Shatterer of Worlds

Kildare Dobbs Before that morning in 1945 only a few pompous bombs, none of which did any great damage, had fallen on the city. Fleets of U. S. bombers had, however, devastated many cities round ab start, and Hiroshima had begun a program of evacuation which had reduced its population from 380,000 to some 245,000. Among the evacuees were Emiko and her family. We were move out to Otake, a town about an hours train-ride out of the city, Emiko told me. She had been a fifteen-year-old student in 1945.Fragile and vivacious, versed in the gentle traditions of the tea ceremony and flower arrangement, Emiko take over had an air of the frail school-child when I talked with her. Every day, she and her sis Hideko used to commute into Hiroshima to school. Hideko was thirteen. Their father was an antique dealer and he owned a house in the city, although it was empty now. Tetsuro, Emikos thirteen-year-old brother, was at the Manchurian front with the Imperial Army. Her mother was kept busy loo king after the children, for her youngest daughter Eiko was sick with heart trouble, and rations were scarce.All of them were undernourished. The dark of August 5, 1945, little Eiko was dangerously ill. She was non expected to follow. Everybody took turns watching by her bed, soothing her by massaging her arms and legs. Emiko retired at 830 (most Japanese multitude go to bed early) and at midnight was roused to take her turn with the sick girl. At 2 A. M. she went back to sleep. While Emiko slept, the Enola Gay, a U. S. B-29 carrying the worlds offset operational atom bomb, was already in the air. She had taken off from the Pacific island of Iwo Jima at 145 A. M. , and now Captain William Parsons, U. S. N. ordnance expert, was busy in her bomb-hold with the final conclave of Little Boy. Little Boy looked much like an outsize T. N. T. block-buster but the crew knew in that location was something different about him. Only Parsons and the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, knew exactl y in what manner Little Boy was different. Course was set for Hiroshima. Emiko slept. On board the Enola Gay co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis was writing up his personal log. After leaving Iwo, he recorded, we began to pick up some low stratus and before very long we were flying on top of an undercast.Outside of a thin, high cirrus cloud and the low stuff, its a very beautiful day. Emiko and Hideko were up at six in the morning. They dressed in the uniform of their womens college-white blouse, quilted hat, and black skirt-breakfasted and packed their aluminum lunch-boxes with white rice and eggs. These they stuffed into their shoulder bags as they hurried for the seven-oclock train to Hiroshima. Today there would be no classes. Along with many womens groups, high school students, and others, the sisters were vent to work on demolition.You can read alsoSimilarities and Conflicts in a Streetcar Named DesireThe city had begun a project of clearance to make fire-breaks in its downtown huddle of woodwind instrument and paper buildings. It was a lovely morning. While the two young girls were at breakfast, Captain Lewis, over the Pacific, had made an entry in his log. We are loaded. The bomb is now alive, and its a funny feeling 1 From Reading the Time (1968). knowing its right in back of you. Knock wood In the train Hideko suddenly said she was hungry. She wanted to eat her lunch. Emiko dissuaded her shed be much hungrier later on. The two sisters argued, but Hideko at last agreed to cumber her lunch till later.They decided to meet at the main station that afternoon and catch the five-oclock train home. By now they had arrived at the first of Hiroshimas common chord stations. This was where Hideko got off, for she was to work in a different area from her sister. Sayonara she reverberateed. Goodbye. Emiko never saw her again. There had been an air-raid at 7 A. M. , but before Emiko arrived at Hiroshimas main station, two stops farther on, the sirens had sound ed the all clear. Just after eight, Emiko stepped off the train, walked through the station, and waited in the morning cheerfulnessshine for her streetcar.At about the same flake Lewis was writing in his log. Therell be a short intermission while we bomb our target. It was hot in the sun Emiko saw a class-mate and greeted her. Together they moved hack into the shade of a high concrete wall to chat. Emiko looked tip at the sky and saw, far up in the cloudless blue, a one B-29. It was exactly 810 A. M. The other people waiting for the streetcar saw it too and began to discuss it anxiously. Emiko felt up scared. She felt that at all cost she must go on talking to her friend. Just as she was thinking this, there was a tremendous greenish-white flash in the sky.It was far brighter than the sun. Emiko afterwards remembered vaguely that there was a roaring or a rushing sound as well, but she was non sure, for just at that moment she lost consciousness. intimately 15 seconds after t he flash, noted Lewis, 30,000 feet high and several miles away, there were two very distinct slaps on