Excerpt of an interview with General Crawford F. Sams:
I found that in Hiroshima, when I first went down there, we didn’t know [what] the reaction of people would be. We didn’t have any troops in there. The first directive then came to the government of Japan to pertain to the civil population. We had to work out a process as to who we would address it to, all this, whether it would be the Emperor, the Imperial Government, [or] the Imperial General, whatnot. We worked it out anyway (the staff), giving the Japanese responsibility for protecting us (that went there). I found that one of the – [from] what would correspond to our National Research Council – Japanese had gotten down there just after the bombing and figured [from] the effects, that there was radiation involved. I was able to contact him and get his first-hand report and so on. So I decided that I had to get this thing in hand with all these groups coming and all wanting to get all the same information. So, the Atomic Energy Commission was set up by law, subsequently, and we wanted to do research because of all this speculation. You know, you get the extremists, you get a lot of theoretical physicists or a lot of radiologists who said, “Oh boy, genetic effects are going to be so-and-so for this.” We wanted to find out the facts and it would be a long-term project.
The Atomic Energy Commission then back here – they had sent over Staff [Warren] and Shields [Warren] and Warren had been over there originally – they were interested in setting up an American research group there. If that was done then it had to be under my control, and I said, “No.” I had said “no” to some other things like this. In the first place, this thing has to go on for at least a generation. If you set it [up] as an American thing and excluded the Japanese, they’re going to throw you out of here as soon as the peace treaty is signed and your research will go to the board. So it has to be a joint thing. I set up, out there then, a Joint Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. The American thing was authorized and financed from the United States – the Atomic Energy Commission – but we got the Ministry of Health and Welfare to set up a commission there and so it was jointly staffed with the Japanese and so on. We had some good statisticians, we used Kure as a control group, and so we set up a long-term project on the effects of this radiation. Then the reports came back. Well, I have to tie some things in because we’re still suffering.
I mentioned deterrents against war. There was a letter brought over by this first group that came up to Japan from the Philippines with me, from the Manhattan Project, in which the President was looking for a new deterrent against a future war, because air power had failed. You know, “If you have another war, air power will destroy civilization,” and it failed because it hadn’t even brought Germany to its knees. A strategic bomb survey over there showed that military production had increased actually during our bombings. So the object of this instruction, called Letter of Instruction, was “You will play up the devastating effect of the atomic bomb.” All right? So I was the one who set the deadline this time. Anybody who had been in Hiroshima and died within six months, whether they got run over by a bicycle or whatnot, would be credited to the atomic bomb. We had to set some kind of order to this. Most of the casualties occurred, of course, from thermal readings. You had the bomb – now I’ll just summarize this very quickly because all the reports that came back were the result of these studies that came over my desk.
The atomic bomb went off and that city had about 250 thousand people in it. In other words, you had a high density population exposed, compared to Tokyo which had a population of nine million, but where they anticipated being bombed early in the war after the Doolittle raid. They had taken all “nonsense” people out so there were about three million exposed to the fire and napalm and high explosive bombs that were dropped there. When the bomb went off, about 2 thousand people out of 250 thousand got killed – by blast, by thermal radiation, or by intense x-ray, gamma radiation. Then, what happened is like an earthquake. The blast knocked down houses, hibachis had turned over and started fires. When you have an earthquake or an atomic bomb, you start fires and then people are trapped in the buildings. And again, by endless interviews, “Where were you?” “Where was your great uncle?” “Where was grandma when this occurred?”
We built up the evidence to show on a cookie-cutter basis that it took about thirty-six hours for about two-thirds of that town to burn.
You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]: a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent. They’re talking about after that, “One bomb and away goes Chicago,” you know? All you’ve got to do is look in Life magazine and whatnot back in ’45, ’46, and so on. What I’m trying to do is to show how it’s like “End the war with one B-17.” Well, you have to keep your feet on the ground. As near as we could figure then, about twenty-one thousand people died in thirty-six hours as a result of being trapped and burned and so on. It’s like those who died in the ’23 earthquake [and subsequent] fire. Then, as I say, I set the six months’ deadline for anybody who had been there, even though they went away and so on, to put a deadline on deaths from delayed radiation effects as far as it takes six months or so for deaths from (what do they call it?) delayed effects.
