First Into Nagasaki (5 page)

From Camp #3 at Tabata near Moji in northern Kyushu come three ex-prisoners who have found the lure of the open roads irresistible after three years’ confinement and have come to Nagasaki in order to view the results of the atomic bomb.

Charles Collings of Northeast, Maryland, says, “The
Houston
was caught on the eastern, or Java side, of the Sunda Straits near Bantam Bay. Three hundred and forty-eight were saved, but they are all scattered.”

Chicago-born Miles Mahnke, of Plano, Illinois, who looks all right, though his original 215 pounds dropped to 160, says, “I was in the death march at Bataan. Guess you know what that was.”

Here is Albert Rupp of Philadelphia, from the submarine
Grenadier.
“We were chasing two Nip cargo boats four hundred fifty miles off Penang. A spotter plane dropped a bomb on us, hitting the maneuvering room. We lay on the bottom, but the next time we came up we were bombed again. We finally had to scuttle the sub. Thirty-nine men of forty-two were saved.” Another from the submarine is William Cunningham, of Bronx, New York, who started with Rupp on his tour of southern Japan.

Another party of four vagabond prisoners from camps whose Japanese commanders and guards have simply disappeared are Albert Johnson of Geneva, Ohio, Hershel Langston of Van Buren, Kansas, and Morris Kellogg of Mule Shoe, Texas—all crew members of the oil tanker
Connecticut.
Now touring Japan with a carefree Marine from the North China Guard at Peking, Walter Allan of Waxahachie, Texas, these three would like a word with the captain of the German raider who took them prisoner. The captain told them, “In the last war you Americans confined Germans in Japan; this war we Germans are going to take you Americans to Japan and see how you like a taste of the same medicine.”

Kyushu has about 10,000 prisoners, or about one-third of the total in all Japan, mixed in the completely disordered fashion the Japanese used and without any records.

At Camp #2, by the entrance to Nagasaki Bay, are living in comfortable air-fed circumstances 68 survivors of the British cruiser
Exeter
which sank in the Battle of the Java Sea while trying to escape the Japanese task force. Eight-inch shells penetrated her waterline. Five of the supposed total of nine survivors from the British destroyer
Stronghold,
sunk near the Sunda Straits at the same time, are also here. There are also 14 Britons of an approximate 100 from the destroyer
Encounter
lost at the same time, besides 62 R.A.F. mostly from Java and Singapore.

Among the 324 Dutch here from the Battle of the Java Sea are 230 Navy men. They include one officer and eight men from Admiral Doorman’s flagship cruiser
De Ruyter.
This officer told the writer that two Dutch cruisers, the
Java
and
De Ruyter,
were sunk at 2330 and 2345 hours on the night of Feb. 27, 1942, by torpedo attacks which the Japs boasted were staged not by destroyers or submarines, but by cruisers. There is also a Dutch officer from the destroyer
Koortenaer,
torpedoed by night in the Battle of the Java Sea.

Husky Corporal Raymond Wuest of Fredericksburg, Texas, told how 105 members of the 131st Field Artillery poured 75-caliber shells into the Japs for six hours outside Soerabaya [Surabaya] before Java fell, killing an estimated 700. To this correspondent’s eager questions about this outfit which he had seen go into action in Java, Wuest said that 450 members fought in western Java and were now scattered throughout the Far East. Eighty-five reached Nagasaki, whereof most were moved to Camp #9 near Moji.

Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945 0300 hours

A Dutch doctor and an American dentist are commandants of two Allied prison camps at the mouth of the harbor of Nagasaki, the seaport of the southern island of Kyushu partly crippled by the atomic bomb. The Dutch doctor is thin, energetic Army Lieutenant Jakob Vink, who is assisted by a Dutch flying ensign and Singapore Brewster flying expert, Paul Jolly. Vink is expert at curing wounds from the atomic bomb.

The American dentist, Captain John Farley of Raton, New Mexico, was one of five American prisoners here who saw the atomic bomb and observed it more fully than any of the others.

Controlled and quiet in his account, Farley said, “I was looking up the harbor toward the Mitsubishi plants five miles from here when I saw a terrific flash. It was white and glaring, very like a photographer’s flare. The center was hung about 1,500 feet from the ground. Light was projected upward as well as downward, something like the aurora borealis. The light quivered and was prolonged for about thirty seconds. I instantly caught the idea that it was something peculiar and hit the ground. The building began to shake and quiver. Glass shattered around me; about one-third of the windows in the camp broke. After the blast passed, I saw a tall white cumulus cloud, something like a pillar, about four or five thousand feet high. Inside, it was brown and churning around.”

The week before the bomb fell, as a consequence of B-29 raids late in July, Dr. Vink went to the Japanese with Dutch Lieutenant Kick Aalders and protested against the prisoners being obliged to live in a camp next door to the Mitsubishi shipfitting plant where they worked. This camp, #14, numbered about 200, three-quarters being Dutch. The Japanese said that the Allied prisoners must be ready to take the same risks as the Japanese.

Later the Dutchman renewed his plea and asked for the right to build an underground shelter because the plant’s were so few and inadequate. The plea was denied, but later granted. The prisoners had only had time to start their hole when the atomic bomb fell. Forty-eight were wounded, four instantly killed, and four, including Aalders, died.

Visiting the camp’s old site with the Japanese police, the writer found it flattened. Vink and Jolly were both in the blast. Jolly said, “Some say three, but I saw four parachutes falling. While I watched, I heard a separate hissing sound of the bomb.”

