When a bomb explodes on the ground, it spends a lot of its power blasting a crater in the earth. To get the most destruction from large 
bombs' explosion, they are often fused to detonate in the air. The point on the ground directly under the explosion, and, so, likely to
receive the most blast effect, is referred to as ground zero.

I has happened that in my life I have visited several places famous for being where bombs have done damage. Hiroshima, Dresden, Coventry, New York City. I hope there is something to be learned from events. And places.

Some people in this group have lived much closer to the places and events I will talk about. I look to you for correction. I am telling you all of impressions formed, in some cases thirty years ago, that have been brought back to my mind with new pain and new clarity and new poignancy by events of the past few months.
-*-
Imagine a mound. Grass-covered. Evenly, carefully formed. Maybe six meters across and a meter and a half high. Like the top of a globe protruding from the earth. The plaque in front of it says it is where the ashes of human beings, who could not be identified, were put together as the people of Hiroshima cleared and repaired their city after the Sixth of August, 1945. The ashes were covered with earth and grass was planted.

The mound is in the Peace Park, on an island just across a narrow branch of a river from ground zero of the first atomic bomb detonation aimed against human beings.

The park is not a somber place, as I had expected. I was there on a sunny Sunday in February. The day after a snow storm - something not often seen in Hiroshima. The various memorials are spread out among grassy areas and small groves of trees. Families come for picnics. People stroll along the pathways holding hands or deep in animated conversation. If you didn't read the signs - which were in many languages - you could have mistaken the Peace Park for a part of Grüneburg Park.

Past the mound, toward the tip of the island, is the Peace Bell. Park visitors are invited to ring the bell, which is done by swinging a two-meter-long log-like pole against the outside of the bell. This pole/clapper is suspended by two ropes perhaps three meters above the ground. The signs, in many languages, warn not to swing the pole too hard. I watched the bell ringers, young and old, as they swung the pole to the far back limit of its arc, then jumped up as high as they could and grabbed the pull rope and rode, feet off of the ground, as the pole charged into the bell and ended with a deep, resounding, long-reverberating, soul-satisfying "BONG".

Did they, did we, for I rang the bell too, want the sound of the bell, our prayers for peace, to be loud enough to be, maybe, heard? Or was it the joy of being alive and swinging through the air on a sunny Sunday and making a great, loud, pleasant sound that had us disregarding the rules on the placards?

In August of 1945 Japan had a brigades of school children traveling from city to city to clear firebreaks among the light, wood-frame houses. The United States Air Force had been bombing Japanese cities, and the resulting fires spreading through the houses had been a major part of the resulting damage. So, some buildings were being removed in an effort to contain the anticipated fires.

Hiroshima, an industrial city, had not yet been bombed, but it was expected it soon would be. So, hundreds of children workers were in the city on the Sixth. And, so, were among the 200-to-300 thousand casualties of the blast and fire and radiation of that first atomic bomb dropped on a city.

There is a memorial in the park to the children who died in Hiroshima. Plaques in it tell the story of the girl who believed if she folded 1000 origami cranes that she would survive the radiation sickness and burns. So, she folded the paper wrappers of the bandages put on her body. She folded the cranes, but died anyway.

Today, school classes and organizations and individuals from all over Japan, and the world, fold origami cranes and send or bring them to the Children's Memorial at the Peace Park in Hiroshima. The multi-colored paper birds are hung on strings, they are mounted in frames, they are laid on the walls. The day I was there, the snows of the day before had melted and caused the coloring of the origami paper to run and add to the softness and emotion of the scene of folded paper birds rustling in the gentle breeze on a sunny February Sunday.

And there is the museum with films and exhibits of the bombing and the aftermath and the rebuilding of the city. The signs and computer texts are in many languages of the world. The city seems to have taken it as its mission to show the reality, the horror of atomic weapons in hopes the first victims of atomic war will be the last victims.

But I want to tell you about the grassy mound. As I stood looking at it, a group of five persons, four men and a woman, arrived and set up a metal box the size of a small picnic basket on a counter in front of the mound. They opened doors on the front of the box and I could see a figure inside. They placed and lit candles next to the box. They put sashes with blue embroidery around their shoulders. Some of them took flat metal cans of a pressed tan powder and rubbed it carefully and thoroughly onto their hands. They stood before the altar they had prepared, before the grass-covered mound of ashes of human beings, and chanted and bowed and clapped their hands and rang small bells.

At the same time, a bus of Japanese tourists unloaded in the parking lot just beyond the mound. The passengers streamed along the path behind the chanting, praying, bell-ringing people. And they stopped. They quietly formed into rows behind the people performing the ceremony and bowed and clapped at the appropriate moments. When the short observance was over, the tourists went on into the park to walk the paths and ring the Peace Bell and visit the other memorials. The celebrants folded their stoles and extinguished their candles and closed their box and left.

