CHAPTER 2

FLASHPOINT

The five-ton plutonium bomb plunged toward the city at 614 miles per hour. Forty-seven seconds later, a powerful implosion forced its plutonium core to compress from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a tennis ball, generating a nearly instantaneous chain reaction of nuclear fission. With colossal force and energy, the bomb detonated a third of a mile above the Urakami Valley and its thirty thousand residents and workers, a mile and a half north of the intended target. At 11:02 a.m., a superbrilliant flash lit up the sky—visible from as far away as Omura Naval Hospital more than ten miles over the mountains—followed by a thunderous explosion equal to the power of twenty-one thousand tons of TNT. The entire city convulsed.

At its burst point, the center of the explosion reached temperatures higher than at the center of the sun, and the velocity of its shock wave exceeded the speed of sound. A tenth of a millisecond later, all of the materials that had made up the bomb converted into an ionized gas, and electromagnetic waves were released into the air. The thermal heat of the bomb ignited a fireball with an internal temperature of over 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Within one second, the blazing fireball expanded from 52 feet to its maximum size of 750 feet in diameter. Within three seconds, the ground below reached an estimated 5,400 to 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Directly beneath the bomb, infrared heat rays instantly carbonized human and animal flesh and vaporized internal organs.

As the atomic cloud billowed two miles overhead and eclipsed the sun, the bomb’s vertical blast pressure crushed much of the Urakami Valley. Horizontal blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a category five hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, plants, animals, and thousands of men, women, and children. In every direction, people were blown out of their shelters, houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds; catapulted against walls; or flattened beneath collapsed buildings. Those working in the fields, riding streetcars, and standing in line at city ration stations were blown off their feet or hit by plummeting debris and pressed to the scalding earth. An iron bridge moved twenty-eight inches downstream. As their buildings began to implode, patients and staff jumped out of the windows of Nagasaki Medical College Hospital, and mobilized high school girls leaped from the third story of Shiroyama Elementary School, a half mile from the blast.

The blazing heat melted iron and other metals, scorched bricks and concrete buildings, ignited clothing, disintegrated vegetation, and caused severe and fatal flash burns on people’s exposed faces and bodies. A mile from the detonation, the blast force caused nine-inch brick walls to crack, and glass fragments bulleted into people’s arms, legs, backs, and faces, often puncturing their muscles and organs. Two miles away, thousands of people suffering flesh burns from the extreme heat lay trapped beneath partially demolished buildings. At distances up to five miles, wood and glass splinters pierced through people’s clothing and ripped into their flesh. Windows shattered as far as eleven miles away. Larger doses of radiation than any human had ever received penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals. The ascending fireball suctioned massive amounts of thick dust and debris into its churning stem. A deafening roar erupted as buildings throughout the city shuddered and crashed to the ground.

“It all happened in an instant,” Yoshida remembered. He had barely seen the blinding light half a mile away before a powerful force hit him on his right side and hurled him into the air. “The heat was so intense that I curled up like surume [dried grilled squid].” In what felt like dreamlike slow motion, Yoshida was blown backward 130 feet across a field, a road, and an irrigation channel, then plunged to the ground, landing on his back in a rice paddy flooded with shallow water.

Inside the Mitsubishi Ohashi weapons factory, Do-oh had been wiping perspiration from her face and concentrating on her work when PAAAAAHTTO!—an enormous blue-white flash of light burst into the building, followed by an earsplitting explosion. Thinking a torpedo had detonated inside the Mitsubishi plant, Do-oh threw herself onto the ground and covered her head with her arms just as the factory came crashing down on top of her.

In his short-sleeved shirt, trousers, gaiters, and cap, Taniguchi had been riding his bicycle through the hills in the northwest corner of the valley when a sudden burning wind rushed toward him from behind, propelling him into the air and slamming him facedown on the road. “The earth was shaking so hard that I hung on as hard as I could so I wouldn’t get blown away again.”

Nagano was standing inside the school gymnasium–turned–airplane parts factory, protected to some degree by distance and the wooded mountains that stood between her and the bomb. “A light flashed—pi-KAAAAH!” she remembered. Nagano, too, thought a bomb had hit her building. She fell to the ground, covering her ears and eyes with her thumbs and fingers according to her training as windows crashed in all around her. She could hear pieces of tin and broken roof tiles swirling and colliding in the air outside.

Two miles southeast of the blast, Wada was sitting in the lounge of Hotarujaya Terminal with other drivers, discussing the earlier derailment. He saw the train cables flash. “The whole city of Nagasaki was—the light was indescribable—an unbelievably massive light lit up the whole city.” A violent explosion rocked the station. Wada and his friends dived for cover under tables and other furniture. In the next instant, he felt like he was floating in the air before being slapped down on the floor. Something heavy landed on his back, and he fell unconscious.

Beneath the still-rising mushroom cloud, a huge portion of Nagasaki had vanished. Tens of thousands throughout the city were dead or injured. On the floor of Hotarujaya Terminal, Wada lay beneath a fallen beam. Nagano was curled up on the floor of the airplane parts factory, her mouth filled with glass slivers and choking dust. Do-oh lay injured in the wreckage of the collapsed Mitsubishi factory, engulfed in smoke. Yoshida was lying in a muddy rice paddy, barely conscious, his body and face brutally scorched. Taniguchi clung to the searing pavement near his mangled bicycle, not yet realizing that his back was burned off. He lifted his eyes just long enough to see a young child “swept away like a fleck of dust.”

