Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  Yoshida, Do-oh, and Taniguchi were north of the explosion. The well where Yoshida had stood was in the second concentric circle, its outer boundary marking a radius of one kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) from the hypocenter. There the blast pressure tore off heads and limbs and caused eyes and internal organs to explode. The bomb’s heat scalded the water in a nearby pond and caused terrible burns on the bodies of children playing by the shore. A woman who had covered her eyes from the flash lowered her hands to find that the skin of her face had melted into her palms. Most trees were downed or shattered. Thousands of people were crushed beneath toppled houses, factories, and schools, and thousands more suffered severe thermal burns. Roof tiles blistered in the heat.

  Like everyone else in Nagasaki that day, Yoshida’s immediate survival and degree of injury from burns and radiation depended entirely on his exact location, the direction he was facing in relation to the bomb, what he was wearing, and what buildings, walls, trees, or even rocks stood between him and the speeding force of the bomb’s titanic power. Yoshida had been facing in the direction of the hypocenter only a half mile away in a rural region of the Urakami Valley, with very little to shield him from the bomb’s blast force and heat. “I was hurled backward into a rice paddy, right? At some point I regained consciousness and could feel the coldness of the water. I stood up, and my body was covered in mud.” The skin on his arm had peeled off and was hanging down from his fingertips, and he could feel that his chest and legs were burned, but Yoshida did not yet know the extent of his facial burns. “Blood was pouring out of my flesh,” he said. Like thousands of others, he went into shock. “I know it sounds strange, but I felt absolutely no pain. I even forgot to cry.”

  The blast had thrown Yoshida and his friends in different directions, but all six survived, albeit with serious burns and wounds. After some time, they found one another and slowly made their way to a small tributary of the Urakami River, where they rinsed the mud off their bodies and lay down together in the grass, hoping that someone would find them. One of Yoshida’s friends handed him a broken piece of mirror, and when Yoshida looked at his reflection, he could not comprehend what he saw. “All I can say is that I didn’t recognize my own face.”

  Hundreds of field-workers and others staggered by, moaning and crying. Some were missing body parts, and others were so badly burned that even though they were naked, Yoshida couldn’t tell if they were men or women. He saw one person whose eyeballs hung down his face, the sockets empty. Everyone begged for water, and some died while drinking from the stream. During the war, Yoshida’s teachers had incorrectly warned their students that drinking water while injured would cause excessive bleeding and death—so Yoshida held out all day with no water to ease his extreme dehydration.

  A group of wailing mothers coming down from the mountains shook Yoshida and his friends out of their dazed state and awakened them to their own physical pain and terror. “We were only thirteen years old,” he recalled, “and when we heard these mothers crying, we started sobbing too, even louder than they were.” The boys rose to their feet and followed the women down the slopes toward the city. At the Urakami River, however, Yoshida wavered. Clutched by pervasive heat and choking dust, he saw people on the ground with severed limbs and heads split open, their brains oozing out. Other bodies were completely carbonized—“turned into charcoal,” he remembered. The river, to which people had fled for relief from the heat and intense thirst, had become a mass grave—because they drank the water, Yoshida thought. Corpses bobbed in the river, now red with blood.

  Yoshida began to feel his face and body swell. He looked down to see leeches from the rice paddy stuck to his bare legs. He and his friends stumbled back to the small stream where they had come from, removed the leeches from their bodies, and placed uncharred leaves over their raw flesh. In an attempt to escape the heat of the sun, the seven boys burrowed into the tall grass against the riverbank. Pain shot through Yoshida’s body, and by this time, his face was so swollen that he couldn’t see. “Hang in there, okay?” the boys whispered to one another. “Gotta keep going—do our best to stay alive!”

  • • •

  Do-oh was injured three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter—within the third concentric circle. There, blistered clay roof tiles later indicated exposure to heat over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the death rate was estimated at 50 percent. When the Mitsubishi Ohashi plant collapsed on top of Do-oh and thousands of others, some people were thrown so far that when they regained consciousness, they were in a different part of the factory. In Do-oh’s area, nearly everyone lay dead beneath an avalanche of heavy equipment, steel beams, concrete walls, and metal columns.

