Full text of "Hiroshima"

First published in the NEW YORKER, August, 1946 Published in Penguin Books November 1946 C Made and printed in Great Britain for Penguin Books Ltd. by C. Nicholls and Co. Ltd. London* Manchester, Reading PUBLISHERS' NOTE- ON Monday, "August 6th, 1945, a new era in human . history opened. After years of intensive research and experiment, conducted in their later stages mainly in America, by scientists of many nationalities, Japanese among them, the forces which hold together the con- stituent particles of the atom had at last been harnessed to man's use: and on that day man used them. By a decision of the American military authorities, made, it is said, in defiance of the protests of many of the scientists who had worked on the project, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. As a direct result, some 60,000 Japanese men, women and children were killed, and 100,000 injured ; and almost the whole of a great seaport, a city of 250,000 people, was destroyed by blast or by fire. As an indirect result, a few days later, Japan acknowledged defeat, and the Second World War came to an end. For many months little exact and reliable news about the details of the destruction wrought by the first atomic bomb reached Western readers. Millions of words were written, in Europe and America, ex- plaining the marvellous new powers that science had placed in men's hands; describing the researches and experiments that had led up to this greatest of all disclosures of Nature's secrets: discussing the pro- blems for man's future which the new weapon raised. Argument waxed furious as to the ethics of the bomb : should the Japanese have received advance warning v of America's intention to use it ? Should a demon- stration bomb have been exploded in the presence of enemy observers in some remote spot where it would do a minimum of damage, as a warning to the Japanese people, before its first serious use ? But of the feelings and reactions of the people of Hiroshima to the bomb, nothing, or at least nothing that was not pure imagina- tion, could be written ; for nothing was known. Tn May, 1946, The New Yorker sent John Hersey, journalist and author of A Bell for Adano, to the Far East to find out what had really happened at Hiro- shima : to interview survivors of the catastrophe, to endeavour to describe what they had seen and felt and thought, what the destruction of their city, their lives and homes and hopes and friends, had meant to them in short, the cost of the bomb in terms of human suffering and reaction to suffering. He stayed in Japan for a month, gathering his own material with little, if any, help from the occupying authorities ; he obtained the stories from actual witnesses. The characters in his account are living individuals, not composite types. The story is their own story, told as far as possible in their own words. On August 31st, 1946, Hersey's story was made public. For the first time in The New Yorker's career an issue appeared which, within the* familiar covers, bearing for such covers are prepared long in advance a picnic scene, carried no satire, no cartoons, no fiction, no verse or smart quips or shop- ping notes : nothing but its advertisement matter and Hersey's 30,000-word story. That story is built round the experiences of six people who were in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped, VI each of whom, by some strange chance, escaped, not unscathed, but at least with life. One, a Roman Catholic missionary priest, was a German; the other five were Japanese: a Red Cross hospital doctor, another doctor with a private practice, an office girl, a Protestant clergyman, and a tailor's widow. For some time after the bomb had fallen, none of them knew exactly what had happened : they hardly realised that their old familiar life had ended, that they had been chosen by chance, or destiny, or as two of them at any rate would have put it by God, to be helpless small-part actors in an unparalleled tragedy. Bit by bit came the awakening to the magnitude of the calamity that had removed, in a flash, nearly all their accustomed world. Hersey's vivid yet matter-of-fact story tells what the bomb did to each of these six people, through the hours and the days that followed its impact on their lives. It is written soberly, with no attempt whatever to "pile on the agony" the presentation at times is almost cold in its economy of words. To six ordinary men and women, at the time and afterwards, it seemed like this. The New Yorker's original intention was to make the story a serial. But in an inspired moment, the paper's editors saw that it must be published as a single whole and decided to devote a whole issue to Hersey's masterpiece of reconstruction. For ten days Hersey ^feverishly rewrote and polished his story, handing it out by instalments to the printers, and no hint of what was in the air escaped from The New Yorker office. On August 31st, in the paper's usual format, the Vli historic issue appeared. It created a first-order sensation in American journalistic history : a few hours after publication the issue was sold out. Applica- tions poured in for permission to serialise the story in other American journals, among them the New York Herald Tribune, Washington Post, Chicago Sun, and Boston Globe. A condensed version the cuts person- ally approved by Hersey was broadcast in four instalments by the American Broadcasting Company. Some fifty newspapers in the U.S. eventually obtained permission to use the story in serial form, the copyright fees, after tax deduction, at Mersey's direction going to the American Red Cross. Albert Einstein ordered a thousand copies of the New Yorker containing the story. Even stage rights were sought from the author, though he refused to give permission for dramatisation. British newspapers and press syndicates immediately cabled for reproduction rights : but the New Yorker's executives insisted that no cutting could be permitted, and with British paper rationing, full newspaper publication was seen to be impracticable. The book production rights for the United States were secured by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and the American Book of the Month Club chose it for publication as an "Extra" ; and the B.B.C. obtained permission to broadcast the article in full in four episodes as part of their new Third Programme. Penguin Books, feeling that Kersey's story should receive the widest possible circulation in Great Britain,- immediately cabled to Alfred A. Knopf for, and were accorded, permission to issue it complete in book form. It here appears save for following English vm spelling conventions in an edition of 250,000 copies, exactly as it appeared in the pages of the New Yorker. Many accounts have been published telling so far as security considerations allow how the atom bomb works. But here, for the first time, is not a description of scientific triumphs, of intricate machines, new elements, and mathematical formulas, but an account of what the bomb does seen through the eyes of some of those to whom it did it : of those who endured one of the world's most catastrophic experiences, and lived. IX HIROSHIMA The following note appeared in the NEW YORKER of 31 dugusf, 1946, as an introduction to John Hersey's article The NEW YORKER this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might wed take time to consider the terrible implications of its use. I . A NOISELESS FLASH AT exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel depart- ment at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor's widow, stood by the window of her kitchen watching a neighbpur tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defence fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order's three-storey mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city's large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassennann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tammoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man's house in Koi, the city's western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he* had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed 14 HIROSHIMA by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition -a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one street-car instead of the next that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time none of them knew anything. t jhe Reverend Mr. Tanimoto got up at five o'clock that morning. He was alone in the parsonage, because for some time his wife had been commuting with their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida, a suburb to the north. Of all the important cities of Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san, or Mr. B, as the Japanese with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29 ; and Mr. Tanimoto, like all his neigh- bours and friends, was almost sick with anxiety. He had heard uncomfortably detailed accounts of mass raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other nearby towns; he was sure Hiroshima's turn would come soon. He had slept badly the night before, because there had been several air-raid warnings. Hiroshima had been getting such warnings almost every night for weeks, for at that time the B-29s were using Lake Biwa, north-east of Hiroshima, as a rendezvous point, and no matter what city the Americans planned to hit, the Super-fortresses streamed in over the coast near Hiroshima. The frequency of the 'warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiro- shima had made its citizens jittery ; a rumour was going A NOISELESS FLASH 15 around that the Americans were saving something special for the city. Mr. Tanimoto is a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry. He wears his black hair parted in the middle and rather long ; the prominence of the frontal bones just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his moustache, mouth, and chin give him a strange, old- young look, boyish and yet wise, weak and yet fiery. He moves nervously and fast, but with a restraint which suggests that he is a cautious, thoughtful man. He showed, indeed, just those qualities in the uneasy days before the bomb fell. Besides having his wife spend the nights in Ushida, Mr. Tanimoto had been carrying all the portable things from his church, in the close- packed residential district called Nagaragawa, to a house that belonged to a rayon manufacturer in Koi, two miles from the centre of town. The rayon man, a Mr. Matsui, had opened his then unoccupied estate to a large number of his friends and acquaintances, so that they might evacuate whatever they wished to a safe distance from the probable target area. Mr. Tanimoto had no difficulty in moving chairs, hymnals, Bibles, altar gear, and church records by pushcart himself, but the organ console and an upright piano required some aid. A friend of his named Matsuo had, the day before, helped him get the piano out to Koi; in return, he had promised this day to assist Mr. Matsuo in hauling out a daughter's belongings. That is why he had risen so early. Mr. Tanimoto cooked his own breakfast. He felt awfully tired. The effort of moving the piano the day before, a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbalanced 16 HIROSHIMA diet, the cares of his parish all combined to make him feel hardly adequate to the new day's work. There was another thing, too: Mr. Tanimoto had studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia; he had graduated in 1940; he spoke excellent English; he dressed in American clothes ; he had corresponded with many American friends right up to the time the 'war began ; and among a people obsessed with a fear of being spied upon perhaps almost obsessed himselfhe found himself growing increasingly uneasy. The police had questioned him several times, and just a few days before, he had heard that an influential acquaintance, a Mr. Tanaka, a retired officer of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line, an anti-Christian, a man famous in Hiroshima for his showy philan- thropies and notorious for his personal tyrannies, had been telling people that Tanimoto should not be trusjted. In compensation, to show himself publicly a good Japanese, Mr. Tanimoto had taken on the chairmanship of his local tonarigumi, or Neighbourhood Association, and to his other duties and concerns this position had added the business of organising air-raid defence for about twenty families. Before six o'clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto started for Mr. Matsuo's house. There he found that their burden was to be a tansu, a large Japanese cabinet, full of clothing and household goods. The two mei^ set out, The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few minutes after they started, the air raid siren went off * a minute-long blast that warned of approaching planes but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight A NOISELESS FLASH 17 degree of danger, * since it sounded every morning at this time, when an American weather plane came over. The two men pulled and pushed the handcart through the city streets. Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city, lying mostly on the six islands formed by the seven estuarial rivers that branch out from the Ota River; its main commercial and residential districts, covering about four square miles in the centre of the city, contained three-quarters of its population, which had been reduced by several evacuation programmes from a wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000. Factories and other residential districts, or suburbs, lay compactly around the edges of the city. To the south were the docks, an airport, and an island-studded Inland Sea. A rim of mountains runs around the other three sides of the delta. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo took their way through the shopping centre, already full of people, and across two of the rivers to the sloping streets of Koi, and up them to the outskirts and foot- hills. As they started up a valley away from the tight- ranked houses, the all-clear sounded. (The Japanese radar operators, detecting only three planes, supposed that they comprised a reconnaissance.) Pushing the handcart up to the raydn man's house* was tiring, and the men, after they had manoeuvred their load into the driveway and to the front steps, paused to rest awhile. They stood with a wing of the house between them and the city. Like most homes in this part of Japan, the house consisted of a wooden frame and wooden walls supporting a heavy tile roof. Its front hall, packed with rolls of bedding and clothing, looked like a cool cave full of fat cushions. Opposite 18 HIROSHIMA the house, to the right of the front door, there was a large, finicky rock garden. There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror and both had time to react (for they * were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the centre of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. He bellied up very hard against one of them. As his face was against the stone he did not see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto's mother-in- law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away,) When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and saw that the rayon man's house had collapsed. He thou'ght a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the A NOISELESS FLASH 19 street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate had fallen over toward the house rather than away from it. In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests and backs. They were silent and dazed. Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker. At nearly midnight, the night before the bomb was dropped, an announcer on the city's radio station said that about two hundred B-29s were approaching southern Honshti and advised the population of Hiroshima to evacuate to their designated " safe areas." Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor's widow who lived in the section called Nobori-cho and who had long had a habit of doing as she was told, got her three children a ten-year-old boy, Toshio, an eight-year-old girl, Yaeko, and a five-year-old girl, Myeko out of bed and dressed them and walked with them to the military area known as the East Parade Ground, on the north-east edge of the city. There she unrolled some mats and the children lay down on them. They slept until about two* when they were awakened by the roar of the planes going over Hiroshima. As soon as the planes had passed, Mrs. Nakamura started back with her children. They reached home a little after two-thirty and she immediately turned 4 on the radio, which, to her distress, was just then broadcasting a 20 HIROSHIMA fresh warning. When she looked at the children and saw how tired they were, and when she thought of the number of trips they had made in past weeks, all to no purpose, to the East Parade .Ground, she decided that in spite of the instructions on the radio, she simply could not face starting out all over again. She put the children in their bedrolls on the floor, lay down herself at three o'clock, and fell asleep at once, so soundly that when planes passed over later, she did not waken to their sound. The siren jarred her awake at about seven. She arose, dressed quickly, and hurried to the house of Mr. Nakamoto, the head of her Neighbourhood Association, and asked him what she should do. He said that she should remain at home unless an urgent warning a series of intermittent blasts of the siren was sounded. She returned home, lit the stove in the kitchen, set some rice to cook, and sat down to read that morning's Hiroshima Chugoku. To her relief, the all-clear sounded at eight o'clock. She heard the children stirring, so she went and gave each of them a handful of peanuts and told them to stay on their bedrolls, because they w&re tired from the night's walk. She had hoped that they would go back to sleep, but the man in the house directly to the south began to make a terrible hullabaloo of hammering, wedging, ripping, and splitting. The prefectural government, convinced, as everyone in Hiroshima was, that the city would be attacked soon, had began to press with threats and warnings for the completion of wide fire lanes, which, it' was hoped, might act in conjunction with the rivers to localise any fires started A NOISELESS FLASH 21 by an incendiary raid ; and the neighbour was reluct- antly sacrificing his home to the city's safety. Just the day before, the prefecture had ordered all able-bodied girls from the secondary -schools to spend a few days helping to clear these lanes, and they started work soon after the all-clear sounded. Mrs. Nakamura went back to the kitchen, looked at the rice, and began watching the man next door. At first she was annoyed with him for making so much noise, but then she was moved almost to tears by pity. Her emotion was specifically directed toward her neighbour, tearing down his home, board by board, . at a time when there was so much unavoidable destruc- tion, but undoubtedly she also felt a generalised, community pity, to say nothing of self-pity. She had not had an easy time. Her husbarfd, Isawa, had gone into the army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5th, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: "Isawa died an honourable death at Singapore." She learned later that he had died on February 15th, the day Singapore fell, and that he had been a corporal. Isawa had not been a particularly prosperous tailor, and his only capital was a Sankoku sewing machine. After his death, when his allotments stopped coming, Mrs. Nakamuru got out the machine and began to take in piecework herself, and since then had supported the children, but poorly, by sewing. As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbour, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion 22 HIROSHIMA toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the centre of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house. Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, " Mother, help me ! " and saw her youngest Myeko, the five-year-old buried up to her breast and unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children. In the days right before the bombing, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, being prosperous, hedonistic, and, at the time not too busy, had been allowing himself the luxury of sleeping until nine or nine-thirty, but fortunately he had to get up early the morning the bomb was dropped to see a house guest off on a train. He rose at six, and half an hour later walked with his friend to the station, not far away, across two of the rivers. He was back home by seven, just as the siren sounded its sustained warning. He ate breakfast and then, because the morning was already hot, undressed down to his underwear and went out on the porch to read the paper. This porch in fact, the whole building- was curiously constructed. Dr. Fujii was the proprietor of a peculiarly Japanese institution, a private, single- doctor hospital. This building, perched beside and over the water of the Kyo River, and next to the bridge A NOISELESS FLASH 23 of the same name, contained thirty rooms for thirty patients and their kinsfolk for, according to Japanese custom, when a person falls sick and goes to a hospital, one or more members of his family go and live there with him, to cook for him, bathe, massage, and read to him, and to offer incessant familial sympathy, without which a Japanese patient would be miserable indeed. Dr. Fujii had no beds only straw mats for his patients. He did, however, have all sorts of modern equipment: an X-ray machine, diathermy apparatus, and a fine tiled laboratory. The structure rested two-thirds on the land, one-third on piles over the tidal waters of the Kyo. This overhang, the part of the building where Dr. Fujii lived, was queer-looking, but it was cool in summer and from the porch, which faced away from the centfe of the city, the prospect of the river, with pleasure boats drifting up and down it, was always refreshing. Dr. Fujii had occasionally had anxious moments when the Ota and its mouth branches rose to flood, but the piling was apparently firm enough and the house had always held. Dr. Fujii had been relatively idle for about a month because in July, as the number of untouched cities in Japan dwindled and as Hiroshima seemed more and more inevitably a target, he began turning patients away, on the ground that in case of a fire raid he would not be able to evacuate them. Now he had only two patients left a woman from Yano, injured in the shoulder, and a young man of twenty-five recovering from burns he had suffered when the steel factory near Hiroshima in which he worked had been hit. Dr. Fujii had six nurses to tend his patients. His wife and 24 HIROSHIMA children were safe; his wife and one son were living outside Osaka, and another son and two daughters were in the country on Kyushu. A niece was living with him, and a maid and a manservant. He had little to do and did not mind, for he had saved some money. At fifty he was healthy, convivial, and calm, and he was pleased to pass the evenings drinking whisky with friends, always sensibly and for the sake of conversa- tion. Before the war, he had affected brands imported from Scotland and America; now he was perfectly satisfied with the best Japanese brand, Suntory. Dr. Fujii sat down cross-legged in his underwear on the spotless matting of the porch, put on his glasses, and started reading the Osaka Asahi. He liked to read the Osaka news because his wife was there. He saw the flash. To him faced away from the centre and looking at his paper it seemed a brilliant yellow. Startled, he began to rise to his feet. In that moment (he was 1,550 yards from the centre), the hospital leaned behind his rising and, with a terrible ripping noise, toppled into the river. The Doctor, still in the act of getting to his feet, was thrown forward and around and over; he was buffetted and gripped; he lost track of everything, because things were so speeded up ; he felt the water. Dr. Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realized that he was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers in a V across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticksheld upright, so that he could not move, with his head miraculously above water and his torso and legs in it The remains of his hospital were all around him in a A NOISELESS FLASH 25 mad assortment of splintered lumber and materials for the relief of pain. His left shoulder hurt terribly. His glasses were gone. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, of the Society of Jesus, was, on the morning of the explosion, in rather frail condition. The Japanese war-time diet had not sus- tained him, and he felt the strain of being a foreigner in an increasingly xenophobic Japan ; even a German, since the defeat of the Fatherland, was unpopular. Father Kleinsorge had, at thirty-eight, the look of a boy growing too fast thin in the face, with a prominent Adam's apple, a hollow chest, dangling hands, big feet. 'He walked clumsily, leaning forward a little. He was tired all the time. To make matters worse, he had suffered for two^ days, along with Father Cieslik, a fellow-priest, from a rather painful and urgent diarrhoea, which they blamed on the beans and black ration bread they were obliged to eat. Two other priests then living in the mission compound, which was in the Nobori-cho section Father Superior LaSalle and Father Schifier had happily escaped this affliction. Father Kleinsorge woke up about six the morning the bomb was dropped, and half-an-hour later he was a bit tardy because of his sickness he began to read Mass in the mission chapel, a small Japanese-style wooden building which was without pews, since its worshippers knelt on the usual Japanese matted floor, facing an altar graced with splendid silks, brass, silver, and heavy embroideries. This morning, a Monday, the only worshippers were Mr. Takemoto, a theological student living in the mission house; Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese; Mrs. Murata, the mission's 26 HIROSHIMA devoutly Christian housekeeper ; and his fellow-priests. After Mass, while Father Kleinsorge was reading the Prayers of Thanksgiving, the siren sounded. He stopped th6 service and the missionaries retired across the compound to the bigger building. There, in his room on the ground floor, to the right of the front door, Father Kleinsorge changed into a military liniform which he had acquired when he was teaching at the Rokko Middle School in Kobe and which he wore during air-raid alerts. After an alarm, Father Kleinsorge always went out and scanned the sky, and this time, when he stepped outside, he was glad to see only the single weather plane that flew over Hiroshima each day about this time. Satisfied that nothing would happen, he went in and breakfasted with the other Fathers on substitute coffee and ration bread, which, under the circumstances, was especially repugnant to him. The Fathers sat and talked a whiJe, until, at eight, they heard the all-clear. They went then to various parts of the building. Father Schiffcr retired to his room to do some writing. Father Cieslik sat in his room in a straight chair with a pillow over his stomach to ease his pain, and read. Father Superior LaSalle stood at the window of his room, thinking. Father Kleinsorge went up to a room on the third floor, took off all his clothes except his underwear, and stretched out on his right side on a cot and began reading his Stimmen der Zeit. After the terrible flash which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth he bad time (since he was 1,400 yards from the A NOISELESS FLASH 27 centre) for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind. Father Kleinsorge never knew how he got out of the hbuse. " The next things he was conscious of were that he was wandering around in the mission's vege- table garden in his underwear, bleeding slightly from small cuts along his left flank; that all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits' mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes ; that the day had turned dark; and that Murata-sa/i, the housekeeper, was near by, crying over and over, " Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai I Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us !" On the train on the way into Hiroshima from the country, where he lived with his mother, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, the Red Cross Hospital surgeon, thought over an unpleasant nightmare he had had the night before. His mother's horrife was in Mukaihara, thirty miles from the city, and it took him two hours by train and tram to reach the hospital. He had slept uneasily all night and had wakened an hour earlier than usual, and, feeling sluggish and slightly feverish, had debated whether to go to the hospital at all ;his sense of duty finally forced him to go, and he had started out on an earlier train than he took most mornings. The dream had particularly frightened him because it was so closely associated, on the surface at least, with a dis- turbing actuality. He was only twenty-five years old and had just completed his training at the Eastern Medical University, in Tsingtao, China. He was some- 28 HIROSHIMA thing of an idealist and was much distressed by the inadequacy of medical facilities in the country town where his mother lived. Quite on his own, and without a permit, he had begun visiting a few sick people out there in the evenings, after his eight hours at the hospital and four hours' commuting. He had recently learned that the penalty for practising without a permit was severe; a fellow-doctor whom he had asked about it had given him a serious scolding. Nevertheless, he had continued to practise. In his dream, he had been at the bedside of a country patient when the police and the doctor he had consulted burst into the room, seized him, dragged him outside, and beat him up cruelly. On the train, he just about decided to give up the work in Mukaihara7 since he felt it would be impossible to get a permit, because the authorities would hold that it would conflict with his duties at the Red Cross Hospital. At the terminus, he caught a street-car at once. (He later calculated that if he had taken his customary train that morning, and if he had had to wait a few minutes for the street-car, as often happened, he would have been close to the centre at the time of the explosion and would surely have perished.) He arrived at the hospital at seven-forty and reported to the chief surgeon. A few minutes later, he went to a room on the first floor and drew blopd from the arm off a man in order to perforjn a Wassermann test. The laboratory containing the incubators for the test was on the third floor. With the blood specimen in his left hand, walking in a kind of distraction he had felt all morning, probably because of the dream and his restless night, A NOISELESS FLASH 29 he started along the main corridor on his way toward the stairs. He was one step beyond an open window when the light of the bomb was reflected, like a gigantic photographic flash, in the corridor. He ducked down on one knee and said to himself, as only a Japanese would, " Sasaki, gambare / Be brave !" Just then (the building was 1,650 yards from the centre), the blast ripped through the hospital. The glasses he was wearing flew off his face; the bottle of blood crashed against one wall ; his Japanese slippers zipped out from under his feet but otherwise, thanks to where he stood, he was untouched. Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon and rushed around to the man's office and found him terribly cut by glass. The hospital was in horrible confusion : heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the patients were running about screaming, many more lay dead. (A colleague working in the laboratory to which Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr. Sasaki's patient, whom he had just left and who a few moments before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis, was also dead.) Dr. Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the hospital who was unhurt. Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit only the building he was in, got bandages and began to bind the wounds of those inside the hospital ; while outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the Red Cross Hospital to begin an invasion that was to make 30 HIROSHIMA Dr. Sasaki forget his private nightmare for a long, long time. Miss Toshiko Sasaki, the East Asia Tin Works clerk, who is not related to Dr. Sasaki, got up at three o'clock in the morning on the day the bomb fell. There was extra housework to do. Her eleven-month- old brother, Akio, had come down the day before with a serious stomach upset; her mother had taken him to the Tamura Pcdiatric Hospital and was staying there with him. Miss Sasaki, who was about twenty, had to cook breakfast for her father, a brother, a sister, and herself, and since the hospital, because of the war, was unable to provide food to prepare a whole day's meals TFor her mother and the baby, in time for her father, who worked in a factory making rubber ear- plugs for artillery crews, to take the food by on his way to the plant. When she had finished and had cleaned and put away the cooking things, it was nearly seven. The family lived in Koi, and she had a forty- five-minute trip to the tin works, in the section of town called Kannon-machi. She was in charge of the personnel records in the factory. She left Koi at seven, and as soon as she reached the plant, she went with some of the other girls from the personnel department to the factory auditorium. A prominent local Navy man, a former employee, had committed suicide the day before by throwing himself under a train a death considered honourable enough to warrant a memorial service, which was to be held at the tin works at ten o'clock that morning. In the large hall, Miss Salaki and the others made suitable preparations for the meeting. This work took about twenty minutes. A NOISELESS FLASH 31 Miss Sasaki went back to her office and sat down at her desk. She was quite far from the windows, which were off to her left, and behind her were.-a couple of tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory library, which the personnel department had organized. She settled herself at her desk, put some things in a drawer, and shifted papers. She thought that before she began to make entries in her lists of new employees, discharges, and departures for the Army, she would chat for a moment with the girl at her right. Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the plant was 1,600 yards from the centre). Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way ; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking under- neath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment ofjihe atomic age, a human being was crushed by ~books. II THE FIRE IMMEDIATELY after the explosion, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had been digging, attached himself sympathetically to an old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding her had with her left hand, supporting a small boy of three or four on her back with her right, and crying, " I'm hurt ! I'm hurt ! I'm hurt !" Mr. Tanimoto transferred the child to his own back and led the woman by the hand down the street, which was darkened by what seemed to be a local column of dust. He took the woman to a grammar school not far away that had previously been designated for use as a temporary hospital in' case of emergency. By this solicitous behaviour, Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror. At the school, he was much surprised to see glass all over the floor and fifty or sixty injured people already waiting to be treated. He reflected that, although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs must have been dropped. He thought of a hillock in the rayon man's garden from which he could get a view of the whole of Koi of the whole of Hiroshima, for that matterand he ran back up to the estate. From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing panorama. Not just a patch of Koi, as he had expected, but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma. 'THE FIRE 33 Clumps of smoke, near and tar, had begun to push up through the general dust. He wondered how such extensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent sky ; even a few planes, far 3 up, would have been audible. Houses nearby were burning, and when huge drops of water 'the size of marbles began to fall, he half thought that they must be coming from the hoses of firemen fighting the blazes. (They were actually drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments, that had already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima.) Mr. Tanimoto turned away from the sight when he heard Mr. Matsuo call out to ask whether he was all right. Mr. Matsuo had been safely cushioned within the falling house by the bedding stored in the front hall and had worked his way out. Mr. Tanimoto scarcely answered. He had thought of his wife and baby, his church, his home, his parishioners, all of them down in that awful murk. Once more he began to run in fear toward the city. Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor's widow, having struggled up from under the ruins of her house after the explosion, and seeing Myeko, the youngest of her three children, buried breast-deep and unable to move, crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free the child. Then, from what seemed to be caverns far below, she heard two small voices crying, " Tasukete ! Tasukete I "Help! Help!" She called the names of her ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter: "Toshio i Yaeko 1" The voices from below answered. 34 . HIROSHIMA Mrs. Nakamura abandoned Myeko, who at least could breathe, and in a frenzy made the wreckage fly above the crying voices. The children had been sleeping nearly ten feet apart, but now their voices seemed to come from the same place. Toshio, the boy, apparently had some freedom to move, because she could feel him undermining the pile of wood and tiles as she worked from above. At last she saw his head, and she hastily pulled him out by it. A mosquito net was wound intricately, as if it had been carefully wrapped, around his feet. He said he had been blown right across the room and had been on top of his sister, Yaeko under the wreckage. She now said, from under- neath, that she could not move, because there was something on her legs. With a bit more digging, Mrs. Nakamura cleared a hole above the child and began to pull her arm. " Itai I It hurts !" Yaeko cried. Mrs. Nakamura shouted, " There's no time now to say whether it hurts or not," and yanked her whim- pering daughter up. Then she freed Myeko. The children were filthy and bruised, but none of them had a single cut or scratch. Mrs. Nakamura took the children out into the street. They had nothing on but underpants, and although the day was very hot, she worried rather confusedly about their being cold, so she went back into the wreckage and burrowed underneath and found a bundle of clothes she had packed for an emergency, and she dressed them in pants, blouses, shoes a padded- cotton air-raid helmets called bokuzuki, and even, irrationally, overcoats. The children were silent^ except for the five-year-old, Myeko, who kept asking questions : THE FIRE 35 " Why is it night already ? Why did our house fall down ? What happened ?" Mrs. Nakamura, who did not know what had happened (had not the all-clear sounded ?), looked around and saw through the dark- ness that all the houses in her neighbourhood had collapsed. The house next door, which its owner had been tearing down to make way for a fire lane, was now very thoroughly, if crudely, torn down; its owner, who had been sacrificing his home for the community's safety, lay dead. Mrs. Nakamoto, wife of the head of the local air-raid defence Neighbourhood Association, came across the street with her head all bloody, and said that her baby was badly cut ; did Mrs. Nakamura have any bandage ? Mrs. Nakamura did not, but she crawled into the remains of her house again and pulled out some white cloth that she had been using in her work as a seamstress, ripped it into strips, and gave it to Mrs. Nakamoto. While fetching the cloth, she noticed her sewing machine; she went back in for it and dragged it out. Obviously, she could not carry it with her, so she unthinkingly plunged her symbol of livelihood into the receptacle which for weeks had been her symbol of safety the cement tank of water in front of her house, of the type every household had been ordered to construct against a possible fire raid. A nervous neighbour, Mrs. Hataya, called to Mrs. Nakamura to run away with herjo the woods in Asano Park an estate by the Kyo River not far off, belonging to the wealthy Asano family/ who once owned the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line. The park had been designated as an evacuation area for their neighbour- hood. Seeing fire breaking out in a nearby ruin (except 36 HIROSHIMA at the very centre, where the bomb itself ignited some fires, most of Hiroshima's citywide conflagration was caused by inflammable wreckage falling on cook- stoves and live wires), Mrs. Nakamura suggested going over to fight it. Mrs. Hataya said, " Don't be foolish. What if planes come and drop more bombs ?" So Mrs. Nakamura started out for Asano Park with her children and Mrs. Hataya, and she carried her ruck- sack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a suitcase of things she had cached in her air-raid shelter. Under many ruins, as they hurried along, they heard muffled screams for help. The only building they saw standing on their way to Asano Park was the Jesuit mission house, alongside the Catholic kinder- garten to which Mrs. Nakamura had sent Myeko for a time. As they passed it, she saw Father Kleinsorge, in bloody underwear, running out of the house with a small suitcase in his hand. Right after the explosion, while Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, S. J., was wandering around in his under- wear in the vegetable garden, Father Superior LaSalle came around the corner of the building in the darkness. His body, especially his back, was bloody; the flash' had made him twist away from his window, and tiny pieces of glass had flown at him. Father Kleinsorge, still bewildered, managed to ask, " Where are the rest ?" Just then, the two other priests living in the mission house appearedFather Cieslik, unhurt, supporting Father Schifier, who was covered with blood that spurted from a cut above his left ear and who was very pale. Father Cieslik was rather pleased with himself, for after the flash he, had dived into a doorway, THE FIRE 37 which he had previously reckoned to be the safest place inside the building, and when the blast came, he was not injured. Father LaSalle told Father Cieslik to take Father Schiffer to a doctor before he bled to death, and suggested either Dr. Kanda, who lived on the next corner, or Dr. Fujii, about six blocks away. The two men went out of the compound and up the street. The daughter of Mr. Hoshijima, the mission catechist, ran up to Father Kleinsorge and said that her mother and sister were buried under the ruins of their house, which was at the back of the Jesuit compound, and at the same time the priests noticed that the house of the Catholic-kindergarten teacher at the foot of the com- pound had collapsed on her. While Father LaSalle and Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, dug the teacher out, Father Kleinsorge went to the catechist's fallen house and began lifting things off the top of the pile. There was not a sound underneath ; he was sure the Hoshijima women had been killed. At last, under what had been a corner of the kitchen, he saw Mrs. Hoshijima's head. Believing her dead, he began to haul her out by the hair, but suddenly she screamed, " Itai ! Itai / It hurts ! It hurts !" He dug some more and lifted her out. He managed, too, to find her daughter in the rubble and free her. Neither was badly hurt. A public bath next door to the mission house had caught fire, but since there the wind was southerly, the priests thought their house would be spared. Nevertheless, as a precaution, Father Kleinsorge went inside to fetch some things he wanted to save. He found his room in a state of weird and illogical con- 38 HIROSHIMA fusion. A first-aid kit was hanging undisturbed on a hook on the wall, but his clothes, which had been on other hooks nearby, were nowhere to be seen. His desk was in splinters all over the room, but a mere papier-mache suitcase, which he had hidden under the desk, stood handle-side up, without a scratch on it, in the doorway of the room, where he could not miss it. Father Kleinsorge later came to regard this as a bit of Providential interference, inasmuch as the suit- case contained his breviary, the account books for the whole diocese, and a considerable amount of paper money belonging to the mission, for which he was responsible. He ran out of the house and deposited the suitcase in the mission air-raid shelter. At about this time, Father Cieslik and Father Schiffer, who was still spurting blood, came back and said that Dr. Kanda's house was ruined and that fire blocked them from getting out of what they supposed to be the local circle of destruction to Dr. Fujii's private hospital, on the bank of the Kyo River. Dr. MasaKazu Fujii's hospital was no longer on the bank of the Kyo River; it was in the river. After the overturn, Dr. Fujii was so stupefied and so tightly squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was unajble to move at first, and he hung there about twenty minutes in the darkened morning. Then a thought which came to him that soon the tide would be running in through the estuaries and his head would be submerged inspired him to fearful activity; he wriggled and turned and exerted what strength he could (though his left arm, because of the pain in his shoulder, was useless), and before long he had freed THE FIRE 39 himself from the vice. After a few moments' rest, he climbed on to the pile of timbers and, finding a long one that slanted up to the river bank, he painfully shinnied up it. c Dr. Fujii, who was in his underwear, was now soaking and dirty. His undershirt was torn, and blood ran down it from bad cuts on his chin and back. In this disarray, he walked out onto Kyo Bridge, beside which his hospital had stood. The bridge had not collapsed. He could see only fuzzily without his glasses, but he could see enough to be amazed at the number of houses that were down all around. On the bridge, he encountered a friend, a doctor named Machii, and asked in bewilderment, "What do you think it was?" Dr. Machii said, " It must have been a Molotoffano hanakago" a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the " bread basket," or self- scattering cluster of bombs. At first, Dr. Fujii could se^only two fires, one across the river from his hospital site and one quite far to the south. 