Sixty seconds had passed.

____

The enormous, undulating cloud ascended seven miles above the city. From the sky, Bockscar’s copilot Lieutenant Frederick Olivi described it as “a huge, boiling caldron.” William L. Laurence, the official journalist for the Manhattan Project who had witnessed the bombing from the instrument plane, likened the burgeoning cloud to “a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.” Captain Beahan remembered it “bubbling and flashing orange, red and green . . . like a picture of hell.”

Outside the city, many people who saw the flash of light and heard the deafening explosion rushed out of their homes and stared in wonder at the nuclear cloud heaving upward over Nagasaki. A worker on an island in Omura Bay, several miles north of the blast, described it as “lurid-colored . . . curling like long tongues of fire in the sky.” In Isahaya, five miles east of the city, a grandmother feared that “the sun would come falling down,” and a young boy grabbed at ash and paper falling from the sky, only to realize that they were scraps of ration books belonging to residents in the Urakami Valley. From the top of Mount Tohakkei four miles southeast of Nagasaki, a man loading wood into his truck was “stunned speechless by the beauty of the spectacle” of the giant rising cloud exploding over and over again as it transformed from white to yellow to red. In neighborhoods at the edge of the city, people peered out of windows and stepped outside to see the atomic cloud rising above them, only to bolt back inside or to nearby shelters in anticipation of a second attack.

Inside the city, the bomb’s deadly gale quieted, leaving Nagasaki enveloped in a dark, dust-filled haze. Nearest the hypocenter (the point on the ground above which the bomb exploded), almost everyone was incinerated, and those still alive were burned so badly they could not move. In areas beyond the hypocenter, surviving men, women, and children began extricating themselves from the wreckage and tentatively stood, in utter terror, for their first sight of the missing city. Twenty minutes after the explosion, particles of carbon ash and radioactive residue descended from the atmosphere and condensed into an oily black rain that fell over Nishiyama-machi, a neighborhood about two miles east over the mountains.

Nagano pulled herself up from the floor of the airplane parts factory and stood, quivering, rubbing debris from her eyes and spitting dust and glass fragments from her throat and mouth. Around her, adult and student workers lay cowering on the ground or rose to their feet, stunned and bewildered. Opening her eyes just a bit, Nagano sensed it was too dangerous to stay where she was. She ran outside and squeezed herself into a crowded mountain air raid shelter, where she crouched down and waited for another bomb to drop.

“The whole Urakami district has been destroyed!” one of the male workers called out to her. “Your house may have burned as well!” Nagano fled from the bomb shelter and ran toward the Urakami Valley. Outside, the neighborhood around the factory was almost pitch-dark and hauntingly still. Large trees had snapped in half, tombstones had fallen in a cemetery nearby, and streets were filled with broken roof tiles and glass. Small birds lay on the ground, twitching. Compared to what she had imagined, however, the damages around her seemed minimal, and Nagano—who could not see the Urakami Valley—half believed that her family might be safe after all.

She hurried through the streets to the southern end of Nishiyama-machi toward Nagasaki Station, over a mile to the east, pressing past partially collapsed wooden houses and people fleeing the blast area. As the road curved west, Nagano rushed by the 277-step stone staircase leading up to the seventeenth-century Suwa Shrine, still intact, and Katsuyama Elementary School, just next to City Hall. Forty-five minutes later, Nagano finally passed the mountains that had stood between her and the expanse of atomic destruction. In front of her, the main building of Nagasaki Station had collapsed. But it was the view to her right that shocked her into finally realizing that the rumors she had heard about the Urakami Valley were true. Where the northern half of Nagasaki had existed only an hour before, a low heavy cloud of smoke and dust hovered over a vast plain of rubble. Nothing remained of the dozens of neighborhoods except tangled electrical wires and an occasional lone chimney. The huge factories that had lined the river near Nagasaki Station were crumpled into masses of steel frames and wooden beams, and the streetcar rails were, in one survivor’s words, “curled up like strands of taffy.” No trace of roads existed beneath miles of smoking wreckage. Blackened corpses covered the ground. Survivors were stumbling through the ruins moaning in pain, their skin hanging down like tattered cloth. Others raced away, shrieking, “Run! Escape!” A barefoot mother in shredded clothes ran through the wreckage screaming for her child. Most people, however, were silent. Many simply dropped dead where they stood.

Nagano’s house was just over a half mile to the north and west, a ten-minute walk on any other day. She faced in that direction to scan the area, but there was nothing—no buildings, no trees, and no sign of life where she had last seen her mother and younger brother and sister. Her eyes searched frantically for a way home, but the flames spreading through the ruins prevented access from all directions. Paralyzed and confused, Nagano stood in front of Nagasaki Station, alone, with no idea what to do next.

____

The three-square-mile region obliterated by the bomb stretched just over a mile east to west and three miles north to south, from the top edge of the Urakami Valley to the bay, close to where Nagano stood. The affected area would have been significantly larger, as in Hiroshima, had not the blast, heat, and radiation been contained by the mountains surrounding the valley to the north, east, and west. The location of the bay, a mile and a half south of the hypocenter, also limited the extent of the bomb’s destruction.

