Another Wake Island civilian, Fred King of Legrand, Oregon, who is troubled with prison abscess, said, “I was in bed. The light seemed to me like a gun flash. It tore plaster down and broke the fixtures—that was from five miles away.”
Corporal Raymond Wuest of Fredericksburg, Texas, captured in Java with the Texas 131st Field Artillery, said, “We thought the Nagasaki power plant must be blowing up. It was a huge electric flash which sent us all to the floor. Then came the concussion. But we never understood until the food bombers also dropped us an explanation.”
Vink is one of eleven Dutch medical officers who have survived of the thirty-eight captured in Indonesia. He was aboard a prison ship torpedoed on June 24, 1944, sixty miles off Nagasaki. From 770 prisoners, 212 survived including 10 Americans. Two drowned in Nagasaki harbor when, despite their pleas of an inability to swim, the crew of a Jap destroyer kicked them overboard with seven swimmers, ordering them to make their own way to another boat.
According to Vink, Camp #14 has had 512 prisoners, of whom 112 died in Nagasaki, mostly from pneumonia induced partly by malnutrition. Vink pointed out that the Japanese incidence of pneumonia is also high.
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945 2300 hours
In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atom can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast’s center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you realize the liberated atom spares nothing in its way. Those human beings whom it has happened to spare sit on mats or tiny family board-platforms in Nagasaki’s two largest un-destroyed hospitals. Their shoulders, arms and faces are wrapped in bandages. Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to know: “What do you think?”
What this question means is: Do you intend writing that America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That is what we want you to write.
Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures of them. About one in five is heavily bandaged, but none are showing signs of pain.
Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband shows eyes dim with tears. It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved.
Visiting many litters, talking lengthily with two general physicians and one X-ray specialist, gains you a large amount of information and opinion on the victims’ symptoms. Statistics are variable and few records are kept. But it is ascertained that this chief municipal hospital had about 750 atomic patients until this week and lost by death approximately 360.
About 70 percent of the deaths have been from plain burns. The Japanese say that anyone caught outdoors in a mile and a half by one mile area was burned to death. But this is known to be untrue because most of the Allied prisoners trapped in the plant escaped and only about one-fourth were burned. Yet it is undoubtedly true that many at 11:02 on the morning of August 9th were caught in debris by blazes which kindled and caught fire during the next half hour.
But most of the patients who were gravely burned have now passed away and those on hand are rapidly curing. Those not curing are people whose unhappy lot provides an aura of mystery around the atomic bomb’s effects. They are victims of what Lieutenant Jakob Vink, Dutch medical officer and now Allied commandant of Prison Camp #14 at the mouth of the Nagasaki harbor, calls “Disease X.” Vink himself was in the Allied prison kitchen abutting the Mitsubishi armor-plate department when the ceiling fell in. But he escaped this mysterious “Disease X” which some Allied prisoners and many Japanese civilians got.
Vink points out a woman on a yellow mat in the hospital who, according to hospital doctors Hikodero Koga and Uraji Hayashida, has just been brought in. She fled the atomic area but returned to live. She was well for three weeks except for a small burn on her heel. Now she lies moaning, with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw, and unable to utter clear words. Her exposed legs and arms are speckled with tiny red spots in patches.
Near her lies a fifteen-year-old fattish girl who has the same blotchy red pinpoints and a nose clotted with blood. A little farther on is a widow lying down with four children, from age one to about eight, around her. The two smallest children have lost some hair. Though none of these people has either a burn or a broken limb, they are presumed victims of the atomic bomb.
Dr. Uraji Hayashida shakes his head somberly and says that he believes there must be something to the American radio report about the ground around the Mitsubishi plant being poisoned. But his next statement knocks out the props from under this theory because it develops that the widow’s family has been absent from the wrecked area ever since the blast, yet shows symptoms common with those who returned.
According to Japanese doctors, patients with these late-developing symptoms are dying now—a month after the bomb’s fall—at the rate of about ten daily. The three doctors calmly stated that Disease X has them nonplussed and that they are giving no treatment what ever but rest. Radio rumors from America receive the same consideration with the symptoms under their noses. They are licked for a cure and do not seem very worried about it.
Nagasaki, Japan—Sunday, September 9, 1945 0020 hours
Watching Americans die from a lack of medicine—while Japanese bayonets denied them the use of a warehouse full of needed supplies a hundred and fifty yards away—was only one experience of two doctors, veterans of the Bataan death march, who reached Nagasaki today.
No pity for the Japanese digging themselves out from the ruins of the atomic bomb was expressed by dentist Lieutenant William Blucher of Albuquerque or Lieutenant Vetalis Anderson of Denver. The two physicians with the 200th Coast Artillery were cheerful, though worn by their more than three years of bitter captivity at infamous Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan in the Philippines and more recently at Camp #3 near Moji in northern Kyushu.
