The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  The city has a distinctive shape. Formed like the letter X, the upper arms are populated valleys split by a range of hills which reach to a height of thirteen hundred feet. The lower arms are heavily congested commercial and residential sections spreading out on either side of a magnificent harbor. According to the strategic plans, Ground Zero would be just to the southeast of the middle of the X, in the heart of downtown Nagasaki. Fat Man was supposed to drop below the hill range and spread its devastation through the relatively flat land around the bay. As in Hiroshima, the fireball could then run out unchecked and achieve maximum devastation.

  As the plane neared the outskirts of the city, the cloud cover seemed to break somewhat. Van Pelt’s eyes were glued to the scope as he directed Bock’s Car toward the dropping point.

  At thirty seconds to bomb release nothing had changed. Sweating faces reflected the intense concentration on the most difficult job of maneuvering the big ship over a precise target.

  Five seconds later, a firm voice called, “I’ll take it.” Kermit Beahan had found a huge hole in the cloud layer and absolved Ashworth and Sweeney of the burden of deciding to bomb by radar. At the radar scope Van Pelt and Buckley felt reprieved from the responsibility of pinpointing the drop.

  The humming signal droned through the plane. The ship shuddered as the open bomb bay doors caught the air. Beahan spotted the oval outline of a stadium a mile and a half up the Urakami Valley northwest of the intended Ground Zero. He sighted on it. He asked for a correction to the right, received it, and was able to put his cross hairs on the stadium. Then he was silent.

  Seconds later the humming signal stopped abruptly. Bock’s Car lurched upward as the Fat Man fell toward the ground. Over the intercom, Beahan said, “Bombs away,” then quickly corrected himself: “Bomb away.” Sweeney turned the plane to the left at a steep angle while the fuselage groaned.

  In the other ship someone shouted, “There she goes!” Fred Bock executed a similar turn as the cluster of instruments and the letter to Professor Sagane fell down on parachutes several miles to the rear of the Fat Man.

  When the atomic bomb left the B-29, arming wires were extracted, enabling the weapon to run on its own internal power. Safe-separation timing clocks held switches open so that the bomb could not detonate near the aircraft. As it fell farther toward earth, additional switches were closed by barometric pressure. Then radar fuses were actuated to sense the exact height above ground. As the shiny black weapon neared an altitude of 1,540 feet, arming and firing switches closed, and the high voltages already built up in massive condensers were released to a series of detonators attached to a layer of high explosive. The detonators triggered an implosion, a bursting inward. The resultant shock wave quickly pressed the separate sections of plutonium together. In turn, the now dense plutonium sphere compressed a tiny “initiator,” composed of particles of beryllium and polonium. Alpha rays emitted by the polonium acted on the beryllium, which sent a shower of neutrons out into the surrounding dark gray metal. In a millisecond, Nagasaki became a graveyard.

  The Fat Man was detonated over the northwest leg of the X, just northeast of the stadium in the Urakami Valley. At the moment of ignition, there was an intense bluish-white flash as though a large amount of magnesium had exploded. The entire area grew hazy with smoke. Simultaneously there was a tremendous roar, a crushing blast wave and searing heat.

  Twenty-four hundred feet to the northeast, the roof and masonry of the Catholic cathedral fell on the kneeling worshipers. All of them died.

  At the Nagasaki Branch Prison, just north of the explosion, 118 guards and convicts saw the brilliant light but nothing more. There were no survivors.

  The baggage master at the railroad station never rose to meet the incoming train. The roof of the building dropped onto his head. His assistant, torn by flying glass, ran into the street where people were beginning to jump headlong into the river to find relief from burns.

  The approaching train had stopped for a moment to discharge passengers near the entrance to the Urakami Valley. Most of the people never left their seats as the white light flooded over them. The windows blew in and ripped flesh into flayed meat. Severed heads rolled down the aisles as uninjured Japanese stumbled over the dead and ran from the train, too stunned to offer any help to others.

  Out in the harbor, two and a half miles from the center of the blast, a seaman watched the explosion from his boat. As he stood transfixed, a small craft near him burst into flames and burned to the waterline. Beside him on his own deck, crew members screamed from burns on exposed portions of flesh.

