No hand was raised for the kamikaze junkpile. Everybody signed for a prison camp, or nothing, and walked out. At the door I turned back to have another look at the map. The kamikaze hole was named Kanoya. While the officer was sorting out his camps and correspondents, I cased Kanoya. A railroad came down to it. Kyushu, in fact, was covered with little railroads. But were any operating? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a long way north, and it was partly mountain country, where bridges had been knocked out.
And then I felt rising in me, like a warm geyser, a jet of confidence. It is like the moment when a poem unties your mind.
“I might kill a couple of days with that Kanoya thing,” I said. “Who’s conducting?” He told me the name of a captain, new to me, not one of MacArthur’s little foxes I had been dodging since Buna and Moresby.
“Okay, I’ll take a chance.”
“Sign here.”
The conducting officer, when I met him later, turned out to be a young, friendly captain who had earned a late overseas assignment by impeccable performance somewhere back home. He had already dutifully pulled together everything about Kanoya that could be wrung out of intelligence. Next morning,* as we got aboard the plane, I asked him: “What made the general take Kanoya and leave out all the rest of southern Japan?”
He knew, because he had asked. “He had to give back to Eisenhower and Marshall all the C-54s he borrowed to bring our headquarters in from Manila. So we’re down mostly to C-47s. They need fuel between Atsugi and Okinawa.”
I wanted to get some idea how hard this eager officer was going to press me to produce. “No pain for you, I hope, if I don’t find a story in traffic safety,” I said.
“It’s a gamble,” he said cheerfully. “No pain, no strain.”
Neither of us mentioned the conspicuous nearness, in flying distance, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There had been just enough atomic ferment at the press conference to warn the command that the reporters could not much longer stall off the editors at home. The look-Mom, I’m-free stories couldn’t last forever.
As we buzzed south at a safe five thousand feet, keeping offshore as if Japan would strike again, I asked myself how I could shake off this earnest, able officer without souring the end of his war, late and little as it was. What gave me trouble was that I liked him. He really wanted to help me, not throttle me.
When we landed at Kanoya the strip was stiff with Japanese soldiers, drawn up in honorific array. Perhaps they were expecting MacArthur himself. They were ready, if need be, to surrender their ancestral swords. What they got, instead, was a natty, cheerful captain leading a rumpled laundry bag of a correspondent. It was obviously a letdown.
Politely we inspected the smashed hangars, the bomb racks, the dormitories where the pilots slept for the last time before taking off for Iwo and Okinawa. We got almost too much attention. It bonded us together, preventing me from looking around to find a way to escape . . . . Had I had enough of Kanoya? my guide wanted to know. “Because I’ve made arrangements for us to fly back tomorrow.” This was alarming. Unable to think of a reason to stay longer, I began to fear that the trip was all a sterile gamble.
Working around the edge of the base that afternoon, I found that the least conspicuous way to get to the mainland was to hire a motorboat. It was only a few hundred yards. I managed to dig up a railroad schedule. All I could read was the numbers. Kanoya was stiff with ambitious Nisei who could have read it at a glance. But I feared that these loyal patriots would turn me in for an extra stripe.
The help I needed appeared suddenly in a tall thirty-year-old sergeant in Army Airways Communications intelligence named Gilbert Harrison, later the organizer of the American Veterans’ Committee, and later still the editor of The New Republic. By his easy irony and barbed distaste for military authority, I guessed he might be the outrigger I needed. After some wary soundings to make sure he would not turn me in, I spilled my plan to him. “Can I come?” he said instantly . . . . We arranged for me to get away by motorboat undercover of night and pointed for a rendezvous over on the mainland.
I shook off my captain early, tapped away at my typewriter until he went to bed in a nearby room, and then went to bed myself, fully dressed. In case he ran a bed check, I left my shoes outside the door. Not long before dawn, I slipped past his door, out under the stars. I felt faint pangs. What punishment might MacArthur’s dutiful colonels wreak on a trustful, gentlemanly, dewy-fresh captain who was given only one, repeat one, correspondent to watch and lost him? To avoid generating alarm and despondency, I put aside my guilt as I stepped into the boat to cross the stream.
