The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  “I’ve got it,” he said. In forty-five seconds he sent the bombing radio-tone signal through the intercom. The crew pulled down their dark glasses—all except the two pilots and Ferebee, who could not have seen through the bombsight with them.

  At 8:15 plus seventeen seconds the plane’s bomb-bay doors automatically swung open. The release of the bomb was timed electrically through the bombsight according to the information Ferebee fed into it. His finger was at a toggle button ready to push if the bomb failed to release. The radio tone stopped abruptly and he watched the elongated missile drop bottom first, flip over and hurtle nose down on Hiroshima. Nine thousand pounds lighter, the plane lunged upward. Tibbets banked violently to the right until he had come around more than 150 degrees, then nosed down to pick up speed.

  The bomb-bay doors of The Great Artiste gaped open and three packs tumbled out. Almost immediately each one flowered into a parachute; dangling below was a cylinder resembling a fire extinguisher—it was a transmitter sending back data.

  Tibbets ordered everyone to “make sure those goggles are on.” The bomb was set to detonate in forty-three seconds, and at thirty-five he slipped on his own glasses.

  Hiroshima was serene and so was the sky above it as the people continued on their daily routine. Those who noticed the three parachutes imagined that the plane had been hit and that the crew was bailing out or that more propaganda leaflets had been jettisoned. One man, remembering how the last leaflets had shimmered down in the sun, thought, The Americans have brought us some more beautiful things.

  Several hundred yards north of Aioi Bridge (Ferebee’s target), Private Shigeru Shimoyama, a recent draftee, looked up and idly peered through his thick glasses at one of the drifting chutes. He was standing outside his barracks, a huge wooden structure once a warehouse. He had been in Hiroshima four days and was already “bored to death.” He wished he were back in Tokyo making school notebooks. All at once a pinkish light burst in the sky like a cosmic flash bulb.

  Clocks all over Hiroshima were fixed forever at 8:15.

  The bomb exploded 660 yards from the ground into a fireball almost 110 yards in diameter. Those directly below heard nothing, nor could they later agree what color the pika (lightning) flash was—blue, pink, reddish, dark-brown, yellow or purple.

  The heat emanating from the fireball lasted a fraction of a second but was so intense (almost 300,000 degrees Centigrade) that it melted the surface of granite within a thousand yards of the hypocenter, or ground zero—directly under the burst. Roof tiles softened and changed in color from black to olive or brown. All over the center of the city numerous silhouettes were imprinted on walls. On Yorozuyo Bridge ten people left permanent outlines of themselves on the railing and the tar-paved surface.

  Moments later came an unearthly concussion that obliterated all but a few solid, earthquake-proof buildings within two miles. Ferebee had been almost on target, little more than 300 yards off the intended drop point.

  Private Shimoyama was 550 yards north of ground zero. He was not directly exposed to the pika flash or his life would have been puffed out, but the blast hurled him into the vast barnlike warehouse, driving him into the collapsing roof beam where five long nails in his back held him suspended several feet off the ground. His glasses were still intact.

  Five hundred yards farther north Captain Hideo Sematoo, a company commander, had just cantered up to his office and was removing his riding boots. The building fell on top of him and ignited. He thought of the seven years he had fought in Manchuria, China, Singapore, Malaya and New Guinea. How miserable to be burned to death rather than die in battle! “Tenno Heika banzai!” he shouted. As the flames reached for him, the wreckage above him was pulled away and he wrenched himself free. Nauseated, he looked at an eerie yellow sky. The ground was flat as far as he could see. Everything was gone—towering Hiroshima Castle and 2nd General Army headquarters. Instinctively he stumbled and crawled toward the main branch of the Ota River. There, crowded along the banks, were hundreds of dazed patients and nurses from the Army Hospital. Their hair was burned off, their skin charred a dark brown. He felt chilly.

