A Toll in Blood
Alvin N. Lasky, a St. Louis business executive, was "doing mostly cleanup and guard duty" in Weapons
Company, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division—"billeted on the industrial site of the harbor" immediately
next to the core blast site in Nagasaki.107 Lasky was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1974, and was unusually
successful in continuing to live with the usually terminal illness.108
Richard W. Bonebrake, a member of B Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, was ordered
to patrol in the center of Nagasaki’s nuclear-blasted area. In October 1977, living in Williamsport, Indiana, where he
worked as a bank clerk, Bonebrake learned he had multiple myeloma, and began the long struggle with
chemotherapy.109
George Proctor, also a 2nd Division Marine sent into Nagasaki’s central area for cleanup, was forced to quit his
job as a construction worker, suffering through several years of multiple myeloma before dying from the disease in
October 1979. His widow, Agnes Proctor, living in Elwell, Michigan, recalled her husband’s accounts of
experiencing severe nausea and aching joints even while still in Japan during the occupation.110 His claims to the
VA for compensation were rejected.
Multiple myeloma was not confined to the five former Marines we located. Anthony Thomas Sirani, an Army
radio operator attached to the 2nd Marine Division, arrived at Nagasaki’s central zone on September 23.111 At age
fifty-five, in December 1979, Sirani died from multiple myeloma at Nassau Hospital in New York.112 The disease
also emerged among U.S. naval personnel accompanying the Marines assigned to begin occupation cleanup duties in
Nagasaki, and among Army veterans engaged in similar cleanup tasks in Hiroshima starting the second week of
October 1945.
"How much longer can the Government ignore such statistics as 10 times the national average for such a rare
disease?" demanded Congressman Robert Davis. A constituent of Davis’s—Napoleon Micheau of Escanaba,
Michigan—contracted multiple myeloma three decades after Army cleanup chores in Hiroshima.113 His plight
prompted Davis to issue a statement, in spring 1980, decrying "the tragedy of the Defense Department’s refusal to
cooperate in locating the military personnel involved in the cleanup operations in Hiroshima and Nagasak."114
The Department of Defense, however, was doing no more than stonewalling. In a letter sent to Illinois
Representative Thomas Corcoran (R) on March 18, 1980, Defense Nuclear Agency director Vice Admiral R. R.
Monroe contended that "medical science has, to date, identified only a ‘borderline’ relationship between exposure to
radiation and the onset of multiple myeloma."115
Later, in a report dated August 6, 1980, DNA officials replayed the same theme: "Medical science believes
multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some
indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure."116
Amid recent research scrupulously ignored by the Pentagon was a survey by the Government Accounting Office.
Coordinated by Boston blood specialist Dr. Thomas Najarian and made public May 31, 1979, it indicated that
veterans who were exposed to atomic bomb testing may have become far more susceptible to multiple myeloma as a
result.117 In releasing the survey results, Dr. Najarian noted that the disease has an incubation period of twenty-five
to thirty years118—a time span precisely corresponding to the experiences of Nagasaki cleanup Marines Coppola,
Ralph, Lasky, Bonebrake, and Proctor.
Meanwhile the Hiroshima-based Radiation Effects Research Foundation was reporting that Japanese survivors of
the atomic bombings faced a risk of multiple myeloma 4.7 times higher than normal. It had taken at least twenty
years for the excessive multiple myelomas to emerge.119
And, in 1981, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study linking radiation to increased risk of
multiple myeloma. University of Oxford researcher Jack Cuzick pinpointed "a clear excess of myeloma among
persons exposed to radiation." The British scientist had compiled information available from two decades of
research around the world.120
In addition to multiple myeloma many other rare bone-marrow diseases plagued the Nagasaki veterans. When
doctors found that former Marine Lyle Wohlfeil’s bone marrow was being destroyed by myelofibrosis, "they kept
asking him if he was ever connected with radiation," recalled his widow, Marilyn Morris, who settled in LaGrange,
Illinois, after remarrying. Wohlfeil had been in the autumn 1945 Nagasaki cleanup, and went on to become a realtor.
