Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  If I were the Mayor of Kokura, I would give thanks every time I saw a cloud. I would have an annual citywide holiday in gratitude to cumuli. I would adopt a cloud as the city’s symbol to the world, a sign not just of Kokura’s good fortune, but also of the sublime arbitrariness of death. Never before in history has the lot of so many tens of thousands of people depended on a cloud.

  With fuel running low, Major Sweeney makes the decision to fly on to Nagasaki to see if he has better luck there. Oh, but the Major was just desperate to drop that bomb and to make his mark on history – but as it is, like Nagasaki itself, no-one remembers who came second and none but the A-bomb diehards have ever heard of Bock’s Car or the Major.

  There was only fuel enough for the single bomb run over Nagasaki, but we, also, had thick cloud cover. As the B29 trawled over the city, Sweeney was mulling over whether to drop the bomb by radar alone; would that that happy thought had come to him as he had been flying over Kokura.

  Suddenly the bombardier, Kermit Beahan, lets out a shout. “I’ve got it!” he screams. “I see the city!”

  Bombardier Beahan, now in control of Bock’s Car, ducks through a chink in the clouds, quickly securing his cross-hairs onto the Mitsubishi Arms Manufacturing Plant. And if I can dally for just a moment longer on one final what-might-havebeen: not only was Nagasaki not the primary city, but the Mitsubishi Plant was not even the primary target in Nagasaki. No, Beahan had actually been searching for the Prefecture, three kilometres south. But that tiny gap in the clouds just happened to be above Urakami, and that in the end is what did for us.

  There was a journalist, Bill Laurence, in an observation plane behind Bock’s Car, the better to record every nuance and detail of the second bomb run. This is just a small piece of the puke-inducing screed that he wrote while he was sitting in the midsection of the appropriately named Great Artiste: ‘Somewhere ahead of me lies Japan, the land of our enemy. In a few hours from now, one of its cities, making weapons of war for use against us, will be wiped off the map by the great- est weapon ever made by man. In a fraction of time immeasurable by any clock, a whirlwind from the skies will pulverize thousands of its buildings and tens of thousands of its inhabitants.’

  What a gloriously lyrical way to describe an atomic bomb. Laurence, I think, must have fancied himself a poet.There was scant poetry to be had down on the ground – even months, years, after the war had ended.

  It would be several days yet before Japan was forced to swallow that bitter pill of surrender – and what a surrender it was. As one, the entire country seemed to break down into hysterical tears. It was probably the greatest single outpouring of grief in history.

  There were two people, however, who were not crying when the war finally ended: the girl and me. The girl, as I remember, actually started laughing; as for me, all I could feel was this numbing relief that, just as the whole sorry farrago of a war had come to an end, I had not had my head blown off with an army service pistol.

  All in the fullness of time. First there is a burned wife and an injured son to be dealt with, along with a man who was only partly on the way to redemption.

  The hospital had not been overtaken by the firestorm, which was a small blessing, as it was at least safe to lie outside in the grounds. But the building was ablaze. It was about 1,800 metres from the epicentre and the bomb had so dried out its tinder-dry roof-beams that within a single hour they had burst into flames. First the roof had gone up, then the third floor, until the smoking timbers had fallen down through the liftshafts and torched the whole hospital.

  In the preceding months, St Francis’ had largely catered for TB patients, but after the bomb it was transformed into Nagasaki’s primary burns unit. Throughout the afternoon, victims clambered up to the hill for sanctuary – and always, the longer they took the worse their injuries. The first of the victims, who arrived when we did, were at least able to walk. Later in the afternoon, they were nothing but black crawling wrecks, and the length of the hair was the only clue as to whether they were men or women.

  The medicines were every bit as basic as they had been at the Hijiyama School two days earlier. The hospital had been well-stocked with creams, bandages and all the other things that might aid a burns victim. But the doctor and his team of nurses had only had time to save their patients from the inferno before all but their most basic medicines went up in smoke.