'But at the same time, he and his friend observed something that puzzled them, and which, as doctors, they discussed: although there were as yet very few fires, wounded people were hurrying across the bridge in an endless parade of misery, and many of them exhibited terrible burns on their faces and arms. " Why do you suppose it is ?" Dr. Fujii asked. Even a theory was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii stuck to his. "Perhaps because it was a Molotov flower basket," he said. There had been no breeze earlier in the morning 40 HIROSHIMA when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to see a friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing every which way; here on the bridge the wind was easterly. New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge any more. Dr. Machii ran to the far side of the river and along a still unkindled street. Dr. Fujii went down into the water under the bridge, where a score of people had already taken refuge, among them his servants, who had extricated them- selves from the wreckage. From there, Dr. Fujii saw a nurse hanging in the timbers of his hospital by her legs, and then another painfully pinned across the breast. He enlisted the help of some of the others under the bridge and freed both of them. He thought he heard the voice of his niece for a moment, but he could not find her; he never saw her again. Four of his nurses and the two patients in the hospital died, too. Dr. Fujii went ba^Jt into the water of the river and waited for the fire to subside. The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion and, as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians and surgeons of Hiroshima with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapaci- tated in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended and why so many who might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors" in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,789 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, THE FIRE 41 that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred. The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki. After the explosion, he hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages. This room, like everything he had seen as he ran through the hospital, was chaotic bottles of medicines thrown off shelves and broken, salves spattered on the walls, instruments strewn everywhere. He grabbed up some bandages and an unbroken bottle of mercuro- chrome, hurried back to the chief surgeon, and bandaged his cuts. Then he went out into the corridor and began patching up the wounded patients and the doctors and nurses there. He blundered so without his glasses that he took a pair off the face of a wounded nurse, and although they only approximately com- pensated for the errors of his vision, they were better than "nothing. (He was to depend on them for more than a month.) Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking* those who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the corridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded. Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to find dreadful burns. He realized then that casualties were pouring in from outdoors. There were so many that he began to pass up the tightly wounded ; he decided that all he could hope to do was to stop people from bleeding to death. Before long, patients lay and croucjied on the floors of the wards and the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and 42 HIROSHIMA under the porte-cochere, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting. A tremendous number of schoolgirls some of those who had been taken from their classrooms to work outdoors, clearing fire Ian6s crept into the hospital. In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, " Sensei ! Doctor 1" and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his*sleeve and begged him to come to the aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skilful surgeon and a sympathetic man ; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding. Some of the wounded in Hiroshima were unable to enjoy the questionable luxury of hospitalisation. In what had been the personnel office of the East Asia Tin Works, Miss Sasaki lay doubled over, unconscious, under the tremendous pile of books and plaster and wood and corrugated iron. She was wholly unconscious (she later estimated) for about three hours. Her first THE FIRE 43 sensation was of dreadful pain in her left leg. It was so black under the books and debris that the borderline between awareness and unconsciousness was fine; she apparently crossed it several times, for the pain seemed to come and go. At the moments when it was sharpest, she felt that her leg had been cut off some- where below the knee. Later, she heard someone walking on top of the wreckage above her, and anguished voices spoke up, evidently from within the mess around her: " Please help ! Get us out !" Father Kleinsorge stemmed Father Schiffer's spurting cut as well as he could with some bandage that Dr. Fujii had given the priests a few days before. When he finished, he ran into the mission house again and found the jacket of his military uniform and an old pair of grey trousers. He put them on and went outside. A woman from next door ran up to him and shouted that her husband was buried under her house and the house was on fire; Father Kleinsorge must come and save him. Father Kleinsorge, already growing apathetic and dazed in the presence of the cumulative distress, said, "We haven't much time." Houses all around were burning, and the wind was now blowing hard. " Do you know exactly which part of the house he is under ?" he asked. " Yes, yes," she said. " Come quickly." They went around to the house, the remains of which blazed violently, but when they got there, it turned out that the woman had no idea where her husband was. Father Kleinsorge shouted several times, "Is anyone there?" There was no answer. 44 HIROSHIMA Father Kleinsorge said to the woman, " We must get away or we will all die." He went back to the Catholic compound and told the Father Superior that the fire was coming closer on the wind, which had swung around and was now from the north ; it was time for everybody to go. Just then, the kindergarten teacher pointed out to the priests Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese,, who was standing in his window on the second floor of the mission house, facing in the direction of the explosion, weeping. Father Cieslik, because he thought the stairs unusable, ran around to the back of the mission hcfuse to look for a ladder. There he heard people crying for help under a-nearby fallen roof. He called to passers-by running away in the street to help him lift it, but nobody paid any attention, and he had to leave the buried ones to die. Father Kleinsorge ran inside the mission house and scrambled up the stairs, which were awry and piled with plaster and lathing, and called to Mr. Fukai from the doorway of his room. Mr. Fukai, a very short man of about fifty, turned around slowly, with a queer look, and said, " Leave me here.*' Father Kleinsorge went into the room and took Mr. Fukai by the collar of his coat and said, " Come with me or you'll die." Mr. Fukai said, " Leave me here to die." Father Kleinsorge began to shove and haul Mr. Fukai out of the room. Then the theological student came up and grabbed Mr. Fukai's feet, and Father Kleinsorge took his shoulders, and together they carried him downstairs and outdoors. " I can't walk 1" THE FIRE 45 Mr. Fukai cried. " Leave me here !" Father Kleinsorge got his paper suitcase with the money in it and took Mr. Fukai up pick-a-back, and the party started for the East Parade Ground, their district's " safe a<rea." As they went out of the gate, Mr. Fukai, quite child- like now, beat on Father Kleinsorge's shoulders a,nd said, " I won't leave. I won't leave." Irrelevantly, Father Kleinsorge turned to Father LaSalle and said, " We have lost all our possessions but not our sense of humour." The street was cluttered with parts t>f houses that had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and wires. From every second or third house came the voices of people buried and abandoned, who invariably screamed, with formal politeness, " Tasukete kure ! Help, if you please !" The priests recognised several ruins from which these cries came as the homes of friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help. All the way, Mr. Fukai whimpered, " Let me stay." The party turned right when they came to a block of fallen houses that was one flame. At Sakai Bridge, which would take them across to the East Parade Ground, they saw that the whole community on the opposite side of the river was a sheet of fire; they dared not cross and decided to take refuge in Asano Park, off to their left. Father Kleinsorge, who had been weakened for a couple of days by his bad case of diarrhoea, began to stagger under his protesting burden, and as he tried to climb up over the wreckage of several houses that blocked their way to the park, he stumbled, dropped Mr. Fukai, and plunged down, head over heels, to the edge of the river. When he 46 HIROSHIMA picked himself up, he saw Mr. Fukai running away. Father Kleinsorge shouted to a dozen soldiers, who were standing by the bridge, to stop him. As Father Kleinsorge started back to get Mr. Fukai, Father L^Salle called out, " Hurry ! Don't waste time I" So Father Kleinsorge just requested the soldiers to take care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the little, broken man got away from them, and the last the priests could see of him, he was running back toward the fire. Mr. Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church, at first ran toward them by the shortest route, along Koi Highway. He was the only person making his way into the city ; Jjje met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pafti, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression what- ever. , After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he THE FIRE 47 approached the centre, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped ; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neigh- bours, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them. As a Christian he was filled with compassion for those who were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, " God help them and take them out of the fire." He thought he would skirt the fire, to the left. He ran back to Kannon Bridge and followed for a distance one of the rivers. He tried several cross streets, but all were blocked, so he turned far left and ran out to Yokogawa, a station on a railroad line that detoured the city in a wide semi-circle, and he followed the rails until he came to a burning train. So impressed was he by this time by the extent of the damage that he ran north two miles to Gion, a suburb in the foothills. All the way, he overtook dreadfully burned and lacerated people, and in his guilt he turned to right and left as he hurried and said to some of them, " Excuse me for having no burden like yours." Near Gion, he began to meet country people going toward the city to help, and when they saw him, several exclaimed, " Look ! There is one who is not wounded." At Gion, he bore toward the right bank of the main river, the Ota, and ran down it until he reached fire 48 HIROSHIMA again. There was no fire on the other side of the river, so he threw off his shirt and shoes and plunged into it. !n midstream, where the current was fairly strong, exhaustion and fear finally caught up with him he had run nearly seven miles and he became limp and drifted in the water. He prayed, " Please, God, help me to cross. It would be nonsense for me to be drowned when I am the only uninjured one.*' He managed a few more strokes and fetched up on a spit downstream. Mr. Tanimoto climbed up the bank and ran along it until, near a large Shinto shrine, he came to more fire, and as he turned left to get around it, he met, by incredible luck, his wife. She was carrying their infant son. Mr. Tanimoto was now so emotionally worn out that nothing could surprise him. He did not embrace his wife; he simply said, " Oh, you are safe." She told him that she had got home from her night in Ushida just in time for the explosion; she had been buried under the parsonage with the baby in her arms. She told how the wreckage had pressed down on her, how the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and by reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole bigger, bit by bit. After about half-an-hour, she heard the crackling noise of wood burning. At last the opening was big enough for her to push the baby out, and afterward she crawled out herself. She said she was now going out to Ushida again. Mr. Tanimoto said he wanted to see his church and take care of the people of his Neighbourhood Association. They parted as casually as bewildered as they had met. Mr. Tanimoto's way around the fire took him across the East Parade Ground, which, being an evacuation THE FIRE 49 area, was now the scene of a gruesome review: rank on rank of the burned and bleeding. Those who were burned moaned, " Mizu, mizu ! Water, water !" Mr. Tanimoto found a basin in a near-by street and located a water tap that still worked in the crushed shell of a house, and he began carrying water to the suffering strangers. When he had given drink to about thirty of them, he realised he was taking too much time. " Excuse me," he said loudly to those near by who were reaching out their hands to him and crying their thirst. " I have many people to take care of." Then he ran away. He went to the river again, the basin in his hand, and jumped down on to a sandspit. There he saw hundreds of people so badly wounded that they could not get up to go farther from the burning city. When they saw a man erect and unhurt, the chant began again: "Mizu, mizu, mizu." Mr. Tanimoto could not resist them ; he carried them water from the river a mistake, since it was tidal and brackish. Two or three small boats were ferrying hurt people across the river from Asano Park, and when one touched the spit, Mr. Tanimoto again made his loud, apologetic speech and jumped into the boat. It took him across to the park. There, in the underbrush, he found some of his charges of the Neighbourhood Association, who had come there by his previous instructions, and saw many acquaintances, among them Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics. But he missed Fukai, who had been a close friend. " Where is Fukakwz/z?" he asked. " He didn't want to come with us," Father Klein- sorge said. " He ran back." 50 HIROSHIMA When Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people caught along with her in the dilapidation at the tin factory, she began speaking to them. Her nearest neighbour, she discovered, was a high-school girl who had been drafted for factory work, and who said her back was broken. Miss Sasaki replied, " I am lying here and I can't move. My left leg is cut off." Some time later, she again heard somebody walk overhead and then move off to one side, and whoever it was began burrowing. The digger released several people, and when he had uncovered the high-school girl, she found that her back was not broken, after all, and she crawled o,ut. Miss Sasaki spoke to the rescuer, and he worked toward her. He pulled away a great number of books, until he had made a tunnel to her. She could see his perspiring face as he said, " Come out, Miss." She tried. " I can't move," she said. The man excavated some more and told her to try with all her strength to get out. But books were heavy on her hips, and the man finally saw that a bookcase was leaning on the books and that a heavy beam pressed down on the bookcase. *" Wait," he said. " I'll get a crowbar." , The man was gone a long time, and when he came back, he was ill-tempered, as if her plight were all her fault. " We have no men to help you, " he shouted in through the tunnel. "You'll have to get out by yourself." " That's impossible," she said. " My left leg . . ." The man went away. Much later, several men came and dragged Miss Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but it was THE FIRE 51 badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was raining. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the downpour increased, someone directed all the wounded people to take cover in the factory's air-raid shelters. " Come along," a torn-up woman said to her. " You can hop." But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she just waited in the rain. Then a man propped up a large sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and took her in his -arms and carried her to it. She was grateful until he brought two horribly wounded people a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn to share the simple shed with her. No one came back. The rain cleared and the cloudy afternoon was hot ; before nightfall the three grotesques under the slanting piece of twisted iron began to smell quite bad. The former head of the Nobori-cho Neighbourhood Association, to which the Catholic priests belonged, was an energetic man named Yoshida. He had boasted, . when he was in charge of the district air-raid defences, that fire might eat away all of Hiroshima but it would never come to Nobori-cho. The bomb blew down his house, and a joist pinned him by the legs, in full view of the Jesuit mission house across the way and of the people hurrying along the street. In their confusion as they hurried past, Mrs. Nakamura, with her children, and Father Kleinsorge, with Mr. Fukai on his back, hardly saw him ; he was just part of the general blur of misery through which they moved. His cries for help brought no response from them; there were so many people shouting for help that they could not hear 52 HIROSHIMA him separately. They and all the others went along. Nobori-cho became absolutely deserted, and the fire swept through it. Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden mission house the only erect building in the area go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on his face. Then flames came along his side of the street and entered his house. In a paroxysm of terrified strength, he freed himself and ran down the alleys of Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would never come. He began at once to behave like an old man; two months later his hair was white. As Dr. Fujii stood in the river up to his neck to avoid the heat of the fire, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and soon, even though the expanse of water was small, the waves grew so high that the people under the bridge could no longer keep their footing. Dr. Fujii went close to the shore, crouched down, and embraced a large stone with his usable arm. Later it became possible to wade along the very edge of the river, and Dr. Fujii and his two surviving nurses moved about two hundred yards upstream, to a sand- spit near Asano Park. Many wounded were lying on the sand. Dr. Machii was there with his family; his daughter, who had been outdoors when the bomb burst, was badly burned on her hands and legs but fortunately not on her face. Although Dr. Fujii's shoulder was by now terribly painful, he examined the girl's burns curiously. Then he lay down. In spite of the misery all around, he was ashamed of his appear- ance, and he remarked to Dr. Machii that he looked like a beggar, dressed as he was in nothing but torn and bloody underwear. Late in the afternoon, when THE FIRE 53 the fire began to subside, he decided to go to his parental house, in the suburb of Nagatsuka. He asked Dr. Machii to join him, but the Doctor answered that he and his family were going to spend the night on the spit, because of his daughter's injuries. Dr. Fujii, together with his nurses, walked first to Ushida, where, in the partially damaged house of some relatives, he found first-aid materials he had stored there. The two nurses bandaged him and he them. They went on. Now not many people walked in the streets, but a great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died. The number of corpses pn the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The Doctor wondered : Could a Molotov flower basket have done all this ? Dr. Fujii reached his family's house in the evening. It was five miles from the centre of town, but its roof had fallen in and the windows were all broken. All day, people poured into Asano Park. This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees- partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings ; partly because the foliage seemed a centre of coolness and life, and the estate's exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves. Mrs. Nakamura and her children were among the first to arrive, and they settled in the bamboo grove near the river. They all felt 54 HIROSHIMA terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river. At once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and they retched the whole day. Others were also nau- seated; they all thought (probably because of the strong odour of ionization, an " electric smell " given off by the bomb's fission) that they were sick from a gas the Americans had dropped. When Father Klein- sorge and the other priests came into the park, nodding to their friends as they passed, the Nakamuras ,were all sick and prostrate. A woman named Iwasaki, who lived in the neighbourhood of the mission and who was sitting near the Nakamuras, got up and asked the priests if she should stay where she was or go with them. Father Kleinsorge said, " I hardly know where the safest place is." She stayed there, and later in the day, though she had no visible wounds or burns, she died. The priests went farther along the river and settled down in some underbrush. Father LaSalle lay down and went right to sleep. The theological student, who was wearing slippers, had carried with him a bundle of clothes, in which he had packed two pairs of leather shoes. When he sat down with the others, he found that the bundle had broken open and a couple of shoes had fallen out and now he had only two lefts. He retraced his steps and found one right. When he rejoined the priests, he said, " It's funny, but things don't matter any more. Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. To-day, I don't care. One pair is enough." Father Cieslik s^id, " I know. I started to bring my books along, and then I thought, * This is no time for books.' " THE FJRH 55 When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his hand, reached the park, it was very crowded, and to dis- tinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily ; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks. Mr. Tanimoto greeted the priests and then looked around for other friends. He saw Mrs. Matsumoto, wife of the director of the Methodist School, and asked her if she was thirsty. She was, so he went to one of the pools in the Asanos' rock gardens and got water for her in his basin. Then he decided to try to get back to his church. He \\ent into Nobori-cho by the way the priests had taken as they escaped, but he did not get far ; the fire along the streets was so fierce that he had to turn back. He walked to the river bank and began to look tor a boat in which he might carry some of the most severely injured across the river from Asano Park, and away from the spreading fire. Soon he found a good-sized pleasure punt drawn up on the bank, but in and around it was an awful tableau five dead men, nearly naked, badly burned, who must haye expired more 56 t HIROSHIMA or less all at once, for they were in attitudes which suggested that they had been working together to push the boat down into the river. Mr. Tanimoto lifted them away from the boat, and as he did so, he exper- ienced such horror at disturbing the dead preventing them, he momentarily felt, from launching their craft and going on their ghostly way that he said out loud, " Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it for others, who are alive." The punt was heavy, but he managed to slide it into the water. There were no oars, and all he could find for propulsion was a thick bamboo pole. He worked the boat upstream to the most crowded part of the park and began to ferry the wounded. He could pack ten or twelve into the boat for each crossing, but as the river was too deep in the centre to pole his way across, he had to paddle with the bamboo, and consequently each trip took a very long time. He worked several hours that way. Early in the afternoon, the fire swept into the woods of Asano Park. The first Mr. Tanimoto knew of it was when, returning in his boat, he saw that a great number of people had moved toward the riverside. On touching the bank, he went up to investigate, and when he saw the fire* he shouted, "All the young men who are not badly hurt come with me !" Father Kleinsorge moved Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle close to the edge of the river and asked people there to get them across if the fire came too near, and thei* joined Tanimoto's volunteers. Mr. Tanimoto sent some to look for buckets and basins and told others to beat the burning underbrush with their clothes ; when utensils were at hand, he formed a bucket chain THE FIRE 57 from one of the pools in the rock gardens. The team fought the fire for more than two hours, and gradually defeated the flames. As Mr. Tanimoto's men worked, the frightened people in the park pressed closer and closer to the river, and finally the mob began to force some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank into the water. Among those driven into the river and drowned were Mrs. Matsumoto, of the Methodist SchQol, and her daughter. When Father Kleinsorge got back after fighting the fire, hfe found Father Schiffer still bleeding and terribly pale. Some Japanese stood around and stared at him, and Father Schiffer whispered, with a weak smile, "It is as if I were already dead." " Not yet," Father Kleinsorge said. He had brought Dr. Fujii's first-aid kit with him, and he had noticed Dr. Kanda in the crowd, so he sought him out and asked him if he would dress Father Schiffer's bad cuts. Dr. Kanda had seen his wife and daughter dead in the ruins of his hospital ; he sat now with his head in his hands. " I can't do anything," he said. Father Kleinsorge bound more bandage around Father Schiffer's head, moved him to a steep place, and settled him so that his head was high, and soon the bleeding diminished. The roar of approaching planes was heard about this time. Someone in the crowd near the Nakamura family shouted, *' It's some Grummans coming to strafe us !" A baker named Nakashima stood up and commanded, " Everyone who is wearing anything white, take it off." Mrs. Nakamura took the blouses off her children, and opened her umbrella and made tfiem get under it. A great number of people, even 58 HIROSHIMA badly burned ones, crawled into bushes and stayed there until the hum, evidently of a reconnaissance or weather run, died away. It began to rain. Mrs. Nakamura kept her children under the umbrella. The drops grew abnormally large and someone shouted, " The Americans are dropping gasoline. They're going to sdt fire to us ! " (This alarm stemmed from one of the theories being passed through the park as to why so much of Hiro- shima had burned: it was that a single plane had sprayed gasoline on the city and then somehow set fire to it in one flashing moment.) But the drops were palpably water, and as they fell, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and suddenly probably because of the tremendous convection sej: up by the blazing city a whirlwind ripped through the park. Huge trees crashed down; small ones were uprooted and flew into the air. Higher, a wild array of flat things revolved in the twisting funnel pieces of iron roofing, papers, doors, strips of matting. Father Kleinsorge put a piece of cloth over Father Schiffer's eyes, so that the feeble man would not think he was going crazy. The gale blew Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, who was sitting close by the river, down the embank- ment at a shallow, rocky place, and she came out with her bare feet bloody. The vortex moved out on to the river, where it sucked up a waterspout and eventually spent itself. After the storm, Mr. Tanimoto began ferrying people again, and Father Kleinsorge asked the theo- logical student to go across and make his way out to the Jesuit Novitiate at Nagatsuka, about three miles THE FJRE 59 from the centre of town, and to request the priests there to come with help for Fathers Schiffer and LaSalle. The student got into Mr. Tanimoto's boat and went off with him. Father Kleinsorge asked Mrs. Nakamura if she would like to go out to Nagatsuka with the priests when they came. She said she had some luggage and her children were sick they were still vomiting from time to time, and so, for that matter, was she and therefore she feared she could not. He said he thought the fathers from the Novitiate could come back the next day with a pushcart to get her. Late in the afternoon, when he went ashore for a while, Mr. Tanimoto, upon whose energy and initiative many had come to depend, heard people begging for food. He consulted Father Kleinsorge, and they decided to go back into town to get some rice from Mr. Tanimoto's Neighbourhood Association shelter and from a mission shelter. Father Cieslik and two or three others went with them. At first, when they got among the rows of prostrate houses, they did not know where they were; the change was too sudden, from a busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand that morning to a mere pattern of residue in the after- noon. The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable. They encountered only one person, a woman, who said to them as they passed, " My husband is in those ashes." At the mission, where Mr. Tanimoto left the party, Father Kleinsorge was dismayed to see the building razed. In the garden on the way to the shelter, he noticed a pumpkin roasted on the vine. 60 HIROSHIMA He and Father Cieslik tasted it and it was good. They were surprised at their hunger, and they ate quite a bit. They got out several bags of rice and gathered up several other cooked pumpkins *and dug up some potatoes that were nicely baked under the ground, and started back. Mr. Tanimoto rejoined them on the way. One of the people with him had some cooking utensils. In the park, Mr. Tanimoto organ- ised the lightly wounded women of his neighbourhood to cook. Father Kleinsorge offered the Nakamura family some pumpkin, and they tried it, but they could not keep it on their stomachs. Altogether, the rice was enough to feed nearly a hundred people. Just before dark, Mr. Tanimoto came across a twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, the Tanimotos' next-door neighbour. She was crouching on the ground with the body of her infant daughter in her arms. The baby had evidently been dead all day. Mrs. Kamai jumped up when she saw Mr. Tanimoto aTnd said, " Would you please try to locate my husband ? " Mr. Tanimoto knew that her husband had been inducted into the Army just the day before; he and Mrs. Tanimoto had entertained Mrs. Kamai in the afternoon, to make her forget. Kamai had reported to the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters near the ancient castle in the middle of town where some four thousand troops were stationed. Judging by the many maimed soldiers Mr. Tanimoto had seen during the day, he surmised that the barracks had been badly damaged by whatever it was that had hit Hiroshima. He knew he hadn't a chance of finding Mrs. Kamai's THE FIRE 61 husband, even if he searched, but he wanted to humour her. " I'll try," he said. " You've got to find him," she said. " He loved our baby so much. I want him to see her once more." Ill DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED EARLY in the evening of the day the bomb exploded, a Japanese naval launch moved slowly up and down the seven rivers of Hiroshima. It stopped here and there to make .an announcement alongside the crowded sandspits, on which hundreds of wounded lay; at the bridges, on which others were crowded; and eventually, as twilight fell, opposite Asano Park. A young officer stood up in the launch and shouted through a megaphone, " Be patient ! A naval hospital ship is coming to take care of you ! " The sight of the shipshape launch against the background of the havoc across the river; the unruffled young man in his neat uniform ; above all, the promise of medical help the first word of possible succour anyone had heard in nearly twelve awful hours cheered the people in the park tremendously. Mrs. Nakamura settled her family for the night with the assurance that a doctor would come and stop their retching. Mr. Tanimoto resumed ferrying the wounded across the river. Father Kleinsorge lay down and said the Lord's Prayer and a Hail Mary to himself, and fell right asleep; but no sooner had he dropped off than Mrs. Murata, the conscientious mission housekeeper, shook him and said, " Father Kleinsorge : Did you remember to repeat your evening prayers ? " He answered rather grumpily, " Of course," and he tried to go back to sleep but could not. This, apparently, was just what Mrs. Murata wanted. She began to chat with the exhausted priest. One of the questions she raised was DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 63 when he