THE FALLING SUN:
HIROSHIMA
From No High Ground by
Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. Harper & Row, Publishers.
The sounding of the
all-clear signal in Hiroshima at 7:13 A.M. on August 6 made little change in the
tempo of the city. Most people had been too busy, or too lazy, to pay much
attention to the alert. The departure of the single, high flying B-29 caused no
more stir than its arrival over the city twenty-two minutes earlier. As the plane flew out over
the sea, Michiyoshi Nukushina, a thirty-eight-year-old firetruck driver at the
Hiroshima Army Ordinance Supply Depot, climbed onto his bicycle and headed for
home. He had received special permission to quit his post half an hour before
his shift ended. Wearing an official-duty armband to clear himself through the
depot gates, and carrying a new pair of wooden clogs and a bag of fresh tomatoes
drawn from the depot commissary, he headed home through the narrow streets of
Hiroshima.
Nukushina crossed
two of the seven river channels that divided the city into fingerlike islands
and finally arrived at his home in Kakomachi precinct a little more than half an
hour after leaving the firehouse. Propping his bicycle by an entrance to his
small combination home and wineshop he walked inside and called to his wife to
go get the tomatoes. At this same instant, in a
comfortable house behind the high hill that made Hijiyama Park a welcome
variation in the otherwise flat terrain of Hiroshima, a mother named Chinayo
Sakamoto was mopping her kitchen floor after breakfast. Her son Tsuneo, an Army
captain fortunately stationed right in his hometown, had left for duty with his
unit. His wife Miho had gone upstairs. Tsuneo's father lay on the straw mat in
the living room, reading his morning paper.
Off to the east and
south of the city, a few men in air defense posts were watching the morning sky
or listening to their sound-detection equipment. At the Matsunaga lookout
station, in the hills east of Hiroshima, a watcher filed two reports with the
air defense center. At 8:06, he sighted and reported two planes, headed
northwest. At 8:09, he saw another, following some miles behind them, and
corrected his report to include it. At 8:14, the telephone talker
at the Nakano search light battery also made a report. His sound equipment had
picked up the noise of aircraft engines. Unidentified planes were coming from
Saijo, about fifteen miles east of Hiroshima, and were heading toward the
city.
The anti-aircraft
gunners on Mukay-Shima Island in Hiroshima harbor could now see two planes,
approaching the eastern edge of the city at very high altitude. As they watched,
at precisely seventeen seconds after 8:15, the planes suddenly separated. The
leading aircraft made a tight, diving turn to the right. The second plane
performed an identical maneuver to the left, and from it fell three parachutes
which opened and floated slowly down toward the city. The few people in Hiroshima
who caught sight of the two planes saw the parachutes blossom as the air craft
turned away from the city. Some cheered when they saw them, thinking the enemy
planes must be in trouble and the crews were starting to bail out. For three quarters of a
minute there was nothing in the clear sky over the city except the parachutes
and the diminishing whine of airplane engines as the B 29's retreated into the
lovely blue morning.
Then suddenly,
without a sound, there was no sky left over Hiroshima. For those who were there and
who survived to recall the moment when man first turned on himself the elemental
forces of his own universe, the first instant was pure light, blinding, intense
light, but light of an awesome beauty and variety. In the pause between
detonation and impact, a pause that for some was so short it could not register
on the senses, but which for others was long enough for shock to give way to
fear and for fear in turn to yield to instinctive efforts at self-preservation,
the sole impression was visual. If there was sound, no one heard it.
To Nukushina, just
inside his house, and to Mrs. Sakamoto, washing her kitchen floor, it was simply
sudden and complete blackness. For Nukushina's wife,
reaching for the bag of tomatoes on her husband's bicycle, it was a blue flash
streaking across her eyes. For Dr. Imagawa, at his
patient's city home, it again was darkness. For his wife, in the suburban hills
to the west, it was a "rainbow-colored object," whirling horizontally across the
sky over the city. To Yuko Yamaguchi, cleaning
up after breakfast in the rented farmhouse where she and her in-laws now lived,
it was a sudden choking black cloud as the ac cumulated soot and grime of
decades seemed to leap from the old walls.