When I landed on the opposite shore, the village lights were just winking out. Nobody was awake but a few fishermen, coiling their nets on the beach after the night’s catch. I don’t remember Harrison being with me, and I think he spent the night in camp, to avoid causing any alarm. As I remember we formed up at the railroad station in Koyama, the end of the line. The gentle captain seems to have assumed that I went out for an early morning walk and got lost, delayed or shacked up.
Harrison protected his disappearance by sending a dutiful service story about Kanoya’s redemption to his commanding officer in Manila. Actually the sergeant was in better legal shape than I was. He had orders allowing him five days to reach Tokyo, means unstated. The orders didn’t say that he couldn’t visit southern Japan any more than a powder room says “Ladies, No Men.” So he chose to imagine that his superiors didn’t care how he went. Nothing happened to him, indeed, until ten days later when his colonel found him in the officers’ mess in Tokyo and asked: “Are you enjoying yourself here, sergeant?”
The first train north did not leave until four in the afternoon. We kept worrying that the Americans on Kanoya might be willing to smudge their image as liberators by asking the Japanese police to pick us up. These police were ubiquitous, the only government Japan had. By train time I felt confident enough to order the soldiers around the station to carry our bags.
For the conquerors to choose to travel in third class, which was crowded as a cage of monkeys, seemed puzzling to the soldiers, passengers and train crew. But we had no Japanese money and it seemed to me that there, where a fuss would cause maximum trouble, we had the best chance of brazening our way through. We also were protected, by this eccentric self-abasement, from the prying questions of passengers of rank who might have the brains and mischief to turn us in.
Harrison had brought a box of rations, including plenty of coffee, a means of barter better than gold. Spectacled students kept pegging us with questions. Where were we going? I refused to say. I wanted to leave a cooling trail. Fumbling for direction, we changed four times. At one junction, all lanterns, rumors and whispers, we found that we had to make the decision: Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The nearer to Hiroshima was the nearer to Tokyo. I was afraid that there we might run into some party of bombing assessors. Nagasaki, being remoter from MacArthur, seemed safer.
Already I had a formula that held off the most officious questioners. I looked them in the eye and said very softly, “Please consider your position.” When they did, they blanched and departed.
We were aristocrats in a series of slow rattlers whose locomotives and coal cars were draped with clinging deadheads, mostly homebound soldiers. Each time we changed trains, at Shibushi, Yatsushiro and Tosu, the good-humored trainmen saw that we were protected by soldiers with fixed bayonets. The trains were filthy and we were hoarse with soot, our arms weary from opening and shutting windows at tunnels. The trainmen filled our canteens with clean water and showed us the benjo, or latrine. At Shibushi we met our first escaped prisoner, a private from Utah. He was not eager to accompany us to a bombed city, feeling that we were inviting a necktie party.
We decorously refused to take any gifts, but we traded intensively, giving hard candy for rice and coffee for small sweet cakes, meanwhile plying our customers for information about where we were. A few hours after daylight we reached Yamaguchi. Here, after eighteen hours of travel, we pi
cked up the train for Nagasaki. We also took in tow three Dutch prisoners captured in Java—as I almost had been, too—four years before. A week earlier, two weeks after Japan surrendered, on August 28 their camp of six hundred starving men had been “bombed” by B-29s with food and pamphlets warning them not to eat too much. MacArthur’s cautious pace in liberating Kyushu excited their derision more than their anger. They were simply ignoring orders to stay in the camps, and wanted to see Nagasaki.
We needed numbers. I accepted them. The trainmen moved us to a baggage car, roomy and airy. As we click-clicked along, it occurred to me that the authorities of Nagasaki might be more difficult than train crews. Here we were, an atomic mission, highly classified, but also oddly bereft of orders. Nor did we have sidearms. We were headed by an untidy reporter and a gangling sergeant, with three alien privates whose rice-gray faces and merriment revealed their ex-prisoner status. I saw that the first Japanese official who guessed our real identity would get the police to put us in custody “for your own protection,” exactly as MacArthur was doing with my colleagues, and telephone to Tokyo for the MPs to come and pick us up. Lacking even a revolver, we could not defend our mission with force. There was only one protection we could assume: rank.