In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fatalities, injuries, and physical destruction from the bombs’ blast, heat, and radiation are described in relation to distance from the atomic explosion, creating an imagined overlay of concentric circles radiating outward from the hypocenter. Within Nagasaki’s first concentric circle—a half kilometer (three-tenths of a mile) in all directions from the blast—nearly all buildings were demolished, and bodies were disintegrated or burned beyond recognition. Mortality was estimated at over 90 percent.

Because the city and its infrastructure were destroyed and government investigations took place only after the war ended, records to account for every fatality could not be collected, but some of the tens of thousands of instantaneous deaths throughout the hypocenter area were later documented. Almost directly beneath the bomb, 43 people in an underground air raid shelter and 134 staff members and prisoners at the Urakami Branch of Nagasaki Prison suffered fatal burns and injuries, including more than 40 Chinese and Koreans. To the east, 314 physicians and medical students died in the auditorium of Nagasaki Medical College, and an estimated 200 patients were killed in the hospital next door. Farther north, 2 Catholic priests and 24 parishioners waiting for confession died beneath the imploded Urakami Church. Just west of the hypocenter, 52 mobilized students and teachers were fatally injured at Shiroyama Elementary School, and an estimated 1,400 children enrolled at the school perished in their homes and shelters throughout the neighborhood. Sixty-eight students and teachers were killed at Chinzei Middle School, less than a third of a mile southwest of the hypocenter. Inside the Urakami railway station, most of the 85 adult and youth employees died. To the south, well beyond this first radius of death, at least 4 Allied prisoners of war—3 Dutch and 1 British—were killed instantly at the Fukuoka POW Camp No. 14 at Saiwai-machi. Four more Dutch POWs died within two weeks. Out of the 9,000 Japanese military personnel throughout Nagasaki, 150 were killed.

Yoshida, Do-oh, and Taniguchi were north of the explosion. The well where Yoshida had stood was in the second concentric circle, its outer boundary marking a radius of one kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) from the hypocenter. There the blast pressure tore off heads and limbs and caused eyes and internal organs to explode. The bomb’s heat scalded the water in a nearby pond and caused terrible burns on the bodies of children playing by the shore. A woman who had covered her eyes from the flash lowered her hands to find that the skin of her face had melted into her palms. Most trees were downed or shattered. Thousands of people were crushed beneath toppled houses, factories, and schools, and thousands more suffered severe thermal burns. Roof tiles blistered in the heat.

Like everyone else in Nagasaki that day, Yoshida’s immediate survival and degree of injury from burns and radiation depended entirely on his exact location, the direction he was facing in relation to the bomb, what he was wearing, and what buildings, walls, trees, or even rocks stood between him and the speeding force of the bomb’s titanic power. Yoshida had been facing in the direction of the hypocenter only a half mile away in a rural region of the Urakami Valley, with very little to shield him from the bomb’s blast force and heat. “I was hurled backward into a rice paddy, right? At some point I regained consciousness and could feel the coldness of the water. I stood up, and my body was covered in mud.” The skin on his arm had peeled off and was hanging down from his fingertips, and he could feel that his chest and legs were burned, but Yoshida did not yet know the extent of his facial burns. “Blood was pouring out of my flesh,” he said. Like thousands of others, he went into shock. “I know it sounds strange, but I felt absolutely no pain. I even forgot to cry.”

The blast had thrown Yoshida and his friends in different directions, but all six survived, albeit with serious burns and wounds. After some time, they found one another and slowly made their way to a small tributary of the Urakami River, where they rinsed the mud off their bodies and lay down together in the grass, hoping that someone would find them. One of Yoshida’s friends handed him a broken piece of mirror, and when Yoshida looked at his reflection, he could not comprehend what he saw. “All I can say is that I didn’t recognize my own face.”

Hundreds of field-workers and others staggered by, moaning and crying. Some were missing body parts, and others were so badly burned that even though they were naked, Yoshida couldn’t tell if they were men or women. He saw one person whose eyeballs hung down his face, the sockets empty. Everyone begged for water, and some died while drinking from the stream. During the war, Yoshida’s teachers had incorrectly warned their students that drinking water while injured would cause excessive bleeding and death—so Yoshida held out all day with no water to ease his extreme dehydration.

A group of wailing mothers coming down from the mountains shook Yoshida and his friends out of their dazed state and awakened them to their own physical pain and terror. “We were only thirteen years old,” he recalled, “and when we heard these mothers crying, we started sobbing too, even louder than they were.” The boys rose to their feet and followed the women down the slopes toward the city. At the Urakami River, however, Yoshida wavered. Clutched by pervasive heat and choking dust, he saw people on the ground with severed limbs and heads split open, their brains oozing out. Other bodies were completely carbonized—“turned into charcoal,” he remembered. The river, to which people had fled for relief from the heat and intense thirst, had become a mass grave—because they drank the water, Yoshida thought. Corpses bobbed in the river, now red with blood.

Yoshida began to feel his face and body swell. He looked down to see leeches from the rice paddy stuck to his bare legs. He and his friends stumbled back to the small stream where they had come from, removed the leeches from their bodies, and placed uncharred leaves over their raw flesh. In an attempt to escape the heat of the sun, the seven boys burrowed into the tall grass against the riverbank. Pain shot through Yoshida’s body, and by this time, his face was so swollen that he couldn’t see. “Hang in there, okay?” the boys whispered to one another. “Gotta keep going—do our best to stay alive!”