Hayano Susukida,
bent over to pick up a salvaged roof tile so she could pass it down the line of
"volunteer" workers, did not see anything. She was merely crushed to the ground
as if by some monstrous super natural hand. But her son Junichiro, lounging
outside his dormitory at Otake, saw a flash that turned from white to pink and
then to blue as it rose and blossomed. Others, also at a distance of some miles,
seemed to see "five or six bright colors." Some saw merely "flashes of gold" in
a white light that reminded them-this was perhaps the most common description-of
a huge photographic flashbulb exploding over the city. The duration of this
curiously detached spectacle varied with the distance of the viewer from the
point in mid-air where the two lumps of U-235 were driven together inside the
bomb. It did not last more than a few seconds at the most. For thousands in Hiroshima it
did not last even that long, if in fact there was any moment of grace at all.
They were simply burned black and dead where they stood by the radiant heat that
turned central Hiroshima into a gigantic oven. For thousands of others there was
perhaps a second or two, certainly not long enough for wonder or terror or even
recognition of things seen but not believed, before they were shredded by the
thousands of pieces of shattered window glass that flew before the blast waves
or were crushed underneath walls, beams, bricks, or any other solid object that
stood in the way of the explosion.
For everyone else in
history's first atomic target, the initial assault on the visual sense was
followed by an instinctive assumption that a very large bomb had scored a direct
hit on or near the spot where they were standing. Old Mr. Sakamoto, who a
moment before had been lounging on the living-room floor with his newspaper,
found himself standing barefoot in his back yard, the paper still in his hand.
Then his wife staggered out of the house, and perhaps half a minute later, his
daughter-in-law Miho, who had been up stairs, groped her way out
also.
Dr. Imagawa had
just reached for his medical satchel to begin the examination of his patient.
When the blackness lifted from his senses, he found himself standing on top of a
five-foot pile of rubble that had been the sickroom. With him, surprisingly,
were both the sick man and the patient's young son. Mrs. Susukida, flat on the
ground amid the pile of old roof tiles, was left all but naked, stripped of
every piece of outer clothing and now wearing only her underwear, which itself
was badly torn.
Mrs. Nukushina had
just time to throw her hands over her eyes after she saw the blue flash. Then
she was knocked insensible. When she recovered consciousness, she lay in what
seemed to her to be utter darkness. All around her there was only rubble where a
moment earlier there had been her home and her husband's bicycle and the bag of
fresh tomatoes. She too was now without clothing except for her under wear. Her
body was rapidly becoming covered with her own blood from dozens of cuts. She
groped around until she found her four-year-old daughter Ikuko. She saw no trace
of her husband. Dazed and terrified, she took the child's hand and
fled. But Michiyoshi Nukushina was
there, and was still alive, though buried unconscious inside the wreckage of his
home. His life had been saved because the blast blew him into a corner where two
big, old-fashioned office safes, used in the family wine business, took the
weight of the roof when it fell and thus spared him from being crushed. As he
came to, raised his head and looked around, everything seemed strangely
reddened. He discovered later that blood from cuts on his head had gushed down
over his eyelids, forming a sort of red filter over his eyes. His first
conscious thought was that the emergency water tank kept on hand for
fire-bombing protection was only one-third full. As his head cleared, he called
for his wife and daughter. There was no reply. Getting painfully to his
feet--his left leg was badly broken--he found a stick for a crutch and hobbled
out of the rubble.
