by Toland, John
The drop point, chosen for maximum devastation of the city, was on high ground near Morimoto’s kite shop. An explosion here should wipe out the center of town, the port area and reach up into the factories of the Urakami Valley. Nagasaki appeared on the radar scope at 11 A.M. Bombardier Beahan shouted to Sweeney, “I’ve got it. I see the city.” So he would be able to bomb visually, after all. Through a break in the cloud cover he could see the oval rim of an outdoor stadium on the banks of the Urakami River. It was almost two miles northwest of the scheduled hypocenter but would have to do. He trained his cross hairs on the stadium, and seconds later, at 11:01 A.M., the plane lurched upward.
“Bombs away,” Beahan reported over the intercom, then corrected himself, “Bomb away.”
Morimoto, the kite maker, was breathlessly telling his wife that a terrible bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and that he feared Nagasaki would be next. He began to describe the pika: “First there is a great blue flash—” A blinding blue flash cut off his words. He flung back a trap door in the floor and shoved his wife and infant son into their shelter. As he pulled down the heavy lid there was a terrifying tremor, like an earthquake.
If there had been no clouds overhead, the Morimoto shop, directly under the original drop point, would have been obliterated but the bomb exploded several hundred yards northeast of the stadium and the river, almost exactly between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi Torpedo Factory.
Hajime Iwanaga, who would be fourteen the next day, was bathing in the Urakami River near the torpedo factory. He saw a black object (it was an instrument canister) drop from a plane and burst into a parachute. He called out “Friendly plane!” to a comrade and exuberantly ducked his face in the water as the pika flashed. Seconds later he emerged into a blinding world. Something warm clung to his left shoulder. It was yellowish. Mystified, he touched it and saw skin come off. He splashed toward the bank as the sky darkened ominously, and was reaching for his clothes when two dark-green spheres, the size of baseballs, streaked at him. One struck his shirt, set it afire, and disintegrated. As he clambered up the bank he heard a comrade in the river shriek in agony, “Mother!” Huge raindrops pummeled him for a moment.
Taeko Fukabori, a year older, was helping pump water out of a large natural cave which served as a public air-raid shelter. She was hurled into the mud and remembered hearing how people had been buried alive in a bomb raid the week before at the shipyards. Terrified, she groped her way toward the exit. Outside (the cave was less than 200 yards from ground zero) she found herself right in hell. Bodies of workers at the entrance were so charred that she could not distinguish their backs from their fronts. A person without hair and blackened body—it was impossible to tell if it was man or woman—walked by, seemingly oblivious, with only a burning string around the waist.
Taeko started up the eastern slope of the valley to get home to her mother. A soldier stopped her and said that direction was impassable. She followed him across the railroad tracks to the river, unaware that the right side of her face and her right shoulder were burned. Inexplicably, she was suddenly certain that her family on the hill was safe.
Farther up the slope, adjacent to the municipal prison and less than 275 yards from the hypocenter, twelve-year-old Kazuko Tokai had crawled into the small, unfinished family shelter to rest. Two feet of dirt above it saved her from the pika. She felt an indescribable sensation on her body and heard a crackling noise like the sizzling of a broiling steak. She crawled outside, into darkness. Confused—she thought that it was night—and unable to feel or smell a thing, she began walking aimlessly.
As the dust cleared, Kazuko found herself at a crumbled wall—all that was left of Urakami Prison. She turned around to get back home. The house had disappeared. Kazuko freed her mother, who was buried under tiles, and together they located Mr. Tokai in the rubble. His skin came off like a glove as they pulled him out.
Near the top of the slope in a seventy-bed tuberculosis sanatorium—1,500 yards from ground zero—Dr. Tatsuichiro Akizuki was inserting a long needle into the side of a male patient when he heard an eerie noise, as if a huge plane were roaring down at them. It was going to hit the hospital! “Drop on the floor!” he yelled. He withdrew the needle and plunged to the floor. There was a white flash and debris rained on him. He struggled to his feet, unharmed. The air was filled with choking dust from pulverized plaster.