  Section of the destroyed interior of the Mitsubishi Arms Factory Ohashi Plant, where Do-oh Mineko worked, October 1945. (Photograph by Hayashi Shigeo/Courtesy of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)

  The crushed room was utterly quiet. After a few moments, Do-oh opened her eyes to find herself lying on the factory floor covered with huge pieces of debris. She extricated herself and stood up to get her bearings, but thick smoke and dust barred visibility in every direction. “The silence scared me. No one else was there.” In the intense heat, with flames darting up around her, Do-oh searched for the exit but could not see it anywhere. “I didn’t know what to do!” she said. “I knew if I stayed there, I would die. I panicked and searched for the door again. I have to escape! I thought. I have to escape! If I don’t escape, I will burn and die!”

  Finally, she spotted an older man staggering in the shadows, his shirt and pants smoldering. She moved toward him as fast as she could, tripping over asbestos roofing, broken iron framing, crisscrossed wooden beams, and unidentified blackened objects she later discovered were the bodies of her coworkers. When she reached the old man, Do-oh followed him through the smoky remains of the factory, past countless people trapped and moaning beneath the wreckage, to the outside where she thought she would be safe.

  But the city as she had known it no longer existed. All around, thick layers of splintered glass, metal dust, and twisted wire covered the ground, along with scorched corpses staring upward or facing down as though sleeping. Hundreds of men and women who had climbed out of the factory rubble staggered across the grounds, half-naked, their blistered skin falling off their bodies; many held their arms stretched out in front of them—probably, one survivor guessed, to keep the skin that had peeled off their arms and hands from dragging on the ground. “They all looked gray,” one woman remembered. “No, not even gray; they were simply colorless, dusty figures with two blank holes for eyes, a stubby nose, and another hole for a mouth.” A mother cradled her headless infant and wailed.

  Do-oh stumbled toward the main road, where she met two of her classmates emerging from nearby factory buildings. The girls were startled when they saw Do-oh’s injuries, but Do-oh was in such shock that she didn’t register the meaning of their expressions. The three girls joined hands and agreed to escape to the hills together. Within moments, Do-oh felt too weak to go on. She squatted on the ground outside the factory gates. “Don’t worry about me,” she assured her friends, urging them to keep going. “I’ll meet up with you soon.” As they left for safety, the girls encouraged Do-oh not to give up and told her they’d be waiting for her.

  Do-oh rested in the rubble, but she was too scared to stay where she was, so she forced herself up and walked in the direction of a Buddhist temple, then made her way down an embankment to some railroad tracks. She had no strength to climb up the other side. She paused and looked up again, then grabbed the exposed roots of a fallen tree on the ridge above her. Holding on with all her strength, Do-oh pulled herself up the steep incline. On top of the embankment, she collapsed on the ground surrounded by dozens of other wounded people.

  It was here that Do-oh finally realized the gravity of her injuries: The whole left side of her body was badly burned, a bone was sticking out of her right arm at the elbow, h
undreds of glass splinters had penetrated most of her body, and blood was streaming down her neck. Too dazed to cry, she reached back to the base of her head and felt a wide and deep horizontal gash stretching from one ear to the other, filled with shards of glass and wood. “Daddy!” she cried. “Please come! Please help me!” As she lay on the embankment, a plane flew over at very low altitude—so close, Do-oh remembered, that she could see the pilot. Panicked at the idea of possible machine-gun fire, she crawled to a fallen tree and squeezed her body under one of its limbs as the plane flew over a second time. Nearly invisible, desperately thirsty, and surrounded by disfigured strangers—some silent and others crying out for their loved ones—Do-oh felt completely alone.

