Visceral / Eyewitness
First Into Nagasaki,
The censored eyewitness dispatches on post-atomic Japan and its prisoners of war,
Nagasaki, Japan – Thursday, September 6, 1945
2300 hours
Walk in Nagasaki’s streets and you walk in ruins.
It is now [28] days since two American planes appeared in a clear midday sky and let fall the blow which clinched Japan’s defeat and decided her surrender. The mystery of the atomic bomb is still sealed. But the ruins are here in testimony that not only Nagasaki but the world was shaken.
The last two or three of what were scores of fires are burning amid Nagasaki’s ruins tonight. They are burning the last bodies on improvised ghats of rubbish. Flames flicker across flattened blocks from which planks, lathes, and timbers have been removed as a fire menace, and only shapeless piles of plaster remain …
Dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, after Hiroshima’s bomb, was like hitting Pittsburgh after Detroit. The puff of death quickly scurried up the valleys of hilly Nagasaki. Whereas Hiroshima was a plain, these small hills tossed the blast from from crest to crest like a basketball. Winds of terrible force churned about in the valleys, stripped the roofs [off of] many homes, and brought the greatest number of dead in houses where they had been sheltered two and three miles from the explosion, in a fashion resembling a hurricane. Roofs fell on weak foundations, burying those below …
At constabulary headquarters tonight, little Lieutenant Colonel Tokunagawa told the writer that as catalogued up to September 1st, 19,741 deaths had been positively and officially counted, plus 1,927 missing. Wounded requiring final treatment number 40,000. [Final estimates, over the years, of deaths from the Nagasaki bomb, would reach beyond 70,000] …
Nagasaki, Japan – Friday, September 7, 1945
2400 hours
Two Allied prison camps in Nagasaki Harbor number nearly 1,000 men, who have just one question they want answered.
It is: How does the atomic bomb work?
They have seen what it does. The Japanese placed one camp amidst the giant Mitsubishi war plants and the other at the entrance to Nagasaki, where it would be impossible for it not to be shelled by any attacking task force …
American, British, Dutch, and Australians each had their national preoccupations …
The Aussies, “Who won the Melbourne Cup?” …
The British, “Is Winnie still in, or did Britain go [L]abor?”
The Dutch, “Is Juliana’s third child a boy heir to throne, or another girl?”
The Americans, “B-29’s dropping us food keep enclosing Saipan newspapers with stuff about some guy named Sinatra. Who is he and what’s his racket?” …
Nagasaki, Japan – Saturday, September 8, 1945
2300 hours
In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atom can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki …
Statistics are variable and few records are kept. But it is ascertained that the chief municipal hospital had about 750 atomic patients until this week and lost by death approximately 360.
About 70 percent of the deaths have been from plain burns … [but] most of the patients who were gravely burned have now passed away and those on hand are rapidly curing. Those not curing are people whose unhappy lot provides an aura of mystery around the atomic bomb’s effects. They are victims of what Lieutenant Jakob Vink, Dutch medical officer and now Allied commander of Prison Camp #14 at the mouth of the Nagasaki harbor, calls “Disease X” …
Vink points out a woman on a yellow mat in the hospital who … has just been brought in. She fled the atomic area but had returned to live. She was well for three weeks except for a small burn on her heel. Now she lies moaning, with a blackish mouth stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words. Her exposed legs and arms are speckled with tiny red dots in patches.
Near her lies a fifteen-year-old fattish girl who has the same blotchy red pinpoints and a nose clotted with blood. A little farther on is a widow lying down with four children, from age one to about eight, around her. The two smallest children have lost some hair. Though none of these people has either a burn or a broken limb, they are presumed victims of the atomic bomb ...
Nagasaki, Japan – Sunday, September 9, 1945
0100 hours
The atomic bomb’s peculiar “disease,” uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is undiagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women, and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer – the first Allied observer to reach Nagasaki after the surrender – that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skins are whole, are simply passing away before their eyes.
Kyushu’s leading X-ray specialist, elderly Dr. Yosisada Nakashima … told the writer that he is convinced these people are simply suffering from the bomb’s beta, gamma, or neutron rays taking a delayed effect. “All their symptoms are similar,” said the Japanese doctor. “You have a reduction in the white corpuscles, constriction in the throat, vomiting, diarrhea, and small hemorrhages just below the skin. All these things happen when an overdose of roentgen rays is given. Bombed children’s hair falls out, and some adults’. That is natural, because these rays are used often to make hair fall artificially, and it sometimes takes several days before the hair becomes loose.” …
Nakashima divides the deaths outside simple burns and fractures into two classes on the basis of symptoms observed in nine post-mortem autopsies. The first class accounts for roughly 60 percent of the deaths, the second for 40 percent …
[He] considers it possible that the atomic bomb’s rare rays may cause deaths in the first class, as with delayed X-ray burns. But the second class has him totally baffled. These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks … [W]here fever is present after two weeks, the healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. The burns come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burns. Four to five days from the turn to the worse, they die. Their bloodstream has not thinned as in the first class, and their organs after death are found in a normal condition of health. But they are dead – dead of the atomic bomb – and nobody knows why …
Omuta, Japan – Wednesday, September 12, 1945
0230 hours
For hundreds of Americans held in Kyushu prison camps, the atomic bomb bursting over Nagasaki in full view was a signal of their liberation from serfdom in Baron [Takaharu] Mitsui’s cruel and dangerous coal mine. Some Bataan and Corregidor prisoners were worked to death here … Here are G.I.’s comments on their coal-mine slavery and on the bomb ending it:
James Small (Gate City, Virginia): “The mine was hard not because of the work, but because the Japanese insisted on our carrying impossible burdens. Many times we took beatings just in order to have two men carry one roof support.”