  Four and a half miles to the south of the blast, a wooden barracks at Kamigo simply fell down.

  When the bomb exploded, Fusa Kawauchi was working inside a cave pumping out water. She did not see the intense flash but heard a noise like the sound of machinery running. She looked at a girl across from her and noticed that her face was streaked with dirt and soot. The two girls got up and went to the mouth of the cave. What they saw was unbelievable.

  The fireball of the bomb had broadened in seconds to fill the valley. It lapped at the ridges on either side. The blast wave leaped the crests and raced through the seaport. People by the hundreds lay on the streets, in the fields, in wreckage, and screamed for water. Creatures that barely resembled human beings walked dazedly, skin hanging down in huge flaps, torsos blackened.

  A mile and a half north of the center of the fireball, Ensign Jolly of the Netherlands Navy lay under a table in a prisoner-of-war camp. He had seen the parachutes drop, and he had seen the flash. Instinctively he plunged under the furniture as the building crashed around him. He lived, but several of his fellow prisoners died in the first seconds.

  Another prisoner of war was an American, Motorman’s Machinist Mate Second-class Jack Madison, captured three years before at Corregidor. He was standing before a coal-washing pit nearly two miles away. Guarding him and six other prisoners was a solitary Japanese policeman, who glanced idly into the sky as Bock’s Car passed by. None of the captives paid much attention to that one plane as it headed over the Urakami Valley. Madison continued working and neither felt the blast nor saw the light as Fat Man burst below the layer of clouds. He was thrown to the bottom of the pit, unconscious.

  At the Nagasaki Medical College, southeast of the epicenter, Dr. Shirabe heard the plane and started for the door of his offices. The room collapsed behind him and left him in total darkness. When the light returned, Shirabe stumbled to the corridor and walked outside to join survivors struggling to reach the high ground behind the building. At their backs were the terror-filled cries of patients trapped in their beds by crackling fire.

  Over the wreckage of the Urakami Valley towered a monstrous expanding pillar of smoke shooting upward from the middle of the explosion at incredible speed. Like a genie released after countless ages of captivity, the column writhed and twisted toward the stratosphere. At its feet lay incredible devastation, as though the living thing had wreaked a special vengeance on its jailers. The deadly apparition seethed up toward the circling planes. It changed faces, it changed colors from purple to salmon to gold to soft white. It escaped into the boundless sky where it sprouted a new head and hovered menacingly over the dying valley.

  The men in Bock’s Car and The Great Artiste were overwhelmed by the sight. The brief, blinding, purplish white flash lit up the sky. Below they could see only a pall of smoke in the Urakami Valley. The center of the city seemed undamaged. Around the periphery of the blast they saw countless fires on the slopes of the hills.

  Pappy Dehart sat in the tail of Bock’s Car, photographing the explosion with a movie camera given him by Dr. Alvarez. His excitement at what he was witnessing made him almost incoherent. As he focused on the scene, two aftereffects of the blast threatened the lives of the fliers.

  The first was a violent series of shock waves. As Sweeney turned to come back over the city to verify the bomb’s point of detonation, he and Albury saw the waves coming throug
h the air like ripples on a pond. When they hit, Commander Ashworth felt as though he were inside a garbage can with someone striking a baseball bat against the cover. By the third blow, he wondered whether the plane was being attacked by antiaircraft fire. Jim Van Pelt distinctly counted five blows against the fuselage—not two or three, as he had expected.

  In The Great Artiste, Laurence scribbled furiously in his notebook. He too experienced five distinct shock waves which bounced the ship about like a matchstick. The navigator, Len Godfrey, was “startled and amazed” at the size of the explosion. As his mind raced to comprehend the enormity of Nagasaki’s disaster, observers in the rear of the aircraft shouted the fact that the mushroom cloud was racing toward them.

  In the lead plane, Ray Gallagher was as quickly aware of the second threat, the approaching radioactive cloud. From his position in the left scanner’s window he saw the spiraling monster apparently heading directly up under the B-29. He shouted into the intercom at Sweeney, “Major, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Van Pelt and Albury also had seen it coming. Albury said to Beahan, “Well, Bea, there’s 100,000 Japs you just killed.” Beahan did not answer. He was watching the advancing pillar of fire—which was much too close.

