Wounded Tiger

by T Martin Bennett

  “They certainly don’t need me here.” He took a last puff and snubbed his cigarette. “Tell him I’ll fly up and be there by this evening.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Carrying a small, leather suitcase through the sitting area of his hotel, Fuchida touched a finger to his hat with an informal salute to his navy men sitting around having drinks and smokes. “Business up in Yamato,” Fuchida said with a grin as he stepped between the chairs sitting on a Persian rug. “See you in a day or so.” A couple of men lifted their glasses in a goodbye gesture as he left the hotel.

  Fuchida slid down into the front pilot’s seat of the familiar B5N bomber. He’d be flying alone this time, about a two hour flight. He was looking forward to it. He glanced down at his aviator clock hung around his neck – 1700. Still plenty of daylight. Flipping switches and checking gauges, he was given the “clear” signal from the engineer who along with another ground crewman used a crank to wind up the engine which faithfully stuttered and rumbled into a familiar roar.

  He’d had a hard time concentrating at the meetings as his mind kept wandering off to his own plans for putting together another Operation Ken31 – sending troop planes to the Marianas to land and deploy soldiers who would attach bombs by hand to B-29s sitting on the ground. He was signed up to participate himself. He believed it was Japan’s best chance to stall the Americans.

  He wound his Nakajima B5N up to full throttle and tore down the runway taking to the sky, banking to the right, and headed north. Although he knew that if Operation Ken was successful it would be the last deed of his life, he still felt he would be content if it kept a single B-29 from dropping its deadly payload on Japan. It was his duty.

  Part VI

  The Light of

  A Thousand Suns

  Chapter 104

  7:00 a.m., August 6, 1945. Peking, China.

  Jake lay on his straw mat staring at the raw wood ceiling as the faint morning light began to illuminate his shadowy cell. Hearing bits and pieces about the war, and simply having American planes bomb nearby, Jake was sure the Allies were making inroads and certainly turning the tide, but his heart went out the Japanese people, whom he knew would be devastated by the prospect of defeat.

  Rolling to his side, he asked in his heart, “What would you like me to pray for?” Just as quickly, he heard a reply to pray for peace, and to pray without stopping. It seemed like such a ridiculously generic prayer, but it also seemed just as obvious as one he should request. He’d never prayed for peace before as it just seemed useless. Yet he felt compelled to do so this day, that God wanted his cooperation, his participation in what he was doing on earth. Jake figured God could do anything he wanted to do, with or without him, but felt clearly he wanted to do things with him, right then and there.

  He got up onto his aching knees and asked for God to put a desire for peace in the hearts of the Japanese leaders and for the Allies to treat the Japanese with mercy after the war. His heart and mind ranged over a myriad of hopes and wishes and requests for the people of Japan and for America.

  Having lost track of time, he felt he heard the Lord tell him that he didn’t need to pray any longer, that the war was over.

  “It’s over?” Jake whispered out loud. He was amazed at the sound of the words rolling off of his tongue. “The war’s over?” he said again, a bit louder. He leaned back, sat upright and looked around with a smile and chuckled to himself. “The war’s over,” he finally said. He felt like he was getting news faster and better than anyone with a newspaper or a radio.

  He leaned over to his benjo hole and whisper loudly, “Bobby! Hey Bob?”

  Bob leaned toward his benjo hole and tried not to breathe too much, “Yeah?”

  “I was praying this morning ... and the war’s gonna be over today. It was revealed to me. It’s over!”

  Hearing footsteps, Jake got to his feet and brought his face against the small grate as a guard came by. “Pssst!”

  The guard stopped and looked quizzically at Jake. Since Jake’s brush with death, they’d let up on him having to stay on the bench.

  In his best Japanese, Jake said, “The war’s over.”

  The guard stared.

  “It’s over,” Jake repeated.

  The guard smiled, shook his head as if a child had told him he’d just seen Santa Clause, and walked on.

  Chapter 105

  8:15 a.m., the same day. Hiroshima, Japan.

  Lieutenant Hashimoto, the officer who informed Fuchida he was needed up north, stood beside two other men in the underground restroom of the Hiroshima train station drying his hands. As he stared at his face in the mirror, a violent shockwave ripped through the building, showering him with cinders from the concrete ceiling and dousing the lights. He was used to earthquakes, but this was much more abrupt, and far more powerful. Certainly a bomb of some sort.

  He pushed through the door and stumbled up the dark steps into the dust-filled light of the station where hundreds of people were lying or crawling on the floor, littered with debris. The windows of the train cars had their windows blown out. He looked up at the huge trussed cover over the rail lines and parked coaches. It was caved in and leaning, but still standing. Despite the nearby explosion, the station was eerily quiet.

  Looking through the wide, concrete arches to the outdoors, he could see a huge, black column of rumbling smoke, about a mile away. He wondered why there hadn’t been any air raid sirens. The sky had been clear. Maybe a weapons depot had discharged and people were knocked down by the shockwave.

