The first thing you learn as you walk amid the flattened houses, and the cordwood that was once walls piled with Japanese neatness, is that the atomic bomb never really “hit” Japan. If the Japanese are right, the bomb exploded over Japanese soil. They can only tell what they saw and try to guess much of what really happened.
At about 11:30 o’clock on the morning of August 9th, a lieutenant who is aide to Major General Tanikoetjie, commanding the district, was walking through the headquarters on the hill above Nagasaki’s long waterfront. The lieutenant heard a high faint moan of aircraft motors, found his fieldglasses, went to a porch and trained them to the sky. What he saw was two B-29s at about 22,000 feet, flying in echelon. No anti-aircraft fire was around them; they were too high for Nagasaki’s batteries.
Suddenly there broke from the forward plane three parachutes. Their canopies unfolded and what they bore earthward seemed to be three oblong boxes. The boxes looked about thirty inches long by eight inches wide. Demurely as The Mikado’s three little maids from school, the canopies sailed downward. The lieutenant took them for some new form of pamphlet propaganda.
The three parachutes had reached the point where the lieutenant could begin sending auto crews to confiscate their freight when something violent happened. With the parachutes at perhaps a five thousand feet level there suddenly occurred below them, at about fifteen hundred feet, a burst of flame. Almost instantly the flame, yellow as gaslight, fell in a widening cone to earth, at the same time spreading wider in hoopskirt fashion.
This skirt of flame fell across the bottleneck creek which is a dead end for Nagasaki’s tremendous shipping industry. Nothing human or animal that was above ground there at that moment survived.
As the fiery skirts swept the ground there suddenly burst upward a cumulus cloud of black dust. This cloud climbed high into the sky, visited by a terrible atomic heat erecting a pillar of warning over death’s city. The lieutenant saw this as it began but immediately fell flat on his face, letting the concussion pass over him. When he rose up the parachutes were gone, and Nagasaki was afire.
The lieutenant never saw the atomic bomb or any other in the air, perhaps because its bulk is reportedly small. His theory is that the parachutes were not carrying bombs, but were carrying machinery for controlling the altitude at which a free-dropped bomb would be exploded by its companions.
Dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, after Hiroshima’s bomb, was like hitting Pittsburgh after Detroit. The puff of death quickly scurried up the valleys of hilly Nagasaki. Whereas Hiroshima was a plain, these small hills tossed the blast from crest to crest like a basketball. Winds of terrible force churned about in the valleys, stripped the roofs in many homes and brought the greatest number of dead in houses where they had been sheltered two and three miles from the explosion, in a fashion resembling a hurricane. Roofs fell on weak foundations, burying those beneath.
Nagasaki had had its first air warning only on July 5th and only one earlier serious raid. The so-called “long” or constant warning had been in effect since 7 o’clock but most people had ignored it.
At constabulary headquarters tonight, little Lieutenant Colonel Tokunagawa told the writer that as catalogued up to September 1st, 19,741 deaths had been positively and officially counted, plus 1,927 missing. Wounded requiring treatment number 40,093.
[ends weller]
please acknowledge receipt this story by radio to weller and whoever’s else in tokyo, mcgaffin or thorp.
george weller
Nagasaki, Japan—Friday, September 7, 1945 2400 hours
Two Allied prison camps in Nagasaki harbor number nearly 1,000 men, who have just one question they want answered.
It is: “How does the atomic bomb work?”
They have seen what it does. The Japanese placed one camp amidst the giant Mitsubishi war plants and the other at the entrance to Nagasaki, where it would be impossible for it not to be shelled by any attacking task force.
Seven Dutchmen—including camp leader Lieutenant Kick Aalders of Bandoeng, Java—and one Britisher died from the atomic bomb attack. The writer visited their camp this afternoon as the first outsider in years.
American, British, Dutch and Australians each had their national preoccupations of which I was able to settle the American and British, but failed completely at the Dutch and Australian. Their questions were as follows:
The Aussies, “Who won the Melbourne Cup?” (with Aussies it is always who for horses.)