  • • •

  Slightly over a mile from the hypocenter, Taniguchi had been riding his bicycle in a rural area surrounded by rice paddies and vegetable fields, in the direct path of the bomb’s unyielding force. He lay on his stomach in the road and waited for the earth to stop shaking. After some time, he raised his head. The bodies of children who had been playing by the road lay scorched all around him. Petrified that he, too, would die there, Taniguchi willed himself to stay alive. I can’t die now, I can’t die now, he told himself. I refuse to die.

  He heaved himself up. All the houses around him were destroyed. Flames spurted from the ruins. Near him, a woman lay in agony, her hair burned off and her face terribly swollen. Taniguchi glanced over at his crushed bicycle. His postal bag was open and mail had scattered all around. Bewildered, he wandered along the road, collecting the letters and stuffing them into his pockets—and for the first time he noticed his injuries. His right hand was seared black. From his fingertips to his shoulder, the skin on his left arm had melted and was hanging in shreds. His left leg, too, was badly burned. Taniguchi felt something strange and slippery on his back, so he reached around to find that his shirt was gone—and when he pulled his hand back, his fingers were covered with charred, melted skin, black and slimy, like grease. “I did not feel any pain, and there was not a single drop of blood.”

  Leaving his bicycle and mailbag behind, Taniguchi dragged himself forward, as though sleepwalking, to search for help. Up the road, he passed the women’s dorm of the Mitsubishi factory, where people squirmed in pain on the ground, their hair singed and their bodies and faces burned and swollen. A short distance farther, he made his way into one of Mitsubishi’s Sumiyoshi mountain tunnels and fumbled through a dark, narrow passageway packed with injured factory workers. Taniguchi collapsed onto a worktable. A woman offered him a bit of water, apologizing that there wasn’t more because the city’s waterlines had been destroyed. She cut off the skin dangling from Taniguchi’s arm, and since all the medicines stored in the tunnel were already used up, she applied machine oil to try to soothe the raw, dust-filled flesh of his back.

  Fear of a second attack spread through the tunnel. As everyone clambered to escape to the hills, Taniguchi tried to hoist himself off the table, but his legs couldn’t support him. Several men carried him outside to the top of a hill where they laid him down on his stomach surrounded by injured people begging for water, crying out for help, and muttering their names and addresses in the hope that someone would tell their families where and how they had died. By then it was past noon. Half-conscious and unable to move, Taniguchi lay facedown in that spot for the rest of the day, the flesh of his back and arms unprotected from the lingering heat of the nuclear blast and the intense sun bearing down through the atomic haze.

  ____

  Until the night before, when he had first heard reports of the Hiroshima bombing, Nagasaki prefectural governor Nagano Wakamatsu’s lack of understanding about the nature of atomic weapons had allowed him reasonable confidence in Nagasaki’s wartime rescue preparedness. Nagasaki Medical College served as the principal site for emergency medical care, supported by eighteen hospitals and medical clinics throughout the city that could provide outpatient care for 1,240 people. If needed, the faculty and staff of Nagasaki Medical College and its hospital could provide extra care, and its student body could offer additional basic first-aid support. Large stores of medicine and supplies had been stowed for safekeeping in concrete-reinforced warehouses. In reality, however, even if the governor had been given more information and preparation time, neither Nagasaki nor any city in the world had the capacity to build rescue and relief operations adequate for a nuclear attack.

  When the bomb detonated, the governor had just convened his emergency evacuation planning meeting inside the concrete-lined air raid shelter that served as the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense Headquarters, situated southeast of the Urakami Valley on the other side of the mountains. After hearing immediate accounts from area workers that several parachutes had descended, followed by a brilliant flash of light and a tremendous explosion, the governor believed that “new-type” bombs like the one reportedly dropped on Hiroshima had been used on Nagasaki as well. When he ran outside to investigate, however, he saw that houses in the immediate neighborhood near Suwa Shrine were undamaged except for windows shattered by the explosion. He turned to the south and scanned the Nakashima Valley and city center, seeing nothing that fit the descriptions he had heard of a completely annihilated Hiroshima. Details from various Nagasaki police stations reported minimal damage and no serious injuries. Based on these early observations and descriptions of damages, the governor concluded that—unlike Hiroshima—the new-type bombs dropped on Nagasaki had caused only fires, and that the atomic cloud he could see rising and expanding above Mount Kompira was only intense smoke. Within minutes, he dispatched telegrams to key officials in Kyushu and western Japan stating that the bombs were smaller versions of those used on Hiroshima and that his city’s structural damages and casualties were minimal.

