6 August 2020

A Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot On A B-29

75 years ago, while two young men escaped from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the US nuked Hiroshima with a bomb named Little Boy.

Official video

Backstory

6 August 1945, at 8:15am (Hiroshima time), an atomic bomb called Little Boy, the first ever to be dropped on a populated city, took less than 50 seconds to fall from the Enola Gay to the city. The B-29 stayed over the target area for two minutes and was ten miles away when the bomb detonated.

The aftermath, Hiroshima

April, same year: two men escaped from a concentration camp called Sachsenhausen, built in the town of Oranienburg, north of Berlin. One of them was my grandfather.

Now a fugitive, he’s running away from imprisonment with a fellow Soviet inmate. They have to steal from German citizens, for food, protection and to go unnoticed during the day. They tie themselves to tree branches at night. The skinny kid came back home, mostly walking, from Berlin to Italy.

A glimpse of something

A Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot On A B-29 is the second song from the concept album After 1989: A Trip To Freedom. It plays around the two events. A glimpse of hope for the two tired men running away in Central Europe, a horrific wasteland in Japan. The nuclear era was born.

The song title

A pun over an old tune by Vera Lynn intertwined with the name of the atomic bomb and the plane that dropped it. Since the song is about two fugitives running away from a concentration camp, I wanted to convey a feeling of cautious optimism at the beginning. Truman’s speech announcing the event, while wrongly acknowledging Hiroshima as a military base, introduces the world to the horrors of the nuclear era.

The contrast between the Christmas carol-like music of the final section, and this flatly delivered horrifying declaration is chilling.