 • • • 

Do-oh was injured three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter—within the third concentric circle. There, blistered clay roof tiles later indicated exposure to heat over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the death rate was estimated at 50 percent. When the Mitsubishi Ohashi plant collapsed on top of Do-oh and thousands of others, some people were thrown so far that when they regained consciousness, they were in a different part of the factory. In Do-oh’s area, nearly everyone lay dead beneath an avalanche of heavy equipment, steel beams, concrete walls, and metal columns.

The crushed room was utterly quiet. After a few moments, Do-oh opened her eyes to find herself lying on the factory floor covered with huge pieces of debris. She extricated herself and stood up to get her bearings, but thick smoke and dust barred visibility in every direction. “The silence scared me. No one else was there.” In the intense heat, with flames darting up around her, Do-oh searched for the exit but could not see it anywhere. “I didn’t know what to do!” she said. “I knew if I stayed there, I would die. I panicked and searched for the door again. I have to escape! I thought. I have to escape! If I don’t escape, I will burn and die!”

Finally, she spotted an older man staggering in the shadows, his shirt and pants smoldering. She moved toward him as fast as she could, tripping over asbestos roofing, broken iron framing, crisscrossed wooden beams, and unidentified blackened objects she later discovered were the bodies of her coworkers. When she reached the old man, Do-oh followed him through the smoky remains of the factory, past countless people trapped and moaning beneath the wreckage, to the outside where she thought she would be safe.

But the city as she had known it no longer existed. All around, thick layers of splintered glass, metal dust, and twisted wire covered the ground, along with scorched corpses staring upward or facing down as though sleeping. Hundreds of men and women who had climbed out of the factory rubble staggered across the grounds, half-naked, their blistered skin falling off their bodies; many held their arms stretched out in front of them—probably, one survivor guessed, to keep the skin that had peeled off their arms and hands from dragging on the ground. “They all looked gray,” one woman remembered. “No, not even gray; they were simply colorless, dusty figures with two blank holes for eyes, a stubby nose, and another hole for a mouth.” A mother cradled her headless infant and wailed.

Do-oh stumbled toward the main road, where she met two of her classmates emerging from nearby factory buildings. The girls were startled when they saw Do-oh’s injuries, but Do-oh was in such shock that she didn’t register the meaning of their expressions. The three girls joined hands and agreed to escape to the hills together. Within moments, Do-oh felt too weak to go on. She squatted on the ground outside the factory gates. “Don’t worry about me,” she assured her friends, urging them to keep going. “I’ll meet up with you soon.” As they left for safety, the girls encouraged Do-oh not to give up and told her they’d be waiting for her.

Do-oh rested in the rubble, but she was too scared to stay where she was, so she forced herself up and walked in the direction of a Buddhist temple, then made her way down an embankment to some railroad tracks. She had no strength to climb up the other side. She paused and looked up again, then grabbed the exposed roots of a fallen tree on the ridge above her. Holding on with all her strength, Do-oh pulled herself up the steep incline. On top of the embankment, she collapsed on the ground surrounded by dozens of other wounded people.

It was here that Do-oh finally realized the gravity of her injuries: The whole left side of her body was badly burned, a bone was sticking out of her right arm at the elbow, hundreds of glass splinters had penetrated most of her body, and blood was streaming down her neck. Too dazed to cry, she reached back to the base of her head and felt a wide and deep horizontal gash stretching from one ear to the other, filled with shards of glass and wood. “Daddy!” she cried. “Please come! Please help me!” As she lay on the embankment, a plane flew over at very low altitude—so close, Do-oh remembered, that she could see the pilot. Panicked at the idea of possible machine-gun fire, she crawled to a fallen tree and squeezed her body under one of its limbs as the plane flew over a second time. Nearly invisible, desperately thirsty, and surrounded by disfigured strangers—some silent and others crying out for their loved ones—Do-oh felt completely alone.

 • • • 

Slightly over a mile from the hypocenter, Taniguchi had been riding his bicycle in a rural area surrounded by rice paddies and vegetable fields, in the direct path of the bomb’s unyielding force. He lay on his stomach in the road and waited for the earth to stop shaking. After some time, he raised his head. The bodies of children who had been playing by the road lay scorched all around him. Petrified that he, too, would die there, Taniguchi willed himself to stay alive. I can’t die now, I can’t die now, he told himself. I refuse to die.

He heaved himself up. All the houses around him were destroyed. Flames spurted from the ruins. Near him, a woman lay in agony, her hair burned off and her face terribly swollen. Taniguchi glanced over at his crushed bicycle. His postal bag was open and mail had scattered all around. Bewildered, he wandered along the road, collecting the letters and stuffing them into his pockets—and for the first time he noticed his injuries. His right hand was seared black. From his fingertips to his shoulder, the skin on his left arm had melted and was hanging in shreds. His left leg, too, was badly burned. Taniguchi felt something strange and slippery on his back, so he reached around to find that his shirt was gone—and when he pulled his hand back, his fingers were covered with charred, melted skin, black and slimy, like grease. “I did not feel any pain, and there was not a single drop of blood.”