Hold out your left
hand, palm down, fingers spread, and you have a rough outline of the shape of
Hiroshima. The sea is beyond the fingertips. The back of the hand is where the
Ota River comes down from the hills to the north. The spot where the bomb
exploded is about where a wedding ring would be worn, just south of the main
military headquarters and in the center of the residential-commercial districts
of the city. Major Ferebee's aim was nearly perfect. Little Boy was detonated
little more than two hundred yards from the aiming point on his target chart,
despite the fact that it was released from a fast-moving aircraft over three
miles to the east and nearly six miles up in the air. Dropped with such precision,
the bomb performed better than its makers had predicted. Several factors combined by chance to
produce even more devastation than had been expected.
First was the time
of the explosion. All over Hiroshima, thousands of the charcoal braziers that
were the stoves in most households were still full of hot coals after being used
for breakfast cooking. Almost every stove was knocked over by the massive blast
wave that followed the explosion, and each became an incendiary torch to set
fire to the wood-and-paper houses. In addition, where [J. Robert] Oppenheimer
had estimated casualties on the assumption that most people would be inside
their air-raid shelters, almost no one in Hiroshima was sheltered when the bomb
actually fell. The recent all-clear, the fact that it was a time when most
people were on their way to work, the mischance by which there had been no new
alert when the Enola Gay approached the city, the fact that small formations of
planes had flown over many times before without dropping bombs, all combined to
leave people exposed. Thus more than seventy thousand persons instead of
Oppenheimer's estimate of twenty thousand were killed outright or so badly
injured that they were dead in a matter of hours. The initial flash spawned a
succession of calamities. First came heat. It lasted
only an instant but was so intense that it melted roof tiles, fused the quartz
crystals in granite blocks, charred the exposed sides of telephone poles for
almost two miles, and incinerated nearby humans so thoroughly that nothing
remained except their shadows, burned into asphalt pavements or stone walls. Of
course the heat was most intense near the "ground zero" point, but for thousands
of yards it had the power to burn deeply. Bare skin was burned up to two and a
half miles away.
A printed page was
exposed to the heat rays a mile and a half from the point of explosion, and the
black letters were burned right out of the white paper. Hundreds of women
learned a more personal lesson in the varying heat-absorption qualities of
different colors when darker parts of their clothing burned out while lighter
shades remained unscorched, leaving skin underneath etched in precise detail
with the flower patterns of their kimonos. A dress with blue polka dots printed
on white material came out of the heat with dark dots completely gone but the
white background barely singed. A similar phenomenon occurred in men's shirts.
Dark stripes were burned out while the alternate light stripes were undamaged.
Another factor that affected injury was the thickness of clothing. Many people
had their skin burned except where a double-thickness seam or a folded lapel had
stood between them and the fireball. Men wearing caps emerged with sharp lines
etched across their temples. Below the line, exposed skin was burned, while
above it, under the cap, there was no injury. Laborers working in the open with
only undershirts on had the looping pattern of shoulder straps and armholes
printed on their chests. Sometimes clothing protected the wearer only if it hung
loosely. One man standing with his arm bent, so that the sleeve was drawn
tightly over his elbow, was burned only around that joint.
The heat struck only
what stood in the direct path of its straight-line radiation from the fireball.
A man sitting at his desk writing a letter had his hands deeply burned because
the heat rays coming through his window fell directly on them, while his face,
only eighteen inches away but outside the path of the rays, was unmarked. In
countless cases the human body was burned or spared by the peculiarity of its
position at the moment of flash. A walking man whose arm was swinging forward at
the critical instant was burned all down the side of his torso. Another, whose
moving arm happened to be next to his body, was left with an unburned streak
where the limb had blocked out the radiation. In scores of cases people
were burned on one side of the face but not on the other because they had been
standing or sitting in profile to the explosion. A shirtless laborer was burned
all across his back-except for a narrow strip where the slight hollow down his
spine left the skin in a "shadow" where the heat rays could not
fall. Some measure of the heat's
intensity can be gained from the experience of the mayor of Kabe, a village ten
miles outside the city. He was standing in his garden and even at that distance
distinctly felt the heat on his face when the bomb exploded.
