Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  Our first goal was the Imperial Hotel, but we found this taken over by colleagues who had landed with General MacArthur’s airborne troops a few hours ahead of the Marines. We went to the only other hotel still extant in Tokyo, the Dai Iti. It was a bizarre situation. We were the first signs of occupation the manager had seen. He apologised that the hotel was full, and in any case uncomfortable. He explained that we would be the only foreigners amongst a hotel full of Japanese, some of whom, as he expressed it, were ‘hotheads’. After more apologies and explanations he agreed to give us rooms and produced forms for us to fill in, exactly as if we had arrived on a Cook’s tour. Solemnly we filled in answers to such questions as at what port we had landed, how long we would remain in Japan, had we been in Japan before, what references could we give in Japan. The manager was concerned when we told him we could not complete the section referring to passport and visa particulars.

  Tokyo for those first few days was a prime example of how completely the Japanese people had accepted defeat. A couple of weeks earlier to think of surrender was to commit a treachery. The propaganda services instilled into people’s minds that with their wonderful suicide weapons no invasion of Japan would be possible. Every person was to be mobilised and ready to mow down with bamboo spears any invader who succeeded in setting foot on the sacred soil of Japan. Now, a couple of days before the surrender was signed, a handful of correspondents without any supporting troops had taken over the nation’s capital, and they occupied it alone for eight days. They registered in the hotels, wandered where they wished without molestation. The Emperor had told people to behave and not to cause ‘incidents’, so the people behaved. Just as the initial wave of suicides outside the Emperor’s palace stopped the instant the Emperor ordered no more suicides.

  Much of the built-up portion of Tokyo was intact. The large modern concrete and stone buildings facing the Imperial palace were hardly touched. Most of the damage was in the residential quarter, where the first fire raid on the 10th of March killed 100,000 people in two hours, according to local figures. Three-quarters of Tokyo’s population had fled to the country, most of the rest were living in the one-roomed, rusty iron shacks that had sprung up like weeds among the ruins, or in open dugouts that offered scant protection against the wet and cold that was already setting in in early September.

  After Tokyo most of us wanted to see Hiroshima, but it was difficult to arrange transportation there. It lay about four hundred miles from Tokyo, we had little information about the roads, and first reports of the Hiroshima airfield were that it was out of commission. We were further handicapped by the reluctance of the Army Public Relations staff to shift their headquarters from Yokohama to Tokyo. I decided to take a long chance and try to travel to Hiroshima by train, as the manager of the Dai Iti hotel assured me there was a daily train which passed through where Hiroshima used to be.

  At what was left of Tokyo’s central station, I managed to squeeze in amongst a lot of Japanese soldiers to find standing room at the end of a compartment on a Hiroshima-bound train. I had stuffed my military cap and pistol belt into a bag, and dressed in jungle greens and carrying an umbrella – borrowed from the Dai Iti manager – I hoped I would be mistaken for a peaceful civilian rather than one of the occupation troops. There was a number of White Russians, Swedes, Swiss and Portuguese about, so there was a chance that I would be taken for a neutral. We were so tightly jammed together that there was no chance of even sitting on the floor, still less of getting into the compartment, which seemed full of Jap officers.

  The troops were sullen at first, craning their necks to get a look at me, jabbering and gesticulating amongst themselves in a not very friendly manner. My cigarettes soon broke down the barriers, however, and by the end of six hours standing with them, they were all smiles, pressing bits of fish and hardboiled eggs on me in exchange for cigarettes. They all had enormous bundles with them, and I found out later they had just been demobilised and were allowed to take away from the barracks as much food and drink as they could carry – as well as their rifles wrapped up in blankets.

  After the first six hours the crowd began to thin out and I managed to wedge my way into the compartment where there were fairly comfortable seats. If I had thrown in a hand grenade I could hardly have provoked more surprise or displeasure amongst the officers. They were the most unhappy collection of men I have ever seen. They still carried their long swords, many of them had pistols and short samurai swords as well. There was a great muttering and grumbling and fingering of sword hilts as I perched myself timidly on the edge of one of the seats. An officer in the seat shrank away as if I were a carrier of plague germs, and barked something at me, which of course I didn’t understand. Soon, however, they settled down to stare gloomily at the floor or into space, their hands clasped over their sword hilts.

  About half a dozen seats away from me I could see the back of a grey head. The hair looked so fine and the shape of the head so much like that of a European, that when the train next stopped I forced my way down, and sure enough found a European with an English book titled Contemporary Japan on his lap. I asked if he was English and he replied: ‘No. I’m an American priest.’

  I expressed great pleasure at meeting him and was probably more than ordinarily exuberant at meeting a fellow traveller with whom I could talk.

  ‘Don’t speak loudly and don’t smile,’ he said quietly. ‘These chappies with the big sticks between their legs aren’t happy today. I knew there was another foreigner on the train by the things they have been saying. They’re not a bit pleased about you. They’ve just been sent home on account of what’s happened on the big boat today (It was September 2, the date of the surrender signing aboard the Missouri.) If you want to speak to me, do so in a roundabout way, because many of them know a few words of our lingo.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m travelling under guard. I have been in camp the last years, and a few days ago they took me to Tokyo to broadcast to our troops and tell them what they must expect to find in Japan and how they must behave. Now they’re taking me back to Kyoto to lock me up again.’