He feared all the patients on the second and third floors were dead, and he started for the staircase with one of the nurses. Patients were coming down, frightened but only superficially wounded. Through a window he saw yellow smoke in Urakami Valley. The cathedral was on fire: so was the vocational high school. The sky was red and a murky yellow. He was drawn outside to the garden. Eggplant leaves and potato plants were smoldering. It had to be similar to the bomb used at Hiroshima. The president of Nagasaki Medical College had seen the wreckage in that city, and just the day before, had excitedly described it at a student-faculty meeting.
At the bottom of the valley Hachiro Kosasa had gone into the storehouse of the torpedo factory to get some metal material when he sensed something vaguely odd. He turned and saw the windows aglow with colored lights—a gas tank must have exploded. He dropped to the floor as the ceiling collapsed. Unaware of deep cuts in his head, legs and thigh, he staggered toward the plant infirmary, but it was gone. In the twilight gloom people milled around helplessly. His instinct was to escape, try to get home. Weak from loss of blood, he tied his legging around his thigh as a tourniquet, and driven by fear that his body might not be found by relatives and given a proper funeral, he headed south toward the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works. Soon his leg no longer supported him and he continued the journey on hands and knees.
At the steel works, which stretched for almost a mile down to the railroad station, sixteen-year-old Etsuko Obata had started a new job that morning filing machine parts on the second floor. The concussion knocked her unconscious; when she came to, she found herself suspended in wreckage six feet above the ground floor. She was carried to a truck bound for the University Hospital up on the eastern slope, but fires forced the “ambulance” to detour south, toward the station. This avenue too became blocked by spreading fires, and the patients were instructed to get out and walk. Etsuko lowered herself painfully onto the highway. The sun looked big and red, burning red. She tried to crawl under the truck for shelter but couldn’t. Incongruously, there was a heavy shower, the raindrops hissing into the fires and hot earth.
Overhead, the crews in the two B-29’s saw “a giant ball of fire rise as though from the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous white smoke rings.” Correspondent William Laurence in The Great Artiste watched a fiery column shoot two miles into the sky. He began scribbling frantically as the pillar of fire became “a living thing, a new species of being, born right before incredulous eyes.” A giant mushroom billowed at the top, even more alive than the towering pillar. It seethed and boiled in white fury like a thousand geysers. In seconds it broke free from the stem and a smaller mushroom took its place. It was, Laurence thought, like a decapitated monster growing a new head.
In Bock’s Car the rear gunner shouted over the intercom to Sweeney, “Major, let’s get the hell out of here!”
As Sweeney swung the plane away from the terrible sight, Co-pilot Albury called to the bombardier, “Well, Bea, there’s a hundred thousand Japs you just killed.”
Beahan didn’t answer.
The men began to unbend from the tension. While removing their cumbersome flak suits they shouted congratulations to one another, and the radio operator sent Sweeney’s first report back to Tinian:
BOMBED NAGASAKI 090158Z VISUALLY WITH NO FIGHTER OPPOSITION AND NO FLAK. RESULTS “TECHNICALLY SUCCESSFUL” BUT OTHER FACTORS INVOLVED MAKE CONFERENCE NECESSARY BEFORE TAKING FURTHER STEPS. VISIBLE EFFECTS ABOUT EQUAL TO HIROSHIMA. TROUBLE IN AIRPLANE FOLLOWING DELIVERY REQUIRES US TO PROCEED TO OKINAWA. FUEL ONLY TO GET TO OKINAWA.
Th
e victims of Nagasaki were not all Japanese. A work party of Allied prisoners at the Steel and Arms Works was caught in the blast and a number of them died. A POW camp a mile away was badly damaged and no one would ever know how many perished. Even forty miles away at the Senryu Camp, Dr. Julien M. Goodman, a surgeon captured on Bataan, felt the concussion. There was a deep rumble, followed by a blast of air. The earth trembled. Within moments there was another tremor, and an Australian physician, Dr. John Higgin, remarked, “This must be the beginning of a great naval barrage.” The shock waves and tremors continued for almost five minutes. The inexplicable phenomenon transformed the camp. The prisoners were called into the mess hall and informed that no more work details would be sent to the coal-mine shafts.