the ship from the blast and the shock wave. That was all the bodily effect we felt. We turned the ship so that we could observe the results. When Emiko came to, she was lying on her face about forty feet away from where she had been standing.She was not aware of any pain. Her first thought was Im alive She lifted her head slowly and looked about her. It was growing dark. The air was seething with dust and black smoke. There was a smell of burning. Emiko felt something trickle into her eyes, tested it in her mouth. Gingerly she put a hand to her head, then looked at it. She saw with a shock that it was covered with prodigal. She did not concord a thought to Hideko. It did not occur to her that her sister who was in other part of the city could possibly have been in danger.Like most of the survivors, Emiko fictive she had been close to a direct hit by a conventional bomb. She t hought it had fallen on the post-office next to the station. With a hurt childs panic, Emiko, streaming with blood from gashes in her scalp, ran blindly in search of her mother and father. The people standing in front of the station had been burn to death instantly (a shadow had save Emiko from the flash). The people inside the station had been crushed by falling masonry. Emiko heard their faint cries, saw hands scrabbling weakly from under the collapsed platform.All around her the maim survivors were running and stumbling away from the roaring furnace that had been a city. She ran with them toward the backings that ring the landward side of Hiroshima. From the Enola Gay, the strangers from North America looked down at their handiwork. There, in front of our eyes, wrote Lewis, was without a interrogative the greatest explosion man had ever witnessed. The city was nine-tenths covered with smoke of a boiling nature, which seemed to indicate buildings blowing up, and a large white cloud which in less than three minutes reached 30,000 feet, then went to at least 50,000 feet.Far below, on the edge of this cauldron of smoke, at a distance of some 2,500 yards from the blasts epicenter, Emiko ran with the assuagement of the living. or so who could not run limped or dragged themselves along. Others were carried. Many, hideously burned, were screaming with pain when they tripped they lay where they had fallen. There was a man whose face had been ripped open from mouth to ear, another whose forehead was a gaping wound. A young soldier was running with a foot-long splinter of bamboo protruding from one eye. But these, like Emiko, were the lightly wounded. Some of the burned people had been literally roasted.Skin hung from their flesh like sodden tissue paper. They did not bleed but plasma dripped from their seared limbs. The Enola Gay, mission completed, was reversive to base. Lewis sought words to express his feelings, the feelings of all the crew. I might say, he wrote, I might say My God What have we done? Emiko ran. When she had reached the safety of the mountain she remembered that she still had her shoulder bag. There was a small first-aid kit in it and she applied ointment to her wounds and to a small cut in her left hand. She bound(p) her head. Emiko looked back at the city.It was a lake of fire. All around her the burned fugitives cried out in pain. Some were scorched on one side only. Others, naked and flayed, were burned all over. They were too many to help and most of them were expiry. Emiko followed the walking wounded along a back road, still delirious, expecting suddenly to meet her father and mother. The thousands dying by the roadside called feebly for help or water. Some of the more lightly injured were already walking in the other direction, back towards the flames. Others, with just now any visible wounds, stopped, turned ashy pale, and died within minutes.No one knew then that they were victims of radiation. Emiko rea ched the suburb of Nakayama. Far off in the Enola Gay, Lewis, who had seen none of this, had been writing, If I live a hundred years, Ill never get those few minutes out of my mind. Looking at Captain Parsons, why he is as confounded as the rest, and he is supposed to have cognize everything and expected this to happen At Nakayama, Emiko stood in line at a depot where rice-balls were being distributed. Though it demented her that the badly maimed could hardly feed themselves, the child found she was hungry.It was about 6 P. M. now. A little farther on, at Gion, a farmer called her by name. She did not recognize him, but it seemed he came monthly to her home to collect manure. The farmer took Emiko by the hand, led her to his own house, where his wife bathed her and fed her a repast of white rice. Then the child continued on her way. She passed another town where there were hundreds of injured. The dead were being hauled away in trucks. Among the injured a charwoman of about forty five was waving frantically and muttering to herself. Emiko brought this woman a little water in a pumpkin leaf.She felt guilty about it the schoolgirls had been warned not to give water to the seriously wounded. Emiko comforted herself with the thought that the woman