Posted on 08/03/2005 8:24:29 AM PDT by Parmenio
In August 1945, two atomic bombs fell on Japan, killing tens of thousands of people instantly. Yet all 24 Australian POWs in Nagasaki - close to ground zero - survived. Patrick Carlyon reports.
The August sun hangs like a red balloon. Smoke smudges the sky, as it has since the American planes began dropping bombs. The Japanese expansion had spread like an angry tumour across Asia and the Pacific. Now, after 14 years, the aggressors are losing. An Allied invasion appears certain. In the hills of Nakama, a small Japanese mining town, Australian prisoners-of-war dig pits to store potatoes. They believe they are pencilled in for execution. They trudge to and from work each day. The locals spit at them and throw rocks. An air-raid warning wails. It’s cloudy, the air cloying in the summer heat. Gunner Colin Finkemeyer, a Victorian lad with a sunny air, has cheered the silver specks delivering fire from above in recent weeks. They bring hope after 3½ years of hell. But what’s this? Finkemeyer and a mate stop digging to stare at an orange and white cloud exploding skywards on the horizon. “Crikey, Nagasaki is really copping it this time,” his mate says.
Gunner Murray Jobling is somewhere beneath the cloud, being thrown across a room. He is one of 24 Australians working as slave labour at the Mitsubishi works in the centre of Nagasaki, a ship-building city. He was having a smoke in the prisoner’s camp when the world fell down. Picked up in the blast, he somehow lands on his feet. The bloke he was smoking with is later found buried in rubble, unconscious, only his boots poking out. Jobling looks around him. The scene resembles a furnace of molten metal. The rows of barracks have been flattened into twisted piles of timber.
Private Allan Chick, another Australian prisoner in Nagasaki, picks himself up off the ground and peers into blackness. He had been straddling the roof of a small building, piling on dirt to reinforce it against bombing. He was chatting with a bloke alongside when there was a flash of white light. Another prisoner later likens the sound to an express train hurtling past a deserted station. But Chick hasn’t heard a thing. He looks around for the log he was just sitting on. It has vanished.
It has just ticked past 11am. In the sky 30,000 feet above sits a New York Times reporter, William Laurence. He feels a tremendous blast strike his observer plane, a B-29 Superfortress, from nose to tail. It’s the first of five shockwaves. A ball of fire rises as though from the bowels of the Earth, followed by a giant pillar of purple fire. Laurence calls it a “living totem pole”, like a meteor coming from Earth instead of outer space. The mushroom would rise to 60,000ft, “seething and boiling in a white fury”, a “decapitated monster” that keeps growing a new head.
A terrible beauty has again been unleashed. This is the second atomic bomb to be dropped on Japan in three days. Debate over the morality of using these weapons will go on for decades. The Nagasaki bomb was different from Little Boy, the uranium bomb detonated over Hiroshima. In Fat Man, as it was known, about 6kg of plutonium was imploded by detonating 32 conventional explosives placed around it. Timing was everything: the detonators had to all go off within one tenth of one millionth of a second. “It is a thing of beauty to behold, this ‘gadget’,” Laurence writes of observing the bomb’s assembly. “Never before had so much brain-power been focused on a single problem.”
Yet Fat Man was dropped almost 2.5km off-target. The squat device, 1.5m wide and weighing almost 4.5 tonnes, blew up at 460m, almost directly above a Catholic cathedral in Japan’s biggest Christian stronghold. A congregation was wiped out, and it’s said the bomb almost completed what centuries of persecution against Christian Japanese could not. About 35,000 people died instantly, some reduced to lumps of burnt meat, some to stains on concrete. Walking corpses, oozing blood from ears and noses, blackened strips of skin hanging like ripped clothing, wandered through the flames, too stunned to wonder what had happened. The death toll would double in coming months but it might have been worse. A ridge shielded much of the older town from the direct blast. Had Fat Man exploded over the shipyards, a few kilometres south, the bomb might have killed close to 200,000.
About 130,000 people died when Hiroshima, flat and hemmed in by surrounding mountains, crumpled in a few seconds on August 6, 1945. The city boasts talismans for what became a political cause for peace, such as the mangled shell of an iron dome on a public building, and a scoured wrist watch that stopped at the precise moment – 8.15am. In Hiroshima, you hear about the wife who found what was left of her husband – teeth – in a pile of ashes. Or of a schoolgirl, evidence of whose existence had dissolved – except for a crumpled water bottle. Little Boy carried about half the destructive power of Fat Man, yet nothing blocked its murderous wave across the city.
Less than half of Nagasaki was chewed up on August 9. The port city’s waterways stemmed the spread of fire. Nagasaki’s bomb did not spawn a vocal society of hibakusha, survivors who tell their ghastly tales to all who will listen. Today’s visitors can ignore reference to the bomb: they are introduced to “the Naples of the Orient” and the city that inspired Madame Butterfly. Yet Fat Man would become the prototype for the ensuing nuclear arms race. Though second in the history books, its technological “success” superseded that of Little Boy. Generations hence would fear nuclear war as the end of the world.
Nagasaki might have been spared the blast. No one knew for certain whether the detonator would work from the air. Nagasaki was added to the list of potential city targets only two weeks before. And it was hit only because the preferred target, Kokura, was clouded over. The B-29 had enough fuel for only one pass. And the crew, Christians, who all prayed before taking off, only spotted a break in cloud cover at the last moment. Major Charles Sweeney flew on both atomic bomb drops. He described a rainbow of colours from above: weeks later, on visiting Nagasaki, he maintained that he felt no remorse. He “just wanted the war to be over”.