  With the rest of my little troupe lying on the grass in a line, and all the other medics treating people who were more dead than alive, I set to work on Toshiaki. The girl had found me a pair of forceps and she soothed the boy as I started to tug the wooden splinter from his leg. How he bucked and squealed, but the girl kept him pinned tight to the ground. I was fortunate that the splinter had penetrated all the way through the fleshy part and come out the other side, so I was able to pull it out point first. First he watched me, eyes wide with shock, but as the pain grew, he thrashed his head from side to side.

  Since our arrival, I’d barely had time to think. The action had been non-stop as we’d unloaded the handcart and borrowed one of the last pots of cream. But, sitting there on the grass, straining to pull that splinter from Toshiaki’s leg, it was where I wanted to be. For a while, I even forgot the pain of my singed left arm.

  Bit by bit, the splinter began to ease out of Toshiaki’s leg, until with a sucking plop it dropped onto the grass. I smeared antiseptic onto his wounds before applying gauze and a final bandage tight round his leg. The burns I could only treat with cream and bandages

  Mako’s injuries were just ghastly. Her pulse was weak and I could feel only a trace of breath as I put my ear to her mouth. I did what I could. I snipped away at the worst of the burned skin and tried to clean her up. I hoped the cream might ease her pain.

  After I had bound her with bandages, Toshiaki snuggled into Mako’s side and we draped the pair with a blanket. If I could have done more, I would.

  Treating the young woman who we’d found on our way up Motohara Hill was relatively simple. I applied cream and bandages where possible and when I was done, she said, “Thank you, Sir. Thank you for not leaving me.”

  “Don’t thank me, thank the girl,” I replied, nodding towards that fey seven year old who was the true hero of the day. She had even found the only doctor in the place and had cajoled him into coming over and treating Yoshito’s leg.

  As a man, he was nothing exceptional to look at. If you saw him, with his trim hair and scholarly, rather diffident manner, you would have taken him for being just what he was: a hardworking medic who did what he was ordered.

  But, unlike some, Fat Man was to bring out the best in him. That is what crises do. You find out a man’s true worth. Some panic; some go to the wall; some think only of themselves; but a few, a rare few, turn into heroes overnight. And Dr Kinoshita was one of the heroes.

  He was smiling as he allowed the girl to tug at his sleeve and drag him over. It said much for him that he could be under so much pressure, hundreds of people clamouring for his attention, and yet still have the time to be amused by a bossy seven-year-old girl.

  “This is the man, Sir,” she said, as she pointed at Yoshito. “I believe he’s broken his leg.”

  The doctor squatted down and with a “May I?” ran his fingers down Yoshito’s legs. “You’re right,” he said to the girl, looking up at her through round, gold-rimmed glasses.

  “I am right,” she said. “That’s because we’ve already done this for a day in Hiroshima.”

  “You... “ The doctor paused and turned his head from the girl to me. “You have come from Hiroshima? You left Hiroshima and ended up here?”

  I nodded.

  The doctor gave a little snort of laughter. “At least you have survived,” he said. “There cannot be many who have survived both bombs. So you’ve seen all these injuries before?”

  “We have,” I replied.

  With a professional eye he looked from Toshiaki to Mako to the young woman, sizing up my handiwork. “A very com
petent job you’ve done,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Thank you.”

  “Could you stay for a while? Could you help?”

  The girl eyed me nervously, aware of the flightiness of her charge. “Yes,” I replied. “I would like that.”

  “We would like that,” corrected the girl.

  “That’s good. That’s very good. Though first let me bandage your arm.”

  It was a wretched night for many reasons. All I can picture is this unending misery, with blackened bodies constantly calling out for water. It was all the horror of Hiroshima, but tenfold – for every victim that could walk or crawl seemed to be trying to reach our hospital, spurred on by the vain hope that we might be able to ease their pain.