He succumbed to myelofibrosis, a severe scarring of the bone marrow, in 1968; he was fifty-four. Having heard VA
officials discount the possibility that Nagasaki’s residual radiation could have been harmful, neither Wohlfeil nor his
widow filed with the VA for service-connected benefits.121
VA national headquarters records show that a claim was filed in March 1968 on behalf of another veteran who
died from myelofibrosis—and who had arrived at the Nagasaki atomic blast center on September 23, 1945, serving
there five weeks. Nagasaki-based VA claims also document deaths from such radiation-connected illnesses as
Hodgkin’s disease, granulocytic leukemia, and oat-cell carcinoma of the lung.122
In late 1979 Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder acquired photocopied summaries of sixty-four Veterans
Administration claims filed by veterans and widows contending residual radiation had caused severe illnesses among
the veterans of Nagasaki and Hiroshima cleanup. We obtained copies of the documents, which made staggering
reading. There were a dozen cases of leukemia, plus various forms of organ cancers and several instances each of
blood-related diseases like myelofibrosis, Hodgkin’s disease, and bone-marrow cancer. A number of claimants
mentioned chronic bizarre skin afflictions. All the claims had been submitted before any national publicity on U.S.
veterans of Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup. Quietly the VA had been systematically rejecting all of them.123
There were good reasons to believe that the sixty-four claims acknowledged by VA headquarters represented a tip
of the iceberg of claims filed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki cleanup veterans. The two dozen that VA rating-policy
staff chief Robert C. Macomber described to us in January 1979 included a number that never turned up in the stack
of claims that VA administrator Max Cleland later provided to Representative Schroeder. And some of the claims
submitted in the late 1970s were not included in that stack of documents sent along to the congressional office.
Chicago Sun-Times journalist Claudia Ricci reported in December 1979 that "of 13 veterans of Nagasaki and
Hiroshima whose cases have surfaced here, 10 have died, nine of them from cancer."124 A Chicago widow, Margaret
Ryan, recounted a discussion with physicians who discovered her husband, James—a Navy veteran who had been in
Nagasaki after the atomic bombing—was suffering from myeloblastic leukemia: "At the time, the doctors asked if
he was ever in Japan. We were in shock. ‘Yeah, I was there,’ he said. ‘Well, you have the same kind of leukemia
the Japanese had.’"125 Ryan’s application for VA benefits was rejected in the spring of 1977, a year before his death.
William Shufflebarger was twenty-two years old while a Marine stationed in Nagasaki at the end of September
1945—"just a few blocks from the devastated area of the city," as he described the location. Living in Oak Lawn,
Illinois, thirty-five years later he was battling Hodgkin’s disease, and cancer of the lymph nodes.126
Severe breathing problems have been frequently cited by America’s veterans of assignments to clean up after
atomic warfare. Sam Scione, of Warwick, Rhode Island, a Marine veteran of Nagasaki cleanup, was the subject of
an article published in the Disabled American Veterans’ magazine in March 1980. As a result of the article Scione
heard from 180 veterans involved in the occupation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki; nearly half—eighty-three—reported
severe respiratory maladies.127
107. Alvin Lasky to authors, August 20, 1979.
108. Diagnosis summary by Virgil Loeb, Jr., M.D., St. Louis, January 8, 1979.
109. Richard Bonebrake, interview, May 1980; also, Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, May 25, 1980.
110. Agnes Proctor, interview, May 1980; also, Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, May 25, 1980.
111. Marie Sirani (widow of A. T. Sirani) to Virginia Ralph, February 6, 1981.
112. Death certificate of Anthony Thomas Sirani, New York State Department of Health, December 22, 1979.
113. Diagnosis summary by Robert E. Ryde, M.D., Escanaba, Michigan, July 24, 1979. Ilene and Napoleon Micheau to authors, June 28, 1979.
114. Press release, Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, May 18, 1980.
115. R. R. Monroe to Congressman Thomas Corcoran, March 18, 1980.
116. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces.
117. The Oregonian, Associated Press, June 1, 1979. See also, letter by Thomas Najarian, M.D., and Benjamin Castleman, M D., New England Journal of
Medicine, May 31, 1979, p. 1278.
118. Ibid.
119. M. Ichimaru, et al., Multiple Myeloma Among Atomic Bomb Survivors, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1950-1976, Technical Report No 9-79 (Hiroshima:
Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 1979).
120. Jack Cuzick, Ph.D., "Radiation-Induced Myelomatosis," New England Journal of Medicine, January 22, 1981, pp. 204-210.
121. Marilyn Morris, interview, March 1979.
122. Robert Macomber, interviews, January and February 1979. Regarding radiation and lung cancer tissue, see Archer et al., "Frequency of Different
Histological Types of Bronchogenic Carcinoma as Related to Radiation," Cancer, Vol. 34, no. 6, 1974, pp. 2056-2060.
123. VA claim files obtained from Schroeder’s office, November 1979.
124. Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, December 23, 1979.
125. Ibid.
126. William Shufflebarger to authors, April 30, 1979.
127. Log of informational phone calls and correspondence compiled by Dora and Sam Scione.