First Into Nagasaki (4 page)

I wanted to cut this experiment off early. I waited a moment. Then, as gravely as I could, I said, “To give you an honest reply, I would have to ask my own people. And of course I would have to begin with those who were walking to church on Sunday on Red Hill in Hawaii when your planes struck them.”

We got along much better after that.

N
AGASAKI
was never, strictly speaking, “destroyed.” Nagasaki had about 300,000 people, about the size of Worcester, Peoria or Tacoma. About 20,000 died right away, the majority by concussion from falling buildings or by burning in ruins, not by concussion of air or direct singeing. I was told 35,000 had been hurt, mostly by burns. Harrison’s figures were 25,000 and 40,000. About 18,000 homes, mostly two-room bungalows, were destroyed, for perhaps $20 million worth of total replacement.

Soon after the Soviets consolidated their booty in the Kuriles and the Rosenberg spy case developed, the atomic bomb became a “horror weapon.” The ideology of the Japanese army became that of the Communist International. Since then, Nagasaki’s casualties have been rising in multiples of five and ten thousand. At the most recent ban-the-bomb meetings the dead tripled to 65,000.

Before the bombs fell, Nagasaki was getting ready to lose the war but win the psychological recovery. American prisoners working in the Mitsubishi plant were naturally told that if defeated, the entire nation would commit hara-kiri. But the executives of the plant had taught their foremen some highly unsuicidal terms, such as, “How are you today?” and “We workers want to save our plant.” They had also shown disbelief in Nagasaki’s immunity by moving their most expensive machinery to a hole in a hill two miles away.

I found these instructors, many of whom had brutal records in prison camps, now fawningly eager to serve the new colonel in town. They mistook me for their bridge into the MacArthur command. The general himself saddled me with the most repulsive of these double-tracked vehicles, an unctuous character who, Harrison discovered, had been one of the roughest straw bosses over the Allied prisoners. These swarming aspirant-interpreters did not, like those in Germany and Italy, try to prove that they had been oppressed democrats all the war. They imitated the army’s pitch: that the United States had won unfairly and owed Japan generous help to come back. Their hands were out to collect the first slice for themselves.

When we entered the ruins, I had my first showdown with my interpreter. The ruins were “poisoned” and “dangerous,” he said. Luckily, in the hospitals I had asked the X-ray specialists. “We don’t think so, not if you wear thick-soled shoes like yours,” they said. When I led the way in, he tried to take my camera. “Photos are forbidden,” he said. “Not to me,” I said.

I got rid of the interpreters in the hospitals because their officious manner got between me and the doctors—earnest, dedicated scientists, with nothing to sell. As fast as the pathetic patients squatting in the corridors died, the interns took them into the back rooms and dissected them for the doctors. Already they knew precisely what the effect of the ray was.

A doctor who had survived Hiroshima explained to me: “The main effect seems to be on the bloodstream. People say that the red and white corpuscles are killed. But we do not find it so. What are killed are the platelets. Do you know what they are?” I didn’t. “They are the third important element of the blood, which gives it the capacity to coagulate. See that man?” He pointed to a thin figure with a paper-white face propped against a wall, surrounded by kneeling, intense relatives. “He was already a tuberculosis case, with minor hemorrhages. He was exposed about a quarter mile from the explosion. He was knocked down, but not apparently hurt. Then, after a few days, his coughing began to increase. He began raising more and more blood. We looked at it, and found the platelets were all dead.” “Is there nothing you can do?” His eyes fell, as if in apology for his inadequacy. “Nothing,” he said.

The most valuable thing I got in Nagasaki was a careful analysis of the effects of the ray on each organ: heart, lungs, kidney, liver, stomach. In all cases there was some deterioration. But often they were almost intact, and the patient died of some insignificant scratch whose bleeding could not be stemmed.

When darkness fell I spent three hours each night tapping out my stories by lamplight. Then, about a half hour before the train left on its twenty-four-hour journey—at least—to Tokyo, two Kempeitai arrived at my door. I addressed the stories to “Chief Censor, American Headquarters, Tokyo.”

I considered trying to smuggle my stories out of Japan, but rejected it. I had made the point I wanted by getting into Nagasaki and proving it could be done safely. Now I wanted to give the MacArthur command the least possible excuse to hold up my research. I eschewed all horror angles. I intended within five days to be in Tokyo myself. I wanted to be prepared to defend every line. If the stories were blocked as reprisal against me, I intended to take the case to MacArthur himself. Only if he blocked them would I consider smuggling them out myself.