  Sweeney pulled away in a turn, and the mushroom soon loomed above them nearly ten miles away. It was black and gray at the base, white and reddish above. Commander Ashworth thought it “vicious-looking.” Bock’s Car and The Great Artiste headed away from Nagasaki.

  Five minutes after leaving the scene, Spitzer transmitted a message to Tinian:

  Bombed Nagasaki 090158Z visually with no fighter opposition and no flak. Results “technically successful” but other factors involved make conference necessary before taking further steps. Visible effects about equal to Hiroshima. Trouble in airplane following delivery requires us to proceed to Okinawa. Fuel only to get to Okinawa.

  As Bock’s Car flew south from Nagasaki, it carried a relaxed crew. With the Fat Man finally delivered on target, the strain built up over the past hours quickly dissipated. Even the seriousness of the fuel shortage could not dampen the men’s spirits, and shouts of congratulations continued to sound over the intercom as they climbed out of thin flak suits and survival equipment. Eventual ditching in the ocean was something they were willing to risk if necessary. Beser said as much. So did Buckley, who also commented to Gallagher, “I never said many prayers in my life, but today I really prayed.”

  On the scant remaining three hundred gallons of gas, Sweeney took the B-29 down the chain of islands between Kyushu and Okinawa. He told Spitzer to call the air-sea rescue people again and alert them to the possibility of a ditching in the area. Repeated messages got no answer. The rescuers had gone home. Having been told nothing of the mission’s delays at the Yakoshima rendezvous and over Kokura, they assumed that the bomb had been dropped at Kokura and that the strike planes had successfully returned to Tinian.

  An hour out of Yontan Field on Okinawa, Bock’s Car tried to contact the tower. There was no response. As the B-29 bored in, increasingly desperate messages were sent to the ground. No one answered. After nearly twelve hours at the controls, Sweeney and Albury were close to exhaustion; but as they came within sight of safety, they saw yet another hazard ahead. The tower at the field still failed to recognize the approach of the plane, and squadrons of P-38’s and B-25’s were taking off and landing below. Because of Bock’s Car’s fuel problem, there was no time left to circle. The plane had to make a direct descent.

  At the pilot’s order, Van Pelt and Spitzer shot off flares. On the ground no one paid attention to the signals.

  Just behind Sweeney, Commander Ashworth sat on the floor and braced himself against the wall in anticipation of a rough landing. The pilot called into his voice radio, “Mayday, Mayday,” as he steered the ship toward the long runway.

  The ground ignored him.

  Sweeney roared, “I want any goddamn tower on Okinawa.” Then he shouted to Van Pelt and Spitzer: “Shoot every flare you’ve got.” Twenty-four of them, all colors, arched into the sunlit sky. The interior of the ship smelled like a battlefield from the acrid smoke. Outside, the multicolored lights—signifying “dead and wounded on board”—hung over the airport.

  The fireworks display finally attracted attention below. Formations began peeling off as Bock’s Car flew along the runway high above the ground; the plane had to have the concrete under it in case a dead-stick landing was necessary.

  Bock’s Car descended rapidly and hit the strip halfway down at 120 miles per hour. It bounced into the air once and settled. The two outboard engines suddenly quit cold and the plane veered to the left, narrowly missing a line of B-24’s parked to the side. Fighting to slow it, Sweeney threw the propellers into reverse pitch. The new Curtis props caused enough drag to tame the wild ride of the B-29 before it plunged off the concrete. Even then, the men in the rear were tossed about like chaff as Sweeney, still at high speed, turned into the taxiway.

  A jeep appeared, prepared to lead Number 77 to a hard-stand. Fire engines and ambulances waited for the plane to come to a full stop. When Sweeney cut the functioning motors, silence enveloped the interior of the plane. A man came to the door as it opened and asked where the dead and wounded were. None were aboard Bock’s Car. The dead and wounded, thousands of them, were several hundred miles to the northeast.

