Nagasaki
Page 8
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By 12:30 p.m., most of the buildings near the hypocenter were burning, including Nagasaki Medical College, and the numerous smaller fires that had erupted after the explosion had converged into a sea of flames. Everything in the Urakami Valley not initially destroyed by the atomic blast burned to the ground, and the fires quickly reached as far south as the Nagasaki Prefectural Government Building, the courthouse, and contiguous neighborhoods on the eastern side of the bay, all of which were gutted. In areas farther out, flammable objects such as trees and wooden houses that had absorbed the immense heat of the bomb spontaneously burst into flames. City officials could not comprehend the magnitude and speed of the conflagration. Beneath a dark, crimson sky, an early citizen firefighting crew set out toward the Urakami Valley along the railroad tracks to Yachiyo-machi, the southernmost neighborhood of the hypocenter area. Wearing helmets, gas masks, canteens over their shoulders, and daggers at their waists, the firemen were a stark visual contrast to the burned and naked bodies of those fleeing the scene. The power of the fires, however—along with the destruction of trucks and equipment and lack of water due to broken water mains and melted and damaged water pipes—prevented firefighters from containing the inferno. Able-bodied citizens raced to the edges of the blazes and created bucket brigades to extinguish the fires, but fanned by summer winds, the firestorm intensified. By early afternoon, the popping and hissing of encroaching flames terrorized survivors in almost every section of the city.
From Nagasaki Station, Nagano had pressed north along the melted railroad tracks parallel to the Urakami River, searching for a way around the fires to get to her home. “There were so many dead bodies on the ground, everywhere,” she remembered. “Heads here, bodies there, and next to them, people barely alive crying, ‘Tasukete kudasai!’ [Please help me!]” At every turn, fires stopped Nagano from moving closer to her neighborhood. As she crossed Inasa Bridge, by total coincidence she ran into her uncle, who was coming toward her. He and Nagano’s father worked at the same Mitsubishi Electric factory near the shipyard. Before racing away to search for his family, her uncle urged Nagano to stay where she was because her father would be coming along soon. Nagano waited, straining in the direction of the Mitsubishi Electric plant to the south, desperate for a glimpse of her father among the throngs of people moving in both directions.
Suddenly, he appeared in front of her. Relieved beyond words, Nagano sobbed and hugged him. Time was critical, however, so they quickly returned to the western side of the Urakami River and maneuvered their way over broken utility poles and severed power lines toward the next bridge to the north. Across the river they could see the crushed Mitsubishi steelworks factory, its towering smokestacks bent at the middle by the force of the blast wind. Hordes of injured people passed them, heading south to flee the area, “their bodies burned and bloated,” Nagano remembered, “naked except for patches of torn clothing stuck to their wounds.” Some of them staggered toward Nagano and her father and grabbed at them, begging for help and for water. “It was so terrible for them. But—” Nagano choked as she recalled the scene: “Doooooooooh suru koto mo dekinatta! [We could do absolutely nothing for them!] At least if we had had a canteen with us, we could have given them sips of water! We apologized—we said we were sorry—that’s all we could do. One after the other, people collapsed right in front of us and died.”
The air smelled of smoke and death. As Yoshida had seen farther north, here, too, the riverbanks were piled high with dead bodies. Corpses floated just below the surface of the river, “like potatoes in a tub,” one survivor remembered, some facedown and others sinking headfirst so only their feet were visible. When Nagano and her father approached the Yanagawa Bridge, they halted at the sight of a dead horse standing on all four legs, totally blackened, its head stretched upward. Nagano clung to her father’s arm as they walked past it and crossed the bridge to get closer to their house—but fires continued to block every entrance to their neighborhood. After many attempts, they grudgingly turned around and crossed back to the west side of the river, where they came to an air raid shelter. They crawled inside and huddled together on the ground. There was nothing to do but wait.
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By two p.m., the atomic cloud had drifted twenty-four miles east and now hung over Mount Kinugasa on the Shimabara Peninsula. In Nagasaki, as the firestorm spread and burned to death people trapped beneath fallen buildings, gunpowder ignited in the Mitsubishi Ohashi factory, creating another explosion that reverberated throughout the valley. The four main thoroughfares into and out of the city were mobbed with dazed survivors wandering through the ruins, people trying to evacuate, and city workers racing to (unsuccessfully) restore power and water to the city. Desperate family members rushed to find their loved ones, bowing in reverence to the dead and injured people they passed or stepped over. From every direction, the ground in the hypocenter area was still too hot to enter, and people raced frantically in search of detours. Many waded through dead bodies to cross the Urakami River only to be stopped on the other side by a wall of heat.
Mothers and fathers searched for their children at schools, factories, and shelters throughout the area, but facial burns and swelling rendered people so unrecognizable that many parents could only identify their sons or daughters by reading the ID tags on their school uniforms. Fortunate families were overwhelmed with gratitude when a loved one returned. When one mother burst out shouting and crying with happiness when her daughter finally came home, a military policeman rebuked her loudly: “Such effeminate behavior has caused Japan to be defeated!”