Leaving his bicycle and mailbag behind, Taniguchi dragged himself forward, as though sleepwalking, to search for help. Up the road, he passed the women’s dorm of the Mitsubishi factory, where people squirmed in pain on the ground, their hair singed and their bodies and faces burned and swollen. A short distance farther, he made his way into one of Mitsubishi’s Sumiyoshi mountain tunnels and fumbled through a dark, narrow passageway packed with injured factory workers. Taniguchi collapsed onto a worktable. A woman offered him a bit of water, apologizing that there wasn’t more because the city’s waterlines had been destroyed. She cut off the skin dangling from Taniguchi’s arm, and since all the medicines stored in the tunnel were already used up, she applied machine oil to try to soothe the raw, dust-filled flesh of his back.

Fear of a second attack spread through the tunnel. As everyone clambered to escape to the hills, Taniguchi tried to hoist himself off the table, but his legs couldn’t support him. Several men carried him outside to the top of a hill where they laid him down on his stomach surrounded by injured people begging for water, crying out for help, and muttering their names and addresses in the hope that someone would tell their families where and how they had died. By then it was past noon. Half-conscious and unable to move, Taniguchi lay facedown in that spot for the rest of the day, the flesh of his back and arms unprotected from the lingering heat of the nuclear blast and the intense sun bearing down through the atomic haze.

____

Until the night before, when he had first heard reports of the Hiroshima bombing, Nagasaki prefectural governor Nagano Wakamatsu’s lack of understanding about the nature of atomic weapons had allowed him reasonable confidence in Nagasaki’s wartime rescue preparedness. Nagasaki Medical College served as the principal site for emergency medical care, supported by eighteen hospitals and medical clinics throughout the city that could provide outpatient care for 1,240 people. If needed, the faculty and staff of Nagasaki Medical College and its hospital could provide extra care, and its student body could offer additional basic first-aid support. Large stores of medicine and supplies had been stowed for safekeeping in concrete-reinforced warehouses. In reality, however, even if the governor had been given more information and preparation time, neither Nagasaki nor any city in the world had the capacity to build rescue and relief operations adequate for a nuclear attack.

When the bomb detonated, the governor had just convened his emergency evacuation planning meeting inside the concrete-lined air raid shelter that served as the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense Headquarters, situated southeast of the Urakami Valley on the other side of the mountains. After hearing immediate accounts from area workers that several parachutes had descended, followed by a brilliant flash of light and a tremendous explosion, the governor believed that “new-type” bombs like the one reportedly dropped on Hiroshima had been used on Nagasaki as well. When he ran outside to investigate, however, he saw that houses in the immediate neighborhood near Suwa Shrine were undamaged except for windows shattered by the explosion. He turned to the south and scanned the Nakashima Valley and city center, seeing nothing that fit the descriptions he had heard of a completely annihilated Hiroshima. Details from various Nagasaki police stations reported minimal damage and no serious injuries. Based on these early observations and descriptions of damages, the governor concluded that—unlike Hiroshima—the new-type bombs dropped on Nagasaki had caused only fires, and that the atomic cloud he could see rising and expanding above Mount Kompira was only intense smoke. Within minutes, he dispatched telegrams to key officials in Kyushu and western Japan stating that the bombs were smaller versions of those used on Hiroshima and that his city’s structural damages and casualties were minimal.

But the governor soon realized that the early police reports he had received had come only from Nagasaki’s outlying areas; no reports had come in yet from the northern sections of the city. “Telephone lines were dead,” he later explained, “and we had no idea that thousands of people, including the police, had been killed or injured in the Urakami area.” It would be nearly an hour after the bombing when he first learned, with great anguish, that almost none of the city’s emergency medical services had survived the nuclear attack: The Medical College and its hospital were destroyed, and a large number of its staff and students were dead. A majority of the city’s other hospitals, clinics, and designated relief stations and their personnel, mostly located within a half mile of the hypocenter, were also gone. Too late for evacuation measures, the governor ordered the mobilization of doctors and nurses in the old city to provide aid to victims—but even they were mostly helpless because nearly all medicines had been destroyed in the blast. Few treatment options remained beyond water, pumpkin juice, sesame oil, machine oil, Mercurochrome (an antiseptic), zinc oxide cream, and an occasional tin of petroleum jelly. Mothers applied cooking oil to their children’s burns, and some boys removed their bleached cotton loincloths to use as bandages.

Wada was among the first civilians to support the city’s search and rescue efforts. Initially knocked unconscious when Hotarujaya Terminal collapsed, when he regained his senses, Wada found himself lying facedown beneath large wooden beams and debris. He called out for help, and eventually several students found him and pulled him out of the wreckage. Wada had suffered minor cuts and injuries but was otherwise unharmed. As he sat in the partially collapsed station house, a little girl about five years old wandered in and sat down in front of him, crying. Her forehead was raw with burns and her face and body were covered in blood. “[Her] eyes were so big,” Wada recalled. “She never said a single word.”

Still weakened and scared, he hoisted the girl onto his back and carried her outside the station toward a neighborhood clinic. “It was still around noon,” Wada remembered, “but the atomic cloud blocked the sun, so it was dark like night.” Nothing around him was the same as before. Every house was damaged. People escaping the hypocenter region walked past him in silence, but they were so badly wounded that “they didn’t look like humans.” When he got to the relief station, it was already jammed with people, so Wada took a wet rag and wiped the girl’s face and body as best he could. In time, a doctor applied akachin (Mercurochrome) and gauze bandages to her forehead and asked Wada to take the girl to a nearby elementary school being used as an emergency shelter. Wada lifted her on his back again and took her to the school’s athletic field, already overflowing with injured and burned people. “I had no choice but to lay her down there,” he said. He went back to the field a few days later, and the girl was no longer there. Wada guessed that she had died.