One thing that made me feel extra secure in my laboratory, able to work methodically and broadly, was that Nagasaki’s airfield was supposed to be damaged beyond repair. And then, on the fourth day, when I had pumped off about ten thousand words to Tokyo—research, interviews, damage reports—my laboratory was burgled, my monopoly ended. The lieutenant phoned me the awful news. “Many American reporters have landed,” he said. “They have two planes.” I hurried downtown with my staff. Indeed there they were, about two dozen old friends from all the war theaters of the world, wandering up and down the pitted boulevards in their go-to-hell Air Force caps, talking Pentagonese. They looked like yacht passengers who have stopped to buy basketry on an island. I had an impulse to hide, but they already knew about Colonel Weller. “You dirty dog, how did you get here?”

I told them. “Well, you better not go back to Tokyo. They’re sore as hell at you. Get aboard with us. We’ve got two Forts—yes, two, one to ride, one to transmit our stories. We take off and sling them straight into Washington. The straight stuff, no censorship.”

How could I close up my atomic laboratory, with the work only half finished? Where were they going? “Right down the line, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Saigon, Singapore, Indonesia, maybe even Bali.”

Up sauntered the small slim commander and deviser of the expedition, Tex McCrary, former New York editorial writer turned colonel, a friendly, dynamic wheeler-dealer who married Jinx Falkenberg and later made himself into a breakfast-hour TV star. “Did MacArthur clear you for Nagasaki?” I asked hopefully. There might be a loophole there for me. He shook his head. “Never asked him. Didn’t have to. We’re flying right out of Washington, under worldwide orders from Joint Chiefs. We can go anywhere, write anything. We have our own censors, and we transmit while airborne. No local clearances.”

“We just throw it over their heads into Washington,” growled a voice. “In three hours from now, all our Nagasaki stuff will be on the desk.”

“Stuff”!
I felt like a Robinson Crusoe, reluctant to be rescued, but half-sensing, from these new-dateline-every-day boys, that my obsession with history was getting out of hand. My Dutch forces had quit Nagasaki and gone back to their camp, where movie projectors and films were now being dropped in. Harrison had run out of time and was leaving. One of my cars had disappeared, and the night before the lieutenant had sent only one Kempeitai, not two. Was it time to cut my losses and go?

But the deep fullness of the Nagasaki story was still emerging. I was beginning to look ahead to something free, big and formal. I considered deferring fighting the censorship in Tokyo, and going north to Hiroshima. My mind was fumbling for something ample, leisurely and magnificent, such as John Hersey was to do several months later for
The New Yorker.

McCrary, kindness itself, offered to take carbons of my stories and file them when airborne. In my stubbornness I refused. First, my work wasn’t over. Second, I had spent four years bucking the MacArthur blackout (minus intervals in European and African fronts). This was my fight and I was going back to see it through. The circus shook their heads as if I were mad, and they were right.

When I looked up, alone again in Nagasaki, and saw the two B-17s swing over the city, and imagined the typewriters talking as they swept southward, I had that bite of shame that comes when you have missed your communications. A few hours later, on the old radio in the villa, the playback of the “the first correspondents in Nagasaki” began to come through.

What remained fascinating for me was the constant revision of my own ideas of total-devastation and no-escape-from-the-bomb. The sharpest correction came from 120 prisoners I interviewed on an island in the harbor, and another camp of workers—Americans, British, Dutch, Australians and Javanese—next to the Mitsubishi plant. Of these several hundred men, only eight had been killed by the bomb. Why so few, when so near the supposedly all-pervasive doom? “Those eight wouldn’t have got it, either,” explained an American dentist, “but they poked their heads out of the slit trench to watch the parachute falling. Just too curious.”

They showed me the slit trench, hardly two hundred yards from where the bomb went off high above their heads, and barely four feet deep. “Whenever there was an air raid warning, we would bugger off and hunker down in the slit trenches till the all-clear sounded, or the foremen drove us back. That’s what saved us. For the last weeks there were so many planes passing north and south around Nagasaki that the warnings and all-clears got all mixed up. The workers stayed at their machines, but we claimed our rights. And they needed our skilled work so much they didn’t force us.”

Blast and ray flew harmlessly over their heads. They had lain prostrate almost directly under it, and only forty claimed to be wounded, few severely.

A few, who had happened to be looking that way, saw the mushroom cloud climb over Hiroshima. But they had then been in the mad camp at Omuta, where an insane Japanese captain with a mania for baseball kept the diarrhea patients running bases in a lavatory league of his own. It was a week after Nagasaki’s bomb, when the prison authorities began burning the medical records, that they knew the war was over.

