First Into Nagasaki (3 page)

Harrison had brought a box of rations, including plenty of coffee, a means of barter better than gold. Spectacled students kept pegging us with questions. Where were we going? I refused to say. I wanted to leave a cooling trail. Fumbling for direction, we changed four times. At one junction, all lanterns, rumors and whispers, we found that we had to make the decision: Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The nearer to Hiroshima was the nearer to Tokyo. I was afraid that there we might run into some party of bombing assessors. Nagasaki, being remoter from MacArthur, seemed safer.

Already I had a formula that held off the most officious questioners. I looked them in the eye and said very softly, “Please consider your position.” When they did, they blanched and departed.

We were aristocrats in a series of slow rattlers whose locomotives and coal cars were draped with clinging deadheads, mostly homebound soldiers. Each time we changed trains, at Shibushi, Yatsushiro and Tosu, the good-humored trainmen saw that we were protected by soldiers with fixed bayonets. The trains were filthy and we were hoarse with soot, our arms weary from opening and shutting windows at tunnels. The trainmen filled our canteens with clean water and showed us the
benjo,
or latrine. At Shibushi we met our first escaped prisoner, a private from Utah. He was not eager to accompany us to a bombed city, feeling that we were inviting a necktie party.

We decorously refused to take any gifts, but we traded intensively, giving hard candy for rice and coffee for small sweet cakes, meanwhile plying our customers for information about where we were. A few hours after daylight we reached Yamaguchi. Here, after eighteen hours of travel, we picked up the train for Nagasaki. We also took in tow three Dutch prisoners captured in Java—as I almost had been, too—four years before. A week earlier, two weeks after Japan surrendered, on August 28 their camp of six hundred starving men had been “bombed” by B-29s with food and pamphlets warning them not to eat too much. MacArthur’s cautious pace in liberating Kyushu excited their derision more than their anger. They were simply ignoring orders to stay in the camps, and wanted to see Nagasaki.

We needed numbers. I accepted them. The trainmen moved us to a baggage car, roomy and airy. As we click-clicked along, it occurred to me that the authorities of Nagasaki might be more difficult than train crews. Here we were, an atomic mission, highly classified, but also oddly bereft of orders. Nor did we have sidearms. We were headed by an untidy reporter and a gangling sergeant, with three alien privates whose rice-gray faces and merriment revealed their ex-prisoner status. I saw that the first Japanese official who guessed our real identity would get the police to put us in custody “for your own protection,” exactly as MacArthur was doing with my colleagues, and telephone to Tokyo for the MPs to come and pick us up. Lacking even a revolver, we could not defend our mission with force. There was only one protection we could assume: rank.

Rank! In war it will get you everything but mail.

I therefore awarded all members of my command spot promotions, starting naturally with myself. I became Colonel Weller. In hardly an hour, between Yamaguchi and Nagasaki, Harrison rose from sergeant to major. He could not have done better in Cuba. The three Dutch privates became lieutenants in an inter-Allied working party so dense with secrecy that they communicated with me part of the time in German, the enemy language. We removed all our tabs that were detachable, dipped handkerchiefs in canteens and washed away the soot. We even cleaned our nails.

I felt small guilt at this lightning round of promotions. In the U.S. Army correspondents carried only the assimilated rank of lieutenant, a painful disparity with Italy’s fascist forces, where they were splendid colonels with orderlies. Still, I could hardly expect MacArthur and his colonels to promote me. After all, I had refused to promote them.

I took off my brass shoulder tabs, lettered “War Correspondent,” and put them in my back pocket, ready for use if Colonel Weller were compelled, by some emergency appearing out of the fog of war, to turn his force around and lead it back into humbler status. The needles kept pricking me in the behind during the following week in Nagasaki. They hurt especially whenever a Japanese called me “Colonel.” I felt like one of those Caesars in triumph, who had an elderly slave standing behind him in his chariot, murmuring, “Remember thou art only a man.”

On September 6, exactly four weeks almost to the hour since the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, our little train of toy cars flustered its way into the remains of the station. For the last ten miles the buildings were in ruins on both sides of the track, and I assumed the whole city was flat. I was wrong. The blast had traveled out along the railroad gulch, instead of being deflected upward as it was by the hills in the city’s heart.