Harold Bridgman, a civilian workman from Witten, South Dakota, who has been imprisoned ever since Wake Island fell on December 23, 1941, saw the atomic bomb hanging in Nagasaki’s sky and told the writer, “To me the light looked sort of bluish, like a photographer’s light bulb. It was so powerful that the blast behind it seemed to suck your breath right away.”

Another Wake Island civilian, Fred King of Legrand, Oregon, who is troubled with prison abscess, said, “I was in bed. The light seemed to me like a gun flash. It tore plaster down and broke the fixtures—that was from five miles away.”

Corporal Raymond Wuest of Fredericksburg, Texas, captured in Java with the Texas 131st Field Artillery, said, “We thought the Nagasaki power plant must be blowing up. It was a huge electric flash which sent us all to the floor. Then came the concussion. But we never understood until the food bombers also dropped us an explanation.”

Vink is one of eleven Dutch medical officers who have survived of the thirty-eight captured in Indonesia. He was aboard a prison ship torpedoed on June 24, 1944, sixty miles off Nagasaki. From 770 prisoners, 212 survived including 10 Americans. Two drowned in Nagasaki harbor when, despite their pleas of an inability to swim, the crew of a Jap destroyer kicked them overboard with seven swimmers, ordering them to make their own way to another boat.

According to Vink, Camp #14 has had 512 prisoners, of whom 112 died in Nagasaki, mostly from pneumonia induced partly by malnutrition. Vink pointed out that the Japanese incidence of pneumonia is also high.

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. Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast’s center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you realize the liberated atom spares nothing in its way. Those human beings whom it has happened to spare sit on mats or tiny family board-platforms in Nagasaki’s two largest un-destroyed hospitals. Their shoulders, arms and faces are wrapped in bandages. Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to know: “What do you think?”

What this question means is: Do you intend writing that America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That is what we want you to write.

Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures of them. About one in five is heavily bandaged, but none are showing signs of pain.

Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband shows eyes dim with tears. It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved.

Visiting many litters, talking lengthily with two general physicians and one X-ray specialist, gains you a large amount of information and opinion on the victims’ symptoms. Statistics are variable and few records are kept. But it is ascertained that this 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. The Japanese say that anyone caught outdoors in a mile and a half by one mile area was burned to death. But this is known to be untrue because most of the Allied prisoners trapped in the plant escaped and only about one-fourth were burned. Yet it is undoubtedly true that many at 11:02 on the morning of August 9th were caught in debris by blazes which kindled and caught fire during the next half hour.

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 commandant of Prison Camp #14 at the mouth of the Nagasaki harbor, calls “Disease X.” Vink himself was in the Allied prison kitchen abutting the Mitsubishi armor-plate department when the ceiling fell in. But he escaped this mysterious “Disease X” which some Allied prisoners and many Japanese civilians got.

Vink points out a woman on a yellow mat in the hospital who, according to hospital doctors Hikodero Koga and Uraji Hayashida, has just been brought in. She fled the atomic area but 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 spots 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.

Dr. Uraji Hayashida shakes his head somberly and says that he believes there must be something to the American radio report about the ground around the Mitsubishi plant being poisoned. But his next statement knocks out the props from under this theory because it develops that the widow’s family has been absent from the wrecked area ever since the blast, yet shows symptoms common with those who returned.

According to Japanese doctors, patients with these late-developing symptoms are dying now—a month after the bomb’s fall—at the rate of about ten daily. The three doctors calmly stated that Disease X has them nonplussed and that they are giving no treatment what ever but rest. Radio rumors from America receive the same consideration with the symptoms under their noses. They are licked for a cure and do not seem very worried about it.

Nagasaki, Japan—Sunday, September 9, 1945 0020 hours

Watching Americans die from a lack of medicine—while Japanese bayonets denied them the use of a warehouse full of needed supplies a hundred and fifty yards away—was only one experience of two doctors, veterans of the Bataan death march, who reached Nagasaki today.

No pity for the Japanese digging themselves out from the ruins of the atomic bomb was expressed by dentist Lieutenant William Blucher of Albuquerque or Lieutenant Vetalis Anderson of Denver. The two physicians with the 200th Coast Artillery were cheerful, though worn by their more than three years of bitter captivity at infamous Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan in the Philippines and more recently at Camp #3 near Moji in northern Kyushu.

How helpless they were to aid 8,000 Americans and 30,000 Filipinos dying respectively at a rate of twenty-five and three hundred daily was retold by the two young doctors. As Lieutenant Blucher recounted, “On the death march we saw men drink from cesspools with dead bodies in them. Any men who dropped out were shot or bayoneted. At O’Donnell we had hundreds of cases of malaria. From a warehouse jammed with Red Cross supplies, the Nips issued us enough quinine for only twenty men. We became the arbiters of life and death. We simply had to decide who would be kept alive and who would be allowed to die. We used rags for dressings.”

According to Lieutenant Anderson, “The Japanese always enjoyed keeping us without water, and forcing us to sit in the sun in order to get thirsty and dizzy quicker. I saw with my own eyes a Filipino bayoneted for trying to offer us water. When the Filipinos saw they’d be killed for this, they set five-gallon tins of water along our marching route. The Jap commander sent ahead a special detail of men to knock the tins over. I saw a Jap kick in the stomach a pregnant Filipino woman who tried to give us riceballs. She fell, and I went past with her lying there. The Filipinos were magnificent all the way through. At O’Donnell they sent us three trucks full of food and medicine. The Japs turned them back at the camp gate, though men were dying so fast we could not bury them. Later, when the Japs allowed us to go into the jungle to gather guava leaves for tea, the Filipinos used to find our parties and sneak them little packets of medicine.”