  Some of them died the very moment that they entered the hospital grounds. They would totter the last few yards, breast the gateway and then slowly buckle at the knees, like a marathon runner brought to the very brink of exhaustion. All about the grassy grounds were strewn these scores of victims – though they represented only a tiny fraction of the misery wrought by Fat Man. If only President Harry Truman had had a glimpse, a single glimpse, of these wrecked lives when he had described the bomb as “the greatest thing in the whole damn world”.

  The victims were littered all about the yard, and with the smoke, the screams and the funeral pyres flickering in the night, you might easily have believed you were in the very centre of hell. Nothing now could surprise me; there was no injury, how ever horrific, that I had not seen countless times before.

  Faces that had been burned into bubbling black masks, yet were still somehow able to plead for water. Black corrugated backs, with the very flesh cooked and crisped like a piece of mutton. Little children whose chests had been so raked with glass shards that they looked like bristling hedgehogs. Shellshocked mothers clutching long dead babies to their chests. And naked nuns,whose feet had been turned into blackened stumps and who had crawled to the hospital on hands and knees.

  All of this I saw and more, and always in the background was that fearful refrain that I would come to know so well: “Water, water! Please give me water!” Others could do nothing more than scream to the world about their own misery. And, perhaps most harrowing of all were the ones who pleaded for nothing more than an end to life itself. “Please kill me,” they would call out, and if you had given them a gun they would have quickly pulled the trigger.

  The bombs brought home two quite separate aspects of human nature. On the one hand, you were constantly reminded of the frailty of human life, and how easy, how simple, it is for that thread to be cut.

  On the other, I also experienced such remarkable resilience, victims clinging on for weeks, months, on end, doggedly refusing to let that last flicker of life be snuffed out.

  The bomb had erased all our differences – and by doing so, had emphasised our humanity. In Nagasaki, we were all either victims or carers; if you were not sick, you tended the sick. The equation was now astonishingly simple and for me, it made life not just easy, but enjoyable. I had a sense of purpose such as I had never experienced before I tended the sick.

  First I would inquire how they were and whether they objected to me treating them. Then I would patiently snip away at the shards of dead skin, before the girl applied cooking oil. How she chattered, but what I chiefly remember that first night was the smell; it was as if we were preparing for the banquet from hell.

  A number of the victims died soon after they had been treated and were tossed onto the pyres; the air was heavy with the smell of cooking oil and that unmistakable sweet smell of roasted meat.

  By midnight, we had run out of oils and creams. I sent the girl off to sleep, where she curled up on a blanket next to old Yoshito the sailor. But although I was numbingly tired, I could not sleep. The ghastly images from the previous three days never stopped playing through my mind. So I found an earthenware pitcher and filled it with water from a small indoor well. There was actually a much larger well outside, but that had been blocked up by rubble from a fallen chimney.

  The smaller well was housed in one of the outbuildings and was perhaps a metre across, with a scuffed whitewash wall around the edge. Straddled over the middle was the usual winding mechanism, while on the end of the chain was a battered wooden bucket, dark with age. It kept us supplied with the clearest, freshest water imaginable. It took an age to wind the bucket up. And when I had that first sip of water, I realised I had drunk nothing all day.

  I drank and I drank, like a hog burying its snout into the river; nothing has ever come close to tasting as sweet as that first mouthful of pure well-water.

  I filled a pitcher and spent the rest of the night ladling water into the mouths of those that wanted it. They were pathetically grateful. “Thank you doctor,” they would call out, to which I could only reply, “You’re welcome,” And it was in this way that I came across my own little band of victims..

  They all appeared to be sleeping, and even my wife was resting easy. For a while, I squatted beside her, staring at the swathes of stained dressings and what came over me was this overwhelming sense of pity. I saw through her injuries to remember the woman I had once loved. Our honeymoon period had not lasted long – but, compared to most, I was lucky to have had even that. And what a wonderful gift she had given me in our boy Toshiaki. And what had I done, meanwhile, to thank her? I had whored my way through any woman who was prepared to have me.