  Dodging between people struggling to get up, he made his way to the entrance, and into another world. The entire landscape was ablaze. Every wooden structure seemed have been knocked to the ground and was in roaring flames. Only a few concrete and stone structures stood, like gravestones in a blazing prairie.

  A woman beside him stood with her arms stretched out, her clothes hanging in shreds from her arms. Confused, he looked at her face. It wasn’t her clothes that were shredded, it was her skin, revealing her raw, glistening flesh. Half her hair was burned to her skull.

  Panicking, Hashimoto stared at the people around him on the sidewalk, posing like scarecrows, standing or sitting in shock, no one making a sound. It seemed as if half of each of their bodies had been burned in a fire, and the other half, left unscathed.

  A man bumped into him, his eyes shut, shards of glass protruding from his face and arms with blood pouring from his flesh and dripping onto the sidewalk. Hashimoto realized that anyone much nearer to the blast was certainly dead. Tens of thousands of people. Maybe hundreds of thousands.

  Fear took gripped him and he bolted away from the blast column, running through waves of smoke, down the train tracks, then to a road, strewn with debris and tangled power lines. Hundreds of people were moving in all directions – some perfectly fine, others completely naked with burns on their bodies, still others covered in blood. There was no screaming, only voices from the rubble of fallen structures, women calling for their children or husbands for their wives. It was so strange.

  Overwhelmed with the need to escape whatever had just happened, or was still happening, he wanted get away. Maybe this was some kind of new death ray he’d heard about. He ran. After a few minutes, he slowed from his frenzied jog, gasping for air, then stopped to look back at the city. A huge umbrella of smoke near the ground was being pulled into some kind of vertical super cloud. He could feel the wind rushing past him, being sucked into the city from the roaring furnace. The overarching black column climbed higher and higher, flashing with lightning and spreading out at the top, like a giant mushroom. The sun had been overtaken by a growing black sky that followed him, reaching over him like a terrifying creature in a nightmare that couldn’t be outrun.

  He began running again, yet the cloud reached out ahead of him as well. Along with the crackling flames of burning homes, he could hear thunder as well, right above him. Then he felt a drop of rain on his hand, and saw several more fall on the stre
et. As he panted and ran, huge drops of oily, black rain fell from the sky. Then it began to pour black rain all around. The ashes of ten thousand souls were raining on his head. He ran faster.

  In a surreal world of strange death, Hashimoto’s mind slowly began to clear as the black droplets abated. This was certainly a powerful, new bomb, a devil bomb, he thought. Exhausted, he came to a stop, leaned over with his hands on his knees, and panted violently. He was ashamed. Ashamed for being a coward. Ashamed for having run away. He looked around at the buildings and up at the power lines and wondered if the phones were working at this distance. Certainly there was a phone nearby. Someone needed to call the base to tell them what had happened. He needed to tell them now, so they could send help.

  9:05 a.m., Yamato Naval Base.

  In a conference room of a dozen officers, all eyes were riveted on a clearly shaken Fuchida as he slowly set the receiver back down onto the telephone.

  “The entire city?!” an officer exclaimed.

  Fuchida nodded while contemplating. “A single explosion,” he said, clearly drifting in thought. A picture of the city he had just walked the streets of the day before flashed through his mind – filled with merchants, vendors, streetcars, families with children – now incinerated. His friends at the Yamato Hotel – cremated alive.

  “How could that be?!” another said. “What was it?”

  “It can only be an atomic bomb,” Fuchida said softly.

  The first officer grunted, “Impossible! They don’t have the technology or the resources to build such a weapon! The Americans aren’t that advanced!”

  Fuchida raised his eyes from the table to the officer. “Apparently they are.”

  Heads turned to the senior commander who cleared his throat. “Fuchida, we need a full report of exactly what happened. Return to Hiroshima immediately. I’ll send a team from Tokyo to meet you at your headquarters tomorrow morning.”

  One thought was indelibly stamped into Fuchida’s mind – the war was over.

  Chapter 106

  August 6, 1945. 1:40 p.m. The skies above Japan.

  The brilliant sun shone through Fuchida’s canopy as he flew in the skies above the lush, green plains of rice. Fuchida held the control stick of his plane as he navigated southwest, back toward Hiroshima.

  He reflected on the fact that only eleven days earlier millions of leaflets fluttered down from American bombers over Japanese cities, leaflets explaining the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms for surrender: “The prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan ... This military power is sustained and inspired by the determination of all the Allied Nations to prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist ... The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland ... We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces ... The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

  The Japanese government was forced to acknowledge the Allied offer and even printed the declaration in the papers. But Prime Minister Suzuki told reporters that he didn’t attach any importance to the declaration at all, that the only thing to do was to “kill it with silence.”32

  Fuchida grunted angrily. Kill it with silence? Now the Japanese were being silenced by being killed. The bitter medicine stuck in the back of his throat: “... the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland ... unconditional surrender or prompt and utter destruction.”

  He scanned across his gauges – fuel, airspeed, altitude – then looked toward Hiroshima in the far distance beyond the green mountains that hemmed it in. There was certainly a great deal of smoke over the city, some of it much higher than his own aircraft. He decided to drop down and circle the city to take a look from above before landing at the base.

