“Put Toshiaki on the cart,” I ordered the girl.
“I will carry him.” The boy looked from me to the girl with shocked eyes.
“Do as you please.”
I led the way, face set in a perpetual scowl of pain as I dragged that black handcart the one kilometre up Motohara Hill. I did not look back. There was no time for thought. I was aware of what was generally occurring around me, of Yoshito’s yelps of pain as his leg pitched against the side of the handcart, or the ruts in the road that seemed to be shaking the cart to pieces. But my sole focus was on getting the handcart to Urakami First Hospital, more commonly known as St Francis’ Hospital. It was usually a gentle stroll of a journey, I knew it well and had made it so many times over the years. Now, with that hellfire at my heels, it was perfect torture.
There was the dead weight of the cart, the endless debris that clogged up the road, and the searing pain of my arm – and, as if that was not enough, the firestorm seemed to be coming at us from all sides. I remember letting out a great howl of rage – “Devil in hell!” – as I saw that our route up the hill was blocked by a wall of flame. I had no option but to trundle the cart back down the hill, and work my way round the blaze. As for the girl, she followed me in docile silence with Toshiaki fast in her arms; I think she was just letting my rage do its work.
How I howled and cursed as I dragged at that handcart. Mako appeared to be unconscious, but my father’s sage old friend was flat on his back and gazing dispassionately at the firestorm.
Amongst the bodies on the road was a woman who was crawling up the hill. “Help me!” she called out, pleading to me with stricken eyes. “Help me, please.” She was a woman in her twenties, and one side of her body had been burned, her left arm and leg turning a purplish brown.
I pulled up the handcart alongside her, trying to work out if I could take her up the hill as well. Perhaps she could sit on the end. It would be impossibly slow. I felt that I had already reached my limit.
“Please,” said the woman again, before breaking off to cough as the smoke snatched at her lungs. “I want to live.”
I was in an agony of indecision. I wanted to help her; I wanted to help everyone. But to pull three people up that hill? Could I?
The girl sidled over. “I will help you,” she said. “Can you walk if you lean on me?”
“I – I will try,” said the woman.
Yoshito had turned his head and was watching from the handcart. “Let me hold the boy,” he said, beaming as the girl passed Toshiaki over.
I stooped and helped the woman to her feet. The girl was brilliant. I know that her unending chatter had, at times, got on my nerves. But on this occasion, she realised she had to draw the woman’s mind away from her injuries.
“This is the second bomb we’ve been in like this,” she said as the woman clutched onto her shoulder and made her tentative first step. “We came from Hiroshima this morning – and look what happened! Down comes another bomb. We arrived just in time. Perhaps we’re a magnet for these new bombs. Is that possible? Do you think that if we went to another city, they would drop another bomb on us there too?”
Within five minutes, she had already discovered the woman’s name, her occupation and where she lived – and, more importantly, they had walked more than 100 metres up the hill without the woman appearing even to notice it.
I was following in their wake with the handcart. I thought the burning sensation in my left arm could not have been any more painful if they had chopped my hand off. Just grasping the cart’s handle was bad enough, but pulling it up the hill, with my cooked sinews shaking with the strain, was torture. I remember how my mouth was champed tight shut and my eyes screwed into gimlets as I concentrated on doing nothing more than counting to ten. Head bent down, I would count each step and, when I had reached ten, would start all over again.
We were making headway. There seemed to be a clear path to the hospital. But just when my spirits began to lift, I looked up again to see that the road was blocked – completely blocked by the ruins of two houses.
I was a mule that had been given a task and could think of no other way of completing it. So, with a grunt of pain, I started to drag the handcart up over the rubble. It was insanity. One wheel had caught behind a piece of concrete, yet still I was straining at the handles, believing that brute strength would ultimately win.
I pulled and I pulled and when nothing happened, I pulled some more.
“Stop!” screamed the girl, who was a few metres ahead of me. “You will break the handcart!”
“It’s the only way.” Again and again, I lunged at the handles.
“Why not take them off? You could carry them over?”