Our faith teaches us that the wisdom of the world's religions can inspire us in our ethical and spiritual life. The simplicity of the ceremony. The spontaneous, reverent participation of the tourists. The uncomplicated, unpretentious understatement of the mound. They combine to give me a picture of something very human, and at the same time very different from what I am used to. A different way of being in the World. Something I can learn from. And I am thankful it has survived.
-*-
It was a Tuesday evening, the Thirteenth of February of 1945. The Red Army was moving across Eastern Europe. People were fleeing before the Soviet troops, trying to reach areas to the west being occupied by the advancing American and British armies. Dresden had been bombed very little throughout the war; it was seen as a relatively safe place by residents and hundreds of thousands of refugees. For good reason. There were few war-related industries in the city, no important military installations; it was not a major transportation hub. There were several hospitals treating the wounded of the German military. Why would it be bombed?

In comparison, Frankfurt had military installations and headquarters, industry important to waging war in and around the city, and had key road and rail arteries converging here. So, Frankfurt was heavily bombed. Even 20 or so years after the war when I was first here, I remember Frankfurt as a flat city - none of its present skyline; rubble still in piles. I see the diorama in the Stadtsmuseum of the city at the end of the war and I wonder at the beautiful city I so enjoy today.

On the night of the February 13th, 1945, Fastnacht, 600 planes of the British Royal Air Force dropped thousands of bombs on the heart of Dresden. The main bomb load was incendiaries - the goal of the air raid was to start fires. And, oh, it did.

Four hours later, another wave of RAF heavy bombers, using the fires set by the first attack as their aiming point, dropped more tons of incendiary bombs on the same place.

The next morning, the 14th of February - Valentine's Day and, ironically Ash Wednesday that year - another wave of bombers, this time of the United States military, dropped more tons of bombs on the ashes and flames of the burning city center.

In his book Dresden: A City Reborn, Anthony Clayton writes:
Even the most graphic medieval metaphors of hell are inadequate to describe the scenes in Dresden's streets during and after the raids. The city's old buildings, once hit, blazed and quickly linked together in an all consuming inferno that in some areas of the city reached a temperature of over 1,000 °C. The inferno created fire tornadoes of hurricane force that flung burning property, furniture and people with their clothes on fire into the air and over considerable distances. Many areas of the central city burned for three days, a few for up to a week. A pall of smoke three-and-a-half miles high containing paper, wood and other items hung over the city for three days.

Dresden was occupied by Russian troops. It became part of the Ost Zone, East Germany, the DDR.

The City was rebuilt. Some buildings lovingly and carefully restored. But rebuilt to the plans and ideals of a new culture of city planning.

Since reunification, the rebuilding continues. In 2005 the Frauenkirche is to be reopened. Its restoration has been the focus of much international effort, which included the royal family of Great Britain.

I find Dresden today unusual among European cities. The old section of the city, the parts most thoroughly bombed and burned, have been rebuilt, but without the narrow, crooked streets that fascinate and attract me, which are usually just off of the wide, major boulevards of cities like London and Paris and Brussels and Frankfurt. Dresden Altstadt is without the little houses and shops that show how people have lived, and do live. Without the feeling of continuity of the generations.

I notice that the old neighborhood across from the Frauenkirche is to be rebuilt, as it was, as it had developed over the history of Dresden up to the bombing. I hope to see that. I hope it will give me a feeling for the people of the city.

What a visitor can learn of Dresden's history through two world wars and since, including the bombing, occupation, rebuilding, and reunification, is contained in half of one floor of the Stadtsmuseum. There was a display of nativity scenes that occupied the other half of the floor when I visited. This in such contrast to the multi-media, multi-lingual display given such prominence in Hiroshima.
-*-
In 1968, with long hair and a backpack and an International Student ID, I visited a family outside of London. They booked me on a series of day trips by bus to see the sights outside the city. One was to Coventry.

I learned about Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom. And I saw the cathedral.

I didn't realize it at the time, but when I visited the new cathedral in Coventry, it had been in use only seven years. I knew, as I walked among the ruins of the old structure, next to the new, that it had been destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War, but what's involved in the long process of restoring, rebuilding, replacing hadn't yet reached my consciousness. And the connection between Coventry and Dresden is a new realization of mine.

Paul Oestreicher, who was Director of International Ministry at Coventry Cathedral from 1986 to 1997 writes in "Out of the Fire - the Enduring Friendship of Coventry and Dresden":
After the raid that destroyed the centre of Coventry, Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring, threatened to 'coventrate' the cities of England one by one. In so doing he invented a word to describe the process of city annihilation that had begun. And Coventry itself became a symbol, a powerful weapon, in the war propaganda of both sides - of Nazi prowess on the one hand and of Nazi brutality on the other.
Oestreicher continues:
Understandably, the immediate instinct of the people of Coventry was for revenge - which was, indeed, to come. Having sown the wind, Hitler's Germany reaped the whirlwind as cities, one by one, but in Germany, not in Britain, were indeed 'coventrated', many in the dying days of the war. Dying days indeed: in Coventry there had been almost 1,000 dead; in Dresden, which was symbolically to become the German Coventry, there were at least 35,000 - probably many more.
-*-
New York is a city I know pretty well. I've lived there. I attended first grade there. I've gone there as a shopper and a tourist, to go to the theater and museums, and on business.