Rank! In war it will get you everything but mail.
I therefore awarded all members of my command spot promotions, starting naturally with myself. I became Colonel Weller. In hardly an hour, between Yamaguchi and Nagasaki, Harrison rose from sergeant to major. He could not have done better in Cuba. The three Dutch privates became lieutenants in an inter-Allied working party so dense with secrecy that they communicated with me part of the time in German, the enemy language. We removed all our tabs that were detachable, dipped handkerchiefs in canteens and washed away the soot. We even cleaned our nails.
I felt small guilt at this lightning round of promotions. In the U.S. Army correspondents carried only the assimilated rank of lieutenant, a painful disparity with Italy’s fascist forces, where they were splendid colonels with orderlies. Still, I could hardly expect MacArthur and his colonels to promote me. After all, I had refused to promote them.
I took off my brass shoulder tabs, lettered “War Correspondent,” and put them in my back pocket, ready for use if Colonel Weller were compelled, by some emergency appearing out of the fog of war, to turn his force around and lead it back into humbler status. The needles kept pricking me in the behind during the following week in Nagasaki. They hurt especially whenever a Japanese called me “Colonel.” I felt like one of those Caesars in triumph, who had an elderly slave standing behind him in his chariot, murmuring, “Remember thou art only a man.”
On September 6, exactly four weeks almost to the hour since the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, our little train of toy cars flustered its way into the remains of the station. For the last ten miles the buildings were in ruins on both sides of the track, and I assumed the whole city was flat. I was wrong. The blast had traveled out along the railroad gulch, instead of being deflected upward as it was by the hills in the city’s heart.
My heart sang with an immense, selfish sense of possession. What happened from now on did not matter much. Even whether it was written did not matter much. I was here. Nagasaki was waiting to be recorded, and I was here to do it.
There were no taxis, no rickshaws, no wagons. Defeat had leveled the Nagasakians into a city of walkers, except for the lucky officials, who had bicycles. By firm language with the police sentries and introductions from the trainmen, we managed to intercept a truck. I asked to be taken to the military commander. The volunteer pointed up to a hill flecked with villas: “The general lives up there.” “Get him down here. I must talk to him,” I said. The police were impressed. It seemed good riddance to take us up to him. I showed annoyance, but consented.
As we climbed the graceful curves into the little-damaged suburb of the executive class, Nagasaki came alive. The long inlet of the main harbor looked eerily deserted, with the floating lamp of a single freighter smoking off the blistered, sagging piers and twisted derricks. We could see the main Mitsubishi plant, a long fallen zeppelin of naked, twisted steel, bent like a child’s structural toy crushed by a passing foot. Its form was still almost intact, though it was almost directly under the bomb. The sturdiness of the ceilings had taken the blast and blocked the ray. The workers were more fortunate than their families in the one-story bungalows around the plant. They did most of the dying.
When we arrived at the arch-roofed villa of the major-general, I left my staff outside and marched up the broad front stairs. Leading me was the general’s aide, a sharp lieutenant around twenty-five with an eye full of cool appraisal. He guided me into the general’s office. He was a square-built, impassive man in his forties, guardedly cordial, warily courteous. I explained my mission: to obtain the facts about Nagasaki. I did not say for whom.
The lieutenant translated, and appended a suggestion of his own. The general nodded. “General say he like to see your orders,” said the lieutenant.
I did not look at the general, but I spitted the lieutenant with a glance. “If the general doubts our authority,” I said icily, “I suggest that he telephone directly to General MacArthur for confirmation.” The general, who understood more English than he let on, glanced at the lieutenant, inviting comment. The lieutenant scrutinized me a shade more respectfully. “But in making such a call,” I said, “the general should consider his position.” Now I looked at the general. There was a nervous pause. The general said something low and rapid.