  I managed to get a seat near the priest, with a civilian sitting next to me and two officers opposite. I offered the civilian a cigarette, which he took, but the two officers shook their heads angrily, with tightly compressed lips, when I held out the packet to them. One of them even leaned over, snatched the cigarette out of the civilian’s mouth and threw it out the window, muttering at him angrily as he did so. A Japanese general came into the compartment and asked about me. Half a dozen officers began to try and explain how and when I had arrived.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said the priest, ‘there’s a pretty tense situation here at the moment and if we make any mistakes we may get into bad trouble. Don’t laugh or smile whatever you do. They’ll only think we are gloating over what’s taking place on the big boat today.’

  When the priest referred to what was happening on the big boat this day, 2 September 1945, my thoughts naturally reverted to the scene where 250 of my colleagues, representing the World Press, with representatives of the allied nations, had gathered on the decks of the American battleship Missouri to officially seal the surrender of the greatest military and naval power the East had known, and bring to an end World War II.

  I could imagine the scene with all its pageantry, and realised that even while the signatures of victors and vanquished were being affixed to the historic document, I, a rather lonely figure gambling with fate, was speeding to Hiroshima. My mission – if I arrived – was to give to the world from the ground floor the first description by a white observer of this monstrous cause which had precipitated this surrender.

  I didn’t feel like laughing or smiling, especially as I watched the glowering officers playing with the hilts or tassels of their swords. The train had no lighting and we seemed to spend about half our time running through mile-long tunnels. My imagination worked overtime in those long jet black tunnels
, and I thought I could hear swords coming out of scabbards every few seconds.

  The tension ended in a curious way. I had asked the priest if my bags were safe out on the platform. There had not been room to bring them in with me.

  ‘Your bags will be alright,’ he said, ‘They might bump us off, but an officer wouldn’t stoop to steal your bags.’

  I mentioned that I had a Hermes typewriter which I would not like to lose, and it turned out that the priest had one of the same make which had been giving him trouble. I got my bags and produced my machine and he was allowed to get his from the luggage rack. We exchanged typewriters, and as soon as I started typing half the officers crowded round to see what I was doing. They were intrigued to see twin typewriters produced in such circumstances and were even more interested in watching the words and sentences take shape. Their curiosity was expressed in a sort of joviality amongst themselves and they seemed better disposed towards me when the priest explained that I was a writer. I passed cigarettes around again, and this time they were accepted. I was given in return a roll of dark bread, some fish and a few pieces of grape sugar. A civilian produced a silver flask of saki and tiny goblets and soon everyone’s suspicions seemed to be dispelled.

  The officers never looked really happy, however, throughout the whole trip to Hiroshima. They looked like people stunned by some great disaster. Slumped over their swords, which would soon be stripped from them, they brooded darkly over a future which boded no good for them.

  The privates standing on the platform were cheerful by comparison. For them the end of the war meant a reprieve from almost certain death. It meant they could return to their farms and homes, to carry on their lives from where they had left off when they were drafted into the army. For the officers it was the end of their world. Their social prestige, their financial standing, their careers were finished. Most of them were not trained for anything but war-making. Their position in society was dependent upon their uniforms and side-arms. That was all over. But one could only wonder how many of those Jap officers really accepted the fact that it was all over. Militarism dies hard, and one can be fairly sure that most of these officers would plot and plan to stage a comeback – if not to wage war again at least to seize power inside their own country. Demobilised career officers make a dangerous army of unemployed, as we know from recent history in Germany, Italy and Spain.

  My priest left me at Kyoto to return to internment until our occupying forces should reach that city. I was sorry to see him go, as Kyoto was still ten hours from Hiroshima, and I didn’t look forward to the long journey alone.

  The train rumbled on through the night, and it was impossible to get any sleep, huddled in the seat with people and their bundles jammed in all round. The officers shoved civilians back onto the platform when they tried to swarm in through the windows, but brother officers were allowed in no matter how they arrived. The procedure was reversed on my return journey, when the surrender had already been signed. Civilians were pushing soldiers, including officers, off trains, so sudden was the lowering of the latter’s prestige.

  At 4 a.m. the civilian who had provided the saki prodded me and said: ‘Kono eki wa Hiroshima desu,’ and so I piled out through the window into Hiroshima station, with the civilian throwing my bags out after me.

  The station was badly knocked about and I had to leave by some improvised wooden gates. Just as I was congratulating myself on having actually arrived without real difficulties – the first outsider to visit Hiroshima – I felt a hand on my arm, and there were two black-uniformed police, nearly stumbling over their long swords in their anxiety to grab me. I tried to shake them off, but they held on and escorted me to a shelter of bags and rusty tin, within a stone’s throw of the station. There were a broken chair, a table and three bicycles, only one of which had tyres. My guard sat me down in the chair and asked me questions which I didn’t understand.

