Mark Millican
Joseph “Toby” Reid said he begged his mother for three months to let him join the Army at age 17 after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but after visiting Nagasaki, Japan, a couple of weeks following the atomic bomb blast he lost his stomach for war.
“We had mixed feelings about it,” said Reid. The Dalton resident said he was one of four World War II sergeants who rode through the second Japanese city to be razed by the nuclear weapon. “At the time we weren’t thinking about what we did, but I got home later (to the U.S.) and thought, ‘My God, what fools we were.’ The two atomic bombs should not have been dropped, because we had them beat to a pulp.”
Reid said he wasn’t allowed into the infantry because of a “bad right eye,” so he served in a quartermasters corp. He traveled around the country with the Army before finding himself on a “liberty ship,” or cargo carrier, cruising under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge on Jan. 1, 1945, en route to the south Pacific.
Landing first in New Guinea, Reid’s unit moved to the Philippines after forces led by Gen. Douglas McArthur captured the islands.
“We were zig-zagging the whole way to avoid submarines,” he said. “The war in Europe was just about over so the military was going to start moving soldiers (to the Pacific) to help. It was stupid of us to take all those small islands. We only needed Guam and New Guinea and a couple more, but we thought we had to take everything.”
Reid’s unit was attached to the Fifth Marine Division, he said, and in July it appeared they were going to invade Japan.
“On Aug. 5 we were sitting off the coast of Okinawa, and heard over the loudspeaker that we had dropped the (nuclear) bomb on Hiroshima,” he recalled. “On Aug. 9 we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki and the emperor (of Japan, Hirohito) took over from the generals. He said the war is over on Aug. 14.”
The bombs killed 90,000 to 166,000 people in Hiroshima, and 60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki, from the effects of the blast and lingering radiation, according to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.
Reid said less than two months later his unit landed at Sasebo, a Japanese port city about 30 miles from Nagasaki.
“We wanted to get off the ship because we had been onboard for a month,” he said. “They marched us down the middle of the street to see what the people would do. The Japanese people never raised their hands (to wave).”
Reid said one day some guys came by in an armored personnel carrier and asked him if he wanted to go to Nagasaki to deliver some Army blankets to a children’s hospital, and he told them yes.
“All of a sudden there was a field of red dust from the buildings that had been destroyed,” he remembered as they approached the devastated city. “The Japanese had already cleaned it up, because there were no dead people around. I said, ‘Stop, I want to get out.’ I didn’t want to go to that hospital and see those dead children. I told them to pick me up when they came back.
“I kicked (at the ground) and it was all just gray and red dust. There was not a sound — no birds, no dogs, no people, and just the lower part of some of the buildings. We had already bombed them to death (conventionally). I don’t see why we had to do (the nuclear bombs).”
Reid had an older brother who narrowly missed death on another continent in World War II. After fighting in North Africa his brother was hospitalized with frozen feet during combat in the mountains of Italy. After healing, he was told his unit had been “wiped out” in fighting and he was sent home.
“When (Gen. Dwight) Eisenhower went out of office (as president) he told us the industrialized military complex was going to get us, and he was right,” Reid said. “Generals like to go to war, and big corporations like to make money.”
Still, Reid considers himself “lucky.”
“The radiation (from Nagasaki) hasn’t killed me, because I didn’t get enough of it. But I had some skin cancers,” he said, pulling up his shirt to show scars. “Some of them were removed recently, but it’s not melanoma.”
Reid, 84, grew up near Plains, Ga., and worked for Uniroyal for many years. He came to Dalton as a rep for the company before working at several carpet mills. He now enjoys history, genealogy, flower gardening and golf. His late wife, Alice, was a retired teacher from the Whitfield County school system.
