The Golden Rule Sails Again – Visits Portsmouth Next Week
Albert Bigelow was commanding the destroyer escort U.S.S. Dale W. Peterson as it sailed into Pearl Harbor when he learned that Hiroshima had just been destroyed by an atomic bomb. He soon concluded that “morally, war is impossible,” and resigned from the Naval Reserve a month before becoming eligible for a pension. As time went on, Bigelow’s convictions only deepened. In 1955, he and his wife Sylvia, by now members of the Religious Society of Friends, hosted two “Hiroshima Maidens”—young Japanese women disfigured by atomic bombs who had come to the U.S. for plastic surgery. Using facts, logic, and argument, Bigelow and numerous colleagues tried …