The British, “Is Winnie still in, or did Britain go labor?”
The Dutch, “Is Juliana’s third child a boy heir to the throne, or another girl?”
The Americans, “B-29s dropping us food keep enclosing Saipan newspapers with stuff about some guy named Sinatra. Who is he and what’s his racket?”
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945 0100 hours
The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be.
Such is the conclusion which the writer, as the first visitor from the outside world to inspect the ruins firsthand, has drawn after an exhaustive though still incomplete study of this wasteland of war.
Nagasaki is an island roughly resembling Manhattan in size and shape, running in a north-south direction with ocean inlets on three sides. What would be the New Jersey and Manhattan sides of the Hudson River are lined with huge war plants owned by the Mitsubishi and Kawanami families. The Kawanami shipbuilding plants, employing about 20,000 workmen, lie on both sides of the harbor mouth on what corresponds to Battery Park and Ellis Island. That is about five nautical miles from the scene of the explosion’s main blow. B-29 raids before the atomic bomb failed to damage them and they are still hardly scarred.
Proceeding up the Nagasaki harbor, which is lined with docks on both sides like the Hudson, one perceives the shores narrowing toward a bottleneck. The beautiful green hills are nearer at hand, standing beyond the long rows of industrial plants, which are all Mitsubishi on both sides of the river. On the left or Jersey side, two miles beyond the Kawanami yards, are Mitsubishi’s shipbuilding and electrical engine plants, employing 20,000 and 8,000 respectively. The shipbuilding plant was damaged by a raid before the atomic bomb, but not badly. The electrical plant is undamaged. It is three miles from the epicenter of the atomic bomb and repairable.
It is about two miles from the scene of the bomb’s 1,500 foot high explosion, where the harbor has narrowed to the 250 foot wide Urakame River, that the atomic bomb’s force begins to be discernible. This area is north of downtown Nagasaki, whose buildings suffered some freakish destruction but are generally still sound.
The railroad station—destroyed except for the platforms, yet already operating normally—is a sort of gate to the destroyed part of the Urakame valley. Here in parallel north-south lines run the Urakame River with Mitsubishi plants on both sides, the railroad line, and the main road from town. For two miles stretches this line of congested steel and some concrete factories with the residential district “across the tracks.” The atomic bomb landed between and totally destroyed both, along with perhaps half the living persons in them. The known dead number 20,000, and Japanese police tell me they estimate about 4,000 remain to be found.
The reason the deaths were so high—the wounded being about twice as many, according to Japanese official figures—was twofold: that Mitsubishi air raid shelters were totally inadequate and the civilian shelters remote and limited, and that the Japanese air warning system was a total failure.
Today I inspected half a dozen crude short tunnels in the rock wall valley, which the Mitsubishi Company considered shelters. I also picked my way through the tangled iron girders and curling roofs of the main factories to see concrete shelters four inches thick but totally inadequate in number. Only a grey concrete building topped by a siren, where clerical staff worked, had passable cellar shelters, but nothing resemblin
g provision had been made.
A general alert had been sounded at seven in the morning, four hours before the two B-29s appeared, but it was ignored by the workmen and most of the population. The police insist that the air raid warning was sounded two minutes before the bomb fell, but most people say they heard none.
As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign of burns or debilitation. Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in the broader extent of its flash and a more powerful knockout.
All around the Mitsubishi plant are ruins which one would gladly have spared. Today the writer spent nearly an hour in fifteen deserted buildings of the Nagasaki Medical Institute hospital which sit on a hill on the eastern side of the valley. Nothing but rats live in the debris-choked halls. On the opposite side of the valley and the Urakame River is a three-story concrete American mission college called Chin Jei, nearly totally destroyed. Japanese authorities point out that the home area flattened by the American bomb was traditionally the place of Catholic and Christian Japanese.