  A thousand yards on the other side of the hypocenter, Mrs. Yasuko Nukushina was trapped in the ruins of the family sake store. Her first thought was of her four-year-old daughter, Ikuko, who was playing outside somewhere. Unaccountably, she heard Ikuko’s voice beside her: “I’m afraid, Mama.” She told the child they were buried and would die there. Her own words made her claw desperately at the wreckage. She was a slight woman, four feet six inches tall, but in her frenzy she broke free into the yard. All around was devastation. She somehow felt responsible; “her” bomb had also destroyed the neighborhood. People drifted by expressionless and silent like sleepwalkers in tattered, smoldering clothing. It was a parade of wraiths, an evocation of a Buddhist hell. She watched mesmerized until someone touched her. Grasping Ikuko’s hand, she joined the procession. In her confusion she had the illusion that vast numbers of planes were roaring over the city, dropping bomb after bomb without cessation.

  Fourteen hundred yards east of ground zero at the presbytery of the only Catholic church in the city, Father Superior Hugo Lassalle, a German, had heard a plane overhead. He went to the window. The empty sky glared yellow—and the ceiling dropped. Cut and bleeding, Father Lassalle found his way to the street. It was dark. The entire city was covered by a blanket of dust. With another German priest he began searching through the rubble for residents of the mission.

  Half a dozen blocks south, fifteen-year-old Michiko Yamaoka had just left home for work at the telephone office. She remembered “a magnesium flash,” then a faraway voice calling “Michiko!” Her mother. “I’m here,” she answered but didn’t know where that was. She couldn’t see—she must be blind! She heard her mother shout, “My daughter is buried under there!” Another voice, a man’s, advised the mother to escape the flames sweeping down the street. Michiko begged her mother to save herself and heard running steps diminish to silence. She was going to die. Then came a shaft of light as concrete blocks were pushed aside by soldiers. Her mother was bleeding profusely, one arm skewered by a piece of wood. She ordered Michiko to escape. She herself was staying to rescue two relatives under the ruins of their house.

  Michiko moved through a nightmare world—past charred bodies—a crying baby sealed behind the twisted iron bars of a collapsed reinforced-concrete building. She saw someone she knew and called out.

  “Who are you?” the other girl asked.

  “Michiko.”

  The friend stared at her. “Your nose and eyebrows are gone!”

  Michiko felt her face. It was so swollen that her nose seemed to have disappeared.

  In the same area, 350 young girls from the Girls Commercial School had been working in an empty lot, clearing an evacuated area. They wore blue mompei and jackets but no hats or fire hoods, and those who turned, curious, toward the pika—almost 300 of them—were instantly doomed. Twelve-year-old Miyoko Matsubara’s instinct was to bury her face in her arms. She regained consciousness in unimaginable desolation—no people, no buildings-only limitless rubble. Where were her mompei? All she had around her waist was a white cloth belt and it was on fire. (Everyone wearing dark clothing who was exposed to the pika suffered primary thermal burns but the cruel flash reflected harmlessly off white material.) She started to beat out the flames with her right hand but to her horror she saw strips of skin, her skin, dangling from it.

  Mrs. Tomita had given birth to a baby girl that morning. Together with her husband, Torao, she was admiring their newborn daughter, Hiroko, when an intense light filled the window. Mrs. Tomita remembered a whooshing noise before losing consciousness. She came to on the floor. Her husband was gone. The baby in her little red dress was lying on top of the sewing machine—alive but unnaturally silent. Mrs. Tomita wrapped diapers tightly around her distended stomach—the midwife had told her to move as little as possible- and walked out into the street with the baby. Torao was
hysterically digging in the ruins for their other two children. He found the elder daughter still alive, but her brother was hopelessly buried somewhere under the mass. There was a shout that more planes were on the way and the family sought shelter in a ditch trickling with foul water.

  Less than a mile south of ground zero the main building of Hiroshima University stood intact amid the devastation. The hands of its huge clock, which faced the campus, had stopped at 8:15. But the bomb, which had stilled so many other clocks and watches at that time, had nothing to do with it; several days previously it had stopped prophetically at that catastrophic moment.

