The Ordeal of Harry Coppola
While certain government agencies were digging in for a protracted struggle, so were some of the victims. A
group called the Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki formed to take up the fight. Its
membership included several hundred veterans and relatives who believed their families’ lives had been forever
harmed by cleanup participation in the two Japanese cities. One of the first activities of the new organization came
in August 1979, when Virginia Ralph and Harry Coppola traveled to Japan on its behalf.
For Coppola—in the throes of an increasingly painful terminal disease—the journey to Nagasaki was his first visit
to that city in nearly thirty-four years. Until recently there seemed to be no particular reason to return. A Bostonian
of Italian descent, a patriotic Marine with official discharge papers listing combat in battles at Iwo Jima and
Bougainville, a bakery worker and then a union house painter who saved a little money and moved to Florida—for
three decades Harry Coppola almost forgot having been sent into Nagasaki’s atomic blast center area in September
1945.
But in 1978 Coppola learned that he was dying of a cancer in his marrow—multiple myeloma—the cause of
unexplained pain and frailty of his bones that had plagued him since 1974.78 He did not have long to live, according
to Dr. James N. Harris, a West Palm Beach specialist. Broward County medical examiner Dr. Abdullah Fatteh,
based in Fort Lauderdale, reviewed Coppola’s records and concluded it was "probable that Mr. Coppola’s condition
of multiple myeloma is causally related to the atomic bomb radiation exposure in 1945."79
Coppola filed a Veterans Administration claim for service-connected benefits for himself, his three sons, and his
widow-to-be, based on a connection between the Nagasaki duties and his terminal illness. As in all such cases the
VA’s answer was an unequivocal no.
Later, after his predicament received national publicity, Defense Nuclear Agency officers tried to undercut
congressional concern by telling people at Michigan Congressman Robert W. Davis’s (R) office that Harry Coppola
had not been in Nagasaki in 1945.80 But Coppola’s Marine Corps discharge papers list his military service as
including "Occupation of Japan—September 22, 1945, to October 6, 1945."81 And an affidavit by Masuko Takaki,
who was a young girl living in Nagasaki in the fall of 1945, recollects Coppola’s presence as a patrol in the central
A-bombed zone of the city at that time. "I remember specifically," the affidavit declares, "because my father invited
him to our home several times for dinner, and I remember he gave my father American cigarettes. I also recognized
his pictures in Japan’s newspapers during his visit August 6, 1979, and made an effort to have a reunion with him."82
Coppola was part of a squad of a dozen crack machine-gunner Marine MPs arriving in Nagasaki shortly before
the larger detachment of Marines and Seabees. He would never forget becoming "nauseous as hell" two weeks after
getting to Nagasaki; he and another Marine with the same symptoms in the MP squad were quickly removed from
the city and put on a Navy ship bound for the States. After a voyage during which he lost large amounts of hair,
Coppola was discharged two days after arriving at Oceanside, California.83 "They rushed us right through," Coppola
remembered. "Other guys there were waiting for weeks to get discharged—they asked me, ’Who do you know, a
congressman?’" Coppola’s impression was that "they wanted to get rid of me fast."84
It was to prove far more arduous to return to Japan in 1979 than it had been to arrive the first time.
"I’m going to Japan because the truth must be told," Coppola said in a written statement. "I’ve already gone to
Washington, D.C., and the Veterans Administration doesn’t want to help me. I’m feeling very bitter that my own
government, that i fought for proudly, refuses to admit that the Nagasaki bomb is killing me. After what I’ve
learned, what I’ve been going through, I’m against all this nuclear crap."85
A few days later, with Coppola beginning to tour Japan, the Associated Press reported his intention to "seek
financial aid in Japan to pay his medical costs." AP quoted Coppola as saying: "I know it’s a lousy thing to do—to
ask the country where we dropped the bomb, but the United States has turned a deaf ear." Owing to expenses of his
bone-marrow cancer, Coppola said, "I’ve blown my life savings, about $29,000, and I’m still in debt."86
Ostensibly a beneficiary of the nuclear bombings, at the age of fifty-nine Coppola had become living—and
dying—symbolic evidence refuting the illusion that the effects of an atomic weapon can be confined to its intended
victims.