But sparing these and sparing the Allied prison camp, which the Japanese placed next to an armor plate factory, would have meant sparing Mitsubishi’s ship parts plant, with 1,016 employees who were mostly Allied. It would have spared an ammunition factory connecting, with 1,740 employees. It would have spared three steel foundries on both sides of the Urakame, using ordinarily 3,400 but that day 2,500. And besides sparing many sub-contracting plants, now flattened, it would have meant leaving untouched Mitsubishi’s torpedo and ammunition plant employing 7,500, and which was nearest to where the bomb blew up. All these latter plants today are hammered flat. But no saboteur creeping among the war plants of death could have placed the atomic bomb by hand more scrupulously, given Japan’s inertia about common defense.
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945 0100 hours
More pieces to the broken mosaic of history are supplied by prisoners in the liberated but still unrelieved camps on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island. While waiting for General Walter Krueger’s army to arrive, the inmates are receiving humble bows and salutes from the Japanese officers who formerly ruled them with a rod of iron. By exchanging visits with prisoners from other parts of Kyushu, they are able to find out what happened in the blacked-out periods of the past.
Camp #14, which was inside the Mitsubishi war factory area until the atomic bomb fell upon it, is now moved inside the eastern mouth of the Nagasaki harbor. Here you can meet Fireman Edward Matthews of Seattle and Everett, Washington, and of the American destroyer Pope, who bummed his way here on the Japanese railroad from Camp #3 near Moji in northern Kyushu. He fills in the unknown story of how the Pope fought, trying to take her cruiser Houston through the Sunda Straits in the face of a Japanese task force of “eight cruisers and endless destroyers. We contacted the Japs at seven in the morning. They opened fire at 8:30 a.m. We held out until 2 p.m., when a Jap spotter plane dropped a bomb near our stern and watched us go down. The Japs saw us sink. It was a perfectly clear day. They let us stay in the water—154 men with one 24-man whaleboat and one life raft—for three days. We were about crazy when they picked us up and took us to Macassar.”
From Camp #3 at Tabata near Moji in northern Kyushu come three ex-prisoners who have found the lure of the open roads irresistible after three years’ confinement and have come to Nagasaki in order to view the results of the atomic bomb.
Charles Collings of Northeast, Maryland, says, “The Houston was caught on the eastern, or Java side, of the Sunda Straits near Bantam Bay. Three hundred and forty-eight were saved, but they are all scattered.”
Chicago-born Miles Mahnke, of Plano, Illinois, who looks all right, though his original 215 pounds dropped to 160, says, “I was in the death march at Bataan. Guess you know what that was.”
Here is Albert Rupp of Philadelphia, from the submarine Grenadier. “We were chasing two Nip cargo boats four hundred fifty miles off Penang. A spotter plane dropped a bomb on us, hitting the maneuvering room. We lay on the bottom, but the next time we came up we were bombed again. We finally had to scuttle the sub. Thirty-nine men of forty-two were saved.” Another from the submarine is William Cunningham, of Bronx, New York, who started with Rupp on his tour of southern Japan.
Another party of four vagabond prisoners from camps whose Japanese commanders and guards have simply disappeared are Albert Johnson of Geneva, Ohio, Hershel Langston of Van Buren, Kansas, and Morris Kellogg of Mule Shoe, Texas—all crew members of the oil tanker Connecticut. Now touring Japan with a carefree Marine from the North China Guard at Peking, Walter Allan of Waxahachie, Texas, these three would like a word with the captain of the German raider who took them prisoner. The captain told them, “In the last war you Americans confined Germans in Japan; this war we Germans are going to take you Americans to Japan and see how you like a taste of the same medicine.”
Kyushu has about 10,000 prisoners, or about one-third of the total in all Japan, mixed in the completely disordered fashion the Japanese used and without any records.
