armenian forced my Father into at least the beginning of a fight by saying nasty things about his mother. At that point my Father recognized a point of honor from which he could not escape and put up his dukes. To my Father's relief the Armenian was satisfied to have gotten a rise out of my Dad and shrugged off the fight.

My Father's reluctance to war was in marked contrast to my maternal Grandfather's reputation as a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor. My Mom used to hush me after I'd injured myself by saying, "Don't cry Harry. Your Grandfather was shot and he didn't cry." Both my parents put Grandfather Robb on a pedestal. Even my father's father, the first Harry Welty, had some piss and vinegar in him. I own a letter from a friend of his who wrote about a fight my Grandfather got into when he was a kid. During a pick-up game of basketball a big thug on the other team harassed one of Harry's teammates. My Grandfather called the bully out and they met after the game to settle accounts. My Grandfather was the one whose ledger ended up short.

I got into a fight or two myself although none of them amounted to much. I don't think my Dad would have backed away from such a fight either.  Fights were like  taxes. It was OK to avoid them but not to evade them. He once advised me that running away from bullies only encouraged them to make your life even worse. He was too practical to be completely unheroic. In that he was not much different that tens of thousands of other boys who jumped into the surf from their landing crafts at Normandy or the Pacific Islands. 

A lot more of those skinny, scared young boys came back home alive because Harry Truman dropped the bomb. My Dad was one of them.