After the heat came
the blast, sweeping outward from fireball with the force of a five-hundred
mile-an-hour wind. Only those objects that offered a minimum of surface
resistance-handrails on bridges, pipes, utility poles-remained standing. The
walls of a few office buildings, specially built to resist earthquakes, remained
standing, but they now enclosed nothing but wreckage, as their roofs were driven
down to the ground, carrying everything in side down under them. Otherwise, in a
giant circle more than two miles across, everything was reduced to rubble. The
blast drove all before it. The stone columns flanking the entrance to the Shima
Surgical Hospital, directly underneath the explosion, were rammed straight down
into the ground. Every hard object that was dislodged, every brick, every broken
timber, every roof tile, became a potentially lethal missile. Every window in
the city was suddenly a shower of sharp glass splinters, driven with such speed
and force that in hundreds of buildings they were deeply imbedded in walls-or in
people. Many people were picking tiny shards of glass from their eyes for weeks
afterward as a result of the shattering of their spectacles, or trying to wash
out bits of sand and grit driven under their eyelids. Even a blade of grass now
became a weapon to injure the man who tended it. A group of boys working in an
open field had their backs peppered with bits of grass and straw which hit them
with such force that they were driven into the flesh.
Many were struck
down by a combination of the heat and the blast. A group of schoolgirls was
working on the roof of a building, removing tiles as the structure was being
demolished for a firebreak. Thus completely exposed, they were doubly hurt,
burned and then blown to the ground. So quickly did the blast follow the heat
that for many they seemed to come together. One man, knocked sprawling when the
blast blew in his window, looked up from the floor to see a wood-and-paper
screen across the room burning briskly. Heat and blast together
started and fed fires in thousands of places within a few seconds, thus
instantly rendering useless the painfully constructed firebreaks. In some spots
the ground itself seemed to spout fire, so numerous were the flickering little
jets of flame spontaneously ignited by the radiant heat. The city's fire
stations were crushed or burned along with everything else, and two-thirds of
Hiroshima's firemen were killed or wounded. Even if it had been left intact, the
fire department could have done little or nothing to save the city. Not only
were there too many fires, but the blast had broken open the city's water mains
in seventy thousand places, so there was no pressure. Between them, blast and
fire destroyed every single building within an area of almost five square miles
around the zero point. Although the walls of thirty structures still stood, they
were no more than empty shells.
After heat, blast,
and fire, the people of Hiroshima had still other ordeals ahead of them. A few
minutes after the explosion, a strange rain began to fall. The raindrops were as
big as marbles-and they were black. This frightening phenomenon resulted from
the vaporization of moisture in the fireball and condensation in the cloud that
spouted up from it. As the cloud, carrying water vapor and the pulverized dust
of Hiroshima, reached colder air at higher altitudes, the moisture condensed and
fell out as rain. There was not enough to put out the fires, but there was
enough of this "black rain" to heighten the bewilderment and panic of people
already unnerved by what had hit them.
After the rain came
a wind-the great "fire wind"-which blew back in toward the center of the
catastrophe, increasing in force as the air over Hiroshima grew hotter and
hotter because of the great fires. The wind blew so hard that it uprooted huge
trees in the parks where survivors were collecting. It whipped up high waves on
the rivers of Hiroshima and drowned many who had gone into the water in an
attempt to escape from the heat and flames around them. Some of those who
drowned had been pushed into the rivers when the crush of fleeing people
overflowed the bridges, making fatal bottlenecks of the only escape routes from
the stricken islands. Thousands of people were simply fleeing, blindly and
without an objective except to get out of the city. Some in the suburbs, seeing
them come, thought at first they were Negroes, not Japanese, so blackened were
their skins. The refugees could not explain what had burned them. "We saw the
flash," they said, "and this is what happened."