  Before leaving the Yamato airfield, he had spoken with Admiral Yano over the phone, the admiral who had called him up to Yamato in the first place. He urged the admiral that Japan should sue for peace – quickly. Yano listened, but many of the die-hard commanders would have none of it – Death before surrender ... we will win the final battle ... the Americans will lose their taste for war – now all complete nonsense to Fuchida. Old men and school girls were practicing with bamboo spears to defend the nation from the inevitable onslaught. Fuchida shook his head – bamboo spears!

  As the city came into view, and he made a wide, arcing turn to his left, tilting down to give himself a good view. There was no question in his mind that the devastation was from a single blast and he was amazed at the completeness of the destruction. Few structures were left standing. He was extremely interested in what they would see for themselves the next day.

  The following day.

  Fuchida stood in the middle of the street with a team eight officers, some with cameras, others with notebooks and leather portfolios, but in vain. There simply was no way to record what they were seeing. Through a constant breeze of smoke permeated with the smell of charred flesh, he saw thousands upon thousands of bodies stacked along the roadsides like railroad ties. Scorched hulls of overturned automobiles lined the roads. He soberly pulled down his soiled white mask and gazed at the smoldering city of endless rubble, from one side to the other. It seemed that everything, everything, was reduced to smoking ash as far as the eye could see in all directions, except for the few, obstinate concrete structures which defied the concussion of the blast and the consuming flames that followed.

  People rode past on bicycles. An adolescent boy walked by carrying a baby on his back whose face and forehead were burned. Four men loaded black bodies onto the flatbed of a delivery truck. The charred remains of a horse lay on its side under the debris of a cart, its legs stiff, its skull laid bare. A hundred yards beyond, more bodies were being thrown onto a makeshift funeral pyre.

  Earlier he’d seen a streetcar with the carbon remains of passengers still seated or standing in their places. Those who survived the immediate blast sought relief from the fires and their unquenchable thirst in the many rivers of the city and perished in the waters. One could walk from one riverbank to the other side on the densely packed corpses. It was an unreal nightmare that could never be forgotten.

  The stench of rotting, burning flesh was nauseating. Fuchida had never been this close to the effects of war on a city. Dropping a bomb from hundreds of feet above a target was nothing like standing beside the smoldering body of another human being. He came as an officer and as a representative of the military, but he saw with the eyes of a husband and the father of two children he loved.

  Continuing further down the road, he passed a long, makeshift bulletin board covered with photographs and desperate notes seeking lost family members, studied by a sober crowd of survivors. Having already crossed the hypocenter of the explosion, he’d been surprised that he found no bodies there at all. They were simply vaporized into little more than powder.

  He was jolted from his thoughts by the officer beside him.

  “How could they use such a weapon against us?” the officer said in near disbelief.

  Without averting his eyes from the catastrophe, Fuchida replied, “If Japan had a bomb like this, we would have used it on the United States, wouldn’t we?” Fuchida thought he would have been proud to strike such a devastating blow for Japan. “This is war,” Fuchida said plainly.

  The party moved forward again, the debris crackling under their boots. Fuchida stooped down to pick up a piece of clay roofing tile, melted from the extreme heat. He shook his head at the thought that intense heat was used to bake tile, yet this bomb was hot enough to melt tile. He dropped it into the ashes, creating a puff of gray smoke. “Everything’s gone. It’s all just ... rubble and ash.”

  Another officer replied, “
Not everything.” He motioned with his eyes for Fuchida to look over his left shoulder.

  There it was. The roof and windows were gone, but the scorched stone walls and steeple of the Nagarekawa church still stood tall, the church he and Genda stood in front of twenty-one years earlier. The church he had insultingly flung his cigarette butt toward.

  An old woman in a filthy kimono pulling a cart with rusted bicycle rims approached. She stopped and glared at the officers, incredulous that they had the gall to take a sight-seeing tour among the wasted ruins and human suffering. “That’s right,” she said boldly, nodding her head. She gazed around at the ruined land, then back at the officers, who were now curious. “That’s right. Take a good look around you. And there are many more cities just like this one.” All the while staring at them, she lowered the cart handles and walked closer to Fuchida. “This is where you have led us.” She sarcastically held her arms wide. “This is your great - Yamato - empire!”

  “How dare you disrespect an officer!” one of the men said as he stepped forward.

  She turned to the man and spoke with an authority he lacked, “What can you possibly take from me that I haven’t already lost?” She looked again into Fuchida’s eyes as she stepped even closer and spoke with quiet fury. “You lied to us about everything. You betrayed us. My husband is dead. My sons are dead. My daughters are dead.” Without looking back, she stiffly swung her arm toward her cart full of charred belongings. “This is all I have left!”

  He saw that they weren’t just the words of a hopeless old woman, they were the words of an enraged nation, furious for having been led into a war that had devastated their country, a land they loved, a nation that had been ground into the dirt in humiliating defeat. She was the voice that was never heard by the military commanders when they passionately argued for war, and she was the voice of the millions who would never speak again.