"I really didn’t know how they were going to accept me. I knew we were going to go on a speaking tour and all
that, but the rest of it I couldn’t anticipate. I didn’t know what the hell to expect."87 Emotion ran high, as the
Japanese hosts and American visitors saw in each other common anguish. Coppola was besieged by scores of
journalists; at times he was accompanied by Masuko Takaki, now a middle-aged woman who succeeded in her
efforts to "have a reunion" with the former Marine she remembered from those dinner-table visits.
When Coppola reached Nagasaki for ceremonies on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the atomic bombing of that
city, a huge amphitheater holding eighteen thousand people awaited his address. "When I got through with the
speech, they gave me an applause until I left the arena. And every five or six feet I would give them a bow. And
they all stood up. It was something; it was deafening, the roar that they gave me. Because I told them, in that
speech, that Truman was livin’ in hell, I told them that he shouldn’t’ve dropped the bomb there. He didn’t drop it on
military targets, he dropped it right in the middle of two cities, with women and children."88
Sitting in the living room of his modest home outside of West Palm Beach, expecting his death would not be
much longer in coming, memories of his second trip to Japan were bittersweet for Coppola. "They were very good to
me. They offered me free medical service, they offered me everything there, live there free. But I figured what the
hell, I don’t want to die in Japan, I’d have to leave my family, go there, I’m not getting cured on it." His wife, Anna,
leaned over the armchair and patted his shoulder. "Multiple myeloma means many, I’m loaded with it, they’re not
going to cure me. And I was told they could never really arrest it; they were trying to control it, but it’ll never be
arrested. But if I’m going to die, I says, I want to die home—I’m not going to die over there. That’s the only reason
why I didn’t take ’em up on it. But they can’t understand why the United States Government won’t help me on
this."89
Travel became still more difficult for Coppola, subject to frequent, torturous attacks. "Sometimes I feel like I’m
in hell," he said, describing the pain searing his bones that all too often left him feeling "like someone cut your leg
off." People told him they found it hard to believe, from looking at him, that he was so close to death. "An apple
can look shiny, beautiful on the outside. But inside, it’s rotten."90
Despite the increasing agony Coppola was eager to participate in activities planned for Washington, D.C., in late
September.
Over the summer several dozen American veterans had signed a petition, addressed to President Jimmy Carter
and Max Cleland, requesting fundamental changes in VA policies. "Some of the U.S. servicemen who were with us
in Nagasaki cannot sign this petition, because they are dead—from premature heart attacks, blood disorders, bone
marrow cancer or other ailments," the document said. "As time passed, it has become clear that our illnesses, and
those of our buddies, were connected to the time we spent in the atomic blast center of Nagasaki in the fall of 1945,
as we functioned under orders there."91
On Sunday, September 23, 1979—exactly thirty-four years after the Marine occupation troops entered Nagasaki’s
harbor—Harry Coppola, Virginia Ralph, and several other veterans and widows of Nagasaki cleanup walked through
Lafayette Park to the northwest gate of the White House. Coppola, dressed in a suit and tie, and wearing a Veterans
of Foreign Wars hat in the bright sunshine, handed a pile of signed petitions to William Lawson, executive director
of the White House Federal Veterans Coordinating Committee.
The next morning, thirty-four years to the day after U.S. Marines and Seabees first awoke to begin their cleanup
assignments in Japan, VA administrators and a White House aide sat down to discuss the aftermath of those duties
with Nagasaki veterans and relatives from New York, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, and California. There was
appreciable tension in the national VA headquarters office suite. What followed were three hours of dialogue and
often heated debate.