One of those who
struggled toward a bridge was Nukushina, the wine seller turned fireman whose
life had been saved by the big office safes in his house just over a half mile
from "zero," the point over which the bomb exploded. Leaning on his stick, he
limped to the Sumiyoshi bridge a few hundred yards away, where, with unusual
foresight, he kept a small boat tied up, loaded with fresh water and a little
food, ready for any possible emergency. "I found my boat
intact," he recalled later, "but it was already filled with other desperate
victims. As I stood on the bridge wondering what to do next, black drops of rain
began to splatter down. The river itself and the river banks were teeming with
horrible specimens of humans who had survived and come seeking safety to the
river." Fortunately for Nukushina,
another boat came by, operated by a friend who offered to take him on
board. "With his assistance, I
climbed into the boat. At that time, they pointed out to me that my intestines
were dangling from my stomach but there was nothing I could do about it. My
clothes, boots and every thing were blown off my person, leaving me with only my
loincloth. Survivors swimming in the river shouted for help, and as we leaned
down to pull them aboard, the skin from their arms and hands literally peeled
off into our hands.
"A fifteen- or
sixteen-year-old girl suddenly popped up alongside our boat and as we offered
her our hand to pull her on board, the front of her face suddenly dropped off as
though it were a mask. The nose and other facial features suddenly dropped off
with the mask, leaving only a pink, peach-like face front with holes where the
eyes, nose and mouth used to be. As the head dropped under the surface, the
girl's black hair left a swirling black eddy.... " Here Nukushina mercifully
lost consciousness. He came to five hours later as he was being transferred into
a launch that carried him, with other wounded, to an emergency first-aid station
set up on the island of Ninoshima in the harbor. There he found safety, but no
medical care. Only twenty-eight doctors were left alive and able to work in a
city of a quarter million people, fully half of whom were
casualties.
SOME SURVIVORS
REACTIONS: Miho Sakamoto, who with her husband's parents had escaped the blast
and fire because their home was protected by the city's only high hill, was told
on August 7 that her husband's military unit had been completely wiped out. She
shed no tears and showed no emotion. Four days later, she visited the ruins of
the building in which he had died, found a bent ash tray which she recognized as
his and brought it home. That night, she seemed in good spirits when she went
upstairs to the room she had shared with her Tsuneo. The next morning she did
not come down to breakfast. Her mother-in-law found her lying in front of a
little altar, the ash tray in front of her beside a photograph of her dead
husband, the razor with which she had cut her throat still clutched in her hand.
She left a note of apology to "My Honorable Father and Mother." “What I am about to do,” she
wrote, “ I do not do on sudden impulse; nor is it due to temporary agitation. It
is a mutual vow exchanged with my husband while he still lived. This is the road
to our greatest happiness and we proceed thereon. Like a bird which has lost one
wing, we are crippled birds who cannot go through life without one another.
There is no other way. Please, do not bewail my fate. Somewhere both of us will
again be living happily together as we have in the past.... My honorable Tsuneo
must be anxiously awaiting me and I must rush to his side.”
Sixteen-year-old
Junichiro Susukida, at his factory school dormitory in Otake, sixteen miles west
of Hiroshima, had seen the fireball and the great cloud that rose over the city
Monday morning. When the first refugees arrived with the news that the city had
been badly hit, he was one of many students who demanded permission to go to
their homes, and he was one of five finally allowed to go into the city to
contact authorities at the main school building and seek news of the students'
families. By the time they reached
Miyajima, on the south western edge of the city, the students could see the
fires still burning in the bright late afternoon. As they came closer, they
began to realize the full extent of the calamity. It was dark before the boys
reached their home neighborhood and began their search for relatives. Junichiro,
though unable to find either his mother or younger brother, did at last
encounter neighbors who told him his brother had survived, though wounded, and
had been taken to the home of other relatives in Fuchu. He could learn nothing
about his mother, however, and finally headed back to his dormitory in Otake.
Dead tired when he arrived at 2 A.M., he was nevertheless too distraught to
sleep. He sat in the school auditorium and incongruously played the piano until
fatigue finally subdued his nerves just before dawn on Tuesday, August
7th.