Not a word came back from Tokyo about my dispatches. The Kempeitai returned to Nagasaki, but they had no message for me. A feeling of hopelessness about my stories began to drag me down. Perhaps they were already locked in some censor’s safe. If so, what sense was there in leaving southern Japan for Tokyo, to start this tedious battle? Why not, instead, mine what there was around me? The camps of southern Japan, six weeks after the Mikado’s surrender, were still not opened.

So, about four days
^*
after McCrary’s flying circus departed, Colonel Weller packed his bag and started up country, sans staff. Two American officers who had wandered into Nagasaki furnished me with a list of unopened camps, each with its weird story. For a week I roamed from camp to camp. Then the grapevine of errant prisoners brought me another blow. The Marines had landed in Nagasaki. I raced back south. What a change!

In three days Nagasaki had undergone the full transformation from crushed worm to brave yellow butterfly. A ruin was changing into a hostess city. Destroyers, transports, LSTs crowded the harbor. My floating lantern was gone. Salvage operations had begun. Jeeps and trucks hustled through the stream of bicycles. Marines leaned on the sagging sills of the harbor buildings, lovingly cleaning their carbines.

But still there were no correspondents. The Navy had landed, but even they were under MacArthur. And still, going on seven weeks after the bombs, the world was waiting. What was the reason? To keep the victory of two nuclear weapons from eclipsing a general? To prevent its being said that the Pacific war was finally won in the Manhattan Project, not in Manila? I could imagine the two hundred correspondents, still bottled up in Tokyo, being told that there were “no facilities” for them in Nagasaki, and that the ruins might be infected. Meantime I was leading Navy doctors and nurses through the now cleared, sorted, arranged embers.

By this time it was not really necessary to become a casualty of Nagasaki myself, but I managed to do so. On a hospital ship’s deck I caught a medicine ball thrown by a burly Navy doctor, and felt something crack. In an hour Dr. Malcolm Stevens, the former Yale coach, had me mummified in a plaster cast from neck to hips. The ship carried me off to Guam.

But I still had my smudged carbons. A month later I started trying to get them through the Navy censorship. “We can’t clear this stuff, but we’ll be glad to send it to Tokyo for you. I’m sure they’ll release it there.” “Thanks, but never mind.”

As soon as I was able to walk, I received orders to go back to China. I was somewhere in Manchuria, I believe, when I received news that parties of correspondents were now being taken to Hiroshima, and yes, Nagasaki, too.

They won. At least I was not busted by my organization for bucking the system, like dour, funny Ed Kennedy, who was too early for Eisenhower with the signing of the armistice. Ed, who had covered the fall of Greece with me, had set up communications that were too good. I threw away my one good chance to communicate, trying for a fuller, more perfect story.

O, Nagasaki! What a way to lose a war!

II

Early Dispatches

(September 6–9, 1945)

From September 6 until September 10 Weller stayed in Nagasaki, exploring the blasted city each day, writing his dispatches far into each night, then sending them off to MacArthur’s military censors in Tokyo, hopeful that they were being cabled onward to his editors at the
Chicago Daily News
and thence to a vast American readership via syndication. These dispatches have remained unpublished for sixty years; it appears that the U.S. government destroyed the originals. Weller’s own carbon copies were found in 2003.

nagasaki 62300 herewith follows first known eyewitness account results atomic bomb dropped nagasaki by american ground observer chicagonewses george weller who reached crippled city three days after first american troops landed southern kyushu

Nagasaki, Japan—Thursday, September 6, 1945 2300 hours

Walk in Nagasaki’s streets and you walk in ruins.

It is thirty-three 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 human 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.

Yet the atmosphere is not precisely dolorous. Nagasaki cannot be described as a city of the dead. The unquenchable Japanese will to live has asserted itself. Though the smashed streets are as barren of production or commerce as Pompeii’s, yet a living stream of humanity pours along them, looking with alert, shoe-button eyes for today’s main chance.

After a 24-hour trip on what seemed like dozens of trains, the writer arrived here this afternoon as the first visitor from the outside Allied world. Trains coming from both Honshu and southern Kyushu were so jammed with returning human beings that the writer was able only to fight his way into the baggage cars. Some refugees rode the locomotives’ cowcatchers. Nagasaki has only about one hundred fifty of its normal three hundred thousand inhabitants, but they are coming back. By the hundreds they streamed along the concrete platforms which alone remain of Nagasaki’s station, their belongings tied in big silk scarves or shoulder rucksacks. Painstakingly these Nagasakians ignored the soot-stained American trudging beside them. Fear or merely resignation may have accounted for their indifference. What looked like disinterest amid Nagasaki’s peace-imploring debris was the suppression of personal feeling in obedience to the emperor’s order.