  But the governor soon realized that the early police reports he had received had come only from Nagasaki’s outlying areas; no reports had come in yet from the northern sections of the city. “Telephone lines were dead,” he later explained, “and we had no idea that thousands of people, including the police, had been killed or injured in the Urakami area.” It would be nearly an hour after the bombing when he first learned, with great anguish, that almost none of the city’s emergency medical services had survived the nuclear attack: The Medical College and its hospital were destroyed, and a large number of its staff and students were dead. A majority of the city’s other hospitals, clinics, and designated relief stations and their personnel, mostly located within a half mile of the hypocenter, were also gone. Too late for evacuation measures, the governor ordered the mobilization of doctors and nurses in the old city to provide aid to victims—but even they were mostly helpless because nearly all medicines had been destroyed in the blast. Few treatment options remained beyond water, pumpkin juice, sesame oil, machine oil, Mercurochrome (an antiseptic), zinc oxide cream, and an occasional tin of petroleum jelly. Mothers applied cooking oil to their children’s burns, and some boys removed their bleached cotton loincloths to use as bandages.

  Wada was among the first civilians to support the city’s search and rescue efforts. Initially knocked unconscious when Hotarujaya Terminal collapsed, when he regained his senses, Wada found himself lying facedown beneath large wooden beams and debris. He called out for help, and eventually several students found him and pulled him out of the wreckage. Wada had suffered minor cuts and injuries but was otherwise unharmed. As he sat in the partially collapsed station house, a little girl about five years old wandered in and sat down in front of him, crying. Her forehead was raw with burns and her face and body were covered in blood. “[Her] eyes were so big,” Wada recalled. “She never said a single word.”

  Still weakened and scared, he hoisted the girl onto his back and carried her outside the station toward a neighborhood clinic. “It was still around noon,” Wada remembered, “but the atomic cloud blocked the sun, so it was dark like night.” Nothing around him was the same as before. Every house was damaged. People escaping the hyp
ocenter region walked past him in silence, but they were so badly wounded that “they didn’t look like humans.” When he got to the relief station, it was already jammed with people, so Wada took a wet rag and wiped the girl’s face and body as best he could. In time, a doctor applied akachin (Mercurochrome) and gauze bandages to her forehead and asked Wada to take the girl to a nearby elementary school being used as an emergency shelter. Wada lifted her on his back again and took her to the school’s athletic field, already overflowing with injured and burned people. “I had no choice but to lay her down there,” he said. He went back to the field a few days later, and the girl was no longer there. Wada guessed that she had died.

  In the early afternoon, he made his way back to Hotarujaya Terminal, where injured drivers and other employees of the streetcar company had begun to gather. News arrived of the total destruction of the Urakami area, prompting Wada, as the student leader, to take an immediate roll call. Of sixty student workers, twelve were missing. Wada sent the girls home immediately and told them to escape with their families as far away as possible, then he and a group of male students set out in search of their friends. He kept thinking about three of the drivers who were heading into the Urakami Valley just before eleven a.m., including his best friend, Tanaka, and he tried to calculate their positions at the time of the bomb. Praying they were safe, he and his colleagues followed the streetcar lines to Nagasaki Station, but fires blocked them from going farther, so they turned back and joined the early relief efforts taking place all around them. As policemen assisted victims, civilian air raid wardens hurried through neighborhoods calling out to the injured, telling them to go to the temporary relief stations being set up in elementary schools. Medical relief personnel worked side by side with citizen aid volunteers, trying to help the seemingly endless numbers of survivors without any knowledge of the kinds of burns they were treating or the weapon that had caused them. Wada and his friends used wooden doors to carry the injured to makeshift aid stations. Of those they tried to save, few lived.