In the early afternoon, he made his way back to Hotarujaya Terminal, where injured drivers and other employees of the streetcar company had begun to gather. News arrived of the total destruction of the Urakami area, prompting Wada, as the student leader, to take an immediate roll call. Of sixty student workers, twelve were missing. Wada sent the girls home immediately and told them to escape with their families as far away as possible, then he and a group of male students set out in search of their friends. He kept thinking about three of the drivers who were heading into the Urakami Valley just before eleven a.m., including his best friend, Tanaka, and he tried to calculate their positions at the time of the bomb. Praying they were safe, he and his colleagues followed the streetcar lines to Nagasaki Station, but fires blocked them from going farther, so they turned back and joined the early relief efforts taking place all around them. As policemen assisted victims, civilian air raid wardens hurried through neighborhoods calling out to the injured, telling them to go to the temporary relief stations being set up in elementary schools. Medical relief personnel worked side by side with citizen aid volunteers, trying to help the seemingly endless numbers of survivors without any knowledge of the kinds of burns they were treating or the weapon that had caused them. Wada and his friends used wooden doors to carry the injured to makeshift aid stations. Of those they tried to save, few lived.

 • • • 

By 12:30 p.m., most of the buildings near the hypocenter were burning, including Nagasaki Medical College, and the numerous smaller fires that had erupted after the explosion had converged into a sea of flames. Everything in the Urakami Valley not initially destroyed by the atomic blast burned to the ground, and the fires quickly reached as far south as the Nagasaki Prefectural Government Building, the courthouse, and contiguous neighborhoods on the eastern side of the bay, all of which were gutted. In areas farther out, flammable objects such as trees and wooden houses that had absorbed the immense heat of the bomb spontaneously burst into flames. City officials could not comprehend the magnitude and speed of the conflagration. Beneath a dark, crimson sky, an early citizen firefighting crew set out toward the Urakami Valley along the railroad tracks to Yachiyo-machi, the southernmost neighborhood of the hypocenter area. Wearing helmets, gas masks, canteens over their shoulders, and daggers at their waists, the firemen were a stark visual contrast to the burned and naked bodies of those fleeing the scene. The power of the fires, however—along with the destruction of trucks and equipment and lack of water due to broken water mains and melted and damaged water pipes—prevented firefighters from containing the inferno. Able-bodied citizens raced to the edges of the blazes and created bucket brigades to extinguish the fires, but fanned by summer winds, the firestorm intensified. By early afternoon, the popping and hissing of encroaching flames terrorized survivors in almost every section of the city.

From Nagasaki Station, Nagano had pressed north along the melted railroad tracks parallel to the Urakami River, searching for a way around the fires to get to her home. “There were so many dead bodies on the ground, everywhere,” she remembered. “Heads here, bodies there, and next to them, people barely alive crying, ‘Tasukete kudasai!’ [Please help me!]” At every turn, fires stopped Nagano from moving closer to her neighborhood. As she crossed Inasa Bridge, by total coincidence she ran into her uncle, who was coming toward her. He and Nagano’s father worked at the same Mitsubishi Electric factory near the shipyard. Before racing away to search for his family, her uncle urged Nagano to stay where she was because her father would be coming along soon. Nagano waited, straining in the direction of the Mitsubishi Electric plant to the south, desperate for a glimpse of her father among the throngs of people moving in both directions.

Suddenly, he appeared in front of her. Relieved beyond words, Nagano sobbed and hugged him. Time was critical, however, so they quickly returned to the western side of the Urakami River and maneuvered their way over broken utility poles and severed power lines toward the next bridge to the north. Across the river they could see the crushed Mitsubishi steelworks factory, its towering smokestacks bent at the middle by the force of the blast wind. Hordes of injured people passed them, heading south to flee the area, “their bodies burned and bloated,” Nagano remembered, “naked except for patches of torn clothing stuck to their wounds.” Some of them staggered toward Nagano and her father and grabbed at them, begging for help and for water. “It was so terrible for them. But—” Nagano choked as she recalled the scene: “Doooooooooh suru koto mo dekinatta! [We could do absolutely nothing for them!] At least if we had had a canteen with us, we could have given them sips of water! We apologized—we said we were sorry—that’s all we could do. One after the other, people collapsed right in front of us and died.”

The air smelled of smoke and death. As Yoshida had seen farther north, here, too, the riverbanks were piled high with dead bodies. Corpses floated just below the surface of the river, “like potatoes in a tub,” one survivor remembered, some facedown and others sinking headfirst so only their feet were visible. When Nagano and her father approached the Yanagawa Bridge, they halted at the sight of a dead horse standing on all four legs, totally blackened, its head stretched upward. Nagano clung to her father’s arm as they walked past it and crossed the bridge to get closer to their house—but fires continued to block every entrance to their neighborhood. After many attempts, they grudgingly turned around and crossed back to the west side of the river, where they came to an air raid shelter. They crawled inside and huddled together on the ground. There was nothing to do but wait.