At Camp #2, by the entrance to Nagasaki Bay, are living in comfortable air-fed circumstances 68 survivors of the British cruiser Exeter which sank in the Battle of the Java Sea while trying to escape the Japanese task force. Eight-inch shells penetrated her waterline. Five of the supposed total of nine survivors from the British destroyer Stronghold, sunk near the Sunda Straits at the same time, are also here. There are also 14 Britons of an approximate 100 from the destroyer Encounter lost at the same time, besides 62 R.A.F. mostly from Java and Singapore.
Among the 324 Dutch here from the Battle of the Java Sea are 230 Navy men. They include one officer and eight men from Admiral Doorman’s flagship cruiser De Ruyter. This officer told the writer that two Dutch cruisers, the Java and De Ruyter, were sunk at 2330 and 2345 hours on the night of Feb. 27, 1942, by torpedo attacks which the Japs boasted were staged not by destroyers or submarines, but by cruisers. There is also a Dutch officer from the destroyer Koortenaer, torpedoed by night in the Battle of the Java Sea.
Husky Corporal Raymond Wuest of Fredericksburg, Texas, told how 105 members of the 131st Field Artillery poured 75-caliber shells into the Japs for six hours outside Soerabaya [Surabaya] before Java fell, killing an estimated 700. To this correspondent’s eager questions about this outfit which he had seen go into action in Java, Wuest said that 450 members fought in western Java and were now scattered throughout the Far East. Eighty-five reached Nagasaki, whereof most were moved to Camp #9 near Moji.
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945 0300 hours
A Dutch doctor and an American dentist are commandants of two Allied prison camps at the mouth of the harbor of Nagasaki, the seaport of the southern island of Kyushu partly crippled by the atomic bomb. The Dutch doctor is thin, energetic Army Lieutenant Jakob Vink, who is assisted by a Dutch flying ensign and Singapore Brewster flying expert, Paul Jolly. Vink is expert at curing wounds from the atomic bomb.
The American dentist, Captain John Farley of Raton, New Mexico, was one of five American prisoners here who saw the atomic bomb and observed it more fully than any of the others.
Controlled and quiet in his account, Farley said, “I was looking up the harbor toward the Mitsubishi plants five miles from here when I saw a terrific flash. It was white and glaring, very like a photographer’s flare. The center was hung about 1,500 feet from the ground. Light was projected upward as well as downward, something like the aurora borealis. The light quivered and was prolonged for about thirty seconds. I instantly caught the idea that it was something peculiar and hit the ground. The building began to shake and quiver. Glass shattered around me; about one-third of the
windows in the camp broke. After the blast passed, I saw a tall white cumulus cloud, something like a pillar, about four or five thousand feet high. Inside, it was brown and churning around.”
The week before the bomb fell, as a consequence of B-29 raids late in July, Dr. Vink went to the Japanese with Dutch Lieutenant Kick Aalders and protested against the prisoners being obliged to live in a camp next door to the Mitsubishi shipfitting plant where they worked. This camp, #14, numbered about 200, three-quarters being Dutch. The Japanese said that the Allied prisoners must be ready to take the same risks as the Japanese.
Later the Dutchman renewed his plea and asked for the right to build an underground shelter because the plant’s were so few and inadequate. The plea was denied, but later granted. The prisoners had only had time to start their hole when the atomic bomb fell. Forty-eight were wounded, four instantly killed, and four, including Aalders, died.
Visiting the camp’s old site with the Japanese police, the writer found it flattened. Vink and Jolly were both in the blast. Jolly said, “Some say three, but I saw four parachutes falling. While I watched, I heard a separate hissing sound of the bomb.”
Harold Bridgman, a civilian workman from Witten, South Dakota, who has been imprisoned ever since Wake Island fell on December 23, 1941, saw the atomic bomb hanging in Nagasaki’s sky and told the writer, “To me the light looked sort of bluish, like a photographer’s light bulb. It was so powerful that the blast behind it seemed to suck your breath right away.”
First Into Nagasaki Page 4