He closed his eyes, then went on. Suddenly he was talking like a civilian. “Big light. Too much. I drop glasses. Fall down. Blind. Fall right there.” He pointed, “General in back. He all right, I think. When get up, still cannot see. Parachute should still be falling. But gone. Man gone, too. Police phone not working anymore. I go tell general. He say it is big bomb, like Hiroshima. We come back on terrace. My eyes better. We can see damage to buildings, bodies in streets. Ships sinking, sailors swimming. Mitsubishi plant, roof gone. General say, very bad.”
Did a wave of fire sweep the city?
“No wave. Only little fires. No big ones. Just a few little ones where workers live next to plant. There, see?” He pointed to the still, lifeless acres of charred beams and blackened walls, a hopeless tangle of burned-out debris.
The vision of the outside world of the bomb as whipping the city with a single, all-killing sheet of flame was wrong. Even the awful heat of the bomb, being only instantaneous, did no more harm than an opened furnace door to anyone who had any solid protection: a roof, a wall, a door. Yet most of the dead had been incinerated right there in the ruins. If not the bomb, what killed them?
He explained. The bomb fell almost at the noontime break in the factory, when wives were preparing rice over charcoal fires in kitchens and tiny gardens. The flame burst on high. The ray swept their roofs. Neither did much harm in themselves. But the blast pressed the roofs down, broke the timbers, sent the ceilings crashing onto the open hearths, scattering red-hot embers amid bodies and firewood.
People not wounded tried to fight the first small fires. But the water lines were broken. Firemen got as far as the edge of the district, then were stopped. They could not get inside, either with hoses or shoulder-pack chemicals. Walls had fallen across streets. Alleys were flaming tunnels. The wounded nearest the edges were dragged or crawled out. Inexorably the smoke spirals turned to flames. The flames spread. In half an hour it was out of control, a broad, orangered, crackling pyre. By then the last cries had long ceased, as suffocation mercifully preceded incineration.
Now came the lieutenant’s epilogue. “What do you think, Colonel,” he said, “of the culture of a people who could drop such a terrible weapon on the people of Japan?”
I wanted to cut this experiment off early. I waited a moment. Then, as gravely as I could, I said, “To give you an honest reply, I would have to ask my own people. And of course I would have to begin with those who were walking to church on Sunday on Red Hill in Hawaii when your planes struck them.”
We got along much better after that.
NAGASAKI was never, strictly speaking, “destroyed.” Nagasaki had about 300,000 people, about the size of Worcester, Peoria or Tacoma. About 20,000 died right away, the majority by concussion from falling buildings or by burning in ruins, not by concussion of air or direct singeing. I was told 35,000 had been hurt, mostly by burns. Harrison’s figures were 25,000 and 40,000. About 18,000 homes, mostly two-room bungalows, were destroyed, for perhaps $20 million worth of total replacement.
Soon after the Soviets consolidated their booty in the Kuriles and the Rosenberg spy case developed, the atomic bomb became a “horror weapon.” The ideology of the Japanese army became that of the Communist International. Since then, Nagasaki’s casualties have been rising in multiples of five and ten thousand. At the most recent ban-the-bomb meetings the dead tripled to 65,000.
Before the bombs fell, Nagasaki was getting ready to lose the war but win the psychological recovery. American prisoners working in the Mitsubishi plant were naturally told that if defeated, the entire nation would commit hara-kiri. But the executives of the plant had taught their foremen some highly unsuicidal terms, such as, “How are you today?” and “We workers want to save our plant.” They had also shown disbelief in Nagasaki’s immunity by moving their most expensive machinery to a hole in a hill two miles away.
I found these instructors, many of whom had brutal records in prison camps, now fawningly eager to serve the new colonel in town. They mistook me for their bridge into the MacArthur command. The general himself saddled me with the most repulsive of these double-tracked vehicles, an unctuous character who, Harrison discovered, had been one of the roughest straw bosses over the Allied prisoners. These swarming aspirant-interpreters did not, like those in Germany and Italy, try to prove that they had been oppressed democrats all the war. They imitated the army’s pitch: that the United States had won unfairly and owed Japan generous help to come back. Their hands were out to collect the first slice for themselves.