"We have very little choice but to accept the evidence given to us by the Defense Department as authoritative,"
John Wishniewski, deputy director of the VA Compensation and Pension Service, informed the delegation. "We
have been assured by the Defense Department that the levels of exposure at Nagasaki and Hiroshima were very
minimal."92
"I have got multiple myeloma, and you say to send new evidence in," Harry Coppola retorted. "Well, I have sent
new evidence, medical evidence, by some of the biggest doctors in the country . . ."93
Coppola added that while the VA’s director "is living high off the hog, big salary, I am looking for—I am ready
to eat dog food! I am living on Social Security! And now I submitted that evidence, now you say ‘Go back to your
military records.’ Well I have asked for my military records, and half the stuff isn’t in there. I went to a Japanese
[language] school in Guadalcanal to learn how to speak Japanese, it is not in my record. I got wounded with shrapnel
in the back on Bougainville, it is not in my record. I got wounded in the leg at Iwo Jima—it is not in my record. I
am not even on the record that I was patrolling in Nagasaki! What records are you talking about? I applied for
disability on this, got a form letter that says ‘It is not in your military records.’ But I have cancer . . . "94
For Margaret E. Powers, widow of a Nagasaki cleanup veteran, the trip to Washington from her home in
Castleton-on-Hudson, New York, was propelled by the same kind of long-standing frustrations. Her husband, ex-
Marine William S. Powers, had died at the age of forty-eight, from gastrointestinal bleeding due to cancer, in 1965.
Soft-spoken, her pent-up bitterness spilled out after a VA administrator offered assurances that the agency was
interested in learning all it could about such veterans.
"Do they know the names of these Marines?" Mrs. Powers asked, turning to other visitors in the VA suite. "They
never kept track of who was in there or for how long, the VA, did they? I mean, how do they know where to locate
these men? Maybe they don’t even know that this is going on . . . I only found this out myself, and I have been a
widow for fourteen years, and my husband was in there on the day that they went, September 23, and he was there [in
Nagasaki] for three months before they sent him to Sasebo, and they were cleaning up the area with bulldozers and
whatnot, and still discovering bodies under the rubble, and getting sick just from the smell of the place. Now they
weren’t too concerned about it then, about sending these boys in there."95
Virginia Ralph added that the VA was refusing to accept responsibility for disabilities that cropped up decades
after military service ended. "If a man is shot in the leg, or shot in the head, or loses an arm in service, immediately
he is taken care of, because there is visual evidence. But when a man is exposed to radiation which is a silent
invader, there is no way to detect that he has radiation illness. He may be lethargic; my husband had dizzy spells,
the doctor said, ‘It is something you must learn to live with.’
"But when his rib cage deteriorated, when the bones fell apart, when he was in his final stages, that is when the
doctors at the VA hospital, every doctor that came in to take his history, the first question was, ‘Have you ever
worked in radiation?’" Ralph, a farmer, never had—except in Nagasaki. "It sounded to me as though the VA
thought that my husband’s illness struck overnight. This is false. I don’t think it is handled individually, because I
have seen several denial letters, and they have the same paragraph: ‘Your husband received insignificant radiation.’
‘Your husband received slight radiation.’ In the case of plutonium, what is insignificant radiation? . . . What is slight
radiation?"96
Back home in Florida, Coppola spoke with a steady stream of interviewers. "I can accept dying, we’re not here
for good," he told a Tampa Tribune reporter. "But I cannot accept the Government giving me a screwing."97
As 1979 drew to a close, the bone-marrow cancer grew still more excruciating. In anguish over her husband’s
worsening condition, Anna Coppola confided: "I don’t know how a person can stand so much pain."98
Shortly before Christmas The Miami Herald quoted Coppola in a front-page article: "Does the Government want
me dead? They hope I die tomorrow. Then my case is closed, and they’ve gotten rid of one royal pain."99 The same
month, Howard Rosenberg, a staff associate of columnist Jack Anderson, called the Defense Department for reaction
to the national publicity often spearheaded by Coppola’s flamboyant accusations and unswerving persistence.
Chatting with an officer at the Defense Nuclear Agency, Rosenberg asked whether the publicized charges were
angering the nuclear military brass. Replied the Pentagon official: "We don’t get mad, we get even."100
In the spring of 1980 Coppola’s appeal to the Veterans Administration was denied. The VA justified its decision
by declaring that "service medical records do not reveal treatment for any condition which could be considered a
result of radiation exposure and do not show any evidence of any early manifestation of multiple myeloma. The
condition is not shown to have become manifest to a degree of at least 10 percent within one year of the veteran’s
release from active military service."101
As the Palm Beach Post noted in an editorial, "Coppola was outraged by this rationale, and rightly so."102 The
lag time between radiation exposure and multiple myeloma is known to run a quarter of a century or longer.