____

By two p.m., the atomic cloud had drifted twenty-four miles east and now hung over Mount Kinugasa on the Shimabara Peninsula. In Nagasaki, as the firestorm spread and burned to death people trapped beneath fallen buildings, gunpowder ignited in the Mitsubishi Ohashi factory, creating another explosion that reverberated throughout the valley. The four main thoroughfares into and out of the city were mobbed with dazed survivors wandering through the ruins, people trying to evacuate, and city workers racing to (unsuccessfully) restore power and water to the city. Desperate family members rushed to find their loved ones, bowing in reverence to the dead and injured people they passed or stepped over. From every direction, the ground in the hypocenter area was still too hot to enter, and people raced frantically in search of detours. Many waded through dead bodies to cross the Urakami River only to be stopped on the other side by a wall of heat.

Mothers and fathers searched for their children at schools, factories, and shelters throughout the area, but facial burns and swelling rendered people so unrecognizable that many parents could only identify their sons or daughters by reading the ID tags on their school uniforms. Fortunate families were overwhelmed with gratitude when a loved one returned. When one mother burst out shouting and crying with happiness when her daughter finally came home, a military policeman rebuked her loudly: “Such effeminate behavior has caused Japan to be defeated!”

Using still-functioning train cars, the first relief train had already left the Ohashi area carrying injured people to medical facilities outside Nagasaki. Many victims died en route or soon after arrival. In the meantime, medical relief and firefighting teams poured into the city from surrounding townships. By late afternoon, regional navy officials had also dispatched medical teams from hospitals outside the city, though many were delayed in arriving due to recurrent air raid alarms in their regions and damaged roads into Nagasaki. Navy rescue workers entering the city by train from the north were shocked by the eerie scenes before them of people crawling toward the tracks, the annihilated city burning in the distance, and the horrific smell of burning flesh, food, and buildings. The men began loading people into the empty trains and sending them off to naval hospitals in Isahaya (sixteen miles northeast), Omura (twenty-two miles north), and Sasebo (fifty-six miles northwest), though these hospitals were not equipped to handle the simultaneous arrival of hundreds of severely burned and injured people. It was impossible to notify the patients’ families about their locations, and many victims died alone before anyone knew where they were.

 • • • 

While Yoshida and his friends crouched against the embankment, the leaves they had placed over their open wounds dried and crumbled off their bodies, and with no buildings or trees left to provide shade, their raw flesh was exposed to the direct heat of the sun. “No words can describe how excruciating the pain was. I really thought I was going to die,” he remembered. “The heat of the sun was more unbearable than the atomic bomb.” When the sun finally fell behind the mountains to the west, the visceral relief the boys felt deluded them into thinking that at last they were saved.

But Yoshida’s burned face continued to swell. At first he used his fingers to keep his eyes open, but within a few hours, the swelling was so severe he could no longer see. Whenever he heard someone passing by, he called out, pleading with them for information about his neighborhood near Suwa Shrine. “Is it damaged?” he cried. “Are the people there okay?” Wounded victims called back to him that the whole city was destroyed. Yoshida faded into unconsciousness.

 • • • 

“Mineko! Mineko!” Do-oh’s father called out for her. When she didn’t return home after the bombing, he had set out to find her, searching the areas around the Mitsubishi Ohashi factory and moving as close as he could to the hypocenter. At the embankment where Do-oh was hiding under the limb of a fallen tree, the faces of people lying on the ground were so swollen that he was unsure he would be able to recognize her even if she was there. Still, he called out her name. By then, however, Do-oh, still bleeding, had fallen into semiconsciousness and couldn’t hear her father’s cries. He returned home to find out what she had been wearing that day, then left again, this time with the hope of identifying his daughter by her clothes.

Some time later, Do-oh regained momentary consciousness and peered up from beneath the tree to see one of her classmates, who told her that her father had been there looking for her. Panicked that she would still be too hidden for her father to find her, she tried to stand up. But she couldn’t move. Eventually Do-oh mumbled loudly enough to catch the attention of a young man passing by, and she asked him to carry her to a grassy area closer to the road. He placed her in a line of dead bodies and injured people, some of whom were moaning in pain. Another stranger covered her with mosquito netting.

Pain shot through Do-oh’s body, and she longed for water to relieve her intensely dry throat. “Anything, even muddy water would have been fine.” Shivering, she reached up to touch her wound a second time, and the slimy gash was so deep that her fingers went in all the way up to the first knuckle. Again, Do-oh drifted into unconsciousness. This time she hallucinated, seeing images of herself walking barefoot along an endless path between rice paddies with vast fields of bright rape blossoms all around. Yellow and white butterflies flew over the meadows. “It was a world where no one goes,” she recalled, “an extremely lonely, isolated world.” In the dream, she sat on a rock. In the distance, an old man in a white kimono beckoned her close to him. As she tried to approach him, another voice awakened her with a small whisper: “Don’t sleep! Don’t sleep!” It was God’s voice, the creator’s voice, Do-oh later believed, calling her back from the edge of death.

Do-oh’s father returned to the embankment and again searched among the bodies for any recognizable scrap of clothing. He called out Do-oh’s name over and over. This time she heard him. Summoning every fragment of energy, Do-oh whispered back—“Yes!”—in a voice just loud enough for him to hear. Her father and three others lifted her onto a broken wooden door and carried her two and half miles to the house of Dr. Miyajima Takeshi, a retired army physician who lived in Do-oh’s neighborhood in northwest Nagasaki, where the doctor and his family had begun providing treatment to victims fifteen minutes after the explosion. It was dark when Do-oh’s group arrived. The doctor’s yard spilled over with injured and dying people lying on the ground—hoping, praying, and begging for help.