“General says you are very welcome in Nagasaki, Colonel. He will give orders to show you everything.” I nodded casually, as if no other result was ever thought of.
“You have only three cars left, I understand,” I said directly to the general, to let him know I realized he had notions of English.
“General says that is true,” said the lieutenant at my shoulder.
“Then my party will take only two of them, the two Fords,” I said. “I realize that the general must have one car for himself. He has the very important task of keeping discipline and order, and preventing looting.” This remark seemed to reach the general. He nodded with vigor. “And I shall require two Kempeitai [military police] every evening to take my daily reports to Tokyo.”
“This is a difficulty,” said the lieutenant. “Many of our men have gone—have been released. Why two? One is enough.”
“One is not enough,” I said. “One Kempeitai must be awake while the other sleeps. My reports go straight through Tokyo to Washington.”
A consultation. “General says it is difficult, but you will have two Kempeitai.”
“Good. Now would the general give us the two cars and send us to our quarters?”
The general sent us down to a hotel. This was our baptism in the new Japan, where the army was spurned. The manager simply refused to book us. He did not like the vagueness about who was going to pay, and who we were. The lieutenant, abashed, called the general. Colonel Weller and his staff were transferred to a villa of their own where we bathed and lived on lobster, rice and sweet little slices of canned tangerine.
Before this muddle about quarters cooled him, the lieutenant took me out on the terrace of the general’s villa. We stood at the top of the long, temple-like flight of steps, overlooking the prostrate, battered city from which rose only the tinkle of bicycle bells. The arrogance habitual to the military caste, sitting uneasily on him as an educated civilian, was now plated with a new veneer, freshly applied, of compassion for the bomb’s victims. He was not cringing. The Japanese had studied Americans for enough years to know that Oriental cringing was not the way to subdue them. You had to play at being American. He was aiming at that underlying strain of compassion that makes the American review all his acts of force, even against assassins.
He pointed at the sky at a point not much higher than we stood. “One enemy plane fly right over city,” he said. “We sound no alarm. Think maybe he is lost. Another plane off there. See
m like he watch first plane. But maybe he lost, too. No formation.”
Did the people take shelter? “No. Only some prisoners lie down in slit trenches. No alarm, so good people keep working.” Did they know about the Hiroshima strike three days before? “We know. General and I know. Police know. But few people know.”
This was a lie, I learned later. At first the Nagasaki newspapers were ordered to censor out Hiroshima, but this was pointless. The trains were still running—nothing can stop the Japanese railroad system, which has a life of its own—and too many people were moving around. Hiroshima was terribly and mysteriously stricken, that much was known. But it did not seem worse than the great fire raids on Tokyo.
Nagasaki, people felt, would be spared. Why? Because in the face of all logic, it had been spared so far. It was a complex of industrial plants. It was a feeder port for the campaign in Southeast Asia. It was the nearest major Japanese city to the American bombing bases. And yet it had been left almost intact. Streams of B-29s flowed north and south around it, but this prime target remained mysteriously untouched. Perhaps, people guessed, it might be because it had a large Roman Catholic population. But Rome’s railroad yards had been bombed, with Catholic bombardiers at the pips. More likely, they thought, it was being saved as the logical port for a coming invasion, a Cherbourg. They did not know MacArthur had decided to hit the north first, then work down. That decision put Nagasaki on the bombing list.
“Police ring our telephone,” said the lieutenant. “They say me: ‘Tell general enemy plane drop parachutists. Please to watch the falling.’ I see big parachute, with man hanging underneath, not moving legs, falling like dead. He seem about eight hundred meters tall. Plane flying away fast, not watching. Very strange, to drop spy over city in daylight. Not fool anybody. Police say, ‘You watch, tell us where parachutist fall.’ I find binoculars quick and watch. Lucky, because binoculars save me from blindness for my life.” He gulped.
First Into Nagasaki Page 2