  Mako was lying absolutely motionless. I knelt forward, till my lips were practically next to her ear, and I whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  She was not quite dead and I fancied that, in the shadows of the pyres, I saw her lips move, with just the single word, “Love”.

  Tears sprang to my eyes as I uttered the words I had not used in over three years: “I love you”.

  She may already have been dead by then, but they say that your sense of hearing is the last to go, so I hope, I pray, that as she passed on from this world to the next, her soul was suffused with thoughts of love.

  I stayed with her till dawn, and it was that last vigil which I think crystallised my position: for some reason I had been blessed, blessed beyond all measure with this great gift of life, and I would now savour every moment until I had sucked it dry.

  At dawn, I placed Mako’s frail body onto the handcart and wheeled her over to one of the pyres. The girl, somehow sensing Mako’s death, had silently come to join me. I lifted Mako off her cart and laid her onto a small mound of corpses. What a cheerless way for it all to end.

  The girl took my hand as the flames danced. I gave brief thanks for Mako’s life and what she had given me.

  “Is there anything you would like to say?” I asked the girl.

  “That is very, very sad,” she said. “She was very pretty.”

  “She was.”

  “I’m hungry,” said the girl.

  “You’re hungry?” I said, cupping my hand round her shoulder. “That is because you’ve had no supper.” And with that, we embraced life and went off to find something to eat.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We were by the well. I had hauled up another bucket of the water and the girl was sipping from the ladle. My left arm was aching viciously; from my knuckles to my shoulders it was a throbbing mass of pain. It was always worst when I had nothing to do, as if my brain had dropped out of gear and suddenly all I could think of was my own footling problems.

  I was swinging my arm backwards and forwards, hoping that the increase in blood-flow might ease the pain, but it did nothing of the kind.

  “This arm is a devil,” I said, wondering if the bandages and

  the oil were hindering or helping the healing process.

  There was a shadow at the door. It was the doctor, still spry, though his clothes a lot dirtier than when I had first seen him the previous afternoon.

  “I hoped I would find you in here,” he said. “I’m sorry about your wife.”

  “Thank you. A merciful release.”

  “I fe
ar there will be many more like her. A grave loss for you, nevertheless, and I’m sorry,” he said. “How is your arm?”

  “Fine. Nothing at all.”

  Hands clasped in front of him, Dr Kinoshita nodded his head from side-to-side, as if weighing me up. “I don’t know if this is appropriate. You may want to be by yourself. But there is something I would like you to do.”

  “Ask of me what you will.”

  “Our water position is bad enough,” he said. “This well is all we have; I fear it will soon run out. More pressingly, we need food; we need medicine, bandages.”

  “And?”

  “And, now that the firestorm is dying down, I hoped that you might be the man to find them.”

  “I ”

  He bowed to me. “Do what you can.”

  “I will.”

  I knew that the girl would want to come too. Even after just four days together, I had already come to know her every mood and whim. But this time, I was adamant. It was going to be hard, arduous work which could take the whole day; it might well be dangerous; and, quite apart from anything else, I wanted her to stay at the hospital to look after Toshiaki. A seven-year-old girl accompanying me through the ruins of Nagasaki? What use could she be? It was preposterous.

  “I know you want to come,” I said, holding up my hand before she had even said a word. “But who is going to look after Toshiaki?”

  There was a lull. The girl pouted. Toshiaki twitched in his sleep.

  And Yoshito piped up. “I will look after Toshiaki.”

  “Thank you for that,” I said, attempting to force a smile. “But it’s going to be dangerous. Much of the city is still on fire. I don’t even know where I’m supposed to be going ”

  “I know of one depot in the Nishiyama district,” said Yoshito, smiling pleasantly. He was like an old dog, happy in himself. “You could avoid Urakami altogether by walking over Mount Konpira.”