____

The sun set on Nagasaki at 7:12 p.m., eight hours after the atomic blast. Near the hypocenter, flames darted out of the rubble, and outlying neighborhoods were still ablaze. People lying on the ground were consumed by fire. At makeshift relief stations and safe zones, volunteers distributed rations for the first time that day—onigiri, crackers, canned meat, and dry biscuits with sesame seeds—prepared by volunteer women’s groups outside Nagasaki and donated through their municipal governments. Workers used megaphones to announce the availability of food, but by then, most able-bodied people had fled. Scraps of burning documents and papers fluttered over the city. The Catholic orphanage and girls’ schools in the northern Urakami Valley had already burned down, and sometime that night, the ruins of Urakami Church ignited, sending pillars of fire high into the night sky.

Darkness had forced most family members to stop searching for their loved ones, though some with lanterns pressed on. A young father found his wife behind their house; charred and covered with ashes, she was calling out the names of their children, who were never found. Some survivors retreated to pumpkin fields beyond the fires to sleep among the injured and dying. Others fought off their drowsiness, afraid they would die if they fell asleep. An eleven-year-old girl slept on the ground close to her mother, her sole surviving family member, only to wake up in the middle of the night to find her mother dead.

By midnight, relief trains had carried an estimated 3,500 injured people to cities and villages beyond Nagasaki, where countless more survivors had also arrived by foot or truck. Teams of medical staff and volunteers worked through the night to treat them, though their supplies quickly ran out.

In Nagasaki, tens of thousands of burned and injured men, women, and children remained trapped beneath collapsed buildings and heavy debris or lay wounded on hillsides, by the railroad tracks, or along the banks of the Urakami River. In what can only be explained as an unintentional error of timing in the Allies’ ongoing psychological warfare initiative across Japan, U.S. B-29s flew over the city in the middle of the night and dropped thousands of leaflets that demanded that Japan end all military action and surrender. The leaflets warned the people of Nagasaki about a possible atomic bomb attack and urged them to evacuate immediately. Most survivors did not see the leaflets until the next day or later, but hearing these and other enemy planes overhead, those who could still move scrambled to hide themselves in mountaintop graveyards, under bridges, or inside overcrowded air raid shelters, where the stench of scorched flesh and blood, the mosquitoes, and the penetrating screams of the injured were unbearable. Across the sweltering city, the sounds of small explosions, fires crackling, and voices of adults and children searching for, comforting, or crying out for their loved ones created a haunting cacophony.

 • • • 

Near the well where he’d seen the parachutes falling through the clouds, Yoshida lay on the ground under the rising crescent moon, fading in and out of consciousness. His face was swollen like a balloon, his throat was so hot he thought it was burning, and he was shivering due to extreme loss of skin. One of his six friends, Tabuchi, who could still see out of one eye, left the group to try to make it in darkness over the mountains to their neighborhood in Nishiyama.

Nagano and her father hid inside the packed air raid shelter not far from Inasa Bridge. With no electricity, flashlights, or candles, they sat in pitch-blackness, terrified as they listened to a series of explosions outside. One by one, people died all around them, crying for water or mumbling their names and addresses.

On the veranda of his house, Dr. Miyajima treated Do-oh before others because of the severity of her injuries, while dozens waited their turn. Working by candlelight and with no anesthesia, he removed hundreds of glass splinters embedded in her head and body. “Stop! Stop!” Do-oh shrieked, thrashing in agony. Her parents and two other adults used all their weight to hold her arms and legs to the table. “If we stop treating you, you will die,” someone told her. But Do-oh didn’t care, and she screamed over and over for the doctor to stop and let her die. The doctor persisted, and before morning, the rice bowl that lay near her head was filled with bloody glass slivers. Her head now wrapped in bandages, Do-oh languished near death.

That night, Wada had walked through the darkened, smoldering streets east of Nagasaki Bay to his home in Maruyama-machi. His house was damaged but still intact. To his great relief, he found a note from his grandparents saying that they and his younger sister were alive and had fled to the suburb of Tagami. From the hillside behind his house, he watched the fires raging in the city center and the Urakami Valley to the north. Filled with apprehension about the fate of his friends, he returned to Hotarujaya Terminal, where he and his coworkers slept on the debris-laden station floor. Outside, refugees from neighboring districts continued to stream through streets lit by flames. Some brought nothing; others carried on their backs—or in handcarts—any possessions they could salvage.

Taniguchi’s grandfather had walked all afternoon and evening through scorched neighborhoods searching for his grandson, getting as close as possible to the hypocenter. But his efforts yielded nothing. Exhausted and scared, the old man finally lay down to sleep in a field not more than a mile from where Taniguchi lay on a hillside surrounded by corpses. The sound of an approaching relief train echoed in the distance.

“The city was burning . . . ,” Taniguchi remembered, “illuminating the sky like a midnight sun.” A plane flew overhead and sprayed the area with machine-gun fire. Bullets hit a rock near Taniguchi’s face and bounced into the bushes, but Taniguchi could do nothing to protect himself.

Later in the night, a drizzling rain fell. Lying facedown and unable to move, Taniguchi noticed some bamboo leaves hanging low to the ground just a few inches away. Desperately thirsty, he pulled his head up, stretched his neck out as far as he could, and strained to suck the raindrops off the leaves before setting his head down and waiting in darkness for someone to come.