Coppola responded, "I’m a very bitter man against the government. When my country needed me in Guadalcanal I
was there. On Bougainville I was there. On Guam I was there. I was there in Iwo Jima; I gave machine-gun
coverage while they put the flag up on Mount Suribachi."103
Out of his original Marine battalion of one thousand men, he recalled, only a dozen or so had survived the war.
He had felt blessed to be among them. But American-made radioactivity seemed about to succeed where Japanese
troops had failed—and the Veterans Administration’s refusals felt like salt in the festering radiation wounds.
Meanwhile, protests came from other quarters. Delegates to the 1979 national convention of the International
Woodworkers of America approved a resolution observing that "the U.S. Government has failed to take
responsibility for aiding veterans and their families—suffering from severe illnesses and financial hardships as a
result of exposure to residual radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." The labor union’s
resolution proclaimed that "we support the rights of these veterans and their widows to receive compensation from
the Veterans Administration for service-connected disability."104 A few months later the White House received a
petition signed by dozens of prominent Japanese scientists and civic leaders, urging aid for Coppola and other U.S.
veterans who had been sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki in autumn 1945.105
During the spring of 1980 Harry Coppola was in hospitals much of the time. "In the last week I almost died two
times, and I know time is running short," he said, speaking into a tape recorder, his voice still strong though audibly
short of breath. "No human should suffer the pains of hell like we’re suffering."106
By the time Harry Coppola died from multiple myeloma bone-marrow cancer on June 16, 1980—three months
short of his sixtieth birthday—he was one of five ex-Marines whose multiple myeloma had been publicly linked to
their presence in the core atomic blast area of Nagasaki in late September 1945.
78. Diagnosis summary by James N. Harris, M.D., August 16, 1978.
79. Abdullah Fatteh, M.D., Ph.D., Office of District Medical Examiner, Fort Lauderdale, to John F. Romano, Esq., West Palm Beach, June 17, 1979.
80. Aides to Congressman Robert Davis, interviews, June 1980.
81. Discharge statement for Harry A. Coppola, signed by commanding officer E. W. Autry, Captain, U.S.M.C.R.
82. Affidavit by Masuko Takaki (1512-5 Waifu, Kikuchi City, Kumanoto-ken, Japan), September 1, 1979; available from Committee for U.S. Veterans of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
83. The U.S.M.C. honorable discharge certificate for Coppola is dated November 9, 1945.
84. Harry A. Coppola, interviews, March 1979 to April 1980.
85. Press release by Coppola and Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, July 26, 1979. Working to get his passport in time to participate in
ceremonies marking the thirty-fourth anniversaries of the atomic bombings, Coppola called his congressional representative, Daniel Mica. Coppola told us
that Mica advised him to be careful not to say anything against the U.S. Government while abroad; to do so, Coppola recounted Mica’s telling him, might be
considered a violation of federal statutes.
86. Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, August 1, 1979.
87. Coppola, interview, March 1980.
88. Ibid
89. Ibid.
90. Coppola, interview, September 1979.
91. Petition presented to White House on September 23, 1979, and to VA national headquarters September 24, 1979; available from Committee for U.S.
Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
92. Transcription of tape-recorded meeting, September 24, 1979.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. Tampa Tribune, November 28, 1979.
98. Anna Coppola, interview, December 1979.
99. Miami Herald, December 7, 1979.
100. Howard Rosenberg, interview, February 1980.
101. "Statement of the Case—In the Appeal of Harry A. Coppola," VA regional office, St. Petersburg, March 28, 1980.
102. Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, April 21, 1980.
103. Coppola, interview, April 1980.
104. International Woodworkers of America, 1979 Resolution No. 6; available from IWA national headquarters, Portland, Oregon.
105. Petition to White House by Japanese scientists; available from Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
106. Coppola to authors, tape-recorded message, April 1980.