How helpless they were to aid 8,000 Americans and 30,000 Filipinos dying respectively at a rate of twenty-five and three hundred daily was retold by the two young doctors. As Lieutenant Blucher recounted, “On the death march we saw men drink from cesspools with dead bodies in them. Any men who dropped out were shot or bayoneted. At O’Donnell we had hundreds of cases of malaria. From a warehouse jammed with Red Cross supplies, the Nips issued us enough quinine for only twenty men. We became the arbiters of life and death. We simply had to decide who would be kept alive and who would be allowed to die. We used rags for dressings.”
According to Lieutenant Anderson, “The Japanese always enjoyed keeping us without water, and forcing us to sit in the sun in order to get thirsty and dizzy quicker. I saw with my own eyes a Filipino bayoneted for trying to offer us water. When the Filipinos saw they’d be killed for this, they set five-gallon tins of water along our marching route. The Jap commander sent ahead a special detail of men to knock the tins over. I saw a Jap kick in the stomach a pregnant Filipino woman who tried to give us riceballs. She fell, and I went past with her lying there. The Filipinos were magnificent all the way through. At O’Donnell they sent us three trucks full of food and medicine. The Japs turned them back at the camp gate, though men were dying so fast we could not bury them. Later, when the Japs allowed us to go into the jungle to gather guava leaves for tea, the Filipinos used to find our parties and sneak them little packets of medicine.”
Without any medicine or instruments, both doctors tried to treat the fractured skulls of men beaten by the swords of Japanese officers standing in trucks during the death march. “It was hard to march and keep ducking these blows when you wanted to fall down anyway,�
� they said.
Lacking any sick bay, Anderson and Captain Louis Snyder of Portland, Oregon, began to outfit an abandoned Japanese latrine. The result was that Camp Cabanatuan’s Marine commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Freeman of Maryland, was confined for allowing the unauthorized use of Japanese property. At one time Anderson and Snyder unaided were treating twenty-five hundred men.
Anderson told how after reaching Moji he tried to persuade the Japanese to part with some hoarded diozane for those dying Americans with pneumonia. Only when two died and a third was beyond help did the Japanese commander give his consent. Oxygen was denied to another ailing man and Anderson heard the Japanese commandant say that the man was “no damned good if he needed oxygen.” He was refused digitalis for an elderly Indian with this remark by a Japanese doctor: “He cannot work; let him die.”
Both Americans agreed that some Japanese doctors were humane but said that American doctors had to submit to the lowest Japanese corpsman. Japanese peasant soldiers would go along through sick bay, ordering men to their feet to work.
Japanese officers always took a Red Cross package each and forced the prisoners to feed Japanese soldiers from theirs. During last winter’s early bitter cold, the commandant at the Moji camp had seven Red Cross blankets and all his soldiers three to four, while the American prisoners had less than enough to go round.
They told how Major John Bennett of Luresa, Texas—after being slapped repeatedly by a Japanese sergeant—attempted to see the Japanese commandant and was beaten until lacerated by the same sergeant.
Both doctors were under orders to salute all Japanese except for the capless, when they were obliged to bow deeply in Nipponese fashion. They told how new Japanese soldiers distributed Red Cross sweaters among themselves and let the Americans shiver last winter. Men with a cold or influenza were not allowed to lie down in the sick bay but forced to stand up. If otherwise unoccupied, their job was to catch bedbugs. “The goal was fifty daily, and if we caught less we were sent to the fields.”
At Moji’s camp the Japanese forced pharmacist’s mate Stanley Shipp of Hay Springs, Nebraska, to falsify the records in order to prove that there had been proper medical treatment. Nevertheless, on August 15th the Japanese removed and burned the camp records.
Nagasaki, Japan—Sunday, September 9, 1945 0100 hours
The atomic bomb’s peculiar “disease,” uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is undiagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer—the first Allied observer to reach Nagasaki since the surrender—that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skins are whole, are simply passing away under their eyes.
Kyushu’s leading X-ray specialist, elderly Dr. Yosisada Nakashima, who arrived today from the island’s chief city of Fukuoka, told the writer that he is convinced these people are simply suffering from the bomb’s beta, gamma, or neutron rays taking a delayed effect. “All their symptoms are similar,” said the Japanese doctor. “You have a reduction in the white corpuscles, constriction in the throat, vomiting, diarrhea and small hemorrhages just below the skin. All these things happen when an overdose of roentgen rays is given. Bombed children’s hair falls out, and some adults’. That is natural, because these rays are used often to make hair fall artificially and it sometimes takes several days before the hair becomes loose.”
