Ghosts of Bungo Suido (35 page)

A week after the cave-in, they handed out cotton laundry bags, told the prisoners to gather up their meager possessions, and fall in on the square out in front of the barracks by 0730. Conveniently for the Japanese, this meant that they skipped any form of breakfast. As the prisoners were released from the barracks, they were surprised to find the parade ground littered with leaflets. The small scraps of paper were covered in kanji, the Japanese symbol language. It looked like they had blown across the ridge from Hiroshima City the day before. One of the prisoners went to pick up a leaflet and then quickly dropped it when the guards went ballistic. Apparently it was forbidden to even
notice
the leaflets, much less touch one. The prisoners couldn’t read them anyway; they had a much more basic need for small pieces of paper.

Paper rain.

Gar remembered that paper rain had been Hashimoto’s cue to go to Hiroshima City and turn the mysterious thing from
OFF
to
ON
. As they waited in crooked ranks, he wondered if the old man had managed it, or if he was even still alive. Based on the appearance of many civilian workers in the camp, food for the general population had become even scarcer than the last time he’d seen Hashimoto beneath the pier. The engineers driving the coal trains looked like skeletons, and they were all from the north. The people living along the shores of the Inland Sea could at least catch fish.

Their attention was distracted by the arrival of four army trucks that clattered into the yard in front of the barracks, their exhausts smelling like popcorn. The officer known as Kai came out and met with another officer from the truck convoy. The truck officer seemed bored with his mission, while Kai was full of himself, as usual, shouting and gesturing fiercely. The truck officer lit up a cigarette and waved a hand at all the assembled prisoners, as if to say, you want ’em loaded, you load ’em. This made Kai even madder, and there were more verbal fireworks, bringing the camp commandant to his office doorway to see what the problem was. He was just in time to see a magnesium flare ignite right above the camp. It was a really big magnesium flare, but strangely, it made no noise—no pop or bang, just the whitest light any of them had ever seen. They were all squinting through their fingers as they slowly realized that it had
not
gone off overhead but farther south, just over the ridge that stood between the camp and Hiroshima City.

The incredible light threw that ridge into stark relief, etching every rocky feature along the ridgeline into the glowing sky. Gar could see the black silhouettes of birds being wiped from the sky by some invisible hand, and then came a sudden and prolonged feeling of ear- and lung-squeezing noise, not a clap of thunder but rather a long crescendo of awful power, followed by an enormous rumbling cloud of burning gases, smoke, dust, and tiny bits of debris rising into the air, going much too fast, pumping straight up into the high atmosphere and filled with boiling red and yellow flame that lasted for what seemed an extraordinarily long time. Everyone, guards and prisoners alike, was transfixed by this apparition that got bigger and bigger as the seconds ticked by, violently shaking the ground like an earthquake and still rumbling as it billowed upward and finally began to expand at the top as the thermal column hit the icy air at 30,000 feet, the altitude at which the B-29s traveled. It was large enough that they wondered if it would reach them here in the camp when it collapsed.

One of the American army docs said it for all of them. “What the
fuck
is that?”

THIRTY-ONE

The drivers had shut down their trucks and climbed out to look, spellbound by the sight of that still-luminous cloud, which was now turning black at its base, as if whatever was underneath it were beginning to burn in earnest. The rumbling noise had subsided, but there was a great wind blowing
toward
the base of that cloud, strong enough to bend trees over and make most of the POWs hunch over or get down on the ground to keep from being blown up and over the ridge. A hail of dust and small rocks flailed their backs for a full minute, and the tin roof panels on the buildings chattered away like a chorus of snare drums.

It was clear the Japs didn’t know what to do and were looking to the commandant for orders. That worthy was still standing on the porch of his office, mouth agape, as he watched that titanic cloud begin to curl at the top and assume an unsettling likeness to a poisonous mushroom in some God-sized vegetable garden. Whereas the commandant looked shocked, Lieutenant Colonel Kai looked even more furious, if that was possible. Everyone could hear the shrill ringing of a telephone inside the office over the shrieking wind, but the commandant was ignoring it as he stared upward at that hideous cloud.

