Nagasaki

Chapter 1

Hiroshima, Monday 6 August 1945, morning

Fate is a plane high in the sky. Sometimes we hear it coming; some- times we don’t. Sometimes we guess the significance of that sound; sometimes it eludes us. We listen to the distant drone in a sort of uncom- prehending stupor. Fate is a lottery, after all. It is only with hindsight that we can appreciate the steps that should have been taken, usually long before, to redirect it. Mostly, by the time we hear the sound of our approaching fate it is too late to avoid the consequences. This is the story of the days leading up to the release of a cataclysmic product of human technological ingenuity, heralded by the sound of a plane at high altitude above the humdrum daily grind of a city crippled by war and languishing in the swelter of summer. Dog days in a city that fate would soon overtake.

On the bus that took them from the company-owned boarding house to within walking distance of Mitsubishi’s Hiroshima shipyards, Tsutomu Yamaguchi realised he’d left his personal stamp—his inkan—behind. Dipped in red ink paste, the inkan was pressed on documents in lieu of a signature. Without it, Yamaguchi couldn’t sign off on his departure paperwork. He told his two companions to go on and he would catch up with them at the shipyard. He got off and caught another bus back to their quarters. Smoke belched out of a wood-burning unit attached to the bus’s rear end. That’s how things worked after so many years of war. Making do with what was available.

On temporary transfer from Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki shipbuilding works to its expanding Hiroshima operation, Yamaguchi and his companions, Iwanaga and Sato, were technical draftsmen working on a 5000-tonne oil tanker. The job done, they were ready to return home. The three had packed their bags early that morning. It was already a bright, clear summer day. They decided to go down to the workplace and farewell their colleagues of the last three months. The next day they would be on the train back to Nagasaki, to their families and friends on the southern island of Kyushu.

It was 6 August 1945. Japan had been at war with America and its allies since Pearl Harbor in December 1941. For the first six months the Japanese had surprised even themselves with the speed with which they drove through South-east Asia to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and Burma. But over the last three years all those gains had been slowly whittled away by the Allied counter-offensive. Having taken Okinawa after a bloody and costly battle, the Americans seemed poised to invade mainland Japan and bring Japan’s dreams of empire to an inglorious end. At this stage of the war, everything was in short supply. Life for the ordinary Japanese had become a grim struggle for survival, clinging to the forlorn hope of an improbable victory, pumped up by propaganda from Japan’s various official sources. By 1945 there were no eggs, milk or coffee available in shops and very little tea. A bitter coffee-like brew could be made by roasting soybeans. Vegetables were the staple, mostly grown in backyard and communal plots. Many public areas, like school- yards and parks, had been turned over to market gardening. Petrol was virtually non-existent for the general public. There were no private cars. Buses and taxis burned wood for fuel and electric-powered streetcars still operated in many cities. Apart from them, the streets were filled with bicycles, pedestrians and a few military vehicles.

Since March, the Allied advance had moved close enough to Japan for regular formations of bombers to carry out massive firebombing raids on Japan’s cities. The predominance of wooden buildings made these attacks particularly destructive. In the face of the grim reality of their lost imperial cause, the Japanese maintained a stoic resilience. Food might be scarce, but civilian and military morale held on doggedly.

U Ba Maw, prime minister of the puppet government of Burma, noticed the change in the people when he revisited Tokyo at that time. They were ‘visibly subdued and disillusioned by events’, he said, ‘but most of them were as determined and defiant as ever’. Ba Maw was there during an American incendiary bombing of the city. He was struck by the Japanese capacity to endure. ‘The result was quite literally a holocaust, a mass burning of one of the densest areas of the city. I saw the ghastly devastation the next morning. But there was no panic or self-pity or even audible complaint among the huge mass of victims. In fact some of them were able to express their happiness that the Imperial Palace had escaped.’ Throughout Japan, schoolchildren and other non-essential civilians had been evacuated to the country, but it wasn’t systematically planned. Those who stayed behind were organised to combat fires, build shelters and work in factories and on gardens. Under bumbling leadership, the hopelessly inadequate home defence was ineffective against the scale of the aerial attacks. A system of air-raid alarms and shelters had been devel- oped across the country. Alarms sounded almost every day, but so far Hiroshima had been spared from the attacks.

At 7 a.m. on 6 August, the Japanese early warning radar network detected US aircraft approaching from the south. The alert was raised and radio broadcasting stopped in many cities, including Hiroshima. The planes approached at high altitudes, but they were few and quite dispersed. By eight o’clock the radar operator in Hiroshima decided there were no more than three planes in the vicinity and the air-raid alert was lifted. Radio broadcast resumed, advising people to go to shelters if an American B-29 bomber was actually sighted, but these aircraft were assumed to be on a reconnaissance mission. Fuel was now in such short supply that Japanese fighter planes would no longer take off to intercept small groups.

Yamaguchi returned to his boarding house in the south-eastern quarter of the city. He either hadn’t heard or had ignored the air-raid alert. As he took off his shoes, the elderly manager spotted his guest of the last three months and invited him to share a cup of tea. In the exchange of pleasantries, the 25-year-old Yamaguchi told how he was looking forward to seeing his family again. His son had been born just before he came to Hiroshima. He hadn’t yet seen his new house. There was plenty to look forward to on his return home.

Another Nagasakian who had been away on business was already on a train home. A short, stocky man with a trim moustache, Takejiro Nishioka was in his mid-fifties, the publisher of Minyu (People), a Nagasaki daily. The intensity of recent American incendiary bombing had prompted newspaper editors in western Japan to look into emer- gency measures in case their printing plants were destroyed. The group had resolved to set up rotary presses in a cave shelter at a location in Nagasaki yet to be decided. The editors agreed to build the underground plant within a month, despite the shortage of labour and materials. The best labour source would be convicts, among whom they could expect some experienced coal miners, but this required approval by the minister of justice and the cooperation of prefecture governors. An order from the home minister would ensure the governors’ support.