  I told them many times in my poor Japanese that I was a shimbun kisha (correspondent), but did not seem to impress them. They woke up a woman who slept on the floor behind a bag screen and she prepared a breakfast of hot water and beans. Several times I got up to go but each time was gently pushed back into the chair. It was too dark to see anything, and light rain was falling outside, so I was not too anxious at first about the wasted time. As soon as it became daylight, however, I opened up my bag, put on my officer’s cap, strapped on my pistol and strode to the doorway. This time my two captors sprang to attention, saluted and let me go.

  I never discovered why I was arrested and why released. Possibly they thought I was an escaped prisoner-of-war, until I put on my official garb; perhaps they thought they must protect me from the local civilians, who were reportedly extremely anti-foreign. It was a kindly detention.

  The railway station was on the extreme outskirts of the city, and on the fringe of the belt of heavy destruction. The central ticket hall was still standing, but roof and windows were badly damaged. The rest of the station, offices, waiting rooms and ticket barriers had been swept away. From the improvised police station I could look across towards some outlines of buildings standing about two or three miles distant. There seemed to be nothing in between as I set out to walk towards those buildings in what I later found to be the centre of the city. I realised there was nothing left above ground for those miles and several miles beyond.

  Walking through those Hiroshima streets one had a feeling of having been transplanted into some death-stricken other planet. There was nothing but awful devastation and desolation. Lead-grey clouds hung low over the waste that had been a city of more than a quarter of a million people. Mists seemed to issue forth from fissures in the soil. There was a dank, acrid, sulphurous smell, and people hurried past without pausing or speaking to each other, white masks covering mouths and nostrils. Buildings had been pounded into grey and reddish dust, solidified into ridges and banks by the frequent rains.

  As I gazed upon this panorama of terrible death and ghastly devastation which stretched to the horizon; with my nostrils assailed by the strange odour of this new death, I knew why the spirit of the men who signed the surrender had collapsed, and why even a nation of militarists, confronted with this awful spectacle of man-planned destruction, had lowered their fl ag, realising the futility of war upon such terms.

  The bomb had fallen just a month previously and there was no time for greenery to cover the scars, even if vegetation would grow on that infested waste. Many trees, especially young willowy ones, were still standing, but stripped of leaves and smaller branches. They had offered resiliency to the terrible blast, but older stouter trees were lying on their sides, with yawning pits where their roots had been. I walked along a tram-line from which all trace of overhead gear had disappeared. Trams themselves were lying on their sides or backs, burnedout hulks blown 50 feet away from the tracks.

  No-one stopped to look at me. Everybody seemed hurried and intent on their own business, whatever it was that brought them into this city of death. In the centre of the town I found that the buildings I had seen from the distance were outlines only, having been gutted by fires which swept through after most of the city had dissolved in a great pillar of dust. In one building, however, there was a police headquarters, and here I managed to make myself and my wants known. Eventually the police provided me with an interpreter, car and guide. The latter was from the local Domei News Agency, the interpreter was a charming Canadian-born Japanese girl.

  The Domei man, who was four miles from the centre of Hiroshima when the bomb fell, described the event as follows:

  ‘We had an alarm early in the morning, but only two aircraft appeared. We thought they were reconnaissance planes and nobody took much notice. The “All Clear” sounded and everybody started on their way back to work. Then at 8.20 a.m. one plane came back. We thought it was another photo plane, and alarms weren’t even sounded. I was just about to leave for work when there was a blinding light, as if from a giant flash of lightning. At the same time I felt a
scorching heat on my face and the house dropped about me. While I was still on the ground there sounded a booming explosion as if a two-ton bomb had dropped alongside me. When I looked out there was a tremendous pillar of black smoke, shaped like a parachute, drifting upwards with a scarlet thread in the middle of it. As I watched the scarlet was diffused through the smoke pillar until the whole thing was glowing red. Hiroshima had disappeared. I knew something new to our experience had occurred. I tried to phone our office, then the police and fire brigade, to find out what had happened, but I couldn’t even raise the exchange.’

  He couldn’t raise the exchange because all the telephone operators had been killed. Seventy-five per cent of the police force, fire brigade and A.R.P. workers were also killed amongst the 100,000 dead of Hiroshima.

  From the third floor of the police station, which had formerly been a bank, and the most solid building in the city, one could see almost to the horizon, nothing but flat acres of ground, from which rose a few trees and factory chimneys. Amongst the buildings still standing was a church which had jumped into the air from about three feet off the ground. It had twisted round and come to rest practically intact but crazily athwart its foundations. Low-level heavy concrete bridges had jumped off their piles, some spans landing back again, others dropping down into the river. All balustrades and stone-work from bridges had disappeared. Of the Emperor’s palace and large military barracks there was not a sign except for red dust and broken grey tiles strewn on the ground. There were no broken walls, large chunks of rubble, blocks of stone and concrete, nor any craters as one usually sees in a bombed city. It was destruction by pulverisation. The only explanation for these buildings still standing seemed to be that they were directly underneath the bomb as it parachuted down to explode and they were perhaps caught in a sort of safety cone, as the explosive force expanded round about them.