  Two student nurses, who were ill in bed at a wooden dormitory of the Red Cross Hospital across the street, neither saw nor heard the bomb. Their first sensation was that their lungs were collapsing. Kyoko Sato crawled out of the caved-in building into a maelstrom of dust. A muffled call, “Sato-san!” led her to her friend, whom she pried loose from the debris. Together they tried to cross the highway to report to the hospital but couldn’t penetrate the solid stream of silent humanity moving away from the city, half naked and bleeding but without hysteria, not even tears. The unreality of it was terrifying.

  Dr. Fumio Shigeto, head of internal medicine at the hospital, never reached his office that morning. On his way to work, he was waiting for a trolley at the end of a long line which bent around the corner of the Hiroshima railway station, 2,000 yards east of the hypocenter. The flash seemed to turn a group of girls ahead of him white, almost invisible. An incendiary bomb! As he dropped to the sidewalk, covering eyes and ears, a heavy slate slammed into his back. Whirls of smoke blotted out the sun. In the darkness he groped blindly to reach shelter before the next wave of attackers came on. Fearing poison gas, he covered his mouth with a handkerchief.

  A breeze from the east gradually cleared the area as though it were dawn, revealing an incredible scene: the buildings in front of the station were collapsed, flattened; half-naked and smoldering bodies covered the ground. Of the people at the trolley stop he alone, the last one in line, was unhurt, protected by the corner of the station building. Dr. Shigeto started for the hospital but was stopped by an impenetrable wall of advancing flames. He turned and ran for open space–toward an Army drill ground behind the station. He saw scores of survivors milling around, crying hysterically, and to ease the pain of their burns they extended their arms from which dangled long curls of skin.

  A nurse approached him; he must be a doctor because he carried a black bag and had a trim little mustache. She begged him to help another doctor and his wife lying on the ground. His first thought was: What if this mob of desperate people discovers I am a physician? He couldn’t help them all. “Please treat my wife first,” said the injured doctor, who was bleeding profusely. Shigeto gave the woman a camphor shot for shock, followed by another injection to stop the bleeding. He rearranged the bandages the nurse had applied and then turned to the other wounded, treating them until he ran out of medicine and supplies. There was nothing else he could do. He fled toward the hills.

  2.

  Enola Gay’s crew members saw a pinpoint of purplish red light miles below them instantly expand into a ball of purple fire. This exploded into a chaotic mass of flames and clouds emanating smoke rings of fog. A white column of smoke emerged from the purple clouds, rising rapidly to 10,000 feet, where it bloomed into an immense mushroom which seethed turbulently as it continued climbing to almost 50,000 feet.

  A shock wave rocked Enola Gay. Tibbets thought it was antiaircraft fire and shouted “Flak!” Parsons yelled that it was shock and added, “We’re in the clear now.” Co-pilot Lewis cast a backward glance at the flash, even though he had removed his dark glasses seconds before the explosion to look at the instrument panel. Ferebee had become so fascinated by the long trajectory of the bomb that he forgot to pull down his goggles. It was as if a photographer’s flash bulb had gone off in his face. Tibbets swept off his goggles, scanned the panel and banked the ship back toward Hiroshima to observe the results.

  “Holy Moses, what a mess!” Sergeant Caron, the tail gunner, exclaimed over the intercom.

  “My God,” said Lewis, “what have we done?” He jotted the words “My God!” in his log. It looked as if Hiroshima had been “torn apart,” and made him feel as if they were “Buck Rogers twenty-fifth-century warriors.”

  The navigator, “Dutch” Van Kirk, was stunned at first, next filled with pride and finally relieved that it was all over. There were cheers over the intercom; it meant the end of the war. Then the crew began to think of the people on the ground.

  Tibbets ordered the radio operator to send a message in the clear that the primary target had been bombed visually with good results. Parsons sent another, this one in code:

  RESULTS CLEAR CUT, SUCCESSFUL IN ALL RESPECTS. VISIBLE EFFECTS GREATER THAN TRINITY [the test at Alamogordo]. CONDITIONS NORMAL IN AIRPLANE FOLLOWING DELIVERY, PROCEEDING TO PAPACY [Tinian].…

  A few miles away the scientists in The Great Artiste were glued to their blast-recording gear. In the photo plane Dr. Bernard Waldman, a physicist from Notre Dame, was in the bombardier’s seat, operating a special highspeed movie camera he had brought from America. There hadn’t been time to test it in the air. He had counted to forty after the bomb dropped and turned on the camera. As the plane banked away First Lieutenant Russell Gackenbach, the navigator, also snapped a series of pictures with his pocket camera.