The first thing you learn as you walk amid the flattened houses, and the cordwood that was once walls piled with Japanese neatness, is that the atomic bomb never really “hit” Japan. If the Japanese are right, the bomb exploded over Japanese soil. They can only tell what they saw and try to guess much of what really happened.

At about 11:30 o’clock on the morning of August 9th, a lieutenant who is aide to Major General Tanikoetjie, commanding the district, was walking through the headquarters on the hill above Nagasaki’s long waterfront. The lieutenant heard a high faint moan of aircraft motors, found his fieldglasses, went to a porch and trained them to the sky. What he saw was two B-29s at about 22,000 feet, flying in echelon. No anti-aircraft fire was around them; they were too high for Nagasaki’s batteries.

Suddenly there broke from the forward plane three parachutes. Their canopies unfolded and what they bore earthward seemed to be three oblong boxes. The boxes looked about thirty inches long by eight inches wide. Demurely as
The Mikado
’s three little maids from school, the canopies sailed downward. The lieutenant took them for some new form of pamphlet propaganda.

The three parachutes had reached the point where the lieutenant could begin sending auto crews to confiscate their freight when something violent happened. With the parachutes at perhaps a five thousand feet level there suddenly occurred below them, at about fifteen hundred feet, a burst of flame. Almost instantly the flame, yellow as gaslight, fell in a widening cone to earth, at the same time spreading wider in hoopskirt fashion.

This skirt of flame fell across the bottleneck creek which is a dead end for Nagasaki’s tremendous shipping industry. Nothing human or animal that was above ground there at that moment survived.

As the fiery skirts swept the ground there suddenly burst upward a cumulus cloud of black dust. This cloud climbed high into the sky, visited by a terrible atomic heat erecting a pillar of warning over death’s city. The lieutenant saw this as it began but immediately fell flat on his face, letting the concussion pass over him. When he rose up the parachutes were gone, and Nagasaki was afire.

The lieutenant never saw the atomic bomb or any other in the air, perhaps because its bulk is reportedly small. His theory is that the parachutes were not carrying bombs, but were carrying machinery for controlling the altitude at which a free-dropped bomb would be exploded by its companions.

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 crest to crest like a basketball. Winds of terrible force churned about in the valleys, stripped the roofs in 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 beneath.

Nagasaki had had its first air warning only on July 5th and only one earlier serious raid. The so-called “long” or constant warning had been in effect since 7 o’clock but most people had ignored it.

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 treatment number 40,093.

[ends weller]

please acknowledge receipt this story by radio to weller and whoever’s else in tokyo, mcgaffin or thorp.

george weller

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.

Seven Dutchmen—including camp leader Lieutenant Kick Aalders of Bandoeng, Java—and one Britisher died from the atomic bomb attack. The writer visited their camp this afternoon as the first outsider in years.

American, British, Dutch and Australians each had their national preoccupations of which I was able to settle the American and British, but failed completely at the Dutch and Australian. Their questions were as follows:

The Aussies, “Who won the Melbourne Cup?” (with Aussies it is always
who
for horses.)

The British, “Is Winnie still in, or did Britain go labor?”

The Dutch, “Is Juliana’s third child a boy heir to the throne, or another girl?”

The Americans, “B-29s 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 0100 hours

The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be.

Such is the conclusion which the writer, as the first visitor from the outside world to inspect the ruins firsthand, has drawn after an exhaustive though still incomplete study of this wasteland of war.

Nagasaki is an island roughly resembling Manhattan in size and shape, running in a north-south direction with ocean inlets on three sides. What would be the New Jersey and Manhattan sides of the Hudson River are lined with huge war plants owned by the Mitsubishi and Kawanami families. The Kawanami shipbuilding plants, employing about 20,000 workmen, lie on both sides of the harbor mouth on what corresponds to Battery Park and Ellis Island. That is about five nautical miles from the scene of the explosion’s main blow. B-29 raids before the atomic bomb failed to damage them and they are still hardly scarred.