My heart sang with an immense, selfish sense of possession. What happened from now on did not matter much. Even whether it was written did not matter much. I was here. Nagasaki was waiting to be recorded, and I was here to do it.

There were no taxis, no rickshaws, no wagons. Defeat had leveled the Nagasakians into a city of walkers, except for the lucky officials, who had bicycles. By firm language with the police sentries and introductions from the trainmen, we managed to intercept a truck. I asked to be taken to the military commander. The volunteer pointed up to a hill flecked with villas: “The general lives up there.” “Get him down here. I must talk to him,” I said. The police were impressed. It seemed good riddance to take us up to him. I showed annoyance, but consented.

As we climbed the graceful curves into the little-damaged suburb of the executive class, Nagasaki came alive. The long inlet of the main harbor looked eerily deserted, with the floating lamp of a single freighter smoking off the blistered, sagging piers and twisted derricks. We could see the main Mitsubishi plant, a long fallen zeppelin of naked, twisted steel, bent like a child’s structural toy crushed by a passing foot. Its form was still almost intact, though it was almost directly under the bomb. The sturdiness of the ceilings had taken the blast and blocked the ray. The workers were more fortunate than their families in the one-story bungalows around the plant. They did most of the dying.

When we arrived at the arch-roofed villa of the major-general, I left my staff outside and marched up the broad front stairs. Leading me was the general’s aide, a sharp lieutenant around twenty-five with an eye full of cool appraisal. He guided me into the general’s office. He was a square-built, impassive man in his forties, guardedly cordial, warily courteous. I explained my mission: to obtain the facts about Nagasaki. I did not say for whom.

The lieutenant translated, and appended a suggestion of his own. The general nodded. “General say he like to see your orders,” said the lieutenant.

I did not look at the general, but I spitted the lieutenant with a glance. “If the general doubts our authority,” I said icily, “I suggest that he telephone directly to General MacArthur for confirmation.” The general, who understood more English than he let on, glanced at the lieutenant, inviting comment. The lieutenant scrutinized me a shade more respectfully. “But in making such a call,” I said, “the general should
consider his position.
” Now I looked at the general. There was a nervous pause. The general said something low and rapid.

“General says you are very welcome in Nagasaki, Colonel. He will give orders to show you everything.” I nodded casually, as if no other result was ever thought of.

“You have only three cars left, I understand,” I said directly to the general, to let him know I realized he had notions of English.

“General says that is true,” said the lieutenant at my shoulder.

“Then my party will take only two of them, the two Fords,” I said. “I realize that the general must have one car for himself. He has the very important task of keeping discipline and order, and preventing looting.” This remark seemed to reach the general. He nodded with vigor. “And I shall require two Kempeitai [military police] every evening to take my daily reports to Tokyo.”

“This is a difficulty,” said the lieutenant. “Many of our men have gone—have been released. Why two? One is enough.”

“One is not enough,” I said. “One Kempeitai must be awake while the other sleeps. My reports go straight through Tokyo to Washington.”

A consultation. “General says it is difficult, but you will have two Kempeitai.”

“Good. Now would the general give us the two cars and send us to our quarters?”

The general sent us down to a hotel. This was our baptism in the new Japan, where the army was spurned. The manager simply refused to book us. He did not like the vagueness about who was going to pay, and who we were. The lieutenant, abashed, called the general. Colonel Weller and his staff were transferred to a villa of their own where we bathed and lived on lobster, rice and sweet little slices of canned tangerine.

Before this muddle about quarters cooled him, the lieutenant took me out on the terrace of the general’s villa. We stood at the top of the long, temple-like flight of steps, overlooking the prostrate, battered city from which rose only the tinkle of bicycle bells. The arrogance habitual to the military caste, sitting uneasily on him as an educated civilian, was now plated with a new veneer, freshly applied, of compassion for the bomb’s victims. He was not cringing. The Japanese had studied Americans for enough years to know that Oriental cringing was not the way to subdue them. You had to play at being American. He was aiming at that underlying strain of compassion that makes the American review all his acts of force, even against assassins.

