Dr Takashi Nagai, the dean of the radiology department of Nagasaki Medical College, set a similar example – despite suffering from leukaemia. That morning, just before the plane approached, he walked to his office at the college, a ferro-concrete building 800 metres from Urakami Cathedral. He began preparing a lecture when an ‘invisible fist’ smashed through the windows. He lay under rubble with a deep cut to his right temple and mumbled for God’s forgiveness: the zealous Catholic convert had intended to confess three sins that afternoon.
Next door, in the X-ray room, Nurse Hashimoto clung to a bookshelf bolted to the floor. The room seemed to sway and bend; the primitive X-ray machines broke up and scattered. Through the window, beyond the smoke and wreckage, the formerly green Mount Inasa glowed red, like a large ember rising out of the bay. She ran down the hall, protected by the heavy walls of the X-ray department, and found five other survivors; they dragged out Dr Nagai and bandaged his head. ‘Help the patients!’ he cried. With wet hand-towels over their faces the nurses plunged into the smoke-filled wards and led or stretchered the patients out. Dr Nagai hurried downstairs to the underground emergency theatre, now flooded and useless. His illness and blood loss – his bandages now resembled a red turban – overwhelmed him. His colleague Dr Raisuke Shirabe used a novel technique to staunch the blood flow: he pressed a tampon into the wound and sutured the skin over it.
Thousands of near dead staggered up the Urakami Valley towards the hospital. The wounded carried the fatally wounded; children dragged their dying parents; parents clutched their children’s bodies. They bumped and shuffled up the hillsides, glancing back at the fires that drew closer, and one by one they collapsed from dehydration or exhaustion.
At the sight Dr Nagai and his team ‘started to lose our nerve’, he later said. The hospital and medical college were virtually destroyed; the ruins of five auditoriums later revealed the charred remains of hundreds of students sitting at their desks. A heavy roof had fallen on Dr Nagai’s First Year; all except for one died like butterflies pinned to a specimen board. Nothing useful remained in the college, no medicines or equipment. Sensing his colleagues’ despair, Dr Nagai issued an order: ‘Quick, find a Hi no Maru [a Japanese flag].’ This struck his friend Dr Ogura as absurd, but Dr Nagai insisted: when a flag could not be found, he grabbed a white sheet and smudged a red circle in the centre with his blood-soaked bandages. Dr Ogura tied the flag to a bamboo pole and drove it into a clearing on the hill above the hospital – a rallying point beyond reach of the fires. ‘It was so simple an act and yet the psychological effect was profound,’ he remembered. Dr Nagai then directed the construction of a field clinic on a stone embankment near the clearing.
Fires, not a firestorm, consumed Urakami; droplets of black rain extinguished the flames. Dr Nagai scoured the lines of refugees coming up the hill for any sign of his wife. When she did not appear his strength broke: ‘She’s dead, she’s dead!’ he cried, and resisted a terrible urge to rush headlong into the smoke-filled valley to find her. His legs gave way and he fainted. He awoke on a stretcher in a field, looking up at a thinly curved moon. Men were building shelters for the injured as nurses boiled vegetables in air-raid helmets over open fires. Somewhere people sang, ‘Umi Yukaba’ (If I Go Away to the Sea), a popular patriotic song. He got up and took the hands of his medical staff; they sat in silence, looking out over the remains of Nagasaki.
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Truman heard of the success of the Nagasaki mission through cables from Farrell and Groves. His reaction was sombre; gone were the exuberant speeches, fellow back-slapping, mutual congratulations. His mood was sober, defiant – and vengeful. The Japanese people had brought this on themselves, his radio address made clear that day. ‘We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor … against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare.’ Truman drew no distinction between civilian and soldier; mother and murderer; child and monster. In a total racial war, there were no distinctions; the victor wrote the laws of war. The ‘Japanese people’ had inflicted these atrocities on America, Truman said in tones that suggested he protested too much. ‘They’ had broken the laws of war; ‘they’ must pay for the crimes of their masters. He reflected the feelings of mainstream America, for whom ‘the Japs’ were collectively guilty.
~~Hiroshima Nagasaki -by- Paul Ham
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