Finally Major Willingham gestured that the prisoners should go back into the barracks. Everyone moved slowly, so as not to arouse the guards or Kai, and slunk back inside. The Jap guards did nothing to stop them, and eventually they all followed the prisoners into the barracks, looking over their shoulders at the monstrous shape blotting out the sun to the south and west. They were visibly shaken by what they’d just seen, and so were the prisoners. The cloud reminded Gar of a picture he’d seen of Mount Etna going off, and he wondered aloud if it would come back to earth and wipe them all out.

There’d been neither air raid sirens nor the sounds they usually heard when a large B-29 raid came in from the south, only that eye-searing white light, blooming just out of their sightline behind the ridge. Now that Gar thought about it, he could also see in his mind’s eye what looked like an expanding transparent sphere of pure, multicolored energy racing out from the hidden center of the white light. He’d seen something similar to that when they’d torpedoed what turned out to be a Jap ammo ship off Luzon. This thing, whatever it was, had been many hundred times the force and scale of that blast. One of the prisoners wondered aloud if those leaflets had had anything to do with what had just happened. They could see through the windows the contrast between a normal sunrise to the east and the looming shadow of that enormous cloud to the south and, increasingly, west of the camp as the high winds clawed at the tops.

A guard sergeant burst through the door and shouted at the other guards, who’d been hanging around in the common area of the open-bay barracks as if wondering what to do next. Jap sergeants and officers never just issued orders—they always shouted them as if they were perpetually furious at their subordinates, who in turn jerked into quick bows and then hustled back outside. The prisoners went to the windows and saw the commandant and Lieutenant Colonel Kai engaged in a heated discussion on their office porch. An underling appeared in the office doorway with two telephones in his hands, and the commandant threw some papers down on the floor and grabbed the nearest phone. They could hear emergency vehicles going by outside the fence in the direction of Hiroshima City, where they could see a lower, more familiar black cloud assembling. It looked to Gar as if the whole city might be on fire behind the ridge, if all that smoke was any indication.

The sergeant came back into the barracks, glared at all of them, and then stepped back outside, where he locked the doors. Apparently their little outing to the other coal mine was off for the day. For the next few hours they heard many vehicles racing by the prison compound, some with sirens but most without. There was endless speculation about what had happened. According to some of the air force pilots, Hiroshima was a major ammunition assembly point. Perhaps a large ammo ship had exploded in the harbor, in turn setting off a warehouse or two. Most of them, though, felt that this was something new and very different. Ammo dump explosions often went on for hours, with trails of rockets and other munitions visible all over the place. This hadn’t been like that at all. This had been a single colossal blast, so big that half the city had gone up into the air—and stayed there.

By late afternoon the vehicles were coming the other way, out of the city, over the ridge, and down past the POW camp. Now they were going much slower, and they were loaded with casualties, horrible ones. By evening there were columns of civilians walking among the crawling line of cars and trucks coming over the pass from Hiroshima City. Many of the walking wounded were so badly burned that their faces appeared to be dripping off their skulls like hot wax. Any of them who fell by the wayside were simply left. The prisoners had no idea of where the walking wounded were all going, but it was clear that the number of casualties in the city was in the thousands, not hundreds. After a while the gates to the compound were opened and some of the injured were diverted into the camp’s central assembly area. They staggered in, the wounded helping the dying, dropping in rows and columns on the parade ground, while the guards watched in horror. The prisoners took care to remain inconspicuous as they stared out the dirty windows, standing to one side so as not to be too obvious. Gar saw one horrifically burned woman being given a cup of water, oblivious to the fact that it was pouring out of a hole in her throat as fast as she was drinking it.