“Because... ” I was still so set on hauling that handcart over that hillock that I could hardly understand what she was saying. Take Mako and Yoshito off and carry them over?
“Because I’m an idiot!” I screamed at her.
I took Mako first, who was like a rag-doll in my arms, and then Toshiaki. Yoshito seemed quite calm as he handed the boy over. “Leave me,” he said. “You don’t have much time.”
“Be quiet! You’re coming,” I said, scrambling back over the rubble again.
Yoshito was the heaviest of them all. He noticed my short pants of breath. “Sorry I am so heavy.”
“Shut your mouth!”
The fire was almost upon us now, burning embers flicking past on eddies of smoke. I placed Yoshito on the ground and darted back over the rubble to retrieve the handcart. Even without its load, it was still unwieldy.
I worked myself into a fury of indignation. How could we have come so far, only to be thwarted by something like this? I lashed out at a stone. For once I was able to harness my rage and let it work for me. I had to strain at each wheel, tugging them separately over every blockage. I kicked and shouted and acted like a crazed Samurai.
Sometimes though it works. I would not recommend it. But sometimes rage can give that extra fillip of strength to help you over the line.
And that, eventually, was the way that we arrived into the grounds of St Francis’ Hospital, along with a band of other injured vagrants, their hair on end and their clothes in tatters. What a relief it was to have dragged that handcart into the compound and to let go of that infernal torture-machine – and, as I looked about me, I wondered why we had come to the hospital in the first place.
It was completely ablaze, flames spouting from the windows, and smoke torrenting from the roof-tiles.
I question the need for Fat Man.
There was a reasonable case for dropping Little Boy. Without that first bomb, Japan would have probably continued the war until the entire country had been crushed like a grape. Among the Big Six were a number of warmongers who were all for committing a nationwide version of Hari-kiri. Their battle-cry was – genuinely, ‘A hundred million will die together!’
But Little Boy had given our ministers all the excuse they needed to surrender. And I am sure they would have surrendered – especially after Russia had entered the war. But still they dithered and they hummed, and meanwhile the Yankees methodically went about their business of dropping a second bomb. They dubbed it, by the way, ‘a quick one-two punch against the Empire’.
But there was never any need for the ‘quick one-two’; Little Boy had in itself been a complete knockout blow.
If the Yankees had given us a few more days before dropping Fat Man; if our inept leaders had run up the white flag a little sooner; if Russia had declared war a month earlier; if, if, if...
You may have noticed that I am obsessed by that one little word:
if
. I constantly ponder how differently my life might have turned out.
The reason is because not once, but twice now, my life has been saved through matters of such total inconsequence. In Hiroshima, I happened to walk into the warehouse a second before Little Boy exploded; in Nagasaki, I was saved by the girl’s high-flying kite.
But it is impossible to weigh up these personal hypotheticals without also evaluating how Fat Man came to be dropped on Nagasaki in the first place. We had the most appalling bad luck.
Fat Man – named, so they say, after Britain’s plump Prime Minister Winston Churchill – had from the first been earmarked for Kokura. Kokura had one of the biggest munitions plants in Japan, far more substantial than those of Nagasaki.
The B29 that was picked for the job was called Bock’s Car. It was a state-of-the-art bomber and the mechanics had been swarming over it for days. And yet on the day that Fat Man was due to be dropped, Bock’s Car’s reserve full pump would not work, severely curtailing Major Chuck Sweeney’s flying time.
And so, inevitably, tragically, Bock’s Car hums high over Kokura, desperately hunting for a glimpse of the city through the clouds. Sweeney is under the strictest orders that he can only drop the bomb if he has visual contact with the city. Once, twice, three times the B29 passes over, but each time the cloud cover is so dense that nothing can be seen.
If I were the Mayor of Kokura, I would give thanks every time I saw a cloud. I would have an annual citywide holiday in gratitude to cumuli. I would adopt a cloud as the city’s symbol to the world, a sign not just of Kokura’s good fortune, but also of the sublime arbitrariness of death. Never before in history has the lot of so many tens of thousands of people depended on a cloud.