Using still-functioning train cars, the first relief train had already left the Ohashi area carrying injured people to medical facilities outside Nagasaki. Many victims died en route or soon after arrival. In the meantime, medical relief and firefighting teams poured into the city from surrounding townships. By late afternoon, regional navy officials had also dispatched medical teams from hospitals outside the city, though many were delayed in arriving due to recurrent air raid alarms in their regions and damaged roads into Nagasaki. Navy rescue workers entering the city by train from the north were shocked by the eerie scenes before them of people crawling toward the tracks, the annihilated city burning in the distance, and the horrific smell of burning flesh, food, and buildings. The men began loading people into the empty trains and sending them off to naval hospitals in Isahaya (sixteen miles northeast), Omura (twenty-two miles north), and Sasebo (fifty-six miles northwest), though these hospitals were not equipped to handle the simultaneous arrival of hundreds of severely burned and injured people. It was impossible to notify the patients’ families about their locations, and many victims died alone before anyone knew where they were.
• • •
While Yoshida and his friends crouched against the embankment, the leaves they had placed over their open wounds dried and crumbled off their bodies, and with no buildings or trees left to provide shade, their raw flesh was exposed to the direct heat of the sun. “No words can describe how excruciating the pain was. I really thought I was going to die,” he remembered. “The heat of the sun was more unbearable than the atomic bomb.” When the sun finally fell behind the mountains to the west, the visceral relief the boys felt deluded them into thinking that at last they were saved.
But Yoshida’s burned face continued to swell. At first he used his fingers to keep his eyes open, but within a few hours, the swelling was so severe he could no longer see. Whenever he heard someone passing by, he called out, pleading with them for information about his neighborhood near Suwa Shrine. “Is it damaged?” he cried. “Are the people there okay?” Wounded victims called back to him that the whole city was destroyed. Yoshida faded into unconsciousness.
• • •
“Mineko! Mineko!” Do-oh’s father called out for her. When she didn’t return home after the bombing, he had set out to find her, searching the areas around the Mitsubishi Ohashi factory and mo
ving as close as he could to the hypocenter. At the embankment where Do-oh was hiding under the limb of a fallen tree, the faces of people lying on the ground were so swollen that he was unsure he would be able to recognize her even if she was there. Still, he called out her name. By then, however, Do-oh, still bleeding, had fallen into semiconsciousness and couldn’t hear her father’s cries. He returned home to find out what she had been wearing that day, then left again, this time with the hope of identifying his daughter by her clothes.
Some time later, Do-oh regained momentary consciousness and peered up from beneath the tree to see one of her classmates, who told her that her father had been there looking for her. Panicked that she would still be too hidden for her father to find her, she tried to stand up. But she couldn’t move. Eventually Do-oh mumbled loudly enough to catch the attention of a young man passing by, and she asked him to carry her to a grassy area closer to the road. He placed her in a line of dead bodies and injured people, some of whom were moaning in pain. Another stranger covered her with mosquito netting.
Pain shot through Do-oh’s body, and she longed for water to relieve her intensely dry throat. “Anything, even muddy water would have been fine.” Shivering, she reached up to touch her wound a second time, and the slimy gash was so deep that her fingers went in all the way up to the first knuckle. Again, Do-oh drifted into unconsciousness. This time she hallucinated, seeing images of herself walking barefoot along an endless path between rice paddies with vast fields of bright rape blossoms all around. Yellow and white butterflies flew over the meadows. “It was a world where no one goes,” she recalled, “an extremely lonely, isolated world.” In the dream, she sat on a rock. In the distance, an old man in a white kimono beckoned her close to him. As she tried to approach him, another voice awakened her with a small whisper: “Don’t sleep! Don’t sleep!” It was God’s voice, the creator’s voice, Do-oh later believed, calling her back from the edge of death.
Do-oh’s father returned to the embankment and again searched among the bodies for any recognizable scrap of clothing. He called out Do-oh’s name over and over. This time she heard him. Summoning every fragment of energy, Do-oh whispered back—“Yes!”—in a voice just loud enough for him to hear. Her father and three others lifted her onto a broken wooden door and carried her two and half miles to the house of Dr. Miyajima Takeshi, a retired army physician who lived in Do-oh’s neighborhood in northwest Nagasaki, where the doctor and his family had begun providing treatment to victims fifteen minutes after the explosion. It was dark when Do-oh’s group arrived. The doctor’s yard spilled over with injured and dying people lying on the ground—hoping, praying, and begging for help.
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The sun set on Nagasaki at 7:12 p.m., eight hours after the atomic blast. Near the hypocenter, flames darted out of the rubble, and outlying neighborhoods were still ablaze. People lying on the ground were consumed by fire. At makeshift relief stations and safe zones, volunteers distributed rations for the first time that day—onigiri, crackers, canned meat, and dry biscuits with sesame seeds—prepared by volunteer women’s groups outside Nagasaki and donated through their municipal governments. Workers used megaphones to announce the availability of food, but by then, most able-bodied people had fled. Scraps of burning documents and papers fluttered over the city. The Catholic orphanage and girls’ schools in the northern Urakami Valley had already burned down, and sometime that night, the ruins of Urakami Church ignited, sending pillars of fire high into the night sky.