He pointed at the sky at a point not much higher than we stood. “One enemy plane fly right over city,” he said. “We sound no alarm. Think maybe he is lost. Another plane off there. Seem like he watch first plane. But maybe he lost, too. No formation.”

Did the people take shelter? “No. Only some prisoners lie down in slit trenches. No alarm, so good people keep working.” Did they know about the Hiroshima strike three days before? “We know. General and I know. Police know. But few people know.”

This was a lie, I learned later. At first the Nagasaki newspapers were ordered to censor out Hiroshima, but this was pointless. The trains were still running—nothing can stop the Japanese railroad system, which has a life of its own—and too many people were moving around. Hiroshima was terribly and mysteriously stricken, that much was known. But it did not seem worse than the great fire raids on Tokyo.

Nagasaki, people felt, would be spared. Why? Because in the face of all logic, it had been spared so far. It was a complex of industrial plants. It was a feeder port for the campaign in Southeast Asia. It was the nearest major Japanese city to the American bombing bases. And yet it had been left almost intact. Streams of B-29s flowed north and south around it, but this prime target remained mysteriously untouched. Perhaps, people guessed, it might be because it had a large Roman Catholic population. But Rome’s railroad yards had been bombed, with Catholic bombardiers at the pips. More likely, they thought, it was being saved as the logical port for a coming invasion, a Cherbourg. They did not know MacArthur had decided to hit the north first, then work down. That decision put Nagasaki on the bombing list.

“Police ring our telephone,” said the lieutenant. “They say me: ‘Tell general enemy plane drop parachutists. Please to watch the falling.’ I see big parachute, with man hanging underneath, not moving legs, falling like dead. He seem about eight hundred meters tall. Plane flying away fast, not watching. Very strange, to drop spy over city in daylight. Not fool anybody. Police say, ‘You watch, tell us where parachutist fall.’ I find binoculars quick and watch. Lucky, because binoculars save me from blindness for my life.” He gulped.

He closed his eyes, then went on. Suddenly he was talking like a civilian. “Big light. Too much. I drop glasses. Fall down. Blind. Fall right there.” He pointed, “General in back. He all right, I think. When get up, still cannot see. Parachute should still be falling. But gone. Man gone, too. Police phone not working anymore. I go tell general. He say it is big bomb, like Hiroshima. We come back on terrace. My eyes better. We can see damage to buildings, bodies in streets. Ships sinking, sailors swimming. Mitsubishi plant, roof gone. General say, very bad.”

Did a wave of fire sweep the city?

“No wave. Only little fires. No big ones. Just a few little ones where workers live next to plant. There, see?” He pointed to the still, lifeless acres of charred beams and blackened walls, a hopeless tangle of burned-out debris.

The vision of the outside world of the bomb as whipping the city with a single, all-killing sheet of flame was wrong. Even the awful heat of the bomb, being only instantaneous, did no more harm than an opened furnace door to anyone who had any solid protection: a roof, a wall, a door. Yet most of the dead had been incinerated right there in the ruins. If not the bomb, what killed them?

He explained. The bomb fell almost at the noontime break in the factory, when wives were preparing rice over charcoal fires in kitchens and tiny gardens. The flame burst on high. The ray swept their roofs. Neither did much harm in themselves. But the blast pressed the roofs down, broke the timbers, sent the ceilings crashing onto the open hearths, scattering red-hot embers amid bodies and firewood.

People not wounded tried to fight the first small fires. But the water lines were broken. Firemen got as far as the edge of the district, then were stopped. They could not get inside, either with hoses or shoulder-pack chemicals. Walls had fallen across streets. Alleys were flaming tunnels. The wounded nearest the edges were dragged or crawled out. Inexorably the smoke spirals turned to flames. The flames spread. In half an hour it was out of control, a broad, orangered, crackling pyre. By then the last cries had long ceased, as suffocation mercifully preceded incineration.

Now came the lieutenant’s epilogue. “What do you think, Colonel,” he said, “of the culture of a people who could drop such a terrible weapon on the people of Japan?”