When we entered the ruins, I had my first showdown with my interpreter. The ruins were “poisoned” and “dangerous,” he said. Luckily, in the hospitals I had asked the X-ray specialists. “We don’t think so, not if you wear thick-soled shoes like yours,” they said. When I led the way in, he tried to take my camera. “Photos are forbidden,” he said. “Not to me,” I said.
I got rid of the interpreters in the hospitals because their officious manner got between me and the doctors—earnest, dedicated scientists, with nothing to sell. As fast as the pathetic patients squatting in the corridors died, the interns took them into the back rooms and dissected them for the doctors. Already they knew precisely what the effect of the ray was.
A doctor who had survived Hiroshima explained to me: “The main effect seems to be on the bloodstream. People say that the red and white corpuscles are killed. But we do not find it so. What are killed are the platelets. Do you know what they are?” I didn’t. “They are the third important element of the blood, which gives it the capacity to coagulate. See that man?” He pointed to a thin figure with a paper-white face propped against a wall, surrounded by kneeling, intense relatives. “He was already a tuberculosis case, with minor hemorrhages. He was exposed about a quarter mile from the explosion. He was knocked down, but not apparently hurt. Then, after a few days, his coughing began to increase. He began raising more and more blood. We looked at it, and found the platelets were all dead.” “Is there nothing you can do?” His eyes fell, as if in apology for his inadequacy. “Nothing,” he said.
The most valuable thing I got in Nagasaki was a careful analysis of the effects of the ray on each organ: heart, lungs, kidney, liver, stomach. In all cases there was some deterioration. But often they were almost intact, and the patient died of some insignificant scratch whose bleeding could not be stemmed.
When darkness fell I spent three hours each night tapping out my stories by lamplight. Then, about a half hour before the train left on its twenty-four-hour journey—at least—to Tokyo, two Kempeitai arrived at my door. I addressed the stories to “Chief Censor, American Headquarters, Tokyo.”
I considered trying to smuggle my stories out of Japan, but rejected it. I had made the point I wanted by getting into Nagasaki and proving it could be done safely. Now I wanted to give the MacArthur command the least possible excuse to hold up my research. I eschewed all horror angles. I intended within five days to be in Tokyo myself. I wanted to be prepared to defend every line. If the stories were blocked as reprisal against me, I intended to take the case to MacArthur himself. Only if he blocked them would I consider smuggling them out myself.
One thing that made me feel extra secure in my laboratory, able to work methodically and broadly, was that Nagasaki’s airfield was supposed to be damaged beyond repair. And then, on the fourth day, when I had pumped off about ten thousand words to Tokyo—research, interviews, damage reports—my laboratory was burgled, my monopoly ended. The lieutenant phoned me the awful news. “Many American reporters have landed,” he said. “They have two planes.” I hurried downtown with my staff. Indeed there they were, about two dozen old friends from all the war theaters of the world, wandering up and down the pitted boulevards in their go-to-hell Air Force caps, talking Pentagonese. They looked like yacht passengers who have stopped to buy basketry on an island. I had an impulse to hide, but they already knew about Colonel Weller. “You dirty dog, how did you get here?”
I
told them. “Well, you better not go back to Tokyo. They’re sore as hell at you. Get aboard with us. We’ve got two Forts—yes, two, one to ride, one to transmit our stories. We take off and sling them straight into Washington. The straight stuff, no censorship.”
How could I close up my atomic laboratory, with the work only half finished? Where were they going? “Right down the line, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Saigon, Singapore, Indonesia, maybe even Bali.”
Up sauntered the small slim commander and deviser of the expedition, Tex McCrary, former New York editorial writer turned colonel, a friendly, dynamic wheeler-dealer who married Jinx Falkenberg and later made himself into a breakfast-hour TV star. “Did MacArthur clear you for Nagasaki?” I asked hopefully. There might be a loophole there for me. He shook his head. “Never asked him. Didn’t have to. We’re flying right out of Washington, under worldwide orders from Joint Chiefs. We can go anywhere, write anything. We have our own censors, and we transmit while airborne. No local clearances.”