Proceeding up the Nagasaki harbor, which is lined with docks on both sides like the Hudson, one perceives the shores narrowing toward a bottleneck. The beautiful green hills are nearer at hand, standing beyond the long rows of industrial plants, which are all Mitsubishi on both sides of the river. On the left or Jersey side, two miles beyond the Kawanami yards, are Mitsubishi’s shipbuilding and electrical engine plants, employing 20,000 and 8,000 respectively. The shipbuilding plant was damaged by a raid before the atomic bomb, but not badly. The electrical plant is undamaged. It is three miles from the epicenter of the atomic bomb and repairable.

It is about two miles from the scene of the bomb’s 1,500 foot high explosion, where the harbor has narrowed to the 250 foot wide Urakame River, that the atomic bomb’s force begins to be discernible. This area is north of downtown Nagasaki, whose buildings suffered some freakish destruction but are generally still sound.

The railroad station—destroyed except for the platforms, yet already operating normally—is a sort of gate to the destroyed part of the Urakame valley. Here in parallel north-south lines run the Urakame River with Mitsubishi plants on both sides, the railroad line, and the main road from town. For two miles stretches this line of congested steel and some concrete factories with the residential district “across the tracks.” The atomic bomb landed between and totally destroyed both, along with perhaps half the living persons in them. The known dead number 20,000, and Japanese police tell me they estimate about 4,000 remain to be found.

The reason the deaths were so high—the wounded being about twice as many, according to Japanese official figures—was twofold: that Mitsubishi air raid shelters were totally inadequate and the civilian shelters remote and limited, and that the Japanese air warning system was a total failure.

Today I inspected half a dozen crude short tunnels in the rock wall valley, which the Mitsubishi Company considered shelters. I also picked my way through the tangled iron girders and curling roofs of the main factories to see concrete shelters four inches thick but totally inadequate in number. Only a grey concrete building topped by a siren, where clerical staff worked, had passable cellar shelters, but nothing resembling provision had been made.

A general alert had been sounded at seven in the morning, four hours before the two B-29s appeared, but it was ignored by the workmen and most of the population. The police insist that the air raid warning was sounded two minutes before the bomb fell, but most people say they heard none.

As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign of burns or debilitation. Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in the broader extent of its flash and a more powerful knockout.

All around the Mitsubishi plant are ruins which one would gladly have spared. Today the writer spent nearly an hour in fifteen deserted buildings of the Nagasaki Medical Institute hospital which sit on a hill on the eastern side of the valley. Nothing but rats live in the debris-choked halls. On the opposite side of the valley and the Urakame River is a three-story concrete American mission college called Chin Jei, nearly totally destroyed. Japanese authorities point out that the home area flattened by the American bomb was traditionally the place of Catholic and Christian Japanese.

But sparing these and sparing the Allied prison camp, which the Japanese placed next to an armor plate factory, would have meant sparing Mitsubishi’s ship parts plant, with 1,016 employees who were mostly Allied. It would have spared an ammunition factory connecting, with 1,740 employees. It would have spared three steel foundries on both sides of the Urakame, using ordinarily 3,400 but that day 2,500. And besides sparing many sub-contracting plants, now flattened, it would have meant leaving untouched Mitsubishi’s torpedo and ammunition plant employing 7,500, and which was nearest to where the bomb blew up. All these latter plants today are hammered flat. But no saboteur creeping among the war plants of death could have placed the atomic bomb by hand more scrupulously, given Japan’s inertia about common defense.

Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945 0100 hours

More pieces to the broken mosaic of history are supplied by prisoners in the liberated but still unrelieved camps on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island. While waiting for General Walter Krueger’s army to arrive, the inmates are receiving humble bows and salutes from the Japanese officers who formerly ruled them with a rod of iron. By exchanging visits with prisoners from other parts of Kyushu, they are able to find out what happened in the blacked-out periods of the past.

Camp #14, which was inside the Mitsubishi war factory area until the atomic bomb fell upon it, is now moved inside the eastern mouth of the Nagasaki harbor. Here you can meet Fireman Edward Matthews of Seattle and Everett, Washington, and of the American destroyer
Pope,
who bummed his way here on the Japanese railroad from Camp #3 near Moji in northern Kyushu. He fills in the unknown story of how the
Pope
fought, trying to take her cruiser
Houston
through the Sunda Straits in the face of a Japanese task force of “eight cruisers and endless destroyers. We contacted the Japs at seven in the morning. They opened fire at 8:30 a.m. We held out until 2 p.m., when a Jap spotter plane dropped a bomb near our stern and watched us go down. The Japs saw us sink. It was a perfectly clear day. They let us stay in the water—154 men with one 24-man whaleboat and one life raft—for three days. We were about crazy when they picked us up and took us to Macassar.”