A Japanese seaplane was heading directly for Nagasaki through clouds at 10,000 feet. Ten minutes earlier a report had come in to the naval air base at Sasebo of a “great bombing” on nearby Nagasaki, and the pilot, a twenty-year-old cadet, had made an unauthorized takeoff to investigate. Cadet Nobukazu Komatsu had heard Truman’s announcement about Hiroshima by short wave. Perhaps this, too, was an atomic bomb.
The plane broke out of the clouds and was confronted by a huge column of black smoke. At the top, “like the head of a monster,” was a massive, swelling ball changing colors kaleidoscopically. Drawing closer, Komatsu realized that the colors were an illusion caused by the sun’s rays. He started circling around the cloud; everything below was obscured. He shouted to his two companions, “Let’s cut into the cloud!”
It was like an oven. Komatsu slid open the cockpit window and extended his gloved hand—it was like plunging his arm into live steam. He jerked it back, slammed the window shut, and found his glove covered with “sticky dust.” One of his comrades cried out; Chief Petty Officer Umeda was vomiting. The darkness and heat intensified. The third man, Cadet Tomimura, opened his window for relief. A blast of heat swept into his face. He screamed and shut the window just before the seaplane burst into sunlight again. Their faces were covered with grayish dust.
His head throbbing, and fighting nausea, Komatsu descended in circles. Below, Nagasaki was a mass of flames and dark billowing clouds. He reduced power to go lower for pictures but the heat forced him to turn toward the bay. There he would land in the harbor and continue to explore the city on foot.ǁ
3.
Ambassador Sato’s report to Tokyo that the Soviet Union had declared war was never transmitted, Molotov’s promise notwithstanding. The Russians themselves, hours later, broadcast the news. It was monitored by the radio room of the Foreign Ministry before dawn that morning, while Bock’s Car was still hundreds of miles from Nagasaki. Smashed was Togo’s last tenuous hope for negotiations through the U.S.S.R., which he had pressed so hard, despite a conviction that it was hopeless. Japan had been stabbed in the back without warning—he was as indignant as Cordell Hull had been on Pearl Harbor day. He took the information personally to Prime Minister Suzuki, berating him for his failure to call an emergency meeting of the Big Six the previous day. Togo’s anger was unnecessary. This time Suzuki did not argue or play with words; his reaction was simple and straightforward. “Let us end the war,” he said. But first he wanted to make certain that the Emperor would approve an immediate surrender, At the obunko he found his Majesty agreeable to acceptance of any terms that would lead to peace.
With this assurance Suzuki called to order an emergency meeting of the Big Six. It was 11 A.M., one minute before “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki. “Under the present circumstances,” Suzuki began, “I have concluded that our only alternative is to accept the Potsdam Proclamation and terminate the war. I would like to hear your opinions on this.”
No one spoke.
“Why are you all so silent?” asked Admiral Yonai. “We won’t accomplish a thing unless we speak frankly.”
The other three military men resented Yonai’s willingness to discuss surrender, yet the Russian invasion of Manchuria had shaken them more than the bombing of Hiroshima.a
An officer entered the room with the report that a second atomic bomb had been dropped. This disquieting news, coupled with that from Manchuria, brought the pent-up resentment of Anami, Umezu and Toyoda into the open. They knew in their hearts that surrender was inevitable but adamantly refused to accept the Potsdam Proclamation even if the Emperor was allowed to reign. They insisted, in addition, that war criminals be tried by the Japanese themselves, that the Army be demobilized by Japanese officers, and that the occupation force be limited.
Togo impatiently tried to make them acknowledge the reality of the situation. With Japan so close to collapse, the Allies would undoubtedly reject such stipulations and the entire effort for peace would be endangered. Could the military offer any hope of victory? War Minister Anami could not, but he still wanted Japan to fight one more great battle—on the mainland. Could you keep the enemy from landing? Togo persisted.
“With luck we will be able to repulse the invaders before they land,” Umezu answered. “At any rate, I can say with confidence that we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading force. That is, we will be able to inflict extremely heavy damage on the enemy.”