One of us – Norman Trenton(?), somebody – got a priest there to say he guessed 100 thousand people died when the bomb went off. Well, you see, it didn’t. There never was 100 thousand people [who] died. I recall the figures to the ultimate, six months’ deaths from untreated burns, thermal burns – they didn’t have any drugs or anything else, except what we could get in to them – and the delayed effects of radiation which take several months. You can get acute death from maybe 3,000 rem [roentgen-equivalent-man] to the central nervous system; you can get that right now. Then you get GI symptoms which cause death in a matter of a couple of weeks. Then you get the leukopenias and so on, which occur over a period of several months. So you have three kinds of radiation deaths. It was about, 67 or 76 [thousand], I got my figures transposed, [who] ultimately died in six months, out of 250 thousand. So we got things going on treatment of radiation effects and all this. That’s the facts of Hiroshima.
When I came back to this country, I was appalled, from a military standpoint, to find that our major planners in the War Department were using their own propaganda, 100 thousand deaths, Bing! And [they were] comparing it – saying it was the greatest killer in comparing it to the number of deaths in Tokyo, which had been literally destroyed by high explosives. Actually, the atomic bomb was a damn poor killer in comparison to the exposed population. Tokyo was dispersed, a third of the total. They were using the nine million figure back there, you see. They said, “Well, 250 thousand people were exposed to it and 76 thousand and whatnot died in six months.” It took me a couple of years to get that comparison straightened out in our official training doctrine in this country. I used to tell them back in the general staff and so on and including the chief of staff, “I believe _____(?) if you can deter a war, for God’s sake, let’s do it and blow up the effects all you want. But don’t believe your own propaganda if you are applying it to your military planning.” Unfortunately, we created such hysteria in this country that the mere mention of radiation, or thermal nuclear power, or a couple of millirems of radiation and you have a hysteria. So this is a fact. Actually, the atomic bomb was a poor killer.
Down at Nagasaki, they missed the ground zero they tried to hit, but there’s still the fact that it hit Nagasaki Medical School and Hospital there and killed a lot of patients and so on – from the _____(?) of the concrete building. But the blast effected this and knocked down part of the concrete and so on. But you don’t hear much about the effects of Nagasaki because actually it was pretty ineffective. That was a narrow corridor from the hospital in _____(?) down to the port, and the effects were very limited as far as the fire spread and all that stuff. So you don’t hear much about Nagasaki. It was a different kind of bomb, but still [dangerous] as far as radiation and things happening. So you have to get your facts and keep them in mind and not let hysteria take over. We’re still paying for that hysteria following the atomic bomb, which is deliberately blown up for a very good reason, and which I participated in, in accordance with policy of the government. Well, I hope that [this information] is not too much. That’s all detail and it’s all in reports. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, of course, is now running under the auspices of the Japanese because of the genetic effects, you see, we have to keep [an eye] on it.
Incidentally, leukemia – you hear about leukemia all the time – this is technical questions. (Got a piece of paper?)
Sure.
(Is this on the record – we can take this off the record.) I’ll show you. Whenever you talk about leukemia and radiation, I get a little irritated because they say, “Oh, everybody’s going to die of leukemia from radiation, from years age.” [ed. note: Dr. Sams is apparently writing or drawing something and showing it to the interviewer.] This is leukemia radiation in the population – [it] increases with age. I have said [that] nobody ever proved that leukemia was ever caused by radiation. Because what happened in Hiroshima – this was the big thing everybody was looking for. It went on like this. Here’s the grade(?) it comes from. Now let’s take 1945. And here’s the age it _____(?). This is how it went up. And then it came down. In other words, this area [ed. note: Dr. Sams is apparently showing the interview something he’s just written] _____(?). What radiation does is trigger, not cause, leukemia. You talk to people here on the faculty and they don’t know this. In other words, if you look at the charts we _____(?) what had triggered it early. The total number of cases – this is what, when I got down below this, all the people back there began to [get] quiet. You hear about this propaganda about the radiation down here and at Pennsylvania. It won’t [cause leukemia]. All it does is trigger at an earlier date what was already going to happen. That’s a very interesting thing and unknown to a lot of radiologists. They don’t teach this in medical school. It was certainly an eye-opener to me when we got that [report] done.
Transcript: Crawford F. Sams, 1979
Further reference:
United States Army Medical Department: Office of Medical History