would die soon anyway. At Koi, she found standing-room in a train. It was heading for Otake with a blanket(a) load of wounded. Many were put off at Ono, where there was a hospital and two hours later the train rolled into Otake station. It was around 10 P. M. A great crowd had gathered to look for their relations. It was a nightmare, Emiko remembered years afterwards people were calling their dear kinfolk by name, searching frantically.It was necessary to call them by name, since most were so disfigured as to be unrecognizable. Doctors in the town council offices stitched Emikos head-wounds. The place was crowded with casualties lying on the floor. Many died as Emiko watched. The town council authorities made a strang e announcement. They said a new and mysterious kind of bomb had fallen in Hiroshima. People were talk over to stay away from the ruins. Home at midnight, Emiko found her parents so happy to see her that they could not even cry. They could only give thanks that she was safe.Then they asked, Where is your sister? For ten long days, while Emiko walked daily one and a half miles to have her wounds dressed with fresh gauze, her father searched the rubble of Hiroshima for his lost child. He could not have hoped to find her alive. All, as far as the eye could see, was a desolation of charred ashes and wreckage, relieved only by a few jagged ruins and by the seven estuarial rivers that flowed through the waste delta. The banks of these rivers were covered with the dead and in the rising tidal waters floated thousands of corpses.On one broad street in the Hakushima district the crowds who had been thronging there were all naked and scorched cadavers. Of thousands of others there was no tra ce at all. A fire several times hotter than the surface of the sun had turned them instantly to vapor. On August 11 came the news that Nagasaki had suffered the same fate as Hiroshima it was whispered that Japan had attacked the United States mainland with similar mysterious weapons. With the large circumstantiality of rumor, it was said that two out of a fleet of six-engined trans-Pacific bombers had failed to return.But on August 15, speaking for the first time over the radio to his people, the Emperor Hirohito denote his countrys surrender. Emiko heard him. No more bombs she thought. No more fear The family did not learn till June the following year that this very day young Tetsuro had been killed in action in Manchuria. Emikos wounds healed slowly. In mid-September they had closed with a thin layer of pinkish skin. There had been a shortage of antiseptics and Emiko was happy to be getting well. Her satisfaction was short-lived. Mysteriously she came down with diarrhea and hig h fever. The fever continued for a month.Then one day she started to bleed from the gums, her mouth and throat became aggressively inflamed, and her hair started to fall out. Through her delirium the child heard the doctors whisper by her pillow that she could not live. By now the doctors must have known that ionizing radiation caused such(prenominal) destruction of the bloods white cells that victims were left with little or no resistance against infection. Yet Emiko recovered. The wound on her hand, however, was particularly troublesome and did not heal for a long time. As she got better, Emiko began to acquire some notion of the fearful scale of the disaster.Few of her friends and acquaintances were still alive. But no one knew simply how many had died in Hiroshima. To this day the claims of various agencies conflict. According to General Douglas MacArthurs headquarters, there were 78,150 dead and 13,083 missing. 2 The United States Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission claims there were 79,000 dead. Both sets of figures are probably far too low. Theres reason to believe that at the time of the surrender Japanese authorities lied about the numerate of survivors, exaggerating it to get extra medical supplies.The Japanese welfare ministrys figures of 260,000 dead and 163,263 missing may well be too high. But the very order of such discrepancies speaks volumes about the scale of the catastrophe. The dead were literally uncountable. This appalling toll of human life had been exacted from a city that had been prepared for air attack in a state of full wartime readiness. All civil defense services had been overwhelmed from the first moment and it was many hours before any sort of organized rescue and backing could be put into effect.Its true that single raids using so-called conventional weapons on other cities such as Tokyo and Dresden inflicted far greater casualties. And that it could not matter much to a victim whether he was burnt alive by a firestorm caused b y phosphorus, or by napalm or by atomic fission. Yet in the whole of human history so savage a massacre had never before been inflicted with a single blow. And modern atomic weapons are upwards of 1,000 times more powerful and deadly than the Hiroshima bomb. The white scar I saw on Emikos small, fine-boned hand was a tiny metaphor, a faint but eloquent reminder of the scar on humanitys conscience.