I remember the city skyline without the World Trade Center Towers. I've been to meetings at the Omni Hotel at their base. I've seen the city from their observation floor. Flying back to Germany the September before last, I saw the towers from the plane's window - mirroring the light of the setting sun on a gloriously clear day. And I've seen the crater where they used to stand, now called Ground Zero. And I am shaken. And feel a very personal loss.

When I was there, three months after the attack last September 11th, I found the visitors, and workers too, seemed to be moving about the site with an air of reverence. There was little shouting. Or running. There was a certain care to movements and sounds near the ruins of the World Trade Center. There was a sense of a shared significance. It was like being in a church.
-*-
In the history of warfare, it used to be the goal of battle to kill as many of the enemy's soldiers as possible, to take control of a battlefield, and the territory and resources and people beyond. The outcome of these battles was decided by the number and strength of the combatants, the cleverness of the commanders, and such factors as terrain, weather and luck. And the will of the gods - the incantations of clerics have been a standard part of armies' preparations for battle. Still are.

I attended a religious service for members of the United States' military last September. There, words were read from a holy book, a prayer from thousands of years ago, that asks that God smite mine enemy. Prayers were offered to a god in whose wisdom the World Trade Center's towers, and the lives of the human beings in them, had been allowed to be destroyed.

Warfare has changed. Some claim the American Civil War in the 1860's was the first modern war. The industrial capabilities of the combatants played a major deciding role. Since then, it is not just battlefields and soldiers, but industrial sites and workers which are parts of how war is waged. And, increasingly, cities and civilians too. In the term of the warriors, they are legitimate targets.

Coventry and Dresden and Hiroshima were all the result of war leaders' attempts to destroy, not the enemy's military, the enemy's will to fight to demoralize the civilian population or bring some element in the government, perhaps not those leading at the moment, to the conclusion it was better to surrender than to battle on.

Göring promised Hitler that the British could not stomach the bombing of their cities; that they would sue for peace, so "the Blitz" entered the English vocabulary and history.

The Allies found that bombing economic and strategic targets was not containing Germany's fighting capacity. Area bombing, as it was called - the bombing of cities and their civilian populations was begun in earnest in May of 1943 with a 700-plane raid on Wuppertal, where24-hundred people died. Hamburg was fire bombed in August of that year; 32-thousand people died there.

As we noted, Japanese cities, including Tokyo where the emperor was, were the targets of air raids before the atom bomb was dropped.

Fifty years after the events, two analysts of the bombings of Dresden and of Hiroshima came to the conclusion it had to do with a threat to destroy a culture. In each case, so the thinking goes, the enemy war leaders were to be shown that not only were soldiers and factories and civilians in line to be obliterated, but culture as well. That if the fighting continued, in one case, all the statues and paintings and historic buildings that mean so much were in jeopardy, and in the other case, the institution, as well as the person, of the ruler-god would end. Culture, what is unique to a people and develops and is maintained through generations, was to be threatened. Not only people would die, but all trace of who they were. And, the strategic thinking was, that that would bring the end of the war.

The one commentator suggested that works of art, to cultured human beings, were seen as irreplaceable, and so, to preserve them, action would be taken. The other says that vaporizing the god-emperor would devastate the culture that had centered itself around him; that military and political leaders would accept defeat rather than that.

Not defeated generals or frightened civilians clamoring for peace, but protectors of the culture would end the war. Cultural values above immediate military or political goals.

Perhaps, the bombings, atomic-, fire-, terrorist-, do give reason to think about culture and a less here-and-now, self-interested view of what is of value.

What I learned from September 11th was how very much we depend upon each other - in ever wider circles. While "community" and "neighborhood" and even "family" mean something very different than fifty or a hundred years ago, and we have lost much in that transition, the fact of our world, in Europe and North America, is that an event in New York can affect millions very directly - in earnings lost, lives changed, fears felt and acted upon.

This system we live in is very delicate. We depend upon the planes flying. We depend upon trucks and trains delivering our food. We depend upon water systems and power grids and communication infrastructure and road networks. We depend upon fire fighters and police and a whole host of emergency workers - not just when a major disaster strikes, but every day.

That there are airplanes in which we travel together and huge office buildings where we come together and work makes us vulnerable to terrorists' attacks. But it also makes the world we live in possible.

We have some choice of how complicated and interdependent our lives are, but that choice comes from the complex systems which support us. This group, and that it can exist, is a product of our cultures.

Perhaps it is encouraging that there is this idea among us human beings of culture. Something that stretches off into time before my parents and beyond my children. Something important, not just of me and my immediate time and place. Something of enduring value. Something worth preserving beyond my thoughts of personal gain.

These are thoughts of preservation, not of destruction.

There is, in the tradition of Native North Americans of what is now New York and New England, the belief that decisions ought to be made for the seventh generation to follow. Perhaps the wisdom of this long view of time and consequences can protect us from us.
-30-
©2002, Bryant Brown. All rights reserved.