“We just throw it over their heads into Washington,” growled a voice. “In three hours from now, all our Nagasaki stuff will be on the desk.”
“Stuff”! I felt like a Robinson Crusoe, reluctant to be rescued, but half-sensing, from these new-dateline-every-day boys, that my obsession with history was getting out of hand. My Dutch forces had quit Nagasaki and gone back to their camp, where movie projectors and films were now being dropped in. Harrison had run out of time and was leaving. One of my cars had disappeared, and the night before the lieutenant had sent only one Kempeitai, not two. Was it time to cut my losses and go?
But the deep fullness of the Nagasaki story was still emerging. I was beginning to look ahead to something free, big and formal. I considered deferring fighting the censorship in Tokyo, and going north to Hiroshima. My mind was fumbling for something ample, leisurely and magnificent, such as John Hersey was to do several months later for The New Yorker.
McCrary, kindness itself, offered to take carbons of my stories and file them when airborne. In my stubbornness I refused. First, my work wasn’t over. Second, I had spent four years bucking the MacArthur blackout (minus intervals in European and African fronts). This was my fight and I was going back to see it through. The circus shook their heads as if I were mad, and they were right.
When I looked up, alone again in Nagasaki, and saw the two B-17s swing over the city, and imagined the typewriters talking as they swept southward, I had that bite of shame that comes when you have missed your communications. A few hours later, on the old radio in the villa, the playback of the “the first correspondents in Nagasaki” began to come through.
What remained fascinating for me was the constant revision of my own ideas of total-devastation and no-escape-from-the-bomb. The sharpest correction came from 120 prisoners I interviewed on an island in the harbor, and another camp of workers—Americans, British, Dutch, Australians and Javanese—next to the Mitsubishi plant. Of these several hundred men, only eight had been killed by the bomb. Why so few, when so near the supposedly all-pervasive doom? “Those eight wouldn’t have got it, either,” explained an American dentist, “but they poked their heads out of the slit trench to watch the parachute falling. Just too curious.”
They showed me the slit trench, hardly two hundred yards from where the bomb went off high above their heads, and barely four feet deep. “Whenever there was an air raid warning, we would bugger off and hunker down in the slit trenches till the all-clear sounded, or the foremen drove us back. That’s what saved us. For the last weeks there were so many planes passing north and south around Nagasaki that the warnings and all-clears got all mixed up. The workers stayed at their machines, but we claimed our rights. And they needed our skilled work so much they didn’t force us.”
Blast and ray flew harmlessly over their heads. They had lain prostrate almost directly under it, and only forty claimed to be wounded, few severely.
A few, who had happened to be looking that way, saw the mushroom cloud climb over Hiroshima. But they had then been in the mad camp at Omuta, where an insane Japanese captain with a mania for baseball kept the diarrhea patients running bases in a lavatory league of his own. It was a week after Nagasaki’s bomb, when the prison authorities began burning the medical records, that they knew the war was over.
Not a word came back from Tokyo about my dispatches. The Kempeitai returned to Nagasaki, but they had no message for me. A feeling of hopelessness about my stories began to drag me down. Perhaps they were already locked in some censor’s safe. If so, what sense was there in leaving southern Japan for Tokyo, to start this tedious battle? Why not, instead, mine what there was around me? The camps of southern Japan, six weeks after the Mikado’s surrender, were still not opened.
So, about four days* after McCrary’s flying circus departed, Colonel Weller packed his bag and started up country, sans staff. Two American officers who had wandered into Nagasaki furnished me with a list of unopened camps, each with its weird story. For a week I roamed from camp to camp. Then the grapevine of errant prisoners brought me another blow. The Marines had landed in Nagasaki. I raced back south. What a change!
In three days Nagasaki had undergone the full transformation from crushed worm to brave yellow butterfly. A ruin was changing into a hostess city. Destroyers, transports, LSTs crowded the harbor. My floating lantern was gone. Salvage operations had begun. Jeeps and trucks hustled through the stream of bicycles. Marines leaned on the sagging sills of the harbor buildings, lovingly cleaning their carbines.