The well-connected and upright Nishioka was elected by the group to go to Tokyo to enlist the support of the two relevant ministers. His mission had been successful. He had the consent of both, but in discus- sions in Tokyo Nishioka realised they would need army labourers as well. These could be requisitioned through General Yokoyama, commander of army forces in Kyushu. In Japan, as elsewhere in the world, who you know can be as useful as what you know. Nishioka didn’t know Yokoyama, but Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, army commander over south-west Japan, was a relative of Yokoyama and a friend of Nishioka. Hata had his head- quarters in Hiroshima. The publisher decided to stop off there on the long train journey from Tokyo back to Nagasaki.

On 5 August there were no seats available on the scheduled west-bound service to Hiroshima, but Takejiro Nishioka was a man with connec- tions. He used them to get on an overnight military train instead. It was expected to arrive at Hiroshima at eight o’clock in the morning, but the early air attack warning had delayed the train by twenty-five minutes. It was already 8.15 when it pulled into Kaidaichi on the outskirts of Hiro- shima, 8 kilometres from the city centre.

On the same side of the city and close to the port, Yamaguchi had finished his tea and retrieved his inkan. Having put on his shoes, he set out once again for the shipyard, this time by streetcar. It went by a less direct route than the bus, going into the city centre and out again, but Yamaguchi was in no hurry. He walked the remaining short distance to the Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company. Akira Iwanaga—his roommate in the boarding house—and Kuniyoshi Sato were already there chatting with workers in one of the large office buildings. Yamaguchi took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Another oppressively hot day was on the way. He crossed a short bridge over a creek. Walking past recently planted potato fields, he noticed a woman coming towards him wearing a black monpe, the shapeless uniform with gathered trousers that most Japanese women wore at that time. In that instant, Yamaguchi heard the faint drone of a plane high in the sky. He and the woman both looked up to see if they could spot it.

8.09 a.m: thirty-year-old Colonel Paul Tibbets of the US Army Air Forces pointed his B-29 Superfortress over the Inland Sea towards the city of Hiroshima on Japan’s main island of Honshu. The previous after- noon, he’d named the plane Enola Gay after his mother.

‘We are about to start the bomb run,’ Tibbets announced over the intercom. ‘Put on your goggles and place them on your forehead. When the countdown starts, pull the goggles over your eyes and leave them there until after the flash.’ The crew had been issued with arc-welder’s adjustable goggles to protect them from the anticipated intense flash of the explosion. There was no flak coming up, no sign of enemy planes. Co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis wrote in his in-flight log: ‘There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.’

Massive in the belly of the plane, as snug as the family St Bernard, lay a 4-tonne blue-black bomb called Little Boy. The name was not ironic— the American military is not much given to irony—but to distinguish it from its longer prototype. At 3.5 metres in length, it still wasn’t short. The product of the top-secret Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb had been developed at laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was assembled on Tinian, an island in the Northern Marianas group, which had been captured from the Japanese in the Allied advance through the Pacific. The Manhattan Project had been so closely guarded that the new US president, Harry S Truman, was unaware of its existence until he was promoted from vice-president on the death of Franklin D Roosevelt. Soon the whole world would know of it. A formation of three B-29s had taken off from Tinian, carrying the uranium-cored bomb capable of considerable but largely unquantified devastation. This type of bomb had never been tested.

Behind Enola Gay a second B-29, The Great Artiste, following 10 metres off its right wing, dropped back a kilometre or so. A third, the unnamed No. 91 piloted by George Marquardt, began circling to position itself to take photographs. The bombardier on Enola Gay, Major Thomas Ferebee, pressed his left eye to the Norden bombsight. At 8.13 + 30 seconds Tibbets said to him, ‘It’s all yours.’ Then, over the intercom: ‘On goggles.’ Ferebee’s bombsight generated flight corrections in autopilot. The aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge spanning a branch of the flat Ota River delta over which spread the city of Hiroshima, came into the crosshairs.

‘I’ve got it,’ said Ferebee.

The bomb-bay doors swung open and a low-pitched continuous tone was sent through the intercom. In response the crew, except the pilots and Ferebee, pulled down their dark welder’s glasses. The tone was also sent by radio to the other planes, giving them fifteen seconds’ notice of the bomb’s release.

At 8.15 + 17 seconds, the radio tone stopped abruptly, replaced by the sound of air rushing past the open bay. Little Boy dropped out rear first. It flipped and hurtled nose down towards Hiroshima.

Maps vii
People featured in this book ix
Time differences xiii
1 Hiroshima, Monday 6 August 1945, morning 1
2 Hiroshima, Monday 6 August 1945 7
3 Nagasaki, Monday 6 August 1945 28
4 Moscow, Sunday 5 August 1945, evening 52
5 Potsdam, 16–29 July 1945 63
6 Nagasaki, Tuesday 7 August 1945 76
7 Nagasaki, Tuesday 7 August 1945 99
8 Nagasaki, Wednesday 8 August 1945 115
9 Nagasaki, Wednesday 8 August 1945 132
10 Nagasaki, Thursday 9 August 1945, morning 154
11 Nagasaki, Thursday 9 August 1945, morning 183
12 Nagasaki, Thursday 9 August 1945, midday 200
13 Nagasaki, Thursday 9 August 1945, afternoon 231
14 Nagasaki, Thursday 9 August 1945, evening 264
15 Tokyo, Friday 10 August 1945 and after 281
16 Nagasaki, Friday 10 August 1945 and after 292
Bibliography 313
Acknowledgements 327
Index 329