With fuel running low, Major Sweeney makes the decision to fly on to Nagasaki to see if he has better luck there. Oh, but the Major was just desperate to drop that bomb and to make his mark on history – but as it is, like Nagasaki itself, no-one remembers who came second and none but the A-bomb diehards have ever heard of Bock’s Car or the Major.
There was only fuel enough for the single bomb run over Nagasaki, but we, also, had thick cloud cover. As the B29 trawled over the city, Sweeney was mulling over whether to drop the bomb by radar alone; would that that happy thought had come to him as he had been flying over Kokura.
Suddenly the bombardier, Kermit Beahan, lets out a shout. “I’ve got it!” he screams. “I see the city!”
Bombardier Beahan, now in control of Bock’s Car, ducks through a chink in the clouds, quickly securing his cross-hairs onto the Mitsubishi Arms Manufacturing Plant. And if I can dally for just a moment longer on one final what-might-havebeen: not only was Nagasaki not the primary city, but the Mitsubishi Plant was not even the primary target in Nagasaki. No, Beahan had actually been searching for the Prefecture, three kilometres south. But that tiny gap in the clouds just happened to be above Urakami, and that in the end is what did for us.
There was a journalist, Bill Laurence, in an observation plane behind Bock’s Car, the better to record every nuance and detail of the second bomb run. This is just a small piece of the puke-inducing screed that he wrote while he was sitting in the midsection of the appropriately named
Great Artiste
: ‘Somewhere ahead of me lies Japan, the land of our enemy. In a few hours from now, one of its cities, making weapons of war for use against us, will be wiped off the map by the great- est weapon ever made by man. In a fraction of time immeasurable by any clock, a whirlwind from the skies will pulverize thousands of its buildings and tens of thousands of its inhabitants.’
What a gloriously lyrical way to describe an atomic bomb. Laurence, I think, must have fancied himself a poet.There was scant poetry to be had down on the ground – even months, years, after the war had ended.
It would be several days yet before Japan was forced to swallow that bitter pill of surrender – and what a surrender it was. As one, the entire country seemed to break down into hysterical tears. It was probably the greatest single outpouring of grief in history.
There were two people, however, who were not crying when the war finally ended: the girl and me. The girl, as I remember, actually started laughing; as for me, all I could feel was this numbing relief that, just as the whole sorry farrago of a war had come to an end, I had not had my head blown off with an army service pistol.
All in the fullness of time. First there is a burned wife and an injured son to be dealt with, along with a man who was only partly on the way to redemption.
The hospital had not been overtaken by the firestorm, which was a small blessing, as it was at least safe to lie outside in the grounds. But the building was ablaze. It was about 1,800 metres from the epicentre and the bomb had so dried out its tinder-dry roof-beams that within a single hour they had burst into flames. First the roof had gone up, then the third floor, until the smoking timbers had fallen down through the liftshafts and torched the whole hospital.
In the preceding months, St Francis’ had largely catered for TB patients, but after the bomb it was transformed into Nagasaki’s primary burns unit. Throughout the afternoon, victims clambered up to the hill for sanctuary – and always, the longer they took the worse their injuries. The first of the victims, who arrived when we did, were at least able to walk. Later in the afternoon, they were nothing but black crawling wrecks, and the length of the hair was the only clue as to whether they were men or women.
The medicines were every bit as basic as they had been at the Hijiyama School two days earlier. The hospital had been well-stocked with creams, bandages and all the other things that might aid a burns victim. But the doctor and his team of nurses had only had time to save their patients from the inferno before all but their most basic medicines went up in smoke.
With the rest of my little troupe lying on the grass in a line, and all the other medics treating people who were more dead than alive, I set to work on Toshiaki. The girl had found me a pair of forceps and she soothed the boy as I started to tug the wooden splinter from his leg. How he bucked and squealed, but the girl kept him pinned tight to the ground. I was fortunate that the splinter had penetrated all the way through the fleshy part and come out the other side, so I was able to pull it out point first. First he watched me, eyes wide with shock, but as the pain grew, he thrashed his head from side to side.