Feb. 5, 1958
In a few days, Albert Bigelow goes to sea again.
And if–as it’s feared–he doesn’t return, there will be those who’ll say it figured. They’ll say that the sea was his destiny.
In a way, they’ll be telling the truth, I guess.
Because the sea has always held a special fascination for Bigelow.
He became personally acquainted with it as a young man and he learned to navigate as well as he could drive a car.
Then, in 1941, when Bigelow was 34, Pearl Harbor was attacked. And Bigelow was among the first to line up at his Navy Recruiting Station.
As
is the fate of many hopeful sailors, he was landlocked for a couple of
years. But finally he talked his way back onto the ocean.
During late ’43, he was in command of a submarine chaser in the Solomon Islands.
He remembers one day during the fighting when more than 100 Japanese planes were shot down.
But
more vividly, he remembers the corpse of one Japanese airman which
floated bolt upright in a peaceful cove for weeks after the heavy
fighting.
"Every day we passed the cove," Bigelow recalls, "we saw the figure, its face growing blacker and blacker under the terrific sun.
"We
laughingly called him ‘Smiling Jack,’ "he adds. "As a matter of fact, I
think I gave him that name myself and felt rather proud of it."
Today, Bigelow reflects that the insensitivity which the war forced him and other decent men to develop is appalling.
Bigelow
was at Pearl Harbor as captain of a destroyer escort when the first
news that we had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima was released.
"It was then," he says, "that I realized for the first time that, morally, war is impossible."
After peace came, Bigelow returned to his wife and two daughters in New England and built up a successful business as an architect.
Then,
in 1955, he and his wife took in two Japanese girls who had been
injured and disfigured by the A-bomb blast at Hiroshima and who had
come to the United States for plastic surgery.
Bigelow remembers that the two girls harbored no resentment, that they loved him and his wife.
How could he respond to that kind of attitude, he wondered at the time.
It
wasn’t long afterward that he joined the Quakers, the Society of
Friends. And he became an active member of the committee for nonviolent
action against nuclear weapons.
When the U.S. was conducting regular A- and H-bomb tests in the Pacific, Bigelow
was asked by the New England office of the American Friends Service
Committee to take a protest petition, with 17,411 signatures on it, to
Washington.
He was selected because he had been active in
Republican politics in Massachusetts, and was acquainted with some name
politicians.
But there, in spite of his connections and the
known fact that the Friends Service Committee is a highly respected and
useful agency, Bigelow drew a blank.
After repeated attempts to
contact influential "old friends," either by phone or in person to
present the petition, he finally was told to leave his damn piece of
paper with the guard at the gate.
Bigelow’s conclusions: "It
seems terrible to me that Americans can no longer speak to or be seen
by their government. Has it become their master now instead of their
servant?"
But Bigelow didn’t give up.
In fact, that’s the reason he and three other men are leaving San Pedro Harbor in their 30-foot ketch next Monday or Tuesday.
They’re
going to take a different attack on the nuclear explosions which they
call "monstrous, evil and unworthy of human beings."
They’re
going to sail to the area where the U.S. government has scheduled
nuclear bomb tests this April. They’re going to anchor and wait for the
bombs to fall.
It’s as dramatic a protest as any man could conceive.
But I know for a fact that Bigelow isn’t doing it for publicity. I don’t believe, either, that he’d be especially anxious to become a martyr.
He merely feels that we’re destroying ourselves.
And
that it’s his duty, as a conscientious citizen of the world, to do
everything in his power to prevent us from doing so. He’s now convinced
that the only way he can reach us with his message is to dramatize it
to the extent that it may cost him his life.
Albert Bigelow is a brave man.
A man with far more conviction than some of the men who are leading our world today.
[Note: Bigelow was sentenced to 60 days in jail for sailing into the Eniwetok test site–lrh].
A link to his archives is here.