Darkness had forced most family members to stop searching for their loved ones, though some with lanterns pressed on. A young father found his wife behind their house; charred and covered with ashes, she was calling out the names of their children, who were never found. Some survivors retreated to pumpkin fields beyond the fires to sleep among the injured and dying. Others fought off their drowsiness, afraid they would die if they fell asleep. An eleven-year-old girl slept on the ground close to her mother, her sole surviving family member, only to wake up in the middle of the night to find her mother dead.
By midnight, relief trains had carried an estimated 3,500 injured people to cities and villages beyond Nagasaki, where countless more survivors had also arrived by foot or truck. Teams of medical staff and volunteers worked through the night to treat them, though their supplies quickly ran out.
In Nagasaki, tens of thousands of burned and injured men, women, and children remained trapped beneath collapsed buildings and heavy debris or lay wounded on hillsides, by the railroad tracks, or along the banks of the Urakami River. In what can only be explained as an unintentional error of timing in the Allies’ ongoing psychological warfare initiative across Japan, U.S. B-29s flew over the city in the middle of the night and dropped thousands of leaflets that demanded that Japan end all military action and surrender. The leaflets warned the people of Nagasaki about a possible atomic bomb attack and urged them to evacuate immediately. Most survivors did not see the leaflets until the next day or later, but hearing these and other enemy planes overhead, those who could still move scrambled to hide themselves in mountaintop graveyards, under bridges, or inside overcrowded air raid shelters, where the stench of scorched flesh and blood, the mosquitoes, and the penetrating screams of the injured were unbearable. Across the sweltering city, the sounds of small explosions, fires crackling, and voices of adults and children searching for, comforting, or crying out for their loved ones created a haunting cacophony.
• • •
Near the well where he’d seen the parachutes falling through the clouds, Yoshida lay on the ground under the rising crescent moon, fading in and out of consciousness. His face was swollen like a balloon, his throat was so hot he thought it was burning, and he was shivering due to extreme loss of skin. One of his six friends, Tabuchi, who could still see out of one eye, left the group to try to make it in darkness over the mountains to their neighborhood in Nishiyama.
Nagano and her father hid inside the packed air raid shelter not far from Inasa Bridge. With no electricity, flashlights, or candles, they sat in pitch-blackness, terrified as they listened to a series of explosions outside. One by one, people died all around them, crying for water or mumbling their names and addresses.
On the veranda of his house, Dr. Miyajima treated Do-oh before others because of the severity of her injuries, while dozens waited their turn. Working by candlelight and with no anesthesia, he removed hundreds of glass splinters embedded in her head and body. “Stop! Stop!” Do-oh shrieked, thrashing in agony. Her parents and two other adults used all their weight to hold her arms and legs to the table. “If we stop treating you, you will die,” someone told her. But Do-oh didn’t care, and she screamed over and over for the doctor to stop and let her die. The doctor persisted, and before morning, the rice bowl that lay near her head was filled with bloody glass slivers. Her head now wrapped in bandages, Do-oh languished near death.
That night, Wada had walked through the darkened, smoldering streets east of Nagasaki Bay to his home in Maruyama-machi. His house was damaged but still intact. To his great relief, he found a note from his grandparents saying that they and his younger sister were alive and had fled to the suburb of Tagami. From the hillside behind his house, he watched the fires raging in the city center and the Urakami Valley to the north. Filled with apprehension about the fate of his friends, he returned to Hotarujaya Terminal, where he and his coworkers slept on the debris-laden station floor. Outside, refugees from neighboring districts continued to stream through streets lit by flames. Some brought nothing; others carried on their backs—or in handcarts—any possessions they could salvage.
Taniguchi’s grandfather had walked all afternoon and evening through scorched neighborhoods searching for his grandson, getting as close as possible to the hypocenter. But his efforts yielded nothing. Exhausted and scared, the old man finally lay down to sleep in a field not more than a mile from where Taniguchi lay on a hillside surrounded by corpses. The sou
nd of an approaching relief train echoed in the distance.
“The city was burning . . . ,” Taniguchi remembered, “illuminating the sky like a midnight sun.” A plane flew overhead and sprayed the area with machine-gun fire. Bullets hit a rock near Taniguchi’s face and bounced into the bushes, but Taniguchi could do nothing to protect himself.
Later in the night, a drizzling rain fell. Lying facedown and unable to move, Taniguchi noticed some bamboo leaves hanging low to the ground just a few inches away. Desperately thirsty, he pulled his head up, stretched his neck out as far as he could, and strained to suck the raindrops off the leaves before setting his head down and waiting in darkness for someone to come.