Nakashima differed with general physicians who have asked the Japanese government to close off the bombed area, claiming that returned refugees have been infected from the ground by lethal rays. “I believe that any after-effect out there is negligible, though I mean to make tests soon with an electrometer,” said the X-ray specialist. The suggestion by Dutch doctor Lieutenant Jakob Vink (taken prisoner in Java and now commander of the Allied prison camp here) that the drug pentnucleosan—which increases white corpuscles—be tried brought the rejoinder from Nakashima that it would be “useless, because the grave X-ray burns are incurable.”
At Emergency Hospital #2 the commanding officer, young Lieutenant Colonel Yoshitaka Sasaki, with three rows of campaign ribbons on his breast, stated that 200 patients had died of 343 admitted, and that he expects about 50 more deaths. Most severe ordinary burns resulted in the patients’ deaths within a week after the bomb fell. But this hospital began taking patients only from one to two weeks afterward. It is therefore almost exclusively “Disease X” cases and the deaths are mostly from this.
Nakashima divides the deaths outside simple burns and fractures into two classes on the basis of symptoms observed in nine post-mortem autopsies. The first class accounts for roughly 60 percent of the deaths, the second for 40 percent.
Among exterior symptoms in the first class are: falling hair from the head, armpits and pubic zones; spotty local skin hemorrhages, looking like measles all over the body; lip sores; diarrhea but without blood discharge; swelling in the throat areas of the epiglottis and retropharynx; and a descent in the number of both white and red corpuscles. Red corpuscles fall from a normal five million to half or one-third, while the whites almost disappear, dropping from seven or eight thousand to three to five hundred. Fever rises to 104 and stays there without fluctuating.
Interior symptoms of the first class revealed in the post-mortems seem to show the intestines choked with blood, which Nakashima thinks occurs a few hours before death. The stomach is also choked with blood, and also mesenterium. Blood spots appear in the bone marrow, and subarachnoid oval blood patches appear on the brain which, however, is not affected. Upgoing parts of the intestines have little blood, but the congestion is mainly in downgoing passages. The duodenum is drained of blood, but the liver, kidney and pancreas remain the same. The spleen is hard but normal, though the urine shows increased blood. There is little blood in the colon but much in the jejunum or upper intestine.
Nakashima considers it possible that the atomic bomb’s rare rays may cause deaths in the first class, as with delayed X-ray burns. But the second class has him totally baffled. These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Un-fevered patients with as much as one-third of their skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, the healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. The burns come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burn victims. Four to five days from this turn to the worse, they die. Their bloodstream has not thinned as in the first class, and their organs after death are found in a normal condition of health. But they are dead—dead of the atomic bomb—and nobody knows why.
Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive on September 11th to study the Nagasaki bombsite. The Japanese hope that they will bring a solution for Disease X.
III
Among the POWs
(September 10–20, 1945)
On September 10, the day after the U.S. military press junket came and went in mere hours, Weller left Nagasaki to explore the POW camps about forty miles north. He probably got there using a car and driver commandeered from the general.
None of Kyushu’s Allied camps, whose prisoners worked as slaves, had yet been “opened”; few camps were aware the war was over, although many Japanese guards and officers had fled. Some camps had received food drops from B-29s. The prisoners—mainly American, British, Australian, Dutch—were diseased, weakened, yet reluctant to risk leaving, fearful for their lives after years of indiscriminate torture and deliberate starvation.
The Japanese POW camps are one of the great omissions in World War II memory. Despite the large numbers involved—140,000 Allied prisoners through the war—they have not been portrayed in films, chronicled by historians, or officially documented as
the Nazi camps have been, though they were seven times deadlier for a POW. The Pacific war was as much a tribal struggle of race, with all its mutual incomprehensions, as a struggle of nations.
Weller’s dispatches are full of prisoners talking who often had realized only that very day that they were suddenly free men, now telling how it felt to be at the receiving end of that struggle. These men were the lucky ones, the survivors. All were brought to the camps from overseas: captured on Java or Singapore, put to work in Burma or Thailand, imprisoned as one of MacArthur’s abandoned eighty thousand from Bataan and Corregidor who endured the death march to O’Donnell and Cabanatuan and somehow survived. A third of the prisoners in any camp died.
Many of Weller’s POW dispatches concern Omuta #17, the largest camp of all. Weller arrived there unescorted and went directly into the commander’s office; shortly afterward an assembly was called, with American POWs on one side and rifleless guards on the other. Speaking from a platform, the Japanese commander said, “Japan has laid down its arms in favor of a great nation.”
Then Weller spoke, and told of the two atomic bombs, the recent surrender, and how U.S. troops for the occupation of Kyushu were arriving down in Kanoya daily, airlifted from Okinawa. “I have no authority to tell you what to do,” he said, “but why should those planes go back empty?” That day, men began to leave.
Omuta, Japan—Tuesday, September 11, 1945 1800 hours
First Into Nagasaki Page 5