thought the priests from the Novitiate, for whom he had sent a messenger in mid-afternoon, would arrive to evacuate Father Superior LaSalle and Father Schiffer. The messenger Father Kleinsorge had sent the theological student who had been living at the mission house had arrived at the Novitiate, in the hills about three miles out, at half-past four. The sixteen priests there had been doing rescue work in the outskirts; they had worried about their colleagues in the city but had not known how or where to look for them. Now they hastily made two litters out of poles and boards, 'and the student led half a dozen of them back into the devastated area. They worked their way along the Ota above the city ; twice the heat of the fire forced them into the river. At Misasa Bridge, they encountered a long line of soldiers making a bizarre forced march away from the the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters in the centre of the town. All were grotesquely burned and they supported themselves with staves or leaned on one another. Sick, burned horses, hanging their heads, stood on the bridge. When the rescue party reached the park it was after dark, and progress was made extremely difficult by the tangle of fallen trees of all sizes that had been knocked down by the whirlwind that after- noon. At last not long after Mrs. Murata asked her question they reached their friends, and gave them wine and strong tea. The priests discussed how to get Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle out to the Novitiate. They were afraid that blundering through the park with them 64 HIROSHIMA would jar them too much on the wooden litters, and that the wounded men would lose too much blood. Father Kleinsorge thought of Mr. Tanimoto and his boat, and called out to him on the river. When Mr. Tanimoto reached the bank, he said he would be glacf to take the injured priests and their bearers upstream to where they could find a clear roadway. The rescuers put Father Schiffer on to one of the stretchers and lowered it into the boat, and two of them went aboard with it. Mr. Tanimoto, who still had no oars, poled the punt upstream. About half an hour later, Mr. Tanimoto came back and excitedly asked the remaining priests to help him rescue two children he had seen standing up to their shoulders in the river. A group went out and picked them up two young girls who had lost their family and were both badly burned. The priests stretched them on the ground next to Father Kleinsorge and then embarked Father LaSalle. Father Cieslik thought he could make it out to the Novitiate on foot, so he went aboard with the others. Father Kleinsorge was too feeble-; he decided to wait in the park until the next day. He asked the men to come back with a handcart, so that they could take Mrs. Nakamura and her sick children to the Novitiate. Mr. Tanimoto shoved off again, As the boat load of priests moved slowly upstream, they heard weak cries for help. A woman's voice stood out especially : " There are people here about to be drowned ! Help us ! The water is rising 1 " The sounds came from one of the sandspits, and those in the punt could see, in the reflected light of the still-burning fires, a number DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 65 of wounded people lying at the edge of the river, already partly covered by the flooding tide. Mr. Tanimoto wanted to help them, but the priests were afraid that Father SchifTer would die if they didn't hurry, and they urged their ferryman along. He dropped them where he had put Father Schiffer down and then started back alone toward the sandspit. The night was hot, and it seemed even hotter because of the fires against the sky, but the younger of the two girls Mr. Tanimoto and the priests had rescued com- plained to Father Kleinsorge that she was cold. He covered her with his jacket. She and her older sister had been in the salt water of the river for a couple of hours before being rescued. The younger one had huge, raw flash burns on her body; the salt water must have been excruciatingly painful to her. She began to shiver heavily, and again said it was cold. Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and more, and said again, " I am so cold," and then she suddenly stopped shivering and was dead. Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat on to the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realised that they were too weak to lift them- selves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and, women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he re- 66 HIROSHIMA membered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like : yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, " These are human beings." It took him three trips to get them all across the river. When he had finished, he decided he had to have a rest, and he went back to the park. As Mr. Tanimoto stepped up the dark bank, he tripped over someone, and someone else said angrily, "Look out! That's my hand." Mr. Tanimoto, ashamed of hurting wounded people, embarrassed at being able to walk upright, suddenly thought of the naval hospital ship, which had not come (it never did), and he had for a moment a feeling of blind, murderous rage at the crew of the ship, and then at all doctors. Why didn't they come to help these people ? Dr. Fujii lay in dreadful pain throughout the night on the floor of his family's roofless house on the edge of the city. By the light of a lantern, he had examined himself tod found : left clavicle fractured ; multiple abrasions and lacerations of face and body, including deep cuts on the chin, back, and legs; extensive contusions on chest and trunk; a couple of ribs possibly fractured. Had he not been so badly hurt, he might have been at Asano Park, assisting the wounded. DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 67 By nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki, worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully up and down the stinking corridors with wads of bandage and bottles* of mercurochrome, still wearing the glasses he had taken from the wounded nurse, binding up the worst cuts as he came to them. Other doctors were putting compresses of saline solution on the worst burns. That was all they could do. After dark, they worked by the light of the city's fires and by candles the ten remaining nurses held for them. Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and parti- tions had fallen ; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses. Some of the hospital staff distributed biscuits and rice balls, but the charnel-house smell was so strong that few were hungry. By three o'clock the next morning after nineteen straight hours of his gruesome work, Dr. Sasaki was incapable of dressing another wound. He and some other survivors of the hospital staff got straw mats and went outdoors thousands of patients and hundreds of dead were in the yard and on the drive way and hurried around behind the hospital and lay down in hiding to snatch some sleep. But within an hour wounded people had found them; a complaining circle formed around them : " Doctors ! Help us ! How can you sleep ? " Dr. Sasaki got up again and went back to work. Early in the day, 68 HIROSHIMA he thought for the first time of his mother at then- country home in Mukaihara, thirty miles from town. He usually went home every night. He was afraid she would think he was dead. Near the spot up river to which Mr. Tanimoto had transported the priests, there sat a large case of rice cakes which a rescue party had evidently brought for the wounded lying thereabouts but hadn't dis- tributed. Before evacuating the wounded priests, the others passed the cakes around and helped themselves. A few minutes later, a band of soldiers came up, and an officer, hearing the priests speaking a foreign language, drew his sword and hysterically asked who they were. One of the priests calmed him down and explained that they were Germans allies. The officer apologised and said that there were reports going round that American parachutists had landed. The priests decided that they should take Father Schiffer first. As they prepared to leave, Father Superior LaSalle said he felt awfully cold. One of the Jesuits gave up his coat, another his shirt; they were glad to wear less in the muggy night. The stretcher bearers started out. The theological student led the way and tried to warn the others of obstacles, but one of the priests got a foot tangled in some telephone wire and tripped and dropped his corner of the litter. Father Schiffer rolled off, lost consciousness, came to, and then vomited. The bearers picked him up and went on with him to the edge of the city, where they had arranged to meet a relay of other priests, left him with them, and turned back and got the Father Superior. DETAILS ARE BEING INVESTIGATED 69 The wooden litter must have been terribly painful for Father LaSalle, in whose back scores of tiny particles of window glass were embedded. Near the edge of town, the group had to walk around an auto- mobile burned and squatting on the narrow road, and the bearers on one side, unable to see their way in the darkness, fell into a deep ditch. Father LaSalle was thrown onto the ground and the litter broke in two. One priest went ahead to get a handcart from the Novitiate, but he soon found one beside an empty house and wheeled it back. The priests lifted Father LaSalle into the cart and pushed him over the bumpy road the rest of the way. The rector of the Novitiate, who had been a doctor before he entered the religious order, cleaned the wounds of the two priests and put them to bed between clean sheets, and they thanked God for the care they had received. Thousands of people had nobody to help them. Miss Sasaki was one of them. Abandoned and helpless, under the crude lean-to in the courtyard of the tin factory, beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a face any more, she suffered awfully that night from the pain in her broken leg. She did not sleep at all; neither did she converse with her sleepless companions. In the park, Mrs. Murata kept Father Kieinsorge awake all night by talking to him. None of the Nakamura family were able to sleep, either; the children, in spite of being very sick, were interested in everything that happened. They were delighted when one of the city's gas-storage tanks went up in a tremendous burst of flame. Toshio, the boy, shouted HIROSHIMA to the others to look at the reflection in the river. Mr. Tanimoto, after his long run and his many hours of rescue work, dozed uneasily. When he awoke, in the first light of dawn, he looked across the river and saw that he had not carried the festered, limp bodies high enough on the sandspit the night before. The tide had risen above where he had put them; they had not had the strength to move; they must have drowned. He saw a number of bodies floating in the river. Early that day, August 7th, the Japanese radio broadcast for the first time a succinct announcement that very few, if any, of the people most concerned with its content, the survivors in Hiroshima, happened to hear: "Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. It is believed that a new type of bomb was used. The details are being investigated." Nor is it probable that any oi the survivors happened to be tuned in on a short-wave rebroadcast of an extraordinary announcement by the President of the United States, which identified the new bomb as atomic : " That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of T