Sergeant James Bennett (Monongahela, Pennsylvania): “I lost my thumb trying to protect my detail from being beaten up by a Japanese soldier. Rushing things to make the Jap cease his beating, I fell forward and a mine car rolling forward caught my hand.”
Corporal Junious Carroll (Thornton, Washington), who had his hearing impaired by an explosion on Corregidor, has lost his left leg at the shin. “A Japanese overman borrowed my cap lantern, leaving me to go through the tunnel to get another … [T]he mine train ran over me.”
Joseph Valencourt (Laurence, Massachusetts): “After the atomic bomb I saw a cloud lit up like a sunset over Nagasaki. But not understanding, I paid no attention.”
Corporal Gerald Wilson (Clovis, New Mexico): “The atomic bomb cloud looked like a giant thunderhead. It kept boiling, getting larger.”
Corporal Richard Burke (Chicago): “The atomic bomb cloud seemed to me like the dying embers of a sunset, but all in one spot” …
Edgar van Imwagen (Palmyra, Ohio, with his left leg amputated two inches above the knee: “The Japs always shoved us in against the coal face without testing whether it would hold, because they wanted to not lose any time. Last December 12th, when I weighed 100 pounds after forty-five days in the mine, the overseer shoved us into an untried coal face. The roof’s pressure, being unbraced, blew the wall in on us. I was bending over, shoveling, and got buried completely. A half hour later the Japanese doctor took off my leg, which healed in sixteen days. A whole bunch of Koreans were buried alive the year before in the same place, and are still there” ...
Omuta, Japan – Thursday, September 13, 1945
0100 hours
Freedom is at hand for 700 Americans and 1,000 other Allies at this large prison camp dominated by Baron Mitsui’s dangerous and worn-out coal mine. Men are still dying here from the effects of Japanese neglect – three since the surrender – but parachutes floating food and clothing down from the sky have improved life for the men, mostly veterans of Bataan and Corregidor …
Chungking, China – {late 1945 or early 1946)
At the end of a long line of iron girders of the several Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki, pushed over at an angle as though with a great foot, there are the remains of an Allied prison camp. A prison camp under the bomb? Yes. And you see the severed water pipes – among the big copper vats of the food kitchen – still giving out pathetic upward streams from the earth, like clams on an alarmed sand flat.
The Allied prisoners were not in their shelters. But were they all killed? They were not. Of about 200, only four were killed outright and four died later. Only about 40 were wounded, and all recovered with little more than simple first aid.
The camp was ruined. Yet some men were out in the open, even, and were not killed. Some wore white garments. The light color threw off the gamma rays that killed so many people, and they were unharmed. [Many of the prisoners also survived by the simple expedient of taking subsurface shelter in a shallow ditch.] …
Discount many of the [Nagasaki] deaths by the fact that the people [i.e., the Japanese] were outdoors, open and vulnerable. Discount many more by the fact that many died of thermal burns, plain heat burns, not due to the heat of the bomb but being caught in the odd fires afterward. The heat of the bomb, of course, killed many.
I obtained the first anatomical reports of the effects of the gamma ray from two shivering [Japanese] doctors in the municipal hospital … The gamma ray, one of the X-ray family, kills in three ways, all horrible.
It reduces the red corpuscles. It reduces the white corpuscles. And last and most serious, it reduces the platelets, the precious small elements that give the blood its power of clotting.
Reducing the reds means anemia. Reducing the whites means taking away the capacity to fight disease, for these are the disease-hunters. But reducing the platelets means that you die from a slight constriction of the throat, with just a few pimples on your legs. You die and they cut you open and your intestine is thick-choked with blood.
All this is very terrible, especially because the long, bony hand can reach out many days after the explosion and summon you by the shoulder. You can walk around perfectly normally for a month, and then you get the touch that means you have been tapped for death.
How could you have avoided this? Very simply. At a great enough distance, two miles or so, white clothing will beat back the gamma. Stand beside a wall, have any masonry between you and the bomb, and you are as safe as underground.
In the shadow of the gamma there is safety, not death.
From FIRST INTO NAGASAKI by Anthony Weller and George Weller, copyright ©2006 by Anthony Weller. Used by permission of Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc. For further on-line information please visit www.randomhouse.com