But still there were no correspondents. The Navy had landed, but even they were under MacArthur. And still, going on seven weeks after the bombs, the world was waiting. What was the reason? To keep the victory of two nuclear weapons from eclipsing a general? To prevent its being said that the Pacific war was finally won in the Manhattan Project, not in Manila? I could imagine the two hundred correspondents, still bottled up in Tokyo, being told that there were “no facilities” for them in Nagasaki, and that the ruins might be infected. Meantime I was leading Navy doctors and nurses through the now cleared, sorted, arranged embers.
By this time it was not really necessary to become a casualty of Nagasaki myself, but I managed to do so. On a hospital ship’s deck I caught a medicine ball thrown by a burly Navy doctor, and felt something crack. In an hour Dr. Malcolm Stevens, the former Yale coach, had me mummified in a plaster cast from neck to hips. The ship carried me off to Guam.
But I still had my smudged carbons. A month later I started trying to get them through the Navy censorship. “We can’t clear this stuff, but we’ll be glad to send it to Tokyo for you. I’m sure they’ll release it there.” “Thanks, but never mind.”
As soon as I was able to walk, I received orders to go back to China. I was somewhere in Manchuria, I believe, when I received news that parties of correspondents were now being taken to Hiroshima, and yes, Nagasaki, too.
They won. At least I was not busted by my organization for bucking the system, like dour, funny Ed Kennedy, who was too early for Eisenhower with the signing of the armistice. Ed, who had covered the fall of Greece with me, had set up communications that were too good. I threw away my one good chance to communicate, trying for a fuller, more perfect story.
O, Nagasaki! What a way to lose a war!
II
Early Dispatches
(September 6–9, 1945)
From September 6 until September 10 Weller stayed in Nagasaki, exploring the blasted city each day, writing his dispatches far into each night, then sending them off to MacArthur’s military censors in Tokyo, hopeful that they were being cabled onward to his editors at the Chicago Daily News and thence to a vast American readership via syndication. These dispatches have remained unpublished for sixty years; it appears that the U.S. government destroyed the originals. Weller’s own carbon copies were found in 2003.
nagasaki 62300 herewith follows first known eyewitness account results atomic bomb dropped nagasaki by american ground observer chicagonewses
george weller who reached crippled city three days after first american troops landed southern kyushu
Nagasaki, Japan—Thursday, September 6, 1945 2300 hours
Walk in Nagasaki’s streets and you walk in ruins.
It is thirty-three days* since two American planes appeared in a clear midday sky and let fall the blow which clinched Japan’s defeat and decided her surrender. The mystery of the atomic bomb is still sealed. But the ruins are here in testimony that not only Nagasaki but the world was shaken.
The last two or three of what were scores of fires are burning amid Nagasaki’s ruins tonight. They are burning the last human bodies on improvised ghats of rubbish. Flames flicker across flattened blocks from which planks, lathes and timbers have been removed as a fire menace, and only shapeless piles of plaster remain.
Yet the atmosphere is not precisely dolorous. Nagasaki cannot be described as a city of the dead. The unquenchable Japanese will to live has asserted itself. Though the smashed streets are as barren of production or commerce as Pompeii’s, yet a living stream of humanity pours along them, looking with alert, shoe-button eyes for today’s main chance.
After a 24-hour trip on what seemed like dozens of trains, the writer arrived here this afternoon as the first visitor from the outside Allied world. Trains coming from both Honshu and southern Kyushu were so jammed with returning human beings that the writer was able only to fight his way into the baggage cars. Some refugees rode the locomotives’ cowcatchers. Nagasaki has only about one hundred fifty of its normal three hundred thousand inhabitants, but they are coming back. By the hundreds they streamed along the concrete platforms which alone remain of Nagasaki’s station, their belongings tied in big silk scarves or shoulder rucksacks. Painstakingly these Nagasakians ignored the soot-stained American trudging beside them. Fear or merely resignation may have accounted for their indifference. What looked like disinterest amid Nagasaki’s peace-imploring debris was the suppression of personal feeling in obedience to the emperor’s order.
First Into Nagasaki Page 3