Togo pressed him: What difference would that make? The enemy would simply launch a second or third assault if necessary. There was nothing to do but sue for peace with a minimum of counterdemands. After three hours the issue remained unresolved. Suzuki adjourned the meeting and reported its inconclusive results to Marquis Kido. “There is but one solution,” he told the Privy Seal. “We must ask the Emperor to make the decision.”
It was a bold suggestion; powerful though the Emperor was, his role did not encompass initiation of policy. But Kido also realized that only an extraordinary act of the Throne could save Japan. Without hesitation the Privy Seal explained the situation to the Emperor. His Majesty, too, saw the necessity for defying tradition.
The Cabinet meeting that afternoon did no more to settle the issue than the Big Six had that morning. The military again lined up against the civilians—all except Yonai, who maintained that nothing could be gained by continuing the war. “Therefore we must forget about ‘face’ and surrender as quickly as possible, and begin to consider at once how best to preserve the country.”
His words incensed his fellow officers. Anami had difficulty in containing his animosity. “That we will inflict severe losses on the enemy when he invades Japan is certain,” he said, “and it is not impossible to reverse the situation and pull victory out of defeat.” Furthermore, Army units in the field would not submit to demobilization. “Our men will simply refuse to lay down their arms. They know they are forbidden to surrender. There is really no alternative for us but to continue the war.”
Four civilian ministers—Agriculture, Commerce, Transportation and Munitions—differed. The people were on the verge of exhaustion; the rice crop was the poorest in years; the country no longer had the strength to fight.
Anami interrupted impatiently. “Everyone understands all that, but we must fight to the end no matter how great the odds against us!”
At the mouth of the Urakami River the globular gas tanks near the railroad station lifted into the air like monstrous fireballs, crashed back to earth and shot up again. Drum cans rocketed much higher. Just to the north, survivors were dazedly working their way from ground zero. A naked man, expressionless, was carrying a boy with entrails spilling from his stomach. A cat, its hair burned kinky, was licking intestines hanging from a horse.
Midori Nishida was a messenger girl at the Steel and Arms Works whose hair had been set afire by the pika. She sought to escape across the Ohashi railroad bridge just above the stadium, unaware that she was heading into the center of destruction. The ties had burned out and she inched across, balancing on the twisted rails. The river below was filled with bodies. The buttocks of one woman near the bank were blown up like ballons. Nearby a black-and-white cow covered with raw spots of pink was placidly lapping water.
At one point Midori almost f
ell and asked for help from a girl coming the other way. It was a classmate, but Midori’s scorched appearance frightened her; she burst into tears and refused to touch Midori. Resentfully Midori edged her way to the east bank. She passed a charred naked man standing like a statue with arms and legs spread apart. He was dead. Beyond she saw bales of charcoal. She was almost on them before she realized they were human beings. Their faces were huge and round as if pumped up with gas. There were no buildings, only flat, smoldering rubble. Near the hypocenter she encountered someone else from her class, a boy. He didn’t recognize her until she spoke. “Are you really Nishida-san?” he said.
All around them, agonized voices pleaded for help. Midori felt irresistibly drawn to them and in panic fled back toward the river. With her new companion she picked her way south along the bank until they found a place shallow enough to ford. They passed a mother and daughter seated on a scorched futon. The girl was leaning forward, dead, her head drooping in the water. The mother stared at her blankly. Why didn’t she pull her daughter out of the water? Midori wondered and continued south past the Steel and Arms Works, unaware that the soles of her sneakers were burned through.
As twilight began to obscure the visual horror of Nagasaki, thousands of survivors were unable to leave the blasted area because of wounds or inertia. Little Kazuko Tokai, whose scanty earth refuge 275 yards from ground zero had saved her from injury, was huddled with her mother and father in an empty public shelter near the ruins of their home. Just before the stars appeared, Kazuko’s father died. Her mother’s voice became hoarse and barely discernible. “Don’t die!” Kazuko begged in the darkness. There was no answer, nor could Kazuko rouse her. She, too, was dead. The girl waited. She heard no sound from anywhere in the vast nothingness. I’m the only one left alive, she thought.b