  In Nagasaki, the mushroom cloud became less vertical, more diffused, as the wind gradually altered its appearance. The scene beneath it had become even more horrifying.

  Within twenty minutes, American POW Jack Madison had regained consciousness at the bottom of the coal-washing pit. His head was bleeding and two ribs were broken. Near him a British prisoner, bloodied, held his hands over his face.

  Madison looked up and saw a silver B-29 circling slowly around the mushroom cloud. He was watching the missing camera plane, which was finally attracted to the area by the flash of the Fat Man. Nearly a hundred miles east and heading south at the time, pilot Hopkins brought his crew across the stricken valley at thirty-eight thousand feet. Bombardier Myron Faryna noticed that the northwest portion of Nagasaki was covered by a blanket of dust and smoke; in the other parts of the city he could clearly see buildings, apparently undamaged. Above the camera plane, the cloud extended for another twenty thousand feet. Hopkins took the B-29 south toward Okinawa.

  On the ground, Jack Madison rose from the coal pit. No one with him had been killed because an intervening hill range had deflected the blast and flame. While he wondered whether an ammunition dump or oil storage depot had been exploded by a bomb, a group of Japanese guards appeared and ordered the POW’s to go with them. Madison walked away from the disaster, but he kept looking over his shoulder at the fires spreading out from the Urakami Valley.

  Much of the city was in flames. Lines of refugees streamed out of the inferno. Many were walking dead, soon to collapse to the ground and expire. Not only had the heat charred and destroyed their skin, but the invisible gamma radiation from the split atoms had invaded their bloodstreams and marked them for sure death. They croaked continually for water.

  Almost one half of the medical personnel in Nagasaki had died in the first minutes, and, as a result, casualties received little or no relief from their wounds. The burned continued to scream, the torn bled to death, and those dosed with radiation never received the transfusions which might have saved them. Over everyone hung a wall of crackling fire which rained down sparks and consumed the slow of foot.

  One of the doctors who died was Dr. Tsuneo, the man who had just returned from Hiroshima. The second atomic bomb caught him in his room at the Medical College. Though carried to a nearby hill by friends, he was beyond help.

  Some of the doctors and nurses were so shocked by the enormity of the catastrophe that they turned their backs on helpless survivors and scurried away to the safety of the high ground. By the time their consciences functioned, it was too late.

  A light rain began to fall on the Ura
kami area shortly after noon. It was black, a result of the condensation of the mushroom cloud, filled with dirt and debris. It acted as a brake on the spreading fires which ate at the wooden wreckage and the bodies sprawled about on all sides. The dirty rain streaked the faces of those still walking and running out of the flames. It put out some fires, but others grew from sparks of smoldering debris.

  Trees had been snapped off, not merely blown down. Seven miles from Ground Zero, in the village of Mogi, one of every ten windows was blown out. Within an area of a thousand acres around the point where the bomb detonated, there was total destruction of all buildings except those of heavily reinforced concrete, and these were completely gutted on the inside. Every structure in the valley and at the northeastern end of the harbor was either destroyed or badly damaged.

  Eighteen schools were smashed to rubble. The street railway system lost almost all of its cars. The Mitsubishi steel complex was rendered inoperable. The huge torpedo factory was stripped like the skeleton of a prehistoric beast and lay naked under the blood-red sun, its steel ribs exposed, its guts scorched by blast and flames.

  Governor Nagano survived the holocaust, thanks to the warning given him and others by publisher Nishioka. When the light shone above him, he dove to the ground and lived to fight for his city. All fire-fighting equipment had been burned up. Telephone lines were nearly all down. Water mains had sprung leaks in hundreds of places. Nagano called outside Nagasaki for help. Though the main Omura highway was badly damaged over a distance of five miles, relief teams went to work in the early afternoon to bring aid.

  By one o’clock lines of refugees began to straggle eastward over the hills into Nishiyama and down into the less damaged portion of the city around the harbor. Most of them were naked. Most had no hair, or what there was of it was frizzled and singed. They cried mournfully. Their burns were black and swollen. Many had no faces, just indentations where eyes and nose had once been. They vomited continually or suffered from diarrhea as they stumbled along.