  On the ground, two and a half miles south of the hypocenter, former news photographer Gonichi Kimura was working outside a stable for the Army when he saw a strong flash to his left and simultaneously felt a searing blast of heat. At first he thought the Hiroshima Gas Company’s tank had exploded, but since he soon discovered that it was still standing, he felt intuitively that some special bomb must have been dropped and decided to take pictures as soon as he could get to his camera, which was stored in the warehouse nearby. By the time he had crawled through the wreckage of the stable, the narrow white column of smoke from the bomb had changed to pink and the top started to swell, making it look like a mushroom, and it kept growing massively.

  At the warehouse Kimura found all the windows shattered from the blast, and there was so much broken glass on the floor where his camera was kept that he could not even step inside, but he managed to stretch in and pull the drawer open. The trees outside the warehouse were in the way, so he returned to the stable to take his first pictures of the atomic cloud—“indeed, a gruesome sight”—which was now covering most of the sky. Fires which had broken out in the western part of the city were spreading rapidly, and he finished his roll of film from the roof of a factory.† Kimura escaped the bomb without injury, but he never saw his wife again—he had left her at home after breakfast that morning.

  Those near the hypocenter never heard the explosion of the bomb. With distance, the noise grew perceptible, then shattering. From three miles it sounded like the rumbling of unworldly thunder; at four miles it was a distant moan which grew into a jarring boom. Near the port of Kure, twelve miles to the southeast, Tadahiko Kitayama thought a nearby ammunition dump had detonated, and several miles offshore, salvagers attempting to raise the four-man submarine Koryu, which was stuck in the bottom mud, heard a deafening “thunderbolt” clap. Moments later they noticed a B-29 coming from the direction of Hiroshima.

  For a quarter of an hour the atmosphere above Hiroshima was churned by cosmic forces. Then huge drops of rain began to plummet down. The rising cloud column had carried moisture sufficiently high for water vapor to condense, and stained by radioactive dust, fall in large drops. The “black rain,” weird and almost supernatural, horrified the survivors. Was it some kind of poisonous oil that would stick to the skin and slowly kill them? It pelted down on the half-naked people, leaving gray streaks on their bodies, releasing in many of them a sense of awareness of the unimaginable disaster that had been visited on Hiroshima. Mrs. Tomita tried to protect her two-hour-old baby, but little Hiroko was soaked by the fallout. She
still had not uttered a sound since the blast.‡

  The deadly rain, which had changed into a foggy, yellowish drizzle, spread to the northwest. Almost none fell on the area to the east where the tires were more intense, and Dr. Yoshimasa Matsuzaka, a skin specialist and head of the city’s civil defense, was trying to bring some order out of chaos. Ignoring his own wounds, he put on his civil defense uniform which his wife had rescued from the wreckage of his office, and leaning on his son, marched toward the East District police station holding high a Rising Sun flag on a long stick. The sight of the determined little procession extending first-aid treatment—Mrs. Matsuzaka and three nurses brought up the rear—calmed the people. The group set up a first-aid station in front of the police headquarters—it was 1,200 yards from the hypocenter—and long lines of injured and burned began to form outside the shell of the station house.

  From his destroyed home less than half a mile away the police chief, Shiroku Tanabe, was desperately trying to get to the station. But he was impeded by thousands of refugees (they looked “as if they had crawled out of a pool of blood”) streaming away from ground zero. By the time Tanabe reached the station house, it had caught fire. He took command and organized a bucket brigade to a nearby “fire pool.” Though half the building was ablaze, Dr. Matsuzaka and his indomitable first-aid team continued to treat the injured and to urge them to seek refuge outside the city.