Over the ridge there was still a vast cloud of smoke, bending to the west as the evening winds rose out of the Inland Sea and blew toward the Sea of Japan and distant Korea. The towering cloud had dissipated by then, but this new one indicated that everything that could still burn down in the city was burning. Another wave of emergency vehicles, with different markings, came down the road and went over the ridge, followed by a column of army trucks filled with soldiers.

At sunset the commandant and Kai were observed heading toward the barracks. The prisoners all scattered to their racks and away from the front windows. Kai unlocked the door and stood back to let the commandant in. Kashiwabara spoke some English and now shouted for all of them to get outside.

“You help,” he demanded. “Outside. Now. You help.”

Gar wasn’t sure what they could do for the writhing mass of severely burned humanity on the ground, but out they came, dispersing through the huddled figures in the near darkness to do what they could. The first thing they noticed was the smell. A sweetish odor of overcooked meat permeated the enclosed prison compound, threaded with more elemental smells as people died where they lay on the grounds. The guards were making rounds with wooden buckets of water and small towels, and the prisoners’ job became one of tending to individuals, wiping away burned flesh or administering sips of water. The burns were the most severe Gar had ever seen, revealing blue white bone in many cases every time they used a towel. Many of the victims could breathe only in a rapid-paced series of tiny puffs, and once they started doing that, they died before long. As the night wore on, the prisoners were detailed to carry bodies off the assembly area into a corner of the compound. They didn’t need lights—there was a deep red glow in the sky coming from over the ridge as Hiroshima or whatever was left of it continued to burn through the night.

By dawn the area within the compound had settled into a profound silence. Gar realized that none of the two hundred or so wounded who’d been let into the prison camp were still alive. The prisoners were exhausted from their night’s work. Most of them just lay down on the ground and tried to sleep. The guards did the same. The commandant had spent the entire night on the front porch of his headquarters building, just staring out into the darkness. Kai hadn’t been seen since they’d come to roust out the prisoners. Rumor had it that he’d gone into the city on the other side of the ridge. There was no food that morning.

Major Willingham was afraid that there would now be a mass execution of the prisoners. They all felt a terrible sense of foreboding. When the Japs came to their senses, they’d want blood for whatever had happened over the ridge. Then Gar heard air raid sirens starting up to the east of them, away from the city. Nobody seemed to know what to do. None of the guards did anything at all, so everyone just looked up into the dawn light and waited to see what was coming next. Finally they could see two lone contrails flying from east to west, very high over Hiroshima City, and then south until they were out of sight. Photo-recce birds, no doubt, Gar thought, coming to see what had happened to the city.

The prisoners spent the rest of the morning clearing away the rest of the bodies, carrying them in litters down to the crematorium building beyond the mine entrance. They kept wondering if there’d be rations, but the little old man never showed. As best they could tell, there were none for the guards, either. The prisoners straggled back to the barracks building in ones and twos, went in, and hit their racks after getting some water from the communal tap. Gar washed his hands and face and then dropped into his rack still stinking of the night’s work. They all did. He fell asleep immediately but was roused seconds later by a sudden shaking, and instinctively waved his hand to swat away whoever was trying to get him up.

“Get out,
out,
everybody out!” someone was yelling. Gar opened his eyes to see everything not nailed down in the building dancing in place as an earthquake rattled their side of the ridge, raising whitish clouds of dust outside and shattering what few glass windows were still left in the barracks building. Gar could see the light fixtures swaying back and forth at the end of their hanging poles, and then some of them even came down, their bulbs exploding on the floor, as some of the prisoners tried to crawl out of the shaking building on their hands and knees.

Something in Gar’s brain said,
Screw it.
He felt exactly the way he’d felt right after the bombing at Kure—overwhelmed, desperately hungry, despairing, surprisingly indifferent. He pulled the sheet over his head and just lay there, waiting for it all to stop, one way or the other, and he knew he wasn’t the only one doing that. Eventually the shaking did end. A sudden warm breeze blew through the barracks, lifting the sheet off his face and blowing all the dust away. One end wall had cracked open, and all he could think of was that they finally had air-conditioning. He went back to sleep.