Science cannot explain how Allan Chick, a Tasmanian fisherman, survived. Fat Man detonated about 1700m away from him. Within 1km, says the official history of Nagasaki city, almost all humans were instantly killed. Within 2km, most people died or suffered serious injury. Jobling told Australian journalist Denis Warner that he cringed at “pints” of liquid sloshing under the blisters of survivors. Hill slopes facing the blast were blackened. A railway track was reduced to two neat lines of ashes. According to Warner, a man 5km away had the glasses ripped from his face. Yet Chick was unhurt. He defied all the laws of nature to survive a most unnatural event.
Australian prisoner Lance Corporal John Marshall told Warner that he spotted the bomb dangling from three parachutes. There was a blinding flash, “which scorched the paint off all buildings, tore the foliage from trees, and killed everyone who had not taken cover. Every bit of steel and every building in the devastated area – which was about four miles long and one mile wide – seemed to fold up in a flash, but, strangely enough, reinforced concrete seemed to resist the bomb.”
The Indonesian prisoner sitting alongside Chick was burned across the exposed half of his face. Maybe Chick was charmed: most prisoners who survived Japanese captivity for more than three years relied on lucky escapes. A year earlier, Chick survived the torpedoing of his prisoner-ship off the coast of Japan. More than 550 of the 772 prisoners perished. He was in the hold at the time: “You had water coming up and, as the ship went down, you had water coming down. I remembered someone saying that drowning is a pleasant death so I gave up the ghost. When I came to I was on a float.”
All 24 Australians prisoners in Nagasaki survived the blast and, according to Warner, at least four including Chick were out in the open. Only six had died by 1984: three are still alive today. Chick now lives in Heyfield, an old timber town three hours’ drive east of Melbourne. When you arrive he isn’t at home. His Japanese wife Nita, who bows to say hello and goodbye, explains that he is in hospital. Perhaps she sees your face drop. It’s the latest heart scare, she says. Perhaps she sees your face drop further. “The hospital is one block that way,” she points through a back room. “You go see him.”
Chick sits in pyjamas and dressing gown in a hospital chair, rheumy eyes, skin papery, his face mottled purple with age. He addresses sausages and mashed pumpkin on a plastic plate. He tweaks his hearing aid and offers a kindly smile. “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he says. At 85 he looks pretty good for someone who should have drowned – and then been burned beyond recognition, or at least fatally poisoned by radiation – 60 years ago. Radiation probably still lingers in his blood; the doctors found traces 25 years back. But no, as far as he knows, none of the Australians at Nagasaki died from cancers linked to the blast.
Chick can’t much remember the fires that erupted immediately afterwards, though he has spoken of telephone poles blackened on the side facing the blast. A Japanese guard raced up, as stunned as everyone else, and urged the prisoners to follow him into the nearby hills for the night. Perhaps this guard was Jidayu Tajima who years later likened the bomb to the bringing of democracy – suddenly, captives and captors shared equal status as victims. Chick recalls returning to the city the next day, and stumbling across rows of bodies he assumes were Japanese or Chinese criminals. He touched a protruding toe and it crumbled to dust.
Finkemeyer, now liberated, walked through Nagasaki about two months after the blast. The rubble reminded him of an untidy paddock. Molten metal weaved through the flattened mess. But something else struck him. For years he had been beaten, jeered at and starved by Japanese. Now Nagasaki was deserted. “I didn’t see a Japanese,” he says. “There wasn’t even a sign of a person.”
Jobling, 87, lives in a nursing home in Kerang, in north-west Victoria. He is unequivocal when asked if dropping a second atomic bomb was just: “Of course it was, it saved our bloody lives. That’s a stupid question.” Chick, like Finkemeyer, had heard rumours of planned prisoner executions. After August 9, his Japanese guards lost their swagger. He eventually got out on an American plane, and tasted a luxury he had almost forgotten – ice-cream.
Chick later returned to Japan for six years of military service, then brought Nita back to his slightly bemused family in Australia – some members, like the rest of Australia, were uncomfortable about Japanese brides. He worked in sawmills and dairies until he retired at 60, a life lived only because, he says, a white light flashed brighter than the sun one hazy August morning.
Interesting but what a misleading headline - yet again. I was hoping it'd explain how and why they survived.
bookmark
"War is hell." --William T. Sherman
War should always be a last resort. Some things are worse, however, than war. When it comes, it should be prosecuted in a way that will make the enemy lay his arms down at the earlies possible moment.
Somewhere I remember reading that there has never been a weapon invented that was not used. Every new weapon results in a shield, which results in a new weapon. And, so it goes.
God help us all!!!
Cool first hand reports......Thanks for the ping !
Carolyn
> He is unequivocal when asked if dropping a second atomic bomb was just: “Of course it was, it saved our bloody lives. That’s a stupid question.”
Damn, that's make a good tagline!
> Somewhere I remember reading that there has never been a weapon invented that was not used.
Sure there have been, at least so far: neither the ICBM nor the H-Bomb have been used in anger.
He DID!
..for Whosoever shall LIVE by the Sword shall alos DIE by the Sword."
"Blessed are THOSE who DIE in the LORD from now on."
Case-in-point: Not everyone HAS to fight. As long as They are Saved, Love and know Jesus